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Google’s Schmidt Predicts Government Censorship Can Vanish In A Decade
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013
| 11
| 21
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“I believe there’s a real chance that we can eliminate censorship and the possibility of censorship in a decade,” Google Chairman Eric Schmidt at Johns Hopkins University. “The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.” Currently, citizens of oppressive regimes have a few ways of sneaking around government Internet blocks, including encrypted virtual private networks, which re-routes traffic through servers outside of the host country. “It’s always a cat-and-mouse game,” said Schmidt. Last spring, for instance, the freedom-loving government of Iran on the use of VPNs. Those who choose to abide by the law are subject to the censorship whims of governments which sporadically block media social media sites that permit dissenting or culturally sensitive material. Wikipedia of all the governments that block the Justin Bieber and cat circus that is YouTube. “In that race, I think the censors will lose and I think the people will be empowered,” said Schmidt. No word on how exactly it will end, though. We can imagine a system where traffic is so encrypted that neither the location, content, or destination is visible to government censors. Or, perhaps the the architecture of the net will change so that only governments can meaningfully identify traffic they don’t like. Ever the optimist, Schmidt thinks that democratic ideals will pervade in China, even with censors. “You cannot stop it if it’s a good idea broadly held,” he said. “That’s how China will change.”
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HTC Channels Crazy With $8,000 Gramohorn Smartphone Trumpet
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013
| 11
| 7
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Smartphone maker — and having something of an identity crisis that’s playing out as a rebranding exercise. That’s why it’s spent millions hiring to spice things up with its . It’s also, apparently, got a few other attention-grabbing tricks up its sleeve. Such as the gizmo pictured above. Part vapourware, part steampunk fantasy, pure marketing madness. No it’s not a leftover prop from the latest Tim Burton flick. The — for that is its ludicrous name — is HTC UK’s contribution to the struggling mobile maker’s internal cultural revolution. What actually is it? It’s audio kit for the outré HTC One user: a passive speaker smartphone dock designed to grab the tiny timbres issuing from the phone’s front-facing speakers and flick them through its twin horns like a Pamplona bull dispatching a pair of overweight tourists. Or actually that’s its secondary function, after the primary one of grabbing consumers’ eyeballs and rattling them in their sockets. If it’s eyes on its logo HTC needs — actually it’s dollars in its coffers but the former tends to lead to the latter — then this mystical hardware unicorn is surely going to deliver. Not so much HTC as WTF?! But in the smartphone popularity contest where Samsung is the ruling Gladiator then anything is better than being invisible. So it’s out with ‘quietly brilliant’ and in with ‘WTF’ blared through a pair of oversized ear trumpets. Bravo HTC, bravo. Say what you like about the Gramohorn II but one thing is for sure: it’s not quietly brilliant. It’s not quiet, period.
HTC hasn’t come up with this chunk of craziness on its own. It engaged a young UK designer called Justin Wolter to do that for it — maker of the Gramohorn II’s (which was, er, . Wolter came up with the dual-trumpet remix of his earlier design, sketched it out and then with a little judicious use of 3D printing, the Gramohorn II was born. These days crazy is that easy. Print on demand means there’s never going to be a warehouse full of unloved Gramohorn IIs. These bad boys are individually made to order. And at £999/$1,600 each (for a plaster-based resin Gramohorn II) — or a frankly insane £4,999/$8,000 for the milled steel version — buyers are being deliberately discouraged from actually getting their hands on the Gramohorn. In all likelihood because it’s going to murder your music by trampling tinnily all over it. Audiophiles avert your ears. Even hipsters would balk at a price tag with that many bells on it. Here’s what HTC has to say about its curious lovechild: To kick-start our Here’s To Creativity campaign Justin has taken the concept of the HTC One’s front facing BoomSound™ stereo speakers and pushed it to the extreme. His design is the physical embodiment of BoomSound incorporated within a unique, dramatic and stylish sculpture. And here’s what Wolter had to say, when asked whether anyone is actually going to use this as a speaker as, well, a speaker: The design aims to function as both a functional consumer product as well contemporary art. As such, it hopes to capture and element of curiosity as well as prompt further thought / discussion. Based on key acoustic principles, the design does what it says, in successfully amplifying sound waves using resonance. The Bauhaus-ian mantra of ‘form follows function’ was always in mind during design development. It also sounds as if the Gramohorn II will be the first in a series of designer eyeball-grabbers coming out of HTC’s UK office. “HTC UK’s ‘Here’s To Creativity’ campaign is supporting young designers, writers and artists helping them to bring their ideas to life. More exciting creative projects to change the smartphone experience are happening soon,” noted Peter Frolund, General Manager UK, in a sadly understated statement. He should really have said: ‘YEAH! WOOT! LET’S DO THIS!’ This sort of grassroots craziness may not turn HTC’s tanker around but in a mainstream smartphone space that’s become slabbish and staid it sure is fun to see something a little nuts going on. Here’s To Crazy indeed.
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Obama’s Interview: Most Important Quotes On Healthcare.gov And NSA
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013
| 11
| 7
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President Obama sat down for an extended interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd about the . The video is embedded below. I’ll get right to the quotes and add context: — Obama was referring to the hundreds of thousands of people from plans that do not conform to rules under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a “Obamacare”).
— , on the Secretary of Health and Human Services, related to with Healthcare.gov, the new federal healthcare insurance e-commerce website. — on the reach of National Security Agency spying. — on whether he knew that the National Security Agency was of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He would not give a straight answer on whether he knew the NSA was monitoring her calls. — on how federal contracting rules makes the government than his tech-savvy campaign. Notably he says he wants to review federal procurement for all of the federal government. There you have it, folks. Convinced?
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Newsle Lands $1.8M From Media Giant Advance Publications, Bloomberg Beta & More To Be The News Reader For People You Care About
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Rip Empson
| 2,013
| 11
| 7
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The Web fundamentally changed how people consume the news. On the one hand, it’s now easier than ever before to create and distribute content to millions of readers; on the other, the Web has become an ocean of content and information, and it almost goes without saying that it’s now more difficult than ever before to locate the signal amidst the noise. Given the dizzying amount of content and news sources out there, most people now just fall back on their social networks to act as the filtration system that helps them find what they want — Facebook for friend-sourced news, LinkedIn for business-related content, an so on. Going one step further, thanks to Flipboard, Feedly, Circa, Techmeme, Prismatic, Nuzzel and more, there are now a million ways to access filtered news on our phones or based on our relationships, interests and so on. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon began building as undergraduates at Harvard to fill a nagging gap among today’s news aggregators. The idea being that, as popular as Google Alerts may be, people want to read news based on who their friends and colleagues are and who they want to know more about. But, from Varon and Hansen’s vantage point, the existing options didn’t go far enough, so they decided to build one that would. Today, Newsle’s network (and person)-oriented news alert service tracks more than 100 million people and processes more than one million articles each day from over 100,000 sources, serving users filtered, personalized alerts based on their preferences. While that scale is impressive, building a great news aggregator isn’t just solving the problem of scale, it requires both scale and awesome filtering mechanisms that work well enough that they can hold a user’s attention when there are a million other tools that can be used. That’s why Newsle prides itself on not only processing enough news so that it can bring you stories from sources you actually care about, but the person identification, natural language processing and disambiguation algorithms that help it serve better alerts. Since launching in 2011 and moving operations from Harvard to San Francisco, Varon and Hansen have managed to keep Newsle afloat with a team of five and $650K in seed financing they raised in early 2012 from SV Angel and Lerer Ventures. Newsle has even had its tires kicked by a few recognizable names in the news business, although the startup declined the offers, and naturally Varon also declined to specify which players those offers came from. Nonetheless, having build what they believe is a solid foundation on which to create the next big news aggregator, the co-founders are eager to stay independent and are looking to expand their natural language processing and data mining efforts with new talent. With its user base now growing 20 percent month-over-month, Varon says, Newsle is adding some coin to its coffers to help it take the next step. This week the startup finally closed a $1.85 million Series A financing round led by Advance Publications, the veteran media company, which owns a sizable fleet of newspapers and magazines, including Conde Nast and a 31 percent stake in Discovery Communications. Participating alongside the strategic investor were Maveron, DFJ, Transmedia Capital, Launny Steffens and previous investor Rockwell Schnabel. The news of the startup’s Series A raise , but the company has brought in additional capital and investors since, including Bloomberg Beta. The investor, as its name would imply, is the new early-stage investment fund and venture capital arm of Bloomberg, which launched this summer and is headed by OUYA chairman and former head of IGN, Roy Bahat. Newsle also happens to be the fund’s first investment, Varon says. In the end, strategic investment from two enormous media companies — or at least their VC affiliate — could be a huge leg up for Newsle, especially with Advance Publication’s giant network of news content. This could make tackling seemingly huge problems on the technical side of personalized news discovery, like better disambiguation — in other words, being able to determine which “John Smith” a user wants to hear about — a lot more manageable. For more, find .
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AOL Asks AOLers To ‘Disrupt AOL’
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Ryan Lawler
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Over the last few years, TechCrunch has done a pretty good job of Disrupting things. We’ve , we’ve , and most recently we’ve . But now, our parent company wants TechCrunch employees, and all the rest of the company, to “Disrupt AOL.” In an internal memo today, AOL Global CTO Curtis Brown announced an “exciting event” that will be taking place next month in AOL campuses “around the world.” In an “exciting twist” on the TechCrunch-branded Disrupt events, the company will be running an internal “Hackathon” and “Idea Battlefield” in which participants will be able to “pitch their ideas” in front of “judges.” Winning ideas will be “considered for actual development.” Oh yeah, and there is a “pretty sweet prize package,” “including CASH.” Then there’s a whole part about the “AOL Open philosophy,” which I’ve never heard of but apparently “challenges and rewards AOL brands to be more open,” which I have never actually seen happen. (One could argue that having the Disrupt branding “borrowed” without our knowledge for this “exciting event” is an example of such “openness.”) The memo touts the company’s “long history of innovation,” which is qualified by the number of patents AOL has been awarded. . Putting aside the fact that an internal hackathon is actually a cool idea, and that encouraging cross-promotion of various internal APIs is a good thing, and that yeah, we could come up with some new ideas for this “Idea Battlefield,” I began to worry that maybe AOL could become too Disrupted. For instance, what if someone Disrupted our broadband business, the , and our grandmothers ended their 15 year-old AOL subscriptions? What if someone Disrupted our horrible internal employee portal, which is only accessible through the most arcane and impossible VPN you might never hope to use? What if someone found a way to Disrupt our massive — — layer of middle management at AOL, thereby crippling our bureaucracy and spiraling the company out of control? Would barnyard animals sprout wings? Would dogs and cats live peacefully together? Would AOL as we know it cease to exist? Almost forgot: If you’re an AOL employee, not only can you submit your ideas to “Disrupt AOL,” but you can also help choose the logo you’ll be forced to look at while doing so. (I’m voting for D.) Full text of the memo: Hey AOLers – About a month ago, we held Beat The Internet Breakfasts in multiple AOL offices. We asked you to share thoughts and ideas about the AOL community, our products, and how we work. We read through each and every submission, and we started to take action. See the different logos below/attached? We need you to pick one. For a t-shirt, for an invitation to the Event we are announcing today and for the design on the $2,500 check you and your co-workers might win as one of the prizes…. But more on that in a second. We are pleased to announce an exciting event coming next month. Disrupt AOL will take place on our campuses around the world on December 3rd, with a Judging Event broadcast globally on December 5th. Putting a twist on TechCrunch Disrupt, this event will be comprised of a Hackathon and an Idea Battlefield, and will culminate in your projects being pitched before judges and considered for actual development. Oh yeah, winners also will get a pretty sweet prize package, including CASH. This event is designed to drive the AOL Open philosophy and to challenge and reward AOL brands to be more open. AOL has a long history of innovation, with more than 1000 patents awarded since the inception of the company. By being open and letting the AOL community- all of you bright and creative people- loose on some of our APIs, I’m convinced we will generate some awesome ideas that will help move the company forward in significant ways. You Want Open? How’s this for Open. Ryan Sagawa, our talented AOL Events intern, has come up with 4 logos for Disrupt AOL. Now we want you to choose the winner. Go to Inside RIGHT NOW to vote for the logo you think should represent Disrupt AOL on all our branding- including the t-shirts all participants will be receiving. For the Hackathon, teams of up to five people will compete to come up with and code an original, open, viable, and innovative idea within a 12-hour time period. If you are interested in participating in the Hackathon and are in search of a team, send an email to DisruptAOLTeam@teamaol.com and we will connect you to other team members. Teams are encouraged to have a mix of both engineers and product managers. The Idea Battlefield will allow individuals and teams across the company to submit their potential products for review by a judging panel, with the best submissions going on to a finalist round to pitch their ideas. Rules, registration, and prizes can all be found now Inside, and we’ll announce the API’s you can choose from in the near future. Please check in often for updates. I realize that we have a lot going on and many, many, competing priorities, but this event is hugely important to the future of the company so I encourage you to take the time to participate. My hope is that the next great AOL product will be born from this event and we will all win. Think big, take chances, have fun, show your love for what you do, and go out there and root for your colleagues. Look for more information on the Inside later this week for how to register as well as the great prizes up for grabs. Curtis Curtis Brown
Global CTO, AOL Inc
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A New $1 Million Prize Competition Aims To Fight Gun Violence With Tech
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013
| 11
| 7
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“We looked at this and said there’s been a systemic failure in the level of innovation and capitalization in this area,” Smart Tech director and serial entrepreneur Jim Pitkow Fast Company. He announced the program at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored conference in San Francisco yesterday. This isn’t the first time Silicon Valley (and Conway) have incentivized their tech brethren to stop gun violence. Three months after Adam Lanza killed 20 children at Sandy Hook elementary, launched a program to expedite investment in violence-reducing technologies. For example, ShotSpotter outfits local law enforcement with an alert systems that can triangulate violence based on the audio-signal of a gunshot (the technology still has some bugs to get worked out). Smart Tech split from the Sandy Hook Promise initiative for logistical reasons. “The Smart Tech Foundation is an offshoot of the Sandy Hook Promise,” Pitkow writes to me in an email. “This enables the Foundation to focus exclusively on this particular flavor of innovation. There are also legal liability and donor aspects that make it easier to do under a separate focused entity.” I’m a big fan of these kinds of initiatives: Silicon Valley can make an impact on all sorts of issues, . You can learn more about Smart Tech’s prize at SmartTechFoundation.org or email the org at info[at]stfdn[dot]com.
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Meet Context, The New Photo Texting App All The Cool Kids Are Using
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013
| 11
| 7
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There are a number of apps out there seeking to displace SMS as the primary mode of communications between mobile users — there’s MessageMe, Line, WeChat, WhatsApp and others. And, of course, there’s Snapchat, which has built a big, booming following around photo messaging. Well, there’s another new messaging app out there called , which seeks to streamline the way users communicate what’s going on around them through that it calls “Simple, Fun Photo Texting.” Context isn’t exactly a photo-sharing app, per se… although photos are a big part of what draws users to it. Unlike other messaging services in which photos are a part — think Snapchat, for instance — you’re not taking or uploading the photo first. Instead, users first enter the text they’d like to share. Then, once that’s done, they take a photo which, uh, provides the ‘context’ to what they’re saying, doing, thinking. For those of you who use Snapchat as a sort of SMS replacement, shamelessly snapping selfies and accompanying them with news of the moment*, Context might provide a more seamless, and possibly more gratifying, way of communicating with others. It might not have the coolness factor of those self-destructing, ephemeral messaging apps — everything is on the record, with a photo-by-photo slideshow of your communication instantly available. For users who want the instant gratification of banging out a message and instantly sending a photo along with it, Context provides drop-dead simplicity. In an era where users are used to perfecting the moments that they share with other through filters (a la Instagram) or happily seeing those moments slip into the ether (via Snapchat), the idea of spontaneous, unvarnished moments that are with you forever seems a bit of a novel concept. That might be why it’s captured the interest of early users, many of which are using it every day, essentially as a replacement for SMS conversations, according to co-founder Ben Broca. And while it’s mostly flown under the radar, I’ve also seen a few top investors playing around with it over the past several weeks. Broca had previously built , an app that scanned Instagram to help people . But he shifted to building the messaging app just a few months later. That said, Context does borrow some of the same design philosophy of Now. Most notably, it uses the same font — which Broca points out conveys a sort of novelty and quirkiness to the app. You know, instead of just using Helvetica, which every other messaging app seemingly uses. ==
* You know who you are.
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To Buy Or Not To Buy? The Twitter Question
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Contributor
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As the offering date for Twitter approached, the bankers could not seem to make up their minds on the pricing, with the offering price rising from $17-$20 barely two weeks ago to $23-$25 last week to . The stock opened today, about an hour later than expected, at an , up 73 percent from the offering price. As you watch this process unfold, with a mix of wonder, greed and cynicism, the question that is begging for a response, is whether you should try to partake in this frenzy. Assuming that you were not able to buy the shares at the offering price, should you buy now? And if you did get the shares at the offering price, is it time to cash out? The answer depends upon not only what you think about the company and its prospects but also on whether you view yourself as a trader or an investor, since it is not only possible but likely, in my view, that Twitter was both underpriced and over valued at its offering price. In the pricing process, bankers gauge market mood and momentum, trying to determine the “right” price for the stock, not wanting to relive the Facebook fiasco, where the stock went into a tailspin after the offering, but also not trying to avoid the LinkedIn scenario, where the stock doubled on opening day. The preferred script for both the bankers and the current owners of the company (founders, VCs) is for the stock to have a healthy “pop” on the offering date, the former because it reduces their underwriting risk and the latter because it acts as a lead-up to their cashing out on their holdings, months later. At a 75 percent jump on the opening day, Twitter’s price jump is uncomfortably close to LinkedIn territory, but the effect of the underpricing on the existing owners (founders, VCs) is mitigated by the fact that only about 12 percent of the shares were available to the public in the IPO. If you were one of the lucky (or preferred) clients who got the shares at $26/share, you have nothing to complain about, but what if you were not? You can still try to play the trading game hoping that the positive news stories from the offering will draw in investors from the sidelines, carrying the stock higher, and wait to sell just before the tide turns. What are the odds? I know that they are not good for me, since I am hopeless at sensing market mood swings or momentum shifts. The answer may be different for you, but if you do trade, I hope that your timing is impeccable and that you are not operating under any delusions of caring about value. In the valuation process, you are trying to assess the value of Twitter as a business. In making this assessment, there are three key estimates that will drive your value: My valuation of Twitter yields a value of $18 per share and assumes that revenues will climb to about $11.5 billion in 2023 (giving Twitter about 5 percent to 5.5 percent of the online advertising market then), that the pre-tax operating margin will increase over time to 25 percent (about 5 percent lower than Facebook but about 5 percent higher than Google) and that a dollar in additional capital invested will generate $1.50 in incremental revenues. To justify the $45 per share, you would need the company to reach much higher. By my calculations, , giving it, by my estimate, about 15 percent of the online advertising market in that year. If you are interested in Twitter as an investment, I think you should make your own judgments about these variables, notwithstanding your uncertainty about the future, and come up with your own estimate of value. Arguing, as some do, that there is too much uncertainty to even try to value companies like Twitter strikes me as an abdication of a fundamental responsibility of investing. I think Twitter is a good company, with the potential to be a great one, but based on my views of the company, it is not a good investment for me at $27, $35 or $45 a share. There are two potential developments that can change that conclusion. The first is if the company finds a new market to enter or an innovative way to break away from its online advertising competitors, which increases potential revenues and value. The second and more likely scenario is that the company stumbles in delivering expectations and that the same momentum investors, who bid it up, abandon it in droves, causing its price to collapse. For the moment, I have my popcorn ready and plan to watch the circus. It should be fun!
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Groupon Q3 Misses On Sales Of $595.1M; Announces Acquisition Of Ticket Monster For $260M To Boost Mobile Business In Asia
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Ingrid Lunden
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Fresh from celebrating its fifth anniversary , Groupon today its Q3 earnings: it’s a mixed picture but shows that Groupon continues to make good on its commitment to take its business beyond daily deals and into a wider marketplace for location-based and mobile commerce. Groupon reported revenues of $595.1 million with EPS of $0.02, missing on sales but beating on EPS estimates, and it : Korea’s Ticket Monster, for $260 million, to build out its mobile commerce operations in Asia through event ticketing and other commerce services. Ticket Monster had been owned by Groupon competitor Living Social, a sign of how one daily deals site has not managed to make a go of the international business, and now another will try anew. As part of the purchase, Groupon says it will be acquiring Living Social Korea. (We’re asking if it intends to keep that business fully operational; for now Groupon says that all management staff and brand is coming over to Groupon and there will be further transition plans revealed after the deal is closed.) The acquisition is being made for $100 million in cash, with the remaining $160 million in Groupon shares, the company says, with the deal closing some time in the first half of 2014. “We’re also excited to announce today that we’ve signed an agreement to acquire Ticket Monster, one of the leading ecommerce companies in Korea,” said CEO Eric Lefkofsky in a statement. “Ticket Monster has been successful building a mobile commerce business in one of the largest markets in the world. It will serve as the cornerstone of our Asian business, bringing scale and e-commerce expertise to that region.” Seoul-based Ticket Monster is known locally as TMON, and it has been around since 2010, and sells event tickets but also other products and services. Groupon says it has 4 million active customers and annual billings of more than $800 million today, growing year-on-year by some 50%, with half of its sales are transacted on mobile devices. Announcing this acquisition seems to set a precedent of sorts for Groupon for laying on significant news during earnings days. One quarterly report for Q1 this year saw ; Q2 ; and now an acquisition is getting announced in Q3. In one regard, it seems that the acquisition news is there to offset the rest of the results, which are a mixed bag: analysts were revenues of $615.7 million for the quarter with non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.01. However, they do fall within Groupon’s own estimates for the quarter, which were between $585 million and $635 million. A year ago the company reported revenues of $568.6 million, with an EPS of $0. Groupon marked last week’s five-year birthday with a redesign of its website and mobile apps, with the new look promoting the idea that while daily deals remain a mainstay of the company’s business, other products and features are now getting equal footing. These include premium restaurant dining offers via Groupon Reserve (launched in ) through to travel and its Groupon Goods marketplace. The company is also making a stronger effort to encourage more personalised deals, encouraing users to fill out profiles of themselves with their street addresses to make offers as localized as possible. The focus on making an acquisition in Asia is also significant in that it shows that Groupon is trying to invest to build out business in that region. The company today noted that while North America and EMEA grew 20% and 12% in gross billings, the rest of the world (including Asia) declined by 13%. In total, gross billings were $1.34 billion, up 10% over a year ago. Other highlights in today’s earnings: . Even if Groupon is now doing more than daily deals, these still remain a significant part of its business. They continue to grow in terms of inventory but not necessarily conversion. Groupon says that in North America, its biggest market, it had 65,000 active deals at the end of Q3, up by some 11,000 in the quarter. Gross billings on deals between the two quarters, however, showed a decline of some $50 million. Overall customer spend was also slightly down to $137 from $138. . These continue to grow overall, up by 10% on last year to 43.5 million. . Groupon says that mobile has seen its tipping point, with more than half of all transactions completed on mobile devices in September 2013 in North America, and over 40% on mobile globally. Its apps have now been downloaded by 60 million people worldwide, with 9 million in the last quarter. Marketplace. Groupon still has work to do in getting more critical mass on its site around the various offerings it places there. It says that some 6% of total traffic in North America was on its marketplace, with those who do go there to search for deals spending 25% more time there than those who do not. Here’s how Groupon’s earnings have progressed across the last few quarters. If you don’t see Q3, refresh the page and they should populate soon.
I’ll be listening to the call and updating with any additional news.
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Apple Rolls Out Patch To Fix Mavericks Gmail Issues
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Chris Velazco
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Apple’s newest version of OS X debuted to generally positive feedback a few weeks back… unless you were an Apple Mail user trying to use the app to check your Gmail. Then you probably had to deal with syncing headaches, incorrect unread email counts, and plenty of other miscellaneous unpleasantness (Joe Kissell has a pretty comprehensive breakdown of the big issues if you’re feeling morbidly curious). Thankfully, after a handful reports indicating that Apple was to fix those sticking points, the company has finally started pushing it out into the wild… also known as the Mac App Store. According to Apple’s changelog, the patch addresses “an issue that prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings”, along with tackling the cause of those pesky errant email counts. Throw in a handful of minor (apparently so minor that Apple doesn’t bother delineating them) stability tweaks meant to make the experience that much smoother and you’ve got yourself Apple’s first Mavericks patch in a nutshell.
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Meet The 9-Year-Old Who Rang The Opening Bell For Twitter’s IPO
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Anthony Ha
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Before Twitter stock started trading this morning, journalists assumed that we’d see the company’s founders and/or executives ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. And indeed, there were excited whispers as we spotted folks like Dick Costolo and Biz Stone on the floor. But the figures who actually took the stage weren’t immediately recognizable. Finally, someone asked, “Is … is that ?” Yes, it was , along with Cheryl Fiandaca of the and , the 9-year-old girl behind the anti-child slavery initiative . Twitter, apparently, was using the opportunity to . After the bell rang, and as we waited for , I interviewed Harr and Fiandaca about their experience ringing the bell and with Twitter. “Today, we rang the bell for hope and freedom, and I just would like to tell everyone out there that you don’t have to be big or powerful to change the world,” Harr said. “You can be just like me.” Later, I also spoke to Scott Cutler, executive vice president and head of global markets at NYSE Euronext, who admitted that it was a long wait for trading to begin. “The previous longest open was 10:17 and that was for the Visa IPO in 2007,” Cutler said. “But again, we’re not focused on trying to rush to get this stock open quickly. This is a natural process where buyers and sellers come together and you want to open at the right price and a price that quite frankly is sustained in the aftermarket.”
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Path Loses Biz Head Amid Rumors Of Over $7M In Funding From Dustin Moskovitz
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Alexia Tsotsis
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It’s been a long, hard road for Dave Morin’s Path, as it has seen in a tough ( ” anyone?) social market. These data points mean that it’s had to trim down staff — and that it took awhile to raise its We’ve heard that Path’s Head of Business gave notice yesterday, in order to co-found his own company with Path iOS developer . We’ve also heard that Product Designer left to raise funding for his own startup right before the company’s . Both had been at Path for three years and had been co-workers at Digg before that. But rumor has it that the bumpy road is about to get a little easier. According to one source the company is set to close an over $7 million raise (between $7m -$10m) from Morin-pal and former Facebooker Dustin Moskovitz, at a flat valuation around $250 million, the same . It has been said that “friends and family” would also join the funding, though the size of that portion is unclear. Path today confirmed to TechCrunch that Van Horn, Trinh, and Bhoga had recently left, outside of its layoffs. “I had been considering starting another company in 2010,” Van Horn said over the phone, “But Dave (Morin) told me to come join Path and I believed in his vision. I’ll continue to be a loyal Path user and an evangelist for the company.” “Matt and Danny have been awesome team members at Path and I’m grateful to them both for being a part of our team and giving their all,” Morin wrote in an email,”I’m thrilled for them both as they follow their respective entrepreneurial pursuits.” Path declined to comment on the additional funding rumors.
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With 220M Downloads And $12M From Qualcomm, Magma, TabTale Is Quietly Becoming One Of The Top Children’s App Makers
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Rip Empson
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With education apps on iTunes earlier this year, the demand for quality learning content, especially content of the kid-friendly variety, is growing fast — and so is the opportunity for app publishers. Since launching in 2010, Israel-based startup, , has been on a mission to capitalize on this demand and is quietly becoming one of the App Store’s top publishers as a result. With a suite of over 240 apps that have more than 220 million downloads between them, TabTale wants to strike while the iron is hot. The startup announced this week that it has raised $12 million in Series B financing, led by Qualcomm Ventures and Magma Venture Partners, with contributions from Vintage Investment Ventures and existing investors. To complement its organic growth, the company revealed in a statement this week that it plans to use its new capital to grow its team and to continue establishing itself as a buyer in the children and family market. The startup and “Paint Sparkles” maker, Kids Games Club, back in March. In September, TabTale was named the eighth largest publisher by download value by App Annie in September, placing it alongside names like EA, Rovio and Disney, with a significant share of downloads powered by Design It, the company’s fashion makeover app. Operating in a fast-growing, hyper-competitive space where the forecast is more of both (growth and increase in competition) for the foreseeable future, what TabTale has managed to accomplish in three years is impressive. It’s now raised $13.5 million to date and claims more than 20 million active monthly users and done so behind girly games like “princess party planner” and while largely flying under the radar. And, clearly not one to miss an opportunity to provide a note of emphasis for its competitors (and startups looking for exit opportunities), TabTale said that it also recently hit profitability. Not bad. a milestone TabTale has since underlined by re profitability.
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Checking Up On Monkey Inferno, The Tech Incubator Where Bebo Is Working On Its Rebirth
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Colleen Taylor
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Michael Birch that his plan is to “reinvent” Bebo at the personal incubator the Birches in San Francisco, and have “a lot of fun” in the process — but we haven’t heard many updates about the plans since then. And people are clearly curious: A Reddit “Ask Me Anything” about Bebo held a couple of weeks back by Monkey Inferno’s CEO Shaan Puri and made it to the website’s front page. So TechCrunch TV headed over to Monkey Inferno to see first-hand how Bebo is coming along. We also got a look at some other projects that the team at the Inferno are working on. Check it all out in the video above.
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Twitter’s Strong IPO Leaves The Company More Richly Valued On A Per-User Basis Than Facebook At Its Debut
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Alex Wilhelm
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If you were holding Twitter stock yesterday, congrats. You can now afford an extra bedroom in your house in Pacific Heights. Or maybe a baby. But not both. Anyway, Twitter’s IPO pop has the world losing its collective marbles, so let’s take a look at how the market is currently valuing Twitter in comparison to a few analogs. The question is simple: Does Twitter’s valuation at its current levels make sense? Twitter initially stated that it would sell its stock as low as $17 per share. Demand for the 70 million offered shares was so strong, Twitter finally priced itself at $26 per share. Shares started the day at $45. There is some quibbling that Twitter left money on the table, but the company went public at a massive delta to what it deemed an acceptable range, and managed to have a stunningly successful first day. If you think the company is crying into its hashtag soup, you’re wrong. For this post, we’ll use Twitter’s initial trading level of , and market capitalization — at that price point, using — of $31.8 billion. Facebook, by comparison, priced its IPO at $38 per share, but started trading at , valuing the firm at $115 billion, again using a . So Twitter is only slightly more richly valued at the time on a first-trade basis than Facebook was when it finally made it to the public markets. Does that make Twitter investors batty? Perhaps not, but it’s worth noting that Facebook stock suffered from large declines from a discounted starting point in the months following its debut. The lesson would therefore appear to be that investors are pricing Twitter as if they expect it to grow more quickly than Facebook did in its first year as a public company. Missteps could be very costly for the social firm. For reference, to calculate its diluted earnings per share, Facebook uses a combined Class A and Class B share count of 3.23 billion. (Google Finance et al. use its basic share count of 2.43 billion, if you were curious.) Therefore, at its current market price of $47.87, the company is worth $154 billion. In its most recent quarterly report, Facebook reported 1.19 billion monthly active users. So, Facebook is currently valued on a diluted-share valuation basis, at per monthly active user. We have to ask ourselves again, is the market overvaluing Twitter, Facebook, or both? I want to hazard a guess towards both. Facebook took a hammering when it became readily apparent that its mobile advertising efforts were puny, and its revenue growth could slow as it matured. Its stock fell as low as $18 per share at rock bottom. It then , and the market responded by bidding up its shares back on a per-monthly-active-user basis to where it IPO’d. Facebook only came back in the market when it proved itself to be perhaps the most adept monetizer of mobile yet, eliminating what was then the key concern surrounding its business. But through these comparisons, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: Facebook’s valuation includes implicitly its ability to generate profit off of its users. It was also a more mature company when it went public, so the comparison is somewhat apple-orange, but it does imply that the market expects Twitter to be worth on a per-user basis when it is profitable – if it’s willing to value Twitter more per-user when it loses money, it is certainly logical to presume that when Twitter does turn a profit, that figure will rise. Profitable companies are worth more than companies that lose money. Facebook’s five-year expected PEG ratio is nearly two, which worries me. That Twitter is valued in some ways more richly than Facebook now, with a far less mature business model, makes me fret. Investors are currently betting that Twitter’s revenue growth will continue at impressive rates. As I : According to its newly refiled S-1 document, Twitter has lost $133.8 million to date in 2013. That compares negatively with its equivalent loss of $70.7 million in 2012. Both loss figures include the results of the first 9 months of the calendar year. […] The other side to all this is that Twitter’s revenues are rapidly expanding. The company posted third-quarter revenue of $168.6 million, which compares favorably to its collected $253.6 million in the first half 2013 revenue. The gist of the above is that Twitter is in a high-growth, high-cost moment. The stakes of that are simple, now that it is public: Keep the revenue growth in high gear, and start to trim the losses. If Twitter continues to grow both its losses and its revenue, its ability to enjoy high margins in the future will be called into doubt. And you can’t say that investors don’t expect Twitter to enjoy the margins that Facebook commands. This all comes down to a simple point: Investors are betting that Twitter will perform at nearly herculean levels in its first few quarters. Can it?
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Ibotta Expands Beyond Mobile Coupons, Now Lets You Earn Cash Back From Restaurants, Fast Food & Home Improvement Stores
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Sarah Perez
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Denver-based mobile couponing application , which pays you cash back for items you buy in grocery stores by simply scanning your receipt, has today debuted its iOS 7-optimized version 2.0 that now brings its shopping discounts to a number of new stores, including home improvement stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot, as well as national restaurant chains like Chili’s, Burger King, Smashburger and more. The company , with a new take on mobile couponing designed to reach those who don’t subscribe to newspapers, clip from circulars, or print coupons from the web. Instead, Ibotta lets you do everything from your mobile phone. And instead of just “clipping” coupons, Ibotta has users actually interacting with the consumer packaged goods brands themselves in order to earn their discounts. Those interactions can be in the form of answering a trivia question, watching a video, or posting about the product to social media. In exchange, Ibotta rewards users with cash for each action taken – typically $0.25 to $0.50 apiece. The app has been surprisingly successful, despite the time it takes to work through these interactions in order to earn the cash back. According to founder and CEO Bryan Leach, there’s friction in every channel – that is, if you’re clipping coupons manually using scissors, it’s even worse, for example. And printing coupons from the web isn’t much better, either. What the company found was that the app appealed to those who do neither. 60% of its audience rarely or never uses coupons, and most are millennials, ages 25 to 35. Most are also female. They don’t subscribe to newspapers, but they always have their smartphones. Since Ibotta’s launch a little over a year ago, the company has grown to 1.9 million regular users, 70% of whom are monthly active uses – a figure that’s extremely high for mobile. Leach says that Ibotta’s users are active, on average, 25 out of every 30 days, citing data from Onavo Insights. Those numbers make it more popular, in terms of engagement, than deal-finding competitors like Groupon, Coupons.com, or Shopkick, he adds. Research from Business Insider released this summer also showed Ibotta as one of the most-used apps on people’s phones. (Score one for the “ ,” I guess.) To date, users have viewed 1.5 billion offers. This includes 45 million “pre-shopping media engagements,” which is a fancy way of saying the brands were able to catch users’ attention before they went actually to the store – a metric brands like. “We’ve got the ability to influence more in-store transactions in the grocery CPG channel than any other mobile technology in the United States,” says Leach. “We’ve proven that people are very willing to have a more interactive experience on mobile that’s not just taking a coupon and putting it on the phone,” he says. Of course, Ibotta’s user numbers could also be skewed by its more obsessed user base. Though it doesn’t necessarily cater to the serious couponing crowd, the extreme couponing sites I visit ( , aspirationally) often mention Ibotta’s deals to their users. These can sometimes be combined with manufacturer coupons and other in-store deals to significantly bring down the cost of food, drinks and other household items when shopping. That being said, the app’s attractive design and simple user flow make it conductive to killing downtime by earning cash back. My one complaint has been that with some stores – like those without loyalty cards to link, for example – the receipt-scanning process has to also be combined with scanning UPC barcodes on the products themselves. This depends on the store, though, and how detailed its receipts are in describing the specific item you purchased. (So your mileage may vary, as they say.) And Leach adds that the company is now working directly with retailers to move away from the receipt-scanning process entirely. With Ibotta 2.0, out now, the company is expanding from grocery stores, Target, Walmart, drug stores, and the like, to new categories. As noted above, the company has begun working with home improvement stores, restaurants (including fast food), and will soon add a major health nutrition chain and a big box electronics retailer to the fold, allowing users to save on other kinds of purchases. In these cases, you’ll usually just have to snap a photo of your receipt to earn the cash back. Ibotta is also now introducing the option to have you earn gift cards from places like Starbucks, iTunes, or Redbox, instead of cash through PayPal, if you choose. The company has over 300 partners currently, up from around ten it had when it first launched. And while they won’t discuss revenue, Leach would say that it uses a pay per performance approach to earn commissions on sales. Ibotta it had raised $3 million in angel funding, in a round closed earlier in 2012. Since then, it has raised more. The company declines to discuss its funding events, but SEC filings show a in 2012 followed by in early 2013. Leach says those numbers are not current, however, and that Ibotta’s financings have come from angel investors, not VC’s. The updated Ibotta app is available or here in .
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Darrell Etherington
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Healthcare.gov Could Only Handle 1,100 Users On The Eve Of Launch
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Recently released documents reveal that the failed federal insurance e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, could 1,100 users the day before it launched [ ]. It has long been suspected that the White House prioritized politics over technical realities in the launch of the healthcare website, but this is some of the best proof that officials were burying their heads in the sand. “Currently we are able to reach 1100 users before response time gets too high,” noted a technical report to the website team. Eventually, the document notes, they hoped the website could handle 10,000. On its first day, healthcare.gov . to the USA Today, the administration expected 50-60,000 concurrent users, and received as many as 250,000. Let’s review: So, on launch day, , with higher premiums. The administration’s team was completely unprepared. “They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” Harvard Professor David Cutler The Washington Post. “It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.” How? How does a website launch on a day when the technical team thinks it can handle less than one-tenth of the demand? This kind of incompetence is why of building the e-commerce experience.
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Behavioral Health Startup Sessions Launches To Provide Personalized Fitness Programs To All
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Ryan Lawler
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Fitness isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition, and there are few apps that are tailored specifically to the needs of individual users. After all, everyone has different exercise interests, goals, time, and patience — not to mention, everyone has a different “starting point” when it comes to how fit they are or what they’re able to accomplish. A new startup called is seeking to provide a more personalized approach to fitness, by connecting users with individual trainers who work with them to set realistic long-term goals and follow up to see how things went day-to-day. By finding out more about a user — including fitness goals, relative starting level of fitness, schedule, exercise interests, etc. — the health coach can work to develop a personalized program for each person. That is, rather than having users attempt to fit a program into their lives, a Sessions health coach builds realistic, achievable goals around a user’s lifestyle and then gradually refine that over time. The end goal isn’t a short-term change in someone’s relative level of fitness, but a sustainable change in behavior that they can carry forward over time. As someone who has struggled with his own fitness for a long, long time, I decided to try it out for myself. The onboarding process included me filling out a detailed initial survey providing general health and fitness information — what I hoped to accomplish, what types of exercise I enjoy, what my day-to-day schedule is like, what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, etc. That was followed by a consultation with my personalized health coach, Glennis, who further talked through my goals and expectations and created a schedule of exercises to perform over the next week. Once that week is complete, things get re-evaluated for the next week on Sunday, which is considered a user’s “anchor day.” On that day, coach and client review the progress of the previous week and plan for the following week, adding new or longer sessions over the coming days. The coach also keeps track of your progress during the week, texting or emailing users to nudge them to complete workouts or asking them how it went afterward. All communications actually get fed into your Sessions timeline, so you can keep track of your communications along with workouts all in one place. In addition to having workouts tracked within the Sessions site, users can connect their calendars to get reminders there. They can also connect activity trackers and apps like Fitbit and Runkeeper to provide another layer of activity data to the system and improve the feedback that they get. For me, the opening fitness regimen was just about scheduling a couple of runs over the course of the week and then augmenting them with a light home strength training session during an off-day. My coach followed up each day a workout was scheduled to see how it went and then marked them completed. Users also do follow-up phone calls with their health coaches to reevaluate things over time. Depending on how much they’re paying per month. Users can pay between $69 or $199 per month, depending on the level of contact they require with their coach. While it’s early days — Week 1! — I have pretty high hopes for the program to enact some actual change in my activity level. I’m not exactly self-motivated, but having someone on the other end to nudge me to work out will likely get me off the couch more often. Sessions was founded in 2012 by Nick Crocker and Ben Hartney, who had both attended the University of Queensland in Australia. Crocker previously co-founded We Are Hunted, and was a product manager for Boxee in New York. The startup was incubated out of Rock Health, and has raised less than $1 million from SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Blackbird and Joshua Kushner.
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Chrome On Windows To Start Rejecting Extensions From Outside The Chrome Web Store In January
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Frederic Lardinois
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Starting in January, Google’s Chrome browser will to install extensions that aren’t hosted in Google’s own Chrome Web Store. While Google had recently increased its security measures for keeping malicious extensions out of Chrome by adding and , the team clearly felt that it had to go a step further to keep Windows machines safe. The leading cause of complaints from its Windows users, Google says, is still due to malicious extensions that override browser settings and change the user experience in unexpected (and undesired) ways. Given that these malicious extensions are virtually always hosted outside of the Chrome Web Store, the team has decided to simply shut down the ability to install extensions from third-party sites. Users will still be able to do local installs during development and admins can use their Enterprise to allow their users to pre-install and allow certain extensions. This move also won’t affect Chrome Apps. For developers who need to migrate to the Web Store now, this move should be . Most Chrome extension developers are probably using the store already anyway, so this shouldn’t be too hard for most of them. The one thing they do have to do, though, is pay a $5 fee to sign up.
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Yale Adds Another Stop To The College Hacker Circuit
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Eliza Brooke
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The organizers of the hackathon at Yale this weekend aren’t exactly sure how many students turned out for the sleepless grind. Gauging from the depletion of t-shirts, they put it at about 950. That’s about 915 more people than came last year, when a group of students organized a mini-hackathon that one participant described as, “Wasn’t great.” With about 150 participants making the haul from Canada, a handful flying in from England, and hundreds more arriving from schools across the US, the hackathon that wrapped up this evening was definitely better than that and adds one more event to the circuit of major college hackathons that includes , , , and . In the spirit of building the intercollegiate hacker culture, a number of the organizers of those events also came out to help at Yale this weekend. A large part of the motivation to hold a major hackathon on campus is to build a brighter, more cohesive programming environment on Yale’s campus. Projects are fractured among the student body or limited to problem sets for class, said Frank Wu, a sophomore and one of the YHack organizers. As far as post-grad career choices go, working in tech is not high up on the list. This weekend’s hacks were pretty awesome across the board, and the littered pizza boxes were many. Here are the winners and finalists, as presented at this evening’s closing ceremonies. Created by two Yale seniors, Rainman gives context to news articles. It’s a major help for those times when you want to educate yourself about, say, Syria but don’t want to toggle between the story and a few reference tabs. The Rainman Chrome extension pulls up relevant Wikipedia articles as a sidebar to the main story. Those articles are pulled based on the keywords in the article, comparing the frequency with which a word appears in the piece to a larger corpus of articles. It’s the type of hack that would be incredibly useful in real life and gets at how we read news articles now, in conjunction with other reference materials. Lux deals with the issue of indoor fluorescent lights that mess with your internal clock and keep you awake long after you’ve tried to go to sleep. The Yale-based team’s idea is that lightbulbs should be smarter and change hue and brightness depending on the time of day with no prompt from the owner, although they can also be controlled with an app. It’s like for real life. Retro in the best way possible, this hack uses a text interface as a replacement for video chat services that often freeze up. Imagine a wall of text that creates a pixelated, black and white video image and you’ve got the idea. Text is a simple way to get data across, and as the Carnegie Mellon students who made it said, “The bandwidth is, like, zero.” The other finalists included Leaf, a Pebble-based hack that uses handshakes as a way to swap contact information at networking events; Hacksearch, a Facebook graph search that lets you include fields that don’t exist, like popularity and attractiveness; Subtle Glass, an Android app that translates spoken word into text using Google Glass; and Laser Lock, which makes data transference possible through LED light. It’s worth noting that the kids on the Laser Lock team MacGyvered part of the hardware for their hack using foam rockets that YHack was giving out as swag and a bunch of Doublemint gum wrappers. And it worked.
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These Hand-Made, Solar-Powered Nixie Watches Are Retro-Tastic
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John Biggs
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watches are nothing new – Woz wears one sometimes – but these glowing tubes, originally designed in the 1970s for heavy-duty industrial displays, are hard to power and hard to maintain. However, it looks like a designer has finally hit on exactly the right mix of cool styling and power management. Created by an Australian named Michel van der Meij, these watches hold a single Nixie tube and have large solar panels on the front. The buttons on the top allow you to scroll through features and you tell the time by reading the display one digit at a time. He sells them for about $1,000 on . The watch is called the Kopriso Mi Esposita and is completely hand-assembled by Michel. He also makes a round model called the Cold War, but it uses a single battery that may or may not stay alive for long. The Esposita can last, without charging, for months as long as it gets plenty of sun. They are surprisingly rare – there are only about seven in the world – and Michel posts them to his page when he’s completed them. Sadly Michel is not yet crowd funding these but I’d be the first in line. A real, working Nixie clock on your wrist without a bulky battery charger is a great thing. describing the watches, but you can for photos and updates.
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Prefundia, A Platform For Crowdfunding Projects To Gain Backers Ahead Of Launch, Exits Beta
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Natasha Lomas
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wants to help crowdfunding projects get backers they launch their campaigns. The startup, for startup it is — launching out of U.S. accelerator this summer — has been operating in beta for the past three months, and has just released some early performance data as it opens its doors to the public. Prefundia said 195 projects have used its platform since June to publicise their crowdfunding campaigns before launch, and it’s claiming that projects using this auxiliary on-ramp to generate pre-launch momentum have been successful 71 percent of the time. Its site showcases forthcoming crowdfunding projects — offering hosting space for photos, videos and text info on a project in the works. There’s then an option for Prefundia users to sign up to be alerted when the project launches its funding campaign. It’s a pretty simple idea. But if Prefundia can get decent traction, it could because a useful platform for makers to test their ideas — to see whether a minimalist wallet made of papier-mâché or a plug-in disco-ball for your iPhone is actually worth the time and effort required to try and siphon off some crowdfunds. “People certainly do use the platform to test viability of projects,” says Prefundia co-founder Daniel Falabella. “ ’s one we know is using it for that purpose. In fact, we’re developing a component for the creator dashboard which will compare a project’s stats to all others on Prefundia in order to benchmark and give a clearer indication of demand.” A successful crowdfunding campaign takes a lot more than luck. A great idea, a well-presented project with the right level of detail, and judicious use of social media to promote your campaign are all key ingredients. Timing is also important. And lady luck inevitably plays a part, too. Getting this recipe right is never going to be an exact science. According to covered by my TC colleague Darrell Etherington, Kickstarter’s average success rate for crowdfunding projects is less than half (44 percent) of listed projects. Indiegogo doesn’t report an official success rate, so estimates vary — from around a third (34 percent), to a mere 9.3 percent if you factor in the projects delisted by the site for failing to raise $500 (albeit Indiegogo disputes both estimates). Whatever the official success rates for the biggest crowdfunding platforms, there’s still clearly a large proportion of projects that flounder and sink without a trace. And a sizeable chunk of those are probably dead in the water because they deserve to be. For every good idea hitting the crowdfunding trail, there are many more running around cap in hand. Prefundia’s 71 percent success rate may sound impressive, but its data sample is very small. Also, it’s not clear how much money the campaigns were seeking — obviously, as a rule of thumb, the smaller the funding target, the easier it is to achieve. Prefundia does say that its users have raised $2.5 million since the launch of its platform. Doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to generate a per-project average (assuming that all the projects using its platform went on to attempt a crowdfunding launch) that comes out at just over $18,000 raised per successful project (138 of the 195 total being successful) on average. And while $18,000 may be all you need to get the ‘revolutionary’ ZipTie to market, tech projects typically need a lot more funds to fly. But of course that’s just a flat average. Prefundia does single out one example, the project, which to help relaunch its project after initially failing on Kickstarter. Second time around the gStick was able to raise $23,901 on the first day, and hit its $40,000 goal on day two. It ultimately garnered close to 4,000 backers and took in almost $130,500 in 16 days. Early crowdfunding momentum tends to beget more success as projects that raise money quickly tend to attract more attention — both from the media and also from users, being as media attention can help a project bag a slot in the “most popular” categories of crowdfunding sites — which in turn gets it in front of more potential backers, owing to greater visibility on the homepage. It’s that virtuous circle of kicking a funding campaign off with a big bang which ripples out and generates even more bucks that Prefundia is aiming to engineer. “Kickstarter’s ‘popular’ algorithm heavily favors projects that gain traction very quickly (see ), so projects that build a lot of momentum before they launch and then drop it all into their crowdfunding campaign on the first day do much better than those who don’t,” adds Falabella. Prefundia is free for forthcoming crowdfunding projects to list on, and isn’t currently taking any cut of successful projects, so there’s no reason not to give it a go — apart from the time required to upload a few media assets, etc. “Monetization plans are on hold until the first quarter of 2014 but will include partnerships with manufacturing brokers, marketing firms, crowdfunding sites, etc — relationships and deals are already tested and inked,” says Falabella. He names , which offers services for startups such as landing pages where beta users can sign up, as Prefundia’s main competitor but argues Prefundia stands out on merit of its focus being exclusively on pre-launch for crowdfunding projects. He also argues it has a lower barrier to entry, because there’s no need to buy a new domain to add a project to Prefundia, and claims the platform can drive more traffic to a crowdfunding page “ Time will tell on the latter point, since it’s not clear how much traffic Prefundia is pulling in to its own platform as yet. It’s also going to need to keep ramping its traffic up to be able to keep generating the big bangs it promises as more projects land on its own pages. At which point, it may be time for a pre-pre-funding startup to step in. Or for all the to realise they are drunk and go home.
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Instagram Is Down For Some Users Due To ‘System Issues’
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Colleen Taylor
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A number of Instagram users are currently difficulty accessing the popular photo-sharing service both on the web and mobile versions of the app. At 3:37 pm Pacific Time this afternoon, Instagram confirmed the outage in a Tweet citing “system issues”: https://twitter.com/instagram/status/399319797722140673 As of 4:00pm PT, the system still appears to be having problems for many users. Indeed, trying to visit individual Instagram profiles on the web (such as ) is currently turning up for me. This has naturally resulted in some panicked messages on social media from people desperate to share sepia-hued snaps of their Saturday afternoons — and even more jokes about the absurdity of such . We’ve reached out to Instagram and its parent company Facebook for additional comment on the outage, details on what’s caused it, and when it should be remedied. We haven’t heard back yet, but this post will be updated with any response we receive. Let’s all hope it’s fixed before the commence. Those artfully-posed selfies aren’t going to post themselves.
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Year Up Helps Give Urban Youth The Training And Connections They Need To Land Hot Tech Jobs
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Colleen Taylor
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One organization called is dedicated to closing that gap, which it calls the “ ,” by providing one specialized year of intensive training to young adults aged 18 to 24 with no more than a high school diploma. After training is completed, the program provides introductions to companies keen to hire skilled staff. It’s working out quite well: 100 percent of Year Up graduates are placed into an internship. And earlier this fall, Year Up’s founder and CEO Gerald Chertavian for the impact of the program. It’s an excellent nationwide program, and its outpost here in the Bay Area not surprisingly has a stronger focus on tech than on other industries — Year Up Bay Area has placed young people in high-paying jobs at tech companies, including LinkedIn and Facebook, among others. So TechCrunch TV stopped by Year Up’s San Francisco offices to find out more about the program and what it’s all about. Watch that in the video above.
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Gillmor Gang: Hocus Pocus
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — find themselves in a quandary over Steven Elop’s alleged exit strategy for Microsoft. Is he really serious, dumping XBox and casting aside Bing? Or is this just a magician’s sleight of hand, misdirecting the attention from the more radical idea of abandoning Windows to save Office. The Gang is torn on whether Office can make the voyage to mobile or not, but with Bill Gates’ so-rumored involvement in the Post-Ballmer strategy, it seems unlikely the next CEO will stop protecting Windows by making Office cross-platform. Head of MS PR Frank Shaw is openly dismissive of the Bloomberg story, and most pundits doubt Elop will get the job turning the aircraft carrier around. It may be fiction, but our bet is some version of this story will be the rabbit pulled out of this hat. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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To Save Itself, The DSLR Market Should Look To Smartphones And Revalue Each Press Of The Shutter
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Darrell Etherington
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There’s mounting evidence that the tendency to favour smartphones over standalone cameras isn’t just tanking compact camera sales – it’s affecting DSLR and interchangeable lens cameras, too. A new claims that DSLR camera shipments could fall 9.1 percent by the end of 2013, versus 2012, according to research firm IDC. It’s a sign that might not be the only thing required to save standalone cameras from going extinct. Canon and Nikon, the two leading DSLR camera makers, both lowered their forecasts for the fiscal year in the past month, the WSJ notes, which means that the market is likely hurting as a whole. While those companies see this as a temporary setback due to global economic conditions, it looks a lot like what’s been happening to the PC market over the past few years – another phenomenon initially blamed on economic weakness, but more likely tied to the rise of smartphones and tablets as alternate computing platforms. Smartphones likely are probably a culprit when it comes to the declining fortunes of the DSLR market. Image quality from mobile devices is on the rise, and the convenience of those devices is a very compelling argument for consumers who might otherwise buy a standalone camera as hobbyists or for use while traveling. And image quality/convenience isn’t the only factor here: there’s also the fact that far fewer people are printing photos than would’ve done in the past, preferring instead to trust their images to digital album services like those offered by Apple and Google. While DSLR makers have been building features into their devices that approximate those employed by smartphones, including Wi-Fi radios, geotagging and social sharing, I’d argue they haven’t gone far enough. The reason DSLRs are attractive to their existing audience is that they’re tricky, to some extent, so it makes sense to want to keep the manual controls and exhaustive menus in place. But the reason more and more users are satisfied with their smartphones is that they’re increasingly making it easy to take great photos with a minimum of user input. DSLRs could have a considerable advantage in this regard. They already have far better sensors capable of taking far better images than any smartphone. What they need now are the smartphone smarts: build in an algorithm for automatically creating the best photo out of five exposures, for instance, like Google has done with the Nexus 5. In fact, Google has all kinds of lessons camera makers should take to heart, with its automatic photo editing features in Google+, which I’ve found time and again make exactly the kind of minor tweaks I’m likely to do myself in Lightroom or Aperture. Likewise, Apple is making its iPhone 5s camera more intelligent, with behind-the-scenes features that make you feel like a pro even if you’re a rank amateur. This is where DSLR makers should be focusing their efforts. They might believe that building front-facing consumer features, like filters, face detection, sharing and other things is what’s going to net them an even playing field with the smartphone set, but the real winning advantage would be in an end product that consistently amazes. Gadget development over the past 10 years has been all about spoiling consumers: These days, if something doesn’t work exactly as expected 9 out of 10 times, most users will put it down and never pick it up again. Each exposure used to be precious, back in the days of film, when you had a limited amount and couldn’t check to see if you’d got a good shot until you were back in the darkroom. Then, exposures were cheap, made so because you have a virtually unlimited amount with digital storage. Now, I’d argue they’re precious again, because users want to be instantly rewarded with a great experience on the first try. Nailing every exposure, regardless of an operator’s level of skill, needs to be the goal of camera makers hoping to give consumers a reason to buy expensive, often cumbersome hardware, even if that’s something that strikes the hardcore hobbyists as counterintuitive. There’s still room for , but to return to positive growth, Canon, Nikon and the rest need to cast a wider net with features everyday users have come to expect.
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Microsoft Starts Taking Office On The Web Seriously
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Frederic Lardinois
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Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its Office 365 suite with a couple of new features and licensing terms. Overall, the update was very much in line with the other 100 changes Microsoft had made to its subscription-based Office version for consumers and businesses, but one feature stood out. Starting this week, all Office Web Apps will feature real-time collaborative editing – a feature previously only available to the and web apps. This in itself is an interesting move, but while talking about the update, John Case, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Office division, told me that this also signals a new way of thinking about the Web Apps inside of Microsoft. Let’s take a step back first, though. If you are unfamiliar with the Office Web Apps, just take a look at SkyDrive and upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. Once the file is online, you can view it in SkyDrive, but most importantly, you can also edit it in a light-weight version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity apps. The Office Web Apps launched three years ago, but have mostly flown under the radar, despite the fact that they are more fully featured than Google’s offerings. Given Microsoft’s control over the file formats, it’s also significantly better at displaying and saving files without mangling any of the formatting. They also use the same Ribbon menu as the regular desktop Office apps, so regular Office users should be productive in them right from the get-go. Until now, however, these Web Apps were basically companions to the clients, and Microsoft did virtually nothing to promote them. It looks like that’s changing now. As Case told me, Microsoft is now finally starting to view the Office Web Apps as standalone services. Case wouldn’t say whether Microsoft is considering a move to a freemium model and package paid services on top of the free offering. If Microsoft considers the Web Apps as a standalone version of Office, though — and in the (very) long run, they could become the only version, after all — I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s something the company is considering. Microsoft always focused heavily on the Office desktop clients. That’s where all the money was made, after all. Now that it has moved to a subscription model anyway, adding premium features to the Office Web Apps feels like a logical next step. Case told me Microsoft plans to invest more into the Office Web Apps in the coming months, so we will likely hear quite a bit more about what the company has in the works for these services. If Microsoft starts to invest more heavily in this area, it will also provide an even greater challenge for Google, whose online office suite is still unsuitable for anything but very basic editing. One advantage Google always had, however, was that it offered collaborative editing. That advantage is gone now, but Microsoft has to start emphasizing these features. So far, it probably didn’t do this because it didn’t want to cannibalize its regular Office sales (the Web Apps are “good enough” for many use cases, afer all). If that starts changing, Google better watch out.
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Moving Past Digital Schizophrenia
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Contributor
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we face today building products is not whether we have an identity without our devices, but rather can we have an identity with our devices? Our identities are fragmented across dozens of websites, mobile applications and databases. Every day, these programs simultaneously squawk at us with push notifications and email updates, disorganizing and splitting our mental focus. It’s not simply that we’ve lost control of our identities. It’s that we have multiple identities based on whatever platform we happen to be on. And that is hindering our ability to accomplish even the most mundane tasks without friction. This digital schizophrenia is harming users who want a well-designed and cogent experience built for their own work patterns. Schizophrenia, as understood today, is a “disintegration of personality” that leads to the inability to properly process thoughts. That is precisely why founders should be focused on building products that allow each of our identities to coalesce across applications. There are three principles that should guide how we build companies around identity today: Targeting the right kind of device is trickier than it seems. It is hardly a shock to anyone that users are interacting with more devices than ever. The popularity of smartphones and tablets has been among the most exciting developments in technology investing in the last five years. Yet, that doesn’t mean that every app should be mobile-only, or even mobile-first. Rather, founders need to focus on what they want their users to accomplish and what platforms make sense for that function. Take Uber. The company takes advantage of smartphones by using your location to hail a taxi. As a workflow, it is among the best experiences of any product on the market today because it focuses on the sole platform relevant to its goals. It’s a great example of a mobile-only company. For Square, though, its product is best used on tablets, because that form factor is ideal for point-of-sale systems. Both of these examples are different from computer-aided design programs, which should probably still be on the desktop given a designer’s need for precision. To ensure a great user experience, companies must also think about democratization of the platform. Today, too many companies are siloing away data, hoping to build revenue models instead of great products. There may be benefits to that strategy in the short term, but this siloing is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons, and we need to be aware of the loss to the user every time we consider adding another store of data to their lives. , the great companies of the future will take advantage of economies of unscale and allow for decentralized workflows to work across their application. With more of our identity information openly available, founders finally can build products with frictionless workflows. Products should be built to take advantage of the different data stores that a user has under their control – whether that be communications on a social network like Facebook or contacts stored in a CRM. These integrations are certainly hard, but products built around each other will create the superior experiences desired by users. The best example of this sort of future is Google Now, which actively tries to combine different data sources together into one integrated experience. These three principles aren’t just good for consumers, but will help enterprises, as well. If we do this right, our focus on identity will create the first quantitative view of an enterprise that can assess productivity in a data-driven way. Who does too many meetings? Who is engaging enough with customers? By giving a human view of the enterprise, we can create a better functioning workforce and ultimately increase our productivity. Projects and companies that focus on identity and overcome this digital schizophrenia are of strong interest to me at General Catalyst. In some cases it’s right in our sweet spot – entrepreneurs at their inception, wishing to partner with us in building companies from a germ of an idea. Ultimately, these smart systems – based on our identities – will not only sweep away the idea that there is a consumer or an enterprise, but do something much more valuable: give us back control of our identity.
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In Which We Make Coffee With The Founders Of Bonaverde, A Machine That Roasts, Grinds, And Brews
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Eliza Brooke
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Last we heard from the founders of , they had a Kickstarter campaign to raise $135,000 to produce a coffee maker that turns green, unroasted beans into a cup of coffee in under 14 minutes. At this point the startup has raised $465,475 with eight days to go, so we caught up with founders Hans Stier and Felix Artmann when they were in New York to check out a prototype of the machine. You may be wondering if this was just an elaborate ploy to get a free cup of coffee. The answer is yes. As far as user experiences go, the Bonaverde is about as easy to manage as the Keurig you bought for your dad on Black Friday — although presumably less so on the cleanup. A couple spoonfuls of green coffee beans go in the hatch on top, you hit “On,” and the machine does its thing: roasting, cooling, grinding, and brewing the beans. Unroasted beans stay fresh for months — much longer than the pre-roasted beans you might otherwise buy — so flavor is one of the claims on which Bonaverde is staking its business. Turns out their machine brews really solid coffee that’s neither stale-tasting nor bitter. Some critics have pointed out that roasted beans should be allowed more time to air before they are ground, and while that may be optimal, Bonaverde’s coffee was still really good. When it launches Bonaverde will also serve as the online marketplace for the raw beans, meaning coffee farmers can connect directly with their end consumers. Down the line, the site will feature all of the producers that shoppers can buy from. Note that coffee maker in the video is just a prototype of the one that will go to market, which has a much prettier exterior.
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Where I Went Wrong, Third Annual Edition
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Jon Evans
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Happy anniversary to me: I’ve now been writing this here weekly column for exactly three years. Over the last year I have opined, prescribed, and predicted many things. And now, like , and the , as part of my one-man crusade for greater opinion-journalism accountability, I’m going to take a moment to go back and look at what I got right… and where I went horribly, hilariously wrong. (cracks knuckles) OK, let’s start with my primary theme this year: technology and jobs. I actually asked the key question in a post two years ago, entitled “ ” This year, though, I expanded on that at considerable length with “ ,” “ ,” “ ,” (sense a theme here?) “ ,” “ ,” and “ .” Whew. Tired of it yet? I can’t blame you. But I keep hammering at it because I believe this is one of the most important issues of our time. The notion that technology destroys more jobs than it creates has slowly become mainstream over the last few years: witness in . My take on it, however, is different: I think all these job losses are , in the long run, because we are (hopefully) at the very edge of a long, slow, decades-long trend towards jobs, i.e. a . The trouble is, our current economic structure is built on those building blocks called “jobs” — and as their number slowly withers away, the necessary transition to a new system will be extremely painful and wrenching for a very large number of people worldwide. OK. Back to the recap. Way, back, to my , which began: “Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Prophet score: . And while that may seem like fish in a barrel now, back then, believe it or not, it was fairly controversial. I also wrote a of about Bitcoin back in 2011, saying: “Does Bitcoin have a long-term future? I strongly doubt it…but I expect that something like Bitcoin eventually will.” Which, I note, is a whole lot like what Naval Ravikant : “It’s better to think about Bitcoin the protocol as Bitcoin 1.0, destined to evolve.” I followed that up with the suggestion that a Bitcoin-like currency would eventually go mainstream in the developing world, not the rich world. Here in the medium term, of course, Bitcoin is … I wrote about and the back in 2011, too, saying: “surely there are better ways to catch these morons than building a vastly expensive and dehumanizing panopticon surveillance state.” Quite happy to stand by that one, too. I’ve been writing a lot about surveillance , though I’ve actually ramped down since it became well-trodden media ground thanks to Edward Snowden. I complained about 3D printers twice. Well, I wrote that they’ll become amazing world-changing technology, at the enterprise level — but I wrote those in articles entitled “ ,” and “ ” This remains a contrarian view, but I’m happy to stand by it. I also claimed “ ,” which was admittedly a little aggressive, but I still think we’re heading that way. Same for “ ,” and “ .” ( .) Bored with my self-congratulation? Let’s move on to where I messed up. Six months ago I proudly proclaimed “ ,” a celebration of Google’s ChromeOS. It’s early days yet, but I think I got that one wrong. I’ve hardly touched my own Chromebook since I wrote that post. Meanwhile, ChromeOS isn’t actually that much more capable than a tablet — and tablet prices are dropping faster. Last year I wrote “ ,” but this year my view evolved into to, “ .” Which is actually mostly a compliment, as those of you who have read the original novel know; the monster was brilliant, urbane, civilized…but spurned by the world. Alas, that seems true of G+ too. And then there’s Foursquare. I complained about them in my and in “ ,” where I described it as a “long-term loser.” On reflection, that was probably too harsh; I think they’ll probably keep eking out an existence on the perpetual edge of mainstream relevance. Last year, I wrote “ “, in which I wrote “it seems to me that the predatory price-gouging Internet is more dangerous to movies than television,” and this year I followed it up with “ ” where I, er, revised my opinion somewhat. The prediction I’m personally most interested in, though, is one I made last year: “ ,” which I followed up this year with “The Second Billion Smartphone Users.” We won’t know until 2017 whether I’m right on that one — but there are that smartphone penetration has already risen to 21 percent in the Middle East and Africa, up from 1.3 percent in 2009. If that’s true, then 50 percent by 2017 looks downright conservative. So: while I wouldn’t bet all your bitcoins on every word I type, that’s a decent performance nonetheless, if I do say so myself. And I hereby resolve to be a little bolder over the next 12 months with my predictions — because if nothing else, it ought to make next year’s iteration of this post awfully entertaining.
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IndieVoic.es Hopes To Become Kickstarter For Independent Media
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Contributor
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The Internet wasn’t kind to media. Huge media corporations have managed to transform their businesses, for the most part, but independent media, often playing a vital role in emerging countries, are seriously threatened by the lack of available funds. hopes to change that. Founded by Sasa Vucinic, V Media Ventures CEO and a former Editor-in-Chief of B92 (Serbian media corporation which played important role in the overthrow of Milosevic), the project is essentially a crowdsourcing platform focused on providing necessary funding to independent media in developing countries. Just like or , IndieVoic.es uses a familiar concept. Media owners can create campaigns and specify the amount of money they need to run their venture. Contributors from all over the world can fund their campaigns in return for valuable prizes (ranging from a postcard to a dinner with former Prime Minister of Thailand). However, crowdfunding isn’t the only way IndieVoic.es aims to help independent media raise money. By announcing no-interest loans and mini-loans for 2014, the platform will enable its users to choose the best funding option for their media. Think of it as a mix between Kickstarter and Kiva. “Our goal is not just to fund independent media. We want to engage the audience and democratize the ownership of media. It is the only thing that hasn’t changed about this industry in the past 20 years” stated Vucinic in an . And he should know a thing or two about financing media. Vucinic co-founded which he ran for over fifteen years. During that time, MDIF has raised 123 million dollars and funded more than 220 independent media projects all over the world. Much like MDIF, IndieVoic.es supports different media outlets ranging from investigative journalism reports and local radio stations, up to specialized blogs covering various topics of interest. Although anybody can submit a project, only those which are curated and checked will actually be eligible for a campaign. We are ensured that this is necessary to maintain a certain standard of funded media. Despite all this, IndieVoic.es is not your ordinary crowdfunding platform. Unlike Kickstarter or Indiegogo, this service is not looking to cash-in on their revenue any time soon as it is specifically trying to operate as a non-profit. “Our goal is to break-even beginning 2016. If our revenue is higher than expected, we will definitely lower our initial cost per campaign”, Vucinic added. Although media isn’t every investor’s cup of tea, “there are those who might find interesting opportunities in specialized media covering a range of interesting subjects”, stated Vucinic. Is leading the revolution independent media owners have been waiting for? It sure seems like it.
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A VC And Olympic Hopeful Taps Indiegogo With A Game To Raise Funds For Young Athletes
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Paul Bragiel, to compete in the Sochi Winter Olympics, After seeing dozens of other younger Olympic contenders struggle to raise funds for training, he felt he needed to do something to help out. Some friends over at offered their talents pro bono to . It’s a beautiful, little side-scroller that takes a player through Bragiel’s training as he skis in Finland, which is where he’s done the bulk of his preparation. Then it shifts to Colombia, the country that gave Bragiel citizenship to compete on behalf of its Olympic team. And finally it ends in Sochi, Russia, where the Olympics will be held next year. They set a in the next seven days, and half of the proceeds will go toward different youth sports foundations in Finland and Colombia while the other half will go toward game development. But they hope to raise somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. Bragiel, who started i/o Ventures out of San Francisco, of competing in the Olympics. But there were many hurdles. For one, he didn’t have a sport. Then, he was also pretty old for an Olympic hopeful at 36 years of age. But he’s hacked his way so far. After considering everything from curling to the luge, he settled on classical cross country skiing, which is a more traditional Winter Olympic sport that has more lenient rules around qualifications. Then he secured citizenship in a warm, tropical country that is less competitive for winter sports — Colombia. Now he’s in the middle of qualifying races. To make it to the Olympics, he must be able to finish five qualifying races where he’s not more than 10 minutes behind the world’s top cross-country skiier — no hard feat. He’s competed in his first qualifying race already, which was a miss. But he’s definitely not deterred. There are plenty more to come. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23DRQuKxJOk&w=560&h=315]
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Gillmor Gang: Private Practices
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — work off that stuffed feeling with a show devoted to the intersection between public and private messaging. What started with Twitter and continued with Facebook has now yielded a startup frenzy many mistake for a bubble. Instagram started the ball rolling, SnapChat doubled down on it, and many fear it will end badly and absorbed by the big players. But just as the Yankees can’t buy a championship, neither will Facebook or even Google slow down the momentum of these private streams. What @scobleizer calls Snapchat’s brand promise may seem to be breakable only at the peril of the founders. I think something else is at work, built on the metadata that these self-destructing messages incentivize. As these services morph in their realtime metaloops, we’re seeing the future materialize in front of our mobile eyes. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Hands On With Jolla’s First Phone — The “Spearhead Device” For Its MeeGo-Successor Sailfish OS
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Natasha Lomas
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The first handset from Finnish smartphone startup is simply called Jolla. This phone has been some two years in the making — a timeframe that testifies to the complexity of building handset hardware a new mobile platform, not to mention rallying developers and achieving . So really two years ain’t bad for a plucky startup whose members used to work for erstwhile king-of-the-mobile-world, Nokia, and left to do what that phone maker decided it couldn’t: make a go of as an alternative to Google’s . What was MeeGo on is now on Jolla’s eponymous handset. The Jolla on Wednesday, in Helsinki, with the first 450 devices taken home mainly by those who had already registered their interest via a . Jolla is now shipping handsets to other pre-orderers throughout Europe. The top three countries for pre-sales were, in order of popularity, Finland (as you’d expect), Germany and the U.K. TechCrunch got hands-on with Jolla’s first phone for a few hours at a London press event, where two co-founders, Marc Dillon and Sami Pienimäki, were also on hand to answer questions. [gallery ids="921150,921144,921149,921147,921142,921141,921151,921146,921143,921148,921140,921145"] The Jolla phone hardware reforms the standard smartphone slab into an attractive plastic sandwich, as if two blocks of different coloured liquorice have been smacked together. The back piece — which was plain white on the above demo device but comes in bright pink for Finnish carrier DNA’s first batch of the phones, and in customisable colours in future when Jolla starts direct sales via its own website — is known as The Other Half. Like Jolla’s software The Other Half is intended as an extensible platform — with connectors built into the back of the phone for power and a bus connection for data transfer allowing for Other Halves that could incorporate a physical Qwerty keyboard, for instance, or a weather station sensor or even an e-ink screen, as well as the NFC-powered software theme-swapping supported by the current crop of shells. “Putting something like a keyboard is expected,” said Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon. “We are working on the developers kit so that anybody can do this… We’re working on accessories, and we expect third parties to work on accessories.” The standard Jolla handset (i.e. with a not-too-fancy Other Half) is a nice size and weight in the hand — neither too big to be overbearing, nor too hefty or lightweight to feel unpleasant to hold. On paper, its specs come across as relatively mid-range — with a 4.5″ display, a dual-core chip, 4G, an 8MP camera plus 16GB of internal memory expandable via microSD card. But differentiating on phone hardware specs is not what Jolla is all about. Its difference lies in the MeeGo-derived Sailfish software platform, and an open philosophy that wants developers — and other companies — to come in and build all sorts of software and hardware extensions atop this platform. The Jolla phone is a showcase for what Jolla the startup can do — tl;dr: “You can’t really have an operating system without a spearhead device, and although we’ve been talking to almost everybody that’s in the mobile space over the last two years, almost every kind of manufacturer, I think they’ve all been waiting to see what we actually are capable of,” Dillon told TechCrunch. “Because if you just look, people wise, then we’re small compared to these guys. Their coffee budget is probably as much as we’ve spent to create this device!… So now they have a way to judge our capabilities by taking a real device and looking at it, and seeing what it does.” Despite this b2b sales pitch, Jolla is committed to its own consumer play too — believing there is appetite for something new and different to shake up the samey-same smartphone space. Dillon said about 80% of those who pre-ordered its handset earlier this year — in some instances without putting any down money down — have been converted into sales. Jolla hasn’t confirmed exactly how many devices were pre-ordered, saying only that it was a . But it did take in €1 million’s worth of sales on the phone’s launch day, according to Dillon. Doing a back-of-an-envelope calculation, by dividing that figure by the phone’s standard €399 price-tag, equates to 2,500 Jolla handsets sold in one day. Albeit, the pre-sales campaign muddies the water a little. Either way, generating €1 million in revenue in a day ain’t bad for a new kid on the phone block. Indeed, getting a smartphone to market when you’re a startup of 80+ full-time employees, not an electronics behemoth like Apple or Samsung, is a monumental achievement in itself. But it is also just the start for Jolla. Now the even harder work of community building kicks off in earnest — if it’s to turn one phone into a whole new-wave open mobile movement. Passion projects attract fans. And Jolla is clearly a passion project for Dillon, who tells me he personally shook the hand of everyone standing in line in Helsinki’s Narinkka Square for Wednesday’s Jolla launch. And for all the ex-Nokians who made the decision to leave to carry on developing a platform that Nokia was abandoning. Jolla’s early buyers are also clearly passionate about the potential of (another) homegrown mobile platform. The question is whether Jolla can build a community beyond these nostalgic origins. Dillon argues it’s already doing that — and that the launch event was characterised by a broad spectrum of interest. “That was one of the things that we were actually curious about. Usually you have a set of early adopters for a new technology platform — we seem to break that. We had a very wide demographic who was taking our first device.” Why does he think Jolla is attracting diversity? “I think that the reason that people have had a lot of interest in us is there’s this David vs Goliath thing but also the fact that instead of just being a corporate face we’re coming out as people and we’re interested in people, and we are people, and I think there’s been a personal connection that we’ve made with a lot of people. “And I believe that people are looking for something different. Imagine if you could only buy two car choices in the world. People can only buy what’s offered to them — and they’ve have had the same kind of experience for five years. So there’s a curiosity to see what happens next.” The Jolla UI is different to Android and iOS, excitingly so, to the point where you can feel its potential to offer something fluid, flexible and freeing to use. It also generally feels fast and responsive — although there is a small lag when opening or switching between apps, and progress bars pop up for certain actions which you might not expect, such as deleting a single photo. But it’s inevitably still got a lot of kinks to iron out, including actual bugs that cause apps to crash or mess up, but also counterintuitive quirks — things not always working as you’d expect. One of the biggest challenges for Jolla is undoubtedly the learning curve its newness demands of users now fully embedded with icon-based, back-button-sign-posted mainstream user interfaces. Navigating around Jolla’s UI requires a different set of gestures to iOS and Android; there’s no back button, there are very few buttons at all — it’s more push and pull, more like BlackBerry 10 or even Windows Phone, with gestures for peeking at content, and pulling in more stuff lurking off screen. (Of course Jolla would say its interface is Unlike all the rest.) Other gestures close or minimise apps — the latter being displayed as small widgets on the homescreen which you can also interact with, if the developer has added in such functionality. So, for instance, you can refresh a webpage from the browser widget or command it open a new tab, or dive right in to search for an app on Jolla’s app store just by swiping left (or right) on the corresponding homescreen widget. To navigate generally, the user has to follow subtle clues — such as a glowing bar that sometimes appears at the top or bottom of the screen or a menu, to signify there’s a list of actions that can be dragged on screen and selected within the same movement; or breadcrumbs of dots that appear at the top corner of the screen, which signify there are other screens’ worth of content waiting to be swiped into view. Getting the hang of these elements is not the work of days, but it does take patience and a willingness to learn something new — something Jolla unfortunately can’t take for granted. Users also have to contend with Sailfish gestures being combined with Android nav elements (such as the Android back button and recent apps key) when running Android apps. Which dilutes Sailfish’s signposts with the very Android paradigms it’s hoping to supersede. “We got rid of the home button — so we did eliminate one of them, but the back button, unfortunately, even though we have our own forward and back solution the [Android] applications still [use] so we still have to have those buttons,” said Dillon. Jolla is working on getting a community portal rolled out to its website, which will include a forum where users can help each other out with queries — to supplement its already launched online . It’s also making a series of how to videos to explain Sailfish navigation and gestures. And will be staffing a variety of social media contact points where people might be looking for answers, says Dillon. Plus there’s an on-device tutorial that walks users through the gesture basics. All of this will certainly help, but getting people to switch from something they know to something different is by definition pushing water uphill — as Microsoft’s long hard slog to get Windows Phone to stick underlines. Then of course there is the big challenge for any ‘other’ platform: the app gap that won’t go away. Even with Android compatibility — and — Jolla is inevitably starting a long way behind the Android-powered competition. In terms of native Sailfish apps (accessed via the Jolla store), there are but a handful at launch — I counted about 28 on the device, which includes basic stuff like an email client and a document viewer. There’s also no support for paid Sailfish apps, as yet, but that important developer incentive is coming down the line. And then Yandex’s Android store presents only a smaller sub-set (apparently 85,000) of the apps Android users get on Google Play (one million+), so inevitably a lot of titles you’d find on bog standard Android are not on these shelves. (And while you may be able to sideload some Android apps, there’s no guarantee of smooth or even workable compatibility with Sailfish). Even tapping directly into the Android apps on the preloaded Yandex Store isn’t a guarantee of smooth results as there are ongoing compatibility issues at this (early) point. Notably, the Android runtime sometimes spontaneously takes over the interface, dragging the user back to an Android app they had quit out of, as if Mountain View is wrestling back control from this open mobile upstart. Compatibility issues also mean Android apps can appear buggy, with elements failing to correctly mesh with native Sailfish elements such as the keyboard, or degrading the experience so the app feels sluggish. On the other hand, other Android apps — such as Twitter — seemed to perform ok during my hands on so it’s not all bad. But it is inconsistent, and Jolla’s Dillon concedes the startup does have work to do on the Android compatibility front. Regardless of myriad consumer-facing challenges, he says Jolla is in it for the long haul. It’s committed to providing its early adopters with a device that improves and continues to evolve, rather than hardware that withers on the vine (as Nokia’s N9 did). “The most important thing for us is that we continue to add value for everyone that bought this,” he said. “What features we do next, we believe the consumers should have a say in what the priorities are — and we will continue to deliver new features via the software.” Jolla apparently has enough funding to sustain that effort too — with an alliance of industry backers committing to . Back in February from a Hong Kong based telecoms & mining firm, China Fortune, in exchange for 6.25% of the company. Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and Baidu have also been floated as future potential partners for Jolla — albeit that might just be wishful thinking at this point. Jolla co-founder Sami Pienimäki said the company’s already spent about €20 million getting to the starting point of being able to release its first handset, running the Sailfish OS. How much more it may need to nurture and build out an ecosystem to really get Sailfish moving remains to be seen. But why might other mobile makers want to use Jolla’s software to power their own devices? “Just using Sailfish is a differentiator already because we were able to take a fresh look and do something new,” said Dillon, when I pose this question. “We [also] have no competing services, or no required embedded services” — a veiled reference to how Google tries to keep its Android OEMs ( ) in line, by dangling the carrot of access to its Play store. Beyond ‘not being Android’, Dillon argues that Sailfish is a place where the next wave of mobile innovation can occur — a liberal space for experimentation, for forming a way beyond the status quo of segmented services and individual apps consumed in a cacophonous pick’n’mix. Somewhere where smarter, more unified and better targeted services can be developed. “What I think the platforms are going to do — and where a real differentiation is going to occur — is when services start to get integrated here [on the homescreen] and not just sticking your application and embedding it into the device but actually connecting multiple applications together to make a more seamless experience,” he told TechCrunch. Instead of users harvesting data from multiple apps and places individually within a device, Dillon envisages a platform where more and more apps plug into each other to funnel data to where it’s needed rather than sitting in separate silos that the user is required to visit. “I don’t want to deal with events the second that they happen all of the time, so when I look [at my Jolla phone] I see that there’s these phone calls that I’ve made, so there’s a constant reminder that these are the people in my life at the moment that I’m communicating with… The same with messages… or email… This is just the beginning of how I believe mobile’s going to start to break this application barrier,” he said. “These kinds of synergies between things is just starting, so that you don’t have to cross apps all the time,” he added. “What we’re doing is we’re creating a place where these things — well beyond what I can think of or tell you today — are going to occur. “The openness of the platform lets a developer, a company, an entrepreneur, a new business take something from the user experience all the way down to the hardware, the metal, the silicon — across to one or more Internet services, and provide something that is going to connect a user to one or more services that are locally relevant, that are important to you right now and not spammy.” All that is for the uncertain future. For now, Jolla has shown a startup can make a smartphone. So it’s already proven a lot of its doubters wrong. It’s also positioned itself to take up the baton from Nokia, as THE Finnish mobile maker — just as Nokia prepares to give up that role (by selling its Devices & Services unit to Microsoft). Which is cruel or opportune timing, depending on your perspective. Building a new smartphone on a new platform is already an impressive achievement. But Jolla isn’t about to stop and admire the view. This startup has no intention of letting a single lovingly crafted handset remain its crowning glory. Onward Sails!
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Yahoo Users Anonymous: A Transcript
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Jon Evans
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This is what happened: A Silicon Valley church basement. Folding chairs, coffee, cigarettes tucked behind ears. , a tall man with a shaved head and an Arsenal FC T-shirt, steps forward to the podium. He has a slight Canadian accent. Hi, my name’s Jon, and I’m a Yahoo! user. Hi, Jon! I guess…I mean, this is so embarrassing, obviously…I guess my story’s like a lot of yours. I got into Yahoo! when I was young, because back then it seemed really cool. If only I had known then what I know now. But I went for a six-month trip across Africa and Yahoo was the only web-mail service that could access my Unix shell account via POP. Gmail didn’t exist yet, Hotmail was a joke, and I was sending friends emails from Cameroon and Zimbabwe, they were amazed, they were . So I got hooked. And then… He falls into grim silence for a moment. Then what? Then I guess I went all the way down the rabbit hole. I registered my domain with them. I used them to host my . I was in so much denial that when they bought Flickr, you’re not going to believe this, but when they bought Flickr I was about it. I thought it would be . (Hollow laughter echoes through the room.) Now, though – I mean, you all know what it’s like to be a Yahoo! user now. Pained yet sympathetic expressions ripple across the crowd. The things that work haven’t changed in like ten years, and the things that have changed don’t work any more. Or they prettier, like the Flickr redesign, or their new NFL game reports, but then you try to use them and you realize that actually they’re just more broken than ever. I used to be that I was a Yahoo! user. Now it’s shameful. I have to hide it from all my friends. (glances at camera in corner of the room) That thing isn’t on, is it? (hastily — too hastily) No. Good. (under his breath) I’m totally going to bury this post on a holiday weekend when no one will read it. Excuse me? Uh, nothing. Anyway, the thing is, I even know what their problem is. I’m an engineer, and a long-term user, so I can tell Yahoo!’s engineering is just terrible. I mean, maybe their engineers are pretty good and they’re just hamstrung by their process and bureaucrats and what have you, I don’t know about that, but the are terrible. Paul Graham said it : “Yahoo treated programming as a commodity.” I mean, consider Yahoo! Mail — (A loud, angry groan erupts around the room.) Last year they mixed secure and insecure JavaScript files on my inbox page for . Months! Can you imagine Google doing that for so much as a day? Or even Microsoft? And just this week I’ve been getting half-a-dozen copies of every email, but the first one arrives hours late half the time, and that’s if the page loads at all! For It’s ridiculous! So why have you stuck with them? I…I really don’t know. Partly it was because I was uncomfortable about how much of my online information Google has, but now I’ve lost so much faith that I’m backing up all my mail to one of my Gmail accounts anyway, which kind of fundamentally defeats that purpose. Partly because moving would be such a hassle. But the thing is — well — Go on. The thing is, I somehow still want Yahoo not to suck. Every time they say things will get better, I want to believe them, even though every time it’s been a lie. Oh, we’ve licked the , now everything will be fine. Oh, Marissa Mayer’s CEO, now everything will be fine. But the truth is — What? The truth is that it’s not going to be fine. Not now, not ever. Because their engineering sucks, so they’re like a sprinter wearing leg irons starting 50 metres behind the competition. And you know what? It’s too late for even Marissa Mayer to fix that. So you’re quitting? Cold turkey? I– (Chairs creak as their occupants lean forward, with bated breath, hanging on his words) you know what, I’m going to give them one more chance. I don’t even know why. Just one more. But this time, I swear, this time if it doesn’t work out, I’m done. (Disappointment is written loudly across every face in the room, including his.) (with deep sadness) OK. We understand. Thanks, Jon. I’m sorry. Dave Ward, .
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Darrell Etherington
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“F*ck You, Google+”, An Adorable Song About YouTube’s New Comments
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Josh Constine
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Some YouTubers are not pleased about being forced onto , and took a stand in the cutest, most profane way imaginable. “You ruined our site and called it integration / I’m writing this song just to vent our frustration / Fuck you, Google Plusssssss!” Personally, I think the shift to Google+ comments is . It will greatly discourage bullying and trolling, turning a cesspool into civil discussion. It will also let YouTube rank comments by popularity, and show you the most relevant ones from friends and celebrities. But change is tough, especially for emotional kids. Remember “Students Against Facebook News Feed”? 750,000 people, or nearly 10% of Facebook’s user base at the time, protested the launch of the feature in 2006. Now it’s one of the most popular pieces of the Internet and the key to Facebook’s addictive nature. YouTube has had its own commenting system since forever. It’s basic, and has become a haven for homophobia and racism, but some people just don’t want to adapt to something new. Emma Blackery has some good points about the forced transition and other troubles in YouTubeland. “If it was gonna work it would have happened by now / Maybe ask Yahoo to fix it somehow” “No one gets videos they subscribed for / Video responses are dead in the water / You can’t leave comments unless you’re linked up / Can you please listen to us? / Fuck you, Google+” Blackery admits YouTube probably won’t halt the march of Google+ comments across its service. Perhaps with time she’ll see the strengths of less anonymous discourse, but for now she just wants to know the search giant isn’t ignoring the convictions of its content creators.
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The Rise Of The Mobile-Born
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Contributor
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Watching my two-year-old nephew Dashiel interact with his mother’s iPad made me realize that he was born into an era unlike any in history. As he grows up his expectations about how information should be presented and processed, and how interfaces should respond, will be profoundly different from how we experience technology today. Mobile is now the channel of choice for everyone, but even those of us who use technology with great alacrity are still digital immigrants. Dashiel represents a new age: the Mobile Born — a generation of kids that have been raised while literally gnawing on the equivalent of a supercomputer — otherwise known as mom’s smartphone. This fact will have a dramatic impact on how companies, consumers and society as a whole manage and view technology. It’s hard to believe, but only a few years ago technology in the workplace was a top-down affair. The IT department decided what hardware got deployed, which applications were used and how business practices got enforced. Then a tiny crack in the IT blockade broke open when C-suite executives, enamored by the stylish, functional and intuitive iPhone, trotted these devices into enterprises and told IT, “Make this work.” IT, accustomed to telling users “no,” had no choice but to listen, and they effectively gave rise to the BYOD trend we’ve seen explode since the iPhone launched in 2007. Today, companies are not just smartphones, but many are embracing mobility and transforming their business practices and work arrangements and driving new levels of productivity and value creation through mobility: is leading the charge in the enterprise mobility management space; is delivering transparent data security; is creating a content management solution for smartphones and tablets; is making the post-PC era safer for everyone; and is securing the enterprise mobile web. These changes are the essence of the mobile-first movement, but they will give way to a new and more dynamic process as the mobile-born users enter the workforce. The mobile-born generation will drive a radical rethinking of office productivity. Fast-forward a few years and we’ll see a new workplace with workstations akin to air traffic control centers powered by multiple touch-, swipe- and voice-enabled devices, allowing workers to visualize and manipulate information tactically, driving the adoption of new user-interfaces and fundamental changes in software and hardware. Think the new FOX newsroom, just without the “fair and balanced” reporting. The way we interact with colleagues or business partners will change as we move to a mobile enterprise environment. We’re beginning to see new companies focused on augmented memory. , for instance, has created a dossier to put an end to small talk for your next business meeting. A nice-to-have now, but as the mobile-born mature, these services will become a must-have. But this is just the beginning. It’s hardly far-fetched to imagine companies that exist and are run entirely in the cloud by a de-territorialized mobile workforce. Already we carry much of our day job’s office communications, data, colleagues, customers and products around in our pockets. This trend will only accelerate as the mobile-born found their own companies around entirely new expectations for organizational structures and workforce optimization. As the mobile-born generation grows up, other unforeseen expectations will need to be met. Watch any 12-year-old do homework and you’ll see that the notion of the “second-screen” is already a passé concept – TV, laptop, smartphone, iPod and tablet combine into a multi-layered information gathering and communications experience. When the mobile-born reach their teenage years, their ability to process information and levels of interactivity will go far beyond what’s possible today, and their shift in consumption habits – right down to the way in which they watch TV – will only continue. Fifteen years from now, we may reach the “ -screen,” as multiple screens may not only be watched but worn, while cameras capture, record and broadcast live conversations across the room and around the world. As a result, we’re already seeing a new wave of companies whose DNA is 100 percent mobile. , for instance, was born of the need for a cross-platform messaging tool on mobile devices. Kik was never resident on the desktop and is a perfect example of the frictionless communication that the mobile-born will come to expect. But by the time Dashiel is behind the wheel, his expectations for seamless, safe communications will need to be solved well beyond what’s possible today. If he’s in a thread in Kik and has to hop in the car, he’s going to want to stay in that message. This will require messaging technology embedded directly into the infrastructure of cars to become the norm just like radios and then CD players once were. And God forbid he’s ever in an accident, companies like will ensure the insurance-claim process is as simple as it can be. Today, the expectation is that everyone has a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet. The future of the mobile-born is that on steroids, and entrepreneurs will rise to the need, seize the opportunity and start creating solutions for things yet to be imagined. The clear winner in this future will be the Internet of Things. The mobile-born will expect everything to be software-driven, have rich functionality and be network-aware – Nest being a pioneering company in this new direction. At the other end of the spectrum, my nephew’s grandmother laments the decline of interpersonal communication. No one’s writing letters anymore and people aren’t talking face-to-face as frequently. She’s right. But for Dashiel, a mobile-mediated reality will be all he knows.
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Yes, High-Skill Immigration Reform Is Still Dead This Calendar Year
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Alex Wilhelm
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Breaking non-news out today: Immigration reform is dead in 2013, meaning that high-skill immigration reform is also kaput this year. We already , but the third-ranking Republican in the House confirmed the fact today. According to , “California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip, said in a meeting with immigration proponents that there weren’t enough days left for the House to act and he was committed to addressing overhaul of the nation’s immigration system next year.” So, that’s that. Not in 2013? Who cares! It’s the end of the year anyways! Well, yes, but if you are in favor of immigration reform, and many in tech are quite keen on fixing our high-skill immigration system, losing this legislative session is pretty darn bad. In short, next year is an election year. That means the potential of primary challenges for sitting House members, which is a threat that can be used to force voting patterns. Currently, the far right is opposed to a path to citizenship, something that the Senate included in its immigration package. It will be a flashpoint in the debate, when we have it, between the parties and chambers of Congress. And that flashpoint heats up when primary challenges are held up as threats to enforce orthodoxy. Don’t trust me, though. What do I know? Instead, listen to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida. He’s a Republican who, , has been involved in immigration negotiations. Here’s his take on getting immigration reform done next year: “I’m hopeful that we can get to it early next year. But I am keenly aware that next year, you start running into the election cycle. If we cannot get it done by early next year, then it’s clearly dead. It flatlines.” I am not convinced that that is possible.
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Intel Has Acquired Kno, Will Push Further Into The Education Content Market With Interactive Textbooks
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Ingrid Lunden
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We had a tip about, and have now confirmed, latest acquisition: , the education startup that started life as a hardware business and later pivoted into software — specifically via apps that let students read interactive versions of digitized textbooks. “I can confirm Intel has purchased Kno,” a spokesperson told us just now. The company is not disclosing deal terms but we’ll hopefully going to speak to John Galvin, the GM of Intel Education, to get more details. Since then, Intel has published a more from Galvin on its site, which points to how Kno will fit into Intel’s efforts to build up its business in the education market — an effort it is making both in <a target="_blank" href=" wider efforts in and software. He writes: The acquisition of Kno boosts Intel’s global digital content library to more than 225,000 higher education and K-12 titles through existing partnerships with 75 educational publishers. Even more, the Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments … We’re looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno’s rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success. To date, Kno’s apps can be accessed via its iPad, Android and Windows 7 and Windows 8 apps, and the main idea behind Kno is that the books are not only digitised but also include additional features to help students and teachers assess their progress, share information with others and generally get more engaged in the content. “They are the same books, only smarter,” the company notes on its site. Although the pricing of the deal remains unclear, we have learned that the entire Kno team will be joining Intel as a result of the acquisition — with one notable exception. Osman Rashid, the co-founder and CEO (who is also a co-founder of Chegg), will not be joining the company. His plans after the exit remain unclear; we’re trying to find out and will update when we learn more. “He was definitely the figurehead behind it,” Galvin admitted later to TC in an interview, but ultimately the two did not see eye to eye about the direction of Kno under Intel. “[Staying on] was something that Osman and I talked about early in the process,” he said. “But where I wanted to take Kno and where Osman wanted to take it were two different things. His direction was to continue with a North American focus and I want to go international; and for us to go international, that’s about integrating with Intel’s sales teams, working on bringing this to new markets.” Using Kno for an international education play is not an out-of-left-field idea. The two companies had already been working together in markets like China on textbook digitising initiatives. Kno was a natural partner that that Intel Capital was among Kno’s list of investors. (The company had raised some in funding since being founded in 2009, with Intel leading its Series C round in 2011. In that $37.5m round, Intel .) “It became more attractive to me to have them be a part of the portfolio rather than just a partner,” says Galvin. He pointed out the company’s ingestion engine as a particularly interesting aspect of the business to help Intel work more closely with the publishing world. There are also some aspects that play into Intel’s bigger investments into areas like AI and natural language processing. “Kno is a very nice e-learning platform, and perhaps eventually also a natural language support platform, with an analytics engine. The capabilities are there. We can perhaps push them into areas they weren’t ready to go in on their own,” said Galvin. He also added that there is still some IP left from the company’s previous incarnation as a hardware play, though for now the focus will be on more software development. Hardware is an area where Intel wants to grow its presence. From reference designs for processors to use in other OEMs’ tablets to its own devices, Intel has been working hard to make sure that it remains a relevant part of the gadget equation with the move to tablets and other mobile devices (it’s been an in mobile devices). In education specifically, the biggest chipmaker in the world wants to take on Apple and Google — or the iPad and the Chromebook, respectively. Again, this is an uphill battle, with Apple currently holding a 94% share of the school market in the U.S. (no surprise that Intel is looking internationally). With this acquisition, it essentially becomes the software platform for Intel’s hardware shell. It’s the same motivation that arguably led Amazon to acquire an education company, TenMarks, last month. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see Microsoft next, says BenchPrep CEO Ashish Rangnekar. (BenchPrep operates in the same space.) For all the positives this deal may bring to Intel, the same may not be said for Kno. Most of the funding Kno received was for its hardware business. Why? Because distribution is a really difficult problem to solve in the education technology space, and a lot of great products die because they can’t get to scale in time. But software is an equally tricky play because of margins. A few sources we talked to said that Kno’s gross margins weren’t exactly sky high, and though its product evolved and it continued to add great strategic partnerships, the business wasn’t blowing the roof off. Rumors have been swirling for several months now that Kno’s principal investors have been pushing for the company to find an exit opportunity, and we’ve also heard from sources that this deal came together fast. It may not have been a huge financial victory for Kno or its investors, but ultimately Kno is better off in the hands of a company like Intel, which has enormous distribution scale behind it.
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Why Apple Bought $578M Worth Of Sapphire In Advance
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple is in Arizona that will be used by GT Advanced Technologies to make sapphire crystals for use in its products. Apple currently uses sapphire in its home buttons and camera lens covers, but several details about the material itself and the nature of its deal with GT indicate that it could be expanding its interests in the hard crystalline substance over the next several years. Sapphire, specifically synthetic, manufactured sapphire, has several properties that make it of interest to Apple. First of all, sapphire is superior to glass, even Corning’s Gorilla Glass material, in several ways. Synthetic sapphire has no color, as it’s a single crystal grown to be optically transparent — making it look very similar to glass. But it’s also extremely hard — 9 on the Mohs scale — which means better scratch resistance. “Chemically strengthened glass can be excellent, but sapphire is better in terms of hardness, strength, and toughness,” says Matthew Hall, Director of the Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology at the Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University. “The fracture toughness of sapphire should be around 4 times greater than Gorilla Glass – about 3 MPa-m versus 0.7 MPa-m , respectively.” The hardness of sapphire will make it resistance to ‘flaw initiation’ (aka starting to scratch) and its ‘toughness’ is how it resists fracture once a flaw has begun (cracking altogether). This strength doesn’t come without a bit of cost, Hall notes. “The density of Gorilla Glass is 2.54 g/cm while sapphire is 3.98 g/cm . Given equal-sized pieces, Gorilla Glass will always be lighter.” The counter-point to the greater weight is that Apple could use thinner pieces of sapphire due to its greater strength overall. This would result in weight and thickness reduction, which is something Apple is very conscious about. You may have noticed that the latest iPad Air was reduced in thickness in part due to its use of . Sapphire has fairly good optical qualities, as well, says Hall. Both materials have roughly similar absorption properties, though sapphire’s refractive index is a bit higher, which would mean a tradeoff in light transmission for durability. “Gorilla Glass is about 1.5 while sapphire is about 1.76 — the exact number is wavelength-dependent,” Hall says. “The reflection that occurs at an interface is directly proportional to the refractive index difference between the two media creating that interface.” The technical details of GT Advanced’s sapphire product match up well with these numbers, you can (pdf). This means that, in roughly the same amount of incident light, Gorilla Glass would allow for a brighter image than sapphire. The key difference between the two materials, and this is where we get to why Apple just ensured its own supply, is the manufacturability of sapphire vs. glass. “The down draw process for making display glass is currently more scalable and energy-efficient than sapphire production,” Hall says. “I admit to being less familiar with the details of sapphire production, but it’s my understanding that all methods are batch-based while the relevant glass making process is continuous in nature. I don’t see an immediate solution for sapphire to compete with glass on economies of scale, but I would certainly be interested in learning what may be in the works.” Hall says that there are questions about the methods of producing large amounts of thin sapphire that is not cost-prohibitive. Which may be why Apple is building a new facility which GT Advanced will inhabit, with its own machinery and processes. GT has been developing a method for making sapphire sheets thinner than a human hair, which are then laminated on top of glass material to protect it — a more cost-effective solution than a pure sapphire sheet. A from Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White noted that sapphire glass accounted for about 11 percent of GT’s sales this year — around $28.9 million in revenue. In 2014, GT expects to make between $480 million and $640 million from its sapphire business alone. So clearly it expects Apple’s additional business to increase its production quite a bit. What chunk of that increased revenue will be sucked up by Apple? The answer , which notes that Apple will provide it with a $578 million prepayment, which GT will reimburse over the next five years. Apple’s deal length wasn’t mentioned, but it’s likely to last at least those five years. Note that this is only the pre-payment, Apple’s investment in sapphire may go well beyond that. In its statement about the deal, GT said that it “has accelerated the development of its next-generation, large-capacity ASF furnaces to deliver low-cost, high-volume manufacturing of sapphire material.” This increased volume indicates significant interest by Apple, for both its current products and future ones. A few months back, there were reports that production volume of sapphire materials was a ‘problem,’ which we’ve confirmed were accurate. An from March of this year noted that production levels were one of the biggest barriers to sapphire being used in smartphone screens. At current volumes, sapphire was just too expensive. At the time, GT said that a sapphire display could cost 3-4x as much as a Gorilla Glass one, but people at the company noted that its prices would fall further as GT “improved the quality of its furnaces and as the manufacturers that purchase those furnaces streamline operations.” Though Apple currently uses sapphire for its touch sensors, GT’s increased output in 2014 points to a much larger role for the material in Apple’s business. This could point to Apple beginning to use sapphire for the screens of its devices. Though there are production challenges, it’s technically possible that Apple has found a way to make it economically feasible to replace the glass material that they’re using with sapphire. In supply chain analyst circles there is chatter that Apple no longer uses Corning’s Gorilla Glass for its iPhone screens, and hasn’t for some time now. But it still makes them out of glass. Expanding sapphire production and buying its own plant indicate a massive interest in the crystalline material by Apple. “First, this material must be extremely strategic, says Creative Strategies Analyst and Techpinions columnist Ben Bajarin. “It is necessary for Touch ID because it is extremely scratch-resistant. If a scratch got on your thumb scanner it wouldn’t work. So then the question becomes what else may they want or need to use a scratch resistant screen for. This is where the wearables idea or watch comes in.” There has been a lot of chatter about Apple and wearables, and it is indeed working on something in that arena. Apple’s M7 motion coprocessor likely has something to do with it, and there are some indications that it’s being worked on by both Bob Mansfield and ex-Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. Watches, a popular wrist-mounted wearable you may have heard of, often use sapphire for their face covers because of their durability. They simply get knocked around more than phones do. “This, for now, is more about smaller screens than bigger. But perhaps it is also a learning process or investment for them to take this to other screens,” says Bajarin. This is how Apple operates with its suppliers in China like Foxconn. If custom machinery or processes are needed for their products, they often put the money into the deal for those. It’s not disclosed in GT’s deal, but there may be a possibility that it’s helping it build the furnaces that it needs. It’s certainly building a fancy new facility for the manufacturing, in the form of a solar farm. Apple’s investment in sapphire glass displays just how important it views the material. This could also mean that it is setting itself up to protect the supply of material over the course of the next few years. Apple has often done this with components like Retina displays. Around the time HP was trying to build its TouchPad tablet, we had because Apple had locked up super high-res display production for some time. HP couldn’t get the panels even if it wanted to, and would have to wait until Apple’s exclusivity deals ran out. This may be a similar scenario, where Apple buys out capacity to prevent others from having access to it. Or it could simply be a matter of building up production levels to where Apple needs them to be just to provide it for themselves. This is probably the likelier scenario, especially given the relative scarcity of sapphire and the production processes used to make it in enough volume. Especially if Apple expands production of its sapphire home buttons and TouchID systems to the iPad line in the coming year. Either way, Apple is planning on using sapphire on a much larger scale than it has previously. There’s no telling exactly when we’ll see the fruits of this increased production, but GT’s increased production levels point to a much bigger use of sapphire by Apple in 2014 and beyond.
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Time Is Running Out To Enter Our Hardware Battlefield In Las Vegas
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John Biggs
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Time is running out to apply to Hardware Battlefield. Have you submitted an application but didn’t complete it? What the heck, man! Do it! Do it now! This is shaping up to be one of the coolest things we’ve ever done and it’s all set on the amazing backdrop of CES in Vegas this January. We’re going to have some amazing judges, some amazing entries, and some amazing times. We want . If you have any questions email me at . We will review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. Please note that video demos are required. We look forward to reviewing your application.
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Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs
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John Biggs
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‘Ello ello! Welcome to another edition of . Today we’re looking at flying drones, crabby bots that climb your body, and a robot that can roll, spin, and eventually decapitate you and/or your pets. Good times! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ShuAEIfGw&w=640&h=360] First we see some silly humans who think they are making the robots dance for them. Robots don’t dance. Robots pretend to dance and then attack when your guard is down. Created by for a , the robots use infrared light to control the position of the drones and the cameras while keeping track of each other in space. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIpqxsVDgVs&w=640&h=360] Next we have a robot that’s totally OK with crashing. Called the IROS 2013, the robot can fly and float thanks to a big foam ring around its rotors. It can even turn on its end and roll towards you like some evil donut from outer space. Called a Multi-field Universal Wheel for Air-land Vehicle (MUWA), the robot came from the . [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLktpkd7ojA&w=640&h=360] Need some good news? How about Baxter? but let’s give him a hand for learning how to stab less and love more. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwpjpKDGxEw&w=640&h=360] Finally we meet these tiny Rubbot, a cloth-climbing robot created by Guangchen Chen, Yuanyuan Liu, Ruiqing Fu, Jianwei Sun, Xinyu Wu, and Yangsheng Xu. This little robot can go up and down light materials (light clothes) and presumably eventually burn off said clothes so the robotic human slurry making machine doesn’t get all mucked up with nylon fiber. Keep your powder dry, humans!
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Quick, Everyone IPO
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Josh Constine
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Facebook’s share price tanked upon IPO, scaring plenty of private companies away from the public markets. But with its eventual recovery and now the stellar performance of out the gates, the Wall Street bell suddenly has a much nicer ring to it. Just in the last few days we’ve heard of Square, Box, and Seamless moving forward with IPO plans. Now, a soaring share price isn’t always a good thing, and a sinking one isn’t all bad depending on a company’s intentions. But up and to the right boosts confidence of the market as a whole, and the shot in the arm from Twitter comes in sharp contrast to a rough 2011 and 2012 for technology offerings. Facebook priced its May 2012 IPO high, and thereby raked in a ton of money for use on expansion, R&D, and acquisitions. What it sacrificed was perceived momentum. Though it was able to unload its shares at $38, the price would soon plummet to $18. That made Facebook look like a loser to the outside world, potential recruits and employees. Soon we saw a grand exodus of veteran talent from the social network. Employees left citing they felt they had “done their duty” to make the world more open and connected. What they didn’t say was that they may have preferred to leave the pimping of Facebook as a business entity to someone else while they went on a new startup adventure. Now Facebook’s share price is at $47.50. It’s regained some of its luster (though not with teens). Those prized employees are still gone but it has plenty of money to buy new ones. Overall, it was a tough transition from private to public that spooked a lot of people. What CEO wants to go public if they risk half their market value evaporating overnight? Twitter waited until some of that fear subsided. It then its IPO low. The original price range of $17-$20 it looked now seems undeniably cheap (oh the joys of hindsight). But even at the time, most considered Twitter worth well over $11 billion. It’s become a backbone of digital communication whose raw, unfiltered nature gives it unique value in the social landscape. Even after pricing TWTR much higher at $26, many still though it was undervalued. When Twitter IPO’d yesterday, its share price popped a remarkable 73 percent. Though it’s down a bit today, it still closed around $41, high above its $26 starting point. Twitter did leave more than . Achieving the more traditionally sought-after 15 percent to 20 percent pop could have given it a much bigger war chest to buy complementary companies and invest in growth. But what it gained was the public sentiment that Twitter’s a winner, that it’s here to stay. And that it’s a beautiful time to go public. Other companies apparently saw the sign. Payment service Square is in talks with banks, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for an IPO in 2014, someone conveniently leaked to the . Square’s sales are said to be around $550 million this year, with $110 million to $165 million in net revenue after payouts to credit card companies. Cloud storage app Box has chosen Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan Chase as underwriters for an early 2014 IPO that could raise $500 million, . And food delivery service Seamless is eying a late-2014 / early-2015 IPO . It had $85 million in 2012 revenue, bought its biggest competitor GrubHub six months ago, and is on track for $200 million+ in 2013 revenue, Deal Pipeline reports. Other companies that might IPO in 2014 include Dropbox, Zendesk, New Relic, and Atlassian. The idea seems to be “get money while the getting’s good.” Big private companies seem intent on getting their day in the Wall Street sun before the weather changes. And the trend extends down to smaller startups private stories too, though their situation is very different. Pinterest may have because it wants to have plenty of money for expansion without fear the fundraising climate could get bleak if consumer investment dries up, as . Snapchat is said to be raising its own round of . Neither of these companies are earning any meaningful revenue right now. But rather than wait until they are so they could raise at better terms and even higher valuations, they’re squirreling away the cash now. One problem this presents is that these big IPOs and raises could inflate valuations for smaller startups, as . If they can’t reach an exit before the market skies turn stormy, they may be left struggling to raise money, and end up with gloomy down rounds. But for big private companies with solid revenue and a strong mobile presence, fast-tracking their way to getting their own stock symbol may be a smart bet. You never know what next year will look like.
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Twitter Drops 7.24% In Its Second Day Of Trading, Burning $2.3B In Market Cap
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Alex Wilhelm
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That’s more than half a Snapchat. The company’s massively successful IPO led some to claim that Twitter mispriced its offering. The company originally indicated that it would price the offering as low as $17 per share, a firm discount to its final $26 offer price. The markets and larger technology industry will closely watch Twitter in its first few quarters, given that the degree of its success – or weakness – as a public company will set the temperature for other companies’ IPO paths. Keep in mind that Twitter, even after this correction – call it what you will – is valued richly. As Peter Kafka of AllThingsD , “Twitter investors are valuing the company at the same level as LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn generates twice as much revenue. And they’re valuing Twitter at about a fifth of Facebook, even though Facebook has more than ten times more revenue.” That implies that Twitter investors are expecting the company to outperform comparable, and rival firms. In , barometric pressure in San Francisco fell from 30.09 inches this morning, to 30.01 inches by the end of trading on the East Coast. Temperature moved in the opposite direction, rising from a chilly 52 degrees in the city this morning to a far warmer 63 degrees by the end of the regular trading. It isn’t clear that impact this will have on Twitter’s stock price tomorrow, but we’re digging into that now.
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Gillmor Gang Live 11.08.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble. Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Like us on Facebook at
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Elop Is Going To Do What Now?
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Alex Wilhelm
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The technology press is abuzz this morning after Bloomberg concerning what Nokia’s – and soon Microsoft’s again! – Stephen Elop would do to reform Microsoft should he be selected as its next CEO. He is widely tipped as a leading candidate for that role as he is set to return to Microsoft as an executive vice president once the sale of Nokia’s hardware business to the Redmond-based software giant is consummated. The piece is interesting because it makes a number of claims concerning Elop’s plans for Microsoft that seem slightly odd. Elop, 49, is not an idiot, of course. But if this is his vision, and it could be, I don’t understand it. Let’s examine the largest claims of his leaked, rumored, or invented vision for Microsoft, via Bloomberg’s unnamed sources that claim to know his thinking. According to Bloomberg, Elop has a radical plan for Office: [Elop] ould consider breaking with decades of tradition by focusing the company’s strategy around making the popular Office software programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint available on a broad variety of smartphones and tablets, including those made by Apple Inc. and Google Inc., said three people with knowledge of his thinking. Tradition here strikes me as slightly tricky, as Microsoft has built Office for Mac for decades. Word for Mac came out in 1985, so the company clearly has a history of selling Office, or at least making it available, on rival platforms. I think that smartphones and tablets are too new to have software traditions of their own, so to speak. But, granted, Office has been slower than some anticipated to land on tablets and smartphones. Let’s review where we are at the moment: Office for iOS , so if you are an Office 365 subscriber, you can Office all day on your iPhone, and according to the product page, iPad. But you have to pay for that, so what about a free option? Microsoft has a free suite of Web apps called Office Web Apps that are, surprise, cross-platform. They are not quite good enough yet, and Microsoft knows it. In a piece detailing recent upgrades to Office Web Apps, journalist and general mensch Ed Bott that the apps are relentlessly cross-platform [and] work on every popular browser in Windows, OS X, and iOS. (In a blog post announcing the changes, Microsoft says it’s “still on track to enable editing from Android tablets, so you can access Office files and tools from even more devices.” That change is due “in the next several months.”) So, Microsoft is bringing free Office to all platforms, and paid versions likely as well, if you need something more heavy duty. The gist here is that Microsoft understands that the landscape for productivity applications is changing. I am not saying that Microsoft will succeed with its current plans. It may fail. But to say that bringing Office to other platforms is a radical departure from its current strategy doesn’t quite square with my understanding of the company’s current positioning. Elop is said to be more than open to slicing off parts of Microsoft if they aren’t core: Elop would be prepared to sell or shut down major businesses to sharpen the company’s focus, the people said. He would consider ending Microsoft’s costly effort to take on Google with its Bing search engine, and would also consider selling healthy businesses such as the Xbox game console if he determined they weren’t critical to the company’s strategy, the people said. This is reasonable until you think about it. It is fair to say that any new CEO should review business units, and excise where sensible. However, you can’t extract Bing and Xbox from Microsoft, as you would a crouton from that damned salad you had at lunch. They are far more intertwined than that. Xbox, for example, is now part of the Windows family. The Xbox One is partially run on the shared Windows core. This matters because Microsoft is working as fast as it can – not fast enough, in my view, but that’s a separate story – to unify its platforms. Once the Xbox One is released, Windows will span, as I have said time and again, from your smartphone (Windows Phone 8), to your tablet, laptop, and desktop (Windows 8.1), to your TV and finally projector (Xbox One). This is not an accidental result. Microsoft has made two massive platform shifts in mobile and the living room to get here. Windows Phone 7.5 was essentially left in the dustbin of mobile history so that Microsoft could move Windows Phone 8 to the shared Windows core. Xbox 360 games are not compatible on the Xbox One, I think in part due to the radical changes that exist between it and the Xbox One. All told, Microsoft’s work to create the largest, unified developer platform (not a PC on every desk, but Windows on every machine, form factor regardless) is not something that the company would, or should be willing to undo. Selling Xbox would be a blow to the strategy and harm Microsoft’s ability too woo developers long-term — a material impact. Also Xbox is a massive success for Microsoft and is key to its current device (the console) and services (Xbox Live) strategy. To sell it off for a short-term financial gain would be, in my view, idiotic. Bing. Oh, Bing. Bing loses money, so far as we can tell. Who else wants to buy the money-losing firewall to Google’s hegemony in search? Apple, perhaps, but why buy the weight that someone else is already carrying? Facebook can’t stomach its losses. And while Microsoft wishes Bing were profitable, it tolerates its deficits because as a company it cannot afford to cede the organization and searching of the world’s information to a rival; imagine Windows 8.1 without Bing. You can’t. The simple idea that Bing can be hocked is to me a fantasy. Moving on. Best for last: Elop would probably move away from Microsoft’s strategy of using [Office] programs to drive demand for its flagship Windows operating system on personal computers and mobile devices, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the 49-year-old executive hasn’t finalized or publicly discussed his analysis of the business. […] Elop’s assumption is that Microsoft could create more value by maximizing sales of Office rather than by using it to prop up sales of Windows-based devices, said two of the people with knowledge of his thinking. Windows revenue has been slipping, it is true, though . Office is incredibly profitable and important for Microsoft. However, when it comes to the core of Microsoft, we’ve already established that instead of shifting away from Windows, Microsoft is currently in the process of re-betting its future on Windows. If Elop thinks that maximizing short-term Office revenues at the expense of Windows is a good plan, that’s his business. I can’t imagine how he would accomplish that, however. If he cedes Office’s focus on Windows (which it does have, to be fair), and cuts its price and ships it on rival platforms, would that drive more revenue? Or if Elop merely intends to bring it to more platforms, the company is already doing that, at whatever implied cost to Windows. I’m not following this argument. — Microsoft, now focused on devices and services, wants to grow those components of its business. To say that it is going to sell off its most successful devices and services businesses is confusing. Typically verbose Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw responded to the Bloomberg piece by saying “We appreciate Bloomberg’s foray into fiction and look forward to future episodes.” If Frank is right and the above points are not representative of Elop’s vision, he might make a fine CEO. If Bloomberg is correct in its portrayal of Elop’s views on how to grow Microsoft, I don’t see his selection as making much sense. It would undo much of what the company has spent recent years, and billions, to create.
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Oppo’s First Cyanogen-Modded Smartphone Will Launch In December
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Chris Velazco
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As much as I love stock Android sometimes you just need something , and that’s essentially been the guiding mission of the folks over at . They’ve made plenty of strides with their customized version of Android over the past few months, but now they’re on the verge of a big milestone — after officially revealing the thing back in September, Chinese OEM Oppo announced earlier today that its first Cyanogen-modded smartphone will launch internationally in December. Wait, what? Who’s Oppo? To really get a feel for what’s going on here, we need to flash back to mid-September. Cyanogen at the time, and the company not-so-subtly hinted that it would forge partnerships with some honest-to-goodness smartphone makers to bring their modified version of Android to a wider audience than just avid phone tinkerers. That first hardware partner wound up being none other than Oppo, a curious Chinese OEM who may be best known for its Blu-ray players that has managed to cultivate a reputation for churning out some impressive (and impressively cheap) Android devices. The specifics of the arrangement were… interesting, to say the least — Oppo developed its N1 smartphone in such a way that owners can easily flash Cyanogen’s custom Android build, but they’re also producing a limited quantity of those N1s that will ship to consumers with CyanogenMod pre-loaded onto them. It’s worth pointing out that the N1 is no slouch either — it sports among other things a 1.6GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 6-inch 1080p display, and what the company refers to as the world’s first rotating camera so a single camera module can handle selfies as well as it can landscapes. Now this is a nice turn of events for Cyanogen fans but this launch could prove to be an important barometer for the Cyanogen team. The Cyanogen-laden version is being pegged as a limited edition release so Oppo isn’t going nuts churning these things out, so an international launch means that both companies will be better able to gauge the sort of demand for honest-to-goodness CyanogenMod phones. And this more widespread launch goes well, Oppo has that much more ammo in its arsenal if it tries to ink similar deals with other OEMs down the road. That’s not to say the team can just call it a day though — one of their bigger priorities is to complete built so owners of existing Android devices can swap their current builds for something a little different. The Cyanogen team has been rounding up beta testers to work on early versions of the installer (which will ultimately wind up in the Google Play Store if everything goes according to plan), but only time will tell when Ma and Pa will be able to flash their smartphones without getting bogged down in the minutia.
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Xbox One, Nexus 5, And The HTC Gramohorn
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Jordan Crook
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Thanksgiving is around the corner, which means that the Holiday season is actually upon us. And you know what that means? Electronics makers are literally spewing gadgets at us in time for gift-giving season. The is on its way, with a launch date of November 22. But will the new model wow you the same way older generations of the Xbox did? Meanwhile, Google released the , which the boys are calling the best and most efficient Android phone available. And finally, we can’t help but notice that HTC has with this whole Gramohorn audio amplifier. Helping you finish up this chilly Friday, we discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the , featuring , , , and . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Flash Sale App Tophatter Adds Android Version, Brings Its Auctions To Canada
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Catherine Shu
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, a flash sales site that sells apparel, makeup and electronics through 90-second auctions, today and announced its first international expansion. The app is now available in Canada and plans to go into the UK and Ireland within the next few weeks. South Africa, Australia and New Zealand are the next markets in the startup’s sights. , a now-defunct platform that let people show off their purchases, Palo Alto, Ca.-based Tophatter went live six months ago and currently has about 1.5 million users. The company says that since the launch of its iOS app in April, its sales have increased from $200,000 per month to more than $3 million per month. It expects to hit $6 million in sales by next summer, fueled by its new Android app. Tophatter says its sellers focus on “artisan and handmade goods,” as well as brands like Coach, Betsey Johnson, Estee Lauder, Urban Decay, Clinique, Kate Spade, Michael Kors, Beats by Dre, Kindle and iPhone. It competes with other flash sales apps such as , and . As shoppers look for the retail apps that will offer them the most convenient shopping experience and best prices during the holiday shopping rush, Tophatter will also have to compete with e-commerce companies such as and . Spokesman Andrew Still-Baxter says that Tophatter differentiates by acting as a more interactive alternative to its competitors. Steps the company taken to ensure that users are engaged is controlling supply and demand so that each auction “room” on the app is always filled with people. “You can buy ‘stuff’ anywhere, but people turn to Tophatter for a fun and social experience. The result is that Tophatter’s users treat the app more like a game, or a social network, than a commerce site,” he says. “The metrics show them hanging out, checking in frequently, and communicating with other users.”
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Impala For iPhone Identifies Your Photos Using Artificial Intelligence, Organizes Them For You
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Sarah Perez
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A new mobile application called is picking up where Everpix left off, in terms of automatically categorizing your photo collections using computer vision technology. Once installed, the app works its way through your entire photo library on your iPhone, sorting photos into various categories like “outdoor,” “architecture,” “food,” “party life,” “friends,” “sunsets,” and more. But there’s a key difference between what Impala does and how Everpix worked. Impala’s mobile app has no server-side component – that is, your photos aren’t stored in the cloud. The software that handles the photo classification runs entirely on your device instead. Impala is not a polished and professional app like Everpix was, of course, and photo classification is its only trick, while Everpix did much more. But its classification capabilities aren’t terrible. In tests, it ran through thousands of my iPhone photos over the course of some 20 minutes or so, placing photos into various albums, some more accurate than others. For example, it did well as gathering all the “food” and “beach” photos, and could easily tell the difference between “men,” “women,” and “children,” but it classified some beach scenes as “mountains,” and photos of my dog under “cats.” But that latter one is by design, laughs Harro Stokman, Impala’s creator and CEO at , which develops the software. “We don’t like dogs,” he says. The app, in its present form, is not meant to be a standalone business at this time, but more of an example of the technological capabilities of the company’s software. Euvision Technologies, Stokman explains, was spun out from the University of Amsterdam where he earned his PhD in computer vision. The technology that makes Impala possible has been in development for over 10 years, he tells us. Today, many of Euvision eight-person team also work at the university, which owns a 15% stake in the company. Meanwhile, Euvision has the rights to commercialize the technology, but doesn’t have outside funding. Instead, it licenses its software, which until today was only available as a server technology used by nearly a dozen clients ranging from the Netherlands police department (for tracking down child abuse photos), to a large social media website, which uses the technology for photo moderation on its network. By putting Impala out there on the App Store, the hope is now to introduce the technology to even more potential licensing customers. Stokman notes that the mobile version is not as accurate as the company’s core product, though. But it’s still a technological feat in and of itself. “We don’t have venture capital, so we couldn’t afford paying for the bandwidth and for the compute power,” he explains as to why there’s no cloud component. “We were forced to think of something that could run on the mobile phone.” friends Like other image classification systems, Impala uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to “see” what’s in the photo. The system is trained using thousands of images from clients and elsewhere on the web, including both those that are like the category (e.g. “sunsets” or “indoor,” etc.) that are being taught, as well as those that are different. To make the system run on mobile, the company had to create a stripped-down version of its classification engine. When it runs on a server, for comparison’s sake, it takes four times as much compute power. “The more compute power, the more memory, the better the results,” Stokman says. In other words, the resulting albums in Impala may be hit or miss. And the app is fairly basic, too. After it runs through your photos, you can tap a button to save the images to your iPhone’s photo gallery. Each album also has a section where photos it wasn’t sure of are listed, but there’s not currently a way to manually approve or re-organize these items by moving them elsewhere. As for the dogs that get listed as cats? It’s nothing personal, it’s just that the Impala engineers are more cat people. “We don’t like dogs, so we didn’t put the category in there,” jokes Stokman. “You can take pictures of dogs, and it won’t recognize them as dogs. It will be cats,” he says. If the app takes off, that’s something that may change with future improvements. For now, the company is working on its next creation: a camera app that can instantly identify 1,000 objects – like sunglasses or keyboards, for example – as you shoot. They’ll be submitting it in a contest at an upcoming conference, and may consider integrating that technology into Impala at some later date. Impala for iOS is . Amsterdam-based Euvision Technologies, co-founded by Prof. Arnold Smeulders, Ph. D., M.Sc., is bootstrapped with investment from Stokman and Chief Commercial Officer, Jan Willem F. Klerkx, M.Sc.
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Banana Republic, CNNMoney And CNBC Among Top Twitter Accounts During TWTR IPO
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Catherine Shu
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Data from social media analytics companies and give insight into the chatter during Twitter’s IPO using data gleaned from (what else?) tweets. Most of the accounts that produced the top tweets are expected (like and major news outlets such as ), but there were a few surprises. (Both Crimson Hexagon and Topsy are Twitter partners, which means they can re-syndicate tweets or analyze their content in exchange for a fee without risking suspension.) According to Crimson Hexagon, there were more than 179,800 “relevant opinions,” or tweets, sent about Twitter during the day of its IPO. Crimson Hexagon also looked at tweets about Twitter before trading started. Over the last three days, Crimson Hexagon collected more than 252,400 relevant tweets; of that total, more than 35,000 were sent during the 10 a.m. hour after trading started. As shown in the circle graph below, among the most popular hashtags and topics were “DavidWeidnerTWTR.” Weidner, a columnist for MarketWatch, caused controversy yesterday with an article called “ One of the top retweets was by , the director of in Bangkok, about TWTR’s IPO price and the company’s valuation. This is not surprising considering how popular social media is in Thailand, where about 27% of the population uses social media, . There are currently about 2 million Thai users on Twitter. Topsy had somewhat different results for the most influential accounts during the first day of trading, thanks to its different methodology. The company said the top tweet–which Topsy measures based on retweets, impressions and how quickly they are shared–was by which operates the New York Stock Exchange. One interesting inclusion on Topsy’s list of top tweets was , thanks to a clever marketing ploy that gave people the chance to win a $100 gift card in return for saying why they are “thankful for Twitter.” News accounts with the most influential tweets were , and . , . The top people were ESPN sports business correspondent , who asked his followers to guess what TWTR would close at on the first day of trading, and serial entrepreneur . Though the above accounts produced the top individual tweets, there was relatively little overlap between that list and the accounts that Topsy scored as the top influencers on the day, as you can see in the graph below. Not surprisingly, made that list, as did Yahoo. , of the Jonas Brothers, made the list, as did the ‘s account, but that was (most likely) not due to Twitter’s IPO.
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Tech Lobbying Group The Internet Association Comes To Airbnb’s Side In NY Attorney General Case
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Ryan Lawler
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Airbnb has been in the midst of a in New York, where it was recently for a wide-ranging amount of user data. Well today the company received broad support from the tech industry as a whole, as Washington, DC-based lobbying group The Internet Association has come to the company’s side in that fight by today. The Internet Association is a for tech companies, with members such as Amazon.com, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, IAC, LinkedIn, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and Zynga. Formed about a year ago to represent the interests of the tech community, the firm has mostly focused on big-picture issues of legislation, backing this or that bill or broadly backing things like stronger privacy protection. But this is one of the first cases of The Internet Association stepping in to a fight regarding one of its particular member organizations. By filing an amicus brief, it’s like the full weight of the tech world is siding with Airbnb in this local fight. In the brief, The Internet Association states that the New York Attorney General exceeded the limits of its power by requesting information on all of Airbnb’s hosts in New York “without any explanation as to whether or how any of those hosts may have violated any law.” Not surprisingly, this is the same argument that Airbnb used when it first publicly came out against the NY Attorney General’s demands. But as the brief states, this type of “fishing expedition,” if upheld, has broader implications for the tech industry as a whole. The association argues that should a court require Airbnb to comply with the NYAG’s demands, it would set a “dangerous and harmful precedent” whereby local governments could request large swaths of information about users without showing any proof of wrongdoing. And that’s something that no tech company wants. Airbnb’s fight in New York will be just one step as the company seeks to get its marketplace for home rentals and short-term lodgings generally accepted by local governments around the world. But the backing of the tech lobbying association will hopefully strengthen its chances and bodes well for other members — like Uber — as they seek to overturn existing legislation in markets where legality of new, innovative business models are questionable. Photo Credit: via
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Guitar Hero Creators Launch Singtrix, A Karaoke Lover’s Dream
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Jordan Crook
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What’s your karaoke song? If you have an instant answer to that (or even if you don’t), pay attention. The guys that helped create Guitar Hero, John Devecka, Charles Huang, and Kai Huang, along with music gaming pioneer and production company owner Eric Berkowitz, have today introduced a new product called Singtrix. like your average home karaoke kit, albeit more modern and aesthetically friendly, but it’s so. Very. Different. Instead of having a pre-programmed library or karaoke-specific discs, Singtrix lets you sing karaoke to on your phone or tablet. The karaoke machine, for all intents and purposes, automatically detects the vocals on any track in your phone or tablet and removes them from the song, replacing them with yours instead. All you have to do is plug your iOS, Android, Kindle or any device with a 3.5mm jack into the Singtrix and the machine does the rest. It comes with a mic, a stand, a 40-watt 2.1 sound system complete with subwoofer, and a shelf to hold your phone or iPad. Users can also download the Singtrix Karaoke app (for iOS, Android and Kindle and powered by Karaoke Anywhere) to play over 13,000 songs with lyrics included. This requires a monthly subscription, but users can also purchase individual tracks. Singtrix also uses special technology to make your voice sound better, or simply different. For example, Singtrix offers 300 various vocal effects like reverb, that can make you sound auto-tuned, more on-pitch, or even sound like Barry Manilow. There’s also an effect called Live Harmony, which replicates your own voice over and causes a choral, harmonic effect on the song. I tested it out and it really does make a huge difference in the way someone sounds. In short, Singtrix destroys all the barriers between a group of fun people and stepping up to a mic. If you’re shy about your voice, you have nothing to worry about. You’ll sound like a star or, at the very worst, Selena Gomez. If the karaoke machine doesn’t have your song, just plug in your phone. You can pick up a Singtrix at the website for $299. [gallery ids="912294,912295,912296,912297,912298,912299"]
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Neat Cuts The Cord With The New NeatConnect Scanner
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John Biggs
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Late-night TV commercial stalwarts may seem a little chintzy at first blush, but rest assured that their products – essentially very simple document scanners – are surprisingly good. Their latest version, the $499 , is a completely wireless scanning solution that lets you scan documents to services like , , Box, Skydrive, and Google Drive. You can also scan documents into Neat’s own cloud solution, NeatCloud. Neat scanners are good for a few things. First, they’re great for moving from a paper filing system to an online storage solution. To use the scanner you simply put documents, receipts, or business cards into the right slots (they’re marked on the front) and press scan. In this new iteration you can select where you want to send the documents by tapping on a small business-card sized touchscreen. It’s here that you set up your various accounts as well, including email accounts, Evernote, and Dropbox. Users of Neat will remember the love/hate relationship with the Neat desktop app. This app held documents in a big bundle, ensuring that your anger knew no bounds when all of your business cards got mashed in with your tax documents. To be fair the optical character recognition did make it easy for you to search through documents with a few keystrokes but it definitely felt less than user-friendly. The first thing you’ll notice about the NeatConnect is that it only needs a single power cable. You don’t have to connect the device to a computer but it does have a USB port and an SD card slot to use it as a TWAIN/Image Capturedevice or to store data right to an SD card. All of the setup is done on the screen by way of a surprisingly usable onscreen keyboard. It connects to your Wi-Fi network automatically (I did notice a few issues latching on to a WPA connection but those were intermittent). All of the settings – color/black and white, dual-sided scanning, and DPI, are selectable from the screen. The NeatConnect is clearly expensive because of the hardware built in. The small screen is actually a tiny mobile computer that handles scanning and transmission wirelessly. The UI is as simple as can be – big buttons set the destination and the various settings – and everything can be managed from the device itself, thereby allowing you to put the Neat anywhere. Scanning is very quick and uploading on a good Wi-Fi connection takes a few seconds. How well does it read documents? I’d give its OCR abilities about a B+. As evidenced from the above business card most of the important stuff is there. Names and phone numbers tend to pop up without problems but unique fonts will mess things up. Luckily the images are stored alongside the text so you can edit them as necessary. As long as your receipts are placed in a separate folder the app will collate them, add up the expenses (when it can read them) and include receipt images. I also use the app to store receipts and simply drag them onto the desktop or our expense manager when I need them. It’s a great solution to a surprisingly annoying problem. Where Neat excels is at creating expense reports. To build one you simply move your receipts to a folder, name it, and run the report. The result is usually an accurate representation of the receipts inside complete with a total as well as an easy-to-read collation of your receipts. You can also just pull receipts out of the cloud and upload them to your device. NeatCloud also bears a bit of attention. This solution allows you to store almost anything on Neat’s servers and you can even email items to the cloud and search other services like Evernote when you search in the cloud app. You get three months of NeatCloud access when you buy the scanner and the annual plan costs $60 up front or $6 a month. Because you can upload stuff right to Evernote and Dropbox, however, NeatCloud is a “nice-to-have” rather than a “need-to-have.” It depends on your own preference. Why is the NeatConnect important? It does one thing and it does that thing surprisingly well. It is a single purpose device, to be sure, but if you have a lot of paper there is no easier way to scan and store it without fuss. There aren’t a lot of devices that can make that claim. Neat has been doing one thing – scanning documents – for years, and the NeatConnect is a nearly perfect home or small office scanner. It doesn’t scan negatives and I wouldn’t run precious family heirlooms through it but it will definitely help reduce your paper clutter and streamline your expense process immensely.
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Green Throttle Ends Arena Support As The Android Game Microconsole Herd Begins To Thin
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Darrell Etherington
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Guitar Hero creator , a Santa Clara-based startup with $6 million in funding, to build out multiplayer Android gaming for the living room. Now, the company says it’s . It’s a mission shared by others , BlueStacks and , and , but now the space is a little less crowded. The question is, was Green Throttle a canary indicating the whole market’s unstable, or just or just part of the natural culling of a herd centered on a real, but limited opportunity? Green Throttle worked by providing an Arena app in the Play Store and Amazon Appstore for Android, which worked with their Atlas Bluetooth controllers. It had created some games on its own, and partnered with third-party devs to provide an SDK that would let their software work with Arena, too. It’s a slightly different vision than that espoused by consoles like Ouya and GamePop, and Green Throttle had a more concentrated focus on multiplayer interaction, but it’s still not a confidence-inspiring development for anyone watching this space. The closure involves the end of support and removal of Arena from the digital app stores where it appears. The app will still work with existing games tailored to Arena for those who already own it, and the Atlas controllers will work as normal, too. The controllers are compatible with any titles that support Bluetooth HID as well, and Green Throttle will continue to sell the controllers, too. Green Throttle still seems like it will exist, as it says to watch for “the evolution” of the company. That could indicate that there’s been an acquisition of some kind, but it’s tough to say at this point. We’ve reached out to Green Throttle for more information, but for now, it’s hard to come up with a very positive spin. Android gaming is something many are betting on, and Nvidia’s CEO was positively bubbly about the possibilities earlier today on an investor call. So far, though, no one company has managed to come up with the right formula to really get the ball rolling on consumer demand.
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Britain’s GCHQ Collaborated With Other EU Nations To Enable Broad Internet Surveillance
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today that the GCHQ, Britain’s NSA equivalent, worked with several foreign governments to help them tap Internet traffic and phone communications. The Swedish, French, Spanish, and German governments are said to be involved. It has been known for some time that the United States and British governments, through a number of programs such as the UK’s Tempora effort, directly tap the fiber-optic cables that are the backbone of the Internet, collecting data in massive quantity. That four other countries do the same is, therefore, not surprising, but it is dispiriting. It will be far harder than we initially perhaps hoped to end this sort of mass surveillance. That the GCHQ was willing to provide what is described as “a leading role in advising its European counterparts” in how to get around legal restrictions is simply depressing. The NSA acts in a similar fashion. After it was banned from collecting data sent in between data centers of private companies on the country’s soil, it started doing so overseas. Problem? Solved. Presumably the GCHQ, close cousin and partner in crime to the NSA, is teaching similar methods. Previously, James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, that furor over news of NSA’s spying on the phone of the German Chancellor was asinine: “Some of this reminds me a lot of the classic movie ‘Casablanca’: ‘My God, there’s gambling going on here!'” Clapper is correct, it appears. The losers here are the regular folks who are having their Internet traffic and telephony data absorbed by more than just their own governments, but by apparently a cadre of nations working in concert to ensure that digital privacy is kaput. The GCHQ is zealous in its will to help allies get around their own law. The Guardian’s quote about Holland is downright depressing: “The Dutch have some legislative issues that they need to work through before their legal environment would allow them to operate in the way that GCHQ does. We are providing legal advice on how we have tackled some of these issues to Dutch lawyers.” Frankly, I think that at this point it is reasonable to state that wholesale monitoring of the raw data that flows through the trunk cables of the web will not stop. The only solution is some sort of new encryption technique that is unhackable – though the NSA is . It is an incredible shame that it has come to this, and that nations find it impossible to keep their hands to themselves.
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OS X Mavericks Is Now Installed On More Than 10% Of Macs, Smashing Mountain Lion’s Adoption Rate
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Alex Wilhelm
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If Apple decided to make updates to its OS X operating system free in part to drive more rapid consumer uptake, it was a great decision: of its new operating system has beaten adoption of the preceding Mountain Lion version by a large margin. According to , OS X Mavericks is now installed on 0.84 percent of the global PC install base, or 10.8 percent of the total OS X install base of 7.73 percent. Mavericks accomplished that in 10 days. By comparison, according to Chikita, it took Mountain Lion a . It’s worth noting that Chikita reported Mavericks – data of this sort is somewhat imprecise. However, we can tell, by weighing both data sources, that Mavericks has enjoyed far more rapid adoption than preceding editions of OS X. In real, or perhaps gross, terms, Mavericks has market share equivalent to essentially half of Windows 8.1 (an operating system that also launched in October), . Only Windows 8 users could update to Windows 8.1, giving the latter a market-share pool of roughly 8 percent. Mavericks, by contrast, could only draw from part of OS X’s aggregate 7.73 percent market share, meaning there were fewer total machines that were able to move to Apple’s new operating system. That explains why Windows 8.1 has grown its share more quickly, though the faster sales rate of Windows-based machines has certainly helped, as well. However, , Mavericks is spanking Windows 8.1: Apple’s decision to make Mavericks free to anyone with a compatible Mac should certainly help its adoption. Available for just a few weeks, already one in ten Mac users is on 10.9; only one in 50 Windows users is in 8.1. Indeed, only one in ten Windows users is on Windows 8.x. Apple has done in a couple of weeks what Microsoft has only managed in a year. Both companies can take heart in the numbers to a certain extent. What will be interesting to watch at the end of November will be the total converted percentage for both Mavericks and Windows 8.1, and whether there is anything that we can glean from that information.
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Google’s Barges Likely Glass Exhibition Spaces, Lease Indicates
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Matthew Panzarino
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The furor over Google’s mystery barges in San Francisco and Portland has reached a fever pitch over the past week. According to our sources the various reports about the barges being showcases for Google’s Glass retail efforts are correct. Today, a report by The notes that most of the reporters going after this barge story have been looking at the wrong San Francisco lease. O’Brien notes that the correct lease’s purpose is the “fabrication of a special event structure and art exhibit only and for no other purpose.” The sources we spoke to were still uncertain about the exact uses that all of the barges would be put to in the end, but aiding Google in showcasing Glass for its eventual retail run is the likeliest fate of the units docked behind San Francisco’s Treasure Island. A story from , which we , outlined a luxury showroom with a ‘party deck’ up top and spaces below for retail stores that could showcase Glass and other Google products. This report was said to be ‘pretty accurate’ by our sources. The barges are composed of shipping containers stacked together, with cutouts that have had large bay windows put in place and then covered up. The shipping container is already a favored construction block of Google, which has used them for years to house data centers that can be easily expanded. The rationale behind using containers in this instance is that the barges likely won’t be a permanent home for the showcases, which could theoretically be disassembled and moved wherever Google needs them to be, on land or sea. Lack of retail stores in which to demonstrate Glass effectively and publicly has always been a concern with regards to making the head-mounted computers available widely at retail. In my time with Glass, it became incredibly evident that people had no idea what they really did, how to use them or what the value proposition was. Poor demo conditions in many places that I showed them to other people limited them to what amounted to a head-mounted video camera. A proper mis-en-scène for Glass will be all-important for having people ‘get’ the thing, and apparently Google is working to provide just that. News of the barges, which are being built by a shell company called ‘ ‘ (an apparent Wall-E reference) was broken , which speculated that they could be water-borne data centers. But, O’Brien notes, this report is actually chasing the wrong lease, one that was signed on August 1st, while work on the Google barge began last year. A noted that the Treasure Island barge will likely be towed across to Fort Mason for display once it’s completed. The , which published the image above, snuck out to get some close-up shots of the one at Rickers Wharf this week.
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A Love Story That Spawned A Hardware Revolution In The Kitchen
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Neither of them had any entrepreneurial history before they met. was a plasma physics Ph.D. at Princeton and had worked in hospitality at Jean-Georges and Mario Batali before entering the magazine world. But while watching Top Chef episodes during their first week of dating, they clicked. Lisa, who was working around some of the most elite chefs in the world, saw an immersion circulator on a Top Chef episode. These devices are used to cook , where food is vacuum sealed and slow-cooked in a water bath to a precise and even temperature. High-end chefs have raved that sous-vide helps them create perfectly cooked food, like steaks where the core is evenly rare without having burnt exteriors. She confessed that she would have loved to have had one. But at the time, sous-vide machines cost well over $1,000, which was far out of reach for an admittedly money-poor grad student and associate magazine editor in Manhattan. So Abe gallantly offered to make one with off-the-shelf parts for about $50. It was the beginning of a partnership that would spawn a company, a family and an adventure through the factories of Shenzhen, DIY workshops in the Lower East Side and then Silicon Valley. Ultimately, the now-married couple wants to start a home-cooking revolution where the once avant-garde technique of sous-vide becomes cheap and easy for everyone. They just released the , which is the product of well over a year’s work and . It’s a home sous-vide machine that you can plop into a bucket of water, and then turn a knob to an exact temperature. It then circulates water around whatever it is that you’re working on — be it eggs or salmon in a bag. “Nomiku is all about modernizing your whole kitchen,” Lisa said. “We see the kitchen as a home manufacturing center. It should be both clean and beautiful.” She went on, “When we started, the cheapest immersion circulator was $1,000. We completely disrupted the whole market and we’re making a whole, completely new one.” Not long after Abe made a DIY sous-vide machine, they started running workshops in Lower Manhattan for other hobbyists and chefs who wanted to hack their kitchen appliances. Eventually, they came up with an idea to create an affordable sous-vide machine — something that would be way easier for regular people than the kitchen appliance hacks they had been teaching. To put their project in motion, they joined a called . While getting totally burned out designing the product and negotiating with suppliers, they took a vacation to Thailand where they reconnected with a former Momofuku line chef named , who had taken some of their Manhattan DIY workshops. Luckily enough, he turned out to be an RISD grad with a degree in industrial design. They spent days together talking non-stop about the product until the point where it became a no-brainer for Suppipat to join as the third co-founder. Last July, they ran a out of any other proposal in the food category. With the $586,000 they raised came the tough part, which involved working through all of the design and logistical issues necessary to create a functioning prototype. “We got really really burned out,” Lisa said. “It was 24/7 with barely any sleep, working on a prototype every day.” Even so, the trio had complementary skills. Lisa had the Mandarin necessary to negotiate with manufacturers and navigate the often frustrating local business culture, while Abe and Suppipat had the technical and design chops to create a prototype that was easy to use and cheaper to make. “Abe is a genius. He did a lot of the magic,” Lisa said. “I don’t think you could’ve gone to Shenzhen and done this. But we had a good melange of mentors from HAXLR8R, I speak Mandarin and we used a lot of new technologies like 3D printers.” They were able to build the initial Nomiku with about $20,000. Still, there were setbacks. They found that , creating the risk that the device would rust. They also had to secure a from a third-party lab to make sure the Nomiku was safe to retail in the U.S. After a few months of production setbacks (which are pretty common for Kickstarter projects), they launched the Nomiku last month. They also raised a small seed round from angels, including i/o Ventures’ partners Paul and Dan Bragiel, Ligaya Tichy, who previously ran community for Airbnb, and former EA Popcap executive producer and Tilting Point co-founder Giordano Contestabile. I ran a test of it side-by-side along some other DIY immersion circulators and a competing Anova product. (This is because when you host a sous-vide dinner in San Francisco, everyone offers to bring their own machine, even ones they built themselves). We made vegetables like eggplant with harissa, Romanesco cauliflower with lemon and anchovies and asparagus with the Nomiku, while doing meats and eggs in the other devices. I’m new to sous-vide cooking, but it did definitely improve the taste of eggs, shrimp and thicker cuts of salmon. Nomiku faces competition from much bigger, well-funded competitors like Anova, a lab equipment company that migrated into making water bath products for cooks, and PolyScience, another similar competitor. A more experienced sous-vide cook and Anova-using friend had the following feedback: he felt that Nomiku’s user experience was more intuitive with a rotating dial instead of a touchscreen. But he said that it lacked features like a timer and was slightly slower in getting the water bath to the appropriate temperature than the Anova. Nomiku said this difference is because their product uses a PTC heating element instead of a conventional coil heater like the Anova. The reason for this design choice is that PTC heating elements don’t burnt out and self-limits their power when they get too hot. Nomiku’s heating has a slight heating curve from being a PTC element (the type that never burns out and self limits its power when too hot) versus the Anova with conventional coil heater. But the Fettermans and Suppipat don’t seem that fazed by their better-capitalized competitors. “I don’t know what their strategy is and I’m not worried about them,” she said. “What we worry about is whether our customers are happy. Did they have a great experience? With every great idea you will have competitors. The only thing you can do is focus.”
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Bing Renews Its Firehose Deal With Twitter
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Frederic Lardinois
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Microsoft today that it has renewed its partnership with Twitter, giving Bing access to all of the public content Twitter’s users create. The terse three-sentence announcement is short on details, but a Microsoft spokesperson told us it extends, for an unspecified amount of time, the deal the two companies made . “The past four years partnering with Twitter have been great, and we’re excited to continue that relationship in order to help deliver the best possible search experience,” the spokesperson told us. Unlike Google, Bing has made social search a cornerstone of its strategy. Its close relationship with Facebook has long given it the ability to highlight posts from the popular social network, as well as from Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Foursquare, Klout and other services in its social sidebar. With Bing’s , which dropped the number of columns on its search results pages from three to two, the social sidebar now features even more prominently on the site. Twitter itself started giving access to its public firehose feed to partners , and it continues to keep a very tight grip on who gets access to this information. It’s providing a full feed to large partners like Microsoft, Google and others, though a small number of select resellers like Gnip and DataSift can provide anybody with the right resources (both financial and technical) with access to this data.
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Gillmor Gang Live 11.01.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– John Borthwick, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Live chat at http://friendfeed.com/realtime-network/5d54b6dd/gillmor-gang-recording-live-today-1pm-pt Like us on Facebook at
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Exactly What It Sounds Like, Sizem Made A Fit Calculator To Find Your Correct Bra Size
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Eliza Brooke
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If you’re a lady, you’re probably well aware at this point that you’re wearing the wrong bra size. Which is a bummer, because as womens’ magazines and lingerie companies will tell you, the right bra is like an unlimited month of Pilates classes for your boobs. A Croatian startup called has created a size calculator to remedy this problem, using a series of measurements taken by the user with a tailor’s tape. It basically asks you to take stock of your girls from every angle possible: measuring on a full inhale, for instance, and after a deep exhale. At the end of this process, Sizem’s algorithm should be able to determine your true size across multiple brands. Sizem is both a consumer facing and B2B product. While shoppers can use Sizem as a search engine, the startup is marketing itself to brands as a SaaS product that can aid in production. By the way, Sizem site also posits that most women don’t know how to put on a bra properly and has a playbook for that as well. It’s called the “Scoop and Swoop” method. We’ll leave it at that. There are a growing number of players in this space, which is probably a good thing since few people really enjoy getting measured by a Victoria’s Secret employee next to the table of 5 for $26 underwear. Another app, , uses two selfies taken from the front and the side to render your chest in 3D. The well-trodden True & Co, meanwhile, takes a more qualitative approach to fit through a quick quiz and home try-ons. Sizem’s process is a bit more involved than either of those, but it quantifies everyday movement in a way that other startups don’t. Of course, that’s assuming that the user is taking her measurements correctly and that the algorithm is good in the first place. But as far as fit calculators go, it’s noninvasive, private, and, hopefully, a step in the right direction when it comes to conquering bad bras once and for all.
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JD Power Explains Why Samsung Beat Apple In Its Latest Tablet Study: Price
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Matthew Panzarino
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Yesterday, JD Power released its and the Internet went a bit nuts. For the first time, Samsung had edged out perennial favorite Apple in customer satisfaction on tablets. This was a stark change from which had Apple handily beating its competitors. There was it was, about and scoring (835 to Samsung, 833 to Apple) simply didn’t add up. I have to admit, I was , and supposed that it . So I reached out to JD Power and spoke to Kirk Parsons, senior director of telecommunications services. What he told us wasn’t too surprising, but it may help clear up some of the confusion. First off, the “power circle” chart that’s being widely circulated is simply a visual tool, and not representative of the actual scores given to the brands evaluated in its survey. The power circle chart showed Apple winning handily in four categories, including performance, ease of use, physical design and tablet features. Only one category showed a clear win for Samsung: cost. But most folks were a bit skeptical, considering that the JD Power report only weights cost as 16 percent of the overall score. Parsons confirmed the percentage, but said that the differential between the price category scores of the iPad and the score of the Samsung tablets that were included in the survey was large enough to “more than offset” the score in the other four categories. Parsons says that the price category contributed to a full two-point difference between Apple and Samsung. For reference, here are the manufacturer’s suggested retail prices of Samsung tablets released in the last year, the range covered by the study. But note that JD Power bases the price category on a ‘cost of service factor’ which includes several questions including “how satisfied are you with the fairness of price paid for your tablet?”. This factor is where Samsung has an advantage, not with the actual MSRP of all the tablet models included in the survey.: And here are Apple’s iPad prices: Note that Apple charges around $100 to double the memory of the model below, while Samsung only charges $50. Samsung also offers tablets both right above and below Apple’s non-Retina iPad mini, which was only just reduced to $299. Note, too, that the study was conducted on devices released within the last year only, so the long-term usefulness of said devices really wasn’t in play here. All of the above prices are MSRP, and many have been reduced at the retailers. Apple rarely discounts its tablets aside from limited promotions or yearly drops, but some retailers offer discounts. Parsons declined to share the exact price ranges of the tablets included in the study. Of note: Apple also scored the same two power circles on the earlier this year, which it aced, and which applied the same metrics and questions. So — purely according to the JD Power study — if you want the best performance, ease of use, physical design and “tablet features,” then the iPad is probably the way to go. But if you’d like to stretch your dollar as far as it can go, the Samsung lineup offers more value.
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Ryan Lawler
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Yes, Only 6 Users Signed Up On Healthcare.gov Launch Day, But Don’t Panic
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Gregory Ferenstein
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New documents that a mere six people managed to sign up for health insurance through the government’s beleaguered e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov on its opening day. Naturally, the every last ounce of this click-bait statistic, but in reality, it probably doesn’t matter. Young, uninsured consumers are compulsive procrastinators. When Massachusetts launched its own e-commerce portal for a similar health insurance law back in 2006, (12,000) came on just two weeks before the deadline. Enrollment numbers grow exponentially as last-minute consumers scramble to take advantage of the new product. Now, this isn’t to say that Healthcare.gov’s epic fail isn’t bad. As I’ve written, it’s riddled with and authoritarianism that have . problems with the website are a serious threat, as it may not be ready when young consumers are expected to sign up. That said, Obamacare was not rolled out to a vacuum. We have plenty of historical evidence from the experience in Massachusetts to put these numbers in context.
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The First Instagram Ad Has Been Spotted In The Wild
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Anthony Ha
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About a month after that it would start running Sponsored Photos and Sponsored Videos, and about a week after it , it looks like Instagram ads have arrived. comes from designer Michael Kors, and as promised, it’s a regular Instagram photo, but it’s also showing up in the feeds of users who don’t follow the Michael Kors account, albeit with a “Sponsored” label. Instagram has said that users will be able to tap a button with three dots under the ad to hide it and provide feedback. I’ve emailed Instagram to confirm that this is indeed the very first ad to go live, and I’ll update if I hear back, but .
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Fab.com Files Counterclaim Against JustFab, Says JustFab Is A “Predatory” Bargain Clothing Peddler
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Catherine Shu
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The latest chapter in the legal dispute between online retailers Fab.com and JustFab is unfolding. In July 2013, JustFab , accusing it of infringing on JustFab’s trademark by using a “confusingly similar” name, along with related allegations including unfair competition. Now Fab.com has hit back with a counterclaim that accuses JustFab of “predatory conduct.” In its counterclaim, Fab.com claims its reputation has been hurt by JustFab’s “questionable business practices,” which it says is just the latest in a string of misleading marketing tactics at companies operated by JustFab’s founders. Fab.com also says that a filing JustFab made to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) while applying to register its “Just Fab” trademark in 2011 contradicts its trademark infringement lawsuit. Fab.com asked the court to dismiss JustFab’s complaint and order it to pay for Fab.com’s legal fees. We’ve embedded the full complaint below. “This case is an example of the old adage that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. We look forward to having the court hear the entire story regarding the two companies’ business practices rather than the selective, one-sided story presented in JustFab’s complaint,” Fab.com lawyer Lance Etcheverry told TechCrunch. We’ve asked JustFab for comment. (In other Fab.com news, the company that co-founder Bradford Shellhammer is leaving the site. Co-founder Jason Goldberg will stay on as CEO.) JustFab has , while Fab.com . As , the two have another interesting parallel. Both Fab and JustFab have projected that they will make $250 million in revenue this year. Fab.com and JustFab are targeting the same class of online consumers–those willing and able to buy fashion online–and as two of the biggest players in the market, it is unsurprising that the two are duking it out so aggressively. JustFab’s lawsuit, filed on Oct. 21 in the U.S. Central District of California, requested that Fab.com be prevented from selling any items that compete directly with JustFab, and to pay for damages of any lost business resulting from confusion over the brands. Fab.com hit back at JustFab’s claim that Fab.com not only shares a similar name, but offers a service that is too similar to JustFab’s. “Operating under the guise of a ‘designer-quality’ fashion retailer, Just Fabulous [JustFab’s original name] is in reality a peddler of bargain-priced, often low-quality, women’s shoes, handbags, denim and jewelry that uses offers of discounted pricing and endorsements by celebrities (such as Just Fabulous’s President and Counterdefendant Kimora Lee Simmons) to lure unsuspecting consumers into a negative option continuous service membership plan,” Fab.com said in its counterclaim. Fab.com referenced customer complaints that accused JustFab of using to get customers to sign up for a “VIP membership” in which shoppers who purchase a pair of JustFab’s $39.95 women’s shoes are automatically enrolled in the program and their credit or debit cards are charged $39.95 a month, whether or not they make another purchase on JustFab. In its counterclaim, Fab.com also cited other instances in which companies operated by JustFab’s co-CEOs Adam Goldenberg and Don Ressler have been accused of questionable business practices. Goldenberg was COO of Intermix Media accusing the company of secretly downloading adware and spyware onto millions of home PCs. Intermix agreed to pay $7.5 million in penalties to the State of New York as a result of the lawsuit. Goldenberg and Ressler also founded the company Intelligent Beauty (of which JustFab is a subsidiary), which was in its marketing of Sensa, a diet product that claimed to help consumers lose weight with a flavored food additive called “tastants.” Intelligent Beauty eventually settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $900,000 in penalties and restitution. The company was also ordered to give clear disclosures before enrolling customers in a membership plan, which Fab.com says echoes customer complaints against JustFab. Fab.com also claims that statements JustFab made to the USPTO invalidate its current claim that “Fab” and “Just Fab” are easily confused.
The USPTO initially refused to register the “Just Fab” mark because it said it would be confused with the mark Fab, which was registered in 2006 by a swimwear and lingerie company called that is unrelated to Fab.com or JustFab. In response, JustFab (then called Just Fabulous) argued that “Just Fab” and “Fab” were unlikely to be confused. As JustFab told the USPTO trademark examiner: “To be ‘just fab’ (or ‘just fabulous’) means to be happy, wonderful or great in some way, shape or form. It connotes a present sense of being.” “Fab,” on the other hand, does not share this same connotation,” JustFab explained to the USPTO. “While ‘FAB’ by itself could be taken to mean ‘fabulous,’ it could also be interpreted as an acronym for another phrase or an abbreviation for a different word. Because ‘Fab’ by itself does not share the same connotation as ‘Just Fab,’ Applicant submits the likelihood of confusion here is very remote.” This is not the first time that Fab.com has dealt with a trademark infringement lawsuit, although last time it was on that plaintiff’s side (that suit, , has now been ). Meanwhile, Just Fab has been dealing with other fashion sites that use the word “Fab” in their brand names in another way — it’s been buying them. In January 2013, it bought Fab Kids; and in May it bought European site Fab Shoes. That route would be trickier with Fab.com, which is now apparently valued at $1 billion.
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Windows 8.1 Doubles Its Market Share In October To 1.72%, Handily Beating Windows 8’s Initial Rollout
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 grew quickly in the first month of its general availability, outpacing the launch of its predecessor, Windows 8, according to numbers out today from NetMarketShare. In October, Windows 8.1 to 1.72 percent, up from 0.87 percent in September, which is a precise 97.7 percent in the month-long period. Yesterday, I guessed that the end-of-October figure . Keep in mind that this is not 1.72 percent of Windows machines, but all desktop-based computers. For comparison, Apple’s OS X controls 7.73 percent of the global PC market. Is 1.72 percent a strong figure? In a sense, yes. We can compare the launch of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 loosely, though unfairly, as Windows 8 had to sell a unit to grow its market share, while Windows 8.1 had to only enact downloads. Windows 8 launched on October 26th, meaning that its October market share tally is representative of people running its various pre-release versions. It . By the end of its first full month in the market, November, Windows 8 had accrued 1.09 percent market share. In December, that figure reached 1.72 percent. Windows 8.1, by comparison, went live on October 17, and by the end of that month had reached 1.72 percent market share. So, Windows 8.1 is growing far more quickly, though its market share path has been smoothed by the sales work that Windows 8 put in. Of course, Windows 8.1 sold units by itself on new PCs in the second half of October, which should not be discounted. Speaking roughly, Windows 8.1 picked up 0.85 percent market share, while Windows 8 lost 0.49 percent market share in the month. So, it appears that Windows 8.1 sold about half of its market share gain, and raised the other half through upgrades. That’s a slower upgrade rate and a faster sales rate than I expected. Windows 8’s market share peaked in September at 8.02 percent. It won’t ever reach a higher level than that, but the operating system can rest content that it managed to grow larger than the OS X install base before it was supplanted. November is the first full month for Windows 8.1 in the general market. I think that if it reaches 3 percent in the month, that will be a decent showing. Four percent would be strong.
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Disrupt Europe Aftermath, The iPad Air, And Google’s New Nexus
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Chris Velazco
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It’s been a long road home for the TechCrunch Gadgets team, but the lure of new hardware was too much to resist so we huddled around our microphones on a dreary Friday morning to gab about them all. So what’s on the docket this time around? Some choice hardware highlights from Disrupt Europe start things off on a positive note, and since Apple’s iPad Air went on sale earlier today, we felt compelled to dig into Cupertino’s latest (and apparently greatest) fondleslab. Meanwhile, Newton’s Third Law of Gadget Dynamics (that’s a thing, right?) ensured that Google had a new hardware announcement of its own to counter with this week. It wasn’t much of a surprise when Google pulled back the curtain on the Nexus 5 yesterday, but we managed to express some love for the smartphone in our own peculiar ways. Join , , , and me, , as we enter the hardware breach once more, won’t you?
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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PLAiR 2 Launches To Take On Chromecast With Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, And Pandora Apps For $49
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Ryan Lawler
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What do you do when your startup launches a product in a nascent category and then a behemoth like Google enters the space and validates it? And eats your lunch in the process? If you’re video-streaming startup PLAiR, you go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. To review, PLAiR had built a that plugged into a user’s TV and allowed him or her to stream video to it. The first iteration of PLAiR was and was designed to compete with streaming boxes like Apple TV, even providing an AirPlay-like ability to find content on your laptop, smartphone or tablet and send it to the big screen. Then a funny thing happened: , a little dongle of its own that did roughly the same thing — but cost a third as much as PLAiR’s device. At just $35, Chromecast became one of the fastest-selling devices in a category that hadn’t really had a clear winner beforehand. Perhaps more importantly, Chromecast has seen a ton of developer support — with a number of the biggest streaming video providers integrating support for Google’s device into their apps. For PLAiR the writing was on the wall. The company had to come up with something radically new and competitive to Google’s product, and it had to do so quickly. It didn’t hurt that PLAiR had a board meeting scheduled for the day after the Chromecast announcement, according to PLAiR CEO Saad Hussain. So the team came up with a plan to build the next iteration of its device — which would be cheaper and support more streaming music, game, and video apps. With the blessing of the board, it went back to work on making a device that fit the bill. In addition to board support, PLAiR got a lot of help from changing economics in the supply chain. Based on its cost of materials for the first PLAiR, there was little it could do to lower the price. But according to Hussain, after Google’s Chromecast announcement, the cost of building similar devices changed almost overnight. Under the hood, PLAiR 2 has a 1GHz ARM Processor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM, 802.11n wireless, and a built-in GPU/VPU for full 1080p streaming. After rethinking the components it would use and the design of the hardware, the company also took a look at how it could add content more quickly. While the old PLAiR device required video to be streamed from the mobile device to the TV, the new device would have apps residing on the dongle itself. And since PLAiR 2 is built to support Android TV and Amazon Appstore apps, it has a wide range of content that’s up and ready to go. The end result is a device that looks similar to the old PLAiR, but costs half as much and has a much larger offering of content than the old device — and a lot more than what Chromecast currently offers. That’s because unlike Chromecast, which requires developers to add code to their apps to beam content to the TV, all PLAiR apps reside on the device itself. PLAiR 2 supports Netflix, VUDU, HULU+, Spotify, Pandora, and games such as Angry Birds, as well as cable apps like the Comcast Xfinity App. Users simply bring up the app on the TV and control the experience from their mobile device or tablet just like a remote control. While the device still costs about $15 more than the Chromecast, at $49, the hope is that the additional content and better user experience will hook more potential customers than its first go-round. For those who want to give it a try, the product is available for pre-order at Amazon.com, Newegg.com or PLAiR.com, and will ship by November 8.
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Google’s Barge Likely A Modular, Floating Retail Space To Feature Glass
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Darrell Etherington
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Google caught some attention this past week for mooring a huge barge in SF Bay for mysterious purposes. Rumors about what that barge could be used for, with some suggesting it’s a floating data center, which Google does indeed have a patent for. But reports from a Bay Area local CBS affiliate and CNET suggest it’s a retail play, and now is reporting (via ) that as confirmed from multiple sources. According to our sources the various reports about the barges being showcases for Google’s Glass retail efforts are correct. The sources we spoke to were still uncertain about the exact uses that all of the barges would be put to in the end, but aiding Google in showcasing Glass for its eventual retail run is the likeliest fate of the units docked behind San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The CBS story outlined a luxury showroom with a ‘party deck’ up top and spaces below for retail stores that could showcase Glass and other Google products. This report was said to be ‘pretty accurate’ by our sources. CBS affiliate KPIX 5 says that the barge will eventually include luxury showrooms for gadgets such as Google Glass, as well as a party deck, and provide hands-on experiences to select potential clients by invitation only. It’s the brainchild of Google X, the skunkworks at Google designed to build some of that company’s more experimental products and services, including Google Glass and self-driving cars, and it’s overseen by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin is reportedly the driving force behind this retail barge experiment, and the purpose of the plan is to compete with Apple’s dominating retail presence, according to the CBS report. While the barge doesn’t look like a luxury showroom at the moment, it’s built out of modular 40-foot shipping containers and is designed to be quickly torn down and put back together easily. It’s not a strictly seaborne affair, either – Google could reportedly assemble it on trucks or on freight trains, too, adding new meaning to the term “road show.” CBS says that the barge’s launch has been delayed because of how it’s been designated by the U.S. Coast Guard, which is so far complying with Google’s apparent request that its purpose be kept secret. Earlier this year, that suggested Google would begin opening its own retail stores in time for this year’s holiday season. A splashy launch of a naval retail outlet aimed at high-value clientele would definitely be an interesting way to kick-off wider retail efforts, and this will help Google do more to evangelize established lines of business like Chrome OS and Nexus devices, as well as more experimental projects like Google Glass, which will need plenty more consumer exposure if it ever hopes to be a more broadly appealing device.
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Unii, A Student-Only Social Network, Signs Up 100,000+ Users In Six Months In The U.K.
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Natasha Lomas
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Facebook started life as a university-only network and has since grown far beyond those original roots, with some one billion+ users globally. No surprise, then, that it’s losing ground among its original user-base. Facebook finally fessed up to some just this week. Being social’s catch-all behemoth means there’s plenty Zuck & co can’t do. Facebook’s huge size, ambition to ‘connect the world’ and user-base that spans the generations is inevitably fossilising its feature-set, as usage of the service condenses down to a well-trodden average. This makes the social network ripe for disruption — or more specifically for creative deconstruction. In recent years less overarching services have been able to come in and attract users to more tailored and intimate products, whether it’s photo-sharing (Instagram), mobile messaging (Line, WeChat) or more targeted social networking services. U.K.-based startup sits in the latter camp. Like Facebook 1.0 it’s focused exclusively on students (you have to have a U.K. university-accredited email to join). But unlike Facebook it’s planning to stick with students and build out a business based on providing services to that specific user-base. “We want to scale laterally and with depth, rather than opening up to the rest of the world,” says founder and CEO Marco Nardone. A tagline on the Unii website reads ‘what happens at uni, stays at Unii’ — a not-so-veiled dig at Facebook as a vast information repository that allows potential employers to pass judgement on job applicants based on the content of their Facebook profile. Unii is purposefully locking down its user-base to make students more comfortable that they are sharing stuff only with each other, not with their parents and/or future employers. Unii. com launched back in May, at a sub-section of U.K. universities and colleges (it’s now live in over 185 out of a total pool of around 300). In those six months it’s managed to gain a decent bit of traction among its 18-24 user-base, announcing today that it has pushed past 100,000 users. Nardone argues that students are getting tired of having to manage their activity across multiple social network services. “Our research across a sample of students from over 30 universities showed us that students are fed up of having to use larger, amorphous services to carry out daily activities and needs which are specific to the student community,” he says. “For example, a group of students need a fifth housemate for a five-bed house, but they are reliant on posting on Gumtree or on a flatsharing platform which means they could be sharing with somebody outside of their university. We can leverage the power of our student-exclusive network and match up students in similar situations.” Nardone said he came up with the idea for Unii after seeing what he thought was a gap in the market for an “all-encompassing platform exclusively for those in higher education”. He had in fact been developing a social network for traders (based on using crowd wisdom to predict markets), after leaving a job at Credit Suisse to do so. As that product developed, he looked into launching a sub-section of the service for finance students, which got him interested in the student market. Then, after talking with students, he realised there was an appetite for a dedicated platform providing student-focused services — and Unii was born. The social network is free for students to join and use, and won’t ever be monetised by ads. Rather the plan is to launch a series of sub-businesses that sit on the platform and cater to students’ needs — from the likes of finding accommodation (Unii Living), to buying and selling books, to finding a job (Unii Jobs). Some of these are already live on the platform (although it’s not yet taking in any revenue, focusing first on building out its users), with many more planned: 10 will launch over the next three to 12 months, according to Nardone. Each of these sub-businesses will then have different revenue generating models. For instance, employers will pay to post jobs to the Unii network — with the ability to segment job adverts by university or study topic, and so on. Another sub-business will provide university societies with tools to manage their memberships — a sub-business that is more likely to have a freemium model, he says. Segmenting users’ content is another focus for the network, which has a dynamically structured tile-based homepage view (see screenshot above) — something that Nardone argues gives it a more flexible technical architecture than Facebook. Unii also allows its users to post updates to their friend group but also to post things university-wide (say you’re looking for a flat-mate), or to post something to the entire U.K. student community. Types of content that can be shared over the network includes the usual social networking staples of photos, videos and links. Unii has also built an opinion polling tool that displays responses in an infographic form. “We’re not really replacing Facebook,” adds Nardone. “It’s great to keep in touch with your family, it’s great to keep in touch with friends elsewhere — in the U.K. and across the world. Facebook is great for that need. But if you want specific niche services, and want to communicate with the entire student market all in one place, which you can’t physically do on Facebook, then you use Unii. So it’s not in direct competition with Facebook… It does different things.” Unii has raised a total of £1.8 million in seed and Series A funding to date, from private investors, and is in the process of closing a “much, much larger” Series B round, according to Nardone — due to close this quarter. He pegs the size of the market in the U.K. at some 2.5 million students (undergrad and post-grad) with a £20 billion total market value. “We want a decent slice of that market,” he says, adding: “We want to be the sole student brand in the U.K.” The startup is also eyeing up international expansion — with the U.S. and China two markets of interest, along with Europe more generally — but Nardone also says it hasn’t made any decisions about where to go next. Unii is currently live on the web, with Android and iOS apps also in the works — due to land in around two weeks.
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Bezos, Amazon And Refusing To Act Your Age
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Matthew Panzarino
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In early 1998, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CFO Joy Covey co-authored a letter to shareholders discussing the previous year’s accomplishments. That letter has become holy writ inside the company, and is in its annual report. The letter and its contents struck me as incredibly prescient, or perhaps simply potent, as I read through Brad Stone’s excellent . It’s no surprise that the letter has continued to be viewed as a touchstone for the company and its employees. The tenets set out in it are clearly represented by the way that the company develops and releases products, and the approach that it takes to everyday business. One of the most commonly discussed aspects of Amazon’s business is its attitude toward profit margins. The company famously makes a ton of money every year and manages to spend most of it, ending up with slim or no profits shown on its quarterly balance books. For some folks, obsessed with the way numbers look in a column, this is endlessly frustrating. How can a company that makes so much money, and continues to be such a darling of the stock market, end up with so little profit to show for it? The letter holds the answer, and makes Amazon and Bezos’ views incredibly clear. Here’s the relevant passage: We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise. The letter follows that up with a nine-point layout that describes Amazon’s decision-making approach. You can to read the points, but if you look at recent Amazon moves, almost all of them are consistent with the tenets set out there. Some of them, such as “when forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows,” speak directly to Amazon’s desire to remain a lean company. Stone’s book paints a crisp portrait of Bezos as a man leaning into it at every turn. A key example of this in the book is an anecdote about then marketing executive Mark Breier bringing Bezos the results of a survey that showed that the majority of customers didn’t use Amazon and would probably never do that because they didn’t read books. At the time, all Amazon sold was books. This was not great news. Bezos’ response? “I brought him very bad news about our business, and for some reason, he got excited,” said Brier. Instead of seeing the news as a major roadblock to Amazon’s continuing success, especially right after IPO, Bezos saw it as the perfect time to start exploring other categories of products that were under-served in brick-and-mortar establishments. After research, some of it performed by future Amazon cloud exec Andy Jassy and future Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, Amazon expanded into DVDs and music. And the rest, well, you know how the saying goes. What the anecdote says about Bezos’ handling of Amazon is very simple, and I believe is overlooked a lot when people think about why the company does one thing or another. Put simply, Jeff Bezos views Amazon as a young company. As a survivor of the dot-com boom and bust, and a nearly 20-year-old company, Amazon is often viewed by tech writers and analysts as a venerable pillar of Internet business. An aging superpower that trades blows with everyone from Apple to Google these days. But that’s not the way Bezos sees it, and that’s not the way he wants his employees to see it. In the eyes of the people running Amazon, it’s still focused on growth, still becoming whatever it wants to be. When you look at it through that lens, decisions to reinvest nearly everything it makes into expansion and new products, such as the Kindle Fire — even though those decisions negatively impact the balance books — make a lot more sense. In this time of for companies with and no , we’re comfortable talking about billion-dollar sums. But when Amazon is concerned, we feel reluctant to use the same frameworks to discuss it, simply because of its “maturity.” But viewed as a company still in its infancy — reframed that way — it actually becomes a lot easier to understand. The age of Amazon? Younger than you’d think. The Amazon presented in Stone’s book is still uncomfortable with its own success, and the Bezos depicted is still just getting started. It’s a fascinating read. I recommend it for students of the company or those simply interested in a ripping business yarn.
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iFixit’s iPad Air Teardown Reveals Tightly Packed Innards Dominated By A Big Battery
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple’s iPad Air goes on sale today – it’s easily the , but we’re waiting with bated breath for the iPad mini with Retina display. Until then, however, the Air is also the most remarkable feat of engineering in any tablet device in terms of what goes on under the hood, or at least that’s what it looks like based on of the brand new device. As it does with every new Apple product release, iFixit has managed to get its hands on one of the first shipping units available anywhere in the world, and they’ve immediately broken it open to see what makes it tick. In short, what makes it tick is a battery. It’s a huge one, and it takes up most of the space within the case – but it’s also actually still smaller than the battery of the iPad 4th generation, despite the fact that it’s a much more powerful machine. This battery has only two cells, and is rated at 32.9 WHr capacity, while the last iPad held a three cell, 43 WHr unit. The new slimmed down lithium ion power source is supplying energy to the same screen as on the iPad it replaces, which is a 9.7-inch display. That means the increased battery efficiency is coming from somewhere else; it also probably means decreased component costs for Apple. Other highlights from the teardown include a look at the A7 chip (which is actually a slightly different version to the one in the iPhone 5s), confirmation that it does have 1GB of RAM, and the RF components that include a Qualcomm LTE processor with 1GB of dedicated RAM itself, which helps account for the iPad Air’s magical range of LTE band connectivity. iFixit concludes by saying that the iPad Air achieves a repairability score of just 2 out of 10, which is in line with the repairability score of Apple tablets in general. If you’re looking for something modular, however, you’re probably not looking for an extremely thin and light tablet that’s as portable as possible while still boasting impressive display and battery life. I’d never pop the case on one of these myself, but it’s definitely fun to take a peek inside courtesy of someone who’s brave enough to attempt it.
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Groupon Redesigns Web And Mobile Apps To Focus On Personalization, Local And Search
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Darrell Etherington
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Groupon hasn’t had a great go of things since becoming a publicly traded company; founder and earlier this year, and its so-called “third-party” or daily deal revenue seems to be in a state of continuing decline as more customers shy away from or ignore those emails offering flash sales. But under current CEO Eric Lefkofsky, the to a place where users go to search for deals, which is why the redesigns of its mobile and web presences announced today make a lot of sense. On mobile, Groupon now has a “Local Explorer” feature, which automatically bubbles up content in the city in which a user is currently located (it used to serve this via a ‘Nearby’ tag only). It detects location changes in the background and sends targeted deals via push notifications, too, which is clearly designed to remind users that the app exists when they’re on holiday and perhaps more likely to be in need of discounted meals at restaurants, etc. There’s now a search bar at the top of every screen on mobile, emphasizing that new focus under Lefkofsky, and users are also greeted with personalized deal collections unique to each when they launch the app, instead of just a generic layout based on their hometown location. Groupon also moves into 12 new markets on the iPad with this update, which is key if the company is targeting travelers. On the web, there’s likewise a personalized homepage with “curated collections of deals based on the customer’s interests, previous purchases, [and] purchases by other customers with similar interests,” and there’s a new persistent search bar on every page of the site, which also features autocomplete suggestions. Those, too are designed to increase discoverability. Also new on the web are results that cross all of Groupon’s lines of business, spanning local deals, travel, restaurants and more, which is clearly aimed at generating some generative cross-market sales from users who are looking for more than one thing at once. Search also gets new filters that are designed to help users pinpoint their own specific areas of interest much more clearly. Groupon may not be doing as well as some would’ve anticipated five years ago on its birthday, but these redesigns are the surest recent sign that it’s turning the prow of what has become a rather large and lumbering ecommerce ship towards new waters. A lot of these changes seem obvious in light of the current trends among online businesses and startups, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still have significant impact on Groupon’s average level of user engagement. Sadly, Groupon still requires an email to sign up for its website, which is perhaps the single most annoying thing about its platform. Baby steps, I suppose.
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6Wunderkinder, Maker Of To-Do App Wunderlist, Has Raised Up To A $30M Series B, In Sequoia’s First Step Into Germany
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Ingrid Lunden
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, a popular task management app from Berlin-based , has built up a loyal following of some six million users, with about one-third of them in the U.S. and nearly 241 million “to-do”s logged to date. Now TechCrunch understands that the startup is closing in on a round of investment that could help it ramp up even more. 6Wunderkinder has raised a Series B round of up to $30 million, which it plans to use in part to open up an office in the U.S. The round sees Sequoia Capital come on as a new investor alongside existing backers and . It’s Sequoia’s first investment in Germany. While term sheets have been signed, there are still some formal German clearances that need to be finalized before the company goes public with the news, we’ve heard. One source pegs the company at a $60-65 million valuation; another disputes that. If the $30 million funding number is accurate, that may have been pre-money. Prior to this, 6Wunderkinder had raised some in publicly disclosed funding. In addition to Earlybird and Atomico, that also includes T-Ventures, the investment arm of Deutsche Telekom, participating in a seed round of an undisclosed amount. Wunderlist said in that it had passed 5.3 million users, but we have heard that the number is over 6 million now. More importantly, the company has been seeing a strong rise in engagement on the app, specifically for its team-focused, paid Pro product of this year, and enhanced since then with features such as comments to encourage more collaboration. It was apparently the growing conversion and loyalty from existing users that was behind the investor enthusiasm. Sequoia, we have heard, took all of a week to meet with and then decide to invest in the company — in , perhaps? While this investment may be Sequoia’s first in Germany, the company — with as chairman — is not exactly a stranger to Europe. Others include in the UK, in Scotland, and in Sweden. When you consider how many task management and productivity apps are on the market today, it’s a testament to 6Wunderkinder that it has managed to make one that is so easy to use, and so well used. It’s also a strong reminder of just how easy it is to make apps that appear similar to others, but it is far more difficult to make just one that works just as it should — that attention to making a perfect product has sometimes kept Wunderlist from getting tons of upgrades in short succession. Wunderlist sits alongside and complements other mobile-centered productivity/organization apps like Dropbox and Evernote — coincidentally also Sequoia portfolio companies. If Dropbox is where you store large files, and Evernote is where you log notes about what you are doing during the day, then Wunderlist is where you can track and remind yourself of when you are supposed to get there, and other things that you have to do. I’d wager that over time we’ll see Wunderlist add even more dynamic functionality to that central premise, focusing specifically on premium features to drive more conversion on its paid products. We at TechCrunch have just returned from a week in Berlin for our first (it was ). Speaking to startups based in the city, one theme I heard more than once was that Berlin is great for hatching ideas and bootstrapping (relatively cheap to live there compared to somewhere like London; a vibrant community of creative people). But, the thinking goes, when you are serious about scaling, then you need to look West, specifically to the U.S. This seems to be what Wunderlist has been doing and what it will be doing more of in the future. The U.S. has long been a focus for the German startup, both in terms of marketing itself to new users, and even in its office culture, with English the lingua franca at the HQ. 6Wunderkinder has had a good run with Wunderlist so far, but not everything has run as smoothly. 6Wunderkinder last year , a project management app it had built and was still in beta, because it wasn’t scaling fast enough — especially in comparison to Wunderlist. Going forward, 6Wunderkinder’s CEO and co-founder Christian Reber will be spending significantly more time over there building a business development team in a new office in Silicon Valley. The product and technical folks, meanwhile, will remain based in Berlin. Even in Germany, though, there will be a strong U.S. influence, by way of Chad Fowler, joined as CTO from LivingSocial in of this year and will be running the team there.
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Zendesk And Japanese SaaS Provider Cybozu Announce Product Integration And Marketing Deal
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Catherine Shu
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Cloud computing providers and Tokyo-based have announced a strategic partnership to integrate and market each other’s products in the U.S. and Japan. The deal underscores the rapidly growing adoption of cloud computing in Japan, and is also a potential harbinger of further product integrations between software-as-a-service companies based in different countries. The agreement means that Cybozu will market Zendesk’s customer service software to businesses in Japan, while Zendesk will promote Cybozu’s cloud platform for business collaboration to its U.S. customers. The two companies will also develop integrations with each other’s platforms. Zendesk and Cybozu will officially launch their joint marketing efforts at the on cloud computing in Tokyo this Friday and their joint product integration is expected to begin later this year. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has received funding from Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, GGV Capital, Index Ventures, Matrix Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Cybozu was founded in 1997 and is listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The partnership will help the two companies accelerate their global expansion. Cybozu, the top collaboration software in Japan in terms of market share, recently entered the U.S. Meanwhile, Zendesk opened its first office in Tokyo earlier this year. Zendesk now has 30,000 customers in 140 countries, who use its software to provide customer service to more than 200 million people. Cybozu has more than 60,000 customers, most based in Japan. The company released kintone, a cloud-based collaboration software application, in the U.S. in July 2013, and its business cloud platform, called cybozu.com, has had more than 5,000 business installations since its release in 2011. Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO of Zendesk, says his company’s partnership with Cybozu will allow it to take advantage of rapid growth in Japan’s cloud computing industry, which has benefited from government support. “We’ve seen the government actively trying to legislate and make it more attractive for companies to move to the cloud, so you’re seeing the beginning of a kind of movement in Japan, which will definitely accelerate the adoption of cloud software,” says Svane. According to , cloud service market for SMBs in Japan grew 25% over the past year to $2 billion in summer 2013, and will reach an estimated $3.1 billion by 2016. The fastest growing category is cloud-based business applications, which are expected to increase 21% year-over-year in Japan, reaching $1.5 billion by 2016. Though Japan was a relatively slow adopter of cloud computing, Ken Aoyama, chief global business officer at Cybozu, says enterprises have become more receptive to the technology over the past two years. Factors spurring interest in cloud computing among Japanese users include strong data privacy laws; the popularity of cloud-based social media platforms like Facebook, Mixi and Twitter; the ; and . Cybozu recently closed deals with social gaming company and a telco company that has 10,000 employees. “A few years ago, customers were concerned about cloud security, but they don’t ask me about that anymore. Now they ask about feature differentiation,” Aoyama says. “There are more customers in Japan migrating to the cloud, not just SMBs, but also big enterprise customers.” Svane adds that the deal between Zendesk and Cybozu continues “a relatively young tradition among cloud companies in the U.S. of working tightly together.” “We work very closely with companies like MailChimp, SurveyMonkey and HootSuite,” says Svane. “We do that because we share similar philosophies, similar platforms, similar Internet-driven open architecture and the same market approach. We’ve seen over the last two to three years a new generation of cloud-based Internet software companies working together on that premise.”
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Steve O'Hear
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Discover “The Red Web” At TechCrunch Shanghai, November 19-20
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Gang Lu
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In , TechCrunch launched a landmark Chinese edition in partnership with super awesome Chinese blog TechNode. Now we are coming together again, and bringing in some of the leading entrepreneurs, investors and others in the region, for our first joint event in Shanghai on November 19-20. We’re calling the event “ .” “The Red Web” is a reference not just to the strong national current that runs through much of China’s tech scene today, but also because red is the color of revolution: we think China’s technology industry and its startup scene are going through one right now. For years, China has been notorious for its copycats. That hasn’t been helped by the fact that companies from outside China have shied away from doing business there — in part because of the language barrier; and in part because the authorities, with their inclination to censorship, haven’t exactly made China a very inviting environment. For every Evernote that has managed to figure out a workaround and pick up traction in the country, players like Google and Facebook have hit roadblocks in their forays into Chinese market. Things are now changing. Big players like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are now investing in startups instead of creating me-too products, and that has encouraged innovation. We’re proud of Chinese startups like Bangcle, GEAK, Rekoo, Qiniu, Go Launcher, Camera360, TouchPal and iSkyDream. And more foreign brands are increasingly finding their way into China. Among those who will be presenting at TechCrunch Shanghai, sharing their experiences about entering the market, will be Opera, Uber, Glow, Flipboard, PopCap and Rovio. As well as those from abroad who are getting more involved with business in China, the event also will bring together leading local players. Xu Xiaoping, co-founder of China’s leading e-learning brand New Oriental and the ZhenFund, will be there alongside Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and founder of Palo Alto incubator Archimedes Labs. Veterans from China’s tech scene will also be on stage, including the co-founder of Dianping.com (the Yelp of China); the founder of Jiayuan.com (the Match.com of China); the VP of Tencent, and more. Chinese angel investors and VCs including Sequoia, IDG, HCP, Gobi and IVS will join us on panels. Following from our first China event in Beijing in 2011, TechCrunch Shanghai will bring these people together to talk not just about some of the bigger trends in China but in the wider world of tech, such as the rise of wearable devices, the new vogue for “sexy” enterprise services, and new online inroads to solve persistent problems in the health and education sectors. We’ll also have some of TechCrunch’s leading writers and editors there, as well as our COO Ned Desmond. Like a formal Disrupt event, TechCrunch Shanghai will also have a Startup Alley, in which 80 small teams will exhibit their products in a bustling, marketplace-style format. Among them, startups we will also see groups of startups from Hong Kong and Taiwan to showcase the startup spirit in greater China. And we will also have a special focus on hardware startups, courtest of the HAXLR8R incubator in Shenzhen. Attendees will have their chance to vote for their favorite companies, with winners getting the opportunity to hit the main stage for live demos. More great speakers and topics will be announced in the coming days. For more details of the event and earlybird tickets, go . If you are a startup and interested in joining our Startup Alley, go .
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With 1M Downloads Under Its Belt, GAIN Fitness Raises $2.1M To Put A Personal Trainer In Every Pocket
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Rip Empson
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debuted back in 2009 to put a professional trainer in every pocket and give Average Joes like you and me the ability to access personalized fitness routines from the comfort of their couches and mobile devices. Since then, GAIN has launched tracking apps for a wide range of activities, from weight training to Pilates, endeavoring to unbundle the fitness class and become a marketplace for fitness trainers and workout plans. , GAIN raised just under $1 million in seed funding from investors like Keith Rabois, Ben Ling and InterWest Partners, among others. Having recently crossed one million downloads and looking to accelerate growth and continue its evolution into a full-service fitness platform, GAIN is bringing some more coin to its coffers. revealed that the startup has raised an additional $2.1 million in venture funding led by InterWest, with contributions from its existing investors. GAIN co-founder and CEO Nick Gammell tells us that the new capital will support some big changes that the startup has in store for its apps and fitness marketplace, the latter of which my colleague Colleen Taylor covered . Although the startup isn’t ready to share details yet, he did say that we can expect some big product and business news to arrive in the next few months. In the meantime, you can find and Colleen taking GAIN for a test drive below.
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Internet Archive Seeking Donations To Rebuild Its Fire-Damaged Scanning Center
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Catherine Shu
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The non-profit suffered a major setback this morning , causing an estimated $600,000 in damages. Fortunately there were no injuries and no data was lost, but the digital library, which seeks to give “universal access to all knowledge,” lost high-end scanners and digitization equipment. The Internet Archive is seeking donations to help rebuild its scanning capabilities for books, microfilm and movies, and allow employees continue digitization work at another location. You can . As fans of Internet Archive know, the site is not just a place where you can go to laugh (and cry) at your old Geocities pages via the , the World Wide Web’s backup. The organization has archived over ten petabytes (or a whopping 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information so far, including . Its latest initiatives include the project, which has over 495,000 archived broadcasts available for borrowing on DVD, so you can factcheck things like news reports or claims by politicians. Other Internet Archive projects include , with more than 2 million e-books. There are a lot of public domain classics (as well as modern books for borrowing), but one of the best things about Open Library is being able to browse thousands of antiquarian and vintage curiosities such as this and . Other cool things in that 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data include: the ; feature films (here’s the campy anti-drug classic ); radio shows, such as ; and . The Library of Congress’s Prelinger Archives has 60,000 pieces of “ephemeral” footage, like , a compilation of vintage burlesque and striptease clips, and , for fans of mid-century industrial, interior and product design. During last month’s government shutdown, the Wayback Machine also , including the Library Of Congress, National Park Service and Federal Communication Commission. As the Internet Archive noted in its blog post about the fire: “This episode has reminded us that digitizing and making copies are good strategies for both access and preservation. We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect.”
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Microsoft Updates Office 365, Brings Real-Time Collaboration To Free Office Web Apps, Adds Yammer To All Enterprise Versions
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Frederic Lardinois
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It’s been six months since Microsoft launched Office 365, its subscription-based version of Office for businesses and consumers. Over consumers now subscribe to (the Office 365 “family pack” with five licenses) and 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using it in some form. This, Microsoft says, makes it the company’s fastest growing business in the history of Microsoft. Since its launch, the team has added about 100 new features to the Office apps and today, it’s adding three more – one for business users and two for consumers. The most interesting one – and the only one that even non-Office 365 users will get to enjoy – is the addition of real-time co-authoring to the Office Web Apps. Those are the apps that allow you to edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations in SkyDrive, and while their feature set easily rivals that of other online office suites, it was missing effective collaboration tools until now. In addition to this feature, Microsoft is also adding an autosave function to the Word Web App. Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office division John Case, it’s worth noting, told me that he believes the Office Web Apps haven’t quite received the recognition they deserve. He plans to change this by focusing more of the marketing on them and giving them more attention in general. “They have always been important companions to the client apps,” he told me,”but we are now starting to view them as standalone apps, too.” In the coming month, he promised, Microsoft will invest more heavily in the Web Apps. The second new feature involved consumers who subscribe to Office 365. Subscribers to Home Premium always got a couple of bonuses with their subscriptions, including 20GB of extra storage on SkyDrive and 60 minutes of free calling anywhere in the world on Skype. Those benefits only applied to the users who paid for the subscription. With this update, everybody who uses the license will get access to these benefits. For business users, Microsoft is announcing a major licensing change to Yammer. Going forward, all Office 365 enterprise versions will now include Yammer Enterprise, too. Before, Microsoft’s social enterprise tool was only available in the top-end enterprise stack of Office 365. This change applies to new and existing customers. Case told me that Microsoft believes that social is increasingly becoming a critical way for companies of all sizes to engage with their employees, but also partners and suppliers. Another change to the Yammer licensing model involves the partners and suppliers. Until now, it was never quite clear if Office 365 subscribers could grant external users access to Yammer, but now the company has cleared this up. Starting today, Yammer customers will explicitly have the right to grant external users access to Yammer. Today is about more than just adding features, though. It’s also about getting stuff done. Apparently. Because this is Microsoft, a company that loves its marketing campaigns more than any other big tech company, the Office team has decided to declare today “Get It Done Day” in an effort to highlight that its users can use Office anywhere, including on the web. We decided not to ask too many questions about this, but if it’s your thing, feel free to tweet about it.
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How Biz Stone’s Biggest Mistake Spawned Twitter
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Josh Constine
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, third company I went to work for, somehow I screwed them all up. Doing startups is all about making mistakes,” Biz Stone nervously admitted onstage at the in San Francisco. He’d just confessed that he didn’t prepare anything so will talk about his biggest screw-ups, including one that could earn him many millions of dollars when Twitter IPOs. “Making mistakes for fun and profit,” the Twitter co-founder joked. Nowadays he’s running a foundation focused on animal welfare, and a new company called Jelly that’s still in stealth. But it all started with Xanga, where he made his first of three big stumbles. Circa 1999, Stone was working as a designer. Some of his friends had graduated from college and became consultants, which they promptly figured out they hated. “Hey, let’s start a web company” one told him, because that was enough detail in those days. The company was Xanga, an early blogging platform that became a popular place for teens to pour their hormone-addled hearts out. Stone said “I loved coming up with these feedback loops, things that made people feel a certain way.” One was ‘eProps’, a feature for showing appreciation for someone else’s writing. “I liked being able to express myself by letting other people express themselves,” Stone recalled. “[Xanga] grew pretty quickly…but my friends started hiring their consultant buddies. In my vision we’d start a company right next to MIT and hire these great smart kids out of MIT and have this cool culture of innovation and ideas. But that was immediately at odds with my friends’ friends who said we had to be in New York,” Stone acquiesced. He wanted an office near Union Square and the East Village, close to cool restaurants. “No, let’s get the cheapest space possible near the Port Authority in this crappy building” they demanded. “The culture of the company started to dramatically shift away from innovation and a way of making people feel. I really didn’t like working there.” He flashed back to a rough morning in the Big Apple: “I woke up and said ‘I didn’t want to go to work’, complaining to my wife.” “So what I did was I quit, which was a mistake, because I was too young and too green. What I should have done was work really hard to make a change in the company culture. ” Whether you like it or not, a “super-organism” will emerge from your early employees, and that will be your company culture. “You might get lucky and it will be awesome,” but if you don’t pay attention to it, he said it can become caustic. “My mistake was not paying attention to company culture. That would come into play later for me and it was a good lesson learned.” “I ended up back in my mom’s basement blogging. I really enjoyed being on the other side, and now all I have is a blog. I’m not building anything and I felt like it was a big mistake.” The name of his blog may have saved him, though. It was called ‘Biz Stone, Genius’. “I pretended like I had all these genius ideas while I was really in my mom’s basement.” He got noticed, got a book deal, and when another blogging platform called Blogger was acquired by Google, Stone says “[its founder] Ev Williams reached out to me and invited me to work at Google.” “Obviously working at Google wasn’t a mistake” he said hinting at its coming rise to power. “I used to just walk around. I don’t know if I was supposed to, but I’d just open doors and see what people were doing.” One led to a guy surrounded by DVRs. Stone asked what he was doing. “I’m recording everything being transmitted on TV all over the world.” Stone backed out saying “Okay, carry on, carry on.” Another led to “a sea of people operating illuminated foot-pedal scanning devices. “We’re scanning every book ever published.” “Okay, carry on, carry on,” Stone repeated. “A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes it’s fantastic, but what I realized later was there’s technology and there’s people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And Hopefully technology gets out of the way.” “The other thing I learned was their whole aphorism, their internal words to live by is ‘Don’t Be Evil’. Originally I thought that was great, but then I realized ‘Don’t Be Evil’ isn’t ‘Be Good’. It’s measuring everything on a scale of evil.” Stone put on his villain voice, stating “We’re going to assume we’ll always be inclined to evil. Well let’s try to remind ourselves not to be evil.” “That’s when I realized A better aphorism might be ‘Be Good’. Don’t have an aphorism that ‘don’t be something’. That came in handy as he plotted the course for his new company Jelly. At a board meeting they were discussing a way to communicate their idea and he realized it was really artificial. ‘Don’t be artificial’ could be their aphorism! But then he caught himself, remembering the Google days. “Our thing can be ‘Be Genuine’. Let’s just tell our users what we’re doing.” The irony of being in deep stealth right now and not telling anyone what it does seemed lost on Stone, but he’d come away understanding two big mistakes Google was making, determined not to repeat them. “I was on the car ride home with Evan Williams and I thought I had this genius flash,” Stone says, starting to get fired up. “Evan! You can record your voice in your browser with Flash.” Ev replied, “Yeah, we’re doing this with AudioBlogger.” But Stone snapped back, “If you can talk to your browser, we can convert it to an MP3. And there’s these iPod things everyone seems to love them. What if we took what you said to your web page and converted it to an MP3 and [put it in an attachment in RSS].” Next, Stone is dreaming up a way to automatically find RSS items with MP3s and sync them to your iPod. “Couldn’t we do the democratization of radio!?!” It turns out other people were already creating podcasting. “But for like 10 minutes we thought we were total geniuses.” Stone laughed. The two decided to quit Google and form Odeo, but it was a tough time for Stone. Google was on a winning streak. “I was watching the stock price go up and up with a calculator [figuring out how much money I was missing out on]. My wife said I shouldn’t do that.” “Odeo, it turned out, was a big mistake.” But a very profitable one with time. After his talk, Stone granted me an audience in the green room to go deeper into the end of Odeo. “What happened was that Apple put podcasting in iTunes. That’s normally a deathblow, but Evan came up with a really good pivot. I forget exactly. It was focused on social discovery. It was something the Apple guys weren’t going to do. It sounded like a great idea.” But soon Stone told Evan, “What you wrote will basically make us the kings of podcasting. And he was like ‘Yes’. But here’s my question. Do you want to be the king of podcasting? He slouched and said ‘no’. I said ‘neither do I, and that’s the problem'” Stone recounted to me in a dim back room of the hosted by Digital Garage and Neo. “We’d raised all this money, and we came to the painful realization that even if we were successful at it we didn’t want it. Evan put his head in his hands and was like ‘you’re right.'” Earlier onstage, he’d explained why ruling the next generation of talk radio didn’t appeal to him. “The death blow to Odeo really was that we didn’t even like podcasting. We didn’t like listening to podcasts. We didn’t like making podcasts. We were really shy in front of the microphone.” He mimicked him and Williams trying to record, going back and forth, “No, say something!” “The problem was we didn’t even like our own project. It pitched really well. It was very sexy but we didn’t use it. This is when I learned a really valuable lesson.” “If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, You have to have emotional investment in what you’re working on.’ That’s what we lacked at Odeo. If you use your own product and giggle when you’re making and using your own product, then the whole world saying it’s dumb just rolls off of you, because you’re loving what you’re doing. And that ends up shining through the branding and communication, and that rubs off on people. It’s infectious enthusiasm.” Nearing the end of his presentation, Stone pleaded with the technologists in the crowd, “ ” Preparing to leave for a flight to New York City, Stone told me backstage that he hadn’t read Nick Bilton’s book “Hatching Twitter” yet, and since he’d forgotten his tablet, probably wouldn’t get to read it soon. As far as how he’s depicted, Stone tells me excitedly, “No matter what it says, who gets books written about them? Abraham Lincoln! Whatever it says it’s still pretty cool. I’m not too worried about it, as far as I know I’m not a major player because I didn’t do anything too juicy. I was loyal to my friends,” implying other founders weren’t as upstanding. How Stone hopes to be remembered is for fighting for the people. “I was the champion of users in general.” More specifically, he detailed to me that “When we wrote the Terms Of Service, I went through it personally and wrote tips. ‘I know you never read this but this is what it means. You can’t really delete a tweet once it’s out there. If you don’t like that maybe this isn’t for you.’ I tried to embody the user and explain that it’s public, and fought any association with any particular government and tried to remain neutral.” Though he hasn’t read Bilton’s take, Stone agreed to give me his version of the Twitter origin story. Apparently, Evan told Odeo’s board that he and Stone were convinced they didn’t want to do podcasting. They thought the board might install a new CEO, but it was them the board had invested in. Then they struck upon an idea, “What if we make a new company?” So they created Obvious Corp and bought Odeo. Stone and Evan were still in the early stage of prototyping their new communication startup when Stone tells me about the moment “I realized I was emotionally invested in Twitter,” referring to his third and most important lesson. “I decided to do some home improvements, to tear up the carpet and reveal the beautiful hardwood floors underneath. But there was no hardwood floor, and there was a heat wave. I was sweating and my phone buzzed.” It was a tweet from Ev, delivered as a text message. “Sipping pinot noir after a massage in Napa Valley.” With a smile, Stone tells me the stark difference in their situations “made me laugh out loud. I’m laughing out loud and this is awesome.” He knew this is what he wanted to build. Tying together his presentation before leaving the stage earlier in the morning, Stone paraphrased Ben Franklin and reflected: “It’s possible that the mistakes of your life are way more interesting than any of your successes. They certainly have been for me and they’ve helped me a lot.” Xanga, Odeo…”They were all failures, but the next startup, Twitter, was a success and now I get to go ring the bell on Wall Street.”
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Silk Road Rises Again
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John Biggs
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Like the legend of the phoenix Silk Road has risen from the ashes of a recent US crackdown and is now live and even more secure. At 4:20 p.m. GMT on November 5, the so-called Silk Road 2.0 reappeared at silkroad6ownowfk.onion, an address on the TOR network. The new site now supports PGP encryption of accounts and includes the forums, market, and escrow system familiar to previous users of the site. While there’s no telling who built the new site, former Silk Road admins have claimed they are behind this iteration. The creation of the new site was, in a sense, . After the fall of Silk Road clone , however, there have been a number of pretenders to the Silk Road crown and, if I were a betting man, I’d wager that more than one was a honeypot for the trapping of drug dealers. Whether SR 2.0 is the real thing remains to be seen – many of the same dealers are coming back even though the site has only a few hundred sellers – but even if this site dies ignobly there is always next time… and next time. In related news the alleged mastermind behind the first Silk Road, , appeared in New York court today where his lawyer claimed he was not, in fact, famed SR admin Dread Pirate Roberts. As one Silk Road commenter wrote, “curiouser and curiouser.”
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The Bitcoin Bubble
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Alex Wilhelm
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We’re back, baby! Bitcoin’s price has taken off again, forcing some to defend the value of the currency as utterly un-bubblish. This becomes a humorous exercise. The finance nerd community (of which I’m not nearly good enough to be a member) is done talking about the Trillion Dollar Coin for now, so it’s back on the Bitcoin bus. Bitcoin is trading at record price points, currently clocking in at around $264 USD per coin. To put that price point in perspective, in April Bitcoin spiked to around $237. It then fell all the way to around $69 in July. And now we are back north of the $200 mark, rapidly approaching the $300 ceiling. People keep , and it confuses me. Of course this is a bubble. It’s a far too rapid increase in the price of a financial instrument that is unmoored from any inherent value that is being bid up by aggressive individual speculation. What else is that? Joe Weisenthal, better known as @ , , making the following key point: “The currency has been surging several percent every day lately, and that’s evidence that it’s not in a bubble?” Bingo. But there is another point that is worth keeping in mind. It appears that Bitcoin is currently seeing its value break ranks with its transaction volume. This is not what we have seen in the past, when the two were in loose unison. Here are , the first showing the price of a single Bitcoin in USD, and the second showing Bitcoin transactions per day. Follow both from left to right, and see if you can feel the change: What’s going on? We can’t be sure, but I think that the shuttering of Silk Road has led to a meaningful decline in Bitcoin transactions. However, speculative spirit is driving the price of the currency higher. So, the current boom is even more bubblish than before, when the price rose before, and then cratered, mostly tied to rising and falling volume. Bitcoin can have ‘value’ based not on any sort of government backing or the like, but it can provide short-term utility to all holders if it has use. But if use is in decline, its value should follow. To see its value rise as its use declines is simply odd. Bubble.
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Poll Finds Tech-Savvy Users Prefer Smartwatches Over Glass Devices
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John Biggs
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A fairly small poll of users on found that, in general, users prefer smartwatches to smart glasses. While this is not definitive proof of any real preference – the sample size is far too small – it does allow us to see what the early adopter will be wearing next season. The poll, produced by Eric Newcomer, asked visitors whether or not they planned to buy a smart device in the next five years and which type they preferred. Sixty-two percent expected to own a smartwatch while 41 percent expected to own a smart glass device in the next five years. When asked what they would buy immediately, the numbers got a little hairier – 45 percent chose neither – while smartwatches still led over glass devices. Writes Newcomer: Polls like this one are interesting in what they tell us about specific, tech-savvy audiences. I’m sure if you asked the same question of a general population they’d still be thinking about whether to invest in a tablet let alone consider a facial user interface. Arguably, smartwatches and Google Glass aren’t quite ready for prime time. Most incarnations are severely limited by computing power and battery (although I am excited about upcoming offering) and Google Glass is a fun diversion for now. It’s not really a war between the two, it’s just a slow creep towards a ubiquity of wearables.
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With 30K Active Online Stores, Weebly Launches DIY eCommerce Platform To Take On Amazon And Shopify
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Rip Empson
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on the NASDAQ this morning, another veteran website builder is responding with some big news of its own. Since launching in 2006 (the same year as Wix), has taken a slightly different approach to website creation than its competitors: By catering to entrepreneurs. Today, Weebly users have created over 20 million websites using the company’s DIY platform and, of those users, more than 60 percent self-identify as entrepreneurs, co-founder David Rusenko tells us. Thanks to these small business owners, Weebly now hosts over 30,000 active online stores, which collectively bring in $13 million in sales every month. In response, Weebly has spent the last two years building an eCommerce platform to help these mom-and-pop entrepreneurs boost online sales and let anyone get their own store up and running in a few minutes. Launching today, Weebly’s new eCommerce platform aims to bring simple online store creation to the masses, Rusenko says, and will provide businesses access to a mobile store and checkout, filtered product search advanced merchandising and an integrated shopping cart. The company’s new eCommerce tools will be available for free, which includes support for businesses selling up to five products. From there, Weebly offers a handful of plans and pricing options that range from $4/month to $29/month, depending on the number of items one is looking to sell. Up to this point, Weebly’s eCommerce tools have been pretty limited, offering basic support for PayPal and Google Checkout and 150 templates as part of its website creation tools, but that’s about it. With its new eCommerce platform, however, Weebly is taking dead aim at both Amazon, Etsy and Shopify, providing a simple, easy-to-use alternative for anyone looking to sell their wares online. As a part of this upgrade, Weebly now offers the ability for businesses to quickly create merchant accounts with either Stripe and Authorize.net (and Rusenko says more are on their way), along with a handful of tools that let them calculate VAT and shipping costs, track orders and offer simple product search functionality. Plus, in a move designed to help it cater to a larger market, Weebly’s new eCommerce tools will also include support for international payments. The other potentially big draw is the addition of flexible shipping and tax options, which may seem like a minor feature but could has big appeal for resource-strapped small businesses, allowing them to offer free shipping on select orders, define carriers and speed while adjusting rates based on location. Rusenko tells us that online stores can now be edited on the Web or through Weebly’s mobile app, and in an effort to prove to an incredulous reporter, showed that the process can be completed on both platforms in less than five minutes, which is pretty cool. To convert its new eCommerce offering into business, Weebly will take 3 percent of sales that take place on its sites — for free users, there’s no fee for users of its “Business Plan” — which, for mom-and-pops should compare favorably with Amazon’s 6 to 15 percent sale price and Etsy’s 3.5 percent. The idea, the co-founder says, is to lower the barriers to eCommerce and get as many people signed on as possible by allowing anyone to be up and running with their own mini Amazon store in five minutes or less. To show the size of the opportunity he thinks is available to Weebly by taking this tap, Rusenko tells us that the team found that, while the top 500 merchants on Amazon are doing just fine, the second group of 500 is growing exponentially faster. By making a set of simple eCommerce tools available for free, Rusenko hopes that the company can start to lure these Amazon “Next 500” types, along with the scores of small businesses without much presence online, over to Weebly’s side. Based on its continuing growth and the expected revenue boost from its new eCommerce option, Weebly recently signed a lease on 36,000-square feet of a historic warehouse in SOMA in downtown San Francisco, which will become its new headquarters. As part of this move, the company also plans to begin a major expansion which will see it add up to 500 new employees across the globe. Apparently, life is good in Website Creation Land.
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Microsoft Unifies Windows And Windows Phone Developer Programs, Lowers Registration Fees
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft that it is bringing together its Windows and Windows Phone developer programs. The commingling of both groups is a move by Microsoft to encourage developers to build for more than one of its supported device classes. It also represents another step in Microsoft’s effort to unify its platforms on top of a shared Windows core. Microsoft now pitches Windows Phone and Windows as a package. The company has also combined the products’ marketing teams, likely helping to further unify their messaging and prevent crosstalk. The Xbox One also leans on the shared Windows core. So, when that console is released, Windows will extend to your smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop and TV. Thus to see Microsoft bring together the Windows and Windows Phone developer groups is hardly surprising. If you were a registered Windows Store developer, you can submit Windows Phone apps at no cost and vice versa. Microsoft has also lowered the price of registering to build for (now) both platforms. If you were already both a Windows Phone and Windows Store developer, Microsoft will give you a code for a free year-long renewal of your account. The application ecosystem issue has long been the key issue holding Windows Phone back, and has become the largest issue with Windows 8.1, after Microsoft fixed a swath of usability plagues that made it frustrating to use Windows 8. Therefore, Microsoft needs to eliminate all hurdles to building for its platforms. I noted above that the unification of the Windows and Windows Phone developer registration systems wasn’t surprising. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a smart move.
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At $26 Per Share, Twitter’s Executives And Directors Own A Combined $3.24 Billion Of Its Stock
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Alex Wilhelm
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Currently, that group holds 124,529,741 shares in the company, or 25.5% of the company. After the IPO, and 70 million shares are sold to the general public, the group will control 22.3% of the company. Evan Williams, who owns the most shares of the group will see his stake fall to 10.4%, but don’t feel sorry for the guy – his 56,909,847 shares are worth $1.48 billion. In second place among the leadership cadre is Peter Fenton, with beneficial ownership of 31,568,740 worth $820 million. Current CEO Dick Costolo has $199.6 million in Twitter stock, while Dorsey has $609 million. Outside of the leadership, external investors are now rich, and almost liquid. Rizvi Traverse controls $2.21 billion in Twitter stock, J.P. Morgan $1.27 billion, Spark Capital $843 million, and Benchmark Capital $820 million. Twitter’s initial public offering saw its price rise, as demand the modest 70 million offered shares was more enthusiastic than what was perhaps anticipated by Twitter. Hoped for, certainly, but expected, perhaps not. A final statistic: According to its filed S-1, existing stockholders of Twitter paid on $2.21 for the company’s stock over the life of the company. The public has to pay the IPO gate rate. In a nutshell, that’s the VC game.
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Twitter Prices IPO Above Estimates At $26 Per Share, Raising $1.82B At Valuation Of Up To $18B
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter will start trading at $26 when it goes on sale, made today by the company on Twitter. That’s on the low side of expected pricing but still above the new official range that Twitter released yesterday. At $26 the proceeds of the sales of 70 million shares of common stock will net it $1.82 billion. This means that the company has a valuation of $14.16 billion based on 545 million non-diluted shares or a maximum of approximately $18.1 billion based on 705 million fully diluted shares. At that pricing, Twitter co-founder , which is worth $1.48B. Jack Dorsey’s stake is worth $609M and investor Peter Fenton’s clocks in at $820M. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s slice sits at $199M. By far the largest stake is held by Rizvi Traverse which holds 16% valued at $2.21B. Union Square Ventures is set to benefit with a $723.8M stake. Twitter pricing chatter has been hot and heavy over the past few weeks, with some predicting that it would price its IPO well it set earlier this week in a revised S-1 filing. The pricing range was , which many considered very low and which drove high demand. Yesterday, we noted that Twitter could easily price as high as $25-$28 on IPO. CEO Tim Sullivan told us that the pricing in the private market has been running up hard over the last year. Sullivan noted that it was priced at around $15 last summer, $17 in December, $20 in March and $30 in September. Bids were entered at around $35 recently but could not be filled because the demand was so high. Twitter’s aggressive pricing early on led to . Much of the talk about Twitter’s IPO pricing in the run-up has been about comparisons to Facebook’s relatively disastrous offering. It had many issues including a high price, disappointing opening and behind-the-scenes drama, but has eventually far surpassed its opening price of $38 per share. Twitter’s indicated revenue over the past quarter was $169 million, though it also scored a net loss of $64 million over the same period. Twitter will list on the NYSE under the symbol ‘TWTR’. Image Credit: /Flickr CC
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Startups Pitching A “Netflix For E-Books” May Have A Tough Sell
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Sarah Perez
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When it comes to getting consumers to pay for things on a subscription basis, some services fare better than others. A growing number of people seem happy to pay for entertainment-based offerings like Netflix or on-demand streaming music, for example, while “box of the month” clubs and subscription-based shopping sites have been something of a mixed bag. More recently, a handful of startups have begun working to introduce subscriptions into a new category: e-books. At first blush, e-books seem like the next obvious choice for subscription-based commerce under the unlimited access model. It worked for Netflix with TV and movies. It’s starting to work for Spotify for music. So why not e-books, then? There are few key players in this space today, ranging from better-established companies to early-stage startups. All want to become this generation’s “Netflix for e-books.” Some founders pitch their companies with that very tagline. For consumers, that means you pay a small monthly fee for unlimited access to the company’s e-book collection, which varies in size depending on the service you’re using. You can then read those books on your computer, smartphone, and tablet, to the extent that the service allows. Notable new entrants in the space include , a younger iOS-first competitor , and soon-to-launch , which is currently in beta. While each company is angling to compete with others on feature set, publisher selection, platform support and more, they are all also competing with a much larger subscription-based player — Amazon. Through Amazon Prime, the company’s $79 per year program, consumers receive expedited shipping, Amazon Prime Instant Video access, and, more importantly in the case of a “Netflix for e-books” market, access to the Kindle Lending Library, where they can freely borrow from over 400,000 titles with no return dates. But today’s newcomers will argue that they’re doing something different from Amazon. E-books aren’t tacked on to a larger service with all of Prime’s bells and whistles, nor are they tied to Kindle devices. And for those who read more quickly, an unlimited buffet of e-books has some appeal. (Kindle owners can only borrow one library book per month.) Explains Oyster co-founder Willem Van Lancker in a perfectly crafted pitch, “we’re so much more than a bag of books and a search bar…we’re really all about building this all-in-one books experience. We treat books as the unique form of media they are.” At his company, the belief is that there’s value that goes beyond the pure economics involved with e-book purchasing and lending. The company touts its technological and design strengths – books download quickly, you’re able to browse more visually by flipping through “big, beautiful covers,” and overall, the goal is to lower the bar for consumers who want a better experience for reading. The team also believes there’s value in the aggregated reading data Oyster aims to collect. As with Spotify, which can surface trending tunes on its network, Oyster readers could also discover the hot new e-books because of this data – a social best sellers list, if you will. “When you have that common library, it really changes sharing,” says Van Lancker. “That’s something that’s really unique to our product – if you look at Oyster, it’s built like a modern social network.” Of course, that’s the same reasoning behind earlier this year: social data. Goodreads had over 16 million readers at the time of the deal, but the technology itself feels stagnant and dated – especially on mobile, potentially giving Oyster an edge. However, when it comes to community size, competitor Scribd has an advantage over both Oyster and Goodreads (at least pre-acquisition Goodreads, that is). Because of its history in the social publishing space, it has amassed a user base of 80 million actives, the company when it first announced its move into e-book subscriptions. The sheer size of its community attracted the interest of HarperCollins, which was also interested in the data-sharing possibilities Scribd was offering publishers. In fact, the company’s goal is to make Scribd the most publisher-friendly of the new bunch – a strategy it hopes will help pull in the big-name brands. Finally, there’s , a soon-to-launch startup that offers various pricing tiers, based on how many books a user wants to check out per month. It also works cross-platform and is focused on providing personalized recommendations. But what really sets it apart is that users will be able to own the titles they download, making it more of a “book of the month” club, rather than a rental service. Still, given its subscription-based pricing, consumers may lump it in their minds along with the other “Netflix for e-books” competitors. While it’s too soon to call the market of a “Netflix for e-books” one way or the other, it’s worth pointing out that there are, in fact, a lot of differences between reading e-books and watching Netflix movies or streaming albums on Spotify. Namely, in addition to competing with e-commerce giant Amazon, whose empire began with bookselling, these startups compete with other so-called “Netflix for e-books” outlets: local libraries. Sure, the technology may not be as robust or include those big, beautiful, Flipboard-like interfaces. And there might not be social networking capabilities that allow companies to collect, aggregate and sell user data. But in return, there’s the price point to consider – libraries let you freely borrow e-books. Consumers can borrow at least selection of e-books from their local libraries, even if they often fail to offer wide selections or new releases, or force you to wait for your turn to check out the book on loan. And when you’re looking into lending options, it’s also worth noting that select titles are available for among Kindle owners, in addition to the lending options via Prime. Then there’s the fact that the cost to purchase an individual e-book tends to fall in the same general ballpark as the monthly fees paid to these Netflix-like subscription services. In other words, if you’re not reading more than a book a month, or reading multiple titles at once, then you might not be getting a good deal. That’s a challenge that Netflix or Spotify doesn’t face since it’s fairly easy to watch more than one TV show or listen to more than one song. Reading at least one book a month seems like a reasonable goal, and certainly it would be great if you read more. But real life tends to get in the way, and reading is an activity that requires more of an effort on the part of the subscriber. There are simply going to be months out of the year where the majority of regular people’s “reading” involves the consumption of online news and a little Facebook or Reddit. Or maybe the back of the shampoo bottle, while…well, you get the idea. But maybe you’re not paying for value, but experience? That’s also a heady bet when there’s nothing dramatically different about the you’re consuming the content itself. Unlike with streaming music, which allowed consumers to free up hard disk drive space on ever-smaller devices by ditching permanent MP3 collections, or streaming video that plays iPads away from the living room, e-books — whether from a library, Amazon or an e-buffet — are still just words you download and read on your tablet or sometimes phone. So if the argument is not that it’s cheaper (it’s not), or that the technological means of access is better (it’s not), then it’s about riding the wave of subscription-based commerce. And that’s still a risky bet. The way consumers are interacting with content for purchase is undergoing a significant shift. Eighty percent of businesses are seeing changes in how their customers prefer to access their services, according to a recent study from the Economist Intelligence Unit, which surveyed 293 business executives this summer on behalf of Zuora, a company, by way of disclosure, that serves as a backbone to many in the subscription commerce world. Over half of the companies are currently integrating new pricing and delivering models, including subscriptions (40 percent are implementing), but also things like sharing (27 percent) and renting of goods and services (17 percent). This lends promise to the subscription model for e-books. But e-commerce software company has done some very specific research into consumer interest in paying for e-books. And what they’ve found, explains Vice President of Marketing Matt Dion, is that while many were interested in the “Netflix-style model,” other models were appealing as well. Maybe even more appealing. Those include buying each e-book individually (i.e. the way most people shop today) and bulk purchases. And there are people who think a payment option, which includes embedded ads in e-books, would be “very appealing.” In fact, in terms of the most appealing idea, this ranks just below buying books one-by-one. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the market for e-books on demand isn’t there, nor does it mean that consumer opinions won’t change. We know consumers often say one thing, then do another. But there are formidable challenges ahead for these new e-books on demand services, including perhaps a lesser one that can’t be addressed by these charts. Among the most voracious of readers is some overlap with those who have been slow to jump on the subscription-based bandwagon in other categories. They’re the “olds” who don’t stream their music or TV on their iPad or phone. They don’t know about or use Spotify. Or, as one older but active reader who devours multiple e-books monthly explained to me when presented with the idea: “Thanks, but I don’t want to commit to $10 a month. We don’t even do Netflix.” These startups are not for them. They’re not for the penny pinchers. And they’re not introducing a radical change in technology that eventually sells itself out of utility. It’s merely a new, and sometimes prettier, way to shop for e-books, which puts it more in line with a subscription-based e-commerce store instead. That may have appeal for those who care about aesthetics or a specific feature set, but not necessarily to a larger majority of e-book readers – and especially not those without the disposable income to overpay for their titles. And while these companies may be taking inspiration from Netflix and its ilk, they definitely have a tougher road ahead. Too bad. “Netflix for e-books” had such a nice ring to it, huh?
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: We’re All Getting The Nexus 5, So Break Me Off A Piece Of That KitKat
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Darrell Etherington
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Google messed up Daniel Bader’s Nexus 5 order, and that makes him sad. Truly, our guest from and deserves better than having half his hopes dashed by a UPS delivery man live on air. We’ve all ordered like the Android suckers we are, and so we chat and what dreams may come. Other topics up for discussion with Daniel, me and Chris Velazco this week include , Motorola’s next week, and whether or not we’re too attached to our devices (i.e., the eternal metaphysical struggle of the gadget lover). So turn off your phone/ /fonblet for just over half an hour and join us.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . Direct .
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Blockbuster’s Demise; An Elegy To Video Store Culture
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Chris Nesi
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After years of clinging to life, Dish Network has announced on its remaining 300 Blockbuster Video brick-and-mortar locations by early next year, signaling another death knell to the age of home video rental. The once-mighty video juggernaut had more than 9,000 locations at its peak in 2004, a number that over the past decade. I worked for Blockbuster as a teenager in New Jersey in the late ’90s. The job had its ups and downs, and some parts that downright sucked, but it was a generally fun time in my life. With the advent of Redbox, a machine not much larger than an ATM performs a service that in my lifetime once took a building, a payroll, a management hierarchy, and two-dozen employees to deliver. Despite the distinct lack of “experience” involved in sauntering up to a machine and pressing a few buttons to make your selection and pay for it, the store model didn’t stand a chance. While most of us probably haven’t set foot inside a physical video store in a while, those of us of a certain age undoubtedly have a multitude of memories associated with the now almost quaint practice of going out to “rent a video.” When I was a kid, going to the video store was an event. We’d excitedly pile in the car and chatter the whole trip about which movie or game we wanted to rent. As part of the first generation with the technology to re-watch at home a movie we saw in the theater, we took full advantage of this brave new world of home entertainment. My parents grew up in a cinematic era littered with classics; the start of the James Bond film franchise, “The Graduate,” “Planet of the Apes” and countless others. Once they saw them in the theater, the only way to ever see them again was as a movie of the week on one of the handful of television channels available at the time. The roots of the “on-demand” home entertainment world we all now live in started with those robust black rectangles called VHS tapes. Everything about the video store was novel. The different membership cards, how they displayed the boxes and the security mechanisms on the tapes themselves were each unique, seemingly with an endless number of permutations. “Ooh, this place cuts one side of the spine of the display box and puts them in a clear case”; “ooh, this one has the boxes you have to pinch on the sides to release the tape”; “Ohhhh—this place displays their tapes SIDEWAYS?!” were common refrains among my friends and me. Each trip had something a little different. Renting video games was always the biggest deal. I lost count of how many times I mowed the lawn, shoveled the driveway or cleaned the gutters for a crack at renting a game of my choice. Who knows how much deeply discounted labor my parents got out of me in those bargains? On display at the store were always dozens, nay, hundreds of video game boxes. Back in the NES era, about the only way I could get my hands on a new boxed game was at Christmas or birthday time. The standard $50 price tag was too rich for my Pixy Stix-laced blood. So visiting the video store games section was like a trip to Shangri-La. The carefully drawn boxes at eye level, featuring full-color paintings of dragons or knights with swords or race cars. Sure, the actual game graphics never matched up to the box art, but it didn’t matter. I was at the video store, and would be taking one of those puppies home to play with. Except for possibly the toy store, no trips to a place of retail commerce inspired such joy and happiness for me growing up. Every time was an adventure, and mystery lurked behind every corner. Who knows what untold secrets lived in the back of the store behind a creaky pair of swinging old west saloon-style doors under a conspicuously placed “Adults Only!” sign? As the last decade-plus of home entertainment has really emphasized the “home,” most Americans now have access to a virtually bottomless library of movies, TV shows, documentaries and adult entertainment literally at their fingertips. Even as an admitted fairly infrequent purchaser of new gadgets, I personally have six different platforms available to me through which I can rent my little heart out. Six platforms, with no effort on my part to accumulate so many choices. Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful having the world of video-based entertainment accessible without leaving our couches. But what’s lost are the experiential qualities of obtaining and watching it. The concept of video “stores” (even the word “video” only lives on as an anachronistic colloquialism these days) took another step into the yawning chasm of obsolescence today. And with it, a place of cherished childhood memories for any kid who ever peeked through a return slot, or had to step on their tippy-toes to put a returned tape up on the counter.
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With $1.2 Million In Seed Funding, Sprig Launches To Bring Fast, Healthy Meals To SF Eaters For $12 Each
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Ryan Lawler
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It seems like every day there’s a new food delivery service launch, each seeking to connect a large and growing number of hungry customers with high-quality meal choices. While the way each tries to approach the market and handle demand differs, it’s clear that there’s huge interest in revolutionizing the way that food is sourced and delivered. So anyway, here comes , yet another food delivery service with an interesting new approach to the market. With its own executive chef and delivery team, the service officially launched in some select neighborhoods of San Francisco earlier this week, seeking to make available a few interesting meal choices each night for about $12 each. There are a few different ways to approach food delivery. Some companies are positioning themselves to handle delivery and logistics, and work with existing restaurants to improve the order and delivery experience. That includes incumbent food delivery services like Seamless and Grubhub, as well as newer startups like Postmates and Zesty. Meanwhile, others are seeking to produce and deliver the food themselves, which they believe can increase the quality of what’s available, while lowering costs all around. Companies in this group include startups like Y Combinator alum SpoonRocket and Munchery, which works with in-house chefs and “chef partners” to come up with meals for delivery. For the most part, they offer a limited, curated selection which changes daily. Sprig falls into that latter category of food delivery services, giving customers a choice of three different meal choices for delivery. Meals cost $12 each (plus a $3 delivery fee) and generally include one entree selection and a couple of sides. Sprig users make purchases via mobile app, which stores their location and payment information, and food is delivered within about 15 minutes. Ok, so it’s one thing to announce that there’s a new food delivery service, but I wanted to try it out myself so I could let all of you know what to actually expect. So here goes. I ordered all three available meal options on Monday night, which happened to be the first night of Sprig’s “soft opening” in San Francisco. There was one beef dish, one pork dish, and one vegetarian dish, each of which came with a couple of interesting sides. And I shared with a friend, to see what she thought as well. Dishes were as follows: All of the meals were hot when delivered, but not soggy or overcooked, as sometimes happens when you get delivery. Presentation wasn’t bad, considering meals were delivered, and overall the food was better than you might expect from usual delivery options. But there were definitely some highlights to the meal, and some things we weren’t thrilled with. Far and away, the pork tenderloin was our favorite part of the meal, and the apple fennel compote went perfectly with it. The yams and Brussels sprouts were also paired well, and weren’t overdone, as one might expect. We also liked the tri-tip, but the best part of that meal was the spicy collard greens that came with it. My friend thought that, while ok, the amount of black-eyed peas was a little overwhelming — she would have preferred more greens instead. Which brings us to the vegetarian offering, the cabbage dumplings. We were both disappointed in the dumplings, which was a shame, especially since it was the only veg-friendly option. Butternut squash and red beans and rice were also both ok, but nothing to fawn over. Some other notes: All in all, not bad for the opening night of the service. (At 6:00, we placed the first order of the service’s soft opening.) But it could have been improved, and hopefully will be with time. Sprig was co-founded by , who had been on the , and had also worked as an advisor to Lyft during its expansion into the Los Angeles market. (Disclosure: Once upon a time, Biyani was part of the TechCrunch family as a contributor to MobileCrunch.) The startup’s executive chef is Nate Keller, who was previosuly executive chef at Google during its growth from 400 to about 40,000 employees. Other co-founders include , who runs ops; product lead ; and engineering lead . To help get it off the ground, Sprig has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Battery Ventures’ Brian O’Malley, Greylock Partners’ Simon Rothman, Andrew McCollum, Larry Braitman, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Darian Shirazi, MHS Capital, Jim Payne, Dan Martell, Andrew Garvin, and Pascal Levy-Garboua. In addition to its investors, Sprig is also receiving help from some big-name folks in the restaurant and logistics world. Advisors to the startup include three-star Michelin chef Kyle Connaughton, Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer, Google’s first executive chef Charlie Ayers, AF&Co founder Andrew Freeman, and World Wrapps and Pacific Catch restaurant co-founder Aaron Novesheen. The company is operating under what it calls a “soft opening” — which means that it’s available during limited hours (6:00 pm to 9:00 pm) and in just a few neighborhoods in San Francisco. For now, Sprig is serving SOMA and Mission Bay (zip codes 94107, 94103, 94105 and 94158), but plans to be available more broadly throughout the city by early 2014.
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Facebook Like Button, Viewed 22B Times A Day On 7.5M Websites, Gets A Redesign
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Jordan Crook
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Facebook has today updated the design of its Like button for the first time since inception. An image of the new design can be seen below. Websites currently using the like button will be automatically upgraded. , Like buttons appear on over 7.5 million websites and are seen 22 billion times each day. The new design has a Facebook blue background and ditches the “thumbs up” for a simple F with the word “like”. F Like. Flike. The company is also pairing like and share buttons together in a single embed, hoping that websites will opt to use both. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, the share button allows for a comment to be added before sharing, while the like button simply auto-posts to your feed. You can take a look at the brand new Like button below. Let us know if you flike it. [via ]
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YouTube Starts Rolling Out Its New Commenting System Based On Google+
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Frederic Lardinois
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In September, YouTube that it would soon roll out a new commenting system powered by Google+. After testing it on channel discussion tabs for a few weeks, it’s now to all videos on the site. Given the size of YouTube, this roll-out will start this week, but it will take some time before it is fully effective. Until then, you may see both systems on the site, depending on which video you are watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bVGp8Z8Yb28 It’s no secret that YouTube comments aren’t exactly a hotbed for , so the company hopes that this change will increase the quality of comments by putting the emphasis on conversations and not on one-off comments. The idea here, YouTube says, is to ensure that “YouTube comments will become conversations that matter to you.” Instead of organizing comments by chronology, YouTube will now rank them by relevancy, taking into account who wrote a comment, +1s, the number of replies and other signals to surface the best comments. Updates from the video’s creator or comment threads they participate in, as well as updates from people in your Google+ circles, will also rank highly. Users who prefer the old way can still switch from the “Top Comments” view to “Newest First.” Thanks to this Google+ integration, comments can now be public or private. So if you just want to talk about a video with people in your Google+ circles, you can now do that. To comment, YouTube users have to , however. By allowing users to connect their accounts to Google+ pages, they’ll still be able to use the service without using their real names, though for the majority of users, that’s probably an extra step they won’t take. In total, though, four out of five people have already connected their YouTube channels to their Google+ accounts, Google tells me. For video creators, the Google+ commenting system introduces better ways to moderate comments. They can now block certain words, auto-approve comments from certain fans (based on the circles they are in) and still review comments before they are posted.
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Uber Strikes Deal To Lower The Cost Of Car Ownership For Drivers
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Ryan Lawler
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is trying to get new drivers on the road, while also improving the experience for those who are already on its platform. To do that, it’s partnered with a couple of auto manufacturers and a few financing providers to reduce the cost of new car ownership for Uber drivers in six of its fastest-growing markets. Over the past year, Uber has been aggressively expanding into new cities, enabling users to request rides via their mobile phone in more than 50 markets around the world. But the problem Uber faces today isn’t how to raise awareness of the service in new markets — it’s how to keep up with demand in cities that it already serves. According to Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, the number of rides requested by Uber users continues to accelerate, even in markets that it’s served for years. As a result, bookings and revenues have grown faster in 2013 than a year ago, increasing by more than 20 percent month-over-month in each of the last two months. The majority of growth in revenues isn’t necessarily coming from cities that Uber is just entering, as they’re still small compared to more mature markets like San Francisco. Instead, it’s markets which have already hit scale that are driving the largest overall increase in revenues and bookings. In some more established markets, Uber is struggling to keep enough cars on the road to meet the demand — and that’s a problem. It means cars either aren’t available, or if they are, there are longer wait times, and lower overall satisfaction with the service. Uber has tried to deal with this in the past by instituting surge pricing — which both curbs demand and ensures that drivers are more likely to continue driving at peak times. But ultimately, the company knows that the only way to deal with that demand is to sign up more drivers. And one way to do that is by ensuring that they’ll have a car to drive if they’ve been approved for the Uber platform. “We need to get hundreds of thousands of cars on the road,” Kalanick said. That would mean investing more than $2.5 billion into buying cars if it tried to pay for that growth itself. Instead, the company has partnered with a couple of auto manufacturers — like GM and Toyota — and struck a deal with auto financing companies to ensure that qualified drivers will be approved for financing rates that are better than they could get on their own. Basically, it’s lowering the cost of entry for anyone who wants to be an Uber driver. Because the company can predict driver income, it’s been able to lock down better rates for those who have been approved to drive on its platform. According to Kalanick, a fully utilized vehicle on Uber grosses more than $100,000 a year. “That robust, consistent cash flow means significantly less risk for a financing company,” he said. “It means reduced rates for a lot of people, and rates that they couldn’t get before.” Uber drivers who couldn’t get financing before will now be able to buy their own cars. And those who could get financed will receive much better rates than if they tried to buy a car on their own. While terms of the financing will depend on the creditworthiness of each driver, Kalanick said drivers could expect to save anywhere from $100 to $200 on monthly payments, depending on the make and model of the car they’re buying. Who will qualify? At launch, Uber is trialing the program in six cities where it sees particularly high demand. Those markets are New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco. It’ll be available to those who already drive for the company, as well as drivers who might have been approved but don’t currently own their own cars. Historically, Uber has partnered with the operators of black car services to use their cars and drivers. For those partners, the new financing offer will enable them to potentially upgrade their cars or expand their fleets of vehicles. At the same time, the deal will empower more drivers to strike out and start businesses of their own as independent contractors for Uber. It could recruit drivers who might work for a cab company today, but would like to own their own vehicles. It could possibly steal away drivers who work for competing ride-sharing services like Lyft or SideCar. But Kalanick sees the biggest opportunity for bringing on new drivers coming from those who are not already affiliated with other black car, cab, or transportation services. By offering financing on just a select group of cars, Uber believes it will be able to add new drivers while still maintaining a standard level of vehicle quality across its system. Available models could include Cadillac Escalades and XTS Sedans for its more traditional UberSUV or UberBLACK service, and Toyota Prius Hybrids for its low-cost UBERx service. For this trial, Uber hopes to sign up thousands of drivers for the program over the next few months. And if things go well, it plans to open the financing offering up more broadly to drivers in other markets. How big could it get? Kalanick sees the program expanding rapidly over the next 12 to 24 months, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of drivers in that time. And if Uber continues to grow the way that it has, it’s going to need them.
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Learning To Code On The Street
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Contributor
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It’s 7:33 AM. Leo is leaning over his laptop writing some practice lines of code while I sit nearby on leftover sandbags from Hurricane Sandy. It’s cold, but it is a great morning. A little less than three months ago, Leo when he declined my offer of $100 in cash in favor of learning to code. You can catch up on his story with Every morning for an hour before work I meet with Leo to help him learn a software engineering language called JavaScript. As part of his agreement to code, he has a refurbished Samsung Chromebook to work on and to study. While there was significant criticism about the offer at the beginning, thousands have rallied around his story on Facebook in what has become one of the most loving and supportive communities I have ever seen online. What started one morning as a jogger ran by shouting, “Saw your story, go Leo go!” has now turned into daily encouragements, cheers, and even strangers walking up to share their excitement for what Leo is doing. To “learn to code” is not the point. Learning to code is not a destination, it’s not an end result; learning to code is a direction. For Leo the direction is very simple. “We need to care about our planet,” he said as his goal in lesson four. Leo’s idea is to build a carpooling mobile app which counts how much CO2 emission you are saving, calling it, He will be announcing the rest of the details as soon as it’s right (and he figures them out). I use this as the end goal of our lessons covering everything from database architecture to location services. Leo’s direction is not just building programming an app. Leo has the drive to make a difference. Here I thought I was the one helping, but Leo’s goal is to help everyone many times over by spreading awareness to make the planet a better place. From coral reefs to declining forests, Leo has told me his one goal is to bring back public attention back to our planet. While I hope his app is very successful, his focus on the big picture is truly inspiring. Put yourself in Leo’s shoes. He walks four blocks to reach a place to charge his laptop and six blocks to use the restroom (in the opposite direction). He sleeps sitting up and sometimes, if it was a rough night, he is still asleep when I get there to find him draped over his laptop case to keep it safe. He must get food, stay warm, guard his things, and somehow manages to study a very difficult subject for hours with a cheery spirit. Many times during this project, especially in the second week, I would have packed up and left if I were him. In the first week, we had to cover things like copy-and-paste, installing programs, and even basic email. Despite the huge mountain to climb he has stuck to it day-by-day. Each morning when I show up, he is there with a smile, “Top of the morning to ya’ patty my boy!” he often says, knowing I am Irish. Beyond being my friend, these sessions have become the best part of my day. Seth Godin, startup guru, says there is always a “gap” or “dip” before you do something very big. The dip is the lowest point, the point when many give up. Two days before his interview with the Today Show, we hit the first major dip. When I arrived Monday morning for our daily lesson I found his hat on a bench and his cup knocked over with coffee spilled on the pavement. Immediately, I thought something was wrong. After talking to his friend, a traffic guard, and two policemen I discovered Leo for trespassing on a public bench and was on his way to central booking. Despite presenting receipts to the arresting officers at the precinct, Leo’s electronics (cellphone, laptop) were also confiscated. Through incredible support, the Facebook community and many press outlets took his story to the public urging the NYPD to expedite his release with “#FreeLeo” started going up on Twitter. Early Tuesday morning, 24 hours before his interview with the Today Show, Leo was released on what I was told was an incredibly fast processing time — the judge also taking a special case. In spite of being requited, due to a “clerical” error Leo’s laptop and cellphone were filed as investigatory, which means that it can take up to six months to be returned. We were frustrated, but somehow the arrest was motivating, Leo had no laptop, no phone to test the app on. He also got sick, but remained unfazed. We continued studying off of the JavaScript books and he used my computer to continue when we had to have a machine. I was told by the officer in charge of the arrest that a letter to the District Attorney would speed up the return of his laptop and cellphone. And in the meantime, a kind member of the Facebook community provided her Chromebook. In Leo’s words to the Facebook community, he wrote, “’Leo the Lion’ loves you all and it’s all going to be ok.” Of the two of us, he is definitely the more peaceful one. The lessons are exactly what you might assume with two key parts: The first part is to focus on the mind. Due to our time constraint, Leo must retain the enormous amount of new vocabulary and memorizes using a trick from ancient Greek orators called “Memory Palaces.” This method was used by the Greeks to memorize entire speeches, hours in length, by visualizing a different room or object in the room for each part of the speech. For Leo, accessing rooms of JavaScript allows him to learn faster and to retain more. The second is not a process or tool at all. It is the humanization of the process of learning to code. Imagine if you had a personal mentor to walk you through each line of code, someone who believes in you and holds you accountable, I believe this is something critically missing from online education and subsequently the free software engineering courses online. In my mind, I see a social network for mentors and mentees. This is where you can only have one friend (your mentor), where you can layout your ideas together, do video sessions, and set up times to meet. I see it as a safe place, where coders are vetted for commitment, and students are truly eager to learn. This place is just a dream for me but dreams are made alone; it’s reality we have to build together. I am asking for 10 software engineers who would be willing to choose from among the thousands who have emailed about Leo, asking to learn to code themselves. These software engineers would commit two months, one hour a day, to teaching one student how to build an app or a website in the language the engineer is comfortable with. Lessons would be conducted over Google Helpouts, Hangouts, or Skype, with every lesson recorded. Ultimately at the end of the two months, we combine and organize all 10 engineers sessions (400hrs of material) into a massive video database that anyone can explore and learn from for free. Upon reading this, if you feel called to help hundreds by truly helping one, please . Look at your clock. Leo is out there now in NYC typing on a small Chromebook. Winter is arriving and with it we are now racing time and the cold. A member of the community put it best, “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and watch him change the world.” PS: Remember this exact time, day, hour, and second when you got to this point. If you are an engineer and want to teach, we are using that as your “Guardian ID” (Monday Oct. 21, 2013 11:53:21 AM = 10212013115321). It’s a very important time, it’s the moment when you decided to help. Thank you.
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