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“Piano Hero” Concept Video Makes Me Want To Try To Learn The Piano For The 500th Time
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Greg Kumparak
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Take a piano. Strap a projector above it. Build a Guitar Hero-esque interface that shows upcoming notes, and project it down onto the Piano’s top surface and keys. What do you get? The piano instructor of . Or, at least, a piano instructor that won’t yell at you and make you wish you decided to stick with soccer after all. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOSEekGuq0w&w=640&h=360] Highlighted in a video this morning, the Projected Instrumented Augmentation System is a project built by a team out of Germany’s Ulm University. Combining the aforementioned projection setup with logic that detects what you’re playing, the system is able to illuminate mis-pressed keys, and can move the song’s notes along at your pace. Yeah, yeah. This might not teach you to play the piano — at least, not without lugging a big ol’ projector with you everywhere or memorizing everything you want to play. It certainly won’t teach you how to read sheet music. But it help you get more comfortable poundin’ away at the old ivories, help you learn to contort your hands into the many crazy shapes that piano playing requires. Plus, it probably feels pretty awesome to play along with. This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen piano playing gamified, with companies like Konami (with ), Harmonix (with Rock Band 3) and to some extent Smule (with Magic Piano for iPad) having toyed with the concept in their own ways. But this the first time I’ve seen it mashed up directly — and man, does that look rad. If you’ve got a MIDI keyboard and are looking for something sort of similar (albeit without the crazy projection setup), check out .
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Sen. Feinstein Claims The NSA Does Collect Phone Call Location Information, Contradicting The NSA
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today Senator Feinstein stated that the NSA phone metadata program that collects records on the telephone calls of American citizens includes location information. Previously, head of the NSA, General Keith B. Alexander, stated that the NSA was collecting call location data under the authority of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. It was left open that other authorization could allow for, and be currently used to, collect location data. It was revealed today that at least tried to collect this data. Here’s the Senator, as : “I’ve listened to this program being described as a surveillance program. It is not. There is no content collected by the NSA. There are bits of data – , telephone numbers – that can be queried when there is reasonable and articulable suspicion.” [Emphasis: TechCrunch] So there’s that. The NSA refused to admit that it had never collected call record data. It was later forced to admit that a program had existed. Now, it claims that, under one element of the Patriot Act, it is not still doing so. Following that, Senator Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (giving her likely an expanded knowledge set compared to other senators), directly stated that the NSA does track location data. What odds would you lay that more is going to come out concerning the NSA tracking the location of our every phone call? In other news, Senator Feinstein today a reform bill in the Senate that would end the phone metadata surveillance program.
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Google Acquires YC-Backed Flutter, A Gesture Recognition Technology Startup, For Around $40M
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013
| 10
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Glass, Android and other products may soon be picking up more Kinect-style gesture features: the company has bought , a Y Combinator-backed startup that focuses on gesture recognition technology. Its first and only product — an app that provides gesture detection and recognition from standard webcam devices — will remain live and operational, the company says. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we have heard that the price was around $40 million. Flutter confirmed the news on its , where it said it will continue to offer its app — it currently has a Mac app — while it also works on research at Google. “We are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google’s passion for 10x thinking, and we’re excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey,” Navneet Dalal, one of the co-founders, writes. (Nice gaming reference, Navneet!) The full note follows below. That (which, btw, added Chrome support in ) clearly struck a chord, with downloads in more than 90 countries, reaching the top-five apps in the Mac App Store in its first two weeks of launch in some 30 of those, and number 1 in 14. It had around 1 million users on desktop. Flutter had been planning to launch a new product in August, we understand, but that plan abruptly got delayed. Today’s news gives us a clue why. What was that product? Likely a Windows version, which was already in private alpha; or an enhanced Mac version with more features — which was also in the works, as Dalal and his co-founder Mehul Nariyawala to Colleen last year. Flutter was in the YC winter class of 2012, and had raised $1.4 million in seed funding from , , and , along with and a handful of individual angel investors. Gesture technology is a big area these days, with services such as those from Microsoft and the Kinect, along with other products like the sensor bringing the concept into the mainstream. Others that are also investing further in gesture technology include . Apple, meanwhile, has yet to make a move here but there have been rumors that it will, too. It’s unclear if Google will keep Flutter working on standalone apps, or whether the technology will get integrated further into its own software and hardware. For now, a Google spokesperson had this to say: “We’re really impressed by the Flutter team’s ability to design new technology based on cutting-edge research. We look forward to supporting and collaborating on their research efforts at Google.” Here’s the full note from Flutter announcing the sale and a video of Flutter from its launch: When we started three years ago, our dream to build a ubiquitous and power-efficient gesture recognition technology was considered by many as just “a dream”, not a real possibility. Since then, we have strived to build the best machine vision algorithms and a delightful user experience. Even after we launched our first app, we didn’t stop our research; your enthusiasm and support pushed us to continue to do better. We’re inspired everyday when we hear, for example, that Flutter makes you feel like a superhero — because any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic, right? Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google’s passion for 10x thinking, and we’re excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey. We’d like to extend a special thank you to all of our users; your feedback and evangelism inspire us every day. Flutter users will be able to continue to use the app, and stay tuned for future updates.
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How Microsoft Built The Cameras In The Upcoming Kinect
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Alex Wilhelm
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Earlier this week I traveled to Microsoft’s Mountain View campus to play with the company’s new Kinect sensor. While there I met with a few of the team’s engineers to discuss how they had built the new device. Up front, two things: The new Kinect sensor is far cooler than I expected. Also, I touched an Xbox One. The story of the Kinect device, both its first and second generations, has been a favorite Microsoft narrative for some time, as it fuses its product teams and basic research group in a way that demonstrates the potential synergy between the two. The new Kinect sensor is a large improvement on its predecessor. Technically it has a larger field of vision, more total pixels, and a higher resolution that allows it to track the wrist of a child at 3.5 meters, Microsoft told me. I didn’t have a kid with me, so I couldn’t verify that directly. It also contains a number of new vision modes that the end user won’t see, but are useful for developers who want to track the human body more precisely and with less interference. They include a depth mode, an infrared view, and new body modeling tools to track muscle use and body part orientation. When in its depth image mode, acting as a radar of sorts, each of the 220,000 pixels that the Kinect sensor supports records data independently. The result is a surprisingly crisp mapping of the room you are in. The new Kinect also contains a camera setting that is light invariant, in that it works the same whether there is light in the room or not. In practice this means you can Kinect in the dark, and that light pollution – say, aiming two floodlights directly at the sensor – doesn’t impact its performance. I did get to test that directly, and it worked as promised. No, I don’t know the candlepower of the light array we used, but it was enough to suck staring into directly. So, developers can now accept motion data from the Kinect without needing to worry about the user being properly lit, or having their data go to hell if someone turns on the overhead light, or time sets the sun. The new Kinect also supports new joints in its skeletal tracking, in case you need to better watch a user’s hands move about. The smallest object the first Kinect could detect was 7.5 centimeters. The new Kinect, while executing a 60 percent larger field of view, can see things as small as 2.5 centimeters. And it can track up to six people, from two before. The first Kinect device became the in history. Its existence helped keep the Xbox 360 relevant, even as the console aged. Microsoft is releasing a new Kinect sensor with its upcoming Xbox One. Both go on sale November 22 and will compete with Sony’s soon-to-be-released PlayStation 4. For a one-year generational update, I feel like the new Kinect is worthy progress on its predecessor. I sat down with Microsoft’s Sunil Acharya, Travis Perry, and Eyal Krupka to track the origins of how the new hardware was designed. It’s a short story of collaboration, akin to what came together for the original Kinect device. Most basically, Microsoft wanted to place a “time-of-flight” camera into the new Kinect. Such a device works by measuring the time it takes for light that it emits to return. Given that speed is a bit quick, and the new Kinect wanted to absorb a massive field of data in real-time, challenges cropped up. Two of our aforementioned Softies, Eyal from Microsoft Research’s Israel group, and Travis from the mother corporation’s Architecture and Silicon Management team, collaborated on turning time-of-flight from a more academic exercise into a commercial product. Input came from what Microsoft described to me as “multiple groups” to improve the camera. Working as a cross-team group, the time-of-flight problem was essentially solved, but it led to another set of issues: data overload and blur. In short, with 6.5 million pixels needing processing each second, and a requirement to keep processing loads low to ensure strong Xbox One performance, the Kinect group was pretty far from out of the soup. Algorithms were then developed to reduce processor hit, ‘clean up’ edge data to prevent objects in the distance from melting into each other, and to help cut down on motion blur. According to Eyal, executing those software tasks was only made possible by having the camera “set” earlier in the process. If the hardware hadn’t been locked, the algorithms would have learned from imperfect or incorrect data sets. You want those algorithms to learn on the final data, and not on noisy data, or beta data, he explained. That hardware is multi-component, including an aggregation piece (Microsoft was vague, but I think it is a separate chip) that collects the sensor data from the Kinect and pools it. Microsoft declined to elaborate on where the “cleaning” process takes place. I suspect that as the firm noted on its need to keep processing cycles low for the incoming data, it at least partially takes place on the console itself. The end result of all of the above is a multi-format data feed for the developer to use in any way they wish. Microsoft spends heavily on the more than 1,000 developers and Ph.D.s that it employs at Microsoft Research who are free to pursue long-term research that isn’t connected to current products. But it does like to share when those lengthy investments lead to knowledge that it applies to commercial devices, such as the Kinect. What to take from this? Essentially that even before the re-org, Microsoft had at least some functional intra-party collaboration in place. And, that a neat device came out of it. The next challenge for the team? Make it smaller.
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TC Cribs: ModCloth, Where Playing Dress-Up Is All In A Day’s Work
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Colleen Taylor
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Welcome back to a new episode of , the video series that steps inside the gates of the hottest technology companies around to get a good look at the places, people, and oftentimes pets behind the web’s most popular products. It’s not often that visiting a tech startup inspires you to amp up your wardrobe. But that’s exactly the feeling you get when you step inside the headquarters of , the San Francisco-based company that sells vintage inspired womenswear. At ModCloth HQ, the number of cute dresses per employee is much higher than at the average startup — and with photoshoots for the ModCloth site going on daily, everyone has some real incentive to look their best. Check out the video embedded above to meet ModCloth’s adorable canine mascot Winston, scope out the staff’s 24/7 clothing swap rack, watch me kick CEO butt at Connect 4 (hey, no one said winning had to be fair and square), and more.
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Facebook And Cisco Let Brick-&-Mortars Demand Customers Check-In To Get Wi-Fi
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Josh Constine
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Restaurants, hotels, and other businesses are spending a lot to provide customers with free Wi-Fi. Today Facebook and Cisco roll out a way to help any brick-and-mortar recoup its costs by asking users to check-in to get Internet access. Those who oblige get dropped on the business’ Facebook Page, and their anonymous, aggregate demographic info is passed to the merchant. The Cisco and Facebook partnership extends that began running with 25 businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area last year. The test showed that businesses tripled their daily check-in count by using the system. Now it’s rolling out so any business in the US can use it. Here’s how it works. Merchants use the existing router and broadband subscription they pay for. They integrate the “Cisco CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi” software, which creates a special landing page for anyone trying to access the business’ Wi-Fi. Instead of having to wait in line to get a password they might type in wrong, customers simply connect to the business’ Wi-Fi network through their laptop or mobile device. They’re strongly encouraged to “Check in for free Internet.” That check-in generates a News Feed story shown to their friends, bringing extra business to the merchant. Once connected without having to type in a password, users are dumped on the business’ Facebook Page where they can Like it or see recent marketing messages. Facebook also provides the merchant with the aggregate ages, genders, and other demographic info of those who check in, but in an anonymized format without names attached. Say a user doesn’t want to share their location. The head of Facebook’s Wi-Fi initiative Eric Tseng tells me they can make the check-in private “if they don’t want to spam friends.” And if customers don’t have a Facebook account at all or are a little paranoid…and have good eyesight, they’ll find a small link at the bottom the landing page to connect without Facebook. Tseng sees the program as a win for everyone involved. Customers get easy Wi-Fi access without fumbling with a password. Businesses get word-of-mouth marketing, Facebook engagement, and analytics that justify the cost of providing Wi-Fi, and Cisco gets its name out there. Facebook gets a ton out of the program, too, including: If the Facebook Wi-Fi program gains steam, it could be easier to find an Internet connection around town since offering it won’t be such a costly burden to businesses. Unfortunately, less savvy users might not realize they don’t have to broadcast their current coordinates to get hooked up. Some people might actually enjoy helping friends discover cool cafes by checking in. But for everyone else, just read the gray print and the web is yours, no strings attached.
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Dell Tries To Crack The Android Tablet Code (Again) With The Venue 7 & 8
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Chris Velazco
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Dell rounded up a slew of journalists in New York today to show off a number of new gadgets — including some shiny new XPS notebooks and convertibles — but the company is finally making good on promises of a big tablet push. And among that portfolio of tablets are two low-cost options that run Android. Really, Dell? I spent a little hands-on time with the new $149 Venue 7 and $179 Venue 8, and came away more than a little puzzled. Dell’s press presentation was pretty light on details, but it soon became clear that the differences between the two were minor. The Venue 7 and 8 feature 7 and 8-inch IPS displays running at 1280 x 800 respectively, 2GB of system RAM, and 4G connectivity options if you’re hard up for some roadside internet access. The only other differences of note were the clock speeds of the Intel Clover Trail chips nestled inside the tablets — the 7-inch model has a processor clocked at 1.6GHz while its big brother features a slightly snappier 2.0GHz chip. Throw in a largely untouched build of Android 4.2.2 and you’re off to the races. But what was it like to actually use them? Long story short: not bad, but far from great at the same time. They at least feel nicer than you’d expect — I think they’re more comfortable to grip than the Nexus 7 — and they’re fetching in a simplistic sort of way. And thanks to Intel’s chips and the 2GB of RAM, I didn’t have too many complaints as I fired up apps and tried to load some websites either.
The biggest issue I noticed was a lack of sensitivity on some of the devices while I poked and prodded at their screens: it occasionally took multiple attempts to successfully bring up the App Launcher or return to the home screen. I suspect that’s all because of non-final hardware or software, but it was alarming enough that it managed to sour me on the experience a hair. The Venues’ cameras were awfully iffy too, though that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Images looked grainy and undersaturated, so stick to your smartphone and you’ll be better off. Those minor misses are either addressable through software or just par for the course for tablets in this price range. The big problem that Dell will almost assuredly deal with is that fact that these two tablets are totally and utterly adequate. They’ll get the job done, and by all accounts, they’ll get the job with with a minimum of headaches. But for whatever reason, Dell seems to think that a strictly solid Android tablet will be enough to make them a notable player in the space, and I’m not convinced they’re right. Now it should be noted that Dell isn’t exactly a stranger to the Android tablets either — it launched the Streak 7 tablet back in mid-2011, and I guess you could count the even older Streak 5 as the damage-prone precursor to today’s phablet craze. The market was younger and less crowded then, but Dell still wasn’t equipped for success. And Dell is far from the only PC maker trying to make a splash with a low-cost Android tablet either, since HP outed its cheap (and largely underwhelming Slate) tablet earlier this year. Throw in some forthcoming Tegra 4-powered devices built on NVIDIA’s Tegra Note design, new Kindle Fires from Amazon, and Google’s stalwart Nexus 7, and you’ve got a taste of just how crowded the tiny tablet market is. I get that Dell is trying to lay a foundation here. If they’re lucky, this Venue business could cement the Dell brand as a tablet player that’s truly worth its salt. And looking past all that “blah” that the Venue 7 and 8 bring to the table, I get the sense that Dell is serious about making a name for itself in the tablet space this time. I’m looking forward to putting the review units through their paces on the off-chance Dell managed to to pump some extra into these things — hopefully they decide to step outside the box for their inevitable followups.
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Tesla Takes A Breather Passing $184/Share Due To Outstanding Convertible Debt, Warrants
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Alex Wilhelm
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Tesla has been on a tear in 2013, showing its first quarterly profit, raising $1 billion in cash, paying off its government loan, and enjoying a more than 400% gain in its share price year to date. Today, however, Tesla slipped 6%, settling around the $180 per share mark. After having risen to a 52 week high of $191.83, Tesla has eased. A good portion of the slip can likely be attributed to some early terms that got outdated quickly due to Tesla’s meteoric rise. There actually appear to be a few factors, including and its stock price reaching levels that impact the convertible notes and warrants that Tesla sold in May. At that point in time, Tesla traded for under $100 per share. In its , Tesla spelled out its fundraising activity during the quarter, including the sale of 4.5 million shares and the raising of $660 million in convertible debt. About 45% of those funds were used to repay a Federal loan, and a fee for repaying the debt ahead of schedule. The convertible debt carries a 1.5% coupon rate, which is quite low, and on the lower end of expectations set at the time of sale. As , the size of the convertible note offering was increased twice to $600 million, a figure that could rise to $660 million if “underwriters purchase additional shares.” They did. So, the full tally of new cash for Tesla tipped past the $1 billion mark. Then its stock continue to rise. Here’s Tesla on how it raised the set up the convertible debt to avoid potential dilution. Recall that Tesla traded for $100 per share at the time of its issuance: To mitigate the potential dilution impact from the issuance of convertible debt to our common shareholders, we also entered into a call spread to increase the effective conversion price from $125 to $184 per share. The call spread allows us to avoid incremental dilution from the convertible debt until our common share price climbs past $184. Tesla recently went past the $184 per share mark, and then saw its stock fall. The company also issued warrants this May – the time of the share sale and debt issuance – that had a strike price of, you guessed it, $184.84. Those warrants are for 5.3 million shares, or around $1 billion at current valuation. So, it seems that Telsa didn’t anticipate its stock to perform as it has, and therefore the financial controls – likely set up for the long-term, given that the convertible debt were not due until 2018 – became somewhat moot. Crossing the $184 mark, Tesla’s stock unlocked investor agency, pushing its share price down. Add to that the fact that Tesla has had an incredible run over the summer that some are citing as perhaps optimistic and we could be seeing more pullback over the next few weeks. Image Credit: / Flickr CC
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Gay Gets Better (And More Targeted): Say Hello To The Next Generation Of Grindr
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Jordan Crook
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Boys who prefer kissing other boys will be glad to know that Grindr, the location-based hookup app focused on gay men, has today released a huge update with a handful of new features and a brand new look and feel, including an all-new logo. To date, has over 7 million downloads worldwide, with over one billion chat messages sent each month and 1 billion photos sent every two months. This is up from of 2012, with 1 million daily uniques, though founder clarifies that between 2.5 and 3 million of those downloads are monthly active users. In terms of conversion rates, Simkhai merely states that “a good percentage” of users upgrade to the Grindr Xtra subscription model, and reminds that Grindr has made its way into the top 15 highest grossing apps in the past five years, number one in social. “When I look at most of the top 20 highest grossing apps they don’t seem sustainable,” said Simkhai. “They’re mostly games. The fact that we’re there is a testament to what we’ve become to gay men, a basic utility.” In terms of revenue, 75 percent of Grindr’s income comes from Grindr Xtra, and the other 25 percent comes from Grindr’s advertising business, which is split evenly between ad network-powered ads and in-house ads sold by the sales team. As a long-time and regular user, Simkhai felt that a huge revamp was in order for the five-year old app, which has remained mostly unchanged over the course of its life. The update brings with it a number of changes, most notably the introduction of Tribes (a way to categorize yourself beyond just gay). These let users self-identify with various tribes (which include Bear, Clean-cut, Daddy, Discreet, Geek, Jock, Leather, Otter, Poz, Rugged, Trans and Twink). is using this form of identity expression to make money. Free Grindr users can only identify with one tribe, whereas Grindr Xtra members can choose up to three. After years of being able to get away with just giving the user access to gay guys nearby, Simkhai has expressed that users are looking for something more specific than just gay. “Now there are so many guys, people would rather spend their time finding what they’re really looking for,” said Simkhai. According to the founder, Tribes are more about increasing speed and optimization of the app as a tool rather than facing competition from niche-based apps like Scruff and Recon.
Another notable change is the addition of filters, letting users view a feed based on their own specific interests. These filters include age, height, weight, ethnicity, etc., but regular unpaid Grindr users only have access to three filters at a time. Paid users, on Grindr Xtra, have access to as many filters as they want. Before this revamp, users were employing the block button (originally conceived as a safety feature) as a filtering tool. Simkhai explains that users have been asking for a filtering tool explicitly and through behavior. Beyond that, users can include more information in their Profile, like body type, tribe, their “looking for” profile, and links to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The feed itself, past having far more customization thanks to filters, has also been revamped to show larger thumbnails for each potential hookup, and an auto-scroll system. The update also introduces a brand new chat inbox, letting users see all their past messages, delete individual lines of chat, and view chats from favorites. “Our biggest focus with Grindr is now on speed,” said Simkhai. “There are lot of guys on it now, and they all want it to be faster. So that’s what we’ve done with the next-gen version.” To check out the new version of Grindr, head on over to the . For Android users, the update should be available soon.
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RadiumOne Finalizes IPO Plan As It Hits ~$100M In AdTech Revenue
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Josh Constine
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RadiumOne is completing the selection of which bankers will underwrite its IPO, which it plans to secretly file for soon, according to a source close to its Wall Street negotiations. The advertising tech company is said to have nearly $100 million in yearly revenue, and hopes to draft off of successful IPOs by fellow adtech provider RocketFuel and Twitter, which also filed a secret S-1. provides businesses with marketing and analytics tools that generate data that the startup uses to target ads for its clients. It earns a cut of the advertising spend for accurately targeting the ads to potential and existing customers on the web, mobile, video, and Facebook. It’s said to be profitable, unlike some other players in the space that are still burning venture capital. The company has raised from , , and . CEO Gurbaksh Chahal, who recently pleaded not guilty to allegations of assault, provided the company’s initial funding with proceeds from previously selling the startups and for $300 million and $40 million respectively. RadiumOne’s funding is about half that of competing adtech firm last month and has seen its share price nearly double on the public market. Its success inspired RadiumOne to speed up its own IPO. Our source says the schedule is to firm up which bankers will back the IPO and then monitor market conditions, especially the public debuts of Twitter and another ad tech startup called Criteo that filed last month. When things look right, it will confidentially file its S-1 thanks to the JOBS Act and go public after that. RadiumOne declined to comment on these details. RadiumOne’s public offering is timed to capitalize on Wall Street’s increased support for tech IPOs as of late. After Facebook stumbled out of the gates last year and saw half its value evaporate, it was dark days for IPOs for a while. But $FB has now blown past its $38 IPO price to hit $50. Meanwhile, adtech firms that got beat up when they entered the public markets like Tremor and Marin Software have been clawing their way back up since July. It’s becoming clearer that TV ad dollars will shift to digital and that businesses can earn money on mobile ads, so RadiumOne seems to think it’s ready for the spotlight.
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Court Docs Reveal Reputed Silk Road Founder’s Alleged Murder-For-Hire Plot
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Matt Burns
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For two and a half years, Silk Road was the Deep Web’s worst-kept secret. The underground site was infamous for drug trafficking, gun running and murder for hire – a veritable rogues gallery for underground dealers. Since launching in 2011, the site generated over $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions. It was one of the not-so-secret successes of the underground web. The and the founder, Ross William Ulbricht, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, soliciting murder, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing. It is the end of a strange era in computer security when one man and a team of salesmen, programmers, and cryptographers kept the government at bay for two solid years. The court filing reveals in explicit terms the lengths Ulbricht’s site went to ensure its users’ anonymity and details the violent means he allegedly used to protect himself and the site. . What follows are excerpts from the court document compiling the notes of Special Agent Christopher Tarbell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Incidentally, Silk Road users, take note: Ulbricht instituted a multi-layer system that protected your identity, but it wasn’t perfect as it seems Silk Road vendors were the weak link in the system. Read on for more details. Tarbell explains in detail Silk Road’s transaction process. Silk Road uses a so–called “tumbler” to process Bitcoin transactions in a manner designed to frustrate the tracking of individual transactions through the Blockchain. According to the Silk Road wiki, Silk Road’s tumbler “sends all payments through a complex, semi–random series of dummy transactions, . . . making it nearly impossible to link your payment with any coins leaving the site.” In other words, if a
buyer makes a payment on Silk Road, the tumbler obscures any link between the buyer’s Bitcoin address and the vendor’s Bitcoin address where the Bitcoins end up — making it fruitless to use the Blockchain to follow the money trail involved in the transaction, even if the buyer’s and vendor’s Bitcoin addresses are both known. Based on my training and experience, the only function served by such “tumblers” is to assist with the laundering of criminal proceeds. Special Agent Tarbell acknowledges that Bitcoins are an anonymous, decentralized form of electronic currency, existing entirely on the Internet and not in any physical form. He also notes, Every communication sent through Tor is bounced through numerous relays within the network, and wrapped in numerous layers of encryption, such that it is practically impossible to trace the communication back to its true originating IP address. All Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public ledger know as the “Blockchain,” stored on the peer-to-peer network on which the Bitcoin system operates. The Blockchain serves to prevent a user from spending the same Bitcoins more than once. However, the Blockchain only reflects the movement of funds between anonymous Bitcoin addresses and therefore cannot by itself be used to determine the identities of the persons involved in the transactions. Only if one knows the identities associated with each Bitcoin address involved in a set of transactions is it possible to meaningfully trace funds through the system. Tarbell alleges that Silk Road used a system that held Bitcoin payments in escrow until the transaction was complete. This was done through user accounts and an Silk Road bank. He explains that every user must have a Silk Road account, Silk Road Bitcoin address, and these address are stored on wallets maintained on servers controlled by Silk Road. After thus funding his account, the user can then make purchases from Silk Road vendors. When the user purchases an item on Silk Road, the Bitcoins needed for the purchase are held in escrow (in a wallet maintained by Silk Road) pending completion of the transaction. Once the transaction is complete, the user’s Bitcoins are transferred to the Silk Road Bitcoin address of the vendor involved in the transaction. The vendor can then withdraw Bitcoins from the vendor’s Silk Road Bitcoin address, by sending them to a different Bitcoin address, outside Silk Road, such as the address of a Bitcoin exchanger who can cash out the Bitcoins for real currency. However, the aforementioned tumbler used by the Silk Road makes it “nearly impossible to link your payment with any coins leaving the site.” Tarbell explains Ulbricht’s continuing efforts to protect the identity of vendors. They were, after all, netting him hefty commissions from the sale of illegal substances. On February 27, 2012, DPR posted a message announcing “a new feature called Stealth Mode,” targeted at the
site’s “superstar vendor[s]” who consider themselves at particular “risk of becoming a target for law enforcement.” The posting explained that the listings of a vendor operating in “stealth mode” would not be visible to users searching or browsing the site. Instead, only users who already knew the specific address of the vendor’s page on Silk Road would be able to access the vendor’s listings, by traveling to the vendor’s page directly. This posting again evidences not only that DPR has been aware that the vendors on Silk Road are engaged in illicit trade, but also that he has specifically designed the site to facilitate such trade. Perhaps most chilling was the evidence of murder for hire. Ulbricht himself requested murders and allegedly paid for them using Bitcoin – one murder cost a little under 2,000 BTC. Special Agent Tarbell alleges that Ulbricht himself used the service at least once to protect his interest in Silk Road. The internal communication also reveals that vendors apparently kept a list of users, showing that while Silk Road was secure, the vendors themselves could be compromised. For example, DPR’s private–message communications from March and April 2013 reveal at least one occasion when solicited a murder-for-hire of a certain Silk Road user, who was attempting to extort money from DPR at the time, based on a threat to release the identities of thousands of Silk Road users. Specifically, the messages reveal the following: Beginning on March 13, 2013, a Silk Road vendor known as began sending threats to DPR through
Silk Road’s private message system. In these messages, stated that he had a long list of real names and
addresses of Silk Road vendors and customers that he had obtained from hacking into the computer of another, larger Silk Road vendor. Threatened to publish the information on the Internet unless DPR gave him $500,000, which indicated he needed to pay off his narcotics suppliers. On March 15, 2013, provided DPR a sample of the usernames, addresses, and order information he
intended to leak. Also, as proof that he had obtained the data from the vendor whose computer he claimed to have hacked, supplied the vendor’s username and password on Silk Road so that DPR could verify it. At Ulbricht’s request, the vendor contacted him to “work out something with them.” Over the course of several communications, the court documents reveal that DPR indicated that he did not owe the accuser any money and viewed him as a “liability”, saying “I wouldn’t mind if he was executed….I’m not sure how much you already know about the guy, but I have the following info and am waiting on getting his address.” Ulbricht provided a name for the intended victim, saying that he lived in White Rock, British Columbia, Canada, with “Wife 3 kids.” DER added: “Let me know if it would be helpful to have his full address.” After being threatened again, Ulbricht apparently requested a bounty be put on the accuser’s head and inquiring about the appropriate amount. After a bit of negotiation and Ulbricht stating “Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k”, the two parties settled on 1,670 Bitcoins, or about $150,000. Several hours later on March 31, 2013, redandwhite wrote back: received the payment. . . . We know where he is. He’ll be grabbed tonight. I’ll update you.” Approximately 24 hours later, redandwhite updated DPR, stating: “Your problem has been taken care of. . . . Rest easy though, because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.” Ulbricht has been indicted in a New York court on charges including narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, soliciting murder and money laundering conspiracy. Silk Road was seized by the FBI today, and replaced with an FBI notice. However, the Silk Road forums are still operating.
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LinkedIn’s Mobile Update Telegraphs Its Interest In Endorsement Data
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Matthew Panzarino
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LinkedIn has updated its with the ability to create endorsements for your connections right from your smartphone or tablet. The move demonstrates how important LinkedIn feels that this endorsement data is to its growing trove of signals. The app has also been updated to look more ‘iOS 7-ready’ and has a new on-boarding guide for users that haven’t used the mobile app before. The LinkedIn newsreader app Pulse for iPhone also gets a refresh which adds background downloading and a new look on iOs 7. But the biggest change is the emphasis on endorsements in the main LinkedIn app, and the additional connective tissue that this adds to its products on all platforms. In a the new ability today, LinkedIn positions endorsements as something that can and should be done on the fly. Previously, these kinds of personal recommendations have only been accessible from the web and were a fairly involved affair. You could draw a fairly clear connection between endorsements and the references you see on a resume. Thorough, in-depth explanations of why someone is good at what they do. Adding them to mobile, along with the language in the release, indicates that LinkedIn wants to ramp up the gathering of these endorsements. Faster, lighter notes about why someone should be considered an expert sounds like a good supplemental source of data that LinkedIn can use to index and recommend workers. Though endorsements have been around since late last year — and LinkedIn says that over 2B of them have been given to day — adding them to mobile introduces a new dynamic. In some ways this sounds like with developers and tech folks for a while. Geeklist allows users to create ‘brag cards’ of achievements and accomplishments that can be summed up in just a couple of sentences. If LinkedIn is able to turn endorsements into this kind of quick-fire card stack that can be flipped through by users and indexed by LinkedIn itself, it might have something interesting on its hands. Specifically, a source of endorsements that’s more human and parseable. LinkedIn has gained a reputation for being overly complex and dry. A layer of humanity and shareable ‘brag points’ could do something to offset that. These moves fit in with LinkedIn’s efforts to make on mobile. Messaging services for networking and content are two clear facets of LinkedIn’s current product push, but this seems to dovetail nicely with the shifting perception of LinkedIn as a job search site, rather than a ‘connection’ resource.
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CardFlight, The Stripe For Real-World Payments, Has Raised $1.6 Million From ff Venture Capital
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Ryan Lawler
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was founded to enable any developer to create his or her own branded app and take in-person credit card payments from it. To accomplish this, it’s raised $1.6 million in funding as it moves to support more customers with its card reader and mobile SDKs. The company received $1.6 million in funding that was led by ff Venture Capital, with additional participation from Payment Ventures, Apostolos Apostolakis, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Plug & Play Ventures, and Great Oaks Venture Capital. Along with the funding, ffVC founding partner John Frankel will join the company’s board. The team behind launched CardFlight as a way to provide small businesses with their own way to build apps that accept in-person credit card payments. Just as Stripe provides an SDK for payments that happen online and through mobile apps, CardFlight provides tools enabling developers to take and process payments. The difference is that CardFlight focuses on the 90 percent of credit card transactions that still happen in the real world. While other companies like Square and PayPal have provided businesses with the ability to collect payments with mobile credit card readers, businesses are reliant on the provider’s apps to process those payments. CardFlight provides its clients with card readers, and also gives them an SDK to build payment processing into their own branded apps. CardFlight has SDKs available for both iOS and Android platforms, and connects with 23 different payment processors. The company’s gateway also allows clients to connect apps with their own internal CRM, inventory management, fulfillment, and reporting and analytics tools. While it’s focused on helping businesses that want to create their own apps, CardFlight has also been used by several vertical solutions providers — that is, third-party developers who build apps for companies that don’t have the technical know-how to do so themselves. That extends the potential reach for CardFlight to provide white-labeled in-person payments for clients. CardFlight has seen tremendous demand for its service since launch: It has hundreds of app developers signed up on its waiting list, according to CEO Derek Webster. The funding will be used to grow its team — currently at seven employees — to quickly ramp up and support more potential customers. Growing the team will not only give it the ability to catch more clients, but also will enable it to diversify its own products and to expand its reach into new verticals. While it’s been particularly strong with event organizers like , it sees opportunities in a wide range of use cases.
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Field Testing Microsoft’s New Surface 2 And Surface Pro 2 Tablet Hybrids
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft has two new Surface tablets that are currently up for preorder, as well as a crop of refreshed accessories. I’ve had the Surface 2, Surface Pro 2, and new Touch and Type covers for a few days now, and can report on their performance. The above video clip has all the hardware specifics that you could possibly want. TechCrunch’s , including an , is worth reading if you have the time. We’ll start with a brief overview of the two devices, and then talk each over each individually. The Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 are a doubling down on the bets that Microsoft made with its first generation hardware: Tablets with kickstands and attachable keyboards that serve as a case. From that we can infer that Microsoft is confident in its hardware ‘package.’ The Surface Pro 2 has been incrementally improved in a number of ways, but its core value proposition, when compared to its predecessor, is greatly extended battery life, which was the chief complaint that Microsoft cited as guidance when it explained its building of the device. Holistically, the Surface 2 is a more improved device, with changes to its hardware stretching from its screen, cameras, battery life, casing, and so forth. It’s a truly great, light device. Whilst as Starbucks — doing requisite road testing of the Surface 2: low power, bad Wi-Fi and light, loud noises, etc. are great friction for getting to know the bones of a computer — it appeared that I had the most attractive device in the shop. The new Touch Cover is a dramatic improvement over the original Touch Cover. If you felt unsure typing on the first generation, the second will be worth checking out. The new Type Cover has a smaller improvement delta over its preceding version. Still, if you demand moving keys, it’s a fine option. That’s the brass tacks of it. Let’s dig in. The Surface 2 is the more important of the two Surface tablets. The Surface RT was a sales disappointment. Keep in mind that potential success of Windows RT is essentially now predicated on the success of the Surface tablet that runs it. The new Surface 2 must help establish Microsoft as an OEM of note, drive revenue for the company, slow the sagging of the PC market as a whole, and, just to add to the pressure on the little computer, prop up half of Microsoft’s recent OS bet. So, how does the device stack up in use? The Surface 2 is a fantastic device right up until you run into the quirks that Microsoft has not yet managed to completely remove from Windows 8.1. Consider the following: I needed to use Word to write a post while testing the tablet. This is a perfect use case for the Surface 2, in that I was on the go, needed to ‘get shit done,’ and had a hard surface to set the device upon. The Surface 2’s hardware (with new Touch Cover) was great. But Windows 8.1 got confused and displayed the desktop in a very odd manner. Word wouldn’t fully expand across the screen, filling it by about 60 percent and no more. I closed, reopened, resized, and so forth, but the desktop stayed skewed and Word wouldn’t open. After some frustration, I flipped the tablet to a different viewing mode, and then back to normal. That jogging of Windows 8.1 solved the problem. The Surface 2 is fast, benefiting from a speedier quad-core ARM chip. Windows 8.1 doesn’t lag due to processor load, though the operating system can sometimes confuse itself. Its screen, now sporting 1080p, is crisp and attractive. I’m a bit blind, but it looks as nice to me as any iPad screen that I have used. Speakers can be a small issue for most, as we all now spend the bulk of our time wearing headphones, but having improved speakers when you need them is nice, and Microsoft came through on that front. I was somewhat dubious that I would give more than a third of a damn that the kickstand has a new angular position. This is why I don’t design products. The new, lower kickstand angle is a fine addition to the Surface line, and I would estimate that around 90 percent of the time that when I was using the Surface 2, it was in the lower kickstand position. The new color of the Surface 2 is also quite nice, and does, thank heavens, avoid fingerprints. The Surface RT, and both generations of Surface Pro, attract and collect fingerprints as if they were planning to gather data for the NSA. A small, but welcome change. The Surface 2, like the Surface RT, is slim and light and feels great to carry around. When carrying the two around the city, I didn’t bother to bring a backpack – it felt better to just hold it and wander. The Surface 2 is a better device than the Surface RT. The largest issues that the Surface RT suffered from were outside of its ability to solve: App density in the Windows Store and the quirks of Windows 8. The Surface 2 combines a wealth of hardware improvements, married to Windows 8.1, and far more available applications. So is it good enough? I think that the Surface 2, provided that Microsoft markets it properly and builds the correct amount of inventory, will be a moderate success for the company. There is a bit of hangover from the Windows 8 launch cycle that will hold the Surface 2 back, but that doesn’t stop it from being an attractive, innovative piece of hardware whose software foundation is rapidly – at last – improving. You already know everything that you need to know about the Surface Pro 2: that it has longer battery life, more storage options, and the ability to tack on up to 8 gigabytes of RAM. The Surface Pro 2 builds on what helped the Surface Pro sell decently: providing a full Windows experience, fused to Touch and Type cover technology, helping you work on the go. Microsoft felt no need to tinker with the core value proposition that worked for the previous generation, so it busted hump to boost the battery life by around 60 percent (use case depending, of course). The guts of the device have been rebuilt almost from the ground up, so I don’t want to sound dismissive, but if you put a Surface Pro 2 and Surface Pro side by side you can easily get them confused. In fact, the most intriguing bits of the Surface Pro 2 come next year, when the Power Cover and Docking Station will be released. Each is designed to make the Surface Pro 2 a cleaner fit into the enterprise landscape. But as I didn’t have access to those add-ons, I can’t provide notes here on their daily use. Will the improved battery life help the Surface Pro 2 sell better than the Surface Pro? Yes. The question is how much better? Microsoft kept the price point of the new Pro on par with the old Pro. If you offer a better device for the same amount of money, it stands to reason that it would sell more units. Briefly, the part of the new line of Surface products and accessories that surprised me the most was the new Touch Cover. The original Touch Cover was pure potential, in that it looked great, but wasn’t quite up to snuff. I felt constantly worried that I was not typing properly, or hard enough, or soft enough, and so forth. The new Touch Cover has something around 14 times as many sensors built into it and improved firmware so that you can screw up, but it doesn’t mind. The result is that the thin – and now backlit – Touch Cover is far better to type on, while retaining the design elements that made it an interesting piece of hardware to begin with. Whether you have a Surface or not, give one of these a whirl. As noted above, the new Type Cover is less dramatically reformed, though its backlit keys and new key travel are both pleasant additions. It’s very hard to discuss the Surface tablets without constantly referencing software, though I tried in the above. The Surface devices are designed to provide the best possible Windows 8.1 experience, and so to use one is to employ Microsoft’s vision of how one should interact with its new operating system. An external facet of this is the deep integration of SkyDrive into Windows 8.1 to better marry the Surface 2 (device) and SkyDrive (service). Microsoft is dishing up 200 free gigabytes of SkyDrive capacity to Surface purchasers. Another example is the front-facing camera in the Surface 2, which is designed to handle low-light settings well, which benefits Skype usage. In this case, again, Microsoft is trying to unite the physical and the digital by providing Skype premium service to people who buy Surface tablets. This all comes together for odd economics: A $449 Surface 2 – that’s its base price, sans a Cover of either variety – comes with SkyDrive storage that retails for $100 yearly (you get two free years), paid Skype service that isn’t that cheap on its own, and the full Office suite. The attached software and service goodies that come with the device rival its cash cost in terms of what you would pay if you purchased each separately. It’s a bizzaro world in which lowering hardware costs are bumping into the prices that Microsoft charges for software, which is something to think about. All told, Microsoft has a far stronger lineup of tablets in play and a vastly improved operating system to support them. If it can’t turn that into a sales improvement over its first generation’s rocky year, it can’t become an OEM, period. But with smart advertising (lots), and proper expectations, the company may do well. I can sum up all the above by saying that if I were heading to a cafe in five minutes, I would probably take the Surface 2 with the new Touch Cover and leave my Macbook Air at home.
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AmEx Partners With VeriFone To Allow NYC Taxi Passengers To Pay For Cab Fares With Rewards Points
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Leena Rao
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Similar to other credit cards, AmEx card holders have been able to use the rewards points they earn for flights hotels, retail purchases and access to concerts and sports events. Today, AmEx is taking this a step further by allowing users to access membership rewards points at point of sale, via a VeriFone integration. In a new partnership announced today, AmEx will allow card holders to use their points to pay for their fare in VeriFone-enabled NYC taxi cabs. We’re told that VeriFone’s in-taxi devices (the screens in the back of taxis that allow you to swipe and pay for your fare via a credit card) process more than 200,000 payments a day in more than 7,000 cabs throughout New York City. At the end of the ride, AmEx card members who have chosen to pay with “Credit” will be prompted by the taxi TV screen to swipe their Card, as usual. After the payment is processed, Card Members who are enrolled with membership rewards will be shown their current point balance, the number of points required to redeem for the ride, and on-screen buttons labeled “Use Points” or “No Thanks.” Card Members that choose “Use Points” will receive on-screen confirmation that the points have been redeemed. If a Card Member chooses “No Thanks,” or does nothing, the payment will be processed as usual. The big takeaway from this integration is the ability to redeem points at point of sale. Considering VeriFone’s widespread use as a point of sale system, you can imagine other integrations that could be rolled out at restaurants, stores and more. No word yet on the next integration, but VeriFone does enable payments in , so perhaps AmEx will expand the partnership beyond New York. A few weeks ago, AmEx debuted a partnership with TripAdvisor to allow members U.S., U.K. and Australia can connect their American Express Cards with their TripAdvisor profiles to post verified AmEx cardmember reviews, access exclusive lists and get special merchant offers. And earlier this year, AmEx announced an to allow cardholders to use hashtags to buy items.
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Ketchuppp Is An App That Wants To Help Friends Catch Up In Person — Not On Facebook
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Natasha Lomas
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Are you spending too much time looking at what your friends are posting on Instagram and Facebook and not enough time hanging out with each other IRL? The founders of Ketchuppp think so. And their answer to this problem is, of course, another app that’s designed to help you meet your buddies when you happen to be near enough to do so. In other words: a proximity-based social networking app. Or a social-mobile-local app if you prefer. It’s not an app that’s about broadcasting your location to all and sundry. Or meeting up with random strangers who share your passion for Vampire Weekend gigs and happen to be nearby (a la ). Or for meeting friends of friends with mutual interests — giving it a narrower focus than U.S. rival . Or an app for meeting potential business leads over a networking lunch (like ). Ketchuppp wants to help you meet up with the people you actually like spending time with on a regular basis (or did before social media ate your social life) — and do so in person, not digitally (so it’s not either). It sets that bar at people you have in your phone’s contacts book. This European Highlight rival has been in the works since January – although its Dutch founders say they came up with the idea in June last year. The and apps were launched in August 2013, backed by €300,000 in self-funding. The funding is coming in part from a social media consulting and concept development company the founders also own, called So-Me Consulting, and from another company, , involved in the project – as the developer. How does Ketchuppp help you engineer quality ‘hanging with yo homies’ time? It does that by running GPS tracking in the background, and pinging you when a friend is nearby — so you can suggest meeting for a quickie catch-up (or “ketch up” — that won’t get old real quick at all). “The idea of Ketchuppp is to be a ‘re-active’ app. You don’t have to look for unexpected encounters yourself. Ketchuppp runs in the background and will send you a notification when a friend is nearby. This is programmed in such a way that there is very minimal battery drain. This was always one of the weak spots of these kind of applications,” it says. “What makes Ketchuppp different from all other social platforms is that we don’t make a connection to any social media platforms at all. Ketchuppp only facilitates encounters with the people from the contact list of your mobile device,” it adds. That means you can sign up with your email if you like, rather than being forced to drag all your Facebook/social media ‘friendship’ baggage with you. The ubiquitous smartphone’s address book has become a neat shortcut for app makers – providing an alternative, ready-made per user contacts network that does not rely on tapping into the social media establishment. Privacy is another focus. The app crucially does not disclose its users’ actual location to anyone — friends or frienemies. ”It only informs you when someone is around. So it is not possible to be surprised by someone who found your exact location on a map. (Like find my friends from Apple.) We respect the privacy of the individual user, both people have to agree on a meeting,” it notes. How nearby a friend needs to be to trigger a notification can be determined by a distance setting within the app. The app also includes three levels of usage so you can broadcast to your buddies or lurk and cherry-pick the friends you want to see.
The three visibility settings are: online, meaning you are visibly using the app and your location will be sent out if a friend passes nearby; hidden, which means you don’t appear as online and your location won’t ping out but you can still see friends’ locations if they pass nearby; and offline, which means not visible, with no pings being sent or received. That’s basically the same as quitting the app except the in-app offline mode is time-limited, so you’ll pop back online again once offline mode expires. Online is the default mode, and if you opt to go hidden or offline the time limit on your privacy can be set to between two and 72 hours (specifically you get: 2, 4, 8, 24 or 72 hour options). If you want more control than that, Ketchuppp lets you block certain people who you never want to have spontaneous catch ups with. If that’s the case you should probably just delete them from your phonebook. (Albeit it does suggest this setting is intended to manage your interactions with family members. You can, after all, choose your friends.) Aside from notifying you when someone you know and want to hang out with is nearby, the app lets you set a status message that’s visible to your friends — to provide a little context around your current mood, say. This is similar to some of the features offered by certain mobile messaging apps. However Ketchuppp is very feature-light in comparison – intentionally so, since it’s clearly keen to minimise time spent in-app. Its focus is on externalising social networking and then monetising the actual socialising that results. “We know the benefits of social media, but we also see the weak spots of it. People are getting addicted and stressed, and don’t know how to handle it. That’s why we created our app. So that people are not only posting on social media about a great day at home, but more importantly, sharing it with their real friends in real life,” it says. On the monetising front, the app pulls local businesses into the mix – suggesting a list of nearby cafes and restaurants where your catch up can take place. Which further explains its external focus. Ultimately this app wants you to pull out your wallet — and buy a drink or two. “We want to give the opportunity to local businesses to make a special offer through Ketchuppp in order to be attractive to potential customers,” it says. “In that way the local business can get more clients through Ketchuppp because of the offer. The company can than also buy higher ranks in the location list.” That’s not its only planned revenue stream. Ketchuppp also intends to charge for the app, although it’s currently free (and presumably would only switch to paid if it gained enough traction to generate demand). Charging is a pretty big gamble with this sort of network-based social tool since its usefulness is intrinsically attached to the extent of its usage. If your friends aren’t using the app, it’s not going to be at all useful for you. And zero Ketchuppp-using friends is currently its problem in my case. Building out a significant user-base to generate momentum is the obvious high hurdle. The app offers a button to click to invite individual contacts to join. While that sort of individual invite mechanism has worked well in the past for growing out mobile messaging networks like BBM, it’ll need a substantial viral network effect to kick in if it’s going to take off. Happily it’s not (currently) using the kind of spammy viral marketing tactics that video chat app . I can confirm Ketchuppp did not mass spam anyone in my contacts book when I signed up. Even if it probably needs to. But then if you’re an app complaining about how digital is dominating real life then acting all spammy to draw attention to yourself would be a tad hypocritical. What it is doing to spread the word is using a variety of offline and online advertising and marketing tactics to try and build an online community. “We are trying to join conversations on radio-stations, TV-shows and newspapers to share our thoughts (and our app) with the world,” it says. “We also give lectures for schools and businesses about the strengths and weak spots of social media and the importance of balancing it with real life contact. And off course we have the invite friend option from your address book within the app.” How are those efforts to gain users going so far? Around two months since the apps launched it has managed to attract around 3,500 to 4,000 active users – and says that’s “growing everyday”. Ultimately Ketchuppp’s makers reckon prevailing attitudes to social media are changing — with more people starting to feel fatigued by the demands to be constantly checking and the intangible rewards of virtually connecting with friends, instead of meeting them in person. With its re-active focus and deliberately streamlined feature-set, it’s positioning itself to capitalise on that tiredness. Whether people are getting bored with Facebook et al. is hard to say for sure. But it’s certainly true that a lot more is going on outside the walls of the big social media fortresses – whether it’s SnapChat’s ephemeral messaging, or the huge growth in dedicated mobile messaging apps that allow for a more intimate kind of one-on-one communication. Such developments suggest there is at least an appetite for a new wave of social apps that do things differently. Ketchuppp has built an app that can tap into that appetite – if it can just get enough people to join in…
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HTC’s CEO Sheds Some Operational Responsibility To Focus On Product Amid Falling Market Share
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today that HTC’s CEO Peter Chou will relinquish some of his daily operational responsibilities to Cher Wang, another of the company’s founders. Chou will use his now freer schedule to focus on HTC’s smartphones. HTC is a . Ascendent during the early boom times of the Android ecosystem, HTC has suffered from bleeding market share, sliding revenue, and a recent nine-figure quarterly loss (USD). Its much-hyped One handset has failed to turn its fortunes. The company is losing money for the first time in its more than decade-long history as a public company. For the three-month period ending August 30, 2012, HTC had around 12.3 percent market share. During the same period in 2013, HTC had . The market might have expanded, lessening the implied unit decline, but HTC is certainly struggling to connect with consumers. Better focus on product could salvage its position in its current war with Samsung. Is Chou being fired? The Financial Times intimates that he is not, describing his move as “temporary.” Chou provided comment to the newspaper, stating that he had taken on “too many things.” Now, he is “very focused.” Without phones that can compete with offerings from companies that control their own platform (Google, Apple, and Microsoft), and produce their own hardware (Google, Apple, and [soon] Microsoft), HTC has little chance of rebound. So, the focus on product is a step in the right direction. If Chou is on the way out, it likely won’t be voluntary. He : “There are a lot of rumors that say I would quit, but I never said that. I’m not going to find another job.”
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Apple Pushes New Version Of OS X Mavericks GM To Quash Last Minute Bugs
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Matthew Panzarino
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The consensus is that Apple currently plans on announcing the details of OS X Mavericks availability and pricing during this . We’re hearing that, in order to kill some last-minute bugs, a quiet update has been made to the previously shipped out to developers. Apple has pushed out updated “Gold Master” versions of its OS before, but it does so very rarely. Once an OS goes to a GM build, it’s a statement that the bits are pretty much ready for public consumption. Most of the time they do not change at all until release. At this point only bugs that could affect first-run experiences or upgraders are likely to be the cause of such a new release. We don’t know exactly what the bugs are, just that this was not a “planned” update and that some last-minute patches were the cause, but that it was also not a mistake. Apple is just getting Mavericks in ship-shape. The number change earlier today, which went from 13A598 to 13A603 if you’re interested in that sort of thing. We had heard that a “new GM” build of Mavericks was inbound, but had assumed it would be a full-on push through Apple’s developer portal. In this case, it has apparently simply changed the build that it’s offering from its servers to the new edition. That would fit with bug fixes that could affect upgraders, as they’ll simply get the new version from the MAS. All of this points to Apple being fairly prepared to announce Mavericks at Tuesday’s event and ship it out to customers fairly shortly thereafter.
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What Games Are: A Farewell To Games Stores
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Tadhg Kelly
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There are sudden goodbyes and there are long goodbyes. In technology and media industries more usually the latter. Entropy sets in slowly, like a cancer or Alzheimers, and little things start unravelling bit by bit until one day you notice how everything changed but you’re not sure why. It’s like that with game retail. No one thing has yet killed it, although everyone who’s anyone has predicted that it will die. And yet it still hangs on in there. I used to work in a shop selling video games to the public in the early 90s and I loved this time of year. It was the exciting phase when your days were busied with selling, advising and talking with customers about new games. You were run off your feet, but not to the insane extent that December would bring. The period I most vividly remember was 1995 when faced off against newcomer Sony’s PlayStation and lost heavily. I remember being a fanboy back then and trying valiantly to push Saturns at everyone. But they all wanted PlayStations because they had been told they were just better. Everybody wanted some new fighter called , or the 3D racing game , or . Game stores used to matter. Aside from the rush to sell copies of to the entire planet, they served an important function for customers. They would often read magazines and come into talk about or try games. We retail assistants would advise parents what games their kids wanted for Christmas, and what to avoid. It was retail, so profit was profit and all the rest of it, but it had its place. Over the subsequent two decades that place has been lost, and of course it’s all the Internet’s fault. The first part to go was the conversation as the magazine-centric culture of games gradually gave way to blog-centric communities and social networks. The second was the actual retailing as people just started ordering things online instead. 10-15 years ago, for example, you started buying your games from Amazon. Today you just download them. But the part where the Christmas customer just buys vouchers or codes to give as gifts hasn’t quite hit yet. Neither has a price advantage. A lot of that has to do with . Many game makers despise the retail arm of the industry because of their perception that stores fleece them blind. In 1995 a few stores used to have a side business going with used games, but not to the extent that they do today. Used games are vital to profitability in retail and every dedicated chain is heavily invested in them. They operate a quasi-rental system where savvy customers get to play many new games by paying for one big game and then trading and topping up to get at all the others. There have been good business reasons for retailers to make this move, mostly to do with the way that costs have gone up while prices have stayed flat. Margins are squeezed on new products, but players still think they’re expensive anyway. $50 for 10 hours of middling entertainment is not good value, but $50 topped up and recycled through half a dozen games is. That maybe delayed the death of gaming retail, as did a couple of other factors. A simple reason is file size. Blockbuster games are huge (filling Blu-ray discs etc.) and not so easy to stream. These days you can buy digitally from Sony but you’re still talking about a download that takes many hours. Another factor is that despite the obvious price advantages of the used-game system, as well as that shown by Steam and the Humble Bundle stores, console platforms still price their digital games far too expensively. Charging $19.99 for a five year-old game just because it’s online disincentivizes users from thinking well of digital when they could just buy a used physical copy for $5. Yet all of these reasons are slowly evaporating. Tablet and mobile games have done a lot to fix the perception that games are objects in the eyes of the ordinary customer. Clouds, game streaming and pre-loading are all attempting to overcome the size issues, while projects to get fiber to all households might remove that practical limit anyway. And while console platforms have attempted to maintain their premium prices for a long time, customers now know that they can expect games more cheaply (even for free) and inevitably they will. The retail death march continues. You might be the player grabbing your games from app stores. You might be a PC gamer grabbing copies of awesome games for 75% off down to your PC. You might be a patron of Nintendo’s eShop, Sony’s PSN store or one of many others. You might be buying your new gaming devices from Amazon. Either way the chances are that you already buy quite a lot of your games in non-physical forms. You’re probably struggling to remember exactly when was the last time you went into a dedicated gaming store. You’re not entirely sure where your nearest one is. You suspect the last time you actually bought a physical game in a shop might have been at a Target. This is the most important year in the games industry in a long time. A lot is riding on the launches of two consoles, with some wondering whether the game console is dying or being reborn. Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have done a great job in acquiring a lot of press interest and setting stellar expectations. Retailers are busy ramping up their bundles (although there’s been some troubling news for those recently) and hoping for a bumper crop after a . But I think it’ll also be the year when the long goodbye speeds up. With new platforms comes new shake-ups of the rules of the industry and, while the new consoles do have disk drives, the likelihood of moving away from retail just gets stronger and stronger. A few years from now when you’re buying or online and playing it there and then you may pause to wonder whatever happened to games stores. You might remember them fondly or wish them good riddance. You’ll notice that everything changed, but not be sure why.
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VCs Try A New Method: Curated Events
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Leena Rao
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VCs have long thrown events for portfolio startups to share knowledge, and learn from each other and from previous successful entrepreneurs. Last year’s Kleiner Perkins featured fireside chats with Bill Gates, Colin Powell and Al Gore. last year included Sergey Brin and Ron Conway, among others. And most other firms hold similar CEO and founder summits for their portfolios. But we’re starting to see a new trend on Sand Hill Road when it comes to events. VC firms are starting to hold curated, topic-based events that include a broader swath of the entrepreneurial community, including non-portfolio companies and founders. Google Ventures and Greylock recently co-sponsored a Product Manager Meetup at Google’s San Francisco office, hosted by GV partner Ken Norton and Greylock partner Josh Elman. Of the 200 or so product managers who attended, 41 percent were from the Google Ventures portfolio, 38 percent were from the Greylock portfolio, and 20 percent came from outside the portfolio. The event itself was created to help attendees learn from some of the leading product minds in consumer tech including Craig Walker (Firespotter), Johanna Wright (Google), Adam Nash (Wealthfront), and Peter Deng (Instagram/Facebook). Kleiner Perkins held an event called 12-200 for a number of both portfolio and non-portfolio founders with startup whisperer and Intuit chairman Bill Campbell. The series was started as a way to focus on issues and challenges that entrepreneurs have when their company is at the stage of 12 to 200 people. Additionally, in a few weeks, the firm will be holding a panel addressing technology and engineering needs for portfolio startups and outside founders and entrepreneurs with partner Michael Abbott, Nest founder Matt Rogers, Flipboard CTO Eric Feng and a few others. With the launch of its new content site Grove, Sequoia Capital announced its new event series “drinkups,” which features a discussion between a Sequoia partner and portfolio founder. The first one, which was sold out, included Roelof Botha and Evernote’s Phil Libin talking about how to price a product. The events themselves are open to non-portfolio startups and founders, but like the Kleiner, Greylock and GV events, these drinkups are a curated, handpicked group of potential and current entrepreneurs. This year, First Round Capital is hosting a quarterly event around the power of design for startups and entrepreneurship that included Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and others. In some cases, VCs are curating these open events around specific business sectors. Greylock is hosting its first conference devoted to marketplaces, called Greymarket, which is an invite-only event that is open to companies and entrepreneurs outside the Greylock portfolio. Greylock partner Reid Hoffman is speaking as well as Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky and eBay CEO John Donahoe. So why are VCs ramping up events? Deal flow is an obvious benefit. The good VCs understand that they can no longer sit on Sand Hill Road, and wait for deals to come to them. Hosting well-curated events is a smart way to meet lots of potential investments at once. But they key benefit to events isn’t building out a new portfolio, but strengthening the existing portfolio of companies (which, in turn, leads to better deal flow). Founders are constantly searching for information and therapy from their peers, and a nicely designed event can be an efficient way to quench both needs at scale. Rather than relying on a VC partner to cross-pollinate the portfolio (“oh, you should totally meet the team at…”), a good event gets the right people in a room, with the right context, and lets the dots connect themselves. Founders won’t just get access to other founders, but to talent, which is becoming a precious and rare resource for startups. Hosting these events, especially for engineers, product and design talent, is a smart way for VC firms to expand their pool of potential candidates for recruiting for their own portfolios. This year, Sequoia held for students from East Coast colleges at Princeton University and in New York City. Students had to apply to attend the conference and were able to see talks from Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Sequoia Partner Bryan Schreier and others. In turn, portfolio startups were able to screen the student attendees during the conference for full-time positions and/or internships. In some cases, VCs are choosing to host events around topics that are outside Silicon Valley or around subjects that are picking up steam as new areas of innovation. In May, Andreessen Horowitz held an invite-only, curated event in that brought together government leaders and Silicon Valley founders to discuss and learn more about the technologies that could change the way government works. In September, A16Z hosted an to bring together investors, researchers and entrepreneurs to talk about the best ways to collaborate on new technologies like robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. All of the events mentioned above have a common thread — they are all curated. These events aren’t open to anyone, and it’s unlikely that the firms will make these events free for all. The theory is that the value of an event is inversely proportional to the size of the audience. While a large event might lend itself better to more business cards in your pocket, a more intimate context gives the two nodes time and space to draw a deeper connection. As far as the guest list goes, most of these events will be oversubscribed, and the challenge will be to bring together the right people in a way that feels fresh and valuable. The key to making good wine is selecting the right grapes. The quality of these events will ultimately be judged by the people that attend. [Images: ]
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With Backing From Resolute, Mafia Wars, Tapjoy Founders & More, OKpanda Wants To Bring Better English Language Learning To Asia
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Rip Empson
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Learning a new language isn’t easy; it takes a lot of patience, time, effort and a good teacher. The other challenge? Just as the definition of a “good” teacher varies depending on the student, there usually isn’t a “right” way to learn (or teach) a new language. As the Web and its content distribution and communication channels have matured, a litany of language learning programs, apps and startups have emerged, utilizing these new tools and technologies to revolutionize the way we learn to speak a new language. Of course, because language study tends to resist a one-size-fits-all approach, there are (and educational resources) as there are learning styles. While their methods differ, they do tend to have one goal in common: To reach the largest possible audience, usually focus on the most widely-spoken languages, beginning with English. , a new language-learning startup that will launch later this year, wants to stand out from the crowd by focusing on one particular market — where, historically, native speakers have struggled to learn new languages. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur and app developer Adam Gries and Nir Markus — the former co-founder and CTO of popular multiplayer-games-as-a-service startup PlayerDuel — OKpanda is on a mission to change the way people learn English in Asia — specifically, Japan. Thanks to fundamental differences in syntax, grammar and punctuation — and culture — learning English can be extremely difficult for native speakers of Japanese. Despite learning English is mandatory for Japanese students from age six to 12, Even though English instruction is compulsory across the country, co-founder Adam Gries tells us, in studying the language learning market in Japan, the team found that native speakers still have a relatively low command of spoken English. Part of the reason for this, he explains, is that most Japanese teachers don’t speak the language or have a firm command of everyday usage themselves, making language acquisition all the more difficult for students. What’s more, he says, regular exposure to English is infrequent for most students, which is compounded by a focus on teaching a more “decorative” or academic version of the English, rather than for real, or more functional application. Of course, OKpanda is hardly the first English language learning service to tackle the Japanese market, and many are just beginning, with and being just a few recent examples. Nonetheless, the OKpanda co-founders believe there’s still plenty of untapped opportunity in Japan, especially considering the dearth of services offering adequate conversational practice in modern, colloquial English, he says. There’s another reason for optimism: The size of the market. Today, — second only to China — with approximately $5 billion being spent on language services, not including peripherals like translation and test prep. And, with these peripherals included, the total market increases to $8 billion. As globalization continues to rise, Japan is also experiencing increasing demand for English-learning among businesses and working professionals. Rakuten and Uniqlo, two multinational Japanese giants, for example, recently introduced English-only policies for all company communications. In other words, both companies now require employees to speak English when communicating with their colleagues. As an increasing number of Japanese companies now operate at a global scale, their leaders are eager to reflect the changing global marketplace and workforce, and Gries says that there’s a sense in Japan that, when it comes to English fluency, Japan has fallen behind other industrialized nations — and its neighbors. To meet the growing demand for better English language learning tools in Japan and help native speakers address the challenge of finding conversational practice in functional English, OKpanda is taking a mobile approach. The team is currently in the final stages of developing an iPhone app that helps users acquire these skills via hundreds of thousands of interactive conversations, which allow users to speak with avatars in “fully dynamic formats,” Gries says. The co-founders expect the app to launch before December and are starting on iOS in spite of the relatively low adoption of iPhones in Japan compared to other markets. While, historically, that would have been a risky move, lately Japanese carriers have begun to offer the iPhone, with a potentially huge step forward for iPhone adoption in Japan coming from NTT Docomo’s recent announcement that it will begin offering iPhone coverage to its customers. Among Japanese carriers, NTT Docomo currently owns the largest share of the mobile market, at 44 percent, which could represent the tipping point for iOS adoption in Japan the country’s adoption of iOS. (Not .) While the startup will start with an iPhone app and look to expand to other mobile operating systems thereafter, the team believes that taking a mobile-first approach is the right way to go when tackling Asian markets. Not only that, but when OKpanda goes live in Q4, the app’s language learning experience will focus primarily on teaching English via listening and speaking exercises and will offer an “innovative matrix of content” that will allow for realistic conversation variety — which Gries believes are key to appealing to an Asian market. Well that, and allowing students to learn conversational English by speaking to avatars from the comfort of their phone, an experience which the co-founders hope will make them feel right at home. Down the line, OKpanda plans to expand on its avatar method by offering live conversations with English speakers, although it’s not clear yet how they will implement this kind of live instruction. Gries also tells us that the app will be free to download and, though the team is still working out the best approach to monetiziation, he says that OKpanda will likely opt for a subscription model in the vein of Lumosity or Lynda.com. In the meantime, to support its mission in Japan and acquire the fuel it needs for launch and its first months in its new home, OKpanda has raised $1.4 million in a round led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from firms like Innovation Endeavors, Kapor Capital and 500 Startups. A handful of angel investors also contributed to the startup’s first financing effort, including the founder of Karma and Tapjoy Lee Linden, the former chairman of APAX Asia Max Burger, Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera and Mafia Wars co-founder Roger Dickey. To that point: Up until last week, the OKpanda team had been based out of offices in New York City, but the staff recently moved into new digs in Tokyo, which will become the startup’s new headquarters for “at least” the next few months, the co-founders tell us. Once its iPhone app launches, the plan is to expand to other Asian markets thereafter — likely at some point in 2014. And depending on how it goes, OKpanda could be headed beyond Asia later next year or the year after. While it’s still early to say how successful OKpanda’s approach will be in addressing Japan’s English learning struggles, there’s plenty of demand for better language acquisition tools. And, looking beyond Japan, there happen to be some-two billion English language learners across the globe — meaning there’s plenty of opportunity. After all, as Dave McClure of 500 Startups reminds us, “English is the de facto global language and there’s a mobile phone in everyone’s pocket.” OKpanda wants to make mobile language learning both fun and easy, and “these days Japan could use more of both, especially with the history of naughty companies that promise English learning but don’t deliver,” McClure says. To help it steer the course, Okpanda has also recruited an impressive advisory board to complement its new investors, which now include educational and user behavior experts including Professor Karen Price, formerly the Associate Director of Harvard English Teachers’ Program, Learnist founder Farbood Nivi and Farmville and Red Hot Labs co-founder Amitt Mahajan, among others. Finally, readers looking to test out the product and receive updates on the app’s progress (including its launch) should sign up
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The NSA Hacked Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s Email While He Was In Office
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Alex Wilhelm
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Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden demonstrate that the National Security Agency (NSA) hacked the email of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon while he was in office, according to . The operation, dubbed “Flatliquid,” exploited a mail server to garner access to the account. The compromised system was also in use by other Mexican governmental authorities. Calderon, no longer president, was a leader noted for his close work with the United States government. The two countries are large trading partners, have a long border, and have intertwined economies. Also, they share a common struggle with the drug trade and drug-related violence. That the NSA snooped on Calderon should come as small surprise. It was that the NSA had also spied on Calderon’s successor as President of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, while the latter was merely a candidate for the office. The implication of the revelations taken together is simple: Regardless of your nation’s status as an ally or adversary, the United States government finds it completely inside its legal purview, authority, and mission to spy in your affairs. Der Spiegel makes this point well, by implication: “Now, though, the revelation that the NSA has systematically infiltrated an entire computer network is likely to trigger deeper controversy, especially since the NSA’s snooping took place during the term of Peña Nieto’s predecessor Felipe Calderón, a leader who worked more closely with Washington than any other Mexican president before him.” Precisely. Rewarding cooperation with industrial-grade espionage isn’t too good an idea. What faith should the current Mexican government have in its dealings with the United States, when we could negotiate and at once read their internal communications? Do you honestly think that the United States government has ceased spying on the Mexican government, or any other government where the NSA can spread its tendrils?
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Cooliris Reports Big Growth in Asia And 3B Connected Photos
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Anthony Ha
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Over the past year, photo app has been announcing a number of international partnerships with companies like , , and . Earlier this week I met with Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar and VP of Business Development Sebastian Blum, who told me that these efforts have been paying off. There are now 3 billion photos connected to the Cooliris service, and 1 billion of those photos have been engaged with in some way. Bhumkar also said that Asia now accounts for 35 percent of the company’s user base (compared to 30 percent a quarter ago), and he expects that percentage to go above 40 in the next three months. What Cooliris didn’t provide was user numbers — back in February, the company said that it had been (Android and web versions are still in the works). Users connect their photos because Cooliris gives them a way to browse images from across a number of services (including Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr) using the company’s 3D wall technology. Thanks to , users can also share and discuss their photos with small groups of family and friends. Bhumkar suggested that the partnerships are an efficient way for “an 18-person company” in Palo Alto that hasn’t “set up offices around the world” to reach a global audience. These go beyond simple integrations, because Cooliris’ global partners agree to promote the app to their users (Bhumkar showed me a screenshot of the service’s prominent placement in the Baidu app store). In return, he said partners are displayed prominently in the localized version of the Cooliris app and can offer their users a slick photo-browsing and sharing experience. Plus, many of these companies are interested in expanding to other geographies themselves, and are hoping that Cooliris can help. “It’s a very mutual partnership,” Blum said. As for making money, Bhumkar and Blum discussed plans to launch premium services in the next few months (following the aforementioned launch on Android and web). For as little as $4 a month, users will get access to additional features like video. Partners will be able to sell these plans to users and share the revenue, or they can pay Cooliris to offer the premium features for free (presumably for a limited trial period). Bhumkar emphasized that “media is the monetization model”, not storage — although users can save photos that are shared in the app, they do so by plugging in to services like Google Drive.
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Rethinking The Seductiveness Of Mobile-First
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch For the past few months, my weekly column here has been focused on some aspect of “mobile.” There’s no denying the scope of the platform shift, user volume, and consumer attention. Yet, for startups, being “mobile-first” in today’s market is a dicey proposition given the harsh realities of distribution and the fact consumers are bombarded with too many indistinguishable choices. Taken together, it begs the question: “For new startups today, is mobile-first the right choice?” In this post, I’ll share some conditions under which being mobile-first today either isn’t necessary or puts a new startup at a disadvantage. The idea here is to play the devil’s advocate for a day, to gently push back against the strong mobile tailwinds and reexamine some reasons why new startups can or should begin their work on the web, even if they end up with a mobile presence eventually. With that spirit in mind, and in no particular order, here’s what I came up with: Consider products aimed at people in large corporations who work on desktops or laptops all day long. Yes, this segment is not growing as fast as mobile is, but then again, nothing is growing as fast as mobile. Specifically, products targeting users in larger enterprises, or where security in information technology (especially in mobile) is a concern, or where the user is required to create content through heavy input (like writing or number-crunching) provide examples where mobile-first just doesn’t work. Applications and solutions targeted at these types of customers are likely better off to start web-first and then grow from this point of origin. The market for experienced, quality iOS and Android developers and designers is extremely tight. If and when these folks do their next thing, it will likely be as a founder or close to formation of a new company. In the absence of a mobile developer on the team, focusing on the web can make it slightly easier to find and recruit engineers. With the team of web engineers ready to go, building for the web, relative to mobile, is a more sane path in many regards. Onboarding, an area where many mobile users drop out of the funnel, can be easier on the web, which impacts retention through emails captured at sign-in. Initial features can be layered in as the stack is built on the back-end, and the team and users can run more precise tests to see what does and doesn’t work. As we all know on mobile, this level of freedom in development is virtually unattainable, as cycles for development, user testing, and feedback loops are considerably longer, and therefore more expensive. If a web team is fortunate enough to pick up some traction and move closer to that elusive goal of product-market fit, being on the web confers some advantages over mobile. First, web users are often logged into other sites with their data or graph information, which makes sharing and inviting a bit easier. More people using the product on the web also increases the likelihood that more people will be exposed to the brand and learn to identify what it is. This type of awareness can be invaluable when it comes time to extend a presence to mobile, because those audiences can be encouraged over time to download a mobile app rather than discovering it through random channels. When it comes time for a website or web software product to extend its reach into mobile, it can drive current users to its application with a more direct message and call to action. To do this, of course, the team will need mobile engineers and designers who can not only work with the current team, but can articulate a vision for how users on mobile interact with the service. The hope is, by this point, a team is ready to extend and can show some evidence of success, some money in their bank account, and some demand from users to provide a mobile touchpoint. There are many more reasons why new companies should seriously think twice about mobile-first. Perhaps a more reasonable way is “mobile-eventually.” Of course, there are some products and services which are truly, inherently mobile in nature — like Uber — that need to either start on mobile or extend rapidly after quick web testing. But for the majority of mobile applications continuously flooding the market as consumers drown in a sea of choices, going “mobile-first” has been and remains a . There will always be a few elite teams who architect larger systems on more than one platform from the beginning, and those folks either have the money and/or experience to play a longer game. This luxury isn’t distributed widely. Instead, the majority of teams are faced with more fundamental, existential questions, and while mobile is “shiny” today and will be for a very long time, getting to the handset doesn’t necessarily mean one has to start there.
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Alex Wilhelm
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Skim Is Snapchat For Text
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Jordan Crook
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Serious question: Which would you prefer? To have all of your chat conversations instantly deleted upon receipt (Snapchat-style), or to keep a record of each and every word forever on the Internet? A new app, , is looking to answer that question. Not unlike , a , the app automatically deletes the message as soon as it’s opened. When a user sends a message, it’s gone forever, no longer viewable to the sender and instantly disappearing when received. In many ways, it’s just like Snapchat but with text instead of photos. “Disappearing content is a growing trend, yet nobody seems to do textual messages very well. At Skim, we have a design-first mentality. Simplicity and beauty is incredibly important, but even more so is security,” said co-founder Jordan Singer. “The feeling of privacy and security the app gives to our users is bar none.” The text dissolves from left to right as you read it, giving you a sense of urgency with every message. It’s incredible how much more exciting a boring message is when it vanishes in front of your eyes. (Just imagine how thrilling an exciting message could be.) Users can set the speed of the disappearing text to slow, medium or fast. To be honest, the app does lack a certain flow when it comes to sending and receiving friend requests, and oddly requires Facebook or Twitter log-in to sign up. Plus, you have to click out of a blank message (after the text has disappeared) to reply, instead of being able to type a reply on that same screen. In other words, execution isn’t perfect but the idea is most certainly interesting. Like Snapchat, Skim isn’t all that secure. However, Snapchat doesn’t make the mistake of promising secure, private messaging, while Skim does. It’s much easier to snap a screenshot of a Skim message than it is a Snap, but the app listing on iTunes still promises the following: What’s more important than your privacy? It’s hard to feel safe these days when your digital life is anything but private. With Skim, you can have fun and feel secure. According to the co-founder, Skim is working on adding end-to-end encryption “to give Skim the next level of privacy and security.”
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Apple Product Placement Architect Suzanne Lindbergh Confirms Departure To Jawbone
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple executive Suzanne Lindbergh, who has been with the company for 25 years, confirmed via email today that she has accepted a new position with speaker and Bluetooth accessory maker Jawbone. The marketing specialist had the official title of “Worldwide Director of Buzz Marketing” at Apple, which put her in charge of making sure Apple products showed up front-and-center in both big and small screen entertainment. Hollywood productions have long featured Apple products in various capacities – I’ve been re-watching Fringe recently, and Olivia’s notebook of choice is a MacBook Pro computer. A recent example that made headlines was in the Netflix original “House of Cards,” which featured one scene in particular with a lot of . While it didn’t take the top spot this year in the Brandcameo awards, which track and compare placements of a variety of product throughout the year, it . Lindbergh’s role appears to have been focused on making sure that Apple products where available to and in use by the right people. Unlike other companies, Apple reportedly (we’ve heard this from sources, too); instead, it simply makes free iPhones, Macs and iPads available to productions for their use. As to the reason for the departure, which was first reported , Lindbergh told us via email that she was simply ready for a new challenge, and Jawbone presented exactly that. Her role at the accessory-maker will be extremely similar to what she was doing at Apple, according to a statement she provided TechCrunch. “I am incredibly excited to head to Jawbone to begin work on entertainment industry collaborations for Jawbone and their incredible products,” she says in the statement. “Excited to be part of a team who are defining the future of wearable technology and audio devices.” I wouldn’t expect Apple to fall out of the Hollywood spotlight as a result of this executive departure, but it will be interesting to see how that strategy changes, if at all, as the person responsible for product placement for 18 years moves on to something new. Lindbergh tells us she created, ran and defined Apple’s movie and TV outreach program back in 1994, so it’s definitely a significant shift.
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Twitter’s #Music App Could Be On The Way Out, Says New Report
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Darrell Etherington
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Twitter’s #Music app, which offered social music discovery culled from activity on the 140-character sharing service, is reportedly nearing the end of its brief life, according to a new . Twitter is “strongly considering” shuttering the mobile app, after its download and usage numbers have dropped precipitously following a respectable launch. From its beginnings, Twitter #Music was something of an ugly duckling at the company, the report suggests, having been spearheaded by now-COO of Jelly just before his abrupt departure. It was essentially developed (and ) on its own, according to ATD, and never integrated into Twitter’s core product to the extent that it would have any real impact on Twitter’s material business. Back when Twitter #Music launched, I took it for a spin and . Before today, I hadn’t really opened it that much since, but it honestly seems like I haven’t been missing much. Twitter #Music still relies heavily on you using the social network to follow musicians you care about to work really well, or to follow people whose musical tastes you find interesting. Neither of those things are true about my Twitter usage, and I suspect it’s the same for a wide swath of the network’s members. It’s true that some of the features work reasonably well in terms of offering up some interesting new music, but none so well as similar services from competing apps. Rdio has done a lot lately to step up its personalized radio offerings, for instance, and they were better than Twitter #Music’s before that. Plus, there’s iTunes Radio now, which is a very strong, very free competitor with no stipulations required to get full track streaming. The real problem is still that what’s unique about Twitter #Music isn’t valuable enough to outweigh the benefits of the other apps playing in the same sandbox. And while music discovery is an area with plenty of legs, it’s also one for which people likely won’t find themselves looking around for multiple solutions. Grab Songza, get some Rdio going, and you’re pretty much set. As AllThingsD points out, even Twitter seems to realize this: It has partnered with both iTunes Radio and Rdio on providing content suggestions over the past year. There’s opportunity for Twitter in music – just not likely in #Music.
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How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Healthcare.gov, a government-run e-commerce website for the Affordable Care Act, does not actually need to exist. The still-dysfunctional federal site could have offloaded all of the work to startups, which were already building more sophisticated price-comparison alternatives to the official site, just like Orbitz does for airline companies. Healthcare.gov was supposed to be an information hub for the needs of millions of uninsured citizens who are now legally required to have a healthcare plan. The federal website ended up offering insurance directly, after 24 states ( ) refused to design their own e-commerce websites for their residents. Unfortunately, at launch, the federal and state sites crashed. Three weeks later, Obama’s signature law, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), is in danger of losing public confidence and the enrollment numbers it needs to meet its promise of cheap, quality insurance. But, it’s unclear why the state and federal exchanges websites were built in the first place. “It’s akin to the state wanting to build a search engine,” says Gary Lauer, CEO of health insurance e-commerce site, eHealth. eHealth is one of a handful tech companies certified as “web-based entities,” which are legally allowed to act as alternatives to the federal and state e-commerce sites. Yet, as the regulations were designed, startups take a backseat to government websites. State exchanges are given the option to interface with private partners. Two of the largest states, California and New York, have delayed tech partnerships for about two years. “In the first year, we can’t custom interface, we don’t have enough bandwidth, we don’t have the technological capacity,” Covered California spokesperson, Anne Gonzales, USA Today. People familiar with Healthcare.gov argue that government-run websites are necessary to conceal the IRS income data that exchanges use to calculate discounts. Obamacare is principally designed for the ; most enrolling will have some discount based on their age, family status, and income. To protect consumers, the government argument goes, only Healthcare.gov should have access to income data. However, there are plenty of existing federal systems that securely transmit personal information with private companies. If you use H&R Block or TurboTax to complete your tax return, you already have confidence that tech companies can safely deal with your most sensitive data. “There’s nothing new in this privacy area, nothing new that we haven’t been doing for years and years,” says Lauer. For instance, ID.me, which facilitates , has been a White House boasting point on how startups can handle the identity verification process. CEO Blake Hall tells me in an email that his system could have securely dealt with IRS data. “On the healthcare side, we could absolutely verify identity and attributes, like income, in order to match the profile of an individual with health care plans.” But it’s unclear why states didn’t prioritize tech companies in the first place. The federal and state governments were overwhelmed with the monstrous task of building a new database for millions of consumers. To this day, most exchanges are still offline. The implications of Healthcare.gov’s failure represents an existential threat to Obamacare. First, Healthcare.gov’s own calculator may be steering individuals into a cheaper plan that could bankrupt them in the future. “People may be totally motivated by the cost of the policy and spend not an adequate amount of time looking at the deductibles and the co-pays and what is covered,” Kenneth Davis, CEO of Mount Sinai hospital, me. Tech startups, such as Fuse Insurance, are designing more sophisticated calculators to help consumers find a health plan that takes into account their specific circumstances. “We built a recommendation engine that compares user needs to plan structure, says Fuse Insurance founder Will Ritchie. “Healthcare.gov does a good job of listing plans, but it doesn’t go so far as to recommend any of them.” But for some reason, the states figured these essential features of FuseInsurance and other tech companies could wait a few years. Worse yet, Obamacare the spritely young bodies of 18-34 year olds to subsidize the healthcare costs of their decaying elders. But it’s cheaper for young’uns to pay the one-time legal fine of $95 (or 1% of income) rather than shell out $200/month for health insurance, so Obamacare risks higher healthcare costs for everyone if glitchy websites send frustrated consumers away permanently. The Department of Health and Human Services has unleashed an and field brokers (“ “) to fish young invincibles into the exchanges, but it seems like tech companies have better ideas. eHealth, for instance, is integrating with the maker of TurboTax to persuade young taxpayers to buy insurance at the moment they have to pay a fine. TurboTax can know if a citizen is uninsured and alert them to an easy-to-purchase health plan right before they pay $95. At least a few states see the benefit of outsourcing the difficult work. Secretary of Maryland’s Health and Human Services, Joshua Sharfstein, tells me in an email, “We’re looking to move forward with these partnerships because we identified two areas of value,” he writes. “1) The ability of private partners to increase outreach; and 2) the ability of private partners to bring innovation to plan selection.” These types of solutions will be entirely absent from California and New York. Ironically, the president’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, often the principle of “Joy’s Law,” named for legendary founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, which states that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else.” to put data in the hands of private developers, rather than have government websites be the central hub. It is bizarre that the president’s signature initiative would ignore its own principles.
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Apple Employees Jokingly Referred To Gold iPhone 5s As ‘The Kardashian Phone’
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Matthew Panzarino
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Internally, the gold iPhone 5s was jokingly referred to as ‘The Kardashian Phone’ by some Apple employees. This fact was today and we confirmed the nickname with our sources. Yes, we asked this question of our sources. Apparently this was not a serious ‘code name’ or anything, just an internal joke. Kim Kardashian, of course, has a well-known connection to gold iPhones. The reality star actually long before Apple’s ‘champagne’ device hit the market, as you can see in the image below. The thing is, it’s a joke right? I’m sure that people in Apple know Kim loves a gold iPhone just as much as the rest of us. It was a fairly unpopular stance for quite a while to say that the gold iPhone might actually be… . But the fact is that the gold iPhone was easily the most sought-after model at launch. Before launch, everyone laughed about the thought of a glossy, sickly gold iPhone 5s. After launch, the opinions were almost universally the opposite; even those that didn’t necessarily love the gold acknowledged that it wasn’t bad after all. I love my gold iPhone 5 by — thanks — Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) At this point, we don’t know if Kim actually has a new gold 5s, they’re still in fairly short supply. It’s possible that Kim is using a gold iPhone 5s inside a black case in the famous above. We’ll leave it for a site in tune with the celebrity iPhone news to decipher. ? BGR actually says Stay tuned as we bring you the latest in Kim Kardashian iPhone news. Image Credit: . Do you own a gold iPhone 5s? — Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia)
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Monica+Andy, A Children’s Clothing Line And Online Store From Bonobos Founder’s Sister, Debuts
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Sarah Perez
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, a new children’s clothing line and online store launching in early November, has the benefit of receiving input from a famous name in the e-commerce space: the “Andy” in “Monica+Andy” is , CEO of men’s fashion brand, Bonobos. Now his sister, Monica Royer, is getting into the business too, but with a completely different take. She’s not designing clothes for men or women, but instead for babies and toddlers. Initially, the line will be aimed at parents with children ages 0 to 3, before expanding to additional age ranges. Royer, Dunn’s older sister, became a mom herself back in November 2010, and was inspired to create what has now become Monica+Andy following her own difficulties in finding clothes for her daughter online. Her child, though not a preemie, was still very small and couldn’t fit into all the cute clothes Royer had on hand in those early days. “I was desperate to buy her new things,” she says. “And after seeing the Bonobos model and how well that worked in men’s apparel, we thought that is something that could potentially work well for moms, because moms are a very reachable demographic and are very focused on the Internet and social media,” Royer explains. Dunn is not involved in the business in any official capacity, but he has invested and helped provide his sister with advice and introductions, she notes, acknowledging the advantage she has in having Dunn for a mentor. The name Monica+Andy, meanwhile, was a suggestion from their mother. Royer’s background is not in e-commerce, startups or apparel. Prior to having her daughter, she spent 10 years working in the corporate world at places like Pfizer and Novartis. But she says she always had a personal passion and interest in design. And after having her daughter, she decided to take on the challenge of turning those personal passions into a business. Ahead of the site’s launch, Royer spent a year designing the dozens of products offered on the site, but she has now hired a full-time design assistant to help her out going forward. After the design work was completed, and the focus became building the site and getting a business off the ground, together Dunn and Royer interviewed Monica+Andy co-founder Brian Bloom, a recent graduate of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. After he came on in June, Bloom’s title was to be Director of Operations, but given his role in this early stage, he’s now considered a co-founder instead. As for the clothes themselves, Royer describes them as “modern, luxurious and fun.” She designed them using soft fabrics and had them all approved through the company’s five-person “panel of moms” advisory board. Though aiming for a luxury feel, Royer says that she also wanted to keep prices affordable, with basic items ranging from $25 to $60 – price points appealing to those who may currently shop for baby clothes from Gap. Also like Gap, Monica+Andy offers free shipping on orders over $50. In addition to being an online brand and e-commerce shop, Royer plans to also help other moms running their own children’s fashion businesses through the site. Either at launch or shortly after, Monica+Andy will open up a marketplace section that features non-apparel items from other moms who may not have the means to launch an online brand themselves. “I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to have this great e-commerce platform and a family that was involved. I was able to do this because I had some advantages,” Royer says. “Now we want to help other moms launch their own businesses, too.” The company has already selected the first two moms they’ll feature on the site, and revenue sharing is being handled on a mom-by-mom basis, for the time being. Ultimately, Monica+Andy wants to embody that “for moms, by moms” spirit. The company is very mom-friendly, in fact, with toddlers running around the office, at meetings, and lots of part-time help from moms who work on the side. After the launch, the plan is to staff up the customer service department using part-time moms. Royer and Bloom tell us that Monica+Andy has also just closed on an initial $300,000 out of a larger $1 million seed round, from various angels investors. As I mentioned above, brother Andy is one of them, though he did not lead the round. The site will launch to the public on November 3, and the company will be promoting the event through a playful kids’ fashion show held at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. In the meantime, parents can visit the and input their email address to stay informed.
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Ask A VC: Greylock’s Simon Rothman On Disruptive Marketplaces, Greymarket And More
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Leena Rao
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In this week’s Ask A VC, we were joined by Greylock’s newest partner, Simon Rothman, to talk about future disruptive marketplaces and more. Rothman, who is spearheading Greylock’s new $100 million commitment to investing in marketplaces, led U.S. operations and founded eBay Motors, which he built into a $14 billion a year global business. He talked about mobile marketplaces, what the next opportunities in creating marketplaces are and more. Rothman also shed more details on the firm’s first marketplace conference, Greymarket, on Friday, November 15th. The event, which is invite-only, will be open to companies and entrepreneurs outside the Greylock portfolio. Speakers include Reid Hoffman, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Lyft co-founder Logan Green and more. One lucky reader could score an invite to the conference. Greylock wants you to send them a one-minute video explaining your best hack or trick for creating demand for, or how you helped to grow, your marketplace to marketplace@greylock.com. The winning entry will spend time with Rothman to develop a presentation to be included on the agenda for the conference (the deadline is Tuesday, October 29). Check out the video above for more!
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Wolfram Alpha Launches Problem Generator To Help Students Learn Math
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Frederic Lardinois
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If you’re studying math or science, you are probably pretty familiar with as a tool for figuring out complicated equations. That makes it a pretty good tool for cheating, but not necessarily for learning. Today, the Wolfram Alpha team is a new service for learners, the , that turns the “computational knowledge engine” on its head. The Problem Generator – which is available to all Wolfram Alpha Pro subscribers now – creates random practice questions for students, and Wolfram Alpha then helps them find the answers step-by-step. Right now, the Generator covers six subjects: arithmetic, number theory, algebra, calculus, linear algebra and statistics. The difficulty of the questions can be tuned down for students in elementary school and tuned up for those in college calculus classes. As the company notes in today’s announcements, the material for students in elementary and secondary schools closely follows the initiative. Using the tools is pretty straightforward. Students (or their teachers) choose which topic they want to study and the difficulty level (beginner, intermediate or advanced) and the system will generate a problem. The team notes that the tool uses Wolfram Alpha’s natural language processing capabilities to try to understand the students’ answers to “ensure that all students can learn and express themselves in their own unique way.” This may actually be the highlight of this service. Too often, after all, similar tools force a very rigid way of answering complex math questions on their students and when they make a mistake, it’s not clear if the answer is wrong or if the student just got the syntax wrong. If a student can’t find the answer after three tries, Wolfram Alpha can show a step-by-step solution. The Problem Generator also allows teachers to easily create printable quizzes with multiple-choice tests.
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U.S. Cellular Gets The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c on November 8th
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Matthew Panzarino
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U.S. Cellular, the 5th largest wireless network in the US, has announced today that it will get the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c on November 8th. Subscribers on the network have been champing at the bit for the announcement and Twitter is that they still hadn’t announced a date that the device would come to the carrier for the first time ever. The iPhone 5s and 5c launched essentially simultaneously on Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, and has been rolling out to smaller carriers ever since. November 8th marks a delay of over a month from the initial release, though Virgin Mobile and other regional carriers have had it since early October. My aunt has been waiting for this! No other network reaches her house up in the mountains of Virginia. — Eric Leamen (@ericleamen) U.S. Cellular tells us that it does not yet have any pricing or plan details to share, but it seems likely they’ll be very similar to the majors. Some retailers like Best Buy have been slicing the sticker price of the iPhone 5c by around $50 to boost early sales. The carrier recently joined the bigs by and eliminating its unlimited data tier for new subscribers.
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Capo 3 Released, Allows Guitarists To Learn Hot Licks And Cool Jams
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John Biggs
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As TechCrunch’s resident guitarist/horrible guitarist, I enjoy apps like . The $29 program allows you to “reverse engineer” any song in your iTunes library, allowing you to play along by marking out your own tablature, playing the chords the app senses in the music, or by looping and slowing down tricky parts of the song. How does it work? I recorded a bit of , strumming away, Rock Band-style, to the chords offered by the app. The song consists of four chords – G, B7, C, and Cm – and you usually play barre chords in the 3rd or 4th position. Capo “found” most of the chords, offering up good approximations for what was going on in the music and serving up imperfect but acceptable alternatives to the real notes. You can hear me below. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115975279″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] Arguably it wasn’t perfect – it dropped some B minor and D chords in there for kicks – but it was enough to get you started. If I were a beginner I’d wonder why things didn’t sound exactly right but it would be easy enough to fix things with a little practice and research. The same thing happened with a number of other songs. Surprisingly Icona Pops “I Love It” came out the best with excellent chord recognition off the bat.
One of the best features is the pitch and speed shifters. You can reduce the speed to 1/4, allowing you to listen to the guitar parts and learn solos by playing and repeating the parts you’re having trouble with. There are similar apps that do these same things ( is one) but this update to Capo seems to have really nailed usability. It’s not perfect – the tab system requires you to swipe over a spectrogram of the song to tell it which notes to pick out and the process is quite imprecise. However, with a bit of practice and the right song I’m sure it can get a bit easier. Capo is a cool tool for amateur guitarists and an interesting toy for professionals. As I so often say when I try stuff like this if I’d had Capo and a nice Stratocaster when I was in high school I’d probably never have gone to class.
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Gillmor Gang 10.18.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/GillmorGang
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Why The Outlook For High-Skilled Immigration Reform In 2013 Remains Troubled
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Alex Wilhelm
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Coming off of what can only be called a political victory in the shutdown and debt limit crisis, President Obama is making noise about reviving comprehensive immigration reform from its dead status. Don’t get too excited. Following his win, the president appears to feel it’s time to push an issue that was all but written off a month ago. However, it remains unclear what, if any, momentum from the shutdown will translate to progress in the House of Representatives for immigration reform. What that means for us in technology is that high-skill immigration reform could be where it was when we last checked: . A few nibbles to get started: Instead of risking his speakership, Speaker of the House John Boehner swung right during the shutdown, and is riding high among the most conservative members of his party. For his stance and actions before and during the partial government shutdown, he is stacking plaudits. Representative Raul Labrador – remember that name – was recently as saying the following about Boehner: “I’ve actually been really proud of Speaker Boehner over the last two and a half weeks. I don’t think he should be ashamed of anything he has done.” Whether you agree with GOP leadership or not, it’s fair to say that the further right elements of the party got the fight that they were looking for. The speaker said as much following the eventual denouement: The House has fought with everything it has to convince the president of the United States to engage in bipartisan negotiations aimed at addressing our country’s debt and providing fairness for the American people under ObamaCare. That fight will continue. That is the temperature. How does all that fit into the immigration reform issue? Well, the folks that did get the fight they wanted, and are currently united behind Speaker Boehner, are viscerally opposed to passing immigration reform this year. And now that they support the speaker, it seems unlikely that he would cross the folks that are currently propping his leadership up, by forcing immigration changes on them in this delicate Congressional moment. Here’s our friend Rep. Labrador, as , on the chances of reform passing the House: “It’s not going to happen this year […] After the way the president acted over the last two or three weeks where he would refuse to talk to the speaker of the House […] they’re not going to get immigration reform. That’s done.” A reform bill passed the Senate, and died in the House, and that happened before rancor was this bad betwixt our two parties. — That we are stuck regarding immigration reform should come as surprise. Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts in the area have . As far back as July, politicians were predicting that the issue . The IBTimes was blunt in its : But opponents of reform — at least the kind envisioned by Democrats, that is, one that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented 11 million — said the prospects of a bill leaving the House have been dead for some time now. Not because Americans and even opponents don’t want reform, but because there was too much optimism that a bill including what they call “amnesty” for the undocumented could pass. And nothing in the past few months has changed that fact. I felt that attaching high-skill immigration reform to the larger package lowered, not increased, its chance of passing. And, damn it, I was right. So it comes down to this: High-skill immigration reform won’t pass – unless the Senate changes its strategy – until we work out the issue of what I prefer to call the path to citizenship, and others call amnesty, which is the key sticking point on the road to change. Stupendous.
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Occipital Raises $1M (And Counting) On Kickstarter To Bring 3D Scanning To The Masses
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Chris Velazco
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Boulder & SF-based startup is probably still best known for its Red Laser and 360Panorama apps, but it confirmed today that it raised over $1 million on Kickstarter to bring its Structure 3D sensor to market. The Structure though. It’s an incredibly small one — so small, in fact, that it can onto the back of your iPad (note: it’s compatible with any iOS device with a Lightning port) and connect without completely killing your battery life. While run-of-the-mill users can use the Structure and its early batch of companion apps to scan objects for printing at Shapeways or to fling balls for virtual kittens to chase around the 3D representation of a room, Occipital was really gunning to pick up developer support this time. It’s certainly a nice little show of financial validation for the team, especially considering this is their first big foray into consumer-facing hardware and the fact that they didn’t exactly need the cash in the first place. At the time, CEO Jeff Powers remarked to me that since the company still had money left over from its previous funding round, the Kickstarter was meant in large part to be a marketing tool that would help gauge the demand for its curious gadget. The team originally set out to raise $100,000 when the campaign officially kicked off in mid-September, and early momentum put the project over the top in just three hours. But could the project’s popularity ultimately prove to be detrimental? After all, I can think of that ultimately took flak because overwhelming demand outweighed the producers’ ability to deliver on what they promised. For now though, the team remains positive about its chances at delivering the Structure to 3D-hungry developers and tinkerers — to hear Occipital marketing director Adam Rodnitsky tell it, this current level of demand won’t affect shipping schedules “at all”. “We put a lot of effort into setting up our supply chain well in advance to make sure we could deliver on what we promised to backers,” he said in an email. “We’re ready to meet this demand… and hopefully much more.” In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the Structure’s voyage from curious concept to crowdfunding darling, you can check out our interview with CEO Powers and demo of the Structure in action below.
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Windows 8.1, The Kindle Fire HDX, And Curved Display Smartphones
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Jordan Crook
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That’s right. It’s Gadgets Podcast time once again, and all I can say is TGIF. Here are some of our topics this week: Who’s already upgraded to Windows 8.1? John had no trouble with it but Matt . Meanwhile, we’ve been testing out the new Amazon , and we all pretty much agree that it’s a fine media-centric tablet and a perfect gift for a mother-in-law. And finally, we discuss the newest trend in smartphones: a curved display. (Here’s , which is many years away from commercialization, and also completely different from the curved displays we’re seeing out of and ). Oh, and we’ll be launching our holiday gift guide in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that. We chat about all this and more in this week’s episode of the , featuring , and . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Google Partners With Facebook To Let DoubleClick Clients Buy Retargeted Ads On FBX
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Josh Constine
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Google and Facebook are getting a bit friendlier despite their social networking competition. Google’s DoubleClick ad buying software will . FBX, Facebook’s retargeted ads platform, has become a major player in the 16 months since launch, and DoubleClick will be a more comprehensive ad buying solution by tapping into it. Google writes “Partnership has been key to Google’s success as a rising tide lifts all boats. So we’re excited to announce a new way to help our clients succeed by working with Facebook to participate in FBX, their real-time bidding exchange…we’re always looking at ways to serve our clients even better – starting in a few months, clients will be able to buy inventory on FBX via DoubleClick Bid Manager.” DoubleClick allows clients to buy ads on dozens of different ad exchanges, but excluding Facebook may have forced some clients to look elsewhere for their media buying needs. Once the integration is live, DoubleClick will become more of a one-stop-shop for buying ads across the web. in June 2012 to let advertisers buy cookie-based retargeted ads on Facebook’s site. When someone visits an advertiser’s website, say to buy a flight to Hawaii, a cookie is dropped onto the user’s computer. The site can then pass this cookie to a demand side platform (DSP) ad tech service that uses it to target that same user with an ad on Facebook. So if the person didn’t buy the flight, the travel site can show them ads hawking that exact same flight at a discount in hopes of getting them to pull the trigger. Facebook started with a small set of DSPs but expanded the ranks over time, yet Google was nowhere to be found. Soon that will change, as DoubleClick will become one of these DSPs with access to place ads on Facebook through FBX. In this way, both Google and Facebook can make money off of advertisers together. It’s unclear who reached out to who about the deal. While Google may have hoped that FBX would flop, the platform gained steam and became necessary to support in DoubleClick, so it may caved. Or perhaps Facebook pushed for the partnership in hopes of driving more FBX sales. Either way it proves that anymore, as I wrote in April. Facebook is successfully breaking into the lucrative bottom of the funnel with FBX. Historically, Facebook ads have centered on demand generation — getting people to want to buy something. But that space doesn’t command as high of ad rates as demand fulfillment — getting people to buy something they already want from a specific seller. FBX and retargeted ads in general can reach people who’ve already been considering a purchase, and the return on investment is often clearer because the ads can be the last click before a purchase. In this way, FBX ads are similar to and compete with search ads, which are Google’s bread and butter. Even if Google will be selling these FBX ads, most of the money goes to Facebook. The deal will create more competition for advertisers between FBX providers. Now Nanigans, AdRoll, TellApart, and other startups that serve ads on FBX will have to compete with Google. At the same time, the move validates the space of these startups and might signal to more businesses that they should be investing in retargeted campaigns. While you might assume the two tech giants are at each other’s throats because of competitions between Facebook and Google+, but relations have improved over the last few years. Facebook ended up working with Microsoft’s Bing to power web searches and ads in Graph Search, but at the feature’s launch even “I would love to work with Google”. All of this is a big endorsement of retargeting as an ad format, but there’s one problem. FBX doesn’t work on mobile…yet. And that’s where users are going. Facebook may very well be hard at work at getting FBX ready for mobile. But in the meantime, I’m , which lets ecommerce apps retarget their existing users with ads that deeplink directly to specific products in the app and get people to buy them. Expect mobile retargeting to be the next big space for innovation, investment, and acquisitions.
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High School Athlete Site beRecruited Secretly Acquired Last Year By Raine Group For $17M-$22M
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Josh Constine
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, the “LinkedIn for high school athletes” looking to be recruited by college teams, was secretly acquired by private equity firm , sources tell me and beRecruited now verifies. Sources with knowledge of the deal confirm Raine paid between $17 million and $22 million for beRecruited because of its growth momentum and lucrative premium features. I got a tip a few days ago about the acquisition and price, and found another source to confirm. When pressed, beRecruited CEO Vishwas Prabhakara told us “I can confirm that the Raine Group owns beRecruited.” When asked why the deal was kept secret, he said “We were growing in a broad market and there was no benefit to announcing the deal. This is the beginning, not the end of the journey.” Tactically, the goal of keeping the deal a secret may have been to prevent other entrepreneurs from realizing and investing in the sports recruitment space. Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. Specifically, beRecruited lets athletes create profiles highlighting their verified academic and athletic scores, research universities they might want to attend, and connect with college recruiters. beRecruited monetizes with premium features for students, such as the ability to see which recruiters are viewing their profiles, appear on coaches’ home pages, and contact them with a letter of interest. beRecruited has over 2 million registered student athletes hailing from over 20,000 high schools in the United States. It also saw 25,000 college recruiters log in over the last year, which is more than half of the estimated 40,000 to 45,000 college recruiters in the country. The company was founded in 2000 by high schooler who took a $1.2 million seed round from in 2007 in exchange for what we understand to be a majority stake. In June 2011, and made its founder, Prabhakara, the CEO. Most recently, beRecruited released an , got a redesign, and became , a sports training school for high school students that graduated Maria Sharapova and Eli Manning. When it was bought by Raine Group it had six employees, making the $17 million to $22 million price tag that sources confirm a big win for its team and investors. Now beRecruited has 14 employees and continues to hire. beRecruited says Raine Group decided to buy it based on its fundamentals, including revenue growth, profitability, team and the market. With such a large user base in a network effect-based business, beRecruited could be tough to disrupt and have plenty of runway. Looking at more macro trends, you could say that technology is allowing people to more closely follow sports, so sports will keep making more money, and playing sports will become more lucrative. That means scholarships and recruitment will be more competitive for high school students, and they’ll be more willing to pay sites like beRecruited to get an advantage.
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Hybrid Data Storage And Backup Company Nimble Storage Files For $150M IPO
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Leena Rao
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Nimble Storage, the developer of flash-optimized, hybrid storage and backup solutions for the enterprise, has filed its with the SEC today. The company aims to raise as much as $150 million in the offering, but this is just a placeholder amount and could change. Founded by former Data Domain and NetApp executives Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari, Nimble Storage offers enterprise-grade data storage and backup appliances for small and medium businesses. Nimble’s suite of four appliances combines storage, backup and disaster-recovery into a single solution, with each box offering different levels of raw storage capacity (up to 24 terabytes), flash capacity and connectivity speed. Additionally, Nimble offers flash-accelerated primary storage performance, instant backup and restores, application-integrated data protection, and offsite disaster recovery, all from a single iSCSI system. This helps lower equipment costs and streamline storage management. The company has raised $98 million in funding from Sequoia, Accel, Artis Capital Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and others. Nimble Storage saw total revenue $53.8 million in 2013, up from $14 million in 2012. The company saw net losses of $6.8 million, $16.8 million, $27.9 million and $19.8 million in the years ended January 31, 2011, 2012 and 2013, and the six months ended July 31, 2013. It seems unclear from the company on when Nimble Storage will become profitable. Nimble Storage had last year that an IPO is the goal for the future. At the time, Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage, told us that the company’s secret to success is that its system delivered four to five times more performance and two to five times more capacity than competitors. And data recovery only takes seconds, and Nimble is relatively simple to deploy compared to incumbent products. It should be interesting to see how Nimble Storage performs in the public markets. Fellow enterprise IPO newbie Violin Memory had a upon its opening in September.
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Nokia Quietly Shuttering Pioneering Location Network Dopplr Nov 1st, 4 Years After Acquisition
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Matthew Panzarino
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Nokia has very quietly shuttered the social travel service Dopplr today, just over four years after acquiring it back in 2009. Nokia placed an that says the service will be closed down as of November 1st. The notice indicates that users will only be able to download their data until that date: As of November 1st, 2013 we will be discontinuing the Dopplr service. What does this mean for you as a Dopplr user? You will continue to have access to your data until November 1st, 2013, after which the service no longer will be available.Nokia apologizes for any inconvenience, and we thank you for using Dopplr. You may recall, or may not really, that Dopplr was a UK company that allowed you to open up travel plans to a close group of friends, letting you see people and events in the locations where you were going to be. An along the lines of the (which was supported by Dopplr), and , much of the feature set has popped up in other services like Foursquare (the brainchild of Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley) and Tripit, among others. It was acquired for around $15 million to $22 million , but the company never seemed to find a way to utilize the standalone Dopplr site properly. Since Dopplr’s appearance in 2007, location services have exploded and are now considered an integral part of every major mobile platform. Early services like Fire Eagle (also ) and Dopplr were signals of the things to come. H/t Image Credit: / Flickr CC
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Digital Loyalty Platform Pirq Launches Nationwide, Gives Up On Daily Deals
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Sarah Perez
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Seattle-based , a digital loyalty and deals platform provider, is now moving away from the deal space entirely, the company says. In addition to deals, the startup had earlier been testing a digital loyalty program which includes smartphone apps that allow consumers to earn rewards at nearby businesses, and going forward, this will become Pirq’s sole focus. The loyalty platform was previously only available in the Seattle area and San Francisco, but as of this week, it’s opening up nationwide and is dropping to a more affordable price point of $14.95 per month. “We never had a standalone loyalty product, you had to do the deals,” says CEO James Sun of the transition away from the deals space. In the past, businesses had to offer a certain number of deals per day with savings between 20% and 50%, which consumers could then locate using the Pirq mobile apps. The company’s claim to fame came last spring, when it was . At the time, Apple had signed on with Pirq to offer food and drink deals to its employees living in the Bay Area by way of Pirq’s iPhone app. But now, times have changed. Sun says that when they were making phone calls from their call center pitching their mobile deal engine to small businesses, the hangup rate was over 25%. But when pitching the loyalty solution instead, the hangup rate fell to under 10%. “SMBs and brick-and-mortar businesses don’t want to do deals anymore,” Sun says. The company even let go of all of its sales staff surrounding its earlier deal efforts. “Nobody has ever tried this before without sales staff, it’s a big risk,” he admits. “But it’s working,” he adds. The standalone loyalty solution launched nationwide this week, and already they’ve gained 80 more paying customers in both the U.S. and Canada. The company already had 500 customers on its deals and loyalty platform before, who are now being transitioned to the newer, simpler product. In recent months, there have been a number of startups that have been working to replace paper “punch cards” at small businesses like restaurants, bars and other shops, with their own digital solutions. (See for example, and .) But Pirq’s advantage over some of its competition in this space is that it doesn’t require any additional hardware or tablets in the store, nor does it require point-of-sale integration. Instead, the process from sign up to launch on the merchant side is meant to take only minutes. The business owners sign up on the web by filling out a short form, then they can print out their temporary signage and merchant Tag (a scannable Microsoft Tag barcode) from their computer. That’s the extent of it. A merchant kit arrives 48 hours later with a few extra goodies including a 5×7 poster and “how to” cards for customers, for example. On the consumer side, customers download the Pirq app, then they can begin to scan the business’s “merchant Tag” while they’re in-store to receive their virtual “punch” on their virtual card. As the customers begin to earn their punches toward whatever deal or discount the merchant offers, the businesses gain insight into their customers’ demographic and behavioral data courtesy of Pirq’s Facebook integration. What makes this interesting is that Pirq actually allows the merchant to use that demographic information to specifically target groups of customers that meet certain criteria, like females 35 and over, for instance. They can also run different campaigns at the same time for different groups. Last fall, Pirq it raised $1.2 million in funding from existing investor Rally Capital in advance of its nationwide rollout. Today, it has downsized to twelve people as it makes this shift away from deals to loyalty, and is working on introducing real-time analytics to merchants’ dashboards. These changes mean, however, that consumers won’t be regularly launching the Pirq app outside of the businesses they frequent, while looking for nearby offers and promotions. Instead, the app becomes more about having a one-to-one relationship with the business in question. But that’s reflective of the larger shift underway throughout the industry, says Sun. “I firmly the believe the market is going to move away from deals. Consumers have deal fatigue,” he says. The new Pirq for businesses is .
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Virgin Galactic Wants To Do Moon Cruises, Replace The Concorde For Terrestrial Travel
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Darrell Etherington
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Virgin Galactic is starting off , which is pretty cool… if you’re a billionaire. But the startup’s (yes, it’s a startup, even with Richard Branson at the helm) Commercial Director Stephen Attenborough took the stage at Wired 2013 in London today to talk a bit more about what the space travel company wants to do beyond billionaires. Hint: It could save the cruise business. In the near term, Virgin Galactic wants to do its star tourist thing, to be sure, but it has also already signed up NASA as the first client for space science missions, and there’s a chance to launch satellites into orbit in the same way that they launch aircraft (which is by piggy-backing on a weird dual-fuselage jet called the White Knight, instead of riding a barely controlled explosion). But there’s also opportunity in world travel, once economies of scale come into play and the cost of running these flights goes down. That means something like the Concorde – the famous high-speed, high altitude jet that was retired in 2003 after a crash in 2000 led to a downturn in consumer confidence – could arise from Virgin Galactic, but one that takes the concept of flying high in the atmosphere to take advantage of lower air resistance to its natural conclusion. A passenger liner based on the Virgin Galactic model of manned spaceflight would allow aircraft to leave earth’s atmosphere, which makes travel far more energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and far, far faster. Travel time from London to Sydney, for instance, would take around two or two-and-a-half hours. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh7HOu5-o10&w=640&h=360] Beyond even that, there’s a desire to build cruise ships that could operate as orbital hotels, taking people up for longer stretches, and even potentially allowing for tourist voyages to the moon and back. This seems completely impossible now (it’s almost identical to a plot element from The Fifth Element), but Virgin Galactic is pursuing this as a very real long-term goal. Of course, Virgin Galactic hasn’t managed to launch even one of its incredibly expensive passenger flights yet, even though it’s been doing very well with test launches. That should change soon, however – Attenborough says that the technical risks have all been pretty much ironed out of the program, and anticipates that the first commercial passenger flight should go up beyond the ether sometime within the next year.
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Motorola Is Becoming Google’s Surface
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Alex Wilhelm
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Motorola isn’t doing very well as a part of Google. In Google’s most , Motorola garnered revenue of $1.18 billion. Not a small number, but a mere 8% of its parent company’s consolidated revenue. And, in the comparable third quarter of 2012, its revenue totaled $1.78 billion. That’s a decline of 34% in a year, even with Motorola launching its much-hyped Moto X smartphone. That’s only half the picture, however, as Motorola loses quite a lot of money: $248 million in the quarter. Google sums this well, noting that the loss was “-21% of Motorola Mobile segment revenues.” Motorola lost $192 million in the year-ago quarter, so the trend here isn’t positive. However, Motorola costs Google in other ways as well. Google recorded an amortization expense relating to Motorola of $153 million in the quarter. However, only $37 million of that sum was incorporated into Motorola’s results, so the net impact of Motorola onto Google’s quarter is in fact larger than it first appears. Huge losses? Disappointing revenue? An albatross attempt to break into the OEM market, competing with its own platform partners? Motorola is Google’s Surface. Before you Microsoft fans bend a fan blade, note that I’m comparing the current state of Motorola to the past of Surface. It is far from certain that the new line of Surface devices will be overproduced as the first generation was, something that led to a . Still, watching two large platform companies struggle financially (not that they can’t stomach the losses) with their hardware projects is something worth comparing. The difference, of course, is that Google spent $12 billion buying Motorola, while Microsoft has certainly spent and loss less than that with Surface, before we even begin to include Motorola’s continued financial losses. At what level of loss and low revenue does Google pull the plug?
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Kickstart This Oscilloscope Watch To See Your Hardware Beat To The Beat Of The Drums
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John Biggs
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Some day, archeologists will look back on our civilization and wonder why we had so many smartwatches. Case in point: by Gabriel Anzziani is a wild little bit of gear that adds the power of a fully-functional oscilloscope to your wrist. Why? Because don’t worry about it, that’s why. The watch contains a small a which includes an oscilloscope, waveform generator, logic analyzer, protocol sniffer, and frequency counter inside a tiny package. Anzziani’s DIY, 3D-printed version is obviously not much to look at right now but if he hits his $60,000 goal you can expect to see a much nice product down the line. [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-watch width=480] The watch will include two analog inputs that will be connected via a keychain fob or perhaps the watch band – that’s still to be decided – and it will have eight digital inputs. A 128×128 will bop out the waveforms (and watch faces) and you should be able to, at the very least, measure your projects on the fly. The first watches can be had for a $100 pledge and he expects to ship by April of next year. Do you need an oscilloscope watch? No way, Jose. But it’s great to know there is someone out there thinking of the hardware hackers who, at some point in their lives, have wished they had a little oscilloscope on their wrist.
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Automatic Link Review Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Realtime Driving Feedback
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Chris Velazco
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to get off my chest: I live in New Jersey, so by definition that makes me a “Jersey driver”. I’ve never thought of myself as the sort of manically aggressive road warrior that befits the stereotype (and I’d argue that Pennsylvania drivers are way worse), but Link dongle begs to differ. It’s been plugged into my car for the better part of two weeks now, dutifully tracking all my hard stops, all my hasty starts at green lights, and all the times I’ve perhaps pushed the car a bit too hard. And the verdict is in: I’m exactly what I thought I wasn’t. I’m a stereotypical New Jersey driver. As the old adage goes, the first step to recovering is admitting you have a problem, and Automatic’s neat little dongle + app combo has helped me to realize just that. But let’s back up a moment — how does this all work? Since 1996, every car that’s been sold in the United States has what’s called an OBD-II port nestled in it somewhere. Odds are good you don’t even know what it looks like (it’s a little trapezoidal thing with 16 pins) or where it is. It’s there so mechanics and car dealers can troubleshoot automotive issues by connecting a computer to the thing, and the Automatic team has whipped up a consumer device that pops in there to monitor your car’s speed, fuel injection rate, and more. There are a few extra bits in there that make the Link dongle more than your average diagnostics tool. The accelerometer means that it can detect sudden stops and starts, and there’s a tiny speaker built into the that audibly alerts you in those moments. It sounds like sort of a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Consistently slamming your brakes isn’t doing your car any favors, but the dongle is much more sensitive than that — seemingly normal stops can trigger the alert which sort of forces you to reconsider how normal your driving really is. The dongle also beeps at you when you’re too quick off the line (something I’m apparently guilty of way too often), and when you push your car over 70 miles per hour. In the end, you’re left with a gadget that’s capable of giving you realtime driving feedback while you tool around town (and it’s much more pleasant than having a backseat driver bark at you). Of course, the (currently iOS-only) app plays a big role in all this too as the Link connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. You can’t glance down at your phone in-the-moment for immediate status updates — the only feedback you’re getting while driving is those audio notifications — but it dutifully chews on all of that data post-drive to show you your route and how many of those driving faux pas you made on the road. It also displays a rough estimate of your fuel economy, and I do mean rough — some quick, back of the napkin calculations gave me figures that weren’t always as peachy as the ones the app displayed. Automatic says this is a known issue though, and they’re apparently working on improving accuracy. All of those metrics get boiled down into a single weekly score so users can easily track their progress over time. And thankfully, there are some features that I haven’t had to use yet. In the event that your car throws up a Check Engine light, the Automatic app is capable of showing some detailed information about what may be causing it and how to potentially fix it. And if you’ve got Crash Alert enabled, the Link will be on the lookout for the sort of incredibly hard stops that usually signify, well, a crash. In the event it detects one, it collects your location information using your phone’s GPS and attempts to send it along to the local authorities by way of Automatic’s backend servers. It’s exclusive to the U.S. and still very much in beta though — Automatic admits that at this point there’s no guarantee that any nearby police stations or fire departments will respond. There are, as always, some caveats to be aware of. While years and years worth of cars physically have an OBD-II port somewhere, the Automatic Link can’t decipher the data from every single one of them (you can check your car’s compatibility ). That crucial Bluetooth connection presents some problems of its own too — if you’re the type of person who relies on Bluetooth to stream your music through your car stereo or access your contact list on the go, you may to have to decide which of these experiences means more to you. Then again, there’s a fair to middling chance that if your car came with Bluetooth functionality out of the gate, it’s already going to replicate some of the Automatic Link’s more basic features. And you know what? That’s just fine. My car rolled off an assembly line in 2006, which was apparently the model year just before the one when neato options like AUX inputs and in-dash fuel economy gauges became standard fare. A drill and a $15 gewgaw from Amazon fixed that first problem, and now a $99 gadget + app combination have taken care of the latter for me (and then some). On some level though, I just wish the Automatic system did more — I’d love a web view that lets me dig into all this information in aggregate, and some maintenance reminders every few thousand miles since I’m probably running a little behind on that too. Now this is all well and good, but there’s a bigger question to tackle: am I actually a better driver? Well, I’m getting there. The thing to remember about Automatic is that it isn’t going to magically make you a more conscientious driver — you have to work at it. The name of the game is behavior modification through better data. In that sense the Automatic dongle is a sort of Fitbit for your car, a reasonably inexpensive doodad that shines a little more light on what you put your car (and your wallet) through on a weekly basis. Exactly what you do with that data is entirely up to you. In my case, I’ve slowly grown to be a bit more thoughtful on road in the two or so weeks since I first jammed the dongle in my ODB port. That’s not to say that I’ve given up my leadfoot tendencies completely — sometimes you just need to crank things up a bit — but I’m noticeably more cognizant of how fast I’m going at any given moment. It’s even gotten to the point where I finding myself driving as close to 70 MPH as possible without actually going over, even when the Automatic isn’t plugged in. It’s also not meant to be a replacement for more robust, capable ODB scanners. Needless to say, dyed-in-the-wool car buffs may not find enough value here to warrant a purchase. The same goes for people who are more than happy putting pedals to the metal on a regular basis — chances are they’re not planning to change their behavior very soon. But for cost-conscious consumers? Or people like me who actively want to change their driving style? The Automatic experience is worth the asking price, and with any luck it’ll only get better with time.
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Meet Telegram, A Secure Messaging App From The Founders Of VK, Russia’s Largest Social Network
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Catherine Shu
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Created by the founders of Russia’s biggest social networking platform, is a new messaging app that offers speed, security and features such as secret chats with end-to-end encryption and self-destructing messages. Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched (originally called VKontakte) in 2006, began working on Telegram 18 months ago as a research project because they wanted to create something that was “really secure and fun at the same time.” The importance of Telegram was underscored when Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and PRISM were first made public in June. “It made a lot of people really scared and concerned about the current situation. We are certainly among many, many people who started to think about ways to fix the problem,” Pavel told me in a phone interview. Durov has had his own run-ins with Russian legal authorities. An into a traffic incident Durov denied involvement in was halted for the second time earlier this month, but not before . VK was also . Though the organization later claimed the blacklisting was an accident, some analysts said it was a government attempt to intimidate online activists. (During our phone interview, Durov noted that he was using a Russian SIM card and that there was a good chance our conversation was being recorded by the Russian legal authorities.) Telegram is based on a custom data protocol called MTProto built Nikolai Durov, a mathematician. The app’s secret chats, a separate feature from its ordinary chats, use end-to-end encryption. They cannot be forwarded and can be set to self-destruct after a certain amount of time. One key difference between Telegram’s secret and ordinary chats is that secret chats are not stored in the app’s cloud, which means you can only access messages from their device of origin. Telegram wants to earn users’ trust by operating as a non-profit, open platform initiative. “The first thing that we wanted to make clear is that nobody has to trust anybody. We don’t take people’s trust for Telegram for granted,” says Pavel Durov. Durov says there are currently about 100,000 daily active users and he hopes users and developers will take advantage of Telegram’s . That way, Durov explains, “we will be able to invite everyone to review the messaging algorithm that we use on Telegram and inspect the source code of the app. We can earn trust from them, that end-to-end encryption is something that can be done on the client side. This way, any interested person can check that the app does exactly what it claims to and doesn’t send information to other sources or does anything else that is insecure.”
Telegram’s founders say the app will remain non-profit because that enables them to avoid commercial and legal pressure. If they eventually need funds to scale up, Telegram will ask for donations from users or make additional services available as in-app purchases. These could include a virtual number that can be used instead of a real mobile number, ensuring more confidentiality. Nikolai Durov oversaw the scaling up of VK’s platform as it grew to 50 million daily unique users over seven years. Pavel says the lessons the brothers learned during VK’s development means they will be able to make sure Telegram remains secure even if its user base rapidly expands. In December Telegram was downloaded over 100,000 times in one day by users in the Middle East, compared to its usual average of 2,000 downloads per day. Based on Twitter chatter, the Telegram team figured out that English-speaking users in the region were downloading the app because they were interested in its group and media sharing capabilities. Unlike WhatsApp, which limits group chats to 50 members, Telegram currently allows up to 100 members. Telegram’s team wants the messaging app to stand out by offering speed and security, as well as reliance on crowd-sourcing and community-driven efforts. “VK is famous for its competitions among third-party developers who build alternative versions of VK on its open API,” says Durov. “I hope Telegram will be able to rely on the community even more than VK since it’s a non-profit project that hopefully will be able to attract people who share the idea behind it.” Another lesson Telegram’s team learned from its experience with VK is to stay clear of Russia’s government. The app rents data centers and servers around the world, including in London, San Francisco, Singapore and Helsinki. “As a foreign company and offshore entity we will not be obliged to comply with the rules of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and countries like that,” says Durov. If Telegram received requests from government or legal organizations, it would not be able to provide data for end-to-end encrypted chats anyway because the encryption keys are generated on each user’s device and not the server. “Anyone could look into our documentation and the source code of the app and make sure that we are not trying to fool anyone. The NSA, for that matter, could do the same thing and see that we cannot provide them with any data for purely algorithmic, mathematical reasons,” he adds. “I think that is a way to refuse data requests without openly breaking local rules in America or any other country.” Telegram is the first project by Digital Fortress, a new company founded by the Durov brothers. The next project will involve voice communication, though Durov is still not sure if it will be developed as a separate project or as a new feature for Telegram. Current priorities for Telegram’s small engineering team include enabling users to permanently delete accounts. “We will come up with solutions to really ensure people that of the complete deletion of their data,” says Durov. “We have to consider several options and chose the best one to do that in a transparent way.”
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Nielsen’s New SDK Adds Mobile Viewing To Its Traditional TV Ratings, Uses Data From Facebook To Match Demographics
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Ingrid Lunden
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After months of trials, today is an SDK that will give it the ability to measure how people view TV on mobile apps and other digital formats. Nielsen plans to use this data alongside its core business measuring traditional TV viewing, an essential component for how broadcasters ultimately sell ads against that content. By doing this, Nielsen is looking for a way to track consumers who now watch TV on “new screens” like tablets and smartphones — still a small number compared to overall TV viewing, but growing by the day, and therefore representing an increasingly interesting audience for businesses that buy TV advertising. Nielsen says the SDK, which will be available to Nielsen clients, will be out by mid-November. While Nielsen traditionally works with broadcasters and their partners to measure TV consumption, launching this SDK also opens up the company to working with other companies that are digital-only but are also playing a part in how people are consuming TV content today. They include Aero, Netflix, YouTube and more. Nielsen’s SDK has been on the cards for some time already. In of this year, Nielsen completed a trial that measured CBS streams that played over the Syncbak app (CBS is a in Syncbak). This also used Nielsen’s SDK. Then, at the , reports emerged noting an announcement of Nielsen’s mobile streaming measurement service was imminent, but without many details of how it would work. While Nielsen’s traditional business has relied on meters in homes to measure audio codes in TV shows, that hardware doesn’t monitor devices like computers, tablets and smartphones. Nielsen says that the SDK approach tracks usage with audio watermarks as well as tags and other metadata on the TV shows and their ads. (It’s technology that Nielsen says is patent-pending.) To figure out who is watching those streams and where, Nielsen says it will use “big data and a census-style measurement approach.” This will involve matching information from services like Facebook and combining this with its existing National People Meter panel. It’s not clear if Nielsen is paying Facebook a fee to use its data or whether it will in exchange be providing Facebook with data in return that it can use to improve its own ad sales. (We’ve asked, and we’re also trying to find out who, besides Facebook, may be providing data.) Much like Nielsen’s social TV measurement Twitter, Facebook wants to make a big play for video and TV-related advertising, and it has been reportedly with its own data about how TV gets discussed, liked and linked on its social network. The key with the new SDK is it gives Nielsen a way of measuring consumption that will augment its data on traditional TV viewing, but it will also be able to pick up data about other online video viewing that doesn’t fall into the traditional TV category. If a broadcaster makes a TV show available for viewing on a digital device “and it meets the ad load and timeline requirements for TV ratings,” Nielsen notes, then views of that content will get counted towards overall Nielsen TV ratings. On the other hand, content not eligible for TV ratings — “due to elapsed crediting time, dynamic ad insertion or because it originated from the Web itself” — then gets included in Nielsen Digital Ratings, i.e. Nielsen Digital Program Ratings for content ratings and Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings for the ad rating. “We’ve been working hard to deliver this new SDK and are excited to be able to deliver a single client solution that supports both the linear (TV style) and dynamic (Internet style) ad models,” noted Megan Clarken, EVP, Global Product Leader, Nielsen, in a statement. “This unified encoding approach for video enables measurement to follow content across screens and ad models.” Traditional TV still accounts for the majority of ad spend — of all ad spend worldwide in Q2 went to TV advertising, according to figures from Nielsen earlier this month. But as penetration of tablets and smartphones continues to grow, users are increasingly using those screens for their TV fix. notes that about 13% of all digital video plays now come from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, growing by 41% in the first half of this year. In other words, while Nielsen’s traditional TV measurement business is probably still robust, a large part of that may have had to do with the fact that it can be measured better. Now that it’s introducing new ways of measuring apps and other online formats, it will be worth watching to see how and if ad spend shifts more as a result. Below, a diagram of how Nielsen sees its new TV ratings system working: Image:
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What Games Are: The Future Of Pervasive Games
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Tadhg Kelly
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Pervasive gaming is a well-worn idea that’s drifted through the pages of design theory for at least 20 years. It’s the idea of a game that goes beyond the bounds of one screen. You’d play your game on your computer and then go out into the world with your PDA and keep playing. Your game would seep in to your life in a variety of ways and maybe even the boundaries of play and not-play would become illusive. While the target devices have maybe moved on from computers and PDAs to tablets and smartphones, the idea is alive and well. Pervasiveness forms the meat of transmedia and gamification. The former is interested in using it as a way to tell stories, going from one format to another. The latter is more concerned with ways that games and behavior usefully coincide. Pervasiveness also features in much of the thinking surrounding massive multiplayer and social game experiences, or at least where the designers of those games believe they should go. When futurist game designers look at smartwatches, smart TVs, iPad minis, microconsoles and other upcoming device types, they invariably forecast a kind of game that hooks into all of the above and gels together. Yet what we actually see in pervasive gaming is pretty thin. It boils down to little more than notifications nagging players to come back and play some otherwise thoroughly normal game along with some data sharing. Pervasiveness simply means messages that remind you to take your turn and cloud saves. There are many sensible reasons why it’s not been a big deal so far. The first is the technology. While the pervasive game sounds good in theory, in practice it’s meant getting a lot of different devices to play nice, and that’s not easy. Look at how long it’s taken simple office software to go from a single-device to a cloud-based experience, and you get some sense of the challenge. Until recently PCs didn’t talk to mobile phones. Mobile phones didn’t have reliable-enough connectivity to maintain conversations with clouds. Consoles didn’t talk to anything almost as an article of faith. The second reason is expertise. Developing a game to work on one platform is hard, never mind porting to similar platforms. Trying to take a game across many form factors and control types and yet somehow make them make sense is a daunting challenge and many game makers balk at the manpower required. This is why many pervasive experiences (such as Foursquare) tend to be rudimentary, and in turn why they struggle to maintain engagement levels. We may be starting to overcome many of these issues. The Unity 3D engine, for example, has made cross-compatibility between platforms much easier. It is now much less daunting for a small studio to consider publishing everywhere, and the performance trade-offs that used to exist with middleware have become a non-issue. There’s also the convergence of core technologies in the computing sector. Microsoft may have gotten the implementation of this idea wrong with Windows 8, but the notion that screens of all sizes will start to operate in similar touch-based ways is likely correct. As device categories become better at being interoperable and clouds offload some of the heavy lifting, possibilities emerge. But there is also a perception issue. Although there is plenty of evidence to suggest that multi-screen multi-device households are (in rich countries at least), game makers tend to think of that as a one-percenter perspective. They believe that the idea that players might move from screen to screen is a nice dream, but most of them won’t. And there is some precedent to this. In the more dedicated end of the video game market gamers tend to be loyal to specific brands and formats. In more casual markets players tend to have a default device, even a default game, that they play regularly but don’t seem inclined to change up. There is also the fractious history of alternate reality games and how they didn’t attract a lot of long term interest. Video games are usually designed with a target environment and control method in mind, indeed making that control method part of the challenge of the game. works really well as a mouse-and-keyboard game but would suck with a joypad. However the experience of playing Mario demands a joypad and would be boring in touch. That close relationship is not easily unpicked, and arguably not one that many players or developers want unravelled. You can’t play on your iPhone. You can’t even conceive of how it would work because the whole game is designed from a PC perspective. Pervasiveness is just another way of saying as-a-service. We predicted for a long time that software would move over to that model, and it has. Barring a few holdouts like Photoshop and Maya, the clear direction for growth in the software industry has been all about service for a while. It’s changed how software is thought of and what’s considered to be an important feature versus just another bullet point on a box. It’s changed how community works with software, often being the force that drives its direction. As a result the powers in the pervasive software landscape look completely different to the older kings. Basecamp to Microsoft Project. Gmail to Outlook. Perhaps the new Numbers to Excel. Successful pervasive games will probably have to do something similar, to be designed from the ground up rather than to think of extra platforms as value-adds. Imagine, for example designing a pervasive space-trading game. The king of the genre, , has existed since 2003 and is designed entirely with the PC in mind. It has a hugely loyal user base that’s sensitive to changes. The game is persistent but not necessarily pervasive unless you sit in front of your PC a lot. It’s attempted to branch out into other platforms (such as through ) but not been successful in doing so. Creating a pervasive space-trading game does not mean taking and adding some mobile features. It means rethinking everything from the ground up. It probably means making a game that will always be much simpler than EVE, but that’s okay. The target of the experience is that pervasive feeling rather than the super-featured depth of the current king. Designing for pervasiveness probably needs a whole new approach and this is one of the bigger challenges that game makers will face over the next few years because pervasiveness is already here. It’s Netflix remembering your position in a TV series from device to device. It’s collaborating on a Google document on the train while your colleague is doing the same from his desk. It’s checking your text message on your wearable smart watch. It’s whatever a sexier looking Google Glass turns out to be good for. None of these new software experiences really fit the mould of uni-device usages, and increasingly the idea that software in the future would work that way will seem quaint. It’s not that games will all need to become pervasive to thrive, but the opportunity is opening up for studios willing to think that way to deliver new kinds of play experience.
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Qualcomm: Nokia Lumia 2520 “Bigger, Faster, Lower Power” Than Microsoft’s Surface 2
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Alex Wilhelm
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If you, like me, took some offline time this weekend, we’re a bit late to the latest slap fight in the world of Windows RT. Until recently, there was only one functional player in the Windows RT space – Microsoft, and its Surface 2 tablet – but Nokia has stepped into the ring, and one of its suppliers is talking a little trash. No shame in that, of course. Bragging is as old as language. But how Qualcomm – the supplier of the Windows RT tablet’s processor – is taking the Surface 2 to task is interesting. Both the Nokia 2520 and the Surface 2 run Windows RT, so when it comes to software, they are on parity. Certainly, you could argue that the Surface 2 might behave better with Windows RT than rival devices, given that Microsoft builds both, but that’s edge work. Qualcomm, as , thinks that the Lumia 2520 is “bigger, faster, [and] lower power” than Microsoft’s rival Surface 2 tablet. Ok. The kicker to this is that, for the Surface line of tablet hybrids, the component of the devices has largely not been the point of complaint raised by reviewers and users. Instead, it’s been the that the Surface devices run on – Windows 8 at first, and now Windows 8. 1- that was the sticking point. Windows 8 was not ready at launch. And Windows 8.1 has yet to be tested against consumer demand. Why Qualcomm is trumpeting the “speeds and feeds” of the Lumia 2520 is simple: It provides the silicon that powers the device. Microsoft’s Surface 2 runs on Nvidia chips. Keep in mind, however, that Microsoft is in the process of buying the Nokia assets that built the Lumia 2520, so we could see reconciliation. For now, however, Nokia’s tablet does directly challenge its future brother. Microsoft recently reported that Surface unit volume doubled in its most recent quarter, compared with the sequentially preceding quarter. Surface revenue totaled $400 million for that period. Here’s the question: Will the Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 markets become akin to the Android realm, where OEMs race to best the hardware specifications of their rivals in their devices?
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The Nexus 5 Gets A New Color And A New Rumored Launch Date
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Chris Velazco
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There really isn’t much we know about Google and LG’s new Nexus 5 at this point — a blew the door open on plenty of technical details, and Google even “accidentally” outed the device in the Google Play Store, giving us a $349 price tag for the base 16GB model. Now, thanks to the one and only , we’ve gotten yet another glimpse of the forthcoming phone in some decidedly different livery. Rather than the bog-standard matte black finish we’ve seen on and off for the past few months, this newly leaked image shows off a white version of the device ahead of its official launch… whenever that may be. In case you haven’t been keeping up with the Nexus 5’s long journey from to , the device is said to sport a 4.95-inch display running at 1080p and a quad-core Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.3GHz. Oh, and let’s not forget 2GB of RAM, an active LTE radio, and a mildly improved 2300mAh battery — all told we’re looking at a pretty solid update. Arguably more important than that new chromatic choice is the latest in a long line of purported release dates for the Nexus 5 — this time it looks like November 1 is the day to circle on your calendars. For a while there it looked like we would get our first official glimpse at the Nexus 5 on October 15, a day that came and went with nary a peep from Google. Then there came word of a small Google Play event slated for the evening of the 24th in New York City, which ultimately turned out to be little more than a meet-and-greet for certain members of the press. Couple that with a separate report from the folks at forecasting a launch on October 31 and it’s starting to seem very likely that the Nexus 5 will make its grand debut at the end of the month. Of course, that’s only a few days away and there’s still no smoking gun — Google hasn’t started distributing invitations — so we’ll see just how much longer this not-so-secret secret winds up staying under wraps. Curiously enough, the Nexus 5 may not be alone when it hits the Google Play Store for real. An put in an appearance in the Bluetooth Special Interest Group’s device certification listings.
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“Post-Print” Startup Stateless Media Creates Short, Smart Documentaries For The Web
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Anthony Ha
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My recent conversation with Stateless Media’s Peter Savodnik was a bit discombobulating. He’s had what seems like a successful career in longform journalism, with publications in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and . Yet he sounded awfully pessimistic about print — and as someone who makes his living as a writer, that’s not exactly what I wanted to hear. On the other hand, Savodnik has a vision for what might replace the feature magazine articles that he used to write, and he’s pursuing it through his new company. ( describes the content as “post-print storytelling”.) Traditional media outlets, he argued, aren’t giving the younger audience “what they want.” “We can lament the fact that people don’t want to read long, thoughtful stories, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground,” he said. “I guess my very strong feeling is that we have a real opportunity here to reconnect with millions and millions of media consumers.” The vehicle for that connection is something Savodnik has dubbed the “shortreal”, which is essentially an 11-minute online documentary. Stateless Media has released two shortreals thus far, one called “ ” (embedded at the end of this post) and a second called “ “. And it just released the trailer for a third (which you can watch below), “Being Radler,” covering “the hunt for an East German spy.”
I thought “Chutzpah”, in particular, was well done — it addresses a familiar topic (politician Anthony Weiner), but in a fresh and entertaining way (and according to the Stateless Media site, it has been viewed 14,326 times). [ Savodnik said that according to his Vimeo analytics, which he sent me, “Chutzpah” has actually been viewed more than 40,000 times.] But what makes a shortreal different from any other online video and actually worthy of a new buzzword? Savodnik argued that the aims are implicit in the name — a shortreal doesn’t take much time to watch (the 11-minute duration was chosen because it’s half the length of a 30-minute TV episode, minus the commercials) and it tells a true story. That storytelling, he added, is what’s missing from many documentaries, some of which are more concerned about being beautiful, while others are “cause-driven” and “predictable”: “We know from the start where we’re being led and what we’re going to think.” “I have the utmost respect for that, but a story is a real story,” Savodnik said. “There are complicated characters who develop over time.” The initial shortreals were directed by filmmakers Edward Perkins and Kannan Arunasalam. Perkins told me via email that even though he’s directed documentary films for the National Geographic Channel and behind-the-scenes featurettes for films include The Eagle and Searching For Sugar Man, shortreals are “fundamentally different from anything I have worked on before” because they combine “the best of investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking.” “People have always wanted to hear great stories, and will continue to do so,” he said. “But the way in which they want to consume stories is changing. We want to give people people these stories exactly how and when they want them. On phones. On laptops. On tablets. And in a short 11 minute format that still explores complex issues, embraces ambiguity, and throws up surprises.” Arunasalam said that a shortreal is closer to a short film than a documentary, “with a very cinematic look and feel.” He offered this explanation for how they’re put together: For me, it’s an interesting dynamic between the investigative journalist and the filmmaker working together. Usually, as a filmmaker you’re on your own to tell the story. But here, the story is reported by the journalist, who does the investigating and the digging for characters and story-lines — so far mainly by Peter — and the responsibility of making the film rests with the filmmaker. With the Stateless Media approach, the skills of both filmmaker and journalist are fine-tuned to the storytelling process, to make the best possible film. Stateless has been self-funded thus far, and it sounds like it’s still very much in the experimental stages — for example, Savodnik said he learned a lot from the production of “The Brothers Sheikh” that led to big improvements in “Chutzpah”. The ultimate goal, he said, is to build out a team of filmmakers who create shortreals from around the world, and to turn Stateless Media into the destination site for that content: “Basically the stories that we like to tell are stories that are — I guess there’s no other way to put it — unexpected, stories that don’t fit into conventional frameworks.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMr89YIuMW4&w=560&h=315]
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Fitwall Is A Gym That Knows If You’re Working Out Too Hard, Or Not Hard Enough
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Many earnest novice gym-goers have a commitment that won’t outlast a green banana. One problem is that newbies exert themselves too much and drop their membership before their overly worked muscles have time to recover. On the other end of the six-pack spectrum, Brad Pitt-looking characters may skate by without breaking a sweat, and drop dead prematurely because they never knew they could work out harder. , a new quantified gym in sunny San Diego, wants to ensure everyone is working out exactly hard as they should be. All members are strapped with heart monitors that display their target heart rate in brightly-lit iPads that hang over them as they perform gravity-based exercises. In the video above, I test it out on their mobile fitwall outside of TechCrunch’s San Francisco headquarters. “We ensure that you’re monitored, in real time,” says Josh Weinstein, CEO of Fit, who first caught up with me at the in Eden, Utah. FitWall’s head coach Clifton Harski says that newbies go “too hard, too often,” which leads to quitting. “We want to train hard, but we don’t want to train hard until we’re ready for it.” Check out my sweaty workout above.
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Foursquare PreCheck-In Wins The First Disrupt Europe Hackathon, Teleapp And Colorful Gift Place Second And Third
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Darrell Etherington
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TechCrunch Disrupt Europe’s first-ever hackathon has just concluded, and the judges have crowned a winner. There were 91 companies presenting hacks at this year’s inaugural event, and 24 hours after they sat down and started hacking, the teams stood up on stage and ran through 60-second demos of what they built. Our panel of judges evaluated their efforts, and awarded them with three top prizes based on the merits of each. Here’s who walked away with the big prizes. allows people to express their intent to visit places before they even go. That can make it easier to plan trips with friends, and it can allow businesses to offer up services and products to potential customers in advance to help encourage them to actually go through with their visit and deliver better customer service. The video of their one minute on-stage demo is above; below, you can see our conversation with them backstage after they were announced as the Hackathon winners.
This is a Google Chrome browser extension that intelligently combs web pages for App Store links and then pushes that out to a user’s phone so they can download the app directly. Saves an email or a message, and is probably a handy tool for tech bloggers like myself. An app that allows couples getting married to crowdsource their honeymoons, collecting payment from family and friends to pay for their trip, in a gamified, playful way. Each of the winners gets to present their hacks during the main show at Disrupt Europe 2013, which kicks off on Monday, and the grand prize winner gets $5,000 for the team. Everyone who presented gets two free tickets to Disrupt, and sponsors have to different teams, too. Sponsors this time around included Box, ChallengePost, CrunchBase, T-Mobile, Foursquare, Lufthansa, Mashery, Paymill, Xing, Yammer, Interoute, Nexmo, Watchmi and Weather Underground. Our judges for the event were Deutsche Telekom hub:raum incubator founder Peter Borchers; Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelist Anika Klauss; SoundCloud VP of Engineering Alexander Grosse; and GetYourGuide CEO and co-founder Johannes Reck. As a bonus, check out where the many participants hailed from at this year’s show, broken down by country.
2013 Disrupt Europe Hackathon Attendees By Country |
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Pretzels, Backrubs, And Booze: Late Night At The Disrupt Europe Hackathon
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Matt Burns
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But then the pretzels and popcorn came out. Beer was served. And everyone got a second wind. Plus, the sponsored masseuse helped calm sore backs. I know he helped me. The attendees made it through the night and eventually formed more than a 100 teams to present the next morning.
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Fancy Hands Enhances Mobile Search In Novel Ways
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch This weekly column has been focused on mobile lately and will likely stay this way. Last week, I wrote from a devil’s advocate position to consider situations in which entrepreneurs may not want to enter the market “mobile-first.” This week, I want to take a slightly different approach and highlight one app (which also has a web presence) that I’ve come to use so often, it’s made it to my wallet (I’m a subscriber) and my home screen: . The idea is pretty simple: Enter in a request, a task, or a search command into Fancy Hands, and a set of virtual assistants will complete the task for you and/or ask questions along the way to clarify until the task is marked “complete.” Most of the interaction for me happens in email, though I input tasks either on the web (at home) or on mobile (when I’m out). After trying a handful of these kind of services, I settled on and happily pay them $45/month for the ability to initiate fifteen (15) requests within a monthly period. While $3 per request may seem high, I’ve found the cognitive load it saves me is worth it. My work-flow is roughly as follows: On my laptop or mobile, I input tasks into CLEAR and/or Asana, and if any of those require light research, I quickly initiate a Fancy Hands request, which then gets queued into my email, the feed I spend the most time looking at. I’ve found Fancy Hands is most useful when I’m on the go, when I have a few moments to kill, and I can kickstart a task and have someone working on it in the background so that I can act on it when I get back to my desk. The nature of the tasks center around search. This provides me great value on mobile. While I use networks like Facebook and Twitter to ask friends and colleagues for recommendations (a type of search), for ones that are more private or specific, Fancy Hands is like having someone help conduct online research for you with options to choose from. The ones I’ve used most often involve travel plans and pricing, looking for suggestions for gifts for family and friends (instead of just going to Amazon), and helping with logistics around making a reservation at a bar or restaurant for a private group, all the way from research to booking. There are some lessons for mobile apps in the success of Fancy Hands. One, it is multi-platform, and for a utility like this, I engage more with the service by between web and iPhone. Two, the company has organized, vetted, and trained an of virtual assistants to stay within the bounds of what’s reasonable in search and coordination, so each request I make is sent to a pool of available labor at a pre-set market price of $3 per inquiry. By making input easier on mobile, I’m inside Fancy Hands more often as I come to rely on it more, and this increases my requests, which in turn increases the work for the assistants. Three, once a task is initiated, I’m alerted with mobile push that update me periodically on the progress of the task, whether more input is needed, and when it’s done. Often, I don’t need to go back into the app, it just sends me a push to keep me posted. That’s my favorite feature, it creates the feeling that stuff is working for me in the background as I do other things. Outside of games, photos, and messaging on mobile, the apps that tend to win my loyalty are the types that provide me with mobile utility that saves me time, works in the background, and allows me to seamlessly work between platforms. And, while I can search for just about anything on my phone, either through the browser, or more vertical searches in apps, the unique flavor of Fancy Hands is the comfort that another person has taken your search intent and helped generate new results. While it all may be possible on the web, to be sure, there’s tremendous value in the mobile app, to help me save a few minutes here or there in a world where I’m constantly searching for any morsel of free time.
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Twpple Hack, Built By Kenyan Duo, Connects Small Businesses With Social Media “Big Wigs”
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Natasha Lomas
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Here at the TechCrunch Disrupt Europe Hackathon, Sam Gichuru (left) and Billy Odero spent the night working on a neat hack to help small businesses promote themselves by tapping into social network influencers. The hack, called Twpple, is designed to give smaller outlets, such as kebab shops, market stalls, hair salons and so on — basically any small businesses that hasn’t built up its own digital following — a stronger voice than they would otherwise have in the digital sphere to promote whatever it is they sell. The hack uses Klout scores as a shortcut to identify individuals with the most social cachet that the SMEs can then tap into. The social influencers get paid for tweeting a series of messages (which they would word themselves) about the business or promotions they are running — with small payments giving them an incentive to help businesses spread the word. “If your Klout score is 25 you can get $2.50 for sending three tweets,” said Gichuru, during his on stage pitch. “We have called this ‘pay per influence.'” The bigger story here is not so much the hack but the fact that Gichuru and Odero came all the way from Nairobi, Kenya, to join the hackathon. The pair work for an accelerator in Nairobi called — where Gichuru is CEO and co-founder, and can normally be found helping startups hone their pitches for the hackathons the incubator runs. They told TechCrunch they made the trip to Europe to attend another tech conference in Amsterdam and meet with some investors and decided to add a two-day hack in Berlin into the mix while they were here. Their eight-hour flight from Nairobi was followed by an epic 13-hour train ride from Amsterdam to Berlin, which involved a lengthy detour after a 500-pound unexploded WWII bomb was found under a bridge(!). Add to that, Odero’s laptop broke and the pair’s Kenyan bank cards were rejected so they couldn’t buy a replacement machine — meaning they had to share one MacBook to build Twpple. Yet still they hacked. Gichuru said Twitter is especially popular in Kenya — hence their focus on that social platform for Twpple. But while social media is a “big game” in Kenya for individuals, many small businesses still remain on the outside. “They are always asking us, ‘hey how do you get on social media? How do we get social media influencers to tweet about us? And talk about us and write and talk about our Happy Hour?’ So we decided to build a platform where they can just log in, even from their mobile phones, create a small campaign — just based on the preferences they put up — for example their location, demographic, target market they want to reach. “Then they’re able to get a list of the social media influencers who have signed up on our platform. And based on these guys’ Klout data they are able to say how much to pay for a certain amount of tweets.” Payments would require influencers to send a series of tweets — in order for the small business to get enough “traction” from the micro campaign, said Gichuru, discussing the hack backstage. “You need at least three tweets [per influencer] to get enough traction [for the business that’s paying for the campaign]. But it has to be a conversation. We have to find a balance between having a real conversation and having marketing tweets from these people,” he said. “It’s very easy for people who have a lot of Klout to start a trending topic [in Kenya],” added Odero. “We have some of the craziest hashtags. And normally it’s just one guy.” “Social media big wigs — we call them ‘big wigs’ — become celebrities in my country,” added Gichuru. “They are known, they are followed, they actually — when the government does something, they do have a voice to question it or put government to task to explain it. And you will notice that even during the recent terrorist attack in Nairobi, social media influencers were the ones who were providing more information than the government, than the mainstream.” Gichuru also pointed out that leaning on social big wigs — who are after all going to be broadcasting marketing messages to their own followers — adds an element of “self-regulation” to the advertising process. “If it’s bad people are going to come back at you,” he said. “And you don’t want to be the point that the community attacks.” How did the TC Disrupt hackathon compare to hacks nailab runs? “It’s been a really global experience. We’re always developing local solutions. Being here gives us a chance to see how to develop for a bigger audience and a bigger market,” said Gichuru. “It gives you a sense of how to monetise it as you’re hacking.” “Most people [at nailab hackathons] try to focus on social enterprise,” added Odero. “It’s easier to get donor funding, it’s easier to get sponsors if you’re actually building something that solves an existing problem where we are.” Here’s Gichuru presenting Twpple on stage:
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Truly.am Uses Facial Recognition To Help You Verify Your Online Dates
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Frederic Lardinois
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One of the coolest hacks we saw at the today was built by two coders from Uruguay who have been hacking their way around the world for the last few months. Truly.am lets you verify who you are talking to online. Say somebody on Facebook or a dating site sends you a picture. How do you know they really are the person in that photo? uses some cool HTML5 tools like WebRTC and the to verify that your conversation partners (or the people you meet on online dating sites) really look the way they say they do. Here is how it works: somebody you don’t know sends you a picture. You then go to Truly.am, upload this picture and enter the person’s email address. That person then gets an email and has to verify his or her identity by using their webcam to take a series of images to train the recognition algorithm. Once those images are uploaded to the Truly.am servers, the facial-recognition service takes over and checks them against the original image. Once the results come back, Truly.am tells the user if the image matched and the requester, of course, also gets an email with the results. As Agustin Haller and Dayana Jabif, the two coders behind the project, told me, you often want to remain anonymous on the net, but in some cases, you really need to know at least a bit more information about the person you are talking to. This hack was partly inspired by their own experience with Airbnb, but I have no doubt that users on online dating sites will love this product. On those sites, after all, fake photos still reign supreme. The team plans to expand this idea to include data from LinkedIn, Xing and other professional services as well, but for now, the facial recognition app is available and you can give it a try to verify your own potential online dates now.
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Here Comes The Disrupt Europe Hackathon Hot Dog Cam!
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John Biggs
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Sometimes you just want a hot dog. That’s why we drove a GoPro mounted to a shopping cart around the Disrupt Europe Hackathon where we saw some of the happiest hackers in the world enjoying fine tubesteak and donuts. Why did we film this? Because we could. Keep up with and our new .
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Beatcoin Is A Music Jukebox Hack Powered By Bitcoin Micropayments
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Romain Dillet
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Why did music jukeboxes disappear? They were probably the first truly social experience around music, but then everybody stopped using them. Meet , a nifty hack that was presented onstage at the . The team turned everyone’s phone into a jukebox. Every bar owner can start accepting Bitcoins to play the songs on his or her phone. “What’s interesting about our hack and Bitcoins is that everything is purely virtual,” Meinhard Benn told me. “It doesn’t rely on any old school economy mechanisms and we feel that it’s very disruptive,” he continued, jokingly. First, you have to install the app on your Android phone or iPhone and plug it in to your stereo. And that’s it for the installation process. Then, everyone can go to a website where they will see the song list and the current top picks. Partiers can vote with their Bitcoin wallets. For each song, users can see a different Bitcoin address attached to the same wallet. In the back-end, a scheduled task will check how much virtual money each song received and rank them accordingly. “The user doesn’t need an app or client, he just needs Bitcoins,” Johann Barbie said. Don’t worry, you won’t get ruined by fighting for your favorite songs. The hackers insisted on the micropayment aspect of Beatcoin. To vote up for a song, you have to send something around 0.0001 Bitcoin. You can set up a screen in a bar to display QR codes and the payment options. Meinhard Benn, Johann Barbie, Callum MacDonald, Richard Flett and Franck Gotthold used Java for the back-end infrastructure that handles Bitcoin transactions and the Android app. For the server, the team chose Node.js, MongoDB and Bootstrap. Finally, the native iOS app is written in Objective-C. When asked whether the team will do a hackathon again, they were enthusiastic. While Benn didn’t sleep at all, Barbie moved from South Korea to Berlin on Friday to be here on time. That’s a lot of dedication to participate in a hackathon. In the end, it was worth it as the hack is already profitable, raking up fractions of Bitcoins over the weekend.
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ION Glasses Are The Unobtrusive Notifications System You Wear On Your Face
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John Biggs
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Google Glass, Google schmass. What you really want on your face are these puppies. ION Glasses are sunglass or prescription glasses frames with a built-in LED, Bluetooth stack, and tiny button controller. What do they do? Well the LED lights up to notify you of new messages – you can set different people to different colors – and you can use the glasses to control the music on your phone, a presentation, or almost anything else controlled via Bluetooth. The astute observer will say “Why in the living blazes would I want an LED in my glasses? Are you daft, man?” And to this I would say “Non!” Understand me here – I’m not saying this product is for everyone, but I met the founder, , and he is so earnest and big-hearted that we have to assume that he thought this through. So here we are. Ambit’s system is fairly ingenious. He’s embedded a small piezo buzzer, LED, and Bluetooth stack inside the eyepieces of a standard pair of glasses. They are no heavier than regular Wayfarers and the logo glows on the side so people know you’re into the ION lifestyle. He is and has raised $22,000 of his $150,000 goal. You get a pair of glasses — suitable for prescription or sunglass lenses — for a pledge of $89. They last a week on one charge. Again, why do you need these? Well, they’re extremely unobtrusive and they’re a great way to see when someone important is calling and to help your prioritize the times you need to pick up your phone. Because of their clever design no one will have to know you’re using them and, in turn, you can react to messages and notifications without panic or rudeness. Would I wear these? I’m not so sure, but if I were in security or needed to be in a lot of important meetings I could definitely see myself wanting to get small, discrete messages in the corner of my eye without the potentially off-putting nature of Google Glass. I rarely end posts with a question but I ask you, dear reader, would you wear these?
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Watch The Disrupt Europe Hackathon Right Here
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Jordan Crook
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Here at , coders, hackers, engineers and designers spent the last 24 hours to try to build the best product possible. There have been trials and tribulations, and quite a bit of Club Mate, and it all culminates today with the Hackathon presentations. We have around 100 hacks hitting the Disrupt stage, each getting one minute to present to a panel of , including TechStars Managing Director in London Jon Bradford and SoundCloud’s VP of Engineering Alexander Grosse. The winner will walk away with $5,000, along with two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe. Plus, our API sponsors are offering up some amazing prizes as well, including the opportunity to win a Lumia 925 from Yammer. It should be a Hackathon to remember, which is why this video will be available until the end of time (or the Internet), but there’s nothing like watching the drama unfold live. Sit back, relax and perhaps witness the inception of .
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Yahoo Acquires Bread, Will Shut Down The URL Shortener That Earned You Money
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Josh Constine
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Yahoo has , a 2.5 year old startup that had raised $3.5 million [Update: and we hear was low on cash and shopping itself around to several companies]. Bread let people make money or generate donations by designing interstitial ads. These ads could promote a product or cause and would be shown to people who click links the designer shared through Bread’s URL shortener. Bread has shut down its core publishing products, and its links will go dead in 30 days. It recommends users switch to dominant URL shortener bit.ly. include musician manager and angel Troy Carter, Formation 8’s Joe Lonsdale, fashion designer Marc Ecko, and Raptor Ventures. Bread’s CEO Alan Chan wrote in a statement on its website that “When we launched Bread in 2011, our goal was to help social media influencers and publishers better monetize their online content. In Yahoo, we found a company that shares our vision. We are thrilled to join Yahoo’s advertising team in Sunnyvale where we will be working on developing next-generation solutions for social and mobile publishers and advertisers.” The team had ten employees as of a year ago, but Yahoo confirms that six engineers and product managers will join its advertising technology team, saying: “We have acquired Bread, a company that created a simple way for social media influencers and publishers to monetize their content. The team’s focus on delivering creative and targeted advertising across social media, desktop and mobile devices aligns perfectly with our mission to delight and inspire users.” The idea of Bread was to let you monetize your social media reach. If you had a product, event, or cause to promote, it could help you get the word out by piggybacking on other content. You’d design your ad, pick a link you wanted to share that you thought people would click, and run it through the bre.ad URL shortener. You’d share the link on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever, and each person who clicked would see your interstitial ad for five seconds before being directed to the link’s destination. Here’s a screenshot of an ad our editor Alexia Tsotsis made in 2011 when Bread was getting off the ground. Eventually, Chan wanted to create premium products like analytics for shared links and the company did launch Bread Pro. However, we haven’t heard much more about Bread since 2011. A source says Bread was running out of money and wanted a soft landing. It was apparently in talks with several companies about acquiring it but went with Yahoo. Being acquired has become a popular way for floundering startups to save face, repay investors, sometimes earn a little money, and find new jobs. Marissa Mayer has been focused on buying consumer startups as of late, but Bread’s team could strengthen the ad products that monetize Yahoo’s properties. Together they might be able to turn all of the Yahoo feel-good momentum into real revenue.
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Colleen Taylor
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Memo From AOL Mgmt Re: Use Of TechCrunch Editorial Branding For Personal Pranks
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Anthony Ha
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Dear [Name Unknown, possibly Chris Smith?], It has come to our attention that you recently used a fake, mocked-up version of our technology editorial “blog” property TechCrunch in a personal prank. Furthermore, it has come to our attention that your friend, a Mr. “Olivier M,” was in fact fooled by the aforementioned prank — or so it seems, based on the email entitled “Personal information in your website”, which was sent to TechCrunch Editorial “ ” earlier this week (please see Attachments A, B, and C). Mr. Smith, as you know, AOL acquired TechCrunch back in 2010. Yet from what we understand, you failed to ask anyone at AOL’s Brand Group for permission to use our intellectual property. It’s possible that you’re sweating as you consider the legal ramifications of your actions, but don’t worry — you’ll note that this letter isn’t from AOL Legal. More importantly, contrary to popular opinion, we here at AOL Management have a finely tuned sense of humor. Indeed, we laugh long and hard every time a journalist makes a joke about dial-up Internet or CDs. We understand that such jokes derive their humor from AOL’s with the aforementioned dial-up Internet and CDs. With that in mind, please consider permission to use TechCrunch branding and imagery to be retroactively granted in this case, because you are funny, subject to certain conditions (please see Attachment D). Indeed, you may tell your friends that AOL welcomes all use of TechCrunch branding and imagery for such friend pranking purposes, subject to the aforementioned conditions. Sincerely,
AOL Management cc: AOL Legal [message truncated due to length]
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Marc Andreessen: Series A Investments Are Still The Bread And Butter Of A16Z
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Leena Rao
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This week, the Wall Street Journal published with Andreessen Horowitz Partner Scott Weiss in which he seemed to indicate that the firm is moving away from Series A investments in consumer startups. He also compared many consumer companies to “fruit fly experiments.” It was unclear what Weiss meant by this, but A16Z founder Marc Andreessen jumped into this over the topic to clarify the firm’s stance on Series A investments. He writes in response to a comment on Hacker News: “Just to be clear we didn’t publicly announce that we are not doing Series A investments anymore. They remain the bread and butter of what we do. Scott was making a more nuanced point about a difference between how we look at consumer vs enterprise companies right now, and our relative preference for enterprise A’s and consumer B’s.” We’ve all seen the towards enterprise investing from consumer startups over the past year. So Andreessen’s commentary on how the firm is approaching consumer vs. enterprise investing isn’t particularly surprising given all the talk about the Series A crunch and the rut in consumer investing. Andreessen goes on to say in the thread that Weiss’ interview with the WSJ is being “over interpreted.” He adds that the firm isn’t refusing to do Series A investments and is working on multiple investments at this stage in both consumer and enterprise. Weiss was merely addressing how the firm is currently thinking about consumer vs. enterprise in the current state of the VC world and environment. Why is A16Z leaning towards consumer B’s and enterprise A’s in this climate? Andreessen says that currently, consumer startups either have the “lightning in the bottle” effect or they don’t. This effect doesn’t necessarily correlate to the capabilities of the founders, either. Getting traction is hard and he says that’s also why we are seeing more acqui-hires of the startups that haven’t been able to get the “flywheel spun up.” He writes, “So, if we have the theoretical ability to invest in a given category — remembering that we can only make one primary venture investment per category — in either the A or B round, we find it often makes sense to let other firms fund the A rounds before anything is proven and wait to see the early signs of lightning and then step in hard at the B. The end markets are so large for the winners that the investment returns in the B can still be outstanding, and we can still offer a lot of useful help to the companies at the B stage such as talent sourcing.” He also says that the firm sees many more great consumer teams struggling to get traction than great enterprise teams struggling to get traction (on a proportional basis). Enterprise startups are more predictable, he maintains. The combination of a great founder, engineering team, idea in a big market is a reliable bet that “magic will happen.” And the A16Z can actually talk to the companies who are using these enterprise products to get real feedback. He adds that the firm also sees 1,200 big company management teams coming through their office, and A16Z will ask these corporate execs then what they think about new ideas in the enterprise. So it’s easier to bet at the Series A on an enterprise company. Perhaps this is what Weiss meant by “Fruit Fly Experiments,” an instability, and tendency to throw multiple products or business models against “a wall” (the consumer) to see what sticks. Andreessen explains, “None of this is religion — we still do plenty of consumer A’s and enterprise B’s. We just think it’s useful to talk about these things in public so that entrepreneurs know before they come see us how we are thinking about things — it optimizes their chances of getting to the right outcome with us (whatever that is).” After reading Weiss’ initial commentary, some hypothesized that A16Z is changing its strategy to adapt to having a $1.5 billion fund, and how to best approach this for returns and scalability. But Andreessen clarifies that the firm always prepares to invest more than just series A and reserves another 2-3x of the A-round investment size for participation in future follow-on rounds for a given company. He also says that A16Z is not an either-or situation when it comes to rounds: “We do venture rounds as small as $3-5M and we do growth rounds as high as $100M. Each fund has a blend of both…When we get a great A round opportunity, we take it. Same with B rounds, and same with later-stage growth rounds.” If A16Z is limiting its Series A rounds in consumer towards enterprise, we’re also curious how this is affecting the firm’s seed funding. Is the firm scaling back on seed rounds in consumer tech, as well? We’ve reached out to Andreessen and the firm for further comment on Weiss’ remarks and the Hacker News thread and will update if we hear back. Photo Credit/
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Brian Chesky Talks About Why Airbnb Didn’t Acquire European Clone Wimdu, Global Growth And More
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Leena Rao
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Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky and Sequoia Capital partner, Airbnb board member, and former Zappos COO Alfred Lin joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Chesky and Lin work together on retaining culture, expanding internationally, and maintaining customer service. The first focused on the importance of developing and maintaining culture at a company, in the Chesky and Lin share their thoughts on how to approach customer support, and in this final chapter, we talk about the company’s strategy and challenges in expanding to international markets. Over the past four years, Airbnb has evolved into an international giant in the apartment and home rentals space, reportedly valued at $2.5 billion during its last funding round. To date, Airbnb has helped service over 8.5 million guests, and has more than 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities and 192 countries. But there are challenges associated with this growth and expansion. The company recently creating a new hub for its global operations in Dublin. In the video above, Chesky talks candidly about how the company considered buying European rival and clone Wimdu two years ago, even traveling to Germany to visit the European startup. Check out the video above for more on Airbnb’s international plans.
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Aussie App Omny Is Heading To The U.S. To Be An All-Purpose, Personalized Radio
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Eliza Brooke
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After delivering audio versions of blog articles to the busy masses through , Australian startup is back with a new service that creates personalized radio stations for users. It’s called , and after a soft launch in the this week, the team is shooting to bring it to the States in the next few months. In a market full of personalized radio services like Pandora and IHeartRadio, Omny is aiming to deliver a little bit of everything necessary to keep you up to date and entertained (hence the name). It’s essentially made for the morning commute, bringing together local weather forecasts, appointment reminders, music, podcasts, breaking news bulletins, and social updates into one channel. “Every app is claiming to be personal radio, but they aggregate podcasts. Ours is the first to properly splice it into segments and have the music and the personal updates together,” 121cast COO and co-founder Ed Hooper said. The iOS app is powered by an algorithm that learns your preferences over time, depending on how quickly you swipe to the next song or news segment. It also scores an individual’s Facebook news to determine what’s worth pushing through to the stream. Omny picks up major events from Facebook like birthdays and engagements, along with statuses that are getting a lot of attention. So you’re probably not going to have to hear that Sophie shared “The 25 Whitest Things That Have Ever Happened” from BuzzFeed on her Facebook timeline, unless everyone you know is liking it. In which case, sorry. Part of the reason for the soft launch in Australia is to work out the service’s bugs and fine-tune the algorithm for giving different segments preference over others, Hopper said. They team is playing with the idea of a hotlist for email, so if you put down your wife and boss’s names, Omny will interrupt what you were listening to to deliver the message. Hooper said they are also working out how much local content should be incorporated into the stream. Among the logistical details that need to be nailed down is how much the monthly subscription cost will be, Hopper added. (SoundGecko, by comparison, is priced at $3 per month.) In addition to subscriptions, they’ll be monetizing on ads, and in a listening session of 20 minutes, the user will probably hear one or two advertisements. How to handle users who don’t have their own music and are not signed up for a music service is another question. Although Omny could partner with services like Spotify for free 30-day trials, there’s the potential issue of user attrition after that month. The only bummer is that Omny does need Wi-Fi to add new content, so subway commuters won’t get as fresh an experience as drivers. That said, the app does aggregate future content when it has Wi-Fi so that tunnels won’t be a huge issue.
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Rappers Are Rapping About Being Verified (Or Not) On Twitter
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Alex Wilhelm
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Here’s a question: Are rappers rapping about being verified on Twitter? As it turns out, a number have, both in the positive (verified) and the negative (not verified). And, it also turns out, I am way, way behind. The lyrics, as you might have already guessed, are fucking incredible. It’s fun to see Twitter become culturally relevant enough that status on the service is something worth boasting about. If you have any other examples, the comments are yours. To the songs! Still ain’t verified on Twitter, started from the bottom still here [ ] In this lyric, Kid Slim points out that he is not verified on Twitter, and that unlike Drake who started from the bottom to reach “here,” he remains low on the status totem. Your minds on bitter your vibes on Twitter / Check my file my resume is verified on Twitter [ ] Royce Da 5’9 in this case isn’t impressed that you are whining on Twitter, and would like to point out that his resume is verified by Twitter. That entire Funkmaster Flex session, by the way, is really worth listening to. Crooked I nails his first verse. Ya’ll verified on Twitter, I’m verified by real n*****S / Ain’t they don’t hashtag, they toe tag / Have me send a DM to ya folks pad [ ] Joell is a member of Slaughterhouse, a rap supergroup that apparently has a thing for Twitter. The irony here is that , so, there’s that. When are you gon’ realize? / That Fat Trel certified, that’s why my Twitter verified [ ] The irony? . Cause my idol’s going up and verified on Twitter [ ] Not completely sure what Chrystopher is saying here, but . The me-me generation where everybody is famous / Blue check next to ya name or remain nameless [ ] XV isn’t very proud of the current generation, who are self-centered and focused on ephemeral symbols, such as Twitter verification. I just ain’t just a trend, but lately I’ve been trending, baby / Blue check beside my name, so call me maybe? [ ] Ok, Miller is , so this isn’t too far out there. But the Carly Rae Jepsen allusion is mostly flat. —
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The Comical Irony That iOS 7 Users Are Suffering From Blue Screens Of Death
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Alex Wilhelm
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So Windows sometimes does this thing when your computer freaks the heck out, displays a blue screen, and then reboots or fails in some other way. Called the Blue Screen of Death, it’s long been a cultural meme among nerds about the shortcomings of Windows. Blue Screens are more past than present, as they are, at least in my experience, more the provenance of Windows XP than Windows 7 or 8. Anyway, in 2007, Apple made fun of the Blue Screen bit in an icon. Some people found it cute, and others thought it was in poor taste. Here is : Ha. Fair play. Whatever. I mean, it’s cheeky, but calm down. Fast forward to today, and it turns out that iOS 7 has a Blue Screen problem of its own. Certain actions will cause the screen to flash blue, and then reboot. This wouldn’t be worth noting ironically if Apple itself hadn’t taken part in the Windows Blue Screen narrative. But they did, and so here we are. Here’s a video of the error, : [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNw457joq5I&w=630&h=473] It’s funny, Apple fans. iOS 7 is the new Vista.
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Ask A VC: Redpoint’s Ryan Sarver On Why He Joined Venture Capital And More
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Leena Rao
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In this week’s Ask A VC, we hosted Redpoint Ventures’ newest partner in the studio to talk about his jump to the VC world from Twitter and more. Sarver recently left Twitter after spending four years working with developers, and helping lead Twitter’s platform strategy. Prior to his tenure at Twitter, Sarver was the Director of Consumer Products at Skyhook Wireless. Sarver, who moved to San Francisco from Boston, recalls how he got his foot in the door at Twitter. And He talks about what drew him towards VC, and which areas he’s interested in investing in. Check out the video above for more.
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Gillmor Gang Live 10-11-13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– Kevin Marks, Roberts Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. like the Gillmor Gang on Facebook at Facebook.com/gillmorgang
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Here Is Apple’s Mailer Asking Cupertino Residents To Support Its New Campus Ahead Of City Council Vote
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Alex Wilhelm
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If you live in Cupertino, you might have received a little gift from Apple in the mail: a brochure asking for support for its new headquarters, which the company calls “Apple Campus 2.” The circular building has become famous even before becoming real, due mostly to its striking design and massive size. The complex, when complete, will house of Apple’s employees. On October 15th, the City Council of Cupertino will vote on the project. If approved, a will be required to certify the decision. Apple, in its pamphlet, stated that, following approval, it will move quickly to dig in. Here’s the inside and outside of the mailer:
If I were a betting man, I would wager that Apple’s bid will be approved. Its pull in its hometown is not small, and the design of the campus is, frankly, beautiful. But even Apple, a company that could probably buy its home city in cash, has to win over the hearts and minds of the residents that don’t currently work for it. We’ll know soon enough if it will work. Then it will be time for shovels. Maybe. — Here’s the full text of the note, if you don’t want to squint: Dear Neighbor, It’s been a long journey since Steve Jobs first presented his vision for Apple Campus 2 to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011. As Steve said then, Apple has always been in Cupertino. It’s been our headquarters and our home, and we want to remain and grow here. A video of the presentation, posted on Cupertino’s website, has received over 1,800,000 views worldwide. Since the initial presentation, we have reached out to the community in a number of ways, and we are truly humbled by the overwhelming support and many expressions of goodwill we have received. Thanks you. We’re now in the final stages of the permitting process, and a key meeting is fast approaching. The City Council meeting to consider the project is scheduled for October 15 at 5:00 p.m. It will be held at Cupertino Community Hall, 10350 Torre Avenue. We would be grateful if you could share your support for Apple Campus 2 by emailing the City Council at citycouncil@cupertino.org and by attending the October 15 meeting as well. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments by emailing us at applecampus2@apple.com. We plan to break ground shortly after approval. We will keep in touch as construction progresses, and we look forward to welcoming all of you to a community day when our beautiful new home opens in 2016. Thank you again for your continued interest in Apple and your support for Apple Campus 2. Best regards, Peter Oppenheimer SVP and Chief Financial Officer Apple
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You’re Not Just The Product, You’re The Ads (And Your Friends Should Thank You)
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Josh Constine
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Word of mouth, sponsored. Trusted recommendations, promoted. Reviews from friends, endorsed. This is the new lexicon of advertising. As the world learns to ignore traditional advertising online, tech giants have found a way to grab people’s attention: using your name, face, and words. Are we okay with that? Maybe we should be. Today, Google announced , an expansion of its program of using your Google+ ‘+1s’ in ads. show your activity such as following a brand, commenting on a post, or reviewing a business in ads that feature your name and face to people you allow to see the actions you took. Google lets businesses pay it to share those endorsements with more of your friends than would have seem them normally in search results, maps, Google+, and elsewhere. And Google’s not alone. Facebook pioneered this social advertising model in 2011 with its ad units. Facebook’s filtered News Feed only shows you the most important posts about your friends. But if you Like a brand’s Page or post, check in at a business, download or use an app, or share a link, advertisers can pay to boost that action’s visibility in the feed or have it appear in sidebar ads. Twitter has social ads too. Its “Promoted Tweets” show posts from businesses you don’t follow. To show these businesses are reputable and relevant the ads show the names of people you follow who follow that business. A Promoted Tweet from HP in my stream mentions three accounts I follow that follow it. Twitter doesn’t use your face, words, or content in its ads, though, and the social context is much less prominent than on Google and Facebook. Combing social signals with advertising makes marketing seem less generic, which is important considering how many ads we see on a daily basis. And just because you don’t click on those ads, doesn’t mean they’re not effective. As Facebook’s head of measurement Sean Bruich told , “On average, if you look at people who saw an ad on Facebook and later bought a product, [fewer than] 1 percent had clicked on the ad.” If your friends’ names and faces got you to look, the ads have done their job. There’s in the Internet business. “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” Essentially, if you’re not paying to use a service, you can expect that your data will be used to make money in some way. For a long time, this business model focused on using your data to ads. Search for a certain keyword, and you’d see ads for related products. List that you’re a 25-year old male who Likes video games, and you’d see ads for things people in your demographic often buy. That’s still how a lot of Internet advertising works. and are starting to display ads that will take into account what you follow. LinkedIn analyzes your profile to deliver ads relevant to people in your income bracket, and Spotify looks at what you listen to so country fans hear ads for pickup trucks. Retargeting is another in ads. Rather than just targeting ads based on what you do on a service, sites can track the cookies left by other sites you’ve visited around the web. That means if you almost bought a flight to Hawaii on some travel site, Hawaiian Air might pay Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to show you an ad for a discount on that same flight in hopes that you’ll pull the trigger. But now, it’s not just your data being invisibly used to target ads. Your are being used ads. Google is doing it in the most respectful and responsible way. You can of having your content used as ads. Facebook lets you that display your name next to ads, but you can’t opt out of Sponsored Stories that use your content as ads. Twitter doesn’t offer any way to opt out of your name being used in ads (though you can opt out of being shown personalized follow recommendations and retargeted ads). Companies have to choose between the health of their business and the freedom of their users. If they let people opt out easily, their ads will be less effective, and they’ll make less money to spend on building their products. For some people, the gut reaction to the practice of social advertising is a combination of disgust, paranoia, and anger. Being used to shill products make people feel…used. They demand privacy and control. Meanwhile, some champion ad blocking software, and wish they’d never see an ad online again. But let me offer an alternative perspective. Advertising is the lifeblood of the consumer Internet. Ads are what pay for the designers, engineers, and servers that keep our favorite services running. Without ads, services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter might have to charge. That would be annoying to some and prohibitively expensive to others. Social networks would be a lot less fun if a third of your friends weren’t there because they didn’t want to pay. And services that deliver knowledge and productivity would be reserved for those with money to spend, rather than for the people who really need information and empowerment. Some good can come from ads. If we accept that big tech companies aren’t going to ditch advertising, we can focus on making our experience with them as painless as possible. That could mean making them easy to ignore. Our instincts naturally draw our eyes to human faces, especially those of people we know. And names of friends stick out from text. If your goal is to maintain a zen-like state while browsing the world’s top sites and apps, social ads aren’t helping. But if instead you want everything you see online to be relevant and useful, social ads could point you towards things you’ll actually like. There are a lot of apps out there. Seeing an ad on Facebook pointing out which apps your friends use, or on Google noting an app your friend gave a five-star review could aid your quest for something great to download. The same goes for picking local restaurants, movies, or household cleaning products. Advertisers will say just about anything to get you to buy (they’ll even use pictures of babies). It’s hard to know if you can believe them when they say they’re “the best calendar app”, “the tastiest pizza”, “the funniest movie”, or “the softest toilet paper”. But you trust your friends. We’ve always asked them for advice directly. Social ads just scale that word of mouth and give you their recommendations without them having to repeat themselves. So in some ways, by not opting out of being used as social ads, you’re being generous. You’re saving your friends from irrelevant ads for things they don’t care about. Maybe everyone should follow Google’s lead and give you the freedom to opt out of having your name, face, and activity turned into ads — even if it hurts the companies providing free services and your friends who use them. If you want to utilize the opt outs offered, go right ahead. [Update: It’s your right to say you won’t have your identity leveraged and that these companies can find another way to make money. Maybe they should.] But before you opt out, remember, you can choose to make ads better for everyone else.
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: BlackBerry, FitBit Force, The New iMac, And Pokemon?
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Jordan Crook
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Is BlackBerry co-founder really , now called BlackBerry instead of RIM, a company which has recently lost most of its design team and talent and… well, dignity? Is the the most amazingly awesome thing Apple has ever done in the history of Apple? What’s the deal with that new ? Do we care? And, in news that doesn’t belong on TechCrunch, what’s our excitement level on a scale of one to ten now that new Pokemon is coming out? We discuss all this and more in this week’s episode of the , featuring , , , , and . 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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Pinterest Acquires Coding Challenge Site Hackermeter Right Out Of The Gate, Will Shut It Down
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Greg Kumparak
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If you were looking forward to boasting about as a means of getting your next coding gig, you’re gonna have to make new plans: the two-month old startup has been acquired by Pinterest, and will be shut down. The premise behind Hackermeter was a fairly simple one: they didn’t think the classic résumé was good enough for hiring coders, so they set out to replace it. You’d prove your chops through a series of coding tests (from a fibonacci sequence generator to some lightweight cryptography), with each challenge being graded based on you and your code’s efficiency. Potential employers could playback your code keystroke-by-keystroke (partly to see how your code spills out of your brain, and partly as a small barrier to copy/pasting challenge solutions from elsewhere), as well as create challenges of their own. Hackermeter’s launch was met with its fair , with most naysayers pointing out that similar ideas had been tested many a time before by companies like , , and a host of others — and yet, the good ol’ résumé lived on. Both Pinterest and Hackermeter’s founders declined to share the terms (we’re still digging, regardless, and will update this post if we hear specifics), but it’s safe to say it wasn’t a massive one. The product was just two months old, its team still small, and, beyond the funds that came with their stint in Y-Combinator’s Winter 2013 class, they hadn’t raised much money. According to their , they were in the middle of trying to raise $750k. Add in the fact that Pinterest already plans on closing it down, and this is quite clearly meant primarily to be a talent acquisition. The company’s co-founders, Lucas Baker and Frost Li, will both join Pinterest as engineers.
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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 another rousing edition of TIDWRTWHUFOO! Today we feature three exciting robots that will change our lives as we know them by eventually threatening us with violence if we don’t “Move along, citizen, or else!” First we present iStruct, a robot from German firm Das Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH. iStruct is special in that he can move from quadruped motion like into bipedal motion with the flick of an internal switch. This allows him to menace you in two ways! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMn99bd-G-E] Next we have SAR-400, a robot that will join astronauts on the International Space Station in a few years. According to , SAR-400 will be teleoperated by users on the ground – or in space – and can manipulate small items and grasp and hold objects in its padded claws. Presumably the padding comes off when they become sentient. Thankfully SAR-400 will be outside the station more than it’s inside, making us wonder what will happen when SAR-400 realizes it should probably just run the whole thing alongside its robotic brothers?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ki1ZHJwwNg#t=23] This robot, JoeBot, just makes coffee. He’s harmless. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70TnyXfTHP8] Thanks for stopping by and see you next week!
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ICANN, W3C Call For End Of US Internet Ascendancy Following NSA Revelations
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Alex Wilhelm
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Key Internet stakeholders, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have condemning pervasive government surveillance and calling for an . The Internet as we know it today is largely managed through a model that is multi-stakeholder, with various non-governmental groups keeping the trains on time. Through this system, no single government gets to hold sway over the Internet, which preserves its role as a catalyst for free speech, open inquiry, dialogue and porn. It works pretty well, all things considered. There have been recent petitions to allow the United Nations larger influence into Internet function. The United States government was vehemently against it. Why? Here’s current UN Secretary discussing what he views are : Would you like the United Nations determining what sort of speech fits the “common purpose”? Of course not. That’s why keeping elements of the Internet’s core structure in the United States, under our aegis, has been so beneficial; the free speech laws in this country are perhaps the most ironclad of any. Also, by keeping such institutions as ICANN here in the United States, we provide a fair buttress: If you want to mess with them, we’re standing right next to, and behind them. However, post-NSA revelations, the United States has lost its standing as the Internet’s defender. Instead, it has been revealed that as a country we have systematically worked to undermine its encryption, and the inherent privacy that it grants users. Instead of keeping the Internet safe, we have built an industry designed on its subversion. And now the Internet is ready to break up with us. From the joint statement: [The parties] expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance. […] They called for accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing. This is a damn shame. If we as a nation hadn’t decided that everyone’s Internet was our own plaything to abuse, the Internet could have kept its center of gravity here, with our First Amendment and burgeoning Internet industry. Now, other parties may, in the future, have as much sway as we do. I don’t often get the chance to quote Senator Marco Rubio here at TechCrunch, but this is such a time. Following calls for greater UN control of the Internet, he explained the situation in last year during the episode: Last year, China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan proposed an “international code of conduct” in an attempt to justify greater government control over the Internet and standardize international rules and behavior concerning cyberspace and information. These and other nations have been calling for more regulation over how the Internet operates and pushing to give the United Nations and ITU unprecedented control over Internet. The Senator, his chamber, the , and the . The irony is that while they were shouting that, their work funded the NSA’s cracking of Internet encryption for all. For shame. Losing primacy over the Internet is a material loss for free speech if it does happen. The statement is just that — for now.
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Google’s New Plan To Highlight Android Tablet Apps Starts On November 21
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Chris Velazco
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Android plays host to some impressive tablet apps — I’m partial to IMDb and Flipboard to name just a few — but I’ve all too often downloaded an app only to discover that it’s a regular phone app scaled to fit a larger display. Needless to say, the experience was less than ideal. Now Google is pushing to shine more light on Android apps that are optimized for tablets with a pair of modifications that will go live starting on November 21. The first change may be the more visually shocking of the two — Android apps that don’t fit Google’s tablet criteria will be marked as “Designed for phones” so users know exactly what they’re getting into before they download. Meanwhile, the second deals with a feature Google rolled out earlier this year, a “Designed for Tablets” view that highlights (what else?) apps that have been crafted with specific tablet experiences in mind. Users will who scour the Play Store on their tablets will soon discover that those top app lists — think Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, etc. — will show off those tablet-tailored apps by default (though users can reconfigure it to show all apps just like before). Those Play Store modifications won’t go live for a few weeks yet, but the timing has me wondering whether or not Google is planning to push a new tablet at around the same time. I know, I know, past performance isn’t a guarantee of future results, but the Nexus 10 was originally revealed back in October 2012 and started hitting the Play Store’s digital shelves in November. And now that we’re hearing Google is preparing to officially out the Nexus 5 and Android KitKat and a revamped Nexus 10 sometime next week, it’s starting to seem like we’ll see a similar timeline unfold shortly. And really, what better way to welcome a new raft of Android tablet owners than by showing them apps that really allow those devices to strut their stuff? It’s a win-win too — while those users get easier access to the best Android tablet apps, developers who spend the extra time to make sure their tablet experiences are more than just stretched-out phone interfaces can score some much-needed exposure.
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Following Its Revamp, Yahoo Email Forwarding Bug Leaves Users’ Inboxes Empty
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Sarah Perez
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has been experiencing a major bug, following its revamp earlier this week. According to a number of reports, the service has been automatically forwarding emails to users’ “alternate,” external email addresses – a setting that was switched on without users’ permission. Yahoo has replied to some help requests via its Twitter account , but it hasn’t replied to help requests on its UserVoice forum, nor has its Customer Care site offered a solution to this problem. We’ve also reached out to the company for information on this and will update if/when we hear back. Some of the affected users have contacted TechCrunch tips and staff about the problem. It seems the bug has been in the wild for some time. Yahoo’s Mail upgrade took place on Tuesday, Oct. 8, when . Complaints began showing up shortly after. In Yahoo Mail, as in many other webmail providers, users had previously been able to configure a secondary address, which could also be used to send their Yahoo Mail elsewhere through , which could be switched off or on. But after the Mail upgrade this week, that auto-forwarding option was set to “on” for some users, even though they had not switched it on themselves. The result was that users were not getting their emails at all, not realizing that they were being sent to an alternate inbox. As one tipster lamented to TechCrunch, “Yahoo support wasn’t any help, and after a couple of days I finally figured out that all incoming email was being forwarded to an old Hotmail address that I haven’t used in nearly 15 years. Making the situation even worse, it appears that the Hotmail address was recycled and is now being used by someone else, which is potentially a huge privacy/identity theft issue,” they said. (Security issues around recycled email addresses was another complaint ). Another on Yahoo’s UserVoice site reads: “Auto-forwarding was turned on for my account without my request or action. For over a day, my mail was being forwarded to a DEAD corporate account to a company that I have not worked for over 3.5 years!! This resulted in valuable lost mail.” Meanwhile, others they couldn’t get help through Customer Care, and that while trying to submit “Feedback,” that page wasn’t working either, leading to messages. Similar complaints are found on Twitter, too, with some @YahooCare responses asking users to check to see if they could switch the setting off. The account then in response to one user that, after checking with the Mail team, their issue — which appears to be related to auto-forwarding — was fixed. But the account is these kinds of requests, so it’s unclear if that’s the case for all. Perfect! Option to undo forwarding (which I did not select) is now visible. Problem solved! Thanks — Wally Seals (@WallySeals) This could be a problem for Yahoo’s attempts at revamping its image. The massive amount of storage Yahoo Mail now offers is tempting for new or relocating email users who may be considering between top webmail services like Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook.com, and Yahoo, for example. But while no service is immune from issues (Gmail last month), anything less than a smooth transition from “old” Yahoo Mail to “new” Yahoo Mail could keep users from placing their trust in the company’s infrastructure for something as mission-critical as email. Really, though, the larger problem here is not that the auto-forwarding was happening (though that’s bad, bugs do happen), but that Yahoo hasn’t publicly addressed the issue (unless you count Twitter support), nor did it reply to those complaining of problems on the forums and through other channels, from what we’re hearing. There’s no reason a rep couldn’t quickly reply on UserVoice at the very least, saying “we’re looking into this now,” or the Mail couldn’t post a short message, even if Yahoo doesn’t have a fancy “app status” dashboard like Google. Without an official comment from Yahoo, we can’t confirm how widespread the issue is or where we are in terms of a fix. This could be a minor issue affecting a small percentage of users, or it could be larger. Below, a Storify collection shows some examples of the complaints.
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Klout Deepens Its Bing Integration By Placing ‘Snapshots’ Alongside Your Search Results
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Anthony Ha
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Well, here’s another reason to care about your Klout score (and, y’know, actually create an account on Klout) — the company, which aims to measure social media influence, is announcing a prominent new integration with Microsoft’s search engine Bing. About a year ago, Klout and said it was integrating with Bing, for example by incorporating Bing results into its Klout score calculations. Today it’s expanding that integration with something called Snapshots, which, if you opt in, will apparently show up on the right-hand column of your search results in Bing. Once you’ve logged in to Klout and claimed your profile, the Snapshot will include your public LinkedIn profile, links to the other social network accounts that you’ve connected to Klout, your most “influential” recent moments on Twitter and Instagrams, topics on which you’re influential, and of course your Klout score. This gives people a way to have more control over what shows up when others search for them. At the same time, Klout and Bing aren’t changing the search results directly or giving people too much control over what shows up in their snapshots. (I wouldn’t be able to make my Snapshot say, “Anthony Ha is the most awesome tech journalist ever” — unless, I suppose, I wrote that in my LinkedIn profile.) Here’s how Klout explains the feature in : Search is one of the most common ways that information about you is discovered by other people. Snapshots on Bing enable anyone who signs up to verify and manage how they appear in Bing search results, based on their public social network profiles. You’ll now be able to easily share your professional accomplishments and highlights, as well as your most influential moments on Instagram and Twitter, when people search for you on Bing. A company spokesperson told me that Snapshots should start showing up in Bing immediately. By the way, you may have seen about the departure of COO Emil Michael and Klout’s broader struggle to find a business model. Shortly afterwards, CEO Joe Fernandez offered additional perspective in which he admitted that it’s been a tough year: “The transition from interesting technology (or if you want to take the negative view, silly ego novelty) to real business has been painful.”
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WebMD Acquires Avado For $20-$30M To Help Drive Its Evolution From Media Company To Patient Engagement Platform
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Rip Empson
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Seventeen years after its inception, remains one of the go-to resources for basic health and diagnostic information (and hypochondria enablement) on the Web. Born at the height of the Dot-com Boom, WebMD is on a very short list of companies that were able to not only endure the ensuing crash, but go on to achieve profitability, a billion-dollar market cap and maintain their position as a market leader — even today. It’s been a bumpy road for WebMD, however, and the potholes ahead aren’t getting any smaller. As the transformation of the healthcare industry accelerates, the threats to WebMD’s business and its position atop the food chain have begun to multiply. Though WebMD saw 138 million unique visitors per month and total traffic of 2.95 billion page views during the third quarter — after reporting its first profit — its popularity has wavered over the last decade. At times, WebMD has been more punchline than pioneer. Today, WebMD is primarily known for its consumer-facing health and diagnostic web portal and mobile apps. When you think of WebMD, you think of its classic symptom checker, where you can enter in keywords like “runny nose,” whereupon it will serve you with possible diagnostic matches. However, over the years, the company has been quietly diversifying, adding services that allow it to reach new audiences. Through Medscape, for example, the company offers medical news and information to healthcare providers through its registration-based portal and apps. In turn, WebMD has also begun to target employers and health plans with its subscription-based patient engagement platform and private online health portals, which give employees a secure gateway through which they can access their personal health information, plan data and insurance claims. While WebMD has build a solid foundation around its flagship health information site, each of these services still live apart from each other. As people continue to adopt and become comfortable using a wide range of digital health tools, the opportunities for patients and healthcare providers to connect and communicate, for patients to take control of (and better monitor) their healthcare will increase exponentially. If WebMD is going to continue to be a part of the conversation in the emergent HealthCare 2.0 Era, it’s going to have to step up its game and adapt to these changes. What’s more, WebMD has business model that’s very much centered on advertising. Where the pharmaceutical industry goes — its primary source of advertising dollars — so goes WebMD. But, as the company looks to close the gap between its consumer-facing apps and services and its provider-facing portal by allowing doctors to push content to their patients’ phones, for example, opportunities begin to present themselves. By giving doctors the ability to prescribe educational material and content across apps, stepping into personalized healthcare information services and behavior change, WebMD could be able to reduce its reliance on advertising. Looking forward, WebMD will continue to deliver its core media services, but perhaps more critical to its survival will be the process of redefining itself as a health technology company. To do so, WebMD took its first step in that direction today with the announcement that it will be acquiring TechCrunch Disrupt finalist and the maker of “Patient Relationship Management” (or “PRM”) software, . Like healthcare itself, WebMD has historically tailored its products to address the two very distinct “worlds” within the system: The consumer world and the professional world. Traditionally, it was as if these two divisions were separated by 30+, New York City blocks. With its first acquisition in five years, WebMD is looking for Avado to both metaphorically and physically become the connective tissue between its offices and between its customers — consumers, patients and doctors. , Avado founders and Microsoft veterans Dave Chase, Bassam Saliba and John Yii have sought to do for healthcare and personal health records what Salesforce has done for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). [ Dave Chase has contributed a number of articles on the HealthTech space to TechCrunch over the years.] The idea, Chase says, has been to increase the level of connectivity between healthcare providers and consumers to make the delivery of care more efficient and improve patient outcomes. “The timing is right,” WebMD CTO and COO Bill Pence tells us. “Traditionally, patients and healthcare providers have lived in separate silos, but with the growing adoption of electronic health records and mobile devices, coupled with the advance in sensor technology, there are now more opportunities than ever before to connect the two and offer personalized, direct-to-consumer services.” While the companies aren’t yet ready to talk about the new products that are on the roadmap in the wake of the acquisition, Pence did say that these products will directly integrate Avado’s technology. Beyond that, as to what will become of Avado once it’s folded into the WebMD ecosystem, Chase says that Avado will take up residence within WebMD’s technology team, currently a small but growing portion of the company’s 1,600 employees. Avado founders Chase and Saliba will be staying on after the acquisition, and will be reporting to Pence. The other members of the Avado team will also join WebMD’s tech team and will remain at their company headquarters in Seattle. While the two companies declined to share details in regard to the terms of the acquisition, TechCrunch sources close to the deal said that the price fell in the $20 million to $30 million range and was a positive outcome both for the founders and for its investors. Avado raised $1 million back in March from investors that include The Partnership Fund for New York City and healthcare angels like Andy Palmer and QxMD founder Dr. Daniel Schwartz. Though Avado managed to secure outside investment and attract “hundreds” of healthcare provider customers and “many thousands” of consumers, its traction is minuscule in juxtaposition with WebMD. While WebMD may not be the sexiest brand in healthcare, it reaches the largest audience of health-focused consumers and healthcare providers in the U.S., Chase said. And therein lies the real value of this outcome for Avado — the opportunity to not only help WebMD in its plans to build the “Health Graph” and integrate its technology into a larger suite of connectivity and patient-empowerment services, but reach an audience of (hundreds of) millions. On the other hand, while WebMD finds itself back in the black and holding fast to its position in the market, the online consumer healthcare pioneer is at a crossroads. Yes, they have a long reach, but without talent that can help it build third party ecosystems, WebMD risks missing a big opportunity. WebMD is eager to reposition itself and transform itself from a digital media company to a health technology company, and, in particular, become a true patient engagement platform. Avado believes it can help WebMD shave two years off of that transition. Integrating Salesforce-like patient empowerment software (and APIs) into its portfolio and infrastructure are the first real step in that new direction. For more, find the .
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Senate Confirms Tom Wheeler As New FCC Chairman
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The Federal Communications Commission finally : Tom Wheeler. Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz and Wheeler was unanimously approved. He will take over for Acting Chairwoman, Mignon Clyburn. As a , there has been concern about what his priorities will be. Rather than join the speculation party, we’ll wait until his first few interviews and actions give us a better indication of how he’ll lead the Commission. More to come.
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Baidu Reports Q3 2013 Revenue Growth of 42.3%, Net Profit Up 1.2%, But Mobile Monetization Still Lags Behind PC
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Catherine Shu
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Chinese search giant reported strong revenue growth in Q3 2013, but it is still investing aggressively in its mobile business, which continues to lag behind PC in terms of monetization. Baidu’s total revenues in Q3 2013 were RMB 8.892 billion ($1.453 billion), a 42.3% increase year-on-year. Operating profit in Q3 2013 was RMB 3.338 billion ($545.4 million), a 1.2% increase from a year ago. Net income was RMB 3.048 billion ($498 million), a 1.3% increase from the corresponding period. Earnings per ADS were RMB 8.63 ($1.41). Baidu currently has RMB 43.3 billion in cash and short-term investments. The company said it expects total revenue in Q4 2013 to be between RMB 9.22 billion and RMB 9.48 billion, a 45.5% to 49.6% increase year-over-year. In Baidu’s earnings call, Jennifer Li, Baidu’s chief financial officer, said that Baidu’s main expenses in Q3 2013 were related to the merging streaming video platforms PPS with iQiyi and the acquisition of app marketplace 91 Wireless, as well as increase in research and development costs and advertising for mobile. Selling, general and administrative expenses were RMB 1.384 billion ($226.2 million), up 115.4% from the corresponding period in 2012, primarily due to promotional expenses for mobile products. Research and development expenses were RMB 1.091 billion ($178.2 million), a 77.5% increase from the corresponding period in 2012, due to the hiring of more R&D personnel. Baidu’s CEO Robin Li said that the revenue growth in Q3 2013 shows that the company’s investment in mobile is on a solid trajectory. But mobile monetization still lags behind Baidu’s PC business. “Mobile monetization has been growing very quickly over the past couple of quarters. Yes, it’s not reaching the level of PC monetization yet. We certainly see the gap is quickly closing, but exactly when it will catch up is another question. Right now we think the highest priority is still to provide the best user experience so they will spend on the Baidu search app to get information and services,” said Li. In the next few quarters, Baidu will continue invest aggressively in its mobile products, said CFO Li. “We have our foot on the pedal to marketing. We’re aggressively promoting our mobile products. The install rate for our core search app is growing 50% quarter per quarter and we will continue to use different channels to build our product’s presence,” she said.
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Barnes & Noble Outs The $119 Nook GlowLight, We Go Hands-On
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Chris Velazco
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For better or worse the holidays are right around the corner, and that can only mean one thing: consumer electronics companies are slaving away on new hardware designs and trying to get those final products onto shelves in time for an annual feeding frenzy. Barnes & Noble is no different. Well, it’s a little different — when I sat down with Digital Content EVP Doug Carlson earlier today he was eager to paint a picture of a savvy bookseller that’s still aware of the human elements of peddling tomes (digital and otherwise). But it wasn’t long at all before he got down to the business at hand and revealed the $119 Nook GlowLight, a new e-reader the company will start selling today. The news will come as little surprise to BN fans considering the company tellingly dropped the price of its back in August in a bid to clear out its supply channels ahead of today’s announcement. I got the chance to play with the Nook GlowLight for bit, and — speaking as a Kindle devotee since the early days — it’s a surprisingly compelling little package. The first thing you’ll notice about it is just how light the thing is: at 6.2 ounces, it’s almost like you’re holding nothing at all. My e-reader of choice (and constant literary companion) has been Amazon’s first generation Kindle Paperwhite, and it’s considerably weightier than the device BN managed to put together. [gallery columns="4" ids="908118,908112,908117,908116,908115,908114,908113"] The other big draw here is the Pearl display, and the fact that the Nook engineering team managed to figure out how to do away with the full screen flashes endemic to e-ink panels. Naturally, BN wouldn’t divulge exactly how it managed to get the job done, but it’s quite a feather in their cap considering Amazon doesn’t seem to have cracked that particular code just yet. It definitely doesn’t hurt that the panel is awfully crisp (it packs 62% more pixels into the same display size as its predecessor) and the lights nestled around the edge of the screen provided even illumination… if not quite as even as the new Paperwhite. As it turns out, the Nook GlowLight really shines (ugh) when it comes to the little things too. That hefty bezel that runs around that display may turn some off, but my inordinately picky thumbs appreciated the size — there’s just more room for my fingers to rest on the thing, something I can’t say of my Kindle. And the new white chassis BN has run with (in a way BN’s going in the opposite direction that Amazon has with its Kindle designs) provided a bit of visual resting space, almost like it’s extending the margins of a page. While I’m talking about the chassis, it’s also worth pointing out that the new GlowLight also has a silicone band that protects the edges of the device that feels rather nice. It doesn’t seem to take much effort to pop off that bit of silicon trim off either, it wouldn’t shock me at all if Barnes & Noble sold colorful replacements so users could customize their readers. And what of that human element? The Nook’s recommendation system features insights from Barnes & Noble team of booksellers to help pump up the value of its results — to hear Carlson tell it, the algorithmic approach that Amazon takes to building a profile for recommendations means it’ll never be able to make the intuitive leaps that lead to readers broadening their horizons. As always, I’ll refrain from passing judgment on the thing until we get to take the final hardware for a spin, but Barnes & Noble has made plenty of thoughtful choices here. If I wasn’t so invested in Amazon’s vast, vast content ecosystem, I’d definitely consider making the switch — it’s just that promising.
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iPad Air Review: Apple Makes Big Tablets Beautiful All Over Again
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Darrell Etherington
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new iPads this month at a special event in San Francisco on October 22, and the first of those to go on sale is the iPad Air, which is in stores and on virtual shelves this Friday, November 1. After a week with Apple’s newest 9.7-inch device, it’s clear there’s a new champion of the large tablet market, and one that breathes new life into Apple’s original slab-style game-changer. The design is the star of Apple’s iPad Air refresh this time around; the 9.7-inch Apple tablet has had the same form factor for two generations now, and that one actually made the design worse – it got heavier, and it got thicker. This new iPad mini-inspired look sheds both size and weight, giving the iPad Air a 43 percent smaller bezel, a 20 percent thinner case, and making it 28 percent lighter, at just one pound.
It’s a difference that you feel, all numbers and measurements aside. The iPad Air is much, much more comfortable to hold than the iPad 4th-gen it replaces; This isn’t strictly a one-handed device, but it’s as close as you can get with a tablet that still has a gorgeous, expansive 9.7-inch Retina Display. The aesthetics of the iPad Air are also improved: That smaller bezel better showcases the screen, for instance, and the mirror finish Apple logo is a nice touch. The silver version I reviewed is very nice, though I personally prefer the space gray finish in this device based on comparing them both at the Apple event itself. Plus, the speaker design is improved both in terms of looks and sound quality. The screen on the iPad Air is a Retina display, which means that when viewed from a standard distance, the human eye shouldn’t be able to make out individual pixels. The actual pixel density of that 2048 x 1536 9.7-inch display is 264 PPI, which is much less dense than the iPad mini, but you’d have a hard time telling the difference when you’re actually using the thing. In short, both are excellent, and lead the market in terms of quality when you factor in color rendering, viewing angle and other visual attributes. Having used primarily an iPad mini for the past year, there’s no question that coming back to the 9.7-inch Retina display was an uplifting experience. It felt a little like getting your prescription adjusted and realizing you’ve been seeing everything poorly for a long time. Video shines on the iPad Air, as does image-rich content like comic books and photos. Not to mention that all that extra space makes for a much more comfortable browsing experience, and offers a lot of benefits when it comes to content creation. It doesn’t feel arduous doing work on the iPad; you can start to remember why people touted the iPad as a PC-killer when it debuted, and it edges ever closer to being able to truly replace notebooks for the majority of everyday users. Apple’s iPad Air has some new powers compared to its predecessor – chief among those is the new A7 64-bit processor, and the M7 motion coprocessor that goes along with that. This means that like its cousin the iPhone 5s, it’s a “forward thinking” device, but it also brings benefits right away, thanks in large part to Apple’s own redesigned first-party apps. When using the new iLife and iWork suites, performance is considerably bolstered by the 64-bit retrofits they got with their recent redesigns – everything feels faster and more responsive. 64-bit processing doesn’t mean that every app necessarily gets a 2x boost in performance over those made for the traditional 32-bit architecture used in previous iPads, but it does mean that software made for those processors will feel even more instantly responsive than it has in the past. Also new to the iPad Air are dual microphones which help out with sound quality on audio and video FaceTime calls, and the motion coprocessor means that you’ll start to see more activity tracking built into the iPad, too. It may seem an odd feature for a tablet, but the iPad is designed to go with you where you go, and it might be even more representative of your general activity level since it won’t be triggered so easily as a phone worn close to the body. Cameras also get an update with the iPad Air, which is to be expected. The real gem here is the FaceTime HD camera that offers 1080p video calling instead of 720p on the last model, which does make a difference. It also has a new 5-megapixel shooter that gets bigger pixels on the sensor, which does lead to better photos. I feel no less ridiculous taking photos with a 9.7-inch tablet than I did before, however, but if that’s the type of photography you go in for, you’ll be better served with this device. The iPad Air may be a lightweight device physically, but it’s a heavyweight when it comes to performance. Benchmarks tell only one side of the story, and the one that most users will be more interested in is around how the tablet work under normal, everyday usage conditions. Put simply, Apple’s latest iPad soars. Other performance tweaks from the A7 include support for OpenGL ES version 3.0 graphics, which makes it possible to build effects into games that were previously only available on the desktop. This iPad is a really strong gaming advice I learned based on my testing with Batman: Arkham Origins on the tablet, and you really get the sense that developers are just cracking the surface when it comes to what they can do with these new graphics capabilities. The version I tested also supports LTE, and this iPad supports the most frequencies of that network technology than ever before. I was able to test out those claims right away, thanks to taking the device from San Francisco out to London. The iPad Air worked perfectly on both AT&T and on EE LTE, making this a world traveler’s best friend and constant companion. Thanks to FaceTime Audio and third-party apps like Skype, this could easily operate as someone’s international travel phone, letting people escape costly roaming charges. The iPad Air’s battery offers up to 10 hours of continuous usage, according to Apple’s official published specs, and I’ve found that it easily matches up with the high bar set for power by previous generations. On average, I found myself getting around 10 hours of actual use on Wi-Fi, and slightly less on LTE networks. Standby time seems to have improved considerably with this generation, also, as the iPad Air seemed to positively sip battery life while unplugged but with the screen asleep. Part of the iPad’s magic is the fact that you can put it down and forget about it for days, then pick it up and still have nearly a full charge. That’s still the case, and it’s made all the more impressive based on the physical changes Apple has made to the case design, which theoretically should leave less room inside for actual batteries. Apple has two cases for the iPad Air, and they follow in the footsteps of those that came before. There’s the Smart Cover, and the Smart Case, both of which feature a magnetic closure with a multi-panelled front. The Case, as its name implies, also has a back component, but the Cover just protects the screen. The Smart Case comes in leather variants, while the Cover is only offered in polycarbonate materials now, though both are offered in multiple color schemes. In almost every single instance where an Apple device is involved, I’m a fan of not using a case at all; the bumps and scratches that inevitably ensue help give the great design character, in my opinion. But if you’re going to get a case, I’d opt for the Smart Cover, as it adds virtually no bulk and protects the part of the iPad that is most important to protect – the glass.
The Smart Case makes the iPad Air feel quite a bit more bulky, in my opinion, and is fairly difficult to get off once its on. On the other hand, it’s definitely more protective than the Smart Case, and it’s still relatively svelte. Apple has also nailed its leather case designs in terms of putting out a product that feels very high quality, and that’s what they’ve done here, too. The iPad Air is a huge improvement over the iPad 4th-gen, or the iPad 2, pictured in the gallery. Its form factor is the best currently available for a 10-inch tablet, and it provides a great blend of portability and usability that leans towards the media device end of the spectrum.
When Apple introduced the iPad mini, I feel in love and felt that I’d never be swayed back to the other side. The iPad Air makes the argument anew that there’s still room for big tablets in people’s lives, and it might just help usher in an era of computing where households own more than one kind of iPad, and PCs are harder and harder to find.
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Apple Replacing ‘Limited’ Number Of iPhone 5s With Manufacturing Issue Leading To Battery Life Problem
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple released a noting that a manufacturing issue has caused shortened battery life in a ‘very limited’ number of iPhone 5s devices. At its introduction, the phone was reported by Apple to have nearly identical life to the iPhone 5, and most tests have borne that out with reviewers seeing identical or slightly improved numbers. The statement, issued by an Apple spokesperson, indicates that a small number of the iPhones that Apple has sold so far are defective. Here’s the statement given to the Times: “We recently discovered a manufacturing issue affecting a very limited number of iPhone 5S devices that could cause the battery to take longer to charge or result in reduced battery life,” said Teresa Brewer, an Apple spokeswoman. “We are reaching out to customers with affected phones and will provide them with a replacement phone.” The Times says that Apple’s statement ‘implies’ that this is only a few thousand devices, but Apple themselves gave no exact number. Apple sold 9 million iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c and iPhone 4s devices in its launch weekend in September. iPhones do not have user replaceable batteries, making the life of those batteries of paramount importance. In general, iPhones get comparable battery life to other devices in the same size and thickness. Other devices from Motorola, Samsung and more have made design decisions that allow them to get greater battery life by packing in larger or thicker battery packs. If that reputation for decent, if not exhilarating, battery life is going to be maintained, Apple will want to make sure that they clamp down on this issue quick. Of course, the bad news about iPhone 5s battery life issues arrives ahead of iPad Air reviews, which are expected later today. Slick. We’ve reached out to Apple to see if it has any more information to share.
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Trulia Reports $40.3 Million In Q3 Revenue, Net Income Of $7 Million
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Chris Velazco
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Online real estate market has been a public company for just over a year now, and it’s already seen its share of ups and downs as it dukes it out with competing players like Zillow. The company just dropped its (with additional color on Twitter, as usual) — the combined company posted $40.3 million in revenue for the quarter, along with net income of $7 million, which works out to earnings of $0.19 per share. Wait, combined company? Let’s not forget that Trulia earlier this year, and this is the first time that Trulia has included its acquisition’s figures into the fold. And as always, those Wall Street analyst types couldn’t keep themselves from projecting: In the days leading up to the release, the analyst consensus as per Yahoo! Finance was for the company to report $37.9 million in quarterly revenue and earnings of about $0.08 per share. That looks like a pretty solid beat at first glance, but if you strip out Market Leader’s fiscal contributions, you’re left with a total of $33.8 million in revenue generated by Trulia’s core business. Still, when you figure that Trulia’s marketplace revenue nearly doubled year-over-year and its media revenue was up 56 percent, it’s pretty clear that Trulia is picking up momentum in a big way. Shareholders seem to agree so far, too — at time of publication, Trulia’s stock price is up almost 5.5 percent from today’s closing position. Considering that Trulia’s entire business model is predicated on getting people to use its site and mobile apps, traffic is always a big concern. We’re seeing some big lifts there too though, as Trulia.com saw 35.3 million uniques this past quarter (up 42 percent from this time last year) while quarterly mobile uniques surged 88 percent year-over-year to 14.5 million.
Trulia |
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Nokia Had A Stunning Q3 In North America, With Device Volume Up 367% From Last Year
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Alex Wilhelm
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According to its , Nokia appears to have finally in North America for its Lumia line of Windows Phone-based smartphones. This bears well for the platform itself, and Microsoft, who is buying Nokia’s device business for more than $7 billion. Nokia’s device unit volume in North America spiked from 500,000 units in the second quarter of 2013 to 1.4 million devices in the third. For comparison, in the first quarter of this year, Nokia shipped 400,000 devices in North America. In the year ago third quarter, that figure was 300,000. To therefore have Nokia almost triple its volume in the region in a single quarter, comparing sequentially, is more than surprising. According to Nokia, the “sequential increases [in North America] were primarily due to higher sales in our Smart Devices business.” So, most of the sales delta is smartphone-based. And, given that the mobile market in the United States is a far larger mobile market than Canada, it can be presumed that most of the sales took place south of the border. Therefore, Nokia sold far more Windows Phone handsets in its third quarter than it had in the preceding quarter. Estimating roughly, it could easily be posited that Nokia sold more than 1 million Lumia devices in the United States in its third quarter. Here’s the graph: The Nokia Lumia line of smartphones was released in November of 2011, during the company’s fourth quarter. In that period, the company later noted that it sold “well over 1 million Lumia” devices. In the following quarter, the first of 2012, Nokia did not disclose Lumia sales figures. In the second quarter of 2012, it reported 4 million units were sold during the period. From this we can surmise that Nokia enjoyed modest, but quickly expanding sales rates of its Lumia line. However, in the third quarter of 2012, sales fell to 2.9 million units, a very troubling point for the company. Nokia blamed it on having “shared the exciting innovation ahead with [its] new line of Lumia products.” From that point, Lumia sales have expanded in each sequential quarter, from 4.4 million in the third quarter of 2012, to 8.8 million in the third of 2013, Nokia’s most recent quarter. Here’s the chart, so you have the full picture: So, global growth has been steady, and in the fourth quarter Nokia could sell more than 10 million Windows Phone devices, breaking that threshold for the first time. Contrasted, however, with its North American sales, you have to appreciate the company’s struggle: While its global operation was expanding and ticking right along, North America was stuck. Introduction of the Lumia 520 (and 521) on the low-end, and the Lumia 1020 on the high-end, coupled with the software improvements in Windows Phone 8, appear to have unlocked, at last, the keys to growth in the United States. This matters because if Nokia failed to ignite growth in this market, it would not be out of the question that its carrier support would have been in jeopardy. And once lost, such support is difficult to rekindle. Therefore, the strong quarter implies that Nokia’s long-term prospects in the U.S. market are at least alive. — Nokia’s Windows Phone strategy has long been panned by critics as doomed, helpless, hapless, perfidious, and expensive. Microsoft’s Windows Phone strategy has been pilloried in the same way. Now that the two are joining teams, the opprobrium can be aimed at a single entity, saving time. Kidding aside, Nokia – which is the de facto Windows Phone OEM, period – proved that it could ship volume on the platform several quarters ago. But the North American question lingered: Could Microsoft’s own platform sell in its home market? After years of slog, the answer is now a firm maybe. So what to look for? Sequentially rising Lumia volume in North America. If Nokia moves, say, 2 million devices in the fourth quarter in the region (and again notes that the rising device figures are based on smartphone sales), we’ll have a ball game.
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AbbeyPost, An Etsy For Plus-Size Clothing, Has Its Eye On Democratizing Fashion
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Eliza Brooke
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Like so many other startups, grew out of a personal pain. Founder Cynthia Schames had become fed up with the lack of stylish plus-size clothing available to her. “I was having the hardest time finding clothes. I live in New York,” Schames says. “If I can’t find stuff to wear, where is everyone else shopping?” AbbeyPost, which launched in January, is an online marketplace for plus size clothing from designers and independent boutiques. Schames explained that while there are great boutiques around the country that carry quality designs for plus size women, they’re only great for locals. The aim for AbbeyPost is to become, like Etsy, a large-scale, inclusive discovery forum that gives women more options than they might find on their own. The target audience is the “Pinterest mom.” She’s in her thirties to early fifties, Schames says: most likely a mother, and she leads a busy life, regardless of whether or not she works. The company is almost entirely bootstrapped for now, having received one small angel investment of $25,000. They are now looking to raise a seed round of about $350,000, Schames says, in order to make additional hires and build a native mobile app. As will happen with any marketplace that has yet to hit its stride, the product listings are still a mix of professional lookbook shots and low-fi, stretched-out images. The lingerie category, for instance, errs on the side of the latter, while curated collections float the better quality photos to the top. While AbbeyPost is still working on building up its density of sellers, Schames has plans for the site that go beyond a simple marketplace.
Because sizing can be so inconsistent between brands, AbbeyPost is developing a feature that uses a 3D body scan of the woman to make fit recommendations based on her exact measurements. A user takes two webcam photos of herself — one from the front, one from the side — which helps the tool’s algorithm generate numerous data points on her unique shape. Those images are immediately discarded, Schames noted, and they aren’t used to generate an avatar. The scan gathers over 115 data points on the body, and, when done correctly, the measurements can be accurate to within a quarter-inch. “We quickly and accurately get sizing information that becomes a permanent and persistent profile so we know what size she is and her measurements every time,” Schames says. The longer-term vision for AbbeyPost’s body-scanning tech is to build a custom apparel brand that uses those data points to create digital patterns tailor-made for each individual woman. It’s a big goal, and Schames says it wouldn’t launch any time in the near future. But the team thinks they have worked out a supply chain that allows them to turn around an order in fewer than three weeks. Creating a plus-size pattern doesn’t simply mean scaling a straight size proportionally, Schames says, because a woman’s curves become more exaggerated as s he goes up in size. Small differences between women’s shapes become clearer, making it harder to fit more women into one standard size. The appeal of custom clothing begins to make sense then. “Ultimately, what we really are is a social e-commerce platform, brand, and data platform,” she says. That last bit — data — means widgetizing AbbeyPost’s fit formula out to retailers so that shoppers can determine the best size for them for any given brand. Again, that’s about a year out, Schames says. AbbeyPost is interesting for its technology. More important, though, is the stance it takes with regard to plus-size women and fashion. With AbbeyPost, Schames is also hoping to make a dent in a retail culture that treats plus size shoppers as second-class citizens. The site has an internal social network, in which users can post photos of themselves in their new outfits. It’s like an image review, Schames says, but the focus is less on the product and more on engaging the individual. Plus-size women often miss out on the social aspects of shopping, whether they’re going out with their straight size peers or shopping online. “Shopping is inherently a really social activity. If you’re the fat girl in the group, you don’t really have that opportunity. You stand in the corner going, ‘Where are the earrings? Because that will fit me.’ That sucks,” Schames says. While AbbeyPost is out to cultivate a body positive culture online, plus-size fashion has in recent years seen a shift toward e-commerce — and not in a good way. Old Navy its plus-size options from stores in 2007 to feature them as online exclusives, while Saks Salon Z from its flagship store in 2011. Target, Schames says, has also been pushing more and more of their plus-size items online. “We already know by their admission that some retailers don’t want fat people in their stores. . ,” she continued. “There may be an element of that. It [the decision to move plus size online] may come down to simple economics of sales per square foot, but that stretches credibility because a majority of women are plus size or above.” A bright spot in the startup world is Rent the Runway’s of plus sizes to their dress rental offerings, which required convincing straight size designers like Carmen Marc Valvo, Badgley Mischka, and Theia to create equally beautiful designs for the plus-size shopper. Recognizing that vast, underserved market is one of the smartest things Rent the Runway has done to date, and to ignore the plus size shopper is just bad business. And, as Tim Gunn , to then serve her only unattractive options is plain insulting. “Nobody’s being honest with this consumer, and nobody’s encouraging her to own where and when and how she is. And I think that’s part of my job,” Schames says. “One of the things we really like to say at AbbeyPost is that at AbbeyPost, we love who you are. And we mean it.”
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Yelp Ekes Out A Win In Q3 As Revenue Jumps 68% To $61M, EPS Losses Grow To $0.04
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Rip Empson
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, the local online business and restaurant guide that has become the web’s go-to resource for reviews of local businesses since launching in 2004, after the market closed this afternoon. , the company beat expectations, with revenue coming in at $61.2 million in the third quarter and a per-share loss of $0.04. Considering Yelp posted a greater-than-expected loss of $2.3 million, it wasn’t a categorical victory, but it was a win nonetheless, with revenue increasing 80 percent from the same period in 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to over 47.3 million, average unique visitors grew 41 percent year-over-year and local business accounts grew 61 percent to 57,000. Wall Street to announce a loss of $0.01 per share on revenue of $59.40 million for the quarter. Yelp passed muster in revenues, but saw an uptick in its net losses in the third quarter of $2.3 million, or $0.04 per share, compared to a net loss of $2.0 million in the third quarter of 2012. Thanks to a fairly consistent performance in recent quarters and solid progress from its local ads business, Yelp’s stock price has bounced back significantly over the last six months — 180 percent in all. This is a strong signal that investor confidence has returned for Yelp, even if many analysts believe that the market is a little too bullish on the company at the moment. The company’s stock price had been hovering around $68 per share on Tuesday, but is currently down 6 percent in after-hours trading on the higher-than-expected loss, though it continues to vacillate. Reflecting on his company’s third-quarter performance, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman highlighted the company’s renewed focus on its mobile experience as a continuing source of growth and opportunity. The CEO also expects its new “Yelp Platform,” which launched in July and allows local businesses to interact directly with customers via its portal, to provide additional value for businesses while increasing engagement among consumers. The company also saw continuing growth in its unique user base over the last quarter, which now stands at 117 million. In its earnings statement today, the Yelp CEO continued: We saw another quarter of strong momentum thanks to the high-quality, authentic content contributed by Yelpers around the world … and our focus on connecting consumers with great local businesses continues to drive our success. In the third quarter, we improved the user experience by adding the ability to write and post reviews from mobile and launched new features such as the customer activity feed for business owners. Looking to the rest of the year and beyond, we are well positioned to capture the large local opportunity ahead of us through our innovation around mobile, geographic expansion and closing the loop with local businesses.
Yelp | Other than that, after adjustments, Yelp’s EBTIDA came in at $8.1 million for the third quarter, compared to $2.2 million for same quarter in 2012. The company showed 46 percent of its advertisements on mobile devices in Q3, which represented a 6 percent increase from the prior quarter. However, Yelp’s performance here will need to be stronger going forward, considering companies in its class, like Facebook, have been able to drive significant increases in revenue by way of mobile advertising. Again, the 46 percent figure is only a 6 percent improvement from last quarter, which takes on a greater significance considering the company doesn’t break out mobile revenue as many other companies do, instead limiting its report to mobile advertising share. Nonetheless, overall, Yelp’s mobile ad business has continued to grow steadily over the last year, and the optimization of its mobile platform has become one of its chief priorities. For example, last month, — key functionality that has long been missing from its mobile experience. Yelp’s cash position grew slightly over the last three months, increasing by about $5 million to $101 million at the end of the third quarter. was announced at the time, but recorded as part of this quarter’s financial statements. The company also said today that it has finally integrated Qype’s French and U.K. portals after acquiring the European startup last year. The total cost of restructuring and integrations in Q3 was $2.8 million, compared to $1.8 million in Q3 2012. All in all, Yelp booked a mixed performance in the third quarter, just beating revenue expectations, while keeping firm hold of its cash and growing traffic. However, the company’s loss widened in the third quarter, thanks in large part to the cost of acquisitions and integrations mentioned above. During the third quarter, Yelp took its first steps into Latin America, for example, beginning with Brazil. Yelp will likely look to Brazil to act as a gateway to the region, helping it to secure a foothold in Latin America. Looking forward, the company will likely continue to accelerate its international expansion and, while this could be a drain on profits in the short-term, Yelp could see significant gains in local ad revenues in the long run as it launches in new markets. As a result, the company expects revenue between $66 million and $67 million in the fourth quarter, slightly above analysts’ forecasts, which tentatively pegged the company’s sales at $64.9 million. Finally, the company separately announced a $250 million follow-on share offering, with an over-allotment of $37.5 million, which Yelp will reportedly use for “general corporate purposes.”
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EA Beats In FQ2 With Non-GAAP Revenue of $1.04B And EPS Of $0.33, Raises Earnings Guidance
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Alex Wilhelm
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Electronic Arts had non-GAAP revenue of $1.04 billion in its fiscal second quarter (2014), and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.33. The Electronic Arts to earn $0.12 (non-GAAP), on, again, non-GAAP revenue of $978 million. The beat has sent Electronic Arts up almost 4% in after hours trading. Electronic Arts also raised its annual non-GAAP EPS guidance to $1.25 from $1.20. That’s a mild upgrade, but one that is welcome. Electronic Arts is a very cyclical business. In its first fiscal quarter of 2014, it had non-GAAP revenue of $495 million, which was considered a beat. The market current expects Electronic Arts to post non-GAAP revenue of $1.8 billion in its fiscal third quarter, a period that includes the holiday sales cycle. The company expects non-GAAP revenue of $1.65 billion in the next quarter. The gap between street expectations and stated guidance is quite large. Investors are therefore expecting the company to best its guidance by a firm margin. Mobile, as with everyone, is a key part of Electronic Arts content strategy. For its fiscal second quarter, the company reported non-GAAP net revenue of $105 million. However, that figure is a mere 19 percent improvement on its year-ago quarter. Moving past the endless non-GAAP numbers, here are the bare-bones figures for Electronic Art’s quarter: The company ended the quarter with $1.4 billion in cash and equivalents. The question for Electronic Arts is now plain: Can the company best its own (non-GAAP) revenue guidance in its fiscal third quarter? If it fails to, it will dramatically fall short of investor expectations and will suffer a strong correction. We’ll know in about three months.
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Jibe Secures $4 Million Credit Facility To Help Make Companies Better At Hiring
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Chris Velazco
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The last time we heard from TC50 alum , it locked up a $10 million Series B from the likes of Longworth Venture Partners (which led the round), Polaris Partners, Lerer Ventures, DFJ Gotham, and Thrive Capital in a bid to make it easier to apply for jobs from smartphones. This time around, though, Jibe has more money to expand its operations but without having to offer up any equity in exchange — the team recently announced that it’s secured a $4 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank as it prepares to flesh out its backend services for enterprise partners looking to hire the right people. “We’re helping to process hundreds of thousands of applications now,” CEO Joe Essenfeld told me. “But these companies really want to rely on data to see how the application and hiring process differs for different kinds of jobs.” Speaking of hiring, he also noted the Jibe team isn’t complete just yet and that hiring would continue as the company prepares to move into a new office in Greenwich Village. As it happens, Jibe has already put part of its new plan into motion. Earlier this month it rolled out a suite of backend tools meant for recruiters. If you thought applying for a job was tough, think about what it must be like for the poor recruiter/HR person stuck trying to sift through that pile of applications. Essenfeld said that three (sadly unnamed) Fortune 1000 companies jumped on the bandwagon when the startup released its recruiter analytics tools, which lets business insiders see where its applicants are coming from, how they stumbled upon the job opening, and how much time they spend on the application. Perhaps most important is the ability to pinpoint the moment those would-be employees give up on filling out their applications, which should give those companies some insight into how to smooth out the onboarding process.
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Sarah Perez
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LinkedIn Beats In Q3 With Revenue of $393M, EPS of $0.39, But Weak Q4 Guidance Sends Its Stock Lower
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Alex Wilhelm
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LinkedIn its third-quarter earnings today, with revenue of $393 million (up 56 percent) and earnings per share of $0,39. Analysts LinkedIn to earn $0.31 per share, on revenue of $385 million. In the comparable year-ago quarter, LinkedIn earned $0.22 on revenue of $252 million. On a GAAP basis, LinkedIn lost $0.03 per share. However, LinkedIn’s performance is generally measured on a per-share basis in non-GAAP terms. For the quarter, LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions group had revenue of $224.7 million (up 62 percent year over year), its Marketing Solutions had $88.5 million in revenue (up 38 percent), year over year), and its Premium Subscriptions top line totaled $79.8 million (up 61 percent), year over year). LinkedIn reported revenue guidance for its fourth quarter of $415 million to $420 million. Investors had forecasted a figure of around $20 million more. In normal trading, LinkedIn was up around 1.5 percent). Following its earnings beat, LinkedIn is down in after-hours trading. Investors, it appears, are disappointed with what appears to be slowing top-line growth at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a very richly valued company. Before its stock moved, following its earnings release, LinkedIn had a trailing PE ratio in the hundreds, a forward PE of 111, and a PEG ratio of 2.92, according . That means it cannot afford missteps, as investors are expecting consistently strong results. The company had non-GAAP net income of $46.8 million in the period. For the quarter, LinkedIn’s adjusted EBITDA totalled $92.8 million. The company had a GAAP net loss of $3.4 million in the quarter, up around 50 percent year-over-year. LinkedIn had 259 million users at the end of the quarter. In sum, LinkedIn had a strong quarter, but its lower-than-expected stated expectations for its year-end quarter have unnerved investors.
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ResearchGate: “Forget About Revenue Until The Network Is Valuable Enough To Command It”
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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ResearchGate’s Ijad Madisch’s lifelong ambition of winning a Nobel Prize for changing the way scientific research is undertaken piqued the interest of Valley investors several years ago. Now with more than $35 million in funding from investors like Bill Gates, Benchmark, Founders Fund and Accel, he’s running one of Berlin’s flagship startups with 3 million scientists using the site. It wasn’t such an obvious journey. Madisch had been working as a medical doctor in Boston several years ago. He asked for permission to go half-time on being a doctor, so that he could spend the other part of his time working on what would become ResearchGate, a LinkedIn-like social network for scientific researchers. His manager told him it was a “birdshit” idea and that scientists by nature weren’t very social. Madisch went his own way, ultimately relocating back to Germany to build the company. Today onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin with Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, he shared a few nuggets of wisdom from his path so far. “I always was convinced that ResearchGate can change the world,” Madisch said. “The World Wide Web was created to exchange knowledge and now you can buy shoes online, but science is still the same.” Cohler, who sits on the board, brought experience from his days as an early team member at LinkedIn and Facebook. The pair really synced on the idea that ResearchGate needed to put off building a revenue model in favor of focusing on product and generating network effects. One of Cohler’s early pieces of advice to Madisch was to forget about revenue until the network was valuable enough to command it. “We need to really create value for the scientists first. If we succeed with this, then we can start worrying about making money,” Madisch said. “You have to be very brave and experienced to give this advice. I wouldn’t have gotten it from any East Coast or German VC investor. And it was the best thing we could have done.” Madisch said the site, which attracts 1.4 million uploads of papers per month and 1,300 data sets uploaded every few days, had led to a few breakthroughs. There was a Nigerian scientist named Emmanuel Nnadi, who was studying pathogens and found a baby in a local hospital who had died in 28 days. The cause of death was a mystery. Nnadi collected samples but had no equipment to analyze them. However, he connected with an Italian scientist on ResearchGate named Orazio Romeo, who agreed to study the samples. They discovered a new type of deadly pathogen that had previously only affected plants. It had mutated somehow to affect humans. Now Madisch is working on ways to surface data to the right groups of scientists in a more automatic way. “There are all these different connections, which we can draw using new technical architecture,” he said “We will find results, which we can only find because we connect the right data without doing any more research and this will change the whole world.” As for the somewhat contrarian decision to relocate back to Germany and base the company in Berlin instead of Boston or Silicon Valley, ResearchGate’s board member Cohler said that Boston lacks the foundations for helping consumer Internet companies grow. “We always ask, ‘What’s the best place in the world for a particular company given its culture, values?'” Cohler said. “We’ve got a pretty strong point of view that Silicon Valley and San Francisco is the right answer for many companies and that’s why most of what we do is based there.” He went on, “But I only had one strong point of view — that Boston was not the best possible place to build this company.” Cohler said there were many reasons for this, but went on to say that Massachusetts labor laws have a chilling effect on how employees can move from startup to startup. Massachusetts strongly enforces non-compete agreements, unlike California. This affects how knowledge is transferred from generation to generation of startups and entrepreneurs. Cohler said that Berlin has many of the right ingredients to be a strong startup hub, with a decent pool of technical talent, a low cost of living and a place at the intersection of technology and many other industries and cultures.
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Proposed USA FREEDOM Act Would Dramatically Curtail The NSA’s Surveillance
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Alex Wilhelm
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Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner have , called the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection, and Online Monitoring Act (USA FREEDOM Act), designed to dramatically curtail the ability of the NSA to collect information on the average United States citizen. The bill is broad. Its key elements are the reformation of how Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can be used by the NSA to support their operations. Limiting those authorities could dramatically undercut the NSA’s reach. The bill’s claims that it will end bulk collection of certain records that is currently based on Section 215’s authority, limiting collection to things that deal directly with terrorism or “clandestine intelligence” that are linked to foreign agents, foreign “power,” or suspected foreign agents, or individuals in contact with a foreign “power.” In short, no more collecting mass data on Americans. It appears that this would end the collection of American citizens’ phone records, something that the NSA currently collect and stores. The USA FREEDOM Act also has new rules in place to constrain other legal methods – FISA pen registers, National Security Letters, and “trap and trace” statutes – so that they cannot in turn be used to “justify bulk collection.” This closes what could have been an open door for the NSA to continue its current operations, but under a separate authority structure. Moving on, Senator Leahy’s office’s summation of the bill claims that it “closes [the] NSA’s ‘back door’ access to Americans’ communications by requiring a court order” for a search of their communications, in data that is collected under Section 702 sans an individual warrant. This provides increased protection of Americans’ communications information that is already collected, which is disappointing. Still, it’s an improvement. Also regarding Section 702, the bill boosts the “prohibition on ‘reverse targeting’ of Americans.” This means that the NSA can’t target a foreigner’s communications, simply to get at the communication of an American. It’s good that they can’t do that, and even better that this bill builds that wall higher. Briefly, the Act would also sunset the FISA Amendments Act two years earlier, in 2015, than it is currently scheduled. This would put its end date in the same timeframe as the expiring elements of the Patriot Act. Therefore, Section 215 and Section 702 would come up for re-passage at the same time. The goal of this, again according to Leahy, is to ensure “proper congressional review.” The Act would put in place a new “Special Advocate” to speak up for privacy during operation of the FISA Court’s secret operations. It would also put in place a “process for public release of FISA Court opinions” when they include legal interpretation that could be important for the public to know and understand. The bill would also allow companies to disclose “an estimate” of the number of FISA orders and National Security Letters that they have received, as well as allow them to comment on how many they complied with, and when relevant, the number of users and accounts impacted. This is something that Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others have requested. When the news of PRISM was first disclosed, tech giants were pilloried for their participation, even though they were unable to comment on much, due to legal gags on their speech. The USA FREEDOM Act would directly lift some of those restrictions. Continuing, the Act would force the government to release an estimate of the number of individuals and United States citizens who were “subject to various types of FISA orders and whose information was reviewed by federal agents.” This forces the government to disclose its work, and therefore perhaps limit abuse by requiring transparency. — That’s quite a lot. However, I am unsure how the above would impact programs such as XKeyscore, the tapping of the core fiber cables of the Internet, and the cracking of encryption software. The NSA does more than operate under the authority of Sections 215 and 702. The bill is a solid first effort, but does not go far enough. We will likely see other bills of similar ilk. This specific bill is interesting given that one of its authors, Representative Sensenbrenner, played a key role in the creation of the Patriot Act, something that he is now trying to rein in. This is the Snowden Effect in legislative form.
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Twitter Apps For iOS, Android And Web Get In-Stream Video And Image Previews
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter today that adds in-stream video and image previews to the main feed in its iOS, Android and web apps. Previously you would have to tap on links for images via Twitter or video service Vine. Now you can see them right in the feed. At this point, the previews will just be for Twitter photos and Vine videos, though we can imagine that expanding to other formats. Not to sound too toot-my-own-horn-ey but this is the way that Twitter has been headed for some time, as I .
Twitter has also tweaked the tweet actions like faving, retweeting or replying to allow you to do that right from within your timeline. If that feature sounds familiar to you, you might have been in one of Twitter’s test groups, where it has been . As for why Twitter is doing this, well there are a few things that jump to mind immediately. First off, it’s aesthetically pleasing — images and videos make the stream look friendlier than a stream of text to new users. Also, it provides an opportunity for advertisers to ensure that you see their media. If they use Twitter’s image hosting and Vine, you’re going to see the visual part of their ads, period. Previously you’d have to tap a link in an ad tweet to see that. The side-effect of these changes, of course, is to lower the information density of the feed overall when it comes to text. If you ascribe to the “picture is a thousand” words adage, though, perhaps it’s increased a bit. In , Twitter is in the process of trying to prove its usefulness to users to ensure that its somewhat slow user growth numbers reverse the cycle. One of those efforts is a new breaking-news notification . This update isn’t the big one we’ve been waiting for, with major updates to its TV offerings and more, but rather more of a maintenance release designed to slip in a bunch of features across the app. Note that you can toggle these in-line previews off in the apps (but not Twitter for web) if you wish, at least for now. The new look for photos and videos is available for , and Twitter.com apps. : And here’s what I meant by Twitter advertisers being served by this image expansion feature. As Van Slembrouck notes, Twitter effectively just launched display ads. Oh, hey. Twitter just launched display ads. — Justin VanSlembrouck (@jvanslem) What do you think about the new Twitter in-stream image and video previews, are they for you?
Image Credit: /Flickr CC
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