title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Google Expands Its Android One Initiative To Bangladesh, Nepal And Sri Lanka | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Back in June, to improve the affordable smartphone experience in emerging markets. The project debuted in India in September, and now it is expanding to cover neighboring Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. ( last month.) that a number of devices under the Android One banner will go on sale in these three markets over “the coming weeks.” The search giant said that existing partners Micromax, Karbonn and Spice — which released phones in India, including — will service these three markets, as well as Bangladesh-based Symphony, which is preparing to launch a phone called the Symphony Roar A50. (Symphony is the hardware-maker , so there is an existing relationship between the two.) As with the initial launch, Google said that the new phones will “give people a high quality mobile experience for an affordable price, running stock-Android with updates from Google” and that’s hugely important for the company. It may be a household name for its desktop services, such as search, but in markets like Bangladesh — where most of the population will adopt mobile as their primary internet platform for internet access — Google needs to be as prominent as possible. Android is already the operating system of choice for most budget devices — here in Thailand, I can buy , for example — but cheap phones often come with heavily modified/buggy versions of Android that will never receive updates or software improvements, and don’t make Google services prominently available. The idea behind Android One is to keep devices affordable but also maintain a high quality experience for users, and avoid leaving phones marooned with a crappy version of Android. Google previously earmarked Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia for future Android One expansions and it said it will reach “more countries” in 2015. We’ve asked if it has an update on when and where those future launches will be. |
News Corp Buys India-Based Financial Planning Service BigDecisions.com | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Fresh from last month, News Corp has now completed its first acquisition in the country, buying financial planning service as . The service is designed to be a one-stop-shop that uses data and algorithms to help consumers in India make better financial decisions, for example related to retirement, insurance, education and home ownership. News Corp did not provide a price for the deal, which includes parent company FinDirect Services and follows its . In a statement that is indicative of News Corp’s startup focus in India, chief executive Robert Thomson said both deals are about using the power of data to help improve purchasing and financial decisions. “Our latest investment builds on our abiding belief that a digital India needs more trusted, reliable and independent data. BigDecisions.com will help Indians make the most important decisions by using accurate information tailored to their personal needs,” Thomson said. BigDecisions.com was founded in 2013 and is based in Mumbai. It claims to have assisted 40,000 users’ financial decisions to date. A News Corp announcement explained that co-founders Manish Shah and Gaurav Roy will lead a “significant expansion” of the product in partnership with its team in India. This year has been a hugely significant one for startups in India. , and each acquired startups from the country, while Flipkart is one of three major e-commerce firms to net significant amounts of capital from investors. Flipkart raised nearly $2 billion in fresh capital this year — including — and that money has begun to trickle down as its founders have in multiple projects as angels, a move that will help accelerate the ecosystem. SoftBank also entered the market late this year, bringing with it yet more attention and boatloads of money. The Japanese telecom firm made a series of big investments — leading , , and — as part of a promise to put as much as $10 billion into young Indian businesses over the coming years. |
“The Interview” Censorship Protestors Screen Chaplin’s Hitler Parody “The Great Dictator” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | A clandestine invite to a “secret screening to protest against censorship” of did not lead to a showing of the North Korea-skewering film at the center of the Sony Pictures hack. It did raise money for free speech charity , though. Instead, attendees in London, Rome and San Francisco who were instructed to come “dressed in a dark suit, and bring a small gift for a stranger” were shown screenings of Charlie Chaplin’s . The protest’s goal was to stand up against the precedent being set by the pulled release of The Interview. While some viewers were disappointed not to see Seth Rogen and James Franco make fun of Kim Jong-un, they at least got to see Hitler made the butt of Chaplin’s legendary slapstick. The London screening had 800 people show up, while 200 made it in Rome and New York, and 120 congregated to see in San Francisco. A silent theater in Los Angeles affiliated with the protest played a Danish film about comedians going to North Korea. The unmarked entrance to the theater where the protest screening was held in San Francisco I attended the SF screening at a rundown movie theater where weekends used to feature a late-night jazz band. It was a ragtag, slapdash affair where the doorwoman and lighting technician were just the first people who showed up and agreed to be volunteers. The events were produced by , a group that puts on film screenings for charity, and previously raised over £24,000 for “Mind, the mental health charity” with a showing of the late comedian Robin Williams’ . Secret Cinema founder and director Fabien Riggall lays out the purpose of the protest screenings on stage in San Francisco Secret Cinema’s founder and director Fabien Riggall hopped on stage to explain that he thinks the public needs to stand up for free expression. He referred to The Great Dictator, saying “these beautiful, truthful films should be made.” After joking about having the finest North Korean projection system set up for the screening, a music video and short film were displayed before The Great Dictator began. Proceeds from screenings went to for freedom of expression, press and access to information. Attendees start to file into the theater in San Francisco That’s the opposite of what the Guardians Of Peace stand for. Now by the US government, their threats of violence against theaters that showed The Interview prompted theater chains to refuse to show the film. Sony Pictures says it has no current plans to release it in any form . Obama called pulling the film’s release “a mistake” on Sony’s part. In effect, hackers have coerced Sony Pictures into self-censorship, despite how desperate the public is to see the film. [SPOILER: A showing Kim Jong-un’s death has gone viral, showing the wide interest in seeing what the hackers didn’t want us to see.] So why did Secret Cinema put in the work to organize the screenings in just 48 hours? Riggall tells that he wanted to shed light on the fact that “ , a fun and silly film that no one’s seen, is getting banned, and that The Great Dictator was also banned in theaters [in occupied Europe during World War II].” But the protest goes much farther than Sony’s decision. He insists “It’s hard to get films with any challenging, truthful stories out there.” He continues, “If people feel they can’t make the thing they want to make, I think it’s really sad. It’s a precedent. Now another film [ is being pulled. I felt we had to do something.” Attendees in dark suits reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s sip drinks before the screening starts Now the question is whether someone with access will leak a full copy of The Interview. The Internet’s runaway distribution train could then carry it to the world without a formal distributor who could be blamed or targeted. If The Interview stays censored, it will only encourage more hackers and terrorists to threaten creative expression that doesn’t fit their views. Then all our Perhaps that’s the reason why a film about the Nazis was the perfect choice for the protest. It reminds us of the dangers of appeasement. |
The Perfect Gaming Phone | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | A sketch comedy show in the UK called used to have a farmer/bumpkin character named Jesse who would emerge from a shed to declare “This week I have been mostly” followed by something amusing. Like eating raw chickens, wearing Dolce and Gabbana, wearing no pants and so on. In that vein, this week I have been mostly enthusing about my silly big giant iPhone 6 Plus. Although released two months ago I got caught in a long wait owing to stock shortages, so my 6 Plus only recently landed in my hands. I had wanted to get it for two main reasons: battery and legibility. I’d grown tired of buying mandatory extra battery packs in order to use my iPhone for gaming. And as I’ve grown a little older my near vision has declined, making text and small interface elements harder to discern. I was also just sort of into it. I’m an Apple user through and through, to the point that it’s hard to consider an ecosystem shift. And so I’d seen several friends with and similar for a while, and lusted. I had some questions about one-handed use (and to be fair, the iOS double-tap solution isn’t the best) but I’ve discovered in the last week that it just means re-learning. I’m using Siri and dictation more, learning some different ways of holding the device and so on. Many of my friends think the 6 Plus is ridiculous. My wife finds it oversized for her fingers. She wants Apple to go back to making iPhones of the v4 size, neat and palm-sized. I get that. In terms of “telephone, text, camera, apps and music” users she’s probably right. My wife frequently plays games with her iPad, but in her out-and-about life she almost never does. But I play games all the time, and the unexpected part of my new big phone world is how different it feels. It feels far more like handheld gaming. It feels more serious. The screen of my 6 Plus is bigger than my PS Vita and much sharper. It doesn’t have anything like the T-problem that my older phones did (where your thumbs occlude the screen and the visible screen area forms a T). At the same time my big phone is yet small enough to feel comfortable when held in landscape mode for playing action games. This is something that my iPad has never felt quite right with. All in all this means I’ve been going back to a variety of games and playing them once more. They feel fresh again. One example is . I bought it when first released for iOS but never liked it. It was too fiddly and I couldn’t see anything, and it killed my battery. In big giant telephone land, however, it’s different. I can see. I’m absorbed. Don’t get me wrong: this is still a touch phone and lacks haptic feedback. But GTA3 on phone gels where before it didn’t. I feel for the first time that I own a real gaming phone as opposed to a phone that happens to play games. Indeed that I’d consider the iPhone 6 Plus to be the perfect gaming phone. It has the specs of course, and the catalog. But more than that: it feels right-sized, carry-able in the pocket while capable enough. It’s easy to pop out of a pocket (too easy possibly – buy a cover with more friction) and get to playing, and that playing will be richer than before. What am I saying? Other than urging you to get a big giant telephone, I suppose it’s that simple change often leads to a different outcome. Over the last few months I’ve felt that while other new paradigms have been trying to find their berth (VR, media streamers, watches, microconsoles, yada yada) mobile has only imprinted itself further and further. With big phones like the iPhone 6 Plus I feel that the devices themselves are ever-more-serious, worthy of the future of becoming the . All I know is that I’m playing , and . I’m playing and the pocket version of . I’m playing and . I’m playing . I’m playing and . I’m playing games on a phone with a kind of glee that I haven’t experienced since I first got on my smartphone many moons ago. If you get the chance you should try it too. |
Microsoft Removes All Third Party Snapchat Apps From The Windows Phone Store | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | that it would crack down on all third party apps, and now the ax has fallen on the Windows Phone app store, which no longer contains any third party apps as . The U.S. company doesn’t have an official app for Windows Phone, so that means anyone who owns a phone running the Microsoft OS can’t download a Snapchat compatible app. Those that already have one — such as 6snap, the most popular option — are also having their accounts locked for using a third-party app. That’s another security measure that Snapchat promised last month to implement. We can't use 6snap though… Our accounts are being permanently locked… — Kyle Walsh (@kwalsh96) , who developed 6snap, suggest that Snapchat itself has instructed Microsoft to remove the apps, but we contacted both companies to confirm that. A Snapchat representative confirmed that the apps had been removed, but pointed out that the move affects ‘a single digit percentage’ of its userbase. I would also note that this affects a single digit percentage of the Snapchat community. Huyn said he will “work closely with Microsoft now to convince Snapchat to change its mind,” but the U.S. company is taking a zero tolerance approach to third party apps after for leaking millions of users’ IDs and passwords. The ban on third parties may not last for too long, however. , and that could mean that it finally releases an official API to allow third parties to connect to its service while providing increased protection for user privacy. That said, so keeping its service free of third party apps on all devices gives it absolute control over targeting its user base with ads, thus potentially maximizing its value to advertisers. None of this means much for Snapchat fans on Windows Phone, who have never had an official app and now don’t even have unofficial ones. Such are the problems of being a ‘third’ platform in . |
Crowdsales Funding Innovation By Bitcoin And Its Community | Lisa Cheng | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Bitcoin as an industry is becoming segregated by ideology, technology and application. There are different groups that argue for differing directions and methods of growing adoption. Within bitcoin today there are three distinct groups with their own definitions of what Bitcoin is. For example, bitcoin miners argue that bitcoin is a payment system where adoption is driven by bitcoin transactions reflecting its use as a digital currency. This is largely based on their function in the ecosystem, as miners serve as a distribution mechanism for introducing new bitcoins into the network, while also being responsible for managing the bitcoin transaction records that make up the blockchain. Conversely, those involved with bitcoin 2.0 like and , whose interests involve developing protocols and use cases on the blockchain itself argue that bitcoin is a platform for decentralized development. To their point, we have seen several implementations of the bitcoin blockchain successfully used in this manner. And for ideological groups like Libertarians, who see bitcoin as an answer to the issues facing banking and government today where the economics of bureaucracy and capitalism have driven people toward bitcoin as a movement – they would argue that bitcoin means freedom. While underlying all of this, the community behind bitcoin and cryptocurrency has seen the emergence of a new kind of activity that blends bitcoin as a payment, a platform and belief system to support technology development where bitcoin is used for crowdsourcing projects. Referred to as a crowdsale, this is a legal term to describe the action of pledges by users of bitcoin as a crowdsourcing resource to support the development of a software project. In exchange for the support, the project provides the crowdsale participant with a digital token of its own designed for use specifically with the crowdfunded result. These project tokens are cryptographic in nature, akin to bitcoin and secured through the transparent blockchain ledger system. The key difference between this token vs. bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is that project tokens have a specific use case. The process of a crowdsale is where a limited number of these project tokens are pre-purchased by users. In exchange for their purchase, the recipient of project tokens acts like the holder of software keys, where keys are a “cryptographic pair of keys” represented by cryptocurrency. Software keys have been pre-sold to users as a standard marketing practice by many of the largest, and longest-running software corporations for developing games, applications and operating systems. They often come in the form of serial numbers, codes or license certificates. In the case of project tokens, it just so happens that cryptographic keys reside in a meta-layer within the cryptocurrency itself, and they are the only evidence, for example, a web application will permit to allow user access. It is through the crowdsale process that these projects can develop support for the resources needed to develop and launch the product. While many startups raise funding from sources such as angel investment, venture capital and financing, crowdsales are driven by future users and their purchasing power. A project hosts a pre-sale of tokens, and upon network launch, the token will also be used to access the network and compensate participants who contribute resources to these networks. It’s a closed economic system for encouraging sustainable technology development. As a side note, many of the bitcoin core devs have argued against the use of the bitcoin blockchain as a platform, because the possibility for increasing the amount of data put into the blockchain will result in the increased size and inefficiency of the network. With respect to the core developers, bitcoin may not be the last cryptocurrency that achieves this level of heightened adoption. In the future, bitcoin 2.0 protocols could transfer to another blockchain at one point. Though projects and 2.0 protocols do not seek to bloat the blockchain, it is my belief that bitcoin is chosen here because it’s the most widely supported and decentralized blockchain network. Tokens leveraging this system benefit from its ability to withstand attack, forgery and outside control through its decentralized network of nodes. The next Internet supported by decentralized networks will need such a system, and transacting between these disparate networks will be tokens verified on the longest-running, community-supported data-authentication service in existence, the bitcoin blockchain. |
Here’s How Microsoft Described Its Newfangled Product Called “Windows” When It Went Public | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Microsoft shipped the first version of Windows on . The company went public on . That means that Microsoft pulled the trigger on its IPO mere months after Windows was first launched into the market. Until today I didn’t know that the two events occurred so close together. Given that I was roughly negative 3 or 4 at the time, I’ve decided to forgive myself. Whatever the case, if you go back and read the original S-1 documents that current tech giants filed often decades ago, you run into some pretty funny stuff. How a company spoke about itself when it was a fraction of the size is always somewhat humorous, given that we have the gift of hindsight that the company lacked at the time — that . In the , the company’s explanation of Windows, then still essentially brand-spanking-new, is awesome. Here’s how Microsoft described the platform that would define its next several decades: In November 1985, Microsoft began shipping Microsoft Windows, a graphical operating environment which runs on the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. As an extension of MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows manages such hardware as the keyboard, screen, and printer. This product allows new applications programs to present themselves in a standard and graphical manner that is independent of video or other output devices. Microsoft is encouraging independent software developers to create applications programs which will take advantage of Microsoft Windows graphical user interface features. Lotus Development recently announced its intent to pursue the development of applications products that will run on Windows. Microsoft’s own new applications software will be based on Microsoft Windows. It is too early in the life of Microsoft Windows to determine what level of acceptance it will attain in the marketplace. Well then. |
BitTorrent Tells Sony It’s Happy To Release ‘The Interview’ | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Many have called for Sony to release ‘The Interview’ online. However, Sony CEO Michael Lynton stated that there has not been a major video on demand service, “that has stepped forward and said they are willing to distribute this movie for us.” Several major movie chains pulled out of the scheduled Christmas Day release of the film after hacker group Guardians of Peace threatened to attack any theater that decided to show the film. The studio said it was forced to then . “We do not own movie theaters. We cannot control what is shown,” Lynton said. Sony has confirmed it was looking for alternatives to release the film. Some have suggested Netflix as an alternative. Sony’s lawyer David Boies later confirmed Sony was looking into an alternative way to present the film when he called the theater cancellation a “delay” on . “Sony has been fighting to get this picture distributed. it will be distributed. How it’s going to be distributed I don’t think anyone knows quite yet,” said Boies. took this as a challenge and has offered Sony a way to release the controversial movie involving the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on its own servers. The peer-to-peer file distribution network believes BitTorrent Bundle is the best way to satisfy both those asking for an online distribution and Sony’s desire to release the film. Like everyone else around the world, we’ve been following this egregious hacking of Sony’s servers over the past few weeks. A trend has emerged among commentary in the days since Sony announced they would not release the motion picture, “The Interview.” There have been calls for Sony to release the film online. And many have contacted us asking: Would they be able to release the movie using BitTorrent? Though we normally would not offer commentary during such a trying time for another company, the answer is yes. BitTorrent Bundle is in fact the very best way for Sony to take back control of their film, not acquiesce to terrorists threats, and to ensure a wide audience can view the film safely. It would also strike a strong note for free speech. Bundle has a self-publishing platform that anyone from Sony can use: https://bundles.bittorrent.com/publish. Using the paygate option, Sony are able to set the price for the film and release it widely without implicating anyone or exposing any third party to a terrorist threat. We disagree, however, with some that have suggested that Sony should make the film available through piracy sites. That would only serve to encourage bad actors. It’s also important to make the distinction that these piracy sites are not “torrent sites.” They are piracy sites that are wrongfully exploiting torrent technology. BitTorrent Bundle is a safe and legal way for Sony to release this film and they would join the nearly 20,000 creators and rights holders now using the Bundle publishing platform. is different from pirating sites such as the Pirate Bay. Instead of files getting shared and downloaded illegally, bundles are a collection of files that can be shared and downloaded legally, either for free or for profit by the controlling site. Thom Yorke in this very fashion in September. BitTorrent says it has reached out to Sony with the offer to use its servers, but that Sony execs have so far not responded. Sony has not responded to our inquiry on the matter, either. We will be sure to update you if it does. |
Living On Bitcoin | Contributor | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | I write for a living and sometimes people pay me in bitcoins. I’m aware that I’m being paid in a currency that hasn’t reached mainstream adoption, but I keep collecting them to see what happens. Last month, while writing a book review late in the night, I got a phone call from an unknown number. It was a guy named Cyril Houri from a Bitcoin company called . He had a proposition that blew me away: he would help me to live solely on bitcoins for a month. I was going to be his guinea pig. Brawker allows people to buy and spend bitcoins by matching a bitcoin holder with a credit card holder; The credit card holder pays for a good/service and receives the bitcoins in return. Effectively, this provides a platform for people to buy bitcoins. More important for you to know while reading this story: the platform allows people to use bitcoins anywhere, with a considerable discount. I didn’t know where I would spend them, or where this journey would end, but I accepted. This was an opportunity I could not turn down. It was time to make some magic. I was living at my aunt’s apartment in New York City where I paid no rent or electricity, and travelled using public transportation (no need to buy gas). The first thing was to take care of me my cell phone bill. I went online and purchased a refill card for my cell phone company. This was done by creating an order on Brawker, posting it, and having someone fulfill it. Within an hour, I got a pin number in an email and paid my cellular provider. Next was food, which is one of the larger expenses. To eat, I purchased a Whole Foods gift card and restocked the whole fridge with organic food. One of the bigger mistakes I made in life was going to college without knowing what I wanted to study. All I got out of it was debt. It’s a mistake I pay for to this day. Every first of the month, money is taken out of my checking account. But this time around, I processed my loan payment a little differently. Using Brawker, I sent someone my bitcoin and they paid Sallie Mae or whoever it is now with their credit card. I had officially finished paying all of my monthly expenses. I still had a considerable amount of money leftover after paying my loan, so I decided to get creative. I’ve always loved creating music. Luckily, we live in an age where we can make quality sounds with small, mobile devices. I bought a MIDI keyboard and have been jamming since. Another one of my dreams was having some farmland. The previous month while on a road trip, I visited a friend’s in Ann Arbor Michigan that runs on bitcoins. This patch of farmland is the first of its kind. While there, the idea of leasing land in bitcoins seemed unreal to me. I had the BTC so decided to do it, and now my crops are currently being taken care of by interns.
While online one night several nights later, I found a dentist in New York City that accepts bitcoin. I made an appointment for a basic cleaning. When I got to her office, the dentist promptly began cleaning. Suddenly, after several minutes, she told me that she was worried for me. “What is it doc”, I asked. “Am I losing my teeth?” “No, but your wisdom teeth need to be urgently removed. They’re growing sideways.” Recalling terrifying stories my friends had told me about their wisdom teeth removal, I kindly refused the wisdom teeth extraction. She finished up the cleaning, and I paid for the cleaning with my smartphone’s bitcoin wallet by scanning a QR code on a slip of paper handed to me and inputting a dollar amount. I pressed “Confirm”, then I was off.
Getting my teeth cleaned In NYC I now had a million-dollar smile. The following night, while walking to a bitcoin meetup, and I met a beautiful girl on the streets of the Big Apple. I was in a rush to get to my meeting, but we had a brief conversation in which I jotted down her email. After texting and learning about each other for a few days, we went on a romantic date at a wonderful Italian restaurant, . We shared smiles, intriguing conversation, fine wine, and luxurious cuisine at a candle-lit table. After we finished eating, I whipped out my smartphone. I opened up my bitcoin wallet, and scanned a QR code on an employee’s cell phone. By pressing “Confirm” on my phone I paid for the meal, tipping generously. Before I could leave, however, another patron, who had witnessed my bill-paying tour de force, asserted that he would not be convinced that Bitcoin was real until he saw more people using it, like me. He had a good point. I dropped my date at the train station and kissed her goodbye. After a week into this experiment, I began to notice that my supplemented income was causing stomach pudge. Frequent visits to my packed refrigerator were causing me to packing on pounds. I wanted to do some yoga. After looking online for a while I found a Bikram Yoga studio close to home in Harlem. For every day of the next week, I spent 90 minutes a day in a hot room doing challenging body positions and sweating my ass off. Being a fairly simple fellow, and having treated myself quite well already, I ran out of ideas. I thought about everything from visiting a gun range to going skydiving. I kept thinking back to the dentist office. “What would be worse?” I asked myself. “Botched extraction or sideways molars that could crush all of my other teeth together?” After a brief deliberation, I made an appointment at the dentist, and got my wisdom teeth surgically removed. I regretted the decision immediately. Although the surgeon did a what seemed like a reasonable job, the pain was excruciating. Shortly afterward, my cheeks inflated and I was in horrible discomfort (I found out bitcoins would not cover the prescribed pain meds, which I would have refused anyhow). I was extremely irritated and it was all Bitcoin’s fault. It seemed like I had signed myself up for a special kind of psychological torture. For an entire week I couldn’t eat any of the food in the fridge or attend yoga classes. With my facial deformity, I pushed aside the thought of finding another date. While strolling along Times Square, I saw a glittering sign promoting on Broadway. A strange impulse told me I had to see it, so I bought a ticket. The show was unforgettable. I was amazed at the fact that such a talented group of individuals could come together to create such an incredible spectacle. That night, I got home quite late. I was exhausted. Laying in bed, I got an email from Jeremy Gardner, Executive Director of the College Cryptocurrency Network. Always up to something interesting, I knew to open the email immediately. “Yo K. Cruz,” he wrote me, “I’m hosting the first ever Bitcoin conference in Disney World tomorrow called Coins in the Kingdom and I’ve got a ticket for you. Come through.” There are worse ways to spend bitcoin than on a last-minute trip to Orlando. So I booked a flight and flew across many cumulus clouds to Disney World to spend a week in my home state. I jumped in the air. “This is Bitcoin! It’s special because of the community that this technology has created!” A huge part of Bitcoin that is overlooked is the network effect. The media constantly reports the failure of centralized Bitcoin exchanges, drug busts, and ponzi schemes while ignoring the fact that humans are being brought together because of this computer program, and they are using their potential to try to change the financial landscape of the world. This is an unprecedented social phenomenon. I spent time at the conference listening to fascinating speakers and having thought-provoking conversations. I also enjoyed tacos by the poolside bar. Everywhere I went, however, I could not avoid Aladdin. This caused me to think about his story. He is a boy born both poor but clever, who finds a wish-granting genie that transforms his life. By wishing for things that he believed would make him happy, he frees himself from the vicious cycle of poverty that he had always been stuck in. In hindsight, Aladdin’s genie reminds me of how this technology that everyone around me was discussing, Bitcoin, has allowed me to do the very same as this Disney character. If “money,” whatever that means, is a verifiable record that can be exchanged for goods and services, then by all means, bitcoin is real money. But paradoxically, I consider bitcoin to be more than that. It’s kind of magical. The magic of the technology exists in what it facilitates and in the multitude of problems that it solves.Writing about it has provided an alternative revenue stream, and all I need is the internet. From my personal experience, Bitcoin did more than just buy me goods and services. Similar to the magic of love itself, it led to both great pleasure and great pain. It’s allowed me to acquire things that I had only dreamed of three years ago, when it seemed like I had nothing. A very special thanks goes out to the kind folks at Brawker for helping on my unique one-month Bitcoin journey. Their generosity allowed me to experience what it’s like having a personal genie that used bitcoins to grant my wishes, regardless of whether the merchants accepted bitcoins or not. The extraordinary opportunity Brawker provided through Bitcoin has opened the door for more incredible opportunities, eye-opening experiences, and has since then catapulted me to many cities around the world. Yes, there are volatility issues with bitcoin as a currency. It’s not currently the easiest thing to use. But the fact this is the first invention of it’s kind and it still has value is a feat in itself (1 BTC= 350 USD as I’m writing this). Services like Brawker are making using it on a day to day basis a feasible task. Sometimes, the thought of bitcoin leads me to daydream of the eyes of the beautiful woman that I dated, the delicious food that I savored, the flights that I took, and the work that I’ve done. And whenever I wake up and think it was all a dream, I just look in the bathroom mirror and open my mouth wide. The wisdom teeth are gone. But mostly, when I think of Bitcoin, I think of the opportunity. I envision the sort of technological innovations it will lead to. I imagine the positive disruption it will create for a broken financial system. And I know, that while not everyone may have bitcoin genies allow them to live their fantasies, this technology has the capacity to positively impact the world. And that is something everyone can get behind. I successfully lived on bitcoins. I changed my life, and hopefully have provided some insight into how this technology works in the real world. Spoiler alert: sometimes it’s like magic. |
How To Speak User | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | In homage to my TC colleague Alex Wilhelm’s recent entrepreneurial lexis magnum opus, , I present its fantastical companion: How To Speak User. Spend an above-average amount of time using digital services and the fabric of reality starts to resemble a curtain that can be pulled to and fro at will. Standing at the bleeding edge, gazing into the red-rimmed, bottomless abyss of disruption, the normal rules of language break down and a Dadaist imperative asserts fresh claims of absurdist relevance. This article is an exercise in simultaneously mystifying and demystifying the lingua franca of digital life in order to encapsulate the chronically ironic state of being a user. Enjoy. Or don’t. — a person whose individuality has been overwritten by line items on a business balance sheet — any business that routinely treats paying customers as users. Also shorthand for Ayn Rand. And a synonym for an online stalker — a pointless time-sink. Or the partial realization of a mythical state of nirvana — an unnecessary expenditure. Or the partial realization of a mythical state of nirvana — a double-barreled insult that insinuates a person’s digital appearance has been algorithmically enhanced and thus they are not only that good looking IRL but also that they lack the post-processing skills to manually create a glamorous online feed of selfies. e.g. ‘my latest Tinder date is so auto-enhanced’ — an impermanent state of being that takes place in a liminal, diminishing space. Sometimes referred to as the Lacan Real — any experience that generates overwhelming feelings of zen-like calm. e.g. ‘my yoga class is so offline’ — terminal indecision experienced when attempting to determine which Instagram filter to apply to enhance your latest selfie — resulting in an inability to post your latest selfie. (See also: nofie) — when none of your selfies is acceptable for posting so you flip the camera and post what your face is looking at instead. (See also: lookie) — a photo of what your face is looking at, rather than a photo of your face. Distinct from a nofie owing to your active intention not to post a selfie — an especially ironic selfie — a selfie that can’t be posted because auto-enhancement has failed — a selfie posted when you are feeling unwell in order to support a sick day petition with peer reviewable evidence. The act of taking a sickie also simultaneously sanctions ongoing activity on social media on your day off. Certain Instagram filters are preferred for enhancing the sickliness of a sickie — a selfie without any digital filters. Analogue make-up is acceptable — a short video clip posted when there are no more selfies left in your repertoire for posting that day — a series of inescapable disappointments. e.g. ‘new House of Cards is totally Tinder’ — an individual who has lost the ability to commit to a decision. e.g. ‘we went to Chipotle but Steve was such a Tinder whore with the menu we had to order for him’ — an annoying friend who’s always turning up at your house, asking lots of nosy questions and rearranging your stuff without asking. Also a synonym for an online stalker — a self-conscious amplifier, used to express strong positive feelings for something. e.g. ‘sick pants dude! I totally like button those!’. (See also: dislike button) — an ironic self-conscious amplifier used to express strong negative feelings for something at the same time as delivering an equal and opposite undercurrent of irony. e.g. ‘I totally dislike button that you are dislike buttoning my dislike button GIF’. Intentionally confusing — an annoying former friend who’s now just your flatmate but who still pretends you’re really close and when you go out sneaks into your room, goes through your stuff and rearranges your photographs. Also a synonym for an online stalker — any conversation that is too boring to recall. Often expressed as an interjection by others. e.g. ‘I was reading this great post the other day on Warrior Forum about the best ways to optimize your usage of –NEWSFEED!’. — a public tirade masquerading as an exercise in Aristotelian logic — a conglomerate of noise whose individual units have zero rhyme and no reason to be housed together — a conglomerate of noise whose individual units are selected to convey an impression of enhanced cultural sensibilities. Played infrequently — something you don’t understand but keep forgetting to look up because you don’t care enough about it — something that becomes steadily unworn. Can also mean totally useless. e.g. ‘this app is so wearable’ — an insufferable bore. Can also refer to any right-wing economist who is especially active on Twitter. Should never be fed — a biological receptor for advertising — a non-biological receptor for advertising. Also an unwearable electronic tag that’s more wearable than a wearable. (See also: wearable) — commercially valuable activity performed without hope or expectation of payment. Also known as charitable giving. Sometimes represented in illustrated form as an individual caught between a large boulder and a very steep slope — something you helped to make that probably belongs to someone else — something that’s definitely yours but which probably belongs to someone else — something that may or may not be yours but which now definitely belongs to somebody else who may give it to everybody else — an insecure storage locker. Also a synonym for blanket surveillance — a digital transfer method that requires a pair of compatible objects to be brought into close contact with each other. Typically accompanied by a warning that overuse of this technology may result in skin rash. Can also refer to surrealist performance art — antisocial behavior that takes place online, typically expressed in the form of clamorous self-promotion. Social activities may include retweeting self-praise, posting #humblebrags, and repeat requests that followers purchase your latest ebook — processed meat, typically wrapped in tin — an emergent language composed entirely of hieroglyphs. A Rosetta Stone has not yet been located to unlock the semantic mystery of stickers but we’re expecting Line to add ‘Line KeyStone’ to its platform to open up a lucrative revenue stream in future translation services — an acute sense of bandwidth despair — an impending sense of doom, momentarily suspended. Can also refer to drinking too much caffeine. e.g. ‘don’t talk to me; I have buffered way too much coffee this morning’ — the utterance of a loon — an ex-lover who breaks into your house and smashes your stuff up — any artifact of indeterminate purpose — an unwelcome but not unexpected event. e.g. ‘Marissa’s leaving drinks were a real Wikipedia fundraiser’ — a great work of satire that you haven’t got round to reading yet but know you really, totally should — a heightened sensation of delayed disappointment that you knew was coming. Oxymoronic — a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — a fleeting sense of euphoria. Also a synonym for ‘a bit rubbish’ — anything that drains your battery really quick. e.g. ‘Taptalk is really Bluetoothing the life out of my devices’ — a mystical place filled with love, laughter and the ethereal music of the spheres. Also a synonym for The Panopticon — any device that no one wants or needs. e.g. ‘This new Windows Phone is literally a connected fridge’ — a thing that lacks vim — a free flowing outlet for discussions of a scatological nature — the act of consuming anything to ludicrous excess. e.g. ‘help me; I can’t stop Scobling soylent’ — a lunatic. Or a futurist |
The Future Of Biometric Marketing | Cavan Canavan | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | The current smartwatch and fitness device space is stagnant. The offerings and the devices are a commoditized mess with companies competing for the same consumers – with the same features. There must be more available from these devices than just tracking steps, miles walked, sleep and general activity, right? Most of these devices, like Jawbone’s Up and Fitbit, have a closed sensor system; however, opening these sensors to third-party developers holds enormous potential. We’re just now beginning to see the glimmer of the benefits as some of the major electronics manufacturers like Microsoft and Samsung enter the space. The new sensors on smartwatches and fitness bands will enable insight into a user’s heart rate, VO2 max, sympathetic nervous response, blood glucose level, EKG, temperature and more. We’re moving into a world where people will be wearing always-on body-monitoring systems. We’re standing at a frontier where we’re pulling laboratory science outside of the laboratory and creating a deluge of new data about human biometrics never before available. This data fosters new insights and the development of new ecosystems allowing understanding of customers at a much more granular level and the ability to offer them new services. It started with time – arguably the sensor most taken for granted. With a timestamp we know “when” our users are writing us, using us and interacting. Then GPS enabled “where,” permitting application companies to understand when and where a user was interacting. Applications and features that were built only off of GPS changed travel and advertising forever. The fingerprint sensor is helping us understand “who,” and companies are now also learning “what” users are doing. Now that we know who, what, when and where users are, the next evolution of sensor data that’s extremely exciting is “how.” How are users doing? How are they feeling? Forget glance-ability and notifications. Forget NFC and payments. The most interesting part of these new devices isn’t the front, but rather the back where the sensors are located. This is where the new health and fitness devices will change the world. We think of these devices as health monitors, but what if I turned them on while you were watching Netflix? What if I turned them on when you crossed a geo fence into a Starbucks? What if I monitored your biometric responses while you’re on Facebook looking at different profiles? This opens up a completely new field of biometric insight related to applications, experiences, entertainment and more. We’ll be able to provide levels of biometric awareness to our applications, our developers and our friends. This enables powerful levels of emotional acuity and intervention, and it will affect everything we do, from entertainment to general consumption to dating. I refer to this as biometric marketing or emotional marketing. Imagine a world where entertainment choices are built around your emotional preference, where you would know before going into a movie or watching a TV show if it fit the pattern for your emotional preference. Movie studios still use pen and paper responses from test audiences, but imagine if no one cared what a critic said because they knew how they felt. Imagine a gaming world where Zynga has direct access to your emotional response to a specific stimulus. They could now create the perfect skinner-box experience with perfectly random reward schedules on a per-user, per-emotional state basis. Daily interaction with others becomes much more interesting if we begin to allow others to know how we’re feeling. Imagine that OKCupid leverages biometric profiling to align similar emotional response patterns. Or imagine going on a date where both parties agree to share their biometric data after the date. You’d be able to read their arousal profile and understand that they weren’t as into you as you were into them – all without an awkward phone call. Or on the other end, you might see a spike when they saw you and a pleasant glowing interaction through the night. We don’t know what love at first sight looks like biometrically, but maybe we’ll know soon. Everyday consumption changes, as well. Every store you walk into would be able to monitor your emotional state on a per-store, per-employee, per-interaction level. They may be able to determine peak stress hours and adjust their service accordingly. One of the largest and most impacted segments will be advertising. Companies will no longer be bidding on Jennifer, but instead on Happy Jennifer or Sad Jennifer or whatever emotional state aligns best with their product offering. It feels predatory, and it is. It’s advertising’s job to take advantage of us. However, we’ll evolve ways of combating it, called emotional fences. Applications and user-centric, emotional defense companies will emerge that let users build emotional fences around themselves during what they perceive as vulnerable states. If you’re angry or if you’ve had a terrible day, maybe you’re not “in the mood” to have a happy advertisement shoved down your throat. The emotional fence will block these unwanted ads. This emotional fencing works for both parties. Think about an extremely frustrating day that you’ve recently had, and then think about all of the advertising that fills that day. If Procter & Gamble has a new Tide ad featuring happy families, smiling children and upbeat music, this ad won’t likely resonate well with consumers in a sad or depressed state. This emotional fencing would permit brands to shield themselves from wasted advertisements for key demographics that aren’t in the proper mental state to accept them. This is a new frontier of data. We’ll be delving into insights never before possible with every heartbeat and every sympathetic response, contributing data to new correlations and building a higher resolution of not only human health, but also human behavior and biological response. Depending on what report you read, as many as 285 million fitness devices will be on human bodies by 2018, with a 40 percent CAGR. Smartwatch sales are predicted to grow from 1 million devices in 2013 to 92 million devices in 2018. It’s not a matter of if this will happen, but when. Many companies are already opening up their sensor sets so that developers can begin to access this never-before-seen biological data. With this access, the current state of commoditized wearables is about to change in a big way. We should expect more from our devices than just tracking our steps and sleep. It’s been a slow start, but we’re standing at the precipice, cracking the door into biometric marketing and creating a new realm of opportunities and insights. Who knows? A year from now, I may be able to tell not only that you read this article, but also how you felt reading it. |
How Clear Is The Future Of Google Glass? | Frank Palermo | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Some ideas are ahead of their time. There is no question that the wearables market is taking off with the proliferation of health monitors, pedometers and activity trackers like Fitbit, Jawbone, Nike Fuelband, etc. And next year the will likely make the wearable watch the next big thing. boldly predicted that companies using Glass and similar wearable gadgets could save up to $1 billion a year within the next three to five years. However, the consumer electronics space can be a funny thing. Consumers tend to buy in herds. They will buy the next best gadget, only when they actually see others with the gadget. One of the problems with products like Google Glass is that it was released in limited fashion as part of the “ ” beta program, (meaning you needed a private invite), which limited distribution. With a price tag of $1,500 very few consumers could afford to try out Google Glass. It takes a much lower price tag to drive consumer interest. Then you have the whole social acceptance problem. For most people, the use of Glass falls under the creepy umbrella. People get spooked when they don’t know exactly what a device is capturing or monitoring. The potential to do real-time facial recognition video at the blink of an eye can scare even the most tech-savvy users. Everyone has certain boundaries around privacy intrusions. It’s not hard to conceive how a wearable personal assistant like Google Glass could absolutely disrupt the medical, security, sports and many other industries. For instance, , which created technology to support the live streaming of information through wearables, has put Glass to work in several industries, such as Healthcare, and now have over 19 hospitals using the platform to improve teaching, collaboration and emergency response. They expect that number to grow to well over a hundred by next year. Companies like , which created Skylight, an enterprise software platform for Glass, and , are targeting workforce apps that provide meaningful benefits for the desk-less workers. According to Google, 80 percent of the global workforce does physical or desk-less work every day. The workplace may turn out to be the big opportunity for Glass in the future. Over 60 highly publicized brands have explored using Glass. Virgin Atlantic ran a six-week trial, where agents at London’s Heathrow Airport, used the technology to welcome customers and check them in for their flights. Sherwin-Williams tried boosting its paint sales, by creating an called that allows a user to take a photo, while the app analyze the primary colors and provides matching colors form the Sherwin-Williams lineup. Real-estate site Trulia created a demo called that allows users to review listings that match their criteria directly from the Glass app. And the Sacramento Kings were the first NBA team to offer fans an in-game Glass experience, where players wore Glass during their pre-game warm-ups and would do live streams to video screens inside the arena. The development community has created over a for Glass ranging from highly innovative to somewhat frivolous For those looking for some amusement, there’s even a Battleship game for Glass called For certain professions or industries Glass could be downright disruptive. And at this point, the average consumer really doesn’t have a clue as to how exactly to use the device. In technology, timing is everything. Most major technology disrupters go through similar cycles of evolution. The first generation of the devices tend to be for hobbyists or toys for the well off, and don’t typically provide much real value; they introduce a new paradigm. The more disruptive it is, the longer it tends to take to get accepted. Over time however, devices get better and technology matures, which in turn drives more widespread adoption. Remember the first cellular phone — or should I say brick? Most people laughed at the idea of carrying this obtrusive device around with them all the time. It’s hard to imagine how these devices evolved to be the smartphones of today that we can barely spare a second without. So, wearable technologies like Google Glass are in a similar class as virtual-reality applications like . They are like the cell phones of the ’80s — waiting to be refined, waiting for technology to be more streamlined, and waiting for more fashionable form factors. They also require more thought around security. It will take some time for these to develop, but when they do, they could become the next big thing. In the near term, the real opportunity for Glass may be in the workplace. With a little more refinement and some more consideration around privacy concerns, the device may be ready to go. If Google wants Glass to take off in the consumer market, it might be best served selling it to Apple, which has consistently proven its ability to shape technology for mass consumer adoption. |
In War With Publishers, Tech Companies Take Wrong Approach | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Publishers have been offered a seriously raw deal in the war over content on the internet. Linking to another site is free, and there are few revenue sharing agreements between publishers and technology companies. Supported throughout the development of the internet by leading companies like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, what might be termed the American model of content has largely won out throughout the world. The results for publishers have been bleak. Despite some limited success with paywalls at a handful of top newspapers and a couple of exceptional startups, traditional business models have largely failed to translate into the digital world. The future looks even more challenging, with increased competition for eyeballs with the exponential growth of content as well as the flatlining growth of internet users in the developed world. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that publishers are striking back. Their most notable success so far has been in Spain, where the local publishing industry got what appeared to be a lifeline in of their stories when they are used by companies like Google. The search company’s response to the law was , which . Reading the tech press, you will be forgiven for thinking that Google is a weak child fighting the supremely powerful and profitable publishing industry. The reality, of course, is entirely the opposite. On their surface, these sorts of policies, , seem ridiculous to the technologists inhabiting Silicon Valley. Charging for snippets and setting up payments between technology companies and publishers is looking backward, an attempt to prop up a dying industry. Far better to invent new and untested publishing technologies (Bitcoin micropayments!) and rebuild the industry from the ground up. Unsurprisingly, these disruptions have led to tech companies keeping all the power for themselves, and forcing the revenue of content to zero. Just take Google News, which is the epitome of the problem. was that the portal makes no revenues, since the company doesn’t place ads on the portal page. There are two flaws with that reasoning. First, Google obviously makes revenues from the site – there is a search bar right at the top of the site where the company places its search ads ( ). But even more pernicious is the opportunity cost of a portal like Google News for publishers. as Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo and former Google search executive, likes to point out. One of those daily habits is checking the news, often several times a day. Google News is a free product with no advertising, aggregating snippets from other sites using algorithms to create a front page for the web that almost no publisher can hope to compete with. The company employs no writers or editors for the site, but relies on that talent from publishers. In fact, it even has the audacity – uncompensated of course. The response is always the same. “Yes, but Google News is referring viewers to those publishers!” That is the American model, where we avoid payments around content but instead compensate websites by offering them referral traffic. Yet, we have enough experience with this model to know that it is as valuable as for publishers. Referral traffic doesn’t work for publishers for the same reason the internet hasn’t worked for publishers: there are still no business models for publishers that can compensate companies for producing high-quality content. That includes traditional models like advertising and subscriptions as well as Silicon Valley novelties like crowdfunding journalists, native advertising, and Bitcoin micropayments. But even worse, referrals are hardly voluntary. They are an important source of power for technology companies, forcing publishers to do their bidding lest they risk losing some of that almighty firehose of traffic. Publishing executives may not be able to monetize that traffic, but they are almost certainly held accountable for their traffic numbers. Someone has to make all of those headlines ready for algorithms to consume, and it never is the technology company. As the Romans might say, . Interestingly, the number one referrer for traffic, Facebook, seems to have taken a markedly different attitude toward its relationship with publishers. The social network has consistently stressed their desire to fill , and the company has responded by to get their articles targeted to the right readers. Diverging from Google’s approach though, the company also could potentially host content from publishers right inside the Facebook app, while . That may be just another way to seize power from publishers, but at least Facebook seems both willing to admit its readers appreciate good content and that it is willing to provide the tools and revenues for publishers to produce that kind of content. As the world wide web heads into its third decade, it is time to take stock of what has happened to the publishing industry. It has been gruesome for the bottom line, but it has been a godsend when it comes to audience development. It’s time for the leading tech companies to seek out better models that will protect great content, and may very well help their own bottom lines as well. |
Vidcoin Solves Buffering Issues For Mobile Video Ads | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | is an advertising technology startup focused on video ads for smartphones. The French startup makes watching video ads less painful by providing an SDK that will buffer videos before playing them so that they will instantly play. “Mobile video continues to be a challenge for one simple reason: mobile connectivity can be spotty so the type of streaming videos [companies like Teads] sell is tough to deliver on mobile,” co-founder and COO Grant Gudgel told me. “So we built a technology and a native mobile video ad format that get around the connectivity issues by detecting the user’s connection speed and pre-loading targeted video ads directly inside of apps on the user’s mobile device.” Vidcoin works directly with app developers to integrate its ad format. In particular, the company targets freemium developers, such as game developers. In the ideal case, if you choose to play a Vidcoin ad, you can get more coins or unlock levels. “The user opts in to watching the ad in exchange for access to desired in-app content,” Gudgel said. “Today we are primarily integrated in gaming apps but are also getting interest from messaging and other freemium apps.” The startup recently raised $1.3 million (€1 million) from Virtual Network, and business angels. It has a current run rate of $2 million, and reaches 50 million people every month. This new funding round will let the company open an office in New York. Finally, the company works with Teads, TechCrunch’s owner AOL, Unruly Media and more. These advertising companies provide an inventory of video ads so that Vidcoin can focus on its technology. Vidcoin is an interesting technology partner for these advertising giants. If ad delivery become much more effective when Teads or AOL use Vidcoin, the small startup could become a potential acquisition target. |
Addr Is A Nifty iPad Ebook Reader For Those Who Miss Readmill | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Meet , a brand new iPad app to read your ePub ebooks. In some way, Addr is very reminiscent of Readmill’s ebook reader. It’s all about importing your DRM-free ebooks and adding a social layer to take annotations and share them with your friends. But the comparison stops there as Addr is a very different take when it comes to design. First, the app goes a bit further than the traditional highlighting system. When you are reading a book, you just drag your finger in the margin to select a block of text and add your notes in the margin. While it sounds like a gimmicky feature, it makes sense when you go back to your previous annotations. You will see them right next to your text in the margin. You won’t have to tap on a button or a sentence to open an impractical and ugly popover. And of course, you can share these annotations with your friends even if they are not using Addr. The second interesting feature is the minimap view. If you want to get a sense of where you are in your chapter, you can see a column of your current chapter in one gesture. It looks like the minimap in , and makes a lot of sense for people who read long form articles on the web. Even though reading a book is very different, seeing a sort of improved scrollbar gives a good sense of your position and the length of your content. “No other ebook reader (abandoned or not) provides this kind of experience,” co-founder Simon Guigue told me. “This experience goes even beyond the experience of traditional books as you can only know the number of pages left in the paper book.” Addr’s current version is an interesting reader. But there is still a long road ahead to make it indispensable, like an iPhone version of the app and more customization features. It’s a promising start and could turn into an interesting tool for heavy readers who rely a lot on annotations. Now, it remains to be confirmed whether there is room for an ePub reader that doesn’t come with an ebook store. [gallery ids="1091604,1091605,1091606"] |
Rakuten Buys Japanese Soccer Team Vissel Kobe, Mirroring Recent Alibaba Move | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Asian e-commerce giant moves into soccer with new acquisition. Sounds familiar, right? in Chinese * football team Guangzhou Evergrande this summer, and now to buy , a top-flight J-League club founded in 1995. The Alibaba comparison is actually a little unfair on Rakuten, since the company already has a sports business via its ownership of the baseball side. But football is more than a sport ( , they say. Unlike Alibaba which acquired a majority stake in Evergrande, Rakuten has bought Vissel Kobe outright. It hasn’t revealed a price for the deal though, which is expected to close before the end of the year. There have been links between the two for sometime. The Japanese e-commerce firm has been Vissel Kobe’s shirt sponsor since 2004, and it says that the move will help market its myriad of services in Japan — which includes banking, smartphones and more beyond just online retail. It has also pledged to use its sports “experience” and resources to “strengthen and develop” the Vissel Kobe team. Rakuten may be best known for its e-commerce marketplace worldwide, but this year it has diversified into a number of different areas. It made a big move in the U.S. in September when it , having earlier stepped into mobile messaging with , which came right before Facebook bought WhatsApp. Rakuten has always done more in Japan, where its brand is near-ubiquitous online — and it via its MVNO telecom service, and this summer to introduce its service in Japan. |
Xiaomi Reportedly Raises $1B In New Funding At A $45B Valuation | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 21 | Xiaomi, the company that is , has reportedly raised $1 billion at a $45 billion valuation, . A Xiaomi spokesperson declined to comment. If the company is indeed now valued at $45 billion, that represents a significant increase from its previous valuation of $10 billion in August 2013, which Xiaomi director Hans Tung confirmed after its . Since then, Xiaomi has focused on . The latter is already one of its key growth markets, with Xiaomi through online retailers like Flipkart. In 2013, Xiaomi said it sold about 19 million phones, and in 2014, it hopes to more than double that by . In addition to growing its smartphone business, Xiaomi has also been focusing on other hardware. Earlier this month, for example, it . It also helps to boost sales of its smart TV devices by (so far, it has put money into and , China’s leading streaming video platforms). The WSJ’s report of Xiaomi’s latest fundraising and valuation follows confusion over exactly how much money the company made last year. In November, the WSJ said that Xiaomi had made net profit of $566 million last year. Following the Midea investment earlier this month, however, Reuters that Xiaomi had made just $56 million in net profit last year, according to a regulatory filing. A Xiaomi representative told TechCrunch that the discrepancy is because “the financial figures reported by Reuters and cited by Apple Insider are for Xiaomi Inc., which is the company that invested in Midea Group. Xiaomi Inc. is one of the companies under Xiaomi. Therefore, the filing only covers Xiaomi Inc. but not the entire Xiaomi.” Xiaomi’s business model has been a topic of speculation because it sells quality smartphones at extremely low prices. The company has said that it generates profits by selling software to users of its devices. |
Mesosphere Announces First Data Center OS And $36M In Funding | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | , the commercial entity built on top of the open source project, announced some major milestones today, starting with $36M in Series B funding along with the early release of what they are calling the first data center operating system. The round was led by new investor Khosla Ventures with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and other unnamed investors. The latest funding brings the total investment to-date to $50M. Besides the funding though, the bigger news was the announcement of their first (DCOS). This is a new kind of operating system that operates on the scale of the entire data center, which means instead of controlling a single machine, the operating system sits on top of the data center and enables administrators to treat all of the resources in the data center as a single, virtual entity. This allows for much simpler management and lets administrators spin servers and software up and down as needs require much more quickly than with current methods. The virtual machine allowed you to make the best use of your resources on a single machine, but Mesosphere wants to take that concept a step further and allow you to apply that same principle to the entire data center. Because today’s applications tend to work across multiple servers, no matter how many ways you break down a single machine’s resources, it’s just not going to suffice anymore. By applying this virtual machine concept across the entire data center, you create a single pool of resources that you can manipulate any way that you like and this could be a powerful capability for system administrators. What’s more, this ability to virtualize the entire data center dramatically speeds up the time it takes to spin up server clusters from days or weeks to hours or even minutes, depending on how large the cluster is you are trying to create. The virtual resource pool is designed to span thousands of machines. In fact, Mesosphere mentioned a reference customer running 50,000 nodes on DCOS, and they believe they can scale to 500,000 nodes by the end of next year. Administrators can operate the DCOS from a command line or use a graphical user interface to quickly drag and drop resources from a library to the command line panel. This gives administrators the ability to start multiple instances of any software in the library very quickly. The library includes popular open source products by default such as Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop and Google Kubernetes, or customers can add internal software packages. DCOS is compatible with several versions of Linux including Redhat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and CoreOS, as well public cloud infrastructure services from companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Finally, you can use it with private cloud infrastructure services including virtual machines, bare metal and OpenStack. Administrators can also set up triggers with a scheduler tool so that when certain conditions are met, the system will automatically run a pre-defined set of commands. For instance, administrators could run a set of commands based on cost, so the job would only run if the cost threshold were met. What’s more, administrators can take advantage of the API to build applications against the single pool of data center resources available from Mesosphere DCOS. Mesosphere said DCOS will be generally available next year, but there is an early access program now. |
Investing In Games: Broad Or Deep? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Here’s a question for all you would-be investors in game companies: Suppose two studios approach you. Studio A has a strategy centered around making a big play on one game. It plans to take your investment and use it to make that game as best it can and find success. Studio B has a different idea. It plans to make many small games, build a platform and ecosystem between them and see which works. Then to accelerate what works to success. Studio A’s model is a deep bet on a single property. Studio B’s model is a broad bet across the market. Which should you choose? Let me ask the question another way: Suppose two technology startups approach you. Startup A has a strategy centered around making a big play on one product. It plans to take your investment and use it to make that product as best it can and find success. Startup B has a different idea. It plans to make many small products, build a platform and ecosystem between them and see which works. Then to accelerate what works to success. Which is the smarter investment? You invest in Startup A because it has focus whereas Startup B does not. Startup A may well scale into operating multiple products one day, but early focus on a killer product is key. Startup B, on the other hand, is putting the cart before the horse. It will make a dozen crappy products, all of which will fail. Here’s the thing. The second question is obvious for most tech investors. They’ll always answer A. And yet (in my experience at least) when it comes to startups working in gaming, investor types tend to prefer answer B. But they are absolutely dead wrong. I’ve written this article to explain why. I’m not saying that games aren’t risky investments. Of course they are. They’re probably riskier than most tech investments because they rely more on the virtues of creativity and entertainment, two factors that are historically difficult to predict. Of course you might need that extra level of reassurance, that prototype or plan that explains how the game is to be developed in parts rather than all at once. Or that assurance that you have some great talent on the team who will bring the thing home. I get that. What I am saying, on the other hand, is that tech investment communities (by which I mean the Valley, more traditional financiers and their various clones) harbor a mental image about games that tends to equate them to content. They see games on the same shelves as books, movies and music, and draw a line. Content expires. Content rarely has deep value. Content is often freer than it used to be. Content is an end-product with no opportunity to build one of . And what I’m saying is that that image is wrong. Of course games are entertainment but they are also platforms, often monopolistic platforms. Increasingly so as the lines between online/offline, retail/service, single/multiplayer continue to blur. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to bring content-style financing to games but it has never worked. Games require a kind of development that isn’t the same as the content model. They’re usually much more like technology products. Every serious games business is not trying to build a game and then disband (like a movie). It’s there to build 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 or 100 versions of the same game. Ad infinitum. Granted that isn’t the ambition of every game developer. Many indies, for example, relish starting over and always build new things in the manner of artists. However scalable games businesses are all built on the idea of making re-playable fun engines that will perpetuate. Just like Microsoft does with Windows or Oracle does. Far from investing in them along the publishing model, you should be investing in them as you would startups. In any platform business the model is to build a great product, attract great users, drive great loyalty and then figure out a growth and revenue strategy from that. That’s Uber, AirBnB, Tinder, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Snapchat and Google. But that’s also Minecraft, EVE Online, The Walking Dead, Moshi Monsters, League of Legends, Clash of Clans, Football Manager, Madden, Angry Birds, Magic: The Gathering, Game of War and many more. Actually it’s the general path to success for most studios – whether independent or as part of a larger company. Making a game is just as hard as making a product. With products the mechanics (what an app is supposed to do) are generally straight forward and the question becomes about whether the experience of using them is right. In games there’s also the added dimension of whether the mechanics are fun, which can take a lot of experimentation to figure out. Focus is the key. And distraction from focus is bad. This is why studios generally work on the same game year in, year out, selling to the same customers, growing their audience and raking in billions of dollars doing it. Just like Facebook keeps working on making Facebook better, Mojang keeps working on making Minecraft better, listening to its community, adding features and fixing bugs. Bungie keeps working on making Destiny better CCP keeps working on making EVE Online better. And so on. Granted some companies later go on to develop several franchises as publishers (like Activision, Nintendo or Glu, say). Similarly some are blessed by circumstance to make a big grab across a number of areas before it becomes clogged or expensive (Zynga, BigPoint). And in the Asian market some operators like Tencent have such a monopoly lock and a low quality expectation from players that being broad works. However that doesn’t mean it’ll work for any startup studio today. Far from it. Microsoft didn’t start day one by committing to a dozen different software and OS applications any more than Apple started by making a computer, tablet, phone, music player and television streamer all at once. You would think that would be self-evident for games too, yet for some reason investors don’t get it. They choose B. I’ve had a front row seat on the Studio B situation on more than one occasion. I’ve seen several well-funded companies built on this model expire. Tragically so, indeed, because the people involved were great. But still they had the wrong model. Here’s why they fail: Studio Bs tend to spend a lot of money on back-end technology and tools for products that they intend to work on one day. They tend to have a meta-pitch, like an innovative technology that they plan to leverage across all of their games and become the leaders in a space they imagine will exist. They say “we’re not just making a game, we’re changing gaming”, which is a noble goal. But in almost every case what happens is they become . Their core technology, y’see, is generally built pre-product and so its requirements are fuzzy. It’s over-engineered, and in turn becomes a constraint preventing innovation on the products (the games). Whereas a small indie can chop and change their product quickly in response to player feedback, an architecture-obsessed Studio B often ends up spending an inordinate amount of time explaining why things can’t be done without breaking everything. So if things are going wrong they are unable to change course without massive pain. Sometimes not at all. And their core tech eventually needs to be pivoted anyway as actual requirements eventually intrude. So Studio B’s games are never as lean as they appear to be, always under-specced and take way too long to get to a basic playable state or meaningfully iterate to find their fun. And this is why they suck. Furthermore this is why Studio B’s typically become clone-makers. Realizing that it’s taking too long to make products or see meaningful change in them, they almost always end up rationalizing that what they need to do is carbon-copy something else. And that means they make shitty clones with zero prospect of gaining loyal fans. It’s a vicious yet inevitable circle. Even more than in the tech world, in the games world acquiring and inspiring loyal fans is essential. The audience is the key asset that every studio builds, not the technology. No audience, no customers, no free marketing channel, no revenue, no next release and next release and next release. Not realizing that is how you spend a lot of money and then go out of business. Players in all markets expect the games they invest their time into to not be half-assed. Whether casual or core, indie or casino, it’s the same. The axes that define “assed” vary from sector to sector but the principle is the same. Nobody likes a boring mealy-mouthed game. If you want your players to talk to their friends about the great game they’re playing, for example, it can’t just be a rip-off of something else. Furthermore it’s much harder to kill a product once it’s underway than it is to greenlight it in the first place. Tech investors already know this to be true in the world of startups. Once a startup scales to a certain level it will get into other product areas (like Google with maps, docs, mail and so on). People will be hired, offices rented, operating costs inflate and management too. But that has to happen at the right time, generally not at the beginning of a company’s life, otherwise the startup risks being half-committed to a bunch of products that are never likely to work well. But said startups always promise that they will one day. The exact same thing is true for games studios. Once you’ve got multiple games on the go it’s difficult to can any one of them. Every team working on every game believes that their’s is The One, and will rationalize that until the end of time. The question becomes whether each game needs some extra investment to find its way, whether each is only half way to its potential, and the fear of failing at answering that question only intensifies. So Studio Bs end up like any bad software company juggling a variety of failing projects and never deciding to kill any of them. Studio B, in other words, is a well-intentioned money pit. I’ve seen plenty of investors get very excited by that story that Angry Birds only cost $140k to make and that Zynga built the first version of FarmVille in two months, and worked with several CEOs who come to believe that solving how to make games for half that cost in 10% of the time is their number one priority. They often use the analogy of low-hanging fruit, of easy wins and analytics as a way to success. They tell that story so much that they eventually become believers, but it leads to a tragic end. Making games isn’t panning for gold. I know there are a couple of examples of studios that did sort of do it that way and found success, but it far more commonly fails. Instead making games is like building a service. It takes focus and diligence. I also know that sometimes that has resulted in over-bloated studios on ego trips that end up spending $100m and going nowhere. But that story is not the norm. Most of the time when talented studios are given the right conditions for success (focus, enough budget, time) they go on to make great things. So, wonderful investor types, do you now understand? The next time someone comes to you with a proposal that promises a broad strategy and lots of low hanging fruit, pause and think. Do they have a game plan that starts with a real audience? Is whatever core tech underpinning their strategy real? Do they have a tangible plan for getting their first million users that doesn’t start with buying a lot of installs? Are they making something deep? If no, pass. Invest in Studio A instead. |
Chat App Kakao Talk Begins Offering Opt-In Encryption Following Recent Privacy Storm | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Daum Kakao, the behind , has introduced a new end-to-end encryption feature on the chat app following controversy around user data in recent months. The company is rolling out a new ‘Secret Chat’ mode today, which is landing on Android devices first with iOS set to follow “soon”, the company said. The new feature is activated in two ways: via a drop down menu inside existing chats or a dedicated button that launches a new Secret Chat. The feature is initially live for one-on-one conversations only, but Daum Kakao says it will become an option for group chats within the first three months of next year. The company also made a small privacy tweak to let users to leave group chats for good, preventing them from being re-added. Kakao Talk has over 150 million registered users, but it is strongest in Korea where it is said to be installed on more than 95 percent of smartphones. That dominance was tested in October when that President Park Geun-hye was preparing to crack down on the chat app and get hold of user data from its parent company. That sent significant numbers of Kakao Talk users fleeing to ‘safer’ apps. Security focused Telegram seemed to profit the most, drawing in a reported 1.5 million new registrations in Korea within days of the saga erupting. Ultimately, that it handed over information and it pledged to introduce steps to make users more aware of their data. That included the introduction of a Google-like transparency report to relay all information requests in Korea, and rolling out now. The company said in a statement today that the encryption keys are stored locally on users’ devices which makes the Secret Chat data inaccessible, even to Daum Kakao: Secret Chat ensures heightened confidentiality of user conversations by providing end-to-end encryption, where the decryption key for chat messages is stored in the user’s device making the messages only readable by the users involved in the conversation. Since the decryption key is stored only in the device, other parties cannot access conversations through any outside point—even through servers. The privacy storm has settled down, but nonetheless it is worth noting that Kakao Talk is not the only chat app provider to get more serious about safeguarding user data lately. WhatsApp, the world’s most used messaging app, in partnership with WhisperSystems recently. While Line, a rival in Japan, for its popular messaging service back in July. The Edward Snowden NSA leaks and privacy-focused apps like Telegram have helped raise awareness of the importance of encryption worldwide but it remains to be seen how many users will opt-in to use such features. WhatsApp’s move to make encryption standard across all chats is a step in a better direction but, as WhisperSystems itself admitted, introducing a feature with the associated demands and at the scale of hundreds of millions of active users is no easy thing. |
Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Defends His Approach At The New Republic | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | The New Republic, the political magazine that was a couple of years ago, has seen in the past couple of days — from the outside, it looks like . The exodus was spurred by the departure of New Republic editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, but it sounds like tension has been building for a while. For example, about a recent meeting where new CEO Guy Vidra (formerly of Yahoo News) alienated senior staffers by offering nothing but “Silicon Valley jargon.” Now Hughes has written in which he lays out his perspective. (The Post, incidentally, was also .) Hughes argues that portraying the dispute as a case of “Silicon Valley versus tradition … dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today.” He doesn’t get specific about what happened here, or about his plans for the future, but he does say he wants to create “a sustainable business” that’s not just going “to chase traffic with listicles and slide shows.” Experimentation and change, he writes, are a key part of that process. (Departing editor Julia Ioffe that Hughes and Verda would paint their detractors as “dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur.” But she said that on the contrary, the staff was “not afraid of change” and has “always embraced it.”) Fairly or not, the story’s been slotted into the broader narrative about the tech world and journalism, so it’s also interesting how Hughes claims not to fit into the Silicon Valley mold: I’ve never bought into the Silicon Valley outlook that technological progress is pre-ordained or good for everyone. I don’t share the unbridled, Panglossian optimism and casual disdain for established institutions and tradition of many technologists. New technologies and start-ups excite and animate me, but they don’t always make our lives or institutions better. I suppose we’ll get a clearer sense of Hughes’ vision for the new New Republic when it . |
This Disk In Your Pants Tells you to Sit Up And Breathe Into Your Belly | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Breathing and sitting up straight are two elements that engineer duo Andre Persidsky and Alex Ahlund believe are key to getting a handle on stress and wellbeing. The two life-long meditators and serial entrepreneurs came together to create , a patent-pending clip-on disk that monitors how your posture affects your breath throughout the day. According to Prana, there is a vast difference between breathing through your belly and chest breathing. The way you sit affects which way you are most likely pulling air into your lungs. Persidsky says this affects everything from back problems to overall stress levels. “Think about when stress is elevated. You are sitting in your office with a million things to do, you slump down, you start with short, shallow breaths. You need to sit up and breath in a way to counteract that,” he says.
He may be on to something. The posted a study that found major breathing restrictions related to posture problems in neck, shoulder and backs of students who slumped while sitting. There are already a couple of different devices out there to track breath or posture, but not something that tracks them together. aims to help people relax by tracking breathing patterns and then encouraging users to improve the way they breathe through different methods. The tracks the way you sit and stand and adds on a coaching element to help you stop slouching. However, Persidsky says you need both to really get the benefit.
“We wanted to offer a truer, more holistic picture of breathing quality, which necessitated factoring in posture, but also providing the capability to distinguish between chest and belly breathing, as most traditions of good breathing (and recent science) emphasize the value of breathing from the abdomen,” he says. The actual Prana device is a silver disk you clip into your pants. We’re told it should work with most Bluetooth-enabled smartphones. The app will track and provide data as to how you sit and whether you are breathing with your belly or mostly with your chest. It also offers breathing exercises from from all around the world, including yoga pranayama, tai chi, and buteyko. These techniques are organized by time of day such as “Wake Up” or “De-stress.” It’s one thing to discover how you are breathing and sitting and another to do something about it. Prana’s medical research lead, Dr. Paul Abramson, had been using the 4-7-8 technique on his patients but had a hard time getting them to follow through outside the office. For those unfamiliar, the 4-7-8 technique is a commonly recommended breathing pattern to help you calm down in times of stress. It’s a four count inhale through your nose, 7 count breath hold, 8 count exhale through your mouth. Prana aims to change how you behave. “It felt misleading to us to just track an isolated breathing signal.”Persidsky and Ahlund came up with similarly gamified techniques found in Spire and Lumo to help people improve their behavior with Prana over time. “Instead of a cup of coffee you can wake yourself up by using the energetic breathing pattern, for instance,” Persidsky points out. Prana learns how you breath over time and then makes recommendations based on what you are doing specifically. The Prana Clinical Mode offers either you or your health practitioner data on how well (or poorly) you are breathing while sitting, standing and exercising throughout the day. Practitioners can also see if you are sitting upright or mostly slouching to make an assessment. Some of the medical uses offered are for diagnosing hypertension, panic disorder, managing asthma, depressing, chronic pain and a slew of other listed medical concerns. People who want to use the device on their own can apply it to stress management, yoga postures or just overall posture health. Prana is not available for the consumer market just yet. According to its website, it should be ready January 2015 for a purchase price comparable to Spire at $149.99. |
How It Feels To Ride A Real Hoverboard | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | The thin air turns thick beneath your feet. You step onto the and an invisible force compresses, condensing and coiling like a spring you cannot see. It sinks for just a split-second, slipping closer to the solid copper floor below. But before it can touch, the magnets strengthen their resolve as they near their arch-nemesis, their object of repulsion. Reality flexes with the strain and scream of motors. Your momentum reverses with a supple bounce. Gravity gives way. The board regains lost altitude, settling into its preferred distance above the ground. You are hovering. And soon, you are sliding. But not like socks on hardwood or a snowboard down a slope. Not even dry ice on a table matches the otherworldly lack of friction. Any semblance of traction has been deleted. You don’t decelerate. There’s nothing to grip or dig into. The slipperiness subverts you balance. You wrongly lean to brace for resistance, but none comes. You simply slide. The closest thing is bobbing up and down on a raft upon a lake. Yet rather than the water shifting out from under you, the metallic sheeting below holds firm. It’s the board’s magnetic bottom that’s so slick it can’t stay put. At least until v2. Arx Pax invented its hover tech to save buildings from earthquakes and floods. But the whole world wants to . Propulsion wasn’t a priority and its maglev “magic” only works over copper flooring, so you can’t take it out in the streets. Still, will put a little hover box on your kitchen table. And the $10,000 full-sized, steerable version is on the way to bring us Back To The Future. So how does it feel to ride a real hoverboard? Smooth. Impossibly smooth. Not just a levitated experience. An elevated one. A sensation ascended beyond the rough imperfection of man-made roads or even the nature’s rippling fluids. It’s a smoothness only attainable through math. Theory made practice. A polished equation calculated just right. Pure science. |
Uber Faces Legal Action In India Following Arrest Of Rape Suspect | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | The Uber driver involved in the rape of his passenger in New Delhi, India over the weekend has been arrested. The man is named Shiv Kumar Yadav, and he will go before a New Delhi court on Monday, according to . Madhur Verma, New Delhi police deputy commissioner, said that police will also take legal action against Uber — valued at — for failure to run checks on the driver’s background and whether he had an adequate GPS device in his car. The police are taking legal advice before deciding whether it would be a criminal or civil case. suggest that the suspect had disabled GPS during the incident, which occurred late on Friday night or early Saturday morning. The suspect allegedly parked the car in a secluded area after the passenger, said to be in her mid-twenties, fell asleep. He then raped her and threatened her life if she reported anything. Shockingly enough, Uber’s terms of service don’t necessarily protect against this. You can have a read through it right , if you’d like, but the main argument is this: Uber is not a transportation company, but rather a technology service that matches seekers of transportation (riders) with providers of transportation (drivers). By using Uber, and accepting the obligatory ToS, you are acknowledging that each and every driver that picks you up in any city in the world is a third-party (not Uber), and thus, Uber is not responsible for of their actions. Read this: UBER DOES NOT GUARANTEE THE SUITABILITY, SAFETY OR ABILITY OF THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS. IT IS SOLELY YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO DETERMINE IF A THIRD PARTY PROVIDER WILL MEET YOUR NEEDS AND EXPECTATIONS. UBER WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN DISPUTES BETWEEN YOU AND A THIRD PARTY PROVIDER. BY USING THE SERVICES, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU MAY BE EXPOSED TO SITUATIONS INVOLVING THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS THAT ARE POTENTIALLY UNSAFE, OFFENSIVE, HARMFUL TO MINORS, OR OTHERWISE OBJECTIONABLE, AND THAT USE OF THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS ARRANGED OR SCHEDULED USING THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR OWN RISK AND JUDGMENT. UBER SHALL NOT HAVE ANY LIABILITY ARISING FROM OR IN ANY WAY RELATED TO YOUR TRANSACTIONS OR RELATIONSHIP WITH THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS. This is hardly the first time that a dispute (to put it lightly) has arisen between an Uber driver and a passenger or pedestrian. One man was , and a when hit by a driver. This isn’t even the first against an Uber driver. But Uber’s Terms of Service, which are very similar to those of competitors Lyft and Sidecar, expressly protect the startup from any responsibility for these tragedies. In this particular case, the police are investigating whether or not some of Uber’s , such as background checks and location-tracking functionality, were enforced. “Every violation by Uber will be evaluated and we will go for legal recourse,” said Verma. This horrendous incident comes on the heels of a , valuing the company at $40 billion. quickly to the situation this weekend, offering to assist police in finding the suspect. I’ve included their response to the situation, as offered by a spokesperson: We became aware of the incident this morning. Safety is Uber’s highest priority and we take situations like this very seriously. We are working with the police as they investigate, and will assist them in any way we can to determine what happened. It is also our policy to immediately suspend a driver’s account following allegations of a serious incident, which we have done. In India, we work with licensed driver-partners to provide a safe transportation option, with layers of safeguards such as driver and vehicle information, and ETA-sharing to ensure there is accountability and traceability of all trips that occur on the Uber platform. We’ve reached out to Uber and will of course update the story as soon as we hear back. |
These Guys 3D Printed Their Own ‘Force Awakens’ Lightsaber (And You Can Too) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Have you seen the new Star Wars trailer? Do you, , see all sorts of design flaws in that oh-so-medieval lightsaber they revealed? If you want one of your own to test your theories, you wait until Disney starts slingin’ them on the shelves for $50 a pop. Or you could bust out the 3D printer and get to swingin’ today. French 3d printing shop leFabShop wanted to give the new Claymore-style saber a spin, so they designed and printed their own, piece-by-piece. It even telescopes! Better yet, they’ve shared the printable files , so you can print one of your own. A word of caution, though: you’ll want to be pretty familiar with your printer before diving into this one. With a good 20+ interlocking/swappable pieces to print, your printer will be churning away for a while. Is it perfect? Eh, maybe not. The clip in the trailer was dark and some details were hard to glean. Meanwhile, they put this thing together quick. But to build something like this within of the trailer’s release? 3D printing is wonderful, and the clever people who make stuff like this are even better. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go test some design flaw theories*. [Via ] |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | This week’s tech news saw the latest from from Uber, Spotify and the tech IPO market. TechCrunch also covered the Sony Pictures hack, the girls who used code to light the White House Christmas trees and Tinder’s new competitor. Here are our best stories from this week (11/29-12/5). Uber announced it raised another 1.2 billion in funding, . Spotify showed us what we’ve listened to throughout the year with its individualized that grabs your 2014 data and highlights. Alex Wilhelm analyzed more of the , posing the question of whether the public market will welcome a company with expanding losses or not. At its annual shareholder’s meeting, within the company. Nadella emphasized the importance of inclusiveness and stated that diversity was at the “core to everything” at the firm, not just something done on the side. and the impact it has had in recent events. He draws a parallel between citizen journalists and “Little Brother,” and advocates for body cameras to be worn by law enforcement during citizen encounters. Five Sony Pictures films made their way onto torrent sites after . Four of the five movie screeners were unreleased titles. Jordan Crook wrote about and other ex-Tinder employees. She concludes that there is one significant difference between the two apps: with Bumble, the girls are in charge. We where everyone wants to found their own company. using code, through the Made With Code program. Dan Conlon pointed out the , and warns that if user experiences are not improved quickly, the smart home dream is at risk of going belly-up. Remember Gangnam Style? Well, PSY’s video has been viewed so many times that , making it the very first video to break the reaches of a 32-bit integer. |
Fashion And Tech Companies Merge Online And Offline Sales | Stephanie W. Chan | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | With and physical retail down 11%, it’s no wonder retailers large and small are increasingly living online. An alternative to simply shuttering the windows, though, is to experiment with new technologies to integrate the showroom, the storefront, and the web. in November, fashion and tech entrepreneurs and experts gathered at the Decoded Fashion New York Summit to discuss integrating technology, fashion and the retail experience — like the partnerships between retailers including , and . , the Rebecca Minkoff partnership marks the company’s continuing expansion into the physical marketplace and not simply a “one-off” deal. The company has filed several patents for the new technology, and according to head of Innovation and New Ventures Steve Yankovich, “This is not a pilot for us. This is a thing we’re going to scale.” Retailers already have startup to help with point of sale technologies, but eBay is hoping for a deeper integration with the retail experience. In the past, eBay has released a following Thanksgiving, which shows online buyer-seller activity in a real world context. The new high-tech store Minkoff launched in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood aims to capitalize on that kind of big data knowhow and bring the convenience and personalization of online shopping to the brick and mortar space. It’s an extension of work eBay has done with other retailers, . Minkoff and her co-founder (and brother), company chief executive Uri Minkoff explained their thinking and the advantages of integrating technology with fashion in their new store. “We began over a year ago to think about what we wanted our result to be, and knowing how technology savvy our girl is and has become, it was sort of a need that we have technology be there,” Minkoff said. “But … how do we dress it beautifully and how do we make it feel seamless and not something that’s so in your face but that has everything that you hadn’t thought of?” Rebecca Minkoff The centerpiece of their wired storefront is an interactive mirror that enables a customer to select items as though shopping online. Recognizing the increasing role in retail, Minkoff decided to integrate the smartphone into the showroom experience. The customer can enter her phone number and then walk away to enjoy a drink while a store associate curates their personalized fitting room. Once that customer receives a text alert, she enters a fitting room, equipped with another interactive mirror that allows her to summon the associate for new sizes and items — like designer-specified recommendations based on her selections. “If you’re looking at a leather jacket, [and] Rebecca wants you to have a certain handbag with that or a certain pair of leather pants, then those will be also there and you can choose your sizes,” Uri said. “You basically have full control over all the inventory in the store.” A customer can also save her fitting room session. It’s another function translated from online shopping — specifically the online shopping cart. The amount of data gleaned from this kind of real-world tracking has implications not just for the costumer, but for the designer as well. Minkoff isn’t the only designer to experiment with technology in stores. At the store in Palo Alto, Calif., shoppers can browse and buy from her kids, lingerie and adidas lines through a large touch screen display on the shop floor. It goes beyond just the boutique scene: An Ugg store in D.C.-area mall Tysons Galleria now enables customers to browse touch screen catalogs and check out using their phone instead of a cash register. In fact, the entire Tyson Corner Center mall is with a designated smartphone app, virtual concierge services, and other functions. |
Apple Is Figuring Out How To Sell An Archetype | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | Around the time of the iPhone 5’s release, I started thinking of Apple as an archetype factory. By removing extraneous detail and ornamentation, they were trimming down their devices to a definitive essence. They were making conscious decisions to spend money and man hours to improve technology in invisible, rather than visible, ways. But this decision is a double-edged sword. I , and I think it still holds up: …when things become archetypes, they become intrinsically less interesting to people who thrive on dissonance and disruption. That’s why the iPhone 5 got such a converse reaction from the tech press when it was revealed. It’s an exercise in precision and restraint, not a play for our wildest imaginations. The iPad has undergone a similar transformation with the iPad Air. Which raises an interesting question when it comes to trying to market it. When something has been refined to its purest form — how do you convince people that you’re capable of improving it? The iPad Air 2 is improved on a variety of metrics from the original, some of those like screen lamination are readily evident if you know what to look for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROZhrRm88ms So, with its latest ad ‘Change’, which debuts today, Apple is putting the emphasis squarely on what continues to be the defining difference between the iPad and the rest of the market: capable apps that people use. Because the iPad continues to enjoy incredible mind-share with developers — who largely build for what they use and use iOS — Apple can showcase the execution, rather than the setup. While you can tout specifications in ads, the results can be , and largely distant from the way real people think about devices. Some takeaways from the Change spot: You can watch the , when it’s on YouTube we’ll embed it here. |
Rumor: Ektron Deal Could Include Merger With European CMS Vendor EpiServer [Updated] | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | As though the story we have been following over the last week hasn’t been convoluted enough, we started hearing rumors yesterday that the deal actually includes another component. The company could be merging with Stockholm-based Web-content management vendor as part of the deal. The story, if it turns out to be accurate, underscores some of the problems that enterprise startups are having in areas that are becoming increasingly commoditized, forcing them into consolidation plays as a path to growth. . We’d been hearing the same thing ourselves but have been unable to confirm it. An EpiServer spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the rumour. “Thanks for reaching out, however, I have no comment,” the spokesperson said in an email. To give some context here, both of these companies make web content management systems (WCM), enterprise software that helps manage a company’s web and digital presence. WCM is currently very much in flux as the industry shifts from a pure web focus to a broader multi-channel view, with a bigger emphasis on mobile devices and native apps. And this is especially important today as companies see mobile apps and as a competitive differentiator. What’s more, the WCM industry is becoming increasingly commoditized as companies share a common set of functionalities. As such, it’s becoming difficult for vendors to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive marketplace. When an industry commoditizes like this, mergers and acquisitions tend to follow. Ektron is based in the US with headquarters in Nashua, NH, while EpiServer’s headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, but in spite of their different locations they have a lot in common. They are each owned by private equity firms, Ektron’s primary owner being Accel-KKR, while EpiServer’s is IK Investment Partners. In addition, both make .NET-based web content management systems. Ektron customers include Microsoft, NASDAQ, Walmart, National Geographic and John Hancock Long-term Insurance. EpiServer customers include Pizza Hut, GlaxoSmithKline, Kellogs and British Telecom. Against this backdrop, several industry sources have told us that a merger of the two companies could make sense, especially since they fill in gaps in one another’s markets. “EpiServer has a strong presence overseas and has never established a good foothold in the US. Vice versa is true for Ektron,” an industry insider with knowledge of both companies told us. They added that EpiServer’s owner, private equity firm IK Investment Partners, doesn’t own any other technology companies, and they said the purchase never really fit the IK product portfolio. Dumping EpiServer would make sense in that context. Another industry insider told us that EpiServer was the stronger product technically, but they had some market gaps Ektron could fill. “They have really good architecture and technology. Solid channel. Bad sales and marketing, especially in the US,” the person said. They added, the challenge would be the migration path for the product that survives, but this person believes the market needs this kind of consolidation because, as they said, “there are too many vendors with very little technical differentiation.” But a third industry insider wasn’t so sure it was such a great match, saying, “The only thing I can think of is that they would try to move the Ektron customers over [to EpiServer]. No way that’s happening. Completely different systems,” they said. This story started last week when . Ektron refused to comment at the time, then released a press release on Friday saying Accel-KKR had made an equity investment in the company. When we talked to company president Tim McKinnon he told us straight out there had been no sale and it was purely funding. Shortly after that conversation, however, a document was leaked online that clearly showed there was in fact a sale, and in to Accel-KKR. At the same time, McKinnon also told us that the company would come back as a new entity and new stock would be issued in which Accel-KKR would be a stockholder. The leaked document said Accel-KKR owned 100 percent of this new entity, but McKinnon said it would be less than that, although he couldn’t say exactly how much. It’s possible this new entity could include both companies if the rumor turns out to be accurate. One source suggested that perhaps Friday’s PR snafu had to do with the complication of adding EpiServer to the deal. Ektron was limited by how much it could say, so it simply tried to make it look like an equity investment instead of a sale. That’s all speculation though, and we will have to see how this shakes out in the coming days. Ektron received $4.5M in Series C funding in June, 2013 from CEI Ventures as well an undisclosed investment from Accel-KKR last April. IK Investment Partners bought EpiServer outright in 2010. : We are hearing chatter this evening that EpiServer will be purchased by Accel-KKR, but that it’s possible the two companies will remain separate entities in spite of this. While it’s still possible the two could be combined at some point, just because two similar companies are owned by the same firm is no guarantee they will be combined. : Swedish business paper, is reporting . and the sale has been confirmed by IK Investment Partners officials. Terms were not disclosed. The story is in Swedish and behind a pay wall, but a reporter from the publication sent me a translation by email. EpiServer has confirmed the deal, but much like Ektron last week, the company is stopping short of calling it a sale in their official announcement, . This is what Ektron called it last week until a document appeared online indicating it was clearly a sale. |
Texting Turns 22 | Nic Denholm | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | ago, 22-year-old Neil Papworth sent the first ever short message service (SMS). His fifteen-character missive – ‘merry christmas’ – was sent to colleague Richard Jarvis on December 3, 1992. This act was considered important enough to mark the occasion with a party but not important enough to invite its author. The truth is, nobody really saw the significance of what they were working on. Twenty-two years and quadrillions of text messages later, SMS is the king of electronic communications. It makes tens of billions of dollars for network providers and connects billions of people around the world. Annual text traffic is expected to reach 9.4 trillion by 2016. And why wouldn’t SMS be so impressive? Cheap, effective and widely available, the rude health in which texting finds itself in 2014 was patently obvious in 1992. Or at least that’s what hindsight bias tells us. The truth is a little more complicated… Those twenty characters summed up, with stereotypically Teutonic concision, Friedhelm Hillebrand’s thoughts on the optimal length of the standardized text message protocol he and a dozen colleagues were working on in 1985. As chairman of the non-voice services committee for the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Hillebrand was tasked with developing a technology capable of transmitting, receiving and displaying text messages. The limited bandwidth available on wireless networks, which at the time were the sole reserve of car phones, meant Hillebrand and his team had to find a data pipeline capable of sending short messages across all cellular carriers and to all mobile phones. The lightbulb moment came with the idea of harnessing an existing radio channel that was already used to alert cellphones about reception strength. “We were looking [for a] cheap implementation,” said Hillebrand in a 2009 . “Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link… it was free capacity on the system.” Hillebrand’s ‘perfectly sufficient’ character limit was 160, a number now as standard to electronic communications as 24 frames are to movies, or 12 bars are to blues. The golden number was hit upon after studying word-counts on a decidedly low-tech platform: the humble postcard. Most postcards contain less than 160 characters. It was already an intuitive message-length for people, so it made sense to stick with that limit. “We tested that you could send 160 characters, but who was ever going to send more than 160 characters to say ‘If you’re not home in 20 minutes, your dinner’s in the dog’?’ Especially bearing in mind this was before predictive text,” says Papworth. The offhand, charmingly humble way in which these world-changing engineers talk about SMS is indicative of the circuitous route it took to market. Projections were about as accurate as the first incarnations of predictive text (not very). Market research was practically non-existent. When Papworth sent his Yuletide greeting in 1992, the technology had already been in development for seven years. Early GSM handsets did not support SMS, and when they began to, the protocol was only used to inform recipients of a voicemail. It took a further seven years for cross-network SMS to become available. As hard as it is to fathom in a world of instant startup success, where Instagram is valued at (and bought for) a billion dollars despite never having publicly hinted at a monetization strategy, SMS nearly didn’t happen. It was so slow out of the gate, it threatened to simply give up and head back to the stable. It took operators a while to “realize the profit they could make from charging more for sending outside the network,” according to Papworth. Nonetheless, it’s hard to cast your mind back to a time when big investment money wasn’t pouring into the technology sector. This is what makes those pioneering Europeans so special. Nobody had any idea whether it would work. SMS wasn’t even developed with widespread commercial applications in mind – it was intended to be an internal tool for businesses with an eye on the future. It’s safe to say the carriers were flabbergasted by the popularity of SMS, especially among younger users. During the 90s and early 2000s, teenagers adopted the technology in droves. It was they who developed text speak, further carving out a niche in which young people could communicate on a level not fully understood by their parents. The technology may have been new, but the independent impulse was as old as time. Even Papworth was oblivious to the full potential of the technology he helped bring to bear. “As a techy nerd, I was just focused on getting my job done. I never thought of people wanted to do this – my goal was to ensure that they do this,” says Papworth. “I don’t think even creators of the GSM standards would have imagined all the uses it has been put to in the last 22 years.” Despite the rise of instant messaging services like WhatsApp, the creators of SMS justifiably see their baby as the ultimate app. The new kids on the block may seem impressive, but in terms of market penetration they can’t compete with the two-decade head start and cross-platform accessibility of texting. As Papworth says of WhatsApp et al, “there’s no guarantee all of your 300 friends have installed it, or even that they have a data plan.” If you want to communicate with your dad, your friends and your nephews and nieces, there are a plethora of options. But the only one you can guarantee will reach all of them is SMS. That’s why we’re still talking about it. So does Papworth’s non-invitation to the first SMS party still rankle? The question’s a non-starter – he was so focused on the job he didn’t care a jot about missing the festivities. For him, it was just another successful day’s work: “That was good enough for me. And it’s still the same ethos I have today 22 years later.” |
Comcast Makes It More And More Difficult To Opt-Out Of Internet Sharing | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | As we learned back in , Comcast has decided to turn every cable router on its network into a public wi-fi access point. While this may sound like a good idea – free Internet for all Comcast subscribers everywhere is the goal – the reality clashes with the Internet user’s sense of freedom and control. And, unfortunately, Comcast is making it harder and harder to opt out of their service. has noted that many users have found that even after disabling the sharing updates to the firmware re-enable it automatically. Wrote one user, : The only solution, according to forum members, is to “buy your own modem/router,” a solution that seems quite simple. Sadly, however, there are also complaints of Comcast failing to remove router rental fees even after multiple requests. While most users are obviously fine with Comcast sharing their bandwidth, this Kafkaesque experience for those who dare think a bit different looks quite frustrating. |
Samsung Ventures Leads $17M Round In Lithium-Polymer Battery Maker Seeo | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | , a Hayward, California-based company that makes lithium-polymer batteries, has closed a $17M round led by new investor Samsung Ventures, the investment arm of Samsung Group. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and GSR Ventures also participated. This brings the total Seeo has raised so far to $40.6 million. Seeo’s rechargeable lithium batteries are built using a proprietary non-flammable polymer electrolyte it calls “DryLyte,” which it claims is safer than traditional lithium-ion batteries. The company . Seeo is currently developing batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles; electric grids; telecom infrastructure like data centers; and consumer electronics. This is not the first clean-tech investment that Samsung Ventures has made. Earlier this year, it , which develops technology that manages energy efficiency in buildings. Since Samsung Group’s verticals range from consumer electronics to industrial engineering, investing in companies that might give it access to cheaper and more environmentally-friendly sources of power makes sense. |
Report: Iran Developing System To ID Any Internet User | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 7 | The government of Iran is no stranger to using its power to in its country, blocking millions of websites when they have run counter to religious or political beliefs. Now it sounds like it plans to take that another step further: engineers are developing a system to identify any individual in the country who goes online, according to a report in the AFP (via ), citing comments made to the semi-official . “In future when people want to use the Internet they will be identified, and there will be no web surfer whose identity we do not know,” the country’s minister of telecommunications Mahmoud Vaezi was quoted as saying. He did not provide further details about how this would work, or the timing for when this system would be turned on. We have been trying to find the original source material the AFP is reporting on. We have also contacted the ISNA for more detail. So far, no dice. The idea with IDing users seems to be that by doing so, it will deter them from posting or reading contentious material by making it impossible to do so anonymously. It comes alongside wider plans to introduce filtering services to identify and block offensive content. The would be rolled out in phases, with levels of service being turned on in one, three and six months. From the looks of it, the filtering appears to be a system that will detect and block out portions of websites that are deemed criminal (in the eyes of Iranian authorities) without blocking the full site. The full project is expected to be completed in 10 months. This is not the first time that Iran has been in the news for technology to ID users. In 2012, Iranian authorities were reportedly , specifically venues like Internet cafes (a popular way of going online in Iran, where about 30 million of its 75 million citizens use the Internet), that would require users to log in to use services. Perhaps bowing to international pressure, Iran has in the past that it was working on such services, although it has, ultimately, to work on ways to restrict Internet access. Among the millions of sites that are regularly blocked for hosting politically or religiously contentious content are Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and most recently and other communications apps like Viber and Tango. Internationally, the country has been more notorious for who have carried out infrastructure attacks in opposition to Stuxnet and spreading malware, with the aim of disrupting services thought to be supportive of the U.S. or Israel — claims the country has denied. Updated with more background information, links. |
Apple Begins Selling Bose Products Again Two Months After Pulling Them | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Apple has begun audio products from Bose again, as . The return comes nearly two months after it pulled the range for unknown reasons. It was never clear why Apple cut Bose out, but it is likely to be related to , the audio company that , in July over noise-cancelling headphones. The two sides , ending the need for the case to go to court, but from Apple’s online store and offline retail outlets just a week later. Bose also stole a march on its rival when it became right before Apple’s purge, although that didn’t stop many sports stars from using Beats products — and in some cases. Perhaps it was a case of Cupertino flexing its retail muscles as a warning or a move to help drive sales of Beats, but either way the relationship seems more stable now. That means that you can hit up Apple’s on- and offline stores in the U.S. before Christmas if you know someone who’d appreciate or speakers in their stocking this year. |
[Update] Turning Unwanted Goods Into New Sales, Optoro Raises $50 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | [Update: Through his own investment fund, Generation Investment Management, former Vice President and KPCB Green Growth Fund partner Al Gore added $10 million to the company’s funding as of early Wednesday morning.] Optoro has raised $50 million to expand its business turning unwanted items into new sales for businesses. Led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Green Growth Fund, with participation from returning investors , and , the new round for Washington-based Optoro is the latest example of firms finding sustainable investment opportunities in businesses far removed from the capital-intensive industry of energy generation. The company works with retailers to re-sell returned and excess inventory. Roughly 15 percent of all goods are either returned or unsold, according to a statement from the company. That unwanted inventory totals over $500 billion — and presents a logistical conundrum for retailers and the municipalities that end up storing that waste in landfills. “Optoro’s proven cloud platform captures that value for retailers and consumers by efficiently finding new homes — not landfills — for returned goods,” says KPCB partner John Doerr, neatly summarizing the company’s green benefits. Either through their own sales channels, secondary sellers like , or on its own site, customers can buy anything from like game systems, smartphones, and tablets to , to . “Since we first invested in Optoro last year, we have seen a major transformation in the way that mainstream retailers approach one of their most costly challenges – managing excess and returned inventory,” said Revolution Growth co–founder and Optoro board member Ted Leonsis. According to KPCB partner and Optoro board member, Daniel Oros, the company is generating significant revenue and is in an attractive market. It’s actually the second supply chain or logistics company in the Green Growth Fund, alongside . Competitors include eBay, which has a business managing auctions for liquidated items, and , which provides logistics services for retailers. “Our solution is bringing cutting-edge technology to a truly antiquated industry,” said president and co-founder Adam Vitarello in a statement. “What’s especially powerful is our win-win-win proposition: Better value for our clients, amazing deals for consumers, and a healthier planet through more efficient use of existing resources.” |
With $16M In Funding, Helium Wants To Provide The Connective Tissue For The Internet Of Things | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Over the next few years, we’ll see a torrent of new devices emerge that are connected to the Internet and each other through a wide range of different wireless networking protocols. As a result, there’s a race on, not just to get those devices connected, but also to provide the network infrastructure necessary to managing all of them at scale. A startup called , which has been quietly operating in stealth over the last two years, is looking to provide the connective tissue between all those devices, all without relying on WiFi, Bluetooth, or cellular networks. The company hopes to do that by combining low-powered wireless connectivity and a smart distribution network for data coming from those devices. While it’s still working out the products and business model that will enable that connectivity, the company is announcing today that it has raised $16 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from FirstMark Capital, Digital Garage, Marc Benioff, SV Angel, and Slow Ventures among others. In addition to the funding, Helium has named former Qualcomm exec Rob Chandhok its president and COO. He’ll also join the company’s board, along with Chairman Shawn Fanning, Helium co-founder Amir Haleem, and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. (While Khosla Ventures hasn’t named a board member yet, we’re told Vinod Khosla has been very active in helping the company to date.) Prior to joining Helium, Chandhok had served as the president of Qualcomm Interactive Platforms and senior vice president at Qualcomm Technologies. There he led the company’s strategic software initiatives in open source, Internet of Things, and wearables verticals. As a result, he has experience in large-scale wireless systems, which should help Helium as it seeks to refine its products and go to market. Chandhok is a new hire — he started at the company on Monday — but the company has already assembled a 20-person team of experts in radio frequency technology and distributed networks. That’s because the big idea behind Helium is to use unlicensed wireless bandwidth to transmit small amounts of data from various connected device and being able to distribute it to applications that rely on it. To do that, the company is developing its own wireless data protocol and wireless modules that can be inserted into devices that manufacturers want to be a part of its network. The belief is that since the devices in question would be delivering bytes of data rather than megabytes, it could create its own connection to them in a cost effective manner without relying on existing cellular or WiFi networks. By leveraging low-power wireless bands and building a highly distributed network of ultra-affordable base stations (or Helium bridges), it could receive and transmit small amounts of data from those devices seamlessly. While Helium hopes to build out its own network for devices to connect to, it’s not ruling out letting devices add data through other networking solutions. After all, as Chandhok told me, the more devices there are that connect into its network, the more powerful it will be. |
HashiCorp Announces New DevOps Management Tool And $10M In Funding | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | The funding was led by Mayfield with participation from GGV Capital and True Ventures. The company’s roots go back to the college days of co-founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar at the University of Washington. They began with a big idea to create what they called a cockpit for building, deploying and managing distributed applications. However, being students who were obligated to do things like take classes, they soon realized the problem was probably too big to solve right then, and they shelved the idea. But they didn’t forget about it, and while they got their education the problem still loomed in their imagination. After graduating and getting jobs, Hashimoto and Dadgar reunited in 2012 and launched HashiCorp . They decided to break their big problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces and eventually built the five open source tools currently on offer. In fact, they found as they developed each one, the community let them know about adjacent problems and they layered on each new tool to address a different need. For Robin Vasan from lead investor Mayfield, the popularity of the open source pieces with developers was a good sign. Atlas, the product they are announcing today is a cloud service that stitches the five open source products into a single interface. Hashimoto tells me while it’s possible to do this without Atlas, it takes a considerable engineering effort and they have done the work for their customers with this product. “We have created a single system and dashboard that strings these products together into one solution,” he explained. And he says that gives developers and IT operations ( a combination also known as DevOps) the tools to get a broad view of the DevOps workflow as applications move through the development, deployment and management processes. Hashimoto points out that the service works across a variety of systems including those running on Windows or Linux or public and private cloud solutions such as VMware, Amazon Web Services or OpenStack. It works on physical servers, containers (like Docker) and with Chef and Puppet. The idea is to give you visibility across all of that throughout the development lifecycle, regardless of the tools you are using. “We’ve built Atlas to allow companies to focus on what they want to do and not deal with all of the complexity of getting from building to production,” Hashimoto explained. |
ToyTalk Raises $15 Million In Series C Round Led By Khosla Ventures | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | , the kids entertainment applications startup founded by former Pixar execs has raised $15 million in a Series C round of financing led by . Former investors , , and join this latest round, putting the total raised at $30 million. Khosla partner Samir Kaul joins the company board, which includes David Sze and Adam Nash from Greylock and Saar Gur from CRV. The fresh funds allow the company to beef up its engineering team and create more applications as well as forge partnerships with companies that can help the company produce physical toy products in the coming year. ToyTalk released a teaser video a few years back showing a Teddy Ruxpin like talking bear that interacted with children via iPad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im6uADXe-sA That was just an idea of what could become a product in the future, according to ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob. But he’s not in the business of making physical products. ToyTalk’s plan is to license the tech to toy manufacturers. Jacob’s main focus here is compliance. “We don’t want to make the products. We want our partners to do that,” he explains. “This is about the kid Internet of Things. A lot of that has to do with compliance…As a parent that’s important to me, too,” he says. Google has made its way into what Jacob calls the kid Internet of Things. The tech giant is coming out with to ensure they are more kid-friendly. “The big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids, so there’s a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children,” Pavni Diwanji, VP of engineering said in an interview with USA Today. ToyTalk recently , the nonprofit producer of Sesame Street, to explore the potential between ToyTalk’s PullString technology, the tech behind speech recognition applications and Sesame Street products. We are very pleased with the investment we’ve had from Khosla and others,” Jacob said. “They support what we are trying to do here with the technology.” * |
Restaurant Reservation Service Reserve Launches In San Francisco | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | , a mobile app that makes it easy to find reservations at top restaurants, that it’s now available in San Francisco. The service, which , came out of Expa, the “startup studio” created by Uber and StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp. CEO Greg Hong said that just as Uber made personal drivers more accessible to a broader audience, he wants to do the same for concierge services. With Reserve, users provide the date and time window for their reservation, then the app will provide a list of recommendations. Once you’ve found a restaurant or restaurants that you like, Reserve works to get you a reservation and updates you on its progress via text. If it can’t get something in your window, it’ll recommend something similar. And after dinner, the app will handle payment, too. The app first launched in New York, Boston and Los Angeles. |
SF And LA District Attorneys File Civil Suit Against Uber For Making ‘False Or Misleading Statements’ | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles counties have filed suit against Uber for claims that the company made “false and misleading statements” to consumers, while also engaging in business practices that violate California Law. At the same time, those authorities announced a settlement with Uber competitor Lyft on similar charges. The complaints claim that Uber “engaged in a variety of unlawful business practices in violation of California Business and Professions Code.” Most notably, the company is charged with the following: The district attorneys are seeking a permanent injunction against Uber to stop those practices — which, if granted, could shut it down in two of its more important markets, at least for a time. They are also seeking civil penalties for those business acts and practices, along with restitution for consumers who paid safe ride fees and for airport fee tolls that weren’t passed on to the airport. Uber has faced intense regulatory scrutiny in a number of markets over the past few days, including , , , and . Then again, it’s gotten used to that after four years of tussles with local governments. Meanwhile, those same SF and LA district attorneys announced a settlement with Lyft for similar charges of misleading representations. Those charges are also related to background checks applied to drivers, customer fare measurement, and unlawful commercial operations at California airports. Unlike Uber, Lyft has agreed to an injunction that would prohibit it from making misleading statements related to its background checks. It also will submit its app to the California Department of Agriculture’s Division of Measurement Standards for evaluation of its accuracy. And it will require Lyft to get authorization from airports in California before operating there, something it has already done at SFO. The company has also agreed to pay civil penalties of $500,000 in two tranches: one $250,000 payment within 30 days and another that would be waived at the end of the year if Lyft has shown that it has complied with all the terms of the injunction.
|
The Happy Home Company Aims To Take The Headache Out Of Home Maintenance | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | I’ve never owned a home. That’s mostly because I make a journalist’s salary while living in one of . But also, I really like the fact that I can call my landlord or superintendent whenever something breaks, because it’s their responsibility. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Doug Ludlow, formerly CEO of the startup Hipster ( , which owns TechCrunch), told me that he’s a first-time home owner, and he became “a little terrified” as he thought about the responsibilities involved in home maintenance. So he started to take things that are “mystifying and terrifying to the average homeowner and make them a little more accessible.” In fact, when Ludlow briefed me on his new startup last week, he said he was taking advantage of The Happy Home Company’s services at that very moment — specifically, waiting for someone to arrive and fix a leaky roof. Now if you’re looking for a handyman, there are other online services that might do the job, like Angie’s List or Handy. (Though now comes from home cleanings.) The challenge, Ludlow said, is that “you actually have to know what the problem is in the first place,” which isn’t always easy, given “the infinite number of things that can go wrong.” The Happy Home Company is focused less on building a marketplace for handyfolk and more on providing “home managers.” So when something breaks, instead of guessing what’s wrong and who you need to talk to, you can just take a photo or video, then your home manager will find the right service provider for you. (Ludlow said the company does extensive screening to find high quality service providers in each area, and will negotiate with them to get the best prices.) The managers also work with you to create a general, prioritized home maintenance plan. And the service handles payment, too — it charges a small fee on those transactions, but Ludlow said that’s mostly to cover the processing fees. The startup’s real source of revenue will be the $9.99 per month that it charges for home managers. The approach reminded me of , which offers a personal assistant to tackle things like laundry and groceries, in part by leveraging services like Handy and Instacart. ( at TechCrunch’s most recent Disrupt SF conference.) Ludlow agreed that Alfred seems to have “done a good job packaging things,” but he argued that The Happy Home Company is aimed at a much broader group of customers — it’s certainly a lot cheaper than Alfred’s $99 a month. Ludlow also put me in touch with his friend Ryan Gerard, who was one of the early testers of the service after becoming a first-time homeowner a year ago. In an email, Gerard told me: For me, the HHC is a lifeline. They are the people I call for help when things break…and things definitely break. I’ve called them to help fix a really loud garage door, a broken door handle, and a variety of small emergencies. In addition, for me the HHC is a proxy for finding trusted service people. I trust HHC, so I trust the people they send. For example, I called them when I needed to find someone to inspect a retaining wall. I wanted an independent consultant who could provide an unbiased opinion on whether it needed replacement. I have no idea how to find someone who would do this, or how to evaluate whether they’re good. The HHC found and recommended a Soil Engineer who came out and provided a thorough examination of the retaining wall for me. The startup was , and it offers both a web interface and an iPhone app. You can learn more at . If you use the invite code “Techcrunch,” you’ll get a six-month subscription for free. Oh, and in case you were worried, Ludlow just told me that his roof isn’t leaking anymore. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwFWZCsFyoc&w=560&h=315] |
Twitch Is Acquiring GoodGame To Make Pro Partnerships More Appealing | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Video-game-streaming service that it will acquire , a full-service agency dedicated to serving the needs to pro-gamers and brands looking to be involved in the eSports industry. GoodGame has built a business over the last 10 years by sponsoring its own competitive esports teams, connecting brands with popular third-party teams, creating viral content for brands looking to market to gaming enthusiasts, and more. “We’ve been responsible for funneling more than $10 million toward players, teams, tournaments, and other parts of the esports ecosystem,” writes GoodGames CEO Alex Garfield in a The move lets Twitch capture more of the value generated by the growing esports industry, which has already been a huge key to its success — on any given day, than concurrently watch major news networks. With GoodGames on its team, Twitch can further ingratiate itself in the business of running teams and getting money to professional gamers. That in turn makes these popular streamers more likely to stick with Twitch when showing off their gaming chops, rather than jumping over to competitors like YouTube or . It also expands Twitch’s interactions with big brands. While Twitch already makes it very easy for Twitch partners (users with a large number of subscribers) to make money by playing video ads on their streams, there’s likely ample room for Twitch to move up-market in terms of quality and revenue thanks to its huge audience and focus on video content. GoodGame’s team brings with it and an expertise in pitching the gaming audience to companies with big budgets for brand advertising. |
If You’re Running Windows 10 You May Have To Reinstall Office | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Microsoft’s , one of the most prominent members of the Windows 10 team, announced today that a security update to the current build of the operating system will not install if a user has Office already installed. Instead, users of build 9879 of Windows 10, if they want to install the security fix, may have to uninstall Office, and later reinstall it. Here’s the mini-tweetstorm from Gabe: The company also released a more technical explanation . Note that you might not have to do the Office dance to get the new code, so try to update without doing so. But if it doesn’t work, this is what to do. Windows 10 is a — the company is working on its new operating system quite publicly, soliciting advice earlier than it did in previous versions. Ship code sooner and more rapidly, however, and you have more issues. The above problem isn’t too surprising, or difficult, but it does underscore Microsoft’s current development pace. Microsoft is not releasing a new build of Windows 10 this year, but smaller updates are fair game it seems. Windows 10 will bring all screen sizes, form factors, and app environments for Microsoft if it pulls off its larger vision. The company will unveil a new, consumer-focused version of Windows 10 in January that may detail how the code will handle switches between user input sources. For now, if you’re on Windows 10 (I wrote this post on a Windows 10 machine I’d like to note) and you want to get the latest on the security side, you should check your build number and make sure you’re up to date. Oh and someone tell Gabe that the kids do it 1/, not (1/4). |
Trustev Uses Fraud Detection Software To Crack Down On Internet Trolls | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Spending time on the Internet, you’re bound to occasionally see comments left from anonymous or semi-anonymous users leaving toxic, vulgar messages that add nothing to the overall discussion. Whether looking at the comments on a YouTube video or your favorite news blog, you find the same people spewing hate with little thought to how it affects those reading. Hence the trend over the last couple of years: publishers abandoning comment systems in favor of using social media to engage with their audiences, while users everywhere repeat the mantra, “never read the comments.” That’s actually kind of sad. It would be nice to read an article that makes you feel something and engage with others without worrying that some serial douchebag will come in and troll you for thinking that it would be nice if maybe women were better represented in games. That line of thinking is what led former Battlefield company to adapt their fraud detection software to spot and ban repeat trolls on publishers’ sites. According to Trustev CEO , the idea to adapt their tools for spotting people committing e-commerce fraud came about as the result of the torrent of trollish hate from GamerGate supporters overwhelmed several popular communities a few months back (which continues to this day). By checking against a variety of factors (summed up in the picture above), Trustev’s tool for publishers can instantly identify so-called “sock puppet” accounts used by serial trolls to attack others without fear of reprisal. As anyone whose been following the GamerGate debacle can attest, no matter how much you block or mute the worst representatives of that community, there always seem to be more heads to the hydra. On sites like Twitter or Reddit, it’s simply too easy for an individual to abandon an account with a bad reputation for a new one. Phelan tells me that for a few cents per operation, a backend registration system that integrates Trustev’s system will automatically identify and ban those engaging in such behavior. While this first anti-trolling release is intended for major news sites (it’s controlled via an analytics-like web app), it’s possible for other platforms and publishers to integrate the system as well. The possibility of wider deployment has put trolls on full alert: in the GamerGate community on 8chan (the site GamerGate moved to after 4chan decided they were too awful and permanently banned the topic), there’s currently a discussion thread discussing how to argue against Trustev’s tool on censorship grounds: |
CoolChip Technologies Is Redesigning The Humble Computer Fan | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | If there’s one part of a PC that doesn’t get enough love, it’s the fan. These small plastic spinning pieces cost almost nothing and keep hundreds or thousands of dollars of advanced technology from cooking itself. The only time anyone talks about a computer’s fans is when we notice them doing their jobs. “I can’t go on YouTube without them winding up, making a bunch of noise!” For many, these fans are becoming increasingly unnecessary. Chips built for phones, tablets and even some laptops are designed to use small enough amounts of power than they can dissipate heat without blowing a bunch of air all over everything. But for users who demand power — gamers, video editors and the like — fans are still a reality that has to be dealt with every day. is working to redesign fans to be less of a nuisance. While there are alternatives (like liquid cooling) for those who simply cannot stand the presence of fans, CoolChip’s work doesn’t require significantly changing a machine’s internal layout. In a presentation at demo day, founder CoolChip founder William Sanchez claimed that the company’s fans are half the size and achieve 35-40 percent greater thermal performance than traditional PC fans. That’s impressive, but not something that most consumers would be aware of or care about. But when Sanchez put a mic next to one his startup’s fans and then a more traditional unit, there was a stark difference: The CoolChip fans appeared to be silent and you could definitely hear the regular fan; both were removing the same amount of heat. Among PC gamers, this could be huge. An enthusiast’s gaming rig typically has one CPU and one to four graphics cards, each of which generate enough heat to warrant one of CoolChip’s fans. Anyone with a PC built for maxing out their games or software would notice the noise reduction from switching to fans this quiet. Apparently I’m not the only one to notice that. Onstage, Sanchez noted that CoolChip has partnered with Cooler Master to bring its technology to market as aftermarket add-ons early next year, and Microsoft consulted with the startup to make quieter fans for the Xbox One games console, as well as an upcoming unannounced Xbox (likely an Xbox One Slim). Then there’s the enterprise and infrastructure market. At a Facebook, Google, or Amazon data center, replacing hundreds or thousands of fans with ones using ~35 percent less power could yield significant cost savings. As data centers move from big PC processors to large networks of ARM chips, there will likely be even more individual chips to keep cool. That opportunity is likely what drew the attention of Peter Thiel’s , which invested $500,000 back in 2012. For a quick look at the actual fans getting everyone excited, check out this prototype video CoolChips posted late last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWijjwW8Dcc |
eBay’s New iPad App Design Hints At Its E-Commerce Future | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | is revamping for the consumer times we live in, starting with a out in the App Store today. According to the e-commerce company, the mobile experience, particularly in the tablet market, is rapidly becoming the preferred way to shop globally. Over 30 percent of US shoppers and 50 percent of users globally are using phones and tablets to pick out ready to buy items instead of bidding on the e-commerce site. A full 59 percent are multiscreen shoppers. This means they are often picking out and saving items on mobile and then buying them later on desktop. That behavior is forging a new way the company plans to interact with shoppers going forward. “The eBay for iPad app is an important step on our journey,” RJ Pittman, chief product officer for eBay noted. “It delivers a better shopping experience for buyers and better merchandising capabilities for sellers.” eBay had plans to release the new iPad app in Q1 this next year, but wanted to find out for themselves how it did during the prime holiday shopping season. Pittman mentioned this is part of the new eBay strategy to be more agile and move faster to keep up with the way we shop in the future. The new app takes Collections and adds in a curated categories element. Those on iPad will see items they are watching, recently viewed or a curated holiday gifts section right on the front page. The app will basically use machine learning to figure out what you are more likely to buy. Recent searches, previous purchases and what someone tends to look at most will be incorporated into what gets populated on the front end. Pittman painted the idea as a sort of that you can actually discover and purchase from. Creating that same feeling of brick and mortar shopping discovery has been a tough nut to crack for e-commerce. eBay is attempting to bring in that much enjoyed past time of browsing in the store and happening upon something you never knew you always wanted, but in the digital realm. “It’s really hard to do browsing well. We don’t claim to have all the answers but we do want to make it awesome enough that you come back and browse often and stay longer,” said Pittman.
The new iPad app includes higher resolution images that users can pinch and zoom in on to get a better sense of the product up close. eBay will encourage on-boarding in this department to help sellers add cleaner, more buyer friendly pictures of items. It also incorporates a cleaner design, simplified navigation and checkout, gesture-based exploration, and what eBay hopes to be a more user-friendly My eBay experience (Buying, Selling, Watching, Following). The app is a bit of a test for the company roadmap in the coming year. Pittman didn’t want to tap down an exact date for the rollout of the same features on other mobile devices, but was able to disclose that this launch will help decide how the same features get rolled out on Android tablets and smartphones in 2015. |
Ralph Baer, The Grandfather Of Gaming, Dead At 92 | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | On weekends, my basement could be considered a shrine and church to Ralph Baer. It is there that my children congregate and play video games for hours, a pastime now as familiar as gathering around an open flame was to our early forbears. Ralph Baer, who died on December 6 at the age of 92, lit a thousand digital fires in a thousand cozy living rooms. He was the grandfather of gaming. A German immigrant, Baer dreamed up the first “game box” while lounging outside of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. His invention, eventually dubbed the Magnavox Odyssey and launched in 1972, pulled video games out of grimy bars and smoky pinball halls and into the home where it has stayed for over four decades. Baer’s vision was of a “brown box” that would connect to the television and send signals over the RF connection. Essentially a tiny electronic TV studio in a plastic case, he and Magnavox came up with an ingenious solution for giving children (and adults) an interactive home gaming experience. The system, when launched, included a version of football, a target shooting game, and an early version of tennis that predated Atari’s Pong. Sales were slow at first but quickly exploded. By 1974 Magnavox had sold three hundred and fifty thousand Odyssey at about $100 each. Baer was born in Cologne and fled to New York with his family in 1938. He returned to Europe during WWII where he worked as a radio technician and intelligence officer. Upon returning to New York he began working on defense-related radio projects but the dream of a game-playing television hounded him. The key, he discovered, was to separate the television display from the game, thereby making it easy to upgrade rather than buy a whole new set. His were not the first video games in existence – there were glimmers of a digital future on the horizon as early as 1958 – but the “brown box” was the first to capture the imaginations of countless proto-hackers. By bringing gaming into the home he was able to breed countless programmers, endless computer graphics artists, and countless game designers who were all draw to his soundless box like moths to a flame. Baer went on to build Simon, a battery-powered color matching game, as well as pioneer the musical greeting card. With over 150 patents to his name he was essentially an invention engine with an eye towards play and every time we fire up our iPads or turn on our wireless controllers we owe him – and his flash of inspiration – a debt of gratitude. |
Microsoft Azure Government Comes Out Of Preview | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Microsoft today that its cloud computing service for federal, state, local and tribal U.S. governments is now generally available after of being in preview. This means the service is now open to all U.S. government customers. There are no more preview programs and the service is also now open for all workloads. By default, Azure Government ensures that all data stays within the U.S. and within data centers and networks that are physically isolated from the rest of Microsoft’s cloud computing solution. It’s in compliance with , a mandatory government-wide program that prescribes a standardized way to carry out security assessments for cloud services. It also supports a wide range of other compliance standards, including HIPAA and the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), which is meant to keep safe fingerprint and background-check data that has to be shared with other agencies. As Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella also announced at the company’s Government Cloud Summit in Washington, D.C., today, Dynamics CRM Online for Government will also soon become available. “The Microsoft Cloud for Government is the most complete cloud for any government organization aiming to be more productive, agile and efficient in today’s mobile-first and cloud-first world,” Nadella said in a canned statement today. “We are proud to offer Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online to the growing number of government agencies that are ready to deploy leading-edge cloud computing solutions.” Amazon has long been offering a similar service for government authorities with its . Amazon’s service covers a very similar range of features, though Microsoft may have a bit of an advantage in that it also offers government versions of Office 365. Google offers a version of , but it currently offer a GovCloud-like version of its cloud computing services. |
Trapit And Addvocate Merge For A Content Marketing Team Up | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Two not-terribly-similar startups, and , today that they’re merging. Trapit co-founder and CEO Gary Griffiths will now serve as CEO of the combined company, which has the unwieldy name Addvocate-Trapit. Griffith told me they put off coming up with a more streamlined name “until we’re fully integrated on the product side.” The rest of the management team comes primarily from Trapit, he said, with co-founder Hank Nothhaft remaining as chief product officer. The company is also announcing today that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding. As a refresher, Trapit spun out from SRI International (which was also where Siri started), and it used artificial intelligence to build what was, in many ways, a Flipboard competitor, gathering topic-based content from around the web. It also . As for Addvocate, it was building tools to . (Addvocate earlier this year.) So why bring the companies together? It’s about creating a combined platform for content marketing, which basically means connecting with consumers by producing and sharing content that’s actually good (or at least not just promotional). It’s an industry where Griffiths said there are a lot of companies that “have their oars in the water,” but he argued, “In virtually all of the other applications, we’ve seen a dearth of the ability to find truly relevant content.” Finding that content is what Trapit is good at, and once it’s integrated with Addvocate, they can promote the content after they find it, too. Griffiths also said that Trapit had been looking to raise a Series B when Addvocate investor Rogers Venture Partners connected the two companies. “We were already going down the advocacy path,” he added. “This just made perfect sense for us — instead of trying to build all that ourselves, we inherit a team that’s already familiar with it.” The Series B was led by Rogers, with participation from Trapit’s previous backers, including Asian TV conglomerate Astro Digital. The combined company will have a team of about 40 people, Griffiths said. |
Forget Mistletoe Drones, These Inventory Drones Are Where It’s At | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | Let have its scuttling crab-like robots that can move entire shelves – a German company is working on an inventory management system that will fly around warehouses and confirm whether items are in stock. The has created a sort of mobile antenna that can move through a warehouse and ping RFID tags (or read barcodes) on inventory items. Called InventAIRy, the project allows managers to get an autonomous review of their inventory in a few minutes by a drone or series of drones. These sorts of autonomous robots aren’t new but they do offer a decidedly interesting use for drone technology. While everyone else is and , these quiet drones can do some actual work while flitting around warehouses. They also map their environments automatically, a feature that ensures you won’t have to install difficult-to-manage beacon systems or indoor GPS analogs. I, for one, welcome our warehouse drone overlords. |
Postmates Is Launching An API To Let Third-Party Sellers Offer Local Delivery | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | On-demand delivery startup is expected to announce the release of an API tomorrow that will enable third-party sellers and apps to offer local delivery via its couriers. Once adopted, the API could drive a lot more volume for the company, as it potentially introduces Postmates to a large group of new customers through its partners. The API, which we’ve been told will be announced at a meeting for press and “special guests” at Postmates’ new San Francisco headquarters, will mark the next step in the evolution of a company by allowing third-party partners to offer local deliveries to customers through their own apps and websites. We first saw Postmates offer this type of functionality through a that allowed local buyers in San Francisco to choose from a limited selection of goods and have them delivered within an hour. While it was originally supposed to be a one-month trial in just that city, is still going strong and has been expanded to New York City as well. With the official launch of the API, Postmates is expected to announce new partners who will unlock local delivery in markets where the company operates. That includes the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Austin, Miami, Orange County, San Diego, Seattle, Las Vegas, Denver, Washington D.C. By partnering with Postmates, third-party sellers will be able to improve customer service by offering instant gratification when a local customer is buying from them. Rather than having to wait two days for a package to be delivered via post, Postmates can have their goods to customers within an hour. The partner initiative is being run by Holger Luedorf, who joined Postmates to run business development over the summer. Luedorf had previously served as head of business development at Foursquare, where he worked with local merchants as well as national retailers on partnerships for that startup. Of course, Postmates isn’t the only on-demand logistics company that’s looking to become a sort of API for local delivery. DoorDash, which also got started in the food vertical, is pitching itself as a delivery and logistics company, not just a food delivery startup. And then there’s Uber, which has experimented with various different types of delivery and certainly has built the logistics infrastructure to support it. For Postmates, however, delivery is a core competency and right now it looks like the largest player in the market. And by offering up delivery outside its own apps and website through its API, the company could become even bigger. Postmates, by the way, declined to comment for this story. |
Using Moleskine’s New Smart Notebook Is Like Magic | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | We covered Moleskine’s launch of its new , but after using one in practice, the tech has clearly merited another look. You can see a live trial of the entire process above, which takes under two minutes and offers up an editable .SVG file pretty much the same as those you’ll get from a $2,000+ digital display and drawing tablet combo. The anchor points on the page mean that the perspective you put on the page is the perspective you get in the digital version, which means if you have a bit of a shaky grasp on that like myself it’s not going to magically correct any of your problems. That said, the resulting vector is much easier to fix and change than would be any scanned BMP or other traditional image file. Plus, using your iPhone’s camera to capture your sketches from the notebook itself is far, far easier than employing any kind of flatbed or hand scanner. Despite the minimal setup and requirements, the app does a good job of recognizing detail, and works even in suboptimal lighting. It’s a first step of sorts, however, for those looking to use it to create production-quality images; even once you’ve got the digital file, some work will generally be required to clean things up and get them ready for color and additional visual effects. The app (free) and the Moleskine notebook ($32.95) are going to appeal to a specific subset of users who are Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers, own an iPhone and spend a lot of time in Illustrator, but that describes an awful lot of creatives out there. For them, this is almost like having a digital drawing tablet everywhere you go, without any need to worry about charge, all that much weather protection or technical skill. Some other devices, like the defunct Wacom Inkling, have promised similar things, but this is the first I’ve tried that’s worth the hype. |
Twitter’s ‘While You Were Away’ Recap Feature Is Rolling Out To Many Users | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Back in November, to boost user engagement, and one of those features — a ‘While you were away’ recap of tweets you may have missed — appears to be rolling out to significant numbers of users. It is not live for all at this point, but the fact that it is rolling out to large numbers of Twitter’s userbase suggests that a full rollout is coming soon. We contacted Twitter for comment but — unsurprisingly, given that it is New Year’s Eve — did not receive a response at the time of writing. [ Twitter declined to comment.] ‘While you were away’ works much like Facebook’s Timeline and is the first major non-chronological feature to hit Twitter. Back in November, the company said it would look at the ‘best’ tweets from your network since you last opened Twitter, and put them at the top of your timeline so you don’t miss them. “Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great,” it said of the new feature, which was announced at the same time as ‘instant timeline’, which is expected to arrive on the service in early 2015. ‘While you were away’ appear in his version of Twitter’s mobile app on New Year’s Eve, and indicates that it rolled out to a significant number of others over the past few days. Some guinea pigs . OMG, it appears Twitter is testing a Facebook-like algorithm for the Home stream called "While you were away…" — Eli Langer (@EliLanger) As for the reaction, it’s a mixed bag. Some users don’t like it or find it confusing: "While you were away"? Come on Twitter…ain't nobody got anything that important to say — Len Dickau (@wakaflockaLEN) Twitter got a while you were away section now?.. Uh I guess. — Meisha. (@itsTRUU) That twitter 'while you were away' thing just means I tweet people three days in delay!?! What is it's purpose!?!?? — and_ (@and_armstrong) https://twitter.com/tylerdv0rak/status/547756457132044288 While others are impressed: This "while you were away" option on Twitter is next level. — LWSDX (@HardHeadLew) Love the 'While You Were Away' feature at Twitter. Achieves its purpose without affecting real time news feed! — Samir Selman (@selman) I like Twitter's new "While you were away" addition. — Zach Baru (@zbaru) The algorithm that Twitter uses to source your ‘best’ tweets from your friends is crucial to its success. As someone who doesn’t use Twitter every minute of every day, I’d appreciate a recap but if it is able to surface content that is relevant and interesting to me. There are already some services that exist solely to do that, while Twitter has email alerts for the purpose too. , for example, taps into your Facebook and Twitter network to surface news stories and other items that are popular with people you know. I’m skeptical that Twitter’s feature can be as effective, particularly since it only serves up a single tweet and that takes up precious real-estate at the top of your feed. Nonetheless, the addition looks like it will be more useful for users than many of Twitter’s recent features — which include , , and . , so we shall see whether that personnel shift means less tinkering and more useful features for users in 2015. |
All Of Samsung’s New Smart TVs Will Run Its Tizen Operating System | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | In its latest attempt to make the operating system happen, Samsung that all of its smart televisions will include a -based platform in 2015. In theory, this means that the new smart TVs will be able to sync with other Samsung devices that use Tizen, the company’s own open-source operating system. For example, they can stream content over wi-fi or connect automatically by Bluetooth. In its announcement, Samsung said its “Tizen’s compatibility with other devices establishes Samsung’s Smart TVs as the control center of any Smart Home.” This, of course, means that Samsung will have to drum up developer interest in the OS, which was first announced in 2012, but so far as failed to emerge as a viable competitor to Android. That hasn’t stopped Samsung rolling out products use Tizen. The decision to build Tizen into all of its smart TVs isn’t a surprise because will replace its former smart TV developer platform. Tizen is also used in smartphones like the and . The launch of the Samsung Z has been , however, and the majority of Samsung’s products still use Android, so the future of Tizen as an ecosystem remains unclear. |
Snapchat Has Raised $485 Million More From 23 Investors, At Valuation Of Up To $20B | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Back in the day, we reported that messaging app Snapchat* in a round led by Kleiner Perkins. And then the WSJ reported that it was $20 million, which left us wondering why a growth round would be so small in terms of total principle. Well, it turns out it’s not. Snapchat has raised a much bigger amount: Nearly $500 million in aggregate, that it slipped out as the working day for New Years Eve was drawing to a close. The filing notes that 23 investors took part, although it’s not clear from the SEC document who led the round. Here is what happened, according to our sources: Snapchat originally set out to raise $40 million, but demand for the round skyrocketed, and it decided to shoot for an ambitious $900 million instead. When that didn’t work out, it dialled it back to $500 million. Rumor has it that Kleiner is leading this latest round, with GIC, Yahoo and maybe wildcards August Capital participating. Portions of that, such as the Yahoo part of the fundraise, closed some time ago. The SEC filing notes that the date of first sale was in April 2014. We’ve also heard that the current post money valuation is $20 billion, although others have disputed this and said it’s closer to $10 billion. The cash is much-needed. One source said that Snapchat has an over $30 million-per-year burn rate, and pays half of that to Google Apps Engine to host all its photos, though this number seems low to us. Another noted that at one point the company was paying $3 million each month in legal fees alone. Snapchat’s had its of . Alibaba the original lead on that round as Re/Code (nee AllThingsD) . According to a source, the Alibaba position was then punted to Yahoo, which put in $20 million of its own cash on hand post the Alibaba IPO. We’ve also heard that Yahoo has actually put in more than this but have been unable to corroborate that beyond the $20 million close. The cause of the numerical ups and downs of Snapchat’s fundraising is the company’s unique spin on financing, which works on a “rolling” basis, from how one source describes it. Snapchat is interesting in that they break the conventions of traditional fundraising, one source tells us. Traditionally an entrepreneur will set out to raise a round for a specified amount of money, and then you get interested investors on the same page based on an agreed valuation and then you close it. Spiegel does this somewhat differently. “He goes after individual investors at different valuations. It’s a rolling investment and a rolling close. In theory you could say he’s already done 40 rounds.” (40 is likely figurative rather than literal.) What this means is that, if it’s true, then yes, Snapchat may have raised nearly $500 million in the last six months. Of that $500 million, it may be that only 75% of it is closed, and with portions at different valuations, some getting in pre-$10-billion, like Yahoo, and some above it and closer to $20 billion. The logic for the high valuation is interesting, too, and points to some of the big hopes Snapchat and its investors have for the app. The last reported number of active monthly users of the ephemeral message app was back in August 2014, but things are moving fast. From what we understand the MAU number is now approaching 200 million users. The company in May 2014 reported 700 million photos sent per day on the app, with 500 million Snapchat Stories. Among the company’s revenue-generating services are sponsored Our Stories, which . There have also been interesting appearances from companies like Amazon using the platform to send disappearing deals to users, and while Snapchat and Amazon may be talking, the e-commerce giant is not among the list of investors at the moment, says a source. Alexia’s SO’s VC firm is an investor in Snapchat. |
7 Venture Capitalists Predict What Will Happen In 2015 | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | From cloud wars to the certainty that there will be hacks, venture capitalists believe that 2015 will be a year of tumult and (in public markets anyway) triumph for the startup world. Here are the visions that the general partners, managing directors and partners from firms such as , , , and have when they gaze into their crystal balls. Together these firms have more than $22 billion under management, so they’re not only seeing the future, they’re often shaping it. The cloud computing wars started years ago, but, largely speaking, Amazon has been uncontested and has quietly become the dominant player in the space. In 2015, Amazon will face a multi-front war as Google will launch its assault on Amazon’s traditionally strong presence in the developer ecosystem, and Microsoft will combat Amazon in the enterprise market by re-doubling its efforts on Azure. We will see more “unbundling” of legacy software companies. The disruptive forces that have pushed HP and Symantec to break up their operations in order to compete with new entrants will accelerate as activist investors and private equity owners push to maximize the value of these existing assets. Look for significant moves from Microsoft, EMC, VMware, Citrix, and Dell in the next year. Despite heightened focus, increased investment dollars and strong media buzz around a revolution in the payments space, there has been relatively little tangible change in the way we pay for things. NFC payment hasn’t taken off despite the introduction of Apple Pay, POS integrations are incredibly fragmented and interchange fees are being driven toward zero. There was much excitement around wearable technology, but practical usage isn’t quite there so adoption has been low. While there were some notable product releases, wide-spread adoption and everyday use is still not at hand. For that to happen, creators need to figure out use cases and applications that genuinely simplify everyday tasks, rather than complicate them. 2015 will feature greater entrepreneurial enablement. For example: With a 21 percent decline in funds but a 40 percent increase in dollars raised, we are seeing larger funds spread across fewer firms. In 2015 we can expect to see the average deal size increase with an uptick in later growth rounds. Real-time and mobile services have empowered a new segment of workforce that thrives on flexible and independent work. This has enabled those that aren’t able to (or simply don’t want to) fulfill 9-5 jobs to enter the workforce and creates a prevalence of non-traditional careers in services. In 2014 in the U.S. alone, there are 18 million independent workers. Expect that number to increase at sharp rates in 2015. 2014 saw changes in policy that enable the entrepreneur with greater independence and freedom. More lenient immigration policies will allow people to pursue entrepreneurship, while affordable individual health care makes traditional employment less of a draw. These policy changes will drive a massive influx of entrepreneurs in 2015 and beyond. Independent of whether this will be driven by startups or by Google, there will be a shift in how and where companies do business in the future leveraging SaaS models and moving away from the stranglehold of traditional ENT software vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others. Virtualization will continue to rise in popularity and finally take the main stage in networking – we have seen this starting to take place with the acquisition of Nicira and ACE. As we move into 2015, security breaches will continue to happen as companies work to patch holes in current software and networks. Trying to stay one step ahead of hackers with the latest software or security features isn’t going to be enough; companies will need to work together in order to combat and fight them off. First it was Circuit City, then Radio Shack, followed by Best Buy. There is still a place for Walmart and grocery stores but not vertical players in alternative commerce. That is were the web and mobile win. With companies like The Honest Company, there will be a rise of vertical commerce with a unique connection to the customer directly. Consumers realize that this isn’t a good thing — AT&T plus Direct TV, Comcast plus Time Warner Cable. The fewer people there are to compete on the price of cable, phone and, most importantly, high-speed data, as well as provide thoughtful journalistic integrity is a concern and the consumers will realize this in 2015. Labor and Workforce Innovation: Until a decade ago, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) were relegated to research labs, technical publications, and big-budget science fiction films. ML and AL have “crossed the chasm” and will have a profound impact on the way businesses work. Pairing human workers with machine learning and automation will transform knowledge work and unleash new levels of human productivity and creativity. Without the advances in automation, the swelling volume of data would overwhelm knowledge workers and cripple businesses. The traditional retail infrastructure and supply chain logistics as we know it is being disrupted by companies creating new technology platforms and data-enabled distribution systems that have predictive analytics, better customer profiling, deeper consumer engagement, blended online and offline data, and more agile supply chains. The supply-chain has been fragmented and inefficient for years, particularity with the delivery of heavyweight goods to the consumer, which until now have been expensive and complex. E-commerce platforms are being transformed for the consumer and the manufacturer by leveraging powerful analytics and forecasting tools helping to alleviate “last mile” (i.e. from warehouse to consumer) problem that is the key logistics issue – where most of the cost, complexity and fragmentation lies, especially with the delivery of heavyweight items. In life, time really is money, and a major source of time is spent on home and family tasks. Life tech allows digitally-enabled services, intelligent personal agents and mobile-device-enabled communication and collaboration infrastructure to truly optimize consumers’ lives. Similar to how ERP helped to organize the business side of our lives, life tech promises to organize the personal side of our lives In addition to companies like Nest. Other companies, such as TicketFly and Ruby Ribbon, have products and services that optimize, personalize and automate our lives as consumers and are creating a smart world that shifts and responds to our needs. : The IPO market will stay open, but a large number of tech companies will price their IPOs below the price of their last private financings. : I think 2015 will be the best year since the ‘bubble’ for venture-backed tech IPOs. We have had a solid year in 2014 and the deals late this year are working well. There is considerable institutional investor appetite; they have made good returns on tech IPOs this year. Most importantly, there are an unprecedented number of high-quality, private, venture-backed tech companies of real scale ($50 million or more in annual revenues) and growth (30-50 percent top-line growth). |
Comcast Customer Spends Four Hours Canceling His Account | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1re1OgcQgdU] A Comcast user named Mike posted a portion of a four-hour call with the company to cancel his account. The resulting back and forth — full of long, pregnant pauses and corporate rigamarole — isn’t nearly as exciting as : Mike’s story is about patience, perseverance and poorly trained customer service providers whereas Ryan’s was about insanity. Note that the video is only 38 minutes long but that Mike has four hours more of back and forth with America’s favorite cable company. His box set is forthcoming. From his : I called back. The 3rd rep had no record at all of any of the previous calls. In fact, they showed me as being enrolled in a plan that was more expensive than the one I had originally. So…over to another retention specialist. This one offered me the 50mbps internet for the aforementioned $39.99…BUT I had to bundle it with a TV package including basic + HBO. I finally get off the phone after almost 4 hours, my speed tests are good, a confirmation e-mail finally arrives all seems well. I go to turn on my TV…no service. I did not include this part in the video (though I do have the recording), but I called again and was told that my original cable TV box had been de-authorized when the plan was upgraded/changed/whatever, and that I need a whole new box. They offered to either ship me one, or send a technician to my house to install a new one. I declined both of these offers, as I simply do not trust that I will not be billed for these services. So, in short, several phone calls, several lies, several hours. Finally got working internet at the right price but the TV service is still not working, and I am so wary of rocking the boat and having them screw up my account again that I haven’t authorized them to correct the TV issue…I simply don’t trust them to not screw it up further. |
A Look Back At 2014 | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | year in startup news. In fact, we wrote more than 13,000 articles here on TechCrunch. That’s why we are giving you a handy TL;DR guide to remind you of all the big news from the past year. Xiaomi Mi Pad and an iPad Mini Retina [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNoKguSdy4Y&w=640&h=360] |
This Cybersecurity Medicine Might Be Tough To Swallow | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Imagine you’re the CEO of a thriving company and you’ve been horrified by the news of the Sony hack, the Target breach and the litany of security issues that have plagued big companies in recent years. You swear you’re going to do whatever’s necessary to make sure it won’t happen to your company. But do you realize what that really means? At a holiday party, a guy starts chatting you up while you’re working on your fourth martini. And he speaks directly to your fears. He knows someone who could help you out with your security problems — make it so that you would never suffer the fate of those poor suckers at those other companies. You have to admit, you’re intrigued because you never want to be in the position of explaining to your board of directors why you were the latest victim. You get the name and run a background check and find out she’s good. Very good. Her experience includes stints with military intelligence, the NSA and a number of successful security startups. You’re ready to write the check just to hear her pearls of wisdom. The day finally arrives and your assistant shows the consultant into your office where she quickly takes a seat, takes a speck of dust off her pants and looks you in the eye. “You’re really willing to do whatever I say?” she asks. You tell her that if she has a plan, you’ll follow it. You wait anxiously to hear what she’s going to say. The first thing you need to do, she tells you, is disconnect from the Internet. Before you can object, she holds up a hand and asks that you let her finish. You start to sweat, and she keeps going. You’ll need to take away all of the laptops. There will be no smartphones or tablets allowed in the building. You’ll use desktop computers without USB ports or DVD drives. There should be no way that you can save to an external device. Everything will be connected on a highly secure, completely private internal network accessible with two-factor authentication. You won’t use any cloud services and there will be absolutely no mobile apps. If you run a website, you will keep it simple and with very little information. Contact information will be through a form and you won’t have an address for the company beyond a post office box. You will hire highly skilled security personnel. Everyone will leave their phones at the door on the way into the building — including you. Everyone will be searched entering and leaving the building — including you. No exceptions. You will put cameras everywhere and you will have your security staff monitor them in a control room to make sure nobody is doing anything suspicious. Anyone caught with a prohibited device will be fired immediately. You will keep partnerships to a minimum, and all guests, including customers, will be subjected to the same strict security regimen, and no one will be allowed to carry any devices of any kind inside. “I couldn’t possibly do that,” you say to her wide-eyed. “I would be sacrificing my entire business, handicapping and harassing my employees and my customers, all in the name of protecting my company.” “So it seems you wouldn’t do whatever it takes, would you?” — So if you can’t lock down your company, what can you do? You have to give up the notion of complete security and place your bets on things you can control because there is an organized effort to attack your networks. And depending on your type of business, the more determined these parties might be. Yet it seems that the further we advance technologically, the less secure we become. a partner with venture capital firm Bessemer Ventures says one of the reasons for that is because technology has become so intertwined in our lives. “Broadly speaking we are adopting technology that’s becoming more and more pervasive in our lives and jobs. The opportunities for cybercrime, mischief and [mayhem] has grown over the years and there is more motivation to do so,” he told me. As Cowan explained, back in the 90s, hacking was about ego, but over time it has evolved to include fraud, identity theft and other criminal activity — and more recently nation-states partaking in surveillance and organized cyber-mayhem. But as one security startup CEO told me recently, we are doing better than we think. You may find that hard to believe if you’re a CEO trying desperately to avoid being tomorrow’s headline. But he described a giant chess match between the people trying to get into our computer systems and those trying to keep them out. As bad as it seems today, this security executive says if it weren’t for the checks and balances that security companies have put in place, it would be far worse and we couldn’t be using the internet to conduct business the way we do. So we are left with a balancing act: We can’t be stupid, but neither can we sacrifice the business in the name of protecting it. “Job one should be providing functionality your users need to get jobs done and have good experience. For most of the interesting applications in the world, trust is an integral part of good user experience,” he said. And if you want to be trusted, security needs to be at least an important component. From a broader perspective, you cannot have a completely secure company that has been stripped of internal freedom, precisely for the same reason you cannot have a democratic society that is safe from any attack and maintain anything approaching privacy. If you decide, as our example above highlights, that you will do anything to be secure, you end up with a company so locked down that it will not be able to maintain a staff, let alone a staff that you would want to work with. Surely there is always a tradeoff between security and privacy, and everyone has their own tolerance level regarding which side of this they should fall on. In the end, you have to ask yourself how much you squeeze the individual factor out of the equation. Can you honestly turn your workers into drones incapable of malicious activity, let alone honest mistakes? When it comes down to it, you would no doubt agree with the CEO in our example that you cannot prioritize security over the company itself. No CEO would. You just have to be able to reconcile the fact that you could experience a breach — and that’s the tricky part. |
How We Celebrate New Year’s Eve On Social Media Around The World | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | From Smartphone selfie sticks to pyrotechnics, this is how we digitally ring in 2015 around the world: https://twitter.com/BestEarthPix/status/550379174985498626
https://twitter.com/BEAUTIFULPlCS/status/550381078654226433 HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!! — Hardwell (@HARDWELL) https://twitter.com/BestEarthPix/status/550325848306642944
https://twitter.com/BeulahGuna/status/550347631151419392 happy new year to all my friends in , thank you for this great year in which we work — Javier (@egomaldito) Happy New Year 2015. from Vietnam — Earth Pics (@EarthPicturz) http://instagram.com/p/xSMpkjIDao A post shared by (@alystomlinson) on A post shared by (@francineld) on A post shared by (@juliaflorence94) on A post shared by (@carlosvargxs) on A post shared by @ on Anthony Quintano/flickr under a cc 2.0 license New York City Department of Transportation/flickr under a cc 2.0 license MinaLegend/flickr under a cc 2.0 license |
Ten Ways The World Changed In 2014 | David Hirsch | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | 1) Companies are leveraging data in order to serve people with relevant content, commerce, and ads based on situations and locations. In content, a good example of this is the rise of companies like and , serving relevant content to users based on what they’re currently reading. In commerce, look no further than where your experience logged into your account is vastly different than a logged-out experience. With their , look for Amazon to leverage the smartphone’s capability in order to serve up more and more relevant commerce to people. is another company to watch in this space in 2015. As it continues to collect data about people, they’ll be able to offer rides in advance of when they know people need it the most by leveraging traffic and other data to make the service as efficient as possible. While and match consumers with personal stylists to help pick out clothing that best suites them. Your phone’s notification bar has also been at the forefront of this trend. Businesses can leverage your phone’s activity based on apps, pages viewed, and locations via technologies like . is providing retailers with tools to leverage this capability. s a company building a social operating system that allows your messages to find you based on what is most relevant and contextual regardless of which app the sender is using. This theme becomes even more important as we live a mobile-only lifestyle and people don’t use mobile to search like they did on desktop. Context matters more than ever. In the past, what was once fixed Internet consumption based on where your desktop computer was or your hefty laptop has become ubiquitous Internet consumption via the smartphone. This has allowed a crop of new services where you use your phone to control aspects of the real world. Examples of this trend are Uber and ( transportation and ride sharing), (home goods) and (storage), (anything), (excess capacity in people’s homes), (hotels), (doctors), (therapy) , (laundry and dry cleaning), (events), (dinner), , , (home cleaning), (everything), (everything), (massages) and (shipping). Uber opened a massive market opportunity, which is transforming many major industries and making them far more efficient than they had been prior to the advent of the smartphone and the Internet. For the first time in several years, we have multiple new platforms with exciting opportunities ahead to build applications on top of them. Whether it’s Blockchain technology, virtual reality, 3D printing, or the Internet of Things, there will be no shortage of innovative applications built on top of these platforms in 2015 and beyond. History tells us that each time a new platform or technology emerges, valuable companies are built on top of them. I have to admit, when I first heard about I didn’t understand it. I realized the merits of virtual reality in gaming and know firsthand how big the gaming community is from my experience at IGN, but such a high price tag and from a company whose mission it is to “make the world more open and connected” just didn’t make very much sense to me. Then my friend and Metamorphic adviser Jane Rosenthal introduced me to Chris Milk who, along with Beck, . It was amazing to sit outside this coffee shop in Venice Beach and feel as if I were at the concert. My outlook on virtual reality changed completely. I now realize that it’s going to change so many industries. Stories will be told differently, sports will be viewed differently, and industries like education and real estate will use it as well. Imagine a world where kids can learn history by being totally immersed in it. In a lot of ways, showed the world that the Internet of Things is here to stay. that will come online in the next few years. These devices show us that the next generation of web-enabled devices won’t be smartphones but rather a world where all of your devices are “smart” whether it’s wearables on your body or in your home or office. The world of the Jetsons isn’t so far off anymore as more and more devices become connected and artificial intelligence technology continues to improve to the point where it can be used in products for consumers. The logged-in vs. logged-out experience of Amazon has changed the expectations for personalization among users. While it used to be a luxury for consumers, now it’s simply expected. This is the human API, and companies are finding all sorts of ways to leverage our data to create an experience personalized just for us. If companies are sending promotional emails to customers with irrelevant offers and products, it’s likely that consumers will unsubscribe (or worse, report as spam). Companies like have realized this in the offline world. When you use Reserve, the restaurant expects your arrival and the company handles all payments. and provide a personalized experience using your Wi-Fi and leveraging your social graph. By leveraging your preferences, these companies provide hotels, restaurants and other areas with valuable data they can use to ensure the guest has an incredible stay. helps to provide your nutritional interest graph by showing foods and recipes based on dietary preferences and restrictions, as well as the stores that carry these products. More and more companies will take note of this in 2015 as consumers expect the Amazon logged-in experience everywhere they go. Whether it was , , or , business models based on content are back and better than ever. A lot of this is attributed to the new “platisher” model, where it isn’t quite a publisher and isn’t quite a platform but both professional journalists and users are creating content under one umbrella. This model provides for strong communities and brand for the content companies. Advertisers also like the branded content side of things where these professional journalists and users are creating content specially tailored for them. Video content is also being consumed very differently. If I told you that , a video game player and commentator on YouTube has more than double the YouTube subscribers than Rihanna would you believe me? People are consuming content differently than ever before. This is the world we live in today, where the in the Staple Center had 32,000,000 viewers and the World Series in 2013 had 15 million viewers. Spanish Comedian has 17 million people who watch his videos while the Breaking Bad series finale had just over 10 million viewers. , a makeup artist on YouTube, has over 7 million people watching her videos, while Derek Jeter’s final home game had just over 2 million live viewers. There is no separation between church and state in content anymore; consumption is happening from all over the globe and great creators can come from anywhere and build up massive audiences. In 2013, 2.3 million more people moved into metro areas than in 2012, driven by the demands of America’s two most powerful demographics. Baby boomers are retiring and moving back to the cities they left when they started families, and millennials want to live closer to each other and where the action is. This has provided a massive opportunity for businesses to be built that leverage the space and time constraints of urban areas. 2014 really was the year that mindfulness became mainstream. prior to the Super Bowl and companies are being created like , which helps to teach people to meditate and in turn clear their mind. Not only do we try to incorporate fitness and mindfulness into the culture at Metamorphic with our founders and our team, but we added Eddie Stern as a formal adviser who meditates with us and teaches meditation and yoga to our portfolio companies. I recently joined the board of the Sonima Foundation, which is bringing mindfulness into public schools. We have lots of work to do, so you’ll be hearing from me in 2015. Nutrition has also really reached the masses in 2014. Whether it was the movie Fed Up, or companies like and raising large rounds of funding and continuing to grow, the public seems to finally have taken note of what we’re doing to our bodies by eating the processed food that’s a staple of the American diet. Other companies like and aim to democratize healthy eating by bringing organic and healthy foods to the masses. Thrive Market provides healthy foods at lower price points while Fresh Nation helps to make the farmers market experience ubiquitous. In 2015, I’m hoping that there will finally be some legislation like there is around Tobacco around processed sugars as well. It seems like in 2014, we’ve finally begun to address tech’s gender inequality problem. When I got involved with a few years ago, there was a problem deeper than just female engineers not being hired by large tech companies. The problem was that there really weren’t a lot of female engineers. And it starts earlier as women haven’t traditionally been empowered to become engineers. Girls Who Code is doing a great job of changing this. Debbie Sterling is also working to change this through her company , which uses toys and games to help give girls confidence in problem solving and engineering from a young age. |
Netflix Helps You Trick Kids Into Thinking Midnight Came Early With An On-Demand Countdown | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Netflix, with a nod and wink to weary parents everywhere, has introduced a clever way to trick the kids into thinking New Year’s Eve came early. The service is offering featuring DreamWorks’ animated characters – King Julien and friends – which parents can call up any time they choose. The idea is to offer families a way to celebrate the New Year’s Eve together, so parents can then shuffle the little ones to bed and the grown-up drinking (or whatever!) can begin. It’s quite the funny little feature, and Netflix is playing up the “fool your kids” angle in its announcing the “Dance Party” and countdown. The company even went to the trouble of commissioning a survey which found that more than a third of U.S. parents already actively try to trick their kids into thinking midnight came early, doing things like finding countdowns from other timezones (36%), or even staging a countdown of their own (22 percent). Netflix thought it could do better. Silly? Sure. Practical? * I mean we already had YouTube, right? Plus, I don’t know about your kids, but there doesn’t seem to be that big of a gap in between the ages where kids can’t tell time at all and the age where they understand that New Year’s Eve happens at midnight and – My daughter just hit five and already has a rudimentary understanding of time, thanks to learning about the long hand and the short hand in school, and can read a digital dial. (Of course, she’s still confused enough to ask questions like, “is today ?” so let’s not give her too much credit just yet.) I’m just saying, you can only really trick the kids for so long. What’s more effective is putting on your best “grown-up being serious here” expression, sternly telling whining children that it’s now bedtime, they will not being staying up late, and there will be consequences for any further tantrums. You know, actual parenting. You can then pour yourself a glass of leftover boxed wine, crash on the sofa, and wonder what the hell band that is on the NYE show on TV, then pass out by 9:30 p.m. as usual. Oh, is that just me? |
YC-Backed Omniref Is Rap Genius For Code | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | While the open source movement has made getting up and running with a software project incredibly easy for those who know what to look for, the reality is that not every project can be updated to support the latest versions of the code they’re built on. Over time, this means that you see thousands of projects running on some old version of a library that seemingly no one is familiar with anymore. Y Combinator-backed is building a code reference tool that could help developers get assistance from others building on the same code. Originally launched as a code search tool for Ruby in November 2013, the site has since added a Q/A feature resembling feature, as made famous by . Omniref aims to include the source of every version of every Ruby Gem in its code library. When you create an account on the site, you can let Omniref look through the code you publicly host on GitHub to see what you’re working with. The startup is using those two key features to build a platform showing relevant questions, news, and commentary on technologies relevant to their work, whether hobbyist or professional. For now, the key feature built on that data is the question-and-answer feature. You can go to any version of any Gem, and ask a question related to the code in general or a specific portion you need to use. Those questions are presented to those whose projects also depend on that code. As questions receive upvotes from developers who find them relevant, the most popular will show up when people check out a Gem they might use in a project. The most useful answers stick to the top, eventually making it a good source of things to watch out for in common use and therefore a way to show Gem maintainers things they may want to look at in future versions. That’s why Omniref is currently reaching out to the maintainers of the largest Gems. If it can get support from key developers in the largest communities, usage will trickle down to the thousands signing up for mailing lists or in communities on Reddit, StackOverflow and elsewhere. That will take time, so in the meantime co-founders Tim Robertson and Montana Low continue to add new features to the platform. In the near term, there’s a few obvious social essentials to add to profiles, like an About Me section. But there’s also a news feed in the works that will combine content from the site with blog posts and updates related to the code in your projects. Robertson hopes this will build up Omniref’s return traffic by making it a regular destination to get coding reference information but also news that keeps you up-to-date with how things are changing. A bit further out, Robertson says they’re looking to make Omniref more useful for less experienced programmers. The Q/A feature the startup launched in August is useful if you know what you’re using and what’s going wrong with your implementation. But if you’re a beginner, you might not be using any outside code at all or not understand what’s broken. Much in the same way that Genius now lets you annotate anything, one day you’ll likely be able to upload your code to Omniref and have pointers to exact issues that need fixing. |
2015 Is Shaping Up To Be The Key Year For Venture Capital | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Eye-popping is the only word that comes close to describing the numbers we saw this year from venture finance. , with companies like of the launch of its enterprise social product. in October, and just yesterday, Instacart announced that . Even if these valuations were frightening, we could at least find solace in the equally eye-popping acquisition prices technology companies were willing to spend this year on high-flying startups. The year started with a bang following , in what remains the highest price ever paid for a startup. The major acquisitions never stopped either, with Facebook also purchasing Oculus, Google buying Nest Labs, and Apple obtaining Beats all in multi-billion dollar transactions. In the enterprise space, massive acquisitions were equally the norm, with , and . There remain lingering concerns about whether we are seeing the start of a whole new era of startup growth or the final throes of an ecosystem completely out-of-control and about to pop. That bubble question is entirely the wrong one to ask though, and that is why 2015 is going to be the most interesting year in venture capital. To see just the start of this, take a look at Beepi, which . While extending a round is not uncommon, what made this round so interesting was one of the sources of those funds. AngelList, the online fundraising site, put in $2.7 million led by Gil Penchina’s syndicate, the largest investment ever made from the platform. This is truly a new world for VCs. While AngelList’s presence has certainly not gone unnoticed in the venture world, its effect has been most immediately felt by angels themselves in seed rounds. Until now, the platform’s round sizes were simply not at a scale where early-stage investors had to spend much time considering the platform or how they might fight it competitively. That is changing as its rounds increasingly move into the seven-digits. Many firms thrive on investments at a couple of million dollars a piece, and now these funds won’t just compete with each other, but also with every large syndicate on AngelList. That is great news to entrepreneurs, who will almost certainly gain better valuations and more control over their company, but for traditional VCs, they are going to have to find ways to adapt against this new onslaught of funding. Even more than the early-stage changes though, growth rounds of fast-growing companies are increasingly going to be done by insiders, or more specifically, friends of the insiders. Venture capitalists are increasingly offering their limited partners the ability to invest directly into later rounds of their early-stage investments, giving them important exposure to growth while mitigating management fees. LPs have traditionally eschewed these sorts of options, preferring to back investment managers who can make these decisions on their behalf. But as startups increasingly wait to exit, the investment options for growth are simply more limited. If I had to make a single prediction about venture capital in 2015, it is that the gulf between the very top venture capital firms and the rest of the industry will widen even more than it is today. Top firms who can organize these sorts of easy growth rounds can promise almost unlimited capital to their entrepreneurs, eliminating the bane of fundraising for founders. That’s a heck of a selling point when the term sheets come in. While this has obvious implications for founders, the wider implications are for everyday investors. Since the 1990s, common investors have been increasingly prevented from investing in growth stocks since startups simply don’t go public as early as they used to. These issues will only compound as large managed funds increasingly become comfortable with investing directly in growth rounds. A founder will almost certainly prefer to take dollars from a handful of private investors rather than submitting to the vagaries of the stock market. That investment inequality is going to accelerate rapidly in the coming year as the tools and contracts needed to manage this capital mature. The other issue, , is that tech companies are sitting on a pile of cash, about $600 billion or so. These changes to later growth rounds also means that the returns that tech companies can potentially receive from their cash will decline if they aren’t actively investing that money in strategic growth rounds. Google’s half-billion investment into Magic Leap is just the beginning of this phenomenon. 2015 is shaping up to be one of the most interesting years for venture capital ever. We will witness the rewriting of the rules for early-stage fundraising as well as a change in the mix of capital for growth rounds that will spread out the growth of top companies far wider than before. Top Silicon Valley companies will continue to impress their incumbency status on the industry as well. While perhaps more of the same we have already started to see these past few years, 2015 will likely be the watershed year that all of these trends come together for the venture capital industry. |
How To Find The Right YouTube Influencers For Your Brand | Polina Haryacha | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Earned media is stealing the show. According to Nielsen, say they trust peer recommendations above all other sources of advertising. According to McKinsey and Deloitte, marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than of paid advertising, while people referred by loyal customers have a . So what does earned media have to do with YouTube? It’s all about the Influencers. YouTube Influencers are more popular among U.S. teens than mainstream celebrities. And with uploaded per minute and 6 billion hours of viewership per month, that means YouTube is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to marketing your message. The secret is certainly out. Companies around the world are recognizing the advantages of leveraging YouTube Influencers and their marketing power. For example, Activision, a major video game publisher, decided to lean in to YouTube Influencers and gained outstanding results. Influencers’ videos about “Call of Duty” have been viewed to date, which is nearly 20 times the number of views for videos on the brand’s own media platforms. Here are a few ways you can identify and connect with YouTube Influencers to partner on your next brand campaign. There are talent management agencies that will recruit YouTube Influencers and help set up a brand campaign. The are Maker Studios, Fullscreen and Machinima. These companies reach out to their network of YouTube channels, find available talent, help to target the best Influencers for your brand, and make deals on your behalf. They come back to you with a list of Influencers and proposed campaign concepts and project costs, which include the talent compensation and agency fees. Sometimes you will find that agencies are the only way to connect with desirable talent, as channel owners won’t get back to you directly (this is especially true for larger channels). The drawback is that often agencies do not deeply understand the nature and specific needs of your brand and simply offer partnerships with popular channels, which are not always your best bet. Another solution for reaching out to Influencers is using platforms that act as a virtual marketplace for connecting brands and Influencers. They are very similar to outsourcing platforms like Elance or oDesk, where people can submit projects and get proposals from freelancers. For example, self-service tool allows brands to outline their expectations for campaigns and receive proposals directly from YouTubers. FameBit’s limitation is that there is no way to filter talent from one long list of proposals to easily find the channel with the best focus and momentum for your brand. They also have brands sign a six-month exclusivity agreement, restricting a company from entering into any deal with the Influencer to create promotional media content. On the plus side, FameBit includes each channel’s audience age and geographic coverage data, which is critical data when trying to find the right channel for your brand. There are other similar platforms, such as , and but most are still in beta. Brands can also connect with Influencers directly on YouTube. The majority of YouTube talents publish their business email in the channel’s “About” section. The default “Send Message” is also available. Here are some general recommendations for an intro email: If you don’t hear back from the channel owner, make sure you follow up and reach out via other sources, such as Facebook or Twitter. YouTube talents receive a ton of emails daily, and an email can easily go unnoticed or get lost in a spam folder. The most challenging element of any of these methods is to correctly identify the talent that best suits your brand and campaign goals. Studying Influencers on YouTube is extremely time-consuming and provides limited insight into the channels. Vital data like demographics, content popularity outside the channel, etc. is inaccessible. Further, there’s no convenient way to measure potential for conversion. However, there are tools that can make the selection process faster and more efficient. analyzes YouTube API, social media, and media campaigns’ performance data to measure a channel’s performance. They compute all of this data and calculate scores for the following categories: OpenSlate also allows you to filter channels by category, geography, subject matter and level of brand safety. They reveal a channel’s demographic data and offer a keyword search and side-by-side channel comparison. As of today, OpenSlate stores data on more than 220,000 channels. However one drawback is that they do not allow you to export data outside of the platform. is similar to OpenSlate. However they differ in the following ways: they operate with data from more than 2 million YouTube Influencers; allow data to be exported; provide a channel’s contact details and network affiliation; and provide additional info about channel’s other social media engagement. Tubular calculates and assigns an “Influencer Score” based on a custom formula using APIs from YouTube, Twitter, web crawls and other publicly available data sources. Tubular also features another useful score called Engagement per View, similar to OpenSlate’s Engagement score. Once you find the right YouTube Influencers, you need to plan performance evaluations, set KPIs and put tracking in place. Here are some tips on which metrics you should you be measuring and how. To measure clicks and conversions, you need to first generate tracking links. Next, you should ask the Influencer to use your tracking link within video descriptions and video annotations. For the video description, you want the link to look clean, so it is recommended to short branded links that can be generated with Bit.ly or similar tools. Tools like Tubular or VideoIQ can give you an idea of how popular a video is outside of YouTube itself. You can also measure the efficiency of each social media network by dividing the number of shares by the total engaged views and then multiply by 100. Besides the number of views, you can find more insight about video performance on a YouTube video page. Click “More – Statistics” beneath the video. There, you will find data about the video’s popularity and trending, how many times the video was shared, and how many viewers subscribed to the channel. All of these stats will help you understand how strongly your brand resonates with the channel’s audience and whether you should run more campaigns with this particular Influencer. By strategically selecting and connecting with the right YouTube Influencer, brands have the opportunity to tap into an engaged fan base that’s growing at an unprecedented rate. Stay on top of emerging industry trends and tools to ensure you are able to leverage new marketing opportunities like this one before your competition does. |
On Comcast? Buy Your Own Modem. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Is your New Year’s resolution to save money? Here. Comcast just raised their , because apparently charging you too much for a modem costs more than it used to. If you’re on Comcast and don’t own your modem, you’re throwing away roughly $120 a year for no reason. I did a quick survey amongst my peers (that is, whoever was around on Facebook Messenger and the people sitting around me in this coffee shop), and 7 of the 10 (!) said they rent their modem. Curiously, most of them own their WiFi router, but not their modem. Why? For the most part, because they “dont know what to buy”. Here: (Update, two years later: removed this link because it was a bit out of date; newer, better modems are now available for around the same price. If you don’t want to research too hard, just look for the best Motorola Surfboard available on Amazon for around $60-90 bucks – the more you pay in that range, the more future-proof it’ll be. In theory, at least.) There was a time when buying a modem was complicated. That time ended about a decade and a half ago. (If you’d rather pick from a huge list, But the one above is one that I personally use and can vouch for as being excellent.) That modem above costs $68. If you’re paying Comcast $10 a month to rent, this modem would pay for itself in a little over half a year. Are you going to be on Comcast for 7 months? Bam! Money saved. “But I don’t know how to set it up!” Plug it in.
Call Comcast, say “I bought my own modem”, read them the serial numbers on the back of the modem. Done. If you’re using one of Comcast’s combo modem/routers, the cost and setup will be a bit more complicated — but you should still do it. Combo modem/routers are, generally, hot garbage. As an added bonus: if you’ve been on Comcast a while and haven’t gone out of your way to upgrade your rented modem, any DOCSIS 3.0 modem you buy (like the one above) will probably be faster and less likely to randomly break itself in a way that requires a restart. |
null | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 12 | 9 | null |
CrunchWeek’s 2014 In Review: Hacks Aplenty, Mega Money, Tech’s Stars Under Scrutiny | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | It was a year of many huge security breaches, from and to the infamous , , and . It was also a year of huge amounts of money, from Facebook’s $19 billion , to Uber’s . And it was a year of tech leaders being held more accountable for their words and deeds, from to . So Alex Wilhelm, Ryan Lawler, and I gathered around the big white roundtable to talk about all of that and a bit more, and you can watch that in the video embedded above. It was a long year, so this is a longer CrunchWeek, clocking in at almost 20 minutes(!) Our New Year’s resolution is to keep these episodes shorter next year, I promise. Happy New Year! |
Snapchat’s New Year’s Eve “Our Story” Will Be Its Biggest Yet | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | Snapchat is preparing to launch its biggest “Our Story” feature yet this New Year’s Eve, documenting worldwide celebrations using curated user photos and videos from cities like New York, Dubai, St. Petersburg, Russia and more. The company says it expects to process hundreds of hours of footage to create this New Year’s Eve collaboration, which will be in the live section of the app for just 24 hours before disappearing. Users will give Snapchat permission to use their content before it appears in the New Year’s Eve “Our Story,” says , which was first to report the forthcoming addition to the app that’s been steadily growing in popularity with teens and young adults. Snapchat doesn’t reveal its internal metrics, but reports have stated that the social app has – far higher than previous estimates from third-party firms like comScore, which earlier pegged the app as having just 27 million users in June. The app is also reportedly , and has long since passed critical mass among those aged 18 to 24, where it now sees 50% penetration, . Though still best known as being a private mobile messaging app, Snapchat has been expanding its focus into broader social sharing in recent months. This summer, it ,” a new feature which offers a more public way to view content shared across its network. The feature itself was a spinoff from Snapchat “ ,” which allows individual users to string together a series of snaps from the past 24 hours into one narrative. At its start, Snapchat “Our Story” at a 140,000-person dance music festival in Las Vegas, the Electric Daisy Carnival. The Stories and Our Story features are now the most popular areas in the application, Snapchat says, telling us that, as of June, users were viewing over a billion stories per day. While Stories have allowed individuals to broadcast their updates to an audience, similar to other social media sites, “Our Story,” is more unique because of its collaborative nature. People can choose to add their content to a story which anyone can view, regardless of whether or not they’re friends with the creator of that content within the app. Since the launch of “Our Story” at EDC, Snapchat has hosted several of these live, curated, collaborative streams, including one for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and another for Diwali in India, for example. The idea is to give users a sense of being there, in the moment, as if they were receiving snaps from friends from around the world. And like Snapchat’s snaps themselves, these stories eventually disappear. The “Our Story” feature can also at least temporarily boost minutes spent in Snapchat, we’ve found. In data provided to us recently by 7Park, during the week when Snapchat celebrated Diwali with an “Our Story” feature, active users in the BRIC region spent 48.36 minutes per week in the app, up from 38.36 minutes the week prior, across 57.59 sessions, up from 47.71 sessions the previous week. (We don’t have Thanksgiving Day numbers to compare, however.) In addition to being viewable within the app, the upcoming New Year’s Eve story will be shown on multiple video screens across Times Square – a move that elevates Snapchat’s visibility, and exposes its service to many more users who may have not yet signed up for an account. The “Our Story” taking place tonight doesn’t have an advertiser, but future New Year’s Eve events could have sponsors – something that could help the company, now reportedly valued at $10 billion, generate revenue. Not all of Snapchat’s “Our Story” events have had sponsors before, but the company with this before for a few events. |
Now With 12 Million Users, Timehop Adds Twitter Vet Jason Goldman To Its Board | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | It’s been a very busy few months for . The app, which provides users with a personal “today in history” memo by surfacing their photos and social networking posts from this day one year ago or more, is closing out the year with more than 12 million registered users, half of whom, some 6 million, open the app every single day. That’s double the number of both registered and daily active users that Timehop had just , when we last checked in with the company in July. To help advise with the growth, the company has added to its board of directors. Goldman, a longtime Timehop user who has been an informal advisor to the startup’s executive team for a year, has become known in tech circles as something of a for his 12+ years of work alongside the more widely-known Evan Williams and Biz Stone as an executive and board member at Blogger, Google, Twitter, and Medium. Goldman’s experience with such products will likely come in handy as Timehop navigates rapid growth in its user base. Jason Goldman In an interview earlier this month, I told Timehop’s CEO Jonathan Wegener that anecdotally, I’ve started to notice a surge in Timehop posts on Facebook from family members and old school friends — people well beyond the Silicon Valley and startup scene. According to him, Timehop’s growth spurt indeed comes from the app hitting an “inflection point” of wider appeal. “People who are super early adopters have been on Facebook since 2004 and Twitter since 2006. More mainstream people were a few years behind. Their experience on Timehop was not going to be really good until now,” Wegener said. Timehop began in February 2011 at a Foursquare hackathon as an app called It caught on right away with some prominent social web early adopters, but Wegener says that at the time, 60 to 70 percent of users who tried out the app didn’t have enough of a history for it to work correctly. “Three years later, everything’s just ripening,” he said. “When we started, remember, Instagram had barely even launched yet. We’re just now getting to the point where people have years and years of digital histories. That’s always been our bet: Your digital history is growing exponentially.” But all that exponential growth needs the support of especially solid infrastructure. Timehop’s staff of 18 has been focused in recent months on reinforcing its architecture to handle the growth and keep its latency down. The company has moved off of Heroku and onto Amazon’s Dynamo DB, and has rewritten its codebase in the Go programming language. Those changes have been key, because Timehop has unique technical challenges compared to many other social-oriented apps, Wegener said. “When someone signs up for an app like Facebook, they typically have no storage needs and no data, and their requirements grow with time. On day one when someone signs up with Timehop, we have a small window of about 10 seconds to grab everything off of their social networks and shoulder all of that content.” Looking ahead, Wegener says that Timehop has begun to think about how it will make money — a company like Coca-Cola could pay for a feature on the anniversary of its being founded, for instance — but for now, he says that revenue generation is likely a number of months away. In the near-term, Timehop is hoping to build itself into a platform where users can write their digital histories across all types of services: Think flight histories, Uber rides, Runkeeper runs, and beyond. “The social networks are the low-hanging fruit for us. Your digital history is much wider than just the things that you post to Facebook and the photos on your camera.” |
Tech To Save You From Your Drunk Self On New Year’s Eve | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | The safest thing you could possibly do on New Year’s Eve is not drink, not go out, not do anything. You’re probably going to go out, anyway. You’re probably going to go to some party and you’re probably going to drink. A lot. You’ll dance terribly. You’ll tell someone that you love them. This person is someone you do not love. New Year’s Day is also the worst day for drunk driving accidents. According to the , Over half of all fatal accidents on New Year’s Day happen in the early morning hours and with drivers with a blood alcohol level over .08 percent. We hope you don’t make an ass of yourself and we hope you don’t try to drive while drunk. But just in case you do have a bit too much to drink, here are some tech tools to help you save yourself from your drunk self this New Year’s Eve: Uber surge pricing might make you feel like you’re forking over what’s left of your rent money on New Year’s but it’s worth taking that or a cab home if you are too drunk to drive. Breathometer helps you know definitively if you are too inebriated to drive by blowing into either the wireless or original breathalyzer device and then testing your BAC level. For $50-$100 plus a free app, it’s cheaper than most breathalyzers out there. Hint: if you are having trouble navigating through the testing process, you are too drunk. Seriously, test yourself before you even think of getting behind the wheel. Drunk texting is one of the more incriminating things you can do while intoxicated. Someone else has the evidence of your embarrassing moment. You might find yourself drinking more than you planned and then whipping out your smartphone in the corner of the room at a New Year’s Eve party and texting someone incoherently. There are several apps that attempt to prevent you from texting while drunk. Drunk Mode hides certain people from your contacts list for up to 12 hours when you tell it you’re about to go drinking. It also helps you locate your drunk friends with the “Find My Drunk” feature. And just in case you can’t remember a thing, the “Breadcrumbs” feature helps you retrace your steps, your delirious, embarrassing steps from last night. Remember when we told you not to drive drunk? Well, this device will make sure you don’t. It’s a member of and it is normally geared toward those who have a problem with drunk driving. A third of all drivers arrested or convicted of driving while intoxicated are those with a previous record, . California State Senator Jerry Hill to require all convicted felons residing in the state to have one of these devices in their car. The device allows the driver to turn on the ignition in their car only if they blow a BAC below the legally required limit to drive. It’s also pretty pricey. These devices run anywhere from $500-$1600 and are usually installed by a car dealership. You drank too much, you know you shouldn’t be driving but you don’t want to leave your car where it’s parked for whatever reason. Do not drive! For about $40 + $2.65/mile, StearClear will hire someone to drive your car for you. It’s possibly more expensive than a cab (on any night besides New Year’s) but cheaper than getting your car towed. It promises not to “hyper inflate or invoke surge pricing on weekends or peak travel times so this may be a good alternative to Uber. This is a similar service to but costs about $35/hour + $2.40/mile. It’s made for corporate executives but can be used as an alternative to get you or your drunk friend’s car home safely, too. If you do happen to get behind the wheel after drinking, there’s an app that will alert you to DUI checkpoints. Mr. Checkpoint says it helps prevent drunk driving and wrongful arrests. The founder tells us , “I personally have been wrongfully arrested for DUI and sued the city.” To be clear, this app alerts you to the checkpoint. Drunks can use it to avoid getting arrested, spending the night in jail (or longer) and handing over thousands in fines. How it prevents drunk driving is a mystery. One day we will have self-driving cars and possibly built-in alcohol detection systems in all our technology. For now we have apps and devices that require you to take responsibility for your actions on your own, before things get out of hand. But people keep on being people and not heeding the warning signs or taking measures to prevent themselves from acting like idiots. Consider this post a PSA and stay safe out there. |
Microsoft’s Windows Store Sees 110% Download Growth From A Year Ago | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | According to the company, Microsoft has seen a 110 percent rise in the number of app downloads on the Windows Store in the last year. The increase, by the firm’s own , is built on the back of 30 percent more active users in the same period, and has led to a more than doubling of “gross sales” for developers. It isn’t clear what hard numbers those statistics point to. In October 2013, the Windows Store was . In early 2014, that figure . Presuming that the December number was between the two, the company’s intra-2014 growth is less hefty than the numbers described might imply. Regardless, the company also reports, and I quote, “an 80% increase in registered developers and 60% increase in app selection year-over-year.” So things are pointing up. All this is slightly moot, given that we are currently in the interregnum between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Either the unified experience of Windows 10 makes the platform the best, and most vertically, horizontally integrated operating system, or it does not. If it lands to the positive, then Microsoft will be able to grow its download and developer numbers — the new D&D — quickly. If not, the slow incline will be its personal treadmill. It’s the last day of 2014, and Microsoft is, in this case, answering questions that it could have been asked a year ago. Something to think about. |
Fighting Distractions Should Be Top Resolution For 2015 | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | BING the head of Sony Pictures is talking about CLICK my friend just uploaded a photo to Face BING the wreckage of the AirAsia flight PLOP Danny, are you around for dinner? We are thinking DING Try out the new version of our app CLICK the weather today will be PING Danny, we have a brilliant idea for a startup and we are launching on Kickstarter. BUZZ. Game over. The first minutes after waking up are regularly the most stressful of the day, and it shouldn’t be like this. I wake up to dozens of notifications on my phone, driven by an expansive array of messaging and email apps as well as news and personal updates. Every few months, I go through a process of cracking down on all of these sources, from retooling my settings in Notification Center to changing my email preferences on websites and apps. Yet no matter how many times I attempt to ameliorate the situation, it always seems to revert back to an unsustainable level. Worse, if I just try to ignore it all, friends, colleagues, and sources complain that I am out-of-touch since I haven’t responded to their entreaties in some arbitrarily short timeframe. Increasingly, we are merging with our devices to become a part of them, blurring the line of who is responding to who. It used to be that I could sit and read a book for hours without even worrying about the time. Now, I can barely go more than a couple of pages without pulling my phone out of my pocket to make sure something hasn’t happened. I know I am not the only one who is recognizing this change – it’s common fodder for dinner conversations. Yet almost everyone I talk to has already thrown in the device on the issue (so to speak), surrendering to our devices without even putting up a fight. This is the year I stop. Researchers investigating distractions have unequivocally shown that . Overall productivity drops precipitously as our brain scrambles to try to keep up with the constantly changing tasks we throw at it. The real damage though isn’t just efficiency, but also the decline in deep thought and creativity that is at the core of excellent, innovative work. We all want to do our best, but what happens if the very devices we are using prevent us from doing it? I wish personal resolve was sufficient to ensure that distractions would go away, but that simply isn’t the case. Instead, we as a society are encouraging more interactions, often with the the ridiculous hope that it will increase performance or profits. Just take the spread of open plan workspaces, , according to industry sources. As these offices have flourished, our productivity has done anything but, leading to a spate of articles in almost every publication about their downsides this year. Investigators have obviously shown that performance declines in such distraction-prone environments, but that isn’t even the worse of it. These offices can also increase stress, blood pressure, sickness, and interpersonal tension. Yet, the trend only looks set to continue as managers drink the Kool-Aid of “fluid conversations” over “people behind desks actually doing work.” Managers aren’t the only ones who want to see us distracted. Advertisers are encouraging the use of “second screens,” the use of mobile devices or tablets during television shows, often as a tool for social interaction with sites like Twitter. At first, the industry hesitated with this customer behavior, since the ads were on on the television after all. But now many see this new behavior as an opportunity to display ads throughout a show on the second screen, not just during commercial breaks. I don’t want to be alarmist and argue that we are reaching peak human. Instead, we need to recognize the context that is distracting us, changing what we can change and advocating for what we can hopefully convince others to do. My solutions aren’t novel, but I am going to commit to them more aggressively than I have in the past. First, I am going to seal off the first and final hours awake to be completely device-free. I am not going to respond to messages at midnight or 7am, but instead offer my mind a chance to calm down before and after the intensity of the workday. Next, I am going to devote most of that first hour to determining exactly what work I need to accomplish today – and what I don’t need to do. Like many, I have allowed emails and messages to drive my to-do list, even though I already know what I should be doing. My days are not that unpredictable (except when a major news story breaks out, of course), and thus planning can greatly reduce stress and distractions – cutting down the length of my workday to boot. Finally, I am developing a habit of keeping my apps closed when I am not immediately using them. My computer is more than powerful enough to reopen an app like Mail and have it downloading email within 10 seconds. I don’t need the continually streaming notifications across my desktop, nor do I need sound effects interrupting my work. Reducing proximity is the key here, and just having to click to open an app is often sufficient to avoid a 5-minute procrastination delay. This distractions disease is afflicting all of us, degrading the work we do and hindering the kind of creative thinking that is critical for excellence. We need to protect that deep thinking, which is why I encourage all of you to make fighting distractions the new “lose weight” resolution of 2015. BEEP. If you will excuse me, a friend just posted an image of a cat, and I need to immediately respond to this. |
Uber Suspends Its Uber Pop Ride-Sharing Service In Spain Following A Court Ruling | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Uber has suspended Uber Pop in Spain, , after it received confirmation of a court ruling that bans its ride-sharing service in the country. Uber Pop, a European version of Uber X that uses everyday vehicles and provides bill-splitting options for passengers, arrived in Spain in April, and it has been under pressure for and in a number of other markets in Europe in recent times. from January 1, and it has been and . Uber said it is “temporarily suspending” the service in Spain after it receiving notice of an injunction against it. A court upheld a complaint from the Association Madrileña Del Taxi made earlier this month. The company said it is “respecting the law” with its suspension, but it intends to appeal the ruling and also work with authorities for the future. “During this temporary suspension of uberPOP, we will also collaborate with Spanish politicians to develop the modern framework needed to create a permanent home for Uber and the sharing economy – and fortunately Spanish leaders have already been standing up for the innovation economy,” Uber said in a blog post. The company’s willingness to collaborate is an interesting one. Uber’s traditional approach to going head-on with, or even just ignoring, authorities seems to have taken a different tilt lately. In addition to working with the government in Spain, it is (after following a suspected rape) , where without authorization. There are a few important points of context here. In these cases, the cities and countries involved have gotten legally-backed bans against Uber — in Spain, for example, Uber waited to receive “the formal ruling” before taking action — but nonetheless the conciliatory approach could be in line with “a new Uber” that CEO Travis Kalanick recently spoke of. In the wake of scandals following and , Kalanick pledged to do things differently. “We will be making changes in the months ahead. Done right, it will lead to a smarter and more humble company that sets new standards in data privacy, gives back more to the cities we serve and defines and refines our company culture effectively,” . It also stands to reason that Uber is open to collaboration because flying in the face of authority can only get you so far. To realize , Uber will need the buy-in of governments and organizations, particularly in Asia where the potential market is far larger than the U.S. and authorities are more prone to knee-jerk reactions and bans, as was the case in New Delhi, India. Of course, more skeptical Uber watchers may argue that Uber has no choice but to comply with court rulings, and that is also certainly the case today in Spain. We’ll have to wait until 2015, and future Uber troubles, to know . |
Manufacturing Reboots Talent Engine In A New Age Of Digital Disruption | Matt Reilly | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Whether a company makes clothing, household cleaning products, cars, healthcare or nearly anything else, it needs people with the right skills. Like other businesses, today’s manufacturers are going digital; operating in an era of change and volatility that has made flexibility critical to their success. But to be able to respond to a dynamic marketplace, manufacturers need talent that can accomplish the mission. For instance, as companies seek ways to scale up and down in response to customer demand, they are redesigning their physical footprints to further enable a cost-effective, flexible operating structure. To have end-to-end visibility of materials moving across their supply chains, many are considering the construction of digitally enabled control towers. These are essentially dashboards that centralize information that manufacturers need to understand customer demand, capacity, inventory, order/shipment statuses and even the progress that third-party logistics partners are making with deliveries to and from factories or warehouses. While it may be a chicken-or-egg scenario (or in this case, new digital equipment or the talent shortage), establishing a workforce that maximizes manufacturing capacity and asset availability is important. Analytics, telemetry data and cloud-based systems can revolutionize the way that manufacturers manage their assets. They enable manufacturers to continuously monitor and predict asset reliability so that maintenance activities can be scheduled with the least impact on production. As 3D printing comes of age, it can be a time saver and cost saver for manufacturers. For instance, instead of making a piece of equipment in the Eastern United States and shipping it to the Northwest, a manufacturer can coordinate with a logistics company that offers 3D-printing services and sell rights to the digital model to the logistics services provider that can then print the parts in a center near the customer. While these digital capabilities may maximize productivity and help a manufacturer become more responsive to its customers, they also demand new skills. So what can manufacturers or other businesses do to stoke their talent pipelines? As a first step, companies need to place a greater emphasis on defining what skills their organization needs. These requirements can include any combination of technical expertise, professional certifications, previous work experience and so-called “soft skills,” including communications and leadership skills. However, it is important for companies to remain realistic throughout this process and consider that it may not be possible for one candidate to possess all of the skills they are seeking. In that case, it may be more important to identify reliable, hardworking, inquisitive people who demonstrate a work ethic, willingness to learn and the flexibility to adapt in a changing work environment. Once companies have a firm sense of the skills they desire, there are two main ways to go about cultivating talent: Tap the power of an organization’s existing workforce and build those skills from within, or develop new talent externally with a trusted network of partners. In the first approach, employers must identify which of their existing employees possess the motivation and aptitude to pursue a long-term, progressive career path within the organization. Under such a model, employers can create training programs, apprenticeships, externships and other skill-building opportunities to help employees move beyond their current role and fill gaps within the organization. In today’s high-tech world, such a multi-tiered talent development strategy is likely to incorporate self-paced, digital learning experiences that are available to employees when it is most convenient for them. Another viable option for accessing talent is to partner with community colleges, vocational programs and other community-based organizations to establish the company as an employer of choice with potential job seekers. However, introducing the company is only part of the equation; companies also need to work with these institutions and organizations to create and launch education and training programs that develop the specific skills they need. With this approach, employers also can monitor and adjust their curriculum to ensure they are creating a robust pipeline of qualified candidates. Of course, developing skills, whether internally or externally, requires a company to make a significant investment. The skills gap took years to emerge and it will not be fixed overnight. Addressing the situation is important. Disrupters play the stronger offensive game in today’s volatile business environment. Talent can play an important role in helping companies execute that offensive strategy. But only with the right skills for a new business reality on the offensive team can a company swiftly respond to changes as they arise in today’s global business world. |
In 2015, Software Eats The Wearable World | Kunal Agarwal | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | 2014 will be remembered as the year that wearables leapt into the Silicon Valley mainstream. Tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm have taken notice and poured money and resources into developing their own offerings. Earlier players like and announced multiple new products and a host of promising startups (Athos, Atlas, Misfit, etc.) have emerged with innovative offerings. With the momentum of these dollars and product releases, its no wonder industry analysts are predicting the wearable movement to be “the next big thing”. Credit Suisse estimates the market could be $50 billion in 5 years, and Morgan Stanley claims the wearable market could reach $1.6 in value. Those of us closer to the leading edge know that in their current state, wearables have next to no chance of attaining these lofty predictions. The big ugly secret of the current wearable market is that over a third of users who own a wearable device . Certainly, price and the lack of design aesthetic contribute to this lack of retention. However, the main culprit is that despite manufacturers’ claims that these are “smart devices” most wearable products aren’t intelligent at all. Granted, there’s a certain novelty consumers feel when they are first able to track the number of steps they take in a day, their sleep patterns, or heart rate. But after some time, the lack of any meaning or insight attached to the data means it just becomes another graph to view. Consumers don’t want data dumps — they want actionable information. This is why a wearable soon becomes just another gadget left in the drawer. In 2015, the wearable market will reach a critical inflection point where it will gain mass market adoption (close to 20% of adults will have one by EOY – double the 10% seen now) and set itself on massive growth trajectory for the next 5 years. This key moment will hinge less on innovations in hardware, and more on the software and networks that make sense of all that data emitted by the devices. To succeed, wearables must expand from feeds of to recommendations and other actionable health . By now the pattern of platform companies, APIs, and independent developers is clear. We should expect , , and similar efforts by Jawbone and Fitbit to drive innovative applications to combine personal fitness data with expertise in exercise, nutrition, and even sleep and relaxation to efficiently move participants towards better health. Done well, the result should be a democratization of what has historically been a privilege for those that could afford gym memberships or personal trainers. Imagine a user with a specific goal – looking their best before a reunion, or competing in a race. Using a wearable device and software intelligence, they can now understand how and when they should be exercising, how to adapt sleep patterns to get better results, and how their nutrition habits affect performance. Imagine further an athlete wearing smart clothing that allows coaches to monitor their fatigue levels and muscular exertion. The coach now has real-time data that allows them to modify their training regimens to ensure peak performance when it matters. The possibilities are endless and the amount and sophistication of data – and the interpretation of that data – will continue to grow. In this regard, wearables are no different than any other hardware category that rapidly expanded after attaining a smart software layer: networking, the personal computer, and most recently mobile phones. |
Grocery Delivery Startup Instacart Raises $210 Million More | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Grocery delivery startup Instacart has raised an additional $210 million, according to an on Monday. The filing confirms a Series C funding round reported earlier this month, which . Kleiner Perkins was expected to lead the round, although no new board members are listed in the filing. The financing comes just six months after Instacart’s last raise, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz and valued the company at . Other investors include Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and Canaan Partners, along with Box CEO Aaron Levie and Y Combinator president Sam Altman. |
Matter And Form’s 3D Scanner Is Inexpensive And Promising | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | At $600, the is probably the cheapest 3D laser scanner on the market. While the system does require some tweaking to get great scans, I was quite pleased with the scanning results and, more important, thing this thing can stand up to the big boys in 3D scanning. Most 3D scanners use a turntable to rotate and scan objects. Like the impressive the Matter and Form “reads” objects with lasers and then creates a three dimensional point cloud. This cloud can then be rendered into a 3D object, allowing you to print or modify it on your computer. While I did have some trouble on initial scans, I cleaned up the environment and allowed the scanner to “see” only the object in front of it and not the mess behind. This means you should probably do your scanning against, say, a white wall rather than against a cluttered backdrop. If you’re interested in 3D printing at all I’d recommend either the or the Matter and Form. While it’s not perfect, it’s a fascinating tool and a lot of fun for the price. [gallery ids="1098385,1098384,1098383,1098382,1098381,1098380,1098379,1098378"] |
In Cybercrime, What’s Old Is New Again | Jonathan Spruill | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Like most cases, this one started with a frantic call from a restaurant owner. The panic and uncertainty bled through the phone. He had just been notified his business suffered a payment card data breach and his acquiring bank mandated he hire an investigator to determine what happened. The on-site setup was typical for a small, medium-sized restaurant – a few point of sale (POS) terminals in the main dining room and a single computer in the manager’s office which was used as the back-of-house server for the POS network. During our investigation, we not only found payment card stealing malware on the POS systems and the back-of-house server but also troubling security weaknesses throughout the restaurant’s infrastructure. For example, the back-of-house server was also used for timekeeping and accounting and as the order system, which the beleaguered owner acknowledged was not ideal, but their budget for computing equipment and security was already stretched thin. We discovered two remote access services that ran on the back-of-house computer: one for the vendor for the POS systems to perform remote technical support and the other for the accountant to check the books and retrieve receipts. We also noticed the restaurant did not have a hardware firewall installed on the network to segment its critical information (like the payment card data on the POS system) from its non-critical information. The owner pointed to a box on the shelf that did, in fact, contain a firewall appliance, but was still in its plastic wrapping. He said he never learned how to set up the device. We checked the running processes on the back-of-house server and saw an unusual item — an executable called “ncsvr32.exe” running from “C:\Windows\Temp.” The filename and non-standard path for executables immediately captured our attention. The unusual path, known malicious filename and the multiple remote access utilities began to tell a familiar story but we still needed to confirm a few details back at the lab. While reviewing the logs from the remote access program, we noticed a succession of failed log-in attempts from an IP address that did not match those provided by the owner for either the accountant or the POS vendor. After the failed attempts, there was a successful log-in entry. The logs showed a transfer of three files. As we continued to dig through the data, we could see the attackers’ actions clearly. They used the first file in the malware bundle to install the second file. The first file was installed as a Windows service and acted as the method by which the malware would persist on the system, re-launching the remaining pieces as needed. The second piece did the heavy lifting, reading through memory and searching for payment card track data. When it found the data, it was passed to the final piece, which performed a simplistic encoding. The data was then stored on the computer waiting for the attacker to retrieve it. We saw additional entries in the remote access logs, where the attacking IP address revisited and transferred data from the back-of-house computer. At the end of the investigation, we determined that hundreds of payment card numbers were compromised. We shared these findings with the owner, and the cleanup and remediation efforts began. Most data breach forensic investigators today would find this kind of case to be par for the course. In fact, we’ve seen these criminal tactics used in some of the data breaches during the past year. However, this investigation took place in 2010. In other words, five years later, things have not changed. Let’s compare our 2010 case to a more recent one. The victim business was not a single location but a franchise from a national chain. During the investigation, we found a remote access service used by the POS vendor to provide support to that location and dozens more across the country. The access logs from the service showed a successful login from an unauthorized IP address and files transferred shortly afterward. The malware was found in another non-typical path, “C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\OracleJava.” The file, “javaw.exe,” was a known name for the Backoff malware family that infected thousands of businesses during the past year. Reverse-engineering work on this sample showed memory-scraping abilities, as well as auto exfiltration to a remote server controlled by the attacker. Like the three-piece memory dumper found in our 2010 case, Backoff was installed as a Windows service to maintain persistence in case of an unexpected re-start. Further investigation revealed the POS support provider had experienced a phishing attack and the unknowing technician’s repository of passwords, conveniently called passwords.txt and saved on his desktop, was compromised. The file contained the hostnames and passwords for all the locations managed by the POS vendor, including those owned by the franchisor, and therefore were also infected by the same Backoff malware. In total, the criminals compromised dozens of locations and stole thousands of payment card numbers. The two cases demonstrate that many criminals use the same basic methods of attack that they have used for years. Yet, many businesses continue to lack the essential security controls and best practices that help prevent these kinds of attacks. In some cases, they simply do not have the resources to fully dedicate to security; in others, they still have that “it won’t happen to me” mentality. This past year has demonstrated that no one is immune to an attack; however, the more difficult a business makes it for a criminal to succeed, the greater the likelihood he will move on to an easier target. |
The Kairos T-Band Turns Your Dumb Watch Into A Smart Watch | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Another day, another wearable design. This time it’s something called the , a watch band that connects to your normal watch and enables all sorts of exciting things like step tracking and notifications. I’ve seen a few of these sorts of things over the past year – one company hid everything inside a nice leather band and didn’t include a screen – and this one has just enough going for it that it’s probably not a massive scam. The basic band, called the ND, has no display and simply vibrates notifications and sends sensing data to your phone. Other models will have touch sensitive displays. The $1,200 model includes a mechanical watch. Everything pictured is possible – curved displays, motor vibrations, and sensors included – but it’s up to the Kairos folks to put them all together. Whether or not they succeed is still in question but it’s a clever idea and a clever implementation. I expect to see more of these hitting the market this year so this won’t be the last smart band we see. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJhwusVRGEc] |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 31 | null |
What The Hell Is A Startup Anyway? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | If you regularly read technology media, and I honestly can’t recommend it, you will run into occasional references to “startups.” Many consider startups to be small companies determined to grow quickly in the hopes of becoming the next passé giant whose corporate campus costs so much to maintain that it eventually has to stop serving chilled sake by robot on Thursdays. But what the hell is a startup? I ask because it seems that a wide class of corporations are that do not deserve it. Is Uber a startup? Of course not. Is the company that your crazy uncle started in the basement to help people better glue the fins on their toy rockets a startup? No, that’s a failure waiting to happen. Is the 14-person, one-year-old technology firm that has raised a total of $437,000 and burning cash monthly to help it keep up its sequential quarter revenue growth a startup? Yep. There is copious gray room at play here, of course, so I am here to help. Everyone has their own definition of just what a startup is, and nearly everyone is wrong. I the question, and received a large quantity of answers: test ? ? ? (I asked a few venture capitalists what they thought, and of Epic Ventures raised the management question, of Kleiner Perkins noted the profitability point, and of Charles River riffed on the growth point.) In the face of that, Amazon , Uber is and yes, even startups can have . So none of those suggestions work. I think that we can instead rely on the 50, 100 or 500 rule, which I just made up. Here’s the term sheet: If your company has, or is any of the following, you have to hang up your Startup Uniform, and realize that you are just another technology company either hunting for or actively avoiding an IPO: So, if you’re worth $499 million, have 99 employees, and are on a current, forward-year, top-line run rate of $49 million, then congrats — you are still a startup. (Actually, if that is you, points for being valued at 10x future revenue, and having nearly half a million dollars in per-employee revenue.) Those three numbers — 50, 100 and 500 — are useful as as to what a startup in fact is. Let’s take a few examples for fun. Mattermark and Buffer are both startups. Mattermark’s recent post-money valuation, revenue, and headcount — — all hit the mark. Buffer, worth $60 million after its last round, has a current and has . It makes the cut! But Xioami, Uber, and the rest of the are no longer startups. They are unicorns. What is a unicorn? A post-2010 tech company that was raised in the shadow of quantitative easing and low interest rates when bored capital let private companies not go public — consider it something of a corporate adolescence. Oh, and they are worth a billion or more on paper. But even if our unicorns are business tweens, they are still not startups. Finally, who thought that a company with a valuation of $40 billion could be a startup? The normal definitions of companies’ various sizes are as follows: So, by normal, public market statistics, not only is Uber’s $40 billion valuation far and above what a “startup” can maintain, according to our rule, it actually places the company among the most valuable public companies, in terms of classification. Lots of companies grow quickly. Not all are startups. When you go to bed tonight, repeat the mantra: 50, 100, 500. You are welcome. |
Moment Brings Back Family Dinner Time By Sounding Alerts If You Pick Up Your Phone At The Table | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to limit screen time around the family dinner table, the mobile application can now help. The app, which previously focused on alerting smartphone owners to how much time they’ve spent staring at their phone, has introduced an update that turns Moment into more of a family application. Family members can track each others’ daily phone use from their device and start “screen-free” timed sessions which trigger loud alerts when anyone picks up their phone. You may recall when it introduced a well-designed and practical tool for anyone interested in limiting their smartphone usage. Created by developer Kevin Holesh, Moment allows you to set a daily limit for minutes spent on your smartphone, then runs in the background, alerting you when you go over that limit with a notification and sound. Most people don’t realize how much time they spend on their phone, Holesh said at the time. When he asked people to guess how much time they were on their devices, their estimates were almost always 50% too low. He also experienced the problem himself when his own digital addictions began affecting his real-world relationships, and he realized that he had started using his iPhone to unwind instead of doing fun and productive things. After the app’s launch, others like it followed, including , for example, which tracked how often users checked their phone throughout the day. Holesh says that after his app’s release, a number of parents wrote to say how much Moment helped them manage their kids’ screen time. This led him to realize that smartphone addiction can be better solved when the entire family works together to combat the problem. [gallery ids="1099177,1099176,1099175,1099174,1099187,1099186,1099185,1099184,1099183,1099182,1099181,1099180,1099179,1099178"] With the introduction of Moment 2.0, the app has been redesigned to include features that better support families. Users can view the daily phone use patterns for other family members’ devices, and anyone in the family can configure a “family dinner time” mode. This hour-long session encourages users to put their phones down – and leave them down – during dinner time. Anyone who breaks the rule will hear a loud alert until they put their phone back down. No more texting under the table, kids? The alert options are funny, too. In addition to more standard alert sounds like a buzzer or alarm clock, there are annoying options like a siren, thunder, or the “most annoying sound ever” from “Dumb & Dumber,” for example. What’s also clever is that the “family dinner time” is not introduced as a strict “parental control”- type tool. Instead, in the family can turn on family dinner time – making it more of group effort where everyone agrees to change their behavior, rather than mom or dad punishing kids with a “no phone” rule. Moment has been download over 1 million times, Holesh says, indicating there is interest in applications like this that can help us address our digital addictions. Currently, the app has around 200,000 active monthly users. Those numbers are on the rise, too, now that the app dropped its price from $4.99 to free just a few days ago. Today, users can instead opt to pay $2 per month via an in-app purchase for the family features. Moment is now being installed around 10,000 times per day, thanks to going free. The app also demonstrates decent retention among those who’ve installed it – again, indicating there is a segment of the smartphone market who do feel like they’ve become overly attached to their portable devices. About 1 out of every 5 people who have ever installed Moment have used in the past week, Holesh reports. [vimeo 115543555 w=500 h=281] Moment is , with the option to pay either $3.99 for 3 months of the family service, or $19.99 for a year. In addition to the family dinner time mode and ability to view usage trends, the family service also lets you enforce limits on daily usage. Users can’t entirely “force quit” the app once installed and running, either (by swiping up from the multitasking menu) – the app will resume tracking when you move to a new location. However, the app can’t be used as a standalone solution for parents setting household rules around screen time. Instead, parents looking for a tougher means of limiting usage will need to also enable parental controls, plus and the ability to change background app refresh behavior, for starters, in addition to the configurations made in Moment. |
United And Orbitz Sue “Hidden Cities” Flight Search Engine Skiplagged | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | and are , a small startup founded by Aktarer Zaman that helps travelers hack the airlines’ opaque pricing schemes to get by finding so-called “hidden city” fares. Airline pricing is and one of its many oddities is that when you are looking for a good price, it’s often cheaper to buy a ticket from, say, San Francisco to Houston that goes on to New York (even though you just want to go to Houston) than a regular one-way ticket. In the airline industry, those are called “hidden ticket” fares (and they only work when you don’t check any luggage). While booking flights with the clear intent to not fly to the final destination on your ticket is clearly against the airlines’ rules, frequent fliers have long used this trick to get better fares. They, however, are also aware of the potential consequences. United specifically prohibits fliers from using the hidden cities trick, and its clearly states the potential consequences (though I’m not sure any of these have ever been tested in court). They could charge you for the regular fare, delete miles from your frequent-flier account, kick you out of their Elite flier program or take legal action, for example. United and Orbitz allege that Zaman used Skiplagged to “intentionally and maliciously interfere with [their] contracts and business relations in the airline industry […]” and “by promoting prohibited forms of travel on Skiplagged, Zaman has induced breach of Orbitz Worldwide’s travel agency contracts with commercial airlines and of United’s customer contractual relationships.” United says it prohibits “hidden city” ticketing because of “logistical and public safety concerns” — though the worst thing that could happen is that the airline would have to make an announcement at the gate asking you to please board quickly and then, when you don’t show, give your seat to a standby passenger (despite its claims, the days when United used to hold flights for late passengers are long over). You can read the full complaint . For the most part, using this trick was always something frequent fliers and travel agents were aware of, but not something the general public knew about. Skiplagged has the potential to make this practice relatively mainstream, however, and throw the airlines’ complex pricing schemes into disarray. The easiest thing to do, then, is to sue Skiplagged. Even though there may be nothing illegal about what the company is doing, lawsuits like this can get expensive enough to destroy fledging startups like Skiplagged — and that’s probably what United and Orbitz are aiming for. In the complaint, United and Orbitz also note that Skiplagged probably wasn’t incorporated, so Zaman may be personally liable. For now, however, the is in full swing and more people now know about these kinds of tricks than ever before. |
Ten One Design’s Mountie Clip Is Perfect For Duet’s iPad Display App | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Your mobile two-screen setup just got a lot more perfect: Ten One Design has launched the , a two-sided clip that securely mounts an iPad, iPhone or any other mobile device to your MacBook or iMac’s bezel, while remaining small enough to slip into a jacket pocket or laptop case accessory compartment. The Mountie isn’t the first gadget to do what it does, but it does appear to be among the best designed. Padded rubberized inserts mean that it’ll respect your device’s industrial design, and fit snugly regardless of what you’re trying to attach to what. A snap clamp squeezes your device to make sure it won’t fall off while you’re working, and a long vertical support strip means you won’t get the wiggle and waggle that can make using two loosely joined devices at the same time somewhat nausea inducing. Two weeks ago, I would’ve walked right past the Mountie, despite it being named for the horse-riding national police force of my homeland. But now that Duet’s excellent secondary display app for iPad and iPhone exists, the Mountie becomes a gadget I will likely recommend (once I confirm it works as advertised, as it should, based on Ten One’s track record) for just about any Mac-happy mobile worker. When traveling, my main productivity suck is not having multiple displays to work across, and Duet combined with the Mountie looks like a cure for all my ails. Ever since the days of the original USB-powered , I’ve had a hankering for this kind of solution, but those that use USB drivers and Wi-Fi connectivity have ultimately proven unsatisfactory, or not actually portable. A 9.7-inch iPad Air, however, with a Mountie and a 15-inch Retina MacBook, may just be a new high water mark in portable productivity. |
Actually, Our Greatest Hopes Lie With Techies | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | For all the stories of 2014, few got the attention of the press like the tension between San Francisco residents and the rising tide of engineers and startup founders who started calling the city their home. Accused of as well as , these techies have been under constant criticism from locals who see these newcomers enjoying the city . The roots of this conflict are deep. , the policy antecedents of the SF housing crisis are long, complex, interconnected, and largely impregnable to change. SF hardly reached this point in a day, and it will not solve it in a short period either. There is such a deficit of housing and office space in the city, that and other neighborhoods of the city, it will barely make a dent in housing prices. That’s why the average sale price for a home in the city . Compare that to the price of a decent single-engine plane like , and you start to understand where some of the criticism against techies is coming from. Another few more startup IPOs, and residents might as well live in the skies on a new private jet just to find an affordable housing option. It is easy to look back over the year’s events and assume that housing prices and ridiculous comparisons to luxury planes are the cause of the animosity toward our industry. But if we learned anything from the past year of blowback in San Francisco, it is that housing prices are just a small part of the problem with the technology industry and its interaction with society. Indeed, in my very first article for TechCrunch almost a year ago, . My argument was simple: “Today’s companies are increasingly destroying the value of existing companies to create the next generation of products and services. We can argue whether the end result is a net benefit to society, but we cannot avoid the immediate impact our work has on the rest of the country anymore.” Little did I know that 2014 would shape up to be a cataclysm between techies and almost everyone else living in this country. As the technology industry quickly engulfs all other sectors of the economy and threatens the livelihoods of more workers, the cacophony of criticism has grown louder. As just one example, , noting that these workers receive none of the benefits of full-time employment, despite extensive regulations placed on their work by the companies. Despite the importance of this dialog, there has been little real work done to openly engage on the problems that our startups are creating for society. The hubris of our industry has only grown with the valuations of companies like Uber and Airbnb, leading to a further distancing between the work we do and the effects we have on every person in the country, and really, the world. What does it mean for American society if we bifurcate it into service-requesters and servants? This is a fundamental question, particularly given how much the technology we are building is shaping this outcome. Do we want this two-tier structure, or are there ways to build other technologies that can ameliorate and maybe even eliminate it? It can be hard to experience the vitriol directed toward technology startups today yet continue to seek out root causes. But that is precisely what we must do. People aren’t angry at startups and technology, but those are among the most visible signs of the huge inequality that has grown in America over the past thirty years. As we start into the new year and the second half of this decade, it is time to revisit these issues and reconnect with the optimistic spirit that made Silicon Valley what it is today. We don’t have to live with income inequality if we can design the right economic structures to slow its growth down and ultimately reverse it. Just take education as an example. Outside the hype around education startups like MOOCs, there has been very little real progress on , despite the importance of education in . The internet, , is still a wide canvas upon which to draw the future, and that is why techies are our greatest hope for a gentler, fairer society. I am deeply optimistic about what we can accomplish. I strongly argued that , simply because a single decision in the design of an algorithm can instantly improve the quality of life for thousands of people. , which is adjusting its scheduling algorithms to go easier on parents through more consistent work shifts. The politics over these policies won’t disappear, but solving them will become simpler than before. We are only halfway through this decade, and we have already seen some of the negatives that startups pose for workers. But with so much potential left with technology, there is no reason why the next five years have to be the same. There must be a better way, and it is my new year’s wish that we seek it out. |
SwipeRadio Is A Faster Way To Listen To Terrestrial Radio On Your iPhone | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | On-demand music streaming services like Beats and Spotify continue to grow, but terrestrial radio also remains a popular way to listen to music on mobile via top-ranked apps like iHeartRadio (#8 in free Music apps on iTunes) and TuneIn Radio (#13). Now, newcomer has launched its own minimalistic take on radio apps with a music app that lets users quickly access their favorite stations via swipe gestures. When first launched, SwipeRadio asks to access your location in order to show you popular stations in your local area. You can then tap on any of these to immediately start listening and add the station to your favorites. From then on, you simply tap the screen to start or stop the station’s live stream, or you can flip through your favorite stations by swiping to the right or left on your phone’s screen. Swiping down brings you back to the full station list and search box so you can find others to add to the app. The app also supports AirPlay, the ability to suppress station announcements, and the ability to tweet at the station’s Twitter account. An in-app purchase of $2.99 removes ads and offers more colors so you further customize the backgrounds to your stations, allowing you to sort them by mood, genre or however else you want to categorize them. (Around half a dozen colors are available for free in the app, however.) By assigning each station a different color, you could easily find the one you want without having to pay close attention – something that’s great if you’re using the app while running or working out at the gym, for example. On the other hand, SwipeRadio lacks the kind of features you would find in other radio apps, including things like artist or tour news, social updates from friends, personalized station recommendations, curated stations based on mood or activity, ways to sort through the station selection by genre, and more. But in SwipeRadio’s case, it’s positioning this as a deliberate choice – it’s offering users a basic experience that requires no user account and no password, so listeners can instead just quickly get to their music. That being said, the app’s list of stations was somewhat chaotic – stations were only identified by their call letters, name and dial position, so it can be hard to find those which didn’t reference their genre (e.g. “mix,” “jazz,” etc.) in their station name. In addition, AM and FM stations were mixed together in the list and the stations weren’t shown in any apparent order, making it even harder to find your favorites. This is especially true if you’re only an occasional radio listener, and don’t remember off the top of your head which stations you like in your local area. Still, once you could put together a list of favorites stations, actually using the app to listen to your favorite stations was fast and easy. SwipeRadio is meant more to be a demo of the company’s radio station API technology rather than a serious attempt at taking down top competitors like iHeartRadio or TuneIn, it seems. Explains co-founder Noam Gordon, the team over the past three years has created its own database of over 50,000 AM and FM stations via , which now powers the SwipeRadio app. The same API is used for Dial.Radio on Telefonica Firefox phones, designed in partnership with Mozilla and featured on its app store. Gordon says the idea for SwipeRadio grew out of users’ frustrations with apps like TuneIn Radio. With the newer versions, the apps are trying to compete more with music-on-demand offerings like Spotify, and have made it more cumbersome to find the stations you’ve favorited. Plus, many of these apps now require you login via social accounts in order to post to networks like Facebook and Twitter, he says. (SwipeRadio offers you an option to post to Twitter when you add new stations, but it’s not required. And it doesn’t require any login in order to start using the app.) “The radio app trend is to…show on all their social,” Gordon says. “[Users] ask why do they have to sign in just to use the app? They don’t want to ‘connect,’ they just want to listen.” With SwipeRadio, he says, the goal is to offer an app focused more on usability and user privacy. SwipeRadio is . |
Access To Gmail Partially Restored In China | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Gmail access is partially restored in China, according to some reports . The bump in traffic follows a multi-day outage that began just after Christmas, which saw Gmail users blocked from using a workaround that allowed them to download their messages through third-party apps like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook which use POP, SMAP and IMAP. The latest shutdown appeared to have closed up that final loophole, blocking Gmail almost entirely in the country. The only way users in China have been able to access Gmail over the last few days were through a VPN service. Today, however, some users on Twitter are claiming access has been restored. Meanwhile, is pointing the finger at Google, saying it could have been the reason for the temporary outage. The English version of China’s Global Times said the glitch fueled “unnecessary speculation,” noting that “we need to have faith that China has its own logic in terms of Internet policy and it is made and runs in accordance with the country’s fundamental interests.” The paper continued, “if the China side indeed blocked Gmail, the decision must have been prompted by newly emerged security reasons. If that is the case, Gmail users need to accept the reality of Gmail being suspended in China. But we hope it is not the case.” At the time of , a Google spokesperson for Asia said “we’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.” We asked Google for an update on the outage and confirmation of the restored access this morning, and the company responded, again, that there was never anything technically wrong on its side. The restoration of service doesn’t appear to be complete as of the time of writing. The traffic is climbing upwards again, but is not near the earlier levels seen before the Christmas outage. , while others say they don’t. One user on Twitter noted they had access for a few hours last night but now have none. It seems to differ slightly for everyone, and often changes for an individual. Had access for few hours last night. Now none. — Paul Carsten (@PaulCarsten) The majority of ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. It’s unclear at this time when access to Gmail via third-party apps will be fully restored, or if it ever will be. |
You Could Fill Up At The Pump With Apple Pay Starting Next Year | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Apple is working to expand the reach of Apple Pay, and its next major destination might be the gas pumps. Chevron’s official Twitter account revealed yesterday (via ) that the gas company is working to make Apple Pay available at its fill-up stations in the U.S. Pump payments are a key ingredient to making Apple Pay truly a convenient, complete replacement for traditional payment cards. The Chevron account originally tweeted that they hoped to offer Apple Pay at their pumps as soon as early 2015, but then changed their tune to state that there wasn’t actually any official timeline in place, but that they were indeed working with Apple to make it happen. To clarify, Chevron is working alongside Apple to integrate Apple Pay at the pump, but a timeline is not set. — Chevron (@Chevron) As the payment system already works with NFC terminals that have presence in some stores, and with a range of payment providers, Chevron and Texaco already do technically accept Apple Pay, but the at-pump payments would be a first that would make for much more convenient transactions overall. Card-based payment at the pump is a huge boon for drivers, and NFC terminals built in to the pumps would make it even easier to fuel up with Apple’s new online payment solution. Already, Apple is expanding the reach of Apple Pay quickly, and it can lay claim to being among the most successful mobile payments initiatives in existence despite its relative youth, simply because few other offerings have really achieved much traction with the overall consumer population. Apple Pay accounted for 1 percent of digital transactions in November according to research firm ITG, which reveals it to be a strong competitor to PayPal, the only other player out there achieving much success. Achieving critical mass for a system like Apple Pay now depends on winning retailers and various consumer-facing verticals over to Appel’s side – nothing short of omnipresent acceptance will let it do more than linger in the low single digits of digital transactions. |
Mobile App Download Volumes Hit Record High In November | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Downtime from work and other responsibilities over the Thanksgiving break here in the U.S. saw consumers downloading applications in record numbers, according to a new report out this morning from mobile marketers . The firm says its “App Store Competitive Index,” which tracks the aggregate average daily download volume of the top 200 free iOS apps, reached 8.1 million downloads last month, propelled in particular by new iPhone purchases and increased activity over the Thanksgiving holiday. Compared with last year, app download volumes grew 42% in November. Fiksu CEO Micah Adler says he expects the trend to continue over the December holidays and even into January. This increase in downloads in November also contributed to decreases in the costs required to acquire users – a key part to growing any mobile app business. The Cost per Loyal User Index declined 27% to $1.58 in November, down 12% year-over-year as new users were busy loading up recently purchasing iPhones with favorite and recommended apps, especially over the holidays. Because those downloads were considered “organic” – meaning users were downloading apps on their own, not because of advertisements or other marketing campaigns – the costs associated with those marketing efforts decreased. But they’re sure to creep back up this month and the next, after the Christmas holidays, as mobile companies traditionally compete more fiercely to be among the first apps installed on new mobile devices, often received as holiday gifts. In addition, the cost to acquire loyal users decreased because, as an overall trend, loyal users on mobile seem to be growing. Fiksu’s data backs up , which said earlier this year that users’ time spent in mobile applications was generally on the rise. In September, it found that people were becoming more attached to apps overall, as time spent using them grew 21% over last year. In fact, people were spending so much time in apps that it now exceeds time spent on the desktop web, said Localytics. More frequent app launches then drive a greater time in the app, as well. Fiksu’s said it saw this trend continuing. Time in-app increased by 21%, and frequency of opening apps increased to 11.5 times per month, up from 9.4 times a year ago. Most recently, we’ve seen this trend on display with popular apps like Snapchat, which , despite bad PR like the hack dubbed the “Snappening” where users’ private, racy photos were exposed publicly. Finally, in November, the costs associated with driving engagement from mobile users – or Fiksu’s Cost per Launch Index – also fell, decreasing to $0.21 on iOS, or down 20%, from October, and falling 16% on Android. More info is available on Fiksu’s full report . |
There’s A Connected Gaming Toothbrush At CES This Year, And I Don’t Want To Go | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Sometimes a vacation is more curse then blessing – I’ve been largely away from email and Twitter for about five days now, and returning is less a breath a fresh air and more a deep inhalation of whatever was in that ancient looking Tupperware container found at the back of the fridge behind the pickled artichoke hearts and other infrequently touched items. Not to center anyone out, but I’m going to center out one specific in particular: The Grush. Based on its name alone, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a colloquial name for the latest STI getting passed around college dormitories, but it’s actually a gamified connected toothbrush for kids “that makes brushing fun.” First: No, it doesn’t. Second: This isn’t even the first time I’ve heard of something like this. And in addition to being a repeat, it’s also an apparition I swear I’ve seen grace the hallowed halls of CES in at least one, but possibly multiple previous years of the show. My inbox is literally Grushed to the gills with similar pitches – it’s as if an 18-wheel tanker stuffed to bursting with CES had a head-on collision with a 20-car freight train loaded down with all the CES its powerful diesel locomotive could carry, and my email is the ensuing wreckage: A mire of CES flotsam and jetsam strewn haphazardly across the countryside. There is precious little worth salvaging amid that disastrous landscape, and both the volume and its general paucity seem extreme compared to previous years. But of course it’s also possible that the show is like a black sheep relative: Early on, they seem only vaguely unpleasant, but as you grow older and wiser, you’d better understand why they’re to be avoided in the first place. CES 2015 kicks off next week, and at this point I’m resigned to my fate – but I’m not entirely without hope. The show also represents a chance at redemption, and despite, or rather because of, the dire forecast of my inbox, the appeal of discovering stories actually worth telling is greater still. Some might think I’m taking too much for granted by feeling apprehensive about an opportunity many would jump at, but a certain reluctance actually probably ends up making for better coverage of a show whose big sounds and bright lights can get in the way of its actual substance. |
Ford And Life360 Partner On App To Curb Distracted Driving | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Texting or talking on the phone while driving ., according to recent data. Now is partnering with the family location services startup on a new tool which could help reduce distractions on the road. Ford is the first automaker to offer in-car use of Life360 and its new “Drive Mode” feature, which notifies friends and family when a user is in a car and requests that they not get in touch while the user is driving. “With the integration of Life360’s Drive Mode, we are helping to keep drivers’ attention on the road by letting their loved ones know that they are behind the wheel, encouraging family members and friends to hold off on sending texts,” said Julius Marchwicki, Ford connected services product manager, in a statement. In 2012, the last year for which data is available, 3,328 people were killed in what the Department of Transportation’s Distraction.gov site calls “distraction-affected crashes”. More alarming, 10% of all drivers under the age of 20 involved in fatal crashes were reported as distracted at the time of their crash, and drivers in their 20s make up 27% of the distracted drivers in fatal crashes. Since its launch in 2008, Life360 has enrolled 48 million families on its location and communication platform for family and friends. The free smartphone app retooled its services for Ford specifically with the launch of its “Drive Mode” feature. The Applink-enabled application launches when a driver connects their smartphone to Ford’s SYNC system, which allows users to navigate apps and communicate via their smartphone while driving. The connection notifies Life360 that a user is in a vehicle, which prompts Life360’s Drive Mode feature to send a message to everyone in the driver’s circle, suggesting not to text the driver. A follow up message is sent when the device is removed from the car. By saying, “Mom’s location,” or asking “Where is Dave?” the system pinpoints the person’s location on a map and offers a location address. |
Samsung Launches Milk VR Video Service For Gear VR | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Now that it’s got a , Samsung is launching a service of its own to provide 360-degree video content so users have a reason to slip on the Gear VR on a regular basis. Taking its name from Samsung’s and , Milk VR will feature downloadable and streamable content free-of-charge to Gear VR owners. The company says that it wants to make Milk VR a “daily habit” for its customers, much in the same way that YouTube has built an ecosystem that brings users back for more with a variety of content from known personalities. That may not be the case for the service’s first users, however. The service is launching today as a technical preview with a limited library of content, so the most avid users may binge their way through it before the service gets regular content updates. That won’t take long, as videos released for Milk VR are said to take 1-10 minutes to watch. I don’t have a Gear VR on-hand to jump in and check out the content, but there should be videos featuring music, sports, action and “lifestyle” in resolutions that you can stream all the way up to huge “4K x 2K” downloads. While for capturing video content for display on virtual reality headsets at its developer conference this year, Samsung says that its sourcing 3D and wrap-around video from artists using a variety of cameras. |
The Payments Tipping Point Will Be In 2015 | Hill Ferguson | 2,014 | 12 | 30 | Payments are finally cool. And the more than 1,500 payments startups on that believe they have cracked the code to solve a piece of the payments puzzle attest to this. Given all the noise in the tech community this year with the introduction of technologies like and , you would think that digital payments have taken over the world. But it hasn’t quite happened. Today, 85 percent of transactions are still done via cash. 2014 started changing the game for payments, and I believe we’re at an inflection point to push more payments than ever into the digital realm for 2015 thanks to innovations in authentication, shopping on social networks, and near field communication-based payment technology. The truth is only about today, which is hard to believe considering there are now . But I think that’s all about to change, and authentication is going to be an even bigger driver in mobile shopping and conversion in 2015. As shoppers, we want security, but we don’t want to give up any convenience. The technology is there to power payment experiences that don’t require entering a password or sharing credit card details. We already have invisible payment experiences that are actually more secure and allow people to pay for an Uber ride, rent a room on AirBnB or Venmo a friend after grabbing a meal out. But more companies need to get on board. With the increasing number of security breaches this year, businesses have every reason to re-evaluate the way they protect their customers. Nobody likes typing in a credit card, and it’s simply not very secure to share that data with sellers. But, that’s only part of the equation. Authentication is a major factor. Remembering passwords isn’t easy, and reusing passwords across multiple sites isn’t secure. Today, Apple and Samsung’s latest smartphones and tablets have fingerprint authentication to make secure, one touch mobile payments a reality. In 2015, every company is positioned to make authentication – and shopping – much easier and more secure. We recently saw to let Alipay users pay with their fingerprint. This fall, to third-party apps. And, this month the released version 1.0 of its open authentication standard, so we can expect fewer passwords and more secure login systems in 2015. predicts the number of global biometrics smartphone users is expected to reach 471 million in 2017. So, when you add up all the pieces of the equation, it’s pretty clear by next holiday season you won’t be using a password or typing in a credit card on your mobile device to buy that 65-inch TV. Shopping in stores has always been a social activity. Not many of us actually go shopping alone. If we do, we find ourselves texting our friend a picture of the collectible Star Trek figure we need to add to our collection (or maybe that’s just me). But shopping online hasn’t been a social activity. Until now. In the mid-2000’s, Facebook and Twitter came along and we started having open conversations about our likes and dislikes, and we started sharing more and more data about ourselves and our preferences. Today, Facebook alone is up to . That’s a lot of people and data to not have shopping happen here. Facebook and Twitter seem to agree. That’s why we saw both social media platforms try out (a way to buy something directly from their sites) this year. Then we have apps like Pinterest that help us share and discover products we’re interested in, creating a strong social context around these products. Instagram has also moved beyond peer-to-peer photo-sharing and now has the brands we love sharing photos of the things we love. What’s happened is social networks and apps are creating new opportunities for retailers to connect their customers with products and services in the moment they want to buy them. We’ve seen encouraging signs this year for the future of near field communications (NFC) in the U.S. (a technology that’s long been used around the world). You might be asking yourself why will it still be two years before everyone uses it? Today, of U.S. retailers have point-of-sale systems that are NFC-enabled, and there’s around nine million retailers in the country. It’s expensive for retailers to upgrade their hardware and the consumer demand hasn’t been there. Many consumers have yet to try out NFC payment solutions like Apple Pay, Softcard and Google Wallet on their phones. And, after three years, only 20 percent of Android phones are using Gingerbread, which was the first HCE NFC capable Android OS. We’ll also start to see more innovation in how companies address what’s in it for the consumer to use NFC. People need something extra that is going to push them to start using their mobile phone to pay in store – whether it’s loyalty or offers integration – but they need to feel this is an experience they cannot live without, just like television did for us almost a century ago. It’s going to take a combination of retailers and smartphone users to make the move towards NFC. And it’s going to take time, but it’s happening. 2014 was the turning point — the year that more payments finally became more digital. A lot of mobile transactions have already ditched the password, and the technology exists to make a simpler more secure mobile payment – we know because many of us are already using this. Most of us are on social media and as we share more information about ourselves the growing expectation is that the products we want will be available to buy in seconds. And as retailers and consumers start integrating these new mobile and online buying experiences into their daily lives, more people will start using NFC to make digital payments increasingly available in the offline world. |
New Delhi Extends Ban On Uber To Cover Other Taxi Apps | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 8 | Authorities in Indian city of New Delhi have expanded a ban on Uber to cover all other taxi hailing apps in the city until they acquire relevant licenses, according to . for “misleading consumers”, having initially caught the attention of officials after on suspicion of . “All other transport/taxi service providers through web based technology, who are not recognized, are prohibited from providing such services in the NCT of Delhi to public till they get license/permission from the Transport Department,” read a statement from Delhi’s transport department. Neither Uber nor Ola replied to requests for comment at the timing of writing. The Journal reports that authorities recognized Easy Cab, Mega Cab, Meru Cab, Chanson Cab, Yo Cab and Air Cab as legally able to service the city. It remains to be seen whether other cities in India will follow New Delhi’s lead and seek licenses from these companies. Going head on with authorities is something Uber is renowned for, even if the company has recently pledged to change. Mere days after last week to make Uber “a smarter and more humble company”, the company launched in Portland, U.S., without the necessary licenses. It is now being . Uber may well opt to ignore Portland’s request to close its operations there, as it has done with other U.S. cities in the past, but the situation in India may necessitate a more conciliatory approach. Uber, for example, introduced in accordance with laws, and there’s plenty at stake in the country. Portland may just be another city in the U.S., but India has become a key focus for the company, which earmarked its latest $1.2 billion funding round for growth in Asia. Given the business potential of the nascent taxi app market, India’s billion-plus population and its status as a foreign business — not to mention the knee-jerk reaction of authorities — Uber may opt to tread more softly than usual. |
Pebble Adds French, German And Spanish Language Options To Its Smartwatch App | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 8 | Pebble, everyone’s favorite indie smartwatch maker, looks to be preparing a European sales push after it updates that will make its smartwatch app available in French, German and Spanish. Writing last month when it support for notifications in over 90 languages, the company said its multi-lingual updates will “pave the way for more languages to come in the future, as Pebble steadily lands in more countries around the world”. Pebble already ships worldwide (with an additional $25 shipping fee plus local charges), but its physical retail presence is strongest in the U.S.. Making the product fully localized in these new languages is a logical first stop to increasing the number of offline retail outlets selling its products in Europe and other parts of the world. It looks like the company may also have plans to add Chinese support soon. That’s according to that lists Chinese among the languages supported by Pebble apps. Pebble owners can change the language inside the settings menu of their iOS and Android apps. There’s no word on which other languages will come next and when they will land. |
Cloud Foundry Foundation Launches With Support From Over 40 Companies | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 8 | , one of the largest open-source enterprise projects around, made a bit of a splash last year. With , the Infrastructure-as-a-Service OpenStack project also has a counterpart in the Platform-as-a-Service world and that project is hoping that 2015 will be its break-through year. To get to this point, the more than 40 companies behind the project today announced the launch of the . The platinum members behind the foundation include EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware. The number of companies invested in the foundation has grown 40 percent over the last few months leading up to the launch and the number of contributors has increased 150 percent over the last year compared to the previous year, with code commits up 1,700 percent (though given how young the project still is, it’s worth taking those numbers with a grain of salt). Not only does Cloud Foundry now has a high-powered foundation behind it, but it’s also getting help from the Linux Foundation, which today announced that Cloud Foundry is now a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. As Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told me last week, his organization will help the project with operational expertise to run hackathons and meetups, as well as legal resources around intellectual property issues. It will also provide much of the infrastructure that it takes to run a big open source project like this. Cloud Foundry grew out of the efforts of Pivotal Software, which also makes a commercial version of it available to its customers. One other thing Pivotal has brought to the project is the concept of the Cloud Foundry Dojo. “One of the problems [with large open source projects] is that it’s hard to get developers into the project as quickly as they want to be,” Zemlin rightly noted (and that’s definitely the case in the Linux world). It can often take months (or years) before somebody is fully up to speed. The Dojo concept uses pair programming that matches an experienced developer with a novice. Thanks to this, it often only takes a few weeks before somebody is up and running and committing patches to Cloud Foundry. IBM and SAP have sent some of their developers through this program, for example. “Every time we work on an open source project or create a foundation, we continue to learn as a company and as an industry about what it takes to create great open-source software and how to participate and work together in these communities,” IBMs VP of open standards Angel Diaz told me. “The Dojo is yet another evolution of the Maslow’s Hierarchy of how to be great open source contributors.” IBM uses Cloud Foundry as the basis for its . Pivotal’s senior vice president of strategy and corporate development Leo Spiegel also added that this project has allowed the company to move this methodology into the industry and accelerate the development of Cloud Foundry. With today’s foundation launch, the organization is also launching a certification program to ensure consistency and compatibility across the different Cloud Foundry-branded products and to prevent fragmentation. |
Portland Sues Uber | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 8 | It’s only Monday, but what a week it’s been for Uber. They’ve been , kicked out of , and now the City of Portland is suing them. Uber just launched in Portland on Friday, but the City’s Transportation Bureau is already dropping the hammer. The dispute? It’s one you’ve heard before. The city has laws for how for-hire vehicles must be licensed, and they want Uber to follow them. Until everyone is on the same page, Portland wants Uber to shut down operations within city limits. The city has issued a cease and desist commanding Uber to halt operations, and is asking the court to step in and make it so. If Uber continues to operate in the city, both the company and individual drivers face some pretty massive fines. Each time they’re busted, it’s a $1,500 ticket to the company and at least $2,250 in fines to the driver. Even if it’s just one dude’s job to write a ticket or two each day, that’s a million dollars in fines by this time next year. Uber has a history of ignoring legal demands in the cities they operate in. Unlike most major cities where Uber has launch, Portland officials have made it quite clear that they’re willing to go fine drivers directly. Unless Uber is promising to foot the bill for those $2,000+ tickets when they arise, it might be tough to get drivers behind the wheel. |
Barack Obama Becomes The First President To Write Code | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 8 | It’s official: Obama writes code. He probably won’t be up to debating the merits of Ruby vs. Python any time soon, but the President took the time to crack out a few lines of Javascript as part of the — an event that encourages students to try just one hour of programming to see if it piques their interest. While I imagine most TC readers don’t need to hear it, I’ll say it anyway: if you’ve never tried to code, ! Even if you never intend to do it for a paycheck, learning even the most basic of basics can change the way you look at our increasingly digital world. You don’t have to dedicate your life to carpentry to learn to use a hammer. Ready to dive in? intro tutorial for absolute beginners, specifically tailored to fit within one hour. As for the President coded up: he wrote a ranking algorithm that just rival Larry and Sergey’s. Wait, sorry, wrong line — he wrote a little blurp of code that renders a square on the screen. Baby steps! |
Telegram Claims 50M Monthly Active Users, Seems To Be Attracting Teams | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 8 | , the messaging app startup created by a team headed by Pavel Durov (who created VK.com), has hit some major numbers, . It now claims to have over 50 million monthly active users, sending 1 billion messages daily. This is after only 16 months of operation and no marketing spend. Further more, the startup has revealed to TechCrunch that it now has 23 million daily users. In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Durov told me that “Telegram’s popularity is spread evenly across continents. We have a substantial user base in Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany. Also in Brazil, Mexico and Guatemala in Latin America, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Uzbekistan, across Asia.” He said the app was also growing steadily in the US and the UK, but is “still small in absolute numbers there though.” Back in March this year, Telegram said it had 35 million monthly active users, 15 million of whom used it daily, with 18 billion messages monthly, 600 million messages daily. By contrast, the far larger WhatsApp is on roughly 600 million MAUs out of a probably billion-plus registered users. Still, these are good numbers for a new entrant. But while Telegram makes a great play of its secure, encrypted platform (I’ll leave the InfoSec people to argue about that one) Durov says a potential key to Telegram’s rising popularity is that users seem to like the ability to sync their Telegram mobile messages with Telegram’s desktop and tablet apps. This is something they can’t do on Whatsapp, which has a largely consumer base in emerging markets. Thus more key tasks, such as for business like sharing documents and files, are easier on Telegram. So the suggestion here is that Telegram is going after a more business-focused, demanding niche than WhatsApp. “We also see more and more small teams switching their collaboration from e-mail to Telegram. Telegram can basically solve some of the same tasks but is more secure and several times faster,” he told me. As for WhatsApp, it appears to have switched from its stated plans to introduce voice calls towards – maybe – following Telegram’s lead on end-to-end encryption, read status of messages and supporting large group chats. Durov says he thinks WhatsApp will launch a Web version, similar to , “since they tried to hire our web dev.” He also plans to use Telegrams small team to its advantage. It was the first non-Google mass-market messaging app to adapt for material design of Android 5.0 guidelines. “It took us 2 weeks, but such changes usually take ages for bigger teams like Whatsapp/Faceboook,” he says. In October, Telegram added usernames and Snapchat-like hold-to-view. This let users add friends without necessarily knowing their phone numbers. Telegram after Facebook bought WhatsApp this year, gaining 8 million downloads in a few days as people became concerned about Facebook owning their messaging. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.