title
stringlengths 2
283
⌀ | author
stringlengths 4
41
⌀ | year
int64 2.01k
2.02k
| month
int64 1
12
| day
int64 1
31
| content
stringlengths 1
111k
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gov’t Analysis Startup FiscalNote Enlists Former Cabinet Secretary Lu And Elsevier’s Chi As Advisors
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
, a startup that promises to help businesses track and predict state and local legislation, is announcing that it has brought on two prominent advisors — former White House Cabinet Secretary for Barack Obama, and , chairman of publishing company Elsevier. The startup was founded by , former president of the 750,000-member youth lobbying group called . Hwang said that many businesses need to follow state and local laws and regulations that may affect them, as well as things like court cases and speeches. Most of the information is online, somewhere, but to actually track everything, “they need to hire different interns hitting refresh on all 50 states to find updated legislation in their specific verticals.” So FiscalNote pulls this data from public sources and gathers it all in one place. For pending legislation, it even analyzes bills based on past voting history to predict the likelihood that they’ll actually pass. By bringing on Lu and Chi, Hwang now has some validation from big names with government and publishing experience. (Hwang suggested that he has already been talking to publishers and news organizations, and that this could also be seen as a more efficient approach to the work of a local government reporter — a comparison that both impresses and pains me, since that’s how I started my career.) Hwang provided email statements from his new advisors, with Lu describing FiscalNote as “an exciting project that has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses and advocacy groups learn about state and local policy” and Chi saying that the company’s “vision for the government information market is both compelling and needed.” FiscalNote is currently looking for a few beta testers now, with plans for a full launch in September, Hwang said. The company is backed by the Plug and Play Startup Camp.
|
YC-Backed Orbs CCG Takes To Kickstarter To Reinvent Magic: The Gathering For Asynchronous Online Play
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Hey, remember Magic: The Gathering? Maybe you’re like me and you played the game religiously as a teenager, only to abandon it as you got older. (For those of you don’t know what I’m talking about: It’s a collectible card game in a fantasy setting. Also: Stop looking at me like I’m weird.) Jeff Pickhardt, founder of Y Combinator-backed developer , loved Magic too. He said he used to play, then after stopping for a while, he tried to pick it up again, but he found “just kind of hard to use for a number of reasons.” At the same time, he was playing Words With Friends, and he realized that collectible card games could be improved by cribbing from the Words With Friends playbook. There’s one big drawback to playing Magic Online, he said — for complicated reasons involving spells and counterspells (don’t ask), the games have to take place in real-time. But wouldn’t it be great if you could play asynchronously? It might seem like a minor improvement, but I still remember my first time playing Words With Friends and thinking, “Holy crap, I don’t have to wait for my fried to take their turn! Holy crap, I could sneak turns in !” Pickhardt is betting that his upcoming game, , will be similarly liberating for players of Magic and other collectible card games. And with its convenient gameplay, it could lure new and lapsed players into the fold, too. Pickhardt comes from the tech world, having worked for Optimizely and Google. One thing that’s missing from his resumé — actual game design experience. Yet he’s doing most of the work himself, down to writing the “flavor text” that connects the cards to the game’s larger story and setting. He said he’s drawing on his experience as a serious player of collectible card games, and when he sat down to create Orbs, he took a close look at what worked and what didn’t in other titles. He also recruited Tom Martell, game designer and winner of the Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Gatecrash (a tournament Jerpix describes as “the Wimbledon of Magic”), to help. And now they’re hoping to raise at least $40,000 for the game’s development. Even though Jerpix has funding from Y Combinator, Pickhardt said it’s not enough to build the game. Plus, he’s hoping to use Kickstarter to connect with the larger gaming community. And the campaign addresses one of the questions you may be asking: Is this just a ripoff of Magic? Or, as the Kickstarter FAQ puts it: “Asynchronous play is becoming more and more standard. What differentiates Orbs CCG?” Here’s the answer: Orbs CCG strikes a delicate balance between a complex, strategic gameplay, while still allowing for asynchronous play. The game has not been dumbed down. For instance, there is a colored resource system in the game, which is important to strategic deck building and gameplay. It also has a number of unique innovations, including spreading combat over two turns, the Bench and the energy system. It is also the first ever HTML5 collectible card game, playable through any browser. The benefit? It’s much quicker and simpler to play your turns throughout the day, from within a browser, rather than having to install software, download all the cards, and launch the game. It might not seem like that big a deal, but reducing the friction to playing the game makes it more compelling to play more frequently. I also asked if Pickhardt sees Orbs as just the first title as he turns Jerpix into a larger game company. Instead, he said he hopes to turn this into an “evergreen” title, where he continues releasing new content that keeps players engaged.
|
Online Grocery Store Redmart Raises Series A Round To Stay Put In Singapore
|
Victoria Ho
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Singaporean online grocery store, , just raised an undisclosed Series A round that is “in the millions”, according to co-founder and CEO Roger Egan. Together with this funding amount, its previous three seed rounds add up to $4.6 million. Redmart will also raise its next round before the year is up, said Egan. When asked why it plans to do so so soon, rather than wait to close a bigger round this time, he said: “We believe we can increase our valuation a lot in the next six months, so we didn’t want to raise too much right now.” He said Redmart’s tech team just updated its e-commerce platform and warehouse management system, and has rolled out an . “We believe these improvements will have a significant impact on our valuation in a bigger round,” he said. Its Series A is likely to be about $3 million, going by reports which have at $1.29 million. This round was led by Singapore-based gaming firm, . Skype co-founder participated in two of the seed rounds, and in the Series A said Egan. Previous rounds also included and . Unlike many startups coming out of the island nation, this Series A won’t go towards expanding out of the country to neighbors in Southeast Asia. “I know Singapore is a small market, so most startups want to expand out, first thing. But for fast-moving goods, it’s a $5.2 billion market in Singapore alone,” said Egan. By fast-moving goods, he means groceries and sundries. The two-year-old company just did $5 million in annual sales, and customer retention rates are “high”, with users returning 1.5 times a month on average to make purchases, he said. Redmart stocks about 8,000 products on its site. Users who spend more than $59 (S$75) per basket get shipping free, so it’s likely that each order exceeds that amount. He wouldn’t state how many active users Redmart has, but said it has about 10,000 registered users in its database. Redmart carries commonly-found brands like Nestle and Kellogg’s in its grocery section, as well as Dettol and Fab in household cleaning sundries. Egan said its first big agreement was with Unilever, which owns brands like Dove, Lipton and Ben & Jerry’s. “After Unilever signed up, it was easy to get other brands on board,” he said. Egan plans to use the company’s new funding injection to continue work on its logistics software. It built its warehousing management and transportation software in-house, and its 11 vans are outfitted with Android-based devices that do delivery route optimization and communicate with the warehouse. “We had to build the logistics software ourselves because our typical basket size is about 30 items. A fashion store like might have an average basket of one or two items. Packing and transportation can be a real challenge at larger scale,” said Egan. Redmart has about 25 people working in its office, and 50 in its warehouse. It just announced a set of hires this month: Tim Klem, who used to be the product manager of logistics at ’90s dotcom Webvan (which in 2001); Trudy Fawcett, who was a buyer at Sainsburys supermarkets in the UK, and Howie Chang, who was head of UX and design at Andreessen Horowitz-funded startup Viki. Last year, Redmart hired Todd Kurie, former marketing director at eBay, as its vice president for marketing. “We were lucky to have these people in Singapore already,” said Egan. Klem was at SAP and Curie was at social media startup before they joined Redmart. Egan founded Redmart together with , that he met during the MBA program at INSEAD Singapore.
|
Startups, I Give Up On You For Today
|
Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Startups, I just give up on you for today. Because after whatever happened in this , the office arrival of that some company made of co-editor Eric Eldon, Susan Hobbs and me ( is wearing a ) and I just received calling me old, I think we should all just take a break for a second here and rethink our core purpose and meaning in life. If anyone needs me, I will be donning my real-life pantsuit and applying to this position. Because clearly the Internet world needs more junk in it.
|
Young Mad Scientist Super Awesome Sylvia Is Kickstarting A Robotic Watercolor Set
|
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
A 12-year-old maker named (she is quite super awesome) is looking for $50,000 to build a robotic watercolor set, the , that can draw nearly anything you design in a computer paint program. Asking why you don’t just take brush to paint pot with your hand is irrelevant — this, friends, is a robotic watercolor plotter. ‘Nuff said. Sylvia is working with to build the kits, and a pledge of $275 gets you a WaterColorBot that acts just like an old-fashioned chart plotter. It is nearly complete and EMSL writes: The system “paints” vector-based files in SVG format, so you’ll need to find applicable pictures that can be easily resized. However, it shouldn’t be a problem to mass-produce your notes to Grandma or that wonderful vector graphic of your pet cat.
|
Reddit Insight Is An Awesome Hack That Reveals How The Internet’s ‘Front Page’ Really Works
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Anyone who has had their website get some traction on knows that it truly lives up to its “front page of the Internet” — the kind of traffic the site drives can be remarkable. But the process by which a link takes off on the site is still pretty mysterious. For the most part, you submit something to Reddit, and cross your fingers and hope that it gets some attention. Well, a cool new hack called finally sheds some light on the methods behind Reddit’s madness. Developed by a who are in the current class at the San Francisco-based programming bootcamp , Reddit Insight draws on Reddit’s open API to display tons of analytics about Reddit, such as how submissions perform over time, what topics are trending in each sub-Reddit, and so on. It’s a nifty site to browse through casually (did you know that despite the Internet’s reputation for being , photos of dogs are actually more prevalent than cat photos on Reddit?) but it’s also a very cool tool that could be used for professional purposes. It’s no surprise that in the few days since Reddit Insight was launched this past weekend, the site has attracted a ton of attention from folks in the programming world on and , as well as from people . So we invited a couple of the developers behind Reddit Insight, and , to stop by TechCrunch TV to give us a hands-on look at the project and talk a bit about how they built it. Check it out in the video embedded above.
|
Casual Game Developer Arkadium Gets On The HTML5 Train
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Casual games company is announcing today that it’s supporting HTML5 games in its Arena Network. In other words, the company is finally acknowledging the need to move on from Flash. The news seems inevitable — and, if anything, a bit late. Back in 2011, Adobe, the company behind Flash, seemed to accept the fact that the technology wasn’t going to make the transition to smartphones and tablets, and . Arkadium co-founder Kenny Rosenblatt said that while his company “dipped its toe in the water” by porting some of its games to the more mobile-friendly HTML5 format two years ago, mobile traffic wasn’t significant enough to justify a full-scale shift. However, he said Arkadium was tracking traffic trends “very closely,” and what was once 5 percent of traffic “quickly became unignorable” when it got up to 10 or 20 percent. For his part, Rosenblatt still doesn’t sound entirely happy about the switch. He praised Flash as “a really strong platform” for games, one that HTML5 doesn’t yet match. “I was hoping that Adobe would stand up for this technology,” he said. Arkadium is 13 years old, but it recently . Its Arena Network is a platform that brings casual gaming to other digital properties, including and . Arkadium is also announcing as a new partner using the HTML5 platform.
|
Venturocket Grabs $700K To Kill Resume Spam, Build A Better “Pay-Per-Connection” Jobs Marketplace
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
With the war for talent alive and well and jobs sites continuing to leave more than a little to be desired, San Francisco-based is announcing today that it has raised $700K in Series A financing for its unique spin on matching job seekers with the most relevant opportunities. The round was led by Runa Capital, with contributions from Talent Equity Ventures, an affiliate of Ward Howell, and AnchorFree co-founder and CEO, David Gorodyansky. In turn, the startup also said that it will be adding former BranchOut executive Michael DeVerna to its advisory board. Instead of offering the same old model of applying for jobs, the startup wants to be a “talent discovery platform,” eschewing posting fees, premium accounts and subscriptions for what Venturocket founder Marc Hoag calls a “market-based” approach to matching job seekers to the right employer. In other words, rather than casting the net wide and applying to every job post they can find, Venturocket is attempting to create a more accurate way for job seekers to self-evaluate and for employers to determine value. The less noise and the less spam the better. The model may seem a bit confusing to those used to the traditional approach to job boards, à la Monster.com or Indeed.com, but it’s actually fairly simple. Allowing everyone on the planet to apply for jobs and connect with employers for free is great in principle, but it doesn’t exactly help employers find the best talent, nor does it help solve the noise pollution. So, Venturocket proposes a model in which job seekers fill out their profiles on the site, claiming tags and levels of skill and view matches based on those skills. Employers can also peruse those candidates and then reach out to those they’re interested in, but the kicker is that each side only pays to use the platform (and for those matches), once they’re made. Typically, this “validation cost,” as Hoag calls it, is just a few dollars and is “equal to the market value” of those matching skills and experiences. If no match is made, then neither side pays. Hoag believes that this model is more fair to employers especially and more reflective of how things actually work today in recruiting. The industry is moving towards easier ways to recruit passive job seekers and away from blanket emails and spam — as it should. Hoag believes that, alongside tools like Entelo, Venturocket can help push things in the right direction. The other potentially appealing part of the startup’s model is that people don’t actually increase their visibility by artificially padding their skills or resumes. Hoag believes that, in comparison to LinkedIn which “shamelessly promotes wealthier job seekers to the top of applicant piles without necessarily producing any good leads,” the pay-per-connection model can be a welcome alternative. For now, Venturocket is focusing on technical talent and placing candidates at positions in the Bay Area (particularly at startups), but Hoag hopes to expand the platform’s scope quickly going forward. The platform is now open to startups and bigger companies, and more than 600 companies are already represented in its marketplace. For more,
|
Stayful Brings The Priceline Model To Boutique Hotels, Letting You Bid On Places To Stay In Realtime
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
There’s a new travel site launching that’s focused on bringing real-time bidding to the boutique hotel market. The site, called , was founded by travel industry veterans from Expedia and Hotels.com and has raised $2.4 million in seed funding to attack the market. The idea behind Stayful is to let users negotiate room rates for unsold inventory at independent or boutique hotels. So it’s created a platform that does just that, providing a listing of available hotels and suggested bids, and then letting the consumer do the work of bidding. To enable this, Stayful is working with various independent or boutique hotels, and scanning available spots to try to determine inventory. Once it’s done that, it algorithmically determines the fair market price of each room and then provides that as the suggested bid price. Users don’t have to take that advice, and hey, they can put in a lowball offer. Of course, the hotel doesn’t have to accept that bid. It can counter with a price of its own, which the user can accept. Or it can shoot down the bid altogether. But once a bid is finally accepted, the traveler gets a discounted rate, the hotels book rooms that would have otherwise stayed empty, and everyone ends up happy. (Yay!) For hotels that aren’t already part of the system, users can submit requests or bids and try to get them on board. It’s, like, one way for Stayful to show that there’s interest in them on the platform. So anyway, why would a traveler want to go through the trouble of bidding on a place when she could just go to a discount travel site or Hotel Tonight or whatever? Because Stayful provides more transparency to travelers who want to stay at a certain type of hotel. Also, it kind of makes them feel awesome to name a price and have a hotel bend to their will. And for hotels? Well they get another way to fill rooms, while also maintaining control over their price. They also significantly lower the cost of obtaining new customers. Stayful was founded by travel industry veterans Cheryl Rosner and Shariq Minhas. Rosner is CEO, after previously serving as president of Expedia Corporate Travel and Hotels.com, while Minhas led engineering at Jigsaw, and worked for travel sites Expedia and Hotwire. The company has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Canaan Partners, and counts Joie de Vivre founder Chip Conley and Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson as advisors.
|
Intel Misses In Q2 2013, Reports EPS Of $0.39 And Revenue Of $12.8 Billion
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Intel reported its fiscal Q2 2013 earnings a few moments ago, and they just fell short of analyst predictions. The legendary chipmaker reported earnings of $0.39 per share and $12.8 billion in revenue (down 5 percent from the year-ago quarter) this time around. According to the consensus provided by and , analysts expected the company to report earnings of $0.40 per share on $12.9 billion in revenue. While it’s a seemingly mild miss, some of Intel’s most important divisions saw some unsettling drops — its PC Client group, for instance, accounted for $8.1 billion of that pie up 1.4 percent, but that figure is down 7.5 percent from last year. Intel has spent what seems like ages now trying to revitalize itself while people continue to pass over more traditional PCs in favor of tablets and smartphones. Estimates released earlier this month by the analysts at Gartner didn’t paint a terribly positive picture — while the decline wasn’t as pronounced as it was during the quarter that preceded it, in global PC shipments. Some fresh blood in the chief executive’s seat may well turn things around, and the person tapped to take over the role after Paul Otellini’s departure seems keen to accelerate Intel’s mobile position. In response to a marked consumer shift away from more traditional PCs, newly installed Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told in late June that the company would focus more heavily on its mobile Atom platform to keep Intel in fighting shape in the mobile space. That’s not much of a surprise considering how heavily Intel played up Atom-powered tablets in its corner of this year’s CES, but Krzanich is reportedly holding weekly meetings to speed up the process of developing and improving those Atom chips. That said, the company still has high hopes for its recently released line of Haswell chips, which are meant to pull double duty both in notebooks and in tablets (like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab III). Of course, Intel is entertaining some more obtuse possibilities, too. Murmurs of a TV service meant to compete with cable providers have become more pronounced — it’s reportedly going to be called and is said to launch before the end of the year. Also reportedly on the table is the notion of manufacturing chips for other companies, though there’s been little word on how strongly Intel is considering that option. Looking forward, Intel expects to generate $13.5 billion in revenue next quarter, though CFO Stacy Smith said in an addendum that the company expects “the overall PC market segment for 2013 to be weaker than we expected at the beginning of the year.” As always, Intel will be holding an earnings conference call at 5 p.m. Eastern/2 p.m. Pacific. I’ll update the post if anyone says anything tantalizing.
|
Driven By Marketplace And PayPal Growth, eBay’s Q2 Revenue Up 14 Percent To $3.9B
|
Leena Rao
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
As expected, eBay decent financial results in Q2 2013 today. Revenue was up 14% to $3.9 billion, compared to the same period of 2012. The company reported second quarter net income on a GAAP basis of $640 million, or $0.49 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income of $822 million, or $0.63 per diluted share. GAAP Net Income was actually down 6 percent in the quarter. The marketplace and e-commerce company was to post earnings at $0.63 per share, on revenue of $3.9 billion, so expectations were in-line with what was reported. “We had a strong second quarter, with $51 billion of enabled commerce volume across Marketplaces, PayPal and eBay Enterprise driving double-digit revenue and earnings growth,” said eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahoe. “Macroeconomic headwinds in Europe and Korea will continue to be a challenge in the second half of the year. But our core businesses are strong and we continue to attract millions of new customers each quarter through mobile innovation. We remain confident in our ability to meet our goals and drive global commerce innovation and leadership.” Total commerce across all of ebYa’s platforms, including Marketplaces, PayPal and eBay Enterprise (formerly GSI Commerce) was up 21% for the quarter, to $51 billion. Cross-border trade in the second quarter was $11 billion, representing 22% of the company’s total ECV. Mobile attracting 3 million new customers in the quarter and is growing at more than 90%. PayPal revenue increased 20% to $1.6 billion and the payments arm gained 4.7 million active registered accounts in the period and ended the quarter with 132 million, a 17% increase. PayPal’s net total payment volume (TPV) grew 24% to $43 billion driven by consumer and merchant use of PayPal both on and off eBay. Marketplaces saw revenue of $2 billion, increasing 10%, or 12% excluding the gain from the resolution of an indirect tax dispute in 2012. Marketplaces gained 3.5 million active users in the period and ended the quarter with 120 million, a 14% increase. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), excluding vehicles, increased 13% to $18 billion. Fixed price GMV grew 17% globally and represented 69% of total GMV. U.S. GMV, excluding vehicles, increased 16% to $7.3 billion driven by mobile and momentum in the parts & accessories and home & garden categories. International GMV, excluding vehicles, increased 11% to $11 billion, showing stable growth while facing a tougher macroeconomic environment. eBay Enterprise contributed $246 million in revenue for the second quarter, an 11% increase. eBay has not seen net income drop over the past few quarters, so it should be interesting to see what Donahoe says about this on the call. In late March, Donahoe eBay’s revenue to grow to a whopping $23.5 billion in 2015. The three areas where the company is going to be betting on include expanding globally, investing in local commerce, and developing additional mobile apps. In June, the company revealed that it was planning a partnership with Kate Spade that to a “pop up” shop with a gigantic touchscreen, “shoppable” store windows. eBay also Belgian classifieds company 2dehands.be last month. PayPal is also focusing on growth, acquiring PayPal also and program to encourage merchants to switch to PayPal-powered point-of-sale solutions.
|
Audiodraft, The Crowdsourcing Platform For Sound And Music, Raises $400K From 500 Startups, Promus
|
Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
, a platform where brands or anybody else can commissions custom music or sounds, just closed $400,000 in a funding round led by 500 Startups and Promus Ventures. The best analogy for what the startup does is 99Designs for sound. Founded three years ago, the company has grown a community of about 20,000 sound designers and music composers who are available to create music or sounds for different advertising agencies and clients on commission. There’s also a library on-hand tracks so that customers can drop by and buy licenses for music for . Then there’s also a way to host contests. (Here’s an from “Four Hour Work Week” author Tim Ferriss, who was looking for music to pair with a teaser video for the “Four Hour Chef.”) Audiodraft of the prize money and a $99 listing fee. With the round, the company is also bringing on a few advisors including Trulia co-founder Sami Inkinen and TaskRabbit vice president of engineering Yee Lee. They’ll use the funding to make a few additional hires in San Francisco and Helsinki and build out a new Agency Studios service. That product is really built for brand and advertising agencies globally that want to have more control over managing current productions and who they work with on the platform. That product will eventually cost $99 per month. The company has grown to about 1,000 registered customers and the average amount they end up charging clientele is about $1,200 with $1,000 going toward the sound designer and the rest going to Audiodraft. CEO Teemu Yli-Hollo, who is also a Finnish rapper, says that there are artists on the platform who are making enough money to pay for their living costs. The company’s now looking for a product manager, business manager and community manager in San Francisco and a product engineer in Helsinki.
|
Liquor.com Raises $3.1 million In Series B Funding
|
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
If you ask me you don’t mess around with people like that you get out of the room and then you get into the car and go home you don’t call nobody you know or whatever, right? So I’m talking with Suffolk Equity Partners, some people out of Cambridge, and they got some investments, right and they invest in and it’s a site for liquor and news about liquor and recipes and whatever, you know? Right. Dot com. What else, right? Everybody’s a genius. And I said I said no, it’s not going to be just liquor, right? Because these kids can’t drink liquor anymore because they want craft beers and wines and stuff and they says liquor dot com, l-i-q-u-o-r, right? Is a great domain name or whatever and was expensive so it’s mixology is what they call it now so it’s a whole site dedicated to liquor. Right. Crazy. So they raise $3.1 million from these Suffolk guys and some other guys out of Cambridge, too, called Typha, and some folks who are got “influential roles in the beverage alcohol industry,” you hear me? It goes all the way to the top. So they got all this money and now they gotta do something with it, right? They got a James Beard award, which is some fancy thing, and they go some money in the bank but they got to expand, see? Right? And this is series B so the money is going to platform “expansion” and ” extending audience reach online across social media and mobile platforms” like them Facebooks or whatever. What’re you drinking? Manhattan? Make it two, please. Yeah, Maker’s Mark or whatever is closest. And some of those nuts over there. Thanks. So they got 1.3 million visitors a month, which isn’t shabby for a booze vertical, and I guess they’re going to use the money to get more drunker and see what happens, right? Boombedoom, right? Drinky uppy. So that’s the story of liquor dot com. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that junk when we had the chance. I could tell them a little about booze. Anyway, how’s your Dad. He was fly fishing or whatever. Oh. Yeah, not your Dad, Edith’s Dad. He’s not dead, right? No, didn’t think so. I’ll get this round. You get next.
|
ColAR Uses Augmented Reality To Bring Your Kid’s Drawing To Life
|
Greg Kumparak
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
I would’ve written this earlier, but I was busy picking pieces of my mind up off the floor. I get to write about cool stuff all day, but this… this is incredible. colAR is the coloring book of the future. By mashing up traditional coloring books with some good ol’ augmented reality voodoo, colAR brings your drawings to life in full, animated 3d. I’m going to put some words down below this video because that’s my job, but seriously, just watch this (though preferably with your own soundtrack): [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmfXgvT9h3s?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] First, you go to colAR’s web site and print out your coloring page of choice (the free app usually comes with one option included and a few others available for in-app purchase, but their full catalog is free until July 28th). Note that you’ve got to use their coloring page templates — they didn’t make something that can magically convert just any 2D drawing to a rich, animated 3D model, or they’d be too busy sailing around on their mega yachts to be making (super rad) coloring books. After you’ve printed out the page, bust out that old art box. Color it in with markers, crayons, or any other tool you’d normally use to do some colorin’. Once you’re done, pop open the app, and hit the “Play” button to bring up a camera view. Hold your drawing up to the camera, and bam! It takes your work of art and wraps it around an animated 3D model. If you picked the bird, it’ll roam around the page and peck for worms. If you picked the plane, it’ll fly around as the clouds whiz by. I like to think that I built , but this one is pretty much perfect. It uses AR in a clever way, but it also does something that would be more or less impossible AR. Awesome. If you’re curious as to how it works: it looks like they’re using Unity for the 3D rendering engine, and Qualcomm’s Vuforia framework for the image recognition. The app is free on both the and the . (If you notice a slight decrease in posts today, it’s because a good chunk of the TC staff is busy coloring. Whatever, it’s Friday eventually.) [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV6kqnXb6v8?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]
|
More Tickets Are Now Available For The 8th Annual August Capital Party In Silicon Valley
|
Matt Burns
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
|
Ready, set, click. We just released one of the last batches of tickets to our annual party at August Capital. Space is very limited. The deck at August Capital’s beautiful Sand Hill Road office can only hold so many entrepreneurs, founders, VCs, and tech nerds. The party is from at 5:30 to 9:00 on July 26. Tickets are $80 and include drinks and food. TechCrunch parties are a thing of legend. Case in point, back when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington used to hold these ragers in his Atherton back yard; Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith met one of their first investors, DFJ. In 2010, we spotted 500 Startups’ Dave McClure writing a check to then stealthy startup Tello (which was recently bought by Urban Airship in December) at the August Capital party. If you’re not able to make it to Sand Hill Road, TechCrunch is bringing much of the magic to our regional Meetups + Pitch-Offs. We’re visiting and . Tickets are almost sold out for Seattle’s meetup.
|
Pitchfork Media Launches The Dissolve, A Movie Site Looking To Break Out Of The Online Hype Cycle
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
Pitchfork Media, the company behind the music site that all my cool friends used to read (I use the past tense because, like me, my friends have gotten old and uncool), just launched a new property — , a site that’s all about movies. When I loaded up The Dissolve earlier today, my first feeling was one of familiarity. That’s usually something you want in a new property, but in this case, it was good thing — I was happy to see the bylines of several writers I used to read at one of my favorite arts and entertainment sites, . The Dissolve was founded by Keith Phipps, who previously edited The A.V. Club, its editor Scott Tobias was film editor at The A.V. Club, and yes, Phipps appears to have done a good job of bringing several of the writers from his old gig over to the new one. Phipps told me that he started dreaming up The Dissolve after in December. As he tried to figure out what he was going to do next, Phipps realized that what he was most excited about was “getting back into film” — movies are a big part of the coverage at The A.V. Club, but they’re mixed in with TV, music, and more. The Dissolve is aiming to be all movies, all the time. Not that the Internet is exactly lacking when it comes to movie sites. Phipps said he thinks are “tons of great film websites” out there, but he had his own vision for “kind of a place to hang out and read about and talk about movies.” He noted that for many sites, there’s a bit of a “hype cycle,” where they’ll post every trailer and every piece of news or speculation about a big movie, but once it’s actually out in theaters, the discussion dies off. “We’re not going to be out of the game entirely,” Phipps acknowledged, but he said he wants to dial the hype down a bit and mix things like posting trailers with in-depth discussions of movies old and new. One example of that approach is a series called the Movie of the Week, where, as the name implies, The Dissolve will run a number of pieces throughout the week discussing different aspects of a single film. And it doesn’t look like these are going to be the latest blockbusters — the first selection is , the second will be . You can read about some of the other planned features in As for building a community, The Dissolve hasn’t done anything too novel on the tech side. it comments on stories, of course, and it also has what Phipps called “a very informal partnership” with movie rating service . Phipps added the he’s open to exploring other services that could be added, but he isn’t interested in building a separate forum or social network: “There are enough of those already.” But given the proliferation of online film criticism, much of it done for free, isn’t the news- and aggregation-based model the one that makes economic sense? Phipps said that to a large extent, he lets other folks to handle the business side — though in the initial stages he did have to convince Pitchfork, particularly Pitchfork President Chris Kaskie, that The Dissolve could be a moneymaking proposition. More broadly, Phipps quoted his aforementioned editor Scott Tobias and suggested that there’s “a real estate bubble when it comes to pageviews in film.” He said he’s discouraged when he sees “variations on the same story aggregated on linked to on every site” and that an approach that values pageviews and nothing else is “disastrous for creativity.” “I hope we’ll build a quality audience that our advertisers think is worth reaching, rather than just going for the numbers,” Phipps said.
|
Rental Car Startup Silvercar Raises $5M As It Looks At New Markets
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
, a startup looking to improve the rental car experience at airports, has raised $5 million in new funding. The news was revealed in a filing with . A Silvercar spokesperson declined to identify the investors who participated in the round, but they sent me the following statement from CEO Luke Schneider: The equity capital will be used to commence operations in additional markets and develop our offering for rapid expansion. In just six months since launching at DFW, Silvercar has grown to serve four locations, and we plan to aggressively open at more each quarter. earlier this year — a premium rental car experience that allows customers to use their smartphones to make reservations and even unlock the car. Ryan said he had “hands down the quickest time from airport terminal to getting into a rental car that you can possibly imagine” and a similarly easy time returning the car. Here’s how he characterizes the overall experience: For urban transportation, there’s Uber. In the hotel industry, there are places like the W. In air travel, there’s now Blackjet. Each costs a premium over standard or economy options, but promise a better, premium experience to users. There didn’t exist any comparable offering in the rental car industry before this. That’s one reason Schneider and the company’s investors think the startup will prosper in what is generally a commodified marketplace. Silvercar’s expansion efforts have been focused on Texas thus far, with availability in Houston, Austin and Dallas. The company previously from Austin Ventures, SV Angel, Chris Dixon, Dave Morin, and CrunchFund (which was founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington).
|
Gillmor Gang Live 07.10.13 (TCTV)
|
Steve Gillmor
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
– Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor.
|
Pantheon Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Collaborative Web Development With New Multidev Feature
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
Drupal-based cloud platform is launching a new feature today called Multidev, which it says addresses the No. 1 request from the developers using the platform — the ability to “fork” every aspect of a web development project so that large teams can collaborate. Co-founders Zack Rosen and Josh Koenig told me one of the big challenges in development is synchronizing the work of large teams, with delays and bugs caused by a “fragmented process.” In a Pantheon , they elaborate: Accurate estimation and cat-herding will always be hard, but these problems from gaps in the toolchain are untenable. Blown deadlines and lost developer productivity have serious real-world consequences — they stretch budgets, fray nerves, reduce business value, and can even put a dev shop out of business. That’s not the cloud. That can’t scale. The need for collaboration tools has been the driver behind , but Rosen (who’s also Pantheon’s CEO) said that GitHub has limitations: “GitHub only cares and knows about your code.” That means all kinds of problems can crop up due to platform differences or outdated databases or content. Koenig said that with Multidev, on the other hand, “When you make a fork, instead of it being another copy of text or code, you get a complete copy of the database, the content files, all the services you have to have to run a website.” Pantheon has already built its own cloud platform for development, and each of those copies runs on that platform via a custom URL, so customers don’t have to spend time setting up their own local environments. The project manager can then merge everyone’s work from their own dashboard without worrying about “It worked on my machine”-type situations. Rosen and Koenig gave me a demo of Multidev, quickly setting up separate project forks and then merging them again. As you can probably guess, I don’t have any direct experience with web development, so the demo went a bit over my head, but I sent the basic information over to , who actually works in the field. He told me that it “actually sounds quite cool” and that he’d consider using it for one of his current projects. Pantheon, which , was built to address many of the problems that Rosen, Koenig, and their co-founder/CTO David Strauss encountered while working as Drupal consultants. Eventually, Rosen said he realized that he wanted to solve those problems with a single technology platform, rather than building custom solutions and “throwing them over the wall.” He added that for many developers, the job of building a website for a large business has become as much about systems administration as it has about development per se — Pantheon can get developers focused on building a great website again while its technology handles everything else, including the hardware, the operating system, and scaling. Multidev will be available to Pantheon’s self-serve and enterprise customers.
|
T-Mobile Reveals $10/Month JUMP Program To Let Users Upgrade Phones Twice A Year
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
T-Mobile has been struggling to position itself not so much as a value carrier, but rather as a carrier that makes it a point not to screw its customers over. To that end, T-Mobile CEO John Legere and CTO Neville Ray unveiled a slew of impressive changes for the magenta-hued carrier, perhaps the biggest of which is the addition of a new phone upgrading scheme. Here’s the long and short of it: under the new JUMP plan, T-Mobile customers can swap their old phones for new phones twice every 12 months after they’ve been enrolled in the JUMP program for at least six months. You don’t get to keep your original device though — you swing by a T-Mobile store to trade in that old phone (as long as it’s in good condition, that is), and the original monthly payments tied to that phone are wiped clean. JUMP also acts like something of an insurance plan, so if you lose or ruin your phone you just pay a variable deductible (it tops out at about ) and the process continues as normal. What’s more, those swapping users will wind up paying the same upfront cost new customers would pay for the same device — T-Mobile’s big thrust here is that users who upgrade their phones should never have to pay more for a new phone than a new customer does. Speaking as someone who has had to defend that practice over years of selling phones that’s a huge deal for consumers, especially considering JUMP will only cost $10 per phone per month once it goes live on July 14. T-Mobile also announced that it has expanded its LTE network significantly, with service now live in 116 metropolitan markets and covering some 157 million people. And since there can’t be a pronounced LTE push without some hardware to go with it, T-Mobile has also confirmed that it will begin carrying the LTE-friendly Sony Xperia Z and Nokia Lumia 925 on July 17. As is often the case though, T-Mobile’s big announcement made the rounds a little early — posted an early peek at the so-called Jump plan hours before T-Mobile CEO John Legere could unveil it himself. Still, T-Mobile’s move stands in stark contrast to what its competitors have been up to lately — both AT&T and Verizon Wireless rejiggered their contract terms so that users would have to wait a full two years to upgrade their devices, up from the 18-20 month upgrade cycle that’s been the norm for years. The last time CEO John Legere took the stage at an event in New York, he passionately ranted about what he saw as predatory pricing practices in the wireless industry and implored rival wireless carriers to “stop the bullshit” — I’m not sure anyone expected his rebuke to be that pointed. This time around, event staff set up a slew of creepy dolls propped up in chairs to evoke AT&T’s kid-friendly commercials so Legere could needle his rival for a overly-simplistic view of the market. “It’s just not getting to the point,” Legere said of AT&T’s ad approach “It’s a lot of say and not a lot of do.” At this point it’s hard to gauge just how well T-Mobile’s “UnCarrier” push has been working for them since the company’s no-contract scheme wasn’t active for all of the quarter covered in their most recent earnings, but some early indicators seem promising. Postpaid subscriber loss (or churn, in industry parlance), was down to a nearly five year low, and Legere is currently on a tear about why things aren’t as bad as people are making them out to be. The post was accidentally published with a speculative draft headline, which was replaced with a more accurate headline to reflect the content of the article.
|
The Plight Of The Intrapreneur, Or How To Be An Innovator From Within
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
At in Montreal this week, one of the noteworthy pieces of data so far is how many non-startup folks are attending workshops ostensibly designed for startups. Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll went out of their way to direct part of their talk regarding their book to attendees who might want to take steps to innovate, but are doing so within an established business as “intrapreneurs” instead of from the vantage point of a startup. Intrapreneurs face the same phases of growth as startup entrepreneurs deal with, per Yoskowitz and Croll, but the nature of each stage and the way they need to be tackled will differ. Applying lean principles within a business requires modification and adaptation; it’s not about just starting up a company within another company, the way it’s sometimes portrayed for big companies like Apple that are said to have maintained a startup mentality among their employees. An intrapreneur has different goals rather than just upsetting the status quo or creating a new product category; that might be what they’re after, but as Croll noted during the talk, they might also be tasked with sustaining existing business; defending their own business against outside innovators; revitalizing a “dog” (low growth, low market share product) or turning a “cash cow” (low growth, high market share) into something with more chance to bring in new customers. Innovation means different things for big companies than it does for small ones, but requires innovation nonetheless. The stages both intrapreneurs or entrepreneurs have to face are the same in general; they need an empathy stage when they sound out their audience needs; a stickiness phase to find and build an MVP; a virality stage where they find out how their product can grow; a revenue stage to prove its fiscal validity; and a scale phase where it starts to grow rapidly For the intrapreneur, however, Yoskovitz says that there’s going to be a peremptory phase where they have to get buy-in from key people in the company to even begin. Then the empathy stage involves finding problems already existing, not testing demand for something. You skip building a business case, and instead you build an analytics picture, find out where the industry is going. Stickiness is about building to a real minimum, which could be restricted by actual regulatory minimums. So for a huge company like MasterCard, the regulatory minimums might be far greater than for a Square because of the size of their existing investment. That’s going to affect how much leeway is available in terms of really building an MVP that can be launched. Virality is about convincing parties that things need to have sharing elements and built-in downloadable products built-in, which can be a challenge in terms of convincing those within the organization to change. On the revenue side, there’s lots more to consider, too. You can’t ignore an existing sales chain or channel, which is why someone like Microsoft can’t just abandon boxed software sales and has to sell a download code on a store shelf. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it’s not something that can easily be ignored, unlike at a startup. Finally with scale, at this stage you don’t just start growing the business you’ve built as an intrapreneur; you generally hand off the baton (what you’ve built) to someone else and lose all ability to steer it. That’s sort of akin to an exit, but really without the big payday to soothe the pain. Increasingly, established businesses want to take advantage of startup impulses and startup mojo to avoid or own their own disruption, and that shows in the attendance at this year’s festival. But in reality, the lessons don’t translate directly; Yoskovitz and Croll articulated that there’s still plenty of value in pursuing lean startup methodology for big companies, but it’s crucial to do so with eyes wide open in order not to get frustrated.
|
The Iconic Picks Up A $26M Round To Build Out Online Fashion In Australia, As Rocket Internet’s Global March Continues
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
, the incubator run by Berlin’s Samwer brothers, has picked up hundreds of millions of dollars ($837 million, in fact) in funding this year for its e-commerce startups, with much of that focused on emerging markets, but today comes news of another significant investment for a far-flung part of the developed world. , a fashion portal serving Australia and New Zealand with clothing, shoes and accessories, is picking up $26 million (A$28 million) in funding. Adding that to the $46 million (A$50 million) already raised, the site becomes the largest-ever investment in an e-commerce site in the country. The round was led by , a family-owned investment group from Belgium, along with existing Iconic shareholders and Rocket regulars Kinnevik and Summit Partners. Adam Jacobs, co-founder and MD of The Iconic, says the investment will be used to build out the site: adding more local as well as international brands, adding more enhancements to the site around user interface and CRM and a long-awaited mobile upgrade. The site is also working to build out what Jacobs refers to as the Iconic’s “fashion community.” This includes the obvious such as social media outreach, but also some offline activities, such as its own printed magazine (retro!) and collaborations for live fashion shows. Jacobs and Rocket are not releasing any numbers yet on the Iconic’s revenues, average basket size or other financial metrics. But Jacobs does confirm that the site, founded in 2011 and now with 4 million monthly users and 45,000 products from 500 brands, is not yet profitable. This is actually very normal in e-commerce terms, he says. “Typically online retailers can take many years to turn a profit, with Amazon first turning a profit in their sixth year for example,” he notes. “In contrast, we are seeing strong growth in the Australian market and are targeting a much faster time frame — the customer response to the Iconic brand and experience has been far stronger we would have imagined. So we are now focused on sustainable growth and are tracking well to our long-term goals.” Those long-term goals, he says, will take the Iconic away from the low-margin sales that people typically associate with online commerce sites that are built more for scale. For one, that’s not possible in a market with a finite amount of consumers in it and no longer term plans to expand outside of Australia and New Zealand. “When we think about sustainable success in online fashion, we think an EBIT margin of 10% is achievable over the long term,” he says, adding that gross margins in fashion are “naturally larger than, say, Amazon’s margins on products such as electronics.” For now, the Iconic has a pretty open playing field in front of it: despite Australia and New Zealand being otherwise on par with other developed countries in terms of Internet, PC and smartphone penetration, e-commerce is still relatively nascent. “We have high Internet penetration and smartphone usage, and high margins on retail fashion, as well as disposable income. But what is underdeveloped in Australia is the e-commerce industry,” says Jacobs. He says that ASOS, the U.K. online retailer, is its biggest competitor. “ASOS targets young female customers, whereas the Iconic caters to a broader audience across women’s and men’s fashion as well as sports. We stock a higher representation of Australian brands as we know our customers love local designers.” . Also working in its favor is that while the company’s addressable market is smaller than that of the U.S., it’s a dedicated user group, in a market where there are still relatively few choices for online fashion. “When we think about scale we know the Australian consumer loves fashion and spends more per capita than almost anywhere else in the world. So while the addressable Australia and New Zealand market is only 30 million people, customers are hungry for great fashion. Additionally fashion e-commerce is growing at approximately 20 percent year-on-year in Australia whilst traditional bricks and mortal retail is flatlining, making this market a very attractive one to be in.” This also sets up the site perfectly for acquisition by a bigger player looking to crack into fashion in the Australian market — a route familiar for the Samwer brothers, who have sold startups to Groupon, eBay and others looking to acquire for international growth. It’s the combination of that opportunity, and the Iconic’s success in meeting its targets so far that have attracted Verinvest and others to the company. ”The Iconic management team has done an exceptional job of growing the company during the past year and we are happy to be investing in this great success story,” said Frédéric de Mevius, founder and chairman of Verlinvest, in a statement. “We have been working towards this investment for some months now and are pleased to confirm our participation.” Like other Rocket Internet colonizations, the Iconic is but one of the startups that the Samwers have established in Australia: these include 21 Diamonds for jewellery; Wimdu (think Airbnb); HelloFresh (think Blue Apron or Plated); and Zanui (online homewares and furniture, à la Fab) — although Jacobs says the Iconic is the biggest of them all right now. It’s here where the company begins to benefit from some economies of scale. The company, like other e-commerce operations, also hopes to stand out in terms of logistics. In its case it offers three-hour delivery in Sydney and free overnight delivery around the rest of Australia, as well as free 100-day returns. It also sublets warehouse space to some of the other Rocket companies for their services.
|
Occipital Releases One Of The First High Quality 3D Scanners For OS X
|
Stephanie Yang
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
While Windows 3D scanning software has until now outperformed any Apple counterpart, Occipital Inc. plans to remedy that today with the launch of for OS X. Originally developed by France-based startup ManCTL, Skanect allows users to create 3D scans on Apple computers using low-cost sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect or ASUS Xtion. ManCTL was in June 2013. Skanect boasts a cheap and easy alternative to creating quick, color 3D scans without a high-end graphics card. It uses the application and a camera sensor to create a 3D image, ready to share or print. Occipital director of marketing Adam Rodnitzky said Skanect has about 3,000 unique monthly active users. In the newest release, Skanect has added the abilities to export texture-mapped models in OBJ and PLY format, adjust the level of detail in exports, VRML export, and improved performance for machines without high-end graphics processing units. While these additions are currently only available for the OS X version, Rodnitzky said they will come to Windows users “soon”. Occipital in its first round of funding led by Foundry Group in 2011. The company also created RedLaser, which was , and 360 Panorama. Skanect has two options available for download: a free version with restrictions on commercial use and exporting, and a purchased version for 99 euro.
|
The Seattle Meetup + Pitch-Off Is On July 18
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
San Diego startups, tech fans, and general citizens, get ready for a night you’ll never forget. We’re bringing for a night of drinking, debauchery, and good old-fashioned tech talk at . Not only will there be fireside chats with some of Seattle’s biggest names in tech, but we’ll be holding a 60-second pitch-off where entrepreneurs can convince a panel of esteemed judges that their product is the bomb. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Those chosen to participate in the Pitch-Off will also get an office hours session with a TechCrunch writer for one-on-one feedback on their pitch and product. If the Pitch-Off seems like your jam, make sure to or with the form below. The event will begin promptly at 6pm and end around 10pm. If you’d like to purchase tickets, head over . They only cost $5 and get you a drink ticket, meaning that we appreciate that you’re 21+ please.
|
With Plug, Create A Personal, Subscription-Free Dropbox With Your USB Drives
|
Romain Dillet
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
Plug just launched a for its $69 adapter. It will transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. Thanks to a deep integration in your filesystem, you won’t have to move your files to a special folder or a virtual hard drive. After launching Plug’s app, everything is transparent and you won’t have to change your workflow. Except that all your devices will now have the same files. Very much like TechCrunch Disrupt alumni , you can cache some folders and files on your local hard drive or stream them from Plug. The only limit in Plug’s case is the amount of storage space you have on your USB drives. Behind the scene, Plug is a small Linux-based machine that creates a VPN network. Then, if you want to access your files from your iPhone, Plug’s client will silently connect to the network and show you all your files. It looks a lot like Dropbox’s app, except that your files are stored at home and you don’t pay a subscription fee. You could say that it’s pretty similar to a network-attached storage device, but with a software trick to replace your entire filesystem. “Our innovation with Plug is a software innovation more than a hardware innovation,” co-founder and CEO Séverin Marcombes told me. “We could have designed this system in the cloud if it weren’t so expensive and so slow,” he continued. After launching the app, all your files will go through Plug. With a USB 2.0 connector and an Ethernet 100 port, it could be a bit slow to stream movies, especially if you have multiple drives plugged into the adapter. That’s why you can cache your files. Even though Plug claims that you can use your files just the way you used to do, this new paradigm will probably take some time before getting used to it. Marcombes compared the caching feature with Spotify’s offline playlist feature, a button that Spotify users already know well. The just started but its goal is pretty low. At $69,000, the Paris-based team will certainly attract a thousand backers to reach its goal. You’ll just have to wait until December before getting your hands on the device.
|
After A Year Of Upgrading Yahoo, CEO Marissa Mayer To Join Us At Disrupt SF
|
Eric Eldon
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo nearly a year ago and has quickly moved to reshape the storied Internet company’s culture and bring in new talent. Starting out, she hired a strong new management team, had a child(!) and altered workplace practices. More recently, she’s been making a huge acquisition push, buying Tumblr for more than $1 billion along with a broad range of other startups, including but not limited to Stamped, Qwiki, Astrid, Ghostbird Software, Summly, and, most recently, Xobni. What’s the big strategy behind all these moves? You’ll get to hear about it directly from her when she comes onstage for an interview at this September. Tickets are , and with our extra early-bird discount going until July 15. Mayer will be joining a top list of industry leaders. We’ve already announced Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and distinguished investor Doug Leone, and we have lots more to come. The conference starts September 7 and runs until the 11 at our favorite location, the San Francisco Design Concourse. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements and a few surprises to be announced soon.
Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Previously as a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer lead the product management and engineering efforts of Google’s local, mobile, and contextual discovery products including Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, Local Search, Google Earth, Street View, Latitude and more. At 36 years old, she was also the youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee. During her 12 years at Google, Marissa led product management and design efforts for Google web search, images, news, books, products, toolbar, and iGoogle. She started at Google in 1999 as Google’s 20th employee and first woman engineer. Marissa’s contributions and leadership have been recognized by numerous publications including the New York Times, Newsweek and BusinessWeek. Fortune magazine has listed her for the past 3 years on their annual Most Powerful Women’s list, and she was the youngest ever to appear on the list. In 2010 Marissa was honored by the New York Women in Communications, Inc. with a Matrix Award. She also been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and Woman of the Year by Glamour Magazine. Marissa serves on the board of various non-profits, including the Smithsonian National Design Museum, the New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Marissa received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence.
|
Confirmed: $1.4B Mobile/Browser Toolbar Startup Conduit Is Splitting, Still Mum On Perion Acquisition
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
, the Israeli-based browser-toolbar and mobile startup estimated to be worth some $1.4 billion, has confirmed to us that it is splitting itself into two entities, but is declining for now to say that it is purchasing Perion as part of the deal. We have also obtained employee memos from sources with more details about the changes; we are embedding those below. “Conduit has always been about providing engagement solutions across web and mobile platforms. As some of our products have matured, we have begun efforts to split the company in order to allow our more mature business units to fulfill their potential, while maximizing the opportunities for our other products and services to focus on Conduit’s overall engagement vision,” a company spokesperson told us in an emailed statement. “Beyond that, there’s nothing specific to say at this point and we don’t comment on rumors.” The news follows unconfirmed reports today ; more than one source close to Conduit also confirmed the details of Conduit’s plans to TechCrunch directly. The details of that story as we have heard it are as follows: One part, focusing on its mobile business, will be run by existing CEO and co-founder Ronen Shilo; and the other, called Client Connect, which develops a for websites (not unlike ) will be merged with , the umbrella company of Incredimail (unified messaging app), Smilebox (photo sharing) and the SweetIM (an IM app). Client Connect is currently run by Josh Wine and he will continue to lead that part of the business. The Perion deal is a reverse takeover that will see Conduit pay between $100 million and $200 million for the company and assume Perion’s public listing on NASDAQ. (Perion’s is $153 million.) Acquiring a company in order to take on its public listing is a way for Conduit to “avoid the complex hassle” of a public offering, according to a report earlier today in Israeli tech blog . There is also the fact that taking the company public gives existing shareholders the chance to free up capital in the company. Conduit has built up a hefty operation since first opening for business in 2005, with some 250 million users and 260,000 publishers on its platform. It reportedly makes about $800 million in revenues annually, with between $200 million and $300 million of that from the toolbar business. The mobile business is based primarily around a DIY app and mobile website builder, with a basic version of the service coming free and more enhanced features starting at $39/month. The move is the latest chapter in the growth of consumer Internet companies coming out of Israel. The country, known for strong plays in enterprise and infrastructure technologies, has been gaining a name for itself more recently for some of its more consumer-focused companies, such as Waze, which Google last month for a price we understand to be around $1.1 billion. Prior to today, Conduit had raised some in funding, including for a 7 percent stake in the company. Other investors include Benchmark and Yozma Venture Capital. (Benchmark partner Michael Eisenberg, who sits on Conduit’s board, declined to comment for the story when we reached out; and it’s unclear if Yomza is still an active investor after .) The first of the employee memos from CEO Shilo notes all the media speculation that has been underway today, by way of leaked internal memos, noting “I’m happy to throw them another one.” Thanks, Ronen! The second is the email the company wrote to employees, which sparked off all the hoo-hah. Dear employees, As we see, the media is working hard these days using my emails to the company as a basis for all kinds of speculation… so I’m happy to throw them another one. In the last month, the option I mentioned of splitting the company has become a decision. Many people are now working around the clock inside and outside the company to make it happen, and the rumors are spreading like crazy. Obviously in the course of examining the split, we have evaluated many strategic options for Client Connect and were approached by other parties. At this stage, our number-one priority remains the same: We are totally focused on completing the split. We see it as a very important step for the company, which will allow us to maximize the opportunities of both CC to become its own company, and Conduit to focus on its engagement vision. Thanks,
Ronen From June 10: Dear employees, Almost one year ago Josh Wine joined Conduit to lead the Client Connect division as part of our on-going practice to structure the company as separate product divisions. And indeed, Josh’s immediate action was to unite the business and engineering/product under one roof, re-brand the division internally as Client Connect, strengthen the management team and introduce additional products to the unit. Like other product units in the company, Client Connect relies on a strong interface with supporting groups such as Legal, Finance, BSS, HR and Marketing to reach its goals. However, we firmly believe that by eliminating these dependencies we’ll be able to significantly improve Client Connect’s efficiency and ability to realize its business potential. Today, after gaining more “mileage” with this divisional structure and improving the collaboration between the groups, we are continuing to explore further steps in creating more autonomy. Our discussions around this issue are not just limited to minor changes and one of the options we are discussing is spinning-off Client Connect into a separate company. This is an exciting yet complex idea that, on one hand, brings with it various challenges yet on the other hand gives great opportunity for an independent company (and its shareholders) to truly succeed. These days, we are dedicating much of our time to this discussion and consulting with the right people. While we are still deep into this process, you should take away 2 important points from this email today: 1. We will keep you posted as we progress and more information becomes available.
2. We are committed to ensure that your rights and privileges as Conduit employees will not be harmed during this process. Thank you,
Ronen
|
Yidio’s New App Is A Comprehensive Guide To All The TV Shows & Movies You Can Watch On Your iPhone
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
There’s no shortage of as portable guides to the shows, specials, and movies now playing on our television sets, but a company called is today launching that addresses the way users are “watching TV” today: via other mobile apps like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, YouTube, and more. Yidio’s new app makes it easy to search for any TV show or movie across free, paid and subscription-based services, then immediately launch that app to begin watching the video in question with just a tap. The company, founded in 2008, currently offers to TV and Internet video that includes over a million programming options from hundreds of content providers. The website sees over 7 million monthly visitors, but those numbers are due for a fall as users’ viewing behavior shifts away from so-called “ ” and web video, and moves more towards streaming video on demand via portable devices. There are many problems today with streaming video services, including the fact that premium cable channels don’t offer standalone subscriptions, not all TV shows are available via streaming on demand, and competitors like Netflix and Amazon are snatching up exclusive rights to programs — meaning if you can only afford one subscription service in your household, you’ll be missing out on something good airing somewhere else. But the problem addresses with its new app is access to the fragmented streaming video app ecosystem. Viewers today bond with favorite shows, movies or actors, not the network or service those appear on, and they just need a simple way to find out where that content can be found. This is what Yidio does. [vimeo 68727759 w=400 h=300] The app lets you search across a large list of video providers, including big names like Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes, Amazon Prime, HBO GO, Crackle, ABC, PBS and Disney, as well as smaller brands like CWTV, Lifetime, truTV and Crunchyroll (an anime video provider). Yidio CEO and co-founder Brandon Eatros tells us that even more content providers are in the pipeline, including Showtime. The company is also planning to increase access to children’s content, sports, cable TV providers and live events, and will then tackle international expansion, as well. “With the app developed on top of hundreds of custom APIs, it’s completely flexible with the ability to add and customize unlimited services as we expand,” Eatros explains. Yidio’s homescreen features a section of scrolling new releases and popular content, as well as sections featuring popular free shows, recently aired TV, new Netflix movies, and more. When you go to search for something specific by keyword, the interface begins quickly populating the search results section as you type. Then, on the video’s landing page, you can see which services offer the program or movie, and you can read more about it, view its Rotten Tomatoes rating and reviews, plus favorite it, mark it watched, or share with others. You can also use the right-side navigation to browse just TV or just movies, browse by genre (e.g. “’80’s classics,” “Family Movie Night,” etc.), or by source (e.g. Netflix, HBO GO). The app also serves as a decent Netflix queue management tool, too, allowing you to add, remove and browse items in your Instant Queue and view your Netflix recommendations. Yidio’s app is first available on the iPhone, though the iPad app is only 30 days out, and the Android version is coming next quarter. Eatros says they launched first on the iPhone because it’s the No. 1 mobile device visiting Yidio.com. “We also believe that your mobile phone is something you take with you, own, personalize and really utilize the app on the go,” he adds. “Combined with Airplay or an HDMI cord – you can continue to use it when you get home on your big screen as a very smart, personalized and easy remote.” Eatros and his brother Adam initially bootstrapped the company in 2008 before raising a small (by today’s standards) $350,000 from Appolicious CEO Alan Warms; Jamie Crouthamel (currently director at ValueClick); founding partners at Seaport Capital Jim Collis and Bill Luby; and Apex Venture Partners GP Lon Chow. The company, profitable for four years, now has 35 employees. The Yidio iPhone app is a .
|
Loudie, The App That Gamifies Your Concert Plans
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
If concerts are you’re thing, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re slightly overwhelmed with all the upcoming concert information sent your way, from various subscriptions with LiveNation, AEG, or Bowery. But an app called Loudie is relaunching to clean up the process of planning with friends, giving you easy ways to access free tickets to shows nearby. Originally Loudie was built as , letting users buy tickets, check-in to concerts and share the moment with others tuning in to the feed from afar. However, founder Lance Dashoff realized that people at concerts may be taking pictures or videos but they’re also consumed in the moment. Sharing isn’t high priority. With the new and improved Loudie, it’s a much more casual experience. Users can browse upcoming concerts in NY and LA, and casually “join” them to spread the idea to their followers. “The idea is around planning,” said Dashoff. “You share a couple of concerts you’re interested in and it only takes having around three friends on it to be useful for finding something similar. It’s a great conversation starter.” Other services tend to bombard you with information, but Loudie lets you be the proactive one, and only sends you notifications when it’s to reward you with a chance for free tickets. Think of it as slightly gamified social planning around concerts. For every concert you join, and how far that sharing travels amongst friends, you accrue points that build on to your overall score. These points do not let you purchase anything, they are simply a measure of your activity on the network. Then, based on how many points you have, your location, and your interests, Loudie will send you push notifications with offers for free tickets for the first people who redeem. Sometimes the offer is for five tickets, sometimes for 10, or 20. Those who don’t move fast enough for the first offer will be given the option to buy tickets from the app, which is accessing the venue’s mobile site. Dashoff tells me that most of the promotional push offers are for relatively inexpensive concerts, between $10 and $20 most of the time. “These are shows you probably wouldn’t have known about at all if we hadn’t sent them to you, where you can invite friends and discover new music,” he said. Eventually, there will be more ticketing options within the app for users, but for now DAshoff wanted to build something that’s easy to use and doesn’t take much thought. You swipe into the push notifications for a chance to win, perhaps join a few new shows to accrue a few points, and eventually make plans with someone to see a show. The app is available now in the for free. [gallery ids="844623,844624,844625,844626,844627,844628"]
|
Second Life Maker Linden Lab Buys Desura For Games Distribution, Plans To Keep It Open
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
is continuing with its mini-acquisition spree in gaming: it has just announced that it is buying , a Australia-based digital distribution service for PC gamers. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but it follows on from the company’s in February 2012 and in January of this year. Linden Lab says it will keep Desura operating for now: “The service will continue uninterrupted for current customers as the team and technology become a part of Linden Lab,” it notes in an emailed statement announcing the deal. The move underscores the transformation that Linden Lab has been making under CEO Rod Humble, who took the reins in 2011 amid declining usage for Second Life, the web-based virtual world that took the online gaming and social worlds by storm after it first launched in 2003. That has included a shift into , as well as monetizable games experiences. Desura is not a games maker itself but provides all other services around them. Specifically, users can buy and play games, get free access to mods and add-ons, use the platform to distribute their own games if they’re developers, and use the platform to create a social layer around games for communicating with other players. “Desura’s talented team, thriving business, and impressive technology are a great fit for Linden Lab,” said Humble in a statement. “This acquisition gives us a global platform for serving creative developers of all kinds, and we’re looking forward to growing both Desura’s global community of gamers and its fantastic portfolio of thousands of games, mods, and other content. Our aim is to invest and support the Desura team in making it the most open and developer-friendly platform in the world.” It’s not clear how many users Desura has today. The move also puts Linden Lab more squarely in competition against the likes of from Valve and , owned by EA. As we note here, it’s not clear how Desura will be utilized longer-term — whether it will remain as a standalone entity or merge with something else out of the Linden Lab. It notes that Blockworld, the iPad game it acquired earlier this year, will soon be released globally. Besides Second Life, Linden Lab also offers a “3D universe” called Patterns; the tablet and mobile game Creatorverse; an online creative space called dio; and interactive fiction “experience” called Versu, which “makes the reader a part of a living story.” Linden Lab to date has $19 million from Benchmark, Omidyar Network, Jeff Bezos and others; Desura has raised : only $100,000.
|
null |
Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 7
| 17
| null |
How To Think About Minimum Viable Products, And The Path To Passion At Startup Festival
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
At in Montreal this week, today saw a Lean Workshop hosted in part by authors Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. The two entrepreneurs and authors spent the morning articulating what makes for a lean entrepreneur or startup, and how lean tactics can apply to companies big and small. The talk was exhaustive, but a couple highlights stood out around what’s meant when people talk about minimum viable products in lean startups, and how to get from there to something that creates the kind of passion that turns consumers into advocates. The minimum viable product, or MVP, is not just something broken you release because it’s easy, according to Vlaskovits. It’s about targeting your ideal early adopter customer and getting them to help you build a product that can truly impress and succeed with a broader market. Too often people seem to think that an MVP can be a barely cobbled together thing that only sort of works; per Vlaskovits and Cooper, it’s more about staying true to the idea of a “minimum viable product” and what those words literally mean. “An MVP doesn’t have to be perfect,” Vlaskovits said. “But it has to be good enough to be viable to that particular market segment and its early adopters.” Once you’ve got those early adopters, they then start pulling the product out of you, by directing development efforts with feature requests. But getting those early adopters isn’t about creating something that invites droves of users; it’s about creating an experience that insists early users have “some skin in the game,” as you want them to be invested. This means specifically trying to filter out users who aren’t your target audience, the authors said. While it can be tempting to just try to net as many users as possible, that’s actually not productive of good results. Cooper said that he often talks to entrepreneurs who want ways to get thousands of customers, but that that’s not really what they need. They actually need one; in other words, it’s better to genuinely reach a few who will help you make something lasting, than reach many who have no reason to stick around. Once you’ve got those early adopters invested and helping with product direction, the next step is to start bringing customers along a line of emotional responses that brings them from potential conversions to passionate users; a passionate user is one who will actually recommend your product to others, unbidden, and that takes much more than just doing the basic work of building a product that satisfies its basic conditions of functionality. “Thinking that the product is going to do it [alone] is the biggest trap,” Vlaskovits said in response to a question about what prevents people from reaching this state with their products. “Featuring yourself to death,” he called it. That kind of bloat is something anyone who follows startups and consumer products will likely be aware of, but it’s a natural place to focus efforts, especially for engineers who are used to making things. But it’s about an entire experience, and fleshing out product with marketing, with sales experience and process, and with everything else that comes after you’ve done the basic work of identifying and helping with a shared pain point that exists in your target market. Vlaskovits and Cooper are all about pushing startups to iterate, and to focus less on big picture visionary tactics and more on hard, gradual work. They didn’t offer up any magic bullet solutions during their presentations, but they did provide useful guidance about how to actually make things that people want and will use.
|
Lyft Holds First Community Meeting To Rally Support And Save The ‘Stache In LA
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
On-demand ride-sharing startup held its first-ever community meeting in Los Angeles last night, inviting drivers and passengers to meet one another and share their stories. The prompt for the meeting was a that the company received from the city a few weeks before and the company’s hope to rally support around keeping the service running in L.A. Since receiving that order, Lyft has received support from both drivers and passengers: Matthew Giangrande, who has been driving for Lyft for the last few months, went to a Transportation Committee meeting to dispel some of the myths about the service, such as there are no background checks for the drivers or that they’re not insured. Meanwhile, frequent L.A. passenger Laura Hunt started a and a devoted to helping connect community members and share their stories with others. In just a few short weeks, they’ve attracted a fair amount of attention from drivers and passengers alike. For Lyft, the event was a way to demonstrate the power of community and to bring people together. This isn’t the only thing the company has planned — it’s hoping to organize a rally outside City Hall in the next few weeks to show support for the service, co-founder John Zimmer told the audience at the event. Zimmer told us that he’s been in touch with the mayor’s office here, and believes that new mayor Eric Garcetti is in support of innovation and wants to help solve some of the transportation crunch in the city — basically the need for everyone here to own a car. Lyft just started that conversation but expects to continue to work with the local government and community here to keep the service up and running. Of course, this isn’t the first run-in that Lyft has had with regulators. It also received a last year, but was able to . While it’s going to continue operating in L.A., it’s hoping that it can convince local regulators of the work it’s doing around safety and leverage community support to get the city on-board as well.
|
Beezinga Brings Data Analytics To The Apiary
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
Beekeeping isn’t exactly something you read about a lot in the tech press, but it’s a big business with about $268.9 million in revenue in the U.S. alone, and technology is slowly into apiaries around the world. , the Microsoft from Slovenia, has developed a system of sensors for standardized beehives (yes, there are ). The system can measure things like the temperature and humidity in the hive, as well as the amount of honey production (by measuring the weight of the hive) and the overall activity of the hive by analyzing a video feed of bee activity at the entrance of the hive. The Beezinga believes it will cost about $40 to retrofit a single hive. That, the team believes, is a price commercial beekeepers will be more than happy to pay to get analytics about their hives. Beezinga is currently beta testing the system and plans to adopt a subscription model once it goes into production. The system regularly updates data from the hive to the cloud and beekeepers can then use a web app to get a quick overview of how their bees are doing. The system, of course, can also send real-time alerts when something is amiss. Right now, Beezinga uses a standard cell phone with a data connection to send this data from the often remote apiaries (and multiple hives can talk to the same phone), but the team is also looking into how to use off-the-shelf technologies to integrate wireless technologies directly into the system without the need for a phone. One cool aspect of Beezinga is that it doesn’t just do analytics, but that it can also defend the hive from attacks from other bees. Using audio analytics, the system recognizes when the hive is under attack and starts spraying water at the attackers in front of the hive. For the most part, this is enough to repel these kinds of attacks. Given the discussion around , Beezinga also believes that it can create a large database of information around beekeeping that may be able to help researchers understand what exactly is happening to bee populations around the world. Beezinga is currently competing in the Imagine Cup finals in St. Petersburg. After presenting their projects to a group of judges over the last two days, the finalists will now have to wait until tomorrow before they will hear if they won one of the prizes up for grabs at Microsoft’s annual student technology competition.
|
Groopic For iPhone Mashes Up Group Photos To Include The Missing Photographers
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
One of the more amazing things about our smartphones is that they don’t just put the capabilities of computers and cameras into small, portable form factors, they also leverage the combination of being both these things to give ordinary users the access to tools that previously required advanced photoshopping skills. Case in point: today, a new application called is launching that lets you take group pictures that also include the photographer snapping the photo. Over the July 4th weekend at the beach, a gaggle of teenagers near me were snapping iPhone photos of each other standing in front of the waves. I overheard one lament, “I thought you wanted to take a photo with me!” I do, the other had replied, explaining that she also wanted a picture of the others together. The group then rearranged themselves into various configurations over and over so everyone got to be in a picture next to their friends. Groopic could have solved their problem of wanting a group photo — well, so could have handing their phone over to one of the many beachgoers packed onto the crowded sand, I suppose. But maybe the teens didn’t want to bother anyone, or risk some stranger dropping their phone in the surf. So instead, they just missed out on a real group photo. Designed by a company called Eyedeus Labs, Groopic uses patent-pending technology developed by a team of five that includes nearly two PhD’s (one is just wrapping his up, explains CEO Ali Rehan). Combined, the team has over 25 years of experience in computer vision research. The company is focused on creating a new genre of camera-based applications that use computer vision, Rehan tells us. “Using our computer vision technology, we aim to bridge the gap between vision research and industry and, in turn, reshape how people interact with smartphones and cameras,” he says. Launching first on iPhone, Groopic is the company’s first product. The app is targeted at those aged 18 to 34 – the ones who take the most smartphone photos. Using the app is simple enough. In three steps, users take two photos with their iPhone, then mark the photographers in each one. Groopic then does its magic to automatically combine these incomplete pictures into one. There are some limitations to the technology, of course. The app requires you stand or sit to the left or right of the group if you’re the one whose image is being swapped out. But, as the clever in-app tutorial teaches you, actually mashing up the two photos only takes a few taps. Snap the photos. Tap the photographers (no need to drag your finger around to outline them, just tap them.) And you’re done. Rehan says the research team is also involved with prototyping other new technology, and currently has a number of proof of concepts built on PCs that are being ported to smartphones. “Right now, we have some really interesting ‘natural user interface’ gaming demos on cellphones,” he teases. Eyedeus Labs is now working to bring Groopic to Android. But for now, Groopic is . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSqIU8md7aI?feature=player_embedded]
|
SEC Lifts Ban On General Solicitation, Allowing Startups To Advertise That They’re Fundraising
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
|
The SEC has just voted of implementing section 201(a) of the JOBS Act, which lifts the ban on general solicitation and permits startups, venture capitalists, and hedge funds to openly advertise that they’re raising money in private offerings. While it may pose added risk of investors being misled, it should make it significantly easier for companies to raise capital to start or continue financing a business. The rule change washes away some limitations on advertising of fundraising that have been in place for 80 years. President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act in April 2012 but now the removal of the ban on general solicitation is finally going into effect. Previously, the idea was that companies could go public if they wanted to openly raise money. However, the intense regulation and scrutiny around IPOs has dissuaded some private companies from offering their stock to the public. Poor IPO performance for some fast-growing technology companies and well as improved secondary markets like SecondMarket have pushed startups to stay private for longer. Four times as much money was raised last year through private offerings than IPOs. Due to the general solicitation ban, hedge funds, VCs, and startups had to quietly raise that money, soliciting by word of mouth and other forms of private communication. Now they could buy ads or openly announce that they’re seeking investors alongside using the traditional quiet method. Investment is still limited to accredited investors worth more than $1 million liquid net worth, and fundraisers must take reasonable steps to ensure investors are in fact accredited. To help the SEC collect data on how investment will change, fundraisers have to file a Form D with the SEC at least 15 days before they begin general solicitation, and amend that Form D to state that they’re done soliciting within 30 days of finishing. General solicitation will fuel a new cottage industry of investor matching-making sites that aim to broaden the investment pool to financial whales outside the insular world of Silicon Valley. “Today, with the ban in place, only the most well-known investors get access to the best deal flow, making it more difficult for accredited investors across the country to invest in top deals,” writes Ryan Caldbeck of crowdfunding website, Circleup, to us in an email. Many sites businesses, like , , , and , help investors find startups to invest in, but have been severely restricted in how they could promote opportunities “With General Solicitation it will be much easier for investors to find companies they are passionate about supporting,” writes Mike Norman of crowdfunding website, WeFunder, to us in an email. The new rule will hopefully open up the capital-starved startup market to the majority of investors. According to WeFunder’s website, are active in the tech startup space. “This is creating a large void in the investment community whereby dissatisfied sophisticated investors are clearly looking to alternative investment options for lower fees, more options, etc. Crowdfunding portals will create a way for accredited investors to find additional deal flow,” writes David Loucks of the healthcare investment bank, Healthios. The SEC is still to rule on the most significant of all provisions: crowdfunding. (JOBS) of 2013 was supposed to permit everyone from Bill Gates to soccer moms to take an equal stake in hot new startups, not just accredited investors. But the implementation of unaccredited crowdfunding has been delayed by . If crowdfunding is allowed, it could pump even more capital into the startup ecosystem. Crowdfunding is mostly being stalled by fears that vulnerable elderly couples watching a late night-infomercial will be duped into handing over their nestegg to stupid investments or nefarious actors. While fraud and bankruptcy is a concern, Kiva co-founder, Jessica Jackley, who also founded the now-defunct crowdfunding portal, Profounder, says “I’m less concerned about abuse and more concerned about how well the new crowdfunding platforms will educate new investors — and entrepreneurs — on their investments,” she writes to us in an email. “No matter how you present an opportunity, investing, especially for equity, is complex. This law requires significant information disclosure and I hope that that info is shared in a way that people can understand and make decisions around.” For instance, a bill pending in North Carolina mandates that investors be warned in plain English “I acknowledge that I am investing in a high-risk, speculative business venture, that I may lose all of my investment and that I can afford the loss of my investment.” With general solicitation now allowed, startups may be able to raise money more quickly and from a wider range of investors than before. That could create more companies, further fracturing top engineering and product design talent. It can take a lot of great minds in one room to solve big problems, and some believe more startup capital thereby leads to smaller ideas. , CEO of FundersClub, says “A lot of noise is about to be introduced to the private markets, and distinguishing signal from noise will become critical for investors, and standing above the crowd will become critical for startups.” Still, the ability to advertise fundraising could spawn high-impact startups that never would have existed, and they might even spring up in areas where there are no investors within earshot — aka outside of Silicon Valley.
|
Nate Silver Is Leaving The New York Times For ESPN
|
Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
, the statistician who rose to national prominence for his scarily accurate predictions of the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, for ESPN. Silver will take the brand with him to the sports giant, according to The Times’ Brian Stelter. Silver will have a number of roles at ESPN, from his stats-driven blogging to a regular role on Keith Olbermann’s new ESPN2 show. He will also reportedly have a role at ABC News in political years. ABC and ESPN are both owned by Disney. Silver’s three-year contract with The Times ends in August, around the time that Olbermann’s show is set to launch. The New York Times bought out Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog in August 2010; however the 2010 deal allowed Silver to retain the Five Thirty Eight brand, which he will now take with him to Disney. At one point during the fall election news cycle, Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog accounted for more than to the entire website and to the Times’ site. That being said, this isn’t the end of the world for the NYT.While it’s bad for them to lose Silver, I’m sure Silver is fetching a pretty penny from Disney. The best thing for The Times is that Silver is only doing politics once every four years; while he’s covering the sports world, the Times can build up the next best alternative. Maybe this time they should do it under their own brand. Silver reportedly informed the Times of his decision earlier today, and Stelter reports that the deal could be announced as early as Monday.
|
Ask A VC: Resolute Ventures’ Mike Hirshland On Why He Hates Party Rounds (And Why Founders Still Raise Them)
|
Leena Rao
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, founder joined us in the studio to talk about seed-stage investing, party rounds and how startups should structure boards. Hirshland, who has openly said he dislikes party rounds, talked about why entrepreneurs still raise rounds with more than 15 investors despite many warnings not to go down that route. He also explained his views on how startups should structure their boards and engage with board members at the early stage. Check out the video above for more!
|
In Wake Of Outcry Over Censorship, Tumblr Explains Its NSFW Policy (Kind Of)
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
So, I was searching for pornography on Tumblr this morning. (It was work-related!) Word was, the now-Yahoo-owned blogging network made a significant change to the way adult-themed blogs could be discovered on the site, which even further hid their content from public consumption. Tumblr following user outcry. According to a of , it seemed as if Tumblr to hide the pornography housed on its network by making it so that adult blogs would not show up in searches. Meaning, if you had typed in a tag (you know, like “porn” or some body part you would like to see unclothed and/or in action), your search results — — would not include any blogs or posts from sites flagged as “Adult.” By some reports, adult-oriented content accounts for addressed this problem, playing it off as something of a bug: …As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed. That’s a very vague statement, however. It doesn’t explain which blogs were affected by this (NSFW blogs? Adult blogs? Both?) or what exactly happened. What we can tell you is that in subsequent tests (read: more porn searches on Tumblr), it appears that finding adult-themed blog with Safe Mode shut off works (i.e. a tag search). But finding adult-themed blogs (a blog search) is an issue. For the latter, searches for very obvious keywords only return a couple of blog results, though there are plenty of tagged posts returned for that same search. muddies the current issue of adult and NSFW content not showing up in search results by also explaining that on certain mobile platforms, search works differently. All this is saying is that native apps on Apple’s iOS platform are more restricted than those on other mobile platforms or the web. That is, Apple doesn’t allow adult material in its apps, so a number of tags have to be censored. This isn’t really Tumblr’s fault — it’s the nature of doing business on Apple’s platform. But because some may have tried to search for what seem to be innocent tags, like #gay, and found it blocked, there was suspicion that something had changed. Tumblr says that it needs to implement more intelligent filtering, but in the meantime it’s making the #lgbtq tag available on iOS, as it includes moderated content. Section No. 3 of Tumblr’s post explains that blogs that had been tagged as in the blog’s settings had been subject to delisting in third-party search engines like Google. Tumblr says that it began delisting some Tumblr blogs run by “spammy commercial porn sites” earlier this year, but the delisting seemed to have carried over to anyone who had flagged their blog “Adult:” This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW → Adult in your blog settings. This was confusing and unnecessary, so we’ve dropped the extra option. If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check “Flag this blog as NSFW” so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines. It’s an odd way to explain the situation, as not only is it unclear what happened, it implies that Tumblr itself is not sure what happened either (“.. …”, the post reads). Could it be, perhaps, that the “some reason” was a policy change that Tumblr had hoped would fly under the radar, but did not? The company concludes its lengthy mea culpa by saying that beyond the fixes listed above (one being the NSFW option dropping the Adult flag, and the second being the bug fix related to searches for Adult and NSFW content on Tumblr not returning results), nothing else has changed recently. Curious about that claim, we took a look at Tumblr’s “NSFW” policy page in the Internet Archive’s , and found that, actually, the page has been consistently updated throughout the year. The fact that Tumblr took the time to rewrite or explain its policies in more detail here seems to contradict the shrug-of-the-shoulders tone of today’s blog post which tries to play off everything that was changed as either bugs or confusing features that needed to be fixed. Here’s what we found on the Way Back Machine. In a screenshot of Tumblr’s policy on April 30, 2013, the page stated that blogs flagged “NSFW” would still appear on tag pages once Safe Mode was turned off. (This is basically how users expect Tumblr to behave): Then, in a screenshot recorded in June 2013, the policy had been clarified to better distinguish between NSFW blogs and Adult blogs, since Adult Tumblr blogs were then no longer being indexed by Google, but NSFW-only blogs were. This is different from the guidelines above which had specified that all blogs tagged just NSFW would be delisted from Google. Now, Tumblr was trying to separate things that were just “not safe for work” from the actual pornography: What’s strange here is that Tumblr’s post today seems to make it sound like the fact that user blogs tagged “Adult” getting delisted from Google and other search engines was an accidental byproduct of Tumblr’s attempt to control commercial porn spam. But since Tumblr took the time to make a nice little reference chart about the matter actually implies that delisting of the Adult blogs – users’ included – was intentional. Likely, the problem was that Tumblr users were tagging their blogs “Adult,” getting delisted from Google, then getting mad about it. This, Tumblr now promises, will change. Blogs will only be flagged as “NSFW” or not, and flagging it either way won’t prevent the site from being promoted in third-party search engines. (But I guess that means Tumblr will now just handle the porn spam internally, and leave users’ porn…err…erotica…alone?) Finally, in a screenshot recorded this month, that handy chart had been updated yet again to include that indicates that some blogs would not see their content surfaced in searches . “NSFW” blogs would be indexed by Tumblr, the chart informs, but “Adult” blogs are not: Again, this implies that the company did intend to crack down on the visibility of the pornography, and had been using the “NSFW –> Adult” flag as its guideline. Those sites with this flag had already been pulled from both third-party search engines, and now from search on Tumblr itself. As of today, it sounds like Tumblr is going back to the original policy whereby NSFW content either appears or disappears based on whether users have Safe Mode off or on. (The “ is currently marked as “being updated,” so no word yet on how the policy will be written next.) Tumblr’s explanations today are confusing at worst, and misleading at best. Tumblr claimed nothing had changed recently, but the company’s NSFW/Adult policies have been in a constant state of flux, and the service is clearly struggling with how it needs to handle the problem of commercial porn spam. It’s unfortunate timing for a backlash like this from Tumblr’s users. The news comes during a week when , spoke of Tumblr’s inclusive and open nature. “We’ve taken a pretty hard line on freedom of speech, supporting our users’ creation, whatever that looks like, and that’s just not something we want to police,” Karp told Colbert at the time. But Tumblr policing that content. Even if Karp says they don’t to. And Tumblr change its policies, even if the company wants to pretend it was just a bug and some things that needed to be “fixed.”
|
Apple To Buy Transportation App HopStop — Mass Transit To Return To Apple Maps?
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Apple has agreed to acquire transit navigation app , according to . AllThingsD has apparently . I’ve reached out to both companies and will update if I hear back from either of them. HopStop offers walking, taxi, and bicycle directions, but is probably most useful when it comes to mass transportation. When Apple broke away from Google and launched its own mapping application for iOS 6, on top of all the other problems it had, it removed transit directions and instead directed users to download other apps — including HopStop. (Indeed, it was through those recommendations that I became a regular HopStop user.) So acquiring the company could be a way to bring that information back into Maps. HopStop has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors, including . The company recently added crowdsourced transit alerts to its system At the time, HopStop said that it has more than 2 million active users. Earlier today, , a startup that merges and cleans up businesses’ location profiles. Here’s a confirmation, more-or-less, that I received from an Apple spokesperson: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
|
Poppy Is Now Courting Developers To Build 3-D Augmented Reality Games For Your iPhone
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Remember Poppy? It’s that device — — that lets you using your iPhone. It’s kind of like a Viewmaster for the digital age. Anyway, a lot’s happened since we first wrote about the company’s Kickstarter campaign. It’s racked up nearly 2,500 backers and met its funding goal, raising more than $150,000 (compared to the $40,000 it was hoping to raise). It’s also announced a slightly more expensive version of the device in white — for people who want to be a little bit more fashionable, I guess. With that success already behind it, the team behind Poppy is thinking about other things that can be done with the device, looking to go beyond just taking and viewing 3-D photos and videos. One possibility is to provide its customers with 3-D-based games, and it’s courting game developers to make that a reality. Founders Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry see an opportunity for augmented reality and virtual reality games being made to work with Poppy. While it works to shoot photos and videos, it would also work equally well as a viewfinder for games that wanted to layer AR images on top. Developers could even use the iPhone’s volume buttons, available at the top of the device, for controls. At $49, Heitzeberg says, the device could be a poor man’s version of the Occulus Rift, particularly for casual games. To be honest, there’s nothing really to stop developers from building for the device. It doesn’t require any special API or anything, just visualization that takes into account the two sides of the screen that get combined in the viewfinder. Of course, it will help to actually get Poppy into developers’ hands so that they can test it out themselves and refine whatever they hope to build. On that front, now that they’ve reached their funding goal, the guys working on Poppy are hoping to start moving into production and hope to have units shipping by the holidays. The Kickstarter’s still going for another week. Want one? .
|
Motorola Will Officially Unveil The Moto X In New York On August 1
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Well, here we go. After a considerable amount of teasing (not to mention cheerleading from Google execs during earnings calls), Motorola Mobility is finally ready to unveil its long-awaited Moto X smartphone to the world, and it’s going to do it at a special event in New York City on August 1. Actually, you know what? “Unveil” may not exactly be the right word — the veil has basically been off for months if you go the sheer number of leaks we’ve seen make the rounds. At this point we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what the device , what sort of inside that peculiarly-curved frame, and what it’s capable of . That’s not to say that Motorola hasn’t kept some surprises for the main event — I don’t think anyone has managed to piece together the entire picture yet — but those leaks have taken some of the shine out of the device’s debut. Even the fast-approaching reveal was hinted at, and by a Google executive no less — CFO Patrick Pichette mentioned during the company’s most recent earnings conference call that the “new Motorola” would reveal itself in the coming weeks. So, what’s there to get excited about now that the most of the device’s particulars have been picked apart by so many journalists, pundits, and fans like vultures feasting on carrion? Here’s something: the price tag. Motorola Mobility pulled in $998 million in revenue this past quarter, and that number has been sliding for the past few months. And that’s to say nothing of the operating losses the company has been posting — Motorola lost $342 million in Q2 2013, up from the comparatively mild $299 million loss from this time last year. In short, Motorola could use a hardware hit, and a competitive price tag could definitely help the company out there. Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside has said that he’s very interested in the concept of powerful low-cost devices and many have taken that as proof that the Moto X won’t cost much at all. Still others believe that, for or that those low-cost rumors are just that: rumors. There’s been little agreement on where the X will land in terms of price, but it won’t be long before that (along with everything else) becomes clear.
|
As The Series A Crunch Tightens, Teams of Coders Are Looking To Find New Jobs On DeveloperAuction
|
Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
, an , has expanded to allow teams of coders and designers to put themselves up for auction as a group. “As a general trend around the Series A crunch, we’ve seen a huge influx of talent on our marketplace in the last two months who are on there because their current company has been unable to secure further funding or has had recent rounds of layoffs,” says co-founder . DeveloperAuction flips the recruiting model on its head by having startups make offers to developers before an interview; if the company likes the engineer after the interview, they have to honor their offer amount. Mickiewicz and his team were approached by a group of three mobile developers whose startup was closing its doors at the end of the month; the group had worked together for over two years and wanted to stay together, so DeveloperAuction made them a team profile. Companies will have to bid on, interview, and eventually hire all three of the engineers if they want to hire one of them. Mickiewicz says he thinks a lot more teams will put themselves up for auction on the platform, as it works well for both the employees, who can stay together with colleagues they like, and the companies, who can bring on people who have already shipped code and worked well together. As more and more developers put themselves on the platform — June was another record month for DeveloperAuctions’ number of confirmed interviews — Mickiewicz says he’s excited about facilitating this “reallocation of talent.” The company now runs two two-week auctions per month, with around 100 developers in any given auction. As much as DeveloperAuction is moving talent from startup to startup, it’s also bringing people in their own doors as they grow. The company will be up to 20 full-time employees by the end of July. Mickiewicz says it’s already on a multi-million dollar annual run rate. “I don’t want to speculate on profitability,” he tells me. “It’s always a question of how aggressively we want to push for growth and invest ahead of the growth curve.” In June, the company had its first designer auction, with three user experience and user interface designers accepting positions from the interviews. Mickiewicz says he sees opportunities to hold auctions for “the entire stack of jobs at venture-funded companies,” including data scientists, salespeople and product managers. The most interesting statistic the company has, though? Developers aren’t merely using the platform to pimp themselves out to the highest bidder. Even with the current insanity that is the San Francisco housing market, 87 percent of developers took jobs with a company that did not make them the highest offer on DeveloperAuction. Mickiewicz says they are “primarily motivated by the opportunity for personal growth rather than money.”
|
Thrive Capital’s Kushner Looks To Build A Modern Health Insurer With $40M For Oscar
|
Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
With new parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) going into effect next year, Josh Kushner is betting that health insurance — an area long considered off-limits to tech entrepreneurs because of its legal and political complexities — is finally ripe for change. Kushner, whose venture fund Thrive Capital with bets in Instagram, Nasty Gal and Warby Parker, has amassed a team to revolutionize health insurance through a new stealth startup called . While the company isn’t sharing details about the product yet or even talking publicly, you can bet that its health insurance offering will likely have a more customer-friendly experience that is transparent about costs. The startup is actually licensed as a health insurance operator in the state of New York, so it isn’t some kind of front-end for existing providers, sources tell us. It will have its own plans so it can offer something truly differentiated. The company launches later this fall and it will only be for New Yorkers at first. Here’s the landscape: next year, some very key parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act go into effect. There will be an individual mandate, where consumers will be required to have coverage or pay a penalty. New health insurances exchanges are being established where consumers can compare and contrast different plans. Then there are also subsidies provided for those near the poverty line who can’t afford coverage. This is already having a profound effect on health care insurance costs. New York state insurance regulators , are at least 50 percent lower on average than this year’s rates, . What that means is that there is a fresh market opportunity for new health insurance providers, especially ones that offer exceptionally good customer service, design, marketing and leverage big data. Kushner put together a team including his old Vostu co-founder Mario Schlosser, a Harvard Business School classmate Kevin Nazemi who oversaw marketing for Microsoft’s CRM programs and Fredrik Nylander, who ran engineering and operations and Tumblr. On the company’s board is Charlie Baker, who ran insurer Harvard Pilgrim out of Massachusetts, the only state with an insurance exchange before the Affordable Care Act was passed. The company also includes other long-time health care executives, who have at least a collective 250 years of experience working in health insurance between them. Oscar raised $40 million from investors including Thrive (naturally), Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures. Founders Fund and Khosla are both very active in the health and medical space, so their participation is no surprise here. While Oscar’s initial funding round sounds like a lot of capital, $29 million of that round is kept in reserve because of state regulations for health insurance providers. So only $11 million of the company’s funding is actually earmarked for operations. While working on Oscar, Kushner is going to simultaneously continue running Thrive.
|
Gmail Offers Full-Screen Compose Again
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Google has a brand new, but ultimately ineffectual, feature for Gmail users: a full-screen compose option. Enabling this option will push the compose window to the center of your inbox, expanded across the majority of the screen for a better viewing experience. Google launched a a few months ago, which gave users a bevy of new tools to build out their emails, as well as a new design to let you open a compose window without ever leaving the inbox. However, it appears that some users enjoy a more full-screen compose experience, not unlike the Gmail compose of Yore. By default, the formatting toolbar will stay on in the full-screen compose. Users can switch to full screen by clicking the expand button in the top right window or set full-screen as the default by selecting the “Default to full screen” option in settings. If you don’t see full-screen compose functionality just yet, have no fear. According to the Gmail team, it’ll be up and running for all users over the next couple of days.
|
Microsoft Experiences Its Biggest Drop Of The Century As Shares Fall 12 Percent
|
Romain Dillet
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Microsoft shares ( ) dropped 12.2 percent, representing the biggest single-day drop in over 13 years. On April 24, 2000, shares dropped 15.6 percent — since then, Microsoft has never experienced such a shelling. Yesterday, the company announced and took a massive writedown due to unsold Surface RTs. The stock closed at 35.44 a share yesterday. It hit 31.10 today and there is no sign of recovery in sight. For Q4, revenue came in at $19.9 billion and earnings per share were $0.59. Both were under analyst expectations. But the most surprising announcement was clearly the Surface RT writedown. That’s why multiple analysts including Raymond James and Cowen downgraded the stock this morning. In just a day, Microsoft’s market capitalization is down $36 billion to $258 billion. The market reaction is very harsh and can be explained by the fact that shares were already trading at a high price — today is only a three-month low. On Monday, shares should certainly recover as well. When the Surface RT was unveiled, many saw it as a potential revenue generator and as a way to finally make a dent in the tablet space. But Windows 8 and Office remain Microsoft’s two most important products. The company likes to share Office 365 and Xbox Live Gold numbers because those subscription services are on the rise. But they are tiny compared to Windows and Office. Some investors may have suddenly stopped believing in Microsoft’s tablet dreams. That’s why the company is experiencing such a difficult day on the stock market. But the Surface RT writedown is the in a year. It could indicate that there are serious strategic issues afoot. The company recently announced a total reorganization dubbed . It should make the company more efficient if it wants to release hardware products again. While the Xbox is a success, the company doesn’t have any successful tablet, phone or computer in its portfolio. The Surface RT and the are far from success stories. Everybody agrees on that today.
|
ModCloth, Now With Over $100 Million In Annual Revenue, Is Going Mobile First
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
, the indie fashion site best known for its vintage-inspired dresses, is today offering the first look into its revenue situation since 2009. The e-commerce startup, which is backed by roughly in outside funding, says it did over $100 million in revenue last year, and is now growing faster than 40 percent year-over-year. That’s up from the $15 million it had previously in 2009. To compare that figure with other well-known e-commerce industry players: Fab.com did $120 million in revenue last year, and is now at $1 billion; Beyond the Rack around $200 million for 2013; Rue La La had estimated $400 million in sales for 2012; and was at $600 million+ in 2012. Meanwhile aggregator Fancy speaks of sales differently, around $100,000 in transactions per day. The majority of ModCloth’s sales are those for its well-known dresses, though other merchandise on the site, such as swimwear and shoes, will see seasonal bumps, explains company CEO Eric Koger, who founded ModCloth with wife Susan back in 2002. News of the company’s progress comes at a time when the e-commerce industry as a whole is learning to adapt to the new mobile landscape, which affects not only where and when people shop, but also how. Earlier this year, ModCloth began tapping into this trend, in February followed by . Koger, who ModCloth’s business as one where all future development will proceed with a “mobile-first” mindset, says that the company’s progress on mobile has gone well, speaking of softer metrics like “increased engagement,” as well as ones that more directly affect ModCloth’s bottom line. “We have more transactions and more purchases on the app – pretty significantly versus the mobile web app,” he says. “We’re predicting that more than 50 percent of our shoppers are going to be coming from mobile devices by the end of the year.” To put that in perspective, it was when the company noticed the surge in mobile visits had begun accounting for nearly 30 percent of ModCloth traffic. A year later, and they expect the number to grow to half. It’s a shift that is not without its challenges — and not just for ModCloth, but for any e-commerce company that wants to maintain and grow its customer base on the devices whose popularity is contributing to . On mobile, e-commerce businesses need to think about things like what merchandise in their lineup works best on mobile, what time of day their visitors shop, when to reach them via push notifications, how they need to revamp their creative assets for smaller screens, and how they can transition various elements of their user experience to work using taps and swipes instead of mouseovers, among many other things. Koger admits that his company doesn’t have all these answers just yet, and what it knows today will likely change in time. Plus, even if they figure out what works, these are the kinds of trade secrets they’ll likely keep close to their chest as the mobile gold rush continues. What ModCloth does know from its early efforts on iOS devices is that a lot of things have already changed in terms of user behavior. Customers seem to be treating the site as something that’s more like a social app like Instagram, than an e-commerce storefront. Since the debut of the mobile apps, reviews have increased by 30 percent, and uploads to ModCloth’s “selfie” gallery featuring shoppers wearing the company’s clothes have increased by 60 percent. In addition, there are also four times as many users socially sharing from the app, and “loves” (a favoriting function) has increased 200 percent since the app’s debut. But if users are treating ModCloth like a social app, or an aggregator like Wanelo or Fancy, does that engagement mean they’re actually buying? This is where things get tricky. Koger’s opinion is that the shift to mobile also means that e-commerce businesses will need to think about conversions in a new way. “It depends on how you define conversion,” he says. “Conversion per visit is much lower – and that’s the metric most marketers look at. But if you look at it on a conversion per unique shopper, it’s much higher.” He notes that this kind of slower, relationship-building experience has been ModCloth’s modus operandi from day one. “Conversion per visit is really the wrong way to look at it,” Koger adds. “The goal is to grow the customer base and get a large share of [a ModCloth shopper’s] closet.” Getting customers to increasingly visit the mobile app impacts the conversion-per-visit numbers, but serves the longer-term goal of making shopping an ongoing activity where pieces of the shopping experience itself have to be sliced up to fit the way shopping on mobile is done. In the few minutes of downtime where users often launch their favorite apps, they’ll spend some of those sojourns browsing and favoriting, others narrowing down selections and adding things to the cart, and later coming back to complete the checkout process, which is made easier by keeping user payment and address data on file. But keeping users engaged in this ongoing flow may prove difficult for ModCloth and other e-commerce retailers who want their customers interacting with them and their apps the majority of the time. Fashion communities that extend across brands – like Wanelo ( ) and Polyvore (No. 36) today rank much higher than any single brand, including ModCloth (No. 110). These aggregators keep users busy in those same, precious few minutes of downtime while also presenting a variety of competitors’ styles and products to choose from, as well. For ModCloth, that’s a challenge that may have to be addressed with strategic use of push notifications for app users, making sure to alert a shopper before a limited-quantity item sells out, for instance. But ultimately, the company hopes the social media sources and aggregators will be a way to pick up new shoppers who then download the ModCloth app and visit the website on their own. “Our vision and where we believe the industry is heading is retailers who align behind distinct communities of customers, and those retailers understand those customers better than any other retailer,” says Koger. “For the customers who discover us on Pinterest and Wanelo, our mission is to make sure we have such an exciting flow of new merchandise…that [the shopper] comes directly to us.” The company declined to provide specifics on transactions or customer base, pointing only to an it released at the end of 2012, which spoke of 1.2 million orders shipped in the year. Its social media customer base (901K on Facebook, 2.3 million on Pinterest) also speaks to the rough size of its user base. As for what’s next for the company, the plan is to add 100 people to its sizable team (now around 435 employees) during the course of 2013, including some expansion of its L.A.-based design team focused on ModCloth’s private label.
|
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Surface RT, Moto X, And The Seattle Meetup
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Hello and welcome to another Friday. It’s a scorcher out there, AMIRITE? But we’re here to cool things down a bit with yet another episode of the . This week, Microsoft . Meanwhile, placed a focus on Moto X (and we also just ). Finally, TechCrunch just yesterday with the TC Meetup + Pitch-off with over 900 people in attendance. John Biggs, Jordan Crook, and Chris Velazco discuss all this and more on this week’s episode. Enjoy.
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
|
null |
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 10
| null |
Blink(1), The Cute Little Indicator Light, Is Kickstarting Itself Into A Second Version
|
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Blink(1), a Kickstarter favorite that is coming back for more. The indicator light, which plugs into your USB and simply blinks on command, and sports updated features including USB 3.0 support, dual-sided LEDs, and improved design. I haven’t seen an example of a Kickstarter project launching a second version so soon or with such competence but here you go: the new Blink(1) will now support more machines – Chromebooks included – and improved IFTTT. It also features dual LEDs so on one side of the device you can show a status indicator and, on another, get input from another program. Think of it as a multi-tasking blinkenlight clad in a handsome metal and plastic case. I have the original Blink(1) and, sadly, I’ve yet to decide what I want to do with it. However, I would definitely also buy this one in order to also vacillate and eventually lose it in my pile of detritus on my desk. However, you can use it as an open source indicator system, an alert system for alarms and sensors, or simply use it to let you know how hot it is outside or whether or not someone delivered a package on time. It’s especially useful if you’re running, say, a server farm and want to immediately pinpoint bum machines or stopped jobs. The team is looking for $28,000 and is already at $9,000. They plan to ship in October. This new blink is also and you can build your own or even print out your own enclosures. It’s a fun little device at a nice price and, if you’re not lazy like me, you’ll probably find it quite useful.
|
Adobe Launches PhoneGap 3.0 With New Plug-In Architecture, APIs And Better Tools
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Adobe today version 3.0 of its open source mobile app development platform. PhoneGap has long been one of the most popular tools for developers who want to write cross-platform mobile apps in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. With this update, PhoneGap introduces a new plug-in architecture that, the company says, “keeps your app small and fast.” The new plug-in architecture, Adobe says, will allow developers to just include the APIs you need, and plug-ins will then be automatically installed or removed as needed. With this release, Adobe is also adding two new APIs to its lineup: for showing web pages in an app and a new for checking a user’s locale and timezone. Adobe has now aligned the command line tools developers can use to work with PhoneGap on different platforms. Previously, developers had to learn new vocabularies as they shifted between native platforms, but the company says that’s now mostly a thing of the past. Adobe’s tools now also integrate with — Adobe’s hosted cloud-based service for compiling PhoneGap projects — so you don’t even need to have a native platform SDK installed to compile your apps. Just a few days ago, Adobe also support for user-submitted plug-ins to PhoneGap Build. Looking ahead, the company says that PhoneGap will soon offer support for Firefox OS and Ubuntu. The team is also working on making the transition to iOS 7. The did a lot of the work to make this happen. Cordova is the open source project PhoneGap is based on and Cordova also just of its framework. The two new APIs Adobe introduced today, for example, have long been part of the Cordova project and just made the jump to Adobe’s distribution now.
|
Apple’s Developer Center Goes Down For Over 24 Hours
|
Greg Kumparak
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
If you’re trying to get some iOS development done and just can’t get to the tools you need, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Apple’s Developer Center is down. While occasional outages are nothing new, the first mentions of this outage that we can find go back well over 24 hours. That’s longer than any outage that I can remember since the Dev Center launched in 2008, besides the pre-planned Holiday/Keynote shutdowns. While this may be a planned maintenance outage (as the outage page implies), Apple generally gives developers a bit of a heads up before those go down. To developers, this means being unable to download the iOS or Mac OS X SDKs, as well as making development considerably more challenging, since new devices can’t easily be provisioned (read: authorized) for application testing. To would-be developers, this means being unable to sign up at all (a bit of a bummer, given that we’re about to roll into the weekend). Apple’s developer forums — a pretty crucial tool for figuring out why the code you’ve written isn’t working — are also down, leaving devs without a place to chat about their tools without breaking Apple’s NDA. We’re reaching out to Apple to try and figure out what’s up.
|
Tracks Pivots From Photo Sharing To Social Self-Expression With The Launch Of Its New Kanvas App
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
The team behind group photo sharing application has launched a new app today called . The new app is aiming to create a whole new wave of social self-expression by giving its users the tools to easily make fun, creative, mixed-media projects that they can share with friends. Until now, Tracks.io has been focused on sharing photos and making them available to friends, allowing people with shared experiences to group them together in things called (surprise!) “Tracks.” After several iterations, however, it realized its users were hacking photoshops and memes and other non-traditional mixed-media assets into their Tracks. So it decided to try something new — build and launch Kanvas to help users create interesting new pieces of self-expression. What kind of self-expression? Well, it allows users to easily use their own photos or art provided, layer them on top of backgrounds and add stickers and text to quickly build unique new creations that they can share with friends. The app has been seeded with a bunch of free backgrounds and fonts and stickers and whatnot that people can use to create new memes and images, but there are also premium packs available for those who are feeling particularly ambitious. That means that Kanvas, while free to download, already has a built-in revenue model. According to Singh, the social aspect of the app could make certain stickers and tools viral — i.e. you see a friend using a certain sticker and you wanna buy that sticker pack, too. The whole thing is designed to be real lightweight and easy-to-use, while also providing a sort of mobile social network for its users to share with. Tracks CEO Vic Singh told me that there were lots of mobile tools for creation or editing mixed media assets, but none of them did a great job of bringing a social aspect in. The hope is to make Kanvas kind of like an ultra-simple, mobile version of Photoshop that has a social network built in. You’re encouraged, of course, to follow other users, and users can follow you. Users can react with comments or stickers, allowing them to engage with other people’s content. And the Kanvas app connects to all the usual social networks where people are prone to expressing themselves — you know, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. (More are likely to follow.) While the team will continue to support the existing Tracks product, and doesn’t have any plans to shut it down, Singh told me that the company is very excited by the opportunity it has in mixed media with Kanvas. Tracks, he said, is already pretty feature-complete, after making 26 updates over the past two years of its existence. And so for now, the focus will be on moving Kanvas forward with new features and capabilities. The startup has from investors that include General Catalyst, TMT Investments, Eniac Ventures, AppFund, BHV Ventures, Harbor Road Ventures, Atventure.us, and a handful of angels including Photobucket founder Alex Welch, who will be joining the board.
|
Microsoft Still Hopes You’ll Buy A Surface RT, Launches New “Surface Vs. iPad” Ad
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE7AQY5Xk9w Sometimes it feels like Microsoft . After yesterday’s was made even worse because Microsoft had to reveal how badly the had been selling, the company today released a new “Surface RT vs. iPad” ad that touts the tablet’s detachable keyboard, a USB plug and low price (which is only low if you don’t buy the detachable keyboard, of course). In this new installment, poor Siri also has to learn that the iPad doesn’t have a kickstand. Maybe Microsoft is just trying to sell the last few Surface RTs that are still in stock, but launching a new ad for the RT today just seems like very bad timing. Microsoft notes in the ad that the iPad doesn’t have all of the accessories and bells and whistles that the Surface RT offers. But the problem is that consumers didn’t miss those. People just didn’t buy the RT and many of those who did expected a full-blown Windows PC and not a tablet that could only run Windows 8-style apps, which still struggle to compete with other platforms’ apps on quality. The RT was a very nice piece of hardware, but the whole idea of an ARM-based Windows machine was just ill-conceived right from the get-go. Users didn’t care that the Surface RT has a USB port and kickstand before and they won’t care now. The x86-based is a much more useful machine, of course, but its price ($899+ at many retailers) puts it in a different category from the RT. The other problem with the ad is that Microsoft also highlights the Surface’s in comparison with the iPad but doesn’t include it in the $349 price for the RT that it shows at the end of the ad. That just leaves a bad taste after watching an ad that’s already ill-timed.
|
Job Listing Suggests Motorola Mobility Is Starting To Focus On Wearable Tech In Earnest
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
Heads up, wearable tech aficionados: Motorola Mobility is looking to produce some new wearable gadgets and it wants some help. The Google-owned company yesterday looking for someone to fill the role of senior director of industrial design for wearables — according to the post, that person will “provide strategic leadership, champion innovation and institute best practices to create a new world-class wearable’s [sic] design group within Motorola.” At first glance, it seems like the sort of person the more business-centric Motorola Solutions would be looking for — after all, they’ve got plenty of experience — but references in the listing to the company’s “future with Google” make it clear this isn’t just an instance of a post going up on the wrong career site. Then again, Motorola Mobility was responsible for devices like the ill-fated MOTOACTV (seen above), so they’re not exactly strangers to wearable tech either. Of course, there’s very big question we need to address here: what exactly does Motorola mean when they use the word “wearables”? At this point it’s tough to say, but Regina Dugan, head of MM’s Advanced Technology and Research Group, gave us a bit of a hint when she took at the stage at . At the time noted that she was “profoundly interested in wearables, and showed off an electronic authentication “tattoo” developed by MC10 — essentially an ultra-thin patch loaded up with very small antennas and sensors — that Motorola would be helping to advance in conjunction with the company. That sounds pretty niche to be honest, but it may just be the tip of the iceberg if the language in the job listing is any indication. There are repeated references to the importance of consumer appeal: the person who lands the gig must “define design strategies that synthesize technology innovation and consumer desires” and “ensure creative direction for design is consumer focused”, which make it look like Motorola eventually wants to release a wearable device that’s meant for the masses. That jibes rather nicely with remarks made by Motorola consumer experience design SVP Jim Wicks last month at TechWeek in Chicago — he suggested that people won’t be hunched over their gadgets in the future, and that wearable tech will continue pick up steam. Motorola definitely isn’t the only one tackling the wearable tech trend, as parent company Google has reportedly been working on a smartwatch for a while now, and Apple has reportedly been fleshing out its staff with who may be working on fitness-friendly wrist-worn gadget. This isn’t the first time that Motorola let an upcoming initiative slip thanks to a publicly available job posting — earlier this year the Google-owned company was caught trying to hire a , a device we know now to be the . To absolutely no one’s surprise, that job listing disappeared shortly after it started getting media attention, but the proverbial damage was already done. As it happens, Motorola is still looking for quite a few people — there are some 450 job openings listed on the Motorola Mobility careers page. Google revealed yesterday in its quarterly earnings release that between March and June of this year, Motorola Mobility lost of its nearly 10,000 person workforce — some certainly moved on of their own volition, Motorola has responded to say that the “vast majority” of those people worked in manufacturing in China and Brazil, and have been transferred to .
|
San Jose State’s Bold Experiment In Online Ed Disappoints, Suspends Pilot With Udacity
|
Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
|
The largest university system in the world in massively open online course (MOOC) education, after disappointing student outcomes. Last January, San Jose State University a partnership with online course startup, Udacity, to offer super-low cost remedial college courses to the masses. Unfortunately, the reports that pass rates for the courses were between 20% to 44%, well below the 75% typical of traditional courses. In a joint statement, the two organizations said that they will “make improvements and adjustments, ensure that campus policies and processes are all in alignment, and increase internal and external communications and opportunities for discussion and dialogue.” On the bright side, SJSU has had much better success with Harvard and MIT’s joint online education project, EdX. In a science course that combined online and offline components pass rates skyrocketed to 91%, compared to 55% without the online component. Part of Udacity’s disappointing performance can be attributed to the students themselves. According to the WSJ, “20% were high school students, 62% of students in the pilot were not regular San Jose students, and all of the matriculated ones had failed a remedial math class before. (Among the regular, so-called matriculated students who had previously failed, 29% passed the Udacity course.)” In fairness to Udacity, It’s hard overestimate impact from different student populations. For instance, wrongly attributed to some experimental k-12 charter schools is due to the fact that they can select the best students. For better or worse, there are vast differences in motivation and ability of the top and bottom students, which can reflect enormous differences in class outcomes. In all likelihood, this is just a short, temporary setback to the inevitable changes that are coming to higher education.
|
Are Adidas Springblades The New Crazy Monkey Shoes?
|
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
It is a point of pride and, to an extent, shame that I introduced the TC audience to minimal running shoes aka . Since I’ve tried to keep up with the trends. The latest stop in my exploration? . Why is this on TechCrunch, you ask? Because these are some high-tech shoes, friends, and I suspect some of you out there in the Valley/Alley enjoy a spot of running now and again, in between complaining about things being on TechCrunch and coding. While the bright, blaze orange upper alone is enough to turn heads, these shoes have plastic springs instead of a sole. These springs add a bit of “lift” each time you step, essentially springing your foot back into the air after each footfall. I’ve been a minimalist runner since 2009, first using Vibrams and then trying various models from Brooks, Adidas, and most recently . After a fairly complete and debilitating injury during marathon training, my long-distance running days are pretty much shot, but I still try to get at least 10 miles in a week. It’s not much, but hey, I’m not running for Miss Blog USA. I’m also fairly slow. That said, running with the Springblade has been, if not a revelation, then quite surprising. I’m a bit more tired running in these than in minimalist shoes, which is normal. These are about 12 ounces and those 16 springs on each foot add just a bit of weight. However, I’ve seen my maximum speed increase from 8 minutes per mile to about 7:50 per mile – a measure taken at my peak speed using a Nike+ GPS watch – an improvement that is fairly important for a slowpoke like me. I also felt less pain in my shins and ankles and a distinct difference in the tiredness I felt after my three-mile runs. Do I think it’s the shoes? Sure. The soles are far springier than I’m used to and I honestly enjoy them over the last pair of full running shoes I bought, the New Balance M1080v2. They also wore me out far faster and I definitely felt a distinct soreness in my calves that I hadn’t experienced in a while. In short, at the very least these shoes changed my stride slightly. Would I recommend them over minimalist shoes? I’m not sure. Vibrams helped me out of a bout of plantar fasciitis, which has not flared up to this day. I have fought shin splints and other knee issues that I believe are weight related and I know I could use a more solid pair of shoes to perhaps take some of the strain off the ankles and joints. These could do the trick. These shoes expel energy forward and work best while running on concrete and less well on soft surfaces like sand or trails. I was worried they’d get caught up in the buckling Brooklyn sidewalks but I noticed no issues. Apparently these are extensively tested to ensure the springs don’t break or buckle and, if anything, they look wild. The shoes are – quite pricey for their weight – but they are a fascinating improvement to the standard, mushy thick-soled running shoes that I’ve eschewed for a number of years. I’ve yet to see many experts weigh in on these shoes, and even Runner’s World is still mum about their opinion. I’m under no illusion that these shoes are more than an interesting gimmick that may shave off a few seconds at your fastest pace. But as a sheer feat of technical improvement to the tired running shoe, I applaud Adidas for attempting something so bold. I would expect these to rise to the level of the Nike Free over the next few months as people try them out simply for the novelty of the design. While I’m not exactly sure if I’ll stick to these over the long run, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
|
Zenefits Lands $2.1M From Venrock, Maverick, Aaron Levie, Charlie Cheever And More To Automate Startup HR
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
For small businesses, managing health insurance and payroll services can be a huge pain and time-sink. They probably don’t have someone on staff dedicated to these issues, and they themselves would rather be dedicating that energy to building a company. launched out of to remove the friction of setting up and managing group health coverage and payroll by automating the process and bringing it online — for free. As a testament to how much demand there is among startups and small businesses, , Zenefits co-founder Parker Conrad tells us that the company has signed on over 110 clients (ranging from 2 employees to over 100) and is now bringing on an average of 10 customers each week. Today, as it looks to continue expanding operations beyond California, Zenefits is announcing that it has raised $2.1 million in seed capital from an impressive roster of venture firms and angel investors. The new round, which includes the initial $372K chunk of capital the startup raised out of Y Combinator from Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, General Catalyst, Garry Tan, Justin Kan and Alexis Ohanian, was led by Venrock and Maverick Capital. A big reason why Zenefits was keen to bring these two investors on board in particular, Conrad tells us, was that Bob Kocher, who led Venrock’s investment, was a key player in helping to write the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) when he worked at the White House. , at its core, Zenefits is essentially a digital insurance broker, meaning that they help startups automate insurance, benefits and payroll but they also get paid a commission by insurance companies each time a company opens a new plan through its system. Over the next two years, as Obamacare goes into effect, the new regulations and provisions mean big changes for health insurance companies and brokers. These health players are not only being forced to move operations online but will also see the amount of commissions they can take drop — among other things. Many health insurance brokers are going to drop their small-group clients to focus on bigger-ticket customers as a result — and, as premiums could go up for businesses — Zenefits could stand to benefit big-time by offering their services for free. Plus, having someone who’s intimately familiar with the complex and nuanced provisions and regulations in Obamacare (because he helped write them) is huge. Maverick Capital is also familiar with the healthcare and health insurance industries itself, having backed some of the bigger startups and players in the market, like One Medical, Castlight Health and SeaChange Health, for example. On top of its lead investors and the Y Combinator partners (like Sam Altman, Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Bucheit and Justin Tan — who all invested personally), Zenefits also saw a number of recognizable names contribute as angels, including Box co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, former Googler and Twitter VP of Corporate Strategy Elad Gil, Weebly co-founder David Rusenko, former Googler and Badoo COO Ben Ling, Google’s Head of Spam Slamming Matt Cutts and Inkling co-founder and CEO, Matt MacInnis. With the new capital under its belt, Zenefits has expanded its team to 12 and will look to add more in the coming year. Because the company is considered a broker, it is paid a commission from insurance companies for each new employee and employee added (every month), which is great for its bottom line. But this also requires that it be approved by the government on a state-to-state basis. Currently, regulations limit it (and others like it) to a few states. But with the changes Obamacare will bring, Conrad expects that digital insurance brokers of its ilk will be allowed to expand to more states beginning in January, at which point, Zenefits will look to move quickly beyond California and New York. In the meantime, Conrad tells us that, according to BenefitMail, the company has already vaulted into the top 5 percent of insurance brokers (in terms of number of clients) in California, primarily as a result of new company submissions to Blue Cross — not bad for a startup five months from launch. For those unfamiliar, Zenefits has been growing fast in California by turning a paper-heavy process into a digital one, allowing users to create new plans, while serving up quotes for group coverage across health, dental and vision insurance. The company’s system makes it easier for companies hiring new employees to add coverage for each employee, or, if a company fires someone (or they leave), they can click a button to remove their coverage and take them off the payroll, while starting them on COBRA coverage. It works for companies regardless of whether they don’t have existing coverage or already are set up, syncing employee coverage data and taking over as your insurance broker for those in the latter camp. The company also recently added payroll services, so that startups and small businesses can just tell Zenefits about a new hire and give them the employee’s information, at which point Zenefits will take care of generating offer letters, IP agreements, onboarding details and then add them to its payroll system. They can also do the same for that employee’s benefits. As part of its payroll services, Zenefits also sets up deductions employees pay for health insurance and other benefits, which employers would usually have to set up themselves. This is a pain, because salary and pricing can be different for each employee and whenever deductions change (which happens a lot when employees move, get married and so on), the price changes. Traditionally, the price of deductions change every 10 years, but with Obamacare, this will happen every year. This could be a huge boon for Zenefits, as it takes care of this stuff for startups and small businesses, who would be seeing a lot more paperwork as a result. Furthermore, while services like Zenefits may seem familiar or not particularly disruptive to some, it’s hard to over-state just how old-school (and offline) most of the big, old school health insurance brokers are in the U.S. Some of them are multi-billion-dollar market cap companies, but may have little or no software or online-based solutions for their customers. So many startups and founder say “we’re disrupting and old offline industry” to get you excited about your company, and in a lot of cases that’s only half-true. Health insurance brokerage is definitely one of those industries that qualifies as ripe for disruption thanks to its archaic procedures, practices and infrastructure. Many are aware of the changes that are coming, but they’re limited in how quickly they can react by responsibilities to shareholders, quarterly earnings and so on. Easier to preserve and protect the current state of things than re-build from the ground up. Zenefits won’t be the only one to benefit — many new companies are going to spring up in this space — but it’s definitely off to a good start. As Inkling CEO Matt MacInniss (who personally invested in this round) told us: Zenefits has identified a huge opportunity in the shifting landscape of benefits and healthcare among growing companies. Incumbents aren’t going to move as quickly as smaller, nimble companies — and they’re not technologists — so I think there’s a huge opportunity for new digital health insurance brokers to quickly move out front to take the pole position in what’s essentially a new category
|
Y Combinator-Backed DoorDash Delivers Food Quickly In South Bay, Hopes To Expand Beyond Food
|
Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
, a Y Combinator summer ‘13 company, delivers food from restaurants in Palo Alto and Mountain View in an average time of 45 minutes. Sound familiar? It’s a crowded space, but while competitors like and offer users an app to order food from any restaurant that has its own drivers and delivery-system setup, DoorDash hires and manages its own drivers, so it can bring you food from restaurants that don’t have their own delivery drivers. That may not seem like a big difference, but for the suburbs and college campuses, it’s a welcome change from having just pizza and Chinese food places offering delivery. DoorDash charges $6 per delivery with no minimum order size, and currently delivers lunch (11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m.) and dinner (5:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.) every day. The company currently delivers to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View from 50 restaurants in the area. , , is doing something fairly similar, but is more expensive–Fluc charges $5.95 per order and inflates menu prices a bit, whereas DoorDash charges $6 per order and doesn’t inflate menu prices. DoorDash partners with the restaurants they deliver from, so they take a cut from the restaurant’s side of things, not from the consumer. DoorDash was founded by four Stanford students: worked on the founding team of Vevo; was at Square and Red Laser/eBay; and and spent a summer together at Facebook. Moore and Xu were friends in Stanford’s business school, and Fang and Tang are undergrads. Moore and Tang had worked on a project together in a class in the spring of 2012, and later decided to work together on DoorDash, bringing in the other two. In February, they built a prototype, Palo Alto Delivery, in one day to gauge demand. Half an hour later, they had their first order and soon they were delivering food every day around campus. The four of them did the first 200 deliveries by themselves; they say they learned so much as drivers that they have new team members start as drivers. I used DoorDash (then called Palo Alto Delivery) several times in the spring and really liked it. On campus at Stanford there aren’t a ton of options for delivery, so I was very willing to pay $6 to get better food delivered every once in awhile. One of the new features I’m most excited about is Group Order, in which you can split the bill with a group of friends through DoorDash but still have all the food come in one order. “Our ultimate goal is to enable merchants to deliver locally,” Tang says. He notes that restaurants are a good place to start, as the company has been able to grow really quickly (they doubled total deliveries in the past two weeks), and they hope to grow both geographically and, eventually, beyond just food delivery.
|
Someone Please Actually Hack Chipotle’s Twitter Account
|
Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
For whatever reason, this week has felt particularly long. It might be some astrological reason like . Or it might just be the emotions that are a package deal with being a woman at the end of any month. Or it might be that burrito haven on Sunday, and the stunt has left a bad taste in my mouth. Brands who stage fake hackings as an attempt to , does the world really need more Internet mistrust post- ? Is fake hacking really something you’d like to have forever associated with your brand? Do you really want Pete Cashmore sopping up pageviews your lame attempt at garnering publicity? For that matter, is using to “position” a tweet really the best use of your precious time left on the planet? I mean, doing on Twitter nowadays is lauded as being cool and fresh. Even if the content itself is not cool and fresh. We’re on to you, The only reason I’m bringing this up is because the world is in the middle of an economic : On one side, over per day; on the other, a class of overprivileged digital natives like myself who get paid to spend their lives on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, thinking up new ways to “go viral.””What if we faked a hack …?!” The only way this will end is with my head . Let them ! Hit send too soon! — Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) Mittens13 password leave — Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets)
|
Get Ready For TechCrunch TV’s Tour Of The New Hollywood, Starting Next Week
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Over the last several years, we’ve seen a new group of digital media companies emerge in Los Angeles, driven by the growth of YouTube as a platform for distribution of video content. What started out as a cottage industry built around YouTube is becoming a pretty massive business, with L.A. at the center of it all. Companies like Machinima, Maker Studios, and Fullscreen were founded with the idea of helping creators to expand their audiences by improving their production value, collaborating with other YouTubers, and adopting a series of best practices. That said, not all YouTube networks are created equal: While some focus on providing creators with tools for high-quality production, others have developed technical tools to help them succeed. Some are focused on specific verticals, like gaming or food, while others are built around aggregating channels with massive audiences and growing them through collaborations. TechCrunch TV spent several days in L.A. meeting with a number of digital media companies, including Machinima, Fullscreen, Tastemade, ZEFR, Big Frame, Maker Studios, and Funny or Die. During those visits we met with executives and creators, toured production facilities, and got to know the people building this whole new ecosystem of video content. We also visited YouTube Space L.A., a huge facility filled with equipment for shooting, editing, and other post-production activities that is free and open to YouTube creators. On Mondays and Wednesdays over the next four weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of videos showing off all the best from our meetings at those companies, giving you a better feel for what each has to offer and what creators can expect when they sign up for a multichannel network. Here are the videos we’ve released so far:
|
Apple’s Developer Center Is Back After Over A Week Offline
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Apple’s Developer Center is finally back online, after taking a break for over a week. The developer site , and stayed down without any kind of return for multiple days. The hack was reportedly one that only affected developer accounts, after an intruder attempted to secure personal information. Apple said at the time that it was possible personal information including developer names, mailing addresses and email addresses could have been accessed, but no credit card data was leaked. Apple offered no time-table for return at the time, but did create a , and started bringing things back online slowly. A researcher reported that he’d possibly prompted the down time after probing the dev center and reporting bugs regarding vulnerabilities in it and the iAd Workbench site, but we’ve reached out to Apple for more specific information about the return and what steps led to it, and will update with a response if we receive one. Here’s the full text of the email sent to developers by Apple about the outage. We appreciate your patience as we work to bring our developers services back online. Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, software downloads, and other developer services are now available. If you would like to know the availability of a particular system, visit our status page. If your program membership expired or is set to expire during this downtime, it will be extended and your app will remain on the App Store. If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us. Thank you for bearing with us while we bring these important systems back online. We will continue to update you on our progress.
|
Google Asks Glass Developers To Start Working On Android-Based Apps Ahead Of Glass Development Kit Launch
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
It looks like Google is about to unleash a new wave of more powerful applications for Google Glass. Currently, Glass developers can only build apps that are essentially that talk to the user’s hardware through a set of relatively limited APIs. At its I/O developer conference earlier this year, Google announced that it would soon release its so-called (GDK), which would let them build Android-based apps for Glass that can run directly on the device. So far, however, Google hasn’t launched the GDK. Instead, Google today developers who are waiting for the GDK to start working on Android apps for Glass using the standard Android SDK (API Level 15) to try out their ideas. As Google , developers can use the SDK to access low-level hardware to render OpenGL and use stock Android UI widgets, for example. Developers can also access the accelerometer of Glass through the SDK. Glass, after all, runs Android 4.0.4, so it’s a pretty well-known platform for many developers. To help newcomers get started, though, the company also released (a stopwatch, compass and level) today that highlight some of the things developers can do with Android on Glass. Over the next few weeks, Glass team member Alain Vongsouvanh , the team will also use these sample apps to “demonstrate the migration path between a traditional Android app and a full Glass experience.” For Glass to reach its full potential, developers need better access to the device’s hardware, so it’s nice to see Google moving ahead with this. It’s still a bit of a surprise that Google hasn’t released the GDK yet. And the fact that it made today’s announcement indicates that it could still be a few weeks out. If you’re a Glass developer, though, now is probably a good time to start thinking about how you would use Android on Glass.
|
Ask A VC: Lightspeed Ventures’ Bipul Sinha On How The Enterprise Sales Model Has Changed
|
Leena Rao
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
On this week’s Ask a VC show, Lightspeed Ventures’ Partner joined us in the studio to field reader questions and talk about enterprise investing. Sinha, who has led investments in Nutanix and PernixData among others, talked about how the enterprise sales model has changed over time. Sinha has an interesting view on this topic, considering he advises startups now on how to structure their sales operations and has an insider experience on how incumbent sales worked while at Oracle. Sinha also discussed what the most interesting niche is within the software defined datacenter space. Tune in above for more!
|
Mobile Payment At U.S. Starbucks Locations Crosses 10% As More Stores Get Wireless Charging
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Starbucks is seeing impressive adoption of mobile payments in its U.S.-based store locations, the company revealed during its quarterly earnings conference call last night (via ). Mobile payments crossed the 10 percent mark in the U.S. as a percentage of in-store purchases, indicating efforts like the Starbucks mobile app, Apple’s Passbook and Square Wallet are popular among users. The coffee franchise is pushing forward with more mobile-focused initiatives, including the installation of wireless charging mats in select locations. The follows a trial of 17 locations in Boston, and will roll-out in Silicon Valley throughout August. The standard it uses is the Power Matters Alliance variety, which unfortunately doesn’t work with phones that use the Qi standard like the Google Nexus 4. Still, a growing number of companies are joining up with PMA’s standard, and Starbucks’s continued support should help it appear in more devices. The lesson here is that Starbucks is putting a lot of weight behind its mobile digital initiatives, and those efforts are bearing fruit. Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman said on the call that its “various digital initiatives have added demonstrable impact to our U.S. business in the third quarter” and promises to do even more for the company with continued investment. Pay-by-app in this way kind of defies what many thought about mobile payments in the early days, that it would be enabled by one dominant provider and come in the form of a single wallet provided by a single ruling platform creator, and that it would be enabled by NFC or something similar. The Starbucks method involves a variety of different payment options and uses traditional barcode scanning to function, and yet it’s very popular. This seems to be because it’s convenient, easy to find and carries familiar branding from multiple trusted sources. While we still mostly pay with traditional methods, the Starbucks example is a good illustration of how mobile-enabled commerce can work if the conditions are right and the source in question has the clout to push it through. But the Starbucks model is an island, which means we could see continued growth in mobile payments on a case-by-case basis instead of as a sweeping trend that trounces cards and currency in one tidal push.
|
Mailbox’s First App, Orchestra To-Do, Is Shutting Down
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Before being for $100 million, before its app became one of the buzzier startups of 2013, the team at Mailbox had been known for , a simple to-do list app with tasks you could assign to others, or pull in via email. Now that app is shutting down, and will be removed from the App Store on September 6th, the company says. The move to shut down the app shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to its users. In order to build the , development efforts on Orchestra had stopped. In fact, the company was a case study in what – it realized early on that the product wasn’t breaking out to become a mainstream hit, so the team took their initial learnings and applied them to a new area. Orchestra, the App Store’s 2011 Productivity App of the Year, inspired the team to treat emails basically like to-do’s when they moved on to building what then became Mailbox. Now at Dropbox, the work on Mailbox continues, the company explains in about the app’s impending closure, but they need to now discontinue the app and move on. Users are advised to copy the tasks they have within Orchestra elsewhere before it shuts down, noting that while the app will still launch on your phone if installed after September 6, all cloud services, including sync, task delegation, and access to the web app and customer support, will become unavailable. These, of course, are some of the main reasons why users chose Orchestra in the first place, so there’s little need to keep the app once it’s disconnected. Though Orchestra was certainly a well-built to-do list application, there’s certainly no lack of task list managers in the iOS App Store ready to step up and takes its place – including some of my personal favorites like AnyDO, FetchNotes, Wunderlist, Evernote, Clear and more. The full announcement is below:
|
FindIt Launches A Universal Search App For iPhone With A Visual Twist
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
, a new mobile application offering universal search across emails and files stored in the cloud, is today making its official debut. With the , you can quickly connect your Gmail, Dropbox and Google Drive accounts, and then proceed to search by keyword, person, time or file type. But the ability to search for items is not what makes FindIt unique — it’s you search. The concept of aggregating a user’s email, local file systems, and various cloud services in order to offer a single mechanism to search across data sets is not a new one. FindIt currently competes with other file aggregators on web and mobile, including, for example, and (which, coincidentally, ). But more broadly, FindIt also competes with some of the moves Google has been making in recent months to personalize search. Its opt-in Google Search for instance, combines data stored in Google’s more personal services like Drive, Calendar and Gmail, which then becomes searchable through Google.com. However, explains FindIt co-founder and CEO Levi Belnap, the problem with search, and especially mobile search, is not in the capabilities of the back-end search technology involved. It’s the process of searching and the way that search results can be narrowed and filtered that needs a change. “Search technology, in and of itself, is actually pretty good these days,” he says, noting that many companies, his included, likely take advantage of the same open-source technologies to power their backends. “But the process of searching on a phone is broken. There’s not enough space to open up advanced search and type in all these different variables. Plus, nobody wants to type anything on a phone,” he adds. With , after you connect your accounts during setup, you can then search in a manner that more closely resembles how humans think about the things they’re trying to remember. For instance, if you’re trying to remember a restaurant you visited, you wouldn’t just type in “Italian,” but you may remember that you ate there a month ago, or that you went there with certain friends. That same concept of drilling down in a more natural way is applied to FindIt’s own search interface, and to get there, you just tap. You can either kick off a search with a keyword then apply filters, or you can start off by tapping on “search by person,” “time” or “type” directly from the homescreen. After you type in your keyword(s), you then tap on filters to narrow your results, specifying you only want emails or images or presentations, perhaps, or only want to see files from last week or 30 days ago. This is easier than swiping through a long list of results on your phone, which is what you have to do today when using some competing apps, or even your native mail client, or the Gmail, Dropbox or Drive apps themselves. In the version of FindIt awaiting App Store approval now, the app will support multiple accounts and will introduce an even more visual way to search through time. (Pictured below.) Belnap says the idea came to him after having left his earlier work with a clean-tech nonprofit to attend Harvard Business School. He trained his replacement for half a year, but then found out that a month after he started school, the guy had quit. “I learned that he didn’t work with the right people and the right things,” says Belnap.”He just didn’t have the information he needed when he needed it.” Belnap had, of course, left a wealth of this info in files and folders, but for the new hire, it was a matter of not knowing where to look to find it. This, he says, inspired him to begin thinking about whether or not there could be a technical solution to that problem. Initially, FindIt was conceived as a web app, but user feedback soon pushed the team, which also includes co-founders Alex Pak and Ben Morrise, toward mobile. Now participating in TechStars Chicago, the company is planning on quickly adding several more cloud services to FindIt, beginning with ones professionals would need, such as Box or Microsoft Exchange, for example. Longer-term, the plan will be to go freemium, where paid users will be able to access data from more complex, business-focused platforms, like Salesforce. FindIt plans to move to the Bay Area following TechStars (likely Mountain View/Sunnyvale), and has a small amount of seed funding from the incubator, friends and family. The app is a free download .
|
Gillmor Gang Live 07.26.13 (TCTV)
|
Steve Gillmor
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
– Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
|
After Losing Nearly Half Its Users In A Year, Investors Dock Zynga’s Valuation By $400 Million
|
Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
It is not a good day to be Zynga, or one of its investors if you held stock in the firm yesterday. Following a , investors have unloaded the firm’s shares, sending them down around 15 percent in regular trading. That loss comes after Zynga’s stock price rose in the wake of a . Investors had hoped that the strength of Facebook’s earnings indicated that Zynga, too, would have reported a good set of financial and user-based metrics. It was perhaps a decent gambit, but it . A small picture of the company’s decline: Zynga’s daily active user count for the quarter totaled 39 million. However, in the preceding sequential quarter, Zynga had 52 million daily active users. A year ago, that figure was 72 million. Revenue, to cite another statistic, was down by more than $100 million to $231 million. Zynga is a company in steep decline. And the market docked its allowance. Comparing yesterday’s closing price of $3.50, Zynga’s current price of $3 is a just over a 14 percent decline. In dollar terms, Zynga today shed around $400 million of market capitalization. As you will recall, this is not the first time that Zynga has suffered from this sort of gut punch to its stock price. This is not Zynga’s lowest point. The company’s 52 week low rests at $2.01 per share, at which point Zynga was worth less than $2 billion. Zynga’s stock peaked in March 2012 at a price of $14.69. At current tip, Zynga’s stock has declined around 80 percent since its all-time high. Whether Zynga can pull out of its current slide is an open question. Its CEO change provided a large bump in its market valuation, sending the worth of Zynga . Quickly, those gains have been erased, and more. Zynga reported $1.53 billion in cash and marketable securities. The market is therefore valuing Zynga, post cash, at under $1 billion. Zing? Guh.
|
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Nexus 7, Cheap iPhone 4s, And Chromecast
|
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Does the high-res beat out the iPad mini? Why has Apple’s ? Is Google’s new dongle an Apple TV/Airplay killer? We discuss all this and more on this week’s . The show features John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Darrell Etherington, and Romain Dillet. Packed house, I know. So sit back, relax, and listen to us make fun of each other while discussing this week’s developments in gadgetry. Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
|
Come Hack At The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon — Tickets Now Available!
|
Greg Kumparak
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Hey, you! On the computer! You want fame? You want glory? You want more free pizza than any human should consume in a single night? Come build with us. We like to start off each of our conferences with a 24-hour hackathon, and we’re continuing that tradition at in September. It’s going to be I know, I know — of course say our event is going to be crazy. But seriously: We’ve had people build everything from to . We’ve had hackathon projects spin out into full-fledged companies, , and get . The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs September 7 and 8, and we’ve just released . What are you waiting for?
|
null |
Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 7
| 19
| null |
A First Look At Younity, The App That Lets You Access All Your Files All The Time
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
But a new app called could make situations like that a thing of the past. Younity, which is in the current class of Los Angeles-based startup accelerator , purportedly creates a “personal cloud” for the files shared on all of your various devices to let you access them anytime, anywhere. I met Younity co-founder while we were in L.A. earlier this month, and his pitch was quite interesting — from the looks of it, I’d be able to access those Iceland photos that are on my home computer from my phone in a snap (that is, if I had .) Essentially, it makes the experience of the cloud come to you, rather than the other way around. It’s still the early days for the Younity app, but it looks promising, and it’ll be exciting to see how it develops in the months ahead. Check out our brief interview with Caso and introduction to Younity in the video above.
|
Pinterest Adds Support For “Do Not Track” As It Begins To Personalize Its Service For Users
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Pinterest announced today that it will add support for Do Not Track, the web browser mechanism that allows users to opt-out of having their personal data and activity collected by websites and third parties. It’s not the first social media company to make this move — Twitter, for example, that it would also support the Do Not Track technology. Do Not Track, for those unfamiliar, is similar in spirit to the Do Not Call registry, in that it allows consumers to state their preferences — in this case, that they do not want to have their website browsing activity tracked or personal data collected. The technology blocks cookies that collect that personal information, and specifically, the cookies left on users’ computers and devices by third parties for the purposes of advertising. However, Do Not Track to work requires cooperation between browser makers, website publishers, and developers to implement. While the major browser makers have gotten on board, there are still only that support Do Not Track. And until today, Twitter was the only other social network to have made that commitment. Explains Pinterest in a statement, “consensus around the technical specs for Do Not Track remain elusive. However, we believe people are making a choice when they turn on Do Not Track. Today, we’re committing to respecting that choice.” Pinterest users will now be able to turn the feature on or off from their account Settings page at any time, the company says. Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Senior Staff Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), says that Pinterest and Twitter are both supporting Do Not Track in similar ways: by either a browser signal or a preference set by the site itself. His organization is focused on improving consumer choice and privacy options, and hopes that Pinterest’s move will lead to more companies doing the same. Pinterest’s announcement about its support for Do Not Track comes at a time when the service is interested in better analyzing user activity in order to introduce more personalized features. For example, that it’s also adding a new “Edit Your Home Feed” button on web and mobile that will make it easier to follow or unfollow boards. When you go in to edit your feed, you’ll be shown personalized pin and board suggestions based on things you’ve already been pinning on the service. So, for example, if you pin a lot of vegetarian recipes, the company explains to us, you’ll then be shown other popular boards that have similar content. In addition, the company will also soon introduce recommendations for boards based on the sites you visit with the “Pin It” button — something that’s similar to what other companies, including Twitter, do to personalize their own experiences. By adding support for Do Not Track just as the company begins to dig further into user data, Pinterest is at least giving its users a choice in whether or not their data is collected, and it’s one of only a few sites to really do so. However, Do Not Track is a technology and proposal that’s currently being debated by the industry, with those companies dependent on ad revenue, like Yahoo, TechCrunch parent AOL, and others, on how the push toward a Do Not Track standard should proceed. As , a lot of the debate centers around whether DNT should mean “do not collect” data, “do not target” users, or whether it should mean “practice good data hygiene.” (In Pinterest’s case, it’s the former, which is what DNT means today). The interesting thing about Pinterest’s implementation of DNT is that it will eventually change what the end-user experience is for those who do or do not enable the setting. For those who permit Pinterest to personalize the site, they’ll have an improved way to discover new content, pinners, pins, and boards they may like. But for those who opt out of tracking, personalized boards will not be shown, which means those users’ Pinterest experiences will remain basically unchanged. Given that Pinterest’s discovery mechanisms today include a basic category list, search box, and “find friends” functionality, regular users have likely been looking forward to the introduction of new features that would allow them to better explore more of Pinterest. But now, those users will have to make a choice about whether or not their privacy — or their personalizations — are the most important thing to them.
|
Inside Tesla’s Supercharger Partner Program: The Costs And Commitments Of Electrifying Road Transport
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Tesla is building a in the U.S. to help give its growing fleet of consumer vehicles the juice they need to conquer the nation’s highways, and now we at TechCrunch have an inside look at how they’re approaching partners to help them expand. Tesla’s footing the bill for the Supercharger spots, asking only for time and access from partners with parking lots, and promising the keys to the future in return. For “prospective hosts” of Tesla Superchargers, the ask isn’t too steep: Tesla covers all costs, upfront and ongoing associated with installing supercharger stations, according to the documents obtained by TechCrunch. That covers maintenance, as well as power costs, with Tesla optionally offering to install a dedicated meter just for the charging station alone, from which the bill will go directly to Tesla itself. The cost for Tesla is between $100,000 and $175,000 depending on the station, and a lot of those come from the permanent modifications needed at the site to support the Supercharger itself. It’s more expensive than putting in a charger for a standard electric car, like a Nissan Leaf for instance, but the Supercharger can deliver around five times the power of those stations in the same amount of time, and is more demanding in terms of infrastructure changes as a result. A property owner doesn’t have to stake any monetary commitment, but it does have to offer up between four or five spaces on average, plus around 200 to 600 square feet for Superchargers and equipment. Most agreements involve four “dedicated” stations, designed such that only Tesla owners can use them (prevents a driver arriving and not being able to find a spot), as well as between four and six additional stations that can accommodate both normal cars and provide supercharging for Teslas. This doesn’t need to be prime real estate either, though Tesla does stipulate it be well-lit, and close to existing power infrastructure if possible. Partners are asked to commit to the program for a minimum of five years, with an option to expand, and most agreements range from five to ten years. The length of the commitment required reflects the large cost of the initial install. In exchange, Tesla is selling essentially the image benefits associated with its brand; partners get the mystique and influence of being a Tesla location, attracting its drivers to their on-site businesses, yes, but also offering up press and social media profile bumps. Plus, for companies with environmental sustainability programs and priorities, the brand association benefits are obviously attractive, too. The Tesla docs also show a high rate of usage at its stations, with some installations seeing as many as 17 sessions per day during their peak usage periods, a fact which it can use to convince partners that the space provided will result in more traffic to their stores and businesses. Installation of the Supercharger requires between 12 and 20 weeks to complete, but only between two and four of those actually take place on-site, with the rest consisting of paperwork, business arrangements and obtaining local permits and approvals. If Tesla’s footing the entire bill, it might seem like a no-brainer to get a Supercharger installed at your roadside business, but there is a significant cost involved in terms of construction time and space committed, so it’s understandable that the electric car company has to make its case through these pitch documents. For us, they provide an interesting look at what’s required from all parties involved to help pave the way for the future of electric transport.
|
Google Axes Shopper Price-Comparison Apps For iOS And Android To Focus On Google Shopping
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
It looks like Google is starting to cut back on some of its less successful mobile apps. Earlier today, we that the Google+ Local app has disappeared from the App Store a few weeks ahead of its planned shutdown, and now, the company has that it is going to shut down the standalone Google Shopper app for and on August 30. Given how much online shopping has , that’s a bit of an odd move, but Google says it wants to focus on Google Shopping and Google Search “to create a better, more consistent shopping experience across all devices.” Over the last few months, Google says it introduced “ , and ” on Google Shopping, and it will put its resources into improving this service going forward. Shopper, which launched in , allows users to check online and local prices by scanning cover art and barcodes, as well as through Google’s standard text and voice searches. The last iOS version only has a , though it looks like the was reasonably popular, with over 34,000 ratings for a 4.2 star average. Google argues that users can still find all of the information from Google Shopper through its search app on mobile and by visiting . Despite today’s announcement, the company is also teasing some new shopping products for mobile. “We look forward to sharing some great things we have coming on mobile for the holidays,” Google Shopping VP Sameer Samat writes in today’s blog post. Those new features, though, will likely be part of Google’s existing apps and won’t come in the form of a standalone app.
|
Hey San Francisco, Your Rep. Pelosi Saved The NSA Phone Metadata Program
|
Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
|
Congress almost cut off funds for an NSA spying program, until San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi stepped in to save it. Rep. Pelosi, of California’s 12th district, to the 2014 Defense Appropriations Bill. Amash’s amendment would have defunded the NSA’s domestic phone record program, which collects metadata on every call placed in the United States. It almost passed, . It now appears that it could have passed, but Rep. Pelosi worked behind the scenes to convince a number of Democrats to vote against the amendment. According , a Democratic aide told the publication that “Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment,” the effect of which was greater than briefings with General Alexander, head of the NSA. Pelosi recently took fire at a liberal gathering for her defense of NSA surveillance programs. The aide went on to say that “Pelosi had a big effect on more middle-of-the road hawkish Democrats who didn’t want to be identified with a bunch of lefties” who were in favor of gutting the funding for a program that the NSA claims is key to its ability to preserve the national defense. It’s not a surprise that a Democrat is in favor of the NSA’s surveillance activities; the Amash amendment managed to split Congress, but . Both Democrats and Republicans voted for and against the amendment. However, Rep. Pelosi’s district makes her vote and lobbying efforts curious: She is the direct representative of San Francisco, which contains inside of it large swaths of the technology industry and its denizens. The tech industry has, on average in my estimation, tilted negative regarding the NSA’s pervasive data-collection practices. It isn’t right to think that an elected official must at every turn vote on issues based on the temperature of their district. But in this case, Rep. Pelosi’s active efforts to stamp out support for an amendment that had a chance at enacting real reform — which I suspect would be quite popular in her district — is somewhat hard to grok. Rep. Pelosi is my Representative in Congress, and I voted for her in the last election. That in mind, I must register material complaint with her recent actions. There is irony in that the elected official that represents the location where Twitter is headquartered is in favor of the NSA’s intra-United States data collection activities. Twitter, of course, for its lack of cooperation with the NSA. Here’s Rep. Pelosi’s district: As TechCrunch , and this is something to take heart in, support for the Amash amendment was by definition bipartisan, and stronger than expected. Functional reform could be possible. One month ago it certainly did not feel that way.
|
When Zuckerberg Thought His Sales Guy Was 50 Cent
|
Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
In April 2005, current General Catalyst Venture Partner replaced Eduardo Saverin as Facebook’s business development head and first sales guy. Colleran was Facebook employee number seven, . And eight years ago around this time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to fly out to New York to meet his new hire in person at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square. Now the two had never met face to face, and, because in the early days when FB had only room for one profile pic, was Colleran’s. So Zuck naturally thought that Facebook’s first salesperson was the on the right and not the white-looking Irish dude on the left. The former just happened to be rapper 50 Cent, of “In Da Club” and “P.I.M.P.” fame, whom Colleran had met through his previous job as a consultant at RCA. According to David Kirkpatrick and our sources, Zuck at the mixup. And the next day, Colleran called up Facebook President Sean Parker and asked, “What’s up?” “Well,” Parker explained, “the meeting went fine. But we both feel a little weird, because we thought you were African-American.” SERIOUSLY. THEY THOUGHT THEIR SALES GUY WAS 50 CENT. What makes this story even better is that 50 Cent KNOWS. Because, after Facebook got big and lucrative, Parker ended up telling him. And, according to sources, 50 Cent was like, “Damn, should have taken the job.” As David Beckham likes to say, “ ” Oh, and . I own shares in Facebook (Colleran’s former employer) and am in a relationship with a VC at General Catalyst (his current one).
|
Facebook’s Feature Phone Platform Scores 100M Users, Most In Emerging Markets
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
Facebook that Facebook For Every Phone, a native app that works on feature phones, has been downloaded 100 million times. Facebook For Every Phone is an of the company’s global strategy because more feature phones than smartphones are used in developing markets like India, Indonesia and the Philippines. In fact, for many consumers, feature phones may be their main or only point of access to the Internet. Facebook only recently began selling ads on its feature phone platform and makes very little money that way, but extending into countries with rapidly developing tech ecosystem may help Facebook counterbalance its . Facebook on mobile as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year. Facebook For Every Phone includes the social network’s most popular features, including News Feed, Messenger and Photos. It is optimized to use less data than other Java apps and mobile sites, which is a boon for users on limited data plans. In addition, Facebook has partnered with mobile operators around the world to offer free or discounted data access to Facebook For Every Phone. The app is powered by Snaptu, a .
|
HTC Appoints New U.S. Strategy Chief, Creates “Emerging Devices” Unit To Focus On Innovation And Global Sales
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
After months of internal turmoil and struggling sales, HTC is trying to reboot its strategy by establishing a new unit to develop “innovative” products and putting its global sales president back in charge of U.S. operations. In an internal email obtained by , HTC’s CEO Peter Chou announced that President of Global Sales Jason McKenzie is now in charge of HTC America and will also support Chou with global corporate strategy. McKenzie already has experience leading the company’s U.S. strategy–he was HTC’s president for the America region for about a year before leaving that post to head global sales and marketing in 2011. McKenzie has steered HTC’s global sales strategy since last fall. Chou also wrote that HTC’s President of North America Mike Woodward “will lead Emerging Devices, a newly established business unit that will focus on innovative new HTC products and global distribution strategies.” Its executive reshuffling comes after when some of its top talent, including HTC Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik, Senior Vice President of Global Market Greg Fisher, Chief Product Officer Kouji Kodera and Global Communications VP Jason Gordan left the company. The launch of HTC’s Emerging Devices unit comes as the struggling Taiwan-based smartphone maker continues to engage in an aggressive makeover of its global strategy and shifts its attention away from the U.S., previously its strongest market, to focus on Europe and Asia instead. HTC has struggled as larger rivals like Samsung grab an increasingly sizable chunk of the Android market. Supply chain issues hindered the sales potential of the HTC One and its other flagship product, the Facebook Home pre-loaded HTC First, suffered from a lackluster reception. “I want to thank these two outstanding leaders for their contributions to the success of the HTC One so far,” Chou wrote in his email. “But as you know and would expect, we also need to do more. With the success of the one, we have many new opportunities both to expand current sales as well as to enter new distribution channels with new business model.” HTC’s were down 82% year-over-year and its shares are . But Chou tried to reassure employees in his email that HTC’s brand recognition is still on the climb. “Among the youth segment, brand awareness is 87%, with 67% of this segment considering HTC a brand ‘on the up,'” Chou wrote.
|
Touch: Where Microsoft Went Wrong
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
Microsoft had a pretty bad week. The software giant announced , which prompted its stock to tank more than 11 percent the next day. One reason for the bad quarter was the $900 million charge it took against “Surface RT” inventory adjustments, but even without this writedown, its quarter still would have been pretty bad. If the earnings show one thing, it’s that outside of its business and enterprise offerings (which delivered relatively good results), Microsoft just doesn’t have any products right now that consumers want to buy. What happened to the company that not too long ago launched Windows 7, a product that many thought was Microsoft’s best operating system yet? At some point in the last few years, Microsoft decided that its consumer products had to be “touch first.” The first time Microsoft really stressed this was when it two years ago at the D9 conference. “A Windows 8-based PC is really a new kind of device, one that scales from touch-only small screens through to large screens, with or without a keyboard and mouse,” Julie Larson-Green, then Microsoft’s corporate VP for Windows Experience, wrote at the time. Since then, Microsoft has been hoping for consumers to buy laptops with touchscreen — maybe even hybrid laptop/tablet computers like the instead of a tablet. Problem is, people aren’t really interested in these machines. Machines like the Yoga don’t, as Lenovo would like you to believe, combine “the intuitive touch experience of a tablet” to give you “the ultimate in versatility.” Instead, they are laptops (and often pretty good ones) that are held back by Microsoft’s Windows 8 touch interface that most users simply don’t care for. At some point in the past, Microsoft must have looked at the success of the iPhone and Android phones and to keep up with the times, somebody in the company made the prediction that going forward, all of our devices would soon be touch and Microsoft went all in with this idea. The company had previously , but now, it was going to bet its future — and that of its OEM partners — on it. The Surface RT is an ill-conceived device that confuses users, but Microsoft’s problem is that it believed users would soon be clamoring to touch their screens. If you’ve ever used a touchscreen-enabled laptop or maybe a Chromebook Pixel, chances are you barely ever touch your screen. There are some situations where large touchscreens make sense (and last year, Microsoft Perceptive Pixel for those occasions where you need a really big touchscreen), but in most cases, it’s just awkward and ultimately useless. Microsoft, as a company, moves very slowly. Ballmer is trying to change this with the , but we won’t see the fruits of this for quite a while. Once Microsoft goes all in, it’s in for the long haul because it can’t correct its course fast enough. “Touch first” — which begat Windows 8 and the Surface — was the wrong move. That ship has sailed. The question now is how long it’ll take for Microsoft to get back on the right course.
|
Google’s Revamped Nexus 7 Spotted In Newly Leaked Press Image
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
In just a few days now, Google’s Chrome and Android chief Sundar Pichai will be joined by a slew of journalists and media types to nosh on some breakfast and show off the newly-revamped Nexus 7. If you haven’t yet had your fill of leaks, none other than has come through with one final (seemingly press quality) image of the updated tablet and its gigantic bezels ahead of its July 24 unveiling. Yeah, the new Asus-made tab doesn’t look too different from the version we’re all so used to, though the dimples that flecked the back of the original are gone, and that front-facing camera has finally found a friend in a 5-megapixel sensor that sits on the device’s rear. One of the bigger gains here is the addition of a much higher resolution 7-inch display — the updated 7’s screen will run at 1920 x 1200, a big leap from the 720p panel we saw the first time around. As usual, we can’t discount what’s ticking under that redesigned hood, and the new Nexus tab is expected to pack a quad-core chipset running at 1.5GHz, , and dual rear-facing speakers. Perhaps most tantalizing is the possibility that the Nexus 7 redux will offer up our first real glimpse of Android 4.3, unless you count those leaked builds that started trickling out soon after Google began selling its Google Play Edition Ones and S4s. poking around those leaked builds have already pointed out improved touch sensitivity and support for low-energy Bluetooth, but I suspect that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You can expect to see the new Nexus 7 in the Google Play Store, but a few big-box retailers seem to be getting in on the launch action as well — images from Staples’ internal employee news system point to , but now it looks like ailing electronics retailer Best Buy is gearing up to launch the device . Whether the tablet will pop up in the Play Store in ahead of then is another question entirely, but the broader retail reach from the get-go is much appreciated considering the issues Google had getting the original Nexus 7 . Let’s just hope there are enough to go around.
|
Apple Confirms That Its Dev Center Has Been Breached By Hackers
|
Greg Kumparak
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
After 3 days of silence as to why the , Apple has just confirmed that they are investigating a security breach. Developers just began receiving the email below; Apple has confirmed to us that the e-mail is legitimate. According to the email, Apple detected a security breach on its Dev Center servers on Thursday. While most of the information on the servers was encrypted and Apple claims it’s safe, they do say that the hacker(s) may have accessed developer’s names, addresses, and email addresses. Though we’ve yet to hear any reports of any individual accounts being used maliciously, it seems the intruders might already be attempting to use the accessed data to their advantage; since the developer center went down on Thursday, we’ve heard dozens of reports of developers receiving unsolicited password reset requests. A quick search on Twitter turns up dozens more.
|
Sports Illustrated’s Peter King Aims To Create Appointment Reading With New MMQB Site
|
Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
is launching a standalone football website, , tomorrow morning. The site’s name comes from star Sports Illustrated writer Peter King who writes a weekly column called Monday Morning Quarterback. ESPN gave one of its stars, Bill Simmons, his own site in two years ago and it’s been a big hit. King is quick to shoot down comparisons to Grantland, noting that MMQB will focus entirely on professional football, whereas Simmons’ site covers a medley of all sports and pop culture. , SI’s VP and General Manager, tells me the combination of King’s star power and readers’ appetite for constant NFL coverage is “the perfect storm.” Sports Illustrated has two other standalone sites besides its main SI.com, SwimDaily and Extra Mustard, but The MMQB is the first sports-centric site to spin out from the main one. King, whose contract was expiring at the end of last season, says he thought seriously about going independent and launching his own site, but when Sports Illustrated offered him the resources to build his own team and run his site with SI’s resources, he liked the opportunity. King has brought on three new writers to start his site: , previously of the Boston Globe, from USA Today, and of the Newark Star-Ledger. Sports Illustrated writers Richard Deitsch, Don Banks, and Jim Trotter, and former Green Bay Packers executive Andrew Brandt will all contribute columns to the site. The team will try to blend top notch sports reporting and analysis with beautiful ways to display media. DeLorenzo says the site will display stories and videos in “Pinterest-style” tiles, and that as the writers populate it with more content, they will eventually add an endless scroll so that readers can keep accessing older stories on one page. The site will feature a lot of video content, including a feature called “3@3” in which an NFL player, coach, or executive will respond to three questions on weekdays at 3 p.m. King says a range of NFL personalities, from Tom Brady to Joe Namath, and celebrity football fans like Olivia Munn will contribute to the site in the first few weeks. “We’re going to try to be all things to all people,” King says, explaining that there will be long form content, like his MMQB column and investigative reporting, short content such as “10 Things I Think I Think” lists, and even content as short as 140 characters for easy sharing on Twitter. “When we know what the story is going to be, we’re going to post our regular schedule,” King tells me, explaining that readers will be able to see what content is upcoming, making the site feel more like TV than an online magazine. You can see what this will look like in the picture above–notice the “Next Up” bar at the bottom, where some stories are marked “Available Now” whereas others have a publication time. The tactic has worked well for ESPN’s Sportscenter, which shows a running feed of upcoming topics, and could bring readers back more during the day. “If we haven’t shown you the game in a diffferent way and shown you different media to cover the game, then we’ll have failed,” King says.
|
What Games Are: Apple Needs To Make An iJoypad
|
Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
I’ve been an iPhone loyalist since the beginning. Although I never owned one of the original phones, I was always a big fan and dived in with the 3G. I’ve never looked back. I use it for phone, mail, social media, audio and as a gaming device. It’s a similar story with my iPad, but with the addition of books and productive things like writing. I find the simplicity of touch-based computing beguiling. It cracks me up that today we have a kind of interaction that we’d only previously seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and what we have is often better than was shown on that show. I’m also one of those people who finds iOS7 beautiful, and look forward to getting my hands on it later this year (I don’t usually install betas). I’ve also never had much interest in other phones. While my Android and Windows Phone friends extol the virtues of those platforms, I tend to find the integration of all my computing devices into the same cloud to be beneficial. I have two Macs and an Apple TV, and at some point plan to get an iPad Mini whenever they make a retina version. I even flirted with using iCloud for mail and calendar too, but that never really stuck. So it’s in light of all that that I want to voice a concern over Apple’s next big step with its touch devices, specifically with regard to gaming. For all the other uses of my smart devices, I find myself growing bored of iPhone and iPad as gaming platforms, and I think the company is messing up on making that story revolutionary once more. Apple has the opportunity to reinvent game control, but it’s giving that idea away. And I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think that my boredom with touch games comes from a lack of diversity in the market. From through to , to , there’s a lot of really cool stuff happening in iOS games and I’m sure this will continue. My boredom is about the limitations of touch-based interactions themselves. Touch feels a bit tapped out, as it were. In , most touch-based games rely on drawing and tapping verbs. You’re either dragging your fingers around the screen or selecting virtual buttons, and gamey things happen. Some games move beyond this and use tilt (particularly racing games) or even location (such as ). The bulk are draw/tap, though. On a PC you have mouse and keyboard, left and right click and scroll. On a console you have sticks and buttons and triggers. Both are robust systems for gameplay. Both are somewhat abstract and off-putting, but also capable of a diverse range of interaction, which is the foundation of great game design. This is why they endure, and why the range of games across all of them is massive. Yet while touch is probably the most intuitive paradigm we’ve ever had, it lacks the ability to support complexity. I don’t just mean that the games often need to remain elegant, but rather that there are many types of game that just don’t work well on touch. When it comes to designing complex and robust interactions, for everything from platform-jumping to shooters or sports, touch has surprising limitations. There’s a lack of tactile feedback or a sense of precision. There’s the problem of occlusion, where your finger or thumb covers a part of the game while you tap on something. As a result there are very few really decent action games in touch. Endless runners, puzzle, sim and gambling games yes. But not so much platformers, shooters, fighters or action adventures. Many games that try to make even rudimentary action work (such as ) find that distinguishing between selection of single and multiple units can get very complicated. Often such games end up asking the user to start remembering various gestures. Perhaps sensing that it was time to expand the range of possible games, Apple has released a specification for iOS-dedicated game controllers. Soon you’ll be able to buy a Bluetooth game controller for your iPhone and iPad, and that will expand the range of available gaming verbs considerably. In principle this is great news but the way that Apple’s going about it is cause for concern. It’s not creating a dedicated iJoypad, a cover/battery add-on for the iPhone that reinvents game control all over again. Instead it’s simply letting other companies do that via an iOS update, and so casting its lot in with peripheral makers. That, I think, is a big mistake. Peripherals are often a tough sell. For many years manufacturers have created a wide variety of peripherals for gaming devices, such as joysticks or light guns to play . These devices often end up being perceived as part of the gaming ghetto because of a lack of support. They essentially constitute a mini-platform inside another platform, and so they need their own games to shine. This means that developers need to spend time adding code to support peripherals, and that leads to a chicken/egg scenario. When it gets enough support, the developer argues, then I will jump in. But the platform cannot get enough support without developers jumping in first. So third-party peripherals end up being used only for very niche applications. However the main exception to this rule is the peripheral built by the platform holder itself. Wii Fit, Kinect and EyeToy are all examples of such peripherals, and each was able to expand the uses of its host platform. When pushed by a platform holder directly, peripherals often sell in the millions. Developers are also much more likely to be enthused by the idea of making games, and often platform holders play a part in incentivizing them to do so. Such devices also have direct support within the operating system of the platform, which means that they can set a standard. Even if clone manufacturers knock out facsimile versions of the peripheral, developers can always work toward the core model, the one that’s set the mould for all to follow. Ordinarily that approach is exactly the one I would expect Apple to take. It has done so in the past with add-ons like or the , and both have worked well. Vertical integration and end-to-end experience is what Apple is all about after all, its key USP in a world of technology companies that prefer to operate in the aggregate. So that’s why Apple is forging ahead and making a dedicated iJoypad for iOS and changing the game once again. Right? Actually, no. While Phil Schiller made a wisecrack about the company supposedly not being , the lack of leadership in the iOS game controller space is a worrisome tell. Rather than reserving it as a big launch story to propel the iPhone 5S and the new new new iPad, the company seems to have decided to give it away. It’s being ordinary, thinking of a game controller peripheral much as PC makers think of Thrustmaster joysticks, and missing a big opportunity. While millions of users probably don’t use their iOS devices for gaming, many millions more do. Games are consistently the highest-selling apps. Some games bank nearly a million dollars a day in sales. The audience is there, so is the content, but the robustness of interaction needed to keep that story going is arguably missing. Adding gaming controls directly onto the next generation of iOS devices would be a terrible idea because it would detract from their intuitive simplicity. However a dedicated cover peripheral of its own that the company could then make big bones about at the launch? That would sell millions. Just as the Smart Cover did, Apple would be able to reinvent the meaning of iOS once more and developers would go crazy scrambling to make awesome games once again. Hell, it might even provide that backdoor into making the Apple TV a microconsole. Everyone would want a new cover for the iPhone 5/5S that doubled its battery life and added cool new gaming controls to it. Especially if Jonny Ive redefined control as something more than the unsexy homunculi that are modern joypads. The opportunity to be bold and try something new is where Apple usually lives and breathes, so the decision to hold back is highly out of character. With the launch of the iPhone 5S there will no doubt be much said about fancier cameras, screens and newer apps, but all of the obvious areas for improvement have been done already. Even more retina resolution or even better EarPods isn’t really a story. Nor is a fixed-up Maps or Siri. Those are just expected. We’re more excited about the possibilities of an Apple smartwatch or TV than a reinvention of something that arguably doesn’t need it. But increasingly it feels so because we don’t expect Apple to make big bets with its core platforms any more. Given how predictable its launch events have become, nobody thinks the iPhone 5S will look much different to the iPhone 5. Nobody really thinks that iOS7 will effect much change other than in visual splendor. It’s hard to escape the gnawing sensation that Apple is running out of gas. Personally I think an iJoypad could be just the thing to really upend that feeling and let the company be bold once again.
|
News360 Adds Edelman And Network For Good As Advertisers To Its New Sponsored Content Program
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
Earlier this week, the makers of personalized news app that they have launched their monetization efforts with a sponsored content program, where companies can pay to have their content promoted to relevant consumers. Even before the announcement, CEO , and News360 had already run a pilot campaign for Cincom Systems. Now it has launched campaigns for two new advertisers, marketing agency Edelman and fundraising platform Network for Good. That’s not exactly a reflection of the success of the launch, since News360 signed up both advertisers before last week. However, together they suggest the potential breadth of the advertising program. For one thing, Karachinsky noted that when he talks about sponsored content, he doesn’t just mean articles — video is also part of the campaigns. Moving beyond text does present unique challenges, Karachinsky said. After all, what News360 is touting to advertisers is its understanding of users’ interests and its ability to use its existing content recommendation technology to deliver ads that are relevant to those users. To accomplish that here required “a little bit more manual work,” Karachinsky said — specifically transcribing parts of the video. Karachinsky also noted that since the Edelman “Smarter Fuel Future” campaign includes a potentially political topic, namely gasoline and ethanol, it can take advantage of News360’s ability to target content based on likely political affiliation. That means the sponsored content can be directed at readers who are more likely to be sympathetic to its message. And while it’s too early to know the effectiveness of these new efforts, in the initial Cincom campaign, News360 said it delivered an impressive 12.5 percent unique click-through rate on the iPhone and 5 percent unique click-through rate on the iPad. Even though those are click-through rates (in other words, if someone saw a promoted headline multiple times before clicking, they still counted as one click for one view), Karachinsky said measuring the results this way didn’t make a huge difference compared to standard CTRs.
|
Blippar CEO Celebrates One Year In The U.S. With AR Advertising Demo
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
Today , a out of the UK, is celebrating its one-year anniversary in the U.S. AR advertising sounds about as exciting API management, but 3 million users beg to differ. At its core, Blippar lets users scan Blippable content in the real world (think Ketchup bottles, packets of gum, train station posters, etc) to see extra digital content through augmented reality tech. Obviously, this has been done before, but Blippar’s scale and smooth technology (users can access the Blippar digital content within 300 milliseconds of scanning) makes this one of the stronger steps toward mainstream augmented reality use, especially in advertising. Mitra explained to TechCrunch that big brands are certainly interested in AR, but use it in their own native, self-developed applications and campaigns. Blippar is different because it acts as a consumer-friendly portal to AR advertising, so that users have a single destination to which they can go and experience a brand’s digital content. So far, the service has over 3 million users (1 million of which are in the U.S.), with 500 brands and over 150 publishers participating on the platform. Obviously, brands are champing at the bit for this type of interaction with consumers. Plus, Blippar offers them all kinds of consumer touch points and data, like their location, what time of day they’re interacting, which content is most popular, etc. For publishers, especially in the print and magazine realm, Blippar offers a way for users to buy direct from a magazine. Even more impressive, Blippar allows brands to modify the digital content based on time of day, location, and other data points, ensuring that the Blippar AR content is as relevant as possible. Right now, Blippar functions as a communications tool between brands and consumers, but the long-term vision involves making augmented reality a mainstream medium. Eventually, users will be able to build their own Blippable content to be shared with their friends. For now, however, is focused on spreading the world and scaling the platform.
|
We Need To Have A Debate About Growth
|
Semil Shah
| 2,013
| 7
| 21
|
TechCrunch . In September 2012, Y Combinator’s penned a widely-circulated essay titled “ .” The message was clear — startups are about growth. Once a startup stops growing, it gets busy dying. Since so much of the Valley hangs on Graham’s words (myself included), this essay cemented what proclaimed in his famous post earlier in 2012 “ ,” that the stakes for gathering huge crowds of users on new hyper-growth platforms was big business. All of this culminated in an event, , which was inaugurated in Fall 2012 and convened again in May 2013. There’s no doubt Chen’s original claim that online and mobile marketers are now expected to be “full stacker,” yet at the same time, what I saw on the venture side of the table during this span has been illuminating and troubling. As traditional venture capital gets bigger, moves to later-stage deals, and requires evidence of strong traction, the thousands of seeded startups blooming are in a desperate race for growth, to submit evidence to a jury of investors to proclaim, “Hey, look, our service is growing!” and hoping for the chance to secure funding to keep going. Investors, looking up and salivating at the skyscrapers like Twitter and Facebook, perhaps lost sight what it takes to build seismic-grade foundations under such edifices. All of this combined to create a vicious cycle where investors expect hyper-growth curves, and entrepreneurs must attain this growth at any cost — or die — thereby creating a perverse incentive to chase potentially inorganic growth in the short-term for the chance to survive. Lost in the race were modest questions of common sense and decorum: “Have users organically found the product?” “What are users saying to their friends and acquaintances about the product?” And, “What is unique about the model that could make this scale to tens of millions of users naturally?” I’d like to underscore that I don’t assign blame here — surprisingly, these are mostly rational moves considering all the circumstances facing these actors. We can point at entrepreneurs who chase bad metrics and wag our finger, but the unfortunate reality is that they can also be rewarded by VCs for it. Or, maybe, we are all to blame. Like most things, the truth in this case probably resides somewhere in the middle. Early-stage startups might do better to think about growth from an engineering, product, and marketing point of view early on, and also to be realistic and willing to staff accordingly in order to carry out the variety of work it takes, to do the things that do not scale, the things that large companies or the dispassionate simply would not do. Hacking growth to establish a beachhead to experiment with new tactics may buy teams more time, but may also be attempting to lock-in organic behavior. Or, perhaps it’s not a this-or-that choice between focusing on growth and doing things that don’t scale, but rather a signal that both investors and founders need to bake the quantitative ingredients of the growth hacker arsenal along with the softer, more qualitative elements of doing the hard things, many of which may be offline, in order to build a credible foundation and differentiate in the market. Maybe both founders and investors need to come to grips with the reality that most startups need more time to chart their path and that investors should be even more selective in choosing which teams and products deserve more swings at bat. That’s why I found it interesting when Graham, most recently, penned another essay a few weeks ago titled “ .” The web loved it, and rightly so. It’s almost as if we are finally dialing back on the culture of growth-at-all-costs. It may be time for everyone to take a breath and ask some more fundamental questions. “Do consumers have any time in the day and attention to use an infinite supply apps?” “How can we be more honest about whether a product is genuinely being used and organically shared?” “When is it time to concede a product just isn’t what the market needs?” “Will at least some investors be willing to have more conviction around earlier-stage products and back them based more on art and conviction, rather than pure metrics?” I don’t know what the right answers are, and they’re likely to be different for each company. What I do know is that the current mix isn’t quite right, and it is not sustainable. I am most interested to learn what you think. Does a startup just equal growth, or should we be focusing on doing things that don’t scale, or is there a balance companies and investors should strike early enough so that it’s not too late? These are all important questions that affect the credibility of we all do, and as difficult as the answers may be to swallow, it is my belief that now is the time these questions need to be asked. /
|
Data Is Becoming The Beauty Box End Goal
|
Victoria Ho
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
The beauty box concept is a few years old now, but some of the newer beauty box startups in Asia have modified their business models to be more data-centric, as competition floods the market. The way beauty boxes have worked is, subscribers pay a monthly fee to receive a shipment of surprise cosmetic items. A lot of these items are sample-sized or have been acquired at great discounts through deals with cosmetics manufacturers. This keeps costs low and preserves margins. The typical subscription fee hovers around the $20 mark for many box companies. Some of the box startups have realized the value of their users’ profiles, and are actively collecting more data from them, in hopes of growing the potential of monetizing their user base. Indonesian beauty box startup just launched in April this year. Christian Sutardi set it up with another ex-Rocket Internet colleague, Cynthia Chaerunnisa. Sutardi told me that instead of pushing subscriptions for one box, the company gets potential clients to fill out a questionnaire. The data engine matches users to 25 different box variations before sending one that the user will likely appreciate more. The benefit to Lolabox is that data. “Our sales proposition to brands is that when they give out samples to people on the street, they walk away and you don’t get anything back. It can also cost a brand $200,000 to carry out a customer survey on a random sampling of women,” he said. The data from those questionnaires filled out, as well as constant feedback from users per box, is what Sutardi hopes will attract big brands to Lolabox. It has 25 brands to its roster, including the cosmetics and beauty company (although he didn’t want to name the specific company). He is aiming to hit 60 brand partnerships by December, he said. By June, the company had 2,000 members. The subscription price is $14 (145,000 IDR). Lolabox’s main competition in Indonesia is Singapore-based , one of the earlier entrants into the country. And it seems Vanity Trove is switching its model towards data, as well. It just announced a change that will allow subscribers to choose the samples to be sent to them, moving away from the one-box model. And yes, there’s a questionnaire involved, too—users can select up to eight samples based on their profiles filled out, said founder, Douglas Gan. This change was just applied to Singapore customers, and Vanity Trove plans to roll this out to the rest of its customers in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan by end-August. Gan said the new customized box was launched so that its brand clients can get better insight to its consumer base, such as the make-up of the segment choosing their products. Here’s a screenshot of what some of the data looks like to its clients: Vanity Trove prices its subscriptions at $20. Elsewhere in Asia, Lolabox and Vanity Trove compete with in South Korea and Australian , which also distributes in Singapore. Bellabox raised a Series A round of $1.3 million at the start of this year. There’s also , which was launched in Hong Kong in 2011, and operates in Taiwan. Singapore and China. None of these appear to have switched to the customized box, however. Overall, these Asian startups considerably new, compared with some of the bigger names in the business. In the US, there’s , which launched in 2010, and Rocket Internet’s clone, , was launched in 2011. Birchbox got a Series A round of $10.5 million in 2011, and competitor, JolieBox last December. Again, these seem to be pushing the traditional single box product. San Francisco-based is one of the few which employ a the survey for customized boxes.
|
Racing Google To Bring Driverless Cars To The Road, Mobileye Valued At $1.5B As Investors Take $400M Stake
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
In the world of self-driving cars and autonomous vehicle technology, Google gets most of the attention, but it’s far from being the only player in the field. Earlier this month, , the Israeli and Dutch maker of advanced driver assistance technologies, self-driving cars “could be on the road by 2016.” Rather than Google cars’ array of radar, cameras, sensors and laser-based range finders, Mobileye wants to offer autonomous driving capability at a more affordable price point by using mainstream cameras that cost only a few hundred dollars. While cars using Mobileye’s systems, , aren’t quite as “autonomous” as Google vehicles, they could help advanced driver assistance technology make it onto the road long before 2025 — driverless cars to go mainstream. With its intelligent, camera-based “traffic assist” technology expected to begin arriving this summer thanks to partnerships with five major automakers, the automotive A.I. company is looking to take advantage while its stock is still high, so to speak. Mobileye announced today that it is selling $400 million in equity to “five unaffiliated” financial investors, which include “some of the largest U.S.-based global institutional asset managers and a leading Chinese government-affiliated financial investor,” according to a statement . The transaction, which values the company at $1.5 billion (pre-money) and was overseen by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is expected to close in August. The company attributes the timing, in part, to the current regulatory support and progression of global safety standards, which have helped encourage automakers to accelerate integration of intelligent driver assistance technologies. Mobileye has been around since the 1990s, and like Google, is more interested in being an artificial intelligence company and, specifically, improving the intelligence of cameras to assist with autonomous driving, than being an automaker itself. The company’s technology has been tested in a number of capacities, but mostly it’s focused on helping drivers avoid collisions. , in the past, its tech has been used by companies like Volvo to detect pedestrians or vehicles up ahead or crossing in your blind-spots, alerting drivers when they get too close to those objects, for example. The newer version of Mobileye’s system that arrives this summer aims to help steer the car in stop-start situations, though drivers are still required to keep their hands on the wheel. Coming up next, and expected to be street-ready by 2013, is a more advanced system that will allow for hands-free driving. The company plans to begin experimenting with and adding to the number of onboard cameras in vehicles to improve the efficacy of its technology in autonomous driving cases and presumably push it closer to the kind of hands-free, full autonomy promised by Sergey Brin and Google in the years to come.
|
null |
John Biggs
| 2,013
| 7
| 26
| null |
Fly Or Die: Instagram Video
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
Now that the dust has settled around the , we thought it was high time to take a good look at the photo-sharing phenom’s new video venture. Does it live up to Vine? Is it better? Or does it just ruin the Instagram experience we’ve all come to know and love? — kindly filling in for John Biggs — and I discuss all this and more on this episode of Fly or Die. As for myself, I’m not against Instagram video but I would greatly appreciate a way to choose between and a video-only stream, or both combined. The video length, paired with loading issues on the app, make the Instagram consumption experience far less enjoyable for me. Brian is neither here nor there on Instagram Video, except for the belief that competition (namely that between Vine and Instgram) is ultimately good for the end user. For those of you who want to investigate further, we have plenty of in-depth coverage of Instagram Video .
|
Facebook Will Begin Making Graph Search Public On Monday
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
Use Facebook in American English and aren’t one of Graph Search’s beta users already? Then you can expect to get the tool in a rollout that will begin on Monday and take place over the next few weeks. The company that “several hundreds of millions of people” will get access to Graph Search this week, after six months of user testing. Graph Search’s beta version . At that time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the product as completely different from Web search: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers. Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide an answer,” he said. Examples of searches Facebook gave during its launch event included “friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter” and “photos of my friends taken at National Park,” but Graph Search’s beta users have discovered much more humorous (and arguably useful) ways to take advantage of the tool. Tumblr Actual Facebook Graph Searches gives many examples of these queries, including and While funny, Actual Facebook Graph Searches touches on privacy concerns surrounding the product, which will no doubt increase as the product becomes available to a much wider number of users. Graph Search means that Facebook users have easier access to older content and much more important if you don’t want embarrassing photos from years ago dredged up or your . Graph Search is an important tool for Facebook as it prepares to sell demand-fulfillment ads, but the company has and is yet to (it is currently available only on the Web site). But Graph Search is just one facet of Facebook’s quest to better organize the data generated from its 1.11 billion users (and ) have pumped into the social networking site and its properties. For example, reveal that Facebook has been working hard to make video content (including Instagram videos) more easy to tag and search.
|
Solar Impulse’s Solar-Powered Coast-To-Coast U.S. Flight Touched Down Safely This Weekend
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
made history this weekend when its HB-SIA airplane touched down late Saturday night in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, completing an entire cross-country United States flight relying solely on energy from that in the Earth’s backyard. The Switzerland-based Solar Impulse organization, founded by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, described the milestone : “For the first time a plane capable of flying day and night powered exclusively by solar energy has crossed the USA from the West to the East Coasts without using a single drop of fuel.” The completion of a cross-country journey is a huge step for solar-powered flight, as it was just three years ago that a Solar Impulse airplane in what then seemed to be an impossible journey. But in many ways, sunshine still has a long way to go before it catches up to traditional jet fuel. The Solar Impulse aircraft, which is called and weighs just over 3,500 pounds, attains an impressive altitude, but its pace is much slower than what we expect from typical air travel. The explained the pace : “The aircraft, powered by about 11,000 solar cells, soars to 30,000 feet while poking along at a top speed of 45 mph. Most of the 11,000 solar cells are on the super-long wings that seem to stretch as far as a jumbo jet’s. It weighs about the size of a small car and soars with what is essentially the power of a small motorized scooter. The Solar Impulse left San Francisco in early May and has made stopovers in Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Dulles.” But the plan is to keep making the technology better, faster, and stronger. In fact, the Solar Impulse crew has a much bigger new journey on its horizon now that it is already working toward. The organization’s stated “ultimate goal” is to circumnavigate the entire earth. Its website says that its round-the-world trip is scheduled for 2015, and the aircraft for that mission, the HB-SIB, is .
Image credit: The final approach of Solar Impulse HB-SIA into JFK airport, on the trip’s final leg from Washington DC. to New York City. Revillard via
|
The Ivee Sleek Isn’t Just An Alarm Clock, It’s A Voice-Controlled Hub For Smart Homes
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
Alarm clocks rarely do much to get people’s salivary glands fired up, but may just change that. To be fair though, calling the Sleek an alarm clock is about as accurate as calling Microsoft an OS maker — the description technically fits, but it’s a hell of an understatement. The Sleek may have the right looks to adorn your nightstand, but its big draw is that it’s capable of connecting to the Internet and interpreting your natural voice commands. The ivee team showed off a pair of Sleek prototypes (which I’m now kicking myself for missing), but they’ve recently launched to help bring the thing to market. Here’s the team vision in a nutshell: once you’ve procured a Sleek, you can set it up and ask it to set alarms, tune the FM radio, or play soothing nature sounds as you drift away into darkness. Once it’s connected to your home Wi-Fi network though, it’ll be able to answer basic queries for weather and stock performance (thanks to Wolfram Alpha’s API). Firing up a web browser and start digging into the Sleek’s backend reveals even more options, and that’s where much of the magic happens — users will be able to hook up certain sorts of smart-home gadgetry into the Sleek service, and can control them by chatting up the Sleek base station. So far the team has managed to get it working with the popular Nest thermostat and Belkin’s smart , and there’s a voice-control scheme for Roombas in the works, too. Oh, and if you do decide to put the Sleek in your bedroom, can you ask it to read you a bedtime story. Sadly, it doesn’t look like backers have any say on what ivee reads (which, knowing the internet, is probably for the best). The big potential downside for home automation nerds is that the Sleek lacks support for some common wireless connectivity schemes like Z-Wave or even Bluetooth, but the team is looking to bypass that hurdle by folding support for existing hub devices that can handle that sort of wireless interfacing. Sadly, the early backer spots (and the slightly lower price tags that went with them) have all been snapped up, so laying claim to a first-run Sleek will set you back a cool $179. In the event you’re dreaming of bossing your alarm clock around, you’ve got about three weeks left to back the project — the campaign has already blown through its funding goal, and the folks involved expect to get those backer units out the door sometime this October.
|
Shazam Pulls In $40M From America Movil To Take On Latin America
|
Mike Butcher
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
, best known for its music recognition app and platform which has become a global success, has raised $40 million in new funding from , the largest wireless carrier in the Americas. It will now pursue a strategic collaboration to push out in Latin America, which involves pre-loading Shazam onto devices. The last funding round for the U.K.-based company was $32 million in 2011 from from DN Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who invested back in 2009. AMX is the leading provider of wireless services in Latin America. As of March 31, 2013, it had 262.9 million wireless subscribers and 65.3 million fixed-revenue-generating units in the Americas. Since 20122 Shazam says its user base has more than doubled to 350 million people and the monthly active users has tripled to over 70 million, with 2 million new users joining each week. Sales of digital goods via the app are now over $300 million a year through affiliate partners like iTunes, a figure that is doubling annually. Crucial to this increased user engagement, says Shazam executive chairman Andrew Fisher, is an updated design and the vastly increased speed of its app for iOS and Android enabling it to recognise songs in a handful of seconds. Crucially, Fisher says, this allows a user to ‘Shazam’ the audio from a TV advert or similar faster than they would be able to Google it. In other words, Shazam is sitting on a sort of ‘Google for Audio.’ A new app for iPad which includes a new feature, Auto-Tagging, helps people recognise and engage with any media playing around them automatically. This is driving Shazam’s push into “two-screen media,” whereby people use a tablet or phone while watching TV. He told TechCrunch that Shazam had done a presentation for Carlos Slim, head of America Movil, which later turned into an investment discussion. “He understands the opportunity of media engagement,” says Fisher. Shazam receives more than 10 million tags each day and 9 billion tags to date. Over 250 TV ad campaigns in 28 countries in North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific from over 150 top global brands
|
As Microsoft Doubles Down On Touch, The Desktop Becomes Even More Of An Afterthought
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
The has now been out for over a week. One of the highlights of this update is the return of the Start button (but not the Start menu), and after using the new version for a while, it becomes clear that, despite this concession, the old desktop isn’t coming back. All the interesting new stuff in Windows 8.1 is meant for touchscreen devices and is happening on the Metro/Windows 8 side of the operating system. The desktop is now an afterthought for Microsoft. For business users, Microsoft has added new security features to Windows 8.1 that mostly matter on the desktop, but besides that, none of the more interesting new tools involve the desktop at all. The new Search tool, which is very good, runs in the Windows 8 mode. Xbox Music, with the new radio mode, only exists as a Metro-style app. The same is true for the recipe app with the Kinect-like hands-free mode, SkyDrive, reading lists, the improved Mail app and even Internet Explorer 11, which gets a minor interface update in the touch-based Windows 8 mode but not on the desktop. In addition, all of the new and much-needed features for multiscreen setups are for users running Windows 8 apps. Indeed, the more I used Windows 8.1, the more it started to feel like a tablet OS with the desktop bolted on. While using the first version, it felt the other way around. Now that you can resize Windows 8 apps at will and use more than two apps at a time, Windows 8 finally feels like a full-blown tablet operating system that, with the right apps, could rival what we’re seeing from Apple and Google. Seeing your emails and the browser side-by-side when you click on a link in a message just makes sense and feels natural once you’ve tried it a few times, for example. Some apps, including Skype, haven’t been updated to work well in this new mode yet, but they will surely be updated before 8.1 is released. We also know that Microsoft is about to launch its Office apps for Windows 8, so for many business users, switching to the desktop could soon become unnecessary, too. One issue with the tablet mode is that many of the gestures, such as swiping in from the left and quickly swiping back to bring up your list of apps running in the background, aren’t exactly intuitive (and this gesture is also the only way to put two apps side-by-side). But once you get used to it, Windows 8 starts to feel like a modern tablet operating system. Every now and then, though, you end up on the desktop and you remember that this is now really a legacy mode. It feels like an afterthought for Microsoft, which is betting that we’ll all use touch screens within the next few years. Except for the Start button, it has remained virtually untouched in Windows 8.1. Even the Settings menu, which previously condemned you to a desktop session to do anything meaningful, is now a Windows 8 app. Microsoft has to support it for the foreseeable future, but more and more, it seems like we’re not dealing with an operating system that has a split personality, but one that has a very dominant side while the other one is allowed to tag along for the ride.
|
The OnBeat Solar Headphones Want To Charge Your Phone While You Listen To Music
|
Natasha Lomas
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
Solar panels need plenty of sun to work well so why not carry them around on your head? That’s the slightly off-the-wall thinking behind this U.K.-based campaign aiming to produce a pair of solar headphones. The OnBeat headphones have a flexible solar panel embedded around the band where it’ll be exposed to ample rays — assuming you’re wearing the headphones outdoors. The panel then charges a pair of lightweight lithium ion batteries located inside the ear cups, and there’s a USB port on one of the cups for outputting charge to the smartphone or tablet you want to keep topped up on the go. Exactly how much charge you’re going to get from such a small panel is unclear — especially considering the entire panel is not going to be in full sun at once, being as it’s curved around your head. OnBeat’s creators say the solar cell has a surface area of 55cm3 with a charge capacity of approximately 0.55W. The creators also claim the headphones can keep another device juiced up all day, albeit they’re not backing up that claim with any sample charging data yet. It seems likely the output is only going to be enough to keep your phone or tablet ticking over rather than fully charging it, so manage your expectations accordingly. The headphones themselves can also be charged via USB from a computer or mains socket if you want to make sure their batteries contain a full power charge when setting out. On the audio side, the headphones have the following vital statistics: OnBeat’s creators say they are taking to Kickstarter to seek funds in order to be able to pay for a large enough initial production run to hit their manufacturer’s minimum order. Which means they are seeking a rather ambitious £200,000 ($298,000) to get their solar headphones off the ground and onto people’s heads. RRP is intended to be around £119.00 per pair, but it has multiple pledge tiers offering the headphones for a lot less, starting from £69.
|
Move Over Peter Thiel, Oregon Proposes Investment Model For Student Loans
|
Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
As college debt to over $35,000 per student, the state of Oregon has proposed a novel to loans: free tuition at public universities in exchange for 3 percent of earnings for the first 25 years after graduation. Just like a venture-capital portfolio that earns its profit from a few star investments, many students would end up underpaying the cost of their college, subsidized by the school’s star businessmen. For example, students who earned a meager $600,000 over a quarter century would pay just $18,000 for their degree, while a multi millionaire would theoretically pay enough to subsidize all the artists, public servants, and . Assuming the Higher Education Coordinating Commission’s pilot goes according to plan, Oregon will roll out a polished version of the so-called “Pay It Forward” student loan program statewide. Critics of higher education, especially venture capitalist Peter Thiel, have long argued that college simply isn’t worth the price tag: “Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math.” To prove his point, he opened the deliciously controversial Thiel Fellowship, which $100,000 to opt-out of college for at least 2 years and invest the money. The implication is that students are better off investing their time and money directly into a product, rather than delaying it for a double major in Beer Pong and 18th-century literature. But as Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Jim Plummer, , the problem with Thiel’s market-only approach is that most investments will fail, leaving students without marketable skills or a network of support. Perhaps more importantly, the general education requirements of college give students an important humanities background, necessary to be a well-rounded citizen. In other words, Thiel’s model doesn’t scale for a democracy. Oregon’s approach is a happy hybrid between the old college loan model and Thiel’s investment approach. The state bets that it’s investment in public universities will yield enough brilliant minds to justify the cost of universal higher-education. It should be noted that Oregon’s proposal isn’t entirely novel. , libertarian icon and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman proposed it back in 1955. Yale University piloted it for their own students before the introduction of federal loans. Starting in 2012, President Obama established an Income-Based Repayment (IBR) system for student loans, based on one that the U.K. and Australia have done for years. With any luck, it will also incentivize colleges to invest in curriculum that teaches real-world skills. If the entire college system was tied to financial success, administrators would have to start thinking long-term. Given that many of the most successful businessmen of our time, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are college dropouts, educators are going to have to do a much better job appealing to their new economic life lines.
|
In The Bay Area, Why “The Rent Is Too Damn High”
|
Semil Shah
| 2,013
| 7
| 7
|
TechCrunch . The unraveling of the Enron debacle in 2001 became a of corporate scandals of that era. The effects were so decimating to loyal employees vested in their employers’ retirement plans and public investors, the Federal Government responded with legislation the following year, the . Originally intended to protect employees and retail investors from cutting-edge white-collar crime, SOX placed onerous requirements on public companies — so onerous, in fact, it has effectively encouraged some of the most high-growth private corporations founded after SOX to remain private much longer, to secondary markets to access liquidity, and to file IPO papers after company insiders and private investors reaped the rewards. The result can be seen most recently in the Bay Area, where surfaced this week suggesting Facebook’s IPO was mostly responsible for San Mateo County past Manhattan in terms of wealth, and as I’ll try to argue, might be indirectly responsible for the house prices, increased traffic, transit , and apps Bay Area residents enjoy today. The rent is, indeed, . Let me state upfront that I am not blaming Facebook, insiders, or investors. In fact, all actors acted rationally within their rights. Facebook is just one shining example of a trend where the technology sector is the real growth-sector of an American economy which has barely withstood two separate economic recessions within a few years of each other. As a result of money flowing into private technology equities and combined with the restrictions imposed by SOX, new technology companies have enjoyed more access to private capital and have thus been able to remain private longer. While SOX was originally designed to protect the public from “the next Enron,” the unintended consequences of such restrictive legislation dampened the appetite of private shareholders and investors to tap public markets too soon. Unfortunately, one of the most harmful consequences of SOX can be seen through the story of Facebook’s IPO and the wealth that it generated — mostly residing in San Mateo County. When wealth is created but concentrated in certain ZIP codes, both local areas and the nation’s economy is affected. It all has a cascading effect. With more wealth locked into San Mateo and surrounding counties, the demand for assets rises quickly. House prices skyrocket. Individuals who don’t have enough cash reserved for a down-payment are forced to rent, where competition for rental property creates its own endless race. Contractors rush to meet housing demand, springing up buildings in a boom-time that create noise pollution and closed streets and blocked highway on-ramps, which combines with more and more warm bodies flocking to the Bay Area for the shot to work in the one sector that provides any hope for real, sustainable economic growth. This is why — in large part because of SOX — that your rent is high, why there’s so much traffic and construction, and why it won’t change anytime soon. There are many, many reasons a great number of people would benefit if private companies operated in an environment where restrictions wouldn’t dissuade shareholders and investors from accessing public markets earlier. Entrepreneurs and investors would have an attractive exit option earlier in their life cycle; entrepreneurs wouldn’t have to rely on “build and shut down” acquisitions to get an exit; employees and insiders wouldn’t feel as much pressure to access liquidity through secondary offerings; wealth-creation would be more spread out and could generate even more jobs; and retail investors would have an equal chance to invest into the next Facebook when its valuation is, say, around a billion dollars versus when its $100B. For a bit of perspective, Google IPO’d after raising a relatively modest amount of venture capital, and Microsoft IPO’d at a $500M valuation — in these cases, the wealth created post-IPO was spread out and technically available to all who could invest in public markets. , a Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote a artfully detailing this view, suggesting over-regulation effectively blocks the entire middle class from participating in the massive wealth creation driven by technological advancement. Over the years, USV’s Fred Wilson has written many great posts on this topic, discussing the of going public early, how public markets can have a effect on company culture, and how the IPO process can be relative to true company value. OK, so there’s my analysis and argument. I expect many will disagree with my assessment of SOX being the root cause of this, and there are indeed many strong cases to be made that companies should remain private longer. I also believe this is a in the Bay Area — not a cyclical one. It’s easy to dismiss this and say “it’s a bubble” or “this is just cyclical,” but the fact of the matter is that this wealth has been generated and is now kept in the Bay Area — it’s not going away. Given this, what should folks in the Bay Area technology and startup sectors expect as a result? Eventually, yes, more affordable and micro-unit housing will come on the market, but there’s barely enough transportation infrastructure to handle the increase this will create. In the meantime, here’s what I think we should all anticipate. First, naturally, asset prices will increase, creating all sorts of inflationary pressures, especially on rental inventory. Second, founders should expect to pay even higher wages for talent, and investors should expect founders will want to raise more money as a result. Third, I suspect more and more people will opt to not commute between the Valley and San Francisco as rubbernecking will only increase, so big tech companies will build satellite offices to retain their talent. More private capital will continue to find its way to the Valley in an economy where technology is the only viable growth sector. While I believe things will get sorted out in the Bay Area in the long-term, the immediate term situation currently is and will continue to be disruptive to many. This is just the beginning. I am not sure what “direct” solutions exist given the limitations of government’s response time. I personally like to see interest in new models emerging as a byproduct of these challenges, many born through frustration and resulting in creative solutions. I enjoy the national conversation around ridesharing and private transportation ignited as a result of the BART strike. I welcome the debate around private shuttle busses ferrying technology workers in and out of a region that can’t provide reliable transportation on its own. I want to see more conversation about the balance between landlord and tenant rights, and to see assets shared according to supply and demand. I hope the economic demand drawing people here will pressure zoning laws to loosen and bring more inventory to market. I want the sharing economy to strengthen inside the fabric of standard economic activity. There will continue to be ideas and realities that irk residents, but this type of “indirect” experimentation is the only way to arrive at a sustainable solution. The region and its entrepreneurs are responding by bringing new products and services to market, and thankfully, are not asking for permission first. The way I see things, this is the only path. Buckle up! /
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.