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Glass Just Got Way More Interesting
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 11
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While it was always fun to get alerts for breaking news, Field Trip notifications about cool stuff around you and use Glass’s built-in navigation tool, the field is now wide open for way more interesting applications. None of these apps, however, run on the device itself. As Google notes, if your app needs real-time user interaction and access to hardware, the new GDK is the way to go, while the older Mirror API will remain available for all other kinds of apps (and developers can , as well). The GDK makes augmented reality apps on Glass a reality, for example. At the GDK launch, for Glass also made its public debut, for example, which is probably the coolest Glass app available right now. Just like Word Lens on your phone, the Glass app can take any text you look at and translate it word by word. It’s not a Google Translate-like machine translation but simply a dictionary-like experience that doesn’t take context into account, but it’s still a really cool way of using Glass and shows the potential of the technology. I’m not much of a golfer and barely ever venture beyond par 3 courses, but , which also launched this week, is probably something most avid golf fans would happily pay for, while runners and cyclist will want to try the new apps for Glass. Until now, Glass was a glorified and expensive smartwatch and was often compared to them. The apps you could run on them really weren’t any more interesting (and in some ways more limited) than what Pebble owners could experience for far less. There won’t be a Word Lens for Pebble, though, and there won’t be any augmented reality games either. But now, don’t seem all that far off and I’m sure the developers at and other augmented reality firms are looking at what they can now do with the Glass platforms. It’s not just about augmented reality, though. Virtually any cool app on your smartphone that uses advanced graphics can now run on Glass (once it’s been optimized for the small screen, of course). If Flipboard wanted to do a Glass app, it could now use its signature animations. Rovio could make a 3D version of Angry Birds where you decide the slingshot’s angle by tilting your head. But given how new the Glass platform still is, there’s room for really basic utility apps, too. Google just released a timer, stopwatch and compass app for Glass, for example. Even those kind of apps weren’t possible before. It’s worth noting that for the time being, Google isn’t letting any of the new apps into its “Glassware” directory and you still need a Glass unit to actually start coding these new apps. Once the GDK officially moved into “developer preview” status, we’ll likely see quite a few more apps in the directory. Over time – and once Glass goes on sale to everybody – Google will surely add options for paid apps and other features as well. The company clearly wants to make sure it has a full set of interesting apps available at that time, though, and the GDK sneak peek is the first step in this direction.
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YouTube, You Need A GIF Creator
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Greg Kumparak
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Love it or hate it (and regardless of how you choose to pronounce it), the GIF probably isn’t going anywhere. Not too long ago, the GIF had become something of a joke around the Internet. No modern-minded web designer would incorporate GIFs into their designs, lest they wanted to become the butt end of a million “ ” jokes. Then came the spread of high-speed Internet, allowing longer, higher quality GIFs to be loaded on the fly. More importantly, then came a massive shift in how content on the Internet is created; suddenly, the stuff the users added to a site or service — the comments, the blog posts, the tweets — became just as important as anything the site itself could provide. Then came the reaction GIFs, the meme GIFs, and GIFs of animals doing adorable things. The GIF spread like a virus across a billion tumblrs — and just like that, a once lampooned format that had been around since the late 80’s was in the middle of a resurgence. You’d still be hardpressed to find a web designer who will tack a GIF into his shiny new site — but the users? They couldn’t care less. In many ways, GIFs are far easier to share than videos. They’re more immediate (in that they don’t generally require user interaction), and generally compatible with more devices. In terms of effort-required vs. emotion-conveyed, GIFs are pretty much your best bang for the buck. And yet, GIFs is still a bit of a pain. At least, it’s harder than it needs to be. There are about a million websites and apps that offer to take, say, a YouTube clip and convert it into a GIF; alas, about 999,999 of those are bad news in one way or another. Some are filled with spyware. Some throw obnoxious watermarks all over everything they spit out. Many just plain don’t work. There are some good ones out there, but they tend to disappear as quickly as they pop up. Still, these third-party sites shouldn’t even That YouTube has yet to fix this, to embrace the GIF as a sharing mechanism, seems a bit crazy. I threw together a quick example of how it could look. In GIF form, of course:
So, what’s in it for YouTube? 1) : “Source?” With any good GIF, it’s the first question people ask. If they made it so that the provided image code links back to the original YouTube video, it’s easy traffic from someone who’s clearly interested in seeing this specific video. 2) : If multiple users all make GIFs of roughly the same part of a video, you know that part of the video is particularly interesting for some reason. Tada! That’s free data that could be used for calculating when to place ads. Make it so, YouTube. I have GIFs to make.
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Done Deal: Apple Confirms It Acquired Israeli 3D Sensor Company PrimeSense
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013
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Well, it’s about time. After months of speculation and persistent rumors, Apple today confirmed that it indeed acquired Israeli 3D sensor company PrimeSense, as first reported by . pegged the transaction as costing Cupertino between $300 and $350 million, but ATD claims the figure was closer to $360 million and anyone hoping Apple will step in with the correct number is a lunatic. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. Sound familiar? It’s the line Apple trots out whenever it acquires another company; see and for more of the same. As always, the road to the truth is a tricky one, and Primesense has spent months dismissing (usually from Israel’s ) that the folks in Cupertino were working to snap it up. Most recently, PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha said that this recent crop of acquisition reports was the product of a “recycled rumor” though retrospect it’s not hard to see why — those rumors were true all along. So that’s another bit of acquisition intrigue under the bridge, but this whole thing raises another weight question: what the hell does Apple want to do with PrimeSense’s tech? It’s really anyone’s guess at this point. Considering PrimeSense’s close work with Microsoft took the Kinect from a wild-eyed concept to a device that’s changing the way people interact with their televisions, it’s not hard to see how the company’s hardware and patent portfolio could give Apple an edge as it (reportedly) tries to crack people’s living rooms. And it should be noted that PrimeSense has gotten to be pretty good at downsizing its sensor arrays. Within the past few months along we’ve seen a more portable version of its Carmine 1.09 sensor fitted into 3D Systems’ curious , and a carefully modified PrimeSense array powers the surprisingly small , which itself is meant to be lashed to an iPad or an iPhone. While there’s no denying that scanners are getting smaller, that potential mobile angle seems a bit more farfetched at this point — the upshot to being able to collect 3D data from a mobile device is still pretty limited especially when you consider the sort of havoc it would wreak on an iPhone’s battery life. No, I’d wager that if Apple does wind up deploying PrimeSense tech in next-gen iDevices, it’ll be an implementation of the company’s gesture-based UI. Rivals like Samsung have already ventured into the space (well, it didn’t venture so much as it dove right in) but no one has really managed to get the experience where it needs to be just yet. If Cupertino’s foray into biometric security in the form of the iPhone 5s’ TouchID fingerprint sensor is any indicator though, Apple is more than happy to let others take a stab at new features first while it continues to polish those concepts behind closed doors.
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Both The PS4 And Xbox One Had Killer Launches, So Chill On The Comparisons
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Alex Wilhelm
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And so forth. Calm down. The only things we can grok from the launch of the two new consoles from Microsoft and Sony is that each company has built and released a new device that has a passionate and large customer base behind it. Sony’s emphasis on gaming appears to be resonating in strong fashion with its audience. And the Xbox One’s pitch to rule your living room from TV to games is apparently suiting another large chunk of the market. The thing to keep in mind with consoles is that sales rates for each competing line are incredibly strong, and durable. Concluding its life as a premier console, for example, the Xbox 360 managed to regain its crown in October as the bestselling console that month. The Playstation had taken top berth the month before. Here’s the [Condensed: TechCrunch]: With the current console generation drawing to a close, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console returned to the top of the U.S. console market in October —reclaiming the No. 1 spot that Microsoft gave up temporarily to Sony’s PlayStation 3 last month after holding the title for 32 straight months. Those sales figures were sharply down from previous rates, which was to be expected moments before the debut of new hardware. Still, that the Xbox 360 -and its kin could move 6 figures monthly 8 years or so after their debut means that we are working at best the early pitches of the first innings of this next generation console war. There is a third player to all of this, but TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino : “Meanwhile, Nintendo has sold just over 3.9M Wii U units so far this year.” Right. Moving on. I don’t have a dog in the console squabble, nor do I care which you choose to buy. But what I do find boring is arguing about who might be winning this early: Each console has proven that they will drive more than a billion dollars in first month revenue, that they have strong ship volume, and will reward early development activity for their platform. Consider all that simple warnings shots. The real war starts now. Let’s see where we are in terms of aggregate sales and spend in 6 months and a year and three years’ time. Until then, we are overly prognosticating a decade’s campaign with its first firefight.
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Eating Its Own Caviar, UK Equity Crowdfunding Platform Seedrs To Crowd-Raise £500K As It Expands To Europe
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Steve O'Hear
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It doesn’t get much more meta than this. , the UK equity-based crowdfunding platform, is listing itself on its site in a bid to crowd-raise £500,000 for international expansion. who put in for a will in total get a 8.81 percent stake. This gives the 2009-founded company a pre-money valuation of £5.175 million. At the same time, Seedrs is announcing that it’s opening up to European investors and startups beyond the UK, giving rise to the claim of being the first “cross-border” equity crowdfunding platform. (Update: A claim that is disputed by .) “National boundaries become artificial when you move online, and the notion that a Brit should only be able to invest in British startups, a German in German startups and an Estonian in Estonian startups seems silly,” says Seedrs co-founder and CEO Jeff Lynn. “Our goal is to open startup investing as widely as we can, and a key part of that is about exposing investors to dealflow wherever it’s located, and giving startups access to capital wherever it’s located”. However, Lynn concedes that equity-based crowdfunding platforms like Seedrs rely heavily on ‘network effects’. The deeper the pool of investors attracted to the platform, the more value that is created for entrepreneurs. Conversely, the more dealflow provided by Seedrs, the more value it creates for investors. “We’re very much a network effects-driven business, and while the costs of expanding to some regions might outweigh the benefits of the expanded network, our starting position is to say that we want to be open to as many people as possible. “In terms of timing, we wanted to do this expansion as soon as we felt we had proven the model well enough in the UK, and gained enough of an international reputation, that we would be well-received as we moved into further countries. We feel we have now achieved that.” , Seedrs has seen 49 deals struck, totalling £2.5 million in funding. From there, it’s not hard to gauge the company’s own revenues. It charges 7.5% in fees for each successful raise on its platform, as well as the same again on any (future) profits made by investors, such as via an exit or dividends. I’m also told this amounts to 80% quarter-on-quarter revenue growth against 6% quarter-on-quarter cost growth, though without breaking out the raw numbers in terms of burn-rate, that’s fairly opaque. So, why then turn to the crowd to fund its international expansion, not least considering the startup is already VC-backed. In early 2012 it raised a £1 million seed round from DFJ Esprit, Digital Prophets (backed by Luke Johnson and managed by the investors behind 1seed) and a number of unnamed angel investors. “We’re raising on our own platform because we think it’s a good commercial and marketing decision,” says Lynn, adding that it would look “strange” for Seedrs to promote democratised investing but then “run off, raise our money from institutions and cut out our customers”. In addition, just like any crowdfunding campaign, Lynn hopes it will create a large base of “mavens” and supporters. “We’d love to see 500 people – or even 1,000 – invest in us, because that would be a massive base of people who would use us, get their friends to use us and bore everyone they talk to about how great we are”. And, of course, Lynn says it’s also a way for Seedrs to eat its own dog food. “I would of course say that we make caviar rather than dog food, but the reality is that we will learn a huge amount by going through this process about what works well in our campaigns and what doesn’t, and we’ll use that experience to improve the platform.” That’s not say that Seedrs won’t look to another VC funding round in the future, but it would have been especially complicated to combine VC funding with crowd funding, says Lynn. (It’s complicated enough since Seedrs will, perhaps controversially, act as nominee over the shares issued for its own crowd-funding. To avoid the conflict of interest it plans to set up a dedicated, independent non-executive committee elected by the investors to vote and take all other actions in connection with the Seedrs shares.) “Later on, who knows? I think there are some wonderful VCs in London and across Europe, but VC isn’t the be-all and end-all of business growth; depending on how our customers and the public respond to this round, we might look to continue to grow with public capital all the way up to a listing.”
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QuizUp’s Mobile Play May Be Anything But A Trivial Pursuit
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch About every three months or so, the early adopter tech crowd fixates on a new mobile app as the hip, new thing. It’s not too similar from fashion, I’d imagine, when certain looks go in and out of style. With mobile apps, however, those that break through the noise of the App Store do usually have something unique and compelling about them — for instance, FrontBack designed a mobile interface which made it to combine pictures from two cameras into one image, or before it, “Dots” from Betaworks used simple, of a 60-second live counter to capture users’ attention. Today, the “hot” app is rom the app’s design, the mobile ecosystem may be able to draw new lessons from its success ( ): QuizUp is a game…check! Yet, it is not just a game in the traditional sense, as QuizUp could transform into a learning platform where users consume information and even get to contribute content that turns into future trivia. Moreover, unlike traditional games, QuizUp won’t likely be under pressure to create entirely new games, like the hits-driven business of most games, but could rather expand its content (akin to Angry Birds) while keeping the experience fresh. This gives Plain Vanilla, the parent who birthed QuizUp, access to real names, avatars, and most coveted — the friend graph data associated with each login. The advantages here are obvious, as QuizUp scores are explicitly shared in various social channels as a vanity share, as well as giving the company the data to create richer user profiles with game data and history, to find new people to play with. In a way, QuizUp feels like the mobile-equivalent of what Zynga provided to Facebook on the web, back in the day — something to do that was fun. In fact, it would seem that Facebook would want to provide a similar type of experience inside its mobile app and web site to keep users around once they’ve skimmed through their notifications and newsfeed. Right off the bat, QuizUp has a packed settings menu, giving users the option to private communicate with other gamers through messages, or by offering digital goods related to the game. Competition for mobile eyeballs is intense, especially in an area as fickle as gaming, so offering users additional options once inside the app may, at scale, help control bounce rates. Plain Vanilla has a larger team and perhaps had the time and resources to pull this off before launch, whereas most startups on a tighter budget may not have had that chance. For millions of people who go to weekly or monthly trivia nights at their local pub, QuizUp brings that functionality — minus the hops, of course — to users’ fingertips multiple times a day in an asynchronous fashion, making the app feel as if it’s a live-multiplayer experience when in fact people are playing at different times. The content of trivia today may be just trivial, but things start to get interesting when you group experts around topics and allow the community to expand the game’s footprint within a known structure. Much in the same way SF-based flash-card site and app Quizlet has on the back of user-generated content, what if QuizUp could benefit from a similar model? Of course, it’s too early to tell, but so far in this game of Trivial Pursuit, the folks have QuizUp seemed to have earned three pieces of pie in their game piece: One, for creating a slick, novel mobile game; two, for cracking distribution early and having a chance to break out; and three for building an infrastructure that could help the content of the game grow in new and exciting ways. Of course, the remaining pieces won’t be earned easily and are the hardest to obtain. The big, overarching trivia question is — will QuizUp be able to keep users engaged and coming back to the app with new games, or will it be stuck on the board with three pie pieces? The answer to this question, no matter the result, will be fascinating to watch.
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Notch Is A Wearable Sensor & App For Tracking And Capturing Body Movements
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Natasha Lomas
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Movement tracking could get a whole lot more granular if the New York-based startup behind this wearable sensor gets its way. , currently being shown off in prototype form on , is a wearable sensor designed to be concealed within clothing at natural hinge points around the body to track and capture specific body movements — sending that data back to a companion (iOS) app for tracking and review. Right now, there’s no shortage of wearable tech aimed at fitness and activity use-cases, whether it’s or or to name a few. Easily enough activity tracker bangles to fill the average-sized forearm. And that’s before you get started on . But fewer Bluetooth sensor-makers are aiming to capture precise body movements — likely because on the surface it seems a smaller, more niche use-case. Something for dancers, athletes and freerunners to get excited about, perhaps. But then again, a wearable sensor — or more accurately a network of sensors if you want to capture a whole concert of body movements using Notch — that can record precise, physical movements and deliver localised feedback to an arm or leg, has potential to be useful in a variety of ways. As a warning system against slouching when sitting, perhaps (a la the ). Or a stress monitor, based on how much nervous gesticulating you’re doing at work. Notch is designed to both capture movement data (either continuously or on demand — recording and pausing can be controlled by tapping on an individual sensor), and to output haptic feedback, via tiny vibration motors, meaning it can be used for motion-triggered notifications. The sensors use inertial measurement units to capture body motion, and Bluetooth Low Energy to send recorded data to the Notch app. For starters, Notch’s own app will offer the ability to set up the individual mobiles, record movements, collect data on those movements, replay the movements as 3D visualisations, and download the data in XYZ format, say its makers. But they are Each Notch sensor is 1.3×1.2×0.31inches (30x33x8mm), and weighs less than 0.35oz (10g). They’re designed to be charged via standard microUSB and will run for 3+ days “normal usage”. The sensors are designed to snap onto clothing via standard male sewing snaps. The startup is also offering some custom clothing — including button-up shirts and casual tees — with built in connector pockets for Notch. Early Kickstarter backers can bag one Notch sensor for $49, with various other pledge levels up for grabs. But if you want the full body capture option it’s considerably more pricey — circa $360 for eight modules, to allow for motion capture of wrists, elbows, head, torso, feet. So that’s clearly going to remain niche. The startup is also seeking a rather sizeable $100,000 to make Notch fly — with sub-$5,000 raised so far, and 43 days of their campaign left to run. If they hit their funding target they’re aiming to ship Notch to backers next June.
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eBay And Amazon On This Year’s Marketplace Holiday Shopping Trends
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Leena Rao
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Each year, e-commerce companies for the holiday shopping season. In years past, it’s been the rise of the iPad/mobile shopper, or the expansion of major spending online beyond just Black Friday or Cyber Monday. This year is not different, with eBay and Amazon weighing in on the big trends for the 2013 holiday season. One thing worth noting is that this year’s holiday season is shorter than years past. This year there are only , compared to 33 days of the season last year. While a few days doesn’t seem like much of a difference, these days can mean millions (or even billions) in sales for retailers. Adobe says that online sales are still expected to grow by 12%, but the shorter season will represent a whopping $1.5 billion in potential online sales from retailers. As Adobe predicts, the shorter season will “mean a more frenetic, distracted shopper — one who will need a highly personalized marketing offer to capture their attention. Retailers will be able to offset those lost days and drive online sales by focusing on special holiday apps, innovative social media campaigns, free express shipping for last minute shoppers, and early promotions well before Black Friday.” With that in mind, the first trend that e-commerce retailers are noticing is around fulfillment and shipping. The transition between e-commerce and fulfillment is becoming more seamless, and shipping is becoming part of the commerce experience, says Steve Yankovich, VP of Innovation and eBay. For eBay, the company has been working on expanding its click-and collect option, and its same-day delivery option, eBay Now, both in the U.S. and eBay also recently , the UK-based marketplace that uses a network of couriers to deliver local goods within a couple of hours. And eBay has eBay Now relationships with a number of well-known retailers, including The Home Depot, Target, Macy’s, GNC, Walgreens, Best Buy, Toys R Us, Office Depot, Urban Outfitters, RadioShack and AutoZone. WHile online shoppers would previously have had to wait a few days for gifts to be shipped, a user can be shopping on a phone in a coffee shop or at work, and either have the gift held at the store, or delivered to their location within the day. A spokesperson for Amazon Marketplace tells us that faster shipping is at the top of Amazon users minds this holiday season. As we heard, Amazon is with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages on Sunday, starting in the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas. Amazon Prime members, who receive unlimited, free two-day shipping on millions of items, can now receive their packages on Sunday in these areas. Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service plan to roll out this service to a large portion of the U.S. population in 2014 including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix. This year, Amazon users can even gift Prime memberships to friends and family, which allows users to access Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 15 million items on the marketplace. Amazon is its same-day delivery programs, and even Wal-Mart is with sam-day delivery. Mobile is still becoming a go-to platform for shopping, and we’re seeing mobile purchasing continue to rise. As Amazon tells, “mobile purchasing is definitely a significant and growing portion of our business. In fact, tens of thousands of new customers make their first ever Amazon purchase via mobile devices every day. Last holiday season alone, Amazon customers purchased more than one toy per second via a mobile device.” While the majority of commerce purchasing, especially around the holidays, still happens in-stores; more people are using phones in the store to either engage with retailers or price-check items. Amazon caught onto this early with its if they use the app to purchase an item in a store while checking a price. As Yankovich explains to us, “There is no question that this holiday season, more people are going to be discovering products in a physical store, and using their mobile phone as a companion.” He says that what’s different from years past, is that more consumers have a reliance on their phones, and eBay is aiming to help engage consumers when they are in-stores. One of the biggest drivers of in-store sales on eBay and other retailers is the company’s scanning app Red Laser. But he adds that Red Laser has evolved into more than a scanning mechanism–you can also search for items, see whether a retailer carries an item in-stock close to you and more. This local information will become even more important this season. eBay an expansion of its connected glass initiative in San Francisco that allows users to shop touch screens on digital storefronts in a local mall for specific retailers. Users can make purchases of items via the glass, pay with PayPal or a credit card on their phone, and have the items shipped to them. Yankovich says that eBay wants to provide the same frictionless consumer experience for physical retail that on-demand transportation app Uber has been able to give riders. Deals and promotions have been a ubiquitous experience every holiday season but this year, Amazon is likely to be pushing more deals via its marketplace, perhaps as a way to make up for some of the lost days for sellers. This season, Amazon started allowing third-party sellers on offer holiday deals that will be featured on the Amazon holiday deal pages. Part of this is helping these sellers drive more traffic during the season, so Amazon will be promoting these third-party seller deals on the marketplace’s high-traffic spots like the Today’s Deals page, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal pages, and category holiday pages. Amazon is also earlier this year. With the shorter season, eBay will be using promotions and deals in the context of the omnichannel experience, says Yankovich. eBay is seeing the consumer transition between screens (computer, iPad, mobile) depending on the time of day, and he says that providing these deals and promotions across all screens (vs.offering mobile only deals) is going to be key. comScore is double-digit growth in both desktop e-commerce and m-commerce spending, so we’ll see if eBay and Amazon return in January with strong, and potentially record-breaking numbers. Photo credit/
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Primo Is An Arduino Robot That Teaches Kids Programming Logic Through Play
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Natasha Lomas
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Dan Shapiro’s showed there is serious appetite for kids’ games that aren’t just fun to play with but also sneakily teach core coding principles. Instead of the $25,000 he was aiming for, Shapiro raised more than $630,000. Geeky moms and dads clearly have money, and will spend it on the right bit of educational kit. With that kind of Kickstarter community response, it’s pretty likely we’re set to see a wave of educational toys doing cool fun stuff with programming principles. To wit, meet : a physical programming interface that teaches children programming logic while they control the movements of an Arduino-powered robot. All of Primo’s electronics are concealed inside wooden boxes, so from the child’s point of view they’re playing with blocks, a board and a cute little robot. But as they snap the coloured pieces (instruction blocks) into the board (the physical programming interface) they are building up a set of instructions that the wheeled bot will execute when they push the big red button. So they get to see their program come to life as the bot moves around the room and navigates around household objects. The instruction blocks comprise four different coloured pieces: forward, to move the bot forward; left; right; and the green circular function block. The function block adds a little more complexity to the basic instruction set as it calls the last line of blocks on the board every time it’s called. Aka it’s a sub-routine. The function element, used in conjunction with the setting of longer physical paths for the robot to complete, then requires kids to use logical thinking to build up longer sequences of instructions to complete the challenge. And that’s the subtle learning it’s hoping to achieve. It’s certainly a lot more basic than the — but the idea is to offer coding ‘baby steps’, for four-to-seven-year-olds, not throw kids in at the deep end. “Skills are mastered gradually. Mountains are climbed one step at a time. Think of Primo as the very first step in a child’s programming education. Primo provides the very basic ABC of programming logic,” Primo’s U.K.-based (Italian) creators note on their Kickstarter page. They’re aiming to raise £35,000 to get the kit to market. The full, assembled kit costs £160 to early Kickstarter backers — or £135 for a DIY version that you can self-assemble at home. They’ve already managed to raise more than £5,500 since the campaign kicked off on Friday, with 27 days left to run. If it hits its funding target, they’re aiming to ship to backers next August.
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Sheet Music App Tonara Adds Interactive Score Synchronization To Help Musicians And Stage Techs
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Catherine Shu
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, the interactive sheet music app, has announced a new score synchronization feature for its iPad app. One of Tonara’s biggest updates, score synchronization currently allows musicians to review their practice sessions and, in the future, will power stage management functions such as automatic lighting or supertitle changes at concert venues and opera houses. Tonara’s technology combines audio signal analysis with proprietary algorithms to enable computers to understand notes in live or recorded music. This means that Tonara’s app can now follow any number of notes played simultaneously on any number of different instruments, track the user’s current position in the score even if he or she changes tempo or makes a mistake, and turn the page at the right moment. It can also match any note in a score with the corresponding note in a session recorded on the Tonara app, so musicians don’t have to rewind or fast-forward through audio playback in order to find passages they need to listen to or practice. Tonara is currently positioning the score sychronization feature as a practice tool, but the Ramat Gan, Israel-based startup is also working on partnerships that will use its tech to power things like smart karaoke systems or stage management tools that will enable lights, projected images or subtitles to automatically change based on specific notes or passages in a score. One of , Tonara has raised a total of $4.75 million so far, including . Investors include Carmel Ventures, Index Ventures, Lool Ventures, Eilon Tirosh and Rami Lipman. Tonara has built up its library of sheet music by partnering with major print music publishers like Hal Leonard, which manages about 200,000 publications and products including music from popular artists signed to Universal, Sony and EMI. The app serves as a “digital music binder” for musicians by letting them download free scores and purchase sheet music for songs from hit artists, or import scores from email, Web or cloud storage services such as Dropbox. In addition to its score-syncing and page-turning features, Tonara also helps musicians hone their skills with an annotation feature that lets them create layers of notes for different teachers or practice sessions.
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Amazon’s Next Kindle Paperwhite To Feature 300ppi Screen, Better Typography, Arrive Early Next Year
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Matthew Panzarino
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Amazon is now preparing a new Kindle Paperwhite for release in early Q2 of next year, TechCrunch has learned. The marquee feature of the new device is a high-resolution 300 ppi screen that will bring the company’s e-reader displays back into technical parity with devices from competitors like Kobo. In addition to a higher resolution screen, the new Paperwhite will be getting a few more hardware improvements. We’ve seen a prototype of the device which has a front screen that is flush with the edges of the device, rather than recessed, and is made out of very matte glass of some sort, not plastic. Despite moving to glass, the new units are said to be lighter than this year’s models. The current Amazon Kindle Paperwhite features a 212 ppi screen that compares poorly to the Kobo Aura HD. E Ink, the company which manufactures the Pearl E Ink screens for both Amazon and Kobo devices, delivered a high resolution 265 ppi screen to Kobo first. Amazon, we hear, was a bit irritated when Kobo shipped the Aura HD earlier this year with a much higher resolution screen than its upcoming Paperwhite would feature. The new 300 ppi Paperwhite, code-named Ice Wine, will leapfrog Kobo’s limited edition device and place a high-resolution screen on Amazon’s marquee e-reader. We hear that there are no major software improvements planned for this edition, but that it will be upscaled to take advantage of the new resolution. However, those of you who are heavy Kindle users will be very pleased to know that Amazon is working on new typography for the device with a custom-built font that’s great for reading. Typography has long been one of the Kindle’s big failing points. Though several fonts were added in its last release, they were not received overly well for the most part. A new custom font specially designed for reading on the device will be a major improvement. We also hear Amazon is working on allowing books to be presented with hyphenation, eliminating the awkward right hand margins, but it’s not clear if that will be in the new software or not. The edges of the device will also now be ‘buttons’ of a sort. According to what we’ve heard, instead of old-fashioned ’split’ buttons found on previous Kindles, these will be ’squeezable’ buttons that give off haptic feedback when activated. Theoretically, this should allow you to change pages without having to awkwardly reach over with your thumb to tap the ‘next page’ zone on the Paperwhite’s screen. And making the buttons squeezable keeps the sleek lines of the Paperwhite’s margins. The rear casing of the new Paperwhite will follow on with the industrial design of the current Kindle Fire HDX tablets, with a more angular shape and chamfer to the edges. Similar in look to the images of the HDX above. It will also feature a rear power button that looks similar to the new Kindle Fire tablets. Rounding out the features of the next Kindle Paperwhite is an ambient light sensor that will take readings of the light in the room and adjust the screen brightness to compensate. On the prototype that we saw the light sensor was faintly visible behind the black bezel in the upper corner of the unit. The system gradually adjusts light in timing with the way an average person’s retina expands or contracts in order to prevent jarring transitions. We’re still several months away from when this new Kindle would debut, so there may be alterations to its design or functionality between now and then, but these are the items currently on the agenda. Amazon is also we’ve detailed previously. Both a budget model and a crazy-sounding high-end device with six cameras in total are being developed. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.
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Fully-Automated Ad Management Startup Multichannel Raises $3M In Seed Funding
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Catherine Shu
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wants to help marketers fully automate their online advertising so they can focus on developing campaigns instead of staring at software dashboards all day. Based in Hong Kong and the U.S., Multichannel has raised $3 million in seed funding from investors including founder Dmitry Fedotov, the Hong Kong Government, angel investor Kevin Ng and a venture capital firm that wants to remain undisclosed. The company will use its new capital to speed up the development of its automated marketing platform, which it describes as “Rocket Fuel on steroids.” Multichannel’s cloud-based software uses algorithms to manage online advertising campaigns across different channels and search engines like Google, Yahoo or Baidu. To use Multichannel’s platform, companies first add each of their advertising channels to the dashboard. The software looks at data from the company’s past and present advertising campaigns to give recommendations on which regions to place ads. Its bid management system automatically manages rates for different keywords and guards against “click fraud,” which unscrupulous advertising channels use to artificially inflate rates. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB1XrrVCBI8&w=640&h=360] Multichannel says the advantages of its platform over other ad management products include lower costs for companies, less administrative tasks and potential “unlimited scalability” into advertising channels across the world regardless of language, currency or local regulations (target users include companies seeking to advertise in China).
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The Battle For The Connected Home Is Heating Up
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Contributor
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Almost 15 years ago, a friend of mine at McKinsey spent a few nights writing a document called “The Battle for the Home”. The thesis at the time was that with broadband, the home PC was gradually going to challenge the TV as the core home digital system. Over the following few years, that battle gradually grew more complex, as the home saw the adoption of a new generation of HDTV sets, game consoles, set-top boxes and DVR options. But fundamentally, the discussion was about who was going to control the home entertainment system. Now, the battle has expanded to the rest of the home. With the emergence of connected devices, the entire home is being reinvented as a data product, opening great opportunities to entrepreneurs. A whole new generation of startups is rushing in. Nest, with its beautifully-designed home products, has become the poster child for this phenomenon, but many others are producing exciting new connected devices and platforms, at an outstanding pace. The irony of this market, not always acknowledged, is that a number of large companies with big brands and existing “pipes” in our homes, have been unusually innovative. From connected locks to mobile-controlled home automation platforms, large companies such as GE, Comcast or Philips have been offering connected home products for a while now, sometimes at the risk of cannibalizing their own analog products. As a result, the new wave of connected home startups finds itself in the fairly unusual position of having to not only execute and build consumer brands, but also out innovate dynamic incumbents. The home is once again at the crossroads of a major battle between startups, cable companies, telcos, industrial conglomerates, and large technology companies. As VC money is starting to pour into the space (SmartThings, August and Arrayent all announced significant rounds just in the last two weeks, as did Quirky, as part of an increased focus on the Internet of Things), a new battle for the home is heating up between startups, cable companies, telcos, industrial conglomerates, and large technology companies. There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the emergence of new connected home startups. For reasons I discussed in an earlier , there’s been an explosion of activity in the space, initially financed by crowdfunding and now increasingly by institutional money – SmartThings and August, for example, both just announced large Series A rounds. Each category is seeing rapid innovation: thermostats (Nest), locks (August, Lockitron), security (Canary, Doorbot), lights (LIFX), home automation (SmartThings, Zonoff, Ninja Blocks, Ube, Berg, Twine, Xively, etc.), garden products (Bitponics, Click & Grow), bathroom appliances (Withings), nursery products (Sproutling, in which I’m an investor), and many others. This is a big opportunity. Beyond the fact that it’s already a significant market ($13 billion, say some estimates), connected home entrepreneurs have an opportunity to create, quite literally, new household brands. The emergence of connected devices is one of those disruptive waves that define entire new product categories. Consumption habits change and reform around a handful of brands that become leaders in the space. Some wonder why smart and ambitious entrepreneurs are scrambling to build products in those seemingly mundane home categories; in fact, those entrepreneurs are attracted like heat-seeking missiles by the opportunity to build category-defining brands. At the current pace, this window of opportunity may not last more than a couple of years, and successful first movers will have a strong brand advantage. Clearly, the adoption of those connected home products is still largely the province of hobbyists and tech enthusiasts. Interestingly however, large retailers seem to be excited about distributing those products to their mainstream audiences. Many entrepreneurs I speak with report engaging with some of the biggest players, such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, Staples, Apple stores and AT&T. While this is not a recipe for long-term success, there’s an element of self-fulfilling prophecy here, where the combination of entrepreneurial energy, investor money and retailer interest could lead to rapid growth for the connected home startups. However, for all the enthusiasm on crowdfunding platforms and in the press, this is already a crowded space. Many of the existing players are large companies that come equipped with deep distribution networks and a whole ecosystem of service providers that make a living installing and maintaining their products. First, there are all the incumbents, both in home and energy automation (Crestron, Lutron, Control4, etc) and home security (ADT, Protection 1, Vivint, etc.). Not the most exciting brands? Perhaps. Second, many large industrial companies have already launched their own connected home products – think, for example, Yale’s Z-Wave deadbolt or the Philips Hue, a smartphone-controlled LED bulb. There are many other examples. Third, the cable providers and telcos increasingly view home automation as a strategic priority. Comcast (Xfinity), Time Warner Cable, Cox, AT&T and Verizon (FiOS) all have solutions for anything from thermostat and light control to security, accessible through mobile apps. Last but not least, the large technology companies Apple and Google are already de facto active in the space, as the mobile phone has become the remote control for the connected home. They may want to go deeper. Google’s “Android @Home” effort seems to have faltered so far, but Chromecast is intriguing. Apple is rumored to be interested in the space at the highest level of the organization, and actively meeting with startups. It has been suggested that they should acquire Nest to enter the space and re-acquire the Apple-bred talent there. Microsoft (Kinect), Samsung and HTC all have existing or emerging efforts. So what’s a startup to do? For those ambitious startups that are gunning for a central position in the connected home, the question is what strategy gets you there faster One key choice is whether to go “product first” (build a consumer product, like Nest) or “platform first” (build a platform that connects all products, like Revolv). The former involves more hardware, but arguably offers a better chance of gaining rapid sales traction if the product delivers. It is also less of an immediate challenge to most of the large companies in the space. The path to control of the home involves releasing multiple products that connect to one another (which Nest is starting to do with its Protect smoke alarm), and eventually become a platform. The “Platform First” strategy is more of a software play, and its core value proposition is home automation. It offers strong long term defensibility if you get there, but the journey is fraught with difficulties. First, as Lowe’s has learned with Iris and Schlage with Nexia, it is difficult to get consumers to buy and install a “hub”. In addition, among the early adopters that are likely to do so, a non-trivial portion are Arduino and Raspberry Pi aficionados that prefer to hack their own system. For mainstream adoption, one avenue for platform players could be to work with home developers and gradually get their systems included in new construction, obviously a long process. Second, the Platform strategy places startups in direct competition with Comcast, Verizon FiOS and many other large companies that are also vying to become the hub for the automated home, and already have millions of customers. The bet here for “Platform First” players is that, by promoting openness and interoperability in a way that is harder for large companies to do, they can build a strong network of developers that write to the platform – perhaps starting with hobbyists and the smaller “Product first” companies that need help competing with the “Product first” leaders – the benefit for the customer being that they will be able to connect all their best-of-breed point solutions. Another key choice, particularly for “Platform First” players, is whether to go consumer (develop your own brand) or enterprise (be an enabling technology for other brands). Some solid companies have chosen the latter, such as iControl Networks (which powers Comcast’s Xfinity and others) or Zonoff (which powers Staples Connect). Others like SmartThings have been building a recognizable brand in the space, which some large companies could perceive as a threat. My sense is that eventually most startups will need to work with the large companies in some capacity to be successful, so perhaps the question is what strategy puts you in the best negotiating position for a partnership (or an acquisition). Beyond positioning, connected home startups will need to combine several characteristics to build long term value and defensibility. Here is my list of seven. This new battle for the home is just getting started. It will have many twists and turns, and I’m very excited to see how it all unfolds.
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Big Insurance Can Now Bypass Obamacare Website, Tech Companies Still Waiting
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Gregory Ferenstein
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As the federal government struggles to regain hope that it can get enough consumers to buy health insurance, it is for consumers to purchase insurance outside of state websites. Consumers in three states, Florida, Texas, and Ohio, will be able to enroll in new plans entirely through insurance company websites. Unfortunately, tech companies such as eHealth and startups like Fuseinsurance have been busy building more sophisticated Orbitz-like shopping experiences, and are still waiting for their opportunity. For the new healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, to follow through with its promise of cheap insurance, it needs to sign up an army of young invincibles. The still malfunctioning federal website, healthcare.gov, , when parents will be able to guilt their children into both giving them grandchildren and getting insurance. With luck, private insurance companies will be able to leverage their vast marketing powers to snag even more new consumers. Hence, the Department of Health And Human Services is expediting fixes to the healthcare.gov’s data hub so that insurance companies in these states can sign up people directly (and take a slice of the profit, of course). Part of the problem with insurance “direct enrollment” is that most of them don’t give the of informing consumers about other options. On Blue Cross’s website, you’ll only see their plans, even if others are better. Tech companies and startups are building platforms to compare all available plans, but, for unknown reasons, the federal government decided to make . It’s not clear why startups are being treated like second-class citizens, being forced to wait in idle while other corporations are given access. In two states, California and New York, they’ve been completely shut out of the e-commerce process for around two years. Still, it’s important to note that this new workaround depends on the federal website being functional. According to sources familiar with healthcare.gov, and the Annual Medical Report’s general counselor, Joel Winston, both insurers and tech companies are forbidden from directly accessing healthcare.gov’s database. In order to determine eligibility for discounts, they’d need access to IRS income data, but that’s not legal to give out. So, the pilot to come up with an alternative to healthcare.gov may work, but if it does, consumers won’t necessarily have access to the best options. [ ]
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Mike Butcher
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CrunchWeek: The Xbox One & Playstation 4, The Rise Of QuizUp, The Fall Of Turntable.fm
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Colleen Taylor
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In this week’s show, Ryan Lawler, Greg Kumparak and I discuss the brand new and gaming consoles that are on the market just in time for the holiday shopping season (and whether or not they’d recommend that you buy one right away), the seemingly quick rise of , the iPhone app that lets you challenge your friends to trivia competitions, and the announcement that its once-popular music streaming app. The rise of QuizUp and the fall of Turntable is just the latest proof that the consumer app market is trend-driven in a lot of ways — so just , an app that is in one day can be out the next. Watch us discuss that and more in the video above.
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Gillmor Gang: Dreamforce 2013 Live
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Adam Bosworth, John Taschek, John Rymer, and Steve Gillmor — gathered at Dreamforce 2013 to celebrate what @scobleizer called the maturing of mobile. On the Salesforce Live TV set, it was hard to hear each other over the bustle and roar of the show floor. But not so hard to miss the excitement as Salesforce rolled out the Salesforce1 platform. The Gang — a collection of Salesforce employees (Taschek and Gillmor), analyst (Forrester’s Rymer), industry veteran who led the boot-up of XML and Web Services (Bosworth), and Rackspace’s Chief Scobleizer Officer — spent a too-short 24 minutes marveling at the speed with which mobile is transforming the tech industry and our lives. Normally, I don’t talk much about what we’re doing at Salesforce, but now that it’s shipping it’s game on. @stevegillmor, @adambosworth, @scobleizer, @johnrymer, @jtaschek The Gillmor Gang is produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Down, The App Formerly Known As Bang With Friends, Relaunches On The iPhone
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Anthony Ha
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Following a trademark dispute with Zynga, the team behind the hookup app Bang With Friends , adjusted their approach, and . Now those changes have come to iOS as well, with an update that was quietly released earlier this week. I never tried Bang With Friends (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it), but in addition to a revamped user interface, it sounds like the new Down app differs in two big ways. First, it’s no longer just focused on, well, banging. Instead, users are asked to distinguish between people they want to date and those they just want to hook up with — they swipe up to “get date”, swipe down to “get down”, and swipe left to skip. (People are only notified of your response if they say they’re interested too.) In addition, Down has expanded its potential matches, so it doesn’t just show you Facebook friends but also friends of friends. That doesn’t just expand the pool, but may also make the “get down” dynamic feel a little less awkward. (I felt pretty mortified when I opened the app for the first time and was immediately asked about my interest in various Facebook friends.) Plus, you can now search through friends and friends of friends by name. Founder Colin Hodge told me via email that many of the changes came “directly from our female users.” For example, here’s how he explained he expansion to friends of friends (for readability, I’ve tweaked some of the spacing and capitalization): One of the things women told us they loved in the first version is that it feels safer than other dating apps because you already know the other person is real and you’re connected to them (you are friends on Facebook). We took this to heart when thinking about the best way to expand everyone’s dating pool. Now many users have thousands of potential dates or hookups because we expanded it to people your friends know. By looking at who your Facebook friends are connected to, we can show you real people who likely have lots in common with you – and at a minimum, you run in the same circles. The company says that the new version on Android has already encouraged repeat usage of the app, with more than 300 percent growth in two-day retention and 200 percent growth in one-day retention. You can .
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Daric, A New Peer To Peer Lending Platform, Will Go Live Next Week
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Billy Gallagher
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, a new peer to peer lending platform, will launch next week as a place for individuals and small businesses to obtain loans, and a place for lenders to see up to 9-10% returns on their investments. Individuals will be able to apply for a loan up to $35,000 and small businesses can apply for a loan up to $50,000 on Daric. According to , the company will offer up to $10 million on the platform, which will compete with Lending Club and other peer to peer lending services. The company was co-founded by , , and . Dawson notes that Daric hopes to differentiate itself with a great user experience, as other financial services companies haven’t focused on design much. He explains that users don’t have to upload any documents to Daric, and can make an account, apply, and (if approved) receive a loan in just a few hours, instead of weeks. Ramachandran tells me the company wants to focus on the positives of a person’s accounts: the income, cash flows, and the ability to pay back a loan, instead of looking at traditional frameworks like credit lines, delinquencies, and credit scores. Daric raised an angel round of funding in January 2012 from Goldcrest Investments; Dick Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo; Jennifer Johnson, COO of Franklin Templeton Investments; and others. Ryan, whose father was an early employee at Goldman Sachs, says his “fundamentally different approach is that this is a technology
play.” He believes Daric can leverage big data and be much more efficient and cost effective than a traditional bank by using
computer algorithms. Daric will go live on Wednesday, November 27, barring any unforeseen regulatory issues.
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Couric Get Would Mean Yet Another Chase Of The Online Video Carrot For Yahoo
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Darrell Etherington
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Yahoo is reportedly going to make its Katie Couric-hosted talk show announcement on Monday, according to a new report from , supported by an earlier article from the . Swisher is known for having an inside track on Yahoo information, and previously reported that a . This would mark the second high-profile news media talent get for Yahoo, after it picked up longtime NYT tech columnist David Pogue in October. Until now, Yahoo under CEO Marissa Mayer has seemed primarily focused on product, with a sweeping revamp of the Internet pioneer’s mobile apps and web-based properties, but content and a push for video content in particular seems to be the new priority for Mayer, alongside ongoing product building efforts. As for Couric, she’s currently hosting Katie on ABC, after establishing her success as an anchor personality on NBC’s Today Show. Couric’s show is set for another season, but recent reports suggest she’s , if ratings don’t improve. There’s a lot of competition to be the broadcast giant of online web video right now, with efforts ongoing at Yahoo competitor AOL (disclaimer: AOL owns TechCrunch) to build on its AOL On live video platform. Recently, AOL started experimenting with original programming via its AOL On Originals series, which to some extent puts it in competition with Netflix and Amazon, too. AOL Originals include a million dollar content deal with Heidi Klum that featured her dressing up as an old lady once and pretty much nothing else noteworthy, and Nicole Ritchie reminding us why she should never have been famous to begin with. Great gets AOL. Just hanging out at the pseudo celebrity unemployment center pays off, I guess. The web series is not a new thing, but major content portals getting into producing them in-house is a relatively recent strategy. It’s attractive because video presents tremendous opportunity for advertising that static web pages and digital display ads just can’t match, in terms of reach and the ability to capture audience focus. If you’re a content player on the web currently, you have to be looking at video, and it’s especially attractive because it’s a problem no one has really come up with a great solution for just yet. AOL Live, for instance, has as its chief as the company recently departed, and the debut of its first series was put on hold. HuffPost Live, the other big AOL-owned live video property, recently had a broadcast cross-publishing deal put on hold, and the this year resulted in layoffs as operations were redirected to New York. People have been chasing the online video carrot for years now, but Yahoo looks to be tying its hopes to attracting big name broadcast talent for original programming. It’s an interesting bid that could become even more interesting paired with Yahoo’s renewed focus on mobile, but I’m still skeptical it will do much to really move the needle on original online programming. Still, it’s a start and Yahoo doesn’t seem to be slowing down the pace on product and content news.
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NSA Has 50,000 ‘Digital Sleeper Agents’ Via Computer Malware, Says Latest Snowden Leak
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Darrell Etherington
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Sleeper agents are among the most sinister spy assets: they lie in wait, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and then deliver a critical blow when activated. The NSA has 50,000 of those waiting for the literal push of a button, according to the latest batch of leaked Snowden documents, as seen by . But these aren’t people, like Keri Russel and Matthew Rhys in The Americans – these are computers, infected with malware and untroubled by conscience or the risk of going native. The NSA reportedly infected 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software with the sole aim of harvesting sensitive information it wasn’t privy to, which is basically what you’d call textbook spy work in the digital age, from an agency tasked with spying. That’s not to excuse or dismiss the significance of this revelation, but we’ve heard from the that the NSA was working on this sort of thing and that at least 20,000 computers had been infected by the program as of 2008. So to hear from Snowden documents via the NRC that it’s now climbed to 50,000 is hardly surprising. New details brought to light indicate that operations from its so-called “Computer Networks Exploitation” program are active around the world, and can remain active for many years without being detected in some parts of the world like Venezuela and Brazil. All the malware can we watched and controlled remotely, and turned on and off “with a single push of a button.” A also asserts that the NSA has been pushing to stretch its surveillance powers even further, with the aim of catching up to the spread and reach of digital technology and online communications. The truly amazing thing about this is just how pedestrian the NSA’s efforts are – according to NRC, they’re essentially running the same kind of phishing scams with false email requests that you’ll see from any other purveyor of malicious software. As an example, NRC points to how the British GCHQ used false LinkedIn pages to lure and infect Belgacom network employees. Just one more good reason to never click on anything sent from anyone ever. The ongoing NSA debacle is like a Breugel painting, with more and more detail emerging every time you look at it anew. Yahoo and Google’s networks were apparently compromised in a similar fashion, r, and with up to 200,000 documents in total potentially taken by Snowden and shared with reporters, it’s unlikely we’re anywhere near seeing the whole picture at this point. The NSA declined to comment on this story or the original report.
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Patent Application For Touch ID Shows How Apple Secures Fingerprint Information On iPhone 5s
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Darrell Etherington
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A new patent application published by the USPTO (via ) shows some more detail around Apple’s use of Touch ID and the fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5s. Apple has been mostly quiet about the specifics of how the tech works, while generally asserting that the fingerprint information never goes to a server, and only remains on the phone itself in a “secure enclave” which isn’t accessible by the rest of the system or third-party devs. The patent describes a system that not only siloes data on the Touch ID “enclave” section of the A7 processor, but that also encrypts the fingerprint maps registered on the device to make it that much more difficult for any thieves to even attempt to pull the data off in any kind of usable form. The enclave is a one-way street, too: the system can check new fingerprints against the stored ones, but there’s no way to check or call up the stored fingerprints at all for external examination once they’re registered. Otherwise, the system works likely as you’d expect it to, checking against stored profiles for possible matches (and using stored lower resolution templates based on variables like different angles to make it more likely to correctly ID your finger). But another patent also published this week shows a breakdown of all the components within the Touch ID hardware, and explains how the actual sensor hardware can be hidden behind an opaque lens that’s been printed with an “ink assembly.” It’s likely this needs to be uniform to read correctly, however, as Apple notably left off its small rounded square icon on the 5s home button, after that has graced each since the iPhone’s initial introduction. These patents provide a little more clarity on what exactly is going on when you rest your finger or thumb on that 5s home screen and have it magically unlock, and it’s reassuring to see just how much thought Apple has put into making sure the info truly is secure.
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Let’s Kill The Aid Industry
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Jon Evans
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Long have I nursed a healthy contempt for the aid industry. As I spent much of a decade , taking local public transit through poor and/or unstable nations , I kept encountering aid workers in their flashy white branded 4x4s, and was almost invariably resoundingly unimpressed. As I’ve written : Most development aid is actively harmful. Selling goods for less than production cost is dumping, a business practice condemned as predatory; aid is just dumping with the price set to zero. The horror stories are legion. Donated clothes decimate local textile industries. Shells of buildings, silted dams, and unfinished “pilot projects” dot the African landscape. Young white people flock to expensive hotels for useless “conferences” that amount to paid exotic vacations. Peace Corps yahoos are flown out at great cost to teach Western hairdressing […] But aid’s worst consequence is the continuation, and amplification, of the attitude that change must always come from outside. My friend Gavin Chait calls it “the recolonization of Africa through aid.” To be clear, I’m criticizing the spent on aid, not aid, which is critically important and saves many lives; furthermore, many medical crises, such as HIV and malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, are essentially ongoing slow-motion disasters. These folks:
( yours truly, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2007) are absolutely on the side of the angels. I believe we in the rich West have both a moral obligation and a practical incentive to help the world’s desperately poor. (After all, you can’t trade with someone who’s broke.) I’m to criticize the development-aid industry, and observe that, even more than most industries, it is a hive of waste and bureaucracy, largely devoted to its own self-perpetuation. I accept that some individual aid projects are beneficial, and a few in the industry have of late been trying to innovate; in particular, moving towards simply , in a few specific cases. That’s a start. But it’s time to move faster towards finishing the job: to wit, eliminating aid as we know it, in favor of simply sending money directly to the poor and letting them spend it as they will. It’s both a moral imperative and the most efficient possible use of aid money. Again, I’m the to this . But what I don’t see others noting is that we’re rapidly approaching the time when technology finally makes this possible on a massive scale. Run the numbers. An people live on less than US$2/day. If we simply sent the today’s aid money to them directly, a family of six would receive an extra $300/year — a huge amount, relative to their baseline of extreme poverty. So why we? If both direct transfers and aid-as-we-know-it are viable options, then the latter essentially consists of taking money away from those who need it the most and giving it to the unelected aid industry instead, to spend on their alleged behalf. How can that possibly be justified? The only answers boil down to patronizing neo-colonialism: “those weak/ignorant/stupid poor people don’t know how to spend money, so we have to spend it for them.” It’s a distressingly popular argument. Fortunately, recent evidence — including, in particular, an ( ) — strongly indicates that this is not the case: Transfers allow poor households to build assets … Transfers reduce hunger … Transfers do not increase spending on alcohol and tobacco … Transfers increase investment in and revenue from livestock and small businesses … Transfers increase psychological well-being of recipients and their families … We find suggestive evidence that cash transfers reduce domestic violence and increase female empowerment in both recipient households and other households in the same village. I think even most aid workers would agree, if pressed, that cash transfers to the people who (by definition) need money above all else are vastly preferable to haphazard aid projects, which may or may not help, and/or supporting corrupt governments / bureaucratic multilateral institutions. But can we actually make that happen? Sure, it may work in a carefully designed study in a single small village in Kenya, but the question is — as it is so often these days — Actually it’s scaling, on a national level. Brazil’s is a much-lauded direct-cash-transfer program which reaches an estimated 46 million. Earlier this year India launched a direct-transfer program tied to its biometric identification scheme; hundreds of millions have already been registered. If these two famously fractious nations can implement direct cash transfers, then why can’t that extend to international aid? In many places the tools are already in place. All you’d really need, technically, is a mobile banking network — Kenya’s is the most famous and most successful example, but there are a — combined with an international payment processor like or (soon enough, I expect) . I suppose you’d want to add biometric identification if you were worried about widespread fraud, eg with something like a one-time registration at an M-Pesa booth. But for the most part, all we really need to do is follow mobile phones as they metastasize around the world into the hands of even the poorest people, and extend the reach of mobile banking in nations where it’s not yet as widespread as M-Pesa is in Kenya. Let me address a few possible objections: ; the technological mantra of our age. I for one am in favor of it eating that white elephant called the aid industry, as soon as possible — — and while we’re at it, let’s take a real, hard, serious look at implementing an scheme in the West, too. Efficiency — and moral obligation — may not begin at home…but let’s hope it returns here eventually. Wikimedia. I have ridden battered taxis, creaking colonial-era trains, overcrowded minibuses, and pickup trucks laden with livestock through Albania, Colombia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Mali, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Tibet, and Zimbabwe, to name a few nations in no particular order.
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The AUUG iPhone Grip And App Turns Your Body Into A Musical Instrument
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Catherine Shu
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Anything that encourages people to stop hunching over their iPhones like a tech-literate Mr. Burns is a good thing–especially when it also looks cool and makes fun noises. The , a grip that attaches to your iPhone or iPod touch and creates sound by tracking your movements through its app, was designed for electronic musicians, but I can see other people using it, like dancers, artists or music teachers looking for an engaging way to teach kids music scales. It recently launched on Kickstarter and is scheduled to start shipping in April if it reaches its fundraising goal. The AUUG platform, which consists of an aluminum grip with an elastic strap, app and cloud-based platform, can wirelessly control software on a PC or non-wireless music hardware with a MIDI cable. It was developed at product engineering studio by a team led by neuroscientist Joshua Young, who wanted to release electronic musicians from their laptops and give them a more expressive way of creating sounds and connecting with audiences. The AUUG app doesn’t product its own sounds, but instead gives users a wide array of options by converting motion data from their iPhones or iPod Touches into signals that are then transferred to other sound apps or external devices. Its performance screen has 8 buttons that line-up with the AUUG grip’s overlay and let musicians play diatonic scales like C Major. Once the AUUG launches, users will be able to connect at to share app presets or setup ideas in an online forum. [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1892750571/the-motion-synth-turn-movement-into-music width=640] More information and to see samples made by electronic musicians with AUUG, check out its or .
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Zulily Closes First Day As A Public Company At $37.70 A Share, Marking A Win For Flash Sales
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Eliza Brooke
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Closing the day at $37.70 a share, Zulily is proving to be a success among flash and daily deals sites. Its first-day performance could give other companies confidence in the possibility of going public, despite doubts in the long-term potential of the model. As we noted , Gilt Groupe could have an IPO on the horizon. Originally priced at $22, Zulily shares hit a high of $41.32 and a low of $36.36 before 12:30 Eastern before stabilizing at about $37 for the remainder of the day. Among daily deals sites, Zulily was well positioned for the long haul for a few reasons, analysts from Euromonitor said. Zulily’s founders were unavailable for comment this afternoon — i.e. popping bottles of Veuve Clicquot, probably. Kidding. They were traveling back to Seattle. As compared to other deals sites Living Social and Groupon that tend to surface a lot of spa or restaurant deals, Zulily is practical and time efficient. Growing children require a series of necessary expenses, along with non-essential but desirable purchases, like toys. There are only so many massages that you can squeeze in. Mothers also tend to be short on time and don’t always have the opportunity to go out shopping, so an online retailer that brings everything they need for their children into one online environment is a big time save. And they’re doing this on the go: According to the company’s S-1 filing, 42 percent of Zulily’s sales came from mobile in the second quarter of 2013. That’s up from 39 percent in the first quarter and 31 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. In the 12 months that ended on June 30, Zulily had 2.2 million active customers generating $214 in revenue each, with 82.9 percent of all U.S. orders coming from repeat customers. As Euromonitor analysts Virginia Lee and David McGoldrick told us, the Zulily founders’ experience at Blue Nile, which went public in 2005, should not be overlooked. Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens were CEO/founder and CTO at Blue Nile, respectively, before launching Zulily. “They knew what they were getting into in terms of what it takes to scale up a business. One of the things they said about Blue Nile — and the idea carries over to Zulily — is the fact that consumers want branded items but at discount prices. But they don’t want to feel like they’re shopping at a discount,” McGoldrick said. Branding Blue Nile as a quality jewelry line convinced customers to buy engagement rings online and for a relatively low price — an impressive achievement at the time, given how weighty a purchase it is. Zulily certainly showcases its deals more than Blue Nile, but the idea is still the same. People love nabbing a deal, but they’re also investing in a brand every time they hit “Buy.” Online native brands like Warby Parker and Everlane that effectively sell at a discounted price by cutting out wholesale-to-retail markup would say that consumers come to them for the brand, not the discount. In bundling clothing for women with children’s items, Zulily does a few things. It gives mothers a chance to think of themselves while they’re shopping for their kids — thus increasing basket sizes in the moment — and also prolongs their consumer lifetime. Even after a kid has graduated from the Zulily age bracket, a mother might continue to visit the site for herself. We’ll be looking to see what moves Zulily makes post-IPO, be that staffing up or building out new features. Flash sales: 1, Haters: 0. At least for today.
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Right-Of-Publicity Claims And Their Impact On The Gaming Industry
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Contributor
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On November 8, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken partially ruled in favor of a class of former Division I college athletes in finding that their antitrust claim for an injunction against the NCAA could proceed as a class action. The players seek an injunction that, if granted, would limit the NCAA’s ability to license the players’ names, images and likenesses in various for-profit endeavors, including licensing to video-game makers. This ruling is the latest development in a long-running dispute that originally began between the former players and both the NCAA, Electronic Arts, and a licensing entity. In late September of this year, EA exited the dispute via with the former players that has . The settlement followed decisions by two federal that suggested that EA faced legal exposure from the use of the former players’ likenesses in the game. Obviously, these cases will have significant impacts on the NCAA and EA. But the broader issue, and one that has significant implications for game developers beyond EA, is the uncertainty behind how courts will resolve right-of-publicity claims. Right-of-publicity disputes involving video game makers have popped up regularly over the years, affecting games that render realistic settings or even games that involve fantastical settings but import characters developed using real-world inspirations in their game. This is an issue that affects large developers that have the budget to render lavish and realistic seeming worlds and even indies that now have the tools to render realistic games. Right-of-publicity issues may also impact developers that use purely hand-drawn fantasy worlds that include characters that draw inspiration from real-world personalities. In addition, developers of MMO and similar games that involve significant use of user-generated content will face continued uncertainty and legal risk from real-world individuals that assert that user-generated avatars violate their rights of publicity. EA was sued in the NCAA litigation due to its alleged unauthorized use of player likenesses in the series. The former players alleged that the EA’s use of their likenesses was unauthorized, since the NCAA’s licensing practice allegedly violated antitrust law, and therefore was a violation of their “right to publicity.” Specifically, EA was sued by former players in and who claimed that ’s use of the players’ biographies, stats, and playing characteristics violated the players’ rights of publicity. EA’s core defense before it settled was that its video game’s use of player likenesses was protected because it was a “transformative use” of the likeness, and therefore protected First Amendment speech. The transformative use test was created by a court in California and has since been followed by the Third Circuit (covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other mid-Atlantic states) and Ninth Circuit (covering the west coast and other western states) as a way to balance individual personage rights against the right of others to create new expression. EA’s transformative-use argument was ultimately rejected by appellate courts because: There were significant dissents in both the Third and Ninth Circuit cases. The dissenting judges believed that the realism in the series showed heightened creativity, since gamers were buying the game for the realistic playing experience provided by game developers. and to set uniform rules regarding the scope of right-of-publicity liability. The EA publicity cases have firmed up the basic rules of the road for right-of-publicity claims in the Third and Ninth Circuits: The more true the use of a celebrity is in a game to the actual context that the celebrity is known for and the more central the celebrity likeness is to the game, the greater the legal risk. However, these guidelines are not absolute. The “transformative use” test adopted by the Third and Ninth Circuit is a multifactor test and is very fact-specific. Thus, the EA case does not provide clear guidance for non-football video games involving realistic settings. Further, as the NCAA has noted, other judicial circuits use different tests to resolve right-of-publicity challenges. Additionally, this will not be the end of video-game right-of-publicity litigation. Video games are a fertile ground for such litigation. Just two years ago, in the case, the band No Doubt prevailed on a right-of-publicity claim against Activision from the And seven years ago a court rejected musician Kierin Kirby’s (of Deee-Lite fame, which produced the hit 80s song “Groove is in the Heart”) right-of-publicity claim that , though the game character and setting in the game at issue was far more fantastical than the environment. We can expect that right-of-publicity cases will continue to pop up as gaming technology permits more and more realistic renderings of characters and environments. In fact, a recent flare-up occurred in the Sony/Quantic Dream production of , in which a 3D nude rendered version of the Ellen Page game character was . Though the 3D-rendered character is a computer recreation of Ms. Page (rather than a digitized photo of her), one can expect that right-of-publicity legal issues will be at play in any fallout that may occur. This controversy shows that video game makers will continue to face uncertainty as the legal rules regarding right to publicity claims sort themselves out and as developers push the envelope in rendering realistic game settings. reportedly has a $27 million budget, but that does not mean this is a large developer problem. Even indie developers , and thus need to take care as to the creative choices they make regarding in-game characters. Moreover, developers that are not rendering real-world 3D environments still need to take care of right publicity issues, as these issues may arise in fantasy environments that include characters bearing real-life likenesses (such as in the case). Thus, right-of-publicity issues will remain on the front burner: Video games will undoubtedly get much more realistic and immersive, as game developers take advantage of the processing available on the Xbox One and PS 4 platforms set to hit the shelves this month. Another area of legal risk comes up in the context of user-generated content, for example, through the use of realistic avatars in Massive Multiplayer Online games. Again, new technology has made it increasingly easy to project anyone’s detailed likeness into the digital world. For example, Microsoft has announced that the upcoming uses a new Kinect sensor to perform a detailed scan of a person’s face and body, allowing anyone to create a highly realistic three-dimensional digital avatar. It may not be long before gamers are recreating photorealistic celebrity likenesses and controlling avatars bearing these likenesses in realistic game environments. The Ninth Circuit EA case found that a customization tool did not shield a developer from liability when the developer rendered a real-world likeness. A different court may find a developer liable where it knows that users are using sophisticated character customization tools to do the same. Thus, this scenario could possibly lead to a right-of-publicity lawsuit against the player and/or game company under current law. The outcome is murky, to say the least, as courts have yet to apply the transformative use test in an MMO setting or to user-generated content. These games may contain the ingredients for the next wave of right-of-publicity cases.
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Gift Guide: For The Tech-Happy Fashionista
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Eliza Brooke
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The holidays truly are the most magical time of the year. The twinkly lights, the spiked eggnog… the designer collaborations on your favorite tech products. It warms the heart. For those who are shopping for the style-savvy technophiles in their lives — or those who just want to shop for themselves, no judgment — here’s a look at a few products that fit the bill. There are a lot of rad laptop and iPad cases out there. Very few are a collaboration between an established handbag designer and Apple, though. , Apple approached Vivier two years ago with the idea for a laptop case partnership, and the results are truly good. They’re available three sizes (11″, 13″, and 15″) in a black basketweave, cobalt, and a cement grey — those last two made a bit more festive with pops of bright red. If you’re one of those who likes a full suite of Apple products, think of this as a fashiony extension of that same aesthetic. They’re available in select Apple stores in NYC (SoHo, Upper West Side, 5th Ave), Palo Alto (Stanford, Palo Alto), Santa Clara (Valley Fair), San Francisco, Los Angeles (Third Street Promonade), Chicago (North Michigan Ave), Toronto (Eaton Center), and Boston (Boylston). They just hit retail stores a few days ago, so fly, my turtledoves! Fly! Also in the Apple Store (what? They have good taste): Rebecca Minkoff teamed up with the headphone maker Frends on a new collection of changeable headphone caps called “FRENDS With Benefits,” and they make sweet, sweet shiny aquamarine hologram embossed leather music together. You heard us right. Frends headphones were already ridiculously pretty — see their and “ ” versions — and these take that to the next level. Black or gold headphones plus the Rebecca Minkoff caps come in at $249 and are available on Nordstrom.com, Apple.com, or select Nordstrom stores. Anyway, the is pretty sweet, regardless of its new fashion cred. And, handily, purse-sized. A gift from , the that allows women to create their own custom clothing and accessories, could go one of two ways. If your beloved (friend, flame, or otherwise) is the DIY sort, a gift card would let her play fashion designer and create her own looks. If you’re feeling brave, go ahead and make something just for her, be that a cocktail dress ($278), a blinged out sweatshirt ($68), or a 3D printed belt ($38-$98).
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Interview Confirms Ballmer Wasn’t Fired, But His Exit Was Accelerated
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was not forced out of his role at the company, but its board did hasten his exit, according to a in the Wall Street Journal, whose sources include Ballmer himself, as well as a number of his lieutenants. Ballmer’s exit was not a firing over the painful related to the Surface tablet line that was recorded earlier this year. That’s a polite way of saying that Microsoft grossly overestimated demand for its new devices and lost a bundle in the process. The Journal reports that in January, Ballmer’s plan to rebuild Microsoft was put under pressure by the company’s board. They wanted faster motion. The CEO is quoted as saying that he had not wanted to shake up the company until after Windows 8 shipped. That jives with the stated timeline: Windows 8 shipped in Q4 2012; in Q1 2013, the board turned up the heat. His personal turning point came on a London street. Winding down from a run one morning during a May trip, he had a few minutes to stroll, some rare spare time for recent months. For the first time, he began thinking Microsoft might change faster without him. “At the end of the day, we need to break a pattern,” he says. “Face it: I’m a pattern.” […] The re-org . Ballmer and the company publicly announced that the CEO would depart . The era of Ballmer was coming to a close. In the end, the board was key in accelerating Ballmer’s departure, but he was not, it appears, fired due to any single issue. When Ballmer did announce that he was leaving Microsoft, there was a good deal of something close to schadenfreude in the media and technology worlds. It was an interesting time. Ballmer was an imperfect CEO, but his final years will be considered his legacy, and I think that the changes he made to the company that he viscerally loves . He initiated a new business model, began to reform key product lines to protect revenue streams and meet market requirements, turned the company into a respectable, if still flawed, hardware company, and retooled its executive layout to prevent it from shredding itself through internecine warfare as it has for so long. Yes, there was Vista, Zune, Kin and a host of other flops under his tenure. But the Microsoft of today is the it being, and that’s not a bad note for Ballmer to leave on.
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Coursera Adds Another $20M To Its Already Massive Series B
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Catherine Shu
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Back in July, Coursera . Now the round has grown to an even more impressive $63 million with the addition of funding from three undisclosed university partners. The education startup that the delay was due to the new investors’ longer due diligence process. The round also includes additional funding from existing investors GSV Capital and Learn Capital. Coursera has now raised a total of $85 million to fuel its ambitious mission of offering Ivy League-caliber education online for free. The startup competes with other MOOCs (massive open online courses) companies like Udacity and EdX. Udacity recently meant to compete with a much more expensive online master’s program in data science from UC Berkeley and 2U, while , which will allow teachers and businesses to create their own digital courses. In addition to its VC funding, Coursera’s competitive advantages include its sheer size (it currently has 5.5 million students signed up for classes from 100 institutions) and , which lets students pay for verified certificates so they can prove that they have completed one of Coursera’s online classes. A verified certificate obviously does not have the same cachet as a university degree, but Coursera’s agreement with the American Council on Education (ACE) to evaluate a subset of courses to see if students can use them to qualify for credits toward a degree is an important step as the company seeks to radically redefine higher education.
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Just.me’s Assets Are For Sale, And Founder Keith Teare Wants To Buy Them
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Anthony Ha
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The assets of mobile messaging startup are for sale. Yet when founder Keith Teare called me to discuss the news, he argued that it’s not a failure. “I feel like Just.me is not successful, but it is not a failure,” Teare said. “I don’t feel defeated — I feel like we’re in the middle of a process.” In fact, Teare said that Just.me has attracted 458,000 unique users on iOS, Android, and the web since , making it the biggest startup to emerge from his incubator Archimedes Labs, as well as “the best startup I’ve ever done.” (Teare’s includes founding or co-founding the EasyNet Group and RealNames Corporation, as well as TechCrunch.) Despite all that, Teare said there are two big issues that are causing the sale. First, he said that Just.me’s initial funding included $1.5 million in debt from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. The debt, combined with the fact that having hundreds of thousands of users, means Just.me is still “pre-traction measured by the meaning of the word ‘traction’ in the current mobile landscape,” made it impossible for the company to raise more money. As a result, it has now run out of cash and can’t pay its debts or cover its costs. Hence the sale. Teare said Just.me is selling off its assets in five “buckets” — a non-exclusive license to the source code, the product and the infrastructure, for an advertising system that connects brands and consumers via direct messages, the Just.me domain, and the company’s physical assets. They’re being sold separately, Teare said, in the hopes of maximizing the money raised. Unless that amount exceeds $1.3 million, it will all go to Hercules. And here’s one more twist: Teare told me, “I fully intend to be the winning bidder for everything.” In other words, he’s hoping to raise money for a new company unencumbered by the debt, which would then buy the assets and continue running the Just.me service without interruption. But in the meantime, he needs to hold a real sale to show that he’s not just giving himself a sweetheart deal, and also in case he doesn’t succeed in raising that money. Just.me’s situation is unusual because of the debt raised early on (Teare said that the money seemed necessary at the time, but he added, “Would I advise early-stage companies against taking debt? One hundred percent yes.”). Nonetheless, he argued the situation speaks to a broader trend of startups struggling to raise money after their initial funding. The idea of a “Series A Crunch” (or a Series B, depending on what kind of round you raised first) isn’t new, and indeed it’s something that . “I escaped London in 1997 because it was hard to raise capital,” Teare said. “It’s like Silicon Valley has become Europeanized. Now you’ve got to bootstrap very effectively or you’ve got to get huge growth.” And that’s a problem if you have a big idea: “It’s very hard to cheaply build anything significant in a multi-platform, mobile world.” You can .
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Lyft Tests Its Own Version Of Surge Pricing In LA, Passing All ‘Prime Time Tips’ To Drivers
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Ryan Lawler
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After a year and a half of keeping a flat fare on all its rides, on-demand transportation startup is set to begin a test of dynamic pricing based on demand. It’s testing out the new pricing model, which it calls “Prime Time Tips,” in Los Angeles beginning today, as a way to make more drivers available during peak demand. Lyft historically has shied away from demand-based pricing, partly as a way to differentiate itself from competitor Uber. But as its popularity has increased, the company also faces periods in which demand outstrips supply. While the company says that it has made many backend improvements to increase ride availability, Lyft is hoping that providing higher tips during periods of high demand will encourage more drivers to take passengers. With that in mind, the Prime Time Tips will be automatically triggered when rides outnumber drivers. Passengers will be alerted with a notification screen, Uber, before they choose to request a ride at the higher fare. That said, Lyft’s initial test of Prime Time Tips varies a little bit from the way Uber currently does it. For one thing, Lyft is capping increases at 25 percent, compared to the 2x or more that Uber’s surge prices can hit. Another way that Lyft is trying to differentiate — it says that 100 percent of any price increase during high demand will be passed on directly to drivers, with Lyft taking only its usual base fare. That contrasts from Uber in that the latter company has a fixed commission split which remains the same in periods of surge and non-surge pricing. Lyft believes that by structuring its pricing that way, it can still incentivize drivers to keep picking up passengers, while providing a fair price to passengers. For now, Lyft is testing the pricing scheme in Los Angeles, which is one of its oldest markets. Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer said that one of the reasons it’s testing Prime Time Tips there is it can be too hard to find a ride there during peak demand. It’s unclear if that test will extend to its other 17 markets, but in the meantime, Lyft probably wants to see what the reaction is like in L.A. and what effect it might have in curbing demand and increasing supply there. Earlier today, competitor SideCar sent an email to passengers saying that it would move from donations to a flat fare structure in California, where the Public Utilities Commission has given its approval for new ride-sharing services. That means its passengers will be able to know how much a ride will cost once they’ve entered in their starting point and destination. Zimmer told me this afternoon that Lyft, too, would be moving away from donations to a fare structure in California. Stay tuned!
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Gillmor Gang Live 11.15.13. (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/gillmorgang
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Microsoft Releases ‘3D Builder,’ A 3D Printing App For Windows 8.1
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Alex Wilhelm
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Out today from Microsoft is a called 3D Builder that will help the amateur set dig into 3D printing, provided that they 1) have a Windows 8.1 machine, and 2) have a Windows 8.1-ready 3D printer. So, it’s a small group. But that’s just fine. Every technology has an incubation phase apart from the mainstream, and 3D printing is only now enjoying public awareness, let alone mass adoption. Windows 8.1 was designed to support 3D printing in an almost gimmick that’s cool instead of moonshotty, due to the falling price of consumer-grade 3D printers, such as what MakerBot produces. MakerBot will support Windows 8.1 this year, if you didn’t know. The application is designed to help you design. It has a catalog of built-in pieces, and you can add your own to zazz things a touch. From the looks of it, if you recall the creature stage of Spore, it should be somewhat similar. I didn’t get to road test the app as I don’t have a 3D printer (AOL? Hey?), but reviews will tell the tale over the next few days. Microsoft was late to the Internet and missed the smartphone train, but it appears hell-bent on being early in 3D printing. If the technology advances far enough as the price falls quickly enough, this could be a winning move for Microsoft in the next five years. For now, you can probably only make little lumpen dinosaurs for your kid if you have all the hardware. From humble beginnings.
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Postmates Launches In Brooklyn And Adds David Sacks, Dave Morin, And Bill Lee As Investors
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Ryan Lawler
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is expanding its service in the New York City area, crossing the bridge and making its mobile delivery service available in Brooklyn, as well as Manhattan. The expansion also comes as the company has added a trio of new investors, bringing angels David Sacks, Dave Morin, and Bill Lee on board. But first, the expansion: Postmates is kicking off its Brooklyn coverage with more than 200 restaurants that have been added to its app, allowing customers in the borough to order from nearby restaurants for the first time. To support the new borough, Postmates has added a whole new fleet of couriers to make pickups and deliveries there. Postmates has seen pretty dramatic growth in Manhattan. It’s growing at about 60 percent , which is three times faster than in San Francisco. And New York City as a market is already profitable for the company. So it makes sense that Postmates would begin supporting the nearby borough as its next expansion market. According to CEO and co-founder Bastian Lehmann, there are many things that are interesting about Brooklyn. For one thing, it’s home to more than 2.5 million people, which makes it the company’s second-largest market after Manhattan. And there’s been a huge amount of pent-up demand there — Lehmann says that since launching in New York City, the app has been opened by someone in Brooklyn 60 percent of the time, even though there was no coverage there. Brooklyn customers will pay the same prices as those in Manhattan for deliveries, starting at $5 for ultra-local delivery and skewing up based on distance within the borough. But for those who are feeling ultra-adventurous or have a craving for something from Manhattan, Postmates will also make deliveries across boroughs for a delivery fee of $20. The expansion comes as Postmates has added a few new names to its investor ranks. The company already had a , including Founders Fund, SoftTech VC, Matrix Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Expansion Venture Capital, along with angels such as Scott Banister, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Paige Craig, and Jawed Karim. But it’s recently added Yammer founder David Sacks, Path founder Dave Morin, and Remarq founder Bill Lee as investors. Sacks comes with a lot of experience in the on-demand space, as he’s also an investor in Uber and Lyft, while Morin and Lee also have done a pretty good job of picking winners as angel investors. Lehmann said that the team had hoped to get those three as investors earlier, but it finally worked out as the company added a little bit of additional capital. “If someone like David Sacks offers his help, you don’t turn him down,” he said. For Postmates, the new investors will help to advise as it scales up and continues expansion into even more markets going forward.
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Nokia’s Tablet Gambit Will Drive Mobile Market Share For Microsoft If The Margins Hold Up
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Alex Wilhelm
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Nokia’s Lumia 2520 tablet will set you back $500 if you want to buy it flat out. AT&T is more than . Pick it up with a wireless contract, and AT&T will knock $100 off that sticker. But pick up a Lumia 925, 1020, or 1520 at the same time, and the price of the Lumia 2520 drops to $200. That’s an incredible decline in cost. I confirmed with AT&T that the phone itself would be subsidized, but subject “to a second agreement,” or contract, so the deal only works if you are ready to pony up for two devices and requisite plans. So, for the sum of $300 ($100 for the Lumia 925, $200 for the Lumia 2520), you can buy into the larger Windows ecosystem of Windows 8.x and Windows Phone. Why would Nokia do this? You can’t really view Nokia’s hardware choices as independent anymore, but for kicks, the reasons would be simple: Device volume is key to the health of the Windows (et al form factors) platform. This means that Nokia does more than help its short-term revenue when it moves devices, it sets up its future by supporting the platform that it needs to stand upon. But Nokia’s hardware division is now all but part of Microsoft’s hardware business, making the above all the more muddled in the best possible way. Let’s do this in pieces: So that’s fun, but the real issue here is that Microsoft (Nokia) has compiled a hardware package that it can presumably vend not at a loss that brings consumers onto its platforms (platform, depending on how precise you want to be), in twos instead of ones. This is only a good for Microsoft if the Lumia 2520 is worth a damn. Early prognostications appear to be in its favor, though I can’t see why I’d prefer one to a Surface 2. But that doesn’t matter; Microsoft merely wants more RT devices sold, period. And that’s why the later points I think don’t matter to Microsoft: In the Game of Platforms, you either win or you become BlackBerry. So to Microsoft, shaving Surface revenue in the short-term to bolster the somewhat tenuous Windows RT piece of the Windows empire probably makes sense. Stepping back, moving units is Microsoft’s current problem, which is of course part of the same app problem that we endlessly discuss. The two are directly entertained. And Windows is bigger than Surface, meaning that it takes precedence. Can Nokia (Microsoft) keep the deal up and not end up in a cold bath whilst ripping up hundred-dollar bills? (Margin pressure is a bitch). I don’t know, but I bet that Microsoft does. We’ll see if it keeps the gambit alive once the deal closes.
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Twitter Ditches Redesign Involving Swipeable Streams, Reverts Alpha & Beta Testers To Old, Four-Button Interface
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Sarah Perez
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Twitter’s tests involving a new mobile interface that would do away with the app’s standard four buttons in favor of a “swipeable” menu at the top, have come to a halt. Previously, users on Android’s beta testing program were using an unreleased version of the application that , including Home, Notifications, Messages, Activity, Trending, Find People and Me, for example. The changes beta users could see, this September, were a hint of what was to come in what would soon be a radical overhaul of the Twitter user interface. Said the report at the time: Twitter will dispense with its hallmark menu—four buttons at the bottom of the screen—which lets users toggle between different sections of the service: Home, Connect, Discover, and Me. Instead, users will swipe from stream to stream to stream. The streams themselves will be both airier and more immersive, consuming more of the screen; they will show more content and less interface. (A new version of its Android app which offers a taste of the new look.) The design had a brighter, almost iOS 7-like feel, hinting that what Android beta testers were seeing could potentially become the new public build that would be pushed across both Android and iOS platforms, as the company attempted to better unify its product versions across devices. But in an update to both the alpha and beta builds this week, Twitter rolled back these changes, reverting testers to the older user interface where four black buttons (Timeline, @ Replies, Discover, and Me) have again returned. They are at the top of the screen in these builds, not the bottom as on iOS. However, resetting both test builds, alpha and beta, to the older, four-button user interface may imply Twitter has some retooling to do when it comes to the release of its forthcoming redesign. We have been that Twitter is pulling back on the aggressiveness of the changes, but then again, alpha and beta builds are still only test builds, so you can’t read too much into any of this. rich media-filled Twitter Cards, , interaction buttons on the mobile timeline, pre-expanded images, and more, not all of which have been met with favorable reviews. Below, are screenshots of what the alpha (top) and beta apps (below) looked like before and after this week’s switch.
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Anonymous Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond Gets Maximum 10-Year Prison Sentence
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Anonymous hacktivist, Jeremy Hammond, who from security firm Stratfor, has been of 10 years. Hammond claimed the harsh ruling was a “vengeful, spiteful act” designed to send a message. In 2012, millions of emails were given to Wikileaks from Strategic Forecasting. They a number of secret relationships between heads of government, for-profit military contractors, and intelligence agencies. They also alleged discrete foreign policy strategies, including the Czech Republic’s for F-16 fighter jets to defend against Russia and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s about President Barack Obama (note: the link to the F-16 story auto-plays an audible video feed). The ruling has ignited calls for reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which governs the sentences for hacking crimes. Back in January, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren a reform known as “Aaron’s Law,” named after the famed hacker Aaron Swartz who had killed himself in response to aggressive prosecution of hacktivist crimes. The 27-year-old Hammond claims that he was the victim of FBI entrapment, baited indirectly through a fellow hacker named Sabu, with officials after his own criminal charges. “It is kind of funny that here they are sentencing me for hacking Stratfor, but at the same time as I was doing that an FBI informant was suggesting to me foreign targets to hit. So you have to wonder how much they really care about protecting the security of websites,” Hammond told . There have been several calls to reform the CFAA, but with Congress unable to solve healthcare and immigration issues, it’ll likely have to wait.
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Zulily Shares Pop 82% Above IPO Price
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Eliza Brooke
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A week after Twitter’s IPO and two days after education company Chegg on the NYSE, , the daily deals site targeted at mothers, opened on the NASDAQ this morning under the symbol ZU. Things are going well since the company priced 11.5 million shares at $22 each late last night, as shares to a high of $41.32 this morning and presently stand at $38.20. The company in early October with the goal of raising $100 million in its IPO. In December 2012, Zulily was valued at $1 billion, and between 2011 and 2012 sales grew from $132.4 to $331.2 million. It’s a success story among flash sales sites, which have faltered and bred a degree of distrust from VCs in recent years. But it may not be the only one to go public. As Bloomberg reported earlier this summer, there’s the of a future IPO for Gilt Groupe, one of the biggest names in flash sales. Although Gilt’s growth had slowed as it took on too many areas, resulting in layoffs and cut divisions, CEO Michelle Peluso told Bloomberg that the company still sees flash sales as its core. Zulily is profitable — although as others will point out, just barely so — and raised a total of $369M from investors like Maveron, Trinity Ventures, August Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, and most recently Andreessen Horowitz. This isn’t the Zulily founders’ first time at the IPO rodeo: that was Blue Nile, the online jewelry retailer, back in 2004.
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Tablet Publishing Startup Onswipe Names Jonty Kelt As CEO, Founder Jason Baptiste Becomes CMO
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Anthony Ha
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There’s a new CEO at — , who was most recently CEO of e-commerce startup Group Commerce. Until this week, that’s the role Jason Baptiste held at Onswipe (which he co-founded in 2010), and it sounds like he’ll continue to be the face of the company. He’s becoming Onswipe’s first chief marketing officer, so while Kelt runs the business, Baptiste’s job will involve evangelizing for the platform, which allows publishers to optimize their websites for tablets and other touch devices, and to run similarly optimized ads. Put another way: His goal is “to make the world love Onswipe.” Baptiste (he’s the one on the left in the photo above, and Kelt is on the right) assured me that the move was very much his idea, rather than something that was forced on him by investors. In fact, he described himself as “relieved” about the change, arguing that his strengths are in “communications, design, marketing,” areas that he barely had time to focus on as CEO. Plus, the company needed someone who can take the business to “the next level,” especially since it started making money from ads in February. “We want somebody who can just grow it,” Baptiste said. “He gets to make the final call as CEO.” Kelt, meanwhile, had been taking some time off after Group Commerce . He’s got experience on the ad side, having served as vice president at Google-acquired ad-tech company DoubleClick. And he already had a connection to Onswipe through its investor Spark Capital, which also backed Group Commerce. Kelt acknowledged that it’s “always kind of a sensitive moment when the founder either is forced out or recognizes that they need some help — in this case, it was very much the latter.” But apparently when Baptiste approached him about taking the job and outlined how he saw the two of them working together, “It all just made sense.” As for where the company goes from here, Kelt said, “The vision and the direction that they’re taking is 100 percent the right one. It’s about scaling that in all respects.” Onswipe recently . The company says it currently reaches 25 million unique monthly visitors on iOS, and it plans to launch the new version of its platform on November 20.
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Tradecraft Launches A School For Teaching Non-Technical Skills To Tech Workers
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Ryan Lawler
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For many companies in Silicon Valley, it’s fairly easy to find, train, and evaluate technical talent — for the most part, it’s easy to determine and quantify how well a person codes. But evaluating and training non-technical personnel is something many struggle with. To help change this, a new school called has emerged to help teach those seeking UX, growth, and sales positions the skills they need to succeed in the tech world. Tradecraft was founded by and , who believe it (or something like it) is necessary to teach necessary skills to non-technical tech workers. The school was founded on the idea that Silicon Valley has done pretty well with training and setting expectations for technical personnel — that is, those who code or work with code. But it hasn’t done very well with non-technical talent, and they want to fix that. Behind the school is a deeper philosophical belief that startups and tech companies in general could de-risk their organizations if their non-technical workers were better trained and equipped to do their jobs. That is, startups generally don’t fail because their code isn’t good, but they stumble due to poor user design, or growth strategy, or business development and sales. Many non-technical workers at tech companies come in at the entry level and then it takes a year or two for them to grow into their role at the company. But if Tradecraft works, the team believes its students will learn enough in 12 weeks to be able to contribute right away. So what is Tradecraft? It’s an intensive 12-week program designed to teach students all the necessary skills they will need to step right into a tech company and begin making an impact. It’s grouped into three tracks that will run simultaneously: UX, Growth, and Sales. Each track will have about ten students in it and will be taught industry leaders: The UX track will be led by respected user experience designers Laura Klein and Kate Rutter, growth will be overseen by Match.com founder Will Bunker, and the sales section will be taught by Klusas. Tradecraft has also recruited top executives from each area of expertise to act as mentors. Tradecraft will be taking a flipped-classroom approach to instruction, with less emphasis on teaching and more emphasis on “doing.” There will be some reading material for the curriculum, but for the most part students will be focused on actually working on various projects for different tech companies throughout the course of the program. To do that, Tradecraft has signed up several company partners — ranging from a just-graduated Y Combinator startup to a publicly traded tech company — that have specific projects for students to work on over the course of the three months. Not only will that give students practical experience, but it will also give them some context for what type of company they’d like to work for. One of the issues that the Tradecraft founders has identified is that some non-technical people who aspire to work in Silicon Valley don’t know where they’d best fit in, whether it be an early-stage startup, part of a larger organization, or somewhere in between. This approach will make them better informed as they look for positions after the program. Tradecraft is for its first group of students now through December 5, with the curriculum starting on January 6 next year. Tuition is $12,000, with financial aid available to qualifying students. At the end of the program, it’ll also work on placing graduating students. But if somehow they don’t find a position within three months after graduation, Tradecraft will refund their tuition.
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Google Music Arrives On iOS, Includes A Free Month Of “All Access” Radio
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Sarah Perez
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Google Play Music arrived on iOS today, following reports from earlier this week that a launch was “imminent.” The app, which will compete with Apple’s iTunes Radio and other streaming music options like Pandora, Spotify and Rdio, offers a standard service and All Access option, both of which allow you to store your music collection in the cloud, and stream songs to your device, without having to first save them locally. All Access adds a radio option, too. Users of the standard service can add up to 20,000 of their own songs to their cloud storage, but All Access users are able to listen to unlimited songs, the company says. In addition to the mobile app, desktop users can also stream their songs from the web interface at play.google.com/music. An Android application was previously available. Those who also choose to upgrade to the $9.99/month All Access service are able to stream songs through a radio option, as well as tracks from their own collection. Unlike some competitors’ services, All Access lets you skip as many songs as you like during radio play, while you also help to improve your personal recommendations by tapping a thumbs up/thumbs down icon. All Access users can also explore various curated sections, including New Releases, Staff Picks and other playlists from music experts and tastemakers. Other features, like building playlists and saving files for offline playback, are supported, too. And All Access automatically builds playlists of songs you’ve given a “thumbs up” rating, plus music you’ve added to your library recently, as well as free and purchased songs you’ve downloaded to your account. Users can also manage their queue while listening to music, which won’t interrupt the stream. The new app allows for streaming over Bluetooth, AirPlay and Chromecast at launch, and the company is now working to bring the experience to the iPad. The app is live now in the iTunes App Store .
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ShopKeep Goes Custom, Releasing A Speedy New System For Holiday Shopping
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Eliza Brooke
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Not to freak everyone out, but there are six fewer days than usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. For shoppers, that means a tighter timeframe in which to negotiate parking lots and mall lines. According to the , retailers have started the full court press on marketing for their most important season earlier than usual. It’s like that scene in Gravity where the space shrapnel starts hurtling toward Sandra Bullock and she’s all, “Oh no, oh .” To cope — and by popular demand from its customers — is releasing a new version of its iPad-based sales management system to cut checkout time in retail locations. Retailers can now customize their register with color coded buttons and group products to jump between different categories more easily. ShopKeep has also focused on receipt and order printing, a pain point that adds friction to the sales transaction. High volume restaurants can now print orders to multiple locations, like the kitchen and bar, while smaller retailers can print receipts and tickets to the same printer. They’re pretty sensible updates to ShopKeep’s platform, making life easier for the independent retailers that make up the majority of its user base. In the coming year, however, ShopKeep is looking to add larger scale businesses to that roster as they move toward cloud services. As with these latest features, customization is a key part of that push. At this point, about half of ShopKeep’s customers are quick serve restaurants, like bakeries, coffee shops, and food trucks. The other 50% tend to be boutiques, clothing stores, and pop ups. They’re the type of retailers who wold be inclined to adopt payment systems like Square. “Our main competitors are Windows-based POS systems. Depending on the sophistication of the merchant, there’s PayPal or Square, but then they realize they need reporting and timeclocks and employee management. When you’re running a store you need retail management, not just payment. They’ll try those first and then move up to us,” ShopKeep founder Jason Richelson said. Acquiring larger clients is a function of making ShopKeep’s system easily customizable through its API. ShopKeep will provide the basic tools for payments, employee management, general ledger, and supplier management, and the retailer can then hire integrators to do custom work on top of that API. Retailers are able to use any payment and accounting providers they want; ShopKeep connects clients to payments, rather than serving as the payments provider. “In three to five years we can be in a really large percentage of retail stores, very similar to what Salesforce did with CRM,” Richelson said. “It’s a very different world now. POS used to be very fragmented because someone had to install a server in your basement. It’s no longer a fragmented industry. There’s going to be a dominant player.”
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Ahead Of Possible IPO, King Reveals “Candy Crush” Hits Half A Billion Installs, 150 Billion Plays To Date
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Sarah Perez
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King, the maker of the addictive and popular “Candy Crush Saga” game, and here in the U.S., new numbers today indicating its growing user base and traction. The company says the game has now been installed over half a billion times across both Facebook and mobile devices, and has seen over 150 billion individual games played to date. Oh, and the level people get stuck on the most? , apparently. It’s one where you have to beat the chocolate and the licorice. (Non-players, feel free to roll your eyes right about now. But really, chocolate was hard.) The casual games company, which sees over 1 billion gameplays daily, is celebrating Candy Crush’s one-year anniversary today, which has prompted the release of these new milestone metrics. To give you a sense of how much the company has grown over the past year, back in February, the company was 9 billion gameplays per month across all its titles, which also now includes things like Bubble Witch Saga and Pet Rescue. Candy Crush, both a Facebook and mobile game, is hard to ignore. Even if you don’t play the game yourself, you’ll be inundated with requests from those who do. have been written about this thing, in fact. The company first released the game to Facebook users in April 2012, but it became a breakout hit over the course of the year, following its smartphone release last November. The premise of the game – matching three or more candies of the same color – is not entirely original, but what makes the game engaging has to do with its perfected viral metrics, cross-platform support allowing users to switch between devices to pick up where they left off, and, of course, that whole aggravating feature where you actually run out of lives and then have to wait to play again. The game has also been designed to be updated as players move forward, instead of having to roll out sequels or spin-offs to get gamers to return. Already, Candy Crush has been expanded with more levels, but King hints today that it will again release more updates as well as new “in-game anniversary treats” over the coming weeks. “The incredible milestone of more than half a billion downloads of the game, as well as the continued enthusiasm from our community, really delights the entire King team,” said Tommy Palm, “Games Guru” at King in a statement released this morning. “Fans can look forward to even more exciting new Candy Crush Saga content over the coming months, including an exciting new twist to the game.” The company also released a few other figures that demonstrate not just how often the game is played, but how it has managed to squeeze its way into users’ lives during their downtime. Over 61% of U.K. Candy Crush fans play during their morning commute on public transportation, while 78% of U.S. players engage with the game the most while watching T.V. Gameplay peaks after work hours, 6 to 9 PM, and on Sundays. Today, one in every 23 Facebook users worldwide is also a fan of Candy Crush, adds King. This fall, it was that the British gaming company King had confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S., using the secretive IPO registration process made possible thanks to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. The Wall Street Journal also that the company had hired J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG, and Bank of America Corp. to handle the IPO. An IPO could value the business at $5 billion to $7 billion, Bloomberg, citing analyst figures which found King’s sales this year topping $1 billion, up from $500 million in 2012. An IPO is risky because a game maker needs to be able to reproduce its hit-making formula beyond one breakout release. For King, several other titles do very well, too, but not necessarily on the level of Candy Crush. For example, according to analysis of King’s Facebook titles, Candy Crush sees over 100 million monthly actives, while Bubble Witch and Pet Rescue see 10 million+ each.
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Boston Pitch-Off Winner Drop Lets You Leave Surprise Messages All Over Town
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Jordan Crook
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The latest of these location-focused messengers is Drop, an app out of Boston that lets you “drop” a message in a certain location, which friends will find as they enter that geo-fenced area. The company walked away with first prize from our . After signing up on the platform, you’ll instantly be shown a map. You can auto-drop to your own location, leaving a message and perhaps a photo for a particular friend or multiple friends, or you can choose a specific location to leave a message at. Imagine leaving a drop for your teenage kid at their high school on the first day of school, or leaving a drop for your best friend at their work when they’re having a rough time. Even better, you could leave drops at special places you share with your sweetheart for them to find as they wander through your town. The company is in its earliest stage, launching just two days ago in the App Store, but the founders have big ideas for new features. For one they plan to make it easier to associate certain locations with users, like their house or their work, as well as some UI tweaks to make navigation a bit smoother. And the potential to generate revenue is definitely there. The only thing advertisers like more than an engaged user base is location information, which is built right into Drop. The app is available now in the .
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iFixit Reveals The PS4 Is Beautiful, Inside And Out
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Matt Burns
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The PS4 is a lovely gaming kit. It’s sleek. Monolithic. And in comparison to the Xbox One. Sony did its 4th generation console right. iFixit found in its teardown that the gaming system is nearly as beautiful on the inside as it is on the out. But that shouldn’t be a big surprise. It’s a Sony product and Sony knows how to build things. However, iFixit did find something somewhat shocking: The latest PlayStation is very user serviceable. On iFixit’s scale of 1 to 10, the PS4 scored an 8 meaning most users can expect to rip the system open and tinker away. Most importantly, the hard drive is very easy to access, giving owners options to upgrade to a larger or faster option. The hardest thing to service, per iFixit, is apparently the fan which is buried deep the system’s innards. iFixit and others have yet to teardown the upcoming Xbox One. That should be in the coming days. Hopefully Microsoft designed it with the same thought as the Xbox 360E, the last model of its generation. That model was simple to open up. In fact, all of Microsoft’s gaming systems from the start have been trivial to crack open and tinker around. The original Xbox’s modability was a significant factor in its widespread adoption. Let’s hope Microsoft hasn’t forgotten that. With the gaming world entering the 7th generation, there is hope that hardware makers, namely Sony and Microsoft, have learned from past mistakes and gamers shouldn’t have to fear a red or yellow light of death caused by shoddy hardware design.
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Toymail Is A Cute Talking Toy That Lets Parents Send Messages To Their Kids From An App
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Natasha Lomas
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Here’s another twist on messaging aiming to make digital comms more fun. is a Wi-Fi connected toy that lets parents talk remotely to their kids via a smartphone app — with their message spoken in the toy’s tone of voice. Why can’t they just give their kids a cheap phone and call them up? Of course they can, but a phone probably isn’t going to be as cute looking or fun sounding as Toymail’s ‘Mailmen’ toys. The idea is to inject a little cartoon fun into parent/child digital interactions, and give kids a chance to play with physical toys rather than being sucked into screens and phones so early. (While letting parents carry on their love affair with their smartphones.) There’s a choice of five different Mailmen characters, which have been designed to look like a cross between a mailbox and an animal. Toymail is not the first cutesy connected object that can remotely convey messages. The now defunct rabbit springs to mind. Toymail’s Mailmen also have some spiritual overlap with The — although where that gizmo churns out tiny little rolls of paper inked with messages, the Mailmen’s missives are pure audio. One half of the Toymail’s creator team, entrepreneur and MIT alumna , came up with the cute yet fiendish : an alarm clock with wheels so it could scoot out of your reach and force you to crawl out of bed to shut it off. Toymail has taken to to try to raise $60,000 to get Toymail to market. At the time of writing, it’s approaching $10k raised, with 17 days left on the campaign. And while each Mailman costs $50 to Kickstarter backers, and the iOS app is free (an Android app is planned), there is an ongoing cost associated with use of Toymail. Parents will need to buy virtual books of stamps to send messages to the toys. Each stamp is good for one message, and a book of 50 stamps costs $0.99 — or unlimited stamps are $2.99 per month.
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Netflix Builds A More Visual, Universal User Experience For TV Apps From The Ground Up
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Ryan Lawler
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Netflix is rolling out a new user experience for its TV apps today, which represents the biggest single product update in the company’s history. The update introduces a whole new way for users to browse, search, and discover titles on a wide range of devices, from the Playstation 3 to Xbox 360 to Roku and everything in-between. The whole thing is a lot more visual, and is designed to entice users with more information about shows and movies on the platform, along with the reasons why those are titles have been suggested. Netflix has spent the last several years gradually adding features to its TV apps to drive more engagement and get people watching more movies and TV shows. And, for the most part, it’s been pretty successful doing so: After all, Netflix subscribers watched more than 5 billion hours of video on the service last quarter, and most of that viewing happened on connected TVs. But the TV experience has a few faults: For one thing, it’s not consistent. The Xbox 360 experience differed from the Roku experience, which differed from the Netflix experience on Samsung Smart TVs or the Sony PlayStation 3. Each platform had a different means of navigation and different features, which led to a bit of confusion for subscribers who watched Netflix on different platforms, based on whichever TV in the home they were at. Not to mention, the TV experience hadn’t evolved that much from Netflix’s core desktop experience. It was still dominated by portrait-mode DVD box images and often required users to dig down a screen or two to find out more about a certain title and figure out why it might be suggested to them. Netflix’s new TV apps, which represent the biggest single product update in the company’s history, are designed to be more visual, taking advantage of the increased screen real estate on HDTVs, while also allowing viewers to learn more about titles before clicking through. Titles are now represented with new, landscape-mode box art and, when selected, the main screen displays three large, rotating images that give more context about what each movie or TV show is about. When it comes to TV shows, that’s true not only for an entire series, but also each individual episode. Each title also has a more concise synopsis and also displays personalized details, such as why it’s recommended, which friends might have watched it, or whether it’s won any awards. While viewers will have more visual cues on the main page for why they should select one video or another, if they dig down to the title screen they’ll find a longer synopsis. For TV shows, that means individual episode descriptions and a viewing progress bar. The new user experience also universally auto-plays the next episode in a series, which could lead to more season-long binge viewing among subscribers. The search experience has also been improved, with dynamic results appearing after users type in just one letter. Actors and director info also appears on the same screen as video titles, and enables users to drill down and find more movies and TV shows from those stars. The new experience will also bring more personalization, with users able to log in with their individual profiles at the start of a session. The update will extend to a whole new group of devices where they previously weren’t available. It will also make Netflix’s extremely available on all supported devices as well. The whole new experience was built from the ground up, based upon a whole new software platform that Netflix engineered to work better with low-power connected TV devices. Netflix VP of product innovation Chris Jaffe told me while demoing the app that the decision was made after Netflix has spent the last several years building apps based on standards like Webkit. But those standard-based applications ended up being a bit “heavy,” due to components that weren’t core to a TV viewing experience. Determined to get the absolute best performance out of its apps, even on devices with little processing power, Netflix stripped out unnecessary components and built a whole new framework for its apps. With the new framework, Netflix is building apps that are faster and more responsive. Subscribers on low-powered devices like Roku streaming boxes should see an immediate difference in the speed with which Netflix loads, as well as how smoothly they’ll be able to scroll through and browse different titles. Videos load ultra-quickly, thanks to the disappearance of the red splash screen that most subscribers have gotten used to seeing over the years, and provide the best quality based on available bandwidth due to adaptive bit-rate streaming. The new framework also gives Netflix more flexibility in being able to make changes and updates to its apps. Once installed on new devices, the framework also enables the product team to dynamically update the app without having to worry about the firmware schedules of consumer electronics manufacturers. For the first time, that’s allowed Netflix to roll out a whole new user experience to a number of new devices all at once, rather than having updates staggered based on the needs of its external partners. Devices supporting the new experience at launch will include the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Roku 3, as well as newer Smart TVs and recent Blu-ray players. But more devices supporting the new experience will be added over time. So there you have it: more visual, more responsive, and built with more flexibility for Netflix’s product team, this update should not only make it easier for subscribers to figure out what they want to watch, but it should drive viewers to watch even more video over time.
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Confirmed: Microsoft’s Belfiore To Take On Some Internet Explorer Duties, Will Retain Windows Phone Role
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Alex Wilhelm
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Sources familiar with the situation have confirmed with TechCrunch that Joe Belfiore, current corporate vice president of the Windows Phone project, will pick up some Internet Explorer duties in addition to his current role. Earlier reports indicated that Belfiore would take on some of the Internet Explorer responsibility left open by now departing corporate vice president of that effort, Dean Hachamovitch. At that time, if Belfiore would relinquish his Windows Phone duties in part or full as part of the change. Instead, Belfiore will, as reported , pick up user interface work on Internet Explorer (TechCrunch has confirmed this as well), but is not set to step down from the Windows Phone team that he has been part of for some time. Belfiore has worked on the user interface of Internet Explorer releases in the past, including Internet Explorer 4. The exit of Hachamovitch from Internet Explorer makes sense from a product perspective, as Internet Explorer 11 recently shipped for both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. The move expands Belfiore’s responsibility matrix, and can thus be viewed as promotion of sorts. Hachamovitch will, , “start a new team to take on something new.” Microsoft is in the midst of a large reorganization, as well as a business model shift and the search for a new CEO, making it a liquid moment for the company. Expect more transfers and expansions such as the one above in the next few months.
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Charitable Donation Platform, JustGiving, Launches Yimby, A Crowdfunding Platform For Social Good
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Natasha Lomas
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The crowdfunding space has just got a little more crowded in the UK, with the official launch today of a platform for crowdsourcing donations aimed at doing social good. — an affirmative play on the phrase nimby (aka ‘not in my back yard’) — is a new business from online charity donation company , a 12-year veteran of the digital giving space. Yimby.com has been operating in beta up to today. If you’re in the business of making money from other people’s largess — JustGiving takes a 5% cut of all donations on its platform, and has raised £1.6 billion for charity since 2001 (which equates to revenue of around £127 million for the business) — then the rise of alternative crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter, is either a concern or an opportunity. A concern because these platforms are on a growth tear, and people only have so much money to give. The most successful crowdfunding platforms also give people more of an incentive to donate by casting the spell of story around causes/projects to increase engagement. Instead of watching from the sidelines JustGiving has decided to wade in, with a little help (to the tune of £50,000) from the UK government to help it launch Yimby. Presumably Yimby tallies with the government’s ‘ ‘ agenda — by outsourcing social project financing to the community, rather than the Treasury. As with its other charitable donations-fuelled business, JustGiving will be taking a 5% fee on donations for all successful projects on Yimby. It’s also charging card fees (where applicable). Here’s how it describes Yimby’s mission: Yimby.com allows individuals to deliver philanthropic projects without being affiliated with a charity, from planting community gardens, to purchasing basketball wheelchairs for local teams or launching mentoring programmes for young people. Yimby is manually checking projects to ensure they qualify as a ‘social good’ — so trying to fund your Birthday drinks probably won’t fly. But individual projects can qualify if the need/cause is great enough, with Yimby noting that a disabled man used the platform to fund making his house more accessible during the site’s beta period, for example. One successful project that took place during the beta was a campaign to save Kettering Town Football Club. Its supporters were able to raise £20,546 on the site in October. Asked why the UK needs another crowdfunding platform, even one focused on social good, JustGiving said its aim is to take the crowdfunding model mainstream — or more mainstream than it currently is. “We’ve continually been asked by our users for exactly this type of service, and now we want to open up philanthropy to any individual wanting to start their own community projects,” it told TechCrunch. “With JustGiving’s experience, technology and reach behind us we hope to bring community crowdfunding to a mainstream audience across the UK.” It did not make mention of , which undercuts JustGiving by charging zero fees on donations, but such disruption can’t be far from its thoughts. And while here’s no shortage of rivals to Yimby — from a mainstream crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter to specialist social good platforms such as or , to name a couple — JustGiving will presumably be hoping its brand profile gives it a better reach than some of its smaller rivals. It’s also clearly keen to tap into the energy around crowdfunding. While Yimby is launching only in the UK for now, JustGiving says the site has been growing fast, adding that it has plans to expand Yimby internationally in future.
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Ingrid Lunden
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TC Cribs: Wooga, Where Addictive Social Games Are Made In The Heart Of Berlin
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Colleen Taylor
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Last month, a number of us TechCrunchers grabbed our passports and jetted to Berlin for our first-ever conference. The tech scene in Berlin is very hot at the moment, so while we were in town, we knocked on the doors of a couple of the city’s startups for series. Now, if you were somehow under the impression that tricked-out startup offices are only found in Silicon Valley, this episode will show you just how wrong you are. The headquarters of social gaming startup in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood are just as colorful and creative as any place we’ve toured — with the added bonus of being filled with a much more multi-lingual staff (and arguably better beer) than you’d find around these parts. Check out the video embedded above to see take us on a tour to see the monsters, robots, swings, nap pods, and Neil Patrick Harris cut-outs of Wooga’s HQ.
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Cyanogen Launches Installer App To Bring Aftermarket Android To The Masses
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Chris Velazco
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revealed a few months back that it closed a $7 million seed investment from Benchmark Capital. The vision it laid out at the time was no small one: it wants its cooked version of Android to become the third most-used mobile OS behind iOS and Android proper. Naturally, that involves getting CyanogenMod onto as many devices as it can, and today the company took one giant leap in that direction. They’ve just made it easier for average folks to flash their software onto their smartphones with available in the Google Play Store. If that last bit doesn’t sound like a big deal, then chances are you’ve never tried to install CyanogenMod on your own. After all, the original installation process wasn’t exactly for the faint of heart. While some devices could be coaxed into running CyanogenMod in mere moments, others required lengthy lists of instructions and some occasional finger crossing. Hardly an ideal situation for a company trying to get CyanogenMod working on as many devices as possible. Even now, there are still some caveats to deal with. The Android app won’t do a whole lot all on its own for one, as it requires a companion Windows installer for heavy lifting so Mac users are plum out of luck at the moment. And most notably, represents just a fraction of the Android gadgets currently floating around out there, so true mass-market penetration is going to take some time. But let’s back up for a moment: why would someone want to swap their current Android build (whatever it may be) with CyanogenMod? Long story short, the Cyanogen team has been working to build extra features into their custom version of Android by way of very frequent updates. While they’ve been developing CM for a long while, it’s still very early days for Cyanogen as a company. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t making headway. The team inked a with Chinese OEM Oppo to fold CyanogenMod support into its curious N1 smartphone, and with any luck, more manufacturer partnerships are in the cards, too.
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Report Indicates That Windows Phone’s Joe Belfiore May Return To The IE Team
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore will absorb some of the responsibilities formerly executed by Internet Explorer’s corporate vice president, according to sources speaking to . Microsoft declined to comment to TechCrunch on the potential move. The role was vacated by Dean Hachamovitch, who announced his internal transfer . Belfiore’s current job title is “corporate vice president and manager for Windows Phone Program Management.” It’s almost confusing. AllThingsD that Belfiore would “lead a group focused on phones, tablets and PCs” under the new re-org structure. To see him move again so quickly could hint at internal fluidity outside the VIX boundaries that were expected. The exit of Hachamovitch was not a surprise, given the recent release of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. His project was over, so the timing of his exit is reasonable. This is doubly true during a reorganization, because there is increased surface area for new internal opportunity. The transfer of Belfiore could make some sense, as the third update to Windows Phone 8 has been completed, and is being rolled out at the moment. But to see him move from a hardware focus to running part of the Internet Explorer project is slightly hard to parse. In favor of the move being logical is Belfiore’s past in the Internet Explorer group, where he . The return would therefore be a very late homecoming. According to Warren: “Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore will take over some of Hachamovitch’s responsibilities for Internet Explorer. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer plans have revealed that Belfiore will lead a team focused on the app side of Internet Explorer and the user experience.” Therefore, Belfiore is letting go of a plum role – “devices” is half of Microsoft’s new business model – for a less visible role running a part of Internet Explorer? I don’t think the move would be castigation for his performance at Windows Phone, as the device group just had the best year of its young life (in a 12-month context). This one is weird. More as it comes.
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Photobucket Is Releasing A New App, Looking To Close The Loop On Their Storage Services
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Eliza Brooke
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When redesigned its site and user experience with better uploading and new social features last fall, it did so in the hope of reestablishing itself as the go-to site for photo sharing and storage after falling in popularity relative to its competitors. The ten-year-old company, which filed $5.67 million in equity funding in May, is now launching a mobile app that extends the full capabilities of its service to smartphone users. Recognizing that photo taking and sharing is fractured between people’s devices and services, Photobucket’s plan is to create one cohesive ecosystem to incentivize users to convert (or reconvert) to the system. “Photobucket has a history of being an open, highly scalable [platform], and we wanted to build on that. We looked at two real market problems: photos are everywhere on multiple devices and services and platforms, and people are losing photos because it’s too hard to back them up,” said David Toner, Photobucket’s head of marketing. Photobucket relaunched its mobile web app last month. It now serves as an onramp to the native app, which allows users to back up, edit, organize, and share their photos. While the app can serve as a quick organizational tool, users are still going to want to do major organization on the website. In a few weeks time, Photobucket will be rolling out the next phase of their development: use as a social hub for event-specific photo uploads, for which people may be using various services like Instagram, Facebook, and Google+. They remained fairly quiet about the specifics, but the aim is to allow people to discover each other’s photos in a way that doesn’t require people to change their uploading behavior. Photobucket’s U.S. monthly uniques stood at 20.85 million in October, up from 20.2 in September and 16.5 in April. But it still has a long way to go relative to other leading photo sites like Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Shutterfly. Of those sites, it showed the highest bounce rates during April through September of this year, according to numbers from SimilarWeb — likely the result of bad traffic from search. It’s also behind Shutterfly and Flickr in page views per visit (Instagram is too, probably because its scrolling feed doesn’t require much clicking). On average time spent per visit Shutterfly and Instagram also came out on top of Photobucket.
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Justin Bieber-Backed “Shots Of Me” Launches Selfie Sharing App
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Josh Constine
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Sunsets? Landscapes? Latte art? Look back at your old photos and you’ll notice they’re boring unless there’s a human face in them. Now think about teens on social media. Immaturity fuels bullying and drama-filled comment reels. So RockLive has taken funding from Justin Bieber to solve these problems with , a self-portrait that launches today. Selfies — photos you shoot of yourself, often with the front-facing camera. That’s what you do on Shots of Me. Take selfies. Share selfies to the app’s Instagram-style internal social network or to Twitter (with Instagram sharing coming soon). Like Selfies from other people. Yes, you read that right. It’s a social network entirely for selfies. The premise is simple, but it hides the amount of work and detail that went into Shots of Me. “We were creating these games and had a good, young demographic. Always high schoolers,” RockLive CEO John Shahidi tells me. “We giggled that we knew how to market to high school girls so let’s build something even bigger,” he says. The idea for Shots of Me came from Shahidi looking at the photo app craze and realizing “People enjoy looking at humans. Not just yourself. People like looking at other people. It doesn’t ever really get old. Looking at a coffee or salad…”, Shahidi trails off, but the implication is clear. Instagram is the home for photos of food and inanimate object photography, as the filters make them look interesting. But they’re not. And people are sick of staring at your lunch. Does the world need another photo app? Maybe not. But if you suspend your skepticism for a moment, seeing the smiling faces of your friends more often probably isn’t such a bad thing. RockLive’s five-person team began building Shots of Me in May and today it becomes available for download. Open the and you’ll find a full-screen feed of selfies from your Shots of Me friends and anyone you pull from your Twitter contacts. In a cool chameleon design trick, the name/location and caption/likes bars above and below each photo take on the colors of the pic and change as you scroll. It’s like you’re looking through a steamy window. Shahidi proclaims “We want to be a top of the line product. You spend $500 on a phone. Does this app fit the quality of the iPhone, does this feel like a like Mercedes or a Ferrari?” That might be pushing it, but the app has number of flourishes like letting you pick the color of the navigation chrome. To enforce the selfies-only rule, you have to take photos using the front-facing camera. And similar to Snapchat, you can only shoot Shots of Me within the app. No uploading means the emotions you see in a newly uploaded Shot Of Me is how that person is feeling right now. What makes Shots of Me functionally unique is actually what it lacks: Comments. “People share photos because they felt so positive at that moment” Shahidi explains. “Drama kills that moment.” If someone makes fun of your photo of the ocean, whatever. But selfies leave people vulnerable. A hateful comment about your face could really hurt, especially if you’re a sensitive teenager. So rather than comments, Shots of Me has a direct messaging system where you can ping anyone who follows you, similar to Twitter. This way, any drama stays private and randos can’t troll you. [Update: After some more real-world usage, I find myself really resonating with the idea that photos with people in them are more fun. I think two pictures I might have taken of dead things over the last day (a , a ) were much better with my silly face in them. Still, there are some nagging design flaws in Shots of Me. As you can see above, the navigation buttons obscure the caption and likes bar beneath each photo. Also, the like button is far too small, making it a chore to hit, which reduces the interaction and notifications Shots of Me needs to grow. It also leads to accidental taps into the accounts of other people who liked a selfie. These need to be cleared up as soon as possible.] It was this philosophy of positivity that attracted Justin Bieber to Shots of Me. The pop star was introduced to the RockLive and Shots of Me, and Shahidi says “Honestly, he loved it. He was a bit annoyed by other platforms” referring to the constant homophobic slurs and hate Justin gets on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. “The commenting thing was something he really cared about. Not just for himself, but for the kids. He said ‘I want a platform where my fans don’t have to deal with this. We didn’t ask him for money. He said ‘I want to be part of this.'” RockLive had already raised $1.6 million from Shervin Pishevar, boxer Floyd Mayweather, early Apple employee Tom McInerney and NALA investments. NALA had set terms to put in some more money, but RockLive let Bieber in at the last minute to let him contribute the majority of the $1.1 million second round. This is Bieber’s first publicly announced personal investment without the help of his manager , who he’s in a few startups with. Shahidi says Bieber “did a lot of due diligence. He asked a lot of questions and he calls all the time.”There’s no business model to analyze, though, as Shots of Me is focused solely on growth, which will be a tough fight. Some will undoubtedly say Bieber has no business investing in tech, but if he can consistently sell millions of record and huge numbers of concert tickets, he must have a knack for understanding what kids want. Overall, Shots of Me feels refreshing because every face is fascinating. There are no botched attempts at artful photos of stale scenes cluttering the feed. Sure, Shots of Me could become a vehicle for vanity, but that’s human nature. You can say it will fail. You can say it’s dumb. But it doesn’t change the fact that people are taking selfies at an alarming rate. Someone’s going to capitalize. Some say selfies are a fad, but we’ve been painting and shooting portraits for a long, long time. The question now is whether Shots of Me’s focus on selfies, no-drama feed, and aid from the Bieber-nation will be enough to carve out an audience amongst the slew of other photo apps. Most obviously, Shots of Me will be taking on Instagram and its 150 million highly engaged users. Then there are stalwarts Facebook and Twitter. Snapchat has become a destination for sharing silly self-portraits, and maybe the mysterious, will seduce some users. The biggest threat may be the recently launched , which cleverly lets you share two-photo diptychs that feature a front-facing selfie plus a rear-facing shot to show where you are. With 300,000 downloads since its launch in August and $3 million in new funding, Frontback is capitalizing on its unique format. It permits funny photo mashups, also prohibits comments, and combines eye-catching faces with added context. Beating out all these apps will be a serious challenge. Shahidi remains confident, noting that “Taking one photo is already a lot of work” and that the non-selfie part of Frontbacks could get stale because “people are typically doing the same thing every day. If you’re in the office, the office is kind of boring”. RockLive actually considered offering the diptych style, but concluded “There’s more opportunities to take photos of yourself than figuring out the other side.” With any luck, Shots of Me will get Bieber to share selfies exclusively on its app to attract some of his 47 million Twitter followers and 57 million Facebook fans. It could blow past Frontback if just 1 percent of those people checked out Shots of Me. Still, Shahidi hopes his product can stand on its own two feet. “Before Instagram, there were dozens of apps that could let you take photos with filters, but Instagram was the first to create a home for your filtered pictures. You knew you were going to see elegant photos.” He hopes Shots Of Me will do the same for selfies. “People are going to enjoy seeing their life documented through the app. They’re your memories. If you’re not in the photo, it didn’t happen.”
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Windows Phone, Android Gain Market Share While Apple Slips Despite Growth In iPhone Shipments
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Alex Wilhelm
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IDC published its third-quarter 2013 today. Winners this quarter are Windows Phone and Android. Apple was mixed, while BlackBerry managed to implode at a clip so incredible, it reminds me of what happened to Longhorn’s dreams. In the third quarter, Android saw its market share surpass the 80 percent mark (global), and its total volume grow to 211.6 million devices. Windows Phone grew year over year from 2 percent to 3.6 percent market share, shipping 9.5 million devices in the quarter. That device volume is a 156 percent improvement on the year-ago quarter. Microsoft is likely content with that figure, but it remains small compared to its two remaining rivals. Apple grew its device volume, from 26.9 million in the year-ago quarter to 33.8 million (third quarter). However, the larger smartphone market grew 39.9 percent in the intervening year, dropping Apple’s global smartphone market share to 12.9 percent from 14.4 percent a year ago. BlackBerry lost even more blood, something that astounds me: It’s still alive? The company lost 41.6 percent of its device volume year-over-year. It shipped a mere 4.5 million devices in the quarter, under half of its former rival Windows Phone’s volume. So, BlackBerry is all but kaput. This means that Microsoft has cleared the path for it being the “third platform.” However, as we recently saw, Microsoft’s . Finally, according to IDC, the average selling price (ASP) of smartphones fell 12.5 percent in the quarter, to $317. This could mean that Android and Windows Phone have space to continue absorbing more market share, as the smartphone market itself expands, because they offer cheaper handsets than Apple. For now, things appear somewhat set: Android rules the smartphone market, Apple makes all the money, and Windows Phone is scrapping to prove that it deserves the third-place spot that it has scratched out in the game.
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Microsoft Updates Surface Firmware, Patches IE Zero-Day Exploit Among 19 Total Flaws
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Alex Wilhelm
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We don’t cover much here at TechCrunch because the majority of you know how to leave Windows Update on and suck down the new software each month direct from the source. This month is a bit more special, however, as it heavily impacts the Surface line of tablets. Among the updates are a set of Internet Explorer fixes that are worth checking into if you manage PCs. For a rundown of what is in the security side of this update cycle, the genial Larry Seltzer at ZDNet . Now, to the Surface news. In short, if you own a Surface 2, Surface (the tablet formerly known as Surface RT), or Surface Pro original, Microsoft has . Surface Pro 2 owners, apparently your devices are working as intended, so you get nothing. Surface 2 owners receive the most: Improved Type and Touch cover performance, camera upgrades, audio fixes including moving sound to speakers after yanking your headphones, better battery life and stability, and better Wi-Fi performance. A grab bag, but one that could make Surface 2 quality of life a measurable delta better. I haven’t had hands-on time yet with the update, but will report back later if the changes warrant their own post. If you own a Surface Pro that is running Windows 8, you can now use Japanese-language, second-generation Touch and Type covers. So, for the eight of you that applies to, mazel tov. Those running 8.1 on their Pro will receive improved Wi-Fi performance. Finally, if you have the original Surface, you too can now use second-generation Japanese Touch and Type covers. A small update, but one that could help Microsoft vend higher-margin peripherals in the country at a moderately improved clip in that country. This is a workable set of updates and a welcome bunch. If you have problems picking up any of the above, drop a comment.
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Quora Signals It’s Favoring Search Ads For Eventual Monetization, Launches Author Stats Tool
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Josh Constine
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30% to 40% of Quora’s traffic comes from people searching for specific things, so it tells me that search ads that leverage intent make perfect sense for how it eventually monetizes its Q&A service. The news comes alongside the , a new analytics tool that shows authors exactly how much traffic their Quora questions, answers, and blog posts are getting. Quora has raised approximately $70 million since being founded in 2009, but has refused to share specific traffic stats or make any concrete moves towards earning money. Instead it’s been focused on growing to a wider audience of contributors and readers without diluting the quality of its content. Quora said in May that all its metrics were up 3x from a year before. Traffic measurement services Quantcast and Compete both show Quora up over the last few months to 600,000 monthly uniques and 1 million monthly uniques respectively in September, but Compete still shows the service slightly down from a high a year ago. This may not take into account Quora’s growth on mobile, though. To get bigger, Quora needs to retain its top contributors. Hence, Quora Stats. The new analytics tool is designed to show Quora authors that they have serious reach. The whole Q&A site, and especially the blogging platform, were built on the premise that on Quora. Because Quora’s home page feed highlights content from across the service rather than just people you follow like Facebook or Twitter, you don’t have to be a celebrity or have built up a personal following to make a splash. Quora Stats aims to prove that. It replaces the very basic tool that simply noted your total views of all your content for each month. , rolling out over the next few weeks, will show you breakdowns of the views for each of your questions, answers, and blog posts. As you can see above, you also get aggregate stats and a chart over time for your views, upvotes, and shares. You can slice these metrics by the last 7, 30, or 90 days or all-time. But more interesting than the new tool may be what Quora’s Marc Bodnick told me yesterday about the site’s plan for monetization. “Advertising at a baseline is a very appealing business model. There are other potential strategies for making money, but interestingly, when you look down and see what people are doing in this database, ‘look up’ is a big part of it. So I think at a minimum, this is a pretty interesting framework for what a business model could be built around.” Essentially, people come to Quora looking for knowledge about specific topics. What’s the best DSLR camera? Is the new Thor movie good? What’s the best SUV under $30,000? If these remind you of what people search on Google, you can probably see how Quora could monetize in a similar way. If it showed standard display ads for cameras, movies, or cars for people searching for related topics, that could work. It could also let brands pay to promote the rankings of certain answers that favored their products, though that might pervert Quora’s quest to become a neutral source of knowledge. When pressed over email, Bodnick wrote “We have said that advertising is a very plausible direction for the company to go when we do look to ultimately monetize. This is reinforced by the high percentage of direct intent traffic on Quora, which we estimate to be at 30-40%. That said – the company has no near term plans to monetize. The best insight is probably that .” [Update: This story was originally titled “Quora Confirms It’s Favoring Search Ads For Eventual Monetization, Launches Author Stats Tool” because what Bodnick told me amounts to him confirming Quora if favoring an ad model based on search ads. Now the company says he didn’t “confirm” that but “signaled” it so I’ve changed the headline to reflect that, even though they both mean the same thing: Quora views search ads as the most viable business model for when it one day decides to try monetizing.] Bodnick concluded ” We’ve looked at the commercial internet and as portion of the traffic, it’s pretty exciting what percentage it accounts for.” When I asked “So are you hinting that search ads based on intent will be how Quora eventually monetizes?” Bodnick said with a laugh, “I’m not just hinting” implying that is in fact part of the long term strategy.
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Airbnb Launches New Mobile Apps, Introduces ‘Host Home’ To Provide Smarter Tools For Managing Listings
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Ryan Lawler
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is hoping to get more of its hosts and guests on mobile, as it has launched a “reimagination” of its iOS and Android apps. Today at an event in Airbnb’s new San Francisco office space, the company announced the new versions, which include an improved host dashboard, a more immersive design, and host groups, to help hosts connect with one another. At the event, Airbnb underlined the company’s grand vision for connecting guests and hosts. “What if you could get paid to bring people to your living room?” Chesky said. “What if you could book someone’s home the way you could book a hotel anywhere around the world?” With its new mobile apps, Airbnb is hoping to better empower its hosts to manage their listings. For Airbnb, today’s mobile launch represents the next iteration of its product roadmap, as the company seeks to provide better tools for connecting guests who need short-term lodging with hosts who have a room or apartment to spare. That’s something that the company has been increasingly striving toward, with a number of new product launches over the years. On the host side, the mobile app underlines new hospitality standards that it’s trying to put forward, thanks to new head of hospitality Chip Conley. It’ll provide a stronger dashboard designed to help hosts respond to incoming messages, accept bookings, manage upcoming guests, update their calendar, and request photography directly from within the app. That starts with Host Home, a new flow for adding your listing to the Airbnb platform directly through the mobile app. That includes the ability to request Airbnb’s free professional photography just from the smartphone. Hosts are also immediately directed to the host forum, quickly connecting the thousands of new hosts with others who already know what they’re doing. There’s also a revised way to respond to inquiries, putting all communications, information about guests, and the ability to check one’s calendar all on a single screen. And, of course, hosts can accept the reservation immediately, without having to move around to different screens. Host Home also makes recommendations for how to make a guest’s stay more special. It recommends amenities, recommends things that users can do to prepare for their guests, and recommends a special touch that hosts can provide for each of their new guests. It then sends a push notification for when guests are checking in. The app also provides users with the ability to learn about local host events, such as local meetups with other community members. For guests, the app was revised to help users more easily discover listings that they’d like to stay at. That includes an improved “Discover” tab, which showcases more of Airbnb’s most compelling properties. It also streamlines the way that users can communicate with hosts and book listings. That includes changing the way that guests are listed, with reviews listed way up in their profiles and a streamlined way to book and pay for properties. Airbnb is launching a new “Get Mobile” program to get even more of its hosts to use those apps. That could include helping hosts to pay for smartphones when they don’t already have them, as the cost will be subsidized against future revenues for those being booked. “Airbnb is a company that was founded by hosts, for hosts,” Chesky said. With that in mind, the company is trying to get hosts rallied around the idea of openness in which you can “go anywhere and feel like you’re going home.” This blending of the online and offline worlds helps Airbnb become not just a peer-to-peer platform, but also an integral part of the experience when travelers arrive. Making booking, communicating, and managing properties easier via mobile will make that a lot easier for Airbnb users.
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Microsoft Ditches Its Employee Ranking System For Something Less Internally Destructive
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Alex Wilhelm
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This morning an internal memo inside of Microsoft detailed a new employee ranking system that will replace former policy. Microsoft’s former method for judging performance was widely considered backwards, poisonous, and generally a bad apple. of The Verge this morning, and TechCrunch independently confirmed its veracity. A Microsoft spokesperson released the following statement to us: “These changes will encourage greater speed, creativity and teamwork to help us bring innovation to market faster and better serve our customers.” The former system used a method of rating employees that encouraged strong employees to surround themselves with weaker workers to ensure that they would stay at the top of their cohort, with the requisite performance incentives and job security. That’s hardly a system that is conducive to strong teams and big new products. Instead, performance reviews will now better match new product cycles so that employee results can be more accurately measured. Microsoft wants to ensure that workers slugging it out on long-term projects don’t forfeit bonuses, or other compensation boosts merely because they are in the trenches for a lengthy time. The last caveat to this is that the company name-checks “leverag[ing] input and ideas from others, and what you contribute to others’ success.” This could foster better cross-department collaboration. Microsoft has long had infamously bitchy, bickering, and boxing business blocs. Its recent reorganization broke up former divisions in favor of more vertically distinct, and less overlapping, units. This forces teamwork. The Windows team needs to kick it with hardware, or the next Surface is going to be a weaker consumer experience, and so forth. So the new groups need to get along, and what better way to encourage that by dropping some cash into the game? On paper, Microsoft’s new ranking system has promise and could hardly be worse than what came before it. If it can dovetail neatly into the company’s new divisions, it could be a long-term boon for the firm. But for now it’s just a memo. Enjoy: To Global Employees, I am pleased to announce that we are changing our performance review program to better align with the goals of our One Microsoft strategy. The changes we are making are important and necessary as we work to deliver innovation and value to customers through more connected engagement across the company. This is a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact. We have taken feedback from thousands of employees over the past few years, we have reviewed numerous external programs and practices, and have sought to determine the best way to make sure our feedback mechanisms support our company goals and objectives. This change is an important step in continuing to create the best possible environment for our world-class talent to take on the toughest challenges and do world-changing work. Here are the key elements: More emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. We’re getting more specific about how we think about successful performance and are focusing on three elements – not just the work you do on your own, but also how you leverage input and ideas from others, and what you contribute to others’ success – and how they add up to greater business impact.
More emphasis on employee growth and development. Through a process called “Connects” we are optimizing for more timely feedback and meaningful discussions to help employees learn in the moment, grow and drive great results. These will be timed based on the rhythm of each part of our business, introducing more flexibility in how and when we discuss performance and development rather than following one timeline for the whole company. Our business cycles have accelerated and our teams operate on different schedules, and the new approach will accommodate that.
No more curve.We will continue to invest in a generous rewards budget, but there will no longer be a pre-determined targeted distribution. Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.
No more ratings. This will let us focus on what matters – having a deeper understanding of the impact we’ve made and our opportunities to grow and improve.
We will continue to align our rewards to the fiscal year, so there will be no change in timing for your rewards conversation with your manager, or when rewards are paid. And we will continue to ensure that our employees who make the most impact to the business will receive truly great compensation. Just like any other company with a defined budget for compensation, we will continue to need to make decisions about how to allocate annual rewards. Our new approach will make it easier for managers and leaders to allocate rewards in a manner that reflects the unique contributions of their employees and teams. I look forward to sharing more detail with you at the Town Hall, and to bringing the new approach to life with leaders across the company. We will transition starting today, and you will hear from your leadership in the coming days about next steps for how the transition will look in your business. We are also briefing managers and will continue to provide them with resources to answer questions and support you as we transition to this approach. I’m excited about this new approach that’s supported by the Senior Leadership Team and my HR Leadership Team, and I hope you are too. Coming together in this way will reaffirm Microsoft as one of the greatest places to work in the world. There is nothing we cannot accomplish when we work together as One Microsoft. Lisa
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Airbnb Touts 500K Homes And 350K Hosts Around The World, Launches Groups To Share Best Practices
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Ryan Lawler
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continued its pitch to regulators and hosts about the benefits of the new sharing economy, touting some new stats about the number of hosts and lodgings available on the company’s platform. Five years after launch, the company now has more than 500,000 homes and 350,000 hosts in 34,000 cities around the world. “This is an economy where people have the power,” co-founder Brian Chesky at an event in Airbnb’s new San Francisco office space. “There are laws for people, and there are laws for businesses. But you are a new category — people as businesses.” Chesky said that the company is having conversations with local governments. And at the event, he introduced the company’s new head of hospitality, Chip Conley, who talked about Airbnb’s Hospitality Innovation Lab in Dublin, in which the company determines best practices that its hosts have developed for the check-in of guests. Conley said that if the hosts get nine “moments of truth” right, they’ll secure trust of their guests. That’s important, as there are 1,000 new hosts joining every day. And so, the company is suggesting new hospitality standards: welcome, support, reviews, accuracy, communication, availability, commitment, cleanliness, and amenities. Hosts who answer a request within 12 hours, for instance, are more likely to get a guest to stay with them. The company is also hoping to provide more help from the community with the launch of its Superhost Program in 2014. But that’s not all: Airbnb also announced new tools for hosts to share stories with one another, and to help each other share best practices. The launch of Airbnb Groups, announced today, is designed to help hosts communicate with each other and by strengthening the community’s standards and way they interact with guests. “We are a community-driven hospitality company,” Chesky said. That will be improved by the company’s adoption of mobile tools, thanks to the for hosts and guests to communicate with each other. Airbnb has seen fantastic growth in the five or six years since launch. Airbnb CTO Nathan Blecharczyk said at Y Combinator Startup School a few weeks ago that the company had , which was up from 4 million at the end of last year.
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Twitter Announces Custom Timelines For Hashtags Or Topics On Tweetdeck, Launching API Too
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter will let you create custom timelines based on topics, hashtags and more from Tweetdeck, it . Twitter is also providing an API to allow developers to build this functionality into their products. This will allow people to create powerful streams of information out of Twitter’s public firehose, effectively allowing anyone to curate individual streams of data tailored to a topic. The topics could be literally anything that’s contained in a tweet, including hashtags, a phrase like ‘drinking coffee’ or event-specific keywords like ‘Superbowl’ or ‘TC Disrupt’. The ability to create custom timelines in Tweetdeck is rolling out slowly, so not everyone will have it right away. This is apparently in an effort to educate people about the new capabilities of custom timelines and to see how people are using them. Not all of Twitter’s consumer products will get this feature right away. If it’s successful, however, it could definitely expand to other products. Twitter’s Brian Ellin says that the custom timelines are ‘entirely new’. “You name it, and choose the Tweets you want to add to it, either by hand or programmatically using the API…This means that when the conversation around an event or topic takes off on Twitter, you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant Tweets.” Every timeline will have its own permalink page that you can refer users to on Twitter.com. That makes it easy to share and shuffle them around and refer people to them. They’re also completely embeddable. Over the past few months, the ‘tweet collection’ tool Storify has been expanding to other networks like Facebook in an effort to allow people to create stories around all kinds of social media. That seems wise at this point as many of the use cases of Storify appear to be covered by Twitter’s new custom timelines. You’re able, for instance, to create a and drag-and-drop individual tweets to it if you wish. Any custom timelines you create will show up in your profile card in Tweetdeck, and users can view them from there. [gallery ids="913731,913730,913729,913728,913727"] Each timeline is public and has its own page on twitter.com, making it easy to share so others can follow along in real time as you add more Tweets. And since custom timelines are part of our Twitter for Websites toolkit, you can embed these timelines on your website. The tweets can also be added programmatically, today as well. This allows users of the API to ‘program’ timelines based on logic operators or to add the custom timeline creation feature to their own products. Politico, for instance, is using the API to feed policy industry tweets into a . Twitter offers a host of examples of people already using the timeline, and those spell out exactly what Twitter hopes to see it used for including TV shows, live Q&A sessions, ‘Twitter playlists’ and sporting events. The custom timelines look like a great way to expand the flexibility of Twitter’s ‘power’ product Tweetdeck. And it also offers a bunch of customization options for people that use Twitter for information gathering. Specifically, this looks like a great way to gather a focused stream of information around particular events, which has always been tough on Twitter. If you want to create a running timeline to follow a particular game or team that doesn’t clutter up your main timeline, for instance, these custom timelines will make it easy to do so. But we can’t help but be drawn to the uses of the custom timelines as an information gathering tool. When breaking news happens these days at least some component of it happens on Twitter. Custom timelines will add a bunch of ways for people who use it for info-gathering in times of news to slice out feeds of solid meaty information from the random chatter around these topics. The custom timelines product is still obviously very early on in its development, but it should be interesting to see where it goes from here. Image Credit: /Flickr CC
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Makerbot Wants To Put A 3D Printer In Every School
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John Biggs
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3D-printer company is leading a crowdfunding drive to buy 3D printers for every school in America. The push, called Makerbot Academy, will begin with CEO Bre Pettis personally pledging a Makerbot to every public high school in the company’s home town of Brooklyn. “MakerBot Academy is a big thing. It is epic. There are around 100,000 schools in the USA and we want those students to be ready for the future,” Pettis wrote. You can donate at the . “As a former teacher, I believe strongly in creating a new model for innovation. A MakerBot is a manufacturing education in a box,” wrote Pettis in a blog post. “We need to encourage our teachers and our youth to think differently about manufacturing and innovation.” Makerbot is working with , part of the The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute that is “kickstarting” the 3D printing industry in the U.S. and designers interested in building educational models can register
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Retina iPad Mini’s A7 Runs At 1.3GHz, Same As iPhone 5s And Slightly Below iPad Air’s 1.4GHz
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Matthew Panzarino
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Early benchmarks, like , noted by Primate Labs founder John Poole, are getting posted for Apple’s new Retina iPad mini and they’re looking pretty good. The A7 in the smaller tablet appears to perform nearly as well as its larger sibling, but is clocked in about 100MHz lower at 1.3GHz. The larger iPad Air’s A7 processor runs at 1.4GHz and the iPhone 5s runs at around 1.30GHz. The lower clock speed in the mini (very slightly lower) will likely not affect performance much overall. The reduction may be due to thermal profiles which prevent the device from getting uncomfortably warm to the touch, a complaint with some previous models of iPad. Many iPad Air owners and reviewers have noted that the tablet does not have the same warming issues even with heavy use. Any true test of iPad mini performance will likely not come as a result of the maximum clock speed but instead as a result of how Apple handles throttling the processor both under load and in idle states. This kind of careful power management is how Apple extends battery life and reduces heat. As long as that’s done carefully, and more along the curve of the iPad Air vs. the more battery conscious iPhone 5s, it’s unlikely that users will see much of a difference between the two tablets. Apple’s iPad mini with Retina display , in a somewhat surprisingly casual launch for a new model.
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Roku Gets New Live Video Programming With WatchESPN And WATCH Disney Channels
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Ryan Lawler
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Streaming set-top box maker has just lined up some more live programming from a couple of cable networks. Today the company is announcing availability of apps from ESPN and Disney channels on its platform, with content that can be viewed by those who log in with their cable credentials. The new channels include WatchESPN, WATCH Disney Channel, WATCH Disney Junior, and WATCH Disney XD, which will all provide access to live, linear programming through affiliated video providers. There will also be some on-demand content, showing recent news, clips, and highlights. It’s all about making that content available on as many platforms as possible. For ESPN and Disney, Roku is added to a list of platforms and devices that include the iPhone, iOS, Android, and Microsoft Xbox platforms. But it requires those networks to have struck deals with cable, satellite, and fiber TV distributors. WatchESPN’s live content is available to more than 55 million households, including from providers such as Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Verizon FiOS TV, Comcast Xfinity TV, Midcontinent Communications, Cablevision Optimum TV, Cox, AT&T U-verse® TV, and Google Fiber. WATCH Disney, meanwhile, is available to 43 million pay TV subscribers, including Verizon FiOS TV, Comcast Xfinity TV, Midcontinent Communications, Cablevision Optimum TV, Cox, AT&T U-verse TV, and Google Fiber. In both cases, Charter and NRTC will have those apps soon.
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Online Real Estate Veteran Redfin Lands $50M From Tiger Global, Investment Giant T. Rowe Price As It Looks To Gain Market Share In The U.S.
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Rip Empson
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As the real estate market regains some life after an extended dip, people are beginning to get comfortable with the idea of selling their home again and, in turn, getting comfortable with looking around for that special place. To help in an increasingly fast-paced market, technology-powered real estate brokerage, , has been on a mission to help people not only find the right house, but to help potential sellers get feedback on the price of their home from hundreds of potential buyers. On the heels of launching a series of that aim to reduce the cost of the real estate search process for both homebuyers and sellers, Redfin is doing a little price whispering of its own. The company today announced that it has raised $50 million in late-stage growth capital from a handful of investors, beginning with Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price Associates. The new round, which also includes contributions from the company’s existing investors, like Greylock Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and The Hillman Company, brings the company’s total funding to just under $100 million. In addition, from what we’ve been hearing from sources, the round values its online brokerage and search business in the ballpark of $500 million. Fortune . With the new injection of capital, Redfin becomes yet another addition to the list of companies pursuing growth capital from backers outside the usual confines of the venture capital world. The investment is the second of its kind that T. Rowe Price has made in recent months, following its investment in MongoDB last month, for example. Furthermore, a raise of this size, at this point in Redfin’s growth, seems to give credence to and provide further supporting evidence that have pegged Redfin as a potential IPO candidate in 2014. However, while an IPO is very likely in Redfin’s future, this could also buy the company some time. With the help of firms like Tiger Global, which have plenty of experience investing in mature companies in later stages of growth, the round also allows Redfin to extend its runway as a private company and delay an IPO for that much longer if it so chooses. In either case, the new capital allows Redfin to focus on increasing its existing marketshare, increase marketing and spend on boosting consumer awareness, , currently sits at around 3 and 4 percent in the company’s hometown of Seattle. Collectively, Redfin currently operates in 22 cities, and, with its new round, the company will no doubt be looking to increase its footprint in its more active markets. While Redfin competes (at least nominally) with the likes of Trulia and Zillow, the company has aimed to differentiate itself by becoming more of an online search and brokerage platform. Rather than take the Kayak-style approach (becoming a lead generation funnel for other brokerages), Redfin is a listing service that combines traditional search listings that one might anywhere with those of its own brokers. In other words, the company employs its own fleet of brokers, enabling it to offer access (in some markets) to live agents and to better control and optimize customer satisfaction. By combining typical listings with those of its agents, the more appealing its search results and recommendations will be, or so the thinking goes. As a result, the company claims that it’s able to save homebuyers an average of $7,500 — in part by giving them access to additional information, better listings and online tools that help reduce the buy-side real estate fees usually incurred at closing. Over the last year, Redfin has been moving to round out its platform with the addition of a handful of that aim to increase its value on both sides of the real estate transaction, including tools that both for market prices and conditions, as well as those that when to buy and when they’re about to step into a bidding war. Because Redfin employs its own local agents, it also has access to more transaction and listing data than the average real estate listings site. This data has already begun to fuel the products mentioned above, on the one hand, and on the other, it can potentially become the engine behind a suite of tools that could provide better insight into local real estate trends and what’s happening at different stages of the process. The more it can develop this data in its key local markets, the more accurate and valuable its platform becomes, and the more its business stands to thrive as a result. Of course, whether its new $50 million will help it get there is another story altogether. For more, find and watch the video embedded below to see Glenn Kelman and Redfin investor from Greylock James Slavet discuss the new funding with TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor:
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Facebook Messenger Fights Chat Competitors By Bringing ‘Contact Via Phone Number’ To All
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Josh Constine
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Facebook is continuing its assault on SMS and competitors like WeChat and Line today by expanding its feature to . The option launched on Android to a select set of testers at the end of October, and is being pushed to all as well as all iOS users. The now and also brings a cleaner layout, and faster start-up and navigation. The intent is clear. , Facebook doesn’t want you to have to switch to SMS to contact someone who you have the phone number of but aren’t friends with. It’s watched as startup messaging apps like WeChat and KakaoTalk that rely on phone numbers have risen to huge user counts. Today’s move could box them out, if it’s not too late. WeChat is thought to have users, while its Chinese parent company Tencent’s desktop messaging service QQ is said to over 800 million active users. WhatsApp is thought to have somewhere between 250 million and , while KakaoTalk is said to have . Then there’s sticker-messaging app Line, and Snapchat, which sees about as many daily photo uploads and which the said refused a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. In case you thought Facebook wasn’t concerned with these competitors, just look at the in the App Store. Each tackles a specific foe. “Text the people you care about, for free” – SMS. “Send photos privately” – Snapchat. “Say it better with stickers” – Line. “Reach them instantly” – WeChat and WhatsApp. “Not just for Facebook friends” – SMS, again. One reason the Asian messaging startups may be gaining ground is they’re getting users addicted to games. Several have their own internal gaming platforms that third-parties build titles for. Meanwhile, Facebook is pursuing a “social layer” strategy in mobile gaming, hoping to provide login and sharing options to native games rather than running the platform itself. That might not be forceful enough to keep users’ eyes glued while they wait for replies from friends. Overall, this degree of fragmentation in the messaging market is dangerous for Facebook because it thrives on having all your friends in one place. Messaging generates a ton of user engagment and return visits, plus also helps companies build an accurate social graph of who you talk to most. That’s important data Facebook needs to refine its News Feed relevancy algorithm and ad targeting. The option to contact someone via phone number within Messenger might dissuade people from using these other apps. It could be especially helpful to budget-minded folks who don’t want to rack up SMS costs. International travelers could meanwhile benefit from avoiding SMS roaming charges. At this point, it doesn’t look like Facebook will be able to beat all these messaging competitors. At best it can hope to stunt their growth and hold onto its existing users.
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Voxel Brings Its App Virtualization Tools To Android
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Anthony Ha
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After at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in September, is announcing that it can now virtualize Android apps as well. The Voxel platform allows developers to run their apps in the cloud, which in turn allows users to interact with apps without installing them. The company is pitching this as a new way for developers to advertise their apps (so a user can play a game before being asked to download it). The technology could eventually be used for other purposes, such as virtualizing enterprise apps to protect sensitive data. Co-founder and CEO David Zhao (formerly the CEO of ZumoDrive-maker Zecter, which was acquired by Motorola Mobility) told me that since the initial launch, Voxel has attracted interest from a number of ad networks and publishers, though he couldn’t announce any new deals. (The company has already announced partnerships with RTB.com, AppSponsor, PlayHaven, and Quixey.) Zhao did say that the initial interest made it clear that it was important to support both iOS and Android apps: “Everybody that we’re working with has a presence on both iOS and Android.” He argued that most developers prefer to try new ideas on Android first, since they don’t have to wait for Apple’s App Store approval process. Voxel now says it can both virtualize Android apps and, through a new Android software development kit, allow developers and ad networks to stream the virtualized apps on Android. Apparently, the main challenge was dealing with the fragmentation of the platform — the fact that Android is running in so many versions on so many different types of devices. “It’s a slightly higher latency on Android than iOS,” Zhao added. “That’s mostly due to the architecture of the two operating systems and how they handle video and audio. But it’s not that noticeable to the end user.” Zhao demonstrated a few apps for me (via Skype), and it did look liked they’d achieved the same speed and responsiveness that the the company had already shown on iOS.
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FWD.us Hires CTO To Fight For Immigration Reform With Tech, Not Just Money
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Josh Constine
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With Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as founders, you’d think would focus on building tech tools to push for immigration reform. Yet it’s mostly used money to buy campaign ads for supportive Congress members and run grassroots campaigns. But now it’s hired as CTO; he’ll be working with volunteer engineers and running hackathons to code the way to policy change. A Stanford computer science graduate and son of an Indian immigrant, Contractor was the VP of Engineering for Bebo from 2006 to 2009, where he helped grow daily page views from 100 million to 350 million before it sold to AOL for $850 million. Now he’ll be working for funded by Silicon Valley moguls that aims to create a path to citizenship for immigrants and expand the H-1B Visa program. FWD.us President Joe Green tells me he hired Contractor because he “combines technical background with experience organizing projects, and is someone who is well-connected and thought of in the tech community, and who was passionate about the issues.” The CTO’s first project was recruiting an army of mentors to help teams of young immigrant “DREAMers” at a this weekend at LinkedIn’s headquarters. These mentors (some who I know personally) include Dropbox head of design Soleio Cuervo, Generator Lab co-founder Jay Zalowitz, open source guru Conrad Irwin, Quora growth product manager Rob Matei, IronPearl founder and current PayPal growth head Stan Chudnovsky, LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Batalion, and a slew of former and current Facebook product people including Arjun Banker, Itamar Rosen, Roddy Lindsay, and Bobby Goodlatte. The DREAMer hackathon will be hosted by Zuckerberg on November 20 and 21 and see over working with the mentors to build tools that teach people about the need for reform, and pressure Congress to make it happen. These could include a way to find friends in states with Congress members who are on the fence about immigration reform, and encourage them to call, write or digitally contact them showing support for the movement. I think a guide to navigating the citizenship process could be a big help for immigrant families. Contractor tells me he also plans to run “hack days” in the evenings from FWD.us’ San Francisco headquarters, so any talented Silicon Valley engineers, designers, or product people can come lend a hand. The CTO’s efforts could help repair FWD.us’ if he can produce tools that really help immigrants and make a difference in getting reform passed by the House Of Representatives.
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What Are The Revenue Targets Snapchat Must Meet To Be Worth $3 Billion?
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today that Snapchat turned down a $3 billion or more all cash acquisition offer from Facebook. The news has taken many by surprise, as Snapchat has no revenue, and is an exceptionally young company. The leaked offer could be a trial balloon of sorts to help Snapchat raise its next round, which was reportedly set to value the firm . The external market view of the company was recently that it would have little trouble raising a huge docket of cash at that price. However, the proposed round , despite rapid growth in the number of “snaps” that Snapchat users send each day in recent months. Turning down $3 billion is a difficult choice for anyone. To do it on the back of no revenue and a product aimed at a fickle market category is downright gutsy. What is $3 billion in market value today? Well, we can stack that market value against Twitter’s recent IPO to come up with revenue analogs that answer the question: At Twitter’s IPO, and day-one valuation, what was its revenue-to-valuation ratio? We can then apply that to Snapchat, both today and in the future, to estimate how much top line Snapchat will have to earn to grow into its valuation at its current levels, and at a later exit or public offering, provided that it reaches either. Or, put another way, we can get some rough numbers of how far Snapchat has to run the revenue game from its current place at the starting line to be a sensibly valued company. We’ll dig in shortly regarding the veracity and fairness of the comparison, but we can make the simple point that Twitter and Snapchat are social, mobile-first messaging platforms that have in their youth both faced public worries about their ability to monetize. I am not at all trying to say that Snapchat should make even a fraction of Twitter’s revenue, but instead that by drawing broad parallels there is quite a bit that we can learn. We begin with Twitter. Let’s set aside the fact that Twitter loses money. Snapchat does as well. That in mind, we’ll focus on revenue. Twitter, in the trailing 12 months (TTM) leading to its final private quarter (ending September 30), had revenue of . This is calculated using the provided nine-month figure for 2013, and then deducting the nine-month 2012 figure from the also provided full-year 2012 figure, and then summing the two ( ). Twitter filed to go public at $26 per share. Using a , Twitter valued itself at $18.3 billion. The company , valuing the firm (again: using a diluted share count) at $31.8 billion. Comparing those figures to Twitter’s top line, the company valued itself at 34.2 times its trailing 12 month’s revenue. Its forward revenue figure would be substantially less, of course. The market valued Twitter at $31.8 billion, instead, or 59.5 times its trailing revenue. With these two numbers, we can now turn to Snapchat, and see the range of revenues that it will have to generate to trade at Twitter’s valuation range, and also where it will want to be if and when it goes public. Younger technology companies are less focused on revenue than more mature firms in the market category. Therefore, the following data points are unfair. However, we are being unfair on purpose, as Snapchat’s valuation implies that it will eventually earn revenues of a certain level. Therefore, we can calculate the that the company currently finds itself in, provided that it does carry on as an independent company, something that I find doubtful. If it does, however, it will need revenue and, eventually, profit. And, given that investors are willing to value Snapchat in the 10-figure range, I don’t think that comparing its metrics in this way to Twitter is too mean; investors are betting that Snapchat will be a hit on par with Twitter later on in its life. We’ll first compare a few revenue marks for Snapchat using Twitter’s own set value-to-revenue ratio: What value is there in calculating revenue deficit? Essentially, it shows how much progress the company has to make to simply be worth a very frothy, valuation such as the one that Twitter attached to itself, as part of its IPO. Now, public investors have a high view of Twitter, in that they are valuing the firm at a much higher value-to-revenue ratio, implying that they are willing to value each dollar of Twitter higher than the company was able to before its IPO. Now, this will lead to a lower implied revenue deficit for Snapchat, but the data is worth seeing. We repeat the above: — There is a perverse little joke going around the Valley at the moment that it is almost better to put off revenue as long as you can, so that you can sell your company for more money. Start to monetize, à la Tumblr, and struggle, à la Tumblr, and you might only get a mere billion dollars! Investors that are betting on Snapchat at the above value points are making one of two wagers: That someone will either be stupid enough (Yahoo), or scared enough (Facebook) to buy Snapchat for a valuation multiple of . Or, that Snapchat is a killer business, and that it will best and blow past the above revenue ranges, on its way to becoming a firm ripe for the public markets. If the latter, they must have calculated how far from zero they are, in that they are pre-paying for Snapchat revenue that has yet to be born. And they are paying a premium for it. Recall that if you grow your valuation too quickly, it can be hard to find an acquirer. And you just might have to turn to a friend for help. Well, once your valuation is in the billions, there is no room left for friends or family to bail you out — only fools if you are lucky enough. Scoff at the Snapchat valuations that are being tossed around and you will be told that there are for Snapchat to monetize. Just look at Facebook! I don’t believe it. Facebook’s data graph is why its advertising system works; Snapchat deletes – theoretically – the information that it could use to target advertisements. So, that’s about where I see Snapchat at the moment. A fun app, and one that I am using more, but one for which I have a hard time understanding the numbers buzzing about its head.
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The Sub-$200 Moto G Smartphone Is Google’s Answer To Android’s Laggy Low-End
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Natasha Lomas
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Motorola there were plenty of theories about why it wanted the mobile maker. Patents, being named chief among them. But of the low-cost smartphone suggests the strategy was — or has certainly become — multi-faceted. If there’s any kind of wall between Google and Motorola it’s definitely a porous one. Motorola’s Punit Soni took the stage in São Paulo to discuss what the Google-owned mobile maker was trying to achieve on the software front with the Moto G. Soni went to Motorola from Google last year, where he’s now VP of product management. His on-stage session cheerleading the Moto G at turns resembled a strident lecture — which in turn sounded very much like Google chiding and schooling its Android OEMs on what it takes to make decent budget handsets. Subtext: stop making awful Android phones and using ‘budget price-point’ as your excuse. “I came from [Google to Motorola],” said Soni, during the Moto G launch. “I can vouch for the fact that Android is the best mobile operating system in the world bar none. It is progressive, intuitive, it’s gorgeous and it’s very high performance. Not only that it updates itself at regular intervals; it only gets better. A device that’s built on pure Android with minor optimisations is going to have an incredibly high performance. That is the crux of our software strategy.” Android’s low end has clearly become an embarrassment to Google, dragging the platform’s reputation down by pairing it with cheap, underpowered hardware — which inevitably results in a laggy, frustrating user experience. Even though the huge reach of Android — which runs the gamut from high end flagships to ‘cheap as chips’ mobiles — is a strength when it comes to talking about marketshare; Google monetises the platform via its own software services. So if those services are absent because an Android OEM made too many changes to the platform, or rendered it frustratingly laggy because of bad hardware/bloated software, then it’s Google’s business that suffers. Seen in that context, the Moto G looks very much like Google’s answer to cleaning up Android’s low end. Soni described the current crop of Android OEMs as having a “confused” relationship with Android — because in trying to differentiate their handsets, they’re either slowing Android down with skins or duplicating Google’s own services and cluttering the user experience. “In today’s ecosystem, mobile manufacturers have a very confused relationship with Android. They build on top of it but then they add on all these custom skins which detract from the user experience and hog resources,” he said. “Then they go and put duplicated software on top of it which basically competes with Google’s mobile services and you have a situation where you have homescreens with multiple mail apps, multiple app stores, multiple video players and music players and so on.” “The result of all of this is you have devices with very non-intuitive, cluttered user interfaces, with apps that actually slow it down and make it worse than they need to be — the phone much slower than it needs to be. Now there has to be a better way to do this,” he added. Soni said Motorola had focused on “complementing” rather than “competing” with Android — and singled out aspects such as the display, the battery life and the camera as areas where OEMs should absolutely be sweating to produce a decent smartphone experience for a low-end price. “We didn’t build TouchWiz UI and Sense UI, and all of these other custom skins,” Soni said, referring to tweaked Android interfaces offered by Samsung and HTC, respectively. “We didn’t duplicate Google mobile services; we focused our energies into building things that have real value to the user. And that actually means the fundamentals. So we spent time optimising the device so that it has an extended battery life, so that it boots faster. “We’re talking about obsessive attention to the basics. Whether it is audio, whether it is data, storage, memory, touch sensitivity, connectivity, you name it. We focused on those aspects which make the phone a joy to use. And because we did that we believe that Moto G actually punches way above its weight, in terms of performance, given its price category.” In other words, the Moto G is basically a lesson in what it takes to make a decent Android handset for sub-$200. TechCrunch asked Motorola Canada’s General Manager, Odile Guinot, whether or not the Moto G was a proverbial gauntlet thrown in the direction of other Android OEMs. “We feel it’s an unserved part of the market,” she said. “It’s not like we’re the only person that can do it, it’s just that we’re the only company that wants to right now, and the only one that is doing it.” To make this device, Google surveyed 15,000 smartphone users and focused on their priorities, among which was customization, according to Guinot. It was higher on their list than other features some might have expected to place high, including LTE support. “That’s just not what the customers were looking for,” Guinot said of LTE. “They did not prioritize that when they talked about an affordable phone. They wanted to have a big display where they could watch their videos and view their pictures, etc. They wanted to have the latest Android.” Do less with Android, and your devices stand a better chance of being updated to the latest version of Android, was another point made by Soni — referencing (in so many words) Android’s ongoing fragmentation problem. More evidence, if it were needed, that Motorola is acting as the mouthpiece of Google — telling Android OEMs what to do and what do. And then hammering that lesson home by unboxing a $179 “premium” smartphone that has to potential to cut a swathe through the low-end Android pack, decimating the businesses of sub-par OEMs. With the Moto G, Motorola is making the rare claim that devices will receive a guaranteed update to Android 4.4. Guinot told TechCrunch that carrier partners are on board with getting the update out on time, and that in fact, it’s in their best interest to do so, so they were happy to help. Google has worked with them to make sure all testing required is completed on time, she added. “A pure Android strategy allows us to shine a light on Google services,” added Soni, continuing to sing from the Google hymn sheet. “Google has some of the best software services in the world. Whether it’s Gmail, Hangouts, YouTube, you name it; the list goes on.” As well as taking out Android’s low-end trash, it’s possible Google also has Samsung in its sights with the Moto G. If the handset lives up to the promise of a premium experience for sub-$200 it could give consumers pause for thought about picking up another budget Samsung device that’s been compromised by a cramped, low-res screen and puny processor. Samsung’s flagships are excellent phones but the company plays at all price-points and makes more than its fair share of sub-par ‘Droids. Motorola name-checked two Samsung devices during the Moto G presentation — the Galaxy Fame and the Galaxy S4 — the only Android OEM singled out in this way for explicit criticism, unless you count the passing reference to HTC’s Sense UI. (The other non-Android device mentioned was the iPhone 4/4S — and eating into Apple’s ‘past years’ discounted iPhones’ lunch is evidently also on Moto/Google’s mind.) When it comes to Samsung, the Korean mobile maker’s dominance of the Android ecosystem has certainly made life tough for other Android OEMs. Motorola’s own position in handsets was looking shaky at the point when Google stepped in to buy it/save it. And today HTC continues to struggle to keep its handset business out of the drink. Bearing that in mind, doing what it can to dilute Samsung’s Android marketshare may also be on Google’s mind — as it puts Moto to work outshining the low-end competition. That said, the Moto G may well make life harder for HTC which is apparently gearing up to shift its focus to more affordable smartphones. At $179 for a quad-core 4.5-inch device, Google-owned Motorola looks set to squeeze handset hardware profits ‘til the pips squeak. The profits it is making off of these phones might actually be in the accessories: those are traditionally high-margin, and Google has made sure to make this the most moddable phone possible, with a huge line of in-house cases, a Bluetooth headset called Buds and lots more in terms of launch accessories. But, at the end of the day, growth in smartphones is coming from the low-end segment — as emerging markets switch from basic feature phones to smartphones. Which was a point Soni reiterated several times. And with Moto G, Google is putting Android in a plum position to “on ramp” those newcomers, and steer them away from alternatives that are offering a better experience at the low end than sub-par Androids. Notably Microsoft’s Windows Phone has been gathering some momentum in markets such as South America with its budget handsets — like the Nokia Lumia 520. They may not have access to a million apps, but the basic experience is solid — and you can’t say the same for every budget ‘Droid. Motorola didn’t say what the ‘G’ in Moto G stands for — and it could well refer to several things. ‘G for Growth’, say, or ‘G for Global’ — with the phone set to go on sale in more than 30 countries, with 60 partners by 2014. Europe, Asia, South America and North America are all set to get their hands on this handset, with both the U.S. and Canada included in the rollout.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Moto G Madness And CyanogenMod For All
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Chris Velazco
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Do you like Android? Do you like multiple people trying to talk at the same time about what’s new in the Android world? I thought so. This week’s edition of the TechCrunch Droidcast is just a little more raucous than usual since Darrell and I aren’t arguing amongst ourselves — TC family members Natasha Lomas and Greg Kumparak joined us from London and California respectively to dig into ‘Droid. The docket this week is a pretty focused one: we four nerds explore the newly-announced Moto G and what it means for the rest of the companies churning out cheap Android phones, along with CyanogenMod’s first big push into the limelight with its new installer apps. Naturally, there’s very little we can agree on, but I like to think that’s just part of our charm. Enjoy!
Intro music by . Direct .
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The Dual-Screen YotaPhone Will Launch Internationally In December
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Chris Velazco
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Russia-based has been working on a curious beast called the YotaPhone for years now, and it’s gained quite a reputation for itself because of its split personality. While the front of the phone sports a traditional LCD screen, the back plays home to a power-sipping eInk display because… well, why not? The launch date was one of the last big questions left unanswered, but that’s no longer the case: the company has just confirmed to us that the YotaPhone will launch internationally before Christmas. Frankly, it’s about time they’re getting this thing out the door considering just how long they’ve been teasing it to the public. Word of device first started making the rounds , and an a very early version of the phone made public appearances at massive trade shows like CES and MWC (you can see our CES footage of the thing below). And it isn’t exactly a surprise that the company was gearing up for an official launch either — earlier this year the Russian company was confirmed it would start the mass production process with the help of a . Still, the news may come as a bummer to some of YotaPhone’s biggest fans, as an claimed that the Yota subsidiary would be pushing the device out the door some time in November. Those same reports also claimed that the YotaPhone would ship with a €500 price tag attached to it, but so far company representatives have remained mum when it came to cost. That long-than-expected gap between promotion and production may have done the YotaPhone more harm than good. There’s little doubting that it raised plenty of eyebrows, but the spec sheet is looking a bit long in the tooth compared to the competition — the final production model is going to feature a dual-core 1.7GHz chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 4.3-inch 720p screen upfront, and a seemingly paltry 1800mAh battery. Granted, it shouldn’t be a total slouch with components like those, but the big question is whether or not the gimmicky second screen will be enough to tempt potential customers away from more prominent rivals like Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony, and more.
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Twitter Now Lets Advertisers Target Users By Mobile OS Version, Mobile Device & Wi-Fi Connectivity
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Sarah Perez
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Twitter today expanded its ad targeting capabilities by allowing marketers to now more granularly segment audiences on mobile (iOS and Android) by operating system version, device, and Wi-Fi connectivity. Before, the company had only offered the option to identify users by operating system alone, on mobile. The change is an important one, given that 76 percent of Twitter’s install base of 230 million worldwide users access the social service using a mobile device. The company announced the changes to the ad targeting on its today, also noting that along with the additional capabilities comes an improved analytics dashboard for managing and analyzing the effects of various campaigns. While for general purposes, knowing whether a customer is an iPhone or Android user can help those promoting mobile apps, there are also scenarios where apps won’t even run on older versions of either the Android or iOS operating system, which would make reaching those users a waste of money. Plus, users still running an outdated version of a mobile OS may not fit the demographic profile of the kind of person an app marketer may want to reach. An early adopter running the latest edition of iOS 7 or Android KitKit, for example, may be more likely to become an early adopter of a new app versus someone still rocking their iPhone 3GS with iOS 5.0. Twitter is not the only social service to help drive mobile app installs through ads – Facebook, too, has seen its mobile ads become a in general, and its Mobile App Ads have driven over 145 million app installs this year, the company last month. Twitter also points out that app marketers aren’t necessarily the only ones who could benefit from its new capabilities, however. Telco marketers may want to reach those users on select devices, or target those who are nearing an upgrade. Other campaigns may have a need to identify users by mobile OS version, device or Wi-Fi connectivity, too. Already the company allows advertisers to target by other metrics, including gender, interests, and location, among other things, and the updated dashboard allows for a deeper analysis across these lines, showing things like impressions, engagements (clicks, retweets, etc.), ad spend and more. The additional targeting options are available today on ads.twitter.com, and are soon rolling out to Twitter Ads API partners, too.
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Microsoft Re-Org Bingo: Rudder To “Advanced Strategy,” Shum To MSFT Research From His Role At Bing
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Alex Wilhelm
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The Microsoft internal moves continue, with that executive vice president Eric Rudder (pictured) is leaving his role atop Microsoft Research to instead focus on a perfectly un-parsable role in “Advanced Strategy.” The company is mum on what is next. TechCrunch reached out by phone, but was unable to learn more on the role’s bent. Harry Shum, now the former head of Bing’s engineering team, is taking Rudder’s old role. The move of Rudder would be interesting under normal, non-re-org circumstances. He’s been in the role for a blink, taking over for Craig Mundie. However, in this time of internal – hopefully creative and efficacious – turbulence, such transfers are to be expected. Yesterday, on the news that Windows Phone’s Joe Belfiore will alongside what appears to be a continuation of his current job, I stated that we should “[e]xpect more transfers and expansions such as the one above in the next few months.” I didn’t mean today, but thanks Microsoft for bearing me out so quickly. The Belfiore move, of course, was based on another in which the head of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch, who is off to work on something “new” at the company. That role, akin to Rudder’s, is occluded in either secrecy or uncertainty. Or both! I refuse to play CEO bingo with the above information as I have too much work to do today. If you want, the comments are yours.
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Google Challenges Apple’s Dominance In Schools With Google Play For Education, Now Shipping
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Rip Empson
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the best-kept secret in education — that is, if Google’s presence in any market is ever “a secret.” Over the last year or so, the search giant has been quietly expanding its footprint in education and is moving quickly to capture a greater share of the K-12 market. sweeping through schools much as it did through the business world, Google’s presence in education has been growing fast, but has been mostly limited to its cloud productivity services. However, with the launch of , Google’s march into education has become more pronounced, as it revealed a service today that will eventually combine the best of its hardware, software and marketplace businesses into one. — its app and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom at Google I/O in May. Today, after spending the last give months beta testing the new service with students and teachers at more than 50 schools, the company is finally pulling the trigger. In practice, Google Play for Education essentially aims to make discovering educational apps a breeze, while helping content providers reach a wider audience of teachers and schools. After surveying teachers and IT admins, , the number one problem they wanted Google’s help solving had to do with time. In other words, already overwhelmed with busy schedules, they wanted time savers — both tools to help students learn in the classroom and tools to help them transition those classrooms to new curriculum standards. To do that, Google is taking this familiar, two-pronged approach, combining hardware and software. This starts by offering schools the ability to choose one of three “classroom ready” Android tablets. First is the Nexus 7, Google’s 7-inch Android tablet, which will be available to K-12 schools beginning today at a cost of around $229 (plus a $30 management fee for those who want to get more Google assistance). Beginning next year, Google will be adding to its roster of education-focused tablets with a 10-inch ASUS Transformer Pad and an 8-inch HP Slate 8 Pro, though pricing is not yet clear for the latter two. But to really lure in schools, Google knows it has to go further. In the K-12 education landscape, the company is not only going up against the familiar duo of , but a growing list of education-focused mobile devices as well, like and whatever becomes of — to name a few. To do that, Google is tying in Google Play and a few other things to sweeten the deal, like offering bulk purchasing with purchase orders and instant distribution of educational apps, videos and other content to their Android tablets via the cloud. With Google Play for Education, teachers can discover apps “approved by teachers for teachers,” the company says, as well as videos and books. Teachers can search for approved apps by grade, subject, by price — and, most importantly — by Common Core standards. In fact, the company will even be paying some teachers to review apps for them, marking those reviews with a yellow badge. As of launch, there will be “thousands” of “edu-approved” apps, through which Google will be offering the standard 30/70 split with developers. To reduce the time and work needed to get schools up and running, Google’s new tablets with Google Play for Education are built on Google Apps for Education, which means that students can use their existing Google accounts to log-in without having to begin the set-up process all over again. Another key element: When teachers find an app they want to use, they can proceed to check out, where they’ll now have the option to make a purchase order rather than having to use their own credit card and get reimbursed by the school. On the other side, schools and IT administrators can now set up a classroom of tablets in a few simple steps. Once they set up the first device, admins will be able to load a class list from a local spreadsheet, the company said, and provision additional tablets simply by bumping a new device with the administrator’s tablet. The idea, Google Play for Education product manager Rick Borovoy , was to enable classrooms to “provision a class in under 10 minutes.” While teachers and schools would usually avoid deploying a bunch of tablets during the school year, by using this simple “bumping” provisioning process, schools can circumnavigate this headache and potentially provision thousands of tablets during the school year without missing a beat. Or at least that’s the idea. With its new tablets that come with Google Play for Education built-in (and built on top of Google Apps), schools can now adopt Google’s education tools all in one go. This allows Google to have another entrance into the classroom on , which have already seen hundreds of districts adopt the company’s web-centric laptops. So far, Google says that it’s been working with startups like ClassDojo, Socrative, Explain Everything, NearPod and thousands more to get their apps up and running on Play for Education. In terms of what this means for K-12 schools in the U.S., Google had this to say in its announcement today: With more than 30 million people using Google Apps for Education already, tablets with Google Play for Education easily plug into many schools’ existing technology. This is an affordable, 1:1 solution that puts greater power in the hands of teachers to find the best tools and content for their classrooms. We’re continuing to evolve the Google in Education offering and are happy to bring even more choice in devices and content. So, stay tuned for more. For developers looking to learn more, check out the and teachers can find . More in Google’s intro video below:
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Founder Stories: The Struggle of Entrepreneurship Is An A/B Test
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Contributor
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For this discussion, I sat down with with Optimizely co-founder to discuss how he and his cofounder left Google and started to build companies together (after Siroker’s stint with the Obama campaign in 2008 and thereafter). The duo launched an educational site to teach kids math, but felt disconnected from the target users and weren’t confident the service could grow. Later, they got into and, during that incubation period, dropped their initial idea (Company #2) and pivoted into what would become Optimizely. The rest, as they say, is history — for now. What struck me most about this conversation, as it was unfolding and as I’m watching it again, is that if you listen closely, you can hear the desperation in Koomen’s voice when he talks about tasting failure during the first two companies. You can hear the stress about not having a paycheck for a year. You can hear the ambition of someone who wanted to do something on his own, and was struggling to find that one “thing.” There seem to be some tough lessons in this story. Koomen and Siroker were accomplished technical engineers, held great positions in and out of Google, and had some of the best angels in the Valley behind them — and struggled for a while until they got to a point where they were revenue-positive and could focus on building the type of company they wanted to.
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The Zune Marketplace Will Be Dead Within 9 Days
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Alex Wilhelm
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Alas poor Zune, you are dead. Microsoft has stretched out the end of Zune over such a long time that I feel that we have called it RIP for years. Here’s what I consider the : By November 22, Zune’s Marketplace will stop selling and renting content, and won’t allow users to browse TV content. This means that the only remnants of Zune will be the hardware that is still in the market and the Zune desktop software. I presume that you can keep using both with music that you outright own, and I have asked Microsoft to confirm the fact. If you have leftover Microsoft Points (yuck), you can convert those to local currency, and spend them in the Xbox Video and Music stores. I bought the first generation device the day it came out, if I recall properly, and this is all a bit sad. Microsoft did some really neat things with its music project, and in the end made one of the best pieces of MP3 hardware, the Zune HD. In its heyday, the Zune music software was, and remains, the best piece of tune-playing software released in my view. Darn you, current Spotify edition. Ultimately, Zune was caught trying to catch up to Apple’s iPod line at a time when Apple was hitting its stride with the iPhone, a device that would break the back of the standalone music player market. And then streaming services such as Spotify caught on, ending the potential for the Zune Pass, with its rental downloads and “keep” option, to become even a modest hit. It was all too late, but still quite nice in its bright autumnal senescence. Zune is over. On we move.
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Facebook Launches Open Academy To Give Kids College Credit For Open Source Contributions
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Josh Constine
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students get paired with mentors and an open source project to which they’ll add code. At the start of the semester, all the mentors and students come to Facebook’s Menlo Park HQ for an intensive kick-off weekend. Then they work in virtual teams from their schools. Mentors teach students about open source, review students’ code and may give lectures too. The winter 2014 session will begin in February. Through the pilot and ‘private beta’ with other universities including Waterloo and MIT, students worked on MongoDB, Mozilla Open Badge, Ruby On Rails and more Open Source projects. The expansion brings the program to schools including UPenn, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon. The program could turn kids from theoretical students working on canned classroom coding challenges into real-world engineers building systems people actually use. “Software development as a profession has many features that are distinct from computer science as an academic subject,” Facebook explains. “Projects are often larger than the people who participate in them; project management and interpersonal relationships can have as much impact on software design as technical issues; and systems are ultimately evaluated by user satisfaction rather than technical merit.” To be clear, Open Academy isn’t entirely altruistic. Surely, the top-tier computer science students admitted to the program will be given a nudge towards working at Facebook after college. Facebook is in a constant battle with other tech giants for top engineering talent, and programs from computer science grants to college hackathons to the Open Academy seek to seduce young code ninjas as well as aid them.
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Amazon’s New AppStream Service Lets Mobile Developers Stream Their Games And Apps From The Cloud To Any Device
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Frederic Lardinois
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Amazon today a new service for mobile developers at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today. , which uses the company’s recently launched , allows developers to easily stream their applications in high definition from the cloud to any mobile devices. Amazon is specifically marketing this for mobile developers, but there’s no reason desktop apps couldn’t use this service, too. The service is now in limited preview and developers can sign up for access . Using Amazon STX, a new protocol developed by the company’s engineers, developers can now stream anything from the interactive HD video of complex 3D games to just the computationally intensive parts of their apps right from the cloud. Using Amazon’s on EC2, developers can now just render all their graphics in the cloud. Apps using AppStream can use all of the device’s sensors, too, and then send this data back to the cloud. This, as Amazon’s VP of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy noted in his keynote today, means mobile developers now have easy access to resources that wouldn’t otherwise be available on a mobile device. As mobile devices get smaller, he argues, the cloud becomes more important. Many of the most popular apps are already running on top of the cloud (and AWS specifically). This, the company says, means an “application is not constrained by the compute power, storage, or graphical rendering capabilities of the device.”
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Matt Burns
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A Pin On Pinterest Is Worth 25% More In Sales Than Last Year, Can Drive Visits & Orders For Months
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Sarah Perez
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According to new data sourced by the social marketers at ( Pinfluencer), the value of a pin on Pinterest growing – today, a pin generates 78 cents in sales, on average. That’s up by nearly 25 percent from Q4 2012, says Piqora. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that a pin can drive both pageviews and orders several months after its original pinning. Pinterest pins deliver two site visits and six pageviews, on average, and more than 10 re-pins. That’s more viral than Twitter, the company notes, where posts are only retweeted 1.4 percent of the time Piqora, which originally arose to track Pinterest usage before , has since expanded its reach and rebranded to reflect its broader footprint across other social networks, like Tumblr and Instagram, for example. But it still has a deep understanding of what’s going on across the Pinterest network, thanks to its earlier efforts. Today, hundreds of brands turn to Piqora for its insights, including Overstock.com, Steve Madden, Crate&Barrel, ZGallerie, AMC, Sephora, Orbitz, HauteLook, and Shape, to name a few. To reach its conclusions about the growing value attached to a pin, Piqora’s engineers analyzed 1,000 brands on Pinterest from February of this year through the end of October, including both e-commerce brands and other publishers. It found that, overall, Pinterest was maturing as a social commerce platform, as more brands began to add “Pin It” buttons to websites, and introduce more Pins that led back to product pages. Says Piqora CEO Sharad Verma, some categories among e-commerce brands could do even better, when they’re more in line with what Pinterest users like. “Martha Stewart was getting 10x more traffic last year from Pinterest than from Facebook,” he says. “So obviously there are cases where a publisher or retailer in a visual space like food, fashion or home decor is very likely to be getting way over two site visits [per pin].” In other words, a pin’s real value depends on what you’re selling – so the numbers will vary from site to site. But what’s interesting about the collected data is that it shows the network can enable product discovery over a period of time, well after the first pinning takes place. Half of site visits take place 3.5 months after the first pinning, while half of orders take place 2.5 months after the pinning. “Good pins are frozen in time on Pinterest,” explains Verma. “The network has a very strong memory – if a product is pinned, it signals it’s a product worth buying.” The reason products do well for so long on Pinterest is the way the site is structured. On social networks like Twitter and Facebook, information discovery and the user experience is concentrated on the feed. Users are not browsing much beyond their feed to look for other information. But on Pinterest, users navigate to other categories and popular sections, allowing them to find more items. These new findings are relevant given Pinterest’s high valuation following several rounds, which value the network at $3.8 billion. Over the course of this year, Pinterest has finally started its monetization efforts, initially by introducing tools for brands like rich pins and product pins, as well as pin recommendations (ads) that appear in users’ feeds and category pages. Verma notes that Pinterest’s traction on mobile could be a hint toward where the company could go with those monetization efforts in the future. Piqora’s analysis found that Pinterest’s mobile user base grew by 50 percent this year with 75 percent of the usage happening on mobile (according to data from brands’ own analytics). “I do believe that Pinterest is gradually becoming the Google of the visual web,” Verma says. “We believe that Pinterest is emerging as the starting point of product discovery and product entertainment on mobile devices.” Users could begin turning to Pinterest when they want to look something up in the product realm, and that could lead the network to own e-commerce product discovery. “Advertisers could then pay for persistent and prominent product placements, just as those advertisers did on Google,” he adds. It’s worth noting, too, that the clicks and revenue data Piqora collected comes ahead of the 2013 holiday season, when those are likely to surge as users go online shopping for gifts this month and next. Last Q4, the company found a pin was worth 64 cents, and ahead of the holidays, it’s already worth much more. Piqora should have additional analysis around Q4 2013 when this shopping season wraps.
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Dropbox Hits 200M Users, Unveils New “For Business” Client Combining Work And Personal Files
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Josh Constine
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CEO Drew Houston today announced that Dropbox has hit 200 million users, up from 175 million in July. He later revealed the new client securely houses both a user’s personal and work files separately, but in one tabbed interface. All the new products today are designed to maximize security and convince enterprises that Dropbox isn’t just a frilly consumer tool. Dropbox already serves 4 million businesses and 97 percent of the Fortune 500, but is hungry for more suits. Today’s news focused on enterprise, whereas Dropbox’s last press event in May focused on developers, and announced it had hit s, up from 100 million in November 2012. At that event the Datastore API to let app developers save metadata to the cloud, such as a user’s state in their apps (like what levels they’d completed in a game). It also launched the Drop-Ins API to let third-party apps pull in a user’s Dropbox files. Houston started today’s event by recounting the Dropbox origin story. He was trying to do work on the bus but forgot his thumbdrive and found himself unable to work. He went on to say he hoped there were many things we soon won’t have to do like “carry our little thumbdrives…back up our computers…[and] send emails to ourselves.” Houston then brought out fashion company BCBG’s CIO Nader Karimi to explain how hard it was to keep the company’s data straight without Dropbox. He detailed how the company can use Dropbox to securely share legal documents. Drew begins to explain the annoyance of having both personal and work information on the same account. Dropbox originally thought it would just offer account switching, but soon realized that if that takes 15 seconds each time and it has 200 million users, it would waste 1,000 years of its users’ time every day. “People think there’s this consumer version of Dropbox, and there’s this enterprising version of Dropbox and we think that’s ridiculous. There should only be one,” Houston said. “To really do this right, you’d have to rebuild Dropbox. But then we thought we’ve hired all these great people, let’s let them rip on it. Now, I’m so excited to introduce the all-new Dropbox for Business. We’ve rebuilt everything.” The new Dropbox For Business client will be rolled out early next year, and businesses can .There was no mention of Dropbox changing its pricing from the current $795 per year for 5 users and $125 per additional user per year. A new notifications bar lets you view alerts from both sets of files or filter to see only one category. Dropbox has redesigned the mobile business client to offer a similar interface to the web for consistency. Developers can also use the Chooser and Saver APIs to let users access any of their files inside third-party apps. The update puts a heavy emphasis on controls for CIOs and IT teams. The new Sharing Audit Logs feature shows admins exactly who is sharing what with who and when. Security teams can easily block sharing of certain files outside of specific teams, or prevent an employee from having their personal files accessible on their work computer. Another new feature called Account Transfer helps businesses when they need to remove access to certain files from an employee that’s leaving the company or switching teams. An admin can select an heir to that employee’s files, allowing them to shift all the contents of someone’s business folder to someone new. A Remote Wipe feature also makes sure employees don’t still have access to any of their old business files on any of their devices, and protects data if a device is stolen. What’s lacking are more collaboration tools available elsewhere, but Dropbox’s Head of mobile and business product Ilya Fushman owned up to that, and says teamwork features are next on the roadmap. It’s good to see Dropbox continuing to focus on simplicity rather than tacking on a bunch of extraneous products. I liken it to Japanese art of folding steel in swordsmithing– making Dropbox a stronger, purer single weapon rather than making it bigger or adding more blades to its arsenal. VP of Engineering tells me “When people ask me what Dropbox’s product philosophy is, I tell them this is it. This was a big one to get right.” The company looked at where the most friction in its product was, discovered managing multiple accounts was a huge pain, and expunged this impurity. If the revamped product is a hit, it could boost Dropbox’s status with lucrative enterprise customers. It earns $125 per enterprise user per year, which stacks up quick vs its free consumer tier and $99 premium personal accounts. Dropbox enterprise competitors include Microsoft, Google, Box and, as of today, virtual desktop enterprise cloud product. But since Dropbox made its name as a consumer product, many businesses have discounted it, going with dedicated enterprise solutions instead. And really, until today, Dropbox For Business didn’t have the deep permissions and security controls to really make the grade. The battle for the enterprise cloud just got a lot more interesting.
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CIA Reportedly Collects Bulk Data On International Money Transfers
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Gregory Ferenstein
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A new report finds that U.S intelligence agencies are collecting more than data on telephone records and Internet behavior. According to the and , the CIA “is building a vast database of international money transfers that includes millions of Americans’ financial and personal data, officials familiar with the program say.” The financial data on money transfers, from businesses such as Western Union, does not include transactions that are solely domestic. A majority of the records are foreign, but includes those between the U.S. and other nations. “It does include data beyond basic financial records, such as U.S. Social Security numbers, which can be used to tie the financial activity to a specific person,” according to the . Just like the National Security Agency’s spy program, the bulk data collection is authorized under section 215 of the Patriot Act, is stored in a dedicated database and requires a court order to search the records. Western Union will spend a whopping 4 percent of its revenue in 2014 to comply with Patriot Act rules. The program was apparently inspired by the September 11 attacks, where “al Qaeda hijackers were able to move about $300,000 to U.S.-based bank accounts without arousing suspicion.” This is the latest bulk data collection program to be revealed, but it likely won’t be the last. [ ]
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Open Garden And textPlus Join Typhoon Haiyan Relief Efforts
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Catherine Shu
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Many members of the tech community have lent their skills to help Super Typhoon Haiyan rescue efforts in the Philippines. These include , and people working with . Now peer-to-peer mobile broadband network and messaging app are also offering services to help Filipinos recover from the devastating storm, which killed up to 10,000 people. Open Garden responded to a from the Office of the President of the Philippines by offering its to help survivors and rescue workers regain connectivity on their mobile phones. The Open Garden app, which can be sent from one Android phone to another using Bluetooth, makes connections more reliable for mobile users who still have access to the Internet and allows phones without a connection to access the Internet through devices that do. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC0G7ac3OwY&w=640&h=360] Stanislav Shalunov, the CTO and co-founder of Open Garden, tells me that the startup got involved in the rescue effort through , which has field offices in the Philippines to provide first-hand relief, and is also working with the government of the Philippines. One of the most important uses for the Open Garden app is improving Internet connectivity for rescue workers. In one field office that has a 300kb/s satellite connection, Open Garden helps conserve its battery by letting everyone check their email at the same time. Meanwhile, textPlus, the free text messaging app, is donating free voice calls to the Philippines. textPlus users can call numbers in the Philippines for free through the textPlus app, which is available on and . textPlus uses Wi-Fi, so users in areas where mobile networks can still use the app. For more information, see .
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TrakInvest Is A Fantasy Stock Trading Platform That Can Lead To Real Jobs
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Catherine Shu
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There are several virtual stock exchanges, including , but stands apart by giving its members a chance to turn fantasy trades into real jobs. Founded by a former JP Morgan principal, TrakInvest partners with institutions like Thomson Reuters and Religare to offer sponsored internships to students in emerging Asian markets. The platform launched to the public in late December and is open to people anywhere in the world (TechCrunch readers ), though it currently focuses on reaching aspiring traders in India, Singapore and other Asian countries. Headquartered in Singapore with offices in India, TrakInvest has received early investment from , as well as leading family offices in India and the Middle East. Founder Bobby Bhatia say his site seeks to differentiate from other fantasy trading platforms with a “learn-share-earn” model. TrakInvest’s main goal is to serve as an education and talent identification tool where students can connect with experienced traders from institutions like JP Morgan. Two of the top traders on the platform represent the types of users Bhatia wants to sign up: Roshni Kanchan, a housewife in India with a 12% return and Alex Dicu, a Polish student studying for an MBA in Singapore. “As more people start using it, our belief is that what we will do is change how trading is done in the emerging markets,” says Bhatia. “In emerging markets there has been arbitrage opacity. We are moving to arbitraging intelligence.” TrakInvest currently has 50 sponsored internships lined up to offer to the top student performers over the next few months. So far, 15 of TrakInvest’s top traders have landed internships in Hong Kong and Singapore at Religare and TrakInvest’s office, and TrakInvest is finalizing details with banks in Singapore and Hong Kong. Interns are picked based on their portfolio performance, research and discussions on the site. A former JP Morgan Partners principal and managing director at AIG, Bhatia began thinking about creating a combination virtual trading community/talent discovery platform after returning to Asia and serving as a mentor to university students. Many had trouble finding the internships they needed to launch a financial career. “When I became independent and set up my own businesses, I started trading equities much more actively. I also saw a number of inefficiencies,” he says. “I built this for my own personal use because I thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if I could get the smartest people at the National University of Singapore or the University of Hong Kong and connect with them to get their views?’ I was mentoring groups of them anyway.” For users who aren’t seeking internship opportunities and are just interested in fantasy trading, TrakInvest wants to differentiate from competing sites, like , which we and , by focusing on social media integration. TrakInvest also hopes to gain an edge with its Thomson Reuters partnership, which gives TrakInvest users access to analytics that usually cost thousands of dollars; the site’s own independent research reports; and its proprietary stock-scoring algorithms. TrakInvest currently has 12,000 reports covering markets and exchanges in countries including Australia, India, China and the U.S. TrakInvest’s partnership with a subsidiary of Religare Financial, one of the country’s largest financial and brokerage houses, will also eventually allow users to open brokerage accounts and execute real money trades through TrakInvest’s platform. Most of the site’s current 2,000 users were recruited from universities while it was in beta. It has received support from several academic institutions, including the Risk Management Institute at NUS, which made about five years of research data available to TrakInvest. Bhatia’s describes TrakInvest’s initial target user as someone between the ages of 20 to 35, who wants to learn more equity trading, follow successful traders and have an auditable way to track to their performance record. The site uses an two-step authentication process to encourage people to use their real names, which creates accountability. Incentives for user engagement include competitions that reward people who refer the largest number of friends or start the most interesting discussions on TrakInvest. The site is currently working on a ranking methodology that will evaluate the trading style and risk adjustment return of individual users. This will be especially useful for students with no previous trading experience and can be integrated into their LinkedIn profiles. Bhatia says he wanted to have internships because of his own career background. Born in India, raised in Kuwait and studied at Stanford and Duke before starting his financial career at O’Connor and Associates in Chicago. He was a principal and founding member at JP Morgan Partners Asia before serving as the managing director and head of principal investments at AIG for the APAC region. After moving to Singapore, Bhatia began mentoring students and realized how difficult it is for people to get a foothold on a financial career, especially in emerging markets. “Jobs were much, much, much more difficult to come by and many were given to people from top universities who had top internships, which were in turn even more difficult to come by,” says Bhatia. “In many cases I felt they were driven by personal connections. A huge part of internships are driven by due process, but others are ‘I have a friend here’ or ‘I know someone there.'” He adds “I would approach people on behalf of the people I was mentoring. The argument I would use was to show real pieces of work, real performance records and then request an internship on their behalf. That was the beginning of that concept.” TrakInvest is free and will remain free for students. Bhatia says the site is considering a revenue model that will allow student traders to charge a small fee for non-students to follow them and take a commission from that. TrakInvest may also charge a small fee, no more than $9.99, for premium research and analytics. Other potential monetization strategies include providing independently audited track records for traders to give to prospective employers or clients.
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Apple Store Point Of Sale Systems Go Down Again Today, Outage Continues
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Matthew Panzarino
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Some Apple Stores have had their point-of-sale systems go down repeatedly today, TechCrunch has learned. There was an extensive outage early Thursday morning and there has been an ongoing outage this evening in some stores. Reports from our sources and from Twitter corroborate that there is some sort of issue going on right now. Apple Store employees are selling to customers with pad and pen, and old-fashioned credit card machines. The Apple Store POS system runs on a combination of software including the RetailMe app and EasyPay apps. The hardware consists of iPod touch and iPad machines running the software. The iPod touches are outfitted with battery cases and card readers and are used as mobile checkout devices. Obviously, this is fairly terrible timing, as Apple’s iPad mini with Retina display just launched Tuesday, and it’s only been a couple of weeks since the iPad Air launch. Apple Stores are busy with people buying these devices, and the outages are making it difficult to maintain the normal speed of service. At the Apple store and their purchasing system is down. Running credit cards old school style. — Crystal Hutchinson (@chutch8582) We’ve reached out to Apple to see if they have anything to share about the cause or duration of the outages. The outages affected the ability to use personal pickup in order to snag iPad minis ordered online. That outage lasted several hours. At this time it appears as if the self-service EasyPay functions of the company’s Apple Store app, which allows customers to scan a barcode on an item and pay for it, are still up and running. Apple limits that to certain items and accessories, and it doesn’t work for big-ticket items like the iPad. Image:
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Google’s Megan Smith Says It’s Time To Uncover The “Lost History” Of Female Tech Pioneers
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Anthony Ha
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Google vice president Megan Smith gave a wide-ranging talk this morning at the Women 2.0 conference in Las Vegas in which she discussed “moonshot” ideas and connected them to the work she’s doing at Google’s “skunkworks” lab Google[x]. She also suggested that we’re entering a third wave” of women’s rights. isn’t a new concept, but it sounded like Smith is thinking about something more recent — this year, she said, feels like “the beginning of the third wave to me.” She suggested that there’s more discussion about the role of women and girls, whether it’s a conversation at the United Nations about developing countries or (as in Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which Smith cited as an example) a discussion about getting more women involved in senior roles at major companies. One of the keys to improving things, Smith suggested, is “visibility” — not just for women now, but also those in the past. She pointed to on female pioneers in science : “Some of the women are famous, many not.” “There’s been a lost history,” Smith said. She offered her own overview of some of those pioneers, including Grace Hopper (who was instrumental in the development of the COBOL programming language), Ada Lovelace (whose early work in computer science is supposed to be featured in ), and Katherine Johnson (who calculated the trajectory for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and other important space flights). Smith added that it’s “astonishing” that most of the people in the room don’t know about Johnson: “All of us need to know that there was an African American woman in the elite levels of that team.” In fact, Smith said Google has been trying to highlight some of that history in the Google Doodles on its front page — . Other Google efforts are more oriented towards addressing these issues in present day, such as making sure women are represented among the speakers at Google I/O and other conferences and providing bias training for those events. (Smith outlined some of Google’s other initiatives in .) The talk wasn’t just about women in tech. She offered some criteria for big, “moonshot” ideas (they need to tackle a big problem, require a breakthrough in technology, and offer a radical solution) and outlined some of the ones Google[x] is working on, such as Google’s self-driving cars and its “ballon-powered” Internet initiative Project Loon. One of the tenets at Google[x], she said, is to offer two-thirds “yes and” feedback and one-third “yes but” feedback; in other words, people aren’t supposed to say no, and they’re not supposed to go overboard with their criticism. Another is to move quickly. Apparently the first prototype of Google Glass was built in about 1.5 hours. Yet another is bringing together diverse minds, meaning that she wants Google to be “the best company for women and minorities” not to mention “gays, lesbians, different races, different walks of life.” [ ]
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Leaks Unbound: NSA Admits Snowden Took Up To 200K Documents
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Alex Wilhelm
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In a recent speech, only now picking up coverage, the NSA’s General Keith Alexander admitted that whistleblower Edward Snowden took up to 200,000 documents. Earlier estimates put the number at . In the talk (a copy of his remarks was and released by the NSA), the general went on to state that he wished “there was a way to prevent” further leaks, and that the information was being put out “in a way that does maximum damage to the NSA and [the United States].” The 200,000 figure, being higher than expected, could imply that the total number of leaks that we can expect is greater than we could have previously hoped. Provided you feel that Snowden has made a positive impact on slowing a pervasive surveillance state, this is good news. If you land more towards the position that the leaks are tantamount to treason, this is likely very bad news. The NSA appears to be treading water at best at the moment. Recent testimony by administration officials in defense of the status quo fell far short of being close to persuasive. As , here’s what the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a deputy assistant attorney general had to say in a statement: Attempting to identify the numbers of persons or U.S. persons whose communications or information may be incidentally collected would, in practice, have a privacy-diminishing effect directly contrary to the aims of this bill. […] Attempting to make this determination would require the intelligence community to research and review personally identifying information solely for the purpose of complying with the reporting requirements, even if the information has not been determined to contain foreign intelligence. […] Such an effort would conflict with our efforts to protect privacy. The above is in response to a bill that would force the government to better detail the number of Americans that have had their personal information or other data collected under NSA programs. It isn’t popular with the Executive Branch. While the NSA and the larger intelligence branch is opposed to more openness, it appears that the door cracked open by Snowden and a cadre of world-class journalists will continue to be forced open with the dissemination of new information. What began with the exposé that the NSA was has expanded around the world to include the , the email of a and — a program to tap data cables between foreign data centers of U.S.-based companies to get around Constitutional boundaries. It is my view that the more we know the better, so I welcome the continued revelations.
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The Omniture Of PR? AirPR’s New Analytics Platform Aims To Show CMOs How To Invest In PR
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Rip Empson
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Startups and PR firms have long had a halting, if not embattled relationship. Spend time talking to entrepreneurs and those working at startups, and it won’t be long before you encounter the nagging mistrust founders have of PR firms and the PR process. That’s why , the PR marketplace and technology platform, is launching a that aims to restore some of that trust — or at least give companies and their CMOs a greater degree of insight into both the value of PR and how to increase PR performance. But let’s step back for a minute and ask: Why is it that, generally speaking, entrepreneurs mistrust PR and often end up unhappy with the PR process — and performance? Well, on the one hand, that’s because, frankly, public relations and communications aren’t skills entrepreneurs necessarily have in spades or are comfortable with (and vice versa). On the other hand, as Zaarly co-founder in a recent blog post, boiled down, startups are all about math. Simply put the job of a founder, Koester says, is to make a simple math equation work: R > E. “You need to show how you can make the revenue you earn from a customer exceed the expenses you incur to get that customer,” he writes. It’s for this reason, among many others, that most founders not only pay attention to math, they’re datavores. The prevailing psychology, especially in a highly technical world, is that if you can’t measure and quantify the value of some activity or spend for the business, it’s not worth pursuing. So, why is there a sense that entrepreneurs struggle to find good PR firms? Well, startups, and particularly the founders and CTOs of tech-focused companies, aren’t always the most “outward-facing” people to begin with. Couple that with the fact that — and take this from someone in the media — good PR people can be hard to find, and you’re already halfway there. On the other side, entrepreneurs are already data and metrics-focused, so unsurprisingly, they have trouble seeing the value in spending money on a PR firm. Why? Well, if it’s an early-stage startup, capital is tight to begin with, but, really, it’s the fact that the PR process is largely opaque. Traditionally, it’s been difficult, if not impossible, to effectively measure Return On Investment (ROI). In the past, PR firms and startups have used “advertising value equivalency” as a placeholder for measuring media coverage compared to a particular publication’s CPM or CPI rates — or the functional equivalent thereof. But this really isn’t the most effective benchmark. If you haven’t already fallen asleep, this is the thought process that led Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer to create in the first place. The startup’s initial product, as we wrote in June, was a kind of “Match.com for PR.” In other words, with tech startups looking for (and actually able to pay for) representation that makes sense for them given the story they’re looking to tell, funding, stage of development and so on. Since then, AirPR’s marketplace has served as a testing ground that has allowed it to observe and collect loads of data on how startups are approaching the PR process, what they want help with and, ultimately, how effective PR is at meeting its goals, costs, publications they want to speak to and so on. Apply the insight and trends from this formula at scale (over time) — now that the company has had 2,000 companies cycle through its marketplace and hosts anywhere between 50 and 75 active PR professionals at any given time — and one begins to see how this presents the opportunity for a real business. Over the last six months, AirPR has worked to productize this data-driven insight into the PR process, ultimately resulting in an analytics platform that can potentially help PR professionals and companies alike measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Launching this week, as it’s being called, attempts to enable companies to track PR efficacy at a more granular level — all the way down to revenue impact. At a high level, the product measures a PR campaign’s web traffic, the number of articles to result from it, social media conversion, performance of core messages and how online interactions drive company sales. The product allows companies to view this information, segmented by engagement, awareness and optimization, in a single dashboard. Sounds like your friendly neighborhood analytics tool, doesn’t it? And, really, that’s the idea — a kind of enterprise-focused Omniture or Mixpanel for PR. Depending on the pricing plan and customization companies choose to pursue, they can also compare their metrics and performance to their competitors. To put this in context, well, the PR industry really hasn’t had much of a relationship with analytics, historically. Fouladgar-Mercer says that whereas marketing clouds like and offer PR monitoring solutions, AirPR Analyst can be the first big data analytics approach to measure effectiveness down to real value. “The only thing missing from the large marketing clouds of Adobe [read: Omniture] and Salesforce is PR,” the AirPR founder contends. And, while you can rarely trust a founder to be honest in the assessment of their own company, he has a point there. Every company has a line item for advertising and PR spend, and thanks to giants like Omniture, most companies know exactly how an increase or decrease in that advertising spend effects its bottom line. “For PR,” Fouladgar-Mercer explains, “it’s still pretty much a black box.” Companies have very little sense of the degree to which tweaking PR spend positively or negatively affects their core business metrics and their bottom line. The other approach that could end up working in the startup’s favor is that, while it’s initially targeting the enterprise and large brands, the long-term goal is to increase PR performance for companies of all sizes. And if the CEO is correct and AirPR is first to market with this, then it won’t matter. But the feature of AirPR’s product that could have the most appeal for companies? It takes less than 30 minutes to setup and integrates with the majority of existing analytics providers, the founder claims. In other words, without the spin, AirPR needs to start generating some revenue from more lucrative enterprise-size contracts and, once it does, it will work downstream to startups. Sure, it’s Goliath over David, but that’s the approach that 99 percent of founders would take. Plus, for smaller companies, there’s always the AirPR marketplace and, at some point in the not so distant future, they’ll get access to Analyst as well. When asked about her experience working with AirPR’s new product, “Your Network is Your Net Worth” author and former Virgin America Marketing VP Porter Gale sums it up nicely: One major misconception about PR is that it’s not a driver of revenue and sales … Some people think of PR as solely a brand awareness builder, but time and time again when the press writes a story about a company, sales tend to go up. With AirPR Analyst, marketing executives, and comms teams can track important metrics and tie them to specific business objectives. For more,
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Coin, The Electronic Credit Card, Reaches Its Pre-Order Goal In 40 Minutes
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John Biggs
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We are, I believe, in an interstitial zone when it comes to payments. Credit cards are still king – just ask – and NFC is just a dream in most countries. That’s why Coin is so interesting. It’s a credit-card-sized device that holds other credit cards, allowing you to swap from card to card and even store gift cards inside its ultra-thin innards. The planned a that would top out at $50,000. They blew past that goal in 40 minutes today, a testament to the desire for folks to leave their plastic at home. The card itself is as thin as a regular credit card. To use the card you select a payment type with the button and just swipe. The Coin card “mimics” your read credit or gift card. The technology is tightly packed inside the card’s plastic case. It uses low-power Bluetooth to connect to your iOS device that is coupled with a standard credit-card reader. You swipe your cards into the system and you’re done. The device holds up to eight cards. Engineer is leading the Y-Combinator-backed company alongside investor and board member . Parashar cut his teeth in payments with a startup called SmartMarket, but this product seems to be his winner. The company isn’t new – and I suspect a bigger player will probably beat Coin to the mass market. However, it’s a cool idea in a cool package and, clearly, the idea has caught fire. You can take a look at the product ; it ships this summer. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Sx34swEG0&w=560&h=315]
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Parsing Microsoft’s Massive 42% Gain In 2013
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft, a company that has suffered from a flat stock price since I was in middle school, is in the midst of a surprisingly strong year. A quick scan of its long-term stock chart indicates that the company is trading higher right now than at any time since 2000. It’s up this year, having risen to $37.91 in mid-day trading this fine Thursday from $26.71 at the close of December 31, 2012. So what’s going on? It’s not a simple story, but when you piece together a few key moments for the company this year the narrative is almost parsable. We’ve seen a massive Surface charge, a sliding PC market, and declining Windows OEM revenue. On the other hand, strong Office revenue, new billion-dollar businesses, the announcement of an impending CEO change and a re-org have given the company a new wind. Microsoft’s stock, year to date, chart via Yahoo: What follows is a rolling, chronological list of some of the events that drove Microsoft’s stock price higher and lower this year. We have now reached what I think we can jokingly call the Era of Hokum: Analysts talking about breaking up Microsoft. Pundits, leaks, purported Elop opinions and the like send Microsoft higher as short-term investors pile in, in hopes of a bang. They got one — for now. — We can’t solve chaos theory in this post, and the Efficient Market hypothesis is bullshit — the above is only the Cliff’s Notes of a Russian novel-esque year for Microsoft. The gist is that after a long holding period, Microsoft is making a successive parade of large moves that are reforming the company. New enterprise products. New business model. New devices. New consumer services. New executive structure. New CEO. It’s what you could have prescribed for a company that was long a market leader, but at the same had watched its preeminence be slowly ground out by more nimble rivals that invented new product categories as it played catch up again and again. Losing, most of the time, as we know. We can’t leave a post like this without asking the best question: Is Microsoft now overvalued? According to (these numbers, I believe, are using a non-diluted share count, so watch out), has a five-year forward PE of 13. That’s fine. But Yahoo also reports that Microsoft’s current PEG ratio is almost two. Put more simply: Microsoft can beat market expectations by growing at truly moderate ranges. But the market expects them not to. Therefore, the recent rally in Microsoft’s stock is somewhat contrary to investor growth expectations. Something has to give. That said, Microsoft doesn’t feel too richly valued for a company with its cash position, dividend and share repurchase program, and quarterly net income. Whether it has more room to run is something for you to decide.
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The Xbox One Is Enormous In Comparison To The PS4
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Matthew Panzarino
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Both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 are essentially repackaged PC parts at this point. Unlike the PS3, Sony’s new console uses standard X86 architecture and fairly standard components. This should allow for an easier development path and quicker adoption among studios down the line. That’s why I was so surprised when I saw this image on the of the two next-gen offerings side-by-side. The Xbox One is so big! Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any shots of them together in one image, as each one has been handling its press events separately, obviously. We have a PS4 in the labs for testing and I was at the Xbox event earlier this year and saw the console in person. It didn’t look all that big, roughly the size of the old Xbox 360’s (before the slimdown) overall. But, when compared to the PS4, the size difference is crazy. But until the Xbox One makes its way into reviewer hands (and is allowed to be shown publicly) we won’t be seeing comparisons. Add to that the fact that the PS4 has a slight edge over the Xbox One in pure processing power and it’s even more puzzling. Developer posits it might be the slimmer Blu-Ray drive in the PS4, or perhaps fan size. Primate Labs’ John Poole that the Xbox One’s system on a chip might actually be much bigger than the PS4’s. One possibility could be more aggressive attention to thermal properties by Microsoft this time around, after overheating and cracking solder caused the ‘red ring of death’ fiasco which cascaded into a major PR issue. Here’s the Xbone next to a slim Xbox 360: And that size differential is even more nuts when you consider that the Xbox One has an external power brick, and the PS4 does not. Its power supply is internal to the device itself, and it plugs directly into the wall. For a look inside the PS4, you can check out Wired’s video of Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori . The site has a bunch more comparison images between the two consoles including controllers and more. Head to check them out.
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SecretInk Lets You Send Self-Destructing Messages Over Email Or SMS Right From Your Inbox
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Sarah Perez
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, the email platform company which with competitor a year ago, is today launching technology called that enables “self-destructing” messages that can be sent over email or SMS. The system works online or inside Gmail and other webmail services using the company’s PowerInbox add-on. This utility also enables other interactive email content from dozens of social networks, news sites, and more. But SecretInk is one of the first email applications the company has funded itself. The move to launch an email add-on that enables additional privacy comes at a time when other encrypted email services like and have preemptively shuttered their services in the wake of the NSA’s spying agenda, deciding it would be better to not exist at all than to risk their users’ privacy. SecretInk, meanwhile, wants to help fill that void – for at least as long as it can. Says PowerInbox Chief Product Officer Matt Thazhmon, “we can go on the record stating that we have never been contacted by the NSA to compromise our server. If we ever were, we would shut the service down so the NSA would never read your message.” (So it’s only a matter of time, then, before SecretInk is no more?) The email application enables messages to be sent fully encrypted over the network using HTTPS. “No plain text or message content ever goes through third-party servers,” Thazhmon explains. “We also remove the message from our servers as soon as it’s opened. No copy is retained or backed up in any way. Messages are never retrievable after they’ve been opened,” he adds. When a sender creates a message using SecretInk on the web, no login is required, and the recipient is then alerted via either email or SMS that they have a message waiting. In other words, the actual communication doesn’t contain the actual message content. In addition to Gmail, SecretInk’s system works with Hotmail, Yahoo, and any other clients PowerInbox supports, including, soon, some mobile clients too. And it also works over SMS, which is something that makes it different from other encrypted email providers. The SMS aspect may have some appeal, as users today turn to a variety of mobile messaging apps to communicate more privately. In those cases, it’s often less about fears of government spying, but rather representative of a tide change in what users want from their social services – that is, something smaller and more intimate than Facebook. Apps for self-destructing texts are hugely popular right now. Snapchat it’s worth more than $3 billion. Other competitors are also trying to get in on the action with private messaging apps like , , , , and many more, which themselves followed and ‘ first steps in this space many ago. With SecretInk, though, you have an app that straddles the line between a web and mobile offering, which is something of a twist. While it works over SMS, it works right from your inbox, too. As a side note, the SecretInk app was built by former members of the TweetDeck team, says Thazhmon. This group is now working to add more features including animations, plus support for pictures and attachments, as well as dedicated mobile apps. is a free service, but there will be a premium tier for marketers who will be able to send time-sensitive messages needing immediate attention in the future. (Hey, is that an actual business model I smell?) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keRUBgyRP8w&w=854&h=510]
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eBay Debuts New Angie’s List Competitor And Local Service Provider Marketplace, eBayHire, In The US
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Leena Rao
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, it looks like eBay is launching its new local service provider marketplace in the U.S. eBayHire is similar to Angie’s List in that the site will get you in touch with service providers. For now, eBay Hire in the U.S. is only accepting requests from service providers. But the company has revealed a little bit more info on its plans for the marketplace. Through eBayHire, service providers can sell their services to eBay users in their neighborhood. You can find traditional service providers like plumbers, movers, contractors, drivers and more; but you can also access more specialized providers like photographers, coaches, those who specialize in antique valuations, upholstery cleaners and more. Each provider has a profile page, where they can list services, bios and rates. eBay says that in future rollouts, ads featuring these pros will show up in product search result pages on eBay’s marketplace. So if you are searching for tennis rackets on eBay you would see an advertisement for a local tennis pro. How does it work on the consumer side? You pick a provider you want to hire and submit a form via the site of what type of service you need. The provider then sends you a quote or calls you, and if you proceed with the service, you book and pay directly with the professional. eBay Hire does not charge a fee to sign up, and it does not make any commissions. But we’re told that after the current promotional period ends, eBay will start charging fees for each booking, similar to the fees charged when users list and/or sell items on eBay.com. eBay also says that it is working with coaches and service pros from the Professional Tennis Registry, the U.S. Golf Teachers Federation and the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. Steve Yankovich, vice president of innovation and new ventures at eBay, tells us that eBay Hire will provide professionals and customers with a “smart and seamless experience.” “This limited beta launch is another example of eBay Inc. using technology to connect buyers and sellers in new ways,” he said in a statement. It’s an interesting move for eBay to enter the services provider industry, even as a test. There is some crossover with Angie’s List, Home Depot’s Red Beacon and TaskRabbit or Exec. But the marketplace giant has been eyeing local and mobile, and this could be part of this strategy. The advertising tie-in is also worth noting — clearly eBay sees potential promise in cross-promotion and leveraging data from each marketplace. We’ll know more as eBay rolls this out more broadly and opens up eBay Hire to the public.
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Greenhouse Raises $2.7M To Make Recruiting A Science For Hyper-Growth Startups Like Airbnb
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Josh Constine
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“Recruiting is our top priority,” most serious startups say, yet they’re terrible at it. Ad-hoc interviews, jumbled notes. But turns the messy hiring process into a well-oiled machine for fast-growing startups like Airbnb, Upworthy, and General Assembly. After nearly two years of quietly perfecting its software, today it raised $2.7 million to disrupt Jobvite and grow bigger itself. “Every exec and biz leader was talking about recruiting but not everyone was really great,” Greenhouse co-founder and CEO Daniel Chait tells me. He had founded and built the custom banking software startup Lab49 from his kitchen table, taking on the responsibilities and stress of recruiting. When he sold the company to fellow Wall Street software company Corpus in 2011, Chait decided recruiting “seemed like a big opportunity.” He started Greenhouse to explore the questions “what makes a company great at recruiting and how can we automate that?” It turns out hiring best practices aren’t that mystifying, yet people don’t follow them. Companies charge into recruiting before knowing who they’re looking for, let interviewers come up with a hodge-podge of questions on the spot, don’t provide consistent feedback, and don’t track if hires perform well on the job. Greenhouse’s software standardizes all of this. You define the ideal candidate, what skills you want to hire for, and what personality and cultural fit you want in an employee. You run recruitment ads and try different variants to find what works best. Then you take applications and recruit, do phone screenings, issue a take home test, then conduct a few rounds of interviews. Interviewers ask the same questions to each candidate and log their feedback into forms. Companies can quickly see candidate scorecards, and HR execs can track the progress of their recruiting teams. The goal is to be able to make apples-to-apples comparisons so it’s obvious who the best person to hire is. Afterwards, Greenhouse can integrate with a company’s performance review system to do recruiting retrospective and determine which employees became rock stars, and how a company can hire more of them. The applicant-tracking system market is definitely crowded, so Greenhouse is looking at a serious fight. It will have to battle with Jobvite, where Chait says he sees the most customers switching from. There’s also Jobscore, Taleo, and many more, some which specialize more in candidate sourcing than Greenhouse. But Chait says many of its competitors just manage your existing, probably-shoddy hiring system, whereas Greenhouse tries to change your ways so you recruit right. Greenhouse provides instructions and best practices right inside the product, so engineers and other employees who help with the process know what to do without intensive training ahead of time. In addition to Airbnb, Upworthy and General Assembly, Greenhouse clients include Klout, Quirky, HUGE, Gawker and Lookout. They pay an annual fee based on their company size, and can get discounts for buying two- or three-year contracts. The talent wars in Silicon Valley have signaled to investors that recruiting is a hot space to invest in, helping Greenhouse to pull in a new $2.7 million round led by The Social+Capital Partnership (who Chait gave rave reviews of) and Resolute.vc. Angels in the round include Nick Ganju (ZocDoc), Seth Goldstein (DJZ and Turntable.fm), Thatcher Bell (DFJ Gotham), Thomas Lehrman (Gerson Lehrman Group and MasterStreet), and Bill Lohse (Pinterest). The money will go to building a bigger engineering team, sales and marketing, and growing to be able to handle more clients. Next, Chait tells me Greenhouse wants to build out a set of cross-industry recruiting benchmarks. “When I buy a job ad, how many candidates should I expect? When I open a position, how many interviews should I expect to do? Ultimately, companies want to know how they stack up,” Chait explains. Many founders I’ve talked to say recruiting is the bane of their existence. When they want to focus on building their product and growing their business, they know they have to take extreme care with hiring. Each employee is a six-figure investment per year, and a few wrong fits can be toxic to a company’s culture and progress. Maybe it’s , but whoever simplifies recruiting to maximize great hires while minimizing time spent will make a killing.
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Keen On… Apple Versus Google: The Dogfight Over A $250 Billion Industry
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Andrew Keen
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Apple Updates iWork For iCloud Beta With Collaboration, Printing And Folders
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013
| 11
| 14
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Apple updated its iWork for iCloud services today with several features that it had previously announced were on their way. These center around a bunch of new collaboration tools that aim to make it a good alternative to Google Docs offerings for iCloud users. Numbers, Keynote and Pages in iCloud were all updated and you can see the new stuff now at . The full list of changes differs slightly for each product but is mostly the same. The collaboration features include a list that shows who’s editing the document currently. That list can be used to navigate to the portion of a doc that they’re editing by clicking on their name. You can also see some of the editing capabilities like moving images or reformatting happen live as the collaborators do it. Here’s the full list of changes from Apple: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iCloud beta: Numbers for iCloud beta: Keynote for iCloud beta: Note that if you open a document in the new iWork for iCloud, you may end up seeing a message notifying you that your file will be converted. You’re given the option to copy your document or open and convert the original. If you do so, Apple notes, you may lose some bits that aren’t compatible with the new format. The new format, of course, was part of Apple’s overarching updates to iWork across all of its platforms including OS X and iOS 7. That’s now unified and the new apps, , are now in lock step. Apple recently that it would be adding back to iWork over the next few months, in response to some vocal criticism.
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Knozen, TheLadders’ Founder’s New Personality-Probing Startup, Closes $2.25M Seed From FirstMark, Lerer, David Tisch & Others
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013
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is the new startup from , serial entrepreneur and founder of the veteran job matching site, . Cenedella is not giving too much away about his new project at this early stage — it was founded “this year”, he says, rather non-specifically — but he’s just revealed one key detail to TechCrunch: Knozen closed a $2.25 million seed round last month — with an impressive roster of investors behind it, including (Rick Heitzmann); (Eric Hippeau, Ben Lerer); (Box Group); ‘, John Elton; and Whisper/TigerText Founder, . What exactly Knozen is cooking up remains to be seen — its public face currently consists of an depicting Botticelli’s — but the startup is evidently drawing on an area Cenedella knows well, having had some 10 years of jobs matching experience at TheLadders. Namely: personality. “We think we’ve found a unique new way to gain insights into people, and that’s why we were able to attract such top-flight investors,” Cenedella tells TechCrunch. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could know what people liked about us? We’re bringing personality to the internet: Knozen is a mobile app to discover and share personalities with your friends.” Extrapolating out from personality, Knozen looks like it wants to figure out ways to identify, categorise and help people share observations on personality — with a view to applying the resulting psychological insight in various sectors, such as HR, sales, marketing & advertising, technology, and so on. Cenedella specifically name-checks those sectors when asked about future monetisation plans. He wouldn’t fully flesh out how exactly Knozen will encourage people to say which of their friends are overly generous and which natively parsimonious — and the product won’t launch until early 2014, being at the alpha stage right now so it’s still going through various tweaks — but he did say Knozen will take the form of a mobile app that involves “fun, free” social games. “We use fun, free, social games, in a unique new way, to show people’s personalities, so that you can comment and share, and let people know what you think makes them unique and different. This is a positive, supportive place for discovering and sharing personality,” he said. “By using social games, rather than testing or single player diagnostic puzzles, we’ve been able to do something pretty interesting,” he added, when asked how it differs to the current crop of online personality tests. “This product connects with the personal/intimacy of mobile — helping to make people better by telling them what people like most about them,” he continued. “I became so enamored with the idea, that I spent the last year learning Objective C, C, Python so that I could build the first version myself. “This is more disruption of traditional HR, traditional work styles, traditional employee and customer relations. We will be the personality API for the internet.” Social networking giants like Facebook have made it their business to pry into their users’ lives by joining up the dots of the things they like and do online — and then flogging that intel to advertisers. Knozen, presumably, wants to gain less circumstantial insights into the lives of its users, based on analysing specific behaviour cues and getting them to volunteer personality data. By cutting out some of the guesswork Knozen will be hoping it can mine a rich seam of valuable data about its users — and then apply that in various ways. Cenedella said areas where the data Knozen will gather could be applied include, the following: “What we’ve learned so far is that people are really interested in what people are like, and what people think about them. Knozen is a positive way to share those interests,” he added. Getting people to want to share such personal data — about their friends and themselves, however positive — may still be a challenge for Knozen. Unless it really has come up with the ‘Angry Birds’ of Myers-Briggs personality tests in addictive app form.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 11
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