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Retargeting Giant AdRoll Poaches Google Ads Veteran To Head New EMEA Office
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Mike Butcher
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As retargeting startup is poised to IPO, one company flying under the radar but, by the looks of it, that is also doing well in the retargeting space is AdRoll. It’s now launched in Europe, or perhaps more accurately EMEA. At the same time it’s poached Marius Smyth, eight-year Google veteran, and former head of UK & Ireland SMB Sales and part of Google’s UK and Ireland executive team. AdRoll says it has had some 600 percent+ growth in the region – an indication of why it might be doing so well. It’s been pulling in 1,300+ advertisers here (but 10,000+ advertisers in 100 countries). They say they recently passed a $100 million run-rate milestone (up from $50 million last year). Backed by Peter Thiel and Accel Partners with $25 million in funding, AdRoll’s success shows retargeting is pretty hot right now. Google launched a “Dynamic Remarketing” product in June 2013 and in June Twitter said it would be offering a retargeting product. Facebook launched retargeting on FBX in late fall 2012. Then of course, there’s Criteo’s NASDAQ IPO. Criteo has already hiked its IPO price range to $27-$29. The company is expected to officially price its IPO this week, after which it’ll begin trading. This comes after Rocket Fuel delivered a very hot IPO. Obviously, this is a European tech success story, even if there are plenty of annoyed people that they decamped to NASDAQ.
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Google Adds SMS Support To Its Android Messaging App As Facebook Axes It
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Chris Velazco
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A few days ago, a pointed to some pretty drastic changes to the Google Hangouts Android app, the biggest of which was that users would be able to send SMS messages without having to switch into another messaging application. Well, Vic Gundotra trotted onstage at a Google+ event in San Francisco (after a power outage caused a half hour stream delay, no less) today to . The Hangouts Android app will be indeed able to fire off bog-standard text messages, as well as share a user’s location and send/display animated GIFs like when the update rolls out in a few days. If you’ll recall, the iOS version of the Hangouts app got at least one of these tweaks ahead of the Android version (which was a surprising and refreshing change of pace) — as of about two weeks ago, iOS Hangouts users could send and receive animated GIFs, and got the ability to make Google Voice calls over a data network as an added bonus. (I should note that last bit is a bummer, but it’s a story for another time). But really, it’s that SMS support bit that seems the most intriguing if only because we’re starting to see some peculiar movement in the messaging space by players that have sought to own it. Take Facebook for instance. Earlier today it pulled back the curtain on a , and the from certain Android devices is officially gone. To hear Facebook tell it, the feature was the victim of poor traction so it got axed. Fair enough — there are more than enough mobile messaging apps out there to fill the chat void for certain users, and Facebook Messenger is poised to reach plenty of them. So two companies, two drastically different approaches to SMS. Though both aim to connect as many of their users as possible, Google’s approach is one that needs to be as fundamentally inclusive to Android users as possible. I don’t see Google axing SMS support even if it’s as much of a drag as Facebook’s attempt was. Now that’s not to say that Google is necessarily dead set on owning the messaging experience on Android; that would run counter to the openness of Android itself, and it’s already been confirmed that users can set other SMS apps as the default in Android 4.4 KitKat. But there’s little question that Hangouts is much more attractive now than it was just a few hours ago. This curious little addition has also revived questions about the future of some of Google’s other apps. Hangouts on Android is itself a fairly robust messaging application, and more than a few people have wondered whether or not it’s ultimately going to replace the occasionally iffy Google Voice app as a sort of centralized communications hub. At least, I’m hoping that’s ultimately where Google is taking things. Either way, SMS support in Hangouts could also serve as a shot across Apple’s bow — the folks at Cupertino often tout iMessage’s cross-device capabilities, but in practice the service doesn’t always work .
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Twitter Says A ‘Technical Issue’ Is Preventing URLs From Being Sent In Direct Messages For Some
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Matthew Panzarino
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Earlier this afternoon Twitter users began experiencing difficulty sending URLs or ‘links’ via Direct Message. Depending on the client used, error messages popped up that indicated the DMs being sent included links to ‘malware’, or simply indicated that the message could not be sent. A Twitter spokesperson said only that “there is a technical issue with URLs in Direct Messages.” Though there was no information forthcoming beyond that, it seems unlikely that the inability to send DMs with links in them is a widespread policy decision based on issues like spam or the new DM behavior, though I suppose anything is possible. This has been a fairly widespread issue, and accounts continue to be easily found via Twitter. Verified users appear to have better luck sending links to both other Verified users and to non-Verified users. However, we have confirmed that even non-Verified folks can send links in some cases. Though the initial error messages indicated a ‘malware’ threat to be the cause of the stoppage, the inconsistency of the errors and the way that they began suddenly indicated that this was a bug, rather than an intentional change in behavior on Twitter’s part. Though some spam on Twitter is sent via DM, this is more rare than the simple ‘@reply’ spam that litters its ‘airwaves’. Usually, an account password of one of your followers must be compromised to send a DM to you, the person that followed them. This naturally limited the scope of these kinds of attacks, making a sweeping change to all DM communications unlikely and unnecessary. Especially, as , as Twitter itself uses DMs to experiment with features like recommendations. Recently, Twitter gave some of its users the from anyone, regardless of follow status. Previously, only mutual follows could exchange DMs. This led to some speculation that the cause of the URL DM fail was this new behavior, whether it was intentional or a bug incurred by the new behavior rollout. We will continue to press for more information on the situation and will update this post when we receive a reply. Image Credit: /Flickr CC and for the error
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Cory Booker And The Silicon Valley Makeover Of The Democratic Party
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Newark Mayor Cory Booker cruised to victory in New Jersey’s special election tonight. As a , he’ll instantly become one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful voices. Booker represents a permanent shift in how Silicon Valley is trying to give an ideological overhaul to the Democratic Party. Booker is a , co-founder to an , and beneficiary of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million education donation to Newark schools. But to see how Booker might act as a legislator, it’s helpful to look at the policies of other tech industry favorites in the Democratic Party. The Silicon Valley poster children, President Barack Obama, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Cory Booker, and are distinctly different from the traditional fight-for-the-underdog Democrat. Overwhelmingly they favor . Mayor Bloomberg outright admitted that “we’re going to have more visibility and less privacy” in a on his push for drone-powered surveillance. He also to “fucking destroy” the taxi industry over its with ridesharing apps, Uber and Lyft. Obama has been an and the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) , ignoring the cries of faculty unions. Booker, too, funneled a sizable portion of Zuckerberg’s donation to charter schools– . As mayor, instead of outlawing stop-and-frisk, the racially charged practice of searching suspects on the street without a warrant, . Every stop must now meticulously record the race, location, and reason; that data is then opened to the public for scrutiny. His novel approach won accolades from Newark’s American Civil Liberties Union for balancing public safety and individual rights. But, a traditional liberal would likely have just outright banned the practice. That is, one of Booker’s signature law-enforcement measures was imbued with some Silicon Valley idealism: Open the data and solutions will follow. As a senator he’ll have a chance to bring an innovation-first approach to legislation. Here are a few predictions and an indication of the kinds of liberal policymaking that could become dominant within the Democratic Party. – At the tech mecca that is the SXSW conference, Booker told me he is a fan of “social impact bonds,” which pay entrepreneurs handsomely for . Reforming the criminal justice system is a priority for Booker, especially focusing on teaching prisoners skills to re-enter the workforce. Social-impact-bonds pilots have to find jobs for the previously incarcerated. With enough money thrown at the problem, startups could leverage data technologies to help with the process. with a “Demo Day” for inmates who wanted to jump into the tech scene. – President Obama of higher education, including a new way to rate schools based on post-graduate employment. It’ll also financially support schools that want to experiment with MOOCs and a cheaper path-to-degree through online education. There’s also legislation afoot to to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) courses. Booker will likely support it, and may even be the first champion of it in the Senate. – High-skilled supporter. Full stop. Last spring we did during a Twitter town hall that Booker conducted in support of high-skilled immigration reform. He’ll likely oppose union-sponsored limitations to high-skilled visas, like a mandatory 90-day waiting period for foreign workers. – Booker is unlikely to buck his presidential mentor on National Security Agency spying. He’ll likely move lockstep with the upcoming recommendations from the White House task force on surveillance reform. He might support more transparency in the surveillance process, just like Facebook and Google have , but mass surveillance will continue close to current levels. Surveillance isn’t entirely a traditional liberal issue, as many Democrats for voted for–and against–Representative Amash’s . That said, privacy will unlikely be a priority of Booker or the new Democrats. – At SXSW, Booker promised that he’d use technology to open up the legislative process. The House of Representatives has been far more forward-thinking, experimenting with , an for pending laws, and making . Senate leadership has lagged — maybe Booker will pick up the slack. Or, ideally, invent a novel way of participation. – Count Booker in. The new Democratic party still sees government as a force for positive change, but the indirect path of innovation and transparency as the best possible path to help society’s most vulnerable. It’s a bold new world for Democrats, and Silicon Valley is playing a big part.
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Turn Report Shows Climbing Ad Rates In Display And Social
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Anthony Ha
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A new report from online advertising company shows rising or steady eCPMs (the effective price paid by advertisers for every thousand impressions). The Global Digital Audience Report is based on data from Turn’s marketing platform between July and September — the company says the platform has access to 2 trillion ad impressions and makes 100 billion ad impressions each month. Looking at individual formats, Turn showed that display eCPMs grew to $1.28 from $1.22 last quarter. Mobile eCPMs averaged $1.02 (barely) growing 0.9 percent. Facebook and Facebook Exchange ads saw the biggest increase, growing 15.4 percent to 45 cents. Video was the only category with a drop, falling 0.54 percent to $10.97, so it’s still way above everything else. The report also says that more inventory is becoming available in mobile apps, and that video advertising is standardizing around a few high-performing formats. One theme in the report is what Turn describes as “the rise of the cross-channel brand” — namely, businesses that advertise in multiple formats and channels. The company says it has seen a 137 percent increase in cross-channel brands this year, with a 500 percent increase in brands that advertise across display, mobile, social and video. On average, brands that went from one to multiple ad channels saw a 3x improvement in return on investment, Turn says. You can .
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The Best And Brightest Startups From Around The World Come Out For Our First Disrupt Europe
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Matt Burns
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Disrupt Europe is now in the can. The energy was electric. Every seat was filled. Startup Alley was packed. Pavel Durov with TechCrunch Co-Editor Alexia Tsotsis. Benchmark’s Bill Gurley . And one lucky TechCrunch fan even and pitch — an event that has never happened before. Fifteen startups launched on the Disrupt Europe stage. From enterprise data companies to consumer electronics, the mix ably represented the best of Europe’s exploding startup scene. But Germany-based and will keep the Disrupt Cup here in Berlin. If nothing else, Disrupt Europe was a great melting pot of entrepreneurial spirit. Startups from more than 80 countries exhibited their products in front of the international crowd. The highlights are below.
With the first Disrupt in Europe came the first Hackathon in Europe. The crowd was focused. On point. The hundreds of attendees formed teams, eventually presenting nearly 100 hacks on the massive Disrupt stage. , a Foursquare system that lets people express intent to visit places before they go, bested the other teams and took home the $5,000 prize. Disrupt Europe:Berlin started with a Fireside chat with Mike Butcher and where the Global Founders Group partner European entrepreneurship, copy cats and more.
Google Ventures general partner MG Siegler took the stage longtime entrepreneur Marco Boerries to , which has been in stealth for the last 4 years. TechCrunch International Editor Ingrid Lunden led a panel with three startups founded in Europe, but two of them eventually moved to the States. Ingrid about the reasons for moving to the Valley or staying put in Europe.
Games are big business and Anthony Ha led a panel with industry leaders including Jens Begemann from Wooga, Misha Lyalin from Zeptolab, and Rina Onur from Peak Games.
Nearly overnight, Airbnb reinvented travel, a thought that TechCrunch writer Ryan Lawler , Nathan Blecharczyk, during an on-stage edition of Founders Stories. Is Bitcoin the new Euro? That was the theme of the panel, led by TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler, where the was that the future of the digital currency lies in the hands of upcoming startups, the regulatory system and China. Berlin’s startup scene is growing so rapidly that between TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington and Matt Cohler, Peter Fenton, Bill Gurley and Mitch Lasky, all from Benchmark Capital, Cohler declared there is no better place to be than Berlin — a statement backed up by the VC firm’s massive presence around Disrupt. The highlight of the first day was arguably when Pavel Durov, founder Russia’s largest social network, talked with TechCrunch Co-Editor Alexia Tsostis about , , and .
Two years ago, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong fired TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington. The two reunited on stage as Arrington grilled Armstrong about that event and . Then, during an audience Q&A session, a long-time Michael Arrington fan [gallery ids="907486,907487,907488,907489,907490,907491,907485,907493,907494,907495,907496,907497,907498,907499,907501,907502,907503,907504,907506,907507,907505,907509,907510,907511,907512,907513,907514,907508,907516,907517,907518,907519,907520,907521,907522,907523,907524,907525,907526,907527,907528,907529,907530,907531,907532,907533,907534,907535,907536,907537,907539,907540,907541,907542,907543,907538,907547,907548,907549,907550,907551,907552,907553,907554,907555,907556,907557,907559,907560,907561,907562,907563,907558,907564,907566,907567,907568,907565,907569,907575,907576,907577,907578,907579"] A variety of companies launched at the Europe’s inaugural Startup Battlefield. From young companies tackling consumer’s needs to startups attempting to upset the enterprise market, the group kept the crowd intrigued for hours. It was standing room only as the judges and attendees sat through the six-minute pitches. Eventually Asap54, Import.io, Lock8, and Voicesphere were selected as finalists and would pitch again in front of another group of judges and compete for $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup. TechCrunch Writer Josh Constine kicked off the final day of Disrupt Europe with a fireside chat with founder and CEO of SoundCloud, Alexander Ljung, about to become the audio platform of the web. TechCrunch TV host Colleen Taylor hosted a panel with Lyst’s Chris Morton, Trendyol’s Demet Suzan Mutlu, and FarFetch’s Jose Neves that touched on the differences between setting up a fashion e-commerce business in Europe vs. the U.S., as well as discussing some of the challenges associated with different business models and how important technology is to their own businesses. TechCrunch editor at large Mike Butcher sat down with a group of some of Europe’s most well-known investors and VCs to explore how entrepreneurs and VCs are expanding the European ecosystem. He was joined by Brent Hoberman (ProCapital, Founders Forum), Christophe Maire (Angel Investor), and Edward Shenderovich (Kite Ventures). TechCrunch East Coast Editor John Biggs with Indeigogo CEO Slava Rubin on the startup’s open approach to crowdfunding, fighting fraud, and its explosive growth in Europe over the last year. Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital took the stage once again with panel moderator Leena Rao and Ijad Madisch of Research Gate to talk startups in Berlin and Benchmark’s stance on Europe. Stripe founder and CEO Patrick Collison joined Google Venture general partner MG Siegler to talk about mobile payments, but ended up concluding that no one clicks on ads. In the late afternoon session, TechCrunch Co-Editor Eric Eldon had the monumental task of moderating the massive panel that included Roberto Bonanzinga (Balderton Capital), Sonali De Rycker (Accel Partners), Saul Klein (Index), Dave McClure (500 Startups), and Ciaran O’Leary (Earlybird Ventures), TechCrunch Co-Editor Alexia Tsotsis hosted a special Disrupt Europe edition of Founders Stories with Tinder founder Sean Rad and discussed the exciting world of dating apps and finding love (or hooking up) through a smartphone. As he explained on the Disrupt stage, once upon a time Aaron Levie attended a party in TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington’s backyard and found his first round of funding that would launch Box. The two discussed the early days of Box and his company’s stance on NSA spying. For the final interview of Disrupt Europe 2013, TechCrunch Senior Editor Leena Rao sat down with noted investor Chamath Palihapitiya who stated at a previous Disrupt that “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.” Well, Palihapitiya justified that statement and followed up explaining his bullish view on Bitcoins, reveling his massive stake in the digital currency, as well as describing his love of investing for the good of humanity. With the champagne poured into the Disrupt Cup and Lock8 crowned the winner of Startup Battlefield, the first of what we hope are many Disrupt Europe conferences has come to a close. Thank you for you hospitality, Berlin. We hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did.
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Blockchain Smashers
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John Biggs
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, Indonesia costs three cents per kilowatt hour. That’s 30 cents less than power in the US and Europe. This means, all things being equal and provided you don’t mind your apartment heating up alarmingly, you can make a decent living mining for and Litecoin (another cryptocurrency) using powerful – and hot – graphics cards, each one running at 140 degrees Fahrenheit or more. That’s exactly what Tiyo Triyanto has decided to do. Using some off-the-shelf components he has jury-rigged a 105 GPU system that can, with intense maintenance, make him $114 a day. The system, a chain of motherboards, cards, and ethernet cable so convoluted that you could imagine it powering a mad scientist’s lab. Instead, Triyanto has created a very precise and complex mining platform using his own – secret – configurations. “Currently I’m making about 60 litecoin per day,” he said. “I’ve kept 95% of the mining profit since April and once the major exchanges start accepting LTC, others will follow, and price is expected to soar. So that 60 LTC could turn into $1,500.” Jakarta, where the temperature hovers around 80 degrees and climb to a balmy 95 with 75% humidity is obviously not an ideal environment for a set of machines that require constant cooling. To keep things from burning up Triyanto aims his machines in different configurations and maintains air conditioners that run in his home all night and day. “However, having cheap electricity is not enough for me,” he said. “I kept optimizing my mining farms, did a lot of research and testing, built an effective air cooling method, and created heat flow management and hardware airflow alignment, all in the effort to maximize the mining uptime. When I started I was too eager to get it working and missed a lot of testing.” In one way Triyanto’s system is genius. Like , CS grad Triyanto is cashing in on his home country’s relatively low electricity costs. This arbitrage, while ingenious, could end as sadly as Kramer’s own adventure. Triyanto’s amazing system will be outpaced soon by faster, more efficient mining rigs. In short, this complex, expensive, and seemingly profitable mining rig is about to be eclipsed by newer and better technologies at a pace far faster than the average user can match. Welcome to the Bitcoin arms race. Things are just getting warmed up. Bitcoin mining is like making money out of thin air. Bitcoin is a controlled currency supply and, as , “it requires exertion and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate that resembles the rate at which commodities like gold are mined from the ground.” Bitcoin is a mix of three monetary processes. First, it handles its own transaction processing (think credit card companies,) fraud prevention (the SEC and security firms), and currency issuance (the treasury.) In a real world these things are very complex systems with many moving parts. The beauty of Bitcoin is that each of these systems are reduced to very simple, very powerful cryptographic methods that ensures that each step in the chain verifies the next. Adam B. Levine, Editor-in-chief of describes it in another way: “Mining is like a race occurs every ten minutes where participants from around the world all compete to solve a math puzzle, when someone finds a solution, all the transactions since the last puzzle was solved are wrapped up into what’s called a block.” These blocks are sent out every ten minutes as a package of cryptographically verified transactions – the buys and sells of the system. Your computer, while it’s mining, is actually verifying and encoding these transactions and, as a reward,if you encode the block you get 25 Bitcoins. Computationally it’s akin to getting a few hundred dollars for rolling a massive boulder up a mountain. And then the boulder rolls down again. Groups can get together and mine concurrently, sharing in the proceeds, but the resulting payouts are minuscule – perhaps a few dollars per day at the very most. Mining speeds are measured in number of hashes processed per second – megahashes (MH/s) and gigahashes (GH/s) are the common notation. A hash is a way to “compress” a long number into something that can be used by a computer to, say, find a piece of data in a database. Some have called the hash a long number’s resume. The goal of processing is to find a hash that has a sufficient numbers of zeroes at the beginning. This signals the completion of the block and pays out the reward from the coinbase – an imaginary mine containing all possible Bitcoins. Bitcoin appeared on January 3, 2009 and slowly ramped up in popularity over the next few years. Originally created by the mysterious researcher (or researchers) going by the alias the system was designed to give early adopters an improved chance of mining Bitcoins. When Satoshi began, the fastest way to mine Bitcoins without burning up your computer was by forcing the computer’s graphics processor to run the process in the background. Because these GPU units were inexpensive and good at handling complex equations, you could squeeze a few hundred megahashes per second out of them resulting in a few Bitcoins a week. They peaked at about 600 MH/s but, depending on the hardware and the setup, they could reach gigahash levels. For a while miners were tooling along, pumping out Bitcoins and sharing tips and tricks for maximizing their setups. Bitcoin mining was a hobby. Now it’s not. In April 2011 Satoshi was gone. He (or they, or her) told a Bitcoin developer that he had “moved on to other things,” a decision that had little impact on Bitcoin. Two years after pressing the start button, Bitcoin was steaming along under its own power. Exchanges rose and fell – the most famous one being Mt. Gox in Tokyo, Japan. Mt. Gox was originally a Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange (M.T.G.O.X.) but switched to Bitcoin transactions in 2011. Tibbane Ltd. bought the company in March, 2011 and it has survived countless attacks, hacking attempts, and serious losses. Today Mt. Gox deals in about a million Bitcoin a month. GPU mining worked well for a while but, thanks to the natural inclination of the miner to add more and more power, the average gain from a few more megahashes fell exponentially. “Its like if your computer got slower every time someone new bought a computer, or someone upgraded to a faster one,” said Levine. As single GPU mining fell to parallel mining the speeds seemed to explode – along with energy usage. Rigs that could mine a few Bitcoins a month were now mining a few Satoshis – the miniscule parts of the Bitcoin after the decimal point and the electricity need by GPUs was frighteningly wasteful. In the end you spent more on the hardware and energy than you could ever sanely mine. And so the arms race began. First users tried field-programmable gate array machines – chips that could be specially programmed after manufacture to do nearly anything. These boards hit about 400 MH/s at 15W, considerably less than GPUs and at similar rates. By 2012 a few manufacturers were offering dedicated FPGA devices that could hit GPU speeds. Then, in 2012, FPGAs were outpaced. Bitcoin rose in notoriety thanks to the rise of Silk Road and the Cyprus economic crash. June 2012 brought Y Combinator-backed and the Winklevoss twins of Facebook infamy invested $11 million in the currency while calling it “better than gold.” In April 2013 it reached an all-time high of $266 per Bitcoin, a stratospheric rise. Accounts that once were worth a few dollars exploded and early users cashed out. A number of folks I talked to described selling their Bitcoin and buying gold bars, cars, and fancy watches. They were either further compressing their wealth into relatively non-volatile investments or just having fun. It was an arms race. “It’s now about getting the newest technology first and deploying before anyone else can,” said Levine. After FPGAs users discovered single-purpose, low-power ASIC chips, the entry-level models being the . These tiny ASICs could be installed in parallel on a standard USB hub and run at a few gigahashes – provided you kept things cool. A small mining rig I have set up under my desk uses two Block Erupters and maxes out at 600 MH/s a second – enough power to mine a dollar every six days. On October 15 the first KNC Jupiter mining rigs hit the network. These $5,000 machines can mine at 500 GH/s at about 500 Watts, a power to mining trade-off that many would be willing to make. A let you expect to see profit of $6,000 from these machines every six months – impressive at first but with each new KNC rig brought online the difficulty is increased. Heavier iron pops up on the forums and Bitcoin fan sites with alarming regularity. One company, , is promising 1 TH/s – that’s 1000 GH/s – for $6,000. Other manufacturers opened up shop offering massive speeds and close up almost immediately – taking preoders with them. One company, Terrahash closed up suddenly in September 2013, writing: “We will be able to refund about 50% of every order with this amount. We are trying to get our money out of Chase, which will help us refund another ~5% of each order. We are trying to return as many components as we can, and as soon as we get more money back, we will send additional pro-rated payments to each order.” The buyers were understandably incensed, writing “Don’t think you can scam people to accept a 50% deal for YOUR failures. Customers are not responsible for the risks you took.” In short, Bitcoin mining has become a fool’s game. The instant a new batch of mining tools hits the streets the total processing power of the Bitcoin hive mind rises. When KNC released its product the total power of the network went from 1 petahash per second to 2 petahashes per second. Many expect the network to hit 3 petahashes in the next month. As a measure of pure computing power the Bitcoin mining system – the actual number of machines blasting away at each block – has exploded… over and over again. “ASICs have increased difficulty and are making mining increasingly out of reach for anyone but very deep-pocket miners,” wrote Reddit user . “It is concentrating more and more mining power into fewer and fewer hands, leaving the network at substantial risk for a 51 percent failure.”
[Image via ] For their part, manufacturers like Cointerra are trying to support the small miner. “We are actually selling to the retail guys, the low-end miners,” said Ravi Iyengar. “We don’t want to focus on enterprise mining because we want it to be distributed. And that’s the whole idea behind Bitcoin: keep it distributed, decentralized, not put all the hash in the hands of the field, and we want to increase that and build that.” But Bitcoin is now a big business. With Valley investment and worldwide interest – especially as a medium of exchange – many users are moving towards hosted solutions. (warning: auto-playing video), for example, offers a lease-to-own model for 1.49 TH/s machines that cost $149 a month. You own the machines outright in 59 months. Rowan Alter, VP of sales at Leasebit, sees the hosted model as the only way to fly. “If somebody wants to own a miner that actually works it will be so sophisticated, so hot, and so loud that you will have to outsource to a firm of your choice to maintain it,” he said. “I think the day of the little guy plugging in a chipset is over.” Where can mining go next? All indications point to large farms where users lease out powerful machines or, barring that, the entrance of large, well-heeled banks that simply continue the ASIC race at a much higher scale. As the difficulty increases the resulting firepower needed to squeeze out a single Bitcoin will raise exponentially. After years of easy returns and rising prices, Bitcoin mining has hit a point where it is all but futile to try to mine at home. Funds like are busy building Bitcoin data centers like where massive banks of ASICs run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not unlike the early Internet, Bitcoin is growing slowly and then all at once. In a way, it’s just what Satoshi would have wanted.
About as far as you can get from Jakarta, another miner was blasting away at the block chain. Julian Rodriguez, 26, lives in the Bronx and, in February, 2013 purchased an $1,500 Avalon ASIC miner that could do 82GH/s . He overclocked it – forced it to run faster than its original specifications – and succeeded in mining $16,218 since June 21st. “I had just started my own consulting business and money was tight, I put a lot on the line for that machine. After overclocking it, the fans ran on full blast at all times, and there was a constant hum in my room. My girlfriend didn’t mind too much,” he said. He ran an air conditioner all summer to keep his room cool at a cost of about $60 a month. He recently sold his Avalon on eBay for $1,725. It’s a profit of about $16,500, less expenses. He pulled hundreds of dollars out of the machine the way Jack’s giant pulled golden eggs from his magical goose. The box, a nondescript metal enclosure with three massive fans containing some of the fastest, single-purpose computing circuitry available to consumers, is a strange thing. To some it’s the future of currency, a way to free us from the chains of fiat tyranny. To others it’s a hobby with little upside. To still others it’s an investment as sure as gold or municipal bonds. It’s Schrödinger’s currency generator, containing nothing and everything at once Why did Rodriquez sell his miner? He’s done mining and sees trading as the next big thing. “I personally feel like it’s now time to trade Bitcoin itself. Buy coins in cash and trade,” he said. He estimated that he’d make about $800 more before January and then watch the machine burn itself out, his processing power winking out like a hot, strange star. But he was amazed at the power the Avalon afforded him. “I’m a Bitcoin believer. I’m just waiting for the rest of the world to get it,” he said.
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Anki’s Self-Driving Race Car Toys Will Launch On Oct. 23rd — We Go Hands On
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Greg Kumparak
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Four months ago, Anki co-founder Boris Soffman took the stage at Apple’s WWDC keynote. After years of stealthily toiling away in their labs with few outside of the company knowing their plans, the team unveiled their first product: Anki Drive, a racing game for the real world. While the company has been somewhat quiet since their WWDC debut, they’ve just announced their plans to ship: come Oct. 23rd, Anki Drive will hit the shelves on Anki.com and at Apple Stores around the country. The “base kit”, which includes two cars, a pair of charging pods, and a massive roll-out vinyl race track, will cost $199. Additional cars, two of which will be available at launch, will cost $69. I got a chance to play with Drive last week at Anki’s headquarters in San Francisco, interviewing co-founder Mark Palatucci while he and I attempted to take down one of the game’s AI-steered cars. For the record, the AI car totally kicked our ass. Check it out in the video up above. Remember ? Those toy race tracks, where you’d place a lil’ electric car into a slot and use a remote control to blast the car around the track along a fixed path? Take that concept, but cram the cars full of modern tech like optical sensors and Bluetooth LE. Get rid of the slots and fixed paths, and pack a healthy helping of artificial intelligence into all of the other cars on the track. Oh, and toss in a bunch of virtual guns and power-ups for good measure. What do you get? Anki Drive. Roll out the vinyl track. Turn on a car or four, place ’em on the mat, and give each a little push; almost immediately, they’ll recognize their position and placement on the track and start zooming around on their own accord. Grab your iPhone — Anki Drive is iOS only, for now — and pick which car you want to drive, let any other human drivers you may have nearby join the match, then pick which cars are AI. Tell it just how smart you want each of the AI-driven cars to be, hit the “Start” button, and you’re off. Anki Drive has two gameplay modes, for now: battle mode, and target practice mode. In the first, you’re zooming around the track armed with virtual machine guns and tractor beams, tasked with taking down more opposing cars than anyone else. There are no actual bullets whizzing around here, of course — as you mash the button to fire your machine gun, LEDs at the front of your car pulse and the sounds of bullets firing rings from your iPhone’s speakers. When an opponent’s bullets find their way to your car’s body, your iPhone vibrates to let you know it’s probably time to switch lanes. Practice mode, meanwhile, allows you to fire at passive opponents to brush up your accuracy. One important thing to note, and something I didn’t realize until I actually played with Anki Drive: you’re not fully responsible for steering your car around the track. You control the gas, and you control the guns — but once you’ve mashed down on the gas pedal, the car’s AI is responsible for keeping you on course. If you watch the video up above, however, you might notice me turning my iPhone about like a little steering wheel. Don’t worry! I’m not crazy. While the AI handles keeping you on the track, you’re able to shift back and forth across the lanes of the track — to say, pass an opponent, or line up your shots — by tilting the phone. Tilt left, your car drifts left. Tilt right, your car drifts right. You just don’t have to worry about pointing in the right direction, or mashing into walls. At the end of each game, you’re awarded points based on how you performed. These points can be put towards upgrades — be it new weapons, or performance modifications. Every tweak and upgrade you make to a car stays that specific car, permanently, opening up the possibility of selling or trading cars to other players. Telling a physical object where it is in the world is surprisingly difficult — especially when that object is small, and especially when that object is zipping around a race track, avoiding other equally small objects. You know that aforementioned roll-out vinyl mat? Hidden within that mat, nearly invisible to the human eye, is a hugely complicated pattern of codes. On the bottom of each car is a camera that picks up and parses these patterns hundreds of times per second, allowing each car to know exactly where it currently sits, the direction it’s facing, and where it’ll be next. All of this data is transmitted back to your iPhone (over Bluetooth LE), which acts as the brains of the operation. As you control your car, your phone is silently crunching all of these numbers, working out how to best block your path and take you down. Anki Drive is Really, really cool. By taking their knowledge of robotics and artificial intelligence and mashing it up with toys, Anki has created something unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. They tell me that their goal was to bring the feeling of a racing video game to life — and really, that’s exactly how I’d describe it. The challenge, though, is the price. There’s a of technology packed under the hood (lol) here, from cameras to bluetooth transmitters, bumping the price of entry to something quite a bit higher than most parents might expect to pay for a toy. At $200 bucks for the base kit — $330 if you want all of the cars currently available (oh, and the cost of the iOS device required to control the game) — Anki is putting themselves in the same price range as a current-gen video game console with its massive library of available games. That’s one helluva pitch to try to make, especially with Christmas just around the corner. With that said, I’m still excited for this. I’m excited to see someone breaking into a new market, mashing up complex artificial intelligence with real world toys. I’m excited to see all of the other ways Anki uses this technology moving forward, and all of the ways they add to Drive. Perhaps most of all, I’m excited to tear one of these cars apart and figure out how it all ticks. “You know, people are going to hacking these things apart, ” I mention to Palatucci. “Oh, we know. As developers, we absolutely know. More on that later.” he replied.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: HTC One Goes Max, LG Mindlessly Curves Glass
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Darrell Etherington
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LG is following Samsung’s example in providing a , HTC is offering a , and Mad Catz is entering the – for which there is no proven demand. The Android world has gone mad this week, and me and your host Chris Velazco are just trying to put the pieces back together. Join us as we try to divine the twisted psyche of the people who created these unnatural devices.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday (or Thursday this week) at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . Direct here.
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Boxer Raises $3 Million To Tame Your Inbox
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Ryan Lawler
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Email management company has raised $3 million in funding led by . The company, which in June, will use the funding to expand its engineering and design team and to build apps for other platforms, most notably Android. Along with the funding, Sutter Hill Ventures managing director will join the Boxer board of directors.
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eBay Barely Beats Investor Expectations With Revenue Of $3.9B, Stock Falls 5% In After-Hours Trading
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Alex Wilhelm
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eBay reported its today, including revenue of $3.9 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.64. The company’s revenue was up 14 percent from the same quarter last year, while its earnings per share rose 17 percent. Analysts had expected eBay to earn $0.63 per share (non-GAAP) on revenue of $3.9 billion. In its , eBay had revenue of $3.9 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.63. That’s not a typo; eBay’s second-quarter performance matches earlier third-quarter predictions precisely. Put another way, eBay failed to grow sequentially, which investors might find disappointing. eBay unit PayPal drove $1.6 billion in revenue, up 19 percent. PayPal now has 137 million members, up 17 percent. eBay’s “Enabled Commerce Volume” metric was $52 billion for the quarter, up a healthy 21 percent. Digging into the numbers, eBay’s operating margin is now back over the 20 percent mark (20.5 percent), it generated $1.3 billion in cash during the quarter, and repurchased around $146 million of its own stock during the period. eBay ended the quarter with cash, and equivalents of $13 billion. In regular trading, eBay fell just over 1 percent. The company is sharply down in after-hours trading. Why is eBay falling if it managed to best expectations by a smidge? eBay stated in today’s earnings report that it expected revenue of $4.5 billion to $4.6 billion in the fourth quarter. Its non-GAAP earnings per share range is $0.79 to $0.81. The revenue figure is in line with expectations, but the EPS prediction is lower than what the street expected, which was $0.83. It’s never good to meet investor revenue expectations with your forecast but fail to estimate a similar EPS figure, because that can imply that margins are set to worsen. It’s even tougher to say after reporting a quarter in which your earnings per share and revenue were flat sequentially.
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Looking Beyond Video, Jun Group Announces Its Overdrive Format For ‘Owned Advertising’
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Anthony Ha
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Until recently, advertising company focused . In recent months, however, it’s been exploring a format that it calls “owned advertising” with a new product called Overdrive. CEO Mitchell Reichgut told me that Jun Group actually “soft launched” Overdrive back in June, and it already accounts for more than 30 percent of the company’s revenue. Overdrive is basically an ad format that looks like sponsored content on the publisher’s website, but actually points to a promotional website or micro-website owned by the advertiser. You , where the ad appears in a site’s news feed, and when you click on it, it links to a Starbucks page. Reichgut said the sponsored content shouldn’t just be the usual promotional copy, but something that’s actually interesting and worthwhile for consumers. Is “owned advertising,” as Reichgut characterizes it, really a new idea? Well, , and in appearance, the Overdrive ads resemble what are sometimes native ads or content-style ads. (I think trying to pry apart each of those terms with strict definitions would be futile). For his part, Reichgut said that, compared to other ad products, with Overdrive, “The focus is on pages that the brands control. … The big insight is that it’s no longer about reaching out to people but bringing people in.” I also asked him how this fits into Jun Group’s existing business, and he said it takes advantage of the existing network to deliver “millions of impressions” for each campaign, while also applying the company’s “core principles,” namely that “advertisers have an absolute right to know where their video is going to run and how.” Plus, even though the Overdrive ads can point to any kind of content, Reichgut said they often involve video in some way.
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Facebook Starts Letting Teens Post Publicly Despite Risks, As It Aims To Stay Cool
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Josh Constine
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Like a cautious parent, despite risks. For the first time, users under 18 can post publicly. The logic is that other sites don’t restrict kids, teens are getting more web savvy, and young celebrities want a voice. This could let minors publicly share things they’ll regret, so they must manually opt in to public sharing and confirm they understand the risks. Somewhat disingenuously, Facebook frames its blog post about the change as being about adding protection for teens. It starts off saying that now when people age 13 to 17 sign up, their posts to the News Feed are defaulted to “friends only” instead of “friends of friends (fof)” as they were before. That is important because many people don’t change their default settings, and if you have thousands of friends with thousands of friends, the fof setting would share your posts to more than a million people. But considering there are 1.15 billion people on Facebook already, and its growth has slowed significantly as it saturates key markets, there are likely well over a hundred million teens grandfathered into the old fof default. The real news is opening up public News Feed posting to minors. That’s good news for teenage celebrities. They can now turn on the option for their user profile to have followers — people who aren’t their friends but who see their public posts in the News Feed. That means they don’t have to run a separate fan Page to build a public audience. Having significant social media reach can help child actors get jobs or earn teen musicians favor with record labels. Meanwhile, the young celebs will generate compelling content that appeals to the critical under-18 demographic. Critics say Facebook is losing its cool with this audience. The company has repeatedly claimed on earnings calls that it’s not seeing significant reductions in engagement from teens, but it admits that mobile-first social networks like Snapchat could be grabbing eyeballs Facebook would have gotten otherwise. Giving their famous peers a megaphone could encourage kids to stick around on the nearly decade-old social network. Another argument supporting the change is that teens are hardcore Internet users that are supposedly becoming quite familiar with how to purport themselves online. If they want to make the conscious choice to switch the audience of the News Feed posts to public, they should have that right. Facebook claims it’s doing its best to protect them by making them acknowledge the risks by confirming the dialogue window, pictured above, that states: “Did you know that public posts can be seen by anyone, not just people you know? You and any friends you tag could end up getting friend requests and messages from people you don’t know personally.” If a minor confirms and starts posting publicly, down the line Facebook will remind them they’re sharing publicly so they don’t forget, and give them a quick way to limit the visibility of their posts. The final argument is that many social media sites and blogging platforms like Tumblr let teens post publicly without restriction or heavy-handed warnings. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for teens to post publicly like campaigning for social causes. Why should Facebook be different from the rest of the web? Well, the counter argument is that Facebook should be different because it’s evolved to be viewed as a friendly place where content is somewhat private. Facebook has had its share of privacy stumbles over the years, and some still think it’s pushing people too hard to be open. For instance, last week it . But the general perception is that Facebook is for sharing with friends. There will surely be users who breeze through these warnings, post immature status updates or embarrassing photos publicly to Facebook, and their reputations will pay the price. Naive 13-year-olds might wrongly assume that anything inside the site or app’s blue walls can’t be used against them. But should that mean intelligent, responsible 17-year-olds with driver’s licenses should be able to post publicly? It’s a nuanced, subjective thing to judge. What’s certain, though, is that it’s more important than ever for parents and schools to educate children about safe and respectable use of the Internet. If we teach kids to look both ways before crossing the streets, we should teach them to look at the privacy setting of their Facebook posts before they share.
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Apartment List Acquires RentAdvisor, Bolstering Their Listings With Reviews
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Eliza Brooke
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Last we heard from , they had just and were aiming to take on Craigslist as apartment hunters’ tool of choice. Now the service has made its next move: acquiring the reviews site , which will immediately add 20,000 reviews to the site’s listings. The all-stock deal brings on board 12 new employees, who will remain based in Atlanta at RentAdvisor’s headquarters. RentAdvisor co-founder Jamie Gallo will be joining the management team of Apartment List. Up until now, reviews have been a missing piece of Apartment List’s product puzzle, and one of users’ most common requests. This means that in addition to high resolution photos and floor plans, users will be able to see ratings and reviews on any given listing. The RentAdvisor site will remain separate from Apartment List for the time being, but the two will be rolled into one next year. The team is currently working on integrating RentAdvisor’s reviews, CEO John Kobs said, with the aim to have them live on the site by late October. “The reason we didn’t want to roll out [reviews until now] was critical mass,” Kobs explained. “We just passed 1.5 million monthly visitors, and now we’re in a place to roll it out. If you have too small of a site, and you don’t have that traffic, it could turn into more of a gripe site.” By adding reviews to its site, Apartment List is aiming to be a point of transparency in a relatively opaque market, which could be a big selling point for apartment hunters. Previously, Kobs had pointed to the number of photos posted per listing — an average of 14.5 as of July — as their metric for transparency, as compared to competitors like Craigslist, , or (the latter two of which have both come under fire from Craigslist for aggregating its data). Reviews are a big step up from that. Current residents can post their thoughts on landlord issues or neighborhood safety; when they do, the landlord is notified and can respond in turn. Not everyone meets their landlord before signing the lease, and the fact that they are visible in the review process could add to Apartment List’s appeal. Apartment List did $10 million in revenue last year and expects to double that this coming year. The goal over the next twelve months is to have a complete supply advantage over other listings sites, Kobs said. “We have a team of people curating profiles for properties that don’t have a file online. We’re taking brick and mortar buildings that up until this point hadn’t had an online destination or home page and creating those on Apartment List,” Kobs said. More specifically, the goal is to build a profile for every apartment in the United States. Addresses first go through a location and identity verification process, after which the team contacts the landlord via phone and email to gather data like photos, floor plans, rental rates, square footage, availability, and amenities. Once the property is online, the team periodically reaches out to the landlord to keep the information up-to-date. Gallo said that RentAdvisor had been approached by another player in the housing listings industry previous to saying yes to Apartment List.
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Windows 8.1 Will Start To Roll Out Tomorrow At 4 AM PDT
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Alex Wilhelm
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Tomorrow, at 4 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Windows 8.1 will begin to roll out as an optional update to Windows 8 users. The new software represents a of the bets that Microsoft made with its Windows 8 operating system. Windows 8.1 contains a grip of new features, including new built-in applications, fresh user-interface changes, and a more powerful search technology that elevates Bing as a component of the Microsoft services suite. SkyDrive also has a prominent place in Windows 8.1, as Microsoft works to ensure that it continues to manage its users’ files wherever they are stored. (For a quick look at why that matters, .) Trust me, you want to upgrade. Windows 8.1 is to Windows 8 as Office 2010 is to Office 2007. I’ll be running through the final code tomorrow (Microsoft did not provide TechCrunch with a copy of the final build) and covering the larger launch itself. However, as this is a staged rollout, not everyone will see the code at 4 am Pacific tomorrow. The new operating system will pop up as an update in the Windows Store at various times, depending on your location. All you have to do is have a fine sleep, and when you wake up, the operating system will either be ready for you to snag, or on the way. Windows 8.1 is even more services-dependent than Windows 8, which opens up more potential fail points – if SkyDrive, Bing, Skype or other services falter tomorrow, it will mar the release of the operating system itself. That said, Microsoft services have been more or less stable of late. What will be interesting is whether most Windows 8 users switch to Windows 8.1, and at what pace. We’ll be able to track Windows 8.1’s market share independently, but I suspect that Microsoft will share a few statistics as they become relevant and aggrandizing. So tonight marks the calm before Storm 8.1. Will consumers react positively? Will the new code spur sales? Will it sit well with the new hardware that is on the way? In about 16 hours, we’ll start answering those questions.
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gregory Ferenstein
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Custom Goods Marketplace Makeably Rebrands As “Hatch,” Now Updates Pricing As You Go
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Sarah Perez
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, the New York-based, custom-made goods marketplace that closed on from Great Oaks, 500 Startups and others earlier this year is now relaunching under a new, easier-to-remember name: Hatch. Alongside the rebranding, the company has also evolved the process by which consumers tweak and “remix” the products offered for sale. The site, founded by ex-Googlers and , is similar to in that it’s an attempt to connect everyday shoppers with artisans capable of producing custom goods. But this summer, Hatch (then Makeably), made a slight shift to differentiate itself somewhat from its competitors. Leng explained that the majority of shoppers looking for custom items weren’t reaching out to artisans with detailed requests sprung out of their own minds, but were rather “remixing” existing products with small change requests. Around 90 percent were asking for minor adjustments – like changing the base material used in a product. For example, they might request a necklace in gold instead of silver. They may have also asked for slight changes to designs or sizes, among other things. To encourage this culture of remixing, the company changed the site to better support user behavior. In a newly added side panel, customers were told to “Make it Yours” and could fill in a form where they selected the changes they wanted to request. Today, Leng tells us Hatch is evolving things yet again. “Based on what we’ve learned from our buyers and makers, we’ve moved the customization process directly into the photograph,” she says. Users can now interact with hotspots over a product in order to make better decisions about how to modify it, and they’re presented with visuals about what some of their inputs would look like after doing so. At present, users can select options from the makers themselves provide (like color or ), they can choose from a drop down menu of options for things that don’t require visual cues (like size), or they can (e.g. a message they’d like engraved), Leng explains. Soon, they’ll be able to drag their own hotspot over a product to better communicate to a maker what they’d like to personalize, too. To do customization right, Leng thinks Hatch should make it easier for customers to understand what they can change, see what the change looks like, and immediately see the final pricing. “These are the principles that make your experience with a service like Moo, NikeID or event CustomInk a great one. But it’s not obvious how you visualize customization when you’re dealing with products that are made by a large number of individual artisans and makers around the world, as well as products that have never been created in the exact variation you want (but which easily could be),” she says. In early tests, the company found user feedback about the new process to be positive. “We kept hearing users describe their behavior as not one of buying, but that of designing and creating,” says Leng. (You can try it here with or .) Today, Hatch offers 1,500 live products on its site, on average around two to three per maker, and the average price point has stabilized at $112, which Leng also notes is six times higher than Etsy’s. Eighty-five percent of makers have had at least one inquiry, 40 percent have made one sale or more, and 60 percent are full-time makers not hobbyists. Meanwhile, on the buyers’ side, 30 percent are repeats, and 98 percent of those make their second purchases from a different category than their first. Since May, Hatch has grown 30 percent month-over-month in new makers and products, and has doubled its user base. The company doesn’t disclose users or revenue, but says that all orders today have come through organic search or referral traffic. And now that the team is comfortable and has made the sell side of the business work, they’re going to focus on building up the demand side in the months ahead. However, the question here is whether the maker movement and the market for those in search of custom goods online is large enough today to keep sites like Hatch afloat for as long as it would need to see this thing through. It’s also interesting that they compare themselves to Etsy, a much larger maker marketplace which recently went through , despite back in 2009. Hatch may have successfully market-tested how custom goods sales can work online, but there’s nothing stopping a larger player from implementing similar technology of their own (or even acquiring Hatch if the startup runs out of runway, perhaps). In other news, Hatch was previously working out of a maker co-working space in Brooklyn called , which shut down earlier this month, after giving Hatch less than a week to find a new home. They’ve now put an offer down on a space in Chelsea, which would bring them into Manhattan.
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Bre Pettis, Jeff Clavier, And Matt Rogers Will Join Us At Hardware Battlefield In Vegas
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John Biggs
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With the rise of crowdfunding and easier paths to manufacturing, there are more gadgeteers than ever before. And we’re looking for some of the best hardware startups to compete on our Las Vegas stage for a giant $50,000 check, tons of publicity and the brand new cup. We are pleased to announce that , , and Nest founder have all agreed to be judges for the competition. Each one will bring their years of experience to bear on what should be an amazing event. Like Startup Battlefield, this new competition will pit 20 hardware startups against each other. The winner will be chosen by VCs, makers and TechCrunch Editors. The best thing? The Hardware Battlefield is taking place at CES 2014 in Las Vegas but is open to all comers and you don’t need a conference badge to enter, attend the battlefield events, or simply spectate. Our goal is to find the diamond in the CE rough. We don’t care about Samsung, Sony, and Philips -– we care about you. It’s free to enter. The competition is open to all hardware companies who are planning to launch (crowdfund or ship) product in a two week window before or after January 10. You can still be in prototyping stage but you must have a working, usable product by January 7 and be ready to offer pre-orders on that day or soon thereafter. We recommend launching your crowdsourcing page during the event, however, as it will have maximum impact. We will have more details shortly but for now we invite you to submit your product. The rules are simple: 1. You must launch your product or crowdfunding campaign before January 7.
2. You must be a single proprietor or small company.
3. This must not be a feature update to an existing product.
4. You must be able to attend rehearsals and sessions in Las Vegas prior to CES and during the show.
5. You must launch first with TechCrunch and approach other media after you appear on our stage. We will pick 15 entrants on October 30 and announce the location, time, and judges closer to the event. The grand prize winner will get $50,000 to go towards research, development, or whatever else your team needs to get by. All projects will be kept confidential until January 7. We are very excited about this new event and we want to make it the best one ever. Remember to email sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com if you’d like to sponsor the festivities and if you have any questions email john@beta.techcrunch.com. We look forward to seeing what you’re working and we hope to see you in Vegas!
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LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman On Two Realistic Outcomes Of Teaching Everyone To Code
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Gregory Ferenstein
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On a regular basis, we get pitched with major tech industry initiatives to broaden computer science education. A day after Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates signed on to a from Code.org to inspire 10 million new computer programmers, education startup General Assembly for self-taught coding. And, just a few weeks earlier, Square CEO Jack Dorsey sat down with House Minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, to chat about a for young girls. But after everyone and their mother can code if-then loops, then what? There are many college-trained computer programmers who never use their coding skills and a sizable share of CS majors who can’t get hired in Silicon Valley. Who caught up with LinkedIn Co-Founder and , , at the Code.org launch event to ask about why he was supporting their initiative. He has some refreshingly realistic ideas about what happens when everyone can code. “It’s not that everyone will have the skills for a high performing job.” he says. “Software skills are useful in every industry, not just for being hired by LinkedIn.” The more people who hand-code their own solutions, the more cool projects we’ll see. Even in the slumbering luddite of the U.S. Congress, Representative Darrell Issa was able to launch a , because he and his staff could code a rough version of it without worry about hiring developers. Who knows how many ideas never happen because an inventor can’t create a prototype themselves. Universal computer science education won’t solve , but it will make us a more innovative society. “If I hadn’t have gone to Stanford, I probably wouldn’t have become a software entrepreneur,” says Hoffman, who remembers always having a world-changing orientation, but never considered technology as a pathway to making an impact. Being embedded in Xerox PARC gave him the epiphany that technology could allow a friend tutoring in East Palo Alto to reach many more students. He never developed the tutoring software, but it did inspire him to get into large-scale tech projects. The same goes for other inventors. Seventeen-year-old Brittany Wenger recently designed a new low-cost way to radically improve cancer-detection rates using artificial intelligence and databases. “I came across artificial intelligence and was just enthralled. I went home the next day and bought a programming book and decided that was what I was going to teach myself to do,” . Without exposure to technology, this cool stuff simply doesn’t happen. Silicon Valley has to be a little realistic about the mathematical prowess of the average American. Forty-seven percent of U.S. college students on rudimentary algebra fractions. The Logical notation of programming, which is much more complex, might be a bit out of reach. Even if we could accomplish the monumental task of transforming the K-12 education system to teach all students anything new, only a fraction of students would actually use it. That said, it only takes a fraction of computer-science-literate students to come up with some super cool stuff, and that, alone, is worth the effort.
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Smartphones Now Account For 60% Of Mobile Phones Shipped Globally, With Apple Expected To Rebound On The iPhone 5s, Says Strategy Analytics
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Catherine Shu
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Global shipments of smartphones are continuing to increase, growing 45% to hit a record 251 million units in Q3 2013, from 172.8 million units a year ago, according to . “This was the first time ever that smartphone shipments exceeded a quarter-billion units in a single quarter. Smartphones accounted for 6 in 10 of all mobile phones shipped worldwide. The smartphone industry’s robust growth is being driven by strong demand for LTE models in developed regions like the U.S. and 3G devices in emerging markets such as China,” said Linda Sui, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics. Samsung is still the leading brand, capturing a record 35% share of all smartphone volumes worldwide. The Korea tech giant’s shipments grew 55% over the last year as it shipped a record 88.4 million smartphones worldwide. Slowing shipments of its flagship Galaxy S4 was offset by strong demand for its new Note 3 phablet and lower-priced devices such as the Galaxy Y. Though Samsung shipped over two times more smartphones than Apple during the quarter, Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawston expects the Cupertino, Ca.-based company to “rebound sharply and regain share in the upcoming fourth quarter of 2013 due to high demand for its new iPhone 5s model.” Apple shipped 33.8 million iPhones worldwide in Q3 2013, up from 26.9 million a year earlier. The slowing shipments as consumers waited for the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c meant that Apple grew just 26% annually during Q3 2013, or about half the overall smartphone industry average of 45%. Apple’s global smartphone market share also decreased from 16% to 13% during the past year. Huawei took the third place spot in the rankings as its global shipments grew 67% annually to 12.7 million units in Q3 2013. Though the Chinese company’s 5% market share is considerably less than Samsung’s or Apple’s, it still makes Huawei the world’s third largest smartphone vendor. Huawei’s shipments were driven by the popularity of its P6 and G610 models in its domestic market. “Huawei remains very strong at home in China, but its position is less robust in other major markets like the U.S. and Europe. Huawei will need to expand aggressively in the American and European markets if it wants to seriously challenge the big two of Samsung and Apple next year,” said Woody Oh, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics.
The other smartphone brands in the top five this quarter were LG, Lenovo LG, which shipped 12 million smartphones worldwide for 5% market share in Q3 2013. The Korean company grew 71% annually, making it the fastest-growing vendor among the top five brands. Strategy Analytics noted that LG’s growth was driven by demand in Europe, but that it still needs to catch up with its competitors in China and India.
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Gowalla Co-Founder Scott Raymond Joins Airbnb’s Mobile Product Team
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Ryan Lawler
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A little less than two years after being , Gowalla co-founder and CTO Scott Raymond has left to join ‘s mobile product team. There, Raymond will work on a product that is growing in importance, as Airbnb seeks to facilitate connections between its users and speed up the process of creating listing and booking reservations. Airbnb has been steadily trying to improve its mobile experience for both guests and hosts. While it has always done a good job of providing guests with ways to search, bookmark, and book reservations on its mobile apps, it’s recently added features enabling hosts to manage their listings on the go. Earlier in the summer, it to allow hosts to create listings directly from the app. That included the ability to upload photos, set a space’s location via GPS, and have instant phone verification to ensure that hosts could be reached from the phone they were listing from. Airbnb plans to continue investing in mobile, because communication between guests and hosts happens a lot faster over mobile than if both parties are on the company’s webpage. About 50 percent of hosts use the Airbnb mobile app today, according to Airbnb . The company has previously said that hosts on its mobile apps typically respond three times faster than those on desktop. “We’re really concentrating on mobile right now, building out our mobile team and building out our mobile product,” Curtis said. Today, Airbnb has a team of 15 working on mobile, but the company will continue to add to the team over time. With that in mind, Curtis said it was important to bring in someone to help the growing mobile product team. That person will be Raymond, who has experience building mobile products for travelers and adventurers. As co-founder and CTO of Gowalla, he built one of the earliest location-based mobile apps for finding and discovering interesting new venue and sharing them with friends. “Gowalla’s mission was to get out and explore places in the world. That experience has been percolating in my mind for years,” Raymond said. Getting back to the themes that he explored at Gowalla was one of the big things that drew him to Airbnb. While Gowalla ended up losing the so-called “check-in war,” the product evolved in an interesting way, particularly with the before the team was . Gowalla 4.0 was designed to enable users to tell stories and discover new places with . That’s consistent with a lot of the work that Airbnb has done recently, as it moves beyond just being a platform for finding a place to stay, and seeks out ways to help travelers, once they get to where they’re going, better enjoy their stay. A year ago, Airbnb , giving guests on desktop deeper insight into the shops, restaurants, and overall local vibe of the neighborhoods they would be staying in in major cities. It’s too early to say which of those elements will make it into the mobile app, but Raymond says it’s clear there’s huge opportunities to do interesting new stuff to bridge the online Airbnb experience with the mobile experience, while also blending users’ experiences online and offline. Stay tuned, as I’m sure it’ll be interesting to see what comes next. I’ll be interviewing Airbnb co-founder and CTO Nate Blecharczyk about product, mobile, and other stuff at in Berlin in a few weeks. If you’re around, ! It’ll be epic.
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Meet Lesson.ly, A Training-As-A-Service Startup That Is Clocking Quick Revenue Growth
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Alex Wilhelm
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If you work for a large company, you likely dealt with an onboarding process. Perhaps little quizzes or pamphlets. I recently enjoyed this precise exercise while joining TechCrunch a few months ago, given that our corporate boss AOL is a fan of all things ancient. The gist is that corporate training is a pain in the ass for the poor schmuck on the receiving end, as well as for those who have to get new recruits up to speed. wants to change that by providing a flexible, online software solution to help businesses train new employees. Corporate training-as-a-service is the play. The company likes to think of itself as the “MailChimp of teaching and learning software.” I tend to dislike “X for Y” comparisons, but in this case it fits well enough to bear repeating. The sexiest thing online? No. But it’s an interesting pain point to solve, and one that likely has a wide market, given the ubiquity of corporate training. As a service, Lesson.ly is currently functional, and attractive, though not as deep in its feature set as it needs to be. Lesson.ly was founded last July, and only left beta this March, so that is to be expected. Companies using the product can create courses for their employees, assign each to various individuals, track their progress, and quickly view scoring. Creation of lessons is the biggest friction point for Lesson.ly users, so the company does hold some customers hands when getting their material in place. Of course, companies can quickly white-label their tests, keeping their brands on top. Lesson.ly caught my eye because I know its founder, , who formerly founded . I covered when Yoder was focused on it. It’s transformed into a side project for now. The company raised a single round of funding this July, led by Gravity Ventures. Also participating in the funding was Collina Ventures and a few angels. Lesson.ly declined to disclose the size of the round, but did note that it is seeking additional capital. I spoke with Yoder about the progress of his young company. Given its model and market, the scorecard for Lesson.ly is revenue and customer growth. According to Yoder, his company has grown its revenue 245 percent month-over-month since January of this year. Now, if you start from a very small number — remember that Lesson.ly is a corporate infant — it isn’t hard to chart aggressive figures. Lesson.ly’s service starts at $100 per month for a company with the need to train up to 25 people. Naturally, it charges more if you need more capacity. Lesson.ly has three full-time employees, though it is in the process of adding two salespeople. I suspect that Lesson.ly’s first round was modest in size, and the company now needs growth capital to hire customer-facing denizens, as well as backend workers. The company has big plans. I asked Yoder how long it would take for Lesson.ly to reach a run rate of $1 million, and he replied that it would take around 12 months. So, come next November, we’ll have a very simple measuring stick for the firm. Yoder also stated that he expected the company’s customer base to triple in the next six months. We expend quite a lot of our total bandwidth covering companies with , , and . Yoder and his small crew are betting that they can take a business model that has been proven to work, apply it to a sleepy, even dull, sector, which is interesting. And if the company can scale its revenues as quickly as it hopes, it could join Nexmo of the profitable young tech companies. Still, Lesson.ly is small enough that it could topple over and be blown away. That said, from what I have seen inside the small, Indianapolis-based firm, that doesn’t seem too likely.
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The Endangered Double Irish Could Make Apple, Google, Twitter And Others Pay Way More Taxes
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Alex Wilhelm
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According to , a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the infamous Double Irish tax avoidance method could be endangered. If it were to be written out of law, the legal practice would force many companies to either find new methods to avoid taxation, or pay far higher rates on their profits. Before we dig into the details of the matter, keep in mind that it is the responsibility of every tax-paying entity to arrange its affairs in the way that will most limit its tax bill, and then pay every cent of that total. The gist is that we should expect corporations to pay as little in taxes as they can. How they manage to do so while staying inside of the law you may find abusive, or asinine, but you should never be surprised by their efforts. O’Rourke is a voice that matters as he advises a number of companies on how to employ the Double Irish tax avoidance method. Intel, for example, is his client. He has worked with Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. In an , O’Rourke predicted that the Double Irish will, in time, become illegal. Regarding government policy, O’Rourke has standing, as, , he helped end a 20 percent tax on profits leaving Ireland. This made use of the country as a place to more simply shuffle around revenue and profit. So, what is the Double Irish, or the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich? It’s a form of income moving that helps companies avoid huge tax bills. In the same report, Bloomberg states that Google saved $2.2 billion last year using the technique, and that companies overall slip past around $100 billion in taxes in the United States and Europe yearly through its effectiveness. So, the dollars at play here are not small. Here’s how it works: Move your money to Ireland, then the Netherlands, and finally to a tax haven such as Bermuda, but in a very specific order. And that’s the kids’ version. The process can become vastly more complex once new entities are involved, primarily when you begin to extend the number of countries. This is enough: A company sells its foreign intellectual rights to an Irish subsidiary (company) that is separate from the firm (which the first subsidiary will own) that will actually drive revenue for it abroad. That second company will “pay” the first company for using the rights. The first firm, headquartered in Bermuda thanks to Irish law, can ship those profits back over the Atlantic sans taxes. But to get the money from company two to company one, the Netherlands is used as a stopover to dodge any sort of withholding taxes. So, two Irish companies with a Dutch company in between. Hence the “sandwich” metaphor. This method, and others similar to it (you can just Double Irish and not Dutch Sandwich, or use a different country to start with) is very popular with wealthy technology companies. If Apple had paid the full-ticket U.S. corporate tax rate on all of its global profits (it never will, of course), it would have far less cash – stored profit – and thus be worth less, and have less internal flexibility. It would also have less ability to distribute profits via dividends, share buybacks, and the like. The winners are shareholders. The losers are governments losing out on huge incomes that they, presumably, want. If O’Rourke is correct, and the Double Irish play is doomed in time, it will either greatly lower the profitability rates of tech companies, or they will find another way to avoid taxes. If tech companies become less profitable, that will trickle down the ecosystem, lowering the rate of acquisitions and any other cash-dependent activity. End of the world? Not close. Painful correction to corporate rates that could shake up tax policy for immensely profitable companies? Yes. Apple, Microsoft, Google and others have stacked mountains of cash built on profits that are taxed at vanishing rates. The next giants to do the same might not have the same favorable tax options open to them. It will take them more time, therefore, to become just as rich. Provided that the Double Irish is closed, the implicit value of future tech-giant cash flow is lowered. This decreases the of large technology companies, those big enough at least to rock a Double Irish. Twitter, , a company that is struggling to find a way to profits, could see that path steepened if the loophole closes. There is to . But tech giants are wealthy and wealth comes with advantages, such as lobbying dollars, political donations and the finest legal offense and defense that you can buy. Given the sums involved, expect the coming battle to get messy.
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Apple Made 15 Strategic Acquisitions In Fiscal ’13, Leaving 7 Undiscovered
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple completed 15 acquisitions in fiscal 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook . That amounts to one acquisition every 3-4 weeks during the year. Given that we only know about eight of those acquisitions, there are still seven more out there. Apple typically makes small acquisitions of companies that have developed a set of skills it needs or a product that it wants to integrate into its hardware or software. Apple’s famous acquisition “confirmation” boilerplate alludes to this, stating “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” So far, we know of the following acquisitions by Apple in 2013: As for what the others are, we’ll keep our ears open. If you have any info, well, are .
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Apple: Future Versions Of OS X To Be Free, $900M Increase In Revenue Deferral Due To Free Software
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today during its earnings call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer confirmed that future versions of OS X would be free. Last week, Apple announced that OS X Mavericks would be available for free, but did not confirm plans for future versions of its operating system. Oppenheimer’s statements during the call indicate that future versions of OS X will also be free. This, along with iWork updates and free copies for each purchaser of Mac and iOS hardware, would contribute to a $900 million sequential increase in net revenue deferred for software upgrade rights and non-software services in the December quarter. Basically, a larger slice of revenue from each device will go towards ‘paying’ for those free software upgrades under a law that doesn’t allow Apple to count revenue for freebies until the products they’re housed on are delivered. Apple noted that this would be enough to affect its gross margins, using the phrase “dollar for dollar.” This indicates that its margins might have been hit by as much as 170 basis points, increasing what it has estimated for its future margins. The market responded to the news that Apple’s margin estimates were directly affected by the deferrals, popping by a few points. Basically, this is the market reacting to the fact that Apple’s guidance for next quarter included these deferrals. That means that what looks like a flat growth curve is actually going to be a pop in disguise in Q1 ’14. Oppenheimer says that these new deferrals would add to those already sliced off for software updates. He notes that this is now $15-25 per iPhone and iPad beginning in September, and on Mac it increased from $20 to $40 in October. He says that it will record those deferrals over two years for iOS devices and over Mac for four years, slipping that revenue back in to the bottom line over years rather than ‘right now’ if it were to charge. Oppenheimer says that it will “work hard” to get down the cost curves on those devices in order to compensate for those increases. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the primary reason for Apple to make OS X and iWork free was to “make it a part of what it meant to own a Mac and what it meant to own an iOS device…Some other folks charge $199 for each of these — the OS and the productivity apps. We wanted to make it a part of the experience.” Apple reported a with $37.5B in revenue, $7.5B in net profit representing $8.26 per share. Apple sold .
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CollabFinder Just Made Founder Dating Super Simple
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Jordan Crook
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Two heads are better than one. It’s an age-old saying that has particular poignance in the entrepreneurial realm, where investors are much more comfortable handing over wads of cash to a team instead of an individual. A new betaworks-backed startup out of New York, CollabFinder, is banking on that very idea. The service helps designers, developers, artists, and producers find each other to collaborate on projects, based on various groups. New York City used the service (while in beta) to power it’s , the city’s largest technology competition, and Bloomberg said the quality of the apps produced this year was much better than previous years. Why? Because CollabFinder made it easy for individuals with good ideas to find the necessary collaborators to make their project awesome instead of mediocre. “If you give people interested in making apps a place to collaborate and make projects together, you’ll have much better projects and apps,” said CollabFinder founder Sahadeva Hammari. “We’ve seen teams make more and better projects than individuals.” Here’s how it works: Anyone can sign up through Facebook, which automatically shows all of your connections within the CollabFinder website. From there, you can check out various groups. A group is created by a company, organization or city. This group is essentially a community of people and projects devoted to a certain platform or API. For example, Flickr is currently piloting with CollabFinder and sending developers interested in using the Flickr API to CollabFinder. This way, anyone who’s looking to build on top of Flickr data can meet with like-minded individuals to build something twice as nice. Once you’ve found the group you’re interested in, you can then post a project. Projects are free to post, and can be any idea you’ve ever had for something you want to build. Other users can then browse through projects, perhaps stumbling on yours and thinking it to be the bees’ knees. You two can connect on CollabFinder and get cracking on the next big thing. In terms of a business model, CollabFinder works a lot like Meetup.com. Group creators, such as Flickr, Harvest, and eBay to start, pay a base fee of $35 each month to foster their communities on CollabFinder. These group creators will often push traffic from their own API sites to their group on CollabFinder, according to Hammari. But what about idea theft? We in the startup world, after watching The Social Network one too many times, have a strange fear of idea theft. However, Hammari reminds me that most people with great ideas simply build them into realities without telling someone. A designer alone does not an app make, and the same can be true for developers. But as added protection, CollabFinder only lets creators on the website, including engineers, scientists, designers, writers, and artists. If you’re interested in finding your professional soul mate, head on over to and sign up.
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Apple’s Greater China Business Bounces Back, Accounts For 15% Of Q4 Revenue
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Chris Velazco
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Three months ago, when CEO Tim Cook was asked why Apple’s revenue from greater China sunk 14 percent year over year, he didn’t have a great answer. Apparently, there wasn’t a “totally clear” answer for the shift. Now, poring over Apple’s Q4 earnings, the story is very different. That same region accounted for $5.7 billion of Apple’s total revenue pie (or, if you prefer, 15.3 percent). What’s more, it’s up 24 percent from last quarter, and up 6 percent from last year. And CFO Peter Oppenheimer even noted during his quarterly breakdown that 27K employees of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China were outfitted with iPhones. So what happened? Why the turnaround? Cook was asked that very question during this afternoon’s earnings call, and he was about as understated as always. “We had a pretty good quarter in China,” he noted. “Obviously we want to do better.” It soon became clear that there was no one reason for Apple’s bounce back in the region this quarter. Cook pointed to a closer working relationship with Chinese carriers, and the government as a whole for one, a shift that allowed Apple to China in its first wave of iPhone 5s and 5c rollouts. In case you haven’t been keeping track, that’s a first for the company and the country, and Cook hopes to keep things running smoothly on the mobile end of things. Part of Cook’s plan to boost Apple’s performance in China comes down to good ol’ fashioned selling. He said that the company is “continuing to invest in stores” in that market (and noted that Apple recently opened a new store in Chongqing). Apple was initially very focused on rolling out in large cities, but the key to maintaining and expanding its foothold in China is apparently going to be centered around earlier launches, investing in indirect distribution and a honing of retail prowess. We’ll see how that goes, but for now there’s little question that Apple is the underdog of the region — Android (and its various forks) reign supreme for a handful of reasons and it seems unlikely for that needle to move drastically any time soon. That said, IDC reported earlier that it expected Android market share in China to plateau going into 2014 and eventually give way for platforms like iOS and Windows Phone to pick up some steam, so Apple’s refined approach may put into place at just the right time.
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Google Launches Invite System For Early Glass Explorers And Preps Updated Hardware
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Chris Velazco
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Hey Google Glass Explorers, Google thinks you’re keen. Really, they do. So much so in fact that the company has been quietly working on an updated version of the Glass hardware, and those of you who shelled out $1,500 to be among the first to support the project will be able to swap your existing units for the second revision for free. Of course, Google Glass is still a ways off from its general launch date — expect it to land some time in 2014 on some sort of Google barge — so naturally Google is gearing up to expand its pool of Explorers. To that end, existing Explorers will have 14 days to choose three acquaintances who are worthy of paying $1,500 for Google Glass. But let’s back up for a moment. What exactly makes this new iteration so special? So far it seems like a pretty incremental upgrade — unless you’re like me and wear honest-to-goodness specs everyday. Google’s Glass team has confirmed on (where else?) that this version will be able to be fitted with “future lines” of prescription lenses. It’s also going to pack a mono earbud, presumably because the existing bone conducting speaker system isn’t exactly the loudest thing you’ll ever hear. With any luck, Google will have tweaked the internals a bit too, as the existing loadout is getting pretty long in the tooth. In case you’ve forgotten, it sports a TI OMAP4430 chipset and 1GB of RAM, which essentially means that in an age of incredibly high-powered components in smartphones, current Glass owners are walking around with the equivalent of a Galaxy Nexus on their heads. And in case you were curious, here’s a copy of the email Google is sending out to eligible Explorers, just so you know what to look out for:
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Apple’s Rebound Quarter In Charts
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Dan Frommer
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Apple just reversed its slide, if you can call it that. After three quarters in a row of slowing sales growth, Apple’s September quarter — reported this afternoon — shows a modest re-acceleration. See for the financial big picture, and for the product-by-product details. Now for the charts. You’ll note a modest uptick in Apple’s revenue and profit growth rate — though profits are still down year-over-year. The iPhone is still the heart of Apple’s business, representing 52% of sales and likely more of its profits.
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Apple’s Q4 ’13 Beats With $37.5B Revenue, $7.5B Profit And $8.26 EPS On Strong iPhone Sales
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple has , reporting $37.5B in revenue, $7.5B in net profit representing $8.26 per share. That marks a year-over-year growth of 4.2 percent in revenue and 4.7 percent decline in EPS, with net profit down 8.6 percent year over year. Apple sold Macs in the quarter, which allowed it to post record Q4 revenue. Analysts had estimated 33.4 million iPhones, 14.3 million iPads and 4.3 million Macs in the quarter. iPhone sales grew 26 percent to hit another record number. iPad sales were relatively flat. Apple sold a total of 71 million iPads in fiscal 2013. Apple sold just 3.5 million iPods in the quarter. “We’re pleased to report a strong finish to an amazing year with record fourth-quarter revenue, including sales of almost 34 million iPhones,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. For comparison, Apple brought in $35.3 billion in revenue last quarter, with $6.9 billion in profits at $7.47 EPS. Apple is currently down 2 percent in after-hours trading. Apple beat analyst expectations across the board for revenue, posting record Q4 numbers. According to , street analysts had projected $37.14 billion in revenue with EPS of $8.16. Estimates put year-over-year revenue growth at 3 percent and earnings growth at -6 percent. WSJ at $7.94, which would give Apple a win in both categories as well. Apple’s own guidance projected revenue at between $34 billion and $37 billion, with a gross margin of between 36 percent and 37 percent. Apple’s estimates have become increasingly accurate over the past few quarters, ever since it changed the way that it gave guidance. Previously, it had a reputation for severely under-estimating future quarters and it’s taken a bit of time for analysts to adjust to its new, more conservative outlook. Apple finished the quarter with $146.76 billion cash on hand. Its projections for revenue in Q1 2014 are between $55 billion and $58 billion with gross margin of between 36.5 percent and 37.5 percent. Apple’s gross profits fell to 37 percent, the seventh quarter in a row for such a decline. Much of that can be attributed to lower margins on devices like newer Retina iPads and lower-priced iPhones. If it hits the higher end of its Q1 ’14 estimates, it could reverse that for the first time in a while, but the lower end would mark another decline.
iPod sales were down 35 percent year over year, Macs were down 7 percent over the same period and iPads were relatively flat. iTunes and software revenues were up 22 percent and accessories were up 5 percent. Even with only a couple of weeks of iPhone sales on the charts, it still accounted for 52 percent of Apple’s overall sales. The impact of the two new models, iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s, likely won’t be felt in full until Q1 2014. The same can be said for the iPad, whose numbers are depressed due to no new model being launched in the period. We’ll see impact from the iPad Air, Retina iPad mini and reduced cost iPad mini in Q1 2014. The average selling price of iPad was $439 up from $436 in Q2 and iPhone ASP was $577 in Q4.
Apple specifically noted that revenue in Greater China was up 23.5 percent sequentially, and 5.6 percent year over year.
Image Credit: /Flickr CC
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Apple Sold 33.8 Million iPhones, 14.1 Million iPads, And 4.6 Million Macs In Q4 2013
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Chris Velazco
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Well folks, Apple has just put up some mixed numbers in its — $37.5 billion in revenue and $7.5 billion in net profit to be exact — but how exactly did the tech titan fare in terms of hardware sales? This time around Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones (which it notes is a record for Q4), 14.1 million iPads and 4.6 million Macs during the quarter. To put that in perspective, the average analyst prediction was for Apple to sell a grand total of 33.4 million iPhones in Q4, along with just under 14 million iPads and about 4.26 million Mac computers. Meanwhile, Apple sold 31 million iPhones, 14.6 million iPads, and 3.8 million Macs last quarter, and 26.9 million iPhones, 14 million iPads, and 4.9 million Macs in the year-ago quarter. Phew. So yes, if we’re taking those averages as gospel, Apple managed to come out ahead on every one of them. Despite that big iPhone sales boost (thanks in part to the recent launch of the iPhones 5s and 5c, iPad sales are essentially flat year-over-year — we’ll see if that trend sticks once those refreshed models start hitting shelves in November. The nature of the electronics lifecycle means that a cyclical dip or lull is to be expected though — with the holidays right around the corner, the company’s Q1 2014 earnings are going to be where the real money is. Speaking of dips, we saw a few of them : Apple sold just 14.6 million iPads back then which was heralded as the first yearly iPad sales decline ever, and (perhaps more notably) the average selling price of the iPhone sequentially. It’s not exactly a shock then to see that both of these trends are still in effect, especially when it comes to iPhone ASPs. Apple makes it a point to never break down iPhone sales numbers by model, so at this point it’s tough to say how many 5s and 5c units have been sold (a situation that’s compounded by iPhone 5s supply constraints and the frequent assertion that people aren’t really buying the 5c). While iPhone ASP is down to $577 this time, though, it seems that the popularity of the higher-priced iPhone 5s has managed to keep the figure from eroding too much. And what of the iPods? The music players (which eventually evolved into much, much more) were one of Apple’s first runaway hits, but the company generally seems happy to relegate them to the background. They haven’t been called out in an earnings release for the past six months, and they were conspicuously absent when Apple updated the rest of its hardware portfolio just in time for the holiday shopping frenzy. In case you were curious, though, Apple moved a hair under 3.5 million of them in Q4.
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Darrell Etherington
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The Final 4 Disrupt Europe Startups: Asap54, Import.io, Lock8, Voicesphere
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Mike Butcher
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It might have been a long time coming, but the first ever , held in Berlin, has been a fantastic window into the burgeoning European tech startup ecosystem. Plus, it has surpassed our expectations on attendance, passing 2,000 delegates over two days. Well known players from Silicon Valley have been rubbing shoulders with the cream of Europe’s entrepreneurs and investors, TechCrunch Writers and Editors, as well as TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. Rocket Internet’s Marc Samwer made a rare appearance, as did Marco Boerries of Number Four, Airbnb’s Nathan Blecharczyk, Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler, to name just a few. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from more speakers such as Alexander Ljung (Soundcloud), Jose Neves (Far Fetch), Brent Hoberman (PROFounders Capital, Founders Forum), Christophe Maire (Angel Investor), Patrick Collison (Stripe) and Aaron Levie (Box), among others. And Tuesday will also see the the Startup Battlefield grand finale…. Our expert judges and team have honed down our 15 finalists to four startups who will battle it out for a chance to win the grand prize: the Disrupt Cup and €50,000 in cash. The Finals judges will be: Michael Arrington (Crunchfund, TechCrunch), Bindi Karia (Silicon Valley Bank) Errol Damelin (Wonga), Klaus Hommels (Angel Investor), Neil Rimer (Index Ventures), and Dave McClure (500 Startups). Here are the Battlefield Finals companies: Asap54 is an app that helps you find clothes that you like around you in the physical world. You take a picture of them with your phone, and let the app find you that exact piece, along with a bunch of others that are similar. Think of it as a Shazam for fashion. By allowing its users to turn any web page into an API with just a few clicks, Import.io exists to make it easy for developers to pull data from the web. At Disrupt Europe the company launched a new service that they call the “Data Factory” that should make it even easier. Lock8 is a smart lock paired to your smartphone, and you use its mobile app to lock and unlock the bike once the lock chain is connected and it contains six sensors to determine if an attempted theft is underway. Since the lock is unlocked via smartphone, customers can easily share their bikes with friends or even rent them out. Voicesphere is a platform for voice-enabling consumer and enterprise apps and making them available in a Siri-like environment based on natural language processing.
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The Syrian Electronic Army Hacked Obama’s Twitter Links And Campaign Emails
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Gregory Ferenstein
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[tweet https://twitter.com/Official_SEA16/statuses/394878079044055041 The pro-regime hacker group, the Syrian Electronic Army, : They managed to hack a link on the Obama campaign Twitter feed and send users to a propaganda video on YouTube (since removed). The group also accessed the emails of many members who work for Obama’s campaign group, Organizing For America. [tweet https://twitter.com/BarackObama/statuses/394862826637905920] “Only the links within our tweets had been hacked,” an OFA official . “At no point did they have access to the twitter handle,” the official said. Like many companies, the Obama campaign has a separate app for their unique shortened URLs, instead of relying on Twitter’s (it’s easier to track user engagement). Quartz that the campaign members have since beefed up their security with Google’s two-step authentication. The formerly hacked link above about immigration has since been corrected. This isn’t the first time the SEA has successfully gone after the president. Last spring, the SEA the AP Twitter account to spread a rumor that the White House had been bombed, sending the stock market into a momentary crash. Today’s hack was particularly sneaky because it didn’t look like anything was suspicious. But, the more important question is, why weren’t they using basic security protocol in the first place?
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Apple Sends Out Set Of Slick Mac Pro Posters To Some Journalists
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple sent out a set of slick Mac Pro posters to at least one journalist today. TidBITS received a long black tube with four Mac Pro images as posters in it this morning. Other journalists like (Photo by Dan Ackerman) and Dallas Morning News’ Jim Rossman also . Apple sends out printed material from time to time to promote products. It recently sent journos a on the App Store’s fifth anniversary. The posters emphasize various aspects of the Mac Pro’s design, such as its thermal venting, external casing and custom silicon. There is also a message inscribed on one of the posters: It’s the computer we were insane to build. The one that turns conventional thinking on its head, then kicks the living $#&% out of it. We challenged all our assumptions. Abandoned our preconceptions. And blew away limitation after limitation. This is the new Mac Pro. It’s like no Mac we’ve created before. And we can’t wait to see what you create with it. Here are the posters sent to Stein: Here’s one of Carlson’s set: You can head here to on Carlson’s Flickr account. We got a chance to at Apple’s event last week but couldn’t tell you much more about it but that it’s pretty warm.
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Rent Management Startup Cozy Recruits Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield To Its Board
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Anthony Ha
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, an online tool for landlords and tenants, is announcing that Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield has joined its board of directors. Butterfield told me that he’s actually known Cozy co-founder and CEO Gino Zahnd since . With that relationship, and knowing Butterfield’s family background in real estate (his father worked in development, his mother was an agent), Zahnd started asking for feedback. Eventually, he invited Butterfield to join the board. The two of them actually recorded a video talking about the news (embedded at the end of this post), in which Butterfield explains why he’s excited about the company: I think there’s a huge opportunity here. I mean, there’s no one really working on the rental experience for the small landlords — there’s the big corporate stuff, but the vast majority of people who are renting a home, a place where they live, are renting from someone who just has a very small number of properties. … It’s also one of those spaces where the big wave of fantastic software that we’ve been seeing over the last 10 years or so hasn’t really touched yet. Cozy’s goal is to take the old-fashioned, inefficient aspects of the rental process and move them online. Its services include the ability for landlords to collect rent online, manage payments from multiple roommates, and screen tenants, and it makes money by charging landlords a $9 monthly fee (following a 60-day free trial). The company recently led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from The Social+Capital Partnership. Butterfield, meanwhile, said Cozy is the only board he’s serving on now. Apparently he likes being on boards because it allows him to see “the other side” and not just the founder’s perspective. (He’s currently founder and CEO at ) When asked about Cozy’s biggest challenge moving forward, Butterfield said it’s “pretty boring” — namely, distribution. Landlords, he noted, don’t really form a “natural community,” so Cozy will have to do a lot of work to make them aware of the product. (The company has already announced that it’s being used by more than 6,000 landlords and renters in more than 500 cities in the US.) “That’s a surmountable challenge,” Butterfield said. “It’s just regular marketing.”
from on .
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Germans React To Revelations That The U.S. Spied On Chancellor Angela Merkel
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Gregory Ferenstein
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It was recently revealed that the National Security Agency secretly and from a spying hub in the United States German Embassy, all while President Obama was reportedly oblivious to the program. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was so discomfited that even after President Obama personally apologized, she called for a of cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies. The new revelations will make an already tense situation much worse. During TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin, TechCrunch TV went out to get some reactions to gauge local sentiment regarding the news. We didn’t find any protesters in front of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, which sits right next to the Brandenburg Gate and just about a mile away from Angela Merkel’s office. Sadly, most people were too afraid to actually talk to us about the NSA on camera, but we found a few brave Germans who were willing to talk to us. Here is what they had to say. In case you want to read up on the current state of this affair, here is a quick breakdown of the recent news: . A clandestine force, the Special Collection Service, built special permeable walls to listen to all manner of communication — “cellular signals, wireless networks and satellite communication.” German officials have ordered an investigation and are pretty angry. . Glenn Greenwald, the former reporter who co-authored the story, notes that that this kind of spying is punishable under Spanish law. . “These decisions are made at NSA,” one official said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “ .” Defending the practice, John Schindler, a former NSA official, reminded the Twitterverse that 9/11 had been partly orchestrated in Germany. [tweet https://twitter.com/20committee/status/394470124217839616]
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Samsung Launches Five SDKs To Lure Developers Into Its Hardware Web
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Chris Velazco
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Samsung kicked off its first Developer Conference in San Francisco today, and the Korean tech juggernaut is eager to show just how much it cares about the devs building apps and services for its hardware ecosystem. And really, what better way to prove it than to unleash five (yes, five) brand-new SDKs for those developers to sink their teeth into? “We have products at every segment and every price point,” said Gregory Lee, president of Samsung Telecommunications America, in his DevCon keynote. “Your applications, your work can be reached all over the world and across all those products.” As you can imagine, there’s plenty to dig into here, but some of these development toolsets are more straightforward than others. Samsung’s revamped Mobile SDK, for instance, consolidates a handful of existing Samsung mobile dev tools so coders and engineers can more easily create apps that take advantage of the company’s S Pen, gesture controls, and audio features (to name just a few). And the Smart TV 5.0 SDK does exactly what it promises, allowing developers to build apps for Samsung’s connected televisions, with a big focus on optimizing those apps for the company’s 2014 class of displays. And considering the general market zeal for devices that connect and interact with each other, it should surprise absolutely no one that Samsung is trying to drive home the value of its vast portfolio of gadgetry by giving devs a way to make all of it play nice together. Consider its new Multiscreen SDK, which packs APIs that should ultimately allow users to quickly sync up smartphones and screens for simple media sharing across displays — Janko Roettgers has . Built on top of that is a Multiscreen Gaming SDK which Samsung developed in tandem with Unity. It’ll allow developers to craft games that functionally turn Samsung smartphones into consoles that output all the action to (what else) a connected Samsung TV. Throw in a new Knox SDK meant to help developers build secure, enterprise-friendly apps that can silo work information from personal data and you’ve got a pretty well-rounded slew of tools for coders and entrepreneurs. Now the general thrust of these releases is to get people more invested into Samsung’s hardware web, and naturally the most prominent vector is Samsung’s huge portfolio of smartphones. You can’t really overstate the importance of smart software to Samsung’s mobile strategy. In a market where nearly every OEM is trying to push the limits of hardware innovation in parallel, fleshing out the all-important software user experience is crucial to gaining an edge over a pack of hungry competitors. And like it or not, Samsung is damned good at loading up its devices with software. Some (myself included) would argue, though, that the company has a tendency to go overboard. There’s a distinct subsection of the Android community that prefers their Android builds to be as clean and as free of cruft as possible, but there are plenty of others who love to lord their whiz-bang features over others. But it has become clearer than ever that Samsung is using its mobile gadgetry as a Trojan Horse to make developers aware of and get them excited about the full breadth of Samsung’s hardware. Now the big question is how many developers will rise to Samsung’s challenge.
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Twitter’s Attitude Toward DMs Shows Signs Of Thawing With Direct Link In Top Bar
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter has been rejiggering its thinking about direct messaging recently, largely in the face of enormous messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Line, Snapchat and others. Today, the signs of Twitter’s thawing feelings about messaging have which takes you right to your inbox. Recent reports from that Twitter is working on its messaging product. The work could manifest in a revamp of the way that it operates in the main product or result in a separate messaging system. The report says that DMs were close to being on the chopping block, but recent attitudes have changed. As someone who uses Twitter DM as probably my second-most utilized private messaging avenue, I’m fairly interested in where they’ll go here. Some folks, like our own Jordan Crook, feel that a standalone messenger app . I happen to agree, and feel that Twitter is more likely to enhance the core product with improvements, but we’ll see. Twitter previously buried the DM section under either your profile view or the settings icon at the top of the page. From what we understand, Twitter’s next version has been in the works for months, plagued by decision-making delays. Whatever it’s doing about DMs, it seems to be showing some outward signs of attention to a feature it has neglected for years. This version is said to have a swipeable interface and other enhancements, but it’s unclear whether it will be the one that brings DM improvements. Image Credit: /CC Flickr
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Hey, Arduino Fans! 1Sheeld Lets Your Smartphone Act As Many Different Arduino Shields
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Greg Kumparak
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I loves me some Arduino. The only thing I love — and I’m sure many of my fellow Arduino tinkerers would agree with me here — is buying or building a new shield (read: add-on board) every time I need to some functionality that the board doesn’t support out of the box (like internet connectivity, microphone input, or audio playback.) 1sheeld lets your smartphone act as many different shields. It’s the first product built by Integreight, an eight man team out of Cairo, Egypt. Integreight was voted as the audience choice at Disrupt Europe this evening, plucking them from the dozens of startups exhibiting just outside of the main theater and dropping them right into the flurry that is the Disrupt Battlefield. Your smartphone is packed with tons of sensors — many of them the same types of sensors that you might want to strap on to an Arduino by way of a shield. It’s got Bluetooth. It’s got WiFi. It’s got gyroscopes, and accelerometers, and a touchscreen that can emulate all sorts of keypads and display types. Why not let your smartphone share those capabilities with your Arduino, effectively allowing it to provide the prototyping functionality of dozens of different shields? That’s the idea behind 1sheeld. With 1sheeld, you strap just one shield (hence the name) to your Arduino board. That shield acts as a wireless middle-man, piping data between your Arduino and your handset. On your phone, you’ve got an app running that can quickly switch 1sheeld’s behavior from shield to shield.
Want to test audio playback, but don’t want to order, wait for, and eventually build an audio shield? 1sheeld lets you pipe audio through your phone’s speaker. Want to integrate internet functionality? It can pull data from your phone’s built-in wireless receivers. Want microphone input? It’ll do it. Magnetometer and gyroscope data? Yep. Hell, it’ll act as an two-color LCD display if you don’t feel like bustin’ out the ol’ breadboard. The idea isn’t to shields, of course — once you get past the early prototyping stages of an Arduino project, you’d probably want to swap in a proper, dedicated shield to do whatever you’re using your smartphone for. Plus, there are some shields that your phone just couldn’t replace. For example, there’s no straightforward way for your phone to act as a motor shield (for, say, powering the motors of an RC car); for those cases, 1sheeld is hoping community input will tell them what functionality their base board needs. With that said, like any good Arduino shield, 1sheeld is stackable — if there’s something it just can’t do, you can always toss another shield on top. Integreight is also working on a product they call the “Smart Breadbroad”, which allows you to hook components up to a breadboard and connect them without wires. The user draws the breadboard schematic on their computer, uploads it to the Smart Breadboard, and all the circuits are automatically configured within the breadboard itself. Integreight plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the 1sheeld some time in November. Through the Kickstarter, the 1sheeld will cost just $20; after the campaign, they’re aiming to sell it for around $40 — which, really, seems incredibly cheap to me. If you’re interested in following their progress, they’ve got a sign-up page [gallery ids="906893,906894,906895,906897,906898,906899"] $20 on Kickstarter, $40 after. We’re talking to them, but we have no contract with them. In the opensource world, you don’t really need that. With an adapter, yes.
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U.S. Tech Companies Raised $8.1B In 806 VC Deals In Q3, Capital Raised, M&A Activity And IPOs All Up From Previous Quarter
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Leena Rao
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Dow Jones Venture Source released its quarterly report on the state of venture capital, including data on number of VC deals, funds raised, M&As and IPOs in the technology sector. According to the report U.S.-based companies raised $8.1 billion from 806 venture capital deals in 3Q 2013, a 2% increase in capital and a 4% decrease in number of deals from the previous quarter. Compared to the same period in 2012, there was a 10% decrease in number of deals, while amount raised went up by 4%. The sectors to increase in amount raised were Business and Financial Services (46%) and Consumer Services (1%). We had that seed and angel investments are up for the quarter as well. By industry group, IT led the pack with 246 deals raising $2.3 billion and accounting for 28% of total equity investment. Business and Financial Services saw $2.2 billion through 195 deals. Healthcare placed third with $1.8 billion in 164 deals. And $1.3 billion were raised by Consumer Services in 148 deals, a decrease of 10% in deal flow, while capital invested went up by 1%. The largest deals in the quarter included Beat’s $500 million raise, Uber’s , Palantir’s and MongoDB’s . The most active investors by amount of deals were in order, Google Ventures (25), Sequoia Capital (17), Andreessen Horowitz (17), Kleiner Perkins (16) and NEA (15). M&A increased by 11% from 2Q 2013, with 111 deals garnering $9.7 billion. This is consistent with our . The number of deals also increased by 25 percent from the previous quarter. These included IBM’s $1 billion acquisition of and AOL’s IPOs seem to be seeing an uptick, with 25 companies raising $2.2 billion through public offerings in 3Q 2013. Both number of deals and capital raised increased from the previous quarter, with 25% and 24% increases, respectively. The largest IPOs of the quarter were and Median pre-money valuations decreased slightly by 7% from 2Q 2013. In terms of VCs themselves, firms raised 11% more funds than the previous quarter and saw the highest number of funds since 4Q’08. The data shows that 62 funds raised $4.1 billion in 3Q 2013, an 11% increase in number of funds, but a 47% decrease in the amount raised from the prior quarter. Greylock raised the largest fund in the quarter at , accounting for 25% of the total amount raised in 3Q 2013. The median U.S. fund size was $123 million in the three quarters of 2013.
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Could San Francisco Automate BART Workers Threatening To Strike?
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Gregory Ferenstein
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For the past week, the entire San Francisco Bay Area has been on the brink of a full-fledged train strike. The unpredictable negotiations have left commuters in limbo: it’s too risky to schedule business meetings, but there is not enough uncertainty to arrange alternative transportation. As a result, BART has an estimated $168,000 after a 5 percent fear-based drop in traffic. [tweet https://twitter.com/RobbyRoby/status/389984005572947968] During last summer’s BART strike, a few outspoken Silicon Valley technologists of the civil libertarian press for that San Francisco should simply automate the train operators and be done with the labor mess. Rather than join the techies vs. worker rage fest, I decided to simply ask the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) authority if it was technically possible to automate train drivers, just like . BART’s answer was conspicuously dismissive. After exchanging emails for a month, they declined my request for an interview and instead gave me this statement: “BART’s response to your inquiry is that you have posed valid theoretical questions best answered by researchers who study the future of train technology, not by the people who are focused on using the existing technology safely.
Thanks for your continued patience.” In other parts of the world, unions and tech-happy politicians are unafraid to engage in a vigorous public debate over the cost and safety of automating trains. The mayor of London has proposed the tube go completely driverless by 2020, using Paris of where unions can work out their opposition to the job-wrecking technology. Our own Congress has trains for the U.S. by 2015. But in San Francisco, the home of the robotic car, the silence is deafening. So I decided to take BART up on its suggestion and ask around. I was surprised at how many people feared talking about the subject, but most of the experts who would speak said that it is definitely possible to automate BART and might be cheaper and safer, too. “It would be possible to replace the train operators with automated control systems,” says Tom Rubin, a veteran transportation consultant in Oakland and former financial auditor of the BART system. “There may be labor union issues that require personnel on the train,” said Peter Torrellas, Chief Technology Officer of Mobility and Logistics at Siemens. But “it is technically possible to have driverless trains that are safe.” Torrellas was forbidden by his communications team from commenting on the BART system. However, I got around their constraints by asking if there were a train system in the U.S. that couldn’t be automated. Torrellas said there was no technical barrier to automation. Okay, there’s probably no technical barrier to automation, but is it worth the money? That’s hard to estimate, because the only way to really tell is if BART had the political willpower to commission a public report. Moreover, city projects are , often by two to three times the initial estimates. In Scotland, driverless trains were part of a plan. Rubin was willing to give us a (very) cautious ballpark estimate, estimating that the government could save around $250 million. BART in labor costs for the $1.6 billion transit system, which pays train operators some of the highest wages in the country ($66,000 – $74,000 ). More specifically, there are train operators and station attendants, averaging $92,156 a year, with benefits. Automation never fully replaces every worker, but BART would save a maximum of around $46,078,000 per year in labor costs — or more, if it ends up from 669 to 1,000. Though Rubin says automation could cost tens of millions of dollars, ultimately it would save the city a lot of money. Siemens (which has a vested interest in automation) also concurred that automation saves cities money. Lastly, a spokesman from the noted that metro automation typically saves 15 percent, but he couldn’t comment on BART. We should emphasize that these numbers are ballpark and unverified since, again, BART has apparently never bothered to ask. BART may have some unknown and unique challenges that could make it much more (or less) expensive. Aside from costs, safety is another serious concern. Even though BART is largely automated, train operators still need to check that passengers have safely made it through the doors and there are no track obstructions. Torrelles says that advances in object detection prevent automated systems from driving until all limbs are inside the train and there’s nothing lying on the track. Not all experts I spoke to thought automation was advisable. Former Canadian IT manager for SkyTrain, George Slade, told me that there were managerial and physical issues at stake. “With full automation most employees are really just waiting around most of the time waiting for something to break,” writes Slade to me through a Help A Reporter Out ( ) inquiry. “This includes a lot of miss behavior [ ]. One of the other managers informed me when I started that working at SkyTrain was like being in high school again.” Additionally, Slade argues that San Francisco has “secure and clear guide-way” on the track for the train. Rubin replies to us that securing the tracks would be a “(comparatively) ‘easy’ fix” and still be worth the roughly $250 million in savings over a decade. The disappointing answer is that no one seems to know — exactly — if automating BART is worth the cost. One reason might be that officials are too afraid of union interests to explore the question. Based on the responses I received, BART is either concealing facts about the possibility of automation, or its management hasn’t seriously considered it, which means BART is either negligent or ignorant. Both possibilities should concern tax payers. [ ]
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Apple CFO Oppenheimer Says New Carbon-Balanced ‘Campus 2’ Will Foster Collaboration
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Matthew Panzarino
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“We can’t wait to get our people closer together, we’re a very collaborative company. One of the beauties of Apple Campus 2 is that it will be walkable. It will be great for us to innovate in for decades to come,” said Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer about plans for the company’s new ‘Campus 2’ in Cupertino. The plans were approved in a meeting yesterday and the Cupertino City Council of the press conference this morning. Oppenheimer was asked a few questions by press, including how he thought the money spent on the campus would be justified. “The innovation that I believe that will come with the team, particularly in the collaborative environment that we’re going to build will be immeasurable,” said Oppenheimer. “We have built the building to be very walkable. You might begin your day in one part of the building and as the day progresses you might find yourself in another part of the building working with other teams.” “It’s a very collaborative culture, and spontaneous conversations are very important to what we do. This building will really foster that,” he concluded. Oppenheimer’s responses were interesting, but even more-so when you consider that Apple has been talking a lot about ‘collaboration’ lately. The past 12 months have, in some ways, been all about the word collaboration. Last October, just 12 days shy of a year ago, Apple launched a re-organization that saw the exit of software chief Scott Forstall, Jony Ive’s installation as a head of human interface and several other moves. The title of the press release? . The hardware, software and services trifecta that Apple has been (in some ways) leveraging to make the iPhone and iPad such popular devices, had been growing increasingly tough to maintain. Power bases inside the company and silos of individual ‘followings’ had grown into roadblocks to progress in the wake of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ death in 2011. Those changes were designed to put a clear person in charge of each of those areas, and to make sure that those people could then work together. That Oppenheimer is using the phrase ‘collaboration’ could indeed simply be taken as PR positioning (and it should to a degree), but it seems to be a theme with Apple lately. One that we’re seeing at the hiring level, the executive suite level and even when it comes to how it constructs its headquarters. Notably, Oppenheimer said that Apple would not be exiting the old campus when the new one was completed. “In a little over three years when we occupy the new campus, we’ll see where we are in terms of total space needs,” he told the press. “We will continue to occupy our current campus just down the street and many other buildings in Cupertino, and we’ll see what our needs are beyond that in three years.” Currently, Apple HQ is overcrowded, with many workers sharing cubicles inside engineering groups. This has been the case since at least 2009, and is only more so now as Apple has grown its employees worldwide to over 72,000. If you back out the roughly 42,400 full-time Retail employees and those in overseas corporate offices, that’s still a lot of people to house. The new headquarters is set to house some 14,200 employees in its initial construction, so if Apple plans to keep existing buildings then it appears that it plans to continue growing rapidly. In 2012 alone, it grew by 12,400 employees. Oppenheimer was also bullish on the environmental state of the new headquarters, much of which had been discussed in the published plans. “It will be the most environmental-friendly building of its size, we think, that’s ever been built or will be built, beginning with energy,” he says. “We are going to make over 70% of the electricity that Apple Campus 2 will use on site with solar and fuel cells. And we will get the remaining energy that we need in California through green sources.” “There won’t be one atom of carbon emitted into the environment as a result of operating Apple Campus 2,” Oppenheimer added, noting that they would be water efficient as well, and would return the 175 acre site to its ‘natural state’. One reporter at the press event also seems fairly insistent on asking Oppenheimer about whether Apple thinks that the new HQ could be ‘repurposed’ when the company (inevitably?) fails. “Could it be subdivided,” the reporter queries. Oppenheimer restrains himself admirably from reminding the reporter that Apple’s $146B cash hoard could coast it safely through the next few decades even if it decided to cease manufacturing, well, anything. In conclusion, Oppenheimer telegraphed the personal nature of the project, which was presented to the council by Jobs before his death, a presentation that . “All of us at Apple are putting tremendous energy and love into this, just as he did,” said Oppenhiemer. “We are humbled by the task of completing it and his vision and his legacy for the campus of Apple.”
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Developers Can Now Submit Windows 8.1 Applications To The Windows Store
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Alex Wilhelm
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Developers are now free to submit their Windows 8.1-ready applications. Microsoft initially denied developers access to the operating system after it was released to OEM partners. Developers, accustomed to getting early access so that they could get to work before general release, were . The company and provided access, but that only solved half the problem, I think. Microsoft still forbade developers from submitting Windows 8.1-ready applications until Windows 8.1 went live. So to beat back criticism, the company promised that it would approve all applications – that pass, of course – . A tepid compromise, but one that is , given that Windows 8.1 is out and developer submissions are open. Kinks aside in getting here, it’s important to note that we should see in the next week a flow of new applications that hopefully are more than quite nice. Windows 8.1, like Windows Phone, has an app deficit when compared to the competing Android and iOS platforms. Microsoft is making progress, but isn’t where it needs to be yet. That said, with Windows 8.1 finally here, we will be able to gauge developer interest by the number of new applications. Whatever demand there had been was pent-up, and should now be free range. If we don’t see a grip of new applications and updates, that will indicate that developer interest is either flat or slipping. We haven’t had a new sales figure for Windows 8/8.1 in about an ice age, but Microsoft will happily tell you that October was its biggest month for activations of the operating system. If Microsoft doesn’t provide us with a milestone before we reach 200 million sold licenses, I shall be cross. For now, development for Windows is now back on course.
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How Money And Politics Brought Waywire And Magnify Together
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Ryan Lawler
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, New York City-based startup Magnify has acquired Waywire, the once-hyped startup founded by . That’s been widely expected ever since over the weekend that the deal would be done soon. In some ways, the matchup makes a lot of sense — both companies, after all, have the shared vision of empowering users to find, collect, and share videos with others. But in other ways, the tie-up of Waywire and Magnify shows a stark contrast in how the different companies hoped to achieve that vision. Waywire came rushing out of the gate with a bold plan to convert some of the toughest users to reach — millennials — into content curators. And it promised to do so thanks to a charismatic founder, Silicon Valley funding, and deals with big-name publishers. Magnify, meanwhile, has spent the last seven years slowly and steadily building its business, waiting for mass-market adoption of curation tools to truly take hold. For those of us who have been following the market since before YouTube, it’s a reminder of the good old days of web video, when there was a solid belief that anyone could become a video star. So how did these two companies end up together? Waywire launched with a grand vision of empowering millennials to with their friends. Founded by Newark Mayor and virtual superhero Cory Booker, along with Nathan Richardson and Sarah Ross, Waywire was meant to democratize communications through video, enabling anyone to become a virtual newscaster. The first version of Waywire’s public alpha enabled anyone to create a “wire” of the videos that interested them, and then comment, tag, or share with friends. It tied into social networks in the hope of creating a viral loop that would bring other users in. The technology potentially offered a new way for media companies to get their videos in front of an important younger demographic of viewers. Waywire sold a number of partners on the prospect, striking deals with more than 60 content providers before launch. Along the way, Waywire also picked up funding from a serious list of investors, making it clear that this was not some pet project from a high-rising political hopeful. While its $1.75 million seed round was modest, backers included First Round Capital, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Troy Carter, Oprah Winfrey and LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner. It was an ambitious plan from a larger-than-life public figure. But it never truly took shape, as almost from the start it faced technology issues and political pressure. Unfortunately, Booker’s presence at Waywire cut both ways: While his participation clearly helped Waywire nab funding, partnerships, and buzz at launch, his ties to the company ended up becoming a political liability during his Senate run. over potential conflicts of interest, an issue that was magnified, as it was trying to raise new funding from investors. With uncertainty looming around Booker’s role and , Waywire was unable to raise the funds it needed to move forward. Meanwhile, being put under a microscope by the press was becoming a distraction for some of the team at Waywire, just as the company was attempting to pivot and relaunch its product. Booker eventually agreed to early last month, but it was too late. The damage had been done. CEO Richardson had already leaving just one of the three founders to steer the ship. (Richardson eventually .) Meanwhile, Waywire was running out of money and options. All development had stopped. Employees were furloughed. Searching for new leadership and new funding, Waywire’s planned launch out of private beta was put on hold indefinitely. Enter Magnify. The New York City-based company might not seem like an obvious choice to buy out a company that’s gotten as much hype as Waywire. Founded in 2006 and backed by $5 million in venture financing, it’s quietly built out a niche for itself among enterprise clients looking for tools to host, store, manage, and deliver videos all in one platform. The company’s been at this for seven years, and it’s been a scrappy survivor through the boom and bust cycle that web video underwent in the late 2000s. It never hit the big time like YouTube, but then again, it also didn’t go bust like all the other YouTube competitors out there. Instead, it’s quietly — miraculously! — continued to operate with just a little capital raised, running lean and adding employees only as needed. Magnify might not be touting hockey-stick-like growth, but it’s producing revenue — at least enough to support a team of 15. But while it’s created a solid business, Magnify CEO Steve Rosenbaum still believes that the much bigger market opportunity still lies ahead. If anything, his vision of a “Curation Nation” — which is also the title of — was way ahead of the curve. So far ahead, in fact, that some people (like me) were beginning to wonder if that future would ever come. Talks between Magnify and Waywire began in early February of this year. At first, however, the companies were just talking about what kind of synergies they might be able to realize through a partnership, not an acquisition. While Magnify was mostly working with enterprise clients — that’s where the money is, after all — CEO Steve Rosenbaum believed the same platform could be used by a company like Waywire to deploy its own consumer-facing solution. (Magnify had once offered a free product for consumers, but shuttered it to focus on customers who actually paid.) As Waywire was considering how it would move forward, Magnify’s pitch was simple: It had already done the hard work of creating a scalable platform for video curation. Why should Waywire rebuild the wheel when it could use Magnify’s platform instead? “The thing that’s become clear to me… the basic core competency of what Waywire was doing was technology that Magnify already had out of the box,” Rosenbaum told me. “When we thought about how much overlap there was between the companies, in this case, it was like 70 percent.” Regardless, those talks didn’t go very far, and Waywire continued to move forward with its plan to secure new funding and relaunch its own video curation product. But the two firms would revisit the discussions as Waywire began to look for other strategic options. There’s good reason to believe that consumer appetite for curation tools might finally be taking hold — if nothing else, Pinterest has shown that there are many consumers with a wild appetite for creating collections of content online. It’s yet to be seen, however, if that appetite extends to video. Magnify will soon find out, as it has already using its own backend technology. It might not have the same flash that the original Waywire had, but at least it’s functional. The new site launched in 10 days, and is just the start of what Magnify hopes to do with Waywire. Rosenbaum says the company will continue to roll out features to make it more intuitive and consumer-centric over time, but the important thing was to get something up that worked. Magnify inherited a number of content partners through the deal. The Waywire site has more than listed now, and that will increase to more than 100 over the coming weeks, according to Rosenbaum. But while having lots of content will help it attract viewers, it’s going to be up to users to keep their peers coming back. After all, that’s what curation is all about. “Web video today is like going on a treasure hunt without a map,” Rosenbaum says. With this deal, he thinks Waywire may finally live up to its promise to help you find what you’re looking for.
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40% Of YouTube Traffic Now Mobile, Up From 25% In 2012, 6% In 2011
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Josh Constine
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It’s hard to get people to concentrate long on anything on their phones and tablets, yet YouTube seems to be the exception. The video service is quickly going mobile, with small screens making up 40% of its traffic now compared to 25% last year, Google said on its . In 2011, just 6% of YouTube traffic came from mobile. Google’s not the only one rapidly shifting a 1 billion+ user base to mobile. To put its transition in perspective, Facebook said it had 819 million monthly mobile users (73%) out of its total 1.15 billion users in Q2 2013, up from 543 million (56%) of 955 million in Q2 2012, 325 million (43%) of 739 million in Q2 2011, and 155 million (32%) of 482 million in Q2 2010. Note these people used Facebook mobile at least once, but may also have used desktop. Facebook doesn’t share what total percentage of usage comes from mobile, but 41% of its ad revenue comes from phones and tablets, up from 30% in Q1 2013, 23% in Q4 2012, and 14% in Q3 2012. As former director of product management tweeted today, YouTube has been investing in a great mobile experience for the web and Android for a long time, and more recently for iOS since it took control of the app back from Apple. https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/390942244829540352 Specifically, YouTube formed the mobile team in 2007 before there was much demand for mobile or revenue there. It transcoded all videos to be able to be served on mobile formats, and did a deal with Apple to get a YouTube app pre-installed on the iPhone. The increasing importance of mobile to YouTube underlines the need for it to work things out with Microsoftand get a high-quality app released for Windows Phone. After months of back and forth, Microsoft launched a YouTube app it created, but it didn’t meet Google’s standards and was . Earlier this month, a much-stripped-down YouTube “app” for Windows Phone was that merely boots users to the m.youtube.com mobile site. The latest YouTube mobile product news includes its plan to let starting in November. Before that, it launched multi-tasking in its and apps, allowing people to while they search and browse for more content to watch. That’s especially helpful for people who use YouTube’s vast library of music videos as a music streaming service. These have all been well-received, and no competitors seem able to challenge YouTube’s reign as the home of user generated video.
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This Week On The TC Europe Podcast: Dailymotion Is Growing, SwiftKey Gets Better, Cambridge Gets Into VC
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Romain Dillet
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This week, we talk about SwiftKey a lot of new keyboard layouts and features, Dailymotion to Japan and acquiring a startup in Europe, and Cambridge VC. This is the , wherein we European writers discuss tech news, as well as what’s happening in our startup scene. As always, those topics were a great opportunity to talk more about our general thoughts on the tech ecosystem in Europe. Is Dailymotion ‘the YouTube of France’ or is it something else? Is Cambridge the most technologically advanced university in the U.K.? Can keyboard layouts be exciting products? To answer this very last question, yes. For all the others, you’ll have to listen to the show. Join , , , and to hear what we think about those topics.
We invite you to enjoy our every Thursday.
Intro music by .
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“Fashion Inspiration” For Tots: Lil’Stylers Wants Parents To Snap & Share Their Kids’ Best Looks
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Sarah Perez
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, a new shopping discovery service launching first on the , has a different (and maybe unsettling?) take on tracking children’s fashion trends. For those following mobile shopping space, the easiest way to put it is to say it’s a “ for kids.” To better explain what that means, Lil’Stylers is an attempt at building a social community around sharing outfits, looks, style ideas, and favorite brands to help inspire parents looking for new ideas in children’s fashion. The potentially icky part? The unwitting participants in this new community are your own kids. Yes, the idea with Lil’Stylers is to have parents snap and share the photos of their own children, rockin’ the latest in tutus and skinny jeans. On the company’s homepage, it even goes so far as to encourage this activity noting in “step 1” of Lil’Stylers’ rules that they prefer a picture of “kids wearing clothes, rather than clothes on a hanger.” Say cheese, kiddo, momma wants to earn some style points for having the best-dressed little bugaboo. Of course, today’s kids have been born into a world of the over-share, where entire social communities have been built up around the concept of doing fun, new things with selfies. ( ). And I’m not going to lie, my kid’s photos been around the internet already, on social services like Facebook and Instagram, for example. I also upload our family photos to various cloud services, like Google+ and Flickr, where I might not have always remembered to set the privacy toggle on. I also once used a picture of my kid (as a baby) here on TechCrunch, but I at least had the decency to feel pretty bad about it later. Despite my seeming hypocrisy then in questioning this kind of service, I’ll point out that largely, my photo-sharing behavior has been about connecting with family and friends. While an occasional tweet might place these photos in the hands of a wider audience, the general motivation is one of connecting with people I know, not strangers. (And tweets are somewhat ephemeral anyway.) So where exactly is the line between sharing on Facebook with people I know, which turns me into a potentially monetizable user who clicks on ads and makes Facebook money, and sharing my kid’s photos with strangers for the purpose of commerce? It’s a gray area these days, to say the least. Lil’Stylers founder Eric Dillon also points to today’s photo-sharing trends in justifying the service’s push to have parents photograph, then share the photos of their kids with a larger community for the purpose of fashion inspiration. And when I point out that there will be some parents out there who may find such a thing a bit touchy, he agrees. “Yes, snapping pics of kids is touchy. However, if you have a look at Pinterest or Instagram, you will find plenty,” Dillon says. “Like every other community, five percent of the users will generate most of the content. Even if the rest is only following, they will still create multiple impressions of a pic, and be consumers.” Ah, so Lil’Stylers will mainly take advantage of the moms (and dads maybe, but honestly, mostly moms) who tend to overexpose their kids anyway? Well, that will fly in the mommy blogger community then. (And, , .) Mommy bloggers have long since positioned themselves as brands’ friends, and many are already working with these companies, so to lean on them for Lil’Stylers curated user-generated content makes sense. And eventually, assuming the service grew large enough, those mommy bloggers could participate in revenue-sharing agreements with Lil’Stylers, which is today monetizing from affiliate sales. I should also point out that the app offers a privacy setting which would allow users to only share their children’s photos with a close circle of family and friends. It’s off by default, but it’s at least an option for those on the fence about whether or not they should post. Outside of these concerns, the app itself is great. It has a clean, modern design, where photos are tagged with the appropriate brand names. Over 100+ kids clothing are represented in Lil’Stylers, too, including Desigual Kids, Pale Cloud, Il Gufo, Nununu Kids, and others. Many brands have taken the time to sign up, create profiles and look-books inside the app, and will regularly post their own pictures, says Dillon. You can already shop the brands which have created profiles by tapping on the photo tags’ with the icon of the shopping bag next to them. These takes you to the brand’s profile page where you can follow their own shares, and visit their site. Though only weeks old, the app has already seen some 17,000 user sessions from its small, but active early adopting community of over 700 parents, who have shared thousands of photos. Dillon says Lil’Stylers will grow its user base initially by targeting the mommy bloggers as well as other bloggers and influencers, as well as reaching out to more kids’ clothes brands. The company is also in discussions with larger retailers, he adds. And to get its name out there, it’s doing marketing stunts, like this recent , for example.
Seattle-based Lil’Stylers is co-founded by longtime software development manager Dillon and whose background is in merchandising. Dillon, a father of two, says that the idea for the company came to him because “where did you buy that?” is a common question parents already ask each other their kid’s clothing. With Lil’Stylers, the hope is to broaden those parent-to-parent recommendations further. The company is currently bootstrapped, and both founders are working their full-time jobs until month-end. You can . Should you? You decide.
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Microsoft Confirms It’s Working On Books, And Other Key Bits From Its Windows 8.1 Reddit AMA
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Alex Wilhelm
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Windows 8.1 day rolls along, and, while I assume that you have already updated if you were a Windows 8 user, Microsoft is continuing to speak out about its new software. The company has again taken to Reddit to answer questions from its community. The , but since you are busy, below are the best pieces from the session. Answers are verbatim, questions are edited as needed from the original thread. Windows 8.1 is out, and from the smoke signals I am currently monitoring, it’s doing well in its first day of general availability in terms of activity and use. We’ll have market share data soon enough, but for now, it appears that Microsoft is having at least a passable launch day for its new code.
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Google Beats The Street In Q3 With $14.89B In Revenue, Net Income Of $2.97B, And EPS Of $10.74
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Chris Velazco
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Google’s Q3 2013 earnings report has just crossed the wires, and they’re better than expected. The company reported that over the past three months, it generated $14.89 billion in consolidated revenue and $2.97 billion in net income, as well as non-GAAP earnings of $10.74 per share. According to Yahoo Finance, analysts expected the company to report about $14.8 billion in revenue for the quarter and earnings of $10.35 per share. Fortunately for the search and advertising giant, that’s a big change from last quarter. The company missed Wall Street’s EPS and revenue expectations . Investors are already reacting to the news: Google’s share price at market close was 1 percent, but at time of writing it’s surged nearly six percent in after-hours trading. More than a few people are keeping an eye on Google’s ad business, and more specifically the company’s cost per click. Online marketing firm The Search Agency reported the other day that it saw Google’s cost per click on the upswing, noting a 3.5 percent lift over the last quarter. Google’s new report points to something different though — specifically, it looks like CPC dipped 8 percent sequentially and 4 percent when compared to the year-ago quarter. That’s not exactly the sort of trend the company was looking to continue, as cost per click declined 6 percent sequentially back in Q2. That advertising business is going to get a bit weirder in the coming weeks: Google has announced that it will use the photos and endorsements of its Google+ users to give some ads an extra boost of personal credibility. With that said, though, Google’s Enhanced Campaigns (which allow advertisers to devise a single ad campaign that can be deployed across multiple types of devices) should help the company cement its position in mobile. Meanwhile, Google’s paid clicks were up 26 percent year-over-year, and up 8 percent over the previous quarter. This quarter also saw Google get a little bolder with hardware — its Motorola Mobility subsidiary released the customizable Moto X to generally positive reviews, and the curious $35 Chromecast dongle rocketed to the top of Amazon’s sales charts almost instantly. If anything, the former is a hair more interesting since the Motorola division has been posting loss after loss for the past few quarters, as well as dramatically trimming its headcount in a bid to cut costs. For now Motorola’s staff count seems to be holding steady, but the division only raked in $1.18 billion in revenue (or 8 percent of the total revenue pie) and reported a considerable $248 million operating loss.
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Facebook Brings Trending Topics, Post/Comment Editing, And Photo Comments To iOS
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Josh Constine
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Facebook’s trying hard to be a mobile first company, but a lot of new features still come out on desktop first where it’s easier to test. But today, the options to edit posts and comments after publishing, and add photos as comments . The goal is to help people express themselves through images and without fear of typos. [Update: Facebook also seems to have slipped Trending Topics into this iOS release. Facebook confirms it has started testing Trending Topics with a small percentage of iOS users. When you load the News Feed, you may see a single bar noting four or so terms appearing in a lot of recent posts. A tap reveals the whole list of 10 trends, which when tapped reveal a feed of posts by Pages that mention them. Facebook first began trials of in early August.] Also added in today’s (that’s slowly rolling out to the App Store if you don’t see it yet) is the option to share emoticon/feeling/activity posts on a friend’s Timeline wall. These let you start a post with a little graphic and statement like “Josh Constine is feeling amused” or “Josh Constine is drinking coffee”. And in a boon to privacy, Facebook now shows a lock icon next to your name in the navigation menu that brings up privacy shortcuts with frequently asked questions and information about whatever you’re currently trying to do on Facebook. first rolled out on the web in July, and let people communicate their responses to posts via images. These image replies are popular amongst the young, hip Tumblr crowd. Bringing the feature to iOS could make the app a bit more popular with the kids, and amongst the comment reel chaos. Facebook first offered on the web in June 2012, and finally . The feature lets you edit text you’ve already published. That way if you push a typo, you don’t have to delete and repost, which erases any likes or comments you’ve received. To discourage bait-and-switching where people rack up Likes or comments to a post then change its text to something different to embarrass anyone who’s already left feedback, Facebook denotes that post or comment has been “Edited” and lets people view the original version. Fears of misuse may have delayed the roll out of post and comment editing — a frequently requested feature. Now post and comment editing is finally available to . The delay illustrates Facebook’s tough quest to become a after thriving for years as a web-based social network. It claimed that all new products had to have mobile versions or they’d be sent back to the drawing board. However, many products remain web only. Most notably, Graph Search. Facebook needs to extend its “move fast” strategy to iOS too.
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Now With 175M+ Users, SoundHound Launches Its iOS 7 App, As Company Struggles To Exit Shazam’s Shadow
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Sarah Perez
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music identification app has the unfortunate position of having to live in Shazam’s shadow, but that may not be the case for much longer. Though both apps currently allow users to push a button to identify a song they’re hearing, SoundHound has been steadily nipping at its older competitor’s heels, with a growing user base and innovative feature set which lets you do different things, like view live lyrics synced to the music, identify songs by humming a melody, or search for music by entering snippets of lyrics. Today the app is finally getting and is expanding its “Music Map” feature (another that it beat Shazam to launch) to include now not just the songs users are tagging around the world, but a personalized map where you can also view only your own tags filtered by day, week, month or all-time. Nifty? Sure. Practical? Hard to say. The company envisions this map being a catalog of moments – a way to associate places with the music you heard there. For regular concert goers, that makes sense. But the company’s real business involves tapping into the much larger group of everyday music listeners – you know, those out there who are still turning on the radio during their commutes. While its competitor Shazam may have a bigger user base, SoundHound hopes to top them through technological innovations. One area where SoundHound has forged ahead recently is in live radio broadcast recognitions – not just songs, but stations and programming. Explains Katie McMahon, VP of Sales & Marketing, “SoundHound has deployed the ability to recognize radio stations. We’ve done this in partnership with …it’s old school, terrestrial radio.” McMahon, who previously spent six years at Shazam before being recruited away by its scrappier competitor SoundHound, points out that radio still has a significant audience. “248 million Americans each week actively listen to radio. It’s almost this forgotten thing since Pandora came out,” she notes. The SoundHound app is capable of taking a radio stream and making it identifiable – whether that’s a talk show, a sports broadcast or an NPR program. This capability, live for roughly a year, is important because it allows radio marketers to connect to mobile users. For example, if you were to “tag” an audio program from the radio, those marketers could reach you through mobile ads, even if you switched on the radio after the on-air commercials had ended. The advertisers may have even first missed you through live radio, but could still reach you through your smartphone. But the app isn’t pushing its users to “tag” the ads themselves – it’s just working to pick up the other audio around the music – DJ chatter, commercials, and other spots – to identify the station and programming, then show the relevant promotions. “We didn’t want to suddenly pivot and change the entire use case and alienate our users,” says McMahon of the radio identification technology. That’s different from Shazam which has become very focused on TV, and specifically making television commercials “taggable” through calls to action to users. (You may have seen the Shazam logo on .) SoundHound doesn’t want to change its core use case. For now, it’s more immediately focused on “music events” – that is, any live broadcasts, including radio or even TV events like the Grammy awards, for example. McMahon says that SoundHound already has the technical capabilities to tag TV – or any audio, really – in similar ways to Shazam. “Can SoundHound do what Shazam is doing on television? The answer is overwhelming ‘yes.’ And moreover, we done it – last Superbowl we had it live.” But the question is will Shazam beginning running its app in the background, to pick up the airwaves and sounds around you wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing? That is, listening to radio, watching TV, at a live event, etc.? McMahon couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say. For now, the company isn’t moving into the more general TV/television commercial recognition space. At least not how Shazam is doing it. “SoundHound is doing live broadcast recognition, and we’ve started in the space of radio,” is how McMahon puts it. SoundHound says it has now grown its user base to 175+ million, up from . This is not the number of downloads, to be clear, but only those that have launched and used the app. Shazam, however, is still larger, now over 375 million users worldwide. But those numbers aren’t surprising, given Shazam’s age. The company was founded in 1999 and has been on the iPhone since 2008, while SoundHound was founded in 2005, then launched a year later. That growth is impressive, especially if SoundHound’s claims are true when it says that most of that growth is organic. Now the challenge for SoundHound is to be seen as something different from Shazam, rather than just a “better” Shazam. McMahon hints that moves toward that larger goal are in the works now. “In 12 months’ time, the association of Shazam and SoundHound will be much wider apart – they’ll be seen as very different companies,” she says.
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Why Senator Shutdown, Ted Cruz, Blocked The FCC Chairman Nominee
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Tea Party darling and Texas Senator Ted Cruz just the nomination of Thomas Wheeler for Federal Communications Commission Chairman. In a statement to TechCrunch, a spokesman says that Cruz is dissatisfied with Wheeler’s stance on whether the FCC will force political advertisements to disclose their donors “Yes, the Senator is holding the nominee until he gets answers to his questions regarding Mr. Wheeler’s views on whether the FCC has the authority or intent to implement the requirements of the failed Congressional DISCLOSE Act. Mr. Wheeler had previously declined to give specific answers, but as he’s now expressed his readiness to revisit the Senator’s questions, the Senator hopes to communicate with him soon. Cruz warned last July that he would exploit procedural measures to block Wheeler if the FCC were prepared to subvert Congress’s attempt to regulate campaign disclosures under the Congressional DISCLOSE Act. The FCC has been without leadership since long-time chair Julius Genachowski left for a last spring. As such, of universal broadband and allocation of spectrum (to fix speed and dropped calls) are also on hold. America may have been under the silly impression that when the government opened up for business, it would get work done.
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Hulu Names Fox’s Mike Hopkins As CEO
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Anthony Ha
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Hulu has that Mike Hopkins, a board member at Hulu and president of Fox Networks Group, is the company’s new CEO. Hopkins had as the likely candidate for the role. It’s been a bumpy year for the online TV site. Then-CEO Jason Kilar left in March and was who now, according to Hulu, is leaving the company. Then there were rumors that the media companies that own Hulu (21st Century Fox, The Walt Disney Company, and NBC Universal) were looking to sell, though . In an email to the company, which was also , Hopkins acknowledged that things have been rough, but he wrote: The fact is, through all the recent uncertainty not only have you kept this business together, but you’ve continued to deliver on every key performance metric. In fact, you are delivering one of the strongest years Hulu has ever seen: We expect revenues to be close to a billion dollars this year, and Hulu Plus subscribers continue to climb. With the foundation you have built, the significant capital infusion of three quarters of a billion dollars, and our partners aligned and fully supportive of what we need to get it done, the sky is the limit for Hulu. I am looking forward to working with you all. What does Hulu need to “get it done,” and what will it mean for Hulu users? It’s hard to say at this point, but when I brought this up with TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler, he pointed out that Fox programming on Hulu, such as American Dad, requires a subscription to, say, DISH Network ( ) access — otherwise you wait a week. So perhaps we’ll see Hulu adopting this policy with other content providers.
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A Standalone Messaging App Is The Last Thing Twitter Needs
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Jordan Crook
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Despite being one of the most popular and powerful social networks on the planet, Twitter is far from perfect. With only a actively using the service, the platform clearly lacks mainstream appeal. So what’s missing? According to today, Twitter may be launching a standalone messaging app to compete with the likes of Line, KakaoTalk and Snapchat. It has even reportedly been meeting with employees at MessageMe. To poach? To aqui-hire? it’s unclear for now. If all of this is true, this points to a big question: Is a me-too approach to messaging the best strategy for Twitter right now? No. And also no. Mainstream users don’t love Twitter for its privacy or for its messaging system. With so many messaging offerings already lined up on our smartphones, the only reason to use Twitter direct messaging is if you absolutely have no connection to that person anywhere but on Twitter. Part of this could be because Twitter’s DM product isn’t a good one — the company has harshly neglected the service since inception. It’s often buggy (such as the URL glitch from yesterday), and it has been hidden away for a while now, with several clicks required behind the profile page to get to it. However, this week Twitter started to turn on the ability for people to privately message you even if you don’t follow them — with a blanked permission box in your settings. (Which seems slightly counter-intuitive, given that messages are meant to be private.) Still, even if Twitter beautified its messaging product, is there a clear benefit to DMing someone over texting them, or Snapchatting them, or sending a Viber message, or using MessageMe? Is that benefit enough to get users to switch from one of the other myriad products already available? For Twitter, the company obviously wants to take advantage of the huge opportunity in the U.S., where the messaging space is highly fragmented. But that’s not what Twitter was built for, it’s not what Twitter is good at, and it’s not what Twitter will be used for in the future. The original idea for Twitter, didn’t pan out so well. Dorsey was wrong (kind of). It’s not about a close group of friends knowing what you’re doing at any given moment, which is closer to messaging than the Twitter of today. Instead, Twitter is used to discuss what’s happening right now in a global forum. It connects people interested in a certain television show, or people at the same venue, or folks who are living through the same tragic or joyous current event, and it does so in real-time. It lets users consume conversations with the option to participate. This, along with a handful of celebrities, is what made Twitter into what it is today. It’s the opposite of privacy and intimate messaging (unless you’re asking ). To grab (and keep) the mainstream audience Twitter is so hungry for, the platform needs to play up its strengths and remove its weaknesses. This doesn’t really include messaging, and following the lead of other popular social apps like Snapchat and MessageMe risks diluting what Twitter actually is. Consider what we seem to like about Twitter. The first thing is the follow structure. Twitter was one of the first social networks to adopt a follow-based structure instead of a mutual friendship structure for connections. This means that everyday users can be appreciated, and followed, by anyone in the world regardless of the relationship between those people. Suddenly, anyone can become a celebrity. A gets a book deal. A BuzzFeed writer ends up writing for sitcoms. Instagram and countless other social networks used the same structure, changing social networking from a tool to connect with friends into a tool to broadcast to the world. There’s something equally vain and comforting that comes with a following, a quantifiable group of people who subscribe to your stream of consciousness. It’s part of Twitter’s magic, and that ever-present hunger for more followers is part of what drives engagement among active users. But beyond the following, Twitter users also love the conversation. It’s one of the only digital tools that focuses on time with such acuity. The best moments I’ve ever experienced on Twitter all centered around what was happening right now. When the , Twitter was the best place to be. When the Bachelorette finale aired, Twitter made me feel less like a loser for watching that ridiculous show. This real-time discussion spans the entirety of Twitter, from serious breaking news in Syria to things as silly as my Bachelorette finale. And what’s more, users have the option to participate or merely sit back and consume. This is what makes Twitter Twitter, and messaging is kind of a distraction from it. Instead of worrying about yet another standalone app that competes with niche social apps, like Twitter Camera and Twitter #music (two major fails for the company), Twitter should be working on making the main Twitter experience easier to navigate for new users. Baby steps have been taken, including the new conversation view feature that pulls responses to tweets into a single thread, connected by a blue line and shown in chronological order. This adds context to what can be a confusing, and sometimes one-word response to older tweets, tweets that may not even have been seen due to the fact that you may not follow the same folks as I do. But even Twitter’s strengths have their own weaknesses. Take the follow structure, for example, which offers up just as much benefit as it does quandary. As exciting as it is to gain new followers, parsing through Twitter users that you should follow is a different matter. I assume most new Twitter users run into the same problem I did when I joined, which is following too many people and publications and organizations, only to have an overwhelming Twitter feed. Of course, this predicament calls for extra organization, which becomes difficult on Twitter. There’s a lack of automation on the social network. That means you have complete control over your feed, but it also means that you have to manually decide on every little detail, from who to follow to your lists and back again. A little automagic would go a long way here, as would automated filtering of the stream to surface content the user actually cares about. that Twitter is working on the third major revamp since the company’s launch seven years ago, with a focus on simplicity and integration with television to onboard new users into an instantly comfortable conversation. These are steps in the right direction, as is a move toward more media-centric feeds. Twitter is historically text heavy, and likely took a heavy blow when Instagram turned off cards integration. More media in-feed means the easier and more comfortable Twitter is to a new crop of users. And to be perfectly honest, a little spring cleaning on the internal messaging system in Twitter wouldn’t hurt. It’s not that it’s a bad feature for Twitter, but it can’t be the hero when hunting down new users. A standalone messaging app, however, is yet another fragmentation of what Twitter is without any clear benefit to users, not to mention being a distraction to engineers who could be fixing other (real) issues on the social network. Of course, this is all speculation until Twitter makes its move in the coming weeks and/or months, but hopefully this 1,300-word plea doesn’t fall on deaf ears. I know it’s TL;DR, Twitter, but make an exception or I’ll DM the whole thing to you, bit by bit.
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Planting A Startup Garden
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Matt Burns
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in deal-making than getting things going. Perhaps I’m just naive.” Those are the words of Rick DeVos, founder and CEO of the Michigan-based , a $15 million investment fund located on the West Side of the state that’s throwing money to startups every single week. And after spending some time around their downtown office, I can tell that it’s clear that Rick is anything but naive. The young VC knows exactly what he’s doing. I recently attended an Update Night at Start Garden. Here, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sitting equidistant from Detroit and Chicago, lives this vibrant investment fund that is committed to the region. Financed by the DeVos family of Amway fame, Start Garden is more than just a general investment fund. It’s a fund that’s trying to cultivate a startup ecosystem where there isn’t one. “Our goal is to make a return but also catalyze and get things to go here” Rick said. He is a quiet guy. Young. Easy to smile. He comes from money. And he loves Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s a humble VC and perhaps one that, from a venture capitalist perspective, has an unhealthy attraction to Grand Rapids. When he says he’s interested in the area nearly as much as making money, it’s hard not to believe him. In fact, I think if he were to be completely honest, he’s probably more interested in making money companies in Grand Rapid. Start Garden opened its doors in downtown Grand Rapids in April 2012. It’s Rick’s second go at accelerating the area’s startups. After watching Y Combinator from afar, he founded Momentum in 2008 to attempt to replicate the same thing in West Michigan. The program ran for three years and made several small seed investments. Rick laughed when I said I had never heard of it. “It took us longer than it should to figure out that Y Combinator and TechStars have worked really well in their communities because of their location,” Rick said. “We couldn’t take it out of those places and put it here and expect it to work. We were very focused at web — probably overly focused. We struggled to find five decent applications in those days. There would be crickets at demo nights. But we would rustle up a bit of money for our companies.” Enter Start Garden. Along with traditional venture capitalist funding, Start Garden runs a program that puts $5,000 into an idea every week through a crowdsourced system. Then, once a month, it runs an Update Night in which each of these companies attempts to get an additional $20,000 in seed funding through a sort of pitch-off competition. As I quickly discovered, Update Night can be brutal for the startups but entertaining for the attendees. The fund’s staffers vet the companies live. In front of everyone. There were easily a couple hundred in attendance the night I went. Start Garden staffers evaluate the company’s progress since receiving the initial $5,000 check, generally 90 days prior, and decide whether they’re right for additional Start Garden funding. Just two companies out of 10 received the extra funding the night I attended. The night is free to the public, and thanks to sponsors, beer and wine are included. As Rick DeVos explained to me, it’s his aim to create a startup ecosystem. It’s his aim to get people to just do something rather than being stuck in a planning cycle. “We like to plan in the Midwest,” Rick said, noting in a mocking tone, “everything has to be like General Motors here. We [at Start Garden] are trying to behave different from the existing angel investors in our speed and approach. We just want people to do something. Just do it.” The small weekly funding rounds allow aspiring or seasoned entrepreneurs to get a boost or proceed without the need to bootstrap funds. Start Garden has made 130 investments, most of them small $5K rounds, since its formation. They have participated in several larger early funding rounds, as well. The night I attended, I watched Start Garden staffers gently turn down quite a few companies for additional funding. In some cases, they acknowledged the validity of the idea or company, but simply stated the business wasn’t right for Start Garden’s venture model. They did invest $20,000 into , though, which makes soda out of hops. Founder Stephen Curtis explained that Start Garden’s initial $5,000 check gave him the headroom to pursue his dream. Like most of Start Garden’s investments, Curtis lives about 20 minutes south of Grand Rapids. He says he’s been in the consumer beverage business his entire life. Starting at a coffee shop, which he eventually took over, he toyed with carbonated beverages for several years but couldn’t bootstrap the money needed to produce a limited run of his soda. He turned to Start Garden because one of the staffers successfully started beverage company . earned its $5,000 funding through Start Garden’s community and Curtis found a vendor that would produce a very-limited run of cans. After presenting at Update Night, the Start Garden staffers were impressed enough with the company’s progress to invest an additional $20,000. Curtis tells me that he now has the ability to negotiate with beverage distributors. I tried some of his hops soda. It’s really damn good. Rick DeVos’s statement of being committed to startups and ideas is supported by the loose terms associated with the fund’s money. There are just two strings attached to Start Garden’s initial $5,000 investment. It’s not debt. Startups do not have to pay it back nor does Start Garden squeeze equity out of these young companies. If a person accepts the $5,000, they must present at an Update Night and give Start Garden an option to invest in later financing rounds. If selected to receive $20,000 in financing, the sum of the money, now $25,000, is turned into a convertible note. Rick estimates that about half of Start Garden’s investments are pure technology companies. The other half involve consumer goods or design, which itself is a solid nod at the depth of the resources in the Midwest. Venture investment is quickly gaining steam in Michigan. 2011 saw a record year for fundraising and likewise, in 2012, firms invested $232 million over 47 deals. It was a dramatic increase over 2011 levels where less than $100 million was invested. This spike caused the state’s national ranking to jump ten spots, landing it as the 15th most prolific state in terms of capital investments. Like Rick discovered with his first startup accelerator, each area is unique. What works in one area might not enjoy the same level of success in another. Start Garden works in the sleepy Midwest, but its approach to invest loose and fast might not be as successful in a noisier area. Rick is onto something here. He hopes that within the next three years, he will be well into his second fund. If nothing else, like his venture before Start Garden, Rick will at worst pack it all in and try something different. But like the startup community he’s trying to foster, at least he’s committed to doing something.
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Mindie Is An Immersive Music And Video Jukebox App Done Right
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Romain Dillet
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Meet , a beautifully designed video-sharing app for the iPhone. But calling it a video app is just one part of the story. It’s not yet another Vine, Instagram or even competitor. Mindie is all about music discovery. You pick a track, record a few seconds of video like you would do in Vine, and share the combination of the two on Twitter, Facebook and Mindie. “Music is a catalyst for creativity,” co-founder Grégoire Henrion told me in a phone interview. “It’s very complicated to shoot an interesting video, but if you put music on an awful video, it will make it interesting,” he continued. As he says, music is the story of your video, not the images. In other words, the video is the caption, not the music. While having no sound is disturbing at first, the experience is still very personal, because music is a great way to share emotions and a particular mood. When browsing staff picks, users can listen to a Disclosure track in a trendy , a nice song from Chvrches in a hipster , Lana Del Rey’s voice while looking through the eyes of a Parisian a Vélib’ bike… Music discovery apps are very hard. For example, Turntable had to , the company’s social music app. That’s why I was skeptical when I read what Mindie was all about. But when you open the app, you instantly get it. Just like in , the content takes the center stage. There is no chrome around the videos, you are putting yourself in your friends’ shoes. Videos last seven seconds, because Instagram showed the Mindie team that 15-second videos are too long. And of course, you hear a few seconds of the hand-picked soundtrack. When you swipe your finger across the screen, you get another video, another song. And it goes on and on. All of this is very smooth. Every time you watch a new video, it feels like discovering a brand new personal experience that someone wanted to share with you. You can like, share and buy the track on the iTunes Store. For now, Mindie doesn’t create another social graph. When you first create your account, you automatically follow all your Facebook and Twitter friends that already use the app. Creating a video is very easy. First, you search for the track that you want to select. Mindie uses the iTunes Store API to pull song previews. Then you shoot your video like in Vine or Instagram. Finally, you can add a caption and share it on Twitter or Facebook. When asked whether Mindie was a video-sharing app or a music discovery app, Henrion’s answer was straightforward: “Mindie is a music app. In the App Store, we are in the music category.” According to him, Vine is becoming an app to share comedy bits and is very different from Mindie. It is no longer the app to capture personal and fleeting moments. That’s why the company doesn’t even see Vine as a competitor. The Paris-based team of four hasn’t raised any money yet. But Mindie believes that it has simplified the music sharing experience to its core mechanisms. As Henrion said, “letting people record small videos make them want to share music.”
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Fun Video Makes Startup Life Look As Easy As Watching MTV — If Only
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Mike Butcher
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-b2Zrr8BEk] We were randomly emailed by one , an entrepreneur from Poland. is a sort of MTV-esque homage to the swirl of experiences that might happen to a startup founder were they to compress their experience into a fast-paced music video, shot in the first person. It’s pretty creative, we’ll give him that. Not many people have managed to compress all the upsides to being a successful startup into a minute video which might be described as a somewhat less hedonistic version . Unfortunately, that’s where the video – which is fun if you suspend disbelief for a moment – departs from reality. For in this video there clearly is no downside to startups, and nor, apparently, a hell of a lot of work. Why did he make it? He says he wanted to “promote entrepreneurship and to inspire startup founders around the world.” Ooook…. Yes, Michal, it’s nice that it’s a “tribute to people (i.e. Gary V, DHH, Leo Laporte) and organizations/brands (i.e. Techcrunch, Inc, Entrepreneur, Startup Weekend) that gave me inspiration to become entrepreneur.” Well alright fella, we’ll take the praise. And at least in the video’s video description he’s linked to all the presentations featured in the video. In other words, there may actually be some learning to be had behind this roller-coaster of a ride. He admits, the video “leaves out the dark sides of being entrepreneur, but again: the main goal was to encourage people to create their own business.” A worthy cause it is not? And ok, he admits “I was also hoping it will allow me to get “noticed” by people outside Poland.” That worked. Sadowski claims the story of his startup – a SaaS tool for real-time social media monitoring and analytics is “somewhat similar” to the one in the video, and that the company is booking annual revenues put to $1 million – “apart from Lamborghini part”. Well fair enough. He succeeded in getting our attention. But let’s make sure we have a reality check here. The video clearly needs a health warning, because it does not include: • Any other cofounders
• Your product crashing
• Your demo pitch going wrong
• Getting rejected by an investor and ejected by security
• NOT taking a vacation for about 2 years
• Not having enough time for hanging out with the opposite sex
• Everyone thinking you’re a douche for buying a sports car right after getting funding
• Getting sued by your investors for blowing the cash *on a car*
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Can’t Find The Windows 8.1 Update? Here’s How To Get It
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Alex Wilhelm
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Earlier today, Microsoft released Windows 8.1, the successor to its controversial Windows 8 operating system. From what I can tell, most folks appear to be having a fine time updating. Not everyone, mind you, but that’s frankly to be expected. However, some folks are having a hard time actually finding the update itself, so let’s help them. If you can’t see Windows 8.1 in the Windows Store, you probably need to run Windows Update to get the “KB 2871839” update. To do this, follow the directions . This appears to be the most common issue. If you are on Windows 8 Enterprise, you get no soup today, sorry. That flavor of Windows 8 is not designed for self-upgrade. You’re going to have to wait until your IT department decides that the code will be yours. If you are a Surface user who installed the Windows 8.1 Preview, and are having issues moving to the final build, head for directions. Finally, via my comrade Tom Warren at The Verge, if all that fails, on your Windows 8 device, and it should do the trick. The update weighs in between 2.5 and 4.5 gigabytes, so strap in for a spell. You’ll need patience. I’m seeing reports on Twitter that the actual install process can take several hours. People are finding the messaging that Microsoft built into the update cycle oddly funny. Instead of “gathering information,” why not just say, “not done yet”? Anyway, for more background head , but get a move on. The grass actually is greener on the 8.1 side of the fence.
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How Harvey Mudd Transformed Its Computer Science Program — And Nearly Closed Its Gender Gap
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Colleen Taylor
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But under , the renowned computer scientist (and Microsoft board member) who joined Harvey Mudd as president , the gender ratio at Mudd’s CS department has changed dramatically. This year, fully 48 percent of the CS majors in Harvey Mudd’s junior class are female. TechCrunch TV had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Klawe in person last week in Minneapolis at the annual , and we were able to speak with her in depth about how exactly Harvey Mudd transformed its computer science department in such a short period of time. Encouraging diversity in computer science is something that Maria Klawe is clearly very passionate about, so it was great to hear her speak about the topic in detail. You can watch that in the video embedded above. At a time when many technology companies are keen to bring more diversity to their engineering teams in the hopes of , it’s great to see this kind of shift at the collegiate level — and it will be interesting to see if other universities follow Mudd’s lead. You can see all our coverage of the 2013 Grace Hopper Celebration .
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Anthony Ha
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Google Malaysia Site DNS Hacked, Credit Claimed By ‘Team Madleets’ Hacker 1337
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Matthew Panzarino
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Google’s has been hacked and replaced with a splash screen giving credit to a group called “Team Madleets.” The normal site has been offline for several hours as of late Thursday afternoon and the page lists a series of handles that are ostensibly part of the team responsible. with brief statement from the hackers below. The of the DNS poisoning variety, in which a hacker gained access to the Malaysia Network Information Center and changed the DNS records of Google’s site to Madleets-controlled servers. So no information appears to have been changed on Google’s servers at this time, as this is a redirect attack of sorts. The stamp at the top says ‘[!] Struck by 1337’, which is apparently a reference to an called 1337, who has recently (allegedly) performed hacks on . A message on 1337’s Facebook page says “Google Malaysia Stamped By 1337” and references the google.com.my and google.my domains. The only other indicator about who the group could be is a reference to them being Pakistani in origin. The leads to a for the team that has the following message posted: We feel we need to alert anyone, that we don’t hack any country tlds for example google.com.my as a result of any kind of hate, We don’t hate anyone, We love all humanity, there is no obvious reason for stamping the tlds.
Least the reason is not any kind of hate.
Whatever the reason is we can’t explain except we love all of you.
Regard’s
H4x0rL1f3 The page info states that “MadLeets is a Ethical and 1337 White Hat Hackers Community. We are Anti Hackers , we teach how to protect yourself from getting hacked.” If the reasoning on the team’s Facebook page is accurate, then this is simply a matter of doing it because they can and not to make a political statement. A link placed in the source code of the page for the artist Instrumental Core. The music is auto-played on the site while visitors are there. Google Malaysia was , along with several other Malaysian sites, by a group protesting the treatment of Bangladeshi workers in that country. One possible motivation for the group taking action now, if it is indeed not simply “exposing vulnerabilities” would be the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Kuala Lumpur, which will be attended by Secretary of State John Kerry in lieu of President Barack Obama. We’ve reached out to both the email address given for the team on the site and to Google. We will update this story if we receive a response from either side. : The hackers responded with a brief statement to TechCrunch: : And of how the situation looked for Integricity, the company that runs the domain name server for Google in Malaysia, as they got the site back up and running.
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As More Startups Move To San Francisco, Y Combinator Opens A Satellite Office In The City
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Ryan Lawler
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Y Combinator has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley, with an office not far from the Mountain View Caltrain station.* Over the years, however, the seed-stage venture firm has seen more of its companies and partners take up residence in the city. As a result, it has opened a small satellite office near San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood to support SF-based staff and partners who need temporary space to work out of. There’s a growing trend of startups being founded in San Francisco, as younger tech workers are looking for more excitement after hours than might be found, in say, downtown Mountain View. Whereas a decade ago it was expected that companies like Twitter and Square want to be near Stanford and Sand Hill Road, newer startups are becoming comfortable with the idea of settling down in the city. And investors are coming to them. Y Combinator already has a number of big success stories based in San Francisco — both Dropbox and Airbnb, for instance, have spacious new offices in the SOMA neighborhood. But the incubator is looking to support more San Francisco-based companies, as the appetite among tech workers for city living continues to increase and as jobs here become more plentiful. At the same time, it’s brought on over the last few years, many of which are based in San Francisco. That includes folks like Socialcam’s Michael Seibel, Hipmunk’s Steve Huffman, App.net’s Dalton Caldwell, and Groupon’s Andrew Mason (who recently moved to San Francisco from Chicago). Y Combinator hasn’t always just been in Silicon Valley — it used to have classes in both Silicon Valley and Cambridge before founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston . But the new office, which opened its doors early last month, follows a larger trend of VC firms and investors looking beyond their stodgy Sand Hill Road digs to meet with and support a growing number of startups making San Francisco their home. Firms like and set up offices here. Early next year, 500 Startups is also , which will be run by new venture partner Parker Thompson and is expected to house one track of its accelerator program. ==
* My colleague Anthony Ha maintains that the YC Mountain View office is “not that close to Caltrain” and “actually a really long walk.”
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Is HP Investing Properly For A Post-PC And Post-Printer Future?
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Alex Wilhelm
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Yesterday HP enjoyed a sharp rally following encouraging words from its CEO, the release of its fiscal 2014 guidelines, and promise that . The company, its CEO Meg Whitman said, is in the midst of . Yes, revenue will decline in fiscal 2014 from fiscal 2013 levels, margins remain an issue, and HP will generate non-GAAP EPS only in the range investors expected, but the company’s statement that it would devote half its fiscal 2014 free cash flow to share buybacks and dividends was welcome. Previously, HP focused on cutting its debt load. Now, with its liabilities back in order, the company feels free to devote more of its generated cash to rewarding its owners. HP forecasts that it will generate between $6 billion and $6.5 billion in free cash. Half of that will be returned. That works out to between $3 billion and $3.25 billion. A line from its release, recounting HP’s accomplishments in its fiscal 2013: Recommitted to smarter innovation, with research and development (R&D) spending expected to be in excess of $3 billion in fiscal 2013. HP has a gambit in place: New revenue sources will eventually grow and surpass the incomes generated from its shrinking personal computer business and printer business. The Post-PC age isn’t here yet, but HP doesn’t want to wait until those doors close in order to open new, replacement revenue drivers. So, as HP’s software and services top line grows, the goal is to have those dollars replace, and more, the slowing of PC and printer sales. This means that HP is building new products, and competing with exceptionally cash-rich companies. And it is being outspent. HP yesterday stated that Microsoft was no longer just a partner, but is . That’s true. Both sell software, services, and devices, often in the same product categories. Microsoft’s $2.8 billion, or roughly what HP spent in a full year. This at a time when HP is turning its cash from debt retirement to paying investors. You have to ask if that money could be better directed towards aggressive hiring in the divisions that are building the 10 and 20 year internal businesses that will sustain HP in the future. A caveat to the above: “HP will invest in its product portfolio to accelerate high-growth areas in the New Style of IT. HP plans to reinvest approximately $0.12 per share of savings from its restructuring program into the business in fiscal 2014, including products and solutions such as 3PAR, networking, Vertica and cloud solutions.” That’s smart. But in a war between HP and rival companies that have more cash, and more mature products, you have to ask if the cash could be better spent. $280 million. That’s the cost of HP’s quarterly dividend, according to its most recent earnings release. So extrapolated out for a full year, HP spends about $1 billion yearly through dividends. That implies that in fiscal 2014, it will spend more than $2 billion buying back its shares. That will be a change. In its , HP repurchased a total of $3 million of its own stock. It’s planning to spend twice that much, , every day of fiscal 2014. That’s aggressive. Why would investors cheer the decision? HP is worth $43 billion. Two billion dollars in buybacks per year – assuming HP continues the effort after fiscal 2014 – removes around 4.65 percent of HP’s extant stock from the market. This concentrates earnings and so forth. But as a decision it doesn’t solve the company’s core problems: Slipping revenue and small margins. If Meg Whitman believes in her long-term strategy, as I think she does, spending money to reward investors in the short term feels dissonant. Unless Whitman is worried enough about short-term investor pressure that she feels the company has no choice but to buy off investor discontent with its free cash flow to allow it time to make the structural reforms it needs, the cash could be better used. I doubt that.
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Rep. Amash Slams Congressional Intelligence Committees As The “Opponents Of Congress”
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Alex Wilhelm
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Members of Congress are not very content with the flow of information that reaches their ears concerning the pervasive surveillance activities of the United States intelligence apparatus. Following remarks from Senator Bob Corker that Congress often learns more from newspapers than their briefings on the National Security Agency and its cohorts, Rep. Amash blasted Congressional intelligence committees as complicit in hiding information, essentially “working with the executive branch against the interests of Congress.” As , Rep. Amash called Intelligence committees not “friends of Congress but [instead] the opponents of Congress.” Explaining what it was like to work with intelligence officials who are reticent to disclose information, even to the branch that is tasked with their oversight: “You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on. So you have to start just spitting off random questions. Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear?” What this means is that the more information that members of Congress have going into those meetings, the better they can press for answers. Rep. Amash continued to say as much. The implication therefore is that the information that Edward Snowden leaked is providing Congress with the tools they need to execute their oversight. As far as I can tell, . Those in favor of its activities , while those who wish to vet its activities are occasionally or . A final detail for flavor: Rep. Amash Rep. Rogers of withholding documents relating to the NSA’s activities from being distributed with Congress. This kept an entire new class of Representatives in the dark. Oversight!
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Philip Kaplan Officially Launches DistroKid, A Cheap, Efficient Way To Distribute Lots Of Music
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John Biggs
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Philip Kaplan, AKA “Pud”, AKA has just announced the official launch of , a service for musicians to release unlimited tracks to various online music stores for a flat yearly fee. Folks wanting to try it out can upload any song for free without submitting a credit card. Artists get 100% of the royalties for their music. “I’m the only employee. I’ve been working on it for a little over a year,” said Kaplan. “The final major piece just went live a couple of days ago (Amazon distribution went live). Which is why I’m opening the service up to a wider audience today.” An the service was eventually spun out into its own project. We first talked about but it has finally come out of beta. Kaplan has bootstrapped the company and has seen 16,338 songs uploaded to the service. Kaplan expects to double that this month. The site’s major competitors are TuneCore and CD Baby, but at $29 per year and $59 per album respectively, DistroKid’s offering is far cheaper. “The founders of both services have publicly endorsed DistroKid over their own services (which is crazy yo!),” said Kaplan. For example, CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers, wrote on Hacker News: “This is exactly what I would have created if I didn’t sign a non-compete agreement when I sold CD Baby. I just created an unlimited account on DistroKid and I’m uploading all of my own music in the background as I type. I’ll be sending everyone I know to DistroKid now.” It’s unique that founders have rallied around Kaplan and his project, especially considering they compete (or competed) directly in his space. “Conversely, DistroKid makes uploading music to stores more like uploading a video to YouTube or copying a file to your Dropbox — super easy and low friction. You don’t have to think about it — you just upload everything you have, whenever you want,” said Kaplan. “I’m a musician. Sometimes I record band rehearsals, sometimes my live shows, sometimes I make music at night using Garage Band. I have a ton of music. I just wanted a simple service that let me upload every song into stores after I’m done recording it. Current options make that nearly impossible/too expensive/too difficult.”
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Facebook Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Name, Highlighting Lack Of Universal Privacy Controls
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Josh Constine
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“Who can look up your Timeline by name?” Anyone you haven’t blocked. Facebook is , notifying those who had hidden themselves that they’ll be searchable. It deleted the option from those who hadn’t used it , and is starting to push everyone to use privacy controls on each type of content they share. But there’s no one-click opt out of Facebook search. To be fair, the “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” feature was likely misunderstood by lots of people. At first glance, you might assume it means that strangers can’t find your profile. But that’s incorrect. There have been lots of ways to navigate to your profile, like clicking your name on a photo you’re tagged in, finding your name in a friend’s friend list, or combing through Likes on a mutual friend’s News Feed post. With the roll out of Graph Search, the avenues for sniffing out someone’s profile grew exponentially. Basically every piece of personal information (and soon the ) could bring you up in a search. If you publicly list that you live in San Francisco, a Graph Search for “People who live in San Francisco” could lead someone to your profile. It also led people to think search was broken in some cases. If I met someone through a Facebook Group and wanted to friend them, I might search for them and not be able to find them if they had used this privacy setting. But what’s more important are the safety implications. Keeping this privacy option around gave people a false sense of security. For that reason, it’s wise for Facebook to remove it. But it should have provided an ever stronger universal privacy control for opting out of search, not a slew of weaker ones. Over the new few months, users who’ve employed the privacy setting to avoid being searched by name will see a big announcement at the top of their Facebook homepage explaining what’s happening. They’ll have to confirm they understand the change before they’re put back into name search and the privacy setting disappears from their options. After that, the way people can stay hidden is to manually restrict the visibility of each piece of their profile. And that is a bit of a chore. You’d have to go through every piece of personal information in your About section and set its visibility to ‘Friends’ or ‘Only me’. At least Facebook provides a quick way to restrict the visibility of all your old News Feed posts. Serious privacy aficionados should remember that your current profile picture and cover image are always public, so you’d have to leave those blank if you didn’t want anyone to any idea of who you are beyond your name. For people with stalkers, though, Facebook may have just gotten a bit more dangerous. Facebook tells me the way to keep a specific person from finding your profile or viewing any of your content is to block them. But what if your stalker just signs up for a fake profile with a new name? Then they could search and find you. One solution is to use a fake name. Though that violates Facebook’s terms of service, it’s a popular solution for job seekers and privacy buffs to avoid bosses and ex-lovers. This is where there’s friction, as Facebook’s mission to connect the world, responsibility to generate returns for its investors, and its duty to keep people’s privacy safe come into conflict. Facebook is not just trying to make more money, and designing easy privacy controls is no simple task. In the last two years it’s added in-line controls for everything as well as privacy shortcuts in the navigation bar, but I feel like Facebook could do more. The social network could surely offer an option to lock down all your personal information the same way it does for your old posts, but it doesn’t. It could offer a way to opt out of appearing in any type of search results, not just searches for your name, but it doesn’t. It wants your friends to be able to find you. It wants Graph Search to be a comprehensive utility. It wants to foster the connection your friendship and News Feed posts generate, which also keep it in business. But it’s protecting its access to these things by sacrificing your right to choose just how much your identity is indexed.
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Foundation: Matt Galligan On The Next Phase Of Circa
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Contributor
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In this episode of my video series, I sit down over some craft beers with entrepreneur and founder . Matt and I discuss the concept of breaking news and Circa’s second version of its news app for iOS and Android. Matt’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs building companies:
“A good formula is looking at what problem you are solving, and then doing constant repetition of that problem. Any time we had a new feature or idea, we asked whether it solved that initial problem, and made sure we were doing things that fit the equation.”
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Amazon Snaps Up Online Math Instruction Company TenMarks To Help It Make Education Apps
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Matthew Panzarino
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Amazon has to snap up online education company . The company offers an online math curriculum currently, and Amazon VP of Kindle Dave Limp says that together, “Amazon and TenMarks intend to develop rich educational content and applications, across multiple platforms, that we think teachers, parents and students will love.” TenMarks was founded in 2008 and has raised debt funding several times over the last few years. Its most recent , when it snagged $3M from Catamount Ventures and Birchmere. TenMarks is a service that lets teachers specify math skill levels or concepts to cover and then develop personalized curriculums it calls ‘playlists’. TenMarks Math is a free product for teachers that it says has been used across ‘tens of thousands’ of schools. “Amazon and TenMarks share a commitment to developing easy-to-implement solutions for schools and families,” Rohit Agarwal, TenMarks co-founder said in a statement today. “We currently offer teachers, students and parents access to effective resources to foster the vision of the Common Core curriculum in math, including scalable professional development and tools for connecting with parents. We back this belief with our business model, where teachers can register and access our product for free, while being able to opt in for premium features, if needed. Going forward, we believe Amazon and TenMarks will create significant innovations in the K-12 arena.” Whatever TenMarks’ business model was, it doesn’t matter much any more as it floats its way into the welcoming folds of Amazon. The acquisition is set to close in the 4th quarter of 2013, and terms were not disclosed. The move is interesting on a couple of levels, as Amazon flat out says that it will be building its own education-oriented apps for ‘multiple platforms’. I don’t doubt that those platforms will begin with the Kindle Fire and perhaps even Kindle. Amazon has shown little reluctance to ship apps on other platforms in the past, and currently offers Kindle on iOS and ‘stock Android’. Also, if there’s a competitor to Apple in the tablet space that could make a real play for the educational textbook market, you would be hard pressed not to finger Amazon. Apple has made a significant play for the education market with the iPad — both on the textbook and 1-for-1 school deployment fronts — and Amazon could be looking for a good slice of that with the Kindle and some ‘in-house’ material. Current programs like could partner up with bespoke apps to create an attractive package. Amazon has struggled to get anywhere near the volume of apps into its store that Google or Apple enjoy, but that doesn’t necessarily matter for the education market. What it needs is a core curriculum that it can sell to schools and partnerships with ed-tech vendors that can help it appear more attractive to school purchasing departments.
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Thiel Fellows Program Is “Most Misdirected Piece Of Philanthropy,” Says Larry Summers
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Two years after billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel announced an experiment to pay bright high schoolers to drop out of college for $100,000, the program hasn’t won over education leaders. “I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel’s special program to bribe people to drop out of college,” said former Harvard President Larry Summers at the Nantucket Project conference during his first public appearance since removing himself for consideration for federal chairman. Never one to shy away from an opinion, Summers said his friend’s ongoing education nonprofit is “meretricious in its impact and the signals that it sends to a broader society.” Summers isn’t the only one leveling criticism. “Peter Thiel promised flying cars; we got caffeine spray,” Stanford researcher and Wall Street Journal columnist, Vivek Wadhwa. For context, remember that Thiel Fellow Ben Yu for developing a topical caffeine spray (all the fun of coffee without the hassle of ingestion). Wadhwa argues that this isn’t the world-changing startup that many had expected from top-tier entrepreneurs with the connections of Thiel. In reality, it’s hard to condemn or praise the fellows program yet. In the context of tech investing, Thiel’s fellows are still greenhorns. Even the most successful startups can take years to stabilize. , and tackling 3D printing, biomedical imaging and solar energy. Of course, It’s unclear whether Thiel ever expected that his fellows would create world-changing products with their $100K. Instead, the project was funded to show that, on average, the cost of tuition could be better spent on building things. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he TechCrunch when the program first began. Summers wasn’t convinced. “I think it’s hard to look back and say it’s a sad thing that Bill Gates dropped out of college — world’s OK, he’s OK. I think it’s a hard thing to say that it’s sad that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. But they are extraordinary exceptions, and if any significant number of intellectually able people, of the kind that would have the opportunity to attend top schools are dropping out, I think it’s tragic.” The criticism, in the end, may be premature. [ ]
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Twitter Launches An Android Tablet Optimized App For The First Time — On One Tablet
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Matthew Panzarino
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In what is a poignant statement about the state of Android tablet apps, Twitter has for the platform. It’s been 3 years since the iPad hit and Android tablets have blown up in the meantime, but this is the first time they’re being served with a real app. Twitter says that the app is rolling out on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 first but will roll out to other Android tablets by the end of the year. Twitter says that it’s included some Samsung-specific features like multi-screen view for the in-app browser, a Twitter widget for the home screen that allows basic twitter actions and shows breaking news customized to countries. There’s also a ‘tweet illustration’ feature that lets you doodle on pictures with Samsung’s ‘S-Pen’. One of the strengths of the Android platform is that most of its phone apps will run just fine on tablets, due to flexible layouts and encouragement early on from Google to build them that way. But since the early days of Android, the tablet market has exploded and Google has changed its tune. It has begun encouraging developers to produce tablet-specific layouts for their apps, providing for better experiences on larger screens. Much of the impetus for this is the fact that there are an incredibly small number of apps on Android that are designed with in mind. On Apple’s iPad, there are thousands. Apple CEO Tim Cook has specifically called out the Twitter app for Android before — and on a Samsung tablet no less. At the , Cook and said “It kind of looks like a blown-up smartphone app, because that’s exactly what it is. Compare that to Twitter on iPad.” Ironically, at the time, Twitter’s iPad app was a unique flower with a cool card-based interface. These days it looks a lot more like its iPhone app and website. During a earlier this year, Cook had this to say about the state of Android tablet apps: I think if I bought [an Android tablet] and used it, and I thought that was a tablet experience, I’m not sure I would ever buy another tablet. The responsiveness isn’t there. The basic touch is really off. The app experience is a stretched-out smartphone kind of experience. It’s not an optimized experience. However, that said, I have always said that the tablet market was going to surpass the PC market. I was saying that well before it was viewed to be sane to say that. It’s clear that we’re 24 months away from that. The feeling that Android tablet app experiences have lagged far behind those on the iPad may not be a popular one, but it’s accurate. A head-to-head from last year makes the problem incredibly visible. Android-powered devices continue to slice out an increasingly large percentage of the tablet market, but continue to trail hardcore in usage figures. Google needs to encourage more companies to customize their apps specifically for tablets like the Note 10.1 if those usage numbers are going to turn around. Remember, Google makes nothing from Android proper, it makes money if people use those tablets for stuff, like browsing the web and using apps. If Apple continues to maintain what it claims to be an 82% share of web traffic, Android tablets are going to contribute nothing to Google’s bottom line. Honestly, with those kinds of usage numbers, who could blame Twitter for dragging its toes? Still, Samsung appears to be selling a decent chunk of them, with an estimated , so it’s a good place to start. Now where are the rest of the Android tablet-optimized apps?
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BlackBerry Co-Founders Mike Lazaridis And Douglas Fregin Consider Buying Back The Company
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Greg Kumparak
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We already know that BlackBerry is considering , with a already having been made. Looks like two other guys might be interested, though: its co-founders, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. Though Lazaridis is a bit more well known and oft credited as the sole founder of BlackBerry, he and Fregin co-founded the company as Research In Motion back in 1984. Fregin acted as the company’s VP of Operations until he retired in 2007; Lazaridis, meanwhile, left his role as Vice Chair of BlackBerry’s board in May, about a year and a half after stepping down as CEO. The pair have with the SEC, disclosing their interest in taking over the company they started. Here’s the nut of it: In light of the Issuer’s recent announcement that its board of directors has formed a Special Committee to explore strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale, the Reporting Persons are considering all available options with respect to their holdings of the Shares, including, without limitation, a potential acquisition of all the outstanding Shares of the Issuer that they do not currently own, either by themselves or with other interested investors (an “Acquisition”). Combining their own personal shares, those managed by their corporations, and those held in myriad family trusts, Lazaridis and Fregin already own at least 8% of the company. It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean they have a concrete to acquire the company — just that they’re considering it. According to the filing, they’ve brought in Goldman Sachs and Centerview Partners LLC to help them weigh their options. [ ]
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Airpush Acquires Hubbl For $15 Million To Bring Native Ads To Mobile
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Sarah Perez
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New York-based , a maker of app discovery and personalization technologies, has been snapped up by mobile ad platform for $15 million, the companies are announcing today. The two businesses will combine their respective efforts – Hubbl with its personalized native ads technology and Airpush with its ecosystem of some 120,000 mobile apps – to create a new, native advertising platform for mobile. Hubbl originally grew out of the efforts of , which was originally working a startup in the social networking space before pivoting to app discovery. The company found app discovery to be a tough business as well, however, and had been transitioning toward its B2B offerings more so than its consumer-facing mobile app in recent months. Hubbl was also challenged in raising a round, from what we’ve heard, with investors spooked by the app discovery market as a whole, despite Hubbl hitting the usual milestones that would have otherwise led to at least a seed stage deal. But given that the full team will now be able to continue their efforts within the folds of a larger organization (Airpush is over 160 people) after going from bootstrap to acquisition, it’s not exactly a terrible outcome for everyone involved. Hubbl’s co-founders and will remain in New York, while the majority of its 25-person staff will stay in India. They will operate somewhat independently from Airpush itself – that is, they’re still continuing their product efforts as they would have otherwise, for the most part. This wasn’t just a talent acquisition in other words. Now at AirPush, the Hubbl team is working on a new product, the founders tell TechCrunch, explaining that it will take advantage of everything they’ve learned over the years building tools for app discovery, and later, more personalized app recommendations, followed by a B2B app distribution product. In its earlier days, allowed users to “hashtag” apps to help categorize apps in ways that the app publishers themselves may not have thought of – for example, a note-taking app may have seen a number of users adopting it specifically for “grocery lists.” This concept helped Hubbl initially build an app database where apps were grouped by how they were used, rather than more traditional rankings like downloads or revenue figures, like on iTunes. Later the company moved more toward , and in early 2013, it was working on another new product called “Spacebar” – a B2B offering involving partnerships with publishers and other content distribution networks, allowing them to distribute apps in a more contextually relevant fashion. That is, if you were reading about fashion or sports on your mobile phone, you might see an app suggestion pointing you to related fashion or sports apps you could download. Now the team is developing in the form of an SDK and API. “Our hashtagging helped us create this precise profiling, user segmentation and targeting capabilities, and we merged that with our content-first approach, and we’ve taken both of them to create a native platform…we’re using everything we’ve done so far, but we’re using it for a much broader purpose than just app discovery,” says Hubbl co-founder Kushal M. Choksi about the product, which they expect to release into beta this December. The company doesn’t want to reveal the exact details about how the native advertising solution will work on mobile for competitive reasons, but generally speaking, it’s an attempt to rethink how this trend toward native ads on the web can work on smaller screens. The ad SDK involves a content-based approach to advertising, where instead of interrupting the mobile app experience with banner ads or interstitials, ads feel more like part of the app itself, and are something users might actually want to clickthrough on and engage with. Hubbl has been testing the SDK with sixteen developers so far, and early results in clickthrough rates have been “encouraging,” the founders tell us, though declining to speak on the record about the exact percentage due to the product’s early stage. “Native is not just about positioning. It’s the content, relevance and personalized targeting that makes a world of difference when it comes to consumption behavior on mobile,” explains Choksi. The SDK, which will be free for developers, will work for nearly any sort of mobile application, including things like games, entertainment apps, productivity apps, personalization apps, and more. App developers interested in testing the beta can sign up for news on for now, with further details to be announced closer to year-end. Airpush says that they expect to release the product to app publishers by January 2014, where it will be able to help increase the earnings for those building both iOS and Android mobile apps. Today, most companies that market themselves as native ad businesses aren’t really focused on mobile though they all support it, which may allow Airpush to have a jump on the space with Hubbl. An exception, and possible competitor, however, may be , which this spring, but has yet to launch its product to the public.
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Another One Bites The Dust: Boston Court Denies Preliminary Injunction Against Aereo
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Jordan Crook
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, Aereo has just confirmed that a federal judge has ruled in favor of Aereo in its legal battle with Hearst Stations , one of three ongoing lawsuits between the streaming TV startup and major network broadcasters, the other in New York and . Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton issued a ruling that denies the plaintiff a motion for preliminary injunction, which would force Aereo to cease business in Boston while the case is being evaluated. This would be a terrible outcome for Aereo, which the company has already avoided in New York. Hearst, then, could not prove likelihood of success based on merits or that irreparable harm would be done to the company without this “drastic remedy,” in legal speak. But this in no way means that the fight in Boston is over. In fact, Aereo was denied the motion it filed to have the case against Hearst brought back to New York under Judge Nathan, who had ruled favorably for Aereo in the past. Here’s what Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia had to say about the win: Today’s decision, coupled with the decisions in favor of Aereo in the Southern District of New York (July 11, 2013) and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (April 1, 2013 and July 16, 2013), shows that when you comply not only with the letter, but the spirit of the law, justice will prevail. Today’s victory belongs to the consumer and today’s decision, makes clear that that there is no reason that consumers should be limited to 1950s technology to access over-the-air broadcast television. Using Aereo, a consumer can simply and easily use an individual remote antenna and cloud DVR via the Internet to record and watch-over-the air programs. This comes on the heels of an , which claims that major broadcasters plan to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review lower court rulings that have been in favor of Aereo, allowing the startup to continue offering access to those network’s free over the air signals. So far, these same broadcasters have lost in the Second Circuit Appeals Court, where officials refused to reconsider a case after upholding a ruling by district Judge Allison Nathan, who previously denied a preliminary injunction in New York. The petition may go through considering that an Aereo-like service, Film On X, is losing against broadcasters in Los Angeles. The Supreme Court may decide to step in if multiple district courts are issuing different opinions. Here’s the ruling:
[IMG courtesy of ]
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Nifti Brings Its Smart Shopping Wishlist And Price Tracker To iPhone
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Sarah Perez
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, a Google Ventures-backed shopping startup which its price tracking and alerts service this summer, is today making the move to mobile. The company is launching by the same name, while also offering a slightly different take from what Nifti does online. On the web, the company’s idea is one of a smarter wishlist where you can track historical price changes over time, and be notified when the price drops below a price point you designate yourself. Meanwhile, though Nifti’s mobile app also includes price history and tracking, it’s also about offering you an easy-to-access portal where you can shop and compare items across different stores without having to continually switch between different shopping apps or mobile websites. Explains co-founder Nathan Sharp, the new product still serves Nifti’s larger purpose. “At it’s core, the Nifti app is still about making it as easy for a shopper to act on price changes as it is for merchants to change prices,” he says, noting that the release has been timed to hit ahead of the holiday shopping season, where prices can often fluctuate wildly. After installation, app users will be able to access a “Stores” tab where they’ll see in real-time what other Nifti users are tracking at the over 700 retailers the company supports – a number which is up from the 400 it was watching earlier this summer. This makes the app something of a user-generated catalog of popular items, which is not an entirely different concept from a number of trendy shopping apps on the App Store today, like Wanelo, for a representative example. But where Wanelo and others tend to be focused on fashion and home goods (and ), Nifti is not limited to a particular demographic in theory, given its broad support for anything you can bookmark from the web using the browser bookmarklet, as well as its . Nifti is also a bit more practical in nature than the current crop of mobile shopping apps are, which are sometimes more about aspirational favoriting than real-world conversions. Services like Pinterest are slowly moving into this area too, having recently launched price alerts and which the company hopes will push its users from just “collecting” and sharing to actually making purchases. But Nifti’s app, on the other hand, is giving you the data and other information you need to push you through and take that final step. Not only does it track the history of an item’s pricing over time, you can now use the app to sort items by date, price, or total discount to see where all the best deals are right now. And while you’re browsing through a store, you can also click a plus sign to begin to track any item found on that retailer’s website within Nifti’s app. Elsewhere in the app, you can view your wishlist – or watchlist, rather – of saved items, where you can quickly tell whether prices are trending up or down thanks to brightly colored red and green buttons with percentage changes and new prices next to old, also color-coded for easy reference. The company currently generates revenue through affiliate deals with the retailers, but over time it wants to broaden those relationships to help retailers better understand their potential customers’ behavior. “We want digital marketing to be less about grabbing your attention, and more about understanding your intention–and that starts with knowing exactly what you want and how much you want to pay,” Sharp explains. The app was quietly released earlier this month for testing purposes, and is currently climbing the “Lifestyle” charts on iTunes where it’s closing in on a top 50 position today. (It’s #62 at the time of writing, per App Annie’s data). Nifti’s mobile release comes at a time when one of its top competitors, Decide.com, has exited the market. , which had raised $16.5 million, in September. Decide had been doing much of the same thing in terms of watching historical price drops over time in order to alert users as to when is the right time to buy. But the company fumbled by starting to charge users for the service too soon – before it had generated significant consumer adoption. It was having trouble scaling its user numbers as a paid service, and was not generating the revenues it would have needed to continue to scale. While investors at the time told us that everyone made money on the deal, and it was a “positive outcome,” there was little talk of specific deal terms because it wasn’t a sizable kind of exit investors want to tout. So Nifti’s decision to remain free for consumers is a good one – especially as it moves to mobile are generally on their way out. Unfortunately for Nifti and apps like it, not all retailers have been quick to adapt their sites for the influx of mobile users. That can leave users who are trying to checkout frustrated with the experience to the point of giving up and abandoning their shopping cart. But assuming Nifti takes off, the company could begin to work with retailers to better streamline and optimize mobile checkout for consumers further down the road. However, Sharp says that for now, checkout will have to take place on retailer websites, but they’re working on making the experience more seamless for end users so they could checkout in the app itself. Ultimately, Nifti plans to offer users the choice of either app or web.
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This Week On The TC Europe Podcast: Raspberry Pi, Wayra, France And Esperanto
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Romain Dillet
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We’ve made it to episode 10! This week, we talk about Raspberry Pi worldwide sales of 1.75 million, Partech Ventures $215 million in European startups the American way, and Wayra numbers about its accelerators for the first time. This is the , wherein we European writers discuss tech news, as well as what’s happening in our startup scene. This episode was a great opportunity to talk about how venture capital is doing in Europe. Is there enough money allocated to young and energetic startups? We answer this question and talk about more pressing issues, such as how much tea is sold in the U.K., why French people are so negative about everything, and more. Join , , , , , and to hear what we think about those topics.
We invite you to enjoy our every Thursday.
Intro music by .
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Frederic Lardinois
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Tony Espinoza Steps Down As CEO Of Couchsurfing, Jennifer Billock Steps Up As Interim As Startup Lays Off Staff, “Doubles Down” On Mobile
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Ingrid Lunden
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Big changes at , the social travel site that lets people connect and crash on their sofas and spare beds when visiting each other’s towns. Today, CEO Tony Espinoza announced that he is stepping down as the company lays off staff and refocuses on mobile. In the interim, Jen Billock, who currently is listed as director of member experience at Couchsurfing on her , will become the interim CEO as the company embarks on the search for a permanent replacement. “The past 18 months serving as CEO have yielded some of the most meaningful and powerful experiences of my 20 year career building technology. Today as I step down as CEO I’m proud that Couchsurfing is poised for the future with a great team, substantial funding, strong investor backing, and a passionate, growing community,” Espinoza writes in an email. The full text is below. The startup, by General Catalyst, Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Point Nine and Omidyar Network, is now going to focus on mobile — and we have heard that this is where all new hires will happen. The company up to now had raised some $22.6 million, with the last $15 million in . As for the layoffs, . A spokesperson tells us that the full number is about 40% of staff, with now 20+ people working at the company. Earlier, a tipster had told us the proportion was 50% of staff. Another about her layoff just calls it “a bunch.” We’ve reached out to Espinoza and Couchsurfing to confirm the numbers. A little more unconfirmed detail: part of the layoffs, apparently, have resulted in deep cuts to its engineering team, with the entire engineering team let go “except for a 3 person skeleton support crew,” according to a tipster. Our tipster — again, this is unconfirmed — says that the reason for the layoffs and other changes is because the company has seen an $800,000 monthly burn rate. But we understand the company has a long cash runway at the moment to figure out ways to turn that around (staff cuts help, too). We have the two internal emails sent to staff below about the management changes announced today, although the layoffs really started to take hold last week as we understand it. These are not the first problems at the company, which had faced some pretty arch and . More to come. Tony Espinoza wrote:
Dear Couchsurfing – Couchsurfing began as a global movement, and I am honored to have been part of its transformation into a mission-driven startup with a deep sense of purpose. The past 18 months serving as CEO have yielded some of the most meaningful and powerful experiences of my 20 year career building technology. Today as I step down as CEO I’m proud that Couchsurfing is poised for the future with a great team, substantial funding, strong investor backing, and a passionate, growing community. I remain in awe of the CS community which has grown in every dimension, doubling in size to 7M members just since I joined the company. Along the way we raised significant financial support from investors who are aligned with the CS mission to make the world better through travel and travel richer through connection. Late last year, I realized Couchsurfing’s rapid organic growth required that we crystalize and strengthen our core values — the foundation for everything we do. It was at this time that I reached out to long-time colleague, Jen Billock, whose proven track record as a compassionate startup leader made her the perfect candidate to focus on our community and transform the way we work from the inside out. She immediately championed the voice of the community and led key initiatives such as the new Ambassador program and an integrated approach to all communication channels, building the scaffolding for Couchsurfing’s evolving brand and member experience. The board of directors and I are pleased to announce Jen’s appointment as interim CEO. The board will soon commence a search for a long-term CEO, and Jen has graciously accepted our request for her to step in at this important moment. We have a great deal of faith in her ability to lead the company through the next phase. I look forward to continuing to partner with her in the coming months as we double down on mobile and continue driving Couchsurfing’s mission. Please join me in welcoming Jen to her new role!
And Jen Billock’s first email: From: Jen Billock
Subject: Re: The Next Chapter Thank you, Tony. I’m deeply grateful to have spent the past 11 months working so closely with you, and look forward to our continued work together. And to the rest of the Couchsurfing team… I came here to Couchsurfing to work with Tony. It’s not every day that one gets to work for a trusted friend and mentor. I am grateful to Tony for that fateful text message (I leapt at the opportunity via text before even speaking to him) because I landed a job that I knew I would LOVE, and it’s changed my life for the better in countless ways. I’m most grateful for being given the opportunity to work with such a talented team in service of Couchsurfing’s inspiring and passionate community. Working with a stellar team is what gets me up in the morning. And to be able to do that for Couchsurfing and its community has been both amazing and humbling. There is nothing in the world that I value more than the power of human connection, and, like a good tech start-up junkie, I believe in the power of technology to facilitate that and to make the world a more open place. Couchsurfing does that in profound ways. I have the pleasure of seeing it every day. Under Tony’s leadership, the global CS community has doubled, which has been incredible to watch. I’m honored to be offered this opportunity, and to shepherd Couchsurfing, along with all of you, as the board conducts a search for a long-term CEO. Thanks for being here with me. I look forward to spending time with you all in the next few days as we continue to build momentum. My door is always open, and I’m always happy to talk, day or night. Jen
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Microsoft Updates Its Outlook.com Android App With Better Syncing, Storage, Colors And More
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today an update to its Android Outlook.com application, including server-side search, improved offline mail storage, colors, vacation replies, and aliases. Outlook.com, a key project for Microsoft, has over 400 million users. The successor to Hotmail, Outlook.com is Microsoft’s mail vision for all mobile platforms. According to Microsoft, 68% of Outlook.com users hit up their digital missives from their mobile device, so having a strong application set matters. If you are an Outlook,com and Android user, this update will contain at least a few things that you like. You can now sync all your mail to your device, if you want to burn the storage capacity. If you want to be able to find any message you want, but not download the lot, Microsoft has added server-side search to the Android app. A different question: How did it have that feature before? Microsoft has also added a new color set to the app, and introduced support for aliases, along with vacation replies. Taken altogether, the Android now appears to be a fully functional mail experience. I can’t imagine what using it previously was like. Before, over more than 10,000 ratings, Microsoft accrued a rating on the Play store of under three stars. You can . If you think that the addition of color is a minor update, by the way, you are picking an argument with Yahoo, who recently rolled out color changes to its Mail experience. Apparently it matters. Final note: The top three webmail experiences continue to nibble around the edges. When is someone going to reinvent this damn plague we call email?
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In Which Jack Dorsey Reads Us Some Poetry And Lists And Plays Us A Jazz Tune
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Ryan Lawler
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Jack Dorsey seems to be at the tech world’s center of attention, thanks to and an about the early days of Twitter, and whether or not he screwed over friends and coworkers in the early going. But the co-founder of Square and Twitter (a company which also just happens to be in a quiet period while it prepares for IPO) sidestepped any unnecessary or awkward questions that might have come his way at Y Combinator’s Startup School today. Instead of doing an interview or relaying anecdotes of his early founder days (like , , or Airbnb’s Nate Blecharczyk), Dorsey took the occasion to dispense wisdom by reading from a couple of his favorite books, as well as his own daily “Do” and “Don’t” list. First up: quotations from . In this section of the program, Dorsey noted the similarities between Henri’s descriptions of creating art and what it’s like to be a startup founder. In a nutshell, founders (like artists) need to find their own way to create products that they’re passionate about. That is, what matters is not so much the ideas themselves but the execution of those ideas. He followed that up with an extensive list of lists found in Bill Walsh’s . The legendary 49ers head coach wrote that book as a leadership manual, and former Square COO Keith Rabois gave it to Dorsey. Most of the advice listed involved how to be a leader (“be yourself,” “be committed to excellence,” “be positive”) and how to manage others (“exhibit patience,” “become best buddies with some employees”), giving founders a guide into how to navigate the difficult waters of managing teams (something that Dorsey reportedly wasn’t so effective at during his Twitter days). But the most fascinating bit might be Dorsey’s own use of lists. He told the crowd that he creates notes for each person he meets, building detailed lists of important things that come from meetings with them, or that he’d like to relay to get things done. He also has a “Do” and “Don’t” list that he takes a look at daily. That Do list is as follows: And the “Don’ts”: At the end of the presentation, he played a jazz tune for the audience that I didn’t recognize. It was inspiring.
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Airbnb Has Now Served 9M Guests Since Being Founded, Up From 4M At The End Of Last Year
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Ryan Lawler
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Airbnb continues to grow at an amazing pace, and now has served a total of 9 million guests in the five years since being founded. At event today, Airbnb co-founder and CTO Nate Blecharczyk demonstrated what hockey stick-like growth looks like after several years in a row. “What happens when you append five hockey sticks together? What does that look like? That’s a really big hockey stick,” Blecharczyk asked after showing the growth charts of Airbnb’s last five years in a row, followed by the overall growth in its bookings. The numbers are pretty incredible: It took four years for Airbnb to serve its — a number which has grown to 9 million in the nine months since the end of last year. In the time since CEO Brian Chesky spoke at YC’s Startup School in 2010, the service has grown more than 73x, according to Blecharczyk. But while the company has seen its bookings go dramatically up and to the right over time, it wasn’t always easy to get people on board. The first several years of Airbnb were a struggle to get the service up and running and to attract interest from investors. “If you are successful, this will be the hardest thing you will do,” Blecharczyk told the audience. Airbnb was famously founded after Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia rented out air beds in their apartment to help make rent. But the founding team had a hard time building a service that took care of all user needs, and one that investors were interested in putting money into. In fact, it took several years before it became anywhere near what the product is today. Some of that iteration came as a result of mistakes that were made along the way. Blecharczyk related an anecdote in which, after launching shortly before SXSW in 2008, Chesky stayed at the home of one of the company’s first hosts. But things got uncomfortable after he forgot to hit an ATM two days in a row, and the host began to wonder when he might get paid. This is when Airbnb decided it should start handling payments for guests and hosts. The team also realized that it wasn’t just a platform for booking lodging during major events, when users began asking if they could find listings for casual travel. One of the biggest takeaways from the speech was that founders need to be resilient and keep trying, even when they face difficult odds. That’s especially true when they hit the so-called “trough of sorrow”: the lull in activity after a big event or growth spurt, like what Airbnb felt after the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver. Not long after that, the Airbnb founders refocused their energies and worked to become “ramen profitable” while attending Y Combinator. It’s there that the team received some of their best advice. For instance, Paul Buchheit’s suggestion that they try to serve a few users that love their product, rather than many who just like it. They also took to heart Paul Graham’s advice to “do things that don’t scale.” That led Gebbia and Chesky to go to New York City and meet with some of their best hosts, snap photos of their apartment, and help them to improve their listings. It’s after the founders did that for 20-40 of its users that the service started to gain traction in that market. Ultimately, that resulted in seed investment from Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo not long after, but Blecharczyk warned not to overlook all the hard work that came before. “So much happened so quickly. It looks really easy, but the journey is a really tough one,” he said.
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Loop: The Future Of Mobile Payments Or A Temporary Fix?
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Sarah Perez
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is a new mobile payments startup making some fairly big claims. The company says it has invented a technology that lets you pay with your phone at nearly any point-of-sale across the U.S., without requiring merchants to upgrade their hardware. Nor do you have to own a particular device, like those NFC-based smartphones required for mobile payment services like or . Instead, consumers can either use a dongle plugged into their smartphone or a special charge case that is simply held close to the magnetic stripe reader (the place you swipe your credit card) at checkout. Seemingly like magic, the payment processes as if you had swiped your card as usual. If mobile payments were this easy, though, why hadn’t someone launched technology like Loop’s years ago? The answer has to do with how complicated the payments industry is, as well as the challenge that lies in changing consumer behavior on a broader scale. But Loop co-founder and CEO thinks they’ve figured it out. Graylin has an extensive background in the industry, having previously founded others in the mobile and payments space, including WAY Systems (sold to VeriFone) and ROAM Data ( ), among others. Loop’s other co-founder and chief technologist, (Hypercom founder), meanwhile, was a pioneer in the early days of magstripe technology. At ROAM Data, which Wallner also invested in as he has now done with Loop, the company was in the business of supplying Square’s competitors with similar dongles for mobile point-of-sale solutions, including names like Intuit, PayPal, and PayAnywhere, for example. Working together on various companies for a decade or so, the two came together to focus their efforts on the mobile payments space from the consumer side, following . “At ROAM Data, we were thinking about mobile commerce as a platform – not only mobile POS, but also mobile checkout, mobile promotions, and mobile wallet,” says Graylin. All the pieces need to work together to close the loop, he explains. They also were thinking about NFC and why that technology hadn’t yet taken off, and realized that asking merchants to change things on their end was the problem. The trick, the founders believe, is in using the POS systems and technology already out there, then getting the consumer on board with their proposed solution. “The one common interface is the magstripe reader, but that was never meant to be a contactless reader,” says Graylin. But Wallner came up with a fix to that problem. He engineered a way to induce a strong-enough magnetic signal to emulate the same signal you would get when you moved the magnetic stripe across the reader by swiping your credit card at checkout. Wallner got this contactless magstripe transmission to work in late 2012, calling it Magnetic Secure Transmission, or MST for short. For those interested in the physics of the technology, a quote from helps to fill in the blanks: MST technology generates changing magnetic fields over a short period of time. This is accomplished by putting alternating current through an inductive loop, which can then be received by the magnetic read head of the credit card reader. This signal received emulates the same magnetic field change over time as when a magstripe card is swiped across the same read head. Loop works within 4 inches from the read head; the field dissipates rapidly beyond that point, and only exists during a transmission initiated by the user (as opposed to NFC). It’s not hogwash. We spoke off record to other magstripe experts with no horse in the race, so to speak, to get their thoughts. And they admit that, technically speaking, the system works. It does work. Testers are , which is live right now. MST works nearly anywhere magstripe is accepted, except in a few locations, like gas pumps or ATMs where the reader is encased deep in plastic or requires you insert your card (such as when it sucks in your card for you) in order to trigger a switch that turns the magstripe reader on. A few older PC-based point-of-sale software solutions will also be exceptions. But overall, Loop works at over 90 percent of the point-of-sale terminals used in the U.S. today, without any changes to the hardware on the merchant side, or a phone upgrade on your part (beyond buying Loop’s accessories). But when it comes to payments, things aren’t quite as simple as getting things to just function. First of all, there’s the security problem. Loop sells a smartphone dongle called the , which allows consumers to load their payment cards into their mobile wallet (a smartphone app installed on the phone). To prevent thieves from using the dongle as a skimmer, the company first has to bind the device to a user’s Loop account. That is, when a card is loaded by swiping it through the dongle – similar to the way you’d swipe when paying with Square – Loop checks the name on the card with the name on the Loop account on the phone. This prevents someone from simply grabbing people’s wallets and quickly loading the victims’ payments cards into their own Loop app on their phone. Once authenticated, the card data is stored encrypted on the Loop device, be it the dongle or the other Loop product, , a Mophie-like case that serves both as the payment mechanism and as a way to keep your phone’s battery juiced throughout your day. The keychain ($34) and ($99, 1200 mAh battery) will ship in Q1 2014, and a premium shipping in Q2 (1500 mAh battery and much thinner) will follow. Another product will be a that can be handed to cashiers for swiping when their POS system is behind the counter. In addition to holding your mobile cards loaded through the dongle, the Loop mobile app is similar to something like as it also lets you snap photos of other cards you carry around in your physical wallet, like ID and membership cards, gift cards, or even those keychain tags with the printed barcodes. At point-of-sale, you hold your phone near the reader and press the “transmit” button on the Loop device or software. The system is in field trials now and will launch near year-end when Loop devices start to ship. But even with the security in place and the technology functioning, there’s still the issue of getting the rest of the industry on board with the solution. In the payments world, a transaction where a card is not swiped is considered a “card not present” transaction, and merchants have to pay higher rates because of the increased possibility of fraudulent transactions. While for now, something like Loop works as a “card present” transaction because it’s essentially tricking the POS hardware into thinking a card has been swiped. But if this grew in popularity among consumers with official industry acceptance and standardization, the industry players – card issuers, banks, even retailers – could eventually figure out a way to fight back. But Graylin is no spring chicken here. He knows he can’t go it alone. “We’re working with card issuers that want to provide this as a safer and more convenient solution for their card holders,” he claims. Though he can’t provide their names due to NDA agreements, he says Loop is in discussions with some of the largest issuers in the world. And they’re even talking with those making the incompatible gas stations POS readers about a software solution. “We’re industry veterans,” Graylin admits. “We’re just going after the grassroots feel.” He explains that the $100,000 they’re “raising” on is not about the money, it’s about gaining access to the “world’s largest focus group” and getting early feedback from beta testers. Graylin and Wallner have already put a couple of million of their own money into Loop, and are in the middle of raising their first outside round — a $10 million Series A — from the same angels who have invested in their previous companies. They also already have 25 employees and 15 contractors working in their Boston headquarters, as well as in California, Florida, Denver, and even in China (to handle the manufacturing and hardware side of the business). And to address the elephant in the room, yes: they know that the U.S.’s transition to (chip cards, a replacement for magstripe technology, like what’s used in Europe) is only years away. The U.S. is supposed to ). Graylin first points out that terminals accepting magstripe will still be around for a long time, and is also skeptical the deadline will be met. Still, it’s a problem for Loop: after consumers receive their EMV-enabled cards, they won’t be able to swipe them (or trick terminals into “swiping” them via Loop) when at an EMV-enabled POS system. For Loop, getting past this particular hurdle is the difference between creating a clever, but ultimately transitional mobile payments solution, and one that fundamentally changes the way consumers pay at point-of-sale. And to be clear, that’s something that no one, not Apple, Google, Visa, MasterCard, banks, carriers, or other startups (excluding to some small extent Square, with its say-your-name-at-checkout feature) – have managed to do. So what’s the plan? “We found a new interface with the magstripe reader in such a way that the transmission to that magstripe reader can now be dynamic. We can even add the level of security that’s much stronger than even the magstripe that’s on your plastic,” Graylin says. He claims also that the major card issuers are now working with Loop to create a dynamic mobile card. They’re asking Loop if there’s now a way to dynamically encrypt (tokenize) the data so they can use the same transmission means (the magnetic interface) for these mobile cards. Discussions, however, are not commitments. Everything is under NDA and in early stages of exploration for now. There’s the potential that the issuers will buy in, because this could offer them something they want — a way to communicate with consumers via their phones, to say things like: “thanks for your business”; “here’s an offer or deal”; “check your balance”; and so on. Getting the issuers to do this would be a selling point for consumers, too, who today may not see an advantage in using Loop over just swiping a card. But if their payment cards became interactive, mobile cards while still secured in a PIN-protected app, that might be worth something. As would be the that could potentially follow. There’s still the very real risk that Loop will not fully convince the key players that its solution is not only as good, if not better, than EMV, but can effectively work beside EMV, too, even as the U.S. transition occurs. And if it can’t, then Loop has a shelf life that will ultimately expire. But for a mere $35 – $99+, depending on your device preference, you can at least enjoy a couple of years where you can pretend to live in a modern world where phones work like credit cards, before all the rules and regulations get in the way. [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop width=480]
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Optimizely CEO Dan Siroker’s Trick For How To Test Investors, Board Members
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Dan Siroker, the co-founder and CEO of Optimizely, a Y Combinator-backed company that helps businesses A/B test their webpages, says he’s got a trick for testing prospective investors. He runs them through mock board meetings, he told founders and hackers at Y Combinator’s Startup School today in Cupertino. Siroker says that the classic ways founders meet potential board members don’t work. They’re usually in fancy dinners or pitch meetings on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where it’s hard to tell what an investor will have to offer a prospective company. So when Optimizely was raising, they held fake board meetings to see who could offer the company the best guidance. Ultimately, to lead the company’s unusually large $28 million Series A round. Siroker said Fenton didn’t fit what the founders originally thought they were looking for in a board member. “He wasn’t technical. He didn’t have operational experience,” Siroker said. “But what he did have was a very good way of helping us get better in the feedback he gave us. He focused on asking the right questions, not on prescribing us the right answers.” Optimizely is now a growth-stage company with a team of 130 people. Last year, they cleared $7.6 million in revenue with a team of 42 people, up from a team of 10 people and $1.2 million in revenue in 2011. “We haven’t looked back,” he said.
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Twitter Exec Makes Really Inopportune BART Strike Joke
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Alexia Tsotsis
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The thing about race, class, religion and gender is that, for the most part, they are out of people’s control. This all-encompassing feeling of lack of control is why, when chronically underpaid service professionals like teachers or transport workers strike, there is an equally out-of-control discussion around the societal and economic value of these professionals. It becomes the real-life version of our comments section. Twitter, which is a) a service I love and b) the Earth’s comments section, has obviously with the San Francisco . There is a pervasive and fallacious idea that the tech sector, which is SF’s Hollywood, which implies that individuals — by virtue or smarts or gumption — control their place in it and the world. There is also a tendency to who doesn’t ascribe or fit in to as just not working hard enough, or . But, going , there a lot of demand for these workers, or at least for these workers to return to work — from both tech operatives and from people outside And, fittingly enough, one of Twitter’s own employees has added to the Twitter BART discussion, since deleted: “What’s brown and black and looks great on someone causing the #BARTstrike? A Doberman. (Toooo angry? Long day in the car.)” — Yeah, probably too angry. For what it’s worth Twitter Head of Global Operations for Media, did write, “whoever caused” the strike, not the people who are striking, couching his words finely so that he could be referring to the workers or the management. Still, wishing violence on anyone is not a professional thing. In fact, it’s indecent and inhuman — especially since two BART workers on the job in an accident a day after his comments. As far as I know, no one ever died trying to make Internet ads more clickable.
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CrunchWeek: Earnings Week Winners And Losers, Netflix Cozying Up To Comcast, Path Layoffs
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Colleen Taylor
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In this episode, , and I talk about the and news from the latest quarterly earnings reports and , Netflix’s with Comcast and what that says about the larger video ecosystem, and private social networking startup Path laying off .
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Phil Libin On Evernote’s Close Call: Just 3 Weeks of Cash Left During The 2008 Financial Crisis
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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While Evernote and a valuation that’s reportedly more than $1 billion, the company faced many close calls. In fact, it had just three weeks of cash left during the 2008 financial crisis when an investor bailed at the last minute, said CEO Phil Libin today at Y Combinator’s Startup School in Cupertino. The investor dialed Libin saying they had seen 60 percent of their fund value vanish into thin air as equity markets crashed on Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy filing. They called Libin and told him, “We’re not going to do it.” “We panicked,” he said. “I spent a week frantically calling everyone that I knew.” Because he had entered “exclusivity” in those financing talks, Libin had given up his right to move discussions with other investors further along. So he was left in a lurch. With two weeks left of funding, Libin made the painful decision to shut down Evernote and fire everyone. (He said that you can’t burn your cash all the way down to zero because you need reserves for the legal costs of shutting down a company.) “I remember sitting there at 3 a.m. thinking that this is what it must feel like to be an adult,” he said. “This is what it feels like — making adult decisions. This sucks.” But then something just short of a miracle happened. A passionate Evernote user from Sweden dialed him up. He told Libin that he had been using the product for two months. He said it had changed his life — it had made him happier and more organized. Libin remembered thinking, “That’s nice. This makes me feel better. Maybe if you can make a difference to one random guy in Sweden, that’s enough.” The user, who asked to remain unnamed, went on to offer some investment. Twenty minutes later, they ended up on a Skype call and then within about a week or so, the investor had wired Evernote a half-million dollars. That gave the young company enough runway to prove traction and fix a complicated legal structure that had scared off earlier investors. They went on to secure investment from Japan’s DoCoMo Capital, then several rounds of financing with participation from Sequoia Capital. After talking about his close call, Libin also offered a couple key pieces of advice to young founders. “I think the most important thing at a young age that you can do is cultivate a group of brilliant, high-energy, willing-to-work-for-free, best friends for life.” He said many of his key people from his earlier companies like Engine Five have stayed with him through Evernote. He joked, “You shouldn’t even make friends with people you couldn’t see starting a company with. Why bother? You only have so many friends you can have.” Evernote was originally formed out of a merger between two companies — between Libin’s startup and that of another company in Silicon Valley that was working on the same idea. “We were way too clever with the legal structure. It basically made us un-fundable for a couple of years,” Libin said. “This was all a mistake. The personalities between the two teams were great. We were able to build something fantastic. But until we were worth enough, we had to unwind and fix it. The fact that we were clever — trying to preserve this unconventional structure — probably cost us 18 months.” He said Evernote was the first company that he’s been passionate enough about to work on for life. (His earlier companies relied on contracts with companies and government agencies.) With Evernote, he tried to do something different. “I thought — let’s build a company we want to keep. Let’s explicitly say there is no exit strategy. Let’s make something sufficiently epic to be our life’s work.” And Libin says this matters now because the larger a company gets, the harder the job gets. “It gets better. But it doesn’t get easier,” he said. “If what you’re trying to optimize for is making things easier, this isn’t it. This gets harder and harder all the time. It’s not fun day to day. Month to month, it’s really gratifying. It’s vastly satisfying. But the only reason this works, is because we found something sufficiently epic to do. “Five years ago, it would have been stupid advice to build something for yourself. But now if you build something that you love, that you believe is sufficiently epic, there might be another billion people in the world who love it, too — unless you’re weird.”
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The Key To Entrepreneurial Success In South Asia
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Contributor
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Asia are obsessed with Silicon Valley, as is much of the world these days. Social media and mass media have combined to create the perception that geeks from the Bay Area are a breed apart. The combination of skinny jeans, hipster glasses and confident personalities like Dave McClure or Steve Blank, it seems, is irresistible. But this style has nothing to do with building a great company. Solving important problems does, and for anyone not in Silicon Valley, that means focusing on their own markets and not what seems to be cool. Countries like Sri Lanka and India have what it takes to be uniquely brilliant and entrepreneurial. South Asian entrepreneurs need to know and believe this. If they do not, South Asia will never become a center for innovation, creating the game-changing products and services their local economy demands and our global economy could benefit from. I say this having spent the last couple of years traveling across India and Sri Lanka connecting with the startup community, recruiting local talent for my own venture, and listening to more than 200 pitches. I recently spent three weeks visiting with accelerators, incubators, and institutes on behalf of the State Department’s and discovered that founders’ obsessions with the Valley prevents them from solving local problems. The paradox I’m seeing is this: The bulk of the world’s economic growth will come from regions like India and China, and although they may have cyclical slowdowns, these markets are necessary to the world economy. In India, the story is not just about tech support and engineering offices. Product startups have been developing through accelerators like or and incubators like and . And various business communities are developing their own nationwide programs to support fledgling companies. For instance, (National Association of Software and Services Companies) has undergone efforts to get India more product-focused. To this end, the organization has devised goals to create events and programming to help inspire 10,000 product companies by 2022. Even Uber, in some ways a symbol of “developed” cities getting even more sophisticated, just launched in Bangalore. But if the best entrepreneurial minds here are trying to copy the next Snapchat, they probably won’t be building products that the market truly demands in India. And the region won’t live up to the hype. “Solving large local problems is one easy way for Asian startups to differentiate and sustain a competitive edge,” says Mukund Mohan, director of Microsoft Ventures. “Since customers are also local, the ability to get quick feedback and iterate rapidly will help them grow faster to achieve scale.” One example of this is , the . By introducing COD (Cash on Delivery), Flipkart has been able to convince consumers to buy online by allowing them to pay with cash instead of credit cards. This twist on traditional e-commerce is a major reason why the company was valued at $1.5 billion. Unfortunately, this example is an outlier. So what are the issues that arise as a result of this infatuation with the Valley? First, countries like India and Sri Lanka blindly implement Western approaches to cultivating entrepreneurship. Asian cultures tend to not be as “individualistic” as Western cultures, and the next breakthrough entrepreneur may not be a rebel like Steve Jobs. They tend to be more motivated by social reputation and intimacy than their Western counterparts. As an Indian-American entrepreneur, I understand this. As a result, it is necessary to create approaches that uniquely address these differences. For example, showcasing entrepreneurship as a credible path is extremely important, as family acceptance is ingrained deeply in the DNA of South Asians. “Entrepreneurship is still a taboo for most Indian parents,” says Cherian Thomas, founder of . “Failure is too bitter a pill to digest and people fear society’s ostracization. A stable salaried career offers all the perks in life and is good enough for most. Besides, we are yet to have a Zuckerberg for inspiration.” Second, key internal aspects of running a startup are also different, such as financing options and lean startup approaches. I recently had the opportunity to watch a Tech-Connect stream with a room full of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs. Tech-Connect is basically a video panel of American entrepreneurs preaching to foreigners. As a (GIST) initiative, it is one of the U.S. government’s methods for fostering innovation abroad. I listened not as an American, but as a Sri Lankan. I felt transported, and it was as if I were part of a sci-fi movie where this Silicon Valley panel was a group of tech gods. The audience hung on the panel’s every word like it was life or death. The problem was that the information disseminated was not only incorrect in the local context, but was also presented as incontrovertible fact. For example, convertible debt was advocated as the only way to raise “early” capital, $100K seed rounds were categorized as small, and crowdfunding was viewed as a viable option. In Sri Lanka, most rounds are priced and equity-based, and $100K is considered to be a large investment since the cost of living is substantially lower. Thankfully, was there to offer the “it depends” perspective, otherwise this would have been a complete waste of time. As Silicon Valley spreads knowledge, it is important for us to adjust to the local context, and entrepreneurs from other countries need to call bullshit when we don’t. Beyond deciding to start a company and figuring out how to run one, there’s also the issue of what results founders in South Asia want. To build something big or build something that looks like a Silicon Valley company that might get bought by a Silicon Valley company. From what I’ve seen, it feels like the goal of getting acquired by a Facebook or Google is over-prioritized. Several entrepreneurs are trying to create the next hot social app. I have seen Quora, Instagram and Path copycats in just the last couple weeks. This is a waste of talent, and a sure-fire way to turn away foreign direct investment or local capital. There are bigger and more relevant opportunities if these innovators would just recognize the unmet needs right before their eyes, such as better infrastructure, agriculture and mobile solutions. “The Indian market is very different from most western countries,” says Abhishek Gupta, partner at TLABs. “Though the opportunities are great, the customer behaviour and purchasing patterns are very different. What works in the Valley may not work here, and even if it does, the purchase behaviour and distribution mechanism will most certainly be different. Deals sites are a good example of this. Groupon caught on quickly but most deal sites in India shut down a year or two later.” That said, there are few companies leading the charge. As Pankaj Jain, venture partner at 500 Startups, aptly points out, companies like , , , and are approaching innovation in India with an “indo-flare.” ZipDial is leveraging the common social interaction of “missed calls” to drive polling and contests instead of Internet-dependent solutions like Twitter, while Innoz makes SMS-based applications for the masses who do not have connectivity. Eko Financial provides low-income workers in urban areas to send money to their homes using mobile phones, while InVenture is a global credit-scoring service. “The real opportunity for smart, savvy entrepreneurs is to solve the problems plaguing them and their fellow Indians on a daily basis,” Pankaj says. “There really is no shortage of problems, big or small. Solving these problems for three-quarters of a billion people who don’t have access to smartphones, tablets or computers is exciting.” In addition, innovations in sustainable agriculture like Lifeline Agriculture, which connects farmers with quality information or management tools that help increase accountability from construction workers, are uniquely . These are a few that are taking local innovation seriously. We need to stop idolizing Silicon Valley. We should seek to learn about and collaborate with international ecosystems, not just preach to them. Efforts like 500 Startups’ Geeks on a Plane or bringing different “local” experts into the GIST’s Tech-Connect mix are examples. Silicon Valley is amazing. It’s why so many of the worlds smartest geeks flock here. However, it’s amazing because it supports the needs of our well-developed economy. South Asia should stop glamorizing the Valley and start looking within to find solutions. Only then will genuine innovation evolve. After all, there is much we could learn and gain from places like Sri Lanka and India.
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Former News Corp Exec Greg Clayman Joins Vimeo
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Ryan Lawler
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News Corp executive Greg Clayman has left his position with the company to join video distribution firm Vimeo as its general manager of audience networks. The news was first , and later confirmed by Vimeo. Clayman had previously served as publisher of the digital-only news publication , and after that took on a new role as News Corp’s EVP of digital strategy and business development. At IAC-owned Vimeo, Clayman will report to Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor and will be tasked with growing the number of viewers who tune in to videos on its platform. That number is currently around 100 million, which isn’t bad but could be better.
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Walmart Labs’ Subscription Snack Service Goodies.co Will Shut Down
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Ryan Lawler
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Last year, Walmart Labs jumped on the subscription commerce bandwagon with a new service called in order to compete with a range of startups offering monthly boxes of goodies to customers. But the service, which has , will be shut down over the next few weeks. To recap, Goodies.co was one of several projects that Walmart Labs has developed since launching as the Silicon Valley-based innovation arm of the brick-and-mortar retailer. The idea is to see what works, what doesn’t, and hopefully apply some of those learnings to the larger Walmart business. With Goodies.co, that meant developing its own subscription commerce business. With the growth of Birchbox and services like it, there was a bit of a rush among e-commerce companies to begin offering various other types of products — including everything from snacks to underwear — on a monthly, recurring basis. Goodies.co promised a box of six-to-eight snack samples for just $7 each month. At launch, there were already a number of similar products out on the market, including and , but the Walmart Labs service severely undercut most of them on price. It appears that plan hasn’t quite worked out: We’ve heard that Goodies.co will soon send email to subscribers — perhaps as soon as next week — that it will discontinue its monthly deliveries. A company representative confirmed the shutdown to us by email, but also said that learnings from Goodies.co will be applied to other products: Yes, we are making changes to the program, and we’re always testing new ideas and concepts. Many graduate in their initial form like Polaris and Get on the Shelf, while some end up being applied in other forms. We are letting Goodies customers know we will discontinue shipping boxes, but the technology and learnings from Goodies have enabled several new products we are incorporating into our mainline Walmart.com business. More details will be shared in the coming months.
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The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Reinventing Yourself
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James Altucher
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Here are the rules: I’ve been at zero a few times, come back a few times, and done it over and over. I’ve started entire new careers. People who knew me then, don’t me now. And so on. I’ve had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me. There are other ways to reinvent yourself, so take what I say with a grain of salt. This is what worked for me. I’ve seen it work for maybe a few hundred other people. Through interviews, through people writing me letters, through the course of the past 20 years. You can try it or not. Every day you reinvent yourself. You’re always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward. Every label you claim you have from before is just vanity. You were a doctor? You were Ivy League? You had millions? You had a family? Nobody cares. You lost everything. You’re a zero. Don’t try to say you’re anything else. Else, you’ll sink to the bottom. Someone has to show you how to move and breathe. But don’t worry about finding a mentor (see below). You have passion for your health. Start there. Take baby steps. You don’t need a passion to succeed. Do what you do with love and success is a natural symptom. Here’s a description of the five years: Sometimes I get frustrated in years 1-4. I say, “why isn’t it happening yet?” and I punch the floor and hurt my hand and throw a coconut on the floor in a weird ritual. That’s okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field. It doesn’t matter. Eventually you’re dead and then it’s hard to reinvent yourself. Google is a good example. When people say “it’s not about the money” they should make sure they have a different measuring stick. “What about just doing what you love?” There will be many days when you don’t love what you are doing. If you are doing it just for love then it will take much much longer than five years. Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It’s not who we are. Today. Today. If you want to paint, then buy a canvas and paints today, start buying 500 books one at a time, and start painting. If you want to write do these three things: If you want to start a business, start spec-ing out the idea for your business. Reinvention starts today. Every day. By year three you’ve put in 5,000-7,000 hours. That’s good enough to be in the top 200-300 in the world in anything. The top 200 in almost any field makes a living. By year three you will know how to make money. By year four you will scale that up and make a living. Some people stop at year four. Whatever area you feel like reading 500 books about. Go to the bookstore and find it. If you get bored three months later go back to the bookstore. It’s okay to get disillusioned. That’s what failure is about. Success is better than failure but the biggest lessons are found in failure. Very important: There’s no rush. You will reinvent yourself many times in an interesting life. You will fail to reinvent many times. That’s fun also. Many reinventions make your life a book of stories instead of a textbook. Some people want the story of their life to be a textbook. For better or worse, mine is a book of stories. That’s why reinvention happens every day. . Make interesting choices and you will have an interesting biography. Repeat all of the steps above, and then in year five you will make wealth. We have no idea how. Don’t look to find the end of the road when you are still at the very first step. How many years of your life did you promise your family? Ten years? Your whole life? Then wait until the next life. The good thing is: you get to choose. Choose freedom over family. Freedom over preconceptions. Freedom over government. Freedom over people-pleasing. Then you will be pleased. That’s fine. Learn HIS way. Then do it YOUR way. With respect. Hopefully nobody has a gun to your head. Then you have to do it their way until the gun is put down. Then after you work 16 hours a day, seven days a week being a janitor, use your spare time to reinvent. Someone who is reinventing ALWAYS has spare time. Part of reinvention is collecting little bits and pieces of time and re-carving them the way you want them to be. What friends? That’s not a reinvention. That’s a specific job. If you like “outer space” there are many careers. Richard Branson wanted to be an astronaut and started Virgin Galactic. Read this post again in a year. Read this post again in two or three years when you are broke and jobless and nobody likes you. Read “B” again. Read “B” again. Read “R” again. Albert Einstein was on the outside looking in. Nobody in the establishment would even hire him. Everyone feels like a fraud at some point. The highest form of creativity is born out of skepticism. Give up. Reinvention will boost every healthy chemical in your body: serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. Keep moving forward and you might not get healthy but you will get healthier. Don’t use health as an excuse. Finally, reinvent your health first. Sleep more hours. Eat better. Exercise. These are key steps to reinvention. Stop litigating and never think about him again. Half the problem was you, not him. Perfect. Reread “B.” Read a lot of books in jail. Make your weaknesses your strengths. Introverts listen better, focus better, and have ways of being more endearing. If you plan on being alive in five years then you might as well start today. Make concentric circles. You’re at the middle. The next circle is friends and family. The next circle is online communities. The circle after that is meetups and coffees. The circle after that is conferences and thought leaders. The circle after that is mentors. The circle after that is customers and wealth-creators. Start making your way through the circles. In 6-12 months you’ll be back at “B” Combine them and you’ll be the best in the world at the combination. Start teaching on YouTube. Start with an audience of one and see if it builds up. In year four, start outsourcing what you do. Once you have enough knowledge (after 100-200 books), write down 10 ideas for 20 different potential mentors. None of them will respond. Write down 10 more ideas for 20 new mentors. Repeat every week. Put together a newsletter for everyone who doesn’t respond. Keep repeating until someone responds. Blog about your learning efforts. Build community around you being an expert. Then keep practicing coming up with ideas. The idea muscle atrophies. You have to build it up. It’s hard for me to touch my toes if I haven’t been doing it every day. I have to do it every day for a while before I can easily touch my toes. Don’t expect to come up with good ideas on day one. AFTER books, read websites, forums, magazines. But most of that is garbage. It will work. Just wait. Keep reinventing every day. Don’t try and find the end of the road. You can’t see it in the fog. But you can see the next step and you know that if you take that next step eventually you get to the end of the road. Sit in silence for one hour a day. You need to get back to your core. If you think this sounds stupid then don’t do it. Stay depressed. Then sit in silence for two hours a day. This is not meditation. This is just sitting. Sleep 8-9 hours a day and never gossip. Sleep is the No. 1 key to successful health. It’s not the only key. It’s just No. 1. Some people write to me and say, “I only need four hours of sleep” or “in my country sleeping means laziness.” Well, those people will fail and die young. What about gossip? The brain biologically wants to have 150 friends. Then when you are with one of your friends you can gossip about any of the other 150. If you don’t have 150 friends then the brain wants to read gossip magazines until it thinks it has 150 friends. Don’t be as stupid as your brain. Spend 10 minutes a day practicing gratitude. Don’t suppress the fear. Notice the anger. But also allow yourself to be grateful for the things you do have. Anger is never inspirational but gratitude is. Gratitude is the bridge between your world and the parallel universe where all creative ideas live. Find new people to be around. Someone who is reinventing herself will constantly find people to try and bring her down. The brain is scared of reinvention because it might not be safe. Biologically, the brain wants you to be safe and reinvention is a risk. So it will throw people in your path who will try to stop you. Learn how to say “no.” Good luck. Don’t trust me. You’ve just read this post.
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Gillmor Gang: Bluetooth Nipple Rings
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013
| 10
| 19
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — demonstrate once again a complete disregard for the trending topics of the week. Instead, we talk bodyware, iBeam fashion design, the things that are still dead, and a healthy component of digital dish disguised as news. Excerpt from the : Most people think they use tech for rational reasons, Steve. Your observation is what’s going on beneath those reasons. – Tom Guarriello
push notifications? idk thats steve’s default answer ha – Matthew Voshell
with the free market there is always going to be multiple channels. like multiple carriers – Matthew Voshell
You’re asking for a Message Blender. – Murray Macdonald
Twitter is just the subject line of email. DM is just email. It’s all just email done differently. – Todd Hoff
I love these end-of-show wrapups by Steve. It’s like, OK I’ve listened to all this shit. This is what’s really going on. – Amyloo
Why can I hear Doc Now? What changed? – Murray Macdonald
he shut down lightroom – Matthew Voshell @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dsearls, @kteare, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Microsoft Yanks Windows RT 8.1 Update “Temporarily” Following Discovery Of A “Situation”
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013
| 10
| 19
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If you are a Windows RT user looking forward to moving to Windows RT 8.1, you can’t — at least for a little while. Today Microsoft removed the update from the Windows Store following the discovery of a “situation” that was “affecting a limited number of users updating their Windows RT devices to Windows RT 8.1.” So the code is now unavailable “temporarily” while Microsoft fixes whatever the heck is wrong. The issue appears to impact the booting cycle of some machines after they update. Microsoft is likely pissed that it had to yank the update – it was hoping for a very smooth Windows 8.1 update cycle. Still, if the error had been present in the vanilla Windows 8.1 update, and not its RT flavor, the embarrassment would have been greatly magnified. Windows RT, of course, is a sliver when compared with Windows 8. Aside from this error, the Windows 8.1 release cycle has been mostly smooth. There were reports of individual user problems, and a general meme was that the update process took longer than expected, but worked. Until today. How many Windows RT users are there? I don’t know, but given that the majority are presumably Surface RT users, Microsoft is delaying those who both bought into its hardware efforts as well as its new software platform. That’s not a very good Saturday for the company. Peter Bright of Ars Technica has : To call this embarrassing for Microsoft is something of an understatement. While x86 PCs have extraordinary diversity, in terms of hardware, software, and drivers—all things that can prevent straightforward upgrading—the Windows RT devices are extremely limited in this regard. Upgrading Windows RT tablets should be absolutely bulletproof. It’s very disappointing that it isn’t. Precisely. We’ll have preliminary market share numbers for Windows 8.1 upgrade cycle next week, though I don’t expect this specific bug to move those numbers too much.
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Seene Uses Computer Vision To Create Unique And Eerie 3D Images On iPhone
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013
| 10
| 19
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It’s not often that I use a new ‘photo capture’ app and impressed by it within seconds. It’s not that there’s not a lot of cool stuff being built out there, it’s just that the frontiers are getting closer and easier to predict. That’s , an app by computer vision company Obvious Engineering that leverages smartphone sensors and WebGL to present curious and eerie 3D scenes. The app is the product of four-man team including CEO Andrew McPhee and CTO Sam Hare. The ‘seenes’ themselves are images mapped onto a rough 3D model of your subject that give the feeling of being able to shift perspective even after you’ve shot it. This produces small three-dimensional digital dioramas of a moment in time and space. The capture process is simple. You tap on the capture button to shoot an image and then turn your device to capture the sides, top and bottom of your subject. Just a few degrees will do. The image is then processed and mapped onto a simple object that approximates 3D space. You can then view it in 3D or share it with others.
There are a couple of interesting components to Seene, in my view. First, it has the same sort of post-capture feel that Lytro, the focus-stacking camera that everyone loves but that has failed to gain an immense amount of traction in its current hardware form. The power of that kind of experience is interesting in the way that it ‘explodes’ these static images out into things that approximate human vision. In the case of Lytro it’s the way that our eyes nearly instantly re-focus when they travel from object to object. With Seene, it’s our simple but compelling binocular vision that creates a feeling of ‘being there’. Seene is also an experience that couldn’t exist in the way that it does without the smartphone, something it has in common with other interesting services like FrontBack and Vine. You couldn’t capture a Seene without a mobile camera in your pocket attached to accelerometers and a powerful dual-core processor that renders the images. The only mass-produced product like this that’s ever been made is the smartphone.
The processing power required is one reason that only iPhone 4S and newer devices can create Seenes, though most other devices can view them. There have been plenty of other experiments using computer vision to model 3D scenes on the web, but Seene doesn’t use cloud processing to accomplish the unique images it produces. Instead everything, from capture to mapping to processing is done right on the device. And the processing time is nearly instantaneous, a fully rendered Seene pops up almost immediately after shooting on new devices like the iPhone 5s. Obvious Engineering was founded in March of 2012 and typically works on projects for clients using their computer vision expertise. Seene, says McPhee came out of a desire of the team to build “something that was our idea.” “Photos drive social communication,” McPhee says and that made them want to do something on a ‘mass scale’ that had the potential to reach hundreds of millions of users. It’s the first thing they’ve attempted to do on this scale. The experience of viewing a Seene in the hand is fairly visceral, as tilting your hand or body will move the 3D image around as if you were ‘looking around the corner’ of an image. I’ve experienced the desire to do that with really compelling images before, but this is the first time I’ve been able to do it and the effect has really impressed me. You can also view Seenes in browsers that are WebGL compatible like Chrome and new versions of Safari. Hare says they’ve had testers in London like directors and photographers producing compelling material that ‘feels’ like a photograph but do things with the app that they hadn’t foreseen. McPhee says that these results come from users who have “different ways of looking at the world.” And indeed some of the , though it does take a bit of experimentation to get results that look great. In my experience, the best subjects are shot at a medium distance, not close up. Moving subjects aren’t really an option at this point though an image of a fountain I shot did give off the impression that water droplets were hovering in mid-air, very cool. The team is bootstrapped currently but looking for funding. I’m not sure what kind of future an app like Seene has at scale without the welcoming arms of a larger entity. But the initial experience is fairly compelling. The dangers here, of course, is that there are all sorts of compelling silos and feeds out there vying for our attention. Instagram, Vine, FrontBack and more all create vertical streams of cool, clever things. But there are only so many hours in the day. Is Seene compelling enough to slice off a chunk of that time? If it gets enough traction and people take to the unique ‘seenes’ that it presents, there could be something here. I hope so, because the team says that they have a bunch of ideas for how to make the app better and some cool features that they need resources to execute, and so far I’m intrigued. You can grab Seene on .
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Zuck Knows If You’ve Been Bad Or Good, So Be Good For Goodness’ Sake
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Jon Evans
| 2,013
| 10
| 19
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Like everyone else I am shocked, shocked!, to learn that Facebook’s latest policy switch was one which will lead to users posting more public data. This time it’s teenagers, who “have the choice to post publicly on Facebook.” which they didn’t before. Why? Simple: as the puts it, “ ” I don’t intend to get all moral-panic on you here. Letting teens post publicly sounds pretty reasonable to me, as does Google+’s recent moves to in your stream, and use their faces in ads. Both are good examples of how social media providers keep trying to make their users’ activities both more visible, more public, and more intimately tied to the advertising that keeps the money rolling in. As Josh Constine recently put it, “ .” But there’s more to it than that. Advertisers, marketers, and Facebook and Google themselves are already analyzing all the data you’ve given them, to better target you with ads. Facebook has commissioned an “ ” working on using deep-learning neural networks to find hidden patterns and insights in that data; Google, which deep-learning technology in various domains, is presumably ahead of them. What people don’t realize — yet — is that many of the things they explicitly told Facebook or Google can be deduced from the things they . Got a medical condition, legal issue, sexual predilection, substance habit, or professional failure that you want kept private? It seems very likely that the ever-improving pattern-recognition systems Facebook and Google are building (and others will inevitably follow) will be able to extrapolate those secrets, with a high degree of confidence, from the subtle cues and nuances inherent in your visible online profile and chatter. Put another way, you may think you’re sitting privately in your home, telling the online world only what you want it to see…but, in fact, every little morsel of seemingly innocuous knowledge you give the Internet is being used to build a window in the wall beside you, opaque to human eyes, but all too transparent to the deep-learning systems of the future. Like a one-way mirror. I suggested this in a post . Now there’s some data to support it. For instance, Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford : People think ‘big data’ avoids the problem of discrimination, because you are dealing with big data sets, but in fact big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination … it is possible to generate a detailed picture about a person’s health, including information a person may never have disclosed to a health provider. Similarly, a Cambridge University paper : Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. Oh, yes, : The volunteers completed a common personality questionnaire through a Facebook application and made their Facebook status updates available so that researchers could find linguistic patterns in their posts … the researchers built computer models that predicted the individuals’ age, gender, and their responses on the personality questionnaires with surprising accuracy. That’s all with technology. Imagine that of a decade hence. The conclusion seems clear. Any comment of yours, or tweet, or Like, might be meaningless outside of its context … but , they can be used to determine almost everything about you, including whatever you don’t want other people to know. It’s very possible that you have already, accidentally, revealed your deepest secrets to the entire world. Now, granted, the world was probably going to find out anyway. Mark Zuckerberg is right when he says we are moving towards a world which is more open and more connected — and therefore less private. In fact, between social media, deep learning, “big data,” and increasingly ubiquitous cameras and other sensors, on drones and embedded virtually everywhere, we’re moving headlong towards a world where privacy is a . Just as was foretold by the prophet Gibson, lo these many decades ago:
`Hey, that’s fine by the Finn, Moll. You’re only paying by the second.’ They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. `We talk now. This is as private as I can afford.’ – William Gibson, Neuromancer On a personal and cultural level, we could probably just adjust to this. I can envision people a generation or two hence reacting to sex tapes with disinterested shrugs rather than outraged shaming, whether or not celebrities or high-school students are involved. It’ll be heaven for stalkers, but that appears to be part of the social price that tomorrow’s technology demands. On a professional level, however, things will get messy. What happens when would-be employers run tomorrow’s pattern-recognition analyses on the sum total of all your lifetime online activity to see if you’re a likely job-hopper, or your health is sketchy, or you’re “not a good cultural fit,” or you’re a binge drinker, or you’re pregnant? Simple: people will inevitably wind up carefully tailoring their online lives to seem professionally desirable — meaning that real sharing, and especially sharing, will wither away and die, because no one will want to take the chance that they inadvertently share far more about themselves than they wanted to. Which is of course the exact opposite of what Facebook and Google want. Facebook’s AI Team may boost its ad sales now, until people begin to realize the consequences of that kind of analysis…but in the long run, that team could conceivably be carrying the seeds of Facebook’s demise.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 10
| 10
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How To Tell If You’re In A Cloud-Friendly Industry
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Contributor
| 2,013
| 10
| 26
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The benefits of an are clear. But are there certain industries that are more cloud friendly? To answer this question, we analyzed industries using a framework that ranks each one based on eight factors that speed up cloud adoption and two factors that slow things down. Two industries stand out as the most cloud-friendly: healthcare and education. Healthcare has the most traction, with focused and fast-growing cloud companies in many facets of this massive and concentrated industry. In addition to Veeva, companies such as , and PracticeFusion are getting traction, and Athena Health has been successful for years. The cloud helps these companies stay current in a strongly regulatory industry. Within education, universities and school districts have shown a willingness to try cloud solutions, particularly those that are designed for non-desk workers and leverage big data. We have seen a range of companies make inroads, including , and , as well as two from Emergence’s portfolio — and . The next tier down includes industries such as retail, utilities, transportation, real estate, construction and insurance, each of which score high on several dimensions. The retail sector looks promising due to its mobile workforce, visual elements, and big data value, and we anticipate major shifts in the software used to drive that industry over the coming years. While these sectors face more hurdles relating to fragmentation and cyclicality, companies such as Real Page (real estate), and (construction), (transportation, Emergence portfolio company) and (insurance) show the potential for cloud solutions in these industries. Finally, a few industries such as banking and government will likely be among the slowest to move to cloud technology. While these industries have great potential given their massive IT spending, it may take a number of years to overcome the privacy concerns and high migration costs. We are starting to see some early progress with companies such as and ; however, many sub-sectors in the financial services industry may not benefit from the revenue expansion and cost savings offered by the cloud for some time. Below are eight factors that increase the potential for industry cloud success, as well as two factors that will slow things down. To arrive at these factors, we reviewed material for public industry cloud companies, such as Veeva, Textura, Dealer Track, Real Page, Athena Health, and Fleetmatics. In addition, we based our analysis on the growth metrics we have seen through meetings with hundreds of private-industry cloud companies. Based on our analysis, we see potential for substantial new industry cloud leaders to continue to emerge over the next few years, particularly in the more cloud-friendly industries such as healthcare, education, retail and transportation. Industry cloud companies have been performing well in the public markets, and investors appreciate the capital efficiency that comes from being able to focus on customers in one industry. Gone are the days when industry verticals could be dismissed as niche plays. Today, they are the future of the cloud.
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With iWork, Apple Walks It Back Before Moving Forward
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013
| 10
| 26
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Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk about Apple’s new direction for iWork, especially when it comes to the OS X versions of its productivity suite. At an event on Tuesday, the company announced that they would be — but it also announced a redesign that many are seeing as a regression of the product. Specifically, many who use Pages, Numbers and Keynote heavily are remarking on the loss of what they characterize as “pro” features. These power users are lamenting the changes, many of which mimic the look and feel of the suite on Apple’s iOS platform. The thing is, they’re right. Apple did “walk back” the features and feel of iWork slightly across the board — and significantly in some niche cases. But it’s far too early in this new era of a free iWork to begin panicking about its future. From what I understand, the fact that this new version of OS X iWork looks and feels a lot like the iOS version is no coincidence. It’s actually a rewrite that’s founded on the code base of the (now 64-bit) iOS apps. And a decision was made to unify the visual look and interactive feel of the apps across all platforms — with the far more prolific iOS used as inspiration. iWork is handled under the supervision of Apple’s Eddy Cue, not the OS X chief Craig Federighi, but it’s boggling to think that this kind of decision wouldn’t have been very carefully considered by the senior staff at Apple. There are easy parallels to draw here to Apple’s “back to the Mac” initiative, which brought features and feel from its enormously popular iPhone and iPad to the Mac — largely in order to make them more familiar to “halo” adopters who may have started their Apple experiences with a portable device, not a traditional desktop or laptop. Lots of folks are getting all worked up about iWork being “dumbed down,” but it feels like a reset to me. I can see this playing out pretty much like Apple’s recent Final Cut Pro X re-thinking. That app was introduced in a radically simplified and streamlined form that caused immediate outcry. Over time, Apple has steadily added back features that were missing from the early dramatic redesign of the pro video-editing suite. A handful of mishandled decisions like pulling the old version of FCP too soon caused unnecessary friction there, but recent updates to FCPX have made it a very viable choice for professionals again. If we can ascribe anything to Apple’s recent efforts to bring iOS sensibilities to its Mac software, it’s that it likes to start extremely tight and zoom out as it adds features back into the mix. Now, you can (rightly) argue that this is incredibly inconvenient to people who use iWork all day to do stuff that has been hampered or made impossible by the changes. And you could argue that Apple could have worked in all of the features that iWork had before and maybe even more. These are not strange and unusual viewpoints. But that’s simply not the way Apple works, and it’s definitely not in its playbook lately as it goes through a big revamp in product direction and design. There are some serious bugs and upsetting omissions in the latest iWork, but that’s the price of a dramatic break with the past. And Apple has shown a willingness to take the heat on this stuff before. It’s unfortunate that users must share in the growing pains, but there it is. Note, though, that this isn’t about free software getting fewer features, it’s specifically about refocusing the product. Making iWork free has nothing to do with the latest versions (or future versions) having less functionality. These don’t feel like “lite” editions of the apps, and Apple would not have put as much effort as it did into improving the quality and feature set of iWork for iCloud if it had planned on making the native apps just so much “freeware.” As with many of Apple’s product decisions lately, this is about serving the majority of users as much as possible. And if that means short-term pain and perhaps even something we could call “regression,” then so be it. In the end, I expect iWork to move forward to the point at which it was and beyond in the coming months.
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Meet The Coders Of The Disrupt Europe Hackathon
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 10
| 26
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The Disrupt Europe Hackathon is , but just because you can’t make it out to Berlin for the festivities, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the experience. That said, we’re bringing you as close as possible to the sights, sounds, and (unfortunate) smells of the 24-hour coding competition with this video. We’re seeing starts from near and far, experienced and brand new to the scene compete. More than $5,000 is on the line, as hackers will present their products on stage tomorrow at noon to a panel of amazing, expert judges. Plus, our incredible API sponsors like Weather Underground and Yammer are giving away some amazing prizes for the best use of their API.
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CrunchWeek: Pinterest’s Big Raise, The iPad Air And OS X Mavericks, And NSA’s Foreign Surveillance
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Leena Rao
| 2,013
| 10
| 26
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It’s that time of week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings three writers, three TechCrunch TV cameras, and a whole lot of opinions together to dish on the most interesting stories from the past seven days in tech news. In a special episode taped from Disrupt Europe in Berlin; , and I chatted about the news around Pinterest’s funding round (at a reported ), the debut of and , and the of the NSA using surveillance on foreign officials, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Social Scheduling Tool Buffer Gets Hacked, Floods Twitter And Facebook With Weight Loss Spam
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 10
| 26
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If you’re a user of social media scheduling app , there’s a good chance that your Saturday morning has been less than relaxing. There have been numerous reports circulating today purporting that the service has been hacked, and just a few moments ago the company officially confirmed those reports in a tweet. the terse statement reads. “Temporarily pausing all posts as we investigate. We’ll update ASAP.” At this point the company has said little else about the cause of the issue, but its effects are clear: users who have linked their social accounts to the service have been posting sketchy weight loss links like the ones seen below. The extent of the hack is also unclear at this point, but Buffer Chief Happiness Officer (yes, really) Carolyn Kopprasch has said that it doesn’t seem like every user has been affected by the exploit. The Buffer team has posted that shines just a little more light on what happened. Perhaps most importantly, neither user passwords or billing/payment information were exposed. Speaking of affected Buffer users, you’re probably in the clear if your Facebook or Twitter accounts haven’t already started spewing spam — following , all sharing from the service has been temporarily halted as the team tries to figure out what’s wrong. A quick attempt to sign in from the Buffer homepage confirms the team’s response — it’s impossible to sign in using a Twitter account, and the corresponding Facebook app seems to have been pulled into so the Buffer API is inaccessible to outside users. Even so, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to revoke Buffer’s access to your accounts just in case — you can disable Buffer from connecting to your , while doing the same on Facebook will require a trip to your While the slew of spammy links only seems to have begun within the last hour or so, it appears as though the root cause of problem may have begun a little earlier than that. Judging by the company’s timeline of tweets, the issues began late last night when some users reported not being able to access the service, while others claimed that their scheduled social posts had disappeared from the Buffer backend. I’ve reached out to the company for some additional insight and I’ll update this post as I learn more.
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