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Y Combinator-Backed FanHero Helps YouTubers Sell Branded Merch To Their Fans
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Ryan Lawler
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There are a lot of new YouTube stars out there, dudes who have a bunch of subscribers to their channels, watching their videos and whatnot. But sometimes it’s tough to make a ton of money from YouTube. I mean, advertising isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be, and then you share some revenue with YouTube and the next thing you know there’s not that much left. They’ve got a lot going for them. I mean, it’s cheaper than ever to buy a camera and get started and edit your stuff together and, man, there are a ton of people on YouTube. But they just wish they could make a little more money, you know. It’s hard out there being a YouTube creator. I mean, you’ve just gotta keep churning out the videos. You know, feed the beast. So anyway, there’s this company called . It’s all about helping those YouTube guys make money in, like, non-advertising ways. Giving the community ways to support them through commerce — you know, selling stuff. It’s like the classic merch model, like how you go to your favorite band’s show and you buy a t-shirt or a CD. But with this you don’t have to go anywhere. You’re just on the Internet and then — BOOM — you can buy their t-shirt right there. Oh yeah, and you can pay what you want. Like, it gives you a suggested amount to pay for a t-shirt or a poster, and it tells you how much your favorite YouTuber gets from that. So let’s say a t-shirt costs $13 and it suggests you pay $23. I mean, you don’t have to, you can pay less. Maybe you’re waiting for your paycheck from Hot Topic and you’re short on money this week. You can pay $15, NBD. Just remember to pay more next time, you know, so these guys get SOME MONEY. I mean, what kind of fan are you, anyway? Oh yeah, there’s also a leaderboard and a place to show who’s buying the most stuff, not to show off or anything just to show everyone how awesome the community members are, and like, a list of who’s going above and beyond. Like that dude who paid $50 for a $13 t-shirt. That’s a whole $30-some dollars, I guess almost $40, that went to that YouTube guy. Every little bit helps, man. Every little bit. Anyway, if you’re on YouTube and have a bunch of fans, it’s really easy to set up. Just make an account and upload an image and FanHero will put it on stuff. Posters, t-shirts, iPhone cases. You know the drill. And then you tell your millions of subscribers about it and they buy your stuff and you get a check, as long as you’ve made $100 or more that month. It’s that easy. Maybe you don’t have time to make a new video this week, but hopefully this’ll give you a little spending money in the meantime, I mean, until you can upload something new and get those views up. The guys behind FanHero are these Stanford CS undergrads Kevin Xu and Charlie Guo, who like, grew up on YouTube idolizing YouTubers. These guys don’t remember a time when the world’s biggest stars weren’t on it. They’re in Y Combinator now because that’s where all the cool kids go to learn about the Internet and monetizing and stuff. For now, FanHero is letting creators keep all the money from the sales of stuff on the site, while it’s in beta and testing stuff out or whatever. After September they’ll cut that down to 75 percent because, you know, they should get paid, too.
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Yelp To Acquire Online Reservation Service SeatMe For Up To $12.7M
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Greg Kumparak
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Yelp has just announced that they’ve agreed to acquire SeatMe, the startup that set out to battle OpenTable in the restaurant reservation space. Looks like they acquired them for $2.2 million in cash and 263,000 shares of common stock, pinning the acquisition price at a total up to $12.7 million. SeatMe’s main offering is part web service, part iPad app. The web app lets restaurant owners easily add an online reservation system to their own site or Facebook page, while the iPad app lets the restaurant’s host/hostess manage their tables on the fly. It also has a few other neat tricks, like texting customers when their table is ready, or flagging a return customer’s known allergens and seating preferences. Competitor OpenTable has been powering Yelp’s integrated reservation since around June of 2010 — this acquisition presumably means that that deal will dry up sooner than later (Yelp tells us they “believe SeatMe complements [their] existing partnerships.”) As pointed out by commenter Max Lemos, below: While at LeWeb London 2013, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO, was pressured time and time again to talk about their open table partnership. No wonder he was so tight lipped future plans and if anything spoke a little to rosey about them. Yelp says that they’ll be bringing the SeatMe team in to help them build out their own reservation system, expanding their time-slotting offerings from just restaurants and night clubs to things like spas, dentists, and salons. As for what this all means for current SeatMe customers? That… goes unmentioned. We’re reaching out to Yelp/SeatMe for clarification there. From an email sent to SeatMe’s current customers, it sounds like the service will go on: How does this change your SeatMe service? It doesn’t. We will continue to provide the same great product and service that we hope you’ve come to love and rely on. SeatMe listed as a “potential acquisition” on one of Square’s hiring pages (of all places), so we had a feeling that the company was looking for a buyer. Seems like Yelp won out in the end, though. That same page also listed the crowd-sourced design startup Chirply as a potential acquisition — so keep your eyes peeled there.
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Microsoft’s Q4 Earnings Miss With $19.9B In Revenue, EPS Of $0.59, Takes $900M Charge Against Surface RT Inventory Adjustments
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Frederic Lardinois
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just its earnings for its . The company reported revenue of $19.9 billion and earnings per share of $0.59. The Wall Street was that Microsoft would report $20.74 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $0.75. The surprise in this release is that Microsoft says it’s taking a $900 million charge “related to Surface RT inventory adjustments.” That’s quite a blow for Microsoft, which put a lot of resources into this project, which launched to middling reviews and failed to catch on with customers. In the , Microsoft reported $18.06 billion in revenue and a loss per share of $0.06 — the first quarterly loss per share in the company’s history — because of a massive writedown after its failed aQuantive acquisition. “While our fourth quarter results were impacted by the decline in the PC market, we continue to see strong demand for our enterprise and cloud offerings, resulting in a record unearned revenue balance this quarter. We also saw increasing consumer demand for services like Office 365, Outlook.com, Skype, and Xbox LIVE,” said Amy Hood, chief financial officer at Microsoft. “While we have work ahead of us, we are making the focused investments needed to deliver on long-term growth opportunities like cloud services.” One factor that has been hurting Microsoft — as well as and others in the PC business — is the general downturn in the PC market and the relatively lackluster reception of Windows 8. As research firm Gartner reported, global PC shipments in the last quarter, and while Microsoft has enough other business units to still make a massive profit, this drop definitely weighed on its Windows division. One factor that softens this blow, though, is the fact that many businesses are finally upgrading their old XP machines to Windows 7. One area many pundits continue to look at is Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which reported an $8.1 billion loss in the year-ago-quarter. Since then, though, this division slowly reduced its losses, and last quarter, it was “only” $262 million in the red. This time around, the Online Services division reported a revenue increase of 9% but still posted a loss of $372 million. For its fiscal year 2013, the company’s revenue, operating income, and diluted earnings per share were $77.85 billion, $26.76 billion, and $2.58 per share. Here are the earnings for Microsoft’s main business units: Earlier this month, Microsoft a major reorganization of its business units under the “one strategy, one Microsoft” banner. The company is now organized by function (engineering, marketing, business development and evangelism, advanced strategy and research, finance, HR, legal and COO). This reorganization obviously didn’t have any influence on this quarter’s results yet, but given that Microsoft is doing this to become more nimble, the company itself surely expects to see some results within the coming quarters.
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Another Day, Another Yahoo Acquisition: Chinese Social Network-Data Startup Ztelic
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Billy Gallagher
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Yahoo has acquired , a Beijing startup focused on social-network data, as first reported by the . This is Yahoo’s second acquisition in as many days (something they’ve already done once this summer), and the company’s 19th acquisition under CEO Marissa Mayer. A Yahoo spokeswoman says the deal is “part of our investment in our R&D efforts” and that eight Ztelic developers and engineers will be joining Yahoo’s research and development team in Beijing. “Ztelic founder and returning Yahoo, Hao Zheng, will play a critical leadership role in our Beijing Global R&D Center,” the Yahoo spokeswoman tells me. “Hao will split his time between Beijing and Sunnyvale, and the rest of his team will be based in Beijing.” Ztelic will reportedly sunset its product as it joins Yahoo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but as we learned on Tuesday during Yahoo’s earnings call, the company has .
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TechCrunch Meetup. Tonight. Seattle.
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Matt Burns
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We’re here, Seattle. And boy is it nice. Blue skies, cool weather, and great startups. We’re loving it. Tonight, at 6:00, for an evening of good times and startup pitches. After sorting through over a hundred applications, we selected 20 companies to take part in a rapid-fire pitch-off competition to be judged by TechCrunch editors and local VCs. There are still a few tickets left for the event. We will also sell a handful at the door, but by cash only. They’re $5 and include a couple of drinks. 21 and older only, please. These meetups are part pitch-off competition and part meet-your-neighbors shindig. Tonight, nearly a thousand entrepreneurs, tech fans and venture capitalists will be gathered under one roof. Come with your pitch deck locked and loaded, and a pocket full of business cards. Tonight’s going to be epic. There ain’t no party like a TechCrunch party.
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Google Misses Estimates In Q2 With $14.1B In Revenue, Net Income Of $3.2B, And EPS Of $9.56
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Chris Velazco
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It’s that time again — Google’s fiscal second quarter earnings have just crossed the wires and they’re definitely not what most people expected. For Q2 2013, the company reported consolidated revenue of $14.1 billion (that’s up 19 percent from the year-ago quarter), net income of $3.23 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $9.56. In the days leading up the release, analysts expected the web giant to post some strong numbers — the consensus estimates according to Yahoo Finance pegged the company as posting non-GAAP earnings of $10.78 per share and $14.42 billion in revenue, both figures that Google couldn’t quite live up to this time around. If there’s anything close to a silver lining there, it’s that analysts were hoping to see Google’s revenue jump at least 20 percent year-over-year, and the company only missed that by about 1 percent. Google’s stock hit an all time high earlier this Monday before settling down a bit, and at time of writing the stock’s price is down over 5 percent in after-hours trading. Of course, not all is as bad as it seems, no matter what some jumpy analysts think. Google’s total ad revenue was up 15% this quarter, which is rather nice considering it’s how Google makes most of its money. Speaking of ads, some folks are probably eyeing up Google’s paid clicks and cost-per-click figures, especially in light of reports from both The Search Agency and Adobe (via ) that pointed to a likely upswing in both rather the divergence we usually see. As it happens, those reports didn’t quite tell the whole picture — Google’s paid clicks were up 23 percent from the year ago quarter, while average cost-per-click was down about 6 percent from the year ago quarter. Meanwhile, Google’s traffic acquisition costs surged to $3.01 billion from the $2.6 billion it reported Q2 last year. And then there’s Google’s once-quiet mobile hardware division. After keeping mostly to themselves after being acquired by Google last year, Motorola Mobility opened up earlier this month to tease the forthcoming Moto X, a seemingly mid-range smartphone that’s expected to make waves thanks to a low price tag and some novel customization options. I suspect Google’s brass will be doing plenty of Motorola cheerleading a little later on today (it’s become something of a tradition now), but the company reported that its mobile hardware subsidiary accounted for only $998 million of Google’s overall revenue — that shakes out to about 7 percent. That’s awfully low even for Motorola, but you can’t really blame them since they haven’t pushed out much in the way of new devices lately… though it does explain why Motorola reported a GAAP operating loss of $342 million. As usual, Google will hold a conference call to discuss the company’s quarterly performance at 4:30 PM Eastern/1:30 PM Pacific. You’ll definitely want to stick around to see what happens — even though CEO Larry Page called Q2 a “great quarter”, he’s going to face some serious questions from curious analysts.
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Content Delivery Network EdgeCast Raises $54 Million From Performance Equity Management
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Ryan Lawler
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Los Angeles-based content delivery network is looking to expand its sales and engineering teams, and it’s raised a fresh round of $54 million in new financing to help it do so. The funding was led by Performance Equity Management (PEM), with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures and Steamboat Ventures. EdgeCast has been around since 2006, and has only raised about $20 million in that time from Menlo and Steamboat. According to EdgeCast president James Segil, the company has been profitable for the last four years, and currently has a $100 million run rate. So if that’s the case, why bother raising money now? “Because chicks dig guys with cash,” Segil told me. No, seriously. “There’s a saying that you should raise money when you don’t need it,” he said. And so, with that in mind, the company took on a whole lot of funding as it looks to expand in a number of ways. First and foremost, it’s looking to hire more salespeople, to get more feet on the street and accelerate its growth. To date, most of its sales operation has been based in its Los Angeles headquarters, but it’s hoping to add more sales offices nationally and internationally. By doing that, it will be able to get in front of more customers and help explain its increasingly differentiated products to them. Speaking of, it’s also looking to boost engineering and work on new products. Segil said he’s hoping to get more skunkworks projects going to strengthen its product suite. As a CDN, he explained, the company is building both software and network infrastructure. Either one is difficult on its own, but doing both can be a challenge. EdgeCast sees ways that it can better optimize its infrastructure, improve routing, stuff like that. So hey, mo’ engineers is mo’ better. EdgeCast has more than 6,000 customers today, including some big names like Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Hulu. Of course, many of them use multiple vendors for content delivery — that’s to be expected — but revenue and usage continues to grow as it signs up more customers and gets them delivering more bits via its network. So why PEM? Well, it’s a fund of funds and already has a stake in EdgeCast through its investment in Menlo. Having that connection and an understanding of the company’s business already was one reason that EdgeCast decided to take investment from the firm, Segil told me.
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Flight Search Startup And Disrupt Contender Superfly Adds Personalized Hotel Booking Service
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Stephanie Yang
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, which helps travelers take advantage of frequent flier miles and airline rewards programs, is expanding its services to include a mobile app for finding and booking hotels. Superfly first launched and uses big data to personalize flight results based on consumer travel records. In April, Superfly developed , which allows users to organize all travel-related emails. This makes it easier to track rewards and frequent flier miles. Now the company is using the same model to help users take advantage of hotel rewards programs and promotions: Superfly Hotels. Available for iOS, delivers personalized hotel results, including hotels you or similar customers have stayed in before. Superfly will also offer cash back on hotel spendings, starting from 5 percent for all users, and increasing up to 10 percent based on booking frequency. With the launch of Superfly Hotels, Superfly is catching up to travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline that already have mobile hotel booking apps available. However, Superfly has an advantage over its competitors– a large data set of hotel bookings collected from travel emails from Superbox. “The word big data is thrown around a lot, but for us big data is all about identity, context and location,” Superfly founder Jonathan Meiri tells me. “Knowing this about the consumer, we’re trying to get all this massive data and help consumers make really simple choices around which hotel is best for them.” Meiri says Superfly has collected information on billions of dollars in hotel bookings. With this information, Superfly can recommend hotels where you are a regular patron or can use rewards programs. Or if you usually travel with one airline, Superfly will display which hotels are preferred by that same airline’s customers. Superfly has attracted investors such Kayak CFO Bill Smith and TravelPort Chairman Jeff Clarke. The company also recently added another recruit from Kayak. Jacqueline LoVerme, Kayak’s former director of business development-mobile, connected with Meiri through Smith and is now Superfly’s vice president of business development. Meiri says Superfly Hotels is working on versions for Android and web. You can download the iPhone app .
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Locket Puts Ads On Smartphone Lock Screens, Pays You To Use Your Phone
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Sarah Perez
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Would you install an Android app that put ads directly on your smartphone’s lock screen? No? What if you were paid to do so, and whenever you swiped to unlock your device, you made a little money? That’s the promise of a new mobile application called , launching today , backed by $500,000 in funding from and a couple of undisclosed angel investors from the entertainment and marketing industries. The New York-based startup was founded in March by , , and , and is currently working out of a Manhattan apartment where five founding team members live and work alongside their three dogs and a hamster. Kim tells TechCrunch that the startup closed on the Great Oaks funding just three days after its pitch – their first VC pitch ever, she notes. Before building Locket, Kim graduated magna cum laude from Duke University and worked as an investment banking analyst at Jefferies. “Working in banking, my only outlet to my outside life was my phone,” she says. “And looking at my lock screen – which was just a picture of a daisy – the question was, ‘how do we monetize that?'” The idea inspired her to team up with fellow Duke grad Jang and Crawford, whose background is in advertising. The company thinks there’s room to define a new market for mobile advertising, which they’re calling “first glance” ads. The idea is already taking off in some overseas markets like Korea, where similar businesses have achieved over 20 percent of Android market share penetration in three months after their debut, Kim explains. However, in the U.S., where Locket is currently focused, it’s basically untapped. The experience of Locket is not all that different from those lock screen ads on some Kindle devices. But instead of forcing users to view the ads, like the ad-supported Kindles do, users have the choice to engage or not. They can choose to engage by swiping in one direction to be directed to a website, Facebook Page, coupon voucher, or movie trailer, for example, or they can go directly to their homescreen by swiping the other way. Regardless of whether they “click-through,” users are paid 1 cent per swipe, capped at 3 cents per hour for now. Ads will also be targeted using social profile data from Facebook (or a brief questionnaire), geolocation, other app usage, and engagement history. At launch, has a limited selection of about eight advertisers on board, and will also be running house ads to fill the space. However, Kim says that in around a month, they plan to offer ads from more than ten advertisers. The company also has deals in the works with two larger Fortune 500 companies, but she’s not allowed yet to disclose them by name. Not all advertisers will be accepted, as Locket’s goal is to respect the very personal landscape that is the mobile phone lock screen. The startup has already rejected ads from alcohol and lingerie brands, for instance, as well as one for a mobile app that wasn’t well-designed. After an advertiser is approved, the turnaround time to get their creative onto users’ phones is about two weeks. Locket also has an in-house creative team, and a technical crew that tests ads on 20 top Android smartphones they keep in the office (um, apartment). They do try to achieve compatibility with most leading Android phones, but the market today includes some 1,600 devices, so the long tail may still experience issues during Locket’s beta, which begins now. The company claims they’ve also worked hard to limit the impact on battery usage. Advertiser costs vary, but the goal is to push Locket over $10 CPM, eventually hoping to top Flipboard’s $30 CPM for its in-app, full-screen ads, says Kim. “We want to be able to charge more than that because we’re front of your mind, right in front of your face. Whatever you’re doing, you’ll see the ad on the lock screen.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoVrkTD7nF0?feature=player_detailpage] Locket’s launch comes at a time when Facebook’s move to take over users’ Android lock screens – and devices – has been met with some resistance. Facebook’s Android launcher Home has the social network hoped for, but there are parts of the experience users liked. One of those parts is the “Cover Feed” which brings images and status updates to the Android lock screen. What made users uncomfortable, however, was news that Home would on this screen, as well. Users didn’t like the idea of having ads forced upon them, but Locket works around that psychological hurdle by offering to pay users for their time. One cent per swipe, and no more than 3 cents per hour (at least, for now), is not much money, of course. But given how much users interact with their phones it’s easy money that could add up over time. Maybe you won’t make but a few dollars per month at first, but as more advertisers come on board, that could change. If anything, the couponing craze and success of demonstrate there’s at least a portion of the market that will work hard for little reward. Locket, meanwhile, requires very little user effort. “What we’re trying to do is change the perception people have towards ads. On mobile, ads suck right now,” says Kim. “But our ads are different because they’re beautiful and they actually reward you for your glances. We hope users will like it.” Locket is .
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When TV Isn’t Just TV Anymore
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Ryan Lawler
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We live in a world where Netflix is . The streaming video company received an unprecedented number of Emmy nominations — 14 in all. That included nine nominations for the Kevin Spacey-led political drama House of Cards, three for Arrested Development, and two for Hemlock Grove. There are some who might say that , and that most of them came on the strength of one big show. But that line of thinking ignores just how quickly this all came to be. Netflix’s Emmy nominations came just two years after it first announced its plans to get into original programming with House of Cards, and a little more than a year after its first original series, Lillyhammer, actually launched on the service. Those nominations show that Netflix is becoming a real player in TV, and that it can compete with the big boys and is working to do so. So Netflix isn’t HBO yet. That network might have racked up more than 100 nominations, but it’s been doing this original programming thing for more than 20 years. What’s important isn’t the number of nominations Netflix received, but that it is in the running at all. That’s because it isn’t what you’d think of as a traditional TV network. It has no linear programming, and all shows are distributed in an on-demand fashion. It doesn’t have weekly release schedules for its episodes, it just makes the entire season of a show available all at once. Most importantly, Netflix isn’t broadcast over the air, nor is it piped into your house via coax or beamed via satellite the way HBO and all the other cable networks are. Instead, it’s transmitted digitally — and not just to your TV, but to your computer, to your tablet, to your mobile phone. That’s why Netflix being recognized by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is so significant. Two years ago, Netflix was a place where people watched reruns of their favorite shows and bad movies on their computers. But now it’s making TV series. And good TV series at that. We’ve seen this play out before. It’s difficult to imagine now a world where the way you got your TV mattered, but I’m old enough to remember getting hooked up for cable and being able to watch and on HBO. Thirty years ago, cable networks emerged but mostly ran syndicated, rerun TV shows and B movies. Then pioneers like HBO began making their own shows. And now the cable networks are generally making better TV than the broadcast networks are. All of which is why many people are excited by this next wave of TV. Netflix is at the forefront of this change, but we’re seeing original programming also emerge from other streaming providers like Amazon Studios and Hulu. They might not be Emmy-ready yet, but it seems like only a matter of time. Photo Credit: via
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Mexican Online Take-Out Ordering Service SinDelantal.Mx Raises €2.5M From Seaya Ventures
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Steve O'Hear
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Mexico’s , the online takeout delivery service started by the founders of Spain’s SinDelantal.com, has raised €2.5 million from Spanish VC . Seaya’s Michael Kleindl was a previous backer of Spain’s SinDelantal, which late last year for a figure we pegged in the range of “a few million dollars,” so he knows its founders, Diego Ballesteros and Evaristo Babé, fairly well. But perhaps most notable is that , despite having no stake in SinDelantal.Mx, has allowed the startup to re-use the SinDelantal name in its bid to give the other major players in the region, Rocket Internet’s , and Delivery Hero/Team Europe’s , a run for their take-out money. And with Just Eat having a presence in Mexico (though it does operate in Latin America via Brazil), might we be seeing history repeating itself? The Spanish version of SinDelantal pre-existed Just Eat’s operation in Spain, after all, and we know how that panned out. In addition, the official announcement notes, “thanks to the technology developed for SinDelantal.com in Spain, the launch has been carried out in a quick and agile way.” Can we say, rinse and repeat? To that end, some numbers. Launched in 2012, SinDelantal.Mx claims it’s already a leader in the Mexican online takeout delivery market. The startup says it works with 1,000 restaurants in Mexico City, receiving over 10,000 orders each month, a metric its achieved in half the time it took for the founding team to do in Spain. The company is also talking up Mexico as a whole, noting that it has 47 million Internet users, pushing it into second place in Latin America in terms of online shoppers (Brazil holds the top spot). Meanwhile, it says that nearly 50 percent of online shoppers make purchases via mobile phones, and that e-commerce in the country is seeing a yearly growth rate of nearly 50 percent. Better still, the online delivery market in Mexico is said to be 10 times larger than in Spain, making the takeout space a tasty proposition. These are sentiments echoed by Seaya’s Kleindl. “I am personally, and we at Seaya are, very bullish on Mexico in particular,” he tells TechCrunch by email, noting that it is a “huge market” with a population of 120 million and a “very healthy macro-economical climate,” which is growing. “For SinDelantal it is an outstanding opportunity because the take-away and home-delivery culture is so strong; that’s why we estimate the market potential being 10 times that of Spain,” he says. “We know the founders very well. They did a fabulous job in the first one and will do it again now with more financial backing, more experience in a much larger market.”
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Legendary Investor John Doerr Will Take The Stage At Disrupt SF
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Leena Rao
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Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page that partner and legendary technology investor John Doerr “sees the future first.” He’s backed companies like Amazon, Intuit and Google. We’re thrilled to announce that Doerr will be taking the stage to talk about what the future looks like at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September. Tickets are and currently available with an early bird discount. While Doerr has been instrumental in betting on today’s iconic technology companies, he’s also focused on helping create the next stage of innovative technologies. He’s on the boards of social news magazine and disruptive online education company . Doerr will be one of the many industry leaders at Disrupt. We’ve already announced Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and fellow investor Doug Leone. And we have lots more to come. The conference starts September 7 and runs until the 11th at our favorite location, the San Francisco Design Concourse. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements and a few surprises to be announced soon. John Doerr is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Since joining KPCB in 1980, John and his partners have backed some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt of Google; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Scott Cook and Bill Campbell of Intuit; and Mark Pincus of Zynga. John’s passion is helping entrepreneurs create the “Next Big Thing” in mobile and social networks, greentech innovation, education and economic development. Ventures sponsored by John have created more than 200,000 new jobs. John serves on boards in the areas of Internet technologies and greentech, including Amyris, Bloom Energy, Coursera, Essence Healthcare, Flipboard, FloDesign Wind Turbines, Google, iControl, mCube, Quantumscape, Renmatix, Upthere and Zynga. He also led KPCB’s investment in Twitter. John’s technology career began in 1974 at Intel, just as the chipmaker was inventing the groundbreaking 8080 microprocessor. During his Intel years, he held roles in engineering, marketing, management and sales. John also learned about operating excellence from Intel co-founder Andy Grove — insight that he continues to share with entrepreneurs today. He later founded Silicon Compilers, a VLSI CAD software company, and co-founded @Home, the nationwide broadband cable Internet service. Outside of KPCB, John supports entrepreneurs focused on the environment, public education and alleviating global poverty. These include NewSchools.org, TechNet.org, the Climate Reality Project and ONE.org. John earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He also holds several patents for computer memory devices. John is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
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Gillmor Gang Live 07.18.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
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Content Marketing Platform Kapost Raises $5.6M From Lead Edge And Floodgate
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup offering tools for content marketers, just announced that it has raised $5.6 million in Series C funding. This brings the TechStars-incubated company’s total funding to $8.7 million. The new round comes from new investors and , as well as previous investor High Country Venture. Content marketing is basically what the name suggests — content that’s created to promote a company that can take the form of blog posts, social network updates, videos and more. In the funding press release, co-founder and CTO Nader Akhnoukh argues that this is a way to avoid “annoying your buyers with ads” and instead “inform, educate and entertain them – all the while earning their trust.” (Others have suggested that in the future.) include a workflow system for creating branded content, a publishing system that can push this content to a wide range of platforms, and analytics system’s for tracking the content’s success. (The company as a way for publishers to manage a large group of contributors.) Kapost says it has more than 100 customers, including Intel, AT&T, Oracle, Allstate, General Mills and Lenovo. An earlier version of the headline said $5.4 million. Apparently, . Also, I asked co-founder and CEO Toby Murdock about his future plans, and this is what he said (via email): Content-specifically buyer-focused (as opposed to product-focused) content–is not some passing fad, but more and more the fuel that drives all marketing and demand generation success. Thus Kapost will go further to connect the dots between content and the leads and customers it generate. This insight is critical for modern marketers to understand what content is working and what is not and continuously improve their efforts.
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Angels Get Carry For Helping A Startup Raise Money With AngelList Syndicates
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Eric Eldon
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is testing out a new service that lets angel investors syndicate deals with each other, a feature that could allow startups to raise venture-sized rounds of money with relative ease. Called , the private-beta product lets any on the AngelList fundraising platform essentially create, lead and collect carry for a fund of angel money for a specific startup. The carry part could help motivate an angel who truly believes in the startup to put in the hard work of helping it raise all the money it thinks it needs. In a world where more startups than ever are trying to raise money, and more investors are competing to find the best ones, this model may quickly become popular. Here’s a bit more about how it works, as gleaned from the newly-public FAQ from AngelList, the resulting conversation around the news on Twitter, and a conversation with AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant. The news, we’ll note, was broken by anonymous startup personality … who presumably has to AngelList, whoever he or she is. VCs and their limited partners (the entities who put money into VC funds) already use carry to align their interests. In addition to the VC partners collecting a set management fee for each fund, the carry provides them with a percentage of the profit for the fund. In the AngelList implementation of the concept, the lead angel the percentage carry that they’ll get from a positive return in the company if it has a liquidity event. They can set this to zero, which would make the most sense if they’re relatively unknown and most concerned with building a reputation. Or they can set any amount above that — 40% could make sense, for example, if you’re a top angel and looking to monetize your reputation and deal flow. The provides the following example of how a lead angel would use Syndicates: AngelList takes 5% regardless, which makes Syndicates a potentially big revenue stream for the funding platform. It also sets each Syndicate up as an LLC specifically for the startup in question, with the lead angel signing off as an investment advisor. This legally obligates the angel to disclose any conflicts, such as other strategic or financial relationships with the startup. As part of the service, AngelList also requires the lead to put up at least 10% of their own money into this vehicle, in contrast with the much lower percentages that LPs typically require of VC funds. In my discussion with Ravikant, he adds a few other points on how he sees Syndicates working. “The backers are likely to be LPs, family offices [of the very wealthy], passive angels, and angels out of market who can’t get into a deal or don’t want to spend the time,” he explains. Meanwhile, the lead angel is expected to take this more seriously than some angels might be used to, in that they are expected to “provide access, oversight, and help the company.” At the same time, he disputes the notion that Syndicates is competing against VCs here — an assumption one might make given that Syndicates could help a company raise a lot of money quickly. “This isn’t about ‘without VCs’ — in our test, anyone investing less than $100K per deal goes via Syndicates. Over that and you get a direct intro. If you’re putting in serious money, the company wants to meet you. The two will coexist.” “In fact,” he adds, “some well known VCs have already approached us about syndicating deals — they wouldn’t take a carry, but would get advisory shares for being on the board and / or get to control syndicate allocations and voting. We are also talking to seed funds who want extra leverage.” A less obvious benefit of the setup is that angels now have a new way to take advantage of pro rata terms. Typical deal terms already allow investors to continue putting money into a company in order to maintain their existing percentage, even as the company raises new funding at higher valuations. But, many angels do not want to raise or borrow the money to do this, so they forego the option. With Syndicates, the investor can fundraise to buy stock made available via pro rata terms, and collect carry on any resulting profit. What about the murky world of finance law? Where does the Securities and Exchange Commission stand on this new method of raising money? AngelList has obtained a no-action letter from the federal agency, which means that it can launch the service without fear of its legal reprisal. You can view the . But wait, how new is this concept? Finance writer Dan Primack notes that “ ” already exist, and indeed they’ve become an method for private equity investors to pool money in recent years. There are very few instances of a carry-based LLC being used for angel investment, though. , a relatively new investment-vehicle startup focused on raising funds around startups and startup categories, has also been pursuing it. is another, albeit at an intentionally smaller scale. To Ravikant, “[t]his is closer to Sequoia scouts than anything else. It allows anyone to be a scout, not just Sequoia’s CEOs, and anyone to be a backer, not just Sequoia. And it’s all carry-based (no fees).” He adds that this is just a test for the next couple months. It may not work, or the implementation may change. But any startup that needs funding and has an angel lined up is going to be looking at Syndicates hard as a new option. And the early-stage investment community is the threats and opportunities. Finally, the SEC, Congress and other government entities are currently changing the rules for private fundraising, which could make Syndicates explode in popularity. Private companies could soon that they’re looking for money, which might help them benefit from the Syndicates concept immediately. And if non-accredited investors are allowed in, lots more money could start to flow through, too (and will have a beating the tech press on AngelList scoops).
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Why You Should Never Digital Detox Alone
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Gregory Ferenstein
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For the first time in years, I spent 72 hours without Internet or cell phone reception. While I didn’t experience any life-altering epiphanies that some claim comes from a digital detox, I now enjoy a handful of very meaningful relationships that never would have existed, with the constant temptation for shallow interactions with dozens of peoples’ avatars, thousands of miles away. I learned that when you’re stuck with people, you’re forced to find meaning in conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have seemed more entertaining than YouTube at the time. I don’t buy the snake oil that cutting ourselves off from the net makes us better thinkers; access to the world’s information has made me more informed and creative. But, the Internet can’t give you friendship, nor can it help you discover ideas that people have never told anyone about. Last week, I had the fortune of testing the “never detox alone” hypothesis at two back-to-back business conferences held in the mountains. The first, , was an invite-only Burning Man-like gathering of 800 young social entrepreneurs in the Utah Mountains. Completely cut off from the Internet, attendees slept in tents, could go horseback riding, dance to A-list DJ’s under a full moon, or attend spirituality-themed talks. I left Summit Outside with more friends and business ideas than I have at any other conference–some from people I’d know for years, but thought I didn’t even like very much. On the flip side, CEOs and investors that normally would have avoided a tech journalist like the plague, were forced into uncomfortable conversations that unexpectedly led to great ideas. The Internet has spoiled us; at the slightest hint of boredom or unpleasantness, we escape to the Internet. Modern life is a constant elevator pitch. Potential friends and projects that don’t enjoy a good first impression get tossed out. Indeed, Summit Series itself has built a thriving company on top of the theory that the best business relationships start out as friendships. Since 2008, has held a pricey annual conference of socially oriented entrepreneurs. Held on a cruise ship, at a ski resort, and in a makeshift camping mountain village, the Summit conferences intermix crazy-fun activities, such as shark tagging in the Caribbean, with A-list speakers, from the likes of Richard Branson and Bill Clinton. Now, Summit has raised $40 million to purchase a mountain and . Of course, I’m fully aware that pricey, quasi-exclusive networking conferences aren’t for everyone. . I understand the , while they party in ostentatious digs. And, on the world. The conferences appeal to wide-eyed idealists. That said, Summit Outside taught me that the world won’t come crashing down If I’m off the grid for a weekend. Like many people feeling the digital overload, I’m still planning my vacation from electronics. But, now I know I shouldn’t detox alone. I’m going to convene a camping trip–at least half from people I don’t know and never would have thought to hang out with. I’ve learned not to underestimate the power of experience and randomness.
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CrunchWeek: Google Chromecast, Apple’s No-Growth Q3, And Earnings Madness
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Leena Rao
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Welcome to a brand new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us writers together in front of the TechCrunch TV cameras to dish on some of the more interesting stories from the past seven days. In this week’s episode, , and I talked about Apple’s (and ), Facebook’s and financials from its earnings reports, and Google’s , Tune in above for more!
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Chris Velazco
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Gillmor Gang: Christmas in July
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate Google’s gift to StreamTV. ChromeCast is cheap, small, simple, and extensible, just in time to kickoff the run up to Apple’s big move to the Big Screen. It’s a win-win for everybody involved, except maybe Microsoft and its XBox offering. Suddenly 3 screens and the cloud has shrunk to 2, or maybe 1. It’s no cakewalk for Google, who must navigate and resolve desktop and mobile OSes and native hardware only seen briefly held to the ear of Eric Schmidt. But Chromecast altering the landscape, making the new Nexus 7 into a peripheral controller for the TV rather than the other way around, will shake up Hollywood’s world view just as Netflix is reprogramming our kids’ attention from channels to apps. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Snapchat And The Beauty Of Ephemeral Photography And Fleeting Creativity
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Darrell Etherington
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Traditionally photography is about preserving a moment in time; you take a picture literally because it’ll last longer. The entire art is built around a quest for permanence, and archival desires. But with , you’re casting off those things you photograph almost as soon as you take the picture – in many cases it’s less permanent than just continuing to look at something. For an avid hobbyist photographer, it’s somewhat counterintuitive, but also very liberating. Part of the appeal of Snapchat seems to be that people don’t have to be too concerned about how they take a photo; the communication is more important here, and since no one’s framing any of your pictures, there’s no reason to sweat composition, lighting or anything else. But I do find myself thinking about those things, resulting in an entirely different kind of art compared to traditional, camera-based photography. Taking photos for Snapchat is, in many ways, much more about audience than traditional photography is. You’re creating a moment for another person specifically in most cases, and you’ve got constraints including your immediate environs, a limited smartphone camera and a camera interface that’s simple to the point of being like a blunt instrument, even compared to the stock iPhone camera app. Best of all, you’re creating for momentary consumption; the photo has to convey what you need it to in a very brief window of time. But the best part is the absence of pretense around taking these photos. The snaps aren’t trying to be something they’re not; they’re pictures, and all the fun and the art is uncomplicated by questions of legacy, or of long-lasting quality and memorability. You’re making something without having to worry about how making that thing will potentially cast you in the eyes of history. Not that most people are consciously thinking about what kind of museums their work will appear in later, or how it will be judged by future generations, but the act of capturing, writing down or recording something is deeply entangled with those concerns, conscious or not. Being free of that allows for more genuine enjoyment – Kurt Vonnegut Jr. comes close to describing how that feels in his novel Galapagos when he talks about the narrator writing the book you’re reading with this finger, in the air: In other words, taking a very long view reveals that both Snapchat and traditional photographic tools are equally ephemeral, as both are of no consequence on a cosmic scale. But having that temporariness brought home and made understandable makes all the difference. We’re strongly conditioned to believe that if you’re going to make something, it’s worth making something that will last. But Snapchat is a good reminder that sometimes, it’s just fine to make something fleeting, too.
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Reminder: The London Pitch-Off+Meetup Is Monday
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John Biggs
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In preparation for I’ve been running around the Continent for more than a month, hitting the for a huge tour and for an amazing meet-up. Now I’m back for a meet up+pitch-off with our own Mike Butcher and the rest of the UK team. Tickets are . There will be great networking opportunities, and a battle to the death to see which entrepreneurs can dazzle and excite in under 60 seconds. PitchOff details: Office hours details Pitch-off winners Venue in London Remember we are holding our later this week so if you don’t want to wing your way North we’ll come to you. Application form for Berlin is . Questions about the events? Please contact: . And whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, dreamer or tech enthusiast, we want to see you at the event, so we can give you free beer and hear your thoughts. Come one, come all.
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SETT Is A New Blogging Platform That Has Community At Its Heart
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Although blogging is nearly as old as the Internet, it still feels like something is amiss. From to , there is a feeling afoot that existing platforms for blogs and long-form content still need a lot of improvement. Five years ago, early platforms like Blogger gave way to micro-blogging and networks like Tumblr. Now we’re seeing the pendulum swing back with platforms for longer-form stories and media. SETT is a blogging platform that’s looking to emphasize community, so that new users can find a right audience immediately and long-time bloggers can interact with higher-quality commenters and contributors. Aside from features that are now standard these days like a news feed of content and WYSIWYG editing, SETT has a top bar where it’s easy for bloggers to track comments or even private messages from others in the SETT community. From the start, when new users sign up for an account, SETT refers readers to your site. It has a word-matching system internally that compares posts to one another. If a reader happens to like a post about one topic, the platform will recommend other similar ones to them. The site is the brainchild of a long-time blogger named Tynan (who declines to use his last name online ever) and Todd Iceton, a developer who worked for Nutshell Mail, the company that was Constant Contact. Tynan for six years but found that it was a bit of a slog for any new user. “For people who are just starting out, their biggest hurdle is just getting that community first,” he said. There are other features meant to enhance a reader’s relationship with a blogger like a simple, one-click e-mail subscription system. Subscribers get notified of new posts and new comments on posts they’ve decided to individually follow. Readers can also start their own independent discussions about posts in a community section, where they can see who is online and which posts are being actively read by a lot of users. The site has had about 100 or so active blogs in beta form, but they’ve opened it up since. Some of the more popular voices on the platform are entrepreneurs like , who co-founded 500 Startups-backed Fitocracy and blogs about how to stay in shape. The bootstrapped startup earns revenue through premium or subscription accounts that range from $12 to $99 per month in cost. At the higher-end of the range, users get more image-hosting space, subscribers and customer support. As for the competition, Tynan and his co-founder Todd say that, while they have respect for the other platforms, Svbtle doesn’t encourage commenting. In any case, they agree that something needs to be done to update outdated blogging formats — even if starting a web-first blogging platform in 2013 seems a bit anachronistic. “Both are expressing frustration with the standard format. The WordPress model hasn’t changed in 10 to 12 years,” Tynan said. “Their model is kind of broken.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk1AcxFO4GE&w=560&h=315]
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Technology And The Ruling Party
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Jon Evans
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“Power tends to corrupt,” said , “and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” The sexism needs updating but the sentiment remains true. That’s been all too obvious this week, during which the powers that be to protect their once-secret surveillance programs…while the NSA to Freedom Of Information Act requests with the claim “There’s no central method to search [internal NSA emails] at this time.” In related news, NSA says it's never come across the term "dogfooding" in any of its data trawling, & doesn't know its definition. — Lun Esex (@LunaticSX) The black-comedy message is clear: surveillance is something that the powerful do to the powerless, in their own perfect secrecy. is but a pipe dream in the minds of civil libertarians. Which puts me in mind of science-fiction guru Charles Stross’s recent blog post : Is the United Kingdom a one party state? […] I’m nursing a pet theory. Which is that there are actually four main political parties in Westminster: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Ruling Party. The Ruling Party is a meta-party…it always wins every election, because whichever party wins is led by members of the Ruling Party, who have more in common with each other than with the back bench dinosaurs who form the rump of their notional party […] Any attempt at organizing a transfer of power that does not usher in a new group of Ruling Party faces risks being denounced as Terrorism. Of course in America this is old news. The one thing that the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have in common is their desire to throw the Ruling Party bums out of Washington. It’s an accepted axiom in American politics that anyone who has been in Washington too long is suspect and probably corrupt. ( think their political parties are corrupt.) The wave of hope that drove Obama into office was fuelled in part by the belief that he wasn’t a member of the Ruling Party. Well, even if he wasn’t then, . That’s what usually happens to successful politicians: The GOP establishment: Obama is a tyrant, except in the areas where we want to give him sweeping unilateral power to exercise in secret. — Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) Nancy Pelosi in 2005: Patriot Act "a massive invasion of privacy" Today, she voted to let that invasion continue. — Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) Similarly, the recent spate of antigovernment street protests in Turkey, Brazil, etc., are–arguably–protests against the various international incarnations of the Ruling Party. As Slavoj Žižek in the : What we first took as a failure fully to apply a noble principle (democratic freedom) is in fact a failure inherent in the principle itself. This realisation – that failure may be inherent in the principle we’re fighting for – is a big step in a political education. Representatives of the ruling ideology roll out their entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion. Žižek’s a Marxist, and I’m a staunch capitalist, but even I have to admit that he may be on to something there. it’s possible that multiparty democracy suffers from an inherent and fundamental flaw: the eventual installation of an entrenched, parasitical Ruling Party. So, of course, as a techie who instinctively thinks in terms of hacking and fixing systems, I immediately find myself wondering: Can better technology save us from the Ruling Parties, or at least alleviate some of our governments’ more glaring flaws? Or will technology further entrench and empower them? These days it’s hard for Silicon Valley to look at Washington with anything other than dismay trending towards horror, along with a powerful sense of “there has to be a better way.” I expect that’s why people have seriously called for . I suspect that’s what Larry Page had in mind, at least in part, when he mused aloud about the desirability of a untrammeled by antiquated laws and politics, where we could with new and better systems: We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] can’t be right if it’s 50 years old — that’s before the Internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology. Google is, after all, the apotheosis of the Valley; a company that muses about to its employees somewhere down the road, a company that . Doesn’t that sound a whole lot better than the Ruling Party? Doesn’t it seem like the best thing we could do is import the Google Way to Washington, and turn our government into a genuine ? Sorry. No. Silicon Valley thinks of itself as built on merit, innovation, iteration, and rational thought, and to some extent it is, but its worldview can be even more blinkered and bubble-bound than that of the Ruling Party. Technology does not solve all of the world’s problems, and it’s dangerous hubris to think that it might. Rational thought is a flawed tool in a world full of irrational people. And most of all, power corrupts; anyone who replaces the Ruling Party will probably eventually become a member. But on the other hand, avoiding politics and/or pretending that it has nothing to do with us is for the tech industry. Edward Snowden has shown us that much. We have become and too powerful. As I wrote here : You probably don’t want to read about political idiocy here, and I can’t blame you. But it may be time for the tech industry to start paying much more attention to the political world, because as Wikileaks vividly illustrates, these days almost every political issue has tech aspects—and hence, down the road, tech repercussions. Can’t help but think I wasn’t wrong. But that doesn’t mean the tech industry should be trying to directly shape what happens in Washington and . We provide tools; we don’t dig trenches. That’s not what we’re good at. (Witness .) Instead we should collectively be trying to ensure that tomorrow’s technologies, and tomorrow’s networks, support individual authority (and privacy), rather than building centralized which increase and cement the existing hegemonies. I realize that this all sounds simultaneously paranoid and naïve. But I believe we’re nearing a crucial point at which, depending on a myriad of separate decisions ultimately made by individual people, technologies can–and –either increase or diminish our individual and collective freedoms by a very significant degree. The direction we will take seems , and could still go either way. So keep your fingers crossed, and your eyes wide open. I’ll be in Las Vegas this week to cover the and security conferences. I’m not entirely sure yet what kind of reportage I’ll be filing, but if you’re interested in occasional sardonic tweets from Sin City, .
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Maxthon Is A Cloud-Based Browser For Power Users
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Catherine Shu
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may not have the name recognition of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, but the cloud browser has gained a global following of more than 100 million unique visitors per month in 140 countries. Karl Mattson, the company’s vice president, says Maxthon’s growth has been driven in large part by Web developers and gamers who appreciate its built-in memory management, Flash, GPU acceleration and HTML5 support. “We really see a lot of confidence in HTML5 and want to do everything we can in a browser to make it easy for developers and other people who are doing the heavy lifting in HTML5 right now building games that can run on it,” says Mattson. The Beijing-based company, which has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Shanghai, was founded in 2006 by engineer Jeff Chen while working at the National University of Singapore. Chen had taken over the job of coding MyIE from its founder, eventually cultivating a community of six million users. The first version of Maxthon was developed using their feedback. The current version is based on and compatible with Chrome extensions. Mattson says Maxthon emphasizes three things: performance, portability and out-of-box experience. The browser works across all platforms, making it convenient for people who use both Mac and Windows or different mobile operating systems to keep their data in sync across devices with a . The company leverages its international reach by localizing for each market. For example Maxthon teamed up with Yandex, Russia’s largest Internet search engine, to , while the Chinese version of Maxthon for Mac is pre-installed with , the country’s largest third-party payment services provider. While its built-in features mean users don’t have to deal with most plug-ins and installs, they have the option of with Maxthon extensions. Another boon is Maxthon’s focus on security and privacy, especially in light of the NSA’s surveillance activities. The browser uses AES 256 encryption. “Even if we were ever subpoenaed by government agencies that wanted some kind of information from users, it wouldn’t be found anywhere,” says Mattson. “The short answer is that it would be technologically impossible for us to deliver. Privacy is so encrypted and secured that we could literally hand over our disk and it would just be a big bunch of mush.” Maxthon’s received funding venture capital firms WI Harper, Charles River Ventures and early Skype investor Morten Lund. The company earns revenue through the sale of premium services.
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The Highlight Startups From FounderFuel’s Summer 2013 Cohort Demo Day
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Darrell Etherington
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Montreal-based accelerator held its Demo Day for its Summer 2013 cohort of startups today, and the nine companies taking part all offered pretty impressive pitches. Three companies stood out from the crowd, however, and earned my pick for highlights of the show. Some are familiar names who have made big changes and expanded their vision, and some are newcomers going after markets where the opportunity and timing are just right. The , presented by co-founder Sam Vermette, got a big boost when Apple ditched transit directions from its iOS default maps app. But it’s gone beyond just filling a gap left behind by the Mac maker, and now offers some of the most accurate real-time transit data available. When you boot up the app, it instantly shows you the nearest transit spots and also the expected times before a bus or train will arrive at each. Vernette said that that’s how their app differentiates itself from others, and from transit features built into things like Google Maps, since The Transit App was built from the ground up with the commuter at the forefront. But the big picture that The Transit App painted wasn’t about helping commuters find their way around on a daily basis; it was about informing the future of urban development. 80 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, Vermette said, and that’s only growing. Cities are struggling to cope as-is, and will be looking for ways to build out their infrastructure in better and better ways. They’ll need data for that, and data is exactly what The Transit App is collecting. They currently gather around 400,000 daily data points, which help identify issues like underserved areas, average wait times, the most popular routes and unnecessary stops. In exchange for their participation and data sharing, The Transit App can help cities build better public transportation that truly meets the needs of urban residents. And that kind of help should be very valuable indeed. Over the past year, big companies like Twitter and Facebook have introduced two-factor authentication, which pairs a traditional online password with a unique, randomly generated code supplied by a second device, which can now be a mobile app tied to a specific smartphone. The need for this has essentially been driven by security breaches, which are becoming all too common. co-founder Rob Masse explained that what Swift Identity wants to provide is two factor authentication for everyone. Not all companies can currently afford to implement two factor because while it’s cheaper than it used to be thanks to the advent of mobile phones and apps, it still requires a lot of developer time and talent to build. Swift Identity offers it up with 10 lines of code to install, and it’s completely free; premium services including geolocation, SMS and advanced reporting help the company drive revenue. The startup has spent two years in stealth mode building Swift Identity, and launched it today to its first group of private beta customers. Another amazing thing that Swift Identity can do is offer single sign-on, which would take a lot of the additional sting out of two-factor in terms of consumer or user inconvenience. Since Swift Identity envisions itself becoming the service layer enabling two-factor on products around the web, a user could authenticate once and then have that authentication apply to other sites also using Swift Identity for the remainder of their browsing session; it’s still secure, but it’s also less onerous for users. Enabling social sign-on for websites is a big win, since it provides them access to a whole host of great new user data, enables virality, gives users a convenient way to use a login they already know and trust, and more. But it’s not all that simple to implement, and managing the various API changes that companies like Twitter consistently put out adds up to a lot of developer hours, which in turn adds up to significant spend. A process that would’ve taken 320 hours according to co-founder Rakesh Soni takes 2 hours with LoginRadius, which gathers 30 social network sign-in APIs into one. The startup employs its own team of developers, which includes around a dozen engineers located in offices in both Canada and India, to manage API changes coming from the big companies. It even has the support of some key partners like Amazon, Mozilla and Google+ who provide early access to API changes before they go live, so that LoginRadius’ customers get to be ready for changes before they go live. LoginRadius did $20,000 in monthly revenue in June, which was a 100 percent increase over its previous month. It is already active on 70,000 websites today, with 10,000 new sign-ups coming on every month at this stage. All those sites provided 70 million data points to LoginRadius, too, which means they can leverage all that data to determine things like customer intent and make money from that side of the business, too. All the were impressive, too, but those three stood out because of their data-driven approaches that offer opportunities to build businesses that not only meet big apparent needs in the market, but also offer opportunities to help identify the next big trends in their respective markets, too.
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Vine For Android Gets Homescreen Shortcut For Instant Video Recording Plus iOS Features
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Stephanie Yang
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Vine has brought up to speed with the iOS counterpart, adding revining, camera tools, channels and more, along with one more update that the iOS doesn’t have– a capture widget. The little homescreen widget immediately boots up the Vine video recording screen so you don’t miss the beginning of those sudden, sharable moments. The green video icon on the Android home screen lets user bypass the Vine homescreen feed that the app’s normal icon opens. This new addition could give Vine an edge when pitted against Instagram, which requires multiple taps to open the app and switch to video before you can start recording a mini-movie. This shortcut will likely remain exclusively available to Android users, since iOS doesn’t support the home screen customization. All other revisions to the app were released for iOS last week. These include revining for showing your followers Vines shot by someone else, 15 new channels for exploring different categories of Vines, and protected posts for those private moments. There’s the new camera tools from Vine for iOS too, like a grid for lining up shots, the ghost silhouette for keeping stop-motion shots steady, and the ability to delete and reshoot your last clip. While and want to keep the publishing flow as short and quick as possible, their latest updates show a big effort to please power users.
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Vonage Co-Founder And VoIP Pioneer Jeff Pulver’s Next Call: Zula, A WhatsApp For Business
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Rip Empson
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Today, whether it be via Skype or Gmail, making phone calls over the web has become part of our daily routine. While the name may not ring any bells for younger generations, Jeff Pulver is one of the pioneers of that very technology we take for granted. A co-founder of , one of the biggest and earliest VoIP companies around, Pulver is a self-described futurist, serial entrepreneur and long-time evangelist for VoIP technologies. But lately he’s been largely absent from the space he helped create. But now the Vonage co-founder is throwing his hat back into the ring as an entrepreneur with , a startup and app by the same name that aims to revolutionize team communication for an increasingly mobile world — for those who’ve grown up on smartphones and social networks. Put simply, Zula, which is still in stealth, is one of that class of business products that is looking to capitalize on the surge of consumer apps that younger people, weaned on smartphones instead of rotary dials, have used for their first forays into virtual communications with others. Pulver wants Zula to follow them into the working world. No surprise then that they’ve privately been calling it the “WhatsApp for businesses.” To do that, Pulver has teamed up with co-founder Jacob Ner-David, a serial entrepreneur and communications technology veteran in his own right, who, among other things, co-founded Delta Three, a VoIP provider that he led through a $1 billion IPO on NASDAQ. With Zula, the two VoIP veterans are getting back into the game and are on a mission to reconsider how teams communicate and collaborate over mobile devices. Zula plans to launch in beta later this summer as an iOS and Android app and aims to help working professionals manage their teams, allowing them to communicate over text, send rich media, make conference calls and share files through a native, mobile-only platform. While the world has already seen its fair share of productivity apps, messaging apps like Skype, WhatsApp and Viber (to name a few) have been on fire of late, Pulver thinks there’s room for a product that strategically combines the two. There has been a healthy amount of buzz about how popular messaging apps are becoming, he says, but there’s still a serious need for a mobile communication tool that caters to professionals who are looking for robust collaboration functionality to help manage their businesses while on the go. To get started, the founders have from Israeli crowdfunding site along with contributions from local angel investors, like Gigi Levy and Oded Vardi — and their own pockets. Since then the team has been dog-fooding the app themselves, Pulver adds, using it to discuss strategy, share company documents, make conference calls and playing around with the best ways to construct meaningful Q&A-style collaboration on mobile. With a full public release for the app slated for September, there’s no doubt that the startup will be entering a noisy space. But the team hopes they can fill an important gap by creating a mobile-only solution that supports all of the critical functions that teams and working professionals need to stay on top of their tasks and manage their businesses. Not only that, but with younger generations having grown up on instant messaging, Facebook and SMS, in creating a business-facing communications and collaboration platform for mobile, the co-founders believe it’s critical to create an experience that can appeal to young people entering the workforce. Pulver says that he thinks the best way to do that is to create a kind of “WhatsApp for business” — taken to the next step with a full roster of team collaboration features. With Dropbox and other big players busy implementing similar plans for the mobile workforce, Zula will have to provide plenty of differentiation on the product front if it hopes to make waves in this space. It’s too early to place any bets, but with two VoIP and communications veterans leading those product decisions, we’re not the only ones who will be keeping tabs on Zula’s progress. More on Zula in the video below: http://youtu.be/QU7RSnIMFKQ
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Star Wars Fans Take To San Francisco’s Streets Thanks To Nerdist Industries’ Course Of The Force
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Anthony Ha
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Geek-focused digital media company did something kind of amazing in the lead-up to last year’s Comic-Con International — it staged a relay race called , where fans carried a lightsaber along the California coast to raise money for the Make a Wish foundation. The company ( ) brought the event back this year, and it swung through San Francisco yesterday. You can see footage from the run and my interviews with a few of the participants in the video above — not only was I struck by the awesomeness of some of the costumes (seriously, if you are any kind of science fiction geek, watch for the cross between Iron Man and C-3PO) but also by the diversity of the runners — in terms of age, gender, home city and more. , who ran his quarter-mile segment while dressed as Boba Fett, told me, “Most Star Wars geeks are stereotyped as out-of-shape and sort of can’t run, so it’s nice to be able to brush away the stereotype and say, ‘Hey look, we’re Star Wars geeks and we’re in shape, too!'” Apparently the relay stopped by a number of Silicon Valley tech offices today. We didn’t tag along for that part, but . (By the way, you may notice in the video that I repeatedly refer to the event as “Course for the Force” and that my hair is sticking out kind of weirdly. My only excuse: It was kind of early in the morning.)
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Vine Is Coming To Windows Phone 8 As Nokia Looks To Attract More Big-Name Apps
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Eliza Brooke
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Perhaps the most understated announcement at Nokia’s Lumia 1020 release event today was the promise of Vine for Windows Phone 8 within the year. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced onstage from Pier 92 in New York City that apps from CNN, Vyclone, Yelp, Foursquare, Path, Flipboard, and Hipstamatic would all become available in the near future. The partnership with Vine, however, went unspoken except in the press release. Twitter confirmed to us that Vine will be coming to Windows Phone 8, but would not share further details about when this is happening or what will differentiate it from the iPhone version, which . Others had taken notice of this hole in Windows Phone 8’s app offerings, among them the third-party Vine app 6Sec, which Nokia could have played this up more today, and they undoubtedly will in the coming months. Hipstamatic’s Oggl PRO, their application for the Lumia 1020, will work beautifully with the phone’s 41-megapixel camera, but it’s no Instagram in terms of traction. The addition of Vine could be a step toward convincing higher profile apps to join the Windows Phone 8 roster. An Instagram partnership, however, would seem unlikely as both Vine and Hipstamatic are direct competitors. “That disparity between our platform and other platforms that folks write about is going away,” Nokia Global Vice President and General Manager Bryan Biniak said in a small presentation this afternoon. According to Biniak, the partnerships with video and photo apps like Vyclone, Hipstamatic, and Flipboard resulted from developing the Lumia 1020 into a photographic powerhouse. For visually oriented apps, providing a great raw image is incredibly motivating. And it probably is. Biniak himself acknowledged that once developers see other well-known names invest in a partnership with Nokia, others are likely to follow. Vine is certainly a step in the right direction, and it seems they’ll be pushing to corner bigger apps in the coming year, perhaps even beyond the photo realm.
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Trulia Now Allows You To Find And Promote Real Estate Agents
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Stephanie Yang
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, the online marketplace for buying and selling homes, has added a service that allows users to search specifically for real estate agents by location, name and company. The search engine returns a list of local agents with pictures, recommendations and other information. This new update comes after Trulia announced a program to partner with such real estate companies as RE/MAX and Realty ONE Group. These companies provide rosters of agents to Trulia, but each profile depends on the individual agent to create and update. This addition is supposed to provide a comprehensive platform for both users and companies instead of depending solely on personal recommendations. Trulia spokesperson Korina Buhler tells me that, according to company surveys, more than half of the site’s users are looking to find an agent when they visit Trulia. She says the Find an Agent search is also meant to help users research agents, because only interview one agent before choosing, according to statistics from the National Association of Realtors. Competitors and also have agent reviews and listings, but Trulia representatives said they are working on making their directory more detailed than others. Agent profiles are concentrated on building an online reputation, with sections for user recommendations, previous selling history, questions and available properties. Other tech developments we’ve seen from Trulia this year include , a personalized real estate recommendation engine, and a redesigned . The Find an Agent search is also available on Trulia’s mobile app and the mobile web.
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Report: Skype And Microsoft Handed Over Calls And Emails To NSA
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The Guardian more top-secret documents alleging that both Skype and Microsoft cooperated with U.S. spy agencies to give away the content of email and video chats. Though it’s unclear whether the collection of this data was indiscriminate or targeted at specific subjects, the language of the documents indicate that the NSA may not have needed an individual warrant for each request. “Collaborative teamwork was the key to the successful addition of another provider to the Prism system,” the documents read. “This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established.” The NSA reportedly had access to pre-encrypted data, “For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption.” The agents were also quite happy with Skype’s wiretap call quality, “Feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete.” Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011, but Skype was reportedly cooperating with federal agencies before the acquisition. Most disturbingly, one document indicated that the agencies do not need a special request to get information, saying that the relationship with the tech company “means that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO [Special Source Operation] for this – a process step that many analysts may not have known about”. NSA leaker Edward Snowden called the SSO the “crown jewel” of the NSA monitoring apparatus. Of course, Microsoft, Skype, and the Director of National Intelligence issued their own legalese-filled defense of the program. Rather than forcing readers to shift through their responses, just randomly string these 4 plug-and-play elements together and you’ll get the gist: 1. [We care about users]
2. [We respect privacy]
3. [It’s legal]
4. [We love the constitution, promise] Another day, a smaller 4th Amendment. For more awesome stories, follow me on and .
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Developer Hacks His Microwave Into The Microwave Of The Future
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Greg Kumparak
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Hello, and welcome back to today’s episode of “Why? LOL BECAUSE WE CAN.” Tired of your dumb old microwave that just to cook it? Stupid thing probably can’t even play animated GIFs or send Snapchats or download the Fergie. What’s the point? In the coolest mod I’ve seen in ages, developer has hacked away at his microwave to add stuff that any self-respecting microwave manufacturer of the year 2013 should have probably added themselves. Voice commands! Barcodes that pre-set cooking times! A Meet the Raspberry Picrowave. As you might’ve gathered from the name, it’s a Microwave mashed up with a Raspberry Pi, the $25 micro-computer adored by modders, hackers, and geeks ’round the world [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2YtARzJTys?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] If nothing else, man oh do I want that self-setting clock. My (two-year old) microwave uses the most ridiculous and impossibly obfuscated series of button presses for clock setting, so a power outage at my house generally means at least three months of the microwave swearing that it’s blink-thirty. Stuffing a Pi into your microwave is cool and all, but the scale of the project gets a whole lot more impressive once , from wiring the Pi into the microwave’s power supply, to designing a new control panel, to etching and producing a custom PCB that fits in the place of the original.
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SaleMove Wants To Make Selling Big-Ticket Items On The Web More Personal
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Chris Velazco
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You and I might buy a pair of socks online without a second thought, but buying a car? Or a pricey bit of jewelry? The process becomes much trickier as the price of a product increases, and it isn’t long before canned descriptions and stock photos just don’t cut it anymore. That’s where a New York-based startup called comes in. Instead of leaving potential buyers alone with a website, the team is working on improving the process of online personal sales. SaleMove (founded by Justin DePietro and Dan Michaeli) graduated from last summer, and have spent the intervening months reaching out to car dealerships and luxury goods dealers during a private beta program. Now the company is dropping those beta trappings and is opening its web-based sales tool to the masses. Here’s how it works. Once a user surfs onto a SaleMove-enabled site, they can poke around as they normally would. That is unless they notice an action bar that lives on the left edge of the browser window. Clicking that brings up the option to talk to a live representative by standard text chat, voice chat, or a video conversation. No matter what option the user selects, that friendly remote operator can jointly control the browser window along with that potential customer — a second cursor will appear on-screen so the operator can guide the users along while they talk. DePietro calls it a “high-touch approach” to online sales, as there’s a knowledgeable agent leading would-be customers around and imparting wisdom as though they were physically in the same place. The backend is where a lot of the magic happens. Once SaleMove has been activated on a site, operators are able to see who’s on the site at any given moment, as well as information like general location, what browser they’re using, what part of the site they’re currently looking at, and how long they’ve been on the site. Those operators can also pull back to see when visitors collectively tend to visit the site to make sure that there’s a sufficient number of operators ready to tend to their whims. And to top it all off, setup only requires the website admin to pop in a line of JavaScript (which the team will happily help out with). Those partner companies basically pay per roof — that is, they pay a set monthly fee per website that uses the SaleMove script. If you’re running a startup of your own, though, SaleMove offers steeply discounted rates if you’ve raised less than $5 million as indicated in your CrunchBase profile. Now all that said, it’s hard not to look at SaleMove and question the very notion behind it (I know I did). Even with a guided web tour in place, the idea of buying a car online or something similarly expensive seems more than a little problematic. SaleMove looks at things a bit differently. Those personal web sales experiences aren’t necessarily meant to seal deals (though remote operators can even walk you through financing forms and the like online) — they’re more like icebreakers meant to give people more meaningful information than what they would have otherwise gotten just poking around on their own. “A sale is not a one-time thing,” co-founder Michaeli said. “It’s a process.” And perhaps more importantly for some companies, SaleMove is positioning the service as a lead generation tool — people may not be ready to buy just yet, but making a personal connection and gleaning some information sets up rather nicely for future sales. The team also hopes that a forthcoming iPad app can help close the interactivity gap. Operators could theoretically take an iPad into a car and give remote buyers a thorough look at what a spec sheet and a few stock photos just can’t reveal. We’ll soon see whether SaleMove’s peculiar approach to personal selling pans out. DePietro says SaleMove will be live in 20 local dealerships and companies by the end of the month. SaleMove has also locked up some $250,000 in seed funding from ERA itself, Autobytel founder Pete Ellis, and SinglePlatform’s Adam Liebman.
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Pac-12 Revamps Network Websites Around Unique Sports Events To Connect More Fans
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Billy Gallagher
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A major part of what makes sports so enticing and addictive is that they connect individuals to something much larger in real time. Whether they’re in the stands cheering with thousands of other fans, frantically checking Twitter for updates, or arguing with friends after the game, fans want to be connected to each other and to content. Hoping to capture some of that energy, the released a that is centered around unique event pages for 3,600 events across all Pac-12 schools and sports. On Monday, 10 of the 12 member schools released revamped athletics websites; the remaining two, Utah and USC, will launch new websites in the future. The schools’ individual pages are tied to the main Pac-12 site and share content, including live streams for games. The moves are part of the , which has included consolidating all of its media rights, launching the Pac-12 sports network, and creating apps for fans to watch content anywhere. Pac-12 Digital VP David Aufhauser tells me the network has put a “maniacal focus on what fans want,” and will adjust the site based on fan feedback from the beta launch. The major change for fans will be the increase in content available via these event pages. Let’s say you’re a big Stanford football fan, like me, and you want to check out every game of the season this coming fall. Each game will have its own event page on the Pac-12 site where you can check out previews, game highlights, post-game interviews, and other content. But football isn’t the best example, because there’s already so much content out there. Say you’re a big fan of a less-popular sport that’s rarely televised or covered by other media. Not only can you watch live streams of the events on the Pac-12 website, but you can now have the same experience as a football fan (albeit with less media) on unique pages for each event. Aufhauser tells me the Pac-12’s goal is to keep these event pages live and archived, so you could go back in a few years and re-live these events. He adds that the network’s next big challenge will be finding ways to connect fans on game day no matter where they are or how they’re watching. Unfortunately for fans, though, this won’t include making much premium content, like football games, available via the web or Pac-12 apps. He says that the network will be working to find a balance between free content online via live streams and content that is tethered to cable subscriptions for the next 5-10 years. “I think it’s always — well not always, but for longer than I think people realize, especially in sports, it’s going to be about finding a balance,” Aufhauser tells me. “There’s a lot of banter in the industry about going over the top. There’s no question that that is an industry trend…but the cable and subscription providers are being innovative, too.”
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Tattoo Hero Wants To Bring Tattoo-Seekers And Artists Together For Beautiful Results
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Darrell Etherington
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One of the startups showing their stuff at Montreal’s International Startup Festival this year is , an Ottawa-based startup building a portal on the web to help connect those looking for tattoos with the artists who can make them. The startup is taking an age-old dilemma, which is normally handled almost exclusively via word-of-mouth, and putting it online with a marketplace and community that gives tattoo artists everything they need to run their business, including SaaS front and back-end tools. For users, Tattoo Hero not only offers artist discovery that actually works by pairing people with artists who match their specific tattoo needs, it also offers a community with detailed, thoughtful blog posts on the industry and a way to share their ink with others. Artists get a sort of Behance online portfolio for their work, a new funnel for customer acquisition, and calendaring tools plus other client-facing service offerings via Tattoo Hero hosted storefronts. That means tattoo artists can get set up with an attractive web presence without knowing anything about code or tracking down a developer to do it for them. Tattoo Hero co-founders Steve Tannahill and Brandon Waselnuk explained in an interview that the idea is not to give tattoo shops something that makes them amazingly cutting edge in tech terms – that’s not what that market either wants or needs. Instead it’s designed to making the actual running of the business as easy as possible, which saves artists headaches not related to the actual job of creating tattoos itself. But the site also offers ample opportunity for users to focus on the art. “On the site, any user can take a photo of their own tattoo and link it to their artist, so that whenever anyone’s browsing and getting inspired they click and see the artist right there,” Waselnuk said. “Then you can save any tattoos you like privately in a page for later, so you can come back to that and check it out as you’re evaluating your next tattoo.” The site is about organic discovery, and making it possible for people to share their tattoo stories the way they would with people in person. But putting it online dramatically broadens the potential audience, making it possible for hidden gem artists who aren’t necessarily the best at self-promotion to increase their reach. “One of the nice things too is that for me, everyone is always asking who did my tattoos and who’s my artist,” said Tannahill, who has lots of ink himself. “From my Tattoo Hero profile, you can look and see who did what, and who are my artists and the artists I like, so you get a good idea of where to go.” Tattoo Hero is active right now, and open to artists and users around the world, though on the content side they’re currently focused on curating the Ottawa-Gatineau region. The startup wants to start fundraising for an angel round, and then hopes to use that money to propel further growth, though they say they’ve been happy and unexpectedly surprised with the pace of new sign-ups so far.
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Nokia, Please Keep Going
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Chris Velazco
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So, finally, Nokia has and let us event goers get some long awaited hands-on time with the thing. It’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill Windows Phone, but is that camera-centric kookiness enough to make the Lumia 1020 worth that $299 price tag? The jury’s still out on that one, but so far the 1020 definitely seems like a Windows Phone worth your consideration. First impressions aren’t actually everything, but the 1020 is quite a looker… even if Nokia seems to be having trouble making up its mind in terms of industrial design. The Verizon-exclusive Lumia 928 features hard corners and a gently-sloping back, while the 925 (arguably the nicer looking of the two) is the first to introduce metal trim. The 1020 on the other hand sticks very close to the original design language of the Lumia 800 and 900, and that’s frankly a very welcome choice. I’d go as far to say that Lumia’s original looks are nearly iconic, but your mileage is going to vary there. As a counterpoint, our (much less geeky) intern Eliza vehemently disagrees with me — according to her, it’s much too angular and looks like a business card. To each their own, I guess. Admittedly, the camera pod does get in the way when you pick up the 1020 thanks to its prominent protuberance on the device’s back, but it doesn’t seem like a deal breaker. Considering just how large the 1020’s camera pod is, I expected the 1020 to be much heavier. In fact, the device was almost startlingly light — Nokia’s fondness for polycarbonate remains untempered, though I suspect the matte finish they’ve used this time around will make the 1020 a little more prone to scuffs and dings. As is always the case when playing with these sorts of things in the field, it’s hard to really get a feel for performance, but swiping through menus and firing up applications was just as smooth as any other top-tier Windows Phone. The only bit of slowdown I noted was while fiddling with some of the camera settings, but that may just be a pre-production software issue acting up. Nokia representatives confirmed that the Lumia 1020 runs a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm chipset (though the people I spoke to wouldn’t specify which one), along with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. That’s quite a strong spec sheet for a Windows Phone, though the fact that Windows Phone 8 is generally a very lag-free OS to begin with certainly factors into the equation. And then of course, there’s the camera. Nokia wouldn’t spend almost an entire hour talking about a camera if it wasn’t worth its salt, but the 1020’s 41-megapixel sensor really seems to deliver… the keyword there being “seems”. As you’d expect, the 1020 is a very snappy shooter, and the images it captured appeared incredibly crisp and bright on screen (perhaps to the point of mild over-saturation, but that’s really nothing new for an AMOLED display). Since none of hardware here was final though, Nokia wouldn’t allow to us transfer our photos off the 1020 for further fiddling so it’s hard to say just how good the images look on different displays or on paper. Despite the Pro Camera app’s name, it was awfully easy to pick up after a few moments of playing. Tapping the icon brings up a series of concentric semi-circles, and sliding up and down each of lets users adjust exposure, shutter speed, iso, and focus. It’s an awfully intuitive scheme that Nokia has cooked up, especially since you’re able to immediately see on-screen what sort of effect those changes will have on the image you take. Nokia has also included a tutorial mode to give first-time users a better idea of what settings can be tweaked and how the sliding control scheme works, a welcome touch for non-photographers looking to spice up their shots. Is the Lumia 1020 going to be for everyone? Obviously not. Can it succeed in a very competitive marketplace? It’s far too early to answer that question, but based on my time playing with it, there’s nothing there that would necessarily disqualify it from success. Earlier today, our own John Biggs for using its resources to create a device that focused on “theatrics”. I honestly couldn’t disagree more — I’m honestly no great camera connoisseur, Nokia didn’t just slap a big honking camera on a crappy phone. The hardware seems well-crafted, the Windows Phone experience is incredibly smooth, and that longstanding app gap is finally starting to close (albeit slowly). I can’t pass judgment until I actually play with the final device, but so far it seems like that camera is just icing on a cake that’s already pretty damned delicious.
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Time Is Running Out For Extra Early Bird Disrupt SF Tickets
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John Biggs
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The early bird, as they say, gets the worm. You, on the other hand, are not a bird. So you can get for far less than you will be able to at the door or even three days from now. But you do not get the worm. Our events team is pulling down our early bird tickets on the 15th and it would behoove you to act quickly. The tickets now cost $1,795 and will put you in front of the Valley’s luminaries including Marissa Mayer, Marc Benioff, Jeff Weiner, and Doug Leone. This is the premier startup conference of the year and we work hard to make it amazing for you. . If you’re still lean – I mean Ramen and futon lean – you can attend by taking part in our 24-hour hackathon where you can meet some of the smartest people in SF. Tickets to this all night event will be open when we get closer to the event.
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Pebble Sold 275K Units Through Kickstarter And Pre-Orders, Tops 1M Watch Apps Downloaded
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Darrell Etherington
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Smartwatch startup revealed today for the first time that it has received 190,000 pre-orders for its wearable computing accessory through its own web store following the tremendously successful Kickstarter campaign it ran last year. That means it amassed around 275,000 pre-orders total for the smartwatch, which is impressive early traction for a device that didn’t have a proven market in place to sell into. Pebble co-founder Eric Migicovsky told me the company wanted to reveal the total order volume now as a follow-up to its , in order to provide some context around the challenges the startup has faced in terms of shipping product to backers. Response at Best buy has also been very good, Migicovsky says, though the team isn’t yet ready to talk about specific numbers. The Pebble is sold out at many of Best Buy’s retail locations already. For the first six to ten months following the close of the Kickstarter campaign, the focus for Pebble was exclusively on shipping; it wasn’t a priority, per Migicovsky, but “the” priority. Now, the startup is getting to a point where it can change its focus to start working towards accomplishing its longer term goals as a company. Part of that includes meeting demand and making sure everyone who pre-ordered receives their device, which should happen over the next year, Migicovsky says. But developers are the other big priority to whom Pebble is now turning its attention. “Our focus as a company is now shifting to supporting third-party developers,” Migicovsky says. The company has seen over 1 million watch apps downloaded to Pebble devices, as measured by installs made through its iOS and Android apps. There’s already an active community around the Pebble SDK, and Migicovsky says that fostering that will be where the startup shifts spending and development efforts. “This means our developer tools will get better, we’ll be focusing on how developers can get their tools out to users,” he said. “It’s in our best interest, as well as in the interest of developers to share this these stories.” So now that Pebble has made good on getting to market, it will focus on these two goals to help build the smartwatch into a lasting, robust platform. Of course, those 275,000 pre-orders, while impressive on their own, might not look so amazing should Apple release an iWatch as it appears to be preparing to do. But that’s still an unknown quantity, and Pebble doing their best to solidify their current market positioning is the best thing the startup can do right now. Migicovsky will also be doing an AMA on Reddit starting at 12 PM PDT, so that should be an opportunity for him to expound further on what the future holds for his startup.
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Most Unproductive Congress Ever Could Kill Immigration Reform
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Gregory Ferenstein
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It’s looking less likely that high-skilled immigration reform will pass soon, if at all. Comprehensive immigration reform is currently sliced up into several smaller bills, waiting for the long, drawn-out deliberative process in the House of Representatives to stitch them together in a bi-partisan-friendly way. But given that 2013 is set to as being the most unproductive year for Congress in history, renewed fighting between Republicans and Democrats could kill any hope that the technology sector will get its immigration reform wishes. Yesterday, top Republicans issued an aggressive statement against both Democrats and their colleagues in the Senate who passed a bill that is apparently unacceptable. “Today House Republicans affirmed that rather than take up the flawed legislation rushed through the Senate, House committees will continue their work on a step-by-step, common-sense approach to fixing what has long been a broken system.” Republicans fear that voting for a bill with weak border security and a relatively easy path to citizenship will spell political suicide. “It would hurt Republicans, and I don’t think you can make an argument otherwise,” said Representative Steve King ( : C). To compound the problem, Politico’s Mike Allen co-authored a damning in which insiders predict that immigration reform will die a slow death: “In private conversations, top Republicans on Capitol Hill now predict comprehensive immigration reform will die a slow, months-long death in the House. Like with background checks for gun buyers, the conventional wisdom that the party would never kill immigration reform, and risk further alienating Hispanic voters, was always wrong — and ignored the reality that most House Republicans are white conservatives representing mostly white districts.” Indeed, BuzzFeed just posted a fun piece on , especially of the most anti-immigration-reform Republicans. Here’s the demographic layout of Representative Steve King’s district in Iowa: And it doesn’t appear that Congress is punished for being unproductive. “During 2011-2012, Congress passed a mere 283 laws – fewer than a third of the more than 900 laws passed by the “do-nothing Congress” derided by President Harry S Truman in 1948,” Anne Kim of Washington Monthly. This Congress, which hasn’t passed much either, may be even worse. I’d really like to end this post on an optimistic note, but it’d be a lie if I even tried. –For the first time in history, the annual Defcon hacking conference tells federal agents to stay away. –Typically, the high-level meeting between generals and hackers has been a friendly and candid exchange about cybersecurity. — “A little bit of time and distance can be a healthy thing, especially when emotions are running high.” — Defcon founder Jeff Moss. –Senator Blumenthal wrote an awesome OpEd for the list-happy BuzzFeed site, using GIFs to illustrate “11 Reasons Why Congress Needs To Fix Student Loan Rates Now” –Ro Khanna, who is challenging Silicon Valley representative Congressman Mike Honda, has already raised over $1 million for his 2014 election. –Khanna has the backing of President Barack Obama’s old campaign team and A-list investors, including Ron Conway and Sean Parker. –Tesla founder Elon Musk took to Twitter for jokes that only a true geek could love. –“TCP packet walks into a bar & says “I’d like a beer.” Barman replies “You’d like a beer?” “Yes,” replies TCP packet,“I’d like a beer.” –And “BitTorrent packet goes to a bar and asks for beer. Everyone in the bar who already has a beer gives him a sip” [tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/354986137753890816]
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Snapguide Now Lets Users Request How-To Guides From Each Other, Another Step To Build Out Its Platform Of Microapps
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Ingrid Lunden
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— the how-to app now that capitalizes on the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets in our lives to encourage us to create guides for everything from to and — is today releasing an update that it hopes will spur users to become more interactive with the service, even if they themselves lack the motivation to create guides themselves. A new iOS update (for iPhone and iPad) will let users start for new guides, along with new interface updates that will help them better navigate the content that is already there. The moves are a sign of how Snapguide hopes to keep people engaged on the site as it continues to grow. That growth has been coming at a steady pace: when we last wrote about Snapguide in , it had 1 million unique monthly users; today that number is up to 2 million and growing at a rate of between 12 percent and 15 percent per month, according to CEO and founder Daniel Raffel. Raffel also tells me that some 3 percent to 4 percent of users are creating content these days, up from the 1 percent that typically provide the content on social networks. The idea is that making guide requests could see that number increase, not only by encouraging more content from Snapguide’s emerging base of power-users, but also by getting users who are not creating guides to start offering more ideas of what they would like to see. And those who don’t have ideas to suggest can vote up requests made by others. It will be interesting to see how far Snapguide’s free creation and free consumption model will take it for growth. It seems like the forces around the platform are more commercial than not. When Raffel first told me about the request feature, I think one of my first questions was whether users can ask for payments for guides — with the idea of this becoming a kind of marketplace for content or a platform for mini-apps, a micro-appstore. This seems to detract from the main point, though: “We could focus on giving people a one stop production shop for selling content, but the thing that interests me is that to get to the path where people are sharing things that are free is actually more interesting,” says Raffel. “That allows people to create a community that is passionate. As soon as you introduce money, that changes the vibe, and the culture. “It’s not something I’m adverse to or think it’s incorrect, but for us to introduce it we still have a lot of work to do to make the best free tools.” Apart from my prying questions, while Snapguide has continued to remain a free platform, it is increasingly getting appropriated by brands anyway, something that it’s happy to encourage without formalizing things too much. Those brands include Build.com, Real Simple, Kate Spade New York, Steve Madden and publications such as BARE Magazine. “We’re still focused on organic growth,” Raffel says. “No business deals or making money on the side. No one paying to get content promoted. No plans for ads.” That doesn’t mean it won’t in the future: “I think it’s safe to say we’re not going to avoid it forever; at some point in time we may have something like sponsored ads or paid content.” And with brands clearly interested in the platform, it will be interesting to watch how Snapguide adds further features like video longer term — being a medium that will put Snapguide in closer competition with YouTube and also more advertising friendly. “We don’t discourage it but we haven’t encouraged it,” Raffel says of video today. “If and when we invest in it we want to make sure we differentiate ourselves from YouTube. We don’t want to be another video hosting site.” Right now, Snapguide supports 60 second clips. “We want things that you can follow along, and that length lends itself to that,” he says.
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Task List App Maker Any.Do Joins The Smart Calendaring Race With New “Cal” App
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Sarah Perez
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Any.DO, makers of a smart task app for mobile, is today launching its next creation out of private beta. The company’s is now available and is designed to integrate with the task app, as well as sync with other mobile calendaring services, including Google, iCloud and Exchange. The new app is unique in how it extends itself beyond being only an appointment scheduler. It starts off by importing your calendar events and contacts from your iPhone, and then lets you log in via Facebook for additional social capabilities, such as the ability to see and respond to your Facebook friends’ birthday notifications via phone, text or email. also adds a layer of intelligence to the appointments themselves, automatically adding things like a map of the location (if provided the address), and a button you can tap to kick off navigation. And when you add an appointment within Cal itself, the app will auto-suggest people from your iPhone contacts, displaying their name and thumbnail photos below the input field. Plus, it can use your location to suggest nearby meeting spots. The overall design is iOS 7-friendly, with a clean, more minimalistic look and feel, though one that still adds color through the use of photos that give your appointments a “theme” of sorts. A selection of these image themes are built in for you to choose from as well, with categories like “food,” “art,” “landscape,” “fashion” and more. Those who also use the company’s task list app will be able to see those items displayed within Cal, too. Mobile calendaring applications are all the rage these days, and everyone has their favorite. But these startups are also seeing notable investment. Today, for example, , and Sunrise recently raised a . Other leading players include the likes of , , and , to name just a few. Any.Do’s advantage here is that it’s not only working on a calendaring app, but also is developing a suite of productivity tools that work together. The company, it should be noted, is backed by outside investment of its own: its $4.5 million in angel and seed funding implies that Any.Do is working on something bigger than just an app, and we’re only now starting to see the results of that. Cal for iPhone is . [vimeo 69827636 w=400 h=300]
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Automation Startup IFTTT’s New iPhone App Is Beautiful, Simple, But Still Limited
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Sarah Perez
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, the web services automation startup by $8.5 million from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, and others, is now available as . Like the web version of IFTTT, the app allows you to create and edit tasks (in IFTTT lingo, “recipes”) that allow you to kick off actions based on other activities. For example, , or . But by its mobile nature, the new app can also now tap into iOS native applications like your iOS Contacts, Photos and Reminders. The startup’s name is an acronym which describes what it does in decidedly geeky terms: “If this, then that.” The idea to put tools that stitch together and automate web services in the hands of consumers has been around for a long time – most notably, perhaps, with , an online service for mashing up and manipulating content from around the web. But where Yahoo Pipes is still overly complex for the typical end user, IFTTT is overly simple. After spending some time with the mobile version, there are two things I’ve come to realize. One, that the minimalistic and tappable mobile interface is now my preferred way to interact with this service. It’s perfectly designed and incredibly easy to use. And two, that I wish the iOS app integration were a little more robust. The IFTTT app suggests a mobile-specific recipe upon first launch called “Save my iOS Photos to Dropbox.” While that seems useful enough, the ability to auto-upload camera photos to Dropbox is actually a feature of the Dropbox iOS app itself (though IFTTT lets you configure a specific folder), so it’s not as handy as it first sounds. This illustrates one of the challenges I’ve faced with IFTTT in the past. The idea of IFTTT is sometimes more impressive than the reality. This is not necessarily the startup’s fault, though — it’s often a problem with the openness of the APIs it relies on. Of the 67 channels that are supported, three have been built for iOS. In terms of these new iOS app-specific recipes, those designed to work with the iOS Photos app are the most useful, I found. For example, you can configure IFTTT to automatically upload photos to a variety of services, even specifying which kind of photos go where (e.g. photos taken with the front-facing camera, screenshots, those in particular albums, etc.) However, IFTTT falls short on executing one of the more obvious mobile-specific actions you would want to take next, like sharing photos with someone else via SMS. According to CEO Linden Tibbets, the SMS limitation, for now, is by design. Though he explains that it’s technically possible to enable IFTTT to text others, the company wanted to put safeguards in place first so that wasn’t abused. When it comes to some of the other iOS app options, I spotted a few other missing items, as well. There was no iOS Calendar trigger, which seems like another obvious miss. I’d love to be able to use Apple’s own calendaring application, then have it sync elsewhere, or trigger other actions to occur, for example, like sending texts to attendees, or adding reminders to Evernote. However, the company explains that, unfortunately, there’s not yet a way for it to directly connect with the iPhone Calendar due to Apple restrictions. That may change with iOS 7, but for now, the entire option is missing due to this limitation. Meanwhile, when working with iOS Contacts, there was only one trigger to start with: adding a new contact. Again, actions that seem like the next logical step following that activity are also lacking. You can’t send the contact a form email, for example — something that would be helpful to those networking and tagging people into particular contacts groups. You can’t friend them on Facebook or LinkedIn or follow them on Twitter. You can’t send them a text message, which is something new friends often do to make sure the other person has their phone number, as well. In so many cases, these issues are technical in nature. Tibbets agrees that the friending use case is “super legit” but held back by API and limitations. “One of the things we’re really excited about is helping our channel partners take more ownership over the things they’re able to do via IFTTT,” he says, implying a need for more direct relationships that would allow IFTTT to bypass some API restrictions. Many web companies have been dialing down the functionality they provide via their APIs to other third-party developers in order to have more control over their service and network. Facebook, has and Twitter is ‘ , and desiccating some businesses in the process. While companies sometimes have valid reasons for doing this at times, IFTTT’s limitations are the flip side of those restrictions. This is why we can’t have nice things. In addition, Apple’s notoriously tight lockdown on its operating system and apps prevents some of the flexibility that Android users have when it comes to moving data between the mobile app silos, or using apps like to automate other aspects of their phones, such as enabling and disabling various functions and modes, transferring files, auto-dimming displays, and more. A lot of those kinds of things are out of IFTTT’s reach because of Apple’s restrictions or incomplete web APIs. It’s a problem that IFTTT will need to figure out how to overcome with workarounds or direct partnerships. It’s also one of the problems I’ve had with IFTTT in the past. Often, when it occurs to me to automate a task using the service, I find that the specific activity I want is missing, though the web service I’m hoping to connect to supported. I can’t always point the finger at IFTTT in all cases, of course. But other times, I think there’s room for IFTTT to offer a little more customization for power users who want to go beyond the defaults. Or heck, even add an “unless this” to the end of operations. But that’s me being selfish. IFTTT succeeds by straddling between a service for power users and being one for the “normals.” Going too far with customization options could turn what’s simple and fast into a complex mess — more like Yahoo Pipes. I’m a little disappointed that IFTTT is an iPhone-first app, too. While iOS is obviously an important platform to address in terms of consumer reach and market share, it doesn’t really showcase IFTTT’s potential on mobile. The comparative openness of Android could have allowed for a wider variety of phone-related actions and would have been a huge draw for a user base who wants an attractive app instead of those (like Tasker, sorry) that look like they were designed by a corporate IT department. Android is on the roadmap, says Tibbets. “Android is in no way a second place. It’s very cool and getting cooler all the time,” he adds. “It’s just a matter of limited resources.” And personal interest, it seems. The IFTTT team uses iPhones, so that’s where they started. At the end of the day, IFTTT’s app is a beautifully designed creation and one that is somehow even easier to use than it was on the web. It’s still a must download for busy web users. But with the limitations around Apple’s OS and other web services’ APIs, IFTTT can’t yet reach its full potential on web, iPhone or whatever comes next.
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Hilary Mason Leaves Bitly To Join VC Firm Accel As Its First Data Scientist In Residence
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Leena Rao
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Accel Partners is announcing a major talent win tonight, with the addition of former Bitly chief scientist as its first data scientist in residence. The role of the data scientist in the VC world was first pioneered by IA Ventures and Greylock Partners. IA Ventures brought on Drew Conway as an in-house data scientist, and Greylock a former data scientist for both LinkedIn and eBay, to its firm’s roster of talent. Since then, employing data scientists to help portfolio startups and a firm’s own internal data mining efforts has become a more common phenomenon. But according to partner Ping Li, this role was purely made for Mason. In fact, he says that they would likely not have brought on a data scientist had it not been for Mason possibly joining the firm. For background, Mason was Bitly’s chief scientist since 2009 and specializes in building systems that help analyze data and extract insights from the social web in real time. as you may know Bitly is a link shortening and sharing platform developed by Betaworks that has raised nearly A New York city resident, Mason has also been an active member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council since 2011. Additionally, she serves as an advisor to several NY startups including knod.es, collective[i], MortarData as well as DataKind, a nonprofit that brings together leading data scientists with high-impact social organizations. She has served as a mentor to Betaspring, the Providence Rhode Island-based startup accelerator, and TechStars New York. In 2010, Mason co-founded HackNY, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a path for talented students to join New York’s creative technical community through events, education, and fellowships. Prior to that she designed statistical models of careers from a resume dataset, for Path101, Inc. She tells us she will remain in New York and become “scientist emeritus” of Bitly, taking on an advisory role to the Betaworks company. In fact, she’s co-hosting a New York-based conference called DataGotham in September to bring the region’s data science community together for a day of learning about how experts on the leading edge of data science are practicing their craft. Similar to Patil’s role at Greylock, Mason’s position will be a hybridization between the entrepreneur in residence job and the executive in residence roles where experts help portfolio companies. She could join or start her own company if she wants, but she will also be focused on helping portfolio companies leverage data into new products and services. Accel’s data-focused investments include Cloudera, Couchbase, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Opower, Prismatic, QlikView, RelateIQ, Sumo Logic, and Trifacta. In terms of what she will be working on, she says, “We’re just at the beginning of what we can do with data. Over the last few years we’ve seen the growth in our ability to store and the infrastructure to analyze data. This gave us the bare capabilities that we have now — essentially, counting things, cleverly, across large data sets. We’re still figuring out what to do with this…I believe the most exciting
opportunities in data products are in giving people insight that they would otherwise never have. Building new capabilities on data has broad applicability.” Li explains that Accel has made a big bet on investing in ideas around processing large data sets, most recently raising its second . Mason was such an exceptional and helpful advisor to the and second big data funds, so the firm might as well formalize her role, he says jokingly. “Data science is not just a science, it’s an application,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “Hilary understands how to take big-data technologies and apply these to solve real business problems.”
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Crowdfunding Reaches Its Terrible, Glorious Climax With ‘Smart Vibrator’ Vibease
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Anthony Ha
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The startup behind a “wearable smart vibrator” called has with hopes of raising at least $30,000 from fans. That sentence kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I mean, I could probably insert some suggestive wording from the campaign description (“People often forget that the brain is the biggest sex organ.”), mention some of the high-end rewards (100 vibrators!), embed the campaign video (which is sometimes hilarious, sometimes awkward, and often both), and call it a day. But here’s the thing: . I mean, if I say “smart vibrator” (or, even worse, “Internet of Things-connected vibrator”, which is the shorthand we were using around the office) it’s easy to laugh and roll your eyes. At the same time, I wonder if that comes from a combination of suppressed Puritanism and immaturity. If we genuinely think that everything in our lives is becoming increasingly smartphone-controlled and Internet-connected, ? (Co-founder that the Valley sometimes forces entrepreneurs to make a false choice between seriousness and sexiness.) Sure, the idea of a remote-controlled vibrator as a tool for long-distance relationships seems awkward, but is phone sex any better? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34Qm3Sm-xQ&w=560&h=315] For what it’s worth, Vibease has validation from other tech industry organizations, having been incubated by the Founder Institute and the Haxlr8r accelerator for hardware startups. It also received an at least semi-positive response from investors when in a segment on Bravo’s “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley” TV show (it’s okay if you missed it, so did everyone else) and from the judges (including my boss Alexia Tsotsis) . So hey, maybe there’s a real business here. Or maybe I and everyone else in the Valley have become so numb to crazy startup ideas that this seems almost normal. Almost. I failed to mention that although the company is only now crowdfunding the vibrator itself, it actually last fall. Just to be clear, I think vibrators are inherently funny. I do think a “wearable smart vibrator” marketed with repeated references to Fifty Shades of Grey is inherently funny (which, again, doesn’t make it a terrible idea, maybe). You may adjust your estimations of my maturity accordingly.
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Zynga Sheds Three Top Execs As Its New CEO Shakes Up The Troubled Gaming Firm
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Alex Wilhelm
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In the last month, Zynga has quietly parted ways with three of its executive staff, early changes under the period of transition that the company’s , is currently leading. Bloomberg the departure of Nathan Etter, John Osvald and Jesse Janosov. TechCrunch confirmed their collective exit with a source familiar with the matter. Etter has already updated to reflect his new role as a vice president at Disney. However, Osvald and Janosav have yet to update their digital profiles, which still list them as vice president-level executives at the social gaming company. That Zynga is shaking up its management structure isn’t surprising, frankly. The company’s founder and then CEO Mark Pincus stepped down from that role, in an admission that things were unwell, and that his leadership hadn’t corrected the company’s course. The company ended up in its current situation because of the choices of its senior management. Some of those folks are now no longer with the firm. It isn’t clear at this time if the three were fired, resigned, or some combination thereof. Mattrick, during Zynga’s second-quarter earnings call, stated that he intended to look at how the firm is “deploying people at all levels of the company.” That process appears to be already under way. In its , Zynga reported declining revenue, a net loss, and falling daily and monthly active users of its various gaming titles. The company has a sufficient cash position to grant it some time to rebuild itself, but not too much. The new question is who Mattrick will bring in to fill the roles that the departed trio left. And if they will become Microsoft talent, as well.
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Vaavud Smartphone Wind Meter Now Available, Use Your Phone To Measure Windspeed Like It’s The Future
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Darrell Etherington
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Kickstarter success is a thing of beauty. Created by a Danish team of enterprising inventors, it plugs into your iPhone or Android device’s headphone jack and connects with an app to . It uses no power, and actually talks wirelessly to your phone via the built-in magnetic field sensor that ships with modern smartphones. The Vaavud is shipping as of July 30, and goes on sale at bitemyapple, Grand St. and other fine purveyors of gadgets and gizmos, but I got a chance to test one out early. The Vaavud blew through its tests in fact (see what I did there?) and definitely told me how fast the wind outside was, or how effectively I was blowing on the thing when trying it out for my own amusement indoors. Which I did plenty, because it’s very fun. The Vaavud ships with an internal mechanism that works with most smartphones out of the box, and a kit to change it over to handle the Samsung Galaxy S2, which requires a slightly different design. It also comes with a soft carrying pouch complete with carabiner, since this thing is designed to be carted with you as you scale mountains or brave rapids. You can use the Vaavud with the app created by the company itself, but third-party apps are also supported, starting with the first to leverage the API, . That app is about crowdsourcing weather conditions, and draws from people using Vaavud around the world to build wind speed profiles of locales. It’s the perfect integration, but as Vaavud is pretty niche, don’t go expecting a lot of that data to pop up for most spots just yet. Data seems to be accurate, but it’s hard to compare as I don’t have any other kind of wind meter technology nearby to compare it to. The charts produced by the native Vaavud app are attractive and easy to read, and the fact that no batteries are required is pretty awesome in terms of using it in outdoor and remote locales where it’s probably most useful. At €40.00 (roughly $61 U.S.) it’s a little pricey for a novelty, but anyone conducting environmental research or just really keen on weather will definitely get a kick out of it. A lot of Kickstarter projects, both successful and not, aim at a particular niche; it’s part of the reason they aren’t good candidates for traditional funding channels. The Vaavud is likely going to appeal to a small segment of the population, but unlike most Kickstarter projects, it’s smartly executed, well-built and elegantly designed. If you think you need a Vaavud, don’t hesitate to go ahead and get one.
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Twitter’s Sunnyvale Office Is Open And Hiring
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Anthony Ha
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It looks like Twitter is now hiring out of its new Sunnyvale, Calif., office. The leasing of an 8,000-square-foot office in downtown Sunnyvale was — apparently that should hold between 40 and 50 employees. Twitter recently posted for that location. It’s looking for a “software engineer, core runtime diagnostics.” The company wants someone “awesome, passionate, and nice,” so, y’know, apply accordingly. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the Sunnyvale office is now officially open, but declined to comment further. At this point, the company has locations around the world, so one more office doesn’t seem like a huge deal. But it’s interesting to see that one of the pro-SF symbols in startup debate is also building a presence in the Valley — albeit a relatively small one for now.
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Atlas Virtual Reality Turns Any Room Into A Holodeck You Can Run Around In
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Josh Constine
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Archenemies for decades, video games and exercise are about to unite. Atlas is a cheap, new “walk-around” virtual reality system that uses markers you put on the ground to track your movements as you play with an Oculus Rift headset. Protagonist is Kickstarting Atlas to get real-space VR into the hands of developers, so they can build games that ditch joysticks and actually let you run-and-gun. Here’s how startup Protagonist’s Atlas system works. First you find an open space. If you’ve got a huge living room it could work, but you’re better off in a garage, on a basketball court or in a warehouse. Then you lay out the location markers. You can print them at home, but Protagonist plans to give out vinyl ones that stick to the floor so they don’t get displaced. Then you strap on your , an optional -equipped gun or sword, and the Atlas chest mount for your iPhone. Fire up the Oculus and Atlas iPhone app, and step into the future. The patent-pending Atlas positioning system maps the markers and uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscopes to know where your are. Play with Atlas and when you walk forward your in-game avatar walks forward, too. Chasing aliens or exploring dungeons could become an alternative to going to the gym. “I’ve wanted a Holodeck since I was a kid,” says Atlas inventor and Protagonist founder Aaron Rasmussen. He’s no stranger to . Back in college, Rasmussen was the first person to make an optical-tracking sentry gun. He stitched together an automatic BB gun and a video camera with some home-made machine-vision software to make a weapon worthy of defending your fort. “The military came to my dorm room. I thought that only happened in movies,” he tells me. Since then he’s built and sold a robotic machine tool company called USMechatronics, created the Blood Energy potion drink sold in IV bags, and most recently sold a ghost detector that connects to your iPhone. (It’s detected zero ghosts to date.) Real-space VR systems have been around for well over a decade but have been reserved for big research institutions. That’s because there weren’t wide-field-of-view head displays with low-latency, head-orientation tracking for under $50,000, and the positioning systems were clumsy and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lucky for Rasmussen, the Oculus Rift took care of the first problem, freeing him up to reimagine real-space positioning. Unlike the Atlas not only lets you walk, but also run, jump, crouch and move around like you do in real life. Right now Rasmussen is the only one working on Atlas full-time out of the four-person team, but that will change if it meets its $125,000 Kickstarter goal to manufacture the chest mounts and refine the software. The plan is to get the system and Unity integration assets to developers so they can start building first-person shooters, fantasy epics, and educational exploration games. “Someone should do Jurassic Park,” Rasmussen says. I’m pretty excited about meatspace/virtual reality hybrid games and their potential to help us avert a where we just get fatter and fatter watching our screens. The technology will take some time to trickle down, but could eventually become a distinct industry parallel to console gaming. “We’re really living in Year Zero of virtual reality,” Rasmussen giddily tells me. “We’re going to to see more wearable technology become consumer products. As developers work on games, we’ll work on a consumer version that kids can get under their Christmas tree. My vision for the system is something you and some friends bring to a racquetball court, play a high-intensity game for an hour, and get a workout.”
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Inside Machinima, The New Video Network For Gamers And Fanboys
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Ryan Lawler
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Los Angeles is becoming a mecca of like Maker Studios, Fullscreen, and others. As part of TechCrunch TV’s tour of these companies, we checked out , which is one of the largest multichannel networks on YouTube. Over the course of that tour, we found out how the company has evolved and what its plans are for the future. The concept of “machinima” started out as an art form, which was user-generated content in which gamers acted out storylines using various video game engines. When it first launched, Machinima.com helped to aggregate the best of that content, but it has rapidly expanded the breadth and scope of the videos on its network. “Now Machinima is a certain type of content, with a certain sensibility,” Machinima EVP of Marketing Kevin Doohan told me. “That sensibility is polarizing — you either love it or you hate it, but you won’t feel nothing about it.” More than just a network of individual channels, Machinima has grown to begin producing its own episodic, feature-length videos. It now has six big episodic series that it’s invested in, including franchises like and . That is part of its move toward becoming a global entertainment brand. Gaming just seemed like a natural vertical for the company to go after, given the size of the audience and the level of engagement. Surprisingly, as it’s grown its number of users, viewers are spending more time with the content. As it’s produced more higher-quality originals, it’s found its users actually engaging with the content for longer, even as more tune in. Check out the video above to learn more about how Machinima continues to evolve and what creators can expect when joining the network. Also, be sure to tune in every Monday and Wednesday over the next several weeks, as we continue to explore L.A.’s new video ecosystem. Check out all the videos that we’ve produced around the large (and growing) new video ecosystem in LA:
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JustFab Sues Fab Over Trademark Infringement, Unfair Competition And More. Fab Says It Will “Aggressively Defend Our Brand”
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Ingrid Lunden
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, the shoes and apparel e-commerce site that has , is taking to the courts to make sure that no one steps on its feet as it expands beyond its home market of the U.S. The company has filed a lawsuit against , the other popular fashion commerce site with “Fab” in its name (funding raised: ), over trademark infringement over a “confusingly similar” name, along with related allegations, including unfair competition. Fab.com has already told us it intends to fight the lawsuit “aggressively”: “Our attorneys are currently reviewing the complaint,” said a spokesperson. “While we are not in a position to comment with any specificity on the allegations we will aggressively defend our brand, products, and services offered to our customers worldwide.” JustFab, meanwhile, countered with this: “We’re in the business of fashion, not in the business of litigation,” Matt Fojut, General Counsel for JustFab, said in a statement. “But we’ve worked very hard to establish our brand. We are not only prepared to protect our intellectual property, but we also believe we have a responsibility to our members and to members of the general public to stop any actual or likely confusion that is created when someone else uses a similar name.” The case, first brought to our attention by , was filed in the U.S. Central District of California, and requests that Fab.com be prevented from selling any items that compete directly with JustFab.com, and to pay for damages of any lost business resulting from confusion over the brands. We’re embedding the full complaint below. This is not the first time that Fab.com has been in the courts over trademark infringement, although the last time it was on the plaintiff’s side (that suit, , has now been ). Meanwhile, Just Fab has been dealing with other fashion sites that use the word “Fab” in their brand names in another way — it’s been buying them. In January 2013, it bought ; and in May it bought European site . That route would be more tricky with Fab.com, which is . Just Fab (original name: Just Fabulous and founded in 2010) is taking issue with the fact that Fab.com not only shares a similar name but offers a service that is too similar to Just Fab’s. Just Fab notes in the suit that after Fab.com pivoted in 2011 to focus on e-commerce from starting out as a social networking site, it focused on discounts for site members, just like Just Fab. And Fab.com, the lawsuit notes, “completely changed their business model from social networking to on-line retailing that, like Just Fab’s business, emphasized excellent design at bargain prices.” It goes on to note that like Just Fab, Fab.com focuses on special deals for members; and that they carry many of the same brands. Together with the name, the similar product offerings cause “marketplace confusion.” To note, Fab is continuing to evolve, with flash sales now being de-emphasized at Fab.com in favor of a more . Meanwhile, Just Fab has stuck to a subscription-commerce model. “We’re staying entirely focused on subscription-based commerce,” co-CEO Adam Goldberg told me earlier this year. There is another interesting parallel between the two companies. Both and have projected that they will make $250 million in revenues this year. This shows that despite the ongoing consolidation among smaller players, the biggest are continuing to move ahead. With both Fab and JustFab going after the same class of online consumers — those willing and able to buy fashion online — it seems like it was just a matter of time before they locked horns. [scribd id=156831505 key=key-ktfzilmg0ljvsz3vk2w mode=scroll]
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Lenstag Helps You Track Your Super-Expensive Photography Gear For Theft Recovery And Prevention
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Darrell Etherington
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If you’re a photographer, professional or hobbyist, you probably know that you can accumulate gear costs quickly. All those costs can be hard to keep track of, making it imperative that you get your stuff insured and/or protected against theft somehow. New site wants to help with that. The website already has users in more than 80 countries and is free to use. Photographers can get in on it by signing up with a simple email and password combo, and then you just start adding gear. Enter a make and model, and suggestions will appear allowing you to be specific. You also enter in your serial code, which the site requires photographic evidence of to verify. An actual person does the final verification, which is why Lenstag isn’t your average possession database. Lenstag having this information means you can give eBay buyers more peace of mind, and then actually transfer ownership to other Lenstag members. You can also report stolen gear, which allows people to look it up when they recover or find stolen gear, including police departments and private buyers shopping on Craigslist, for instance. Additionally, every piece of gear gets an auto-generate page designed to float up in search results, so that if someone is checking out a perspective search on a particular model of lens or camera with your serial number, they’ll see a notice that it’s stolen and get a form to submit a report. The site introduced a new feature that lets you make a temporary verification link for their online sales of used camera goods, which is handy since you don’t want the listing hanging around once the gear is already sold. In general, it’s an amazing service and one that requires nothing more than a small amount of extra effort for a lot of extra peace of mind. Lenstag founder Trevor Sehrer, whose day job is in mobile engineering with Google, told me that he plans on doing outreach to form official partnerships with police services soon, after first focusing on building out additional user-facing features. The Finnish Police have already endorsed Lenstag without any prompting, he notes, so it should make sense to start with them. When asked about revenue, however Sehrer demurred. “I’m much more interested in solving the problem of camera and lens theft with Lenstag than making money,” he said. “The site doesn’t cost a lot of time or money to operate since users only need it when their set of gear changes and the verification system can scale quickly to as many verifiers as I need to get through any backlog.” He is eventually looking at partnering with insurance providers, but the aim would be to pass on discounts to members of up to 20 percent, not necessarily to make revenue for the site itself. As a photographer, I find this a very welcome resource, especially given its design and human-powered verification. I can imagine a time when asking for a Lenstag verification will be standard practice when buying and selling used gear, and I’m sure other photographers would appreciate the peace of mind that could come along with that.
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Now Analyzing More Than 15 Billion Actions A Month, Mixpanel Launches A Big Marketing Campaign And A Conference About Analytics
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Ryan Lawler
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Andreessen Horowitz-backed analytics startup has been growing quickly over the last year, adding new customers and rapidly expanding the amount of data it tracks. Now it’s looking to grab more customers and help them better understand their users, with a big marketing push in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, as well as the launch of a conference about data-driven decision making. If you haven’t been paying much attention to Mixpanel, that’s probably because analytics are pretty boring. I mean, analytics are boring but important to understanding where your growth and users are coming from and ultimately how you can get more users. But if you are in the guru/ninja/growth-hacking business, you probably have at least one of your four displays tuned to Mixpanel all day long while you sip $5 locally roasted fair trade coffee and rub your beard and say to yourself, “Hrm, interesting.” Maybe you’ll call one of your coworkers over and point at your screen and say, “Hey, look at this. I had no idea our conversion rate on that campaign was so strong.” That’s because Mixpanel is, like, an ultra-customizable version of Google Analytics (or, insert any other boring analytics engine you can think of) that allows you to really dig deep and get in there and find out what your users are doing. Last summer it launched a , which it extended out to kind of creepily track what they’re doing with a . That, of course, helps with customer support. Not only do you know what users are doing and where they’re coming from, but you can also . That’s got a lot of gurus and ninjas and growth hackers scratching their beards and pointing at their screens and bugging their coworkers. In fact, Mixpanel now has more than 1,300 mobile apps and websites paying to use its platform, and together, they’re analyzing more than 15 billion actions each month. Revenue is growing 10 percent each month, and it’s adding about a billion more interactions each month. Ok, so it’s gotten this far with basically no marketing whatsoever. Which means it’s an awesome time to move from online marketing, which it can track, to offline marketing, which exists in a world that no one truly understands and leads to people to say they don’t know . Now Mixpanel wants to wonder the same thing. So if you’re one of the poor souls who drives up and down Highway 101 every day you’ll probably start noticing billboards with various pieces of interesting, trivial data points it has lifted from , a free data set that it recently released to anyone who wants to know what people are doing with those 15 billion actions and on which devices or whatnot. Or if you’re in the Caltrain station, or basically if you find yourself near any location where a startup exists in SOMA, you’ll probably also see a Mixpanel ad through the month of August. Mixpanel has also succumbed to the inevitable desire to … because, well, startup conferences. But more than just an advertisement for its own products or a thinly veiled excuse to , (which stands for data-driven conference, I think) is all about bringing together smart people to make analytics sound interesting for an afternoon. It’s enlisted 21 speakers to take on that task, most of whom you’ve probably heard of. They’ll talk about how analytics is affecting everything startups do, from product design to marketing to whatever. Still with me? Mixpanel has , Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks.
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Windows Phone Manages Mere 1.1% One-Year Market Share Growth In Its Home Market
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft is in the smartphone game until the smartphone game is over, and Windows Phone is its vehicle. That said, the company’s success thus far appears to be slightly lumpy and downright sluggish on the home front. The release of Windows Phone 8, and a crop of new smartphones from Nokia and HTC, helped boost the platform’s sales numbers. For example, in the second quarter of 2012, Nokia running Windows Phone. In the second quarter of 2013, that figure , up around 45 percent year over year. That’s a strong number. But Nokia is an , as other OEMs slip into obscurity; only HTC has meaningful market share aside from the Finnish smartphone giant. While the Lumia line and Windows Phone as a whole are growing, the U.S. market remains a more than difficult one for Microsoft. Recent data released by Kantar details that Windows Phone controls 4 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. That’s only up 1.1 percent in the past year. In my view that delta is soft and somewhat worrisome. You might be on guard, given that the +1.1 percent figure is a 37 percent growth rate for Windows Phone in the United States over the past year. That’s correct, but it’s not hard to put up large percentage gains when your market share is so small to begin with. Years into its life, Windows Phone is less than 10 percent the size of either iOS or Android at current tally. It has cemented itself as the “third player” in mobile, but the simple fact is that even with the noticeable and welcome bump that Windows Phone 8 provided, Ballmer’s old joke about going from very small to very small in the mobile world remains an oddly annoying truism. The key weakness of Windows Phone isn’t its hardware or platform technology; Windows Phone is in fact a delight to use, and Nokia has reached its stride regarding device quality. Instead, the application marketplace on the phones remains weak, and, as Wired’s Alexandra Chang , that situation remains largely un-remedied. Why is that? In short because unit volume and U.S. market share remain too low for many developers and companies to pay attention to. So the 4 percent figure is at once a mark of progress, as well as a measuring stick pointing out how far Microsoft has to go. WMPoweruser regarding the numbers: “As [Microsoft’s Windows Phone leader Joe] Belfiore and colleagues all stated in the past – it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” That’s true, but at what point do we get past a slow jog?
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Russian Politician Proposes Law Punishing Individuals For Using Naughty Language Online
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Alex Wilhelm
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You can’t be a little pregnant, and you can’t be slightly censorious. Word out of Russia is that the country is working to further denigrate free speech, this time with a proposed law that would make the use of naughty language online a punishable offense. Ludicrous? Certainly. Outside the bounds of possibility? Not in the slightest. TechDirt, which , notes that this is not the first time that Russian politicians have tried something like this. Last year another bill that would have introduced broad Internet censorship was considered. Russian citizens pushed back heavily in that case. This time around, here’s the current idea, as described by [Emphasis: TC]: According to politician, [pages] of posts and messages containing swear words, will have to be . This should apply to pages on social networks, websites, and various forums. You might think that such a broad, draconian, and almost impossible-to-enforce law would have no chance of passage. However, the current governing climate is more in favor of such a law than opposed to it. In the United Kingdom, a is being raced to market. It was put together under the guise of protecting children from pornography, but in fact , blocking all sorts of information. The Russian bill is being proposed on the grounds of protecting children, as well. As far as canards go, this ruse is overplayed. Here’s how such efforts work out in practice: In the name of protecting children from what their parents might not want them to see, the state is taking on the role of guarantor of the public morality, deciding what is fit, and not fit, to read and see. Grant the government that power, and you have ended free expression and free inquiry. This is not to be allowed. Let parents raise their kids and protect them as they will. It is not good to allow the state to do an end run around individual liberty in the name of helping some other person’s kid. A final note: The Russia bill is essentially impossible, in that to actually enact it would require hiring a massive labor force to parse the Internet as real-time censors. Therefore, it would only be enforced capriciously, making it all the more odious. Say it with me: No. Pravda’s article on the law includes an incredible set of quotes from current Russian lawyer Sergei Smirnov: When people express their thoughts or emotions with the use of profanity, many are offended by it. Obscene lexicon is equated to disorderly conduct, there is an appropriate article in the Code of Administrative Offences. […] Obscene language offends both children and adults. A ban on its use is not an infringement of human rights. This is a direction towards a civilized lifestyle. No, it isn’t, for fuck’s sake.
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Why Labor Unions And Silicon Valley Aren’t Friends, In 2 Charts
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Gregory Ferenstein
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None of the Internet giants have unionized employees, which has made Silicon Valley a favorite target for civil libertarians. Earlier this month, after several prominent Bay Area technologists came out against the BART subway union strike, . “There’s a reason why so many people are hating on the techies,” wrote Slate’s Andrew Leonard, after quoting one tech executive who wanted to automate BART employees out of existence — “Get ‘em back to work, pay them whatever they want, and then figure out how to automate their jobs so this doesn’t happen again.” There’s a very good reason why unions have never had a presence in Silicon Valley: they aren’t fans of technology. Labor and Lyft, which threaten taxi drivers with increased competition. They’ve effectively paralyzed a multi-billion-dollar sharing economy industry from spreading around the country. Not to be outdone, one of the largest labor unions in the country, AFL-CIO, is the leading opponent of more high-skilled immigrants, “greedy” for wanting to make it easier to hire foreign engineers. Technology is in the business of disrupting industries. Startups will tell you that it takes every ounce of brains and grit to get a product off the ground; they don’t just need an environment that acquiesces to technology, but fully embraces the chaos. Two surveys, one from 1983 and another I conducted this month, illustrate the differences in attitudes on innovation between tech workers and unionized workers. As far back as I can see, unions have been tech-averse. In one 1983 survey of labor unions [ ], Researcher Stephen Peitchinis found that a mere 14 percent of unions had policies advocating for technology change, while 14 percent actively opposed innovation if it threatened members’ jobs. Most (42 percent) have policies that begrudgingly accept technology so long as employers do so in a way that minimizes its impact on the workforce. Peitchinis also has a few historical gems in the paper, including one of a railway union that fought to keep fire-safety workers on board . It is no shocker, then, why economists generally find an inverse relationship between innovation and unionization. “Indeed, economists generally find that unions stall innovation,” a research team from the University of South Florida in May. “Firm innovation output, measured by patent counts and citations, declines significantly after firms elect to unionize and increases significantly for firms that vote to deunionize.” It’s no wonder that unions never found a foothold in the Valley. Since the survey was conducted in 1983, I wanted to see if the protectionist sentiment was still around. I tried to replicate the spirit of the study, using Google Surveys to gauge the attitudes on job-replacing-technology on union workers vs. people who work in the tech industry. Roughly twice as many respondents in tech were willing to sacrifice their jobs for innovation (16.5 percent vs. 30 percent). Three times as many unionized employees were willing to stand in the way of innovation to protect jobs (27 percent vs. 11 percent). Unions may be quite valuable in other parts of the country, but they haven’t been needed much in the Valley. Despite having no union, Facebook, Google and other tech companies are consistently . Cushy salaries, luxurious dining amenities, and decentralized management structures provide an elite class of high-tech workers all the benefits and influence that unions have long hoped for. Moreover, the Valley has long subsisted on freelancers, who roam between high-tech firms. “I think unionization would ruin the free spirit and innovation in the high-tech industry,” freelance web designer Alvin Bost CNET in 2001. “It would be terrible for people like me.” Unfortunately, those outside the Valley bubble , as technology automates more and more jobs. It’s a serious problem. If Google ran the BART system, I seriously doubt a human would still be powering every train. However, I think Slate is wrong to characterize this as “class warfare.” Many technology workers hold a genuine philosophical belief that the benefits to innovation outweigh the short-term gains of protecting workers. I think many in the Valley have been honest about their philosophical assumptions, and it’s time for unions to be honest about theirs. * ** . [ ] Legendary Hacker Dies [ ] –Barnaby Jack, who was set to speak at the Black Hat hacker conference, died at the young age of 35
–“Jack had exposed a security flaw in insulin pumps that could be made to dispense a fatal dose by a hacker 300ft away, pushing some medical companies to review the security of these devices.” –Senator Ron Wyden wrote an OpEd to promote medical data transparency, for his bill, Medicare Data Access for Transparency and Accountability Act
–“patients could see how often a physician performed certain lab tests, X-rays, MRIs or other treatments, and at what cost. Similarly, patients could also see the wide price variations between nearby hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices.
With access to this type of data, consumer groups and other advocates could begin assessing quality of care while researchers could examine regional health disparities and identify ways to address them” –Harvard Professor Noah Feldman argues that bloggers should be legally protected as journalists when they’re acting as journalists.
–“Anyone publishing information for the public interest is protected by the First Amendment — and that same anyone should get the protection of a shield from subpoena.” [tweet https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/361894512001429504]
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Finland’s Next Gaming Phenom? Grand Cru Raises $11M From Idinvest, Qualcomm, Nokia Growth
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Almost at a steady pace, Helsinki has produced a hit gaming company every couple of years: Rovio’s Angry Birds in 2009 and then Supercell iOS game developers in the world last year through Clash of Clans and Hay Day. Is the next one ? Named after the French wine classification, the 25-person startup has been quietly working on a game called the , which has been called a more mainstream and accessible take on Minecraft. Early on, they picked up funding from Supercell-backer Lifeline Ventures and now they’ve racked up an additional $11 million from strategic investors like Qualcomm Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners and lead investor Idinvest Partners. Their funding comes at a time when the Helsinki gaming community is abuzz with the success of companies like Supercell and Rovio and as dozens of other tiny startups splinter off with talent from both these companies and then longer-standing studios like Remedy and Digital Chocolate’s local office. To an outside observer, it may seem pretty random that Helsinki keeps churning out world-class gaming companies, but the community has deep roots because of these older gaming companies, the existence (and then decline) of Nokia and longstanding events like , which has been an annual mecca for developers and enthusiasts for more than 20 years. Grand Cru’s executive team is pretty experienced in the field: CEO ran RealNetworks’ studio Mr. Goodliving, while chief technology officer came from Habbo Hotel-maker Sulake and chief marketing officer ran marketing at German social game maker Wooga. The company has yet to launch its first game but they’ve been quietly at work on its flagship title for about two years. It’s like a more cartoonish and social version of Mojang’s 8-bit megahit game Minecraft. Players solve puzzles and create shareable worlds while traveling to a flooded Earth to rescue humans. They don’t have a timeline for when it will be released. “We will launch it when it’s ready,” Warin said. “We’ve put two years into the game. We will not fumble on the finish line and we have taken a very extensive process in developing the game.” Supernauts is done in third-person and the artistic style is quite different in feel and form. “We’ve spent six months perfecting the camera controls and user interface,” Warin said. “There aren’t very many 3D games for a casual audience.” He said the game’s social features are much deeper than what you’d see in a typical casual game. “We don’t want to have the standard stuff, where you visit your friends and they give you stuff,” he said. “We have proper multiplayer competitions.” They plan to use the funding to launch Supernauts, and Warin said the company is taking after the instead of staffing up really aggressively. “We’re not going to grow too quickly and go on a crazy hiring spree. We’re not going to be cranking out new products every six to nine months,” he said. “We want to make sure the people we hire have a good, strong cultural fit with people who want to make games with the same level of ambition that we have.”
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Greylock’s Newest Partner Josh Elman
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Leena Rao
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This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Greylock’s newly appointed partner . As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. As was announced last week, Elman is , focusing on consumer investments. Prior to Greylock, Elman was a product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, and helped Twitter grow its active user base by nearly 10x. Before Twitter, Elman worked on platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Earlier in his career, Elman led product management for Zazzle, was also part of the early team at LinkedIn focused on growth and jobs, and led product and engineering for RealJukebox and RealPlayer at RealNetworks. Elman told TechCrunch last week that he’s particularly excited about social platforms, communication tools, new media, marketplaces and mobile experiences. And he’s been working on product development for over 15 years, so he has plenty to share on how to build beautiful products that delight consumers. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google Relaunches Zagat’s Website And Mobile Apps, No Payment Or Registration Required
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today gave , the restaurant review service , a set of new mobile apps for and , as well as a complete facelift . For the first time, Google , all of the service’s ratings and reviews are now available for free and without the need to register. Currently, the new Zagat covers restaurants and nightlife nine cities, but Google says it plans to expand this list to over 50 U.S. and international destinations. Today, the site only covers San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Google also plans to expand the range of reviews to include hotels, shopping and “other places of interest,” something the printed Zagat guides have been doing for a while now. The new site, Google says, will also feature and from local editors, as well as curated , improved search and map-based browsing. You will also be able to make reservations through Open Table and read menus before you arrive at the restaurant. The website, of course, still lets you participate in the . It’s interesting to see that Google is holding on to the Zagat brand. After acquiring the company, it wasn’t clear if Google was just interested in the content for its Google Maps and Google+ Local brands and whether it would shut Zagat down sooner or later. Today’s launch, however, explains why Google is shutting down its on August 7. While Google says it did so because Google Maps now does most of what the Local app used to do, there would have been quite a bit of overlap with Zagat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ep3iIDDDlaM
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Groupon Loses Mobile Head David Katz, Who Is Heading To Sports Commerce Site Fanatics
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Ingrid Lunden
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continues to roll out that point to the e-commerce company’s ongoing ambitions to move beyond the daily deal and further into becoming a central hub for local and mobile commerce. But come August, it will be doing so without one of its most senior mobile execs. David Katz, VP and GM of consumer mobile, is leaving the company at the end of next month and taking up a position as SVP and GM of mobile for , the sports apparel commerce site. Katz passed on the news to friends and colleagues in an email, which TechCrunch obtained via an anonymous tipster. We’re including that below. Meanwhile, Groupon has also confirmed Katz’s departure, interim management for mobile, and plans for recruiting a replacement: “David is leaving Groupon at the end of the month to take another position,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’ve begun a search for a new leader of our Consumer Mobile division. Groupon has very deep and talented mobile team that will continue to report to our Senior Vice President of Product Development Jeff Holden, and we’re excited about the future for one of the fastest-growing Mobile operations in the industry.” Fanatics, which had been (now eBay Enterprise) in March 2011, was as part of Kynetic (a new company from the founder of GSI Commerce) just seven months later. Sports apparel is big business. In June of this year, Fanatics was when it raised $170 million from Singapore’s Temasek and Alibaba. Prior to that, Fanatics had raised $225 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Venture Partners and Bank of America for its network of sports commerce sites, focused mainly on apparel (one of the biggest in its portfolio of sites is ). Making a bigger move into mobile is a logical step for the company. Katz , and before taking on the role of VP of mobile. Prior to that, he was VP and GM for retail solutions. And before that, Katz spent six years at Yahoo, with the last three as VP of mobile. I’ve spoken with Katz several times about the launch of new mobile products, and he’s always been firmly focused on business as usual, despite there sometimes being more than a little drama going on around him. In the wake of co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason getting ousted, Katz that it was simply “business as usual” at Groupon, with the company just focused on shipping new products. He was also one of the key people there trying to make sure that what Groupon was doing in the U.S. would also see light outside of North America — no small task, considering that much of Groupon’s international growth was inorganic and therefore based on different IT systems. The question going forward will be whether whoever succeeds Katz and Groupon will continue to give mobile the same focus it has had up to now, and whether that ambition connects with consumers, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. We’ve reached out to Katz for comment. For now, here’s his memo: Dear Friends, Just a quick note to let you know that I’m going to be leaving Groupon and joining Fanatics, Inc. as SVP and GM, Mobile. And what you may ask is “Fanatics”? If you don’t know, Fanatics is a privately held e-commerce company that is the market leader in sports apparel (~$1B in annual revenue). Fanatics runs the online stores for the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA, major college conferences, major media properties like ESPN, Fox Sports, NBC Sports, CBS Sports, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo and Sporting News and lots of individual pro and college teams. Basically, if you are a sports fan there’s a good chance you’ve already bought something from Fanatics. So why am I’m making this switch? Well… 1) I get to work in sports, which is awesome 2) I think this is a strong team building a great, big business that is on the cusp of becoming enormous 3) I get to build a brand new mobile team and some cool product from scratch In my new role I’m going to be setting up a new dev center in the Bay Area to build and market mobile apps and sites. I’m going to be building a new team – which is part of the appeal – so if you know great mobile developers, PMs, designers or marketers who love sports and m-commerce please send them my way. I’ll be at Groupon through mid-August and moving over to Fanatics immediately after. I’ll send new work contact info when I have it but I’m always reachable at this email. Thanks, DK
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At Current Pace, Tablets Will Outsell PCs By Q2 2014
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Alex Wilhelm
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The PC market is in poor health, and consumers love tablets. When do those two trends cross? No prediction is perfect, but given simple trend analysis, it appears that by the second quarter of 2014, tablets will likely outsell the PC market. That said, current market dynamics could accelerate, pushing us over that mark a bit sooner. Let’s get into the figures to untangle just where we stand. The Next Web’s Emil Protalinksi , using data served by Strategy Analytics. The rough picture is that in the second quarter of 2012, according to the firm’s analysis, 51.7 million tablets were shipped globally. That figure is up from 36.1 million in the second quarter of 2012. How does that compare to the vanilla PC market? As was reported at the time, second-quarter PC shipments . Other estimates had the figure at 75.5 million, but that’s close enough for this sort of comparison. The simple story is that the PC market is slipping, down 11 percent year over year in the most recent quarter, while tablets are up sharply. In the past year, from the second quarter of 2012 to the second quarter of 2013, tablet shipments were up around 43 percent. Much of that growth was in the Android segment, it’s worth noting. Microsoft managed to put marks on the board as well, but as Apple’s tablet products find market saturation, Android appears to be the key growth platform for the touch-computing niche. IDC raised its recent PC market decline prediction from 1.3 percent for 2013 to 7.8 percent. That still feels optimistic. Here are some simple numbers: Assuming that the PC market declines another 11 percent in the coming year, and the tablet market manages, let’s say, 30 percent growth in the next 12 months, we end up with 67.6 million shipped PCs and 67.2 million shipped tablets. Those numbers presume that tablet growth slows in the next four quarters compared to earlier rates. In a separate estimate, IDC concludes that tablet shipments will . At that pace, and assuming that the PC market doesn’t dramatically improve, the lines simply meet sooner. At current tally, IDC itself predicts tablets will overtake PCs in 2015, but their PC estimates in that case feel far too optimistic, though Microsoft would prefer them. PC shipments in the first quarter of 2013, and 11 percent down the next. That trend is north of painful. So even assuming that tablet growth is slower than IDC expects, and that PC shipments simply continue their current pace of decline, by the second quarter of 2014, tablets and PCs will ship similar unit volumes. We’re not post-PC yet, but we are certainly almost at PC-tablet parity, and that’s a real market change.
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iTunes Beta Adds iTunes Radio, Slide-To-Unlock Tweak And Screenshot Detection API Added To iOS 7
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple has released a new beta of iOS 7 today, which is the fourth in the series. There are only a couple of months to go at most before we see the final edition roll out, so it’s not surprising that this update contains a variety of notable visual changes that smooth out some of iOS 7’s rough spots. There’s also a new iTunes beta of version 11.1, which brings iTunes Radio to the OS X desktop. Apple when it unveiled iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 Mavericks back in June at WWDC 2013. iTunes Radio promises to be a streaming online radio service, sort of like Pandora, which allows anyone to make a genre or artist station, skip tracks and hear suggested artists, all included ad-free with the price of an iTunes Match subscription ($29.99 per year) or with audio and visual ads when accessed completely free. On the desktop, iTunes Radio looks to operate pretty much the same as it does on mobile, providing access to some pre-set stations and letting users create their own. The interface is remarkably minimal for now, but Apple has left lots of room for custom stations. There’s also a button to let you buy songs being played back instantly in the “Now Playing” window, as you can see in the screenshot below provided by an anonymous tipster. As for iOS 7, it receives a design change on the lock screen that addresses complaints that the original layout was confusing to users. Specifically, there’s now an arrow next to the “slide to unlock” text on the lock screen, and the down arrow on the status bar suggesting the notification center has been replaced with a solid bar (as you can see in the screenshot from 9to5Mac below). There are also numerous visual refinements and icon changes, including for AirPlay devices, as , along with a screenshot detection API that Snapchat users will appreciate. We’ve also heard that shared links are now working in Safari, and likewise icons have been tweaked in the iOS mobile browser. Typically, Apple has a minimum of four betas before a full release, and iOS 6 last year had four before the general public release in September. I expect we’ll probably see at least one more (if not more) this time around, as this is a major overhaul of iOS, with much more dramatic changes than in past versions.
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Weathermob Raises $650K More To Turn Smartphones Into Mini Weather Stations
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Sarah Perez
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, a mobile, social network centered around crowdsourced weather reporting, has raised an additional $650,000 in new funding today from a number of angel investors, including Mark Hastings, Lord Waheed Alli, Victoria Hackett, and Drew Volpe, bringing its total raise to date to $1.1 million. The company had in angel funding last spring. Launched about a year-and-a half ago, Weathermob offers users that makes it easy to report your local weather in less scientific terms. It includes a spinning, slot-machine-like interface where you choose from weather icons like a sun or storm cloud, before adding your own personal take on the weather by picking icons that represent how the weather makes you feel (cheerful, miserable, etc.) and what it’s good weather for — like grilling out or playing golf. You can also optionally add pictures or videos to accompany the post. In some cases, these pictograms can be a bit confusing I found. For instance, what does it mean that you think it’s good weather for ? Or eating pizza? (I mean, isn’t always a good time to eat pizza?) However, this method is far less technical than setting up a real weather station of your own for participation in a community like , for instance. “What percent of Weather Underground is women?” co-founder and CEO Julia LaStage asked Chief Product and Marketing Officer and co-founder Michael Nicholas during an interview. “I don’t know, maybe negative 6 percent?” he jokingly replied. (Um, I like Weather Underground, and I’m female, so….?) Anyway, the point is that Weathermob is trying to make weather reporting and sharing more social and accessible. Plus, with session times averaging more than six minutes, it seems to click with a portion of mobile weather app users. The app isn’t only for socializing around weather, though. As with a traditional weather app, you’ll still find the current temperature and lows and highs at the top of the screen, which you can tap for the extended forecast. Explains LaStage, the starting premise for the company was the human story surrounding weather. “We think there’s more of a story than the story told by scientists, and the story around numbers,” she says. “That’s proving to be something that’s delightful for users and a bigger data play than we probably even knew.” The company says it now has 100,000 monthly active users, across some 137 countries worldwide. The funding will help it hire additional engineers and data scientists, the execs tell TechCrunch. The bigger plan for Weathermob is turning smartphones into weather stations by using sensors that are being built into the phones themselves. Nicholas notes that the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example, ships with . These, he expects, will become standardized across more Samsung Android devices. The bigger question is whether Apple will follow suit, but the company is already brainstorming workarounds if not. (Weathermob is also planning to launch on Android this fall.) “In the next 24 months, you’re looking at what could be fully-fledged weather stations in people’s pockets all over the world,” Nicholas says. This could be especially helpful in emerging markets which don’t have weather towers and other infrastructure for weather collection and reporting. With the new funding in tow, the startup is moving forward with product development, hiring, and its larger ambition to be a weather “observations” company that will eventually sell its weather data to other companies making forecasts and predictions. For end users, however, .
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Marketing On WeChat Helps Apps Succeed In China’s Fragmented Marketplace, Says Wandoujia
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Catherine Shu
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China is the , but data about app downloads is difficult to get because Google Play is inaccessible there. The Chinese app ecosystem, which will be according to one estimate, is very fragmented, with more than 200 app stores competing for consumers. As a result, it’s difficult for developers to gauge what makes an app successful. With over 170 million users, is one of China’s largest third-party app stores. Its , which Wandoujia releases in an effort to attract foreign developers, sheds light on what’s capturing the interest of Chinese smartphone users. One notable trend is the importance of , one of China’s most popular messaging apps with 450 million users, for spurring an app’s viral growth. The developers of Crazy Pic Puzzle, in which users guess the corresponding Chinese characters for an image, made it easy for players to share winning pictures and scores to WeChat Moments, a Path-like SNS feed. The app scored two million downloads at a growth rate of 80,000% in June, according to Wandoujia data. Baidu PhotoWonder, another app that leverages WeChat Moments, had 1.6 million downloads in June at a growth rate of 4,300%. Other trends spotted by Wandoujia include the growth of money-saving apps. Of Wandoujia’s top five fastest-growing apps, three help users score deals, including group-buying app Discount 800, which grew 2,000% to 163,000 downloads in June. This is not surprising considering how fast China’s is growing and how many shoppers use their mobile devices to browse online stores. Another trend highlighting the growth of mobile use in China is the increasing popularity of role-playing game apps. While massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG), one of the largest Internet sectors in China, are usually played on PCs, app versions have started taking off. Sefirah, a Korean-made MMORPG, was number two on Wandoujia’s list of top new games in June, with 69,000 downloads. The success of foreign MMORPGs, which have short life cycles but high in-app purchases, show that “foreign developers can reach a big audience in China,” says Wandoujia. “Games don’t require a Chinese Wu Shu story to succeed.” Other foreign-made apps that landed a position on Wandoujia’s list of bestsellers in June include Blendoku, Plants vs. Zombies and Line.
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The Granddaddy Of Messaging Apps, WhatsApp, Finally Goes For A Subscription Model on iOS
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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While messaging has become a veritable war with apps like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Path and Facebook Messenger across Asia and Western markets, there’s been one longstanding app that’s presided over the space with very few apparent changes. WhatsApp, the Sequoia-backed messaging app that dominates in Europe and that is often tipped as an attractive acquisition candidate for companies like Google and Facebook, just went freemium finally on iOS. The app has been paid for years on the iPhone at a $0.99 price point. But today it went free with an annual subscription fee of $1 after the first year. This isn’t really a surprise as . It brings WhatsApp’s business model on iOS in line with other platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone. The paid app business model is really a vestige of an older era when developers would sell their work up-front. But over time, many paid apps have made the switch toward going free with paid features. Games really triggered this wave, but other high-usage apps like messaging have gone for a freemium strategy. Japan’s Line, for example, made $58.9 million in the first quarter of this year in Japan — which apps like Path and Facebook Messenger have subsequently copied. WhatsApp launched back in 2009 and quickly grew popular in markets where SMS pricing made messaging through smartphone apps cheaper. It really dominates in Recently, the company said it was bigger than Twitter , in a single day.
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TC Cribs: A Trip To Houzz, The Startup HQ That Feels Like Home
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Colleen Taylor
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Welcome back for a brand spankin’ new episode of , the TechCrunch TV show that knocks on the front doors of some of the tech industry’s hottest companies to take a look inside their offices. This time, we headed about 30 miles south of San Francisco to the leafy, sunny, startup-happy paradise that is Palo Alto, California. There we visited , the startup that brings inspirational home design ideas to the web. Given Houzz’s focus, we expected to find a nice-looking office — and we certainly weren’t disappointed. Check out the video embedded above to see Houzz’s homey family photos, bustling working area, and the cocoon you can go to if you want to escape it all (with beautiful classical piano music included.)
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Incredible Labs, Maker Of Personal Assistant App Donna, Cuts 25% Of Staff After Launch
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Ryan Lawler
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Incredible Labs, the startup that built personal assistant app , reduced headcount by about 25 percent this week, as it seeks to streamline operations and improve its balance sheet. The layoffs came just a few weeks after Incredible Labs finally . We’ve written about Donna a since launch, but it’s important to note that the app came out after about a year of flying under the radar. When Donna launched, it did so amid a wave of personal assistant and smart calendar apps hitting the market. The company had raised a total of $2.5 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Maynard Webb, CrunchFund, Ashton Kutcher, and some other angels. But the competitive landscape has shifted a bit since the team first started working on the product. Most recently, two of its competitors in the smart calendar space just raised new funding. New York City-based from Mike Hirshland from Resolute.vc and Rob Go from NextView Ventures, along with investors like Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, BoxGroup, 500 Startups, and John Maloney from Terrapinbale. Tempo, the smart calendar app incubated at SRI, led by Relay Ventures and Sierra Ventures. But since the launch, Incredible Labs has decided to refocus its efforts and streamline its operations. CEO Kevin Cheng sent the following statement when asked about the cause of the layoffs: “With the launch, we now have a clear understanding of what areas to focus on and what our needs are to execute on our vision. Unfortunately, that clarity also means some very talented members of our team didn’t quite fit our immediate needs and had to be let go.” The founding team is still intact, according to Cheng, and at the end of the day only three people were let go. Still, for an early-stage company, losing a few of its members can be difficult going forward.
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Zynga’s Former Chief Game Designer Takes Strategic Investment From Nexon For SecretNewCo
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Back in January, Zynga’s chief game designer Brian Reynolds, who was also behind older hits like Rise of Nations and Civilization II, . He’s popping up back on the scene this month with a new company called (appropriate, eh?), and the startup is announcing a strategic partnership with Tokyo-based gaming giant Nexon today. The Tokyo-based company is investing an undisclosed amount of capital in Reynolds’ company for a minority stake. While Nexon isn’t sharing how much it invested, just assume it’s a very early-stage investment. The deal will give Nexon worldwide publishing rights for SecretNewCo’s flagship game, which has an appropriately named working title of “SecretNewGame.” SecretNewCo’s flagship game itself sounds reminiscent of Civilization. The title is a “mobile strategic social network game” where the player begins as the leader of a tribe in the Stone Age and has to guide their civilization through all ages of human history. Like in Civilization, they can trade with their friends, launch raids against enemies, form alliances and defend against attacks from other players. Nexon is making this deal to appeal to Western audiences after building up longstanding franchises in China, Japan and South Korea like MapleStory. “We have had our eye on a few people in the West and Europe who we’ve been thinking about for a while,” said Nexon’s chief financial officer Owen Mahoney. “When Reynolds left Zynga, we struck up a conversation about what his next plans were.” While Nexon in the first three months of this year, European and North American markets contributed less than 5 percent of the company’s revenues during that time. In contrast, China makes up nearly half of Nexon’s revenue base. So the company is looking to grow its presence in the West at a time when barriers between international markets are falling. Games that have historically done well only in Japan or China now have the ability to reach a fully global audience through the Android and iOS platforms. Japan’s mega-hit Puzzles & Dragons is now at 16th place on the top-grossing charts in the U.S. while Western titles like King’s Candy Crush Saga and Supercell’s Clash of Clans are doing well there. More deals with Western game developers could patch up Nexon’s offerings in these markets. Mahoney says Nexon is looking at acquisitions and strategic investments of all sizes, from very early-stage deals to ones that could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had 110.5 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in cash on its balance sheet at the end of March. “We’re not limited in size. We have a large cash position, so we’re well-capitalized and able to move for things that are large when they become available,” Mahoney said. “But we think that the opportunities are going to be a range of both small, medium and large deals and it depends on the creative orientation of the team, whether they have the same approach to building companies and franchises over time, the valuation, and how our teams and theirs get along.”
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Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Has 340M Monthly Users On Mobile, Promises To Improve Display Ads, Video
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Anthony Ha
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One of the big themes that CEO Marissa Mayer kept returning to during the webcast discussing was mobile. “Yahoo’s future is mobile,” she said, noting that the company now sees 340 million monthly mobile users. She didn’t offer any earlier mobile traffic numbers to illustrate growth, but to show the company’s commitment in this area, she said that the mobile team has grown by 6x. Many of those new team members have joined Yahoo through what Mayer called “tuck-in or talent acquisitions,” and she said we can at a similar pace. The webcast actually kicked off with a discussion of the growth that Yahoo has seen with a number of new products, many of them mobile. For example, the number of daily active users to Yahoo Mail on mobile has increased 120 percent since the launch of the tablet app. And since launching the new Yahoo app enhanced by Summly, daily users have increased 55 percent and time spent has increased 60 percent. (One reason to highlight traffic growth: Offsetting the disappointment in the quarter’s flat revenue.) Overall, Mayer said Yahoo’s traffic (as measured in pageviews) actually grew year-over-year — that might not sound particularly impressive, except that it reflects recent growth offsetting earlier losses. Mobile, she said, is “still early” but also “growing quickly.” Mayer pointed to mobile as one of four key areas for Yahoo’s future growth. The others are search, display advertising and video, and the last two areas are ones that the company “will begin to clearly address” in the second half of the year, she said. On display, Mayer acknowledged that Yahoo has “felt some negative impact,” particularly from the growth of programmatic ad buying. She said the company has been making progress with “early efforts” in areas like new ad formats, but later, one of the analysts asked whether the programmatic trend is going to continue driving ad rates down. Mayer argued that these technologies provide “an opportunity to do a much better job to match the right users to the right advertisements,” which could result in ads sold at premium rates. Mayer also mentioned Yahoo’s Tumblr acquisition, which she said presents opportunities across all four areas. For one thing, she said, she’s working with Tumblr’s David Karp to develop native ads, which she said “can be every bit as good as the content itself.”
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Path Is Raising $50M At A $500M Valuation, Still Looking For A Lead Investor
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Billy Gallagher
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is raising a $50 million Series C round at a $500 million post-money valuation. Sources tell us the company is still seeking a lead investor, the round is currently oversubscribed, and one of the investors in the round is “a strategic private investment group in Asia.” Last April, the social network founded by ex-Facebooker Dave Morin . We’ve also heard rumors that Path has been in acquisition talks with several industry giants. Google, which to acquire Path in 2011, was the name that came up the most, but sources have said those rumors are false. This contradicts an that said the company was raising at a valuation as high as $1 billion. Sources say that Path was never raising at a valuation as high as $1 billion, but is still having some difficulty with this Series C. On the one hand, it’s hard to read too much into investors passing on Path, as that is commonplace in funding rounds. And yet, the timing of the round can’t be great for Path, as it comes at a , and right on the heels of for acquiring users, and amid speculation about the company’s userbase. Onavo Insights tells us that while millions have downloaded the app, active users are declining, at least in the U.S. In June, 1.9 percent of U.S. iPhone users actively used the app, which is down 24 percent from 2.5 percent of users in May.
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Google Opens The New Google Maps For Web To Everyone
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Greg Kumparak
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Remember that shiny new Maps web interface that Google started ? It’s here! Technically, the new Maps interface has actually been here for a while… assuming you signed up for an invite shortly after it was announced and were able to make it through Google’s invite queue before they opened the floodgates today. (I signed up a few hours after the announcement and just got my invite a week or two ago.) But wait! Don’t head straight over to maps.google.come and expect the new look just yet. While they’ve ditched the invite queue and the whole having-to-wait bit, you’ll still need to opt in. To do so, just , scroll down to the bottom, and hit the “Try Now” button. It should let you in immediately. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THxJHcR1D2c?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]
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With Its $5 Billion Share Buyback Program, Yahoo Still Has A Big Pile Of Cash For Acquisitions
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Romain Dillet
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Yahoo just released its mixed , and a few sentences may have given the answer everyone was waiting for — yes, Yahoo still has plenty of cash to pursue more acquisitions. Evidence of this lies in the company’s share buyback program. “During the second quarter of 2013 Yahoo repurchased 25 million shares for $653 million,” one can read in . Those are part of a bigger $5 billion program. These shares can be reissued and sold for cold cash any day. Back in September 2012, Marissa Mayer decided to sell 40 percent of Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba for $7.6 billion. $3.65 billion was set aside to reinvest in Yahoo shares, proving that the company is confident in its own future. “We are happy to announce that as of today we have essentially completed our commitment to return $3.65 billion from our Alibaba Group proceeds to shareholders, repurchasing a total of 190 million shares,” wrote CFO Ken Goldman in today’s earnings release. But the company will now go even further. It has a $5 billion share buyback authorization with the SEC and it plans to use this authorization in full. In other words, reports of the disappearance of Yahoo’s cash after the have been greatly exagerated. For those who are not familiar with a stock buyback program, the stock can either be canceled or reissued at a later date. In case it is reissued it is a big win for the company because existing shares are not diluted and the new shares just keep the same stock number, just like nothing happened. They are other advantages as well. For example, it shows that Yahoo if very confident, saying more or less that there is no better investment than its own stock. It slightly raises the price of existing shares as there are less outstanding shares. For the past twelve months, have been doing very well. With a share price of 15.65 on July 16, 2012, today’s price of 26.88 represents an incredible 71.8 percent increase in just a year. That’s better than Google, Apple or eBay. Yahoo’s share buyback program has paid off so far and the company could spend more than $3.65 billion in acquisitions, because the value of its portfolio is worth more today. As long as the stock goes up, it’s a good strategy. So today’s earnings taught entrepreneurs and VCs one thing: the acquisition spree can continue.
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Microsoft Asks Attorney General To Release Gag Order On NSA Spying
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Gregory Ferenstein
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[tweet https://twitter.com/BradSmi/statuses/357219988328816640] Microsoft is tired of getting pummeled in the press over reports that it to the National Security Agency. Unfortunately, the federal gag order related to the NSA is so strict that companies can’t even talk about the existence of the program. Today, Microsoft issued a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder to release the gag order so that that they can dispel rumors. “I’m writing to ask you to get involved personally in assessing the Constitutional issues raised by Microsoft and other companies that have repeatedly asked to share publicly more complete information about how we handle national security requests for customer information.” The letter followed a categorical denial that Microsoft provides special access to the NSA. “We do not provide any government with the ability to break the encryption, nor do we provide the government with the encryption keys,” Microsoft General Counsel, Brad Smith. that will allow it to prove that they fought the NSA, so there’s room for Microsoft to be optimistic. The full letter has been pasted below: Dear Attorney General Holder: I’m writing to ask you to get involved personally in assessing the Constitutional issues raised by Microsoft and other companies that have repeatedly asked to share publicly more complete information about how we handle national security requests for customer information. In my opinion, these issues are languishing amidst discussions among multiple parts of the Government, the Constitution itself is suffering, and it will take the personal involvement of you or the President to set things right. Since the initial leak of NSA documents, Microsoft has engaged constructively with the Department of Justice,the FBI, and other members of the Intelligence Community on the ground rules governing our ability to addressthese issues and the leaked documents publicly. We have appreciated the good faith in which the Government hasdealt with us during this challenging period. But we’re not making adequate progress. When the Department andFBI denied our requests to share more information, we went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)on June 19 to seek relief. Almost a month later, the Government is still considering its response to our motion. Last week we requested official permission to publicly explain practices that are the subject of newly-leaked documents that refer to Microsoft and have now been misinterpreted in news stories around the world. Thisrequest was rejected. While we understand that various government agencies are trying to reach a decision onthese issues, this has been the response for weeks. In the meantime, the practical result of this indecision iscontinued refusals to allow us to share more information with the public. This opposition and these delays are serving poorly the public, the Government itself, and most importantly, the Constitutional principles that we all put first and foremost. As I know you appreciate, the Constitution guarantees the fundamental freedom to engage in free expressionunless silence is required by a narrowly tailored, compelling Government interest. It’s time to face some obvious facts. Numerous documents are now in the public domain. As a result, there is no longer a compelling Government interest in stopping those of us with knowledge from sharing more information, especially when this information is likely to help allay public concerns. I feel very fortunate that we have both an Attorney General and a President with such long standing knowledge of and appreciation for our Constitution. Put simply, we need you to step in to ensure that common sense and our Constitutional safeguards prevail.Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely,
Bradford L. Smith
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Josh Constine
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After Acquisitions Aplenty, Yahoo Q2 Beats With EPS At 35 Cents, But Revenue Flat Again At $1.07B
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Rip Empson
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The day for purple exclamation points (or lack thereof) has arrived. Yahoo its earnings report for the second quarter of 2013, with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) net earnings of $386 million, or 35 cents per share. Revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) was flat compared to last year, at $1.07 billion. Marissa Mayer just passed her one-year anniversary as CEO of Yahoo, and so far, expectations have been fairly low for the company, which has struggled mightily in recent years. Mayer has been busy instituting ambitious plans for the company, beginning with a memorable acquisition spree that seems to have included every forgotten or “B List” startup on the planet. But Yahoo’s future is still decidedly up in the air, and many remain unsure if Mayer can lead Yahoo through such an epic turnaround. Nonetheless, enthusiasm has begun to build, as the company’s shares have been soaring of late. As a result, analysts predicted that the company would report revenue of $1.08 billion and 30 cents for EPS (up 11 percent for the year). Wall Street typically evaluates Yahoo on an ex-TAC basis, including the cost of acquiring traffic. Ex-TAC, revenue was $1.07 billion for the quarter. To break that down: In turn, while search revenue actually overtook Yahoo’s display revenue last quarter, the company was back to its usual trend this quarter. Search revenue was $403 million for Q2 (a 5 percent increase), while display revenue came in at $423 million (a 12 percent decrease). All in all, Yahoo had $4.8 billion in cash and securities in the second quarter, down from $6 billion in the same period last year. GAAP display revenue was $472 million for the second quarter of 2013, a 12 percent decrease compared to $535 million for the second quarter of 2012 and the number of display ads sold dropped as well, not necessarily a good sign. That being said, paid clicks on Yahoo’s search advertising increased 21 percent in Q2. As Mayer begins her second year as CEO of Yahoo — while her leadership is seen as crucial for turning the company around — expectations are going to increase. She’s been doing her best to tamp down expectations, and that will continue to work for a little while, but eventually investors are going to want to see real results — and growth. Yahoo has been showing some slight gains on Google and Microsoft in search, but it’s got plenty of work to do elsewhere. “I’m encouraged by Yahoo!’s performance in the second quarter,” Mayer said as part of today’s earnings announcement. “Our business saw continued stability, and we launched more products than ever before, introducing a significant new product almost every week.” “From the new Yahoo! News, the new Yahoo! Sports app, the redesigned Yahoo! search, the new Flickr, the new Yahoo! Mail for tablet, the Yahoo! Weather app, our new Yahoo! app with Summly,” she continued, “this quarter drove tremendous improvements in our product line and our users responded with increased usage and engagement.” As a result of its unprecedented acquisition spree of late, Yahoo has added a ton of engineering and product talent in a relatively short amount of time, and — it would like to have you believe — that it’s been picking these startups up at rock bottom prices. By doing so, that it will be able to rebrand its mobile products and begin moving more aggressively into social marketing segments, along with reaching broader demographics and just generally putting a more attractive (inter)face to the world. But we also got a chance to see just how much Yahoo is willing to spend to make its turnaround (and all these acquisitions) possible. During the second quarter alone, Yahoo repurchased 25 million shares for $653 million and used a net $1 billion in cash for acquisitions — including a net $970 million to acquire Tumblr. These significant costs were offset, however, by the $846 million it received from redeeming its Alibaba shares. By the way, sale of its ownership in Alibaba is expected to net Yahoo close to $20 billion over the years to come. So for anyone wondering how the company was planning to finance its acquisition spree: Say “hello” to Alibaba, Yahoo’s financier.
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Bitcoin Transactions Rise As Economic Unrest Hits Argentina
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John Biggs
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Bitcoin has created an interesting solution for problematic economies. Because it allows seamless extraction of wealth out of a bank account and into the cloud, Argentinians have been ramping up usage of the cryptocurrency in an effort to stem the effects of their worsening economy and their choice to go BTC is actually moving the market slightly. Even as BTC penetration in other countries remains flat or down, Argentina’s portion of Bitcoin downloads has risen from 1% of the whole to 3% and interest in the currency is at an all time high. According to , the country’s first Bitcoin meetup group started in 2008 with eight members and is now up in the 400 member range. The post goes into the economic details of the move towards Bitcoin but in short, the Argentinian government fined a group of economists for recalculating inflation to much higher levels than the official party line. In addition, dollars are being used as an alternative currency thanks to a weak peso and the potential for capital controls like those happening in Cyprus. Argentinians just want to get their money out of banks and, to that end, they’re trusting variable BTCs over their own currency. In all financial reporting there is always a bit of if-then conjecture. However, the rise in interest in Bitcoin in this part of the world connects to some real world political choices. It’s a fascinating example of how the currency is taking on a life of its own and, more importantly, becoming a viable investment alternative.
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Charitable Water Filter Maker Soma Raises $3.7M Seed Round
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Eliza Brooke
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, a startup that’s hoping to be the Warby Parker of water filters, has closed a $3.7 million round of seed funding led by and . Other backers include Lerer Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Cowboy Ventures, Vast Ventures, Mindful Investors, The 4-Hour Workweek’s Tim Ferriss, Coca-Cola’s Rohan Oza, and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy of JOYUS. The San Francisco-based company, which raised $150,000 from over 2,000 backers through a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, closed a $1.2 million initial seed round last summer. Targeted at do-gooder design and sustainability snobs, Soma produces glass carafes fitted with biodegradable water filters. It’s a subscription service where consumers buy the carafe and starter filter for $87, and Soma sends a replacement filter every two months for $14.99. For every filter that sells, Soma donates money to , which funds clean water projects around the world. This one-to-one model is well established with companies like TOMS Shoes and Warby Parker, although Soma simply donates money rather than giving away the actual product as TOMS and Warby Parker do. This is probably wise, since a well gets to the root of providing clean water more effectively than an elegant carafe would. CEO and co-founder Mike Del Ponte told us that because tech companies have so much growth potential, it is the ideal space to couple business with doing good. Del Ponte, who has a background in philanthropic work and marketing, declined to disclose how much Soma donates to Charity: Water with each purchase. This most recent round of funding will go toward building the Soma team, marketing, and developing new products. In August, they will ship to the 2,000 Kickstarter backers who prepurchased decanters, and sales will open up to the public on Soma’s website in September. Despite the expenses of the product’s high-quality sustainable materials and the donations to Charity: Water, Del Ponte said Soma has healthy margins because of its direct to consumer production structure. By avoiding the costs of going through a retailer, Soma can invest in its brand experience, something that will be essential to roping in those design and sustainability elitists. Soma’s advisers include Neil Blumenthal of Warby Parker, Katia Beauchamp of Birchbox, and Eric Ryan of Method, the biodegradable soap company, all of whom the company is looking to emulate in one way or another. With a solid roster of investors, new products in the works for 2014, and a long term plan to redefine how we consume beverages in the home, Soma seems confident in its footing even before it has completed production on its first batch of filters. We’ll be watching to see how the company fares with consumers when the product drops next month, the true test of its worth.
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We Can All Go Home Now. Piracy Is Mostly Dead
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John Biggs
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According to a , piracy has fallen alarmingly in that country thanks to viable alternative sources. For example, music piracy has fallen from 1.2 billion songs in 2008 to 210 million last year. About 60 million movies and TV shows were pirated last year, compared to 125 million and 135 million five years ago. In short, access to paid content, whether via streaming or a la carte services, is slowly whittling away the impetus to pirate. To be clear this data comes from Norway and may not be representative of all areas but given the popularity of services like Spotify, Rdio, and Netflix – not to mention the many platform-specific releases made available on each of these services – has done what Hollywood couldn’t. Writes : Norway has led the charge against file-sharing sites, recently passing a law that and allows rights holders to go after copyright offenders. However, it seems it’s a case of “Too much, too late.” The laws coincide with some of the lowest levels of piracy in the country which, in the twisted logic of the MPAA, will be chalked up to strong laws and not to the success of stable, usable, and preferable alternatives to piracy. As “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.” If a product is available in staggered intervals or is completely unavailable or at a particularly onerous price differential, the impetus to pirate is far greater. When everything is easily available one click away it is a far more interesting market and far better for the producer and the consumer.
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Microsoft Releases A Hobbled Outlook iOS App That Pretty Much No One Will Use
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Matt Burns
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Outlook is now available for the iPhone and iPad. Kind of. Don’t expect full Outlook functionality. This isn’t a MS Office Outlook app; this is stripped down mail, calendar and contacts app much like the one found in Windows 8. It’s free to download to right now. But, in typical Microsoft fashion, it’s not that simple. , the app’s oh-so-catchy name, requires a subscription to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite. This is the same $100-a-year subscription needed to use Office on iOS, which seems to state that Microsoft doesn’t want anyone to use their apps. Because, well, if these apps were free, it would eliminate the MS Surface RT’s main selling point. It’s sad because OWS seems like a quality application that brings Windows 8’s flat styling to iOS. This app also brings Exchange support to iOS in a native app that supports push notifications and remote date wipes. The Outlook Web App seemingly provides much of Outlook.com’s functionality. It sports email, calendar, and contact support. There’s voice input, two-column view, and Bing Maps integration. The app looks and feels a lot like Windows 8’s version of the apps, likely making users of both platforms (like me) feel a bit more at home on a mobile device. Of course this isn’t a full version of Outlook. Microsoft wouldn’t release that for the iPad or iPhone. This version is just a mail app so don’t expect to do much more than what’s available on Outlook.com. when Office hit the iPhone, Microsoft is walking a thin line with its iOS apps. On one hand the company is trying to take one of its core products to new platforms. But it cannot do so in a way that would potentially cannibalize its own fledgling platforms. After all, the only way to get the full power of Office on a tablet is to buy a Windows 8/RT device — like the MS Surface. Microsoft is ignoring the masses and just preaching to the choir. By requiring a $100 a year subscription to Office 365, it kills any chance of Microsoft’s apps going viral and finding new fans. Right now the only paying Microsoft users can use Office for the iPhone or OWS for iOS. And that’s just of the users on iOS. [gallery ids="846925,846926,846927,846928"]
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KeepSafe, The Private Photo Gallery App, Raises $3.4M And Grows To 13M Users
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, which on people’s phones, just raised $3.4 million in a round led by Floodgate. They’ve also grown to 13 million users, 6 million of whom are active every month. This is probably not a perfect way of putting it, but one could argue that KeepSafe attacks a market that overlaps a little bit with Snapchat. Many of the reviews for KeepSafe on the Google Play market say things like, or “ ” So it seems that there is an audience of parents who often let their kids borrow and play with their phones, but don’t want them to see more adult content. That said, the app’s founder, Zouhair Belkoura, has always said that he and most other users rely on KeepSafe for more mundane things like separating out work sketches and ideas from personal photos of friends and family. Most privacy-centric social networks and photo-sharing apps that I’ve seen have had trouble growing and competing with Facebook or Instagram, but KeepSafe seems to solve a basic problem that many people and parents want fixed. The app was only launched a year and a half ago, and 6 million monthly actives is not a bad place to be right now. With the round, Mike Maples of Floodgate will join the company’s board. Existing investors like Asset Management and Strive also participated. KeepSafe will use the funding to hire more engineering and product development talent. They like providing a fake PIN lock screen. (One wonders why someone would want to pay for a fake PIN lock screen in addition to a normal PIN screen, but maybe we live in an extra paranoid society where people have things they want to double-protect.)
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Keen On… Brian Solis: WTF Is The Future Of Business?
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Andrew Keen
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Known as one of Silicon Valley’s observers of social media, analyst is now thinking way beyond Twitter and Facebook. The future of digital business, Solis says, is “shared experiences”. . WTF? Yes, exactly. In his lavishly illustrated new book (itself a memorable media experience), , Solis reminds us that all new technology businesses must be experiential. Rather than Facebook, Solis says, the future is businesses like Uber which not only solve a problem but also provide a memorable experience. “Every time I get into an Uber car,” Solis says, “I want to hear stories from drivers.” And he’s bullish too about healthcare businesses built around quantified self technology like fitbit. Experience, experience, experience, Solis says. That’s the future of business.
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Crowdfunding Site Medifund Wants To Help Students Become Doctors
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Catherine Shu
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is a crowdfunding Web site that wants to increase the number of doctors in countries with a critical shortage by helping students afford medical tuition. So far, the site, which is based in the Philippines and launched last month at , has successfully completed the , who raised PHP 25,000 (about $577 USD). Founder Jossy Onwude, who is currently a student at Southwestern University’s Mham College of Medicine in Cebu City, says he was inspired to create Medifund by Bless, who had trouble paying for her studies after her relatives ran into financial difficulty. The site is currently in public beta and has about 30 students waiting to sign up for fundraising campaigns when it goes live. Onwude hopes Medifund will help increase the number of doctors in countries like , Indonesia and his native Nigeria. He also wants the site to enable more women to pursue medical training. “There is a huge shortage of doctors in Asia and Africa,” says Onwude. “In the Philippines, for example, one doctor might have to work in several hospitals.” Of course, every successful crowdfunding site needs to have quality-control measures in place. To make sure students signing up for donations on Medifund are serious about their goals, the site uses a gaming system that encourages students to add more details about their background, education and achievements. For example, badges are earned when they upload videos, transcripts, financial statements and school recommendations. Over the next three months before its public launch, the Medifund team will further develop its platform, work with payment companies to ensure that donors in different countries can use the site and seek funding. Onwude is currently in talks with medical schools, NGOs and scholarship programs that are interested in partnering with Medifund. Onwude says Medifund will take 5 percent of every fully funded project in order to keep the site running. As Medifund grows, Onwude says it will also launch a peer-to-peer education loan program and a reward system that allows donors to accumulate points for services like medical consultations. The startup’s founding team represents a multitude of nationalities and come from tech, design and medical backgrounds. Before entering medical school, Onwude, an alumnus of entrepreneurship camp, gained startup experience as founder of and Pinoyborn. Other members of Medifund’s team include Nanaho Nishiyama, previously a marketer at and project manager at , Michael Millan and Francis Alturas, designers at , Dan Pantinople, designer and founder of and Kent Astudillo, as well as sym.ph developers Fe Mojado and Richmond Wang.
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Surf Air, The Air Travel Startup That’s Bridging The Tech Hubs Of L.A. And S.F.
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Colleen Taylor
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Now, location will probably always be important when it comes to building a tech business, but a startup out of Los Angeles called has made it much easier for people on the California coast to travel between the state’s tech hubs in San Francisco, L.A., and most recently Santa Barbara, through a uniquely tech-savvy service that bridges the big gap between super expensive private air travel and hassle-filled commercial air travel. The company has taken on a and is eyeing some big expansion efforts going forward, so while visiting L.A. earlier this month, we at TechCrunch TV made it a point to talk to Surf Air CEO at MuckerLab, the Santa Monica accelerator where Surf Air got its start. Watch the video embedded above to hear more about Surf Air’s business model, its growth thus far, and plans for the future.
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Last Chance To Get Tickets To The Seattle Meetup + Pitch-Off On July 18
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Jordan Crook
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There ain’t no party like a TechCrunch party ’cause a TechCrunch party don’t stop. So hopefully you’re ready, Seattle, because in just two days the is going to rock your socks off. On Thursday July 18, entrepreneurs, VCs, technology enthusiasts and TechCrunch writers will come together under one roof to talk tech, hear some pitches and drink some beer. It’s expected to be a generally merry event. There are a very small number of tickets left, so if you’re interested in throwing down $5 for a drink ticket and an evening of startup-flavored fun, head over or hit up the form below. For those of you who are just now finding out about this, the includes a 60-second pitch-off competition where startups have one minute to explain to a panel of judges why their product is the best. Judges will include TechCrunchers and local VCs. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second place will receive two tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third place will receive one ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Companies participating in the pitch-off have already been chosen, but the beer remains unpoured. So come on out. Be a part of that. And if Seattle’s a little too far up the coast for you, no worries. TechCrunch is headed to .
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Michael Dell Vows To Stay At Dell Regardless Of The Outcome Of His Offer To Take The Firm Private
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Alex Wilhelm
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After promising to sell his shares at a discount and increasing the price of his offer, Michael Dell, founder of Dell, has today vowed to stay at the firm regardless of the to take the company private. This is not a surprise, given that Dell owns a large equity stake in the company. For him to step back if his plan to take the struggling computing giant failed would almost be odd; given how much of Michael’s personal fortune is tied up in the company, to fully step back would be the functional consignment of his wealth to others. Who would be comfortable with that? In an , Dell stated that he, in the language of the paper, “wouldn’t sell assets or commit to any leveraged recapitalization as some shareholders have advocated.” This means that Michael would not take part in the plan advocated by activist investor Carl Icahn, that would see a tender offer put forth for most of the shares in Dell corporation at a price slightly higher than what its founder has offered. Michael Dell wants to take the company private, to give it space to reform, and rebuild its product line and business service offerings. The only current competing offer, via Mr. Icahn, would not grant the Dell company that flexibility, though, it would greatly boost the per-share revenue of the equity that Icahn would control after newly acquired debt was used to fund the repurchase of other shares. Michael Dell and his partner Sliver Lake recently boosted their per-share offer for Dell shares to $13.75 from their former offer of $13.65. That small margin was the target of criticism when it became known. As I : How can Michael Dell and his partner think that they can get away with such a pathetic sweetening of their former offer? Because what Icahn has in mind for Dell is complex and not in the best interest of the corporation. The firm needs time as a private entity so that it can rebuild its OEM business and focus on expanding its business services arm. It cannot do that with sufficient flexibility if it is chained to quarterly earnings reports. Given what Michael Dell has said to the Journal, either Dell shareholders accept his offer at the August 2 meeting, or perhaps Icahn won’t have access to enough shares to execute his plan. This essentially limits the options of shareholders to two: Accept what the founder has in mind, or sit adrift. Ironically, the company continues to to both offerings, signaling that the market lacks confidence in either plan to reach conclusion. Time is short, and this chapter is all but closed for the famed OEM.
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Bob Mansfield To Leave Senior VP Of Tech Role At Apple, But Will Remain To Work On Special Projects
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Catherine Shu
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Bob Mansfield is leaving his role as Senior VP of Technologies at Apple, but will remain at the company to work on special projects reporting to Tim Cook. Rumors first started flying about Mansfield’s movements when his biography on its website. The company has not yet issued an official statement, but that Mansfield is moving on. We’ve emailed Apple for more information. Apple says Bob Mansfield is no longer on Apple’s exec team but will remain at Apple working on special projects reporting to Cook. — Poornima Gupta (@PoornimaGupta) Apple that Mansfield, who joined the company in 1998, was planning to retire from his position as senior VP of hardware engineering. Mansfield changed his mind two months later, however, and stayed on at the company as its senior VP of technologies. At the time, it was that Mansfield had decided to stay after iOS software lead Scott Forstall . If Mansfield had followed through on his original decision to leave the company, it would have marked a major departure for Apple. Mansfield led the hardware engineering of some of Apple’s most profitable devices, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac.
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Jawbone Hires Its First VP Of Data To Focus On The Intersection Of Wearables, Quantified Self And Personalized Health
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has made a key hire that shows some of the direction the company is headed towards when it comes to the quantified self and wearables development. The developer and manufacturer of the fitness device UP has brought on Monica Rogati, who was formerly a senior data scientist at LinkedIn, to be the company’s first VP of data. Rogati is a huge win for Jawbone when it comes to talent. At LinkedIn, she developed the system that matches jobs to candidates, and created the first machine-learning model for the People You May Know feature, according to a At Jawbone, she is leading the data team and focusing on the intersection of wearable computing, quantified self and personalized health care. Jawbone CEO and founder Hosain Rahman explains that Rogati is one of the best data scientists in the space, so it was a no brainer when it came to trying to recruit her to lead data efforts at Jawbone. “Not only does she have a deep technical background, but she can take data and actually turn this into personalized, meaningful product experiences,” Rahman said in an interview. Earlier this year, Jawbone to add to its data-mining efforts. The company also bought , which creates a wearable, health-tracking device. We’re assuming that Rogati will be working on how to add innovative software enhancements and products around the data uploaded by users of the UP and other devices. Her hiring, Rahman explains further, is representative of the supercharging of Jawbone’s data-mining efforts. In the data-focused approach, Jawbone is tackling how various factors like sleep, weather, nutrition and more affect and are related to each other. “We want our users to be able to give them understanding on top of their data, and then make smarter choices,” Rahman says. Part of this is being able to give users a more personalized view of their health and data, he adds. “This is just the beginning, and there is so much more to come when it comes to taking data and actually seeing what it means for consumers,” said Rahman. It should be interesting to see what product additions Rogati develops to create a more personalized and insightful view of the data processed by the UP, and even the Body Media band. We’ve been speculating that Jawbone is beyond developing fitness gadgets and into creating full-fledged health-monitoring devices. Software that is able to process and create valuable insights from this data will be integral to the success of this effort.
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What Games Are: Self-Publishing On Console Will Not Create The Next SuperCell. But Microconsoles Might.
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Tadhg Kelly
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To the joy of many, Microsoft announced : Rather than try to maintain a fortress of solitude, the console will support indie publishing. You’ll be able to use your console as a dev kit (traditionally dev kit licenses could be very expensive) to make and publish your games. Microsoft even promises to remove some of the category barriers that segregated indie games to a backwater page in the Xbox dashboard. These moves can be read in two ways. The first is largely as a reaction to Sony. with the indie developer community for a while, quietly building up relationships and facilitating the publishing of a number of games such as and . As part of PS4 the company has significant plans to allow small developers to self-publish on the system, although still under a dev kit model. It promises to send free kits to developers that need them. The second read is to consider these moves in light of wider trends. Outside of giant thousand-man studios and tiny indies, most mid-sized gaming companies are nowhere within 100 kilometers of consoles these days. There’s just no place for them in a sector that values its 20m+ unit hits, and they can’t afford to compete at that level. All of those people have shifted to mobile, tablet or social instead, where they are finding success. The move to attract indies sits semi-uncomfortably. The console industry is used to acting like a car showroom, developing specific pieces of beautiful game content and then engaging in a large sales push toward success. Fans of consoles (including many developers) are also used to this model, and tend to think of this activity as “real games,” as well as the most economically significant activity in the industry. Much as Hollywood still thinks that box office means something, console game executives tend to be more impressed by stories involving unit sales rather than residuals. That showroom mentality is what led Microsoft down the path of making Xbox One into , which nobody understood, or Sony make a very similar thrust with PlayStation 3. The pivots away from those big plays may at first glance seem like attempts to atone or to broaden out their relationships with game makers, but I tend to think otherwise. What they’re actually about is developing a few show-bikes to go alongside the show-cars. There are several meanings of the term “indie.” For some it simply means financially independent, able to make games and revenue and be self-sustaining. For others the term is political, expressive of points of view and meaning. This second version is far more popular in the games press because it has more of an emotional component. Indies stand for something and become heroes fighting an unspecified “man.” It may surprise you, but in the console-ist view the political kind of indie game is more desirable because it ticks the art-game box. Art games are rarely expected to make their money back, and certainly not to become big franchises. Yet there’s a lot of value in having them. If you can have a few notables talking up your platform, a few Phil Fishes and a few “thatgamecompanys” making signature games, then this is a great story. It aligns you with the kind of story seen in and at GDC. Most important is that it gets the press on side, which is hugely important in the mutually assured destruction of console platforms. Appearing to be indie is worth acres of PR. At the same time, supporting a few such indies allows platforms to retain their essential power. While PC gaming has always reserved much more power to the developer and treated hardware makers as little more than component makers, console gaming has always worked the other way. The console is the main brand and the . The games all appear on the console with the holder’s say-so. The publishing model places the console brand front and center, and the games are in support, and the market tribally responds along those lines. Taken in that vein, the modern console industry’s understanding of allowing indies to enter into its playpen is pointed but they are not embracing an ecosystem any time soon. From the standpoint of where they’ve been, modest steps to change their model may seem like great leaps for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Like TV executives who are still tentative about streaming, there’s a sense of not going too fast for fear of losing everything. This is why Microsoft’s newfound message of developer liberation is still pretty garbled. The exact plans for how Xbox One will go indie-friendly come across as a bit hazy. They smack of a recent decision at the executive level which will need some thoughtful re-engineering time to figure out on the practical level, so don’t expect it for launch. Also how it reconciles with some other showroom features (like the heavy push on mainstream TV) is anyone’s guess. Not to let Sony off the hook, its plans for indie liberation are similarly convoluted. Sony , which — even though the company promises a speedy turnaround — still sounds every bit as ludicrous as Roku wanting concept approval for movies it streams. It should make any developer pause and think seriously about what it implies. Yet the bigger issue is that both plans are not enough. They do not represent change real enough that indies in the first sense of the word (financially viable) would find attractive. It’s also woefully out of step with just how far games have come. Developers are far more empowered today than they have been since the days of microcomputers in the 80s and are not keen to sacrifice that freedom. It used to be imperative to placate Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft for any game to have a chance of being published. This was expensive between concept approvals, extensive technical requirements and laborious quality assurance and certification processes. But what could you do? They were the gatekeepers, it was largely a relationships business, and that was that. Even when they moved into digital markets they were choosy, taking an active role in content selection and publishing. Games were released on schedules to give a window for sales to build and platforms were managed like topiary. Not too many games of one genre or another, just a few key ones and a heavy sense of curation. All very bonsai. Then Apple and Facebook upended that model with something more organic and irrevocably changed how developers thought of success. Success was no longer to be like Jonathan Blow or Ubisoft. It became being . The console industry has never been able to fully understand the depth of that shift. The way that developers approach making games on Facebook, iOS and Android is radically different to how things used to be when console platforms (and PCs) was all there was. They just do it, no dev kits, relationships, publishing schedules or concept approvals required. They may need to pass some curation (particularly from Apple) but those conditions tend to be far narrower in scope than anything the console industry ever imposed. Essentially don’t crash, no porn, no defamation and you’re good to go. That new model is the one that breeds true independent game development success. The bonsai paradigm of consoles prevents developers from expanding too much, meaning that a thatgamecompany gets to make cool games but not really grow (if they want to, of course). Whereas the iOS/Android/Facebook model gives birth to Rovios and Zyngas (in happier times perhaps). When platforms get out of the way and let software be software, software becomes wildly successful and the platform itself grows. Obviously Rovio is an extreme case, but many other smaller studios have managed to forge their own destinies in a similar fashion. Studios like Spry Fox and NimbleBit make the games they want to make, how they want to make them, with whatever business model they desire, and it’s no big deal. So they are free to innovate and they do. Same for us at Jawfish. Console makers do realize that they’ve painted themselves into a corner, want to change and get some press goodwill. Yet not to the extent that they detonate their existing business. Especially not when many of their fans prefer and buy into predictable franchises over innovation. I don’t envy them, but that gap is why microconsoles are a real threat. OUYA, GamePop, GameStick, Mad Catz and whatever Google might be cooking up are relatively unencumbered by old constraints, and therefore able to empower indies in the first sense. The fact that they’re mostly using a common operating system helps, but their main advantage is the potential flexibility and the focus that being simple provides. The first generation of microconsole hardware is . Of course it is. The idea is brand new and still finding its way. The OUYA’s joypad, for example, isn’t good. The processors for most microconsoles are probably underpowered, and there are lots of early firmware and operating system issues. Look past these early-phase issues, however, and take in the longer view. Microconsoles can iterate on hardware quickly, like phone makers, where Sony is stuck with a fixed spec for the next seven years with PS4. Big consoles have to be static because big publishers (like Activision) need the spec to be stable enough to master in order to make the next . A SuperCell, on the other hand, doesn’t. An iPad doesn’t. Indeed most every other form of electronics has figured out how to move to an annualized cycle except console makers. Beyond hardware issues the next issue is the customer. Who are microconsoles for? Everyone. Everyone who likes to play games cheaply, for fun, with simple controllers and low (or free) prices. As we’ve seen on phone, tablet and Facebook, that translates to a hell of a lot of people. And before we get too worried about TV being somehow special in this regard, consider that that is a self-cyclical piece of thinking born of consoles being pretty bad as devices. They are only now getting into the idea that maybe they should have power/resume states like every other device you’ve owned since the turn of the millennium. Part of the reason why they have that special gamer aura is because they are a hassle. There’s no reason for micros to follow the same path. The future that I see for console gaming is one where hardware incrementally cedes power to software. Pushed by microconsoles offering a vastly cheaper option on the one hand, and developers of incredible games with the right business models on the other, the prospect of all three current console platform holders being reduced to only vertically satisfying their core fans is very real. The prospect of big publishers taking a bath is also very real. It will take a couple of iterations to get their hardware and business models right. It may take the entrance of a big player like Google or Samsung to validate it (much as Amazon did for ebooks). There will also be that initial flurry of press coverage that will swamp all channels with talk of PS4 vs X1 (and ill-advisedly lamenting Nintendo) for the next 18 months. That will cover over the real story to an extent, allowing OUYA et al room to breathe and pivot. But in the medium term? The new SuperCells will not be coming from these revamped “indie” console offerings. They’ll come from a very different kind of device entirely. ( .)
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Bootstrap 3 Goes Mobile-First, Now Reportedly Powers 1% Of The Web
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Frederic Lardinois
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The team behind , the immensely popular grid-based, front-end framework for web development, launched the first release candidate of Bootstrap 3 includes over the weekend. Besides a tweaked look and a couple of new features (and also the removal of a few others), the most important change in this update is that Bootstrap, just like its close competitor , is now mobile first and responsive by default. The announcement coincided with new data from source-code search engine , which also this weekend that 1 percent of the 150 million websites in its index now use Bootstrap. Bootstrap, which was developed at Twitter but has since been spun out into its own organization after its developers left the company, has clearly caught on with developers, who can easily set up a good-looking site without having to involve designers or worry about how the site will look on different browsers. My guess is that the vast majority of those 1 percent of sites are run by startups. The problem with this, of course, is that if you spend enough time looking at startup landing pages (which most of us here at TechCrunch are contractually obliged to do), it often feels like they all look alike after a while because the majority of developers all built the same Bootstrap-powered site. That said, version 3 introduces a new flat look for that makes it stand apart from version 2 sites. In total, the development team made over 72,000 additions and deletions and changed 300 files between the last version of Bootstrap 2 and this first . By going mobile first, Bootstrap now asks developers to first think about the mobile site and then think about how it expands to larger screens. Previously, the thought process was the other way round, with developers working from the 12-column desktop grid down to smartphone-sized screens. In the process, the team also changed some naming schemes and added features like retina image mixins and small grid systems for tablets and phones. If you’re currently using Bootstrap 2, switching to Bootstrap 3 should be relatively easy, but given how much of the code has changed means you can’t just drop in the new files and hope everything will work.
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Dell’s Cloud-Friendly Project Ophelia Inches Closer To Release As Testers Receive Early Units
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Chris Velazco
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Google’s $35 dongle may have made all the headlines this week, but the folks in Mountain View aren’t the only ones working on curious gadgets that plug into your TV’s HDMI ports. Dell showed off its Android-powered all the way back in January, and it managed to turn a few heads… until its tentative launch window came and went without much fanfare. Now, though, it looks like early devices are finally on their way to testers ahead of a full launch in the coming months. Not exactly familiar with Project Ophelia? Let’s flash back to CES 2013 when Dell showed it off for the first time — long story short, you plug Ophelia into your TV (any other display with an HDMI input) and Android 4.0 fires up so you can mess around on the web and download apps from the Google Play Store. Of course, that concept isn’t exactly new: Countless tiny Android devices that plug straight into your television have popped up on crowdfunding sites and for what feels like ages now. Ophelia’s big differentiator, though, is its support for Dell’s Wyse cloud computing tech, which allows users to (among other things) remotely access files stored on PCs or servers and connect to Citrix or VMware-powered virtual machines. The company’s eagerness to show off Ophelia’s enterprise chops could go a long way in justifying the device’s roughly $100 price tag, but what’s even more interesting is the very fact that a huge PC manufacturer is moving to embrace such a strange little segment of the market. Considering the state of the PC market, though, it’s not hard to see why a company like Dell would put together something as peculiar as Ophelia. PC players have been feeling the squeeze that comes with declining demand over the past months since people are starting to give up more traditional computers for mobile devices. Dell definitely isn’t immune to this sea change, either — its revealed that its end-user computing division (which accounts for PC sales to consumers) dipped 9 percent from last year. Dell’s Ophelia may just legitimize what is now a largely underwhelming class of gadgetry, thanks to its potential prowess as both a consumer and enterprise device, but it may take more than an aggressive price point and some nifty new features to make Ophelia into something worth owning. For Dell’s sake, here’s hoping Project Ophelia doesn’t meet the same fate as its Shakespearean counterpart did.
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Mozilla, The Late-To-The-Mobile-Party Lumbering Dinosaur Of Open, Is Playing Carriers’ Pet To Make Firefox OS Fly
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Natasha Lomas
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The first mobile devices running Firefox OS are out in the market. It’s too early to say how well Mozilla’s fledgling open web HTML5 mobile platform is doing in its bid to steer budget buyers away from Android gateway devices. Which is, make no mistake, exactly the hope of the carriers throwing their weight and influence behind this alternative open platform. A raft of carriers signed up to support Firefox OS at its launch announcement . According to 17 carriers are currently committed to distributing devices (namely: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom). So far only a handful of devices have gone on sale, including the ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch. More are apparently due to be announced this year. It is, to reiterate, the very beginning of the Firefox OS project. Telefónica started selling the first consumer handset running FFOS in Spain at the start of this month — the . It says it won’t be breaking out sales for individual models but asked about early sales indications, a spokesman said: “The team is very happy with how it’s going in Spain.” But it’s not just carriers putting FFOS phones in the market. Being an open platform there is scope for smaller players to get involved, such as hardware startup Geeksphone, which put out two Firefox developer preview devices (called ) back in April, . Geeksphone has now followed those up by announcing its first consumer-focused device, called the . The Peak+ is $196 (excluding taxes) on pre-order, with a slightly higher price tag planned when it goes on sale in September. “Firefox developer preview is no longer where we want to be. We are evolving towards a consumer market,” Geeksphone CEO Javier Agüera tells TechCrunch. “Geeksphone has always been selling to any customers and users since its foundation four years and a half ago… [Initially] we went for the developer preview branding because we wanted to target those early adopters, those early users who were building up the ecosystem, and we felt that was a natural thing to do. “Now we’re evolving to a more consumer-oriented perspective — back to our origins. We will keep of course a developer-friendly brand, with some unique characteristics, but target everybody.” So far, so good — for Firefox OS and for the diversity of the mobile ecosystem. Even Android fans can probably get behind the idea that another open mobile platform offering choice is A Good Thing. Some may even concede that challenging Google’s ability to dominate and control the mobile ecosystem may be ultimately beneficial, too (assuming Firefox OS can build momentum, of course). Diversity can foster innovation, after all. But it’s not all good. Mozilla is not universally liked in the open-source space. Quite the opposite. The organisation has a reputation for “viciously defending its brand,” as MeeGo startup Jolla’s Marc Dillon put it in thinly veiled comments earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow — where Firefox OS was being very publicly endorsed by carrier club, the GSMA. Dillon shared the stage with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker and Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth in a panel discussion about open platforms, and the underlying tensions between the smaller players and the grand old dinosaur of open . Mozilla has a reputation for being slow, lumbering having teeth. Much like its dinosaur logo. You could describe it as the Microsoft of the open-source movement. Which doesn’t sound like the kind of Android-challenging champion the mobile world needs right now. And yet Mozilla’s corporate attitude and approach have clearly made a lot of (equally conservative) carriers comfortable about working with it — which is perhaps the only way Android can be challenged at this point, being as it owns . Here’s the latest example of Mozilla’s corporate ethos in action. Last week the organisation contacted publications (including TechCrunch) that had reported on Geeksphone’s new “Firefox OS” Peak+ device to request a “correction.” Mozilla’s email said the Peak+ is not “Firefox OS certified” so cannot be described as a Firefox OS phone. Rather it should be described as being “based on Boot to Gecko” technology — the initial moniker of Mozilla’s Firefox OS project. Here’s the full statement Mozilla requested accompany the Peak+ news: Today, Geeksphone announced the pre-sale of a new device based on Boot to Gecko technology. We want to clarify that this new phone that was announced is based on Boot to Gecko technology with pre-release software, but is not a certified or supported Firefox OS device. As I noted in an update to the , this is an issue of brand control. Technically speaking, Geeksphone has not yet jumped through the certification hoops to achieve FFOS certification. But it’s highly likely that that’s because it’s not possible for Geeksphone to do that yet. The startup declined to comment about the certification issue when contacted by TechCrunch, noting that they are partners with Mozilla and have been working closely with the organisation to build the Peak+. From the outside looking in, it’s hard not to conclude that, despite this apparent partnership, Geeksphone is being treated as a second-class citizen vs. the carriers backing FFOS. After all, Telefónica’s first FFOS device (the ZTE Open) does carry the Firefox OS brand. So it is possible to gain certification at this early stage — at least, if you are involved with one of the carriers backing Mozilla’s open-platform play. It’s possible that Geeksphone, with its more limited and therefore targeted resources, hasn’t been able to divert the required effort to gaining certification yet. But Mozilla’s response, when I asked for clarification about its Firefox certification guidelines, suggests otherwise — since they revealed they are still finalising their processes. Which in turn suggests the Peak+ branding bottleneck is being caused by the lumbering dinosaur, not the nimble startup. (Case in point: it took Mozilla’s PR one whole day to obtain these very partial answers to my certification questions.) Q. What do device makers have to do to achieve certification as a Firefox OS device?
A. Because each device maker is a separate entity, the details of Firefox OS certification vary slightly from one to another. We will be publishing more details about how future partners can become Firefox OS certified soon. Q. Do Firefox OS certified devices have access to specific apps that non-certified devices don’t? Such as the Firefox Marketplace?
A. As conversations with interested parties continue, we are finalizing our guidelines for device makers. Tl;dr Really, those conclusions should not surprise, given Mozilla’s late-to-the-mobile-market position and reputation for cumbersome development. It’s trying to turn those weaknesses into strengths by cosying up to the only folk likely to laud them. No wonder so many carriers are so keen to work with this open-source alternative. Mozilla’s branding strictures and usage enforcement are corporate that will reassure the conservative telcos they are treading familiar ground with Firefox OS; that this open ecosystem is nonetheless policed to order, not encouraged towards anything-goes chaos. Mozilla is demonstrating its willingness to back carriers’ desire to control and to own in order to differentiate itself from Android’s free-for-all which has ended up undermining telcos’ control of users and accelerating the decline of their traditional revenue streams. Fast-tracking carrier-backed devices to the front of the FFOS branding certification queue is just symptomatic of that underlying pro-telco strategy. Mozilla has made something of a Faustian pact to try to establish an alternative open mobile ecosystem. And with Android so rampantly dominant, that may have been a necessary trade-off to give FFOS a fleeting chance. But it still leaves something of a bitter taste to anyone who roots for David over Goliath.
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Architizer Relaunches To Connect Architects With Other Architects, And Brands, And Clients Too!
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Jordan Crook
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For 100 years or more, architects have relied on the massive catalog sitting on their desk to find the right products to use in their projects — this brand of glass, or that brand of toilet. That catalog had a monopoly on the market for a century, but with the birth of the internet, that catalog never made the transition over to digital. But a site that launched back in 2009 as a platform for architects to publish their work, , is relaunching tomorrow to finally fill the void it left. Architizer is a two-sided platform that lets architects upload their work in order to get more potential clients as well as professional feedback from their peers. Meanwhile, brands can pay a subscription to connect their own product pages to Architizer projects in which their products were used. It looks a little like this: Architects upload their work in any format they like, from a PDF to a picture of a napkin covered in scribbles. Architizer’s curatorial team then deciphers that project, beautifies it, and publishes the project on the firm’s own Architizer firm page. Within the project, other architects can comment and view all the materials used in the building, from the fixtures to the window systems and more. Then, brands who had products used in that building can connect with that project. So let’s say the building used Kohler toilets, for example. Within the project page, Kohler would be listed as the plumbing provider, and that would automatically be hyperlinked to the Kohler product page on Architizer. Architizer is free to use for architects and firms, while brands pay a subscription fee of anywhere between $95/month and $595/month for Architizer to hyperlink every mention of that brand on the site. Architizer launched back in 2009 as a self-publishing platform for architects who wanted a digital portfolio. Though the two sites were inherently different (one is an editorial curated blog and the other is a self-publishing platform), stuck out as the greatest competitor to Architizer at the time. See, ArchDaily receives tips from architects who send in their work, and then features those projects in an editorial blog-style web site. Though Architizer’s content was all self-published by architects, Architizer had an editorial team that packaged and featured the top projects for browsing on the site. At the time, most of the company’s revenue came from traditional advertising and running branded competitions amongst architects. This new form of native advertising, however, wherein brands pay to connect with users, will end up being the main source of revenue moving forward. As it stands now, native advertising is huge with regards to any curated or editorialized content, especially when it involves user generated publishing. Everyone from blogs like BuzzFeed and Gawker to social networks like Facebook and Twitter are pushing branded content into a special place on the site, where it’s sure to receive eye balls. Meanwhile, recommendation engines like WeeSpring are working hard to offer solid feedback on very niche verticals, like pre-delivery baby shopping. However, combining user-generated content with a subscription-based paid service for brands to automatically promote themselves (within that user-generated content) is a relatively new business model. Architizer grew from 200 projects published in 2009 to 55,000 projects published now, but founder Marc Kushner believed there was still a piece of the puzzle missing with regards to materials used in projects, and making information on those materials easily accessible to architects. “Right now, architects know more about the sandwich they’re having for lunch then they do about the products they’re using in their projects,” said Kushner. “Right now they’re learning about these products from reviews on Amazon because there is no online destination to get credible information. We’re looking to change that.” The site has been redesigned entirely from the ground up to make uploads faster as well as connect users to other architects and brands. As it stands now, the site sees 1.5 million monthly visitors with over 14,000 firms on the platform according to Kushner. The relaunch will include participation from 18 partnering brands including Sherwin Williams, Kohler, and Dupont. [gallery columns="4" ids="852685,852686,852687,852688"]
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Review: Google Chromecast
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Greg Kumparak
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Sir Arthur C. Clarke It’s probably the most overused quote in tech writing… which sucks, because I’d really like to use it to describe how I feel about the Chromecast. The Chromecast is deceptively simple: you plug it into your TV, then stream video and music to it from apps running on your iPhone, Android device, or laptop. The Chromecast itself has no remote; whatever device you’re streaming from is the remote. The Chromecast has next to no user interface of its own, either; it’s got a single screen that shows the time and whether or not it’s connected to your WiFi that appears when nothing is being streamed, but again, the device you’re streaming from largely acts as the interface. The Chromecast is a wireless portal to your TV, and doesn’t try to be anything more. I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I don’t think I’ve ever been as surprised by a device as I am by the Chromecast. The price? Surprise! It’s $35. Are you ? According to Google, they’re not selling them at a loss. Even after accounting for the Wi-Fi chip, the CPU, 2GB of flash memory, the RAM, licensing the right to use HDMI, assembly, packaging, and shipping them to the states, they’re somehow making money selling these things for . Sure, their profit margin is probably like, four cents — but that they’re not selling these at a loss at that price point is kind of absurd. The setup? Surprise! It’s ridiculously easy. Plug it into HDMI, give it some juice (through USB, which most new TVs have, or a standard wallwart), then run the Chromecast app on a laptop to tell it what Wi-Fi network to connect to. Done. App compatibility? Surprise! It’s already there on day one in some of the most notable online video apps, including Netflix and YouTube. I didn’t even have to update the apps — I just launched ’em on my phone and the Chromecast button was sitting there waiting for me. They’ve even already built an extension for Chrome that drastically expands the functionality of the device (though, in its beta state, it’s a bit buggy — more on that later). Hell, even the very announcement of the Chromecast was a bit of a surprise. Google somehow managed to keep the Chromecast a secret until before its intended debut, even with a bunch of outside parties involved. Netflix, Pandora, teams from all over Google, everyone involved in the manufacturing process — all of them were in the loop, yet nothing leaked until someone accidentally published a support page a few hours too early. Now, none of that is to suggest that the Chromecast is perfect. It’s not! Not yet, at least. But its biggest issues are quite fixable, assuming that Google doesn’t look at of the Chromecast and say ‘Oh, well, screw this thing.’ And for just $35, the few blemishes it has are pretty easy to overlook. Video streaming quality is quite good (on par with what I get on my Xbox 360 or my Apple TV, at least) particularly when pulling from an app or website that’s been tailored for compatibility — so Netflix, Youtube, or Google Play, at the moment. If you’re using the Chromecast extension for Chrome on your laptop to project an otherwise incompatible video site (like Hulu or HBOGO), however, video quality can dump quite a bit depending on your setup. It’s using your laptop as a middle man to encode the video signal and broadcast it to the Chromecast, whereas the aforementioned compatible sites just send video straight to the dongle, mostly removing your laptop from the mix. When casting video tabs on a 2012 MacBook Air running on an 802.11n network, the framerate was noticeably lower and there were occasional audio syncing issues. While we’re on the topic, the Chrome extension packs a bit of an easter egg: the ability to stream local videos from your laptop to the Chromecast. Just drag a video into Chrome, and it’ll start playing in a new tab. Use the Chrome extension to cast that tab, and ta da! You’re streaming your (totally legitimate, not-at-all-pirated-am-i-right) videos without bringing any other software into the mix. I tried it with a bunch of video formats (mostly AVIs and MKVs. MOVs kinda-sorta work, though most won’t push audio from the laptop to the TV for some reason), and they all seemed to work quite well, albeit with the lowered framerate I mentioned earlier. Even within the apps that have already been tweaked for Chromecast compatibility, there are some day one bugs. Sometimes videos don’t play the first time you ask them to, instead dropping you into a never-ending loading screen. Other times, the video’s audio will start playing on top of a black screen. These bugs aren’t painfully common, but they’re not rare, either. Even with a bug or two rearing its head, the Chromecast is worth its $35 price tag. Remember, this thing launched, and it came mostly out of nowhere. Those bugs? They’ll get patched away. The sometimes-iffy framerate on projected tabs? It’ll almost certainly get better, as the Chromecast extension comes out of beta. Pitted against the AppleTV — or, in a fairer comparison, against the AppleTV’s built-in AirPlay streaming feature — the Chromecast’s biggest strength is in its cross-platform compatibility. Whereas AirPlay is limited to iOS devices and Macs (with limited support for Windows through iTunes), Chromecast will play friendly with any iOS, Android, Mac, or Windows app that integrates Googles Cast SDK. Having just launched, the Cast protocol obviously isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as AirPlay, either in terms of Apps that support it or in terms of other devices (like wireless speakers) that utilize it — but assuming that developers embrace the format (and really, they should), both of those things could quickly change. If developers support the protocol, Google could quite feasibly open it up to third parties to be integrated directly into TVs, speakers, and other types of gadgets. If that happens, AirPlay could be in trouble. On the topic of its cross-platform compatibility: the experience on Android is a slightly better than it is on iOS, as Google has considerably more freedom on the platform; for example, apps that use Chromecast can take priority over the lockscreen, allowing the user to play/pause/skip a video without having to fully unlock their Android device. That’s just icing on the cake, though; for the most part, all of the primary features work just as well on iOS as they do on Android. It’s one of the easiest recommendations I’ve ever made: If the Chromecast sounds like something you’d want, buy it. It’s easily worth $35 as it stands, and it’s bound to only get better as time goes on, the bugs get ironed out, and more apps come to support it. [ ]
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Fly Or Die: Nokia Lumia 925
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Jordan Crook
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The is the Finnish phone maker’s latest attempt at wooing hapless shoppers over to the Windows Phone 8 platform, and it’s a solid proposition. The real stand-out feature has to be the camera, which is still considered PureView despite being an 8.7MP camera, as opposed to the Lumia 1020’s 41-megapixel shooter. Still, the Carl Zeiss camera is loaded with exclusive Smart Camera software, including a special burst mode that takes ten shots at once. This burst mode lets users do a number of different things, including grabbing the best frame of a shot, composing an action series, or even changing focus after the shot was taken, Lytro-style. It’s pretty much by Natasha, John and I that this is one of the best smartphone camera’s available. But the camera isn’t the only thing that shines: The Lumia 925 has a slight profile with metallic edges and has a solid feel in the hand. John admits that it does soak up prints, however. In terms of specs, a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip powers the device, which has 16GB/32GB of onboard memory and 1GB of RAM under the hood. It also sports a 4.5-inch AMOLED display at 1280 x 768. And if that weren’t attractive enough of a deal, you can run in and pick up the Lumia 925 at a T-Mobile for $0 down and 24 payments of $20. Two flies.
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How Social And Primary Sources Affect Online Media Brands
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch Throughout high school and college, I took a heavy dose of political science and history classes. As a result, those teachers and professors stressed the importance of investigating source documents and analyzing them on their own merits versus secondary sources (like textbooks, for instance), even though we were all issued textbooks, essays by subject matter experts, and a range of other interpretations. Eventually as college ended, the courses focused more on the primary source and our own interpretation of it. Fast forward to today. At least in the world of startup technology news, which moves too fast to be captured by textbooks or print-versions of magazines, primary sources remain important, but social sources — at least for me — trump all. Of course, in early-stage, private companies, obtaining primary sources is difficult. In my world of tech news, like many, Twitter is my main source of information and how I surf the web. Specifically on Twitter, however, I do not follow any “news sources” directly. There is too much information out there. As a result, I try to follow people who’ve I’ve grown to trust who read and share articles or random blog posts. In order for me to read something, I need a social signal to trigger and capture my attention. “Who” shares it with me matters. The “source” matters still, just not as much. And, in some cases, the source online can be propped up by a brand and hold power in its distribution. Real estate to create content online is infinite. There is no barrier to entry to create information, to build an audience, to generate page views, and to peg those against ads. Therefore, at least in my small world of online tech news, social sources reign supreme. I’m guessing many of you reading this may feel the same way. The social signal from following a friend or trusted industry source motivates me to gain interest in a link, to read the story, or save for later. The most critical piece of information in that decision is not where the link originates from and resides, but rather who has shared this link. In a way, the tweet itself, as a unit of social currency, is more important than the source itself. One product which demonstrates the pervasiveness of this Flipboard. Yes, Flipboard has dedicated media channels for sources, but on their social feeds, the author of a piece of content is nearly greyed out so that the reader can focus on “who” shared the content with them over “who” created it. The point of view I’m sharing obviously isn’t new or earth-shattering. The idea of “social news” has even collected dust. We all know it to be true. However, I believe this has big, long-term implications for online media brands. In my college history experience, book publishers spent time aligning with universities, professors, and other beacons in that world in order to make sure their materials were picked as sources. Fast-forward to today, those kind of tactics may not be as effective. Instead, media brands are forced to think critically about the quality of their loyal, core audience, because it is those individuals who will, as social sources, share and discuss the content, information, facts and myths with their own friends and audiences. This is where real, sustainable distribution lies. For media companies online, the social source trumps the primary source — it is the realization that who shares information online is oftentimes more important than what that information is. And for many media brands, that is a fundamentally — and at times scary — new reality. / Flickr Creative Commons
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SaaS Pioneer Open-Xchange Raises $20M To Expand Its Cloud-Based Services
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Catherine Shu
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, a maker of Web-based communication, collaboration and office productivity open-source software, has received $20 million in funding from United Internet, former Deutsche Bank COO Hermann-Josef Lamberti and existing shareholders. Part of the proceeds will be used for a secondary transaction. This investment round is notable because it’s the first time Open-Xchange has announced new funding since 2008, when it raised a $9 million Series B. The company has delivered Open-Xchange in the form as software-as-a-service (SaaS) for six years, making them pioneers in that area, and it’s now poised to take advantage of the shift toward cloud office systems, which Gartner will rise from 50 million users today to 695 million by 2022. The company plans to use the funds to invest in software development, professional services and international business development, as well as marketing and sales. Open-Xchange launched OX App Suite earlier this year, an integrated Web desktop that shares information and files across devices, allowing users to manage their files, email and contacts. In March, the company also introduced OX Text, the first application of its Cloud-based office productivity suite OX Documents, which was built by original members of the OpenOffice team and enables document editing in browsers. Open-Xchange plans to complete the software suite with spreadsheet and presentation editing apps within the next 12 months. The company says that its revenue and user base has grown 50% year-over-year in the last three years, and now has 75 clients that reach 80 million end users, including customer accounts of telcos, hosting providers and ISPs. “Open-Xchange has the potential to disrupt the cloud market in the coming years. Its technology will change how businesses and private users will buy and consume cloud services. Open-Xchange is uniquely positioned in this market, enabling telcos, web hosters, mobile and cable operators alike to successfully compete with over-the-top giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft,” said Lamberti in a statement. The company also announced two new additions to their supervisory board: Lamberti and Dr. Oliver Mauss, the CEO of United Internet subsidiary United Internet Ventures. “Open-Xchange’s vision of becoming the web desktop for cloud services makes this one of the most exciting software investment opportunities,” said Mauss, CEO United Internet Ventures.
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With Launch Of 3.0, Adobe Social Supports Instagram, LinkedIn, And More, Plus Predictive Capabilities
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Anthony Ha
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Adobe says version 3.0 of , its set of tools for social marketing, is going live right now. When I met with Bill Ingram, vice president of product management for digital marketing, and Emi Hofmeister, senior manager of product marketing, they said Adobe Social is part of a larger effort to revamp Adobe’s marketing products. Last year, they conducted surveys about how the company was doing, and they discovered, as paraphrased by Ingram, that “we’re kind of hard to do business with.” One reason: With 26 different products (and that’s just on the marketing side), it was hard to know what to buy. So Adobe consolidated the line down to five core products — Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Media Optimizer, and yes, Adobe Social, which . (If less than a year doesn’t seem like enough time to reach version 3.0, that’s because the version that came out last fall was technically considered Adobe Social 2.0. Because reasons.) As for what’s actually new, Adobe Social now includes support for Flickr, Foursquare, Instagram, and LinkedIn. (That’s on top of previous support for Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter.) The new integrations include full access to Foursquare’s firehouse of data and the ability to both publish to and analyze from LinkedIn Pages and Groups. In addition, the predictive publishing capabilities that were have gone live, giving publishers tips about what kind of social media content they should publish and when so that they can improve their engagement. And it uses , which makes it easy for different teams to collaborate across Adobe’s various marketing products. To illustrate the new experience, Hofmeister took me through an example. As a hypothetical online publisher, she spotted a trending topic, formulated a post on that topic linking to a relevant article, looked at the full calendar of scheduled posts, scheduled the post for an empty slot, got a recommendation for a better time to publish, then scheduled her post. Thanks to new “parent-child” authoring capabilities, she was able to just write one post and push it to all social networks, customizing as necessary. And then, of course, she could track whether that post was to driving the results that she was interested in and use that data to do better next time.
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Publicis And Omnicom Are Merging To Form A $35.1B Advertising Leviathan
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Ingrid Lunden
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Today and , two of the “big five” global advertising and marketing agencies, a “merger of equals”, in which the two will combine to create the world’s biggest agency, with some $22.7 billion in annual revenues and a market capitalization of $35.1 billion. The pair say that the new Publicis Omnicom Group initially will be jointly run by the two existing CEOs, John Wren from Omnicom and Maurice Levy from Publicis, and headquartered both in New York and Paris, with a holding company HQ in the Netherlands. The companies will trade publicly as ONC (currently Omnicom’s symbol) on both the NYSE and Euronext. The confirmation — after of the deal swirled earlier this week — was delivered today in a press conference on a hot Sunday summer afternoon in Paris — a slightly oxymoronic setting for a megadeal. “For many years, we have had great respect for one another as well as for the companies we each lead. This respect has grown in the past few months as we have worked to make this combination a reality. We look forward to co-leading the combined company and are excited about what our people can achieve together for our clients and our shareholders,” the co-CEOs said together. If Google is the world’s biggest digital advertising network, the merger of these two will create an advertising megacorp that will be the world’s biggest provider of advertising to feed that machine. It will be twice the size of its nearest rival, WPP. While there are two other agencies in addition to these, Interpublic and Havas, they are significantly smaller. This will lead, inevitably, to antitrust scrutinty from regulators. Today, the companies, both already global operators, noted that they will need regulatory approval in 41-46 countries. “We are not expecting anything that would prevent us from going forward,” Wren said at the press conference (according to ). “We are confident that we will get regulatory approvals,” Levy also noted. It may also spur more merger activities among other players. Without a doubt, the history of the ad industry has been one of ongoing consolidation, and in that regard this seems like a logical and inevitable step. Some of the agencies that were once rivals and will now coexist under one owner will include BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, Leo Burnett, Razorfish, Publicis Worldwide, Fleishman-Hillard, DigitasLBi, Ketchum, StarcomMediaVest, OMD, BBH, Interbrand and ZenithOptimedia, with clients covering some of the world’s biggest buyers of advertising, including mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, drinks companies like Coca-Cola, financial services companies like Visa, and many more. The companies say they will have “efficiences” of $500 million as a result of the deal; whether that will lead to layoffs or closures has yet to be announced. But while this plays to type in some regards, the world of advertising and marketing is also up against growth of other disruptive forces, for example the change in consumer habits brought about by the internet. That has taken the rug out from some of the more traditional formats for advertising, such as print media, and pushed more spend towards digital formats like the internet and mobile advertising. These are still relatively smaller players in the wider advertising ecosystem: worldwide there will be about . But if you break out a newer area like mobile advertising, it’s expected to be just under $9 billion this year globally, . Still, the smart money sees the writing on the wall. TV advertising dominates today, , but it has grown by just 3.5% so far this year while Internet has gone up by 26.3%. The IAB estimated that mobile will go up by 83% this year. Publicis and Omnicom’s rival WPP projects that by 2018, 40% of ad spend that it oversees will come from digital. That is driving a number of and , but it is also fuelling the rise of a new kind of advertising company focused around advertising technology (ad tech) to better measure, leverage and distribute ads in these new mediums. The rise of digital media is also dovetailing with the growth of advertising and digital opportunities in emerging markets like China, South America, India and so on. All of this plays strongly into the technology and startup ecosystem, both in terms of the companies that are growing up around these innovations, but also because such a large part of the tech world is built around the consumer internet, and much of the consumer internet is built on free, ad-based models. Consolidation of players like Omnicom and Publicis speaks to a growing desire to better scale and consolidate on the kinds of returns at can be made from newer platforms like the internet.
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Josh Constine
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By Wrapping Sensors In A Plushie, “Teddy The Guardian” Aims To Sell Medical Tech For Kids
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Eliza Brooke
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In only a few months, the founders of , a medical technology start-up based out of Zagreb, Croatia, have developed and launched what they’re marketing as medical sensor technology for children. But unlike the sleek , this one takes the form of a teddy bear. The product is called a plushie installed with sensors that measure heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and temperature, and then relay that data via Bluetooth to a parent’s phone. The sensors are scattered around the bear’s body; pressing a finger to the bear’s paw, for instance, takes heart rate and oxygen levels. The idea behind disguising medical tech as a lovable toy is to provide parents and pediatricians more accurate, consistent data points. When a child is stressed out about going to the doctor, his or her vital signs will be skewed. Taking data points when the child is in a neutral emotional state can give doctors a wealth of good information to compare against when something is wrong. Of course, the bear is just as much a tool for keeping parents attuned to their child’s general well-being as it is a medical device. IDerma co-founder Josipa Majić said that for busy parents who don’t have as much time to connect with their kids, the data can show when their child’s day has been particularly stressful or problematic. Later versions of Teddy will be equipped with sensors specific to different medical conditions, Majić said. Blood sugar level measurements for diabetic children, for instance. While the United States and Europe comprise Teddy the Guardian’s primary markets, China and India are also of interest. The increase in disposable income in rapidly developing countries has resulted in more money spent on a family’s first-born child, Majić said. “We see the mommy community in the developing world as the quite the disrupters. They spend at least some time, up to 8 hours a day, on their cell phones and smartphones. 90 and even 91% [of their time] in China. In India, they believe tech makes them a better mom.” Teddy the Guardian has already cleared its biggest hurdle: getting FDA approval on the medical technology. Although IDerma has its own sensors, Majić said they opted to outsource sensor development to another healthcare company, the name of which she declined to give. The reason is simply because going through FDA and CE approval processes are expensive — too much so for a start-up. To get the green light, a company needs a very competent legal team, Majić said, which most cannot afford. “These regulations are really start-up unfriendly. I would even say hostile,” she said. It is difficult for U.S.-based start-ups to get approved by the FDA, she said, not to mention those from Central or Eastern Europe. In Europe, each country has its own legal specifications, which requires an even bigger legal team. The company is currently bootstrapped, funded by IDerma’s past projects. Majić said they were considering either launching a crowdfunding campaign or applying to accelerators in London and Silicon Valley. They have, however, begun taking pre-orders and are talking with several multinational companies. Outside of health trackers like Jawbone Up, Scanadu is the main competition in the world of medical tricorders for consumers, though Teddy the Guardian occupies a distinct space in its focus on pediatrics. Having FDA approval on the sensors is a leg up, meaning Teddy may be able to get out on the market before competing medical devices proliferate too much.
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