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Gillmor Gang: Free As A Bird
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — recorded a Tuesday evening session in the wake of Apple’s iPad refresh announcements. Tim Cook cemented control of the company by open-pricing apps and OS for the price of the hardware. In so doing, Apple did what Google has been doing for years: free upgrades to enhance the network effects of the platform. The hardware continues to attract not only the core faithful but a growing number of tire kickers for enhanced collaborative services. The freed-up iWork apps may seem like an attack on Office, but the easier target is Google Apps. Google is forced to counter by playing ball with iPhone users to retain cross platform share for Google Now, and the big prize of push notification keeps opening up a lead in aggregate with Microsoft fading fast. @stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Apple’s New iPad Air And Traveling With Gadgets
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Jordan Crook
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Guten Tag, and welcome to a very special (Saturday) edition of the . This week, Apple unveiled the , the thinnest, lightest, and most powerful iPad yet. But is it an upgrade worth your cash? Is it light enough to truly become a one-handed device, as ? Plus, as the gadgeteers are traveling through Berlin for , we thought it worthwhile to discuss how to travel abroad with your favorite gadgets. It’s a podcast for the ages, featuring , , , and . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Moniker Guitars On Building A Business Through Kickstarter
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John Biggs
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to become a Kickstarter success? First you need a great product. Then you need a plan for the future. Luckily, Austin-based had both. We first covered when founders Dave Barry and Kevin Tully had already created a small guitar shop and wanted to expand into custom git-fiddles. They built a unique guitar customizer to allow buyers to add colors, designs, and logos, and hundreds of sales later they’ve moved from Kickstarter darling to actual startup. Since launch, the company has sold and built 43 guitars through Kickstarter and they have built a growing and expanding manufacturing business. In fact, they’ve built “several hundred” guitars since launch, including a in crazy green. “Kickstarter has been a huge boost in growing our business,” said co-founder Tully. “In addition to providing crucial funding to make several of our product lines possible, Kickstarter has been one of the better marketing decisions we’ve made as a business; which was a little unexpected.”
The company has used crowdfunding as a platform for customer acquisition and fan-base building. They were also able to build new product lines. “It was enough to launch our line of semi-hollow body guitars,” said Tully. “However, we still need to be aggressive about getting our product out in front of people and letting them know we’re here. I learned that everything is going to cost twice as much and take twice as long as I thought it would. But patience is a virtue, and we’re seeing the results of our hard work and patience and it’s incredibly fulfilling.”
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Hackathon Team Builds ‘Open Radioactivity Warning System’ For Crowdsourced Data
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Anthony Ha
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Hackathons can sometimes turn into a sea of laptops and monitors, so perhaps it’s no surprise that, as I wandered the Disrupt Europe Hackathon today, I found myself drawn to a table covered with wiring and gadgets, including a Geiger counter. The idea was pretty unusual, too — as the four-person team explained it to me, they’re trying to build a system for collecting and displaying crowdsourced radiation data. Philipp Wagner (the team member actually working with the Geiger counter) explained that in situations like the Fukushima nuclear disaster, you might not trust the company involved to give you accurate warnings about the radiation danger. So a participant in the Open Radioactivity Warning System would receive their own Geiger counter that collects and shares live data online. The team’s hardware attracted other passersby, and one of them suggested that a similar project already exists. I think they were talking about , a project that was originally funded through Kickstarter in the wake of Fukushima — right now, it looks like Safecast is focused on Japan. The team comes from the Austrian cities of Linz and Vienna, and it’s their first time at Disrupt. Philipp attributed the idea to his teammate Alex Entinger, who seems to have brought the the group together — he went to university with one of his teammates (Matthias Schörghuber), another is his girlfriend (Adriana Ghira), and he said he recruited Philipp because they work on the same floor. It seems like the system is still very much a work in progress, but Alex said he’s determined to have something finished for the hackathon presentations tomorrow. In the meantime, you can see on the website of Entinger’s startup, .
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The War On Hackers
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Jon Evans
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Corey Thuen was a developer at the Idaho National Laboratory who helped to develop a network-visualization tool called Sophia. Then Battelle Energy, the company that the INL, the notion of open-sourcing Sophia, and instead licensed it for commercial use to a company called NexDefense. So Thuen created a separate-but-similar tool called Visdom, written in entirely different languages. (He : “ “) And what happened? That’s right: . No, wait, it gets even . Because Thuen identified himself as a “hacker” — he’s a security researcher who’s worked for the FBI, among others — the judge had his computer seized without notice on the that: there are national security implications associated with an open-source release … In addition, the defendants have identified themselves as hackers, as discussed above. A well-known characteristic of hackers is that they cover their tracks … The tipping point for the Court comes from evidence that the defendants – in their own words – are hackers. By labeling themselves this way, they have essentially announced that they have the necessary computer skills and intent to simultaneously release the code publicly and conceal their role in that act. There is so much so wrong here that I scarcely know where to begin. Should we be more outraged by Battelle’s decision to license, rather than open-source, code developed with taxpayer money? By their broad ? By the idea that their – copyright should apply to similar code written independently By the amazing contention that an open-source version of a would have “national security implications”? Or by the notion that those who call themselves “hackers” are advertising to the world their to break the law? …This seems like a good time to link you to the , because Mr. Thuen has a very expensive road ahead of him. But let’s also step back and take a look at the larger picture here. It’s not like this is the first hacker panic in recent memory, or the first time that the American legal system has decided to aim bizarrely huge howitzers at alleged hackers and/or computer-related crimes. Think of , threatened with 35 years in prison; , charged with the of “aiding the enemy”; , jailed for years for the crime of incrementing a URL; and Barrett Brown, indicted for . It doesn’t help that the mainstream understanding of “hacker” does indeed mean “criminal,” whereas the tech-world definition is . But there’s a lot more going on here than just a semantic misunderstanding. I think hackers — and all computer experts — are increasingly perceived as than other potential criminals … because, perhaps rightly, they’re seen as more powerful. Hacker technology is increasingly seen to be encroaching on domains that were, until recently, the exclusive purview of nation-states. Who needs a central bank or fiat state currency when you’ve got Bitcoin? What happens when the state monopoly on violence is subverted by 3D-printed guns? (Hence the recent .) Or when Edward Snowden decide that it’s their individual duty to watch — and report on — the NSA watchmen? Or when intellectual property rights are honored ? What happens is that the empire strikes back, of course. Two years ago Cory Doctorow gave a in Berlin entitled “The Coming War On General-Purpose Computing.” (And the great Vernor Vinge was way ahead in his novel .) As Doctorow : …all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too—and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this: “Make it so that self-driving cars can’t be programmed to drag race” “Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can’t make harmful organisms or restricted compounds” Which is to say: “Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out.” I submit that: So throw Corey Thuen some money, would you? And then buckle your seat belt. Because if I’m right, then this next decade is going to be an awfully bumpy ride. Jesse Lee Morgan, .
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A User’s Guide to Disrupt Europe: Berlin
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Leslie Hitchcock
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin kicks off on Monday, October 28th. TechCrunch has put together an incredible array of offerings from our partners to make your Conference experience better than ever. As always, Disrupt EU will be a busy and boisterous event so use the following guide to get the most out of the show. We will be providing free shuttle service from two locations, to and from the Arena Berlin, 26-29 October 2013. This year we’re working with for onsite ticket purchases at the conference. . , official mobility partner of Disrupt, has offered TechCrunch readers a 10EURO credit on their first mytaxi Payment rides using code: We have an amazing group of startups exhibiting in Startup Alley. Take a quick preview of the companies . On this page you’ll find company descriptions, details about when the companies will be exhibiting, and contact information so you set up meetings or get in touch with the teams. If you’re an armchair Disruptor, thanks to you’ll be able to view the conference action from the TechCrunch home page or EU Disrupt event page. : The by Mass Relevance pulls in yours, theirs and our live updates about the show. Tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram pics, and more! Try it out by using the #DisruptBerlin and #HackDisrupt hashtags. You can follow and comment on the conference by using the #DisruptBerlin and #HackDisrupt hashtag. has long been a TechCrunch partner. If you purchased a ticket, you used Eventbrite. We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, .
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Chinese Internet Giant Tencent Goes From Snapchat “Role Model” To Potential Investor
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Catherine Shu
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Snapchat is looking to raise up to $200 million at a valuation of $3 billion to $4 billion and one of the potential investors that founder Evan Spiegel has talked to the most is Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings, . Spiegel has referred to Tencent in the past as a “role model,” . The startup’s last funding round was in June, when it . If Snapchat does indeed take on Tencent as an investor, it gives the startup a powerful partner. Though Spiegel has of an acquisition offer from Facebook (which , a Snapchat clone, at the end of last year), he’s repeatedly made specific references to his admiration for Tencent, another social media company with a market cap that is not too far off. Last month, , which puts it close to Facebook’s market cap. Tencent owns WeChat, which now has about 236 million active users, making it one of the world’s largest messaging apps, and Spiegel has said he admires the company’s ability to . (We’ve contacted Tencent and Snapchat for comment.) The company has also recently ramped up its investment in overseas companies, . For example, Tencent was the lead investor in , which was announced in June. Along with Japanese conglomerate Itochu, another Fab.com investor, Tencent will help accelerate the e-commerce company’s expansion into Asia. Other U.S. startups Tencent has invested in include Y Combinator alumni , , , and ; Pair ( ); and photo-sharing app . On Snapchat’s end, partnering with Tencent can help it gain a foothold in Asia, where it will compete against popular messaging apps like WeChat, Kakao Talk and Line (which ). Tencent could also help Snapchat figure out business models. The startup has been considering , including Stories, its new 24-hour timeline play. Spiegel has said that he wants Snapchat to begin generating revenue before its next funding round (though it looks like the company may be shifting strategies and taking a new round to go big on monetizing instead). Out of the top Internet companies in China, which also include and , Tencent is currently the best poised to take advantage of the shift to mobile. At the China 2.0 conference at Stanford University, Tencent president Martin Lau (who attended grad school at the college, which is also the alma mater of Snapchat’s founders) said that the company . It launched WeChat in 2011. If Snapchat decides to tackle markets in Asia, it would compete with WeChat, so it makes sense for Tencent to consider taking a stake in the Venice, Calif.-based startup. Snapchat’s base of users is smaller than other messaging apps, but they skew young (in their teens and early twenties, an age bracket attractive to advertisers) and are highly engaged. At Disrupt SF last month, founder Evan Spiegel said , representing a quick and significant increase from 200 million in June. Taking a stake in Snapchat would help Tencent keep up its admirable record of leveraging online communication trends. Its other messaging products include , which has 818 million monthly active users, and microblogging platform, with 220 million monthly active users. In addition to its own services, Tencent holds , another messaging app that is popular throughout Asia.
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H2O-Pal Helps You Get Your Two Gallons Of Water A Day
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John Biggs
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The United States National Laboratory Of Water Drinking And Health (not a real laboratory) recommends that all humans drink lots of water all the time. That’s why exists – it’s a water bottle that tells you how much you’ve drunk and, more important, when you’ve reached the daily goal of two to five gallons (warning: you could probably drink less) needed to stay alive. The system uses a scale and accelerometer to see how much water you drink during the day. You fill the bottle, snap on the electronics, and hit the town. You can pull the puck-like device off of the bottle for washing. It then connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth to report your drinking habits. [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/outofgalaxy/h2o-pal-the-perfect-solution-to-monitor-your-water width=480] They are asking for $95,000 on with devices starting at $59. They will sell for $69 when H2O-Pal launches in February. The Ljubljana-based company showed me prototypes of the system last summer and I was duly impressed. Anything that can ensure that we liquid-based lifeforms maintain our juiciness is A-OK in my book.
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The TechCrunch Disrupt Europe Hackathon Is Underway!
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Matt Burns
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And they’re off! TechCrunch’s first Disrupt Europe Hackathon is officially underway. There are hundreds of registered coders, hackers, and designers. More than $5,000 is on the line and the deadline is tomorrow morning. Plus, Foursquare brought a box of dodgeballs so things will get wild. Thanks to Daylight Savings time ending in Europe tonight, the attendees get an extra hour of coding, too. Apps must be submitted and approved by 9:30 a.m. Sunday. The presentations start just a half hour later, and the teams have just 60 seconds to impress a panel of judges. The top three teams get to present their projects again just a few days later — but this time, it’s in front of the massive audience at the main Disrupt conference. And because we like to sneak as many clever people into our conferences as possible, the top 50 teams each get two tickets to the main Disrupt Europe event (valued at nearly €1,000 each). We’re holding Disrupt in Europe for the first time. Starting Monday, Arena Berlin will play host to dozens of speakers, hundreds of startups and thousands of attendees. Like State-side Disrupt conferences, the show will also include Startup Battlefield in which 15 startups will launch for first time and compete for a giant $50,000 check. Registration is closed for the Hackathon but . You can follow and comment on the conference by using the #DisruptBerlin and #HackDisrupt hashtags. [gallery ids="905570,905571,905561,905560,905558,905562,905556,905555,905559,905551,905554,905563,905553,905552,905564,905550"] SSID: Deutsche Telekom or Deutsche Telekom 2.4
Password: techcrunch 12:30pm – Registration opens, Lunch/Beverages served. Come alone? Use the opportunity to find a team! 1:30pm – Hacking Kickoff 2:00pm – Paymill (Room A) 2:30pm – Box (Room B) 3:00pm – Lufstansa (Room A) 7:00pm – Dinner Midnight – Food and snacks 7:00am – Breakfast served 9:30am – Hacking concludes and hacks submitted to wiki. HACKS MUST BE SUBMITTED by 9:30 A.M. 10:00am – General public (friends, family) welcome to enter auditorium to view hackathon presentations 11:00am – Hackathon presentations begin 2:00pm – Hackathon Awards 6-9pm – After-Hackathon Party (Webrazzi)
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With $1M In Funding, Appsee Promises Mobile Developers Real Insight Into Their Users
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Anthony Ha
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Israeli startup says it’s taking a different approach to mobile analytics. I wrote about the company more than a year ago , when it focused on making video recordings of mobile app user activity. Now the company is launching a broader iOS analytics platform, where user recordings are just one feature. So what’s Appsee actually doing differently? The company says most mobile businesses analyze their apps using “traditional metrics, such as number of downloads, number of daily users, and number of daily sessions, without understanding the full reasoning behind these figures.” The company adds: With numerous analytics platforms only having a narrow set of app analytics tools that track and analyze these metrics, there is no true method in place for understanding user behavior. Typically developers must manually choose the measures they want to check, platforms do not usually identify and track everything automatically. Appsee says that after customers add a single line of code to their app, the service will track every user session. Developer look at reports on those sessions using filters like churned users and first-time users, then drill down to a recording of a single session to see the actual behavior that’s attracting their interest, say a crash or whatever. In addition, Appsee says it offers heatmaps showing where users touched each screen and makes automatic recommendations on how the interface and usability can be improved. It seems publishers think Appsee is addressing a real problem here — the company says customers already include British Gas, My Supermarket, AppsFire, eToro, and Onavo (analytics company that was ). Appsee is also announcing that it has raised $1 million in funding from Giza Venture Capital and angel investors including Moshe Lichtman. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY2yCRnWx-A&w=420&h=315]
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YPlan Launches On Android
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Jordan Crook
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has only been around for less than a year, but the company is rapidly covering new ground. After expanding from the UK into , the social planning service is today launching an Android app. YPlan works by aggregating cool events, parties, and activities happening within the next 24 hours, eternally answering the question “What are we going to do tonight?” The fact that users can pay directly for any activity right within the app, never having to print a ticket or worry about fumbling for cash at the door, which gives the service an “Uber for nightlife” feel. The company claims to have more than 300k downloads in the past 10 months, and is hoping to boost those figures with the launch of an Android version of the app. YPlan has thus far received . So why’d it take so long to launch an Android app? According to the company, finding good Android developers is difficult and YPlan kept the bar very high in the search. “Developing a quality Android app takes a lot of time so we’ve been working really hard on it over the summer, splitting effort between Android and expansion to NYC,” said Viktoras Jucikas, co-founder and CTO of YPlan. Obviously, cross-platform availability is crucial to YPlan’s success as the company builds out it’s userbase. Eventually, co-founder Rytis Vitkauskas plans to integrate more social into the plan-oriented app, letting larger groups of friends rally together for certain activities. For now, however, the company is focused on scaling in the two markets it’s available in. New Yorkers and London residents interested in learning more about YPlan can visit , or download the or app to check out the experience.
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Yahoo Is Ordered To Start Using Microsoft Search In Hong Kong And Taiwan
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Catherine Shu
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Signed in 2010, Microsoft and Yahoo’s was supposed to lift Google’s stronghold on search advertising. But the deal has steadily eroded since then, with the latest sign coming from . U.S. District judge Robert P. Patterson ruled on Monday that Yahoo must start using Microsoft’s search technology in those two markets under the terms of its agreement. The court filing show that Yahoo was reluctant to roll out Bing in Hong Kong and Taiwan because it wanted to see if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s successor is equally committed to the deal. Yahoo was scheduled to start using Bing in those two countries this month, but told Microsoft on September 20 that it wanted to delay the launch until early 2014. Judge Patterson upheld an earlier ruling by an arbitrator that Yahoo’s “breach of the agreement ‘established irreparable harm to Microsoft.'”
Monday’s court ruling is the latest indication of how unhappy Yahoo is with the Search Alliance. In February 2013, Mayer and had not delivered the market share gains or revenue boost that was expected. Google still retains the same two-third share of the U.S. search market that it had in 2010, compared to Microsoft’s 16.3% share and Yahoo’s 12.2%, . Both Yahoo and Microsoft have also gone significant strategic shifts since entering into the Search Alliance, which was signed two years before Mayer became CEO. Microsoft has yet to announce Ballmer’s successor yet, but it’s almost certain that the company’s next leader will .
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A Closer Look At Microsoft’s New Surface 2 And Surface Pro 2 Tablets
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Alex Wilhelm
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Over the past few days, we’ve had in our hot hands the new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 tablets. We published an and and today, we’re sharing a short video run-through of the hardware. Surface, of course, is Microsoft’s hardware gambit that places it in contention with its traditional OEM partners. The company’s new devices replace its earlier efforts, which produced decidedly mixed sales. So, enjoy the above clip, and then strap in: Apple’s iPad event is tomorrow morning, and you’re going to need your rest.
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Google Maps Engine Gets Free Tier And A Public Data Program To Help Governments, Other Orgs Surface Maps
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Matthew Panzarino
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Google is launching a free tier of Google Maps Engine today, in conjunction with its , a small business tool. The free tier offers all of the same features but has smaller quotas for data access, in the ‘tens of megabytes’ vs. the terabytes available in the full version. Google is also launching a new Public Data Program that allows organizations to sign up for a free GME account to create maps and publish them on the web. This could let an organization like, say, the government of Latvia, surface maps of data that it would normally have to have a team build custom tools to present. The idea is to offer up a public map of new voting districts, transport routes, public works or any other kind of data in a way that can be easily searched via Google or other tools, and that can be distributed widely in a stable fashion. Google happens to be very good at that, and many organizations and government simply aren’t. Any organization will be able to take advantage of the new program, which does not face the same quota limitations as the free-tier Google Maps Engine product. The only stipulation is that these maps be posted publicly. This serves their needs to have those maps easily searchable, and Google needs to have its mapping products be the most complete picture of the world. There are only so many layers of data that Google can collect itself, and this program taps another whole group of organizations with unique, valuable data to add to the overall product. Today, Google is also announcing that it will have integration with some very popular GIS software like and . It’s also firing up a , one of the biggest spatial visualization companies around. Their data transformation tool FME will get full Google Maps Engine integration. Maps Engine is used by companies like FedEx, Amtrak and NOAA. Google recently that was designed to allow companies to import data and layer it on top of Google’s own mapping layers. The Google Maps Engine product has been around for about two years and available commercially for over a year. The benefits of a free tier are obvious: It offers a taste of the full-on product to attract new enterprise customers. The benefits of a public data tool to help governments and others ship public maps are a bit more subtle. Yes, these organizations get a stable and powerful platform based off of Google’s mapping efforts, but they’re also potentially contributing hundreds of thousands of individual data sets back to Google’s overall mapping platform, making it even more dominant.
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Netflix Tops HBO In Paid U.S. Subscribers As Members Stream 5 Billion Hours Of Content In Q3
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Rip Empson
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Today, , with the streaming video provider exceeding analyst projections thanks to strong subscriber growth in which it added 1.3 million domestically. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells said in a letter to shareholders this afternoon that the company recently surpassed the 40 million members milestone, up from “less than 30 million just one year ago,” they said. That’s not the only milestone Netflix checked off in the third quarter. In an earnings interview this afternoon, Hastings said that the company served up over 5 billion hours of streaming video content over the last three months. Netflix leadership last shared streaming numbers in April, more than four billion hours of video during the first quarter of 2013. So that means that viewership increased by 1 billion hours over the last six months, for a total of 9 billion hours streamed over the course of the two quarters (Netflix has not shared viewership numbers from Q2). What’s behind this eager consumption of Netflix streaming content? First and foremost, Netflix is continuing full-steam ahead with the production of high-quality original content, launching House of Cards earlier this year, which it followed up with its teen thriller Hemlock Grove, the much-anticipated third season of Arrested Development and now Weeds creator Jenji Kohan’s new dramedy set in a women’s prison, Orange Is The New Black. For Netflix, what’s likely just as important as the number of viewers these shows have been able to bring in is that it’s now able to say that, like HBO, its now producing original content that’s worthy of bringing home hardware. , Netflix became the first company of its kind to win multiple awards, as House of Cards Director David Fincher took home “Best Director,” while the show also captured awards for Casting and Cinematography. Netflix is on a mission to compete with HBO, which has long set the standard for excellence in original content, taking home 27 Emmy Awards this year — to Netflix’s three. While it still has a long way to go in the award department, Netflix has reportedly surpassed HBO in another key area: Paid domestic subscribers. , the company now has 29.9 million paying members, whereas SNL Kagan (via Bloomberg) reports that HBO has 28.7 million U.S. customers. Hold onto your hats, original programming lovers, that puts Netflix in the lead for the first time. Of course, just as it is on the hardware front, Netflix still has a very long way to go when it comes to the total number of paying customers worldwide. In Q3, Netflix came in at about 38 million total paid subscribers for both the U.S. and foreign markets, whereas HBO boasts about 114 million subscribers. Netflix is making solid progress for a digital and DVD streaming rental service when compared to the wily old veteran of premium cable and satellite network television. Yes, Netflix has a long road ahead of it, and any sign of weakness usually sends shareholders into a tizzy. However, the company’s stock is holding strong, up 6 percent in after-hours trading and up over 200 percent over the last year. But if Netflix continues to see strong domestic and international subscriber growth, keeps pumping out quality original content and , then the road between it and HBO may not look so gargantuan after all. Especially if this remains true: “We have a remarkable complete rate, which is a good leading indicator with us,” said Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos in the investor call this afternoon. “On traditional TV, typically the bail-out rate begins to pick up around the third or fourth episode of a show, but what we see is steady growth as people binge out of the gate, and then others catch up later,” he said. “Compared to shows that lose audience week over week over week, we generally gain audience over time.” It sounds too good to be true, although admittedly David Fincher and Kevin Spacey is a pretty dynamic combination.
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Google’s Maps Engine Pro Aims To Help Small Businesses Visualize Location Data As Easily As They Make A Pie Chart
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today, at Google’s San Francisco offices, Google introduced Maps Engine Pro, a utility that allows small businesses to use Google’s location tools to create maps out of location databases. There will also be a mobile app available for Android initially to allow users to edit and create these maps on the fly. The app, called Google Maps Engine, will allow access to any level of GME service. Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps, noted that there are still 1 billion monthly users of Google Maps but also over 1 million active sites and apps using the APIs. McClendon says that Google is also after semantic data, including local location, imagery, Street View and base maps. Each of those layers must be collected separately and sometimes includes mistakes. Google has spent a lot of time creating what it calls a ‘canonical base map of the world.’ This map allows it to answer questions like ‘how do I get there?’ But on top of all of those data layers is something Google is calling the Knowledge Layer, which contributes to people’s ability to get questions with more complex parameters answered. All of these layers service consumers and the enterprise on either end of the scale. Now, to service those in the middle, like small businesses, Google is introducing Maps Engine Pro. It’s a tool that allows businesses to create internal- and external-facing maps that utilize its data layers to make business decisions. Among the decision-making tools will be the ability to optimize the locations of your people and company assets, engage your users and build apps that take advantage of all of Google’s layers. Google’s Vinay Goel, Google Product Manager on Google Maps, detailed how professionals could use some of these tools to solve problems. One example Goel gave is that an insurance underwriter should have easy access to your location and the canonical data surrounding the risk profile of your neighborhood in order to calculate your plan and premium. The pricing of Maps Engine Pro is $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year depending on the license usages. Here’s an example of a in Maps Engine Pro: Heather Folsom, Product Manager of Google Maps Engine Pro, spoke about the capabilities of the new service. Basically, you’re able to upload a spreadsheet of data that you might have with locations or other mappable data and see it instantly visualized. You can then sort or filter it and use it to craft strategies. has been one of the testers for the program and a video shown to press at the event noted that MEP was used to visualize where the customer service calls were coming from on the East Coast. This allowed them to see where the best locations might be to send those callers to get service, which stores had the most inventory of the parts that were needed to fulfill those orders and more. A demo was also given of placing a downloadable database of publicly available San Francisco planning department data on a map. Once imported, it could be easily filtered by any of the criteria in the data columns in a ‘Google Docs’-style spreadsheet. Editing this spreadsheet in ‘live’ fashion results in the points changing on the map. Though this might appear, at first glance, to be Google tooling its Maps Engine product down a bit, it’s actually more about boosting the consumer maps offerings to be more useful to small businesses or pros. The consumer tools that allow users to build custom apps are all well and good, but entering data that an SMB might have in its databases is tedious and doesn’t have the flexibility needed to create custom reporting tools and analysis. And on the other end of the range, the full-blown Google Maps Engine product requires some fairly serious geographic information systems chops to craft useful tools for internal use. Google Maps Engine Pro is about making those tools more friendly and accessible, letting small business owners and other ‘professionals’ visualize their mapping data, rather than trying to do so internally from a spreadsheet list of locations. The key is being able to easily import and filter that data by a variety of factors. Just going by the demos that we saw, this appears to be fairly quick and easy. It should be an interesting additional layer of data that helps businesses make decisions based on location data. Just a couple of years ago this type of tool might have to be manually crafted by a developer or contractor, or cobbled together out of open-source mapping data and tools. Goel says that Google hopes that GME Pro will sit alongside documents, spreadsheets and storage that businesses will use daily to make decisions and get things done. You’ll be able to find out more about the new Maps Engine Pro tool at today.
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Andreessen-Backed Game Developer TinyCo Lays Off 27 Employees
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, an , is laying off 27 employees as it moves toward a new strategy. The company says it will outline its new moves in the coming few weeks. “We’ve moved 10 steps forward on executing a specific strategy around how we build games and what games we build. To execute against this strategy, we decided to consolidate game development out of our SF office and reduce our staff,” said CEO Suleman Ali in a statement. “Laying people off sucks, especially since TinyCo has always been a breeding ground for great friendships. We’ll provide more updates, including a game launch, in the near future.” According to a source, they’ve laid off employees based both in San Francisco and in Argentina. TinyCo is one of a handful of early mobile game developers that built casual simulation games on iOS and Android. They were pursuing a strategy that was kind of like what Zynga did to build out presence on the Facebook platform. TinyCo built casual games around proven concepts like Tiny Chef, a restaurant sim, or Tiny Monsters, where players would raise baby monsters. Early on, they had multiple top-grossing titles in the top 100 — Tiny Monsters, in the top 100 U.S. iPhone games for more than six months last year. But they haven’t held on as strongly this year, with , according to App Annie. Many of the other companies that blew up around that time in 2011 like Pocket Gems and Storm8 have since been eclipsed by studios like Supercell, to Softbank and GungHo for $1.53 billion, or Candy Crush-maker King and Kabam, which successfully transitioned from Facebook to mobile platforms. Pocket Gems still has three top-grossing titles in the top 100 on the iPhone in the U.S., however, and Storm8 holds two top 100 grossing titles on Google Play.
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InfoScout Tells Brands Who Buys What By Getting Meatspace Shoppers To Photograph Receipts
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Josh Constine
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Brands are desperate to know what demographics they should be marketing to. Yet until now, that data was very hazy or tough to collect. It was easy to monitor sales by particular store and time of day, but not the age, gender, interests, income, ethnicity, education, and household size of who buys them. One archaic data-collection method used by Nielsen and partner Information Resources Inc. is handing out bar-code scanners and getting people to scan everything they bought and key in how much they paid. It could take 20 seconds or more per item and only netted participants a tiny cash reward. That’s a ton of hassle. Getting parents to cut out UPC box tops from cereal and other products and hand them to raise money for their kids’ school is another high-friction way to get rudimentary data. But InfoScout came up with something much better: mobile apps. Users enter their demographic information, and then take a photograph of their brick-and-mortar shopping receipts. InfoScout uses machine vision to see what people bought where and what they paid. InfoScout’s app has a Tamagatchi feel, where you feed your digital pig photographed receipts to earn coins you can cash out for PayPal money or Amazon gift cards. Meanwhile, replaces box-top collection and lets people raise money for schools by camera-phoning their receipts. Together they have 200,000 registered users and 100,000 monthly active users, and pull in a whopping 40,000 receipts a day, up from 20,000 just two months ago. InfoScout has just been sitting on this data, waiting to get six months to a year’s worth so it could use natural language processing and machine learning to do longitudinal analysis on people’s shopping habits. Now it’s ready to share and sell the insights, so today it launches Infoscout.co. Anyone can track up to five brands’ customer info for free. That includes detailed demographic info but also stats like whether Red Bull is bought more at convenience stores or supermarkets, what else was in people’s baskets, and did they pay with cash, credit or food stamps. Beyond quantitative data, InfoScout’s in-app surveys provide qualitative data like what percentage of people bought Red Bull on impulse, if it was out of stock would they stay loyal and go elsewhere or buy another brand, how customers rate the product, and what words they use to describe it. The free version of InfoScout.co could be helpful to mom-and-pops, journalists, and researchers but the startup is courting big enterprises to make money. Paid subscriptions will launch in December and let businesses track unlimited brands and get deeper reports on demographic, psychographic and shopper profile attributes. Premium access will run in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per year and is primarily aimed at big consumer packaged good companies, with Procter & Gamble, Nestle, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Unilever already signed up. Subscriptions will also be marketed to retailers, marketing agencies, and financial institutions looking to better understand the CPG market. InfoScout will need to find a way to adapt to electronic receipts, as they’re starting to replace paper ones. But its apps give it a good barrier to entry, and data sales could help InfoScout make good on the led by Bain Capital Ventures and joined by Founder Collective, dunnhumby Ventures and a major retailer. All this info could have a big impact on CPG giants. What should their commercials look like if their customers are mostly teenage boys? Where should they place their products in stores if 30 percent of sales are impulse buys? How can they change their branding if people describe their goods as “cheap”? On the Internet we’re used to getting oceans of statistics about our businesses, but InfoScout could bring this big data to meatspace commerce.
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Netflix: ‘Orange Is The New Black’ Is Our Most-Watched Original, But Our TV Exclusives Are Even Bigger
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Anthony Ha
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Earlier comments from Netflix suggested that its show “Orange Is The New Black” was a hit — specifically, that each of its original shows had a better first week than the one before it. It expanded on that point in and letter to investors: Orange is the New Black has been a tremendous success for us. It will end the year as our most watched original series ever and, as with each of our other previously launched originals, enjoys an audience comparable with successful shows on cable and broadcast TV. Since Netflix’s investment in original programming is relatively new (it really came to prominence this year with “House of Cards”), being the most-watched “ever” may not be a huge accomplishment, but it’s still impressive since “Orange Is The New Black” didn’t have the star power of “House of Cards” or the built-in fanbase of “Arrested Development.” What it had was positive buzz and . It’s also interesting that Netflix says the audience is “comparable” to successful broadcast and cable TV shows, though that encompasses a broad range. (The company doesn’t release viewership numbers on specific shows.) The letter also mentions some of Netflix’s other successes in original programming, like for “House of Cards” (the first time a major primetime Emmy has gone to a program that didn’t air on broadcast TV or cable). The company sounds optimistic about the Emmy odds of “Orange Is The New Black” come next year. Netflix also notes that even though “our original series get most of the headlines,” more viewing is driven by “exclusive complete season-after series,” i.e. TV shows where Netflix gets exclusive streaming rights once the full season has broadcast. That may not be an apples-to-apples comparison — it sounds like there are more season-after exclusives (including The New Girl, The Walking Dead, Scandal, and Breaking Bad) than there are shows that are completely original to Netflix. However, it’s a good reminder that Netflix’s business isn’t just about its original content. In fact, while the company that it plans to double its investment in original content in 2014, it also says that expenditure will represent less than 10 percent of its total content spending worldwide.
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Who Said It? President Obama Or An Infomercial?
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Gregory Ferenstein
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At today’s White House press conference, President Obama came out to sell Americans on the Affordable Care Act and try to deflect criticism about Healthcare.gov’s . I think most of us in the press expected him to address the shady government contract processes that , to take on a $92 million, U.S.-government-funded e-commerce project. But instead of providing more details about why most people still can’t sign up for the new healthcare plans online, the press conference turned into a bizarre sales pitch for how Americans can still purchase insurance . I don’t think I’ve ever seen a U.S. Commander-in-Chief say “1-800” so many times. But don’t take my word for it. See if you can tell the difference between actual statements from President Obama and quotes from an infomercial. (Answers below the last quote. Don’t peek!) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7d85T4OfqA&w=420&h=315] *Answers! 1. President Obama
2. President Obama
4. President Obama
6. President Obama
7. President Obama Lines three and five were delivered by none other than informercial legend , the late commercial genius who could make car wax and knife sharpeners seem like magical necessities. He was kind enough to lend his considerable powers of persuasion to sell health insurance (video above). The Department Of Health and Human Services a “tech surge” of the “best and brightest” to fix the ailing Healthcare.gov system. To date, most users still can’t sign up online. I’ve argued that able to design an e-commerce site, so I don’t know why HHS thinks that more government programmers will save the situation. In the past, I’ve been exceedingly complimentary of . But the press conference today was a bizarre mix of propaganda and crass salesmanship unbecoming of a president. The American people deserve an explanation, not a 1-800 number.
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TechStars-Backed Lua Will Open To The Public By 2014
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Jordan Crook
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More than two years after , little has grown up. The company, which provides mobile workforce technology to enterprise customers with mostly out-of-office employees (think Convo or Yammer but as a usable mobile-first product), is today announcing plans to offer self-service public availability by the end of the year. As it stands now, Lua has to forge relationships with clients and tailor the mobile technology to that specific use case. The team started out offering the service to Hollywood, where films and TV shows offered the perfect test customer. See, production crews have a number of separate departments, such as construction, food and beverage, hair and makeup, etc. This allowed Lua to test the flexibility of the service. Since, the company raised led by IA Ventures. The company is now moving into the hospitality space, as well as major venues like the Barclays Center, which uses Lua for every event from concerts to basketball games. By the end of the year, any company with a mobile workforce will be able to sign up for the collaboration software on their own. Teams under 30 people will pay $5 per person/month, and teams over 30 people will pay $8 per person/month. The app works on iOS and Android, with an SMS plug in to let feature phones have access, as well. Those who want to learn more can head .
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Netflix’s Q3 Beats Analyst Estimates With 1.3M New Domestic Subscribers, $0.52 Earnings Per Share
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Ryan Lawler
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Netflix’s third-quarter earnings report just came out, with the company beating analyst expectations on higher-than-expected subscriber numbers. For the third quarter, Netflix reported earnings of 52 cents per share on revenues of $1.1 billion. That compared to earnings of 13 cents per share on sales of $905 million in the year-ago quarter. Earnings were above analyst expectations of 49 cents a share, while revenues were in-line with the $1.1 billion forecast for the quarter. As always, the most-watched number for Netflix’s earnings report is the company’s domestic subscriber growth. It added 1.3 million domestic subscribers in the quarter, compared to its forecast of 0.7 to 1.5 million US customers during the three months ending in September. Analysts were expecting it to add about 1.1 million subscribers at home and another and 950,000 overseas. In the second quarter, , which was a bit lower analyst expectations. That drove the stock down about 8 percent in after-hours trading, but shares had rebounded since then to over $350. Overall, shares are up more than 200 percent over the past year. Investors were also looking to see how Netflix’s international growth fared. The company added 1.4 million subscribers overseas, which contributed revenues of $183 million. Netflix’s growth comes as the company has been adding more high-value original content to its subscription streaming service. Earlier this year, it launched political thriller House of Cards and the third season of cult comedy favorite Arrested Development to rave reviews. In the third quarter it added prison dramedy Orange Is The New Black from Weeds creator Jenji Kohan. While gaining it subscribers, Netflix’s content push is also winning it some awards. The streaming service became the first of its kind to , including one for Best Director of a Drama Series, given to David Fincher for House of Cards. Those wins showed that the company could compete against cable and broadcast networks in playing the original content game. On the product side, Netflix has also been refining its service to become more personalized. Over the summer it added to support multiple viewers in a household, and followed that up with a new which is designed to provide new ways to search and discover content available in its library. All of which is meant to keep users coming back for more, and ultimately keep them subscribed to the $8 a month service longer. The company is also reportedly to get the service embedded on their set-top boxes. If that happens, you can expect subscriber growth to probably tick up even faster. For the fourth quarter, Netflix expects between 32.7 and 33.5 million domestic subscribers, or an increase of between 1.6 million and 2.4 million subscribers. Domestic revenue is expected to come in between $731 million and $741 million, while international sales are pegged at between $210 and $224 million. The company expects total earnings of between $29 million and $49 million, or $0.47 to $0.73 per share. Netflix investors reacted pretty enthusiastically to the earnings report, driving shares up 10 percent to a record high in after-hours trading.
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Social Video Broadcasting Startup Spreecast Comes Out Of Beta With A New Design
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Ryan Lawler
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It’s been two years since we , a startup that allows anyone to create live, social video broadcasts. After all that time, it’s finally coming out of beta and doing so with a big new redesign. Spreecast was launched as a platform for enabling users to quickly and easily create multi-user video broadcasts. As a free product, it provides all the producer tools necessary to invite multiple speakers into a broadcast, take questions and invite audience members to participate, and archive those conversations to be viewed later. With the redesign, the new Spreecast is cleaner and more airy, cutting out all the jumble of logos and screenshots that used to dominate the homepage. With everything else in the world going flat — from iOS 7 to the New TechCrunch — Spreecast has followed in those footsteps, simplifying the product and making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. Uh, yeah, it also has a new logo. Besides the updated home page, Spreecast has made some changes to the way its player works, incorporating user feedback to improve the broadcasting experience. It changed the colors of its call-to-action buttons, for instance, to more clearly emphasize them and help its users along in creating and managing broadcasts as they happen. While not entirely new with this release, Spreecast has also done a fair amount of work on the backend in order to add other features that broadcasters were requesting. For instance, it recently added new monetization features for its big media partners, which enables sponsorship placements and pay-per-view options. It also has a paid analytics offering and the ability to download archived videos for paying users, as well. For Spreecast, the new monetization features are a way for it to cash in on a large number of serious media organizations who have begun using it for broadcasts. That includes partners like ESPN, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Oxygen, ABC, and ABC Family. The product is also used by organizations like LinkedIn, The Heritage Foundation, USC Athletics, Stanford Athletics, and Sesame Street to connect with users and fans. With the launch of monetization features, as well as the availability of Spreecast’s mobile app and mobile web experience, the company decided it was finally time to pull off the beta tag. Spreecast was , and has raised more than $13 million from investors that include Meakem Becker Venture Capital, GGV Capital, MentorTech Ventures, Stan Shuman, Frank Biondi, Gordon Crawford, Sandy Robertson and Edward W. Scott, Jr.
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Facebook Adds Video And New Pricing To Its Mobile App Ads
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Anthony Ha
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Facebook just two changes to its mobile app install ads that should make them more appealing to advertisers. First, the company says it will now support video in these ad units. “Video creative has proven to be an effective way to drive engagement in News Feed,” Facebook writes, and it makes sense for app ads since a video can be much more effective than screenshots and text for giving you a sense of the gameplay or user experience in an app. (Startups like and are trying to go beyond video by including interactive app demos in ads.) Introducing video could also make the ads into bigger moneymakers for Facebook, since video advertisers (cost per thousand impressions) than they do for other ad types. (I asked a Facebook spokesperson how video will affect the pricing, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. The spokeserson told me, “These ads go into our auction just as any other ads. The type of creative (photo, video) doesn’t affect the pricing.”) Facebook’s announcement blog post quotes John Clelland from DoubleDown Casino, an early tester of the video unit: In our early tests, we found that using video in our mobile app ads resulted in increased install rates and decreased costs per install. We’ve seen tremendous success with mobile app ads and are looking forward to using video to make them even more engaging with rich media like video. In addition, Facebook is also announcing that it will allow app advertisers to bid for ads on a cost-per-action basis, instead of having to pay based on clicks or impressions as they had before. Since the rationale behind the ads is to drive installs ), Facebook is basically allowing advertisers to pay based on what they really care about. The company says that internal tests showed that paying based on installs instead of clicks meant that advertisers were effectively paying 20 percent less for each install. A few weeks ago, these ads have driven 145 million installs this year.
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Facebook’s Referrals To Media Sites Up 170% YOY, New “Stories To Share” Tells Pages What To Post
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Josh Constine
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Facebook wants to get more news content in its feed by proving to media sites it’s their premier social ally. referral traffic to media sites is up an average of 170% this year. It also launched the “Stories To Share” tool, which aims to drive even more traffic by suggesting which articles media sites should post to their Pages but haven’t yet. There are plenty of places for media sites to share on the web, and Facebook wants to prove that it’s the place they should go first…and most frequently. In a statistics dump this morning, it cites that a of referral traffic to media sites from social networks comes from Facebook. It didn’t share any absolute traffic numbers, but notes that this year TIME’s referral traffic from Facebook is up 208%, BuzzFeed is up 855% and Bleacher Report is up 1,081%. But it found that sites could get even more referral traffic by posting more often to their Page. A study with 29 sites over seven days found that posting to the News Feed 57% more often caused an 80% increase in referral traffic. “When, people find Facebook more engaging, people spend more time on Facebook and see more ads, so one of our goals is to get people to use Facebook more,” Facebook’s head of platform Justin Osofsky tells me. “It’s important to make Facebook more engaging first and foremost because it creates a great user experience, but that also help our business.” So to get publishers to post more content to the News Feed through their Pages, today it’s launching “Stories To Share” on the admin panel of Pages for media sites and publishers. The little box looks at what links to a Page’s site are being shared most frequently by users and getting the most in engagement, but haven’t been posted by the Page yet. With a quick click, admins can compose and share a story for that link. We’re seeing about a half dozen Stories To Share listed on TechCrunch’s Page. The feature defaults to tell admins what’s hot from the last day, but they can filter to show which of their posts are trending in the last three hours or two days. The move comes as part of Facebook’s multi-pronged push to tell media sites “if you scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours.” It now lets media publishers — and show the world Facebook is a real-time news source, too. It’s providing that show who is talking about what most frequently to lend data to their posts and broadcasts — and get wide, mainstream exposure for Facebook as a place to talk about current events. And it allows Pages to promote their posts so they’re seen by more of their fans — by paying Faebook for Promoted Post ads Facebook can’t survive without great content that pulls people back to the feed. Luckily it has a massive traffic carrot it can use to tempt media sites to publish to it and talk about it.
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Soylent Closes $1.5M In Seed Funding From Lerer, Andreessen Horowitz
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, the drink that’s designed to fulfill a person’s nutritional needs, just raised $1.5 million in seed funding from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures. Yes, that’s right. The seemingly wacky personal experiment of YC-backed founder Rob Rhinehart and his team is becoming a full-fledged business with $1.5 million in pre-orders. Chris Dixon led Andreessen’s involvement in the company. “He’s a straight shooter and he thought it had a lot of potential,” Rhinehart said. “They got in there pretty quickly.” Other investors include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and YC venture partner Garry Tan through their fund, Initialized Capital. Then there are Jack and Sam Altman through their vehicle, Hydrazine Capital. Soylent will use the funding to help bring their manufacturing in-house and to do product development, which includes hiring a culinary director who can work on the taste and mouthfeel of Soylent. (It’s still a bit bland, if you ask me. But that’s by design.) They’re also relocating the company to Los Angeles because Rhinehart said the costs of operating in San Francisco were too high to have an office and manufacturing facilities. The company also has a lot of connections to Caltech down south. Soylent is a meal replacement that Rhinehart personally designed for himself after he became fascinated by inefficiencies in the industrial food system. Last year, Rhinehart stopped eating regular food and . The experiment drove enough interest that Rhinehart decided to do a pivot, and change his YC-backed startup from working on wireless networking to making Soylent full-time. Now his diet is 90 percent Soylent and 10 percent “recreational eating,” or what he calls eating regular food. He gave it the self-deprecating name Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans. To be clear, Rhinehart’s version of Soylent is made of humans. It contains a mix of carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and dozens of other vitamins that are deemed medically necessary by the Institute of Medicine for a person to live. They will release a full nutrient list in December, but you can see on Rhinehart’s blog. Rhinehart’s vision is to create an inexpensive, fully nutritious and ubiquitous food source that any regular person can find anywhere — even in grocery and convenience stores around the world. It would be something that would compete against the cheap snack, junk and fast foods that are everywhere around us. There are 50 or so beta testers that have been mostly living off Soylent for the last several months. While there haven’t been any major health issues with the beta testers so far, no one fully understands the long-term implications of switching their diet mostly or exclusively to Soylent. Each of the individual ingredients is tested by the FDA and EFSA (European Food Safety Administration), however. It’s also manufactured in a Modesto-based factory certified by the NSF. Rhinehart says they’ve gotten to version 1.0 of the formula and are looking to ship in December. There have been delays from an early September ship date because of issues with suppliers, he said. They’ve tweaked some of the specific nutritive ratios since then, too, like the Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acid supply. It will cost about $65 for a week’s supply of meals.
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BlackBerry’s BBM Will Hit iOS And Android Today, One Month After Botched Launch
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Chris Velazco
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Hey, remember when BlackBerry was going to officially roll out BBM for iOS and Android a few weekends ago only to be stymied by technical issues? At the time it was yet another dark mark on BlackBerry’s already sketchy record, but things are finally starting to look up. The company confirmed on its that the messaging app will go live in the Android and iOS app stores for new users once more at some point today. It’s a good thing, too. Considering the sorts of troubles that BlackBerry has been dealing with lately, it’s a little heartening to see that the company has finally managed to iron out the wrinkles with one of its biggest cross-platform pushes in recent memory. If you happen to be one of the six million (!) people who threw your name into the “I Want BBM” hat, you’ll be able to start using the apps right away. Unfortunately, the rest of us will be stuck a queue waiting for our turn to really use the apps, though the company noted that it was we “focused on moving millions of customers through the line as fast as possible.” Curiously enough, BlackBerry also crowed about the fact that over 1 million Android users had installed an iffy pre-release version of the application. To be fair that’s a pretty significant indicator of demand, but those people are also partially to blame for the BBM delay as a whole — that early version of the app generated amounts of data traffic that BBM head Andrew Bocking said was “orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user”, and at the time there was no way to launch a new, fixed version of the app without effectively screwing over all of the people who installed the illicit version. That not-so-little issue has apparently been cleared up though, but BlackBerry has offered little guidance on what sort of wait times interested users will have to endure before they can start BBMing each other. We’ll soon see how annoying this process really is, but in Blackberry’s defense, it really can’t afford to botch this whole thing a second time. A slow, manageable trickle of new users is definitely a nice change of pace from the damning traction seen at the end of September, but there are still plenty of potential problems BBM still has to face — think WhatsApp, Viber, Voxer, Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, Line, Kakaotalk, and all those other entrenched messaging apps. The path to continued relevance is a tricky one, but at least BBM is finally ready to leave the gate.
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Microsoft Releases Code To Fix Surface RT Tablets Borked By Windows RT 8.1 Upgrade
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Alex Wilhelm
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The Windows RT 8.1 upgrade until Microsoft can fix an issue with the software that was causing havoc for a slim percentage of Surface RT owners moving to the new operating system. The company today released a new statement relating to the problems, indicating that the bug in the code only impacted Surface RT owners. In the company’s estimation, around 0.1 percent of Surface RT owners who tried to upgraded suffered from the issue. But, as the bad code could, it seems, brick your device, that’s a far too high percentage. Windows RT has had a troubled past, and to have Microsoft trip and fall while helping the owners of its own hardware upgrade its own operating system from version to version, is incredibly embarrassing. To have the issue stretch out for multiple days must be excruciating. So the company is working to fix the problem with alacrity. The company has that can be used to restore devices to working order. Here’s Microsoft’s full statement on the matter: Based on our investigations of a situation customers have encountered updating to Windows RT 8.1, we can confirm that as of now this is a Windows update issue only affecting Surface RT customers. While only less than 1 out of every 1,000 ( or less than 0.1%) Surface RT customers who have installed Windows RT 8.1 have been impacted, improving their experience and ensuring their systems are fully operable as quickly as possible is our number one priority. along with actionable guidance for affected customers. We continue to work towards making the Windows RT 8.1 update available in the Windows Store again and apologize for any inconvenience. Further updates will be provided as they become available. This is exactly what Microsoft wanted to avoid in its Windows 8.1 planning. Let’s see how long it takes to fix.
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What Do You Love About Writing Code? We Ask, Software Engineers Answer
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Colleen Taylor
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The answers were all unique, and all pretty inspiring — so we compiled a number of them in the video embedded above. I especially enjoyed hearing , the president of , share her viewpoint (starting at 3:30.) Here’s one good excerpt:
“I love abstract problems, but I also love working on problems that might change people’s lives. I think computer science technology is one of the most inter-disciplinary fields there is. It’s a way of parsing the universe around you, and it’s a way of actually contributing to creating new things in the universe. One of the things I hate about the current state of things is people think of technology as something you use, but not something you create. And one of the things we’ve convinced our students at Mudd is: If you want to make a difference in the world, and if you want to be creative, and you want to solve puzzles, what could be better than computer science?” Through all the big news TechCrunch covers about venture capital funding and pivots and M&A deals and IPOs, it’s good to remember the individual passions and day-to-day work that lays the foundation for it all.
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Behind South Korea’s Big $65M Mobile Gaming Merger
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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They’ve been rivals for more than 10 years. Both Com2uS and Gamevil have battled for the local South Korean gaming market through the era of candy-bar phones until today. But in a new twist this month, they’re actually joining forces with Gamevil’s in its longtime competitor. The reason? Android and iOS have fundamentally changed the global mobile gaming market. They’ve flattened it and games arguably can now cross cultural boundaries more fluidly than they ever have before. Games from European developers like King’s Candy Crush Saga and Supercell’s Clash of Clans can be distributed seamlessly in Asian markets. At the same time, themselves between Google’s Android platform and domestic game developers, lessening the power of local studios. So there’s more competition from abroad and weaker leverage for domestic developers. The deal, which values Com2uS at roughly $304 million, gives Gamevil a majority stake in the company. We hear that more serious talks started several months ago between James Song and Jiyoung Park, the heads of both companies. Only a handful of employees knew about the deal before it closed. Both companies have seen their stock prices decline over the last year (see below) as both on mobile gaming companies. It’s been difficult to see any of the developers break out from the hits-driven nature of the business after some early hope that a hugely dominant studio would emerge. While Gamevil’s to $19.1 million in the second quarter of this year, their profits have declined 32.3 percent in the same time because they’ve had to pay more royalties to studios they publish games on behalf of. At the same time, Com2uS year-over-year to roughly $19 million in the second quarter because of poor performance of new games. So you can see the argument that both companies might be able to do better together in the face of broad industry shifts. Gamevil’s shares rose 2.2 percent on the news, while Com2uS’ declined slightly. Also, because Gamevil tends to be more focused on publishing while Com2uS does first-party games, there’s an argument that both companies’ businesses are complementary. Furthermore, the larger network of players will also help in terms of cross-promotion and marketing. Gamevil says it has 300 million installs while Com2uS hasn’t released its figures. That said, it’s unclear how the size of the combined workforce might be affected or how the management structure will work out between the two companies, which have about 800-900 employees between them. From what we understand, the companies are going to keep both brands for now. In any case, it will be interesting to see whether this deal heralds another big consolidation wave for game developers in other parts of the world.
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Microsoft Announces Azure For US Government, Satya Nadella Dodges The CEO Question
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Alex Wilhelm
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At the San Francisco offices of Yammer, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella today announced a new instance of its Azure cloud product built for U.S. government customers. The product, formally called “Windows Azure US Government Cloud,” is a separate service, hosted inside the U.S. that will only be managed by U.S. citizens. The announcement follows recent news that Microsoft earned a of authorization to sell its products to the government. Azure for U.S. government customers, in a way, screams with irony, given the current news cycles that discuss the encryption cracking, Internet surveillance, and other secret practices that the United States government is undertaking through its intelligence arms. To flip that and require a separate instance of Azure to protect government data from any form of snooping is somewhat grimly humorous. Not that any of that is Microsoft’s fault. It just wants to sell its services to whomever needs them, and if it needs to tweak Azure to sell it to the government, then so be it. I’m unsure how deep demand is for cloud computing in the government, an infamously technologically backwards group, but we’ll find out. Also at the event, Nadella stated that Skype is undergoing a reformation to run more of its processes on top of Azure itself. Perhaps most interestingly, Nadella said that to build a public cloud of the scale of Azure, with a global datacenter footprint, would cost around $5 billion or $6 billion. That’s a high bar to entry. Local clouds could be built for a fraction, of course, but to reach the scale of AWS or Azure, you will need a firm 10-figure budget. And that’s only going to grow in time, as the public cloud grows. Microsoft also announced that in October it will release HDInsight on Azure, a Hadoop-based service for the Apache operating system. It’s another notch in Microsoft’s nascent, but growing open source support record. The day’s event was a from the enterprise and cloud group at Microsoft. Nadella deferred the CEO question, and reiterated that Steve Ballmer remains “very much” the CEO of the company. And he didn’t wink following the remark.
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BranchOut Launches Talk.co To Expand From Networking Into A WhatsApp For The Workplace
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Josh Constine
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BranchOut’s professional network cratered when Facebook muted its virality. the $49 million-funded startup is hedging its bets with the launch of a mobile-first web, , and messaging app for coworkers that looks like Yammer and WhatsApp’s white-collar love child. Talk.co ditches Yammer’s passive news feed for a list of message threads that get your colleagues to respond faster. grew to a whopping 33 million users with its namesake Facebook app that helps you find friends or friends of friends to refer you for jobs. But when Facebook cut off the spammy wall posts it employed for growth, and its desperate attempt to become a real-time stream of failed, its engagement withered. “It’s not a failure. It’s still alive,” BranchOut founder and CEO Rick Marini pleads. BranchOut has been stripped down to more of a professional search tool that the startup will try to grow. But “active users aren’t very big right now,” Marini admits. What the founder realized in the meantime was that people who got jobs through BranchOut were having trouble communicating with their coworkers. Companies would tell him “We’re using Yammer [or just email], but we see employees using WhatsApp, or GroupMe, or MessageMe, and we want that internally.” So Marini repurposed some of the BranchOut team and spent three-quarters of his own time to build Talk.co. You can see a demo and quick chat with Marini in the video below: You sign up for , , or with your work email address, which the service then verifies to ensure you’re really part of the company. Once you’re in, you get a buddy list of all your coworkers. You can send one-on-one and one-to-many instant messages or set up a chat room for “Engineering,” “Marketing,” “After-Work Fun,” or whatever you want. Instead of posting to a news feed like with Yammer, Convo, and other workplace collaboration tools, you send text, photos, and links directly to each other. Each message delivers a (mutable) notification to its recipients. That makes Talk.co feel more urgent and increases accountability. CC me on a Yammer post and I don’t feel compelled to respond. Message me and two other coworkers on Talk.co and I’m likely to feel like it’s my responsibility to reply. And since I can reliably see who is actively online in Talk.co, I know who to reach out to for immediate help. That means Talk.co could boost workplace efficiency. It could also increase collaboration and connection between colleagues without forcing everyone to hand out their phone numbers. Sally from product might not want to give Jim from sales her cell phone number, but Talk.co could ensure Jim can ping her after hours if her new feature is preventing his ads from showing up right. It’s also a cleaner, less spammy channel than email, which keeps queries from getting lost. Marini tells me Talk.co will be free at first, but will likely start charging for premium services and larger organizations on a per-seat per-month basis. Similar to Asana’s model, a few employees can try it out for free, and only need to persuade their CIO to pay when Talk.co has proven its value and they want the rest of the company on it. Talk.co certainly benefits from simplicity and familiarity. Most people have used a group messaging app and this works exactly the same, just exclusively with coworkers. And it does feel more nimble and likely to inspire real-time collaboration than feed-based tools. But chat also gets messy quickly. It’s tough to remember what each thread is about when it’s a conversation, not a post with a series of comments. Chat makes people feel almost too comfortable, leading them to prattle on and socialize when they should be focusing on work. It might be tough to find important old threads too as there’s no search feature in the mobile app yet, though Marini says he’s working on it. The big question is whether the fluid nature of chat’s speed is worth sacrificing the perceived permanence and importance of posts to a feed. Each company will have to answer that for themselves. Luckily, Talk.co’s strategy isn’t centered around stealing customers from serious enterprise communication tools. Marini tells me Talk.co could be an addition, not just a replacement, but insists it’s for “companies with 5 to 5,000 employees. If you have more you probably are already using Yammer, or Chatter, or Jive, or Skype. We’re focused on the small and mid-size business market who have no kind of service today at all.” because Marini was strangely beta testing it at BranchOut.com. That led us to think they were pivoting entirely. While Talk.co is now the company’s and Marini’s priority, BranchOut will continue to limp along. BranchOut’s investors were supportive of the reallocation of resources to Talk.co because the startup’s meant it had years of runway — plenty of time to experiment with something hot. That’s how they see the workplace communication space because of two big trends: the shift to mobile, and the Bring Your Own Device movement. Tools built web-first don’t necessarily translate to the small screen or harness its strengths. Meanwhile, companies are tired of paying for extra mobile devices for their employees, who don’t want to carry a second one anyways. They’d rather use their own phones, and Marini hopes he can get Talk.co installed on them. “We’re in the third inning”, Marini tells me, likening his startup to a baseball game. “The first inning we got out there and grew incredibly fast. The second inning was tougher. Facebook made changes to the developer platform that affected everyone. In the third inning, we’ve reacted to that and focused on utility.” If can convince professionals that it can deliver the ease of consumer messaging with the security and purpose of the enterprise, BranchOut might still be able to eek out a win.
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Airbnb’s Brian Chesky And Sequoia’s Alfred Lin On The Importance Of Culture And Core Values To A Business
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Leena Rao
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co-founder Brian Chesky and Sequoia Capital partner, Airbnb board member, and former Zappos COO joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Chesky and Lin work together on retaining culture, expanding internationally, and maintaining customer service. In this episode, we focus on how Lin and Chesky first met, and what Chesky has learned from the Zappos model in creating a culture at Airbnb. Founded by Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, Y Combinator-incubated Airbnb was as a marketplace to find a sofa to crash on or a room to rent for a short time. In fact, Sequoia led Airbnb’s seed round back in 2009. Flash forward five years, and the company has evolved into an international giant in the apartment and home rentals space, reportedly valued at during its last funding round. To date, Airbnb has helped service over 8.5 million guests, and has more than 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities and 192 countries. As he explains in the video above, Chesky was obsessed with Airbnb’s culture from the beginning. Shortly after the startup raised funding in 2009 from Sequoia, the founders flew to Zappos to understand how they could apply some of the learnings from the e-commerce company to Airbnb’s own internal operations. One of the things that Lin helped Chesky and the team develop were the core values of Airbnb, and how to extend the culture of a business to the recruitment and hiring process. Check out the video to hear what Airbnb’s six core values are, and stay tuned for the second video in this series, which addresses the company’s international expansion, how Chesky is approaching the challenges involved with growing globally (with the help of Lin) and more.
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DG Acquires Republic Project, A Google Ventures-Backed Ad Startup, For $1.4M
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Anthony Ha
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Publicly traded ad management and distribution company Digital Generation, better known as , is announcing that it has acquired ad startup for $1.4 million in cash, with additional earn outs based on revenue and profitability. The startup as a way for artists and labels to sell pre-ordered music to fans. Since then, Republic Project has evolved into a broader ad platform that allows customers to create rich media ads that run on multiple platforms and devices, and to update their campaigns in real-time. Republic Project last year from Google Ventures, 500 Startups, and others. Last year, for $15.5 million. In the press release announcing the acquisition, DG CMO Ricky Liversidge said this deal will boost his company’s efforts “to integrate and innovate within areas such as social and mobile, while making sure advertisers can move quickly within a data driven landscape.” And Republic Project CEO AJ Vernet said joining DG will allow his team to “fast track our solution globally.” The companies say the entire 11-person Republic Project team will be joining DG’s Los Angeles office.
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Those Giant Fox News Touchscreens Are Microsoft Perceptive Pixel Displays Running Windows 8
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Alex Wilhelm
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Huge iPads or tiny journalists? That’s the question that after Fox News detailing a new set that includes a number of analysts sat before . The screens measure 55 inches, run Windows 8 (soon: Windows 8.1, presumably) and look damned futuristic. Secret Fox News hardware? Something that Samsung kicked together for the company? Nope, just Microsoft’s PPI display technology deployed in the wild, the company confirmed with TechCrunch. Microsoft’s PPI business comes from its acquisition of Perceptive Pixel in July 2012. Microsoft, through that acquisition, is now an OEM of some of the largest touchscreens in the world; PPI displays also come in an 80-inch variant. For fun, here’s a shot of long-time Microsoft denizen Craig Mundie poking a PPI display at TechForum on Microsoft’s campus this March: And here we have Shep Smith’s crew using their own PPIs: According to Smith, Fox News can toss the images of any of the displays on air when they wish. The skinning you see above (from black to white) appears to be in place to let the displays match the color scheme of the new studio. Aside from it being simply neat of Fox News to use the displays, it’s a nice moment for Microsoft: The company has found an early commercial use for the technology. Inside of Microsoft you can better tell the pecking order by who has a PPI display in their office, compared to a whiteboard, if you were curious. I spoke with Microsoft’s Eric Rudder , who told me that the multitouch slate screens cost around $7,000 for the 55-inch model. Once that goes through a few product cycles, PPI displays could become affordable enough for the rest of us. For now, I’m jealous of Fox News for the first time in a long time.
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Google Glass Gets Transit Directions So You Can Get Your $1,500 Head Computer Stolen On The Bus
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today, Google Glass gets , as long as you’ve paired it with an Android phone. Previously, the head computer would give you directions to nearby locations but only via your feet or personal vehicle. This latest update adds buses, streetcars and more into the mix, letting you specify a location and allowing Glass to pin down the exact routes and timing for you. This utilizes the navigation system of your connected Android phone, meaning that you’re not going to be able to do this with Glass alone, or with it connected to an iOS device. Currently only the MyGlass app on Android can pass along the location information needed to get these directions. The Glass team explains how you use the new transit directions: “From the Home screen, get directions by saying “ok glass, get directions to…” Glass will pull up directions by whatever method you used last. To switch the manner of transportation, tap the directions card and swipe until you see Transit.” This all sounds great and lovely, but my worry is that Glass isn’t exactly ubiquitous enough — even in San Francisco, home of all things new and gadgety — to feel comfortable trucking along on most public transportation while wearing it. I’ve worn it out and about both in suburban and urban areas and felt very uncomfortable riding trains or buses with it on. The devices are still $1,500 and there is a certain theft risk here. Not that this is a reason for the Glass team to stop adding features, though, and they continue to do so at the ‘one update a month’ clip promised at Google I/O. This update also brings two additional features, including the ability to tap on a card to visit links sent to you in tweets, texts, emails and other messages. You can now also see a profile picture of the person you’re talking to while sending a message. The text is overlaid on top of it. Still not to be found? The full will allow people to build official ‘native’ Glass apps instead of the current crop of what are basically web-based apps.
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Forkly, The Foodspotting Competitor From Brightkite Founders, Is Looking For A New Home
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Sarah Perez
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, a Foodspotting competitor launched back 2010, is shutting down. Well, sort of – it will remain open for six to eight months, and maybe more, while looking for a new home, we’re told. It looked like bad news for the company when one of its co-founders, , left the startup to join as CTO at , and now we’ve confirmed why: Forkly is “in transition.” The company, for those unfamiliar, was notable mainly for its creators: May and . With Brightkite, the team was well ahead of the check-in trend that later led to companies like Foursquare, with the launch of to combine social, mobile and local to form a new kind of network. But Forkly was not quite as groundbreaking. Its emphasis was more on rating individual food items and dishes in order to discover what’s good where, not just sharing pictures of your meal. The idea was to help users build their own “taste graph,” meaning a personalized profile of what you like to eat. In February, the company a revamped app they called “Forkly 2.0,” which was designed to make that taste graph more useful through personalized recommendations. Unfortunately, Forkly wasn’t very differentiated from Foodspotting – at least in the eyes of consumers. In addition, it and other food-focused social networks and review platforms have also had to contend with the rise of other companies, like Yelp for reviews, Instagram, where users like to post their meal photos, and, ironically Foursquare, which also lets you find what’s good to eat nearby. Forkly took in $200,000 in seed funding back in May 2011, followed by $700,000 in March 2012, according to , which hasn’t posted an update for seven months, as of the time of writing. Investors included Jeff Miller (founder of Punchfork), David Cohen, Jim Deters (CEO at Galvanize), and others. The profile also notes that the app had roughly 300,000 users on iOS, and an Android version was due out in March 2013. However, that Android app never launched – the site still lists the app as “coming soon.” Meanwhile, the iOS app has not been updated since this July, and May left for Push.io in September, according to his . The company currently has 2.1 million dishes, 360,000 downloads, 500,000 dish ratings, and 93,000 restaurants with ratings. Though the Forkly app is still live in the iTunes App Store, it’s ranked #320 in the “Food & Drink” section, according to the latest figures from App Annie – a metric that indicates the app failed to gain significant traction in its niche, or perhaps ran out of money to continue its user acquisition efforts. According to TechCrunch sources, Forkly is indeed in the process of winding down operations, but it hasn’t been fully closed down yet. A more formal announcement has yet to be made. That’s why the app is still available for download on the App Store. . : According to Becker, management of Forkly is being taken over by investor Steve Croake, while both founders are moving on. The company is now shopping itself around to other larger firms, where it could be a good fit. He says some discussions are underway now. “The technology is really awesome, we have a great community and great data, but it’s not really being monetized at the moment,” says Becker of Forkly. “Martin and I have other opportunities in front of us. We’ve been working on this for two and a half, almost three years. It’s time for us to move on,” he explains. Becker is remaining for now to help during the transition along with a couple of others. He’s also working on some side projects including a new travel site called with blogger, Startup Weekend founder, and TechStars Boulder’s former community director Andrew Hyde. He also has a project underway at .
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Mobile Engagement Platform Appoxee Grabs $1.8 Million As It Heads To The U.S.
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Sarah Perez
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With mobile publishers and toward in-app purchases in order to monetize on mobile, there’s an increased need to generate more revenue out of existing install bases. That’s an area which mobile app engagement platform has been focused on since its founding in early 2011, and today it’s announcing an additional $1.8 million in seed funding to help it continue its growth. The round was led by U.S.-based hedge fund Lazarus Israel Opportunities Fund and , who previously served as President of Microsoft’s R&D center in Israel, and is now joining Appoxee’s board. including Cyhawk Ventures and Oryzn Capital also participated in the round, bringing Appoxee’s total funding to $2.4 million to date. The additional investment is aimed at helping the startup, which has so far seen traction in its home base of Israel and elsewhere in Europe, take on the U.S. market. To that end, Appoxee plans on opening a San Francisco office by year-end. In the U.S., the company will have compete with a variety of companies like Urban Airship, Facebook acquisition Parse, and dozens of others. Explains CEO Itay Levy, his product is differentiated from many operating in the space by the methods it uses to help app publishers create their campaigns. Appoxee primarily targets product managers and marketing managers – that is, the business side of app publishers. After signing up for the platform, instead of having to figure out how to use the system to meet their needs, Appoxee instead asks the customer about their goals. Then, working backwards from those goals, it helps the publisher build automated campaigns whose focus is on increasing retention and in-app purchases. Says Levy, in some cases it will increase in-app purchases by 20%, but they’ve even seen others where they increased by 100%. The company now touts thousands of developers and apps using the platform, including names like Playtika, Social Point, Sygic, and Win.com, to name a few. In 2011, Appoxee was installed on 3 million end user devices, and by 2012 that number grew to 60 million, he tells us. Today, it’s at 275 million installs, and is sending over half a billion push notification messages per month. While Levy declined to speak about revenue specifics, he would say that revenue is up by 800% since the beginning of the year and is still growing. The company today offers a free tier with unlimited push messaging up to 250,000 users, then launches into services beginning at $500/month. The funding, in part, will go toward product enhancements, mainly those that will provide more automation in terms of the campaigns being run, as well as other optimizations. “We want to allow engagement and more automated. As a publisher, it will be very easy to create an effective campaign. Some of the things that we’re doing today can be automated,” Levy says. Also in the works, Appoxee plans to grow its Tel Aviv-based team with hires on the engineering and product side, while looking for more sales and marketing hires in San Francisco. By next year, they hope to have doubled their 15-person team.
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Tablo BookMaker Takes The Complexity Out Of EBook Publishing
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John Biggs
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Getting a book published used to require something called “an agent” who talked to a “publishing house” who, in turn, hired a “printer” to make a “hardback” or “paperback” version of your words. is just another in the long line of startups aimed at relegating those things to the deep, dark past. Tablo is an Australian company founded by Ash Davies and Andrew McIntosh, two design hackers who wanted to grab a piece of the epub pie. Their product has been funded to the tune of $20,000 by Australian accelerator Angelcube. There are two publishing methods: you can cut and paste your chapters one at a time into the WYSIWYG interface or simply upload iBooks-compatible epub files. The system then makes them available in your web browser or, for an extra fee, in the Amazon and iBooks bookstores. The company saw $12,000 in revenue in its first month after launch and they have 150 authors from 30 countries signed up for the service. “Creating a book with Tablo is like creating a blog post with WordPress. You can create your book in the cloud with full control over your design, media and content,” said Davies. “You can preview your books in the browser, collaborate with editors or friends and publish to bookstores with a single click.” The service also lets you embed books onto websites and you can read them on any mobile browser. “Publishing my own eBook sucked – it took me months to wrestle with book conversions, file formats and publishing contracts,” said Davies. “As a blogger I was so used to being able to type something and click publish, but nothing like this existed in the eBook world.” The company is ramping up its U.S. presence and is looking for local funding. Because both of the creators are designers, the whole thing has a simple, WordPress-esque feel to it, similar to sites like , allowing bloggers and other online media ninjas to build books without all the old-fashioned clutter of “book stores” and “editors.”
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After Buying Wibiya For $45M, Conduit Discontinues Product As It Shifts Away From Toolbars
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Ingrid Lunden
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Less than a month after browser-toolbar and mobile startup merged its Client Connect division , the company is making another change to its business. Conduit has announced that it will be discontinuing , the social browser toolbar service that it , as it shifts further away from its toolbar business. In a letter mailed to customers that is living at — but which is not yet publicly accessible through the company’s actual site — Wibiya founders Daniel Tal, Avi Smila and Dror Ceder write that the company will be discontinuing its service by the end of the year. “Most of” Wibiya’s team and some innovations will get integrated into other Conduit operations, they note. The letter has no explanation for why Conduit has chosen to streamline operations. “Joining a larger company is never easy,” they write, “and we learned a number of invaluable lessons along the way.” Conduit is offering Wibiya customers three months of , which costs $39/month. But in an internal email that we have obtained, Ronen Shilo, the co-founder of Conduit who helped engineer the company’s reverse takeover of Perion in September, puts the decision down to a move away from toolbars in general — a change that Conduit is making in the wake of deciding to split the business, which it did back . That split divided the company in two, with one part focusing on its mobile and engagement business and run by Shilo, and the other, Client Connect, merging with . It was into Client Connect that Wibiya had gone, along with Conduit’s other toolbar business; together these merged with Perion brands like Incredimail (unified messaging app), Smilebox (photo sharing) and the SweetIM (an IM app). Client Connect is currently run by Josh Wine. “As you know, the decision to separate the company reflects a newly focused objective for Conduit – including a shift in product strategy – which has implications beyond Client Connect. One of those is that maintaining Wibiya as a free-standing business no longer fits where we are headed,” Shilo notes. “We acquired Wibiya as a complementary solution for our toolbar business; they delivered publisher solutions within a site, while our toolbars did that outside the site. Now that the toolbar business is no longer a focus, it’s clear that Wibiya, as a business unit, lacks a strategic role for us.” The Wibiya business enabled publishers to integrate toolbars on their websites that let users do things like share links on social networks; translate pages into different languages; or offer free apps, games and video galleries — all in the name of getting users to spend more time on the site. Wibiya — an Israeli company founded in 2008 — was conspicuously absent from both $1.4 billion Conduit’s communications when it was splitting into two in July, and its reverse takeover of Perion in September. At the time of the Wibiya acquisition in 2011, we reported that its toolbars were on around 120,000 sites, reaching some 200 million unique users. Those numbers have grown, but not by much: It’s now used by some 150,000 publishers reaching some 285 million uniques. It’s not exactly clear, but it may have been that this business simply was not generating meaningful enough revenue, or growing fast enough, for the company. It wouldn’t be the first toolbar to shut down after getting acquired. The same thing about a year after Google bought it. Both Wibiya letters, to customers and to employees, are below. Dear employees, As you know, the decision to separate the company reflects a newly focused objective for Conduit – including a shift in product strategy – which has implications beyond Client Connect. One of those is that maintaining Wibiya as a free-standing business no longer fits where we are headed. We acquired Wibiya as a complementary solution for our toolbar business; they delivered publisher solutions within a site, while our toolbars did that outside the site. Now that the toolbar business is no longer a focus, it’s clear that Wibiya, as a business unit, lacks a strategic role for us. However, there is great technology, human experience and capabilities within Wibiya, and we’re in the process of integrating many of these into the existing Conduit businesses. This will enable us to use much of Wibiya’s technology and skills in our existing and planned products. Wibiya is comprised of a strong team of talented individuals from various disciplines and we look forward to finding them exciting positions within Conduit. We will carefully and thoughtfully wind the brand down between now and the end of this year, as part of our overall preparation for life after the separation. This decision has not been easy for Wibiya’s founders or myself but as always Dror, Daniel and Avi are true leaders and product visionaries and understand the current situation and where we’re headed. They will remain with us to ensure the process is successful and I personally intend to remain close to them, in active dialogue, as they figure out their plans. I want to personally thank the Wibiya founders and employees for their contribution to Conduit and look forward to seeing their future efforts come to fruition, whether within Conduit or elsewhere. Ronen
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Netflix iOS Bug That Breaks Output Via Apple HDMI AV Adapters Will Be Fixed
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Matthew Panzarino
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The latest Neftlix update for iOS 7 finally added full AirPlay support to the app, something that many probably assumed it already had. But it also appears to have broken the feature, which allowed it to connect directly to TVs with Apple’s HDMI AV adapter. Some users have been crying foul about the error, claiming that Apple and Netflix were trying to force people to buy Apple TVs in order to use AirPlay. We reached out to Netflix about the error and they ensured us that this is just a bug that is affecting a ‘small percentage’ of customers, and that they’re working on fixing it. A search of Twitter shows that there are quite a few users running up against the issue . Here’s the error that one user, , had been seeing: So, if you’re seeing a similar error, just know that it’s not a grand conspiracy of some sort, just an unfortunate bug. Hopefully Netflix will get the update rolled out soon. In the meantime, an on the matter suggests that turning AirPlay off completely will force video to output to the HDMI adapter, letting you watch video the way you want while Netflix rolls out a fix.
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Sparkcentral Picks Up $4.5 Million To Build Its Vision Of Social Customer Service
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Alex Wilhelm
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announced today that it has raised a $4.5 million Series A round of funding and changed its name to . The company’s vision is the integration of social customer service into the mass-scale call centers that large corporations staff with phones, people who answer phones, and angry calls. Sparkcentral’s focus on enterprise-level clients sets it slightly apart from companies, such as , which cater to outfits that want to publish material, and handle complaints. Sparkcentral wants to focus more narrowly on the customer service needs of large firms. The company is originally from Belgium, but is now ensconced in the Bay Area. Its new $4.5 million round was led by Bob Spinner, who put in around $3.5 million. The rest was fill-in from prior angels and other investors. Including its seed round, Sparkcentral has now raised $5.625 million. Sparkcentral — then TwitSpark — launched its product in September of 2012. In its first year, the company signed up 35 customers, who pay a minimum of around $10,000 per year. Selling to large companies involves long sales cycles, Sparkcentral CEO and founder Davy Kestens tells TechCrunch, noting that they have closed a deal in as little as six weeks, but that the average contract takes longer to settle. The company has rapidly ramped up its team size since closing its Series A lead investor roughly six weeks ago, growing from six to 16 people in the time period. With its fresh money, Sparkcentral does intend to expand its sales staff slightly (past its recent hiring, of course), but has more of the funds earmarked for marketing efforts and feature expansion. Sparkcentral wants more customers like Delta, who have large staffs monitoring social channels. Any brand of sufficient size has to play both offense and defense online, monitoring and managing complaints, as well as reaching out to current and potential customers. Sparkcentral wants to answer the first part. The question the company must answer is simple: Can it grow its customer base quickly enough, and protect its margins while doing so, by providing a social customer service option to large companies. Or, put another way, is there enough market demand for its tailored solution; do companies that have large call centers – the larger the company, the more conservative it is, usually, and always technologically – have the appetite to bake social into their normal customer service operations at scale. If not, Sparkcentral’s core premise is off, and its cost structure won’t work. That it is has accrued 35 customers in a year can be viewed as initial market validation, but it will be the acceleration of that number that is far more interesting over the next 24 months, after which the company will presumably be hunting for new capital. Regarding its product, the company expects to have its API completed by the end of the year. The ROI of social media has always been somewhat dicey to calculate. In the case of Sparkcentral, either it lowers the call volume that companies deal with, or it doesn’t.
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Sarah Perez
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FiLIP, A Smartwatch For Kids, Will Be Home For The Holidays
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Eliza Brooke
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Just in time for frenzied family trips to the mall — i.e. the holiday season — wearable tech maker is preparing to take its first product to market, a GPS and mobile-enabled watch that keeps children and their parents in communication. After three years in product development, AT&T has partnered with Filip Technologies as the device’s network provider, distributor, and billing service. Exact pricing and service plans will be announced in the coming weeks, Filip Technologies CEO Jonathan Peachey said. Although the final retail price on the FiLIP watch has not been set, it will not exceed $200. The monthly voice and data plan will be less than that, Peachey added, the aim being to not burden the average family’s monthly mobile budget. The colorful two-button watch, worn by the child and hooked up to an app on a parent’s phone, can make and receive calls to the parent. It also uses a combination of GPS, cell tower location, and WiFi triangulation to act as a locator, and there’s an emergency button that begins ambient sound recording and connects the child with emergency services. And although smartwatches are , it’s wearable primarily because kids are prone to losing things not attached to their bodies. The FiLIP watch is aimed at children 11 and younger, given that many parents don’t want to buy their kids a cell phone until they’re a bit older. Although there are GPS devices and phones with limited calling capabilities targeted at children on the market, it’s a diversity of features that Filip Technologies is hoping will set its product apart. “You need a combination of location and voice,” Peachey said. “I can’t point to a product that does the features we do in a wearable product.” This summer has marked a few milestones in the development of the product. FiLIP passed its FCC certification in late July, making it the first wearable mobile device with full two-way voice capability to do so. Earlier that month, Peachey joined the Filip team from Virgin Group, where he was the CEO of Virgin Management USA and later an advisor to Sir Richard Branson. It took about two years of engineering effort to get the product to a place where it could enter FCC testing, Peachey said. During that time the engineering team built a large scale prototype and then spent nine months shrinking it down to the size it is today. An official drop date isn’t set yet, but the device will land in stores in the next few months.
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Verbase Is A Search Startup Using ‘No Ads’ To Lure Users To Fire Its Crowdsourced Engines
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Natasha Lomas
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Has Google done enough annoying stuff to drive users elsewhere in search of other, less privacy-trampling search engines? Security focused rival , as some users switched to punish Google for participation in the NSA’s Prism data collection program. So there would seem to be a degree of scope for user churn away from search category leaders. Perhaps more scope for alternative search engines than in a long time. Add to that, privacy-trampling isn’t the only complaint people have about Google either. Its penchant for self-focused spam by seeding organic search results with its own vertical services has drawn ire in Europe. The European Commission is currently undertaking an antitrust probe to consider — i.e. by the company injecting its own content at the top of results, and pushing down rivals’. ‘Don’t be evil’ never looked so sardonic. It’s Mountain View’s penchant for larding search results with increasing amounts of spam (its own, and paying advertisers’) that Hong Kong based startup — which currently bills itself as “a search engine with clean and pure results” — reckons gives it a chance to inch into a market so sewn up by Google that few would bother to even try. Antoine Sorel Neron, founder and CEO of Verbase, cites a that suggests nine percent of search engine users aren’t always finding what they’re looking for when they go a-hunting data on the Internet. Of course, that still leaves a massive majority — 91% — who are getting the info they seek from Google et al so presumably aren’t crying out for alternatives. Indeed, the same Pew report goes on to note: Asked which search engine they use most often, 83% of search users say Google. The next most cited search engine is Yahoo, mentioned by just 6% of search users. Verbase is clearly not afraid of a daunting challenge, then. That said, Neron stresses his search engine is not actually trying to compete directly with Google. Because, well, that doesn’t make a lot of business sense when so many users (apparently) remain satisfied with Google. But he does believe there is a niche to be carved out for a different approach to search — to try to serve that fractional minority who purportedly aren’t finding what they’re after with the current search tools. “With Google, you might see a whole page of ads before you even get to any organic search results,” says Neron. “It actually makes for a biased search experience and it’s to the detriment of users.” How exactly is Verbose different to other search engines? It’s taking a crowdsourced approach to improve the relevance and type of search results it returns. Verbase is using Yahoo’s API to provide initial search results but then adds its own special (de-biasing) sauce on top in the form of an algorithm designed to filter out spam. Plus, it’s also factoring in its own users’ interactions to rate search results and (hopefully) improve relevance. This crowdsourced element should improve over time, says Neron. “We don’t need to be as big or as publicly held as Google,” he adds, pointing out that crowd-powered vertical search engines are already successful for products such as YouTube, Google Maps and Waze (albeit, all those products are now owned by Mountain View). Verbase users can directly rate search results, by clicking on the Verbox button next to a result and making their vote on its relevance/usefulness (choosing from a word list, which also displays other users’ preferences as percentages as an additional crowdpowered guide). The search engine also lets users filter search manually by selecting categories after they search to help narrow down results — which helps feed more human-powered relevance data into Verbase’s own database, so it can keep improving. Users can also create content for particular search queries themselves (via the Bases tab), and sign up to live online chat events that could be attached to search queries (as another way to locate sought-after info). The basic idea for the crowdsourced element is to supplement algorithmic search with human-centric content creation and discovery, says Neron. “We provide more than one way to find what you’re looking for — allowing you to engage with information that’s not just a page of links,” he tells TechCrunch. However, Verbase is by no means the first to think of crowdsourcing as a mean to improve search algorithms. One high profile earlier attempt that springs to mind — the , after just over a year trying and failing to make it stick. Bottom line: you need an awful lot of users to make crowd-powered search fly. So, unsurprisingly, the Bases and Chatbases aspects of Verbase look very threadbare indeed at this early stage in its development. Verbase launched in beta at the start of this year. Discussing usage, Neron says it fielded some 50,000 unique searches last month. With spam and adverts to be kept out of results in the short term, he’s hoping it can keep pushing that figure up to reach a point where it can start to generate useful crowd-powered results, and give its users some genuinely relevant social search results (rather than just a few Google+ pages, a la Google). Neron notes that Google’s marketshare of the search engine space has been flat for a few years. And then of course there’s PRISM- and privacy-gate to perhaps make people think about alternatives. Not that Verbase is billing itself as a privacy-focused search engine, like DuckDuckGo. Rather it’s playing the anti-spam, anti-advertising card for now, while it waits to see if it can accrue enough users to build its Mechanical Turk, crowd-powered engines. Verbase’s business model will require ads to be incorporated into results in future — Neron is up front about that. But, in the meantime, its users get to enjoy an ad-free search life. And when adverts do come to Verbase they will be kept entirely separate from search results, says Neron, likely sectioned off to the right-hand side in a separate pane, rather than being allowed to contaminate the main feed. Answering the charge that it’s a hopeless task to wade into a pool that already contains such a vast, well-resourced competitor, Neron is upbeat. “A search engine is a very viable effort if it’s made in the right way because this market is so big,” he says, adding: “It’s a huge market opportunity. All of the major competition are putting ads at the top of results.” Albeit, he needs to be upbeat, having put in around $120,000 of his own money to fund Verbase since development work started, back in 2011. If the fledgling search startup can keep attracting users, he says it will likely look to raise external funding next year. To hammer home Neron’s point about ‘spam free’, here’s the results Verbase returned when I searched for the following query: ‘what is Bitcoin’: And here are the results I could see on my laptop screen (i.e. as above, without scrolling down to see more results) when performing the same search query on Google: Google spammy? Absolutely. The question is whether enough people notice such a strong smell of spam issuing from Mountain View that they go seeking alternative search tools. Verbase will certainly be hoping that a disgruntled nine percent end up knocking on its door.
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Fox News And Its Big-Ass Touchscreens
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Jordan Crook
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And in this week’s episode of absolutely , we bring you BATS, officially known as big area touchscreens. The media outlet responsible for bringing fair and balanced news into our lives has today released a video that shows off the network’s brand-new Fox News Deck studio, a room filled with video walls and giant 55-inch touchscreens that will henceforth deliver the news to Fox News viewers, along with Shepard Smith. Why, you ask? To deal with “the new reality” as Senior Executive Producer Kim Rosenberg puts it, which includes “smartphones, apps, the internet, your computer.” As viewers change, so too must Fox News, and the only way to deal with the constant presence of the Internet is to build it right into the studio. According to , the remodel has lasted almost a month and the team has been training for “weeks” in order to learn how to use “new cutting edge computer programs” that are capable of showing three or even four tweets at a time. Some of the new tools include a 38-foot video wall, which Smith can manipulate with a Wii-style remote, as well as another large display wall that shows tweets under investigation, and “confirmed” tweets. But the real stars of the new Fox News Deck are the BATS, short for “big area touchscreens.” These Windows 8-powered computers are constantly monitored and used to surf for and confirm news, which is then chosen by Smith to stream live on television. Why these computers need to be 55-inch touchscreens remains unclear. But will the information specialists working on them be exhausted after a days work? Absolutely. would be proud.
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The NSA Oversight Farce
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Alex Wilhelm
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This weekend we learned that President Barack Obama’s NSA surveillance panel, built at least in theory to vet our intelligence activities and weigh their performance against the right of privacy, after the government shutdown froze its funds. It was an emblematic moment. As a nation we couldn’t even keep the farce of oversight in play long enough to have it ultimately disappoint us. A pattern has become clear, regarding the surveillance activities of both the United States and the United Kingdom, most especially when it comes to their keeping tabs on their own citizenry: Clarity with the opacity of wet mud. Senator Corker of Tennessee last month that while he had received some information that proved useful, classified briefings that the NSA held for Congress “have generally been limited to simply discussing the facts underlying specific public disclosures and have not provided a fulsome accounting of the totality of surveillance activities conducted by the federal government, and in particular, by the NSA.” Corker went on to state that he regularly learns more “new revelations” about the activities of the United States’ surveillance apparatus in newspapers than in provided briefings. This, he notes dryly, means that Congress is left to decipher why “prior briefings provided by the Executive Branch did not cover the material contained in these articles.” In other words, why the hell aren’t you keeping us in the loop? Senator Corker is the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. In a short blurb before his letter, the Senator linked to the damning that the NSA violated its privacy rules thousands of times each year. The implication is that he hadn’t been told. Former Member of Parliament (MP) Chris Huhne that the public would not be surprised at how much MPs know, but instead by how little. (Huhne departed from Parliament following a bit of skullduggery, which is worth reading up on but irrelevant in this context.) A short excerpt from his column (Note: The GCHQ is like the British NSA): When it comes to the secret world of GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA), the depth of my “privileged information” has been dwarfed by the information provided by to the Guardian. The cabinet was told nothing about or the NSA’s Prism, or about their extraordinary capability to vacuum up and store personal emails, voice contact, social networking activity and even internet searches. He goes on to note that even during his time on the National Security Council he did not learn of either program. Final oversight of the government rests in the hands of its people, regardless of who currently stands elected. However, as we’ve seen several times in recent months, the government isn’t too keen on the public learning much. Aside from , the United States and the United Kingdom have taken such courageous steps as and threatening and intimidating him in the process, as well as blocking folks from that it is building to greatly expand its storage capability in order to store more collected digital information. So the U.S. Congress isn’t kept informed of the NSA’s activities, and Parliament is hardly kept abreast of the GCHQ’s surveillance work. That, and the public is blocked and generally harassed when they try to uncover information that could help them be functionally informed, and therefore have a say in their own government. Oversight? Out of sight.
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The Internet Costs 30% Of Monthly Wages In Some Nations. Google Wants To Help.
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Internet access is astonishingly expensive in some parts of the world. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that fixed broadband costs 30 percent of the average monthly wage within the developing world [ ]. To address this, Google, Facebook, USAID and a host of top-tier tech companies have teamed up to make the Internet universally affordable. The newly launched (A4AI) aims to achieve the UN development goals of keeping Internet access costs below 5 percent of monthly income worldwide. Unlike , Internet.org, the Alliance will focus on policy-driven solutions, including “innovative allocation of spectrum, promoting infrastructure sharing, and increasing transparency and public participation in regulatory decisions.” According to the ITU, there are . More details about the alliance are available on Google’s .
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Twitter Exploring Personalized Breaking News Notifications With @Eventparrot Experiment
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Matthew Panzarino
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Twitter appears to be exploring introducing breaking news notifications tuned for you to its apps, if a new experimental account is any indication. An account called @ has garnered around 1,500 followers and promises to deliver ‘direct messages that help you keep up with what’s happening in the world’. : Yep, , the account has just been verified. I received my first message from the account this evening, a repackaged tweet from CNN breaking news about rebels kidnapping Libya’s prime minister: The account looks nearly identical in makeup to the @ account that spawned Twitter’s recent addition of push recommendations for follow suggestions and ‘interesting tweets’. That account also started out with the profile text ‘this is a Twitter experiment’, and was after it garnered a lot of positive responses on Twitter at large. It’s impossible to tell whether the account is an ‘official Twitter experiment’ as the company does not comment on experiments it runs. But the account has all of the earmarks of an experiment in delivering a personalized set of breaking news alerts that are determined by an algorithm to be actually useful All of the earliest followers are Twitter employees, which isn’t too surprising as they tend to dogfood new experiments in some cases. For now you’ll have to forgive me for hedging my bets on this being something Twitter is actually responsible for, but I believe that it is. All of the earmarks are there. I’m also jumping to conclusions a bit about where Twitter might take this as it is . So, if it’s not successful or doesn’t meet with the acclaim of @magicrecs, it might go nowhere. But, if it’s successful, then twitter might roll out news notifications that have the same kind of personal ‘magical thrill’ that an account follow recommendation from @magicrecs has. In I noted that Twitter appears to be working hard to create a reason for individuals to feel that the service is tailored to This new @eventparrot experiment could be another step in that direction, which is a good thing. Twitter is still very much trying to figure out how to balance its need to make money with a need to both attract and retain new users. I personally feel that the tapering user growth numbers that we saw in Twitter’s S-1 are a direct result of it focusing too much on bringing outside media to Twitter, rather than Twitter itself being the If people see Twitter as just another place that they can see the same video clips and pictures that they’ve seen elsewhere, there is no motivation to make Twitter a part of their daily lives. If, however, people see that Twitter is using its data to break news that matters and to deliver media created specifically for the service — that’s what will bring the retention. I’ll be watching @eventparrot closely to see how it shapes up. Ironically, or perhaps not so much, I was notified of the new experimental account via @magicrecs. Image Credit:
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Twitter’s Silent Chairman
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Matthew Panzarino
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Last week, when Twitter’s S-1 filing dropped, the media pored over it with a fine-toothed comb, extracting every bit of juice possible from under the freshly peeled-back rind of the intensely secretive company. One very interesting tidbit was dug up by the : Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had apparently given up the voting rights of his stock to fellow co-founder Ev Williams. Though the piece discussed the agreement, which assigned a proxy vote to Williams, the truth of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this gifting was still a mystery. Until today, when another hot nugget dropped in the form of that takes material from his upcoming book on the company. If we piece together Miller’s discovery, revelations from Bilton’s piece and some bits and pieces about the comings and goings of Twitter employees, a picture starts to emerge of exactly why and when those votes were removed, making Dorsey Twitter’s ‘silent Chairman’. The cogs of this particular bit of corporate machinery started turning in 2008, when Williams and board members Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson expressed concern in Dorsey’s ability to act as Twitter CEO. Push came to shove and, in October of 2008, Dorsey was informed by the pair of board members that he was out as CEO during a meeting at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. Octobers have actually shaped up to be no good very bad months for Twitter (and Odeo) founders in general, as October of 2006 is when Odeo co-founder Noah Glass was shown the door. Bilton’s piece points to Dorsey as the catalyst for Glass’ ouster. The offering from the board? A ‘silent’ Chairman position, which would have no voting shares. Williams would control those shares and take on the CEO role. A bitter pill, to be sure, but the ‘silent’ part of that position went beyond just voting shares. Dorsey didn’t have day-to-day involvement with the company and was expected to be as literally silenced as he was legally. Instead, according to Bilton, he started myth building. He began to build up his role as a creator of Twitter and started speaking for the company in interviews, ignoring the ‘silent’ part of his ‘silent’ position. You can see the tension exposed in this clip from an interview on The View. Barbara Walters had spoken to Dorsey the day before the May 6, 2009 interview, and he had given her an interesting version of the creation story, one that excised co-founder Biz Stone and Williams’ contribution (at 3:48): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwQTAmPFaWQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=224 From what we understand, Wilson and Sabet, both early investors, didn’t want to outright fire Dorsey, for a couple of reasons. Sabet, for one, thought that Dorsey might take his talents over to competitor Facebook. Williams felt there was ‘no way’ that would happen. Of course, if the accounts in the Times piece are correct, Dorsey called Zuckerberg about a potential position the day after he found out he was out as CEO, so those fears were well founded. As far as we know, Bilton’s piece today was actually the first time that many of those involved were aware of that call. Over the next two years, Williams considered removing Dorsey from the board seat as he continued to trade on his position as co-founder and public figure. But the fear of defection or public embarrassment stymied those plans. Eventually, Dorsey was able to leverage the reputation that he had built in the media to convince many Twitter investors and employees that he needed a day-to-day role, alongside operations manager and then CEO Dick Costolo. In early October of 2010, Dorsey was able to make good on his efforts and get himself voted in as a no-longer-silent Executive Chairman. That move didn’t get made . Though the S-1 filing notes that Dorsey’s votes won’t return until the company goes public, he most likely gained that power back once he was voted in as Executive Chairman. Bilton’s piece paints a very human portrait of the four founders of Twitter: Glass, Dorsey, Williams and Stone. Dorsey, especially, gets his myth dismantled a bit, as the piece slices through the persona that he’s managed to polish over the last few years as the most prominent public face of Twitter and then Square to present — who would have thought — a human being. A human that had cultivated an image of surety that he may not have always felt, a component that is essential to the prototypical Creation Myth. If you’ve had the opportunity to interact with some of the most incendiary entrepreneurs — whether you consider them successes or failures — they often have this characteristic in common. A need to have their partners and employees simply . In the best founders, this is coupled with brilliance of one sort or another, but that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes a myth — no matter how powerful and effective — is just a myth. No matter how nuanced the reality, the stories that grow out of what we learn of the early days of any company will likely get distilled down into heroes and villains by the nature of the media beast. But the truth is that there’s a bit of each in every founder’s story, and Twitter will have its share. Bilton’s book, titled “ ” should bring some more fascinating details about the company when it arrives next month.
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From Sprint And TechStars To The FDA, A Look At The Changing Landscape Facing Health Startups
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Rip Empson
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The health-care industry in the U.S. is broken, and considering the industry itself represents some 18 percent of the U.S. economy, it’s a sizable problem. While other sectors have begun to adapt, health care has managed to resist change — particularly the technology-based variety. Meanwhile, 30 percent of total health-care spending in the U.S., or more than $750 billion per year, “unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud and other problems.” In other words, inefficiency comes with an enormous price tag. With Obamacare on its way, a sense of urgency has grown around efforts to find (tech-based) solutions to the industry’s inefficiencies and high costs. , startup and investor activity has increased significantly, with investments in digital health businesses doubling from 2009 to 2011, and accelerating through 2012. However, while startup and early-stage hacking (and investor awareness) in digital health is on the rise, it’s not all sunshine and roses. showed that investments in the space have skewed towards later stages, exits are few and investors continue to dabble rather than make a handful of bets. Rock Health co-founder Halle Tecco attributes this to the prevailing perception among investors that it’s “still too early to be making major commitments.” Furthermore, while other sectors have seen their Googles, Facebooks and PayPals — which, in turn, produced dozens of active angel investors — the “Facebook of digital health” has yet to emerge. “The emergence of a handful of key players in the market, or a few billion-dollar success stories, would go a long way” towards creating that active angel pool and inspiring the next generation of HealthTech entrepreneurs, Tecco told us at the time. However, a recent news in the digital health space illustrates that things could be changing. After the SEC lifted its 80-year ban on “general solicitation,” allowing startups to publicly advertise their fundraising efforts, AngelList has begun experiments that could have big implications, like to strike a partnership with AngelList, creating a special fund “through which accredited investors can now invest an equal amount of capital in each startup” from its most recent batch. This will allow as many as 100 accredited investors to back each of its graduates at once, at a $10 million cap, in a convertible note. This could potentially give entrepreneurs greater access to early-stage capital without having to deal with the hurdles traditionally associated with raising money, in turn giving investors, which might have avoided investing in digital health startups otherwise because of the risk or unfamiliarity, access to a pre-validated portfolio of companies. Or at least that’s the idea. While there’s a long way to go, it could turn out to be a great opportunity for digital health startups to combat the dearth of early-stage capital and “nibbling investors.” After all, amid this low angel activity, digital health startups have already begun to pursue alternative sources of capital, with an increasing number turning to crowdfunding. , for example, that 38 digital health campaigns raised more than $4.5 million across Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Medstartr and Fundable so far this year. the accelerator and its partners reported that 34 digital health campaigns closed in Q3 and raised a total of $2.1 million. However, crowdfunding remains a “hits business,” the report says, as 85 percent of crowdfunding campaigns in digital health fell short of their mark — at $20K. On the bright side, Rock Health’s third-quarter analysis found that venture funding is again on the rise, with $1.5 billion flowing into digital health so far this year. This means that funding is up 37 percent relative to Q3 2012 on a total of 145 deals since the first of the year. The space also saw an uptick of big investments from venture firms in Q3, with leading the way. Furthermore, Practice Fusion, the free, web-based EHR provider, , while motion-tracking sensor maker, Fitbit, closed a , connected health device startup, Withings, raised and Ayasdi, which offers a Big Data solution to help uncover insight (like more targeted disease treatment) for the enterprise and big health players, raised Sharecare, Jeff Arnold and Dr. Mehmet Oz’s social health engagement platform, which allows consumers and employees to access assessments, content and tools designed to personalize (and increase) engagement, to $91 million. According to CrunchBase, the company’s last (disclosed) investment was $14 million in January 2012. And, while the amount of round was undisclosed, Heritage Group has previously stated they “make individual investments of up to $15 million in early and growth-stage healthcare businesses,” which means that either its most recent round included more capital from other investors or the company has quietly raised over $60 million during the last few years. More significantly, The Heritage Group has been looking to re-assert itself of late and emerge as a potential strategic partner and significant source of capital for digital health startups. The organization, which represents hundreds of hospitals across the U.S., says it invests in solutions that seek to “reduce cost, improve outcomes and increase the efficiency of healthcare delivery.” Its investment in Sharecare came days after it took the role of lead investor in Simplee’s . As a result, the startup, which makes a mobile app and platform to help consumers understand and manage their health-care expenses, saw its total capital increase to just under $20 million. While Heritage Group is a familiar name in the industry, a number of big players in the tech industry not usually thought of as health-care companies have been quietly tiptoeing (or diving) into the space. From Calico, Google’s new enterprise, which shows that the tech giant is eager to begin dipping its toes into the hunt for , to Box, which, over the last year, has . Both, but especially the latter, could represent big opportunities for startups as these players begin to expand their footprints. Box, as I wrote recently, has now partnered with dozens of health-care companies, secured HIPAA compliance and has made an equity investment in drchrono, a startup building a doctor-facing EHR platform for iPads. The company is looking to “leverage its cloud collaboration platform and growing ecosystem of mobile apps to give doctors and healthcare providers” a better way to securely exchange files, health records and collaborate in the cloud. Based on what we’ve heard from Box’s new Health Boss, Missy Krasner, the company is looking to play a bigger role in encouraging innovation at the startup level in digital health, starting with a it launched last month. Companies like Accenture and Royal Philips to stir up innovation, albeit from a hardware, wearable-tech angle, recently unveiling a “proof-of-concept video as well as plans” to develop clinical apps for Google Glass. As mHealth News , the companies aren’t the first to see the health and medical “potential of Google Glass,” as Accenture/Phillips follow Qualcomm and Palomar Health into the world of Google Glass and mHealth, a “Glassomics” incubator at Palomar’s new, futuristic campus in California. With a dearth of seed capital facing digital health startups, beyond crowdfunding, accelerators and incubators have begun to pop up in greater numbers to fill the gap. Of course, the Accelerator Bubble isn’t always a good thing, and could act in much the same way noisy startup verticals quickly balloon with copycats and me-too businesses, rather than creating a real ecosystem and support network around their incubations — rather than Boiler Room, pop up-style shop that’s more front than substance. However, along with Y Combinator and a few others, TechStars has become one of the more trusted names in the Accelerator World and seems to be taking the opposite approach to Y Combinator, attaching its name to a growing list of affiliates all over the country. (Not unlike Startup Institute.) Bringing another huge mobile company into startup incubation, TechStars recently announced that it is co-creating the in Kansas City in tandem with, you guessed it, Sprint. TechStars co-founder David Cohen that the accelerator will offer a three-month-long program, which is set to begin in March 2014. Startups selected to participate will receive up to $120K in funding — $20K of which will come from TechStars, up front, with Sprint offering an additional $100K in the form of convertible debt to those that graduate. TechStars will be running the program, while Sprint will provide “expertise and resources,” like mentorship, access to its carrier technology, APIs and testing labs, along with support from development teams and “a network of engineers at its corporate campus,” . Techstars is running the program, while Sprint is providing its expertise and the resources available to a company with 53 million customers. That includes mentorship, access to its carrier technology and application programming interfaces, support from its development teams, and access to testing labs and network engineers at its corporate campus. While it may appear to be another run-of-the-mill accelerator of late — in Missouri, no less — the city plays home to a handful of big technology and life sciences companies, like Garmin, Sprint and Cerner, as well as The Stowers Institute for Medical Research. It also happens to be the first market that Google chose for Fiber, its high-speed Internet infrastructure project, and is on its way to becoming a viable hub for tech startups. To that point, Sprint’s involvement should represent another positive sign for digital (and mobile) health entrepreneurs, as the company recently hired a “chief healthcare executive” and has been making an effort to accelerate its existing remote monitoring and secure mobile network tools for health care. More importantly, both Verizon and AT&T have recognized the opportunity in the mobile health market and are remote monitoring and for health care. The competition, by itself, is a good thing, but it also represents opportunity for entrepreneurs as big, enterprise players pour more capital and resources into digital health. For those building quality products, this could mean exit opportunities, or at the very least potential partners, for distribution and otherwise. What’s more, it probably won’t be long before these other big mobile players find a way to get into the startup incubation game themselves. The list of HealthTech accelerators with the same kind of traction, brand recognition and network one associates with Y Combinator, for example, is small. Granted, most health accelerators are (at least) a few years younger, and Rock Health, Blueprint Health, Startup Health, DreamIt, NY Digital Health Accelerator and a few others have started to make some headway (particularly the first two). TechStars entering the fray makes sense, and is likely a sign of things to come. The digital health space will be looking to Box, Google, Sprint and other established tech companies to act as resources, partners and perhaps even exit ramps to complement the traditional list of institutional investors. The industry is still in search of a few big exits or IPOs to coax more angels into the ring, and with close to (or more than) $100 million in capital in their tanks, companies like Practice Fusion, Audax Health, Sharecare, Castlight, Care.com, 23andme and Zocdoc need to step up to the plate. In the meantime, support from alternative sources of capital, like crowdfunding, AngelList and accelerators may very well provide the bridge to keep innovation alive in the industry. Plus, the backdrop and context surrounding the industry should be looking more and more appealing for founders looking to start building. The government-backed health exchanges are now live (and a total mess), Obamacare will be going into full effect in a couple of months, bringing a laundry list of digital imperatives — and changes as a result — to the industry. This is confusing for startups, and some are Two other significant pieces of news to consider: Amazon Web Services is to U.S.-based health care entrepreneurs, who were previously legally unable to use these key development tools and the FDA has finally put out its final guidance on what type of mobile health apps. MobiHealthNews has a great , which is a must read for digital and mobile health entrepreneurs — a lot of it isn’t necessarily surprising, but a number of questions as to what kind of cases/apps the FDA won’t be regulating are now much more.
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Microsoft Rereleases Its YouTube App For Windows Phone
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft today re-released its YouTube app for Windows Phone, two months after Google the prior version over a terms spat. The application is little more than a bridge to YouTube’s website itself. In May, Google and Microsoft to get a strong YouTube app into the Windows Phone marketplace. Microsoft had built something that broke Google’s terms of service (the app was pretty rocking, though), and so the firms decided to work something out in harmony. Instead of a symphony, though, the relationship . Microsoft released a new YouTube app for Windows Phone in August. One day later, it stopped working. The same day, Google confirmed that it had yanked the app’s access to YouTube. The issue? Microsoft had built the application in native code, and Google wanted it to be built using HTML5. Microsoft admitted to Google that Windows Phone simply wasn’t capable enough at the moment, but indicated that, in the future, it would be open to making the shift. Google wasn’t having it. Also, there were spats between the two companies about API access and the like. The kicker is that Google itself built its YouTube application with native code, which is what Microsoft wanted to do on its own platform. However, Google requires all third parties to build their YouTube applications with HTML5, and since Microsoft was technically just another third-party — ha, no dice. Today’s release of the same app that was in the market ages ago is at once the nadir and denouement of a silly situation. Congress might be a gaseous chamber prone to uncomfortable rumbles, but the between Google and Microsoft might actually be more petty. That’s an accomplishment.
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T-Mobile Takes Aim At Rival Carriers With Free, Unlimited International Data
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Chris Velazco
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T-Mobile USA just loves to crow about how different it is from the rest of its carrier rivals; it decided to show off the latest of its “Uncarrier” moves at a packed concert/press event in New York City’s Bryant Park. Here’s the gist of it: if you’re a T-Mobile customer on one of their Simple Choice plans, you can now use unlimited data in 100+ countries totally free of charge. Better still, existing customers don’t have to do anything — the feature will kick in starting on October 31, so there’s no need for last-minute phone prep before leaving on a jet plane. This, in short, is ridiculous. In a very good way. It can be hard to appreciate how impressive that is unless you’re a traveler who’s had to deal with roaming headaches in the past. Let’s put this whole thing in perspective. Back before T-Mobile rolled out this plan, they charged a whopping $10/MB if you were data roaming in Canada, and $15/MB everywhere else. That means if you were to listen to, say, an average 40MB episode of the TechCrunch Droidcast while abroad, you’re looking at an additional $600 on your next phone bill. That’s an admittedly extreme example, but it’s not hard to see how those charges can add up really fast. Other carriers handle things a little differently. AT&T for instance is a big fan of international data bundles (which I’ve had to deal with more than a few times in the past) — $30 nets you a 120MB bucket to sip from while you’re traveling, with prices increasing from there. That seems a bit easier to swallow, but T-Mobile is the first of the nation’s carriers to do away with the need for pricey bolt-on packages or exorbitant roaming fees altogether. Considering just how much these carriers love money (seriously, it costs hardly anything at all for a carrier to pass a text message along and think about how much those things cost) this is a very surprising, very welcome move. Naturally, there are some catches. T-Mobile hasn’t confirmed what sort of data speeds you can expect if you’re listening to the Droidcast while on holiday in Cambodia, but I’d wager they’re not terribly zippy. In the event you need to add some extra to the equation, you’ve got the option of shelling out additional cash to temporarily boost those data speeds. If I’m being completely honest though, there’s probably a considerable chunk of T-Mobile customers that will never take their phones outside of the confines of the United States. This move is certainly a big one, but only a small subset of customers will really see the value in it. At this stage, T-Mobile’s game is all about proving that it’s a different sort of carrier so it can tempt precious subscribers away from its rivals. But I’d wager it’s still got a long way to go before it gets where it wants to be. You can check out the full list of compatible countries below.
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Crowdsourced Design Startup Dispop Gets Into the Ad-Buying Business
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Anthony Ha
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, the startup that allows businesses to crowdsource the design of their ads, has relaunched its platform with a big addition — the ability to actually run ad campaigns. Through the service, advertisers could already solicit submissions from multiple designers, then A/B test them to see which ones are the most effective. However, after the platform , founder and CEO Ayal Ebert said he discovered that larger advertisers want to keep their designs in-house, so the new platform is focused on small and medium businesses. “The feedback we were getting from our customers was that it’s too complicated to source and optimize creatives from one platform, and run campaigns from another platform,” Ebert told me via email. “Moreover, our customers were telling us that the process of setting up and managing a display campaign (or remarketing campaign) on Google is extremely tedious.” So with the new Dispop, advertisers will still be able to crowdsource their designs, but they can also run their ad campaigns from the same platform, setting a budget, targeting a specific audience, and tracking their results. The company says it integrates with ad exchanges including AppNexus, OpenX, Rubicon, PubMatic, BrightRoll, Google, and Facebook Exchange. Dispop actually launched the new platform back in September (it’s just talking about the update publicly now) and Eyal said last week that the company has run campaigns for more than 150 customers, with 20 or 30 new sign-ups every day.
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Former Mint And Intuit Exec Anton Commissaris Joins Vend To Run US Operations
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Ryan Lawler
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New Zealand-based point-of-sale startup is looking to expand quickly in the U.S., and it’s made a big hire to lead that charge. , who had served as an executive at Mint.com and later Intuit has joined the company as its President of U.S. operations. Vend offers a cloud-based point-of-sale system that is designed to help small and medium sized businesses for track sales and inventory, without investing heavily in proprietary equipment. It can be accessed on any PC with access to the web, or used via the iPad as well. The company has more than 8,000 store owners in more than 100 countries using its product. But so far, much of its business has come from its home market of New Zealand and neighboring Australia, but it’s looking to expand into other markets in a big way. In the U.S., it will be relying on Commissaris to help build and grow the team, in an effort to take on other vendors in the payment and point-of-sale space. Commissaris had been SVP of revenue and business development at Mint prior to its purchase by Intuit. Once acquired, he joined that company as its director of revenue and business development for a few years. Since then, Commissaris has served as Chief Revenue Officer of Apsalar and COO of Credit Sesame. At Vend, he’ll be in charge of a small but growing team in North America. The San Francisco office will have four employees, in addition to another five that are in Toronto. Current company headcount is 75, with offices also in Auckland and Melbourne. A lot of his work will be spent on working to grow the company’s customer base in the U.S., but also working with partners to integrate with other third-party payment and inventory systems. It already works with payment processors like PayPal and Auth.net, as well as startups like Swarm Mobile and Stitch Labs. Vend has raised more than $10 million since being founded in 2010, including an that came from MYOB founder and Xero investor Craig Winkler, Seek.com.au co-founders Paul Bassett and Matt Rockman, as well as The Milford Active Growth Fund and Point Nine Capital.
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PC Market Beats Expectations, Slips 7.6% In Q3
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Alex Wilhelm
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According , the PC market contracted 7.6 percent in the third quarter. The group had expected a 9.5 percent decline, so the quarter outperformed expectations. In the United States, the PC market was essentially flat during the quarter, with unit volume falling a mere 0.2 percent compared to the year prior. That fact, coupled with rising device volume for the three largest OEMs, provides a few rays of light in an otherwise crepuscular market. ASUS and Acer lost more than one-third of their unit volume compared to the third quarter of 2012, a stunning decline. Helping the quarter best expectations were what IDC calls “business purchases” and blocks of PCs running Windows 8.1, Microsoft’s new operating system that was recently released to hardware manufacturers. Total unit volume for the quarter totaled nearly 82 million. In the third quarter of 2012, that figure was just over 88 million. The PC market remains a massive space, and a huge revenue driver for its constituent players. Lenovo, HP, and Dell control just under half the market between them, with a combined market share of 46.1 percent. So, what does all that mean? Frankly that, despite our endless discussion of the Post PC Era, the PC Era is still with us, and we in it. Still, IDC stated in its report that there is a “high probability that we will see another decline in worldwide shipments in 2014.” Yes. But we’re still selling nearly 1 million PCs each day, and if it weren’t for economic uncertainty in Europe (a market in which PCs had a tough third quarter), the unit decline for the quarter might have been closer to 0 percent rather than 5 percent. The next quarter for the PC market will be bellwether. Microsoft has a far stronger operating system headed into the market than what it sold a year ago. And the lineup of PCs built to handle Windows 8.1 are materially improved over last year’s crop of non-touch machines. If Microsoft can’t turn those factors into a winning quarter, perhaps one of very, very minor unit decline, then I’m unsure what gust of wind could ever refill the PC market’s sails. It’s an interesting question: At what point will the PC market have contracted sufficiently to allow it to post year-over-year quarterly growth again? Perhaps never. The old-fashioned back-to-school PC sales cycle this year . That’s somewhat unsettling.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: More Leaks Than A Sinking Ship
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Chris Velazco
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There’s nothing like a heaping helping of leaks to make it through hump day, and there are plenty of them to dissect on this week’s edition of the TechCrunch Droidcast. Some of them are more surprising than others — who know that HTC was working on a plus-size version of the One with a fingerprint scanner on its back — but co-host Darrell Etherington and I are always more than happy to get in there and start tearing things apart. Naturally, HTC isn’t alone in its inability to keep secrets. New details about LG’s new Nexus smartphone made the rounds thanks to a whopper of a service manual, and @evleaks blew Samsung’s Galaxy Round surprise just hours ahead of the official reveal. Throw in some ruminations about the Platonic ideal of an Android tablet and you’ve got the new Droidcast in a nutshell. Enjoy.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at roughly 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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Brian Chesky And Sequoia’s Alfred Lin On Adding The Wow Factor To Airbnb’s Customer Service
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Leena Rao
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As we mentioned earlier this week, co-founder Brian Chesky and Sequoia Capital partner, Airbnb board member, and former Zappos COO joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Chesky and Lin work together on retaining culture, expanding internationally, and maintaining customer service. The first focused on the importance of developing and maintaining culture at a company, and in this segment Chesky and Lin share their thoughts on how to approach customer support. Chesky talks about Airbnb integrating the Zappos experience to its own customer service efforts. In the video, Chesky says he and his team storyboards the end to end customer experience and measures every touch point where quality service can be integrated. Check out the video above for more, and stay tuned for the last part in our series, which addresses the company’s strategy and challenges in expanding to international markets
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HP Admits What We Already Knew: Microsoft Is At War With Its OEM Partners
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Alex Wilhelm
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HP stated the obvious today, clearing the air a bit in the world of personal computing, not to mention other areas of the technology industry. Microsoft, it said, is now a competitor to its business. Of course, we knew this. HP sells software, services, and devices. So does Microsoft. Here’s the key quote from HP CEO Meg Whitman: “Current [HP] partners like Intel and Microsoft are turning from partners to outright competitors.” Microsoft is no longer content or able to mint money by selling software to partners, corporate clients, and the public. As it moves into services and devices, companies that were partners will retain that status, but also garner a new classification: adversary. As a company, Microsoft will speak to you in loud tones about how much it loves its OEM partners, such as HP. But its tone shifts when conversation turns to its Surface line of tablets, which, in its view, is top-notch. Hang out with Microsoft teams and you’ll see an encroaching level of Surface usage that will in short order overtake ThinkPad’s former preeminence among the company’s employees. Microsoft has to bloviate and state that it remains committed to its partners — in part because it is, which is underscored by the simple reality that the company has no choice in the matter; Surface sales are hardly the entire PC market. But at the same time you can’t directly undermine your partners with billions of dollars in investments into your own competing products and not risk slight message incoherence. So it’s the firm smile and filed statement from Microsoft in this case. HP must be more blunt. Its 330,000-strong workforce is in the process of a promised, multi-year transformation. It can’t afford anything but clarity to its investors who, by and large given its current market capitalization, remain skeptical. Business Insider that HP now discusses a multi-OS strategy, when before it was gung-ho for Windows 8. Well, relationships change and markets shift. HP can’t live a 90s life in this decade, and neither can Microsoft. There is more than sunlight between the two.
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Airbnb Files A Motion With The NY Supreme Court To Block Attorney General’s Subpoena
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Ryan Lawler
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Airbnb’s fight with local regulators in New York continues to heat up, as it was put under pressure to provide a large amount of user data to the Attorney General’s office there. Today, the company fought back against those demands by filing a motion that it hopes will block that request. Earlier this week, Airbnb was subpoenaed by the , which sought data on more than 15,000 local hosts in the community. At the time, Airbnb said that it would continue conversations with the Attorney General to see if the two sides could reach a compromise in the situation. For Airbnb, that meant working with the local government to weed out bad actors and illegal hotels without compromising the user data of thousands of its users. In a blog post last week, Airbnb from hosts and also to provide a helpline to weed out nuisances throughout the city. It looks like the compromise isn’t going to happen, as today Airbnb announced that it filed a motion with the New York Supreme Court in an effort to block the Attorney General’s request. In a , Airbnb said it believed the subpoena was “unreasonably broad” and that it would fight against the request. Public policy head David Hantman wrote: “The subpoena issued by the Attorney General last Friday goes well beyond bad actors and demands information about thousands of regular Airbnb hosts in New York. So, we made it clear to the Attorney General’s office from the very beginning that we would never agree to this type of government-sponsored fishing expedition.” Airbnb said that it will likely take some time before a judge rules on the motion, during which the company would “continue to work with the Attorney General’s office to make New York and the Airbnb community stronger.”
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New Google Maps Regains Support For Multi-Destination Trips, Now Integrates Your Flights And Upcoming Events
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Greg Kumparak
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The big, still-in-Beta brought a bunch of new shiny stuff, from its new fullscreen interface to drastically improved public transportation integration. It also some features, though – and when you take away things that people (like me!) have been using for years, those people (like me!) get sad. One of the features that got washed away in the refresh: multi-destination trips. At long last, it returns. To add a new location to your route, just click the little plus sign below the list. Once you’ve got all your destinations listed, they can each be dragged up or down to adjust the order of your route accordingly. To be clear, this change only really affects those of us who’ve taken the plunge into ; those undaunted by the occasional bug or five, those willing to turn a blind eye to the new interface’s seemingly insatiable hunger for every cycle your CPU can throw at it (though, admittedly, the Beta has gotten a lot less resource intensive since launch). If you’re still on old Google Maps, you’ve had multi-stop directions all along. Meanwhile, New Google Maps has also picked up a few new tricks by way of its product-brother-from-another-mother, Google Now. If Google is aware of an upcoming flight, hotel, or restaurant reservation on your schedule, that data will now be pulled straight into Maps whenever you’re signed in. Searching for “SFO”, for example, would trigger a drop down list with your upcoming flight’s details. You’ll probably want all that data you find yourself searching for directions to the airport — but when the taxi driver asks “Which airline?” and you realize you’ve completely forgotten, keep that one up your sleeve. Lastly, Google Maps is also now piping in data about upcoming events in a given area or at specific venues. Search for “music venues” and it’ll plot out music venues in the currently shown region and toss up a smattering of upcoming shows. Search for a specific venue — like, say, the Oakland Coliseum (Go A’s!) — and they’ll try to dig up everyone who’s playing there in the next few weeks.
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EXMO, A Mobile Events Platform Making Conferences More Social, Exits Beta
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Sarah Perez
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Although there are a number of mobile applications working to replace the printed guidebook for conferences and events, there’s no all-out market leader at this point. In addition, a number of the companies building conferencing apps are focused on larger events, with pricing plans to match. Today, a startup called is launching its own take on a mobile events platform, with a more social app initially targeting events with fewer than 1,000 attendees. The company, founded by Todd Goldberg and Karl White, emerged from a Startup Weekend event – which is also just the kind of event that could use an app like this. During its beta period, EXMO was used by 14 Startup Weekend events, in fact, as well as dozens of other smaller-scale or grassroots events, including things like Barcamp, hackathons, food and wine conferences, and more. In total, EXMO has run 100 events to date, with thousands of total attendees. Today, the company is taking the app out of beta, with a number of new features and integrations. Already, EXMO offered several things making it more interesting than some competitors’ apps which only mirror a paper event guide on mobile. Instead, EXMO’s focus has been on allowing organizers to better engage attendees within the app, says Goldberg, who explains that EXMO allows for features like feedback, real-time polls, and other social integrations. At present, EXMO offers Twitter integration, and with today’s launch, event organizers who enter their information on EXMO’s site can use an “Activity Wall” option, which allows them to display social media content (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Vine, etc.), event content (speakers, sessions, announcements), and polls using TVs and projectors. The Activity Walls are customizable and colorful and can also help to engage attendees who haven’t yet downloaded the mobile app itself. Another feature that helps to differentiate the app from others in the space is its support for user-created social events. “Let’s say attendees want to plan their own happy hour or meetup while they’re at the event; they can do that through the app,” says Goldberg. “It’s a way for attendees to create their own ‘unofficial’ sessions.” There are quite a few things EXMO is still working on, of course, given its early stage – the app has been in active development for roughly nine months, and until recently EXMO was just a two-person team. (Now there are a few more people helping out, but not full-time.) The company is working to refine the experience and design, better integrate Twitter and other social media services, improve the organizer analytics, and more. In the meantime, EXMO has partnered with EventBrite, which, incidentally, . EXMO’s team is “launching” the app from the EventBrite offices today, in fact. With this integration, event organizers can now sell tickets in the app and on their promotional pages. (Currently, when organizers create their events, they get a promo page that they can share on social media or through email. These pages can also point users to the app download.) Ticket sales data from EventBrite have also been added to the event organizer’s dashboard. EXMO’s pricing model is currently freemium-based with a free version of the app for events with up to 50 attendees. It’s then $2 per head afterwards, with the price decreasing the larger the number of attendees. Though Goldberg says it’s too early to discuss revenues, so far around 25 percent of the events it has run have been paid. is currently bootstrapping, but may be looking to raise outside funding in a month or so to continue its growth. Though there are many conferencing apps much further along than EXMO, including DoubleDutch (which ), Guidebook, Quickmobile, Cvent, plus more social apps like and , and several , Goldberg says that EXMO’s product and strategy will set them apart. The app is flexible enough to suit a variety of events, while the focus on small to medium-sized events is an opportunity, he says. “There are more of those events out there like that, than there are the bigger ones. That’s where we’ve found good traction so far.”
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Mark Lennon
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Microsoft Promises Quick App Approvals Following Windows 8.1 Release
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Alex Wilhelm
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After a public face plant regarding the release of its operating system update to developers, Microsoft that applications built for Windows 8.1 will be approved no more than five days following their submission, once the new build of Windows becomes generally available. That means that come October 18, when Windows 8.1 becomes downloadable by all, apps submitted to take advantage of its improvements won’t be tied up by a long line, harming developers who want to stay ahead of the curve. It’s an interesting gambit. The Windows Store on Windows 8, as Microsoft will tell you, has more than 100,000 applications. The real number, though, is north of 115,000. Whatever the case, if even a decent slice of that app set were to submit an update at once, it would flood Microsoft’s approval staff. Microsoft previously announced that developers to the final build of Windows 8.1 before its general release. That was greeted with a giant raspberry from the coding cohort, and Microsoft its take and promised the code a month early. However, even with that recantation, Windows 8.1 applications cannot be submitted before the general availability of the operating system. That’s why this matters: Microsoft is forcing developers to wait until 8.1 is fully baked and out in the wild before they can hit go on their apps. By promising that submitted apps, even given the restrictions in place, will be filed in short order, Microsoft is extending a tentative kiss to developers it recently razzled. What this also means is that there will be all but zero Windows 8.1 applications available for download on the day that Windows 8.1 hits the masses. Here’s on the matter (emphasis mine): The RTM versions of tools, services, and platform are required for So, no Windows 8.1 applications at launch, but likely a goodly number a few days after.
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VEVO Launches Music Video App For Samsung Smart TVs & Blu-Ray Players
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Ryan Lawler
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announced that it is launching on yet another connected TV platform today, making its music videos now available on the . The launch will grow the number of viewers who will have access to the company’s streaming service, while also improving monetization of its content. Over the past several years, VEVO has moved to make its music video apps ubiquitous across all screens and all connected devices. It started out on mobile devices and tablets but has been gradually expanded to , , and the Xbox. As a result, VEVO’s app becoming available on Samsung Smart TVs isn’t that big of a surprise. The app will be made available on Samsung Smart TV products — both actual HDTVs and Blu-Ray players — from 2012 and 2013, and will work in a number of different geographies, including the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. According to the company’s blog post, the Samsung app is built for TV viewers. When launched, it will go directly to the company’s . VEVO TV is kind of like the next-generation of MTV, built for the streaming video set — it’s a human-programmed group of music videos that runs in a linear feed. From the Samsung TV app, viewers will also be able to browse different genres of music videos to get a continuous feed of certain types of music. They’ll also be able to view playlists that they’ve put together once they’ve connected the app to their own individual accounts. For VEVO, the goal is not just to get its 75,000 music videos in all the different places where viewers might see them, but to better monetize those videos on new platforms. Since the company controls all the ad sales and placement on new connected TV platforms, it gets more money than for videos that appear on, say, YouTube. While YouTube is still the biggest single distribution platform for VEVO, more of its revenue is coming from new platforms and from original content. Expect VEVO to try to take advantage of this as it expands to even more online and connected devices as time goes on.
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Themer App Grabs Half A Million To Bring Android Customization To Mainstream Users
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Sarah Perez
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Android users are rolling their eyes over the newly introduced customization capabilities released in Apple’s iOS 7 like “dynamic” (live) wallpapers and backgrounds with the effect. You can already do these things on Android and have been able to for some time. In fact, you can fully personalize your smartphone, from the homescreen widgets to the default apps, icon sets and more. A new company looking to build a business around smartphone personalization is MyColorScreen, which last week released its theming app, Themer, into private beta. Though not yet available to the public, already 250,000 users have signed up requesting an invite, and so far, around 140,000 have installed the app after being let in. Though to some extent the app is competing with the numerous other Android “launchers” on the market today, Themer is something of a different beast. Instead of either taking over every aspect of your phone, like Facebook Home did, or offering a launcher app as the base plus a suite of widgets you have to seek out and download separately, Themer is designed to allow for one-click installations, with backgrounds, icons, widgets and more all bundled together in each theme. To use the app, you simply browse for a theme you like, push a button, and your Android phone is customized. The themes are high-quality, too. They’re purchased from the designers who haunt the MyColorScreen website, a social service where users can share and comment on photos of Android customizations. You can think of it as something of a for Android homescreen designers. MyColorScreen has an interesting history. The company co-founders, Ashvin Dhingra (CEO), Joshua Solan, and Brandon Miniman, didn’t create MyColorScreen.com themselves – they acquired it. Solan, who owns a popular mobile software development community called XDA Developers, and Dhingra have backgrounds in finance. After school, they worked on hedge funds in San Diego together before relocating to New York. But all the while, they had entrepreneurial side projects on the side. (Solan bought XDA Developers a while ago, but he’s now more involved with MyColorScreen today.) “We were always amazed at the large user base of XDA,” explains Dhingra. “We would look at it, and think ‘what are the big things people are talking about on XDA? What is it that people want to do with Android?’ And what we noticed is that a lot of people are talking about customization, and making their device different,” he says. That gave them an idea. Android customization, though powerful, was still not as accessible to the mainstream as it could be. Developers would talk about rooting their phones and installing ROMs, which is something everyday users don’t really do. Meanwhile, designers would use advanced but complex widgets like UCCW to build unique and personalized homescreens. The team realized that building a launcher that could bring this level of deeper customization to a broader audience could be something very attractive and worth building. Before building the Themer app itself, they bought the MyColorScreen domain from its Thailand-based owner, Pete Rojwongsuriya, for five figures, as it was one of the larger Android community sites on the web at the time. That allows them to dig into a wide network of designers who are willing to sell their creations to MyColorScreen for use in the app. The designs are purchased for around $50 each, but are then customized and optimized for the most common Android screen ratios, so they’ll work on a large number of different devices. There are fifty themes now and more are added all the time. There’s also a good handful of widgets, like a dialer, news widget, calendar, music player, etc. Work on the Themer app itself began earlier this year, after CTO Rohit Talati’s hiring. Now MyColorScreen has an office in Irvine, where four full-time employees work alongside Dhingra. The company had been self-funding their efforts and acquisitions initially, then raised a seed round of about half a million in funding in July from and other angels. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKfnzawQFYU&w=640&h=360] The app is free during beta, and will remain free to users, as will its themes even after public launch. Instead, the plan is to generate revenue through things like branded homescreens (a theme has a homescreen for everything from Amazon, for example) and branded widgets (e.g. offer a well-built widget for a company that doesn’t have one, like Yelp), but in ways that wouldn’t compromise the user experience. Another idea is to introduce an app discovery element to Themer. That is, some themes would include app folders for things like “Shopping” or “Games” which would automatically organize the apps you own, but also include links to the Play Store as suggestions for those you might like to try. The company is currently seeing around 20,000 to 30,000 sign-ups per day, and roughly the same number of installs. Later this afternoon, they’ll be increasing the pace of the rollout, Dhingra says. The app is now in beta on Google Play, where you need an invite code to use it after install. There are 500 invites for TechCrunch readers here: .
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Just One Week Left To Register For Startup Alley At Disrupt Europe
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John Biggs
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As we approach we would like to extend the offer for you, some of the best startups in the world, to take part in Startup Alley, our special pavilion focused on bringing amazing startups together under one roof. This gets you a table at the event and the chance to show off your product to press, investors, and TC writers and editors. It’s a great way to launch and we’ve had many successful companies come out of the Alley. You can pick up . Startup Alley is jam-packed with early stage companies showing their talent and technology to audience members. Browsing through Startup Alley introduces a range of exciting companies to the marketplace, many who are launching at Disrupt for the first time. Around 50 new companies demo on Monday and a whole new set of 50 companies demo on Tuesday. As you can see, a total of around 100 companies launch at Startup Alley every year. Startup Alley companies also get the chance to present on the Disrupt stage in front of our esteemed judges. On Monday and Tuesday, the audience votes for their “Audience Choice Winner” and receives the last spot to compete on stage as part of that day’s Battlefield contestants. If chosen, that company will be eligible to compete in the Battlefield Finals for the $50,000 grand prize and coveted Disrupt Cup. Startups wanting to participate in Startup Alley must be less than 2 years old, with less than $2.5 million in funding. You can .
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Who Will Be The First Snapchat Stories Celebrity?
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Josh Constine
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Each sharing medium has its virtuosos. YouTube celebrities, Instagram artists, Vine comedians. And soon, thanks to the private ephemeral messaging app’s new public broadcast feature Stories, we may see Snapchat superstars take the spotlight. Their creations could make Snapchat less about intimate conversations and more of place where the whole world gathers in one person’s shoes for a few seconds. . For a demo, you can check out mine under my silly handle “Steenboat”. Until now, the app been the quintessential lean mobile product that nails one use case. You take a photo or video, jazz it up with some drawings or text, and send it to one or a bunch of friends with a self-destruct timer that deletes your messages within 10 seconds of it being seen. It felt personal and urgent. You were one of the lucky people selected to gaze through this fleeting window into a friend’s life. But the startup noticed an odd emergent behavior. What was intended for back-and-forth conversations between two people or to let you share something exclusive with a small group was being used less discretely. Snapchatters were sending their little moments to dozens and dozens of friends — almost like they would broadcast a Facebook post to a large, though still private, group. Some people were even trying to build a fan base for their Snaps. pushes the limits of the app’s rudimentary drawing feature to recreate classic paintings and compose portraits they screenpic and post on their blog. BuzzFeed highlighted the work of , who doodles on photos to create surreal visions of his New York Subway commute that he’d share on Reddit. Meanwhile, Snapchat was looking to become more robust and potentially set up a new way to interact that would increase the time people spent in the app, and create an opportunity for making money. Despite seeing people send 350 million photos and videos a day (stunningly, that’s about as many as Facebook), and raising , it wasn’t making money. So it . Instead of, or along with, having your Snap delivered with a push notification to specific friends, you can post it to your Story. Your friends can tap your Story to see all the photos and videos you’ve added to it over the last 24 hours. But buried in the settings, a new option was added. One that could turn Snapchat into a vector for self-expression to a mass audience. All an aspiring Snapchat star has to do is promote their username and they can build a following for their constantly evolving story. Witty jokesters, steady painters, beautiful models, artsy photographers, and inspiring videographers are just a few types of Snapchat celebrities that could be catapulted to fame by Stories. I asked McKenna, the closest thing Snapchat has to a star so far, whether he’ll be using Stories. He gave me an emphatic ‘yes’, noting “with Stories there’s a really good platform to have an overarching theme that I think would end up being hysterical. So far it’s just been quick snaps of people with some horrible drawing.” You can follow McKenna on Snapchat at “chillhartman”. As Snapchat-specific artists learn the strengths of the Stories medium, we can expect some full-fledged tales of adventure and daily life to emerge. Then there’s the potential for existing celebrities to amplify their stardom through Snapchat Stories. The medium could let a celebrity like Katy Perry or Jimmy Kimmel delight fans and make them more loyal by offering quick peeks into their daily lives. And since content disappears from Stories 24 hours after it’s posted, there’s less need to worry if their make-up or acting is perfect. Stories could also be a perfect on Snapchat. Right now when you swipe to your friends list, you see a “Recent Updates” section that lists friends who’ve added Snaps to their Stories. “Promoted Stories” from brands or public figures could fit naturally there. You could see the tale of a hungry man’s quest for Taco Bell, or clips from recent concerts by a musician performing soon in your city. If the Stories feature goes as planned, it could make Snapchat something you browse when you’re bored, not just an app you open when you receive a message. That could give it the eyeballs necessary to start making money. The only risk is that by giving users a more public way to share their perspective, it could lose the simple focus and intimacy that made us so excited to get notifications from that little smiling ghost.
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Runtastic Releases Scary, Exciting “Story Running” To Encourage Your Ploddings
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John Biggs
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, an Austrian running startup with an aim of hitting the Polars and Nikes of the world where it counts, has released something it’s calling essentially an app that tracks your run and replays an audio story that becomes more exciting as you approach the high points of an interval run. There have been a few of these already, most notably and, unless you’re ensconced in a long audiobook, they do add a bit of aural pleasure to the long slog of keeping you out of an early grave. There are a number of genres, including “Fantasy,” “Adventure” and “Travel.” Runtastic also announced the Libra scale, a BMI, bone mass, muscle mass, and BMR/AMR calculating scale that connects to an iOS device to track your weight and important statistics. It costs 129 euro and will be available in November.
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Nomorerack Raises $40M In Series B Financing To Build Depth Across Its Biggest Categories
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Eliza Brooke
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Less than one year after a $12 million Series A round, the multi-category retailer has raised $40 million in Series B financing led by Oak Investment Partners and HTV Industries. Although the company launched as a flash sales site in 2010, Nomorerack has since transitioned to position itself as an online retailer that offers deep discounts across the board in numerous categories. The financing will go toward customer acquisition and building out the depth of its top categories, which include jewelry, apparel, electronics, home and lifestyle. “At the end of the day, when we advertise on [sites like] MSN, the broader we are, the more appealing we are,” CEO Deepak Agarwal said. The company did $9 million in revenue in 2011, north of $100 million in 2012, and is now on track to do close to $300 million, Agarwal said. It’s profitable, and about 70 percent of sales are repeat purchases from consumers. They are currently seeing around 5 million monthly unique visitors to the site. The site started off featuring sets of nine items that would stay live for 24 hours before they were swapped out for another batch. Today, there are more than 3,000 deals available at any given time, curated by a 16-person buying team, many of which are live for months at a time. How long any given product remains available on the site is determined by an algorithm on the backend that takes into account revenue and sales volume. “It started out as a daily deal and then over time has evolved to have deep breadth and depth. A lot of products do not get removed from the site. Whereas before, when we launched, they would only last for 24 hours.” The site is able to offer discounts to consumers by buying directly from manufacturers and disrupting the typical retail pricing chain. Agarwal said that while Nomorerack is taking market share away from brick-and-mortar stores like TJ Maxx, Target and Walmart, their consumers are shopping on similar sites like eBay and Amazon. The site recently launched a full-scale jewelry boutique, a mechanism for building depth that they would like to apply to apparel and home, as well. The manufacturing chains for apparel and jewelry are especially ripe for disruption, Agarwal said, as there is a particularly high discrepancy between the manufacture cost and retail price of both. It’s not dissimilar to the recent push Amazon has made in the fashion category. Home, the site’s biggest category, currently accounts for 30 percent of sales dollars, with electronics coming in second and fashion in third. Acquiring customers is the company’s biggest expense, Agarwal said. The team is largely based on display advertising, with about 80 percent of marketing dollars going in that direction. That means advertising on sites like AOL, Yahoo, Facebook and Google, as well as running national television commercials, which Agarwal described as an effective driver for them.
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Circle Raises $9M Series A From Accel And General Catalyst To Make Bitcoins Mainstream
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Catherine Shu
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has launched with $9M of Series A funding to increase mainstream adoption of digital currencies like Bitcoin by providing a payment platform for consumers and merchants. Investors include Jim Breyer, and . All three invested in Circle founder Jeremy Allaire’s previous startup , an online video platform . Circle is a payment platform that wants to make it easy for businesses and consumers to use Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Despite its , as well , more consumers and companies are beginning to show interest in Bitcoins because they can facilitate online payments at lower costs and with greater security and privacy than existing electronic payment methods. One potential draw for merchants is avoiding the fees and risks of fraud and chargebacks associated with credit cards. For consumers, Circle says it is building a secure platform that will protect consumer privacy. For businesses and charities, it will provide tools and services that enable them to accept digital currency payments with no transaction fees.
Circle’s Series A is one of the largest–if not the largest–amounts of funding secured so far by a digital currency startup. Other Bitcoin-based companies that have recently landed significant investment include , which , and BitPay, which . Other startups that have recently launched to take advantage of the increasing interest in Bitcoin include ; ; ; and . In order for companies like Circle to be successful, however, they will have to allay concerns about regulatory issues. As Shakil Khan, founder of Bitcoin news Web site CoinDesk, . On the other hand, there are potential opportunities for digital currency companies around the world. For example, China’s government is beginning to show interest in Bitcoins (and a division of Chinese Internet giant Baidu ). Circle is based in Boston, with international operations headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is regulated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury, as a money transmitter and is seeking state licenses. John Beccia, the former chief regulatory counsel for the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, D.C., will also serve as Circle’s general counsel and chief compliance officer. Allaire also co-founded of Allaire Corporation, creators of Web development language ColdFusion. Allaire Corp. was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, where Allaire became CTO and helped oversee the creation of a Flash-based application platform. “Bitcoin and digital currency represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the future of the Internet and global commerce,” said Alliare in a statement. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to make payments easier, more secure and less costly for consumers and businesses. Digital currency can dramatically reduce the friction and costs currently experienced in the world by merchants and consumers.” Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners, will join Circle’s board of directors, as well as David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners. “The dramatic global growth in mobile, social and online commerce is creating the need and potential for a real global digital currency. With Jeremy’s vision for Circle and track record as an Internet pioneer, the opportunity here is to potentially build a significant global company,” said Breyer.
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Ecomm Newcomer Greats Is Building A Brand On Sweet, Affordable Sneakers
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Eliza Brooke
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Someone should probably go make a Wikipedia page for the “Warby Parker model,” since it has rapidly become the go-to business strategy for online retail startups. The latest addition to the genus is , a men’s footwear brand that launched in August. The name derives from the ambition to put a fresh spin on the enduring designs in sneaker history. Although that might sound like copycat design, pretty much every shoe brand iterates on others’ designs; as with most menswear categories, the classics persist in one form or another. Although their wares are manufactured in the same facilities as upscale lines like Lanvin and Balenciaga, the goal is to create high quality goods while keeping the price point low by cutting out retail overhead. The shoes are priced in the range of $39 to $190, and while early adopters will undoubtedly skew toward sneaker aficionados, the target audience is broad. “We’re going to make shoes for men with feet,” co-founder Ryan Babenzien said. Babenzien and his co-founder, Jon Buscemi, are career shoe guys. The former did branding and marketing at K-Swiss and Puma, while Buscemi already has founding another footwear brand, , under his belt. The company raised an angel round of $500,000 last April, at which point they hadn’t even opened a bank account, Babenzien said. They were pre-selling in beta until their launch on August 6 and only began shipping three weeks ago. Like Warby, Greats got a lot of early attention from press, including the seal of cool-approval on GQ’s . Now the team is looking to raise its seed round. More than anything, Greats is aiming to be a label, not a startup with a clever business model. When we spoke, Babenzien came back again and again to the idea of building a brand, and, more importantly, to making sure that the DNA of the product is readily recognizable to consumers from the get-go. (Lest we forget that, the site’s URL is greatsbrand.com.) Greats launched with two styles in three colors each and will be rolling out six additional shoes over the course of the next year. Sneakers are a focus in the first batch, but they’ll also be adding styles like boots and boat shoes into the mix by the end of 2014. At the moment, Greats’s profit margins are 60%, but the team thinks they can get them higher than that. “I could have sold this for $120,” Babenzien said, gesturing at the $99 black leather sneakers he was wearing. “And nobody would have blinked. We wanted to make a real statement.” Part of the team’s long-term roadmap is globalizing Greats. Babenzien said they have been seeing web traffic coming from France, England, Asia, Australia, and Canada. “The culture of men’s sneakers and footwear is global… we’d like to get to $100 million in revenue in five years,” he said. “I think based on what we’ve seen, it’s well within reach.” They’ll also be taking on auxiliary categories. Socks, for instance, are something they could get into in the near term. (“That’s more of a strategic category than anything else,” Babenzien said.) Bags and sweatshirts would naturally follow. Because sneakers are part of a youth culture, college age guys form a large portion of Greats’s potential market, and the brand has the opportunity to outfit them from the shoes up. The company has been moving quickly since April, and they’re wasting no time in getting their products into the offline retail world, as well. On November 9, Greats is opening a hundred square foot shop in a small glass walled shopping complex on Williamsburg’s waterfront, which they’re calling the “Field House” in reference to the brand’s vintage athletic vibe. Customers can buy shoes in the shop, although Babenzien noted that it’s the only physical store in which people will be able to make purchases. The store will only be open from noon to 7 pm on weekends, the point being to get consumers touching and test driving Greats shoes, rather than serving as a major retail location. Although having an offline location was always in the team’s playbook, they didn’t expect to make the move so soon. But the Williamsburg space was cheap and didn’t have a lease, so they snatched it up. Greats is also getting product into the real world with two displays at the upscale LA men’s store and at High Point, a sneaker Mecca in Phoenix. The shoes won’t be available for sale at either joint; it’s more about building the brand in the context of other sought-after designers. The sneaker market for guys is big, and these shoes, with their buttery leather uppers, are sweet. (Unfortunately for the ladies, they’re not running unisex sizes just yet.) The tricky part about online native fashion startups is that the fashion part of the equation — finding the line’s voice and aesthetic point of view — so often loses out to a focus on being online native. Young, creative designers fail all the time out of a lack of business acumen, but a fashion label needs direction, achievable through tight branding and great product. The Greats guys get that.
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Calls To Limit Speech In The Snowden Era Underscore The Importance Of A Free Press
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Alex Wilhelm
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The Snowden revelations have reignited a discussion about privacy — especially privacy in the digital age. That discussion will eventually, we can hope, not only reform how the government views the privacy of its citizens, but also how those citizens interact with private entities that might store massive amounts of their personal information. It’s stunning to consider how much better informed we are as a global citizenry thanks to Snowden’s efforts and the journalists that have worked closely with him. They have carefully brought to light documents and information regarding the spying efforts of the United States government, and to a lesser degree, the British government on a scale that was previously unimaginable. But the Snowden leaks have done more than uncover a secret world of surveillance. They are starting to drive change at the congressional level. Following revelations that the NSA taps the fiber-optic cables of the Internet, tracks the metadata of all phone calls placed in the United States, and forces technology companies to hand over user data, we’ve entered into a new era of transparency. There are forces arrayed against this trend, however. The parts of the government that wish to remain hidden are not enjoying their time in the spotlight. Change is already under way. Bills in Congress are , with bipartisan and bicameral support, that would greatly curtail the legal authority, and therefore ability, of the NSA to collect as much data as it currently does. The shifting tone in Congress — most recently and most notably the on the subject of the NSA — has been matched by a stiffly unshifting tone from the spy agencies themselves. With its track record of , the NSA has managed to explain little in recent weeks — and complain much. It has become known that their talking points are — there will come a time when leaning heavily on 9/11 will show of argument, but we can have that talk some other time — now public, the public protestations of the NSA are becoming increasingly cardboardish. But when the NSA and its ilk are clear, we can learn the most. And when it comes to something so intensely serious, clarity is useful. The NSA’s General Keith Alexander recently made the following set of remarks (transcription ): “I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense. We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on.” It’s somewhat difficult to tally just how much the general managed to get wrong in two short statements, but let’s try. He’s wrong that the documents are being sold; they are not. Stopping “it” would mean stopping the free press, in essence overriding the First Amendment. That’s not a good idea. He’s correct that it would be up to “courts and the policymakers” to gut free speech in the country, but he’s wrong in that it is “wrong to allow this to go on.” In short, the general is not much of a fan of free speech, an adversarial press, a transparent government, public accountability, or a great many other things that a constitutional, democratic republic requires to function. Let’s look at just how bad an idea it would be to follow his advice. If we did not allow newspapers, blogs, Twitter users, writers and readers of all shapes and sizes and sorts to publish what they might, and learn what they will, then we would not know that the NSA was tapping the in foreign countries. Why foreign countries? Because the rules that guide the NSA are looser in foreign countries, and so it can do what it can’t in the United States. What we have learned is plain: If there is data, the NSA wants to tap, collect, store, and then analyze it at will. Given the history of privacy, and the historical backing of the Fourth Amendment, this isn’t much in line with the American Experiment. To then prevent the American citizenry from finding out that their legal protections were being hollowed out not good, and the general is . Across the pond, this is a bit more explicit. Here’s [emphasis mine]: I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.” During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. The last sentence is key, as it describes a process by which what is fit and not fit to be published is determined before publication. In August The Guardian stated that such a thing was “near impossible” in the United States. And yet, General Alexander recently called for “a way of stopping it,” again with “it” being the reporting about the Snowden documents. Alexaner continued: “It’s wrong to allow this to go on.” So, the general is calling for prior restraint, which has long been a firewall between censorship and the public learning what it might. There are fresh threats from the British government, however, that also bear telling. Here’s current Prime Minister David Cameron on the continued leaks ( ): We have a free press, it’s very important the press feels it is not pre-censored from what it writes and all the rest of it. The approach we have taken is to try to talk to the press and explain how damaging some of these things can be and that is why the Guardian did actually destroy some of the information and disks that they have. But they’ve now gone on and printed further material which is damaging. I don’t want to have to use injunctions or D notices or the other tougher measures. I think it’s much better to appeal to newspapers’ sense of social responsibility. But if they don’t demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act. Sadly, his government has already taken to smashing laptops of journalists and threatening prior restraint. He has now introduced new legal methods as potential tools to increase pressure. Also, there is a certain sliminess to the comment that the press “feels it is not pre-censored from what it writes.” There is a large gap between that and the press in fact free to write whatever it wishes. It’s plain that the governments of the United States and Britain would prefer it if we knew nothing of their surveillance activities. With that in mind, we now do, and they want to stop the continued leaks. But as we are seeing from congressional activity in the United States, the leaks are producing change. Which is precisely what the NSA and GCHQ do not want. Tough. If to get their way they think for a moment we are willing to give up the right to free expression, thought and writing, .
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Is Comcast Buying The Seattle Mayoral Election To Dodge Homegrown Competition? Not Really
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Alex Wilhelm
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The mayor of Seattle has alleged that Comcast donated significant sums to his rival ahead of the November 5 election. The money could have been donated, perhaps, in hopes of scuttling the planned public-private broadband initiative in the city that could introduce new inexpensive, and fast competitive service. In response to a question during a asking what would happen to the effort — which will likely be executed with a private firm by the name of Gigabit Squared — Seattle Mayor said, “I don’t know, but I do know Comcast gave [rival candidate] Murray a big pile of money.” That’s a stark implication. The , intimating as well that Comcast could be taking a financial interest in the outcome of the election, and therefore is donating to prevent its competitive landscape from becoming steeper. Let’s be frank: Comcast wants less competition not more, as do all corporations. It also makes political donations, as do nearly all public companies. It also donates to specific candidates, over time, because it finds the views of those candidates more palatable to its interests and perhaps in hopes of swaying them slightly during their time in elected office. That is simple politics. If any of that surprises you, you are a bit behind. Comcast has donated to McGinn’s rival in the past through his tenure as a State Senator. So, the relationship is extant. This election cycle, Comcast has to his campaign, and a Comcast executive named Janet Turpen also donated $500. That sort of company-executive donation is not abnormal. For example, Yahoo and one of its executives have also donated to Murray’s mayoral electoral bid this cycle. No one is accusing Yahoo of attempting to buy a vote. Now, the Post goes on to list the following larger and less public donations by Comcast to groups that have put money behind Murray: The Broadband Communications Association of Washington PAC, which received 94 percent of its 2013 contributions from Comcast, donated $5,000 to the group People for Ed Murray less than a month after Gigabit Squared’s pricing announcement. That was the PAC’s largest single donation. Unsurprisingly, People for Ed Murray has made significant expenditures supporting Murray’s candidacy. The Web site of the Broadband Communications Association of Washington also lists Janet Turpen as president-elect. Comcast also donated $5,000 to the PAC called the “Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy,” or CASE, whose largest expenditures were donations to People for Ed Murray, to the tune of $52,500 — over half of the money spent by the group according to the most recent disclosures online. Their second largest expenditures was $10,000 to People for a New Seattle Mayor, a group opposing McGinn’s reelection. So, $10,000. That’s hardly big money. Perhaps $10,000 speaks more loudly than what is normal in a mayoral election, but the sums here are not out of hand. Comcast, in a statement provided to the Post, denied that it is trying to buy the election or unduly influence it. Which is what you would expect the company to say, of course. As a firm it is spending to have an impact. You don’t spend money for no reason, of course. Comcast is supporting Murray because it favors him over McGinn. And given that McGinn has worked on creating a competitor to Comcast, that is hardly surprising. Still, what we lack in all of this a simple answer: Does Murray favor scrapping the public-private broadband pilot, and later the full project? That is not clear. The Post says this: The [Murray] spokesman also committed that, if elected, Murray would honor the current agreements between Gigabit Squared and the city, “but he will also makes sure that the City monitors the company’s performance to ensure that they are delivering the promised results as the project moves forward.” In other words, the limited pilot project would likely go forward in a Murray administration, but there’s more of a question about whether the rest of Seattle would be offered gigabit service via a private-public partnership. That strikes me as a bit weak. Could it be that Murray is less enthusiastic about the broadband initiative than McGinn? Sure. It’s not his project after all. But the intimation that Comcast is trying to shift the election perhaps to dodge this specific bit of competition feels like perhaps sensible speculation, but speculation all the same. Murray can lay this all to rest by simply stating that he is committed to the project — if he is, of course. Simple speech is the best response to innuendo.
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Hands On With The Nexus 5 And Android 4.4 KitKat
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Greg Kumparak
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The Nexus 5 is here! The Nexus 5 is here! After months of hype and more questionably “accidental” leaks than any device in recent memory, Google announced their new flagship Android handset this morning. I’ve only had the device in my hands for a few hours, so it’ll be a few days before I’m ready to give my final yay or nay on this thing. With that said, I recognize that I’m amongst a very lucky few to have access to this thing before they start leaving the warehouse en masse later this week, so I figured I’d share some early impressions. The Nexus 5 comes in two colors: one black, and one white. $349 gets you a 16GB model, while $399 gets you 32GB. Both of those devices are unlocked and off-contract, mind you — for the price, the hardware stuffed into this phone is rather amazing. Alas, it might be tough to get one for a while. The Nexus 5 just went on sale this morning, and almost immediately sold out. If you’re one of the people who got their order in: don’t worry, so far I’d say you’ve made a solid choice. While my notes above may seem neutral (or even neutral-negative), I’m actually pretty darn pleased with the device so far. It feels like they took the Nexus 4, the Moto X, and the HTC One — all three devices of which were devices I really liked — and mashed them together, pulling in many of the best parts of each. If you’re already an Android fan or a Nexus 4 owner, you’ll like what you see here. If you’re an iPhone user, this one really be the one to convince you to make the switch. I know I’m tempted. Check back in just a few days for our full review. [gallery ids="908872,908873,908871,908870,908869,908868,908867"]
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Apple, Microsoft-Backed Rockstar Consortium Sues Google, Samsung Over 7 Nortel Patents
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Matthew Panzarino
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The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Ericsson and Sony. It purchased patents off of the defunct telecommunications company Nortel in 2011, in a bidding war with Google. Now, the consortium has filed suit against Google, ASUSTek, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech and ZTE over those patents. The suit was filed in a U.S. District Court of Eastern Texas today. “Google placed an initial bid of $900,000,000 for the patents-in-suit and the rest of the Nortel portfolio. Google subsequently increased its bid multiple times, ultimately bidding as high as $4.4 billion,” the filing states. “That price was insufficient to win the auction, as a group led by the current shareholders of Rockstar purchased the portfolio for $4.5 billion. Despite losing in its attempt to acquire the patents-in-suit at auction, Google has infringed and continues to infringe the patents-in-suit.” Google famously bid some not-so-random numbers before the end, . The suit also involves a licensee of the ‘Associative Search Engine’ patent, NetStar, Inc. The other patents are US , , , , and . They’re mostly fairly dry stuff related to database searches, relevance in advertising presentation and data sorting, but exactly the kind of stuff that makes Google’s special sauce work. We can’t speak to the strength of the patents, but they certainly appear to be relevant. Google lost out in a and went on to acquire Motorola, a move that many attributed to a patent grab, but that was also about hardware in a lot of ways. Notably, HTC has a on some patents, but apparently not these. News of the suit was first today.
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Twitter’s IPO ‘Oversubscribed’ Despite Accelerating Losses And Growth Concerns
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today, report that Twitter’s highly anticipated initial public offering is oversubscribed, indicating booming interest for its shares as the firm looks to become a public company. Notably, Twitter had priced the shares well below expectations, all but guaranteeing an oversubscribed IPO. The report says that the IPO had enough interest to be oversubscribed before bank involvement. When Twitter filed its documents to go public, it was criticized by some for its extensive, and widening losses. And currently, all signs are pointing to Twitter’s revenue in calendar 2013 has expanded quickly as well. The company will raise around $1 billion in the IPO, valuing the firm at around $11 billion. Twitter plans to . Early indications are that Twitter would price on November 6th and begin trading the day after. At this point, Twitter now has options available to it including floating more shares or hitting above the higher end of the range when it prices next week. Losses aside, Twitter will be the hottest IPO of the year. Strap in.
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SoundTracking Launches Updated App With New ‘Discover’ Section For Trending Music
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Anthony Ha
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Music-focused social network released a new version of its smartphone app today, one that co-founder and CEO Steve Jang said will make the app useful beyond “hardcore music lovers.” We’re also hearing that SoundTracking has reached an agreement with Sprint, with SoundTracking being preloaded or featured on certain Sprint Android phones starting next spring. However, Jang declined to comment on any potential partnership, so hopefully we’ll know more about that soon. Anyway, back to the updated app. There’s a new design with features like larger photos and brighter colors, but the most interesting addition is probably a Discover section, which is basically a new take on finding music through Soundtracking. Previously, people discover music based on what was shared by the users they followed. With the new section, you can find music in a way that’s not subject to the randomness of who you follow and when you checked your newsfeed. There’s a song of the day chosen by the SoundTracking team (something the company was already experimenting with via email, and which got a positive response), hashtag-based search, and charts of general trending music and music nearby. Jang said he plans to go further in this direction with more charts focusing on different types of music. The obvious comparison seems to be Twitter #Music, an app that recommends music based on what people are tweeting. Jang suggested that social networks in general have moved toward personalized recommendations that less reliant on timelines and on who you follow. On the other hand, a recent report suggested that usage of the #Music app has declined and that . The problem in that case, Jang suggested, is that people wanted that experience in Twitter itself, not in a separate app. Jang added that 14 million tweets, Facebook status updates, Instagram pictures, Foursquare check ins, emails, and SMS messages are sent each day from SoundTracking. Users have created a total of 40 million music moments, which have been shared more than 6 billion times and viewed 530 million times within the company’s mobile and web apps. “The stats reflect that we continue to create a product that’s’ really great for expression, sharing, and outbound messaging,” he said. “I think our work on the Discover section and charts and personalized is really going to address the other side. … Now we need to help people who love music that are little bit more passive, more of viewing and listening type.” ” So we can expect more “lean back” type experiences to come in the future.
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Ask A VC: AngelPad’s Thomas Korte On NYC Expansion, The Incubator’s New $7M Funding Round And More
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Leena Rao
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In this week’s special episode of Ask A VC from Disrupt Europe in Berlin, Germany, founder and former Googler talked to TechCrunch about his incubator’s strategy, expansion and more. Korte, who with six other ex-Google employees, explained why he’s kept the incubator small, with only around 10-12 startups per session (with two sessions per year). Korte also told us that AngelPad is heading east for its next session, debuting a new session in New York City (interested founders can apply , and the deadline is Sunday). While AngelPad was bootstrapped for the past three years with the backing of its founders, Korte also revealed that AngelPad just raised $7 million in outside investment from undisclosed LPs. As of AngelPad had seen 62 companies participate in five sessions. In 2012 alone, AngelPad’s 62 total companies raised $56 million, which is on top of the $25 million they had raised in 2011. The incubator has also seen some impressive exits from portfolio startups, including Twitter’s recent Tune in above for more!
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Oracle, Red Hat, And Google Employees Pitch In To Fix Beleaguered Healthcare.gov, Reports Indicate
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Alex Wilhelm
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Workers from tech giants Google, Red Hat, and Oracle and other companies have reportedly joined with the government to help fix the notoriously broken Healthcare.gov website that is a key portion of the Affordable Care Act. According to a , “experts” from the firms have been dispatched. It is not clear yet in what quantity or what their role will be. The government needs the help, and it is good to see the technology community step up. After all, this is our domain. In a piece by , Google is parting with Michael Dickerson, a “site reliability engineer.” Also according to Wayne, Greg Gershman of mobile company Mobomo is said to be taking part as well. When the Affordable Care Act went live recently, its website, which was supposed to provide a central exchange, failed: It lagged, dropped users, and fed wrong information to insurance companies. It was a tectonically embarrassing moment for the government and the president. Later, a “tech surge” was called for. It appears that this is part of that effort. The government has promised that the website will be functional by the end of November. That gives the Silicon Valley cavalry just a single month to get the beast back in the pen. Also unclear at the moment is why these three firms have stepped up and not others. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, and Twitter are other firms that could spare an engineer or two. Private tech employees helping the public government untangle a website built in part by Canadian contractors? The leaks from this saga are going to be amazing.
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Chris Velazco
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Google’s Search Results Can Deep-Link To Your Android Apps
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Chris Velazco
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It should be clear by now that there’s than some early reports alluded to, and one of the more interesting (to me, anyway) tidbits managed to escape the early leak treatment. Tucked away toward the tail-end of Google’s Nexus 5/KitKat presentation was a mention of a feature called App Indexing that should get companies (and the Android app developers that work for them) a little worked up. That’s because Google has developed a way to deep-link to the contents of an app from within a user’s Google search results with a feature it calls App Indexing. Here’s how it works. Say you’re using the Google Search app to dig up some dirt on that Ender’s Game movie that doesn’t look very good. If you happen to have the IMDb app installed on your device while you search, you’ll be treated to an info card in that results stream that includes an “Open in app” button. Give it a quick tap and the IMDb app will spring to life and immediately direct you to its Ender’s Game listing. Naturally, the feature isn’t just limited to showing off movie details — so far the full list of supporters includes Allthecooks, AllTrails, Beautylish, Etsy, Expedia, Flixster, Healthtap, IMDb, Moviefone, Newegg (yes!), OpenTable, and Trulia. The way Google sees it, the move is all about providing these companies with a choice. If they think their mobile interfaces are enough to keep users engaged, they can simple go about their business. But if they already have an Android app (or are in the process of building one) that can do a better job of engaging with its users, a little extra work to implement those deep links may be well worth it. It’s not hard to look at this as a move to bolster Android app development, either. There’s little doubting that Android is a global force — which may be only compounded by the fact that Android 4.4 KitKat may drive device sales in developing markets by bringing a more advanced feature set to cheap hardware — and in many cases the Google Search app is going along for the ride. That means that with any luck, huge swaths of the global Android community will be searching for stuff using the Google search app and seeing those deep-linked “Open in app” buttons when they’ve got the right apps installed. Tell me that’s not a compelling reason for a company to develop an Android app if they haven’t already. Despite the buy-in from all those app partners, it’ll be some time before users like me will actually start getting those results in the wild. Google is testing the feature with those previously listed partners, but the updated cards that will display that information won’t actually roll out until some time in November.
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Keen On… Social Media: The First 2,000 Years
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Andrew Keen
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How old is social media? Maybe we can date it from the birth of in February 2004. Or perhaps we can go back to 2002, to when was founded. Or even way, way, way back to digital antiquity – back to 1997, when Reid Hoffman founded the first social media website, SocialNet. No, social media is actually older, 2,000 years older, than Facebook, Friendster or SocialNet. That’s the view at least of the digital editor of the , whose new book makes the intriguing argument that social media has actually been around since the Romans. It’s the industrial top-down media of the last 150 years, Standage told me, that is the historical anomaly. Social media, he explains, “scratches a prehistorical itch” for personalized news, opinion and gossip. So rather than a waste of time or a distraction, he insists, Facebook and Twitter are actually something that satisfies us as human-beings. Standage is too good a historian to argue that nothing about social media is new. He acknowledges, for example, that the globalized, instantaneous and searchable nature of social networks are truly new. Yet Standage’s comparisons of contemporary social media with Roman papyrus letters or hand-printed tracts of the Reformation really do suggest that social media goes a lot further back than 1997. “The only surprising things about social media,” Standage dryly concludes, “is that we are surprised by it.”
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Google’s Nexus 5 Is Now Real And Ships Today At $349 For 16GB, $399 For 32GB
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Greg Kumparak
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At long last, Google has officially announced what has been perhaps their worst kept secret in a while: the Nexus 5. The Nexus 5 had seen more than its fair share of early outs, with everything from fleeting, “accidental” appearances in the hands of Google employees in quickly-deleted promo videos to full-blown product pages going up on the Google Play store ahead of time. The Nexus 5 will be the first device to ship with (codenamed “KitKat” through a with Nestlé and Hershey), which they first announced back in early September. Other devices, like the Nexus 4, 7, and 10, will be getting 4.4 . The new Nexus comes with two color variants: one black, one white. The 16GB LTE model will cost you $349, while the 32GB LTE model will set you back $399. Both devices are unlocked, and will go up for sale later today. While Google’s Nexus line mainly exists to provide people a direct route to an unlocked, higher-end device, the Nexus 5 will have a few features that’ll be exclusive at first. It’ll be the first device with Google’s “HDR+” mode, their company’s new in-house approach to HDR, which takes multiple shots in rapid succession and combines the best parts of each into one photo. It’ll also be the first with Google’s new homescreen launcher, which brings Google Search to every page of your homescreen and allows you to trigger a search at any time by saying “Ok, Google”. We’re just about to run off and spend some time with the device, so check back in just a bit for our hands-on pics and early impressions!
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Amazon Launches AWS SDK For JavaScript In The Browser
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Frederic Lardinois
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Amazon today the developer preview of its . With this, developers can now easily build dynamic JavaScript applications that can from the browser without the need to write any server-side code and to configure an application server for hosting. Amazon previously launched an , so this isn’t Amazon’s first foray into supporting JavaScript. Indeed, it turns out that this new SDK uses the same programming model in the browser and in server-side Node.js code. With this new SDK, developers can make direct calls to Amazon’s S3 storage services, Amazon SQS for reading from and writing to message queues, SNS for generating and processing mobile notifications and to Amazon’s DynamoDB NoSQL database. Access to Amazon’s more traditional database services is not currently an option. This means developers can now build JavaScript apps that can create and popular S3 buckets, for example, and query DynamoDB tables without the need to access these services through any server-side code. To access these features, developers need to add a tag that integrate’s Amazon’s JavaScript library into their code. The SDK supports Amazon’s web identity federation feature (you wouldn’t want to add your AWS credentials in your HTML and JavaScript, after all). By doing this, you can also use a public identity provider like Facebook, Google or – of course – . As with all things Amazon, the setup isn’t completely trivial, but the company has created a that will get you started.
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Android 4.4 KitKat Targets Google’s Next Billion Users, Adds Pervasive Search & Improves Google Now
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Darrell Etherington
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details of its long-awaited Android 4.4 KitKat operating system for the first time, going beyond just the candy bar branding. KitKat is designed around three major tentpoles, Google told TechCrunch, including reaching the next billion (it ) Android users, putting so-called Google “smarts” across the entire mobile experience, and building for what comes next in mobile devices. Google said that Android is growing at three times the speed of developed markets in developing countries; but the phones that are catching on in those markets are mostly running Gingerbread, a version of Android that’s now many versions out of date. These phones, however, have lower specs with only around 512MB of memory available, and Gingerbread is what’s required to fit within those tech requirements. That presented a technical challenge Google was keen to tackle: How to build KitKat in such a way that it can bring even those older and lower-specced devices up-to-date, to help provide a consistent experience across the entire Android user base. That mean reducing OS resources, and then also modifying Google apps to stay within those boundaries, as well as rethinking how the OS manages available memory to make the most of what is present. None of this was enough, however, so Google went further to help third-party developers also offer their content to everyone on Android, rather than just those with the top-tier devices. A new API in KitKat allows devs to determine what amount of memory a phone is working with, and serve a different version of the app to each, making it possible for the same application to run on even the earliest Android devices. “People generally launch new versions of operating systems and they need more memory,” Android chief Sundar Pichai said at a Google event today. “Not with KitKat. We’ve taken it and made it run all the way back on entry level phones. We have one version of the OS that’ll run across all Android smartphones in 2014.” That’s the single biggest feature being announced here: Google wants to get everyone on the same platform, and is doing more than it ever has to end the fragmentation problem. One version over the next year is a hugely ambitious goal, but if the company is serious about not only serving a growing developing market, but offering it something like software version parity, it seems like it’s finally figured out how to go about doing that. It’ll still be up to manufacturers to decide whether or not devices get the KitKat upgrade, Google notes, so we’ll probably still see a fair amount of older devices get left out via official update channels. Here’s what’s coming with KitKat, which launched on the today. Aside from making KitKat the One OS To Rule Them All, Google has also introduced a number of new features with this update. Album art is displayed full screen behind the lockscreen when music is playing, for instance, and you can scrub the track without unlocking. There’s a new launcher, with translucency effects on the navigation bar and on the top notification bar. Long-pressing a blank space on any homescreen zooms out to allow you to re-arrange them all, and when you’re running an app that is written for full-screen, the navigation bar and the notification bar both now disappear entirely from view. Launcher-specific stuff is Nexus-only initially, of course, and whether some of these elements make their way to manufacturer-specific home screens will depend on those OEMs. Android now offers up a new dialer, which incorporates search for easy reference. This means you can enter the name of a business even if you don’t know it’s number or have it stored in your address book, and then the dialer will retrieve it from the same database that powers Google Maps. It’s incorporating local data, as well as looking for the name used in your search. This also allows the phone to provide caller ID information for incoming calls, too, and there’s a new auto-populating favorites menu that builds a list of your most frequent dialled numbers. Google has indeed consolidated the entire text/video/MMS experience with Hangouts, as predicted. It replaces the default messaging app, and allows , to a number or to someone in your contact book. There’s also a new Places button for sharing map locations, and emoji support is finally built-in to your software keyboard. This is the iMessage equivalent that Android has been lacking thus far. It’s going to be a tremendously useful feature, especially for those who are transitioning to Android from BlackBerry in that next 5 billion Google is adamantly pursuing. You can now attach photos to communications not only from your local library, but also from Google Drive, and from Box, as well. Any third-party provider can provide a hook to be included, according to Google, which is impressive considering that Google isn’t limiting things to its own ecosystem.
New HDR+ software is built-in to Android KitKat, which has no apparent changes to the surface user experience – a device owner just snaps the shutter button. Behind the scenes, however, Google’s mobile OS is taking many photos at once, and fusing the best parts of each together seamlessly to come up with a better end product. Lights appear more natural, faces are visible even when backlighting threatens to overwhelm, and moving objects are more in focus. HDR+ is Nexus 5-only to start, but Google says they’re looking to bring it to other devices later on, too. Developers can now add printing to individual apps, and Google will work with building it out for additional manufacturers, too, something it says is “easy” to accomplish. Right now, any HP wireless printer works with the system, and any printer that already supports Google Cloud Print will also be able to take advantage of the new feature. Search is at the core of Google’s overall product experience, the company explained, so it’s doing more to make that accessible on mobile. Search is now on every homescreen by default in Android, and it supports hotwording, so that you can just say “Okay, Google” to get search up and running at any time, much like you would on Glass. Speech is crucial to Google with this update, and it said it was proud of its improvements so far; the error rate of speech recognition dropped 20 percent last year, and there’s been a 25 percent increase in overall speech recognition accuracy over the past few years, according to Pichai. Using voice recognition also now allows you to tap a word and bring up a list of alternatives to select from. The system also now asks more clarifying questions, using natural language, to ensure better service overall. Google Now has been updated to be accessed via a swipe form the left side of the screen, which is a tweak from when it was accessed via swiping up in previous versions of Android. Google also focused on answering questions like “How can we help users in more ways, and bring up the most relevant content?” with this update, which means new types of cards. Now can now figure out that The Walking Dead is a favorite show of the user, for instance, and offer up articles related to it and its progress. So not only is Google Now aware of your surroundings and schedule, but also what type of content you’re interested in. It can also note which blogs you check regularly, and provide you info about when new posts appear; in other words, Google is adding some of the features that were core parts of Google Reader to Now, and making them more contextually-aware. It can also incorporate crowd-sourced data to make better recommendations. For instance, it could know that people often search for geyser times at Yellowstone National Park, and provide a card with those if it sees you’re in the area. If you’re near a cinema, it’ll present movie times and a link to the Fandango application for purchasing tickets. Another example Google provided is that Stanford students, who often search for the academic calendar in fall, will now receive that data automatically when the correct season arrives, provided they’ve informed Google of their student status previously in some way. These types of Cards will roll out in mid-November, Google says. Now when you Google things, – and not just to the app generally, but to specific content within the app. Some results will have “Open in App X” next to them, and those will take you directly to a relevant section within, like a recipe for example. Partners at launch include Expedia, Moviefone, OpenTable and more. This is a Nexus-only feature at launch, but Google says it will be available for all KitKat devices in time. Android 4.4 KitKat is available today via the , and it’s available on Nexus 5 hardware immediately, which also goes on sale today in 10 countries. It will also be available on Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and the Google Play edition of both the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One in the coming weeks. It’s an OS update that Google says is focused on furthering their vision for software that will run across all levels of all kinds of devices, not just on phones, which has interesting connotations give everything we’ve been .
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Hailo Ups Its Minimum Fare In London To £10, Triggers Licensing Complaints
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Natasha Lomas
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Another chapter in the ongoing saga between city cab regulations and on-demand taxi apps: cab app , which in London relies on a portion of the city’s black cabs to power its taxi-hailing-on-demand service — meaning it is bound by the same minimum fare regulations attached to London black cabs — has raised its minimum pricing in the city. Hailo operates in a range of cities globally, including New York, Toronto and Chicago, tailoring its pricing to each market. In London to £10 between 6am to 10pm Monday to Sunday; and £15 between 10pm to 6am. The problem is that licensing regulations for black cab drivers stipulate they can’t charge more than a £2.40 minimum fare at any time. Transport for London (TfL) confirmed to TechCrunch that it is investigating complains following Hailo’s price hike. “We are investigating complaints about Hailo introducing a minimum fare policy. It is against the licensing regulations for any taxi driver to charge a customer more than the metered fare. Action will be taken against any driver found to be doing so,” noted Helen Chapman, TfL’s General Manager for Taxi and Private Hire, in a statement. The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that Hailo’s prior minimum fare also broke the regulatory minimum. Despite the fact it has technically been breaking TfL regulations since it launched its service two years ago (with a £5 minimum), a TfL spokesman said he is not aware of any instances of a Hailo-using driver having had their licence taken away as a result of a complaint about charging more than the regulatory minimum. Complaint investigations are on a case-by-case basis, into individual drivers. There is no wider investigation into Hailo’s practices, he confirmed. A Hailo-using driver losing their cab licence as a result of such a complaint is “theoretically possible”, he conceded. A spokeswoman for Hailo reiterated that the startup has always charged a minimum fee in London. Asked about TfL investigating complaints about the price hike she described it as being engaged in a “conversation” with the local authority cab licensing body. The rational for Hailo’s price hike is to attempt to encourage more black cab drivers to sign up to use the app — since they are guaranteed a base fee of £10, even for a short trip. More cab drivers using Hailo means app users having a bigger pool of cabs at their command and therefore less time waiting around to be picked up (or poached by a non-Hailo using taxi). At present, Hailo has some 14,000 black cab drivers on its books, out of a potential pool of 24,000, according to the spokeswoman, so there’s evidently room for growth. “The updated minimum fares help Hailo to continue to increase cab coverage across London whilst still passing on savings to our customers by providing all the benefits of their service which include: no booking fee or billing the customer for the cost of the journey to the pick-up, five minutes free waiting and arriving at their door in two taps with all of the information on the cab driver that will be picking them up including a photo,” she said. “If the fare on the meter is more than the minimum charge, we will not charge more than the meter, but if the fare is below we will charge for the provision of using our service — the ability to e-hail a cab which will arrive within minutes and include contact details and license plate of your pick-up driver. This will also help ensure you get a cab when you really want one.” On the one hand it’s the classic story of dusty regulations not keeping up with changing technologies times. But, on the other, a £10 minimum does sound pretty steep vs £2.40 — as alternative Twitter-based cab hailing system, , points out: Hailo points out that only a small proportion of cab journeys conducted via its app fall under its new minimum fare. The “average minimum charge” is £15, according to the spokeswoman. And just 15% of journeys fall under the new higher minimum fares. Ergo, if the amount on the meter is less than the minimum you are required to pay then that extra money is going to pay for the convenience of the service vs standing around hoping a black cab will chance to drive by. “This upfront, transparent and fair pricing model means that we can continue to provide a fare with no hidden charges, and will increase the likelihood of our customers being able to get a cab,” she added. Those arguments may sound convincing but convincing arguments take time to overturn regulation. In the mean time, the issue is that black cab drivers using Hailo in London are breaking licensing regulation when they ask for more money than is displayed on the meter. And since Hailo’s minimum charge has been increased, drivers are probably going to be breaking the terms of their taxi licence* more often than they were before (and customers may be more inclined to complain about the higher minimum). At the end of the day, Hailo may well be upping its minimum fare because it feels it can get away with it — having carved out a dominant position in London vs other cab hailing apps. Hailo provided the following stats on its London usage: And if it gets more black cab drivers registered, that lead will only increase, cementing those higher minimum charges. *London cabbies aren’t always averse to breaking the terms of their licence — just try and get a cab to take you South of the river after hours and see how many drivers speed off in search of another fare when they hear where you want to go
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Highlights From The Disrupt Europe 2013 Hackathon
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Greg Kumparak
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This past weekend, we brought together 500 of Berlin’s finest coders, designers, and builders for our first ever Disrupt Europe Hackathon. Teams had to slam together the best thing they could build from the ground up in just 24 hours, with $5,000, a chance to present your project in the main Disrupt Europe conference, and tons of other prizes up for grabs. Couldn’t make it? It’s okay — there will be another one. In the mean time, TCTV has put together a lil’ video to show to give you a sense of the energy, exhaustion, and raw talent involved with an event like this. While the judges had to , we were absolutely blown away by all of the projects — so much so, in fact, that we ended up giving tickets to Disrupt Europe to every single team that presented (we originally planned on giving tickets to the Top 40 or 50 teams, but there were just too many projects that we all liked.) Want to peruse all of the awesome submissions? You can check out the full .
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Facebook’s Desktop Ad Revenues Fell $26M In Q3 As Its Mobile Ad Revenue Surged $226M
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Alex Wilhelm
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As part of its , Facebook today reported that 49 percent of its advertising revenue in the period came from mobile usage. That figure is , in which Facebook reported 41 percent of its advertising revenue came from mobile usage. Facebook had third quarter advertising revenue of $1.8 billion. Forty-nine percent of that tally is $882 million, implying that Facebook’s desktop advertising revenue for the quarter totaled $918 million. In the second quarter, Facebook had advertising revenue of $1.6 billion, of which 41 percent was mobile-sourced, or $656 million. That implied that Facebook had desktop-sourced ad revenue of $944 million in the second quarter. Thus, Facebook’s desktop advertising revenue $26 million from the second to third quarter. Facebook’s first quarter desktop ad revenue (calculated in the same way) totaled $875 million. Therefore, for now, Facebook’s desktop ad revenue peaked in 2013 in the second quarter. However, a strong holiday quarter could see Facebook’s desktop ad revenue grow again. For the most recent quarter, its growth rate was negative. The company’s user base continues to grow, which could easily afford the company more advertising dollars overall. Even if mobile continues to surge for Facebook, desktop advertising revenues could still expand, even as their percentage of the company’s total advertising top line falls. Essentially, assuming that Facebook has upside on its desktop advertising ARPU, it could grow desktop ad revenues in coming quarters due to its expanding userbase, and improving monetization of overseas audiences. Facebook’s largest revenue category will be mobile-majority in the fourth quarter unless something dramatic changes. It’s no small feat that Facebook grew its mobile advertising revenue $226 million in a single sequential quarter, though in the second quarter that figure was $282 million. Facebook has all but made the transition to being a mobile-first company. Perhaps Yahoo can take a page from its script.
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After Nearly 5 Years And 5M Backers, Kickstarter Gets A New CEO As Two Founders Step Back
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Rip Empson
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As it approaches its fifth birthday, Kickstarter’s star continues to rise, as the indie crowdfunding goliath that five million people have now collectively pledged nearly one billion dollars to its crowdfunding projects. Today, in a somewhat surprising turn after yesterday’s milestones, it appears that an impromptu version of the “Management Shuffle” will be rolling into Kickstarter. , Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen announced that he will be stepping down from his role as CEO and will instead assume the role of chairman beginning January 1st. Chen explained that the move will give him more time to pursue his own creative projects: “I’m looking forward to stepping away from the day-to-day to consider our path from a new perspective … [and] I’m also looking forward to having time to work on creative projects of my own, after all these years working on an engine to support them.” But Chen isn’t the only co-founder to depart as part of the company’s management shuffle. Charles Adler, who “has long been itching to move with his family back to Chicago,” is also planning to leave his day-to-day role at the company and will assume the role of an adviser. In Kickstarter’s version of the management dance (we’re still waiting for the music), when two co-founders step back, one must step forward. With Chen and Adler set to depart, Yancey Strickler, who has held a number of roles within the company, with community, communications and customer service among them, will be taking the reins as Kickstarter’s second CEO. Considering that its leadership has remained largely unchanged over the years, the Management Shuffle represents a significant change for Kickstarter. Usually, when companies undergo signficant changes to its founding leadership team, it’s not a good sign. These kind of moves always produce speculation and a few worried looks, but Chen assured readers in his post today that the move shouldn’t have any impact on the company itself — or its mission. In fact, Kickstarter PR Chief Justin Kazmark tells us that Chen plans to stay involved, both in company projects and by supporting Yancey in his transition to CEO. Instead, by assuming the role of Chairman, Chen is looking to use the position to gain a new perspective on the company’s trajectory and plans to spend a significant chunk of time focusing on the big picture and keeping Kickstarter close to its core mission. In fact, Union Square Ventures co-founder and early Kickstarter investor Fred Wilson sees Chen’s fingerprints all over the impromptu management shuffle. Reflecting on the changes , Wilson quipped, “like all things that involve Kickstarter, this is a classic Perry move.” The company and its CEO have always marched to their own drummer, and Kickstarter’s Management Shuffle is yet another example of this freewheeling mentality, Wilson explains. While its expected that the company’s investors would look to temper speculation and air on the side of its founders, Kickstarter has given them plenty of very legitimate reasons to do so. To illustrate the point, Wilson described the long-time CEO as an entrepreneur that was very “wary of taking money from VCs … and had no intention of taking the company public and no intention of selling it,” and was determined to put creators first. Although he was initially skeptical of the founder’s motivations, they decided to invest anyway. Over time, the investor said that Chen ended up proving him wrong, and his perspective ultimately led to just as much, if not more, value creation — a model which remains in place today: Four and a half years after launch, Kickstarter is a very important and sustainable business. It will continue to grow, it will continue to fund creativity, and it will continue to do things its own way. Kickstarter was built in Perry’s mold and the unique culture and mission of the Company are derived from him. I suspect his decision to step up to Chairman and allow the team to run the business day to day is Perry’s way of saying to the team that they have his confidence to lead Kickstarter into the future. Kickstarter will always be Perry’s work and we are very happy to be a part of it and be inspired by it every day. , Kickstarter’s success can also be attributed to the role it plays (and how it’s taken advantage of) the industry’s macro shift away from infrastructure dominated by industrial manufacturing and “toward the maker economy.” Ultimately, considering Kazmark also tells us that Kickstarter is in the process of rolling out in Canada and plans to launch in Australia and New Zealand in the coming weeks — as long as the company can continue to represent the interests of creatives and creatively-inclined entrepreneurs as the shift to a Maker Model (and its own expansion into new markets) continues — it should be able to stay the course. Assuming these management changes go as advertised, of course. For more, and .
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Google’s Plan For Hangouts And Motorola’s Modular Future
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Chris Velazco
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To paraphrase the one and only Gloria Gaynor, Darrell and I are back from outer space for yet another edition of the TechCrunch Droidcast. Well maybe not outer space , but the two of us have had to spend some time far from home and we couldn’t get together to record a show last week. For that you have our deepest apologies. But if it’s any consolation, my trusty co-host and I had a real blast putting this week’s episode together. This time around we tackle Google’s savvy changes to its Hangouts Android app, Lenovo’s curious new tablets (complete with a dose of Ashton Kutcher), Motorola’s crazy-exciting dive into modular smartphones, and a little bit of love for the Nvidia Shield. And yes, in case you were wondering, that last bit was Darrell’s idea. The world of Android is a weird and wild one, and we’re glad to be back digging through it. Join us, won’t you?
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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Facebook Admits Some Decrease Of Usage Amongst Young Teens For The First Time
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Josh Constine
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Facebook may be feeling the pinch from teen-focused, mobile-first social networks like Snapchat, as CFO David Ebersman said on today’s that Facebook “did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens,” though he prefaced that saying “usage of Facebook among US teens overall was stable from Q2 to Q3.” This is the first time Facebook has reported real trouble with teens. Facebook did say that “We remain close to fully penetrated among teens in the US,” (eww, terrible phrasing) and noted there wasn’t a ton of data supporting the drop with young teens. On the data, Ebersman said “This is of questionable significance … but we wanted to share this with you now because we get a lot of questions about teens.” The grim notes on young teens come after Facebook had last quarter. Mark Zuckerberg said in July that “One specific demographic I want to address is U.S. teens. There’s been a lot of speculation and reporting that fewer teens are using Facebook, but based on our data that just isn’t true.” But the social landscape is rapidly shifting. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September that it sees . That’s equal to the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per day. Of course, some teens may be shifting their attention to Instagram, which Facebook owns. Still, analyst confirms that his research shows Facebook is losing usage amongst teens in core demographics like the U.S. in main markets like the US all my millennial research suggests they are leaking that demo quickly. — Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) As soon as Facebook reported the news about teens, its share price took a nose dive, as shown below. You can see in the share price chart how, at around 5:20 EST when Ebersman discussed teens, its price suddenly sank. This wiped out the billions of dollars in valuation gain Facebook scored from the 15 percent share price climb Facebook made in after-hours trading based on the strong for the quarter it released at 4pm EST. Facebook had a strong beat of estimates, hitting $2.02 billion in revenue, $0.25 EPS, with 49 percent of ad revenue now from mobile. The news about teens was clearly hard on Facebook but could be a boon to Snapchat, which is trying to close a big round of funding of around at a valuation between $3 billion and $4 billion. That could be easier, or Snapchat’s valuation could rise thanks to signs Facebook is losing teens — Snapchat’s core demographic. As I wrote the other day in my piece , the permanence of Facebook may be partly responsible for teens shying away. They feel that everything they post on Facebook is scrutinized, and they could jeopardize their future by sharing themselves being silly, partying, or by discussing their opinions. They worry parents, friends, and potential hirers might discriminate against them based on their digital past. Another possible cause for reduced usage amongst teens is that they see Facebook’s mobile app as bloated. There’s the News Feed, messaging, photos, events, groups, apps, and more. That means it can feel overwhelming, providing so many options that it causes decision paralysis. Compare this to slimmer services like Snapchat and Instagram where it’s obvious what you’re supposed to do — view and share photos and videos. Finally, Facebook may cause drama for some teens whose “friends” may not be as civil as adults. With kids trying to figure out their identities as they hurdle into young adulthood with hormones raging, comment threads can get heated. Facebook has tried to by offering resources and easy ways to , but it’s still an issue on the social network — likely more so than on other apps that focus on media sharing and private messaging. Or perhaps the nearly decade-old social network just isn’t as novel as it used to be. Teens are the tastemakers of the world, and if Facebook can’t hold onto them, there are worries the rest of its user base could start to slip away — or at least use it less.
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TechCrunch Disrupt Europe In 1,337 Photos
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Matt Burns
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TechCrunch Disrupt Europe was a hit. Thousands of attendees, founders, and venture capitalists from around the world filled Arena Berlin for the event. Startups from more than 80 countries exhibited their wares. 15 startups launched in the first Startup Battlefield held in Europe and the $50,000 prize and Disrupt Cup. Disrupt Europe was something special. It was alive. It was vibrant, energetic, and rousing. Words cannot describe the electric pulse of this conference, parties and the hackathon. But perhaps the hundreds of photos and videos below can.
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Facebook’s Mobile Tipping Point: 48% Of Daily Users Are Now Mobile-Only (But No Mention Of BlackBerry)
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Ingrid Lunden
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The word “ ” did not come up during conference call yesterday, but you can see why such a crazy idea like the social network buying the beleaguered handset maker might have a sliver of plausibility to it. The company is moving closer to a tipping point where mobile usage and revenues will soon be outweighing that of desktop, and although Zuckerberg has the so-called “Facebook phone,” you never know how the company may want to capitalize on its mobile muscle in the future. CEO Mark Zuckerberg today noted during the company’s earnings call that 48 percent of users on a given day are only accessing it from mobile. That comes as nearly half — 49 percent — of the company’s advertising revenues, its key revenue driver, now come from mobile ads. That means nearly $890 million in Q3 was made from Facebook’s different mobile advertising units such as app install ads and engagement ads. “It’s a pretty incredible sign of how Facebook has evolved in the past year,” he said. This shows that Facebook is on track to match the prediction it that mobile revenues would pass desktop by the end of this year. And from the looks of it, the change of balance could come soon on mobile, too. Mobile continues to grow much faster for Facebook. Mobile MAUs grew by 45 percent over the last year (to 874 million in Q3 2013 from 604 million in Q2 2012) — these include both those who are using mobile exclusively for Facebook, and those who are using mobile at some point in the month in addition to desktop. That 45 percent works out to 2.5 times as much growth as MAUs overall, which were up 18 percent ($1,189 million in Q3 2013 and $1,007 million in Q3 2012). Facebook points out its figures do not include Instagram-only usage, but during the call COO Sheryl Sandberg provided some striking figures that point to just how much time consumers are spending on Facebook’s mobile properties when you do add it in. Combined with Instagram, the very popular mobile-first, photo-based social network, Facebook now has 150 million monthly active users. It accounts for one of every five minutes spent on mobile in the U.S., Sandberg noted. And that is even having an impact on desktop: Facebook (again, with Instagram) account for one in 8 minutes on desktop, she said. What does Facebook’s mobile traffic work out to compared to other popular properties? Sandberg noted that Facebook accounts for more mobile minutes in the U.S. than “YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat and LinkedIn — combined.” (It seems that this stat was taken from comScore research, which actually combined Instagram and Facebook.) Mobile-only users on a monthly basis now stand at 254 million, Facebook noted in one of the slides that accompanied its presentation. The full deck of those slides, which also spell out other metrics like MAUs and DAUs across mobile and desktop, is . With 1.19 billion MAUs overall, it means that 21.3 percent of MAUs are now mobile-only. That is up 2.3 percentage points from 19 percent in Q2. The same may not be said for desktop. CFO David Ebersman noted that daily actives on web “declined modestly” in contrast to what is happening on mobile. Facebook’s daily active users on mobile worldwide now stand at 507 million, up by 38 million over Q2; while monthly active users are up to 874 million, up 55 million from Q2. : Stats on Instagram and Facebook usage modified slightly after double checking quote after publication.
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No, Madam Secretary, Prices On Healthcare.gov Are Not A “Hypothetical Situation”
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, wins the award today for most creative political spin. During a congressional grilling about the failings of the federal e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, the secretary now claims that insurance prices are merely “hypothetical situations.” The claim was in response to that Healthcare.gov is low-balling insurance prices by 50 percent or more (or hundreds of dollars a month). The website fails to ask consumers their birthdates, only if they’re older than 49 years of age, and therefore lumps many older consumers in with some of their 20-something counterparts who are eligible for discounted rates. It’s the equivalent of Apple saying that when an iPhone is available for purchase, it’ll be half the cost of what consumers end up paying at the register. When Representative John Shimkus asked Secretary Sebelius for an explanation for the low-ball prices, she , “It is clearly a hypothetical situation…” While it’s true that the Healthcare.gov calculator does inform consumers of possible price changes upon final checkout, it really only that prices will be lower “ . Many people who apply will qualify for reduced costs through tax credits that are automatically applied to monthly premiums. These credits will significantly lower the prices shown for a majority of those applying. Final price quotes are available only after someone has completed a Marketplace application.” As the secretary notes in her testimony, because many consumers cannot actually log in to the website, their true eligibility discounts (i.e. price) cannot be determined. But that’s no excuse for misleading consumers trying to financially plan for changes in their monthly expenses. No explanation was given for why the website does not include a simple form for asking consumers for their actual birthdates. The Secretary was willing to take responsibility for Healthcare.gov’s failures today; I’m not sure why she felt the need to spin the specifics.
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Facebook’s Q3 ’13 Beats With $2.02B Revenue, $0.25 EPS, With 49% Of Ad Revenue Now Via Mobile
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Matthew Panzarino
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Facebook , posting $2.02 billion in revenue (making this the company’s first $2 billion quarter) with earnings of $0.25 a share. That blew away estimates of $0.19 EPS and $1.91 billion in revenue. Much of the growth can be attributed to exploding ad revenue on mobile, with 49 percent of its revenue in Q3 coming from outside of the desktop. Facebook’s $1.80 billion overall ad revenue was up 66 percent in Q3 compared to the year-ago quarter. In fact, Facebook grew in almost every important metric. Daily active users were up 25 percent to 728 million, and Facebook’s overall users went up 18 percent to 1.19 billion. Mobile MAUs were up 45 percent year over year to 874 million. Facebook’s monthly active users number jumped up by 40 million overall. Mobile daily active users were 507 million in September of 2013. Notably, much of Facebook’s overall growth was in the rest of the world, with only 1 million new users coming from the U.S.
The growth in mobile across Facebook’s revenue and user counts follows the industry trend as users continue to make their pocket computers their primary ones. Making mobile revenue work has been one of Facebook’s primary challenges, and one of the main reasons that so many have been skeptical about its future as a public company. The explosion in mobile revenue as a percentage of Facebook’s overall business serves as a sort of answer to those naysayers. “For nearly ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to connect the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a release today. “The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we’re prepared for the next phase of our company, as we work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy.” At the moment, Facebook stock is up nearly 11 percent in after-hours trading to 54 percent.
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John Biggs
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NSA Infiltrates Google And Yahoo Networks, Report Says
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The National Security Agency has secretly taped the networks of Google and Yahoo to monitor real-time communication, according to newly revealed documents from whistleblower, Edward Snowden [ ]. “The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials,” to , which obtained the hand-scribbled documents. Both Google and Yahoo maintain expensive fiber-optic data linkages in strategic data centers around the world to optimize the flow of information. This infiltration would allow the NSA to know “who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.” Upon learning about the NSA tapping into their networks, Google released a statement, saying the company is “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity.” Codenamed, MUSCULAR, the surveillance project is operated jointly with British Intelligence agency, GCHQ. While the NSA already had access to communication through court-sanctioned collection program PRISM, the agency may prefer international territory because it permits them to subvert American privacy law. The NSA is forbidden from spying on Americans without stringent court oversight; international law may be less restrictive. reports that upon showing this information to two engineers familiar with Google’s system, they “exploded in profanity” and said “I hope you publish this.”
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Runnable Raises $2M Seed Round To Expand Its “YouTube Of Code”
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Frederic Lardinois
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a Palo Alto-based startup that aims to make it easy to discover and reuse code snippets, today announced that it has raised a $2 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures with additional investments from , and . Hiten Shah, the founder of KISSmetrics and Isaac Roth, the founder of Makara, also participated in this round. The service, which launched with about 1,000 code snippets for popular programming languages and APIs, plans to use this new influx of cash to onboard the companies that are currently waiting to bring code snippets for their APIs, libraries and SDKs onto the site. Since its launch about four weeks ago, the team told me, it has now gotten requests from over 150 companies that want to add their code to its library. The idea behind the service is to turn it into a “YouTube of code.” Currently, the company argues, developers spend a lot of time searching for code snippets, but there is no single site where they can easily find them. What makes Runnable so cool is that, in addition to finding these code snippets, you can also edit and run them right in the browser. To do this, the team just spins up a virtual machine to run the code in a few seconds and then destroys it when you’re done. Right now, Runnable is still monitoring all the code submissions to the site. Over time, the company plans to open its service up to any developer or company. Runnable hopes that, as it becomes more popular, it will become the go-to site for any company or open source project that wants to get coders to use their tools. It bootstrapped this process by adding lots of snippets from PHP, Node.js, Ruby and other popular languages. Now, it will start adding snippets from new projects as it brings on these new partners.
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Tesla Officially Opens West Coast Supercharger Circuit, Covering San Diego To Vancouver
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Darrell Etherington
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Tesla’s , making it possible for owners of the Model S to travel free between San Diego and Vancouver, using Highway 101 and Interstate 5. This makes a Supercharger reachable within 200 miles to over 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of those in Oregon and Washington. A lot of attention has been paid to Tesla’s efforts to make a coast-to-coast trip in one of its vehicles a reality, via Superchargers and other charging stations, but blanketing the West Coast means that Tesla S owners can now travel from essentially the Mexican border to within the Canadian one without paying any money to fill their cars, and with a minimal amount of charging time required. Superchargers can charge a Tesla S to a capacity worth around 200 miles of driving distance in just 30 minutes, and the stations are positioned near restaurants and shopping centers to give you something to do while your car powers up. To promote the new corridor, Tesla is having two Model S vehicles make the trip from San Diego to Vancouver, and they’ll be pushing updates to their various social media properties along the way. Spoiler alert: those cars are definitely going to make it without incident. Supercharger rollout continues globally, with to cover 100 percent of the population of Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg, and 90 percent of the population in England, Wales, and Sweden with a station within 320 kms by the end of 2014. Getting past that basic excuse of “I can’t buy one, there’s nowhere to charge” is clearly a huge part of the company’s global rollout strategy, which is why each of these Supercharger network expansions is a big win for Tesla and for founder Elon Musk.
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