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Amazon Launches Its Fastest EC2 Instance Type Yet
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Frederic Lardinois
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Amazon today its fastest EC2 instance type yet. The improved C3 instance type, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels noted in the announcement at the company’s re:Invent developer conference today, represents the highest process performance on EC2 yet. The C3 instances join the new storage- and I/O-optimized I2 instances the company also today. The new C3 instances are powered by 2.8 GHz Intel E5-2680 v2 Ivy Bridge processors and the smallest instance (c3.large) comes with 3.75GB of RAM, two virtual cores and seven EC2 compute units (Amazon’s proprietary way of classifying the speed of its instances). At the high end, the c3.8xlarge instance has 32 virtual cores, 60GB of RAM and 108 ECU. The processors, Amazon notes, support Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions for more efficiently processing vector-oriented data. The high-performance instance types all come with improved network performance and are all based on SSDs. Using these instances, Amazon launched a 26,496 core cluster and evaluated it against the recent Top500 scores for supercomputers. The cluster would have ranked as #56 on the list with a performance of 481.18 teraflops. These new instances are now available in Amazon’s US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.
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Judge Permits Google To Continue To Make Books Relevant Online
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Gregory Ferenstein
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As an author and , I use Google Books almost every day. It’s become the primary reason I even bother exploring non-fiction books online, rather than looking up an article on the same subject. Today, a U.S circuit judge that Google provides enormous benefit to society and authors, and denied the Author’s Guild’s copyright suit to block the massive book-scanning project [ ] [tweet https://twitter.com/StevenLevy/status/401023094216617984] “Google Books provides significant public benefits,” wrote Judge Denny Chin, who argued that Google’s strategy of letting users preview select pages preserves copyright, while giving the public the incredibly important asset of searchable books. Google has scanned over 20 million books. For those with current copyright claims, Google randomly obscures the pages from full viewing, but keeps all the words searchable (see image below. “Privacy” is highlighted because I searched for it in ). Google’s mass book scanning project has been a rallying cry for author unions and publishers to attack the search giant’s commercialization of their copyrighted works. But, just like how a news story can quote excerpts of a book and schools can hand out a limited number of pages, Chin ruled that Google’s preview function respected the legal parameters of “fair use”. He also noted that Google doesn’t actually monetize the project. As an author I found the Judge’s analysis spot on. I’ve been researching the history of privacy for the last few months. I discovered a rich corpus of privacy literature in the seemingly irrelevant subject of renaissance architecture, in part because Google searches for “privacy” yielded books I never would have known about. “It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books,” explained Chin. Most importantly, I still rent or buy some of the books. Many of the architectural drawings are obscured in Google’s preview, so I’ve ordered them from my local library. Moreover, Google Books has vastly accelerated my research, since I can now search for keywords, rather than having to painstakingly shift for “privacy” and “individualism” in obscure historical literature. Even better, I’ve been able to trace the historical rise of the concept of “privacy” through , which shows the number of occurrences of keywords throughout the centuries. “It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life,” Chin observed. The Internet has given us the expectation of immediately accessible, searchable content. As a high school debater in the late 90s, I used to spend hours in the library digging through books. Almost immediately when the Internet gave us the power to search content, I ditched my library habit for Google searches in the comfort of my PJs at home. It has saved me untold hours. Because books never quite adapted to the Internet, my use of them in research dropped off a cliff. On a weekly basis, I just completely ignore books that opt out of Google preview because I have no idea what value they may be to me. Instead, I look for a book summary or an academic article on the same subject. Without Google, I don’t see how the book can maintain its mindshare in the Internet age. Publishers should be thanking Google for making them relevant again. As an author who wants to write high quality material and sell books, I hope Google scans my works. [ ]
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Email Is Now Just Another Stream
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Contributor
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Only a couple of years ago, pundits were predicting an end to email. But instead of fading away, there’s been ever-increasing email volume and usage. Rather than being replaced by Facebook and Twitter streams, email is actually becoming a stream itself. Mail systems are evolving to match the new volume of email, and users will increasingly see only algorithmically vetted emails. Some other emails may be shown below the vetted email, and the rest will flow away into temporal oblivion, just like uninteresting social posts from a few hours ago. Implications for marketers are significant. The days of the average AOL or Yahoo! mail user scrolling through every email in their inbox are rapidly fading. Email has been especially important in e-commerce sales and customer re-engagement. For e-commerce in particular, exceeds the performance of social advertising. Large-volume email senders will need to make a greater effort to send emails that are both personalized and interesting to the recipient. The email tsunami problem is pervasive. Several Silicon Valley folks have already committed the unfortunately termed “email suicide,” where they give up on reading unread email and start anew. Others are adding email auto-responders stating that they will not necessarily see email. New vendors such as SendGrid have helped bring on the deluge by dramatically lowering the price of sending volume email and democratizing access with simplified onboarding and easy developer APIs. Google has added several features to Gmail in an attempt to add some order to the chaos of email. The changes will effect both email users and marketers. With Gmail features like , , and , users are increasingly engaging only with algorithmically vetted email from senders they know. Priority Inbox is only a satisfactory product and needs to evolve to automatically mark as “important” email from senders that a recipient repeatedly opens, especially if the recipient replies. Next-generation email clients like go as far as sorting email by relevance rather than date. For marketers, sending a ton of email without any user engagement will soon become counterproductive. For each type of volume sender, a new balance will have to be found between sending numerous emails and still achieving desired “open rates” and “clickthroughs” — mechanisms by which an email provider like Google can detect whether or not the email is of interest to a user. Much like how “edge rank” increases for Facebook posts when the people like, share or comment on it, “mail rank” will be an increasingly important benchmark for email marketers to measure their effectiveness. At CBS Interactive, we send over 200 million emails a month, ranging from news summaries to personalized fantasy sports updates, to an audience of 270 million unique users. We have corporate standards and systems to ensure that recipients can easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails. However, given these upcoming changes, we will need to look at overall open rates from a particular property and begin to proactively prune users that have no interest in emails we send. The shift to email as a stream will have personal implications as well. People may have to be introduced via a mutual party rather than sending a cold email, especially if the sender has sent numerous emails that have not entailed or received a response. Even personal emails from people you know may soon be treated like a Facebook or Twitter post, where a user either immediately responds, such as with a Facebook like or comment, or instead lets it flow into the ether. Much like social posts, senders will likely shift toward keeping email messages short and to the point. Facebook and Twitter both have nascent but unique takes on messaging. Facebook messages that are not from one of your friends go into an “other” folder that is rarely read. Twitter direct messages can only be sent to people who follow the sender, although Twitter is . Stream-oriented companies like Facebook and Twitter essentially charge brands to target their own customers by allowing brands to purchase promoted posts for their fans and followers. Email providers may soon sell “promoted emails” where a marketer can target a user in their priority inbox. Users may revolt, but in the end they are getting email for free, so it will be hard to complain. Email has become a stream, and as the adage goes, when you’re not paying, you’re the product.
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Microsoft Matches PS4 Sales With 1 Million Xbox Ones In 24 Hours, But Takes 11 More Countries To Do It
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Matthew Panzarino
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Microsoft sent out some Xbox One PR today to various outlets, you may have seen the numbers. Over 1 million Xbox One ( ) consoles sold within 24 hours! That’s pretty good, and far better than the Xbox 360 sold on its opening day, marking a new record for Microsoft. But let’s make sure to put the numbers in perspective. Sony’s PlayStation 4 in 24 hours when it launched around a week ago. So far, the two console giants are neck and neck. , there’s just one little detail Microsoft fails to mention in its PR: The Xbox One launched in a total of 13 countries, 11 more than the PlayStation 4. Sony’s console launched only in the US and Canada, and will roll out to more regions later on. The Xbox One, by comparison, launched in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., U.S., and New Zealand. That’s a lot more territory to only match Sony’s numbers blow for blow so far. The PS4 won’t hit other major territories like the U.K. and Europe until November 29th. Unfortunately, we can’t draw many conclusions from the numbers because Microsoft makes sure to mention the following: “Xbox One is now sold out at most retailers. We are working to replenish stock as fast as possible to meet the unprecedented demand from our customers.” So, with stock unavailable at ‘most’ retailers, the lack of additional sales could simply be a result of there being no cookies in the jar. People could want Xbox Ones but simply not be able to get them. Sony did not make a mention of selling out of its stock in its release. Also notable: The Xbox One retails for $100 more than the PS4 due to the inclusion of the Kinect motion sensor, so this amounts to more money for Microsoft at this point. I’m sure we can count on some fantastic sounding momentum numbers from both Sony and Microsoft in the days to come. But for now, they both appear to have at least some raw parity of sales numbers. Meanwhile, Nintendo has sold just over 3.9M Wii U units so far this year.
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Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
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Klint Finley
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Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution. Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy. You may have seen them crop-up on tech hangouts like and , having cryptic conversations about “Moldbug” and “the Cathedral.” And though neoreactionaries aren’t exactly rampant in the tech industry, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas, and Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, says he’s been influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small, minority world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture. Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter. “Reactionary” originally meant someone who opposed the French Revolution, and today the term generally refers to those who would like to return to some pre-existing state of affairs. Neoreaction — aka “dark enlightenment — begins with computer scientist and entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin, who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin — the self-described Sith Lord of the movement — got his start as a commenter on sites like before starting his own blog in 2007. Yarvin originally called his ideology “formalism,” but in 2010 libertarian blogger Arnold Kling The name stuck as more bloggers — such as (who helped popularize the term), (who coined “dark enlightenment”) and — started to self-identify as neoreactionary. The movement has a few contemporary forerunners, such as and , and of course, neoreaction is heavily influenced by older political thought — and are particularly popular. Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible. “Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” . “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.” Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders. For Yarvin, stability and order trump all. But critics like Scott Alexander think neoreactionaries overestimate the stability of monarchies — to put it mildly. Alexander recently , a massive document examining and refuting the claims of neoreactionaries. “To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural,” he wrote. “Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.” Yarvin proposes that countries should be small — city states, really — and that all they should compete for citizens. “If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move,” he . “The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.'” That will probably sound familiar if you heard Balaji Srinivasan’s Y Combinator speech. Although several news stories described the talk as a call for Silicon Valley to secede from the union, Srinivasan that his speech has been misinterpreted. “I’m not a libertarian, don’t believe in secession, am a registered Democrat, etcetera etcetera,” he wrote. “This is really a talk that is more about emigration and exit.” I don’t know Srinivasan, but it sounds like he’d find neoreactionary views repulsive. And exit is a concept that appeals to both the right and left. But there are others in the Valley pushing ideas much closer to the neoreaction. Patri Friedman, who co-founded the Seasteading Institute with Peter Thiel, specifically mentioned Yarvin’s blog in a reading list at the end of , and Yarvin was to speak at the Seasteading Institute’s conference in 2009 before his appearance was canceled. Thiel, meanwhile, voiced a related opinion in his own : “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Incidentally, Thiel’s Founders Fund is one of the investors in Srinivasan’s company Counsyl. The co-founder of Yarvin’s startup was one of the first recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. Anissimov was the media director of the Thiel-backed Machine Intelligence Institute (formerly known as the Singularity Institute). It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist’s head spin, but I’m not actually suggesting that there’s a conspiracy here. I don’t think Peter Thiel is part of some neoreactionary master plot — I don’t even necessarily think he’s a neoreactionary. But you can see that a certain set of ideas are spreading through out the startup scene. Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry, seasteading and scientific racism (more on that later), and this larger “caveman cult” has an impact on tech culture, from work environments to the social atmosphere at conferences. To be clear though, pure neoreaction is an extreme minority position that will probably never catch on beyond a tiny cult following. But there has been an explosion of interest since late 2012, despite the fact that Hoppe, Sailer, Yarvin and others have been writing about this stuff for years (and neoreaction’s European cousin has been around even longer). And this interest just happens to coincide with growing media attention being paid to the problems of the tech industry, from sexism in video games to “bro culture” in the tech industry to gentrification in the Bay Area. And many professionals, rather than admit to their role in gentrification, wealth disparity and , are casting themselves as victims. This sense of persecution leads us to our next neoreactionary theme. Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the , in other words. The name comes from Yarvin’s idea that progressivism (and in his view, even today’s far right Republicans are progressive) is a religion, and that the media-academic-civil service complex punishes “heretical” views. So what exactly is the Cathedral stopping neoreactionaries from talking about? Well, the merits of monarchy for starters. But mostly, as far as I can tell, they want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist. Or at least be able to express such views without the negative consequences of being labeled racist. Speaking of which, neoreactionaries are obsessed with a concept called “human biodiversity” (HBD) — what used to be called “scientific racism.” Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of — if not the — most important personal traits, and that it’s predominately genetic. Neoreactionaries would replace, or supplement, the “divine right” of kings and the aristocracy with the “genetic right” of elites. To call these claims “controversial” would be putting it lightly, but they underpin much of anti-egalitarian and pro-traditionalist claims neoreactionaries make. Delving into the scientific debate over race, genetics and IQ is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ve included some links on the topic in the reading list. It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring. We don’t need more public shamings and firings — what we should want is for neoreactionaries to change their minds, not their jobs. As Jessica Valenti about the firing of John Derbyshire — a cause célèbre for — neoreaction: “After all, what’s more impactful—a singular racist like Derbyshire or Arizona’s immigration law? A column or voter suppression?” I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s not like I think the media should ignore the tech industry’s misdeeds. But maybe recognizing that cycle is the first step towards fixing it. Foundations of neoreaction: Against Neoreaction: by D.J. Witherspoon et al. An earlier version of this story accidentally misidentified Pax Dickinson as Pax Dickerson.
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Google’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Doodle Pits You Against Daleks, Cybermen, And Weeping Angels
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Greg Kumparak
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As we learned from that back in August, there’s some pretty strong Doctor Who love goin’ on at Google HQ. Today, just in time for the show’s 50th anniversary, the company found another way to fly that Whovian flag. This one’s not quite as hidden as the TARDIS egg, but you’ll still have to know where to look. Following up in their long established tradition of swappin’ out their logo for a stylized doodle to mark events, holidays, and anniversaries, Google’s doodle today is a lil’ Doctor Who-themed mini-game. It has Daleks! And Cybermen! And Weeping Angels! Alas, these angels don’t seem to care whether or not you blink — they’ll chase you down either way. In the game, you set out as any of the first 11 Doctors (sorry guys, no appearances here) to race across the map while avoiding running into any of the aforementioned baddies. One cute touch: if you die as any of the early doctors, you’ll regenerate as the next one in the timeline. The one catch: as far as I can tell, the doodle no longer shows up on the US site for some reason (be it licensing, or because Doctor Who just has a stronger foundation outside of the US). Fortunately, getting to one of Google’s international pages is just a matter of . Looks like it’s back on
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Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green Hints At Further Windows Harmonization Across Device Classes
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Alex Wilhelm
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A recent written by includes a quote from a Microsoft leader that directly hints at future harmonization of the various strains of Windows across disparate device classes. According to Branscombe, Microsoft executive vice president said the following at a recent event [Insertion via CITEworld, formatting: TechCrunch]: We do think there is a world where there is a more mobile operating system, that doesn’t have the risks to battery life or the risk to security [that Windows does] but it also comes with a cost of flexibility. […] We have the phone OS, we have Windows RT, and we have full Windows. We are not going to have three. I think that the simplest way to interpret Larson-Green’s first remark regarding battery life and risk is that if Windows is to be smoothed between Windows Phone and Windows 8, the vanilla Windows code will have to better at handling power sensitive situations, like mobile. Windows 8 is a partially mobile operating system, so the challenge isn’t insurmountable. Moving on: “We are not going to have three.” If you wanted to be crass, you could guess that Windows RT is going the way of that one thing that isn’t around anymore. Branscombe doesn’t think so, and neither do I. I reached out to Microsoft for comment on the quote, and was given the following statement: “We’ll continue to support a broad range of chip architectures, including ARM, so our partners can deliver a broad range of devices. We have nothing additional to share about the roadmap at this time.” Microsoft at least wants us to believe that it remains committed to ARM. I do. In no small part because the company is investing so heavily in Windows RT as a mobile-centric operating system that can run in tablet circles. Look at the non-ARM tablet that Microsoft built, and you can see how it views Windows Regular as a mobile operating system. It doesn’t. Windows Phone runs on ARM-based chips. Could we see harmonization between Windows RT and Windows Phone? That feels wrong, given the inherent user interface difference. But if Microsoft could blend the two (perhaps in a way that is exceptionally dichotomized on different screen sizes, which is what we currently see, etc), we could have a single ARM Windows build, and an x86 edition. The oddity would be user interface sameness between the ARM build and x86 build some of the time (tablets!) and not others (smartphones!). I think what we have known for some time is that Windows is not the past of Microsoft, but instead the core code bit that Azure-power services will flow through. And given the aggressive introduction of Windows (via WinRT and so forth) to hardware classes where it wasn’t before I think demands general homogeneity in ever increasing levels. That’s something that you could accomplish by limiting the number of permutations that Windows takes. You know, from three to two.
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Twitter Enables Perfect Forward Secrecy Across Sites To Protect User Data Against Future Decryption
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter has enabled , website and API feeds in order to protect against future cracking of the service’s encryption. The PFS method ensures that, if the encryption key Twitter uses is cracked in the future, all of the past data transported through the network does not become an open book right away. “If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic,” says Twitter’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews. “As , this type of protection is increasingly important on today’s Internet.” This will augment the TLS and SSL protocols already used by Twitter to protect logins and transmission of data across its network. Twitter made its site , though a allowed passwords to be sent in plain text for some time from a sub-section of Twitter’s site. This is a simplification, but PFS basically ensures that if an agency is recording all of Twitter’s encrypted data it can’t crack one key and read it all. Instead, Twitter has implemented a solution that lets each client and server session generate its own encryption key, never sending that key over the networks. If an organization were to collect a bunch of Twitter data, it can’t break one lock and read it all, it must now break thousands or hundreds of thousands of additional keys to read any significant chunk of data. The organization most likely to be collecting enormous amounts of Twitter data for later decryption? The National Security Agency, who was recently revealed to have several major data gathering programs already in play. The revelations, which came via the Washington Post and whistleblower Edward Snowden, detailed a complex and robust system of collection tools that allow the NSA and other government agencies to access unencrypted data and to collect encrypted traffic in the hopes that they can decrypt that data in the future and add it to their searchable data stockpile. The site, according to an interview with The New York Times, will encounter a bit of a speed hit to make this work, to the tune of around 150ms on initial connection. But the differential should be worth it to enable extra security. Google implemented PFS two years ago and reports earlier this . You can read more about Twitter’s implementation of PFS .
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IDrive Launches Facebook Backup So You Never Lose The Photos And Videos You Were Tagged In
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Frederic Lardinois
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, like most online backup services, has long focused on keeping the data on your local hard drive safe by backing it up to the cloud. Now, however, the company is launching a new product that expands its services beyond your local drive and deeper into the cloud. IDrive now allows you to also back up your pictures and video on Facebook to its servers. untags Facebook, the company argues, has evolved “into such an important part of social interaction that using the media site to store or share pictures / videos is frequently the chosen way of exchanging data.” The service is now available to all IDrive users (including those on the free 5GB plan) and once all the data from Facebook is backed up, users can access their images and videos from any web browser and the company’s iOS app. An Android app, the company tells me, is “coming soon” and all the data is automatically encrypted with what IDrive calls “an NSA-proof private key option.” It’s worth noting that IDrive isn’t the only company that offers this kind of backup feature. There are a few tools that allow you to download your data onto your own drive, of course, but services like and also offer the ability to back up your Facebook data. Chances are that IDrive, too, will add support for other online services in the near future.
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Uber-For-Laundry Startup Washio Uses Ninjas To Get Your Dirty Clothes Clean
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Ryan Lawler
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There’s no shortage of on-demand services popping up these days, as different startups each attempt to win the favor of users in specific verticals. One of the latest startups to launch in an “Uber-for-X” category is , which is seeking to bring the on-demand model to the way in which people get their laundry and dry cleaning done. By employing a team of so-called “ninjas” to pick up clothes to be washes and drop them off 24 hours later. It’s no surprise that with the onslaught of on-demand services taking hold in most major cities, someone would eventually create an Uber-for-laundry startup. Using smartphones, location, logistics, etc. to make the process of cleaning your clothes “easier” and “more efficient.” Call it a first-world problem if you will, but more and more customers are willing to pay a little bit more for the convenience of not having to do a task themselves. In the matter of which you value more, your money or your time, a whole lot of people are edging toward the latter, and they are voting with their debit cards. It’s why , for example, not to mention all those I keep writing about. And, let’s be clear, people have been paying others to do their laundry for them for decades. It’s just recently though that laundry and dry cleaning went from being something you carried a few blocks away to having your clothes picked up from your home or office. Washio to come to market with this concept, and it’s most assuredly not the last. But when you think about it, moving to a model where laundry — and especially dry cleaning — becomes mobile kind of makes sense, according to Washio founder Jordan Metzner. After all, dry cleaning is a $15 billion industry, but it requires an infrastructure that is massively overbuilt today. The reason there are so many local dry cleaning shops is that no one wants to travel too far from their home to drop off their dry cleaning. And, for the most part, those shops don’t actually do the wash themselves, but mostly subcontract the work out to massive laundry and dry cleaning facilities. But anyway, what if you didn’t need to drop that off, and instead, the laundry and dry cleaning service came to you? Metzner sees an opportunity to displace the existing dry cleaning infrastructure, using the analogy of what Netflix did to Blockbuster a few decades ago. It used to be that there were video stores all over the place, a few blocks away from each other, because no one wanted to go too far for their entertainment. Then came Netflix, which mailed DVDs to subscribers, meaning you no longer had to leave the house. Sounds possible, maybe even plausible. After all, how many laundry services are out there which not only pick up and drop off your clothes, but also turn it around within 24 hours? Ok, that’s good and all, but how does it actually work? Since I recently did my laundry and didn’t really have any need for dry cleaning, I had a friend* try out Washio for me and relate back what her experience was. While she was initially wary of any company that employs “ninjas” — “Ninjas are worse than gurus, or rock stars,” she says — she agreed to test the service when I offered her a code to do her laundry for free. Because, well, FREE LAUNDRY.** Anyway, here are her thoughts on setup: Setting up an account on Washio was easy. It linked to my Facebook, so everyone could know that I am a rich bitch who is too good for laundromats. I set the time for pickup, I set the time for dropoff (the next day). There was pricing information available on the site, but it would have been nice to be able to estimate the cost for my dry cleaning pieces before I committed to a pickup. On the day of pickup, she received a text reminder about an hour beforehand, which she says “was a helpful reminder to get my shit together.” She says that at the appointed time, “a friendly white man in a purple t shirt double parked his car outside my house and gave me a cookie”** in exchange for her two bags of dirty clothes — one of which was for wash and fold, and the other was for dry cleaning. Any special instructions? Nope. And then the friendly man disappeared with her laundry in tow. A day later, she received another text letting her know that her laundry was on its way back home. And, after the ninja got stuck in a bit of traffic, another text apologizing for the delay. (“Nice touch.”) When her clothes were dropped off, they came in two sturdy, reusable laundry bags — one for wash and fold and another garment bag for dry cleaning, which could be used the next time she wished to use Washio. “No disposable plastic here! Glad to see that the ninjas are eco-conscious,” she wrote. Clothes came back clean and soft, with no damage or lost socks. That said, there was some question about pricing, and about not being able to estimate the cost before laundry is picked up. But then, she’s frugal like that. Final verdict? All in all, Washio was pretty great. Prices are competitive for wash & fold. I’m not so sure about the dry cleaning. My local dry cleaner can do my silk blouses for way less than $8/shirt (like $3-$4). Anyways, the service was great. I would use it again if I’m ever in a pinch, but probably not regularly. For now, Washio is only available in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, where the company just recently launched. But already, it’s seeing pretty solid demand. In L.A. in particular, its “ninjas” generally stay in specific neighborhoods where they do pickups and dropoffs, which speeds up the process. Washio doesn’t wash or dry clean the clothes themselves — it simply partners with large, third-party facilities to handle that and all the quality control. In that way, it’s not so different from most small neighborhood cleaners which send dry cleaning out to larger facilities. But, it takes care of all orders and fulfillment. Investors include Webs.com co-founder Haroon Moktarzada, Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford’s Sherpa Ventures, Pejman Nozad’s new fund Pejman Mar Ventures, SV Angel, Saba Software CEO Bobby Yazdani, Hamid Barkhordar, addthis co-founder Hooman Radfar, Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff, Kissmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah, and Apollo Global Management’s Chris Edson. Moktarzada is also on the board, and he and Shah are serving as advisors to the company. ==
* Ok, ok, my
** DISCLOSURE: Yes, we used a code to test out a service for free.
*** “Normally this would trigger many red flags,” she says, “but I’m not 13 anymore.”
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Doom’s John Carmack Leaves id Software To Focus On The Oculus Virtual Reality Headset
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Alex Wilhelm
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Video game legend has , a company that he helped to found, to focus his energies on his role as the CTO of . It’s the end of an era, as Carmack wrote game franchises like Doom and Quake while at id. Carmack is renowned for his coding prowess, work with three-dimensional graphics, and building games that changed the landscape of gaming. Also, the , something that we should not forget. But if Carmack is known for helping build what is next, his decision to move on is hardly surprising. Oculus, if it finds mass adoption, will change the way gaming works, and how we interact with gaming content for the forseeable future. id Gaming released the : John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio. John’s work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work at id is complete, and his departure will not affect any current projects. We are fortunate to have a brilliant group of programmers at id who worked with John and will carry on id’s tradition of making great games with cutting-edge technology. As colleagues of John for many years, we wish him well. The headset may be dorky looking, but Oculus contains in it the hope for a more immersive future, one that steeps a player inside a game, granting them no quarter to escape: Once you strap in, you are in. Oculus certainly has the cash that it needs to see its project through: The company raised . Previously, the company raised $2.4 million through a much-heralded Kickstarter campaign. The company in June to a hit and run accident. With Carmack on board full time and cash in the bank, Oculus appears to be on a solid path. But really, Carmack, Doom 3 on Oculus. Make it happen. Or at least Quake 3. Please.
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Travel Startup Triptrotting Relaunches As Wist, A Local Recommendations App For iPhone
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Sarah Perez
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Travel startup Triptrotting is relaunching today on mobile as , an app that gives you the top five personalized suggestions for dining and drink in any given neighborhood or city, based on your likes, plus friends’ and locals’ recommendations. The is debuting with support for Miami only, but will arrive in other large U.S. cities, like New York and Triptrotting’s home base of San Francisco, early next year. Later, it will roll out to other major urban cities around the U.S. and the world, as well as expand its recommendations into new categories beyond just dining and drink options. The company, originally founded by Shana Zheng and Aigerim Shorman, closed on its from Google Ventures, GRP Partners, Launchpad LA, 500 Startups, Idealab, and others. had users in 175 countries, but it never grew very large, necessitating a shift in direction. Today, the company has scaled down to a team of four, and Zheng has since moved on. Triptrotting, before, was focused on “clueless tourism” by connecting travelers and hosts online for local insight and suggestions, or even area tours. But in the many months since its raise, the team found that users were more interested in just asking locals for their opinions rather than anything else. More importantly, they were clamoring for a service that worked on mobile. “The paradigm shifted drastically in the last year – all of our users were expecting something very on the go,” says Shorman. “We had to address it. The world has moved on to ‘here and now’ versus ‘I’m going to do this in four weeks.’ That was a huge discovery for us,” she says. So Triptrotting scrapped its online website, and relaunched as a mobile recommendations app called Wist instead. The new app provides the top five recommendations of where to go eat or drink based on a number of factors, in order to give users a local’s insight no matter where they are. There are only five suggestions because ten is too many and under five is too few, the company found during beta testing. For starters, Wist takes into account your current context, like your physical location, date and time of day. And in the future, it will take into account other signals as well, like traffic or weather. It then combines these with its understanding of your own personal interests and tastes (e.g., vegetarian) and who you’re with (e.g., business colleagues, friends) as well as with what Shorman calls “social proof.” “What we’re doing is we’re looking to see if there are any places nearby that your friends have been to, and we’re combining that with what the locals like,” says Shorman, adding that location data is pulled from Facebook. Triptrotting, now Wist, already has over 450,000 places in its database, with a few thousand live for its launch in Miami. The app itself is simple to use, with only a few screens to access. It pops up its suggestions, and you can tap on them to see more detail, including photos, business information, reviews and more. Given its focus on recommendations, combined with the social element, it will compete with other more broadly focused rating and review apps, like Yelp or Google+ (Google Places), as well as with social apps or restaurant finders, like Foursquare, Ness, Urbanspoon and others. There is something to the simplicity of only having a few options to choose from, instead of having to dig through a list of nearby places which is many pages deep. That being said, gaining visibility on mobile is harder than ever these days in an App Store with a million options to choose from, especially when a good many of them are larger competitors. But for travelers, Wist may end up being a handy tool. “Ideally, we want to get to a point where you feel like this is your neighborhood, anywhere you go,” says Shorman. Wist is available for .
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Turntable.fm Shutting Down So Company Can Focus On Turntable Live Events Platform
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today, Turntable.fm has that it will shut down its ‘virtual dj’ product entirely to focus on its new Turntable Live platform, which attempts to replicate the ‘being there’ experience of live performances. TechCrunch broke the news of Turntable.fm’s live event , but today the company has acknowledged that Turntable.fm will be shuttered. The news comes in a blog post by the Turntable team, where it details the efforts to get Turntable.fm, which was beloved by a core group of users, to work on a wider scale. “For over 2 years, we’ve improved and evolved the turntable.fm experience. We made rooms expand to unlimited sizes, made thousands of UI improvements, launched GOLD, built a mini-player, designed tons of avatars and listened to our community, trying to make the experience as wonderful as possible,” says the posting. “Over those two years, the community has played over 400 million songs in about a million rooms.” Unfortunately, those efforts weren’t enough. Comscore numbers in September put Turntable traffic at around 89k uniques. When he spoke to us a couple of months ago, Founder Billy Chasen said that the removal of the ability to upload music was able to save the company about $20k a month. But the posting says that the price of running the music service remained too high. “It was a tough decision to make because we love this community so much, but the cost of running a music service has been too expensive and we can’t outpace it with our efforts to monetize it and cut costs,” says the posting. “If we also want to give Turntable Live a real shot, we need to fully focus on it.” The company says that playlists and songs will be able to be exported via Spotify or CSV file. It’s also making avatars available for everyone, rather than just those who have leveled up. It’s going to work on making ‘anonymous’ raw data dumps of Turntable info available for developers to play with. The company says it will host a live party on Turntable.fm on December 2. Presumably the site will be shut down after that date. Here’s an example of what a Turntable Live performance looks like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kil6dT5_f9I I always found Turntable.fm quite cool, but the basic concept had some distinct flaws. Streaming music is often something that people listen to in the background, without the time or inclination to directly participate. Having humans program your stream is kind of neat, but the overhead of hanging out in a special online room to do so ended up not panning out. A live event is another whole bag entirely, as people would theoretically be showing up for a specific reason and hanging out would feel like less of a chore. At least, that’s what Turntable is betting on. We’ll see. In the meantime, come pour one out on Turntable.fm .
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Google Wants To Bring Glass To Optometrists’ Offices, But No Partnership Yet
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Frederic Lardinois
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According to a , Google is working with to bring Glass to optometrists’ offices. We have learned from sources close to Google, however, that Glass does not currently have any partnership with VSP (yet). So while the two companies may be exchanging ideas, as the WSJ reports, no formal relationship between the two companies as been established so far. A Google Spokesperson provided us with the following statement: “We have said for some time that we are working to bring Glass prescription frames to our Explorers and we’ve created prototypes that members of the Glass team are actively testing. Beyond that we don’t comment on rumor or speculation.” VSP is a U.S.-based group that provides vision benefits and services to over 60 million people. The company works with a network of and also owns Marchon Eyewear and Altair Eyewear, which design and manufacture eyewear. This matchup between Google and VSP would make it easier for Google to bring Glass to users who need prescription Glasses. Google has never hidden the fact that it has been working on prescription versions of Glass and everybody who has picked up Glass has likely seen at least one Google employee who was wearing the company’s own prototypes. Google also specifically that Glass v2, which is now rolling out to new and existing Glass users, was tweaked to make adding prescription Glasses easier. Google, however, hasn’t officially launched prescription lenses for Glass. As Glass already comes with a sunglass attachment, adding a prescription version wouldn’t be all that hard, but it would hardly look stylish. There are, however, some companies that are already manufacturing these kinds of lenses. Just around the time Glass rolled out to the first group of “Explorers,” we also that Google was working with to make glasses that “look less like Geordi La Forge’s eyewear and more like something a style-conscious person in the early 21st century would be happy to put on his or her face.” It’s been relatively quiet around this collaboration ever since, but Warby Parker would be the kind of hip company Google would probably like to work with on this project. To get Glass to the masses, though, it needs a company with a network like VSP. :
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Record Setting 32M Tuned In To Watch League Of Legend’s Season 3 Finals
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Alex Wilhelm
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Among the youngs, competitive gaming, often referred to as esports, is growing at a rapid pace. The world’s , League of Legends, this week reported the viewership figures for its recent Season 3 finals event that sold out the Staples Center in Los Angeles: , with peak concurrents spiking as high as 8.5 million. For comparison, League of Legend’s Season 2 finals – also taking place in Los Angeles – last October saw , and 1.1 million peak concurrents. So, the audience for League grew more than a touch in the yearlong period between the two events. Why does this matter? Becuase esports, and League especially, perhaps, are changing media consumption habits for an audience that skews young, and male, a target group that advertisers covet. Also, as the world turns its attention to the new Xbox One and Playstation 4 consoles, it’s important to keep in mind how popular PC gaming remains. League of Legends is a team-based game pitting five players against another five, each playing a unique champion out of a roster of more than 100. Teams work in concert to destroy their opponents’ base through the use of neutral monsters, team fights, and item purchases employing won gold from gameplay. It’s chaotic, colorful, fun, and exceptionally hard. Fueling the rise of esports is more than television deals in Asia. Instead, livestreaming company Twitch has enabled – though bumps remain – games of all sorts to be played for audiences that can span the globe. It’s not by accident that both Sony and Microsoft worked to incorporate the technology into their new consoles. The question that the above sums to is simple: How large can League grow in its 2014 season?
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Aufeminin Acquires Subscription Service And City Guide ‘My Little Paris’ For $90 Million
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Romain Dillet
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From little Parisian website to subscription service juggernaut, has come a long way. Earlier this week, acquired the company. We’ve learned from multiple sources that Aufeminin agreed to pay around $90 million (€66.7 million) for the acquisition. Part of Axel Springer, Aufeminin is one of the largest lifestyle website in France. For now, Aufeminin spent $54 million (€40 million) in cash to acquire 60 percent of My Little Paris, with future plans to acquire the rest of the company. It’s a great success story for its four co-founders — the startup only put together $6,700 (€5,000) of initial capital. In 2008, before becoming a highly-valued subscription service, My Little Paris started out as a woman-centric weekly newsletter to share restaurant advice and various urban tips. The newsletter rapidly attracted a healthy subscriber base. Today, more than a million people receive the recommendation newsletter three times a week. Now, the content is available on its website, as well as on sister websites , and other verticals (My Little Book Club, My Little Wedding…). But the most important part of the business is no longer the websites — My Little Paris shouldn’t be considered as a content-first company. In 2011, the company launched , a subscription service for women. Every month, subscribers receive a box of beauty and fashion items carefully curated by the startup. So far, 70,000 people have subscribed for $21 (€15.50) a month. My Little Paris has launched other types of boxes, such as , a subscription service for tights. In the end, the content business was a great way to attract customers for its subscription service. It is one of the best examples of content monetization. Thanks to this acquisition, the My Little Paris team has international expansion plans in mind. For now, the company remains very France-centered. The company will certainly target women in urban areas in order to reproduce its French successes around the world.
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Microsoft Now Shipping Kinect For Windows Preview Kits To “Thousands” Of Developers
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today that it is shipping developer preview kits of its new Kinect for Windows sensor and software. That means the company is getting the new Kinect (a pre-release version) and the code to run it into the hands of developers on the same day that the Xbox One launched. The Xbox One brings the living room variant of the new Kinect to average folk en masse. According to Microsoft, “thousands” of developers signed up for the program. That’s nontrivial given that it cost $399 to take part, as The Next Web’s . Developers who receive the pre-release Kinect will also be given the final Kinect for Windows device when it is finished next year. Kinect for Windows is a technology I’ve been a fan of since I heard of it. Adding voice and motion control to your computer that can likely already handle touch, and mouse and keyboard input is compelling. Other companies like Leap Motion are working on similar, if technologically dissimilar efforts. However, Kinect for Windows, unlike its Xbox-based cousin, remains a developer toy better suited for one-off experimentation than daily use. Buy a Kinect for Windows sensor and if you can’t code, you can’t do much more than look at the device. That said, no platform is born mature, and if we’re eventually going to bake elements of Kinect into our laptop screens and desktop monitors, we have to incubate the technology. The software side of the new Kinect contains a new SDK, supporting what the second generation Kinect hardware can bring in, in terms of data. For more on that, .
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Announcing The 7th Annual Crunchies Awards
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Alexia Tsotsis
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The glitz. The glamour. The nerds. It’s nearly time for the , where TechCrunch, Gigaom, and VentureBeat put aside the day-to-day blood sport of blogging and celebrate the best of technology. As in years past, the collective tech blog community will give awards to the best and brightest startups, founders, investors and thought leaders in our industry. There are 20 Crunchies categories in all, including CEO of the Year and Best New Startup, and . The award ceremony will take place on Monday, February 10, 2014 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, beginning at 7:30 pm. Davies is an elegant venue that has hosted some of the greatest musical performances in history and now the Crunchies. Following the awards, the Davies will also provide a festive playground for this year’s after party. As always there will be a hosted bar, hors d’oeuvres, intriguing interactive entertainment and other fun surprises. And tech bloggers. General admission . Seating is very limited and the event tends to sell out quickly. Crunchies nominations close on December 15th at 11:59pm.
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Alex Wilhelm
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KwikDesk, An Ephemeral Messaging Platform, Mulls Introducing Bitcoin
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Jordan Crook
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sprouted up this week called KwikDesk, dubbing itself as a “Snapchat Meets Twitter.” The service allows anyone to send self-destructing messages into the ether with tags, which can be used to later dig them back up in a search. It’s entirely anonymous, with no senders IP log or record of individual users. Senders can choose to let the message live for 24 hours, 10 days, or 100 days. Founder Kevin Abosch tells TechCrunch that the service plans to integrate the transmission of Bitcoin, and has just put a team on it. It’s a head scratcher. Bitcoin is now being accepted by a number of entities as legitimate currency, but the added layer of anonymity from KwikDesk leaves a Silk Road-esque taste in the mouth. Abosch says he never thought of that, but is rather interested in the BitCoin movement and how it can be applied to his latest art project that seemingly blew up. “When I saw the US government is auctioning off that silkroad guy’s seized bit coin assets, I thought that’s validation of the currency,” said Abosch. “I love the idea that my little art project could end up being the easiest way to move this new currency. The whole underlying structure of bit coins is anonymity and respect of privacy.” See, Abosch is actually a (as well as an investor, and an advisor to Summly) who developed KwikDesk as a conceptual art project. Here’s how he explained it to me: Kwikdesk was and is a conceptual art project I created which was a reaction to all the noise of social media… the logging in, the cookies, the trending, the feeds, the clutter… Then something strange happened. People started using it in a multitude of ways… secret messaging by getting creative with #tags and writing messages with no spaces. Gamifying it with treasure hunt-style games, using is as a confessional of sorts. I self-funded and then as it has grown into something rather special, I brought my two talented friends David Coallier and Connor Murphy along to help part-time. For me Kwikdesk is, not unlike my photographic portraits of people, a “portrait” of humanity from a different perspective. The idea is surely interesting, but does it have staying power? You send messages and get no feedback whatsoever, contrary to every other form of social networking (even Snapchat). That might be cathartic to some people — a bottomless pit for your weird thoughts or confessions — like a Xanga to a 13-year old girl in the 90s. But then how do you consume messages easily and repeatedly? You have to search for certain words or hashtags to see any of these ephemeral tweets. Abosch explains that people are getting creative with messaging, using special tags like #09485wedks0932 or writing messages with no spaces, disqualifying the message from the basic word (not tag) search. But then you need this specific tag, sent through some other form of communication, to retrieve your messages. Still, people seem to be into KwikDesk. Abosch reports 50,000 messages sent over the past 48 hours. However, it’s fair to note that Abosch’s friend, Wired’s , tweeted about the startup two days ago. This is cool: anonymously submit + retrieve messages with a Snapchat-style expiry. eg Search “u876” to see my message — David Rowan (@iRowan) Yesterday, it was picked up by . Today Abosch has redesigned the site, and promises that improvements and new features will be implemented daily. Before: After: [IMG via ]
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SEEiT, The Feature That Turns Twitter Into A Remote Control For Comcast Subscribers, Rolls Out This Week
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Sarah Perez
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A new feature on Twitter which will allow Comcast subscribers to tune to or record select television programs by clicking on tweets is now live. Last month, Twitter and Comcast a strategic partnership to introduce “See It” button in tweets, which Twitter users would tap on to immediately watch a live show or set their DVR to record it for the future. Today, Twitter is announcing the “See It” (or , as it’s hilariously being spelled) buttons will roll out this week with two NBC Universal programs, a drama called “Haven” and the reality program “Naked Vegas,” as the first shows supported. These are odd choices for the SEEiT launch, as the shows aren’t exactly the most high-profile TV programs from the forthcoming lineup. However, Twitter refers to the rollout as a “preview,” indicating perhaps they want to test with less well-known shows while working out the kinks. On Comcast’s new website, NBC’s “The Voice” is at the top of the page, and in several screenshots. Many it would also be among the first to receive the new functionality on Twitter, as it was the only program from the Comcast lineup which appeared on Nielsen’s of the most tweeted about shows. Comcast has a number of other more interesting programming options it could have chosen from for the SEEiT preview, including The Blacklist, Chicago Fire, The Michael J. Fox Show, Sunday Night Football, Access Hollywood, NHL, Premier League Soccer, Sochi Olympics, Today Show, Psych, and Suits. We’ve just launched , providing instant access to TV shows and movies! Learn about it here: — SEEiT (@seeit) We’ve launched our partnership with that allows users to tune in to a TV show directly from a Tweet! — Jana Messerschmidt (@janamal) SEEiT previews this week on Twitter for iOS with ‘s drama series Haven and reality show Naked Vegas. — Twitter TV (@twittertv) In addition, while SEEiT today is limited to Twitter, Comcast intends to introduce the feature further across the web, it seems. “We are talking to other social networking websites, services and apps so you will be able to use SEEiT in other places soon,” reads the explanation on the SEEiT site. Twitter this week also to call out TV shows currently being tweeted about on its network in the Discover/Trending section. Though Comcast’s is interested in trying to drive TV ratings via Twitter, for the social network, it needs to be able to prove to networks and advertisers that it can do more than provide a place for users to chat about things like TV and movies, but they will actually respond to a call-to-action, too. Comcast’s SEEiT is only one of the efforts on that front. Twitter’s in-stream video ad program Amplify, has been growing as well, most recently by which joins BBC America, CBS, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel on the Amplify platform.
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BancBox Invest’s Crowdfunding API Processes $4M Inside Three Months
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Mike Butcher
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, a payment services platform similar to Stripe, has a platform allowing developers to build a lot of different payment services. Earlier this year it BancBox Crowd (now dubbed ), an escrow service aimed at crowdfunding portals that operate on equity, debt or revenue share models. It’s now announcing that 18 crowdInvesting platforms are using the BancBox Invest API. In addition it says $4 million has been processed on behalf of partner platforms. I’d love to tell you about competitors for this crowdfunding API, but it appears not to have any right now, which could be an opportunity for a bunch of new startups. The companies using BancBox Invest now include 99 Funding, Angel RoundUp, FilmFunder, FlashFunders, SeedInvest and SparkMarket, among others. They have also released some interesting data about its usage: The average investor funding is around $15,000 and the average escrow size is $250,000. BancBox Invest claims to be the only cloud-based, automated, independent escrow solution that ensures that CrowdInvesting portals remain in compliance with FINCEN, FINRA and SEC requirements, specifically Rule 15c2-4 which covers the transmission or maintenance of payments received in connection with under writings. BancBox was created in 2011 but previously, co-founders Goyle, Praveer Kumar, and Bill Wilson launched the now well-known National Payment Network (NPN), which had investors like Foundation, Floodgate, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal, and Founder Collective. It manages $100 million in consumer deposits daily in nearly 200,000 individual accounts. Its transaction volume has increased 100 percent to nearly $2 billion annually.
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Android 4.4 KitKat Now Available For Google Play Editions Of HTC One And Samsung Galaxy S4
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Catherine Shu
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Android 4.4 KitKat update is for people who use the Google Play editions of HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. They follow Motorola’s Moto X, which less than one month after Google revealed it. Back in October, Google that KitKat was designed to reach the next billion Android users in developing markets, which means that Google had to figure out how to create an OS that can bring older and lower-specced devices up-to-date, as well as helping third-party developers offer their content to all Android users, not just those with top-tier handsets. Android 4.4 KitKat’s new features include a new launcher, a new dialer that incorporates search, Hangouts with consolidated text, video and MMS, new HDR+ software for cameras and deep app linking for Google search. But the version of KitKat on the Moto X and the Google Play versions of HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 doesn’t have the Google Experience Launcher available on the Nexus 5, which was . The Google Experience Launcher, meant as a Nexus 5 exclusive, lets you swipe left for Google Now, trigger Google Search through an “OK Google” hot keyword and has a new options for customizing the look of your operating system. The Google Play editions of HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 differ from the ones sold by carriers in that they are offered unsubsidized without a contract and operate on “pure” Android rather than the company’s customized skins.
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Niche Raises $550K To Help Marketers Work With Social Media Celebrities
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Anthony Ha
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Niche, a startup that connects brands with popular users on social media, has , and it’s also announcing that it has raised $550,000 in funding. Niche isn’t the first startup attempting to make money from celebrity-driven marketing campaigns on social networks — after all, . But the team seems to be working hard to recruit content creators from social media. For one thing, Niche’s creative director Cody Johns is a big deal on Vine himself, with more than 1 million followers. For another, co-founder Rob Fishman (formerly social media editor at the Huffington Post) said the early creators who have signed up on Niche reach a collective audience of 75 million people (though there’s an important caveat to that number, which I’ll get to in a second). Niche’s offerings to creators, which are all free, include a profile that aggregates their accounts and content from across social networks ( . It also provides analytics about their engagement, so they can see what kinds of content seems to be connecting with people and what doesn’t. And, yes, it helps them make money by participating in marketing campaigns. On the flip side, marketers can browse leaderboards showing the top Niche users, either on a specific social network or across all of them. They can then reach out to those creators and develop campaigns with Niche’s help. “These individuals have mindshare, but they don’t have traditional sales structures,” Fishman said. “And brands are dying to work with these people, but they don’t know how.” (Here’s the caveat: If, say, you’re following someone on Twitter and on Vine, you’ll get counted as two people. Niche doesn’t de-duplicate users, at least not yet — Fishman admitted that’s partially because it’s a technical challenge, but his co-founder Darren Lachtman argued that if a creator can reach an audience member multiples times through multiple networks, that’s also an important indicator of reach.) include CBS Films, Relativity, and Gap, as well as startups like Lyft, Blue Apron, and Handybook. Campaigns have included Another campaign for Relativity’s Romeo and Juliet increased the film’s social media following by thousands of users, Fishman said. He added that Niche takes a very hands-on, customized approach to each promotion, because it’s important that creators aren’t just re-posting marketing messages that they clearly don’t care about: “The human touch is important to us.” Niche focused on Vine initially, but it has since expanded to include all of the major social networks. Lachtman said the team sees Facebook and Twitter as platforms for distributing and promoting content which might originate in a content creation app like Vine. He also said that the Niche approach is “platform agnostic” and will add new social networks as they become significant. The funding, meanwhile, comes from David Tisch (Box Group), Michael Kassan (MediaLink), Chris Altchek (PolicyMic), Bryan Goldberg (Bleacher Report/Bustle), John Alderman, and friends and family.
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Tagboard Revamps Its Cross-Platform Hashtag Aggregator
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Anthony Ha
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The hashtag has been , but the broader conversations often remain locked on one site or platform. A startup called is looking to change that, and today it’s launching version 2.0 of its product. Basically, Tagboard aggregates hashtag-associated content from across six social networks, including videos from Instagram and Vine. Customers can customize the content’s appearance, embed it, and browse analytics to see how it’s performing. The content can also be broadcast on a big screen, as it was in the recent One Direction live broadcast pictured to the left. (Co-founder and CEO Josh Decker said the broadcast was Tagboard’s “biggest event yet,” with millions of viewers seeing Tagboard content.) Decker described the product as a way “to ‘magnetize’ the hashtag and have it pull together disconnected posts to create one larger, more powerful conversation.” The initial product was focused on adding social content to forums (he said he had the initial idea while trying to upgrade forum software) before the company shifted focus to real-time social media content. Companies that have used Tagboard include Audi of America, Microsoft, Comcast, Clear Channel, Intel, Jaguar USA, and Engadget (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by AOL). One of the big challenges, Decker said, has not been acquiring new customers, but rather on-boarding them through “a very manual process.” Version 2.0 features automated on-boarding, so companies can sign up for paid subscriptions in a completely self-service way. Other new features include a hashtag definition database and content moderation, which should reduce any brand concerns that they’ll suddenly broadcast offensive or inappropriate content. Decker added: The single most important improvement in Tagboard 2.0 is the completely rebuilt foundation which allows us to grow and scale to the future and build new features quickly. For example with this launch comes the ability for users to easily “own their hashtag” by registering and customizing the associated Tagboard. The other thing this allows for is for them to self-serve a suite of professional features like curation, embedding, analytics and live display so that they can get the very most out of their hashtag campaigns. Tagboard says it has raised $2.2 million in funding from various angel investors.
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Omniata Is Building An Analytics, CRM Platform To Watch For The Digital Goods Era
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Mobile gaming companies — the revenue gorillas of the iOS and Android platforms — are at the forefront of refining how virtual goods transactions are done. But attracting the kinds of users and retaining them is growing more complex with each month. It’s becoming a big data problem where top studios often rely on a handful of outside services to help manage their analytics or provide personalized ways of keeping their gamers glued. One of the ones to watch is a stealth company called . They’re an experienced team out of EA and Digital Chocolate that has quietly racked up some of the industry’s best-known developers including Angry Birds-maker Rovio, Grand Cru and Gaia. (They also have a few other unnamed clients that are behind several of the iOS store’s top 20 grossing games.) The company’s CEO was EA’s director of product management, data and acquisition, engagement and monetization platforms and recruited much of his San Francisco- and Helsinki-based teams from his days at early mobile game developer Digital Chocolate. While there are plenty of other analytics and player management services out there ranging from Flurry to Playhaven to Apsalar and others, Arias has a broad vision of what Omniata will ultimately do. He thinks of Omniata as an SAP for the digital goods era, where all kinds of businesses will need to manage ongoing relationships with their customers. Gaming just happens to be a good starting point because of Arias’ own personal contacts in the industry and the maturity of gaming on mobile platforms. In that sense, he says Omniata is more of a Swiss army knife. While other tools might focus exclusively on user acquisition analytics or serving the right kinds of ad units to paying or non-paying customers, he’s building a platform that can cover all of those use cases. Omniata can handle A/B testing like an Optimizely or basic analytics like Flurry, and it can also handle more sophisticated analysis covering different cohorts of users that join at different times. The platform is now tracking 23 billion events per month and its system can handle 200,000 events per CPU core, a level of processing power that he says can help companies optimize a user’s experience on the fly. The company has raised a small round of seed funding from
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Couric Hire Is Key To Yahoo’s Mobile Strategy
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Alex Wilhelm
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A technology company hiring a media personality might not make sense at first, but if you dig through the company’s recent past, it begins to make more sense. In a widely leaked move, Yahoo has hired Katie Couric to be its . The role, kicking off in 2014, will frame Couric as the face and leading voice of Yahoo’s growing news and content arm. The hire follows a string of notable pickups by the Internet giant, including , , , , , , and others. It is . If you look at Yahoo’s most publicized strategic shift in the Mayer era, it interestingly isn’t content by itself. Instead, Yahoo has made a hard turn into the mobile space with some grace as and a focus on repetitive activity has yielded it a quickly growing mobile user base. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently reported that Yahoo has monthly mobile users. In September, Yahoo reported 350 million monthly active mobile users. The company claimed 300 million monthly mobile actives in February. So, in under a year, Yahoo has grown its mobile audience by at least 33 percent. A culling of applications that didn’t fit its new rubric and a rapidly expanding mobile developer force ( , more than quadrupling during Mayer’s tenure) has helped Yahoo deliver applications that are compelling. The firm focuses on building apps that hit repeat daily activities: email, weather, the stock market, and so forth. Nailing those categories means that Yahoo’s apps will have maximum impact, as their usage is high frequency by nature. The company only has to ensure that the mobile experiences that it builds are compelling, and then monetize the heck out of their recurring usage. That’s Yahoo’s recipe to ignite revenue growth, it seems. Its search business, despite managing to force Microsoft to , is likely mature and is definitely slipping. Its year-over-year top line is in decline, as is Yahoo’s larger search market share. Yahoo has put its bets on mobile, a space where it controls . Will that 5 percent figure grow as Yahoo’s mobile user base expands? Not so far, at least. The company’s market share of mobile search is down almost precisely 1 percent in real terms year to date, or about 16 percent proportionally to its starting share point. That as the company has boosted its aggregate mobile user base greatly in the same period. So, at least so far, there is no positive correlation. That tells us that if mobile is to generate the revenue Yahoo want it to (and that it must, of course), it won’t be search-based. Checking in on , top line relating to search is the second-largest category for the firm. Yahoo’s largest revenue driver is advertising. So, we’re talking ads sold against user time, which means pageviews and app opens, which means content. We have now come full circle. Yahoo needs to continue to attract people to its mobile properties in growing rates. To do so, it must populate its applications with consistently compelling content, content that is better than what is offered by other applications and companies that are on a similar tip. Enter the, presumably expensive, mega stars. You don’t snag a Couric if you don’t want to use them heavily. Yahoo picking up famous journalists is not new. It’s been at it for a few years now. Mayer the simple reason she is hiring so quickly: “News is a definitive daily habit for our users — and Katie will work with our talented editorial team to pioneer a new chapter of digital journalism.” Yahoo considers news the type of content users will check more than once a day. Also, news content can have a higher per-piece ROI, given that one story can fit into multiple applications. A single sports story could fit into several Yahoo apps, meaning that the company can use one piece of work a number of times, thereby increasing its value. And fundamentally, Yahoo applications are more interesting if they are full of exclusive and high-quality content. Much more so than they would be if there were stuffed with AP and Reuters reprints. If you want exclusive, high-demand content, you go out and get the people that you consider to be chronic progenitors of such copy and clips. So Pogue and Couric. There will be more probably before the year is up. Yahoo is that it can monetize its growing mobile presence at rates that will replace the gaps created by declining revenue streams. So far, — Yahoo’s revenue continues to decline on a year-over-year basis. The company is seeing its revenue per ad decline, perhaps indicating that it is selling more mobile advertising units. It has reversed a decline in its total ads sold in the most recent quarter, something that could also be tied to rising mobile usage: “The Number of Ads Sold (excluding Korea) increased approximately 1 percent compared to the third quarter of 2012.” Here is the company’s chart on the growth rates (often negative) of its number of ads sold, and their price:
Both the decline in price and the increase in volume could be due to growing mobile usage. If we continue to see an increase in sold ads in the fourth quarter, and perhaps another decline in price, I think we’ll have a trend. Companies have notoriously foundered upon mobile shoals. Yahoo is instead charting a course directly for choppy, mostly unknown waters. At a minimum, you can applaud the company’s move as bold. Questions abound: Will Couric’s work be folded into mobile experiences, and if so, in what format? Will Yahoo push hard into mobile video? What are the margins in that content variety? Does Yahoo think of itself as a news organization or a technology company? Will its focus on mobile harm development on its extant web properties? There are far more questions than answers at this point, but the bet is simple: Great content in great apps will monetize at great rates. Call it the Mayer Strategy.
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QuizUp Sends Personal User Info To Strangers, Company Says Bug Contributed To Weakened Security
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Ryan Lawler
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It’s only been two-and-a-half weeks since hit mobile trivia app began to . It’s fun, and it’s addictive*… but if you haven’t started playing yet, you might want to wait a little bit before downloading the app and connecting it to Facebook. That’s because one software developer claims to have uncovered what he views to be privacy issues with the way that QuizUp stores and shares personal information. . Kyle Richter, a software developer and CEO of Dragon Forged Software (full disclosure: a to QuizUp), wrote a today detailing how QuizUp shares the personal information of its users with their opponents in plain text. According to Richter, that information includes but is not limited to “full names, Facebook IDs, email addresses, pictures, genders, birthdays, and even location data for where the user currently is.” We spoke to Richter about his article, and asked additional questions to follow up after we received a response from Plain Vanilla, the publishers of QuizUp. It’s important to note that the information users have access to is not that of friends, but of strangers that they’re playing matches against, Richter writes. Facebook tokens are also sent over SSL but in plain text, which means that if you’re tech savvy enough you could intercept it, though the app does not have posting permissions. Just as importantly, QuizUp appears to store your personal contact data you give it access to your address book, presumably to invite other users to join you in playing the game. Richter writes: “When access is granted, all of your contact’s emails are sent, once again in plain text, to QuizUp’s servers. This is done under the deception that you are hand inviting your friends on a one by one basis via SMS, while in the background it is copying and transmitting their contact data.” As a note, the data transmitted was done so over SSL, and required interception and translation by a proxy tool. Not something likely to happen to most users. These are serious allegations, especially for an app that relies on social connections to help spread its virality. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen this type of activity: Transmitting user contact data in a manner that is interceptable to the company servers is part of what landed Path in a year and a half ago. After from its servers, Path eventually over those privacy violations. To be clear, QuizUp is not retaining any contact data on their servers, which was another major component of the Path case, and it asks explicitly for user permission to use the data to find friends. Plain Vanilla CEO Thor Fridriksson spoke to TechCrunch via email, saying that there were many untrue statements in Richter’s article, starting with the implication that QuizUp sends user data in plain text. “Privacy is incredibly important to us,” he said. “We never send or receive any data in plain text to our servers.” And that’s true, to a degree. The information is sent over SSL, which is a good basic security measure, but it transmitted in plain text. Text that Richter says he easily intercepted using a tool on his computer. Some of that text was easily readable in one of the default storage files on an iOS device, accessible without any specialized tools. Fridriksson’s response to us included the note about SSL transmission, but admitted that there were security flaws in the way the app handled a user’s information. “Due to a bug in our third-party network library this encryption could be weakened on some occasions. This issue has been addressed in an update waiting review at Apple,” Fridricksson’s statement sent to us says. “User’s passwords are hashed before we store them in our databases. The user’s Facebook access token is never stored in plain text on the client.” Though the token does not appear to be stored on the device, it was transmitted in plain text, un-hashed. Richter showed us one of the access tokens sniffed from the device. And strangers’ information from their Facebook profiles was indeed stored in plain text on the device in a default info file. Plain Vanilla also admits that it was a mistake to transmit address books without hashing them: Our user’s address books are not stored on our servers and only used temporarily to help us find your friends. It was a mistake to not hash the contents of the address book before sending to our servers and we are currently changing the client application so it hashes the address book contents before sending to our servers. This is where the statement from Plain Vanilla gets a little fuzzy. It says that they “discovered a slight server error which inadvert[antly] leaked some player’s profile data to other users IF they had modified their client application in order to decrypt the communication. This was an developer’s error and has been fixed already on our servers.” Richter did not modify his client in any way, simply read the traffic that was already being sent. And the local file which contained user information did not require any decryption to read. And indeed, the information is posted right on Richter’s site (though it is censored). This would not be possible if it was not stored or sent in plain text. Though Plain Vanilla says Richter never sent them any emails, we were shown the original email sent to the company’s dedicated privacy address by Richter. Fridricksson’s statement to us concludes: We will be developing with our community stronger privacy features to ensure that everyone can enjoy QuizUp without any privacy concerns. We never received any emails from Kyle Richter but we welcome any concerns and will work with any security experts in order to make the QuizUp community a better and more secure place. Transmission of contact data in interceptable fashion, for the record, was exactly the kind of behavior that got Path in hot water, and sparked a Congressional inquiry, though Path also stored address books on its servers, which QuizUp . Richter notes that the app is extremely popular, with something like 1.5M downloads in the store over the past couple of weeks. The app’s issues have the potential to affect a of people. We have a journeyman’s familiarity with the processes used by Richter to suss out the traffic and data storage issues of QuizUp. We’ve actually used them in the past to duplicate the Path issues for reporting purposes and to uncover like Facebook, Foursquare and more last year. The allegations come as QuizUp has enjoyed several weeks sitting near the top of the Apple App Store rankings. Also, it comes not long after the company announced that it had raised $2 million from Sequoia Capital. Other investors include Greycroft Partners, IDG Ventures, Tencent, BOLDstart Ventures, CrunchFund (which is owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), and MESA+. : TechCrunch spoke to Fridricksson further about the updates to QuizUp. He says that a server side fix has already been made to the way the app transmits any personal information. The next time any user opens the app, they will not transmit information in the way that made it so easy to intercept before. An update to the app is already in review with other security fixes. As far as the local cache of data, Plain Vanilla says that it does not contain any information other than the basic info you choose to share with those you’ve authorized in the app as friends. : Fridriksson followed up with a discussing the security-related concerns and thanking Richter for bringing them up. The post detailed the changes that Plain Vanilla has made to address the issues and what it’s doing going forward. In conclusion, he wrote: “We’re sorry for this. While the issues are not as serious as alleged, we will do better to ensure QuizUp is a secure community for you to connect with people from around the world through shared passions and interests.” ==
* You can see that by Ryan’s Level 45 ranking in The Wire trivia.
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In Its First Acquisition, Byliner Buys Seesaw, The Startup Led By CoTweet Founders
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup offering and , just announced that it has acquired mobile developer . Seesaw launched an app of the same name that allowed users to collect opinions from friends, then followed it with . The company is also — it was founded by Aaron Gotwalt, Jesse Engle, and Kyle Sollenberger, who previously co-founded CoTweet (which was , which in turn was ). Gotwalt will become Byliner’s chief technology officer, Sollenberger will be the vice president of user experience, and Engle is joining as an advisor. Seesaw’s four other employees are also joining Byliner, the company says. “Byliner’s mission is to connect people to the stories and storytellers they love, and the amazing team that Aaron, Kyle, and Jesse have assembled will help us continue to deliver on that mission,” said Byliner President Deanna Brown in a press release. I asked whether this is primarily a talent acquisition, and a Byliner spokesperson replied: “We have designs on some of their tool kit and we love the talent.” (I followed up by asking what will happen to the existing Seesaw and Everlapse apps, and I’ll update if I hear back.) They also confirmed that this is the company’s first acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Seesaw’s investors include Freestyle Capital, Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, and betaworks. Byliner’s investors, meanwhile, include CrunchFund — which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington. And here’s what Byliner had to say about the existing apps: “We are going to build on the Everlapse app, and unsure on the Seesaw app for now.”
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If Inaccuracy Were Illegal, The Feds Would Have To Regulate Most Health Gadgets
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Gregory Ferenstein
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I wore a calorie counter that told me I was burning over 3,000 calories a day. If that were true, I would be emaciated enough to play Gollum in the next sequel. The accuracy of consumer health gadgets varies widely across the spectrum, yet this hasn’t stopped the FDA from popular genetic testing company 23andMe over concerns about the quality of their diagnostics. 23andMe may be at fault, but so is a large part of the entire health tech industry. The FDA is that 23andMe could cause a stampede of unnecessary and invasive medical procedures from consumers who get false readings on life-threatening abnormalities. Specifically, women who test positive for a gene associated with onset breast cancer, BRCA1, have been known to demand mastectomies against doctors’ advice, even though “false positives” are quite common. 23andMe advises their consumers to follow up breast cancer concerns with more accurate diagnostics, but the FDA is rightly worried it could trigger neuroticism that won’t be quelled by more sensitive tests. We can debate whether 23andMe is at fault, but if they are, so is the massively expanding industry of wrist pedometers, scales, blood tests and sleep trackers. Trust me, dieting information causes irrationality every bit as much as genetic abnormalities. At least for my body, some health trackers are inaccurate. Every day, the Basis watch, Nike FuelBand, Jawbone UP, BodyMedia, and Fitbit gave me daily readings for calorie output that could differ by over 1,000 calories ( have found similar ). To calibrate them to a more accurate measure of calorie burn, I got a metabolic rate test at . The involves running on a treadmill while a mask measures energy output from carbon dioxide expelled from my lungs. Here’s how three popular trackers (from last summer) compared to the 140 calories that Breakaway said I burned: : -13% (123 calories)
: -8% (129 calories)
-3% (136) Now, a dozen calories may not sound like a lot, but over the course of a day, it can mean the difference between gaining and losing weight. On the day I tested, here was my total calorie burn: : 2,072
2,440
2,753
2,408
*Nike only gives exercise-induced calorie burn. I’ve had similar luck fancy body-fat, percentage-measuring scales to a hydrostatic “dunk test”: , a 4 percent delta can mean the difference between “average” and “fit” — not to mention much bigger love handles. I should note that this is not a test of what device is most accurate. I don’t know and it certainly depends on the individual user. For instance, for those who ride a bike, most health trackers, such as the UP, FuelBand and Fitbit, can’t tell if you’re struggling up a San Francisco behemoth or gliding on a professional track. I also own a , and health trackers have difficult recording steps when I’m typing (instead of swinging my arms by my side). I had originally planned a much more thorough review of the devices’ respective accuracy of steps, calories and sleep, but had trouble getting data from all the gadgets except BodyMedia and Basis (the only two that give minute-by-minute to consumers). I’m going to re-do my test on the next generation of devices soon. Suffice to say, while I don’t know what is most accurate, I know most of them have to be misleading. Most consumer device companies begrudgingly acknowledge they aren’t very accurate. When I confronted Jawbone with my preliminary findings, a spokesman wrote to me, “UP is focused on overall lifestyle and helping people understand their baseline of their core activity throughout the day.” In other words, if they had done more scientific comparisons, they weren’t telling me. 23andMe, too, warns users in bright highlighted letters to get “clinical tests” for BRCA if they have a strong family history of breast cancer. The same goes for the rise in blood test companies, though our ability to test for the presence of nutrients, such as Vitamin D, is still developing. Perhaps 23andMe raised the ire of the FDA because of its aggressive defense of releasing BRCA information. They write blog posts citing research on how false positives . A bold move. Regardless, like 23andMe, the staple of every health tech company’s marketing department implies changes in lifestyle. The FDA has chosen to grant most of these gadgets and apps some leniency with the less stringent Class II regulation. But, it’s hard to see a difference between genetics and exercise, especially if a calorie counter leads users to dramatically cut their food intake. There are a few ways in which consumer response to health trackers go could go awry. First, , many of the implied recommendations from 23andMe still have to go through a doctor (like prescriptions or advanced screenings). In contrast, many people adopt diets and exercise habits without having to consult a physician. They may buy a standing desk and run in the evenings, without knowing that . A sedentary lifestyle kills many of thousands of people each year, so getting the exercise part of one’s health right cannot be underestimated. It’s not hard to meet the steps or calories goals of some health trackers and still be at risk for diseases associated with a desk job. Second, there have been calls to regulate health trackers and apps for some time. BodyMedia, the band that gave me the most eye-opening results, and is used in research projects. Yet, executives at BodyMedia have admitted to me that all devices have difficulty accurately measuring activity (cross-training exercising like Crossfit throw them for a loop). It should be noted that BodyMedia goes pretty far at giving actionable advice. It offers a detailed calculator about how to lose weight by combining exercise and diet, . Inaccuracy could seriously mislead patients who need a calorie deficit, or discourage those who are led to believe they’re not exercising enough. Personally, I’m not opposed to the FDA forcing tech companies to perform due diligence on their devices. Maybe informational products just shouldn’t be regulated. But let’s not pretend that genetic information makes consumers any less irrational or reckless than dieting.
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Sygic Fleshes Out Travel Experience With Features Powered By Groupon, Foursquare, And ParkMe
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Eliza Brooke
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The offline navigation system is rounding out its offerings by integrating with Groupon, Foursquare, and ParkMe on a slew of new features for their U.S. and Canada user base. Although the Slovakian startup has accumulated 30 million users across 115 countries since 2004, Europe remains its biggest market. In order to lock down a larger swath of the Americas, Sygic is hoping to use its new features to become a more comprehensive travel service. “We think that navigation is really about content,” said Sygic CEO Michal Stencl. Once you have the map portion of things down, that might be true. It’s certainly one way to try to compete in the U.S. market with popular services like Google Maps. Sygic’s new features mean Groupon powering location-based deals, Foursquare offering food and event recommendations, and ParkMe showing users the best places to park their cars in real time. Previous to this Sygic has already begun layering on its functionality as a travel app, having integrated with TripAdvisor and Booking.com earlier this year.
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gregory Ferenstein
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Twitter Streamlines Its ‘Age Gate’ Process To Make Ads More Attractive To Adult Brands
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter introduced ‘age gate’ screening over a year ago in order to make the platform more legally sound for ‘adult’ brands like liquor and beer vendors. Today, it’s in its apps greatly in order to improve the follow rate and therefore the attractiveness of running an active account for those brands. The previous method, which was , involved following the brand, receiving a DM that took you to another page, asking for your age and then kicking you back and allowing you to follow. The new process creates an in-app flow that uses the standard iOS date picker to tap in your date of birth and then allows an immediate follow. In addition to the easier flow, Twitter says that it will remember your status as a ‘legal adult’ (but will not store your date of birth). This makes it even easier to follow adult brands once you’ve followed the first. This method, and the previous method for that matter, are basically the same thing that you see implemented on any website with ‘over 18’ content. There is no validation of your date of birth in any fashion, so there’s nothing to prevent a minor from lying and following Jim Beam on Twitter. But there is a solid legal basis for indemnification of pandering to minors if even a simple, easily bypassed gate is in place. Basically, Twitter and the brands are both safe as long as they can say they asked the question. The obvious side-effect of this is to make it much more attractive for adult brands to inhabit their Twitter accounts and to improve the chances that those brands will feel it’s worthwhile to advertise on Twitter. And Twitter gets to tout the fact that the brands are advertising directly to people that have ‘proven’ they’re in a viable customer group for the product they’re trying to sell.
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Google Gives Business Owners A Single Place Online To See All Their Customers’ Reviews
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google now makes it easier for business owners to see who is reviewing them across the web. Verified business owners who are already using the Places for Business user interface can now go to , where they’ll find a new “Reviews” section. There, they will find all of their customers’ online reviews and be able to respond to them. The service also offers some basic review analytics so businesses can track how their reputation changes over time. The service doesn’t just pull in reviews from Google properties, by the way. It also aggregates data from around the web, too. This makes it a pretty comprehensive tool for business owners who want to manage their online reputations. Google will pull in data from most of the review sites that currently allow it to snippet their content, including TripAdvisor, Zagat, UrbanSpoon, Insider Pages and others. Unsurprisingly, Google gives ratings on its own sites first billing and separates them out from other properties, but this tool still offers businesses an easy and free way to see what people are saying about their cupcakes or car repair services. Google isn’t the first company to start tracking online reviews for small and medium business. Services like and others offer similar services – though often with more additional features. Most companies don’t yet make use of these services, however, so a free Google service for managing online reputations will likely attract quite a few users.
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Microsoft Confirms That “Excessive Profanity” In Xbox Upload Studio Videos Can Cost You Account Privileges
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Alex Wilhelm
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Reports have surfaced over the past 24 hours that Xbox users are after uploading profanity-laced videos. Xbox One customers complained that they were losing the ability to use Skype and other applications on their consoles. Microsoft today released a statement regarding the account bans, that swearing in private Skype calls could result in account suspensions. However, the company did confirm that if you upload content using the Upload Studio feature of the Xbox One that contains “excessive profanity,” your account could lose some or all of its privileges. The company did not clarify how it tracks the level of profanity in uploaded content, whether via automated check, or a less pervasive process. Here’s Microsoft’s full statement: To be clear, the Xbox Live Policy & Enforcement team does not monitor direct peer-to-peer communications like Skype chats and calls. Also, we take Code of Conduct moderation via Upload Studio very seriously. We want a clean, safe and fun environment for all users. Excessive profanity as well as other Code of Conduct violations will be enforced upon and result in suspension of some or all privileges on Xbox Live. We remain committed to preserving and promoting a safe, secure and enjoyable experience for all of our Xbox Live members. I’m always opposed to incursions on free expression, though Microsoft certainly has the right to control its own communications network; this is not a free-speech issue. That said, it’s an odd choice by the company. Gamers are notoriously dickish to one another over in-game chat on any platform. Saying that swearing is not to be tolerated (at least partially) in this one area of gaming on top of a platform that is an obscenity cannon just feels squishy. Also, it’s inconsistent. And as I don’t think that language deemed by some as “foul” should be banned while playing games, I don’t think that it should be banned in uploaded videos of games being played. Whomever decided that gamers need to be coddled in Redmond essentially stepped in an unneeded PR puddle of mud. Microsoft wants nothing but a smooth launch for its console. Banning potty-mouthed users isn’t a way to make friends in the gaming world.
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Insta-Sales? Soldsie Expands From Facebook-Based E-Commerce To Include Support For Instagram
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Sarah Perez
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Instagram isn’t only a place to share perfectly framed photos of sunsets and selfies – some business owners have realized that the site works for pushing product, too. Today, e-commerce startup , which previously focused only on businesses selling to their Facebook Page visitors, will now bring similar functionality to Facebook-owned Instagram. This will put Soldsie in closer competition with services like , which has for over a year, as well as with , a site which The Daily Dot described as the “mutant love child of Instagram and Craigslist.” More broadly speaking, Instagram’s ability to be a marketing vehicle for businesses and brands has led to the growth of others, like Vitrue and Buddy Media for example, which help companies manage their social media presence and run campaigns. And more recently, Instagram began experimenting with brand of its own. But Soldsie’s system is designed primarily for small to medium-sized merchants running daily and weekly sales, as opposed to individuals selling their own items, or those running some sort of marketing campaign. “It’s kind of like creating an e-commerce site, but putting it through Facebook and Instagram,” explains Soldsie co-founder Chris Bennett. He notes that Soldsie had been quietly testing Instagram support with a small number of merchants (under a dozen) since September, ahead of rolling it out more publicly today. And as with Soldsie’s Facebook support, the process for selling on Instagram is simple for merchants and shoppers alike: a seller posts a photo of an item for sale and instructs users to comment “ ” along with their email address. Buyers using Soldsie on Facebook complete their transactions on the site, but Instagram shoppers are treated a little differently. After commenting, buyers are automatically sent an invoice for the item in question via email, though the company is also offering an option that would direct shoppers to a form hosted by Soldsie instead. The company is also now working with its merchant customers more closely, says Bennett, providing them support that includes advice on how to better run their sales, communicate with their customer base, and more. The pricing for either service – Facebook or Instagram – is not set in stone, Bennett adds, saying that it’s now a mix of a minimum of sales or a percentage of sales. During the beta period, the first business to test the Instagram selling feature saw 72 orders in its first day, and another business is seeing $1,000 per day in sales on average, says Bennett. “People are beginning to build their following counts on Instagram, and it’s great to see that the businesses we work with are seeing a great return on investment for building up their following base,” he says. However, Soldsie’s beta tests have been too small to draw larger conclusions from at this point. What we do know is that social media can drive purchases – see, for example, – but whether or not it will ever drive a significant number of in-stream purchases, so to speak, is something that’s still being proven. Earlier this summer, Soldsie over $10 million in transactions processed on its platform, and a reach of over 1,000 merchants. Bennett says the company is growing and has now seen $15 million in transactions as of today.
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Twitter Slips Below $40 As The NASDAQ And NYSE Flirt With Record Levels
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Alex Wilhelm
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Twitter’s stock is slipping today, shedding around 4.5 percent of its value in regular trading. That works out to around $1.3 billion in market capitalization, calculating with a fully diluted share count of 705,098,594. Its decline coincides with a very public record for the tech-heavy NASDAQ exchange, which traded over the 4,000 mark earlier today. As the USA Today : “The Nasdaq composite topped 4000 briefly for the first time since September 2000 in early trading Monday, [after] it crashed 78% to 1114 in the 2000-02 bear market.” But Twitter trades on the NYSE, not the NASDAQ, which remains something of the market of record for technology if we can bend the cliche to our will. So to see NASDAQ’s rise coincide with Twitter’s fall today means that the social company is losing altitude at a slight angle to the market. If Twitter fell on a day in which the majority of technology stocks also lost a similar cut of their value, it wouldn’t mean a thing. The NYSE is also up today, over the record 16,000 mark, sitting around 16,091, up roughly 0.16 percent. According to Google Finance, broader technology stocks are off around 0.15 percent, so the climate isn’t perfect this Monday for Twitter. Still, the size of its decline and its fall through the $40 price floor is worth noting. With a current share price of roughly $39, Twitter is well down from its , but is up from the level it priced its shares: $26. In the vein, keep in mind that Twitter initially indicated that it would price its own equity at . That in mind, the company is miles and miles away from becoming a failed IPO in any sense whatsoever, unless you were the person who bought in at $45.10 on its first day of trading, naturally. As I : The markets and larger technology industry will closely watch Twitter in its first few quarters, given that the degree of its success – or weakness – as a public company will set the temperature for other companies’ IPO paths. The company’s first months’ trading could set the stage in my estimation for its first year or two of public life, as was the case with Facebook. The company could continue to ease until its first quarterly earnings report, at which point the first hurdle will present itself. Coverage out this morning is typically gaunt and accurate in its own way: Once again, new “metrics” are being applied to justify stratospheric valuations. Twitter is losing money. A price-to-earnings ratio? There is no E in the P/E. But its stock is trading at 20-odd times the company’s annual sales. Good enough. Only, we all know that it is not. Talk to folks about Twitter’s valuation and the metric of choice for the period after its first public year is its operating margin. People expect it to match Facebook’s. The direct implication there is that people are expecting Twitter to have the E in the P/E, and not too far out. What that looks like in the short term is that Twitter aggressively expands its revenue base using its new capital, and then perhaps slows its cost growth to levels below the delta of its top line increase. Then, continue that process through break-even and into the black. So, though Twitter has slipped from its massive day-one IPO jump, none of the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the firm have changed. Barring something large, it’s a coast all the way until D-Day for the firm: earnings.
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Fly Or Die: Kindle Fire HDX 8.9
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Jordan Crook
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In early October, we brought you on the seven-inch Kindle Fire HDX, of which John is a huge fan. Today we bring you the seven-incher’s big brother, the . In terms of Amazon’s evolution as a hardware (and specifically tablet) company, the Fire HDX 8.9 is a markedly improved device from previous generations. It’s thinner, lighter at just 13 ounces, and more powerful with a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor and improved software. But how does it match up to the competition this holiday season? John seems to think that this next-gen Kindle Fire has finally achieved “productivity status,” moving from a reader on steroids to a full-fledged computing device. I’m not as convinced, but I also haven’t been able to spend with these Fire HDX tablets as him. Would either of us save $100 and choose the HDX 8.9 over an ? Probably not, based almost entirely on the iPad’s ecosystem and App Store. However, both of us feel that the smaller size tablets are a better idea for the average consumer. Unless you require a larger screen for reading, or use the tablet almost exclusively to watch movies and TV, a smaller device like the seven-inch HDX or the iPad mini with Retina are more portable and comfortable options.
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Google Opens Glass Mirror API To All Developers Even If They Don’t Have Glass
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Frederic Lardinois
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In the early days of , everybody who picked up their unit would also be whitelisted for access to the , as Google only wanted developers with access to the actual hardware to develop for the device. Well, those days are over. Google announced that the whitelist is now gone and the Mirror API is open to all. There are currently two ways of writing applications for Glass. One is through the Mirror API, which allows developers to asynchronously push and pull information to and from the device and then display it in a . This works great for news apps, social networking services and other services that can use Glass to display status updates and similar information. For apps that need real-time access to Glass’ hardware and want to display information outside of the card interface, Google launched the Glass Development Kit (GDK) last week. This opens up a whole new for developers, but while anybody with a bit of web development experience can write apps for the Mirror API, writing GDK apps is . So far, Google has only allowed a very small number of applications into its official “Glassware” directory, so it’s virtually impossible to gauge how many Mirror API-based prototype apps for Glass already exist. But this announcement will surely motivate a large number of developers to create Glass apps even if they don’t have access to the actual hardware yet.
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Quad’s Mobile Messaging App For College Groups Supports 500-Person Chats
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Sarah Perez
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A new mobile chat application targeting college students, , is working to move student organizations off of email and onto smartphones for managing their group communications. Despite the popularity of mobile messaging applications, like WhatsApp, Kik, GroupMe and dozens of others, few of these can support a large number of chat participants, often capping out at , if not fewer. Even though the of college students today carry smartphones, and are increasingly turning to messaging apps for their personal communications, that 50-person limitation is a deal-breaker in terms of using most messaging clients within a bigger college group, like a fraternity, sorority, an academic group, sports team, or another sort of student organization. That’s the problem Quad set out to address starting this September when the app first launched. Today, Quad has a presence on 2,500 of the 4,500 college campuses across the U.S., where on average, 10 to 15 percent of the students have begun to use the application. Quad is the second app from Appsurdity, a company founded in late August 2012 by Mary Yang, formerly of SpeedDate, and Matthew Murphy, previously co-founder and CMO at Lemon, and who served as head of marketing at textbook rentals site, now academic hub, Chegg.com. The company’s first application, an “Instagram for voice” called Dubbler, has climbed to just over a million users, but the company’s 10-person team has largely been spending its time on Quad in recent months. Murphy says that the idea for Quad initially came from discussions with college interns working at Appsurdity. “College groups are still very much the center point of the ecosystem on college campuses,” explains Murphy. And when he asked the interns how student groups communicate these days, they would sigh and admit that they still had to use email. The interns told him that mobile chat apps simply couldn’t handle larger groups, much to Murphy’s surprise. “I started looking into it and found that GroupMe caps out at 50 people, WhatsApp caps out at 50 people, and iMessage caps out at 10 people,” he says, referencing a few of the high-profile apps within the mobile-messaging landscape. But the problem wasn’t one that was necessarily technical in nature, but rather one that was more of a usability challenge. That is, a group chat with hundreds of people participating would simply get too busy, too cluttered, and difficult to follow. Your phone would buzz non-stop. In the latest version of , out today, the company has introduced a user interface designed to make group communications in large groups better. To do so, the app takes the best of thread-based organization from online forums with the concept of topics and sub-topics, and has combined that with real-time mobile messaging. In practice, the way this works is that each “quad” (group) in the app will break down into further “sub-quads” for the various topics that need to be covered, ranging from upcoming meeting announcements to discussions about recruitment efforts or anything else that interests the group in question. “I haven’t seen this done anywhere in mobile chat yet,” says Murphy. In these sub-quads, users can share text, photos, emoji, contact cards, a location (such as a meeting location), voice messages of up to 90 seconds, and more. There are also a few fun features, like a dice game and something called a “shake emoji,” which is where you shake your phone to send an emoji that makes it look like the glass on your phone has broken. Why? Who knows? The students get bored in class, apparently. While 90 percent of students in Quad’s groups have an iPhone or Android smartphone, the app also supports SMS for those who carry a non-supported phone, so as not to limit its ability to reach all the group’s members. In addition, today’s release of Quad ups the number of users in a group to 500 from the 200 it initially allowed for following the app’s soft launch earlier this fall. Though Murphy declined to provide user numbers and actives, he would cite Penn State’s adoption of Quad as a representative example. That college has over 400 groups on the app, with a combined 8,000 users out of a student population of 40,000. Now the team at Quad wants to further grow the app’s footprint to reach 30 or even 50 percent of the student body on the campuses where it has traction, and expand to those where it doesn’t yet have a presence. Eventually, the plan is to generate revenue via in-app purchases for things like emoji packs and premium features. Appsurdity is currently backed by some undisclosed angel funding, but may consider raising a round in the future to help it grow. And longer-term, Murphy says the team may consider bringing a version of Quad’s feature set to other organizations, like businesses. “It’s definitely something we’ve been thinking about. Businesses would make perfect sense for it,” he says. But he said that change would come once the company tackles the college market first. “There are 21 million college students in the U.S. and then abroad, it expands exponentially…but we could evolve over time,” adds Murphy. Quad is available for download in the and .
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Kingsoft Office Raises $50M From Morningside, GGV And Shunwei China Internet Fund
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Catherine Shu
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, which makes an office suite that competes with Microsoft Office, has landed $50 million in new funding from Morningside Group, GGV Capital and Shunwei China Internet Fund. The company, which recently incorporated in the U.S. and opened its North American headquarters in Palo Alto, will use its new capital to support its U.S. operations and expand globally by cementing partnerships with OEMs (for mobile preloads), software developers and service providers in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Morningside and GGV will join Kingsoft’s board of directors to help develop its global strategy. Kingsoft Office Software’s PC version currently has 120 million users worldwide, while its Android version recently passed 100 million registered users. A company spokesman told me that Kingsoft’s primary focus in the U.S. is offering free software for mobile, while in emerging markets it will focus on both PC and mobile office products. Kingsoft is planning a major update to its iOS version that will add functionality similar to its Android apps. Other recent steps Kingsoft has taken to increase its global footprint include investing in Go Launcher, an Android app maker based in Beijing that has 42 million monthly active users, 70 percent of whom are based outside of China. Sungy Capital, Go Launcher’s parent company, it had picked up $20 million from Kingsoft and antivirus software maker Qihoo 360.
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Katie Couric’s Global Anchor Position At Yahoo Confirmed
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Darrell Etherington
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TV personality Katie Couric will indeed by joining Yahoo as first reported by , the company announced via a blog post today. She starts the gig beginning “early 2014,” and will continue her hosting duties on ABC’s concurrently. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the new hire today via a blog post on , using a terrible nautical pun. Couric will officially be in charge of Yahoo’s growing team of news correspondents, which include recent pick up David Pogue, as well as Megan Liberman and Matt Bai. She’ll be taking on a role as the “face of Yahoo News” and will be fronting a lot of original video content shot for the site, according to Mayer. “And this is just the beginning,” Mayer says, and seems so emphatic about it that the paragraph that contains it is actually repeated twice in the original version of the blog post (since corrected). I already opined at length about , and recent numbers indicate that there will be a feeding frenzy among advertisers to shore up the logging on instead for news and content. Yahoo does seem to have a bit of a split focus, considering how much effort it’s putting into mobile products and services, but video is probably part of the larger picture. Viewers aren’t just turning away from TV and to their computers, after all – they’re .
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Prompt.ly Raises $1.5M Seed To Become The OpenTable For Time And Services
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Mike Butcher
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We’ve seen the rise of the ‘on-demand’ economy in the form of startups like TaskRabbit and FancyHands. What we have seen less of is a full-blown ‘platform play’ where it is not about connecting buyers and sellers (TaskRabbit) but about managing a business based on time (likeOpenTable). , which operates a service in the UK and US, has been doing this for the last three years and pretty successfully. But until recently it’s been more or less alone in the platform space. BookingBug grew out of the Web and has , but the requirement here is for a more mobile-centric SaaS platform for service providers of kind, enabling any business to plug into this global mobile revolution, where getting some time with a music teacher, cleaner, business coach or personal trainer is only a tap away. Now a new startup in this more mobile-oriented era is poised to break cover. has something of a star-system of a team, including noted investors and advisers. Leading the company is Richard Titus, already a massively experienced tech entrepreneur. You can , but only the Android app is available right now. The iPhone app is awaiting clearance. Prompt.ly has now secured funding from several key angels including Ethan Beard from Facebook and several funds including Subtraction Capital (a new fund founded by PayPal’s Jason Portnoy and Paul Willard). Titus says they will have topped off their $1.5m seed round before Christmas and “Series A discussions are heating up.” Titus was co-founder of Razorfish in LA, Schematic, and was the CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital which created the Daily Mail online, as well as getting the BBC’s digital arm into shape. He’s joined by cofounder Eli-Shaoul Khedouri, CTO, formerly of Everest (another mobile startup) and a former Chief Architect of infosec for NYC. Titus tells me that Prompt.ly starts off with the premise that “time is broken” and requires a deep, purpose built platform for schedule management and time management. Attacking the enterprise is hard in this space and yet there is an enormous invisible economy out there for on-demand tasks (as Task Rabbit and others have shown). He calls this market “The Invisible Economy”. It’s made up of Dog walkers, personal trainers, itinerant web designers, handymen, you name it. And it’s all based on time. But they’ve done their research. Using data from the SBA and the IRS they estimate there is between 20 to 60m people in USA alone that fall into this ‘small-slot-of-time’ mode of work, making it worth an estimated $1.27 Trillion in the US, and accounting for one in every five purchases. The majority of purchases are based on time – by hour or by service. After hundreds of interviews with itinerant workers, they’ve identified 1,200 categories of these people who sell their time by the hour or session. Everyone from lawyers to baby-sitters. “This is an enormous part of the economy but it has no back office,” says Titus. “Less than 150 of the people we spoke to had a computer and yet all had smartphones.” He or she has no back office; is Mobile-first or mobile-only; takes cash and/or credit cards. That equates, he says, to 30% of US GDP, 56 Million jobs and 44% of the US employment. This is not like Square (which is the retail space), it’s about selling excess time, so it’s about payment for time not payment tracking for goods. Right now that’s a very broken experience. “We’re closer to Open Table or Square than we are Yelp,” says Titus. This sector often loses track of billings and collections, so thus a loss of income. Right now it’s being managed with phone calls and dozens of texts. And once they lose a job, they can do nothing about it. Plus they have trouble filling unbooked hours. Prompt.ly will operate on a Freemium model – free up front then a $9.99 a month & up, feature-tiered offering. It theory, this could pay for itself with the first rebooked session of whatever the service is. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/75922382] This post has been edited post-publication to correct the earlier omission of BookingBug.
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Indian Streaming Music Dhingana Claims 9 Million Monthly Unique Users As It Hones Its Competitive Strategy
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Catherine Shu
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Indian streaming music service says it now has 9 million unique users per month from around the world. As music streaming services around the world face down the international expansion of and , Dhingana CEO Rohit Bhatia says the startup is hedging its bets on a mobile-first strategy as well as growth in international markets. Over 75% of its users access its one-million song library from mobile devices, which the startup says marks a 200% growth year-over-year. Dhingana, which is based in Pune, India and Sunnyvale, Ca., says half of its monthly active users come from outside of India. The U.S. accounts for most of that number, with 2.5 million users, while 1 million access the service from Europe and the U.K. CEO Rohit Bhatia says Dhingana has achieve most of its growth from organic traffic and spends almost nothing on marketing. The service, however, faces several major competitors. Though Spotify and Deezer have not launched in India yet, both are and presents an attractive opportunity. Dhingana’s main domestic competitors include and , both of which also want to leverage international growth. For example, Saavn, , is taking a by offering an English-language service for foreign audiences with a taste for Bollywood music while building its catalog of Western tracks for Indian listeners. Gaana, a music streaming service backed by , one of India’s largest Internet companies, . Other Indian streaming music services include and . Bhatia says Dhingana’s competitive advantage is offering a vast array of music for every language and region in India with tracks in more than 42 languages and genres. “It took Dhingana almost over a year and a half to sign licensing agreements with 900-plus labels,” says Bhatia. “If you want to be a truly Indian music streaming service, you have to sign up with all the regional labels, so it can be pretty time-consuming.” Dhingana’s cross-platform strategy is tailored for the country’s fragmented mobile marketplace, where . According to Dhingana, its apps have been downloaded over 6 million times across Android, iOS, Windows 8, BlackBerry, Nokia and Amazon Kindle platforms. In addition to a mobile-optimized site, it also has Web apps for Opera and UC Browser, two of India’s top mobile browsers. Once users switch to smartphones, Dhingana sends a push notification prompting them to download the app for their operating system. Bhatia says Dhingana also focuses on search-engine optimization so its Web site shows up near the top of search results for popular tracks. The service currently monetizes through ads and a premium subscription service called , which is in a in-app purchase through its . The startup in October 2012 from , with participation from previous investors Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners.
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Hey! You! Come Build Something Amazing At The Very First Disrupt Europe Hackathon
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Greg Kumparak
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In just a few weeks, we’re bringing for the very first time — and with it, one of our big ol’ Hackathons. If you live in Europe and have never had the chance to build at one of our events, now’s your chance. Never been to one of our Hackathons? Here’s what you need to know: once you’re in, you’ve got just shy of 24 hours to build the best, most incredible thing you and your self-selected team can build from the ground up. At the end of the crazy overnight sprint, you’ve got 60 seconds to pitch your team’s hack in a battle for fame, glory, and a bunch of crazy prizes. The top team takes home $5,000 dollars in cash, and the top three teams get to present their projects in front of the massively influential audience at the main Disrupt conference. There will also be a bunch of fantastic prizes from our API sponsors, but we’ll announce those in just a few weeks So, what should build? Something amazing. Something clever. Something that shows just how crazy talented you and your teammates are. Remember: this is a Hackathon. Our judges wont be looking for the thing with the best potential business model — they’re looking for something that makes them stop and say “ ” We’re changing things up a bit this time around. Since it’s our first big event outside of the US in some time, we’re keepin’ the attendee list for this Hackathon a bit smaller than its stateside counterparts. We’ve got a to keep things fair and to help make sure everyone at the event has a great time and, like all of TechCrunch’s upcoming events, our is in full effect here. Oh, and just to sweeten the deal a bit more: even if you don’t take one of the top three spots or win one of the awesome API sponsor prizes, there’s still something great up for grabs. Each of the top 50-or-so teams (with the final number depending on how many teams enter) who present will get tickets to the entirety of the Disrupt Europe conference, normally valued at nearly $1k each. Why? Because we think you’re rad. As long as you’re building something, participating in the Hackathon is free. Interested sponsors, . We released the first batch of tickets last week, and it was by far the biggest batch we’ll release. Every batch we release will get smaller and smaller — so if you’re looking to attend, make sure you register quick.
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How Many Of Twitter’s 218 Million Users Are Just Blind-Tweeting From Other Apps?
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Josh Constine
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Being a communication backbone of the web has its pluses and minuses. Twitter gets lots of content syndicated from other sites, but those contributors don’t necessarily visit Twitter or see its ads. That last part is a problem, especially since these blind tweeters count as some of Twitter’s 218.3 million active users. Twitter explains on that an “active user” includes not only people that actually visit its site and mobile apps, but also “Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter through…registered third-party applications or websites.” Those users do push content to Twitter that draws people to its feed where it shows ads, so they help the site monetize. But they also aren’t seeing ads themselves. There are tons of ways to syndicate to Twitter. People auto-tweet their blog posts, Tumblr updates and even their Facebook posts. IFTTT and other automation services make this easy. In its pre-monetization phase, getting more content may have been the right bet, and still may be, but it could make Twitter seem larger than it is. “I don’t really go on Twitter anymore but I share my Instagrams there,” a friend told me today. These Insta-pushers are even worse for Twitter than non-visiting contributors from elsewhere, because Instagram pulled support for Twitter Cards. That means rather than lingering on Twitter and viewing Instagrams in-line, people are whisked to Instagram’s website…where they don’t see Twitter ads. My friend is not alone, considering that Twitter listed “the degree to which users access Twitter content through applications that do not contain our ads” as one of its risks. Yet it doesn’t break out users who actually visit its feed from those who don’t. If that number is a significant percentage of Twitter’s total active user count, bankers might want Twitter to disclose it in revisions to its S-1 in the upcoming weeks before it actually goes public.
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Twitter Has Been Making 80 Cents In Ad Revenue For Every Thousand ‘Timeline Views’
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Anthony Ha
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If you’re reading Twitter’s to see where the business stands as it prepares to go public (hey, that’s what ), you may have noticed a number that comes up repeatedly: “advertising revenue per timeline view.” What does that actually mean? Twitter says that along with things like monthly active users, ad revenue per timeline view is one of the key metrics it uses to evaluate its business. The company treats timeline views (“the total number of timelines requested when registered users visit Twitter, refresh a timeline or view search results while logged in on our website, mobile website or desktop or mobile applications”) as a measure of user engagement, and it uses ad revenue per timeline view to track its ability to make money from that engagement. By that measure, Twitter’s ability to monetize is improving. It says advertising revenue per timeline view was $0.80 for the three months ending on June 30 of this year, up 26 percent from the same period in 2012. That number is significantly higher in the United States ($2.17) compared to the rest of the world ($0.30), though the international number is up 111 percent year-over-year. Why invent an entirely new ad metric (and one without a handy acronym)? Well, Twitter has an unusual advertising model, with advertisers paying to promote tweets, trends, and accounts in users’ news feeds, so the standard ad measurement of CPMs (the cost per thousand impressions) may not apply. The fact that “advertising revenue per timeline view” actually measures revenue for every 1,000 timeline views suggests that this metric may be a proxy of sorts for CPMs. (It’s probably a little dodgy to compare Twitter’s numbers with traditional CPMs, but hey, just for fun — according to eMarketer, Facebook had an effective CPM of $.071 on mobile and $0.19 on desktop in 2012.) However, Twitter is really selling its ads as a way for companies to engage with consumers, so the filing also notes trends in cost per ad engagement — basically, it’s been falling steadily, with a sequential decrease of 46 percent in the last quarter, 12 percent the quarter before that, and 19 percent the quarter before that. (A decline in cost means Twitter is getting paid less for each engagement.) The filing attributes these declines to an increase in ad inventory, which has been partially offset by growing demand. Advertising also gets its own section (page 18 if you want to read along) in the filing’s discussion of various risk factors, where Twitter notes that all kinds of things could go wrong with its ad programs — for example, if Twitter is unable to convince brands to invest in building a presence on the service, or if new programs like don’t take off, or if the decline in cost per engagement continues. , Twitter brought in $253 million in revenue in the first six months of the year. Of that amount, $221 million (87 percent) came from ads, compared to $32 million (13 percent) from data licensing. In comparison, the company made $7 million from advertising in all of 2010 (that’s when it launched its first ad programs) and $21 million from data licensing. Oh, and Twitter says that .
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Lyft Is Expanding Its Ride-Sharing Service To Silicon Valley
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Ryan Lawler
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Ride-sharing startup has been on a mission to make its mobile ride app available in various markets around the country, recently launching service in places like Dallas, Indianapolis, and St. Paul. But its newest market is a little closer to home: Beginning Friday evening, riders in certain parts of Silicon Valley will be able to start requesting rides. Lyft, of course, is incredibly popular in its home market of San Francisco, where it launched and where it’s been operating for the past year and a half. As a result, it’s not surprising to see the company extend the service farther south. After all, with so many people in SF working on the peninsula — and vice versa — there was likely a number of people who were able to use Lyft in one place who wished to use it in the other. The launch, which happens tomorrow evening, will expand availability in the South Bay but it won’t totally cover the area. Lyft’s Silicon Valley service stretches from Menlo Park down to San Jose, but at launch it won’t accept rides between the San Francisco city limits and, say, Redwood City. (It will drop off in those areas, so long as the ride originates in SF or farther south in Silicon Valley.) According to Lyft CEO Logan Green, the company is taking the same approach that it took in Los Angeles, its second market. With that launch, the ride-sharing service made itself available in just one specific part of the wide sprawl of the city: Santa Monica and Venice. Later, it expanded to other parts of the city as it felt comfortable with its ability to serve each new neighborhood. In the same way, Lyft decided to light up the “densest, most-active swath” of the Silicon Valley market and make sure it could provide an adequate level of service there before expanding. It will close the gap between SF and Menlo Park over time — and eventually, it will likely expand into Oakland and the East Bay to serve the entire “San Francisco Bay Area.” Lyft expects to see other similarities between Silicon Valley and L.A., like a longer average trip length. Green said that the average trip in cities like San Francisco tends to be about two miles, while in the suburbs you’ll see it be more like four or five miles. But traffic is usually less intense than in the center of major cities. According to Green, Silicon Valley pricing per mile will be tuned down slightly from what San Francisco riders can expect to account for the longer average trip length and less traffic. Green says that Lyft is ramped up for a bigger launch than normal, but that the company expects to be able to meet Silicon Valley demand. In part, that’s because a lot more people in Silicon Valley have cars than those in San Francisco. For a ride-sharing company, one of the advantages of operating in more suburban markets is that the number of potential drivers is a lot higher than in cities where everyone takes public transportation. Lyft has raised $82 million from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Mayfield Fund, K9 Ventures, and Floodgate.
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Oscar, The New York Health Startup Looking To Revolutionize Insurance, Launches
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, the New York-based startup from Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, has finally launched. Their debut comes as the U.S. government unveils new health insurance exchanges where consumers can pick and choose plans. The startup, , is an insurer itself and is looking to make the consumer experience less opaque. They’ve launched four tiers of plans for people of different income ranges and family sizes. Below is an example range of plans for someone with no kids who makes $50,000 a year in New York — which might give you an idea of Oscar’s target demographic. The plans range from $218 ro $365 a month. One of the things they are offering to differentiate themselves against other health insurers is unlimited access to telemedicine. Clients should be able to call up doctors for any ailment at any time. There is also free access to generic drugs on certain plans. Another thing they’re doing is using natural language processing to match symptoms patients are reporting with appropriate doctors. So if a patient complains of chest pain, the system should route them to physicians who might have the matching expertise. Oscar is actually licensed as a health insurance operator in the state of New York, so it isn’t some kind of front-end. This also gives it more power to be creative with the entire consumer experience. And the $40 million the company raised isn’t actually all going toward operations. Because of state regulations around the industry, about $29 million of that round is kept in reserve. Only $11 million of the funding is actually going toward operations.
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Twitter’s Accumulated Deficit Is $418.6 Million And That Figure Is About To Get Much Bigger
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Alex Wilhelm
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It costs a lot of money to build a business of Twitter’s scale. The company prior to its , which could total $1 billion itself. Here’s another figure: Twitter’s accumulated deficit to date is $418.6 million, a figure that will race to $748.2 million once it goes public and realizes $329.6 million in costs related to stock-based compensation expenses. This is not to say that Twitter has spent $418.6 million to date; that figure is far higher. Accumulated deficit can be viewed as the company’s net income, net loss and paid dividends added together as debits and credits. So the formula is net income, minus net loss, minus paid dividends. Twitter pays no dividends, so its accumulated deficit is simply the amount of money that it has spent than it has brought in as revenue in its life. In a simple way, it’s the money that Twitter had to raise to keep its lights on during its growth. The company continues to lose money on a GAAP basis, and even on an adjusted net loss scale. So we can expect that Twitter’s accumulated deficit will increase in time. The company doesn’t appear to be operating in a way that would place it on a quick ramp to profitability, its loss rising year over year when the first half of 2013 is compared to the similar period in 2012. Twitter is not alone in having a large accumulated deficit. In 2005, for example, Amazon . That was a full decade after its birth and eight years after its initial public offering. Trulia, by way of another comparison, had an before it went public. If Twitter raised more than $1 billion, but has an accumulated deficit of just $418.6 million, where did the rest of the money go? It still has quite a lot of it left, with cash on hand of $164.5 million and short-term investments of $210.5 million. Twitter is about to become far more cash rich, following its offering, but not profitable.
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Twitter’s International Revenue Is Skyrocketing, But The Company Is Worried About Sina Weibo And Line
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Alex Wilhelm
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Twitter’s international revenue is up massively year over year, with the company earning more in the first half of 2013 from outside the United States than it did in all of 2012. Twitter’s full-year 2012 international revenue totaled $53 million, while its first two quarters of 2013 saw $62.8 million in international incomes. According , Twitter has sold its “Promoted Products” services in more than 20 countries. That implies that Twitter is able to monetize its service in more than its home market. Users around the world are therefore valuable to the company, and not merely to its usage statistics. International revenue is a growing percentage of its top line, growing from 17 percent of total incomes in 2012, to 25 percent in the first half of 2013. This is healthy for the firm, underlining that it retain revenue growth potential despite becoming an established company. Twitter, like Facebook, generates much of its revenue from mobile usage of its social product. The company, however, is direct that while mobile is currently a strength for it, rival services that are also strong on mobile could slow its growth in usage and revenue. Here’s Twitter’s S-1 name-checking a number of services that could harm its growth: [I]ncreased competition from local websites, mobile applications and services that provide real-time communications, such as Sina Weibo in China, LINE in Japan and Kakao in South Korea, which have expanded and may continue to expand their geographic footprint; If those services were to expand to as many markets as Twitter, they could lower Twitter’s usage, and therefore its ability to sell advertisements. Twitter plans on selling advertisements in more countries in the future it states, but if Line and its ilk slow its rollout, Twitter could find its revenue growth on hold. Twitter is , and it is quickly becoming an international firm. Given strong smartphone penetration in Asia, this is not surprising. But in the markets where it could see the most potential, Twitter will also face the stiffest winds.
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The Twitter IPO By The Numbers
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Matthew Panzarino
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Here are some accumulated statistics from our scouring of the for your perusal. The overall numbers show a company with good but slowing growth in users, solid revenue in mobile but no profit yet to show. Twitter is absolutely a mobile-friendly company, with some 75 percent of its monthly active users coming on portable devices. About 65 percent of its ad revenue comes from there, too, in sharp contrast to Facebook, which had no mobile revenue at the time of its IPO. Image Credit:
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Anthony Ha
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After Silk Road
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John Biggs
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The Internet routes around damage. With the fall of the comes the inevitable expectation that the underbelly of the Internet is somehow cut and something important has been removed like a dark organ of indeterminate worth and function. This is not true. As we well know, the Silk Road was not the first nor the last – even as the Feds celebrate their victory the Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded are angling for the crown – but the destruction of the Silk Road and, to a degree, the recent comments by the founder, show how deeply we trust the Internet with our secrets and how readily it gives them up. We know, now, with certainty that nearly nothing is safe. However, we also know that modern encryption techniques can keep prying eyes out of nearly everything we see or do. Sites like the Silk Road are brought down by carelessness and hubris rather than technical know-how and I’m sure the FBI understands as much about the security systems put in place to protect clients as any other educated amateur. It is at the intersection of human frailty and rock-hard encryption that we find ourselves at a crossroads. The great machines can keep enemies at bay as long as the gatekeeper remembers to close the door. Can we trust the cloud and can we trust anonymous services to truly keep us anonymous? Yes. However, the caveat is that when that trust is broken, it is broken catastrophically, taking down a swathe of the Internet with it. One part of the Silk Road fallout that I found particularly interesting was the site’s seemingly apocryphal ability to back to the owners in the event of a raid. While this behavior hasn’t been documented – it’s all rumor right now – it would be an amazing solution for future systems. By learning from the mistakes of Ulbricht and the like, we can build stronger and better systems for the dissemination of information. While I don’t support what went on on the Silk Road – the hacking services and illegal gun trading alone made it more like the Wild West than Utopia, not to mention the alleged murder-for-hire plots – I do support its right to exist. No government should be able to shut down a conglomeration of like-minded people who wish to do business anonymously. We cannot judge the pot dealer or the LSD buyer any more than they can judge our habits and predilections. The morality of this can be debated but the right to an anonymous exchange cannot. The Silk Road isn’t dead. The FBI knows that, Ulbricht knows it, the users know it. Just as the death of Napster didn’t stop the trafficking in downloaded music, this will not stop the trafficking in Bitcoin. Someone with a similar bent will build another Silk Road and another, eventually creating a machine that can bar the door without the gatekeeper’s intervention. Then, it seems, we’ll simply have to deal with a machine that refuses us entry because of our foibles and foolishness. The destruction of the Silk Road will teach the authorities a thing or two about Bitcoin and encryption but it will teach future Dread Pirate Roberts important lessons in evasion and obfuscation.
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Rizvi/Sacca, Evan Williams, Spark Capital, USV, Benchmark, DST Among Twitter’s Largest Shareholders
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Leena Rao
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As expected, Twitter’s , which states that the company is looking to raise as much as $1 billion in a public offering. As with every S-1 filing, the company reports which individuals/firms hold the most shares in the company. According to this , founder Evan Williams owns 12 percent of the company before the offering. Benchmark and the firm’s partner and board member Peter Fenton owns 6.7 percent. Fellow founder Jack Dorsey owns 4.9 percent and CEO Dick Costolo owns 1.6 percent. Other stock holders that own 5 percent or more of the company include Rizvi Traverse (which is reportedly backed by ), Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and DST. It’s not clear how much each investor owns specifically. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital Twitter’s earliest institutional investors (USV led the company’s first major round, and Spark Capital led Twitter’s second round), as was Charles River Ventures, who is not listed in the table and put in around $250,000 early on. Benchmark came in at Twitter’s Series C funding. We’re hearing from a source that Rizvi could own as much as 15 percent of the company. We’re also hearing that after Rizvi, Williams is the next largest single shareholder followed by Benchmark, Spark, USV and then DST. Spark originally owned around 15 percent, as well but sold some of the stake to Rizvi. Other large employee (or former employee) shareholders that were not listed in the table include founder Biz Stone, COO Ali Rowghani, and former General Counsel Alex Macgillivray. Other things to note from the chart: revenue chief Adam Bain holds less than 1 percent of the company, as do board members Peter Curie, and David Rosenblatt. It appears that other board member Peter Chernin’s shares have not vested. In terms of salary, Costolo made $200,000 per year (but this was dropped to $14,000 in August of this year); Bain makes $200,000, and SVP of engineering Christopher Fry earn $145,513 yearly. Including stock, Costolo’s total compensation was around $11.5 million, Fry’s was around $10.3 million, and Bain’s was $6.7 million for the year.
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Dell May Have A Winner With Its Windows-Powered Venue 8 Pro
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Chris Velazco
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The most pleasant surprise to come out of Dell’s press conference the other day wasn’t its line of new laptops or the silly Android tablets it’s trying to foist on weary consumers. To my utter shock it was the Venue 8 Pro, the company’s first pint-sized Windows 8 tablet. Let’s start with its looks. The lightweight, plastic body screams “generic,” and you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate it from the Android-powered cousins we looked at earlier. That’s not to say it’s completely devoid of nice touches, though: The back plate features a pattern of concentric circles that break up the monotony of an otherwise plain soft-touch finish and seems to help with grip. The Venue 8 Pro is unexpectedly light, too, as it weighs a relatively scant .87 pounds — that’s well within striking distance of the iPad mini. That said, the Venue 8 Pro suffers from a distinct lack of style. It’s perhaps to be expected considering that this is Dell’s first attempt at bringing a full-on Windows 8 experience to a device like this, and there’s a lot that could go wrong with this sort of endeavor. Take the screen, for instance. One of my favorite reviews ever written features Paul Thurrott just eviscerating Acer’s Windows 8-powered Iconia W3 tablet for its godawful screen. Some may say he was too heavy-handed in his criticism, but when the primary means of consuming and interacting with your content just sucks, something is very very wrong.
Thankfully, early stinkers like the Acer make Dell’s approach seem all the more palatable. The Pro’s IPS screen — which ran at 1280 x 800 — was bright and well-saturated, and viewing angles seemed more than respectable during the brief moments I spent playing with the thing. Of course, the screen’s size poses some issues. There’s no denying that parts of Windows 8.1 just aren’t suited for such small displays. The classic desktop mode is cramped and festooned with tiny icons that require a fair amount of dexterity to poke at accurately. Dell plans to downplay some of those issues by selling an active stylus that allows for precise manipulation of screen elements — I took that thing for a spin too and came away impressed. Part of the stylus’s appeal is because Dell fought the urge to make it small enough to slot into the Venue’s chassis. Instead the company opted to make a full-sized pen, which helps dramatically with usability (though you’ll have to tuck it into a case or a pocket). And then there’s longevity to consider. I’m told that the battery is slated to last between 8 and 10 hours of normal use (whatever that is). That wouldn’t amount to much if this thing wound up trading off performance for power, but the whole package seemed suitably snappy thanks to its 1.8GHz quad-core Intel Bay Trail chipset. We’ll see if that remains the case once the final devices start trickling out into the wild. After being let down in such a big way by Microsoft’s original Surface RT, I thought I’d never splurge on a Windows tablet again. Now, after having played with Dell’s attempt, I find myself rethinking my earlier position. The prospect of running full Windows apps on a device this light and this cheap is a terribly attractive one, and at this moment Dell’s tiny tab seems well-equipped to take on what few Windows competitors are playing at this size. I may even buy this thing over the iPad mini, which is yet another thing I never thought I’d say. Stay tuned for the full review in short order.
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In Twitter’s IPO Filing, The Letter To Shareholders Is Fittingly Concise
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Anthony Ha
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Everyone’s going crazy as Twitter just made for its IPO public. One of the standard parts of the S-1 is a letter from the CEO to shareholders, where they lay out their vision for the company. In Twitter’s filing, however, it’s a letter from “@Twitter”. And whereas the letters from , , and all clocked in at one or two thousand words, Twitter’s letter is just 135, plus an embedded tweet. That’s probably appropriate for a platform that was initially distinguished by the 140-character limit that it imposed on its users. It may also reflect the fact that Twitter isn’t identified with a single founder or executive the way that, say, Facebook is — none of its founders currently have a full-time role with the company (though apparently co-founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Ev Williams ). And hey, it’s not like the rest of the filing is lacking in a rundown of the company’s perspective on the risks and opportunities that it faces. So here’s the full text: LETTER FROM @TWITTER Twitter was born on March 21, 2006 with just 24 characters: We started with a simple idea: share what you’re doing, 140 characters at a time. People took that idea and strengthened it by using @names to have public conversations, #hashtags to organize movements, and Retweets to spread news around the world. Twitter represents a service shaped by the people, for the people. The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve–and do not detract from–a free and global conversation. Thank you for supporting us through your Tweets, your business, and now, your potential ownership of this service we continue to build with you. Yours,
@twitter
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Dude, No One’s Getting A Dell Venue Tablet
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Darrell Etherington
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Dell had an event this week, which is in itself noteworthy regardless of what they launch, but it turns out ! We talk about those for a while, as well as the , , Amazon’s , and briefly the . This week on the show prodigal son Chris Velazco returns from his many travels (we held the podcast a whole day to make sure he could come), and we’re joined by Natasha Lomas as well. I nearly forgot to mention that we also chat briefly about , and it must be forgettable because BlackBerry itself seems to have forgotten about it as well.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday (or Thursday this week) at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . Direct here.
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Twitter Files For $1 Billion IPO, Will List As TWTR
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter has just . The company is looking to raise $1 billion in this initial offering, which is set to mint many millionaires among shareholders and founders like Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Currently, the filing does not list a valuation, and sources are saying that’s because they have yet to determine one. Twitter’s revenues have been revealed for the first time, as well. Revenues for 2012 were $316.9 million, for a loss of $79.4 million and in the first half of 2013 they’ve already earned $253.6 million for a loss of $69.3 million. That’s just above estimates from last year but well below tracking of over $600 million for the year. Overall, Twitter has lost $418.6 million since it began. Twitter will be offering up 472,613,753 shares of stock in this initial release. Twitter says that it currently has 218.3 million monthly active users, and those users have created over 300 billion tweets. That MAU number is significantly lower than many had expected at this point as they announced that they had 200 million MAUs in December. Twitter says that it delivers over 200 billion tweets per day. Twitter says that 75 percent of its MAUs access the service from mobile devices (that’s 161.25 million) and that 65 percent of all of its ad revenues come from mobile. This marks a big contrast to Facebook, which had no revenues in mobile at all when it filed for IPO. Twitter says that in the second quarter of 2013 there were approximately 30 billion ‘online impressions’ of tweets off of its properties. The companies’ current estimates put spam accounts at under 5 percent of MAUs, but says that this may not be accurate. On the employment front, Twitter says that it has gained over 900 employees in the year since June 2012, an increase of 90 percent. It currently employs over 2,000 people. Twitter’s IPO has been a hotly anticipated event for some months now, with news of Twitter’s “secret” filing . The stealth filing was made possible by the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) act, which allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to file for an IPO without exposing the details immediately. Twitter lists a number of risk factors in the filing, noting that the business could be harmed if “influential users, such as world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands or certain age demographics” conclude that an alternative product or service is more relevant; they are unable to convince potential new users of the value and usefulness of our products and services; or they are unable to combat spam or other hostile or inappropriate usage on the platform. Image Credit:
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Mobile Twitter: 164M+ (75%) Access From Handheld Devices Monthly, 65% Of Ad Sales Come From Mobile
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Ingrid Lunden
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Twitter started on mobile, and that’s where the service is going. In the that the company filed today for its public offering, Twitter called mobile the “primary driver of our business.” It said that 75 percent of its 218.3 million+ monthly active users are accessing the site from mobile devices — or 161.25 million users. And mobile accounts for 65 percent of all its ad revenues. In all, the word “mobile” comes up 130 times in the 160+ page document. From the intro to the filing: Mobile has become the primary driver of our business. Our mobile products are critical to the value we create for our users, and they enable our users to create, distribute and discover content in the moment and on-the-go. The 140 character constraint of a Tweet emanates from our origins as an SMS-based messaging system, and we leverage this simplicity to develop products that seamlessly bridge our user experience across all devices. In the three months ended June 30, 2013, 75% of our average MAUs accessed Twitter from a mobile device, including mobile phones and tablets, and over 65% of our advertising revenue was generated from mobile devices. We expect that the proportion of active users on, and advertising revenue generated from, mobile devices, will continue to grow in the near term. If you recall, when Facebook filed its S-1 before going public, the company had no revenues in mobile and made a big point of spelling that out, with accessing the service from mobile devices (those are from the initial S-1, which got revised up several times before the company finally listed). Twitter is in a significantly different position. Not only does the company have a majority of its users accessing from mobile devices, but it already makes a majority of its ad revenues from these platforms. (The main ad unit currently on Android and iOS, Promoted Products, was introduced in February 2012.) While there have been a lot of changes to the basic desktop product over the last couple of years, in 2013 you could argue that the biggest product moves that Twitter made have been in mobile, from the launch of the Vine video app (to follow through on the photo filters that it launched near the end of 2012) through to its experiments with Twitter Music (also a mobile app), and its (a specialist in mobile ad-tech). Twitter pretty much says it all about mobile and its ambitions to push the envelope in that area, in a bit of very typical S-1 jargon: “If new or enhanced products or services fail to engage users and advertisers, we may fail to attract or retain users or to generate sufficient revenue or operating profit to justify our investments, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected.” With 130 mentions of mobile in the S-1, here are a few of the interesting points that jumped out at me during a first reading: — . Specifically, it pinpoints the rise of multiple local messaging apps. “Increased competition from local websites, mobile applications and services that provide real-time communications, such as Sina Weibo in China, LINE in Japan and Kakao in South Korea, which have expanded and may continue to expand their geographic footprint,” it writes. — . “Our metrics are also affected by mobile applications that automatically contact our servers for regular updates with no user action involved, and this activity can cause our system to count the user associated with such a device as an active user on the day such contact occurs.” — . The 75 percent MAU number is from the end of June 2013; a year before that it was 66 percent. — . Twitter makes its clearest statements in the filing about why it makes new products for mobile. “Our most engaged users are generally those who access Twitter via our mobile applications,” it notes. “In the three months ended June 30, 2013, a substantial majority of timeline views were on mobile devices, and the increase in timeline views was driven by mobile user engagement…we plan to continue to develop and improve our mobile applications to further drive user adoption.”
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Why Did Apple Buy Cue? Because Google Now Eats Siri’s Lunch
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple has Cue, for over $40M. Why? Because Google is absolutely murdering Apple when it comes to the utility of Google Now. Apple is likely to use the acquisition, or its talent, to bolster the offerings of its Today section with additional signals curated from email, social networks and more. This would improve the utility of the section, which is fairly sparse right now, and enable Apple to more vigorously compete with Google Now. Google’s service already collates data from all of its services and networks, offering proactive information and assistance to users on Android (and in the iOS Search app). Siri and iOS 7’s new Today section of the Notification Center simply don’t compare to Google Now in-depth, usability or overall power. The ability of Google to tap into the deep array of contextual data that people have living in their Gmail inboxes and other Google products is being leveraged wonderfully by the Google Now team. I’ve said before that Google Now can be considered reason enough to buy an Android phone, and I don’t think Apple is blind to how good it is. With iOS 7, Apple introduced Today as a way to show you upcoming appointments, weather and basic directions to home or to work. This is sort of skimming the top of what is possible with the host of sensors your smartphone has available to it and the troves of data that you store in your inbox and other services. It doesn’t dip into your Mail.app data, or provide information based on your location besides simple ‘get there’ directions. Google Now does all of that and a lot more, providing transit instructions and recommendations on timing if you’re traveling. The card-based interface of Google Now offers a really compelling experience that only Google is churning through enough data to replicate. Apple ostensibly has similar data available to it, especially for heavy iCloud users, but it doesn’t leverage it. There’s just nothing on iOS that compares to the power of Google Now, including Siri and the Today feature. Much of that lies in Google Now’s predictive nature. It doesn’t just tell you what’s going on now, it anticipates the information you might need and delivers it to you you need it. The iOS version of the Google Now service is prevented from doing a lot of this because it has no deep access to the system. This is where things get interesting, as the Cue acquisition could be used to make Siri more powerful and aware, notifying you either via push notification or voice of things you may not even know you needed. The early arrival of a flight or train, congestion along your favorite route to work, and more. Push notifications are the future of how we communicate with our smart devices, whether they’re pocketable or wearable. Making sure that any that Siri or Today might send are content rich and relevant is an important problem. The close integration of Siri as a responsive system and ‘Today’ as a proactive system could be greatly aided by the contextual information that was the core of Cue’s feature set. Cue originally leveraged social accounts to provide an accurate picture of what things you had coming up and what you’re going to do. Later in life it turned its attention primarily to email. The experience of the app itself was never ‘amazing’, per se, but they definitely their claws deep into email parsing and signaling. And that expertise could help beyond just Siri and Today as well, it could also give other apps like Calendar a contextual steroid shot. Rather than getting context-free dates and names there is potential here for Apple to offer a Calendar app that actually helps you , rather than just remind you things are due. Apps like Sunrise calendar and Donna are displaying what can be done with smartphone sensors and volunteered user data. That’s just the beginning of what’s possible if you own the bones of the OS. These kinds of acquisitions are exactly the kind that Apple likes to make. Small, talented teams that offer it the ability to either implement a new feature or augment an existing one. The proactive use of data in service of the user will be the defining feature of the next generation of smartphones. It will be interesting to see what the Cue team manages to get done.
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Adobe Gets Hacked, Product Source Code And Data For 2.9M Customers Likely Accessed
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Greg Kumparak
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Uh oh — Adobe has just that one of their servers has been hacked. While their investigations are still ongoing, Adobe has shared a few details on what they believe could have been accessed and obtained in the hack — and it’s a big one. From what Adobe has shared so far, it sounds like the hackers had access to encrypted data for as many as 2.9 million customers. While Adobe stresses that the data is encrypted and that they “do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers”, that data — encrypted or not — is definitely something they want out in the wild. Adobe has yet to disclose that data was encrypted, so it’s currently unclear just how secure it is. Meanwhile, it also appears that the hackers may have been able to access the source code for of Adobe’s products: Acrobat, ColdFusion, and ColdFusion Builder. This goes hand in hand with a report , who noted that he and a fellow researcher had discovered at least 40GB of Adobe source code available on a hacking group’s private server. Beyond the obvious business implications of having your otherwise locked down source code floating around in the wild, there are potentially security concerns here. Once you’ve got the source code for an application in hand, it becomes much easier to dig up the stealthy lil’ security screw ups that might otherwise go unnoticed. Combine this new potential for big zero-day exploits with the many, millions of Adobe Acrobat (Adobe’s official PDF reader) installs around the world, and this all starts to get pretty worrisome.
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Shumway, Mozilla’s HTML5-Based Flash Player Replacement, Lands In Firefox Nightly
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Frederic Lardinois
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, Mozilla’s technology experiment to build an efficient, web-native renderer for Flash files, has now in the latest . The idea behind this project – which is still far from being production-ready – is to fully replace the Flash Player to display SWF files by using HTML5 and JavaScript. Back in the late 90s, Macromedia’s Flash Player helped bring sound, video and animations to the mainstream web, but today, Flash is probably one of the most hated browser plug-ins. It’s still heavily used, however, and while most mobile browsers don’t support it anymore, it remains a staple on the desktop. Mozilla started working on this project in early 2012 and, as it noted when it last talked about this project in detail , the main goals for Shumway are to “offer a run-time processor for SWF and other rich-media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available.” It also wants to push the open web forward by improving ways to display rich media format in the browser without the need for proprietary solutions. Until now, Shumway was only available as a . It’s still not activated by default in the latest Firefox Nightly builds (version 27), but you can go to about:config and activate it (you still need to have the Flash Player installed, though). Even without installing the latest Firefox Nightly, you can take a look at its capabilities thanks to Mozilla’s online . While Shumway won’t run all that many commercially available Flash applications yet, demos like this or this basic show the technology’s potential. Whether it will be able to fully replicate all of Flash’s capabilities remains to be seen, however. For Mozilla, this is the second major project that replaces an Adobe technology. With , the organization already replaced Adobe Reader as the default technology for rendering PDF files in the browser. It’s also worth noting that other projects have tried similar approaches in the past. Google’s Swiffy, for example, launched as an , and while we haven’t heard all that much about it since, it looks like that project is still . Adobe itself has also been stepping away from Flash, too, and virtually all of its recent projects for web developers have been about supporting web standards and creating HTML5-based sites.
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Inside The Grace Hopper Celebration, Where Thousands Of Women Are United By Tech
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Colleen Taylor
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It makes sense that Hopper is a unique kind of gathering, since it is dedicated to a very unique person: was a pioneering technologist who was one of the first computer programmers, and she had a real knack for being able to explain computer science in . Hopper passed away at the age of 85, and two years later her first namesake conference took place. In the years since, it has grown to become the world’s largest gathering for women in computing. Most anyone who has gone to Hopper will tell you that there’s just something very special about the event — and that the reasons for that go far beyond gender. So this week, TechCrunch TV producer/shooter/editor extraordinaire and I headed out to Minneapolis where the 2013 Hopper Celebration was held to see what it’s all about. Check out the video embedded above to see what the scene is like, and hear women like the Hopper celebration’s co-founder , Harvey Mudd president , Facebook engineering director , and others talk about what exactly it is that keeps them coming back year after year. And be sure to check back in, as we’ll have more videos and coverage of Hopper in the days ahead.
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Filing Says Sleep- And Health-Tracking Startup Lark Is Raising Another $3.6M
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Anthony Ha
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, which onstage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference back in 2010, has raised $3.1 million of an intended $3.6 million round of funding, according to . I’ve emailed the company and its CEO Julia Hu for confirmation, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. The filing doesn’t specify the investors in the new round, but intriguingly, it does identify Weili Dai, president and co-founder of Marvell, as member of its board of directors. Although Lark started out with a silent alarm, it expanded its product lineup to include a sleep coach product called Lark Pro and . The company announced Larklife in October of 2012, and Hu described it to me as a way for folks who aren’t as serious about fitness or weight loss to track and get actionable recommendations about their diet, exercise, sleep, and more. , Larklife was sold in Apple’s retail stores (and elsewhere). I actually tried the service out for a few months late last year and early this year. During that time, everyone kept asking me about the blue wristband (the look definitely wasn’t as subtle as, say, the Nike+ Fuel Band). I thought it had potential, but eventually I decided that it wasn’t providing enough value to justify the (minor) inconvenience — and, perhaps more damningly, the ridicule that it prompted from . In the months since, while I’ve seen an increasing number of people around San Francisco wearing some sort of fitness device, it usually isn’t the Larklife wristband. Lark previously raised $1 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, CrunchFund (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington), and .
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Saps Looking For Twitter Bounce Penny Stock 1,400%, Telegraph Strong Retail Interest In Its IPO
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Alex Wilhelm
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I have all my money under a mattress in fear of a debt ceiling collapse, and people are buying stock because they think an S-1 means the company has started trading. Let’s rewind: Twitter has . Its stock symbol, when it commences trading, . Another firm, Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, which is out of business following bankruptcy in 2007, currently trades as . You can see where this is going. Blitzed with excitement about Twitter’s impending IPO, folks managed to think that TWTRQ was TWTR itself, or that Tweeter was Twitter if you prefer, and bought the living hell out of its stock. The price should have been an early warning sign: TWTRQ is a penny stock, trading at less than a cent per share at the end of Thursday, hours before Twitter released its S-1 document. Today, the stock lost its collective marbles and managed to peak at $0.15 per share. That’s a high price for a dead company. The simple explanation is that there are enough farking moronic retail investors in the world who, in their delirium to buy Twitter shares, managed to convince themselves that the defunct, penny-per-share firm that had a similar name and ticker symbol was the real deal. All before Twitter actually is even public. This bodes well for Twitter. If there is this much dumb money stoked for its flotation, it could be set for a very strong first day of trading indeed. The question that rested on the markets following Twitter’s S-1 was simple: Would investors, both institutional and recreational, bite? The answer, at least partially, is yes. Trading of TWTRQ was halted. TechCrunch boss Alexia claims that she is . That’s just free money. The kicker is this: People who invest are often no smarter than your neighbor, the one who can’t keep his dog inside. And that horde apparently has its eyes on the little social service that could. Twitter’s accelerating losses are apparently no cause to fret to those who can self delude into bouncing a penny stock 1,400 percent in a day by accident.
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Skype Will Finally Start Syncing Chat Messages Across Devices
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Frederic Lardinois
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If you use on your phone and desktop, you know how annoying its inability to effectively keep your chat message status in sync between different machines can be. After you start Skype on your phone, for example, it downloads and alerts you of all of the sometimes hundreds of messages you’ve received since you last shut it down, even though you’ve long seen them on your desktop. Sometimes, this also means the app will be unresponsive for quite a while (or just crash). Thankfully, it looks like those days will soon be over, as the Skype team today that it plans to roll out chat message status syncing across devices over the next few months. This news was buried deep in a of Skype’s most recent (and previously announced) architecture changes and releases. As the Skype team notes, people now use Skype across multiple devices, so it has decided to finally make syncing a priority. It’s unclear when exactly this capability will start rolling out beyond Microsoft’s vague statement that it’s coming “over the next few months,” however. Microsoft has recently poured a significant amount of resources into the Skype platform. Not only has it rolled out a backend architecture that de-emphasizes the peer-to-peer nature of Skype in favor of more centralized services, but it’s also added a number of new features based on these changes. For example, the company added web-based Skype support to Outlook.com and launched improved push notifications for Windows Phone 8 (even when the app isn’t running) and similar features that its more centralized architecture now enable. It’s also working on connecting the more consumer-focused Skype with its communications suite for businesses.
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Pinterest Or Pintrips? Pinterest Files A Trademark Infringement Suit Against Travel Planning Startup
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Ingrid Lunden
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has made a point of the many social media companies that riff on Pinterest in their own brand names, with some of the more prominent of these going so far as to . And as for the rest? Get ready to go to court. Today Pinterest filed a suit against , a personal travel planning startup, accusing it of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition and trademark dilution. “This action arises from Pintrips’ decision to adopt a social media brand that is confusingly similar to Pinterest’s, and its refusal to recognize, discuss or remediate the confusion it causes among consumers,” lawyers for Pinterest write in the complaint. This comes in the same week that Pinterest won a against a cybersquatter called Qian Jin, who had registered more than 100 names that sounded a bit like Pinterest. (This is the same person who has also filed for trademarks that .) And these are not the only trademark scuffles Pinterest is involved in: — the issue here is that it looks too much like Path’s “P.” We understand that this could get resolved without any court actions, however. We wrote about Pintrips back in , when it launched a “collaborative trip-planning dashboard for tracking flights and prices across destinations in real-time.” To be fair, if you look at the functionality of Pintrips, there is a lot there specific to planning travel that is not related to what Pinterest currently does. Pinterest’s Pinboards are essentially image-led collections of links from around the web that users can share with each other, with the ability to follow specific Pinners or particular topics. Pintrips, meanwhile, is an online dashboard where users can track price changes for flights they may be interested in taking. Users collate flights by way of a browser plug-in. When installed, a “Pin” button appears next to different flight offers (those who support the service so far include American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, United, U.S. Air, Virgin America, as well as searches on Google, Expedia, Kayak, and Orbitz). By clicking the button they get added to your Pintrips dashboard. Indeed, for Pinterest it is less about the functionality and more about the name attached to it. The full complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (and embedded below), appears to rest on a few key points: First and foremost, there is the issue of the names. Pintrips just sounds too much like Pinterest to the plaintiff’s mind. If you say both names out loud, they really do sound a lot alike. But more specifically, Pinterest has rules against companies that use names that sound too much like its own. And it has already gone after companies that are trading under such names. “When Pintrips launched its own social media service, it could have adopted any number of trademarks. Instead it chose PINTRIPS, which is similar in appearance, sound, and commercial impression to PINTEREST,” the company writes in the complaint. “In doing so, Pintrips has chosen a brand that causes confusion among consumer and implies a connection, affiliation or sponsorship that does not exist.” There is also the issue that Pinterest has a lot of content on its social network that is related to travel. “Pinterest has made a particularly big splash when it comes to travel,” the complaint notes. “Pinterest users have posted more than 660 million PINS in Pinterest’s ‘Travel’ category to date. Many people use Pinterest as a travel-planning tool.” It goes on to note how many airlines and hotels, among others, use Pinterest as a marketing platform for their services. (A platform that, incidentally, will , which is another reason why sitting alongside a similar sounding service is not sitting right with Pinterest.) Perhaps most-eye-catching is the fact that certain mechanics on the sites are similar, and have similar names. Specifically, Pinterest believes that Pintrips’ “Pin” button is “confusingly similar” to Pinterest’s “Pin it” button. (They’re pictured up above) In some regards, the buttons could be one of the more damaging aspects of the case. It is the “Pin it” button that Pinterest relies on to disseminate its service all around the web and to get people to keep using it from whatever other site they visit. Those little buttons also effectively act like little bits of advertising for the service. Pintrips is very much a David to Pinterest’s Goliath in this story, but the worry if it grows, its Pin button on travel sites may be mistaken for a Pin-it button. Moreover, if Pintrips is allowed to keep its button, what’s stopping others from following in that path? All of that spells brand dilution for Pinterest. We are reaching out to Pintrips for a response and will update this as we learn more. Pinterest is not commenting for this story. [scribd id=173485191 key=key-1wt05b5a8dxje2f65spg mode=scroll]
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Twitter’s M&A Has Ballooned From $52.2M Last Year To Over $417.5M In 2013
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Leena Rao
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When it comes to acquisitions, it’s clear that Twitter had been spending more money on acquiring technologies and talent in 2013 than in the past few years. According to the company’s recently Twitter spent $52.2 million in cash and stock on acquisitions in 2012. In the first half of 2013, Twitter spent double that, $112.5 million on acquisitions. Note, this does not include the company’s largest acquisition to date, , which was purchased in September for $305 million in stock. Other acquisitions made after June include and (it’s unclear how much the company spent on these acquisitions). Even without these numbers included in the tally, Twitter has spent over $417.5 million on acquisitions this year (which isn’t over). That’s a 700 percent jump in acquisition spend over the past year. According to the filing, Twitter spent $52.2 million on 10 acquisitions in 2012, which include ($19.1 million), , , , , and one other unnamed acquisition. Together, Twitter spent $33.1 million on these acquisitions (minus Dasient). Twitter also agreed to put up as much as $28.5 million of cash and equity consideration (i.e. bonuses) contingent upon the continued employment of some of the employees of these acquired companies. In the first half of 2013, Twitter spent $112.5 on acquisitions. These include ($38.2 million in stock), ($67.3 million in stock), an unknown acquisition that could be ($2.5 million), and three others that could be , and ($4.5 million altogether). It’s unclear if Spindle is a part of this group because the acquisition was made in mid-June of this year, and it may not have been complete by June 30. In addition, Twitter says it agreed to pay up to $54.9 million of equity to employees from these acquisitions on the conditions of staying at the company. What’s not listed in the acquisitions note in the filing is the purchase of MoPub (though Twitter did add this in other sections), and the separate acquisitions of Trendrr and Marakana, which were both announced in August. It’s unclear how much Twitter paid for the latter two companies, but counting MoPub, it’s safe to say that Twitter has spent at least $417.5 million on acquisitions this year. In 2011, Twitter spent $20.4 million (in cash and stock) for . The other acquisitions from 2011 include , , , , and . The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $18.5 million in mostly stock, but a small amount of cash. Twitter also greed to pay an additional $15.5 million in cash and equity for employment. There have been other acquisitions prior to 2011, ( , , Mixer Labs, and ) but the filing doesn’t elaborate on these in the note. While Twitter has made a number of acquisitions for talent, the company’s biggest acquisitions add core functionalities to Twitter’s advertising platform. Twitter sees MoPub as potentially being a key foundation of the company’s mobile advertising efforts. Adding Bluefin’s technology is key to providing analytics to advertisers, especially when it comes to about what people are saying about their brands from TV. Dasient added anti-spam and malware security features and talent to Twitter, and Crashlytics brought app crash report tools to the company. Twitter’s purchase of search engine became the foundation for its own search. According to this Business Insider , Summize’s acquisition could be worth around $800 million with the current value of Twitter’s stock. As Twitter’s vision broadens, expect the company to continue to be aggressive with its acquisitions, especially with some of the billion dollars it raises in an IPO.
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Ask A VC: Battery Ventures’ Brian O’Malley On AngelList Syndicates And The Importance Of A Lead Investor
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Leena Rao
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In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we welcomed Battery Ventures’ general partner Brian O’Malley into the studio to talk about his perspective on the latest topic du jour, O’Malley, who leads Battery’s Seed & Early Stage practices, explained how he thinks AngelList Syndicates will effect the investment ecosystem. We also talked about the importance of having an involved lead investor for an early stage startup, the next big opportunities in e-commerce and more. Check out the video above for more!
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Elon Musk Details Cause Of Tesla Model S Fire, Says It Would Have Been Worse With Gas
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Matthew Panzarino
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to the today to talk about a Tesla Model S fire that caught the this week. Musk says that the fire was caused by a piece of a tractor-trailer that punctured the battery compartment of the car with a “peak force on the order of 25 tons.” The owner of the car, says Musk, was able to pull off of the road safely and exit the car. The fire began in the front module and was “contained to the front section of the car,” Musk writes, and never entered the passenger compartment. “Earlier this week, a Model S travelling [sic] at highway speed struck a large metal object, causing significant damage to the vehicle,” Musk said. “The geometry of the object caused a powerful lever action as it went under the car, punching upward and impaling the Model S with a peak force on the order of 25 tons. Only a force of this magnitude would be strong enough to punch a 3 inch diameter hole through the quarter inch armor plate protecting the base of the vehicle.” Musk was also careful to point out statistics that show that gas vehicles are just as susceptible, if not more so, to a similar kind of impact. “Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse,” the Musk letter says. “A typical gasoline car only has a thin metal sheet protecting the underbody, leaving it vulnerable to destruction of the fuel supply lines or fuel tank, which causes a pool of gasoline to form and often burn the entire car to the ground.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0kjI08n4fg Musk quotes statistics that he says point to the fact that you are 5 times more likely to experience a fire in a gas-powered car than a Tesla. Musk notes that a gas tank is typically only protected by a thin sheet of metal, not the quarter-inch “armor plate” that’s featured in Teslas. Musk also trots out numbers — a move reminiscent of his against a negative NY Times review — related to car fire safety. Over 150,000 car fires per year, one vehicle for every 20 million miles and one fire in over 100 million miles driven for Teslas equate to the “5x” figure that Musk notes. At this point it’s probably important to note that Tesla has only been around for a few years, while conventional gas vehicles have had a lot more ‘miles driven’ to have an opportunity to catch on fire. Still, the track record of the company with regards to road safety and fires does pull a stark contrast. This is in obvious response to the media attention the fire got, and the fact that some of the stock pullback that Tesla has experienced in the last few days was attributed to a viral video shot of the fire on a Washington highway. That pullback was likely more and a downgrade by Baird, but the timing of the fire has to be seen as brutal by Tesla PR and company watchers. Musk also published correspondence between the company and the owner of the car, Robert Carlson. In the correspondence, Carlson seems satisfied with the explanation of the fire. “I guess you can test for everything, but some other celestial bullet comes along and challenges your design,” Carlson’s letter says. “I agree that the car performed very well under such an extreme test. The batteries went through a controlled burn which the internet images really exaggerates. Anyway, I am still a big fan of your car and look forward to getting back into one. Justin offered a white loaner–thanks.” Carlson goes on to note that he is an investor, and says he expected something like this to happen to Tesla at some point, perhaps just not to him. “But now it is out there and probably gets a sigh of relief as a test and risk issue-this “doomsday” event has now been tested,” Carlson concludes, “and the design and engineering works.” Image
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Deep Web Users Are Ready To Launch Silk Road 2.0
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John Biggs
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In an by the creators of the defunct anonymous marketplace there is information that the former admins and users of the are planning to resurrect the service. User RR writes: “We have SilkRoad v2.0 ready to launch and is now in its final testing stages. Our site has all the features of the original one and we have kept the same style of forum for your ease.” The new SilkRoad will be sending out anonymous invites to former vendors and then open to the Tor-using public soon after. The representatives of Atlantis write: Users are already planning ways to keep the new site secure. This includes the creation of something called , an “open source, anonymous bitcoin marketplace specifically built for use in conjunction with Tor or I2P via the hidden services such as .onion websites and .” What does this mean for law enforcement and fans of the original Silk Road? First SR won’t be dead for long and I suspect that hackers, now emboldened, will produce many more SR-like sites than any government can police. While the last mile problem of shipping products to and from vendors and clients can still be controlled by customs and postal authorities, I doubt it will be as easy to take down these variegated new services. “What’s striking to me as an outside observer is there seems to be no shortage of well educated American males in their late 20′s (Manning/Snowden and now Ulbricht) willing to sacrifice bright futures and their own personal liberty to highlight the draconian laws and downright totalitarianism being inflicted by their government on the populous,” writes the Atlantis representative. “History will show it’s the will of the people that’ll win in the end and not that of the dictators in power and I thanks to the actions of DPR and others like him I believe I am now witnessing a full revolution in progress and I for one will be sticking around to document it.”
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Hands-On With The Kickstarted Bohemian Guitar Company’s ‘Oil Can’ Guitars
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John Biggs
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In order to put our money where our hype is we like to take a closer look at products we’ve talked about on the site. Today we have the Bohemian Guitar Company’s “oil can” guitars, a that raised $54,000 – $20K over their $32,000 goal. The company, based in Georgia, just started shipping their cleverly-designed gitfiddles and I got the chance to try one out. The guitars have a single pickup controlled by a set of volume and tone dials. A wooden bridge at the bottom and a nice maplewood neck that continues into the oil can body. The body itself is ostensibly recycled and repainted and adds an excellent bit of twang to your picking. The machine heads are serviceable – the ones I tested were a little tight – and the pickup, while simple, seems to be nicely placed for resonance and sound quality. How does it sound? Take a listen. Excuse the quality here – I’m not a good guitarist. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/113821667″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/113821683″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] Generally you will get a twangier sound out of this guitar and it resonates enough to even act as a sort of steel acoustic. I’m positive a superior guitarist can use the unique body to positive effect. I showed it to Charlie Appicella of who found it playable and light, if a little too cute for his purposes as a professional jazz guitarist. That said there’s no shame in bringing this thing out especially if you’re a surf or country band and want a little Bo Diddley-like authenticity.
The guitars now cost $299 and a portion of the proceeds go to charity to help spread a love of music in children. It’s a noble goal and it looks like the team, Adam and Shaun Lee, have succeeded in building a business with the Kickstarter push. Most of the models are currently sold out and they’re working on their Boho line – complete with hipster-ish can designs – as we speak. It’s an interesting end to a compelling and surprisingly cool project.
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Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs
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John Biggs
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Welcome to our continuing series featuring videos of robots that will, when they become autonomous, hunt us down and force us to work in the graphene factories of Mars. Below we see Wild Cat, a fully untethered remote control quadrupedal robot made by , creators of the . This quadruped can run up to 16 miles an hour and features a scary-sound internal gas engine that can power it across rough terrain. Wild Cat was funded by the program aimed at introducing flexible, usable robots into natural environments AKA introducing robotic pack animals for ground troops and build flocking, heavily armed robots that can wipe out a battlefield without putting humans in jeopardy. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wE3fmFTtP9g] Next up we have ATLAS, another Boston Dynamics bot that can walk upright on rocks. Sadly ATLAS is tethered to a power source but he has perfect balance and can survive side and front hits from heavy weights – a plus if you’re built to be the shock troops of a new droid army. ATLAS can even balance on one foot while being smacked with wrecking balls, something the average human can’t do without suffering internal damage. I can’t wait for him to be able to throw [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6Okylclb8] Finally we present these charming from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which we . The robots exert an internal force to spin and then connect with each other using magnets, allowing them to fly into the air for a second and then fall down next to their brothers and sisters in exactly the right spot. This allows these completely featureless squares to form any shape they want and, like autonomous LEGOs, they can build complex devices out of a few simple shapes. “There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” said researcher Kyle Gilpin. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.” They may look innocuous but imagine these things self-assembling into, say, a wall, a door, or even a plate of explosives. They could sneak through pipes into your home and create a robotic assassin to destroy you in the sleep, thereby freeing up your “Schlafplatz” for other humans who have been reduced to sleeping out of doors after the robots took over most habitable locations for the storage of fermenting human slurry. Stay frosty, humans! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6aZbJS6LZbs]
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YourMechanic Introduces Pre-Purchase Car Inspections So You Don’t Buy A Lemon
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Ryan Lawler
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Before you buy a used vehicle, it’s always a good idea to take the car to a mechanic. Knowing what’s wrong with a car before you buy it could save you a lot of headaches down the line, and it could help you negotiate the price of the vehicle. now wants to make it easier for used car purchasers to get vehicles checked out, with the launch of . For those who might have forgotten, YourMechanic runs a marketplace that who come to them. All mechanics are certified to check out and repair vehicles at the drivers’ homes, meaning no more taking your car to the shop and waiting days for a fix to be made. YourMechanic also does all the work of figuring out which parts need to be ordered and installed. It’s like Uber for car repair. Since last year, the company has been growing steadily — about 25 percent per month — and attracting a number of return customers along the way. It’s also been expanding over time: YourMechanic started out just offering service in the San Jose area but has grown to service pretty much the entire San Francisco Bay Area. That said, it hasn’t always been easy-going. YourMechanic co-founder Abhas Art Agrawal said that, at the outset, the company had a fair number of problems with its part-matching algorithm. In March, for instance, about 40 percent of the parts it was shipping to its mechanics were wrong, which led to repairs not being able to be completed or on time. Agrawal says that there are about 27,000 vehicles in its database, along with about 200 different jobs for each of those cars. That’s a lot of different jobs and parts that were necessary to clear up. Things have drastically improved since then, with mistaken parts down to about 5 percent now. That’s still not perfect, but the company continues to improve with time. Anyway, so now that we’ve caught up, what about that new inspections service? About 10 percent of clients already request inspections, but the company wanted to standardize the ability to make that request. Car inspections cost about $100 each, but can save clients a ton of money in being able to negotiate the cost of a car. For YourMechanic, the car inspections service also acts as a new way to sign up clients. After all, once a car buyer knows what work needs to be done, it’s pretty easy to sign up and have one of the on-demand mechanics show up and take care of things that should be fixed. The company was a Y Combinator alum and has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from YC, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Jeff Clavier, CrunchFund (which is owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), Paige Craig, A-Grade Investments, Jawed Karim, Justin Waldron, Joshua Schachter, and Kevin Freedman.
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This Week On The Gadgets Podcast: Silk Road, Instagram Ads, BBM, And The Z30
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Jordan Crook
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An anonymous, underground drug trafficking web site has been busted and the founder has been arrested, effectively shutting down a $1 billion+ revenue business after two years. And in softer tech news, Instagram has revealed plans to over the next couple months. Meanwhile, BlackBerry continues to be in shambles, with and the in the company’s home country of Canada on Rogers. We discuss all this and more in this week’s episode of the , featuring , , , , , and a special guest appearance by . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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General Assembly Shuts Down Co-Working Space In NYC To Focus On Education
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Jordan Crook
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After three years of offering co-working spaces to young startups and entrepreneurs, General Assembly has decided to shut down the co-working brand of its business in 2014, according to multiple sources as well as . According to the post, it simply makes more economic sense to shut down the co-working branch of the company and shift complete focus to the , which provides classes on things like Digital Marketing, Business Fundamentals and Tactics, and Back-end Web Development. As it stands now, General Assembly already has 3,000 alumni students who have taken a longer term class with them, and 70k students who have step foot inside one of GA’s worldwide offices looking for mingling space and/or a class to enroll in. The General Assembly building in New York’s flatiron district is a 30,000 square foot space, 11,000 square feet of which have been dedicated to the co-working area, with tenants like Neverware and Alphapipe taking up the space. While the GA space itself will be expanding to 45,000 square feet in the next few months, the dedicated co-working space will soon be occupied with GA staff while the communal space will be used as an alumni hang-out/event space. Here’s what Jake Schwartz, CEO and co-founder, said in the blog post: Over the past two and a half years, our community has grown much larger than our amazing co-working members. It now encompasses the tens of thousands of students who’ve come through our doors and the more than 3,000 alumni of our long-form courses, not to mention the hundreds of instructors and the 2,000 hiring partners who come to GA in search of top talent. Similarly, support once meant desks and space, but has come to also mean instruction, opportunity and talent for our students and hiring partners. It is in this context that we have made the decision to stop offering our coworking services in 2014. It is not a decision we took lightly – but it is a necessary one as we work to expand our global network of students and alumni. “I’ve been at GA since the beginning and will be sad to leave,” said Avi Berkowitz, AlphaPipe’s co-founder. “However, our team has grown significantly in recent months and so the need to move was something already in the cards for us.” Luckily for Berkowitz and other tenants, there are a number of co-working spaces in the NYC area that have open arms. The landscape has changed quite drastically from when General Assembly first opened its doors as one of the only collaborative working spaces in the city. However, with the pivot in the business at GA (now focused predominantly on education) and the soaring price of real estate in the Flat Iron district, this seems to be a decision that makes the most sense for General Assembly. So confirms Schwartz in the blog post: “For a long time now, coworking has been a small part of the “business” of GA, even as it has remained important as a reminder of community as a founding an ongoing value of our company.”
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter Vs. Facebook IPO In One Chart
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Gregory Ferenstein
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In the near future, anyone with an Internet connection and some lunch money will be able to invest in one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies. But after big brother , should America’s armchair investors pin their hopes and dreams on Silicon Valley’s younger sibling? We help you compare in one easy chart. The difference between the two is Twitter’s glaring negative sign on its net income. That’s right — , where at least Facebook was turning a profit at their IPO. Other than the sheer size of Facebook’s user base, the companies are wildly divergent: Facebook went public at a valuation , and Twitter is expected to price its shares at a level that will value it at under $20 billion. Facebook, quite simply, was much larger at the time of its IPO. In fact, looking at Twitter’s filing documents, you almost wonder why it is going public now. It has ample cash reserves but accelerating losses, as it invests in its research and development budget and builds out its sales team. The reason, we think, is that investor pressure has built to the point that Twitter needed a large liquidity event to break free from some of its oldest invested capital. For a company of its scale, there were only two options: sell or IPO. And for Twitter, that meant it only had one option. Hence its S-1. We do not say all that to indicate that Twitter is not a valuable, interesting company. It is both. But the bent of its filing docs feels more like a company heading toward an offering and not the numbers of a firm ready to enact one.
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Video Automation Startup IRIS.TV Launches With $1.7M In Funding To Keep You Tuned In Longer
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Ryan Lawler
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A new startup in Los Angeles called wants to give video publishers the tools to make streaming video more personalized and keep viewers hooked for longer. The company is coming to market with $1.7 million in seed funding from angels in the media and finance worlds. IRIS.TV was founded by the folks behind , which sought to provide a continuous stream of interesting videos to consumers. After a few years working on a consumer-facing product, the team decided to take all their learnings and technology and apply it to the B2B market instead. The pitch to video providers is that IRIS.TV can build that same type of continuous experience, but do so in a way that keeps users tuned in to their video properties. The technology is mostly designed to string together short-form videos that create more of a lean-back experience for casual viewers. Rather than having to search for the next video to watch once the current one is over, consumers are offered something they will (hopefully) find relevant and enjoyable. Of course, the idea of offering up that kind of continuous streaming isn’t new, and most video publishers these days have already implemented some sort of auto-play feature into their video players. For IRIS.TV, the difference comes in making that stream more personalized. While most auto-play experiences now just offer up the next video in a queue or playlist, IRIS.TV seeks to offer up videos that will be relevant on a user level. To do so, IRIS.TV uses a proprietary algorithm to extract and process video metadata, which allows it to apply complex business rules. It then has an adaptive stream management system that inserts a series of videos into a player and updates that playlist based on user interactions. It wraps that all up by providing detailed analytics of video performance, including locality and demographics data of the viewers who tuned in. Since being founded officially in February, IRIS.TV has been busy building relationships with major media companies and their technology partners to make its technology work with their video players. The company has therefore partnered with online video platform providers like Brightcove, Kaltura, Unicorn Media, and Viddler. It’s already gaining interest from some large major media corporations who are interested in deploying the technology on their web and mobile properties. While the company can’t name any of those customers yet, IRIS.TV co-founder and CEO Field Garthwaite says it will be integrated in a TV app and a mobile app soon. But it expects to be more broadly used in the field in Q1 or Q2 of next year. IRIS.TV is based in L.A., because that’s where all the media companies are, and its founding team has experience at places like ABC, Deluxe, Yahoo, Hulu, Disney, Universal, Rubicon Project, and Rand Corp. That includes , , , and . The team has raised a total of $1.7 million from angels in the media and finance worlds. That includes folks like , who was Bill Cosby’s long-time agent and is considered the “godfather of television syndication”; Nick Rau, co-founder of Vizu (which recently sold to Nielsen); former Viacom exec Jimmy Barge; and entertainment attorney Jor Law.
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Locca Wants To Stop You Losing Stuff — Or Your Kids — With Its SIM-Packing GPS Trackers
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Natasha Lomas
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You wait ages for a lost-item tracker hardware startup, and then loads and loads pile on at once. There have been a spate of such startups cropping up on crowdfunding sites in recent times — notably , which raised back in July, although it won’t be shipping product until next year. Others hoping to attack the space with similar Bluetooth-powered tags include the likes of , and (with its next-gen Elite offering), to name just a few. And now has just kicked off for a pair of item trackers, the Locca Phone and Locca Mini (pictured above left), that incorporate a range of tracking tech to offer longer distance real-time item tracking. The latest , colloquially known as Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE, is undoubtedly encouraging more startups to try their hand at item tracking. But Bluetooth has its drawbacks for an item-tracking use case — notably it has a pretty limited range of around 30 meters. Tile is hoping to get around that by leveraging a community of uses to create a distributed network effect, so that the proximity of your lost Tile to another passing Tile user can be used to cast its item-finding net wider. But that’s only really going to happen if its product takes off in a big way. In the meantime, all these Bluetooth trackers can only really offer a limited use-case scenario of finding stuff you’ve lost in your own house, say, or sounding an alarm when you stray a few meters away from your bag. That’s why Locca reckons there’s room for another player in this space — one that can track items over much greater distances. Unlike its Bluetooth tag-touting rivals, it’s sticking a SIM card inside its trackers so it can draw on a range of location pinpointing technologies, including GPS, to boost tracking range and enable live tracking of lost items even across international borders (its service will initially cover the U.S., Canada and Europe and expand to more countries in 2014).
“Locca locators have integrated five of the best locating technologies: AGPS, GSM cell-triangulation, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low-energy and FSK. Therefore the positioning is very accurate and fast, and tracking is possible worldwide, e.g. your lost luggage with a Locca is in Madrid, and you can see where it is from London,” the startup tells TechCrunch. Items are viewed on a corresponding Locca app that displays the real-time position of tracked items on a map, and offers additional functionality such as setting up different zones where you might want the system to behave differently toward tracked items. However there’s a cost to Locca’s more comprehensive coverage: Locca plans to charge buyers a monthly service fee for the data they’re using. Both Locca’s forthcoming devices — the smaller, lower-cost Locca Mini and the full-fat Locca Phone (which can also be used to make and receive calls) — come with a built-in SIM. The monthly cost of keeping each tracker active is €9,90 ($13,50) per month for the Locca Mini; and €14,90 ($20,30) per month for Locca Phone. Battery life is another cost of this type of tracking option. Locca says it’s developed its own energy-saving algorithms to help improve this but while the larger and more expensive Locca Phone will have a guaranteed ‘more than one month’ longevity, the smaller Locca Mini looks to require a lot more juicing. Locca says the Mini’s battery is good for “7 days active time”, perhaps longer depending on your usage. “Depending on which technology is used the battery lifetime is shorter or longer. E.g. a Locca is fixed on your dog. At home the device is connected to FSK, when the dog enters the garden GSM is turned on and when the dog runs away you could even switch on in addition the APGS to see the exact position,” it says. An item tracker with a flat battery is no longer an item tracker — which does give the Bluetooth tracker startups an edge in some respects: for instance, Tile boasts a year-long battery life. In fact, Tile owners will never have to charge the device — instead, they get an email reminder towards the end of the battery’s life to send Tile back and purchase a replacement (costing $25). That yearly fee for Tile is still cheaper than a year of Locca’s service (albeit, you can start and stop the Locca service whenever you like within the app, with no contracts required). There are other GPS trackers on the market, but Locca claims its Mini device is “the smallest with so many locating systems.” It’s also relatively lightweight (23g) — affixing it to your dog’s collar is one use case they envisage. Other use cases could include fixing it to car keys, putting it in your handbag or tagging your bike. The larger Locca Phone tracker, which can also make and take calls, thanks to a built-in microphone and speaker, is being marketed as something to give to an elderly relative or your kids. (Locca co-founder, Albert Fellner, is also founder and owner of Austrian mobile maker , which makes mobile phones for older people — likely explaining this portion of Locca’s focus.) Calls can be put through to the Locca Phone via Locca’s app, giving parents an alternative channel to speak to their kids or check in on elderly relatives. Another use for the Locca Phone is as an in-car safety device, as it will incorporate crash sensors and can be set to automatically make a phone call in the event of an accident. Locca is offering Indiegogo backers a variety of options to bag its hardware. The Locca Mini can be picked up from €99, with six months of service included in that price. And the Locca Phone from €149, also with six months of service. It’s also offering a range of accessories, such as cases to fix the trackers to your pet’s collar or a bike kit to mount it on your bike. The startup is focusing on getting the Mini delivered first, with an estimated ship date of December, while the Locca Phone is slated for February next year. Locca said it has been bootstrapping the project up to now — and is hoping to raise €75,000 via Indiegogo — although it has also previously taken in an angel investment of €150,000.
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iCloud Alternative Loom Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round
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Sarah Perez
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A startup called , which begin its life as the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing startup Popset, is working to build a better iCloud for both consumers and developers. Currently, the company offers a cloud storage and syncing service, in the form of a mobile application for iOS and desktop app for Mac. And today, Loom is also announcing $1.4 million in seed funding to continue to build on its vision. The round included participation from Google Ventures (MG Siegler, disclosure: previously a TechCrunch employee and current contributor); Tencent, Great Oaks VC, Overbrook Entertainment (Will Smith), Damon Way (founder, DC Shoes), and a few other angel investors. The company first its follow-up to Popset in May, and then . At the time, co-founder explained the team had realized that they were trying to solve the wrong problem with Popset – people weren’t lacking tools for group photo-sharing, but they did need a better way to organize and manage their photo libraries. Thus, Loom was born. The iOS application is fairly straightforward in its design, in an effort to appeal to a broader mainstream user base. After signing in, you simply start backing up photos to the cloud where you’ll receive 5 GB of free storage. A Mac app allows you to also import photos from your computer, and includes a one-click iPhoto export option. Additional storage requires a , and conversion rates for Loom are now above 3 percent, Senderek tells us. However, the company is not disclosing the number of users or actives it currently has. What makes Loom useful, however, is not just its file-syncing and online storage capabilities, but that it’s designed to serve as your mobile device’s default photo album replacement while saving you storage space on your phone. To do so, Senderek explained earlier that Loom itself stores photos in their original size on its servers, then creates multiple, smaller versions for access on mobile. Users can then clear out their iPhone’s Camera Roll, but still have access to all their photos in Loom, where they can organize them into albums, or share them with friends. Alongside news of the seed funding today, Loom is also announcing an iOS 7-optimized app with full RAW support for more than 130 types of RAW formats (meaning it will now store the original RAW files on its servers, to serve up the smaller versions on mobile). More importantly, it’s opening its doors to all interested users as it exits beta. In addition to building the front-end apps for consumers, the longer-term plan is to bring Loom to developers too as an alternative to the iCloud tools provided by Apple. Other things on the company’s roadmap include video streaming, improved sharing (easy album sharing to Facebook, for example), support for more imports (Aperture, Flickr, Instagram, etc.), and additional, premium plans with higher storage caps. Android support is not in the immediate future. Beyond product development, Senderek says the eight person team is looking to add a few more engineers with the new funding, and hopes to be around ten or eleven by year-end. “When Jan presented the idea for Loom, we realized that the idea seemed very elegant and organic, but actually there wasn’t anyone in the market doing ‘photos in the cloud,’ in a very broad sense, well yet,” says David Wallerstein from Tencent, Loom’s largest seed investor. “Loom is very focused on being the one destination in the cloud for all of your photos, across all devices, and facilitating the sharing of those photos, especially collections of photos, across the Internet. The fact that they are very focused on this particular mission, in this way, set them apart,” he adds. Of course, Loom is not the only company doing photo sharing and sync. It will have to take on some big names, including Facebook, Google+, Yahoo’s Flickr and perhaps even up-and-comers like Amazon (with Cloud Drive) or Dropbox. It will also have to solidify its value proposition to users who may be content with the free offerings they have elsewhere, which could affect its revenue potential. Interested users can sign up for Loom .
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Gillmor Gang Live 10.04.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Like the Gillmor Gang on Facebook at facebook.com/gillmorgang
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White House’s Deputy Tech Advisor Turns To Bartending Amid Shutdown
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Gregory Ferenstein
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[tweet https://twitter.com/KateNocera/statuses/384128161535262720] Here’s a novel way to spend some mandatory vacation time: serve your fellow co-workers top-shelf alcohol. The government shutdown has most of Washington’s public sector furloughed, so Tom Power — the White House’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer — . Washington D.C.’s shutdown is like a Catholic school prom: all that pent-up frustration has finally been set loose. According to , the furloughed tech advisor sent out an invitation to his friends to enjoy some happy juice specials at Gypsy Sally’s, one of many DC waterholes . “The only restriction is that if you do telecom work in the private sector, you can’t tip me when I pour you a beer,” he wrote in an email. “How much better can it get?” [tweet https://twitter.com/GingerGibson/statuses/384127970199470080] Aside from Power winning the award for awesomest bureaucrat, it shines a light on just how little our government can do during a full-on shutdown. Power is one of my go-to experts on all things telecom; he helps the federal government with the tricky issues of allocating wireless spectrum. If you’ve ever dropped a call, you desperately want the issues he deals with resolved. For some folks in the country, such as , who has her experimental cancer treatment on hold, the shutdown is a disaster. For the tech industry, not so much. Startups and tech companies regularly do business with the government; it may not be disastrous to wait a few weeks on any particular project, but it is costing the tech industry untold dollars in wasted time. It’s still a damn shame, though. Until then, may Power and his sauced D.C. brethren live it up. [ ]
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CrunchWeek: Twitter’s S-1, The Silk Road Shutdown, And The Rumored Amazon Phone
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Anthony Ha
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So this is what is like without adult supervision. Leena Rao and Colleen Taylor, the show’s two regular hosts, were both out of town this week, but there was still plenty of news for TechCrunch writers — specifically , and me — to talk about. We weighed in on the anticipation around Twitter’s IPO filing ( ), the , and (one of them with a whopping four cameras). By the way, apologies for the occasional bursts of random background noise. I blame the gremlins hiding in the TCTV studio.
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An AngelList Syndicates FAQ For Entrepreneurs
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Contributor
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Investors have been talking this past week about AngelList Syndicates and its nuances and potential implications, but mostly as it all relates to investing. Having run two of the first six Syndicates on AngelList – successfully generating over $800K in reservations and oversubscribing both in under 24 hours – I’ve inbounded a lot of calls and emails from entrepreneurs asking how AngelList Syndicates impacts them. Below is my personal (not AngelList official) FAQ for any entrepreneur thinking about Syndicates. Check out on its launch and the for a detailed answer, but the short answer is it allows anyone to invite investors to co-invest with them via the AngelList platform. It’s like your trusted adviser or friend becoming your Super Angel by raising money on your behalf for an allocation in your round, on demand and in real time. No. In exchange for access to the investment and the guidance that the Syndicator is expected to provide to the company over the life of the investment, the Syndicator charges a carry from Syndicate participants (like a VC); you pay nothing. This is the big question that investor blogs are going back and forth on. It comes down to this: like with VC firms, it’ll depend on the Syndicator. Super Angels and VCs who have proven themselves as entrepreneur friendly and resourceful are rewarded with great deal flow; the same will likely happen with Syndicators. If you have access to a big-name Syndicator, get clarity from them around expectations post-syndication. If you want more support than they can offer, ask them to come in as an individual on your cap table and find a Syndicator committed to being a value add. No. With “backers,” Naval Ravikant & Co are allowing anyone – including traditional fund LPs – to get behind a Syndicator and invest alongside them, meaning A (and B?) sized allocations are possible. This is the biggest question in my opinion, and as the platform evolves, the answer is becoming clear: it depends. Perhaps you want to: If the usual suspects don’t get your story despite incredible traction or similar, then perhaps. Say you’re addressing an unsexy or difficult-to-understand, but big, problem; you can now find an expert in that domain to invest and then syndicate like-minded investors also passionate about that domain. But if you’re failing to raise capital because of more fundamental issues, Syndicates might not be much help, as Syndicators will only be as good as their investments. That said, there will likely be Syndicators without a track record but with access to long-tail backers, but taking their capital – like taking capital from a tier III VC – might have downstream consequences on your ability to raise brand-name capital (if that’s your plan). Anyone can be a Syndicator. Start with friends or advisers or investors you work well with and who have the ability to fill your allocation based on existing backer commitments, experience or street cred. Or, try and connect with someone with an existing and make your pitch. If you have a strong Syndicator with plenty of backer capital to start, and you’re more concerned with raising capital quickly than exactly who is on board, you could syndicate the whole thing. I suggest getting a few folks to kick off 30-50% of the round with their brand and name – folks you want involved and on your cap table – and then syndicate the balance. While having a Syndicator can greatly reduce the amount of effort involved in raising on AngelList, it’s a partnership, which is why finding a Syndicator you want to work with is so important. Together you will build or spruce up your company’s AngelList profile, selling the sizzle and the steak. In addition, you will decide how much of the round to Syndicate, and what the minimum allocation is (what you start with for size of round) and maximum allocation is (if you get oversubscribed, you can increase the allocation). There shouldn’t be an unreasonable delta between these two, and you probably don’t want to move the goal line more than once. You can always oversubscribe a second time and still take down more capital than listed as allocated. You will also decide together whether you want to go broad or start with a targeted group of investors which you can reach out to via AngelList if they follow you or your Syndicator, or via email. You can also try and get featured by AngelList, but even if not there will be a viral component as followers of folks who make reservations will be notified, and thus made aware of the Syndicate. The Syndicator will write a personal note that will go out to the target audience explaining the why; below that note, the email will have a snapshot of your AL profile. As capital gets committed, celebrate. If it’s not getting committed, ask yourself if you’re reaching the right audience, a big enough audience, or are telling the right story. Much of this will be the Syndicator’s responsibility. After a few days or a few weeks, whether the Syndicate is undersubscribed or oversubscribed, it’s closed by the Syndicator. At that point the Syndicator and the CEO collaborate to decide whose reservations to accept, modify or reject. Note that if a round is not oversubscribed, or if someone committed before a round oversubscribed, you’ll have fewer grounds on which to reject investors – so if you are concerned about who joins, share in phases. The Syndicator then works to collect the capital via AngelList, which takes a couple of weeks. The net net for entrepreneurs is this: If you’re raising an angel or Series A round in the next few months, AngelList Syndicates is absolutely worth exploring. Figure out the best person to take your story to AngelList and raise value-add capital on your behalf, and get them to Syndicate an allocation. Just be sure it’s someone you’ll enjoy working with before, during, and years after the Syndication process.
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Gillmor Gang: IPOed
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — Sure, we talked about the Twitter IPO, about the Bitcoin Bust, about whether Apple is a hardware or software company, and other stuff. Looming in the background was the idea that our politics have atrophied yet more to complete decrepitude, that we could unring the bell of the election, that the collapse in Washington was nothing more than a preexisting condition. It’s a dullard’s version of Chicken, and no matter how far we slide, there’s still more to go. But luckily, we have hashtags and social graphs to keep us amused while the republic goes under in the slowest possible version of realtime. I’m glad Ev’s a billionaire so we can get Track reinstalled. Waiting for the electrician, anyone? @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem
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Josh Constine
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At its heart, Twitter is a firehose. Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers. It’s what makes Twitter feel like the real-time pulse of the world. But it could also be preventing Twitter from growing. Follow too many people, and you lose track of those you love and stop following anyone new. Imagine you’ve just joined Twitter. You follow some popular accounts of big publishers and celebrities you’re interested in, as well as some friends and acquaintances. The unfiltered feed works. You get up-to-the-minute news and stay aware of what people you know are up to. There aren’t so many tweets in your stream yet that you miss the ones from the people you care about most. But then you follow a few more people, and then a few more. You find more distant acquaintances and colleagues on Twitter so you follow them. You subscribe to experts in the niche areas you geek out about. Friends retweet something funny and you follow the author. Or somebody random @ replies and follows you so you do the polite thing and follow back. Gradually, your feed gets noisier and noisier. A few of the accounts you’ve followed post dozens of times a day and drown out everyone else (TechCrunch’s account is renowned for this). Twitter’s a stream, not a queue where you have to read every tweet, but you still. You find yourself missing great jokes, links, and insights from your closest friends who only tweet occasionally. When you visit Twitter, you see fewer interesting things in your feed than you used to. And that’s where the problems for Twitter’s business start. You put up with the mess but don’t enjoy your experience as much. If you’re a power user, you might create a Twitter List of your favorite people, but it takes a lot of effort. For everyone else who wants to trim the fat from follow lists, it’s tough to know where to start. Twitter keeps on recommending more people to follow, both organically, and in exchange for ad dollars, but doesn’t tell you who you never interact with and should unfollow. It takes multiple clicks to unfollow someone, making it a laborious chore to ditch 10 accounts, and you still have hundreds left. You might have noticed that the “Follow Friday” trend where you’d recommend people other should follow has died off. No one has the bandwidth. Your firehose is full, and it leads to two behaviors that are devastating to Twitter: You visit less and you stop following new people. The first means you encounter fewer of Twitter’s ads. It only gets paid when people click its ads, and you can’t click if you don’t visit. You’re also not around to @ reply, favorite, and retweet other people. That means they see fewer notifications and return to the site less frequently, so they see fewer ads, too. Another active user disappears, and Twitter’s MAU stagnates. The second means that the friends, acquaintances, publishers you would have followed end up with a smaller audience. No one wants to feel like they’re talking to a brick wall or shouting into a black hole. After a few days, weeks, or months of tweeting with no one listening, these people give up. Twitter is littered with the corpses of accounts that passed away too young or never truly lived. Some reports, like one from Mike Isaac, peg Twitter at having more than , yet today, Twitter confirms that only 218 million are active. That’s a painful attrition rate that is hindering Twitter’s ability to grow large enough to become profitable. Worse yet, people who quit Twitter or just hardly visit likely return to Facebook. It’s literally friendlier. People have a built-in audience of real-life chums who Like and comment on their posts. They don’t have to be ‘thought leaders’ battling to be heard. They accumulate friends just by living, and it’s not a contest to have the most connections. Even if it were, Facebook’s filtered feed is built to adapt to however many friends you make or Pages you Like. Rather than show an unfiltered feed of everything posted by everyone in your social and interest graph, it just shows you the best posts — the ones with the most Likes and comments from the people you interact with most. That doesn’t make it as good as Twitter at being a source of breaking real-time news, but Facebook does its best to make sure your feed is always interesting. It doesn’t always succeed, but the filtering happens automatically. And Facebook gives you direct control, allowing you to select how frequently you want certain people to appear in your feed or even what kind of stories (photos, games) you want to see. These controls are little-known and buried behind far too many clicks to be used efficiently, so it has room to improve. Twitter’s not the only one with unfiltered feed problems. Instagram may eventually have to grapple with it. But for now it’s younger, has fewer users, and its casual feed of photos is less vulnerable to noise since it’s just pretty pictures. Getting people to manage their own streams is an extraordinarily tough design problem. But Twitter’s role as the most popular unfiltered feed on the web means it needs to pioneer ways to make the format sustainable as it grows. Twitter should not abandon its unfiltered feed. It’s the foundation of its whole user experience. Still, there are other ways to alleviate the overflowing firehose problem. Twitter may want to forge as many connections in its “interest graph” as possible. Each follow tells it more about what kinds of ads to target to people. But the company should look to make it easier to unfollow people who clutter your feed. First, making it quicker to unfollow someone by adding a button to expanded tweets would help. More forcefully, Twitter could analyze which people you never @ reply, retweet, favorite, expand the tweets of, or visit the profile of. Then it could suggest that you unfollow them either in the sidebar or with an immediately accessible button on their tweets in the stream. Twitter could also provide a feed-cleaning tool. It could rank who you follow by your engagement with them, and make it easy to bulk unfollow people you don’t care about but who tweet a lot, or add to a List the people you interact with most. These tools will need to work from mobile, considering 75 percent of Twitter users access the service from their small screens. If Twitter doesn’t address these issues, veteran users may tune out and new recruits might never see the magic of its global forum. There’s nothing like tweeting something and getting responses within seconds. It makes the whole world feel smaller. The challenge is whether Twitter can retain its intimate town square atmosphere for everyone as it grows to become a digital city…and a public company.
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Meet The New Serfs, Same As The Old Serfs
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Jon Evans
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Once upon a time there were things called , and they were well understood. People went to work for companies, in offices or in factories. There were exceptions — artists, aristocrats, entrepreneurs — but they were rare. Laws, regulations, and statistics were based on this assumption; but, increasingly, what people do today doesn’t fit neatly into that anachronistic 1950s rubric. I’ve had the pleasure of trying to explain to border officials that my “job” consisted of contracting in Country A for a client in Country B, while also writing books and selling apps. I don’t recommend it. This disconnect will just keep getting worse. The so-called “sharing economy” mediated by sites and apps like , , , , Mechanical Turk, etc etc etc., replaces “consistent work for a single employer” with “an agglomeration of short-term/one-time gigs.” That doesn’t really map to the old-economy assumptions at all. And even relatively high-skill professions are now being nibbled at by shared-economy software; consider Disrupt winner . I say “so-called” because, let’s face it, “sharing economy” is mostly spin. It mostly consists of people who have excess disposable income hiring those who do not; it’s pretty rare to vacillate across that divide. Far more accurate to call it the “ .” (Not to be confused with the “patronage economy” — Kickstarter, Indiegogo — which deserves its own post.) It’s not surprising that relatively-wealthy techies like me have created apps and services which make relatively-wealthy techies’ lives a little better, instead of . But it a little surprising that these apps effectively echo what’s happening on a massive scale in the corporate world. Did you know “the hiring rate of temp workers is five times that of hiring overall in the past year” “The number of temps has jumped more than 50 percent since the recession ended”? Meanwhile, , “The median hourly earnings for the self-employed are £5.58, less than half the £11.21 earned by employees.” The : This “ephemeral workforce” phenomenon isn’t just American; the UK has also set records in the contingently employed. Something profoundly structural is going on. Even healthier economic growth won’t make it go away. We already know how software will eat manufacturing (robots and 3D printing) and transportation (self-driving vehicles.) This new servant economy shows us how software will eat much of the service sector; by turning many of its existing full-time jobs into a disconnected cloud of temporary gigs. In many ways this is inarguably a good thing. I may not think much of but I think even less of the insane medallion system that rules taxi industries across America for no good reason. (Anyone who believes taxi companies’ claims that they’re safer probably also believes the TSA’s claims that keeps you safe.) I applaud the leveling of that demented regulatory wall. What’s more, when the New Temps no longer require companies like Manpower to connect them to their actual employers, but can pick and choose on the fly among competing third parties, that too will be a huge benefit for all concerned. It’s entertaining to read Manpower’s CEO dismissal of this trend as “somewhat niche…I don’t think it’s going to take over the world” in . I suspect that quote will sound fantastically dense in ten years’ time. And yet this trend makes me uneasy. The slow transformation of a huge swathe of the economy from steady jobs to an ever-shifting maelstrom of short-term contracts with few-to-no benefits, for which an ever-larger pool of people will compete thanks to ever-lower barriers to entry, in a sector where most jobs are poorly paid…does this sound to you like it will decrease inequality and increase social mobility? Maybe, in certain specialized high-skill areas. But across the spectrum? I doubt it. It sound like it will reduce prices…but, unlike Wal-Mart, servant-economy providers are rarely servant-economy customers. (As prices drop, their incomes drop too, keeping the now-cheaper services still out of reach; a vicious circle.) The people who benefit are, surprise, surprise, the techies, the professionals, the bankers, the . You know. People like you and me. And, of course, the companies hiring the armies of temps. I don’t want to sound like a pessimistic Luddite; I do believe that this will ultimately be better than the status quo for most people. But it seems to me that — like many of the other economic shifts triggered by new technologies, as I’ve been — the vast majority of the benefits will accrue to a small and shrinking fraction of the population. Is that inequality such a bad thing? If the techno-economic tide is lifting all boats, does it really matter if it lifts the yachts higher than the fishing boats, and the super-yachts into the stratosphere? It seems to me that the answer depends in large part on whether the fishing boats have any realistic prospect of achieving yachtdom: Heard at conference: "Americans are willing to live with inequality if you don't violate their faith in upward mobility." Too true. — Andy Goodman (@GoodmanCenter) Unfortunately, is actually in America than in other rich nations…and so far I see no reason to believe that the combination of tomorrow’s technology and today’s economic architecture will change that. In fact I have a nasty gut feeling that the opposite is true, both in America and worldwide.
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The Potential And Pitfalls Of Twitter’s Mobile Business
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Sarah Perez
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Twitter has millions of monthly users, growing revenue, brand awareness, a propensity for breaking news, and data ripe for mining. Adding to this, Twitter’s main feed allows advertisers and media outlets to grab users’ eyeballs in a time when so many are looking away from the big screens in their living rooms to the small screens in their laps. But Twitter also has a growth problem, which potentially limits the extent of what it hopes to accomplish, and the revenue it could earn. Twitter’s problem and its potential lie in its mobile nature. On Thursday, the company revealed a steadily rising user base, 138 million monthly actives in March 2012, going to , . But its sequential growth from quarter to quarter . 18% growth in monthly actives as of March 2012, followed by quarters where growth fell between 9% and 11%, to finally just 7% growth in June 2013. Twitter was, in its own way, a mobile-first company before such a buzzword even existed. Launched firmly in the midst of the “Web 2.0” era, where social networks weren’t established destinations, but more experimental new ways of connecting people with each other through the power of ever-faster internet connections, Twitter – or “Twttr” as it was known at the time – began as a website where you could post and view messages, and turn on or off text messages from others. In July 2006, as “sort of a ‘group send’ SMS application.” Oddly enough, that description still fits, over half a decade later. Sure, it’s no longer about sending text-like messages – but today’s Twitter is a lot like how SMS itself could have evolved over the years, had the mobile carriers innovated on the technology instead of sitting back and letting the dollars flow in as users bumped up their messaging plans. Consumers messaged more and more, moving to ever-pricier unlimited plans, and then, even those plans weren’t enough. Messaging became a real-time flow, and one that converged with the rest of the web, with all its links, photos and videos, and other media. Twitter, meanwhile, with its SMS-like origins – 140-character lengths were a nod to the worldwide standard length of SMS at 160-characters, but shorter to allow room for 20-character usernames – was poised to fill in the gap. What if, sometimes, your messaging didn’t have to be quite so private, but rather a way to reach a wider community of friends, colleagues, or like-minded peers? What if you could like you were messaging with people as as Britney or Bieber or as important as the President or Pope? What if you could be alerted to the most recent, most interesting thing that’s happening in the world (or just in your world), with a buzz of your phone? That was Twitter. That Twitter. But Twitter isn’t alone in forging this path, and that’s a potentially large problem for it to overcome. In some regions, mobile competitors, and other services like China’s Sina Weibo, are in its newly released S-1 filing as a concern which could slow its usage and its revenue in international markets. One could argue that such competition has already slowed its growth. Here in the U.S., Twitter’s home base, smartphone adoption is at its saturation point – meaning everyone who wants a smartphone pretty much has one. But they don’t all have a Twitter account, and when you ask around, many are still not convinced they need to. For those who do, they don’t have to choose only between old-fashioned SMS and Twitter’s evolutionary service which took the idea of group texting into the internet age. They also have friends to message on Facebook, or Apple’s iMessage, or yes, plain ol’, can’t-be-killed SMS. And they have a plethora of new apps where they can communicate in ways Twitter didn’t envision. Younger mobile users are sharing falsely-aged photos on Instagram ( ), or posting private, messages on Snapchat (est. ). And beyond the U.S., other messaging apps have just as much, if not more, hold than Twitter. Whatsapp ( ), LINE ( ), KakaoTalk ( ), WeChat (with Weixin, ), Tango ( ), ChatOn ( ), and many others, have sizable user bases of their own – though, to be clear, they tend to report member numbers, not monthly actives. That’s not to say that users will only adopt just the one mobile messaging-like app, and if they’re using X, they won’t use Y. Neither communications, social networking, or messaging are zero-sum games. But every minute someone spends drawing mustaches on disposable photos in Snapchat, or posting to a service that’s more popular with their own local group of friends, is a minute they’re not on Twitter. Elsewhere on mobile – a place Twitter has dubbed “ ” – we’re closing in on a million mobile apps to choose from. In the U.S. today, users with a few minutes to spare aren’t necessarily tweeting, they’re (18% of the time) and playing games (32% of the time). Twitter, meanwhile, is fighting for a slice of the 6% of the time spent “social networking”…outside of Facebook. What Twitter has going for it is that it’s one of the few third-party social services deeply integrated into Apple’s mobile operating system, which will allow it to pull people back into its app in different ways than those that are not. Throughout the rest of the world, these percentages of time spent may differ but the overall trends are the same. Users are web surfing, socializing, reading, gaming and communicating on mobile , like reading print media and watching TV. So it’s a very good thing that Twitter is building a growing business on mobile, even if, with TV, it’s tying ad revenue to . But we have to also acknowledge that what constitutes a successful mobile business may end up looking very different from those built for the web. Mobile is personal, intimate, consumed in smaller chunks, and yet also real-time – we’re flipping between apps as fast as we once mashed buttons on beat-up remote controls. Twitter’s draw is that it is, at once, all these things. It’s the idea of SMS, modernized and personalized. Its bite-sized updates are ideal for consuming in stolen handfuls of minutes, and its content seems almost ephemeral with the speed with which it passes and is then forgotten. Twitter is not just a business going mobile, it’s infused with a mobile spirit. And that certainly gives it a head start over some, but it doesn’t guarantee a win.
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Founder Institute Says It Has Graduated More Than 1,000 Companies
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Anthony Ha
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Adeo Ressi, founder of the startup incubator, recently told me that FI has hit a big milestone — more than 1,000 (1,003 at the time of our conversation) companies have graduated from the program. A mind-boggling number of incubators and accelerators have launched in the past few years. That seems doubly true when you remember how few there were when the Founder Institute launched four years ago. By Ressi’s count, FI was one of the first three, following Y Combinator and Tech Stars. And it has a pretty different model. Instead of targeting twentysomething programmers who have already started working on new companies, Ressi said his team created “a structured process” that would allow people who were working at big companies and “daydreaming” about their own startups to learn about the business and to figure out whether it really made sense to pursue their ideas. Another distinguishing feature (and a factor in the relative speed with which 1,000 companies have emerged from the program) is the Founder Institute’s approach to geographic expansion — Ressi said it has chapters in 55 cities across 30 countries and six continents, with more to come. He added that in order to launch in a new city, the Founder Institute needs to be satisfied with both the local mentors who have volunteered/been recruited, and with the level of entrepreneurial interest. But the real measure of an incubator’s success may have less to do with how many startups it launches, and instead how many have successful exits of some sort. Ressi estimated that the total portfolio has an estimated value of $5 billion, which might seem like a big number when there have only been six “liquidity events” (including the acquisitions of and ). But he noted, “Our best companies are far from selling.” He also said that 89 percent of companies are still operating, and 74 percent of companies are operating at or ahead of their growth plans. Ressi predicted that those numbers will get even better as FI revamps its curriculum. He said he looks at the curriculum as “a versioning system,” and the institute is currently launching version 3, which responds to changes in the startup landscape in areas like social media. I also wondered if we’re going to see a consolidation in the number of incubators over the next few years. Ressi responded: “The Founder Institute is in an unsual position, in that we’re not doing it for the money, we’re doing it to be an organization that affects entrepreneurship. With other investors, I don’t believe that they’re all going to find this to be that viable a model, and what you’ll see, I don’t know if it will be consolidation per se, but they’ll decide that, ‘This is too long a game for me to play.'” Oh, and if you’re wondering how hard it is to get into the Founder Institute, Ressi said it has a global acceptance rate of 14 percent (if you include incomplete applications) or 35 percent (if you only include complete ones). Of those who are accepted, an average of 30 percent will graduate.
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Sarah Perez
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Google, SAP, Cisco & Samsung Among Potential Tech Buyers For Some Or All Of BlackBerry, Says Reuters
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Natasha Lomas
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Google, SAP and Cisco are among a number of technology companies interested in buying up portions — or all — of BlackBerry’s business, according to , which cites several sources close to the matter. BlackBerry has also apparently asked for preliminary expressions from Intel, LG and Samsung, by early next week. Portions of the business of most interest to potential technology buyers are BlackBerry’s secure server network and patent portfolio, according to the sources. None of the companies named by Reuters provided comment on its report. Other tech companies, including Microsoft, Huawei and Lenovo, are notably absent from the list of prospective buyers. Redmond unsurprisingly so; despite being previously linked with a possible BlackBerry bid, Microsoft is now tied up with its own . Meanwhile Chinese telco Huawei has over national security concerns about links to the Chinese military — likely making a bid for a company that supplies phones to government officials a difficult sell. An enterprise-focused bidder — such as SAP or Cisco — might make the best fit for BlackBerry’s security-focused messaging handset business at this point, with the consumer smartphone marketplace now primarily centred on Android and iOS. That said, the BYOD trend has been steadily eroding BlackBerry’s enterprise reach, so even here its appeal is increasingly niche. (Albeit, it does have its own that seeks to tap the BYOD trend, with the ability to manage iPhones, Android-powered devices and BlackBerrys). Late last month, days before BlackBerry reported a (due mostly to a writedown on unsold Z10 devices), . Its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, is the prospective buyer, tabling a $4.7 billion bid for the company. Going private also opens up the possibility that a new owner might look to break up the company and sell off its constituent parts, although Fairfax claims it has no plans to do so. But, according to Reuters, BlackBerry is actively shopping itself around to potential strategic buyers anyway — as an alternative to the Fairfax deal. That deal, which values the company at $9 per share, has faced some skepticism from financial analysts — who believe a $7 per share price is more realistic — which may explain why BlackBerry is apparently looking elsewhere now. Technology buyers are not the only potential bidders for the BlackBerry pie, with private-equity firms also asking the company to provide additional financial details about its various business segments, according to two of Reuters’ sources. However they said BlackBerry is currently focused on taking bids from industry peers. Despite Google et al apparently agreeing to talk, it’s unclear how much serious interest there is in buying BlackBerry or which, if any, parties will bid. Potential bidders are apparently proceeding with caution, given the level of uncertainty around BlackBerry’s business and questions over the future value of its business assets. Google’s interest is likely to be in BlackBerry’s patent portfolio. Android has faced renewed legal attacks in recent weeks, with ‘s Android-powered One flagship device in the U.S. last week. was also aimed at bolstering Android’s IP defences. So it’s due diligence for Mountain View to at least take a closer look at BlackBerry’s patents. Samsung may also be eyeing those. However, Reuters notes that the value of BlackBerry’s patent portfolio and licensing agreements is diminishing rapidly — likely to halve over the next 18 months. Which may temper any interest there. BlackBerry’s patents are estimated to be worth between $2 billion and $3 billion, and its security-focused messaging system services business is likely worth $3 billion to $4.5 billion. The company also has $3.1 billion in cash and investments — however with revenues sliding and more loss-making quarters looming, that cash is going to get eaten up pretty quickly. Reuters cites Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu’s prediction that the company will burn through almost $2 billion over the next year and a half. Meanwhile, BlackBerry’s long-touted plan to extend the reach of its consumer mobile messaging service, BBM, — perhaps with the hope of creating another business asset it could shop around to buyers — . BBM was initially slated to launch on the new platforms globally late last month but the rollout was halted after a leaked version of the Android .apk overloaded its servers. The company has since said it remains committed to launching BBM on Android and iOS but given no new timeframe for when this will happen. In the event, it may be that BlackBerry’s bits get broken up and sold off before BBM is able to make the leap onto other platforms.
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Siri 2.0? Skyphrase Wants To Make Data More Accessible With Natural Language, Starting With Analytics & Fantasy Sports
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Rip Empson
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With an increasing number of commercial applications relying on its technology, natural language processing (NLP) has started to come into its own of late. After years of research and experimentation, it has emerged from geeky obscurity and into the limelight — thanks to Watson, Siri and Nuance’s Dragon, among others. Of course, every time Siri misunderstands a command, it’s easy to dismiss those aforementioned decades of progress, curse technology and chalk it all up to hype. Of course, doing so is dismissing the fact that NLP is tackling a near-impossible task: Teaching computers to understand human speech. Deconstructing and understanding the endless string of words, expressions and sentences, and the nuance of syntax, emphasis and tone in human speech is a byzantine problem. Even for super computers. Part of the reason for this, says founder Nick Cassimatis, is that those brave enough to tackle the problem in the first place have generally stuck to two main approaches: Using statistics and brute force or by way of logical reasoning and language rules. Peter Thiel’s , a new investment vehicle that backs startups pursuing cutting-edge research and hacking away on problems that “might still be too risky to get traditional venture backing,” recently selected as one of its first investments. NLP as a whole is still in its infancy and much of the hardcore innovation and engineering is taking place within academia, making it a tough (and risky) bet for investors. However, while SkyPhrase’s founding team is composed of researchers and professors itself, Cassimatis wants to not only bring his work outside of academia but compete with the Siris of the world by taking a third, less-traveled and trickier approach to the NLP problem. Skyphrase, , has developed an artificial intelligence technology that aims to combine both the brute force and logical reasoning methods mentioned above, and take a more holistic approach to teaching machines how to understand human speech. Led by CEO Nick Cassimatis and a handful of his graduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) outside of Albany, the team collectively has decades of experience working in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics research at RPI, Stanford and MIT. Over time, the team has developed algorithms that essentially work to synthesize logical reasoning and traditional processing in order to analyze a larger and more complex range of queries, ideally with greater precision. While it’s tricky to sum up nine years of research without being a little reductionistic, Cassimatis explains SkyPhrase’s alternative technique as one that focuses on teaching machines to respond to queries by helping them to analyze and build meanings piece-by-piece and brick-by-brick from available signals. In contrast, tradtional NLP technologies may receive a user’s query and attempt to fit it into a pattern they’ve already predicted, he says, so, when you throw Siri a query she hasn’t heard before, for example, you’re probably not going to like the result. SkyPhrase is able to more accurately answer these types of queries, Cassimatis says, by leveraging both algorithms and data structures to paint a more holistic view of the components in language. Doing so has allowed Skyphrase to produce results that are significantly more accurate than what one has come to expect from Wolfram Alpha and Siri, he says. In fact, the CEO claims that SkyPhrase’s NLP tech can respond to whole questions at close to 90 percent accuracy on average, where as Wolfram is closer to 30 percent. While that’s encouraging, it’s important to remember that NLP and SkyPhrase itself are both in the early stages, and there’s still a pretty steep learning curve for the average user setting out to use NLP tech. , for example, found that the startup’s tools still needed some training when it came to applying it to more unfamiliar territory, like in Twitter and Orbitz searches, for example. The artificial intelligence technology still requires some activity, the CEO explains, and it has to learn as it goes. In areas it was more familiar with, SkyPhrase can add a lot of value quickly, which is why the startup has decided to apply its tech to two new areas — in two distinct areas. With SkyPhrase, Cassimatis really has two goals: One is to hone the NLP technology and continue to productize it in areas where it can add real value and, two, reduce the amount of legwork, friction and time it takes to develop natural language interfaces. “Our goal, long-term,” the founder says, “is to let as much of the world’s data be accessible using natural language as possible by building out applications in individual verticals, but also by making it easy for third parties to create natural language interfaces for their own data and applications.” To start, SkyPhrase has developed two applications of its own to test and improve its technology, one being a search and analytics product which anyone can apply to their own Google Analytics account and the second being an app targeting fantasy football fans. Its fantasy football search tool allows users to quickly search statistics without being distracted by irrelevant links and is great for drafting and selecting the best players, making trades and so on. http://youtu.be/fxfN3DfbKWk The other cool feature of the app is that it allows users to set up alerts during the season, which could range from the simple, like “tell me when Tom Brady throws two touchdown passes today,” to more complex queries. This is also a potential area of differentiation for the startup. While there are other cool apps out there and tools to help fantasy statisticians , others put most of their focus on past events and data, making the results a little less actionable than most fantasy fans would like. In turn, its Google Analytics application helps users answer complex and precise questions about their web traffic, for example, without needing to learn and use a more complicated interface or rely on special analytics reports. Users can ask questions in simple language and get answers quickly, rather than having to trawl Google for answers. To give an example, SkyPhrase for Google Analytics can handle commands like, “show me pages that visitors from New York City viewed in the last three days,” or questions like, “which keywords generated the most traffic to our registration page last week?” http://youtu.be/F2JZumsSYr4 In the end, Cassamitis says, “data is full of important insights that are never discovered because the answers are too difficult and expensive to find.” While SkyPhrase is beginning with football and Google Analytics (because that’s where they wanted help), the CEO thinks the startup’s tech can make it easy for developers with “little knowledge of linguistics or artificial intelligence to create natural language interfaces for their own data and applications.” It’s still early in the game, but it’s a mission that’s pretty easy to get behind, and each step the startup takes on the tech side could result in some pretty cool consumer and enterprise apps on the other. For more, find
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Quantopian, A Community Of Quants, Picks Up $6.7M From Khosla, Spark
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, a community where around 11,000 or so quants collaborate on algorithmic trading strategies, has raised $6.7 million from Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $8.8 million. Quantopian says it is the world’s first browser-based algorithmic trading platform. Developers can build and test algorithmic trading strategies on the platform. Then, they can share their work and collaborate with others. Over the past 10 years, quantitative and high-frequency trading strategies have risen in power as daily turnover has exploded. Human speed and judgment hasn’t been able to keep up with the ever-growing complexity of global financial markets. “People are realizing that anything that is subject to human judgement can be improved by automation and machine learning,” said CEO John Fawcett. Fawcett, who used to be a chief technology officer at Tamale Software, a investment research software company that sold to Advent back in 2008, said that he saw an opportunity to support a community of independent traders who wanted to refine algorithmic strategies on their own outside of big funds. “It’s directed at the individual who wants to strike out on their own,” said “I saw that there were people practicing as quants today, who wanted to operate on their own but couldn’t given compensation, lifestyle and the nature of funds.” He added, “The other thing I wanted to do was be part of a movement for an increasingly systematic approach to investing.” The company has racked up about a decade of pricing data and history that developers can backtest their ideas against. Right now, it’s just U.S. equity data, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine added historical data on currencies, commodities or other asset classes. “We built this cloud infrastructure that has historical market data for U.S. equities and an integrated development environment where you implement two functions,” he said. “We feed all the data through those two functions, which can decide when to buy or sell any security.” They launched earlier this year and , who used to run Thomson Reuters’ quant strategy, as a vice president. So far, the site has about 50,000 algorithms. But they don’t have a revenue model yet. They’re merely building the community first. Fawcett is critical of the typical fee model where fund managers pick up a set percentage of assets under management and a percentage of how much they return. He says that model incentivizes firms to break up as star investors accumulate resources and start to think about going off on their own. “Having an umbrella organization over many managers never really worked because it’s a star driven business,” he said. “With the fee or following model, you’re taking a little bit of the compensation out of what the fund manager is earning. This basically penalizes success.” They’re thinking about charging a monthly fee for access to a particular algorithm, but haven’t settled on that. “We’re still in the phase of building a community, in the same way that AngelList spent a couple years getting access to startups before they built syndicates,” Fawcett said. As for investors who want to harness the strategies that quants have built on the platform, Fawcett is still thinking about how much Quantopian should open the kimono and help prospective investors understand what they’re buying into. “We envision having progressive disclosures about the way these strategies work for people that are backing them,” he said.
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Penn Jillette Turns To FundAnything To Become A Bad Guy
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Cyan Banister
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igZYs5T-jr8&w=420&h=315] Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame is about as nice as they come. And he’s super sick of it. So he wrote a movie called “Director’s Cut” in which he will no longer be the hero. His role is so bad, in fact, that he decided not to pitch the script to Hollywood execs, because he’s pretty certain they wouldn’t buy it. While he funded his last two movies and himself, he says he doesn’t have enough money of his own to take this gamble a third time. So this time he turned to new crowdfunding player where he currently is at $437,721 of his $999,972 goal with 32 days left in the . I spoke with Brad Wyman, chief crowdfunding officer of the five-month-old FundAnything to find out how it’s different from other platforms and how it plans to set themselves apart — other than by making Penn a super scary guy? There are a lot of crowdfunding platforms out there to choose from — Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc. They offer a wonderful marketplace for creators to fund their projects based on competitive fees, payment models (paid when funded, paid daily, paid by milestone), their payment processors (Amazon, PayPal etc.), marketing practices, social reach, etc. Brad explained that FundAnything hopes to make its mark as a place where no idea is turned away and where celebrities help “uplift” those who don’t have a large audience of their own. Each section of the site has celebrity endorsements, and those celebrities help pick and choose projects they think are worthy of more attention. For example, Donald Trump heads up the small business and foundations section of the site and he personally contributes to these campaigns. They also hinted that Pitbull is coming on board shortly. Aside from having celebrity sections of the site, they also actively seek campaigns they can fund with celebrities who have rabid fan bases, because their audiences also get in front of the other projects and everyone wins. In the first 100 days of business, they had their first successfully completed $1 million campaign with comedian/podcaster Adam Carolla. However, when a celebrity hosts a crowdfunded campaign, people inevitably complain about how they shouldn’t ask their fans for money, as was the case with Amanda Palmer and . But there is a difference between just simply asking for money and commerce. Zach sold an acting role in his film. Penn is selling access to his home, his personal things and his voice. You give money for something, or for nothing, but it is driven by choice. Nobody is forcing you to and not only is it a great way to give your favorite artist or creator complete control of their creation, but also feedback as a fan. If the project doesn’t get funded, then maybe it is a really shitty idea. If people are buying perks like mad and talking to you about what they want to see and are pre-buying their DVDs, I just don’t see what the fuss is about. I signed up to be an executive producer of Penn’s film, because, just as badly as he’s wanted to be a bad guy, I’ve always wanted to be an executive producer. I also bought a perk where Penn will record a message for your voicemail. I plan on giving that away to the person who has the best comment or tweet by the time the campaign ends. I’ll announce the winner in the comments and I’ll contact you via Facebook. Obviously, I need to know who you are, so anonymous entries don’t count. Penn announced yesterday that as soon as they reached 2,000 backers (which they just crossed) they would start production. That means they will be the first (as far as I know) project to start filming while the crowdfunding project is still running. It’s genius, because they will be able to cast the main characters in order to drum up more interest and get more people involved. I’m looking forward to seeing more campaigns like this. The problem with Kickstarter, in my opinion, is that the project doesn’t get funded unless the goal is reached, which creates an artificial deadline and pressure that maybe works for some. But if you can actually pay out along the way in milestones, that seems like another approach in order to get fans really engaged with the projects. Regardless, I’m really excited that there’s a platform emerging for everyone and their needs and it will be interesting to see how FundAnything fares along the way.
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Cue, The Startup Formerly Known As Greplin, Shuts Down Its App
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, the personal assistant app that grew out of a promising search product, has shut down. The company left a brief note on . Cue is Shutting Down We appreciate all of the support from you, our users, as Cue has grown over the last few years. However, the Cue service is no longer available. Cue Premium users who registered through the website will receive a prorated refund. Cue Premium users registered though the iPhone App can request a refund through iTunes. In accordance with our privacy policy, your data and personal information will not be stored or transferred; it has been permanently deleted. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you. It’s been an incredible journey that wouldn’t have been possible without your loyal support. Our sincerest thanks, – The Cue Team The company was backed with at least $4.7 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures and angels like Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Joshua Kushner and his fund Thrive Capital along with Christina Brodbeck, Peter Chane, David Rusenko and Keith Rabois. It’s not completely clear whether the product is merely shutting down, or whether the entire company is closing shop. We’ve reached out for comment. We had heard reports they had raised additional funding last year, but we were never able to confirm this. We are hearing from additional sources that they did raise that extra funding, so this is looking like a product pivot or a sale rather than a full shutdown of the company. Cue started out as Greplin, a all of a person’s online social content off Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. Last year they pivoted and launched a personal assistant app called Cue, that turned a person’s e-mails, contacts and files into a daily agenda with key items like restaurant reservations and flight confirmations. It’s worth noting that Cue was an investment that former . One of the other investments he led, , for what we heard was roughly $35 million after raising $20 million in funding.
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You’ve Got Until Sunday To Apply For San Francisco’s Entrepreneurship In Residence Program
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Anthony Ha
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Last month, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee program for startups solving public sector problems. Now there’s an actual application deadline and that deadline (this Sunday, October 6) is coming up. In some ways, the program’s head, Rahul Mewawalla (he’s on the right of the photo with Lee and Lee’s chief innovation officer Jay Nath), embodies the idea of building a bridge between government and the tech world — his includes positions at Nokia, NBC Universal, GE, and Yahoo. Mewawalla acknowledged that EIR programs aren’t new (definitely not new at VC firms, and not entirely new on the government side either), but he said San Francisco’s is the first to have a strong “product focus.” “We want people who have already built a product that can serve public needs and drive real, tangible benefits,” he said. He declined to say how many applications the program has received thus far. He did say applications have covered areas like open data, health care, recruiting, and transit. He also pointed to that should emulate the San Francisco model — which is something he’s hoping for. The 12-week EIR program is supposed to provide access to government officials, access to private sectors leaders, workshops and training, access to coworking space, and more. .
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Veteran Travel Search Engine Skyscanner Lands “One Of Largest” Sequoia Investments To Date At $800M Valuation
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Rip Empson
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In travel search, most young people’s memories don’t extend much further back than Kayak, which began appearing, circa 2004. Though its name may be slightly less familiar among American travelers, is today one of the largest flight search engines on the Web, and outdates Kayak, with its origins going back all the way to 2001 B.C.E. Over the next 10 years, the Scottish company built its brand on its a fast, reliable flight comparison engine — and, like its North American bretheren, has since expanded into hotel booking and beyond — with its “turnovers” reported to hit $30 million (and $10 million in profits) last year, Buoyed by partnerships with Chinese search engine, Baidu, and an international user base that sees the search engine now supporting 30 languages, the company announced that it has landed an even bigger fish — a knight, in fact. Today, Skyscanner announced that it has finalized an undisclosed investment from Sequoia Capital, led by partner, Sir Michael Moritz — who will also be joining the company’s board of directors. Although Skyscanner declined to disclose the size of the investment, the company did choose to disclose that the investment came at a whopping valuation of $800 million. That’s a head-turning amount, especially considering that, according to CrunchBase, Skyscanner has raised $5.2 million to date and, as we mentioned above, was seeing $30 million in turnover a year ago. Skyscanner must have really put its foot on the monetization accelerator over the last 12 months. Although, to put this in context, this is a trend that’s been afoot for awhile now among venture investors, as older funds are looking to decade-old, time-tested startups that have been largely bootstrapped. Accel and Sequoia — hat tip to my colleague Anthony Ha for pointing that out — and Accel did the same for Lynda.com, which . There are no sure bets on either side of the coin — investing or building — but these are about as close as one can get. I believe some may call it “risk management,” while others would say “timidity,” but either way, it’s a testament to what Skyscanner has been able to build over the last 10 years. Sir Moritz was an early investor in Google, LinkedIn, YouTube and PayPal, among others, and has been closer to the Queen of England than most of humanity. Again, while neither party disclosed the investment amount, they did manage to drop that this is “one of the largest investments in any company Sequoia has made to date.” However, in what seems almost counterintuitive, the company then added that, despite Sequoia making one of the largest investments in the 40-year history of its firm, Scottish Equity Partners will remain the company’s largest investor. The investment comes on the heels of continued growth for the European flight search company, as it has more than doubled its staff over the last 12 months, and will double again to 500 over the next year. It has also been making a big push on mobile, and its apps (across platforms) have now been downloaded over 25 million times, with its website attracting over 25 million uniques per month. According to its statement today, Skyscanner has grown more than 100 percent y/y over the past four years, and just recently opened a new office in Miami, which it plans to use as its North American headquarters as it expands its business into the U.S., Canada and Latin America — and Kayak’s terrain. The news today also comes on the heels of Skyscanner’s recent acquisition of Barcelona-based Fogg, a startup focusing on optimizing hotel search and booking, which is another parallel between Skyscanner’s strategy and that of The acquisition could allow the company to increase its stickiness and expand its travel booking engine into an additional (and more lucrative) vertical, following its successful launch of its car rental engine in 150 markets worldwide. Also worth noting is that, while some of the parallels between SkyScanner’s approach to the market and that of Kayak.com may be purely superficial and a result of the natural evolution of similarly positioned, mature market leaders, its new leadership could help deepen that relationship. (A thanks to for pointing this out.) SkyScanner’s newest investor and board member, Sir Michael Moritz, was an investor and board member of Kayak.com up until its billion . As such, Moritz had a very unique vantage point from which to both view and help guide the company as it went through an IPO and, later, an exit. Kayak stumbled in its run up to the public markets as it worked to develop more substantial revenue streams and, likely, in retrospect would say that it filed for an IPO a tad prematurely. Furthermore, Moritz has also served as a , the airline and IT services provider that was acquired by Google in a controversial, ~$700 million blockbuster deal . Sequoia’s investment in Skyscanner put Moritz on the board of yet another big travel company on its way to (at some point) some kind of liquidity event. If the past is any indication, Moritz has plenty of experience to draw on as the company positions itself for its next move — whatever that may be. It’s also astonishing to think that, should the company navigate an IPO or big-ticket exit, that Moritz himself has put a not-so-insignificant imprint on the shape and heft of some of the travel industry’s biggest players — or at least its biggest startups. For more,
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Amazon’s Smartphones Detailed: ‘Project Smith’ 3D Flagship Model And A Value Handset With FireOS
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Matthew Panzarino
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Amazon is in the process of developing two smartphones, one inexpensive model and one with a 3D eye-tracking interface, TechCrunch has learned. The details are somewhat sparse, but are corroborated by sources and reports from earlier this year. Amazon is planning two devices, the first of which is the previously rumored ‘expensive’ version with a 3D user interface, eye tracking and more. Both devices were under the ‘Project B’ moniker before the news earlier this year. The expensive model’s code-name has since been changed to ‘Duke’ and now ‘Smith’ — and a release is not planned this year. Details of the devices via a throwaway account earlier today and TechCrunch verified some aspects of the posting with our sources and came away with some additional information. They match up with details from the WSJ report: But the people familiar with the plans said the smartphone and set-top box are just two elements of a broader foray into hardware that also includes the audiostreaming device and the high-end smartphone with the 3-D screen. Inside Amazon’s Lab126 facility in Cupertino, Calif., where each of the devices have been under development, the efforts are known as Project A, B, C and D, or collectively the Alphabet Projects, said the people familiar with the plans. The ‘Smith’ project includes a device that sounds like a bit of a hardware beast. The screen itself is not 3D but the device features four cameras, one at each corner of the device that will be used to track eye and head motions in order to move the interface around to ‘give the impression’ of 3D. Instead of using the phone’s internal sensors, like Apple does with iOS 7, it would base the movements off of the user’s point of view. Theoretically, this will provide a more accurate 3D representation of the screen’s contents. There has been some software testing on a feature that will recognize the user’s face and ignore other faces around it, so as not to project 3D perspectives that are proper for your neighbors, but not for you. Another feature said to be planned for the device, but not yet locked for release, is an image recognition feature that lets users take a shot of any real-world object and match it to an Amazon product for purchase. The possibility of this object recognition model offsetting some of the cost of the device through purchases by users is mentioned in the posting. Four cameras (5 including a rear camera for shooting images) would be a large additional expense, so it’s tough to imagine that making it to market, and it’s not needed for motion tracking. But it could be necessary for the object capture mode, and Amazon could be looking for a differentiating feature that sets its devices apart from the crowd. It’s not clear what OS this device runs on but it’s hard to believe it’s anything but a heavily modified version of Android that supports the 3D views. What we’re hearing is that if you move your head you can see things like media player buttons that move around and can even ‘peek’ off the edges of the screen to see things not visible from the front. Much of this is said to be experimental and the effects may not be as pronounced in the final version. A second project which fell under the ‘Project B’ handle is a value device. Said to be a ‘cheap’ phone with basic software that is similar to that found on the Kindle Fire tablets — now called FireOS. The posting says that Amazon is looking to release the inexpensive device this year, something that would dovetail with a report by ‘Jessica Lessin’ writer Amir Efrati . Note that Amazon denied to Efrati that it would release a device at all this year and that if it did the device wouldn’t be free. Our sources indicate that this may be because the project’s target date has been shifting around and it may get pushed into next year. There is no word on whether Amazon would try to offer the ‘cheap’ device low-cost via ads. The devices are being shipped around internally inside a locked metal case with just the screen visible, and are not allowed outside of the building, even for engineers working from home. The floors of Amazon’s Lab126 facility where the devices are under development are locked down. This has become standard operating procedure for secretive companies like Amazon and Apple when it comes to hardware development. The development teams for the devices are split between Sunnyvale and Seattle. There is also some scuttlebutt around staffing in the posting, some of which we hear is accurate. Amazon has indeed pulled engineers from other projects onto the phone teams, leaving other hardware projects with reduced staff. The posting also claims that Amazon wanted to have launched the device already, but had issues with software and hardware, as well as employee retention. We’ve been unable to corroborate this aspect of the leak. Since these devices are still classified as in development, it is quite possible that the feature-sets may change — even dramatically — before they are released to the public. If there has been a struggle developing the devices, then Amazon could consider modifying its requirements for bringing them to market. We have reached out for comment on this story and will update the piece if we hear back. Image Credit: / Flickr CC
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