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It’s Not A Bird, Plane Or Taco-Copter. This Wedding Has A Ring-Dropping Quadcopter
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Sadly, was not a reality. But maybe quadcopters could disrupt the near-dominant hold that children have on ring-bearing at weddings. Otavio Good, , the app that translates written words while you’re traveling in foreign countries, used a quadcopter to deliver his wedding rings by air yesterday. When the marriage official asked him for the ring, Good shrugged. Then a harpist strummed up the James Bond theme, while a quadcopter emerged out of the nearby in Redwood City, flew across a pond and landed in Good’s hands. He untied a ribbon, carrying the two wedding rings and then set the quadcopter free like a dove and it flew away into the distance. Good’s brother, Kevin, who also serves as the “Director of Flying Robot Arts” at a , commandeered the quadcopter. No one is really sure whose idea it was between, Good, his brother and Good’s now wife and cancer researcher Zinaida Tebaykina. Commercial and recreational quadcopters have been used to film mountain climbing, concerts and . It’s not even actually the first time (maybe it’s the second) or . “It was kind of an excuse to buy a quadcopter,” Otavio Good said. “We just modded it and brought it out here.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VvDOjE9bRk&w=560&h=315] Video is courtesy of Jelena Jovanovic, a technical program manager at Google who attended Good and Tebaykina’s wedding.
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Facebook Engineer Fires Back At BuzzFeed: Users Don’t Care How Many People View Their Posts
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Josh Constine
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“The Number Facebook Doesn’t Want You To See”, from Thursday by BuzzFeed claimed Facebook is hiding the number of people who see your posts so you don’t feel bad that most people don’t Like or comment. This morning, a Facebook engineer claiming that is “just plain wrong”, and that Facebook’s testing showed most users are more interested in feedback than total views. BuzzFeed cited a of 220,000 Facebook users that says they underestimate their posts’ audience size by a factor of three. In reality, Facebook users reach 35% of their friends with each post and 61% of their friends per month. The article hinged on the idea that if you have hundreds of friends yet only get a couple of Likes per post, it’s not that people don’t see your posts, it’s that they ignore them or don’t care enough to Like. BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel writes that Facebook “knows full well that the only thing worse than speaking to an empty room is speaking to a room full of friends and family and having them ignore you.” He’s right. That’s not very pleasant, and it’s his reasoning for why Facebook won’t tell normal users how many people see their posts, and it sounds plausible. Facebook doesn’t want to hurt our feelings and prove our friends don’t care about us. Sure. In some cases when I post something I think is really interesting and I get little feedback, I wonder whether my friends find me boring or Facebook didn’t show it to that many people. But brings his own data to the argument. It’s not an official statement by Facebook, though I was tipped off to it by Facebook PR. About the potential view count feature BuzzFeed suggests the social network is purposefully denying users, Backstrom writes: “A few of us did build and test a feature like this internally. Our conclusion after testing it: people are way more interested in seeing *who* liked their posts, rather than just the number of people who saw it. In fact, in all of the thousands of pieces of feedback we receive about News Feed each month, virtually no one has asked to see this information. If we saw enough people asking for this, we would definitely consider building it into the product. But, from what we’ve seen, including the raw numbers isn’t worth the space it would take up on the screen.” It’s not a matter of hiding anything from users, apparently. It’s just a trade off of value and screen real-estate. Facebook could add it view counts, but it would provide too little utility and take up too much room. That makes sense, especially on mobile. When the view count number is relevant, Facebook shows it, like for advertisers, Page owners, and Groups. Facebook because it would help people schedule events and make sure everyone in the group was on the same page. Let’s say a book club posted it was changing its meeting location, members could see whether all their fellow bookworms had seen the post, or whether they should be called or texted so they don’t get lost. The feature provided enough utility to warrant the space it took up. But not everyone wants others to know what they’ve seen when it comes to normal news feed posts. That’s something Warzel never mentions. View counts could raise privacy questions if they come with a list of names like Groups post. If Facebook had view counts with names and you visited someone’s profile, they could find out because you had suddenly viewed all their recent posts. That’s why when people suggested Groups was just a stepping stone to Facebook showing news feed view counts, I wrote that would be too sketchy, and unlikely to happen. Backstrom concludes that “this BuzzFeed article suggests that we have lots of ulterior motives when we make decisions about News Feed. The reality is that we’re just trying to show people as many interesting stories as possible.” “never wrote that ppl were crying out for post view counts, like he says. Only that it’s in fb’s best interest not to show them.” He believes hurt feelings equal fewer users. In my opinion, quite the opposite could be true. Showing view counts with names could decrease Facebook usage. Some people might find view counts fascinating, but they’re unruly. Scanning a list of hundreds of people to see who saw your posts sounds like a chore. It would take up screen space and most wouldn’t use it consistently. But the real danger is that view counts could cause a chilling effect on Facebook browing. You might be apprehensive to freely bounce around Facebook if you knew your were leaving digital breadcrumbs everywhere you went. Warzel tells me he was imagining view counts would be “anonymized”, without names. “don’t agree that it’s a real estate problem. could have separate analytics-doesn’t have to be on each post.” we know too little about our social network audience, and that anonymous, aggregate view counts could change that. If Facebook wants to back up Backstrom’s claim that view counts are omitted because they’re not worth the real-estate, it could place them somewhere where they wouldn’t detract from the average user’s experience. For example, on the perma-linked page dedicated to each post. That would let interested users dig for their view count without cluttering the Facebook home page. this all misses the main point of the article, which is: there's a lot happening behind the scenes… (1/2) — Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) & we (the avg user) don't have adequate data to know exactly what kind of reach we have over networks like FB. (2/2) — Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) But is this transparency for transparency’s sake, or do we really need this data? In the end, I’d bet the missing view counts stems not from some malicious fight to keep users in the dark, but from Facebook’s philosophy of trying to only build things that are useful for a wide audience. Maybe it is in Facebook’s interest to hide view counts, but because you’d find them boring, not illuminating. Making this data available, though a bit buried, could be the right balance.
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What Games Are: The Culture Gap In Mobile Games
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Tadhg Kelly
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This week was very sad because of the unexpected . Only 34 years old and very recently married, Davis was a journalist, podcaster and general impresario of gaming fan site Giant Bomb. In particular many people knew him as the host of the Giant Bombcast. It is one of the most popular podcasts in the world which discusses games, gaming news and other happenstance things every Tuesday. While his passing is profoundly sad, one positive aspect of it is the outpouring of support from the gaming community. For example, the post announcing his death saw more than 6,800 comments. The news became the third highest trend on Twitter. Many fans sent flowers, built tribute pages and otherwise expressed their condolences. It made me reflect on how, for all its faults, a strong culture surrounds gaming. Through sites like Giant Bomb, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, IGN, Gamespot, Eurogamer, Penny Arcade, Polygon, Joystiq and a brace of others the community has complex conversations. They add a layer of richness to the gaming experience, which fans find meaningful and connect to. These connections are very important within the games industry. Through sites like Giant Bomb, many independent games find players, and the coverage tends to have a personality. Listening to the hilarious breakdown of a game like (which is exactly as it sounds) makes the listener want to check that game out, just to see what it is. Not unlike music magazines, gaming sites bring fans and creators together through a mediated conversation. They also help to establish voices. In gaming culture, much like any medium, personalities are key. The sense of authorship, of a real person (or people) sitting behind a game and crafting it with intent, connects fans to games in ways that brands often struggle to do. While studios tend to believe that teams matter more than individuals, figureheads are still key. Big name game designers like Cliff Bleszinski are known figures because of media outlets, particularly those that engage him in wide-ranging discussion. Even in formats that are supposedly dying, there is much heartfelt activity. Retro games sites, for instance, keep much of the heritage of games alive when nobody else would. Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the most active sites, mostly covers PC games at a time when many TechCrunch readers consider the PC to be deader than disco. Yet it thrives. The gaming media plays a very important role in binding a culture together. However the same could not be said for games appearing across all formats. Most sites tend to cover console and PC gaming. Their natural audience uses Steam, Xbox Live and PSN, and tends to frame its thinking around them. There are some acknowledgements about the things happening in mobile phone gaming (such as Spaceteam, or the recent iPad release of ) but not fully so. Nobody’s making funny videos riffing off Anna Marsh’s . The newer mobile and tablet game has many more players for its games than the more traditional gamer haunts, but conversely has almost nothing to say. It has no strong voices who cover the culture of the medium and bring an audience with them. Instead its main influencers are platforms like the algorithms of Facebook or the editorial choices of the App Store team. Its primary means of facilitating discovery are all mechanical operations like AppGratis. Success is often closely linked to marketing spend ( ) and the most important factor is usually simply to be seen. This is not for the want of trying. Blogs like Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer write about mobile games, but they tend to do so in an industry-focused way. Arguably that’s simply because that’s where the readership seems to exist, and to try and build a more consumerist mobile gaming blog seems a bit field-of-dreams. So the majority of their conversation tends to be about process like monetization, metrics, retention, business model and case studies. Cultural discussion (reviews, previews, interviews, critique and such) is largely absent. Few fans seem particularly engaged with mobile and tablet gaming in the way that they are with other formats. There are few, if any, great debates raging through the mobile space that don’t start with the question “ ” The mobile space is also almost completely without personalities. Where a Bleszinski has a great deal of cultural cachet, nobody knows who created Draw Something. Few people could tell you who the creators of are either (Paul Murphy and Patrick Moberg). Their game has been downloaded at least 3 million times, yet they are effectively anonymous. Compare them to Mike Bithell who created Thomas Was Alone. His game has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but not on the order of Dots. Yet he’s arguably becoming much more famous as a game maker because the formats in which he operates have active coverage. Finally there’s also the issue of cultural significance. To many players Candy Crush Saga is highly addictive. To people on the industry side it’s a master class in how to craft a great retention experience, construct progression and then monetize players well. It’s celebrated, a key achievement. Yet while reports of revenue hit the business press, and it seems to cross over into some mainstream coverage, folks at sites like Giant Bomb, Kotaku and Penny Arcade only talk about it a little. Why? Because they haven’t much to say. To them it’s just another Bejeweled in a world of very similar games, and there’s no soul to that story. I recently asked whether where process-driven business isn’t as successful as it once was. With all of its advertising channels filled to the brim with very similar products, the inevitability of said channels growing less useful is one that we’re already starting to see. Stagnation, difficulties in finding audiences and chart pressures abound. This doesn’t mean that mobile is dead. Very far from it. It means that it’s becoming complicated, sophisticated, and issues like the tone of the conversation that its games have with its players is starting to matter. It also means that a potential coverage gap is emerging, one where writers could start to talk about mobile games as games, promote mobile game designers as personalities and act much as other sources we see for other formats. The gap that might be emerging is the one that talks about the culture of mobile games, makes comedy videos about them, discusses their impact and what they mean. The one that runs previews, interviews and features with their makers. The one that doesn’t talk about the business or the process, but the product and its producers. The one that surfaces the weird and wonderful among mobile games and shoots them at an audience looking for a bit more depth. And does so with integrity. Whatever shape it takes, doesn’t it seem like high time that we saw that layer emerging around the biggest gaming market in the world, much as it has around others?
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Why Pens Are Popular On Kickstarter And What It Means For Crowdfunders
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John Biggs
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This morning brought news of the $72,000 on Kickstarter. RETRAKT is a nice-looking pen made of aluminum that looks a little bit like a part that fell off of a space ship. But $72,000 raised? For a pen? What gives? I think pens, in this case, are a fascinating case study of the value and danger of crowdfunding. I decided to explore what exactly was going on with these instruments and how they can help folks who are looking to crowdfunding for products or, if they are ambitious, to fund projects. My search quickly led to dedicated to pens on Kickstarter. The creator, a developer named Sean, explained he’s working on new features and is going to add reviews and discussion of pens not on Kickstarter. “Our site/twitter feed is still in its infancy but has begun to generate a good following and response in short time. We’re even starting to hear about projects that haven’t even been launched on KS yet!” he wrote. I found 185 live and mostly-funded compared to 81 iPad cases and 164 iPhone cases. There are a mere 111 Arduino projects. Obviously this represents funded or open projects and isn’t representative of the entire gamut (Kickstarter tends to ) but why do so many pens survive? First, we have to understand the fascination with writing instruments. While I usually only need a pen when I mark up a take-out menu before I order, there is a subset of the Internet that goes batty for nice writing instruments. There are , . Pens are a commodity item that have been elevated to a collector’s item and item of obsession, on par with high-end watches in terms of items that are very expensive, make little sense to outsiders, and can be either garish or beautiful (or, if you’re Sylvester Stallone, both). As a watch guy I understand the allure of fancy pens. It doesn’t make much sense, to be sure – fountain pen makers items that have been reduced to penury by commodity Bics and we’re never going to go back to blotters and India ink. “I think pens have become popular on Kickstarter for a couple of reasons. In the case of the Karas Kustoms projects, they are handmade in America, which is a very hot commodity at present,” said Ana Reinert, editor of . “I also think that there are so few options available for a good pen at a decent price at present that we office monkeys are willing to help fund projects to give us what we want. Pen options at present are at the two ends of the spectrum — cheap plastic and hideous looking from the local big box office supply store or high-end and well over $100 on the Mont Blanc, Waterman, etc end of the spectrum. A small run, highly-crafted pen in the $25-$80 range is an affordable luxury for people and it gives them something beautiful and functional,” she said. Pens, in short, are easy to buy because they are small and often, when not clad in diamonds and pearls, fairly inexpensive. You can trust that a pen maker will stay true to his or her word because it’s not that hard to mill a tube, stick some ink into it, and add a spring. As , “there are worse addictions, right?” Clearly pens offer a template for success. The key, then, is to set a low enough price point for popular adoption while grabbing a niche interest. I’ve supported card games, Arduino boards, and metal wallets on Kickstarter and I’ve been consistently pleased with the resulting projects. You should also be wary of scammers, especially in these niche areas. While I couldn’t find a pen scam, I did find this To a person familiar with watches the pieces are obviously of low quality and the torrent of exciting verbiage on the page reinforces the fact. Then the lady doth protest too much, it’s most likely she’s lying. When dealing with niche products like pens there can often be levels of nuance the average user doesn’t see. Perhaps the pen is simply a rebadged model from Alibaba? Maybe it’s a copy of another item? “Investing” in a $20 pen isn’t a huge expense, but it pays to be wary. Finally, we learn that crowdfunding is the long tail of manufacturing. Whereas there are rarified pens near the front of the pack then a massive number of commodity pens further along, these pens appeal to collectors and fill specific aesthetic and functional needs. The same goes for any project. However, the key is finding your place on that long tail. In the end, pens are easy to sell because they’re not dangerous. If a project goes belly up, you’re not out hundreds. It seems, also, that pen fans are a bit more trusting of the manufacturers. After all, the simple fact that someone is taking an interest in their hobby/obsession is an important point. There is money to be made in niche products for niche users and crowdfunding is definitely the way forward for fans of board games, writing instruments, odd electronics, and the like.
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Only 16% Of Republicans and 29% of Democrats Want Increased Immigration
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Despite the international heritage of the United States, Americans are not eager for more immigrants. finds that only 16 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of Democrats think that immigration “should be increased.” The good news is that this paltry support is a record high and continues to grow. “Support for increasing immigration remains the minority view, but one that has steadily gained support, not only from Democrats and nonwhites, but among whites and across the political spectrum,” writes Gallup. Support is growing over time. We’ve written about could kill immigration reform this year. This is mostly because the most anti-reform Republicans in the House of Representatives live in heavily white districts, and they are likely rewarded more for inaction than finding some kind of compromise. As is typical in surveys, respondents give a completely different impression when they are asked about specific reforms. In a Gallup poll last February, an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats supported every major provision of comprehensive immigration reform. Unfortunately, the poll about detailed provisions will probably mean less for a candidate’s re-election. You’d have to believe that the average citizen holds sophisticated views in the voting booth and wouldn’t be duped by political ads that swipe an incumbent for “increasing immigration.” For better or worse, some calculating House Republicans seem to recognize this reality. That said, all the pro-immigration language from lobbies, President Obama and prominent Americans looks like it’s having a positive effect. So there’s reason for optimism…in the future. : I expect commenters to point to other surveys that may contradict these results. I typically do not write about research that does not have transparent methodology, or if the research is really bad. For more stories like this, follow me on .
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As Dropbox Transforms From Utility To Platform, The Bulls And Bears Emerge
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch Earlier this week, one of the Valley’s most steady high-growth technology companies held its first-ever developer conference — — marking a potentially historical turning point for an already large company with the potential to become even larger. The company — Dropbox — has all the ingredients for the breakout status it has earnestly earned. The founders are from MIT, the initial idea looked so simple (perhaps, only a feature) that some of today’s savviest investors early, the company took root inside Y Combinator, perfectly timed its cloud storage offering, differentiated against incumbent solutions on speed and efficacy, fine-tuned and arbitraged a business model against declining storage fees and increasing rates of device obsolescence, spurned an acquisition offer by Steve Jobs, a multi-billion dollar valuation, and now, with a and from 2013 looking ahead, is embarking on a path very few companies get the opportunity to experience: to potentially be a great, independent, standalone technology company. In the Valley, most people believe this will happen and, for a variety of reasons, want to see it happen. That said, there are also some who are of Dropbox’s ability to make a critical transformation in its core business — from a utility providing seamless storage across a range of devices, to a platform where developers invent new ways for end users to access and interact with data. In short, there is a “Bull Case” and “Bear Case” for Dropbox as its valuation creeps higher and higher. The bulls contend the high-growth, usage rates, and lock-in give it every chance to become a robust platform and a stand-alone, neutral piece of real estate that will continue to earn consumers’ trust while other larger technology companies fiddle with their own native solutions and lack of seamlessness. On the other hand, the bears — mostly comprised of late-stage and public investors — marvel at Dropbox’s net receipts yet can’t help but wonder if and when their margins will shrink as the price of storage approaches zero and if one of the two biggest infrastructure providers — Google and Amazon — will attack those declining margins by giving away space for free. The Dropbox Bears have valid concerns, especially in the post-Facebook IPO wake which unfortunately marks this current crop of technology startups, for better or worse. Lucky for Dropbox, the revenue streams they enjoy now, combined with nearly $250M+ in venture capital, afford it the rare luxury to invest in making this turn into a platform. The company is able to recruit some of t because very few emergent companies can offer the top class a chance to work on complex problems at such astronomical scale. Additionally, within the last 12 months, Dropbox has also dipped into the M&A waters by Snapjoy, Audiogalaxy, and most , scooping up Mailbox, to help accelerate this transformation, as consumers’ shift in using devices (especially mobile) presents a rare opportunity to bypass legacy solutions. Taken in full, Dropbox indeed has a rare opportunity though is not without thorny challenges. Will consumers (and eventually enterprise) opt for native solutions, either motivated by laziness or top-down security protocols? Will developers build new applications on top of Dropbox, only to compete against a rapidly growing and fragmented app ecosystem that uses different storage options? Or, will Google and/or Amazon see Dropbox as a growing threat and undercut its prices by giving away the store? Of late, Google seems to be bent on, well, owning the entire web, and Jeff Bezos has remarked “your margin is my opportunity.” Yikes! I believe any startup has the chance to compete against an incumbent like Google and tell Apple to buzz off, but Bezos is the last guy I’d want to face in the dark alley of cloud infrastructure. All this said, hundreds of millions in revenues is enough to hit the public markets with already, no doubt. And, they will. No question there. The real question the company will need to answer is “What is the quality of that revenue?” How long will Dropbox be able to charge for access to a commodity when for their competitors, those revenues are a line-item expense and write-off? And, most interestingly, will Dropbox’s march to remaining an independent, public, standalone company have been the right economic choice given today’s public market scrutiny? Only time will tell, of course, but in these twists and turns of a young company, I not only applaud the ability to resist the temptations to cash out, but also fundamentally believe today’s environment of technology giants fighting each other on every front imaginable (and allegedly collaborating wit government to share data) creates a rare opportunity for a company like Dropbox to continue to gain the trust of individuals and businesses to store their data. It also helps that Dropbox’s software is lightening fast and, well, it does just work. The future syncs bright.
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Package Tracking Platform AfterShip Marks Its Public Launch With A New Track Button Plugin And Pricing
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Catherine Shu
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, the package tracking platform for small e-commerce merchants that , is leaving beta mode today and launching to the public. The Hong Kong-based startup also debuted an easy-to-use for vendors that don’t want to deal with an API. By inserting a simple short code (like the one for Facebook Like button plugins), an AfterShip Track button will appear next to tracking numbers on an e-commerce site and allow customers to view delivery information without leaving the page. AfterShip gives small merchants the same kind of tools as e-commerce giants like Amazon. For example, its API and Track Button plugin allow customers to track shipments through 85 carriers directly on an e-commerce Web site, increasing the amount of time they spend there. Merchants can use AfterShip to enhance customer service by setting automatic SMS notifications to let buyers know when a shipment is delayed or arrives so they remember to leave feedback on e-commerce sites like eBay. The platform also includes analytics that let vendors compare the performance of different carriers. “UPS may say that shipments arrive in two days, but nobody knows if that is really true,” says Chan. “We give power back to merchants to audit all shipments and see if they are really delivered on time.” Since its private beta launch in March 2012, AfterShip has tracked over one million packages. About 60% of AfterShip’s 4,000 clients are in the U.S., while most of the remaining 40% are based in Hong Kong or mainland China. Chan says most of AfterShip’s users are smaller merchants who sell high value merchandise like electronics, custom-made items or even gold bars. The startup plans to scale up by targeting more merchants in China and Latin America and Chan says AfterShip’s platform will eventually be able to perform automatic translations. In addition to service and design upgrades for its public launch, AfterShip has to attract more small vendors. Users can track packages for free, while premium accounts include features like automatic notifications, the ability to export shipments in a .CSV file and AfterShip’s API.
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Leaked Video Highlights Moto X Software Features, Including Always-On Voice Commands
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Chris Velazco
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUmuIEp6dvs Motorola’s secretive Moto X smartphone has been spotted in its fair share of photos ( and ) this past week, but there are only so many thrills to be derived by looking at still images. The folks at got their collective hands on a short demo video from Canadian wireless carrier Rogers that affords us our best look yet at what Motorola’s first post-acquisition phone brings to the table when it comes to software. One of the earliest and most persistent rumors about the Moto X (or the X Phone as it was known) was that the device would always be listening for voice commands. The Rogers video confirms that is the case, and that the command “OK Google Now” is all it takes to rouse the phone and prompt Google’s proactive data surfacing service. Curiously, yet another leaked video shows another Moto X reacting to the command instead. At this point it’s tough to say if the change in activation commands is a regional software difference or just a holdover from earlier stages of development. Also onboard the X is a new visual notifications scheme that doesn’t rely on an embedded LED — the video notes that “information quietly appears” on the display in the form of icons that seem to help users differentiate, say, Facebook messages from standard texts. Users can also fire up the X’s camera by vigorously whipping their wrists while holding it, though it’s unclear whether or not we can redefine that action to launch different applications. Once the camera is up and running, users can tap anywhere on the screen to snap photos, or hold their fingers down to enable a burst mode of sorts. It strikes me as a much savvier approach to operating a camera than what Google does in stock Android Jelly Bean, and hopefully those tweaks make the leap from Moto exclusive to stock Android staple. Curiously absent from the video is any mention of the customization options expected to be part of the Moto X experience. Canadian customers can pick up a black or white X starting in August, and I suspect those in the U.S. will be able to pick up their non-tweaked models from multiple carriers around the same time. As it happens, engravings and colorful plastic backs may not be the only design choices Motorola will leave up to its customers — AndroidAndMe’s (who’s had a generally solid track record with Moto X reports) says that wood trim may also be an option when the device launches this summer. Really, the only thing this torrent of leaks hasn’t turned up yet is a price tag, but at the rate things are going I wouldn’t expect that last tidbit to stay a secret for too much longer.
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Internet Killed The Magazine Star
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John Biggs
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I’ve been musing on whether or not to weigh in on the demise of , a computer “magazine” that was once printed on “paper.” Founded after the acquisition of PC Magazine by Ziff-Davis publishing, PC World’s story is so similar to the stories of the major blogs these days that it is worth a brief look. PC Magazine and PC World began competing when PC Mag employees refused to go along with the acquisition. A similar thing happened in the early days of Gizmodo when Pete Rojas was hired away from Gawker Media to start Engadget. I read these two blogs a decade ago while slaving away at Laptop Magazine/PC Upgrade which, as you can easily surmise, no longer have print editions either. This little power struggle created the two juggernauts of this decade and ushered in the demise of the computer magazine. The resulting blossoming of online titles chewed away at the giants of the print era. While computer magazines – usually with DVDs attached – are still popular in areas with less developed Internet availability, the U.S. has become a magazine wasteland, the only titles left on the newsstand being either general, mass-market news and gossip or amazingly niche titles that work best in print. Advertising also flowed the way of Gizmodo and Engadget (albeit slowly) and finally it choked off the major players in the print game. The last few years has been a litany of print edition closings, much to the chagrin of a few of my tech writer friends. Remember that computer magazines were once amazingly, important just as blogs are now. Many of us 1980s kids learned to program by typing in long strings of code from titles like Antic and Compute and even before I wanted to become a writer I idolized John Dvorak and Steven Levy, two tech writers who put a little bit of soul into their work. I remember reading about the in PC Mag and salivating over items in the classifieds section at the back of the magazine where things like voice synthesizers and high-speed modems went for hundreds of dollars. Before Gateway the only way to buy a computer was to build it from components. Sure you could get a ready-built Tandy or IBM, but they were expensive and often underpowered. Computer Shopper, another defunct title, offered a warehouse full of gear that a tech-loving father and son team could build on the kitchen table. Check out . It doesn’t make me sad that PC World is gone. I hadn’t read it in years and the people I know working there will remain employed. The Internet killed the print edition as surely as the Kindle is killing the paperback. Pressing “Print” on a massive machine and igniting a series of distribution channels that require trucks, boxes, and newsstands cannot compare to pressing “Purchase” on a tablet. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you ink. I once had a box full of PC Worlds and PC Magazines. I would peruse them, type in programs in assembly, marvel at EGA graphics, and wonder when I would have a hard drive of my own. Things have changed, to be sure, but the tech press is still alive and well and quite vibrant. PC World, the print magazine, played its part. Now it is time to cede the stage.
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Adobe Systems Completes $600M Acquisition Of Conversational Marketing Startup Neolane
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Catherine Shu
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Adobe Systems today that it has completed its acquisition of Neolane, a conversational marketing company with annual revenue of just under $60 million. As , the deal is worth $600 million in cash and adds a roster of new features to . “With the completion of the Neolane acquisition, Adobe’s lead in digital marketing is extended further, bringing critical cross-channel campaign management capabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing business, in a statement. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Paris, France, Neolane has offices around Europe, North America and Asia and provides services for customers including Accor Hotels, Alcatel-Lucent, IKEA, Samsung, Sony and Dior. Neolane is the sixth product in Adobe Marketing Cloud’s suite, which also includes Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager and Media Optimizer. The acquisition of Neolane allows Adobe to add tools such as handling leads, marketing resource management, high-volume email marketing campaigns and a real-time offer recommendation engine. Adobe has been busy building out Marketing Cloud this summer–another major new feature is an that allows users to collaborate across all Marketing Cloud products. Last year, Neolane led by Battery Ventures with participation by Auriga Partners and XAnge Private Equity.
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Chris Devore Talks Up Seattle As A Solid Tech Hub
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John Biggs
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Each time we run a meet-up we like to have a brief interview with some of the major players in the industry. This time we spoke with , creator of Founders Co-Op and a serial entrepreneur and general Seattle cheerleader. “When you asked me ‘Can you talk about why Seattle is a great place for a startup up,’ that’s basically my spiel all day long,” he said. He believes Seattle is full of amazing talent and opportunities for smart people looking for a great place to live and work. Devore spent a few years in the valley before returning to Seattle and feels that Seattle is still a nascent market for start-ups. In the past five years, however, more money has begun flowing into the area and there are, as a corollary, more success stories. “Entrepreneurs essentially have a personality defect that makes them not a good fit at a big company,” he said. That’s why you don’t to work at Microsoft or Amazon if you move to Seattle – in fact it’s discouraged. Rather than , however, Devore wants to fill the city with great people and ideas. A noble goal, to be sure.
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Kiip Will Power Rewards In Yahoo Japan’s Mobile Apps
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that delivers real-world rewards to app users when they perform desirable tasks and reach key milestones, is announcing its integration with Yahoo Japan — marking the first time Yahoo Japan has integrated a third-party service into its app, according to Kiip co-founder and CEO Brian Wong. As in other Kiip campaigns, users of the Yahoo Japan iPhone and Android apps will see “achievement ads” offering them rewards after completing certain activities. However, unlike most Kiip campaigns, the rewards in this case will take the form of Yahoo’s T-Points. In other words, Kiip is providing the technology for Yahoo Japan to bring T-Points from the web (where they are already available) to mobile. Wong said Kiip is piloting similar programs with “about a dozen” publications. For those partners, Kiip serves as less of an ad network and more of a technology provider to optimize and promote existing rewards programs on mobile. “Yahoo is playing publisher and advertiser in this case, leveraging the technology we’ve created over three years,” he said. “It’s not easy deliver these promotions at the right moment and the right place.” The “Use Yahoo! Japan Apps Get T Points” campaign will run from July 24 to August 23. For its initiatives in Japan, Kiip has help from , Japanese Internet company , and the Digital Garage-owned marketing agency CGM. Wong said this also illustrates Kiip’s larger shift as it moves beyond advertising in games. It’s now powering rewards for nearly 1,000 developers in a number of categories — for example, .
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Facebook Remembers Its First Chef, Josef Desimone, After Tragic Motorcycle Accident
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Although CEOs and the first engineers are often the ones most lionized for creating the founding blocks of great companies, there are others who shape corporate culture in ways that are sometimes hard to appreciate or see. Early Facebook employees today are reeling from the loss of the company’s executive chef, Josef Desimone, who . He died of an apparent motorcycle accident, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I have some very sad news to share. This morning Josef Desimone, our executive chef, was involved in a motorcycle accident and I’m sorry to report that Josef has passed away. Josef was a Facebook legend and institution. “Chef Josef” joined us in 2008 and built our culinary team from a handful of employees in a single café into a global team with dozens of world class restaurants. He never compromised on quality while maintaining total attention to detail. Josef played an incredibly important role in defining our culture during those first years and right up to the present. Away from Facebook, Josef was just as energetic and driven. Almost every weekend he was volunteering with veterans’ organizations, hosting firefighter breakfasts or supporting some other valuable cause. He had a strong belief in giving back more in life than he took, and it shows in all the people who mourn him today. We will find a way to permanently honor Josef’s legacy at Facebook soon. For now, let’s remember and celebrate the passing of a great friend, devoted mentor and inspirational leader. Many Facebook employees are posting memories of Desimone. Current employees referred me to the press department and I’ve reached out to former employees as well. Facebook hasn’t added anything beyond Zuckerberg’s statement yet. In any case, people remember him as someone who valued high quality and who was deeply caring and empathetic. He joined Facebook five years ago and set up the company’s culinary teams in multiple offices around the world. Said one early Faceboook engineer Wayne Chang, Desimone would often exclaim, “I have the best job in the entire world!” on countless status updates. He also took care to be inclusive of many cultures in Facebook’s menu and daily meals. One time, in honor of a Persian festival named Nowruz, he went out of his way to research Iranian cuisine by going out to local restaurants and asking for advice from employees of Iranian descent. The menu ended up including: lavash bread, a white fish dish called , lamb and chicken kebabs, a cucumber and tomato salad along with spinach and yogurt. Elliot Schrage, a very longtime Facebook employee who is the vice president of communications and public policy, : I’m one of many people who’s life was improved by knowing Josef L. Desimone. He was an extraordinary person — passionate, dedicated, inspirational. He helped shape the culture that exists at Facebook today and built a team (indeed, a company) that will carry on his legacy. We’ll miss him greatly David Recordon, an engineer manager at Facebook, also : Sitting next to Chef Josef throughout 2010 was such an amazing experience. Always going out of his way to bring people together across the company, super caring to those around him and was a mentor whether that’s around cooking or the leadership which went into doing it really well at scale. Corey Owens, who was a public policy manager at Facebook before joining Uber, : Chef Josef L. Desimone was one if the very first people I met at Facebook. He struck up a conversation with the awkward new kid, filled his belly with the feeling of home, and was a constant reminder of the things in life to be thankful for. Struck down way, way too soon – but somebody who made every moment count and made a lot of lives better along the way. Thanks for everything Chef. Audrey Kim, who was an account strategist at Google when Desimone worked there, : Thank you, Josef L. Desimone for sharing your incredible culinary gift and generous heart with me. My life is better because I knew you, was nurtured by and learned from your kind, loving spirit. Heaven is so lucky now to have your sweet potato fries and garlic mac&cheese. Can’t wait for your big big hugs when we all see each other again. If you knew Desimone personally and have any more memories you’d like to share, please post them in the comments and we’ll add.
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Behind On Loan Payments, Online Gaming Company Zattikka Could Fold As Soon As August 2
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Steve O'Hear
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Online gaming company suffered a precipitous decline on the London Stock Exchange today, falling a staggering 64 percent in normal trading. The cause of the plummet is simple: Zattikka is behind on its loan repayments and today confirmed that discussions are ongoing with its creditors. That is troubling given that a loan payment of £0.275 million, which was due on the 9th of this month, remains unpaid. The debt owed comes via a firm that Zattikka purchased, Hattrick. According , the company must pay the sum by the end of business on August 2, or the loan holders will demand their full debt be paid in two business days, which is €6.4 million. It’s a simple assumption to make that if Zattikka cannot make the small-interest payment, the full debt is also outside of its current financial capabilities. That means Zattikka is not long for this world. Zattikka is a company that went public at a far younger age than most firms, raising $20 million in the process. Those funds were used to acquire a number of smaller gaming companies, including Hattrick. As : Zattikka […] that it will be using the funds to make acquisitions, starting with three smaller social games developers: Hattrick Holdings, Sneaky Games, Inc. and Concept Art House, Inc. That is a sign not just of more transactions in social/casual games but also of increasing consolidation of smaller, independent studios as the market continues to mature. However, it appears that the company, once sporting a valuation north of $20 million at the time of its flotation is now essentially without worth. Google Finance of the company at $333,274. The irony is strong: Employing Google’s valuation figure, the mere interest on the debt that Zattikka must pay is worth more than its entire business. This is one story that is almost over, and doesn’t have a happy ending. There are, of course, parallels with online gaming outfit and publicly listed Zynga, which has been severe Wall Street pressure post-IPO. And in fact, Zattikka has at times been called the “Zynga of Europe,” though would have something to say about that. It’s also not the only European player in the online and browser-based games space to be facing difficulties, as the casual gaming market is undergoing a transition, to put it mildly. As we when Hamburg-headquartered Bigpoint announced its new CEO after founder Heiko Hubertz stepped down, the industry began facing a wave of challenges, the biggest being market saturation and trying to drum up loyal gamers from a savvy but fickle user base. That’s because the online gaming space has moved from being a market that was underserved to somewhat of a gold rush, with supply outweighing demand. As a result, consumers are wising up, particularly casual gamers who now expect a greater level of quality from an industry that has become plagued with “me-too” offerings and an avalanche of sequels. But of course the biggest attack has arguably come from mobile, where the major browser-based games makers, not least the Zyngas of the world, have been caught woefully short. Zattikka, as TechCrunch noted at the time of the company’s public offering, is involved in mobile gaming, although it clearly found the change in focus difficult; the market shift from online social gaming to mobile gaming has created more than one corpse. It’s worth noting that pushback is accumulating against gaming companies employing traditional fundraising techniques. TechCrunch’s that the hit-based gaming industry leads to rapidly growing companies that might fade quickly in the near future. This makes valuing their long-term worth difficult, as their future cash flows are opaque. .
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How To Stop 3D Printing’s Race To The Bottom
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John Biggs
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Today’s big news, courtesy of , is about the expiration of laser sintering patents that will change the face of 3D printing in 2014. In short, the reason “good” 3D printers – namely the ones that create solid, injection-molded style pieces – aren’t cheap or readily available is that older 3D printing companies have held the laser sintering process hostage. For example, the Form One printer by Form Labs infringes on these patents even though they detail a printer that uses a laser to fuse fine powder to create an object and the Form One uses a liquid. That’s neither here nor there, however, because these patents will soon encourage a race to bottom in 3D printer quality, mirroring just about major CE device in the past decade. The first tablets got popular and cheap – and manufacturers flooded the market. 3D TV looked like it was the next best thing so everyone made them. Heck, even small form-factor computers had their day a little less than a decade ago. Once a device is deemed popular by the market, the quality quickly falls and the supply rises precipitously. To be clear, a good 3D printer doesn’t need to cost $5,000 and I would wager it doesn’t even need to cost $2,000. However, once 3D printers hit the $300 mark, watch out. Quality at this price point will disappear and the costs will be centered on materials, driving the cost of ABS and other materials sky high. Think about the cost of 2D printers vs. the cost of their ink and you see where we’re headed. I want every home in America to own a 3D printer. But, more important, I want every home in America to own a 3D printer. 3D printers do no one any good if they are wonky, poorly designed, and under-supported. The current crop, Makerbot and Form Labs included, have a real attention to detail that is missing in nearly every aspect of consumer electronics. I doubt they will stay that way when they become popular. At this point, 3D printing is in its indie infancy – the Pixies before Surfer Rosa, if you will. Once these patents expire the world will be awash in cheap hardware designed to cash in on a fad. It is up to us, then, to be careful with what we buy. First, I would support open source as much as possible as well as DIY for educational markets. DIY helps the little guy – the guys who sell the parts that can’t be manufactured at home. The goal of many 3D printers was to create a machine that could make itself. This needs to continue to be a focus. Second, let’s avoid letting the big guys horn in on this market, shall we? Obviously Stratasys bought Makerbot, much to the chagrin of open source advocates, but once Dell, HP, and Vizio get in on the market, there’s no telling what kind of garbage will be peddled at your local Best Buy. 3D printing is a difficult technology that needs to be brought to the general consumer. I don’t think the huge manufacturers are the guys to do it. 3D printing will truly heat up next year. I’m excited. With a little preparation and understanding, however, we can ensure the future will be less like Palm and more like Apple.
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Happy Birthday To Alex Wilhelm, Our Newest TechCrunch Writer
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Eric Eldon
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Alex Wilhelm is turning 24 today, but he’s been writing about tech since his sophomore year of college. So he’s joining us now with four solid years at The Next Web, where he wrote about Microsoft, finance, tech policy and the broad range of startups that have helped define this era. He’ll continue writing about those same topics and will also be focusing on monetization on mobile, and the changing nature of online software business models. It’s worth adding that has become a bit of a monster on Twitter, regularly pumping out a flood of at-replies to anyone who comes near… including to the official accounts of large content sites like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed*. This is fine by us. In fact, since TechCrunch is such a freewheeling place anyway, we expect him to really start going to town here, like so many others have before him. Please wish our newest TechCrunch writer a happy birthday and warm welcome.
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A Peek Inside Science Inc.’s Santa Monica Tech Startup Studio [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
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So when a few of us TechCrunch TV folks were in L.A. earlier this month, we made it a point to head over to Science’s Santa Monica HQ to get a firsthand look at what it’s really like inside. After all, a video is worth at least 1,000 words, right? Watch the video above to see the busy (and buzzy) Science space, and hear co-founder talk about the studio’s past, present, and future — and how the Southern California locale shapes its startups.
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Memorability Lets You Create & Narrate Beautiful iPad Photo Books, No Printing Required
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Sarah Perez
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There’s no shortage of mobile photo book applications on the market today, but a majority of these are focused on taking digital creations and turning them into offline, printed products. , a recently launched iPad photo book app, is different. Instead of bringing online web printing services to the new, smaller screens of smartphones or iPads, the app instead suggests that we no longer need to print out our photo scrapbooks at all — and that an iPad-only solution actually has advantages of its own. If you do a search for “photo books” in the iTunes App Store, you’ll find a variety of solutions for building photo albums that can then be shipped to your home. Some of these are built for iPhone, like and , for example. Others, like , are universal apps, and others still, like , are iPad-only. Memorability fits into this latter group in the sense that it’s been designed for tablets alone. But unlike the others, Memorability is not meant as a utility for building hardbound photo books — it’s the digital replacement for them. There’s no accompanying web service or printing option with the app. Users’ albums are saved locally to the iPad, while the company’s servers will only host the albums shared with other family and friends for up to 30 days. Like the traditional scrapbooks it’s inspired by, Memorability includes pre-designed templates that can be customized with text and captions. But it also includes a unique feature, as well: voice support. In addition to arranging photos into albums, users can record narrative voice-overs. The resulting photo books can then be viewed in an automatic slideshow mode, or can be swiped through manually. Private sharing is built into Memorability, allowing users to friend each other, then view and comment on each others’ books, which appear in the app’s feed. Plus, you can optionally share books to Facebook or via email to reach family members or friends without iPads. There the photo books are turned into movie files that play the slideshow and narration when clicked. Based in Chapel Hill, N.C., and bootstrapped by husband and wife team and , Memorability got its start — as many companies do — in order to solve a personal pain point in the co-founders’ lives. “I have thousands of photos of my children on my computer, but as a busy mom, I never had time to do anything with them,” says Anne, who worked on Memorability’s interaction design and wireframes while husband Tom, currently a senior director of product at TIBCO, coded. “When I looked for a solution for my iPad where I could display my photos, I wasn’t happy,” Anne says of the iPad’s current app selection. “I wanted something that was more like a physical photo album. When I didn’t find anything like that, I decided we needed to do it,” she adds. The premium version of the app is available for free in the App Store, offering a number of built-in themes, and the ability to record up to a minute of voice per page on albums that can be 20 pages long. After the launch period is over, the app will remain free but will then cost $3.99 to upgrade to the full version with more free themes and albums not capped at five pages each. A number of album themes will remain available for in-app purchase in both editions, and new themes will be added monthly, says Anne. Given the scrapbooking vibe of building the digital books, there may be an opportunity for Memorability to sell additional embellishments in time, but the company decided against the “sticker pack business model” for now because the immediate goal is keeping the app easy to use. However, the team is considering letting users pay to keep their albums shared with others for longer than the 30-day default at some later point in time. Memorability is interesting because it actually replicates the feeling you used to get from putting photos into a scrapbook, while also taking advantage of the digital medium that’s now at hand. It’s a lot like except that Story is only built for iPhone, and is not as polished or pretty — things that matter to Memorability’s most likely female, Pinterest-pinning, family-focused crowd. The Clarks also envision Memorability as more than just another tool for sharing photos, but rather as a storytelling platform, Anne explains. “One thing I’m hoping with this is people will have meaningful interactions by viewing these personal photo stories from family and friends,” she says. The premium version of Memorability is available as a . (The code MEMORABILITY will get you one extra free theme.)
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eBay CEO John Donahoe: I Wish We Could Buy Airbnb But We Can’t Afford It
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Leena Rao
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At Fortune’s Brainstorm Conference in Aspen today, eBay CEO John Donahoe joined Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky onstage to talk about how they mentor each other (you can watch the live stream ). The two CEOs have been informally advising each other for a few years, after being introduced through eBay board member and Airbnb investor Marc Andreessen. In fact, Donahoe asked Andreessen who the smartest founder was in Silicon Valley, and he immediately responded with Chesky’s name. Fortune Deputy Managing Editor and moderator Stephanie Mehta asked Donahoe why eBay doesn’t just buy Airbnb. He explained that he would love to buy the company (which was most recently valued at ), but eBay can’t afford it. In fact, Donahoe believes that Airbnb can be a great independent company and will be “the next eBay,” and “one of the more successful startups of this generation.” According to eBay’s last earnings release, the company has as of late June. The love wasn’t just dished by Donahoe. Chesky says that Donahoe is the archetype of the world-class CEO that can manage a successful company, and he relies on the eBay CEO as a core advisor to help make him a better leader and CEO. As for other acquisitions, Donahoe said the marketplace giant and PayPal parent will continue to acquire new startups that are developing compelling technologies. Stay tuned.
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5by Wants To Be Your Web Video Concierge, And It’s Taking Aim At Phones And TVs, Too
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Chris Velazco
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I like to think we’ve all been here at one point: You’re bored out of your wits and rather than try to do something productive, you just spend hour after endless hour on YouTube. The problem that tends to come up in those situations is that, after a while, you just can’t find videos that strike your fancy any more. Tragic, I know. As it happens, that’s exactly what Greg Isenberg, founder and CEO of a Montreal-based web video startup called is trying to fix. 5by takes a decidedly different approach to how it finds and plays videos for you, though it may look a little familiar if you’ve spent some time mucking around with mobile music apps. 5by has been called the of video, and it’s not hard to see why. Once you mosey over to the website, you’re greeted not by a smattering of videos but by a series of categories like “Blowing You Away” and “Killing Time.” Clicking any of those categories brings you to a slightly more granular set of options to choose from (think “Animals” or, my personal favorite, “Space”), and one more click takes you straight into a video (culled from YouTube or Vimeo) of 5by’s choosing. When you’re in a video, you’re presented with a series of reactions: you can hit buttons to signify that you’ve laughed at the video being shown to you, hated it, or felt it tug at your heartstrings. And if a video just isn’t your cup of tea, there’s always a skip button to take you far, far away. While all that skipping or liking or OMG-ing is going on, 5by is quietly taking all of those little interactions and learning what you do and don’t like so it can serve you a video better suited to your tastes the next time around. It sounds like a simple enough concept, and Isenberg says it’s working very well so far. He and the rest of the 5by team launched a very lean version of the site at the Launch conference held this past March, and in the days that followed, 5by attracted thousands of visitors who stayed on the site for about 12 minutes. These days, that average time on site has jumped to 19 minutes, and Isenberg says that the site has curated about 100,000 videos for its users to gawk at. At this stage, all that content curation is handled by the small 5by team, with a little help from a curation algorithm designed to bring in high-value video from multiple sources. The algorithm knows to pull in videos from popular sources like Vice and Epic Meal Time and sort them into the proper categories for users to discover. But that process of curation won’t remain in-house for too much longer. Part of the 5by monetization plan hinges on a CPV model like the one StumbleUpon leans on, but Isenberg says companies are starting to sign on as curators and push their own videos to viewers who like video categories or certain kinds of videos. It’s no secret that the line between video content and the ads that go in between those videos has grown awfully murky, and sponsored content on websites like BuzzFeed show that there’s a decent chunk of people who don’t mind mixing content and advertising. Now third-party curators can target certain types of users to receive videos and native ads (remember, 5by can figure out what you like and what you don’t) and Isenberg says Playboy has signed on to be the first one. The thing that hasn’t eluded the 5by team is that, as enthralling as a leanback web video experience can be, there’s only so much leaning back you can do when you’re plopped down in front of your computer monitor. As far as Isenberg is concerned, the future of 5by will rely on branching out from traditional PCs. They’re working on an iOS app, and it ditches the web version’s category view in favor of a greater focus on how much free time you have to blow. Isenberg also confirmed that 5by has already engaged in talks with two major television OEMs about the prospect of baking 5by into their forthcoming smart TVs. Why? Well, for lack of a better term, the YouTube experiences you’ll find on most smart TVs are generally pretty lousy. It’s still early days for 5by, but I’ve already found myself wasting more time there than I care to realize — if Isenberg’s cross-platform expansion plans pan out, we could all be in a bit of trouble.
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Netflix’s Original Content Plans Go Beyond TV Shows To Include Stand-Up Comedy And Documentaries
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Anthony Ha
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Following a second quarter that saw , Netflix’s touted the progress that the company has made in original content and its future plans. Perhaps most interesting is its intention to expand beyond TV shows to stand-up comedies and feature-length documentaries. That’s not entirely new information — Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos had already stated his plans to expand into comedy in . And it already . However, as far as I can tell, the company hadn’t previously mentioned its documentary plans. “Netflix has become a big destination for fans of these much loved and often under-distributed genres,” the letter states. I’m guessing that Netflix can also produce this content at a relatively low cost. As for its other content plans, the company also noted that it has renewed every single one of its first-season shows (Lilyhammer, House of Cards, Hemlock Grove, and Orange is the New Black) for a second season, and that it would “be delighted to produce a fifth season of , if possible, given fan reaction.” It says all of its shows have “engaged large audiences across our markets,” though as before it didn’t didn’t release any specific viewer numbers. It did attribute part of the current quarter’s growth (600,000 new subscribers) to Arrested Development, which it said brought “a small but noticeable bump in membership” when it was released. That’s less likely to happen to entirely new shows because they’re less established. Overall, Netflix says original programming accounts for 5 percent of its $3 billion in total amortized content costs. Oh, and for those of you interested in the , which is supposed to allow different people in a household to use a single account with less pain, Netflix says it still plans to roll it out this quarter.
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Google Brings Cloud Print To Windows, Makes Printer Sharing Easier
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today a number of updates to that finally bring it to Windows and make it easier to share printers with others. Even Google knows that there are still some occasions when you just need to print something, so for the last few years, the company has been steadily improving this service. At its core, Cloud Print allows you to share your printers with others and print virtually anything from anywhere. There are plenty of “ ” printers on the market, which you can connect to the Internet and manage from your Google Cloud Print accounts. Until now, however, Google only supported Cloud Print in Chrome on Chrome OS. There are also some third-party tools for OS X and Windows, but until today Google itself didn’t really offer any support for third-party operating systems. Today’s launch of the allows admins to easily connect their existing printers in their schools and businesses. The service runs in the background and connects your printers to Google’s cloud. It’s officially in beta, requires that Chrome is installed and is compatible with Windows 7, Vista and XP with the installed (but then, you shouldn’t run XP on your computers anymore…). The other tool Google is launching today is Google Cloud Printer for Windows, which is essentially a printer driver for Windows that lets you use Cloud Print just like any other printer that’s installed on your computer. With this, you can print to Cloud Print from any application on your computer. With today’s update, Google also now makes it easier to share printers with anybody nearby by simply providing them with a link. You can manage access this way and also set limits for how many pages a given user can print per day (something schools will surely appreciate).
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Netflix’s Q2 Misses Due To Lower-Than-Expected Subscriber Adds, Earns 49 Cents Per Share On $1.07B In Revenue
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Ryan Lawler
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Netflix just released its , missing analyst expectations with lower-than-expected subscriber numbers. For the second quarter, Netflix reported earnings of 49 cents per share on revenues of $1.07 billion. That compared to earnings of 11 cents per share on sales of $889 million in the . Earnings were above analyst expectations of 40 cents a share, while revenues were in-line with the $1.07 billion forecast for the second quarter. But the most closely watched number was probably Netflix’s domestic subscriber growth. On that front, the company reported net additions of 630,000, compared with 528,000 a year ago. The second quarter is typically a weak one for new subscribers, especially compared to the prior two quarters. Nevertheless, Netflix’s numbers were in-line with its guidance but it underperformed analyst expectations of domestic subscriber growth of around 700,000 net additions. While Netflix’s push into original programming is working to get more people signed up and subscribing to the service, just not as quickly as some bulls might have hoped. In the first quarter, Netflix released the Kevin Spacey-led political drama House of Cards, and has followed that up in the second quarter with the highly anticipated release of the fourth season of Arrested Development, as well as Eli Roth’s horror series Hemlock Grove. (Orange Is The New Black, the company’s latest original release, wasn’t reflected in the report, as it came out in the third quarter.) Its shows have received a bit of critical acclaim recently, with Netflix receiving 14 Emmy nominations last week. That includes nine nominations for House Of Cards, three for Arrested Development, and two for Hemlock Grove. But Emmy noms didn’t necessarily translate into subscribers for the company. Looking beyond the company’s domestic streaming market, Netflix posted relatively strong growth in international markets for the second quarter. It added 610,000 international subscribers, which matches growth from last year’s second quarter, when it launched in the U.K. and Ireland. According to its management comments, it saw strong growth in Brazil after raising the price of the service in that market. International contribution loss was lower due to better-than-expected growth and lower content spend across multiple markets. Its DVD service lost nearly half a million subscribers, but it continues to be a huge profit driver for the company, contributing about $109 million in profit to the company. That said, the contribution profit declined 19 percent year over year, which the company said is in line with its decline in members and revenues. For Netflix, this quarter’s financial results follow several strong quarters in a row, in which the company has outperformed analyst expectations. After a rough couple of quarters nearly two years ago, as it raised prices and separated its DVD and streaming business units. And those positive results have driven its stock price up, from a 52-week low of $52.81 up into the $260s today. But after today’s release, the stock is down more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.
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Sir Michael Moritz To Join Us At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco
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Alexia Tsotsis
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The original journalist-turned-investor, , will be joining us onstage at next September. In his over three-decades-long tech career, Moritz, who rose from humble beginnings, has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, written two books about Apple, consistently topped the Forbes , and has either sat on or currently sits on the boards of Stripe, LinkedIn, PayPal, Yahoo, Google, Kayak and Zappos among others. Moritz’s leadership as Chairman at Sequoia has been marked by efficiency and focus. And the lucrative $25 million co-investment in Google with competitor Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Moritz saw the firm through some of the most major tectonic tech shifts of our time before he stepped away from last year. At Disrupt SF, Moritz will be speaking about the latest shift — the personal economy. Moritz joins other noted investors at Disrupt, including Kleiner’s and Sequoia’s . With founders and CEOs like and , Disrupt SF 2013 is already set to have a stunning . And we still have more to announce in the coming weeks. Disrupt SF takes over The San Francisco Design Concourse from September 7 to 11. Tickets are currently on sale . If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be .
Partner Sir Michael Moritz is Chairman of Sequoia Capital where he has worked since 1986. Michael represented Sequoia in its investments in Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Flextronics, Kayak, Pure Digital and Zappos.com. He has always had an eclectic set of investment interests and today represents Sequoia’s interests in Klarna, Green Dot, and Stripe (two banks and a payments company), LinkedIn (the world’s professional nework), Instacart (grocery delivery in an hour), PopSugar (the entertainment and fashion site for women), [24]7 (an outsourcing customer service company) and The Melt (a grilled cheese restaurant chain). Before joining Sequoia, Michael worked as a correspondent for Time; wrote a couple of books, including the Little Kingdom, the first authoritative book about Apple’s early years; and co-founded Technologic Partners, the precursor of Venture Wire.
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She++ Documentary Features Industry Leaders, Stanford Professors and Students Talking Women In Tech [Video]
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Billy Gallagher
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, a Stanford community for women in tech, a 12-minute documentary today featuring discussing gender in technical fields. In the documentary, high-profile Silicon Valley leaders Kimber Lockhart, a Director of Engineering at Box; Tracy Chou, a software engineer at Pinterest; Jocelyn Goldfein, a Director of Engineering at Facebook; Sandy Jen, CTO and co-founder of Meebo; and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, share their experiences with gender in the classroom and workplace. Two Stanford seniors, and founded she++ in 2012. Since then, the two have hosted two conferences, produced the documentary, and started a mentorship program. “I wanted to share a story that could relate to girls who had parents as doctors, or girls whose parents did not go to college,” Agarwal says. “I did not want to just target the mainstream communities in the Silicon Valley, nor the high schools dominated by surrounding technical influences. The point was to widen our reach, and make the story accessible and relatable.” The documentary has been screened over 100 times in 12 countries and has been translated into five languages. Nearly 300 people attended the documentary’s premiere at Stanford in April, where I saw both the documentary and an interesting panel discussion on challenges facing women in CS at Stanford and in Silicon Valley. “The she++ documentary brought light to the issue in a way that is very accessible for all students, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background,” says Cullen White, a teacher at Fairmont Heights High School, where he estimates 120 students and parents viewed the documentary. “It provided me, as a male teacher, with a tool that can be used to inspire my female students more than I can alone.” Israni and Agarwal say one of the biggest surprises for them was how professional the final product looks and the feedback they’ve received. “We also had a surprising number of technology companies — we spoke at screenings for Facebook, Twitter, EA, Zynga, Foursquare and Square–host screenings,” Israni tells me. “They weren’t our target demographics, but at those screenings there were hundreds of women who confessed that they still face some of the challenges explored in the film, and that this is the first time they had been brought up so publicly and forcefully. The fact that this issue has been so pervasive really reinforced our belief that this is necessary. And it was those women who begged for copies of the film to show to their daughters, nieces, and the like–a huge part of why we chose to make it public.” Chou, a panelist at the first she++ conference, says she thought it was a really valuable experience and that “participating in the documentary made a lot of sense to me.” She says she got really positive feedback from women in the audience and is excited that the documentary will make some of the conference’s ideas more accessible to a broader audience. [vimeo 63877454 w=640 h=360]
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Researcher Reported iAd Workbench Hole Before Apple’s Dev Center Went Dark, Here’s What He Found
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Chris Velazco
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Apple’s developer site and remained dark straight through the weekend. The company revealed yesterday that it was because an “intruder” attempted to access personal information pertaining to Apple’s registered developers. While Apple continues to work on revamping the Dev Center’s security and bringing the whole thing back online, a 25-year-old Turkish security researcher named Ibrahim Balic thinks that it may have been . But was it? Balic swears up and down that he’s not a malicious hacker. Rather, he claims to be just a security buff who stumbled upon a way to access gobs of Apple user data, tried to warn the company about it, and made a (now private) video highlighting the security flaw in question when Apple wouldn’t respond. Because of Apple’s usual opacity, my multiple calls and emails have gone unanswered, so it’s nearly impossible to say for sure whether his poking around caused Apple to take action last week, but the timing definitely seems curious. Let’s back up a minute. Balic is an avid bug hunter (he’s reported them to among others) and has filed a grand total of 13 bug reports to Apple since he first took an interest in the company on July 16. The one that gets most of the spotlight in his video seems to be Apple bug #14488816, which Balic reported on July 18 — the same day users first started reporting downtime for Apple’s Dev Center. That little security issue is centered around Apple’s iAd Workbench, a recently launched tool that lets users craft and target iAd campaigns to better build hype around their iOS apps. Balic discovered that if you manipulated a request sent to the server that runs Workbench, it would allow you to try to add a new user to the account. From there you could try throwing in first names, last names — whatever really — and the server would then respond with a full name and email address. Once Balic understood the full scope of the problem, he (and this is where his rationale loses me a bit) wrote a Python script to scrape all the data he could find and showed some of it on YouTube. And what of the Dev Center itself? On July 16 Balic did in fact file a bug report (#14461474) to Apple that dealt with the Dev Center’s vulnerability to a stored XSS attack. He said that it was technically possible to access user data by exploiting that issue, but he never attempted it. Instead, he claims he reported the problem and went off in search of the next big bug to report. It’s too bad, though, that the video seemed so definitive: After showing off images of Apple’s downed Dev Center and the company’s official response, Balic then showed a slew of files that seem to contain full names and email addresses. It seems pretty damning, but Balic says that he never went after the Developer Center site directly, and all that user information he highlighted came from the iAd Workbench. Two separate bugs paved the way for one very confusing video. Of course, he didn’t do a great job of explaining this. In a comment left in our original , Balic that “one of those bugs have provided me access to users details etc” in reference to the iAd bug, and followed up by noting that “4 hours later from my final report Apple developer portal gas closed down and you know it still is.” The poor framing of the comment made it seem as though he submitted that data leak bug report and Apple shut down the dev site shortly afterward, but his final bug report actually was filed hours later. He later added that neither the data of the 73 Apple employees nor the 100,000 subsequent data files he scraped had anything to do with that Developer Center exploit he reported on the 16th. According to multiple files Balic sent to me, the data gleaned from the iAds issue is (thankfully) limited to names and email addresses. More worrying though is the idea that this particular bug could have affected more than just Apple’s developer community. An Apple representative told TechCrunch yesterday that only developer accounts could have been affected by the breach, but Balic insists that the issue he found returns regular email addresses and Apple IDs, too. There’s nothing encrypted about what he showed in the video — names and email addresses are rendered in plain text. I’ve contacted many of the users whose information appeared in the video but haven’t heard back yet, so we can’t confirm whether these people are developers or regular iTunes users, or if they’re just a bunch of random email addresses. In his original #14488816 bug report, Balic included a few examples of user data that he was able to obtain through the iAds exploit. One of those email addresses he recovered belonged to our very own Josh Constine, who confirmed that it was in fact his Apple ID as well. Throughout our conversation, Balic maintained that he was only ever trying to help Apple and plans to delete all the user data he’s collected so far. When asked why he downloaded all that user data rather than simply reporting the bug, Balic says he just wanted to see how “deep” he could go. If he wanted to do ill, he says, he wouldn’t have reported everything he found. For what it’s worth, he also says he never attempted to reset anyone’s password — the farthest he went was to email one of the addresses he had discovered and ask if it was really the person’s Apple ID. Balic didn’t get a response. Is it possible that Balic’s poking around caught Apple’s attention and prompted the company to take the developer site down? Yes. The iAd Workbench may fall under the same broad umbrella as the Dev Center, and the Add User functionality that once appeared in the iAd Workbench seems to have disappeared. Only people within Apple really know what’s going on, and they’re just not feeling very chatty at the moment; I’ll update this post if they respond.
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Frontback Is A Deeply Personal Photo-Taking App To Capture Fleeting Moments
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Romain Dillet
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From the team behind , is a straightforward iPhone photo-taking app to capture the moment as it happens. You launch the app, take a photo of what you have in front of you, take a photo of your face and share the digital collage on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. It’s addictive, very easy to understand, and, more importantly, deeply personal. “People tell us that they want to see their friends, not only what their friends see,” co-founder and designer Frédéric Della Faille told me. “We want to own the selfie,” he continued. The Frontback concept isn’t something new. When you on Checkthis, you can add as many photos as you want, as well as text and headlines. Nearly four months ago, Della Faille first two pictures on Checkthis of New York’s beautiful landscape and his reaction. He explained the concept of a ‘#frontback’ at the same time. Over the past few months, I have started noticing that more and more users were posting #frontback pictures on Checkthis. Like in the early days of Twitter, a user invented a new use case — except that this time around, the user was Checkthis’ co-founder. There wasn’t any sort of #frontback wizard tool to ease the process of creating them. Users were only experiencing with this newfound lingo and artistic rules. Enter Frontback, the app. It was released today in the App Store. Now, there is no whitespace around a Frontback photo, absolutely no chrome. The photo itself doesn’t have any filter. It’s just two square-ish photos on top of each other, filling up the entire screen of your iPhone. It’s all about immersing yourself and putting yourself in your friends’ shoes. “It tells so much more than a photo on Instagram,” Instagram designer recently told Della Faille. “Two photos change everything,” Della Faille told me. “On Instagram, you share something because it’s beautiful, but you don’t share the context,” he continued. Frontback isn’t another social network. For now, it’s built on top of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. When a friend joins Frontback, you automatically follow him or her, without having to do anything. And of course, you’ll probably start seeing their Frontback posts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as well. Della Faille now hopes that users will launch the Frontback app to capture fleeting moments, just like they would launch the default Camera app. He calmly went through a few examples of great Frontback posts. “This guy thinks about Frontback while piloting a plane. And this guy thinks about Frontback when he’s at the new Belgian king parade. And this guy when he meets Agoria. All of that happened over the weekend.”
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Timehop, The Place To Reminisce Online, Raises $3M Led By Spark Capital
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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While present-focused social networks like Facebook and Instagram make plenty of room for the narcissists in us, there’s not really a dedicated and focused place to reflect on the past. Timehop, which , has evolved into a that surfaces old memories from your social networks. will pull up status updates from a year or more ago, reminding you of friends you’ve lost contact with or thoughts you had a year ago on this day. The New York-based startup says it just rounded up another $3 million in funding led by existing investor Spark Capital. O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, which had also previously backed the company, participated as well. Andrew Parker, a principal at Spark, joins Timehop’s board. Timehop’s CEO Jonathan Wegener says that the company will use the round to build out the team beyond seven people and focus on mobile apps. Timehop just shut down its e-mail service last week. “The big, long-term vision is to be a place to reminisce online,” Wegener said. “Basically in this world, all social networks are real-time. They’re about what’s happening right now, but there’s no place online to discuss the past.” While the Series A crunch has made fundraising tough for all kinds of consumer-facing mobile and web products, Wegener said it was Timehop’s stickiness that made a compelling case. He said one-third of Timehop’s user base opens the product on any given day, which is a very respectable retention figure. “Users who try to the product fall in love with it. This helped us make the argument that people are working Timehop into their everday lives,” Wegener said. “At first, people don’t understand why they would want this. But they get really addicted to it. They see it as a mirror of their own life, and a reflection of their past self.” He said he’s used the app to remember which friends he’s lost touch with over the years. The app will pull up old group photos, reminding Wegener to reach out and reconnect. Timehop’s earlier investors also included angels like Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Alex Rainert, Groupme’s Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin.
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Samsung Q2 Profits Up 47.5%, But Operating Profit At Its Mobile Division Slows
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Catherine Shu
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As the worldwide smartphone market slows, Samsung’s second-quarter earnings showed that it is beginning to feel the pressure despite being the world’s top smartphone vendor. Samsung said its Q2 2013 operating profit increased 47.5% to $8.5 billion, in line with the company’s own estimate. Operating profit at its mobile division, which accounts for two-thirds of the company’s revenue and is its biggest earnings driver, rose 52% to 6.23 trillion won ($5.6 billion), but fell 3.5% from the previous quarter. The reporting period included the launch of the Galaxy S4, Samsung’s flagship phone and its main rival to the iPhone. One month after the Galaxy S4’s launch, Samsung said it’d hit a , but the Korean tech giant is under the same challenges as Apple thanks to a slowing global smartphone market and shrinking margins. Earlier this week, Apple , due in large part to a dramatic revenue plunge in China. Samsung said that smartphone sales will continue to be slower in the third quarter. “Entering into a typically strong season for the IT industry, we expect earnings to continue to increase,” said Samsung head of investor relations Robert Yi in a statement. “However, we cannot overlook delayed economic recovery in Europe and risks from increased competition for smartphone and other set products.”
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A Week With The Shine, A Beautifully Designed Smart Activity Tracker Made From Japanese Metal
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Fitbits. FuelBands. UPs. The market for smart, connected activity trackers continues to get ever-more crowded. And yet, there’s not an obvious winner yet. is a new entrant in the space and they may have the most beautifully-designed piece of hardware yet. The company behind the Shine is itself a homage to Apple founder Steve Jobs’ famous “Think Different” campaign and that began with the line, “Here’s to the crazy ones. ” Backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, , who built up a glucose-monitoring business called Agamatrix that had the first official medical device add-on to the iPhone, and former Apple CEO John Sculley. For a small startup, they have an impressively multi-national team with industrial designers in San Francisco, data scientists in Vietnam and manufacturing in South Korea and Japan. The Shine is a tiny circle not much larger than a quarter that’s made from Japanese metal or aircraft-grade aluminum. It has LED lights beneath the surface that glow through minuscule holes on the metal itself. Those lights form a ring, indicating how far a person is toward completing their activity goals for the day. You tap the Shine twice to see how much progress you’ve made. If half the lights shine, you’re halfway done. If they complete a circle, then you’ve hit your goal. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMmZ4Dcz1rY&w=560&h=315] I had a chance to test it out for a week or so, tracking everything from regular walks to dancing and downhill mountain biking. Overall, I love the product. It looks like a piece of jewelry in many ways, and while I’m not an industrial designer myself, several other friends who work in hardware were impressed by the make and form of the Shine. It is not plastic like a Fitbit. Then because it doesn’t have to be worn as a bracelet like the FuelBand or Jawbone UP, it looks a lot more elegant, especially if you’re a woman and want something more discreet. The Shine is comparable in price to its competitors at $99.95. The Fitbit is about $99.95, the Jawbone UP is $129.99 and the Nike FuelBand is about $150. The Shine has four different accessories: a wristband, a necklace, a watch and a magnetic clip that makes it easy to attach anywhere, from your shoe to your sleeve to your shirt. My preferred accessory was the magnetic clip, but I didn’t have a chance to try out the necklace or watch. Throughout the day, the Shine tracks how much you walk or run. It also handles sleep, swimming and cycling, but you have to program it. To do that, you tap the Shine three times, and it will recognize whichever activity you set up in the paired app. Unfortunately, like the other activity trackers, it doesn’t handle yoga (and as someone who practices pretty much every day, the Shine and other competing products are missing out on an hour of physical activity). The tapping is a bit hard to learn. Sometimes I would tap with two fingers and sometimes with three. Sometimes the Shine would misinterpret a few taps as a signal to record a different type of activity instead of showing me my results so far. You can also use it to tell time with different lights glowing to represent the hour and minute hands of a watch. “The data science to get the double tap is hard,” Vu told me. “There is no on and off button for the Shine and everything is powered by sensors.” Indeed, the only way to turn the Shine off is for the battery to run out or for you to remove it. That underscores the huge benefit of the Shine, which is that it doesn’t need to be charged every few days or weeks. It has a simple coin cell battery that needs to be replaced once every four to six months. It’s also waterproof to a depth of 50 meters. I dunked it in a river in the Sierra Nevadas this weekend and it came out fine, but you could theoretically scuba dive with it, too. The data transfer to the iPhone is also beautiful. You can see how it works below. The Shine uses a simple Bluetooth connection, and the app directs you to place the Shine on a circle on the iPhone app’s screen. Circles radiate outward before the iPhone picks up the activity data in the Shine. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmUOczrb9J4&w=560&h=315] The paired app tells you how many points you’ve achieved in a day. The Shine doesn’t do “steps” because it would be hard to swim in steps. The middle-range goal of 1,000 points per day requires walking for 1.5 hours, running for 35 minutes or swimming for 25. You can move points higher as you please. Overall, I was really happy with the product. It is just that much more beautiful looking than the standard Fitbit or FuelBand. For women who are turned off by the look of the bracelet trackers, it’s probably the ideal choice. The Misfit Shine is only compatible with the iPhone for now, for Android-using supporters of the Shine who backed it on Indiegogo. The company had a late last fall where they racked up 8,000 supporters in 64 countries, hit their goal in nine hours and went on to raise $850,000. That was nearly nine times as much as they targeted. Like many other hardware startups, Misfit Wearables used crowdfunding more as a marketing strategy than as a capital source. Misfit had no problem raising from some of the Valley’s better-known VC firms, and this product shows why.
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Prim Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
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Josh Constine
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You can call it a first-world problem. Or you can say it distracts people from their passions and contributions to the world. Either way, laundry is a chore, and wants to do it for you. You can schedule Prim online to come to your place, pick up your laundry, have it washed and folded at a top-notch laundromat, and deliver it back to you. $25 for a bag. It’s that easy. Prim’s Stanford-educated founders originally came into Y Combinator to build an in-video advertising platform, but the business wasn’t there. The idea for Prim was scattered all over their floors. See, co-founder Yin Yin Wu’s boyfriend worked at Facebook, where they have free laundry service. His clothes ended up neatly washed, folded, and in his drawers rather than in heaps waiting to be done. That meant he could focus on his job and life. Yin Yin thought, “why couldn’t this service be available to anyone?” So they created Prim. Currently operates in San Francisco, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park — home to the world’s busiest techies. You go online and select from their upcoming 9am-11am or 8pm-10pm pickup and drop-off windows. You throw your clothes in a garbage bag and wait for Prim’s text that it’ll be there in 15 minutes. The driver calls when they arrive. You can hand them the bag, leave it with your doorman, or if you’re comfortable, give them a copy of your key or send a photo of it and they’ll make a copy so they can just come into your place and grab the bag. Their driver takes the sack of clothes to be tagged and brings it to a well-rated local laundromat with a track record of flawless jobs. Within two days you get notified to confirm your delivery, and Prim brings the washed and folded clothes back in high-quality nylon satchels. It even ties together your stacks of shirts or whatever you wouldn’t want wrinkled so they stay prim and proper. See! That’s where they got the name! You got that already? Sorry. The cost is $25 for the first bag of each pickup and $15 for the additional ones. That’s a bit more expensive than you can expect from a laundromat’s wash and fold, but you get the pick-up and delivery included. Because Prim brings in so much business, it gets discounts from the laundromats so the price stays reasonable. Prim strives for perfection, but in case anything gets lost or damaged, Wu says Prim has insurance and will refund you 100% of the cost of your clothes. “If there’s any mistake, we try to bend over backwards for our customers” says Wu. The idea is that as Prim gets bigger, it can use economies of scale to improve its margins and lower its costs. While it’s only in the Bay Area now, expansion plans don’t include the sprawl of LA (where operates) or fighting the specialized competitors in NYC. Instead it’s looking at Seattle, Boston, and other dense cities full of time-strapped knowledge workers. In SF, Prim will have to battle where you drop your clothes in a public locker, and delivery services like (where you pay by the pound), (which requires special lockable bags), and some other local services. Prim differentiates through simplicity and its flat rate. The risk is that the price is too high and it can’t get traction, or too low that it can’t squeak out a profit. Getting the balance right and giving people a great experience will make or break the startup. Luckily, I loved Prim. It got my laundry done in 24 hours, everything came back clean, dry, soft, unwrinkled, and nothing seemed shrunk. Oh, and I did basically zero work. No dragging my clothes to the laundromat, fiddling with change for the machines, and most importantly, no waiting for hours. Even if you have machines in your home or apartment, doing loads one at a time can be quite annoying. My laundry often languishes because I dread the rigamarole. With Prim, I’m a lot less likely to make it to the bottom of my sock drawer. A more flexible morning pickup schedule would help, but Prim says they’ll always work with customers to find some time that works. Adding in dry cleaning would also be a big plus, and help them compete with other services that handle all your clothes-washing needs. No, Prim isn’t going to save anyone’s life, but it could still help improve the world if you think about it. Convenience doesn’t just breed laziness. It can enable productivity. In that way, I’d say Prim shares DNA with Dropbox and Asana, not just Uber and TaskRabbit. Prim lets you concentrate on what you love to do, what you’re responsible for, or how you contribute to the universe. I’m decent at writing, terrible at laundry, and busy. Spending a ton of time washing and folding is just inefficient for me. I feel better stimulating the economy and letting someone good at laundry do their thing. And imagine how this could free up a CEO, doctor, charity director, or parent to take on the duties only they can fulfill? Think how long it takes you to do laundry. If that amount of your time is worth more than $25 (or $40 if you’ve got a big wardrobe), use . Prim Co-Founders (From Left): Xuwen Cao and Yin Yin Wu
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Cross-Device Ad Startup Drawbridge Adds Mobile App-To-Web Retargeting (And Vice Versa)
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Anthony Ha
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, an ad targeting startup by and , is expanding its offerings today with a new feature allowing mobile advertisers to reach consumers with retargeted ads, regardless of whether they’re using an app or on the mobile web. Founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said that while ad retargeting (i.e., ads targeted based on your past visits and activity) is possible within apps, things get trickier when you try to cross the boundary between apps and websites: “It’s literally two devices on the same device, separated by an iron wire.” (I question her question use of “literally”, but I think you get the point.) App developers can also try to reengage their users through alerts and notifications, but users can always turn those off. In order to solve that problem, Drawbridge is “piggybacking” on its core technology. That technology examines user activity to help advertisers identify when multiple devices are likely being used by the same person. That allows advertisers to use data collected on the desktop to target ads on mobile. The company’s include PC-to-mobile retargeting and mobile app marketing. The mobile-to-mobile retargeting is intended to fill out the mobile marketing product, Sivaramakrishnan said. Drawbridge has already run test campaigns with e-commerce companies, who were either trying to bring old customers back to the site or to convince current customers to buy more. Sivaramakrishnan said that in a campaign targeting lapsed users, the client reached 100 percent return on ad spend within three weeks. Another campaign targeted active users and reached 100 percent ROAS within a single day. Advertisers will have a chance to test this out for themselves, Sivaramakrishnan said, because the new capabilities include an A/B testing framework. So advertisers can run part of their campaign with Drawbridge’s retargeting and part of their campaign without it and see which ads perform better. Earlier this year, to allow mobile consumers to opt out of its targeting. Since then, Sivaramakrishnan said that some users have indeed opt out, but that the rates haven’t been “heavy”.
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Google’s Chromecast No Longer Comes With Free Netflix Because Demand Got Too Nuts
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Greg Kumparak
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In what is a solid example of the best sort of problem to have, Google’s is already proving too damned popular for its own good. At yesterday’s debut, Google announced that buyers of the $35 device would also be getting three free months of Netflix service with their purchase. Just 24 hours later, that deal is off. Why? “Overwhelming demand”, says the Googles. had to pay for that service in the end, after all — so if Google can’t even keep these things on the shelves, they can probably get away with nippin’ out the Netflix perks. With that said, those three free months might have been a non-trivial part of the device was getting snatched up so quick. A streaming-only Netflix plan costs $8 per month ($24 for three months) and Google’s Netflix deal applied even if you were already a Netflix subscriber. For current Netflix customers (or for anyone who would be down to sign up for 3 months of free service) it brought the effective cost of the (already crazy cheap) Chromecast down to At that point, there’s not even a decision to make. If you snatched up a Chromecast before Google killed the deal: don’t worry. The got confirmation that Google will honor the promotion for all the early buyers, though it’s not entirely clear where they plan to draw the line. Amazon updated their product page to say they’ll honor the deal for anyone who ordered before 5:31 p.m. yesterday. Sucks for you, 5:32’ers!
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Pentotype Lets Developers Quickly Build And Collaborate On Interactive Wireframes From Their iPads
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Ryan Lawler
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Are you a developer? Do you wanna create wireframes and share them with your friends and collaborate and mashup and test out the user experience of new apps before you commit to code? Well here comes , a new web app for the iPad (and frankly, any other HTML5-enabled device) that will let developers quickly sketch out wireframes of their apps and test out user interaction. Pentotype is an app for creating quick wireframes of mobile apps on the iPad. While it’s based on HTML5, it’s designed to run like a native app, allowing users to sketch out their apps and see how they would work. Users can simulate their app functionality through the wireframes and then share with others to get their take. It enables both viewing and collaboration for the earliest part of the app-creation process. Note, these aren’t fully realized apps that the service churns out, and there’s no code exported by the service. It’s really just a way to get a feel for the user experience before it’s all committed to code. Pentotype co-founder Thomas Wanschik compares the service to a “combination of the apps Paper and POP enhanced with sketch recognition.” Pentotype follows the typical freemium model: Users of the service can try it out with a couple of free projects to see how they like it. Those who want to use it more will be asked to pay up. The team is still working out pricing, but those who want to create more projects can to get more info. The startup was founded by Johannes Dörr, Thomas Wanschik, and Waldemar Kornewald, three German entrepreneurs who had studied and done contract work together. They had mostly bootstrapped the project over the last year-and-a-half, taking a small bit of funding (about $120,000) through a German/EU stipend program called “EXIST Gründerstipendium.” They are also part of a local university incubator in Germany called “ ,” which provides free office space and other services for startups there.
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Here’s Video Of The House Debate That Almost Passed An Amendment Cutting At The NSA’s Domestic Surveillance
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Alex Wilhelm
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Yesterday, an that would have dramatically undermined the NSA’s authority to collect records on the phone calls of American citizens failed to pass. Proponents of the amendment claimed that it protected the Fourth Amendment rights of the public. Those opposed argued that it would erode national security. The debate back and forth was perhaps the best encapsulation of the current conversation in Congress concerning the pervasive surveillance of the NSA that has recently become better known, mostly through the from the now fugitive . That information has , demanding that they choose a side, at least rhetorically, on the issue. Yesterday was a further step in the direction of accountability, albeit only in the lower chamber of Congress. The members had to vote yes or no on whether to defund a known — and previously — program that collects private data on Americans sans their status as party to an investigation. You’ve read coverage on the NSA for months, with commentary of all sorts taking positions on both the digital and telephonic collection practices of the agency. The following debate isn’t a cable news segment stacked with paid pundits, half-neck analysts, or think-tank hacks. Instead, this is our Congress, arguing with itself, about how to handle our privacy. The . That’s a defeat, but those in favor of its passage were , myself included, anticipated. Enjoy [Debate begins at 16:40]:
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Pfc. Bradley Manning’s Trial Comes To An End As The Government Alleges He ‘Aided The Enemy’
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Alex Wilhelm
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While the world has become fixated on the NSA’s domestic and foreign surveillance activities in the past months, the trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning is coming to a close. Concluding arguments were heard today. The government, as , is trying to convict Manning using the Espionage Act, and slap him with the charge of ‘aiding the enemy.’ Manning has plead guilty to “lesser” charges. We in technology must pay attention to those willing to leak from the government, given that such information has played a key role in the shaping of public opinion regarding piracy and privacy among other issues. The is material, and critical. Firedoglake has of not only reporting on the case, but also live-blogging as much as possible. The government alleges that Manning leaked not out of a desire to spread knowledge of government and military misdeed, but instead out of a lust for fame. His pride, it was asserted, was proven because the government produced a picture of a smiling Manning. Hard evidence, certainly. At the same time, as , “Govt repeating over & over #Manning was obsessed about his own fame, craved notoriety. At same time arguing further he kept identity hidden.” If you can untangle the logic behind that argument, you are a better person than I. Regarding the video that showed needless civilian deaths, the government, according to Firedoglake merely stated that the clip contained “actions and experiences of service members conducting a wartime mission.” The government put a price on the “worth” of the Afghanistan and Iraq Logs that Wikileaks released to the public at $1.3 million and $1.9 million, respectively. The idea of prosecuting Manning for “aiding the enemy” is worrisome, as it is an around-the-side charge: Manning provided information to the enemy because he gave it to a journalistic organization that published it, allowing the “enemy” to read it; this would make all leakers and whistle blowers potentially legally damnable on the same charge. If we set that precedent, investigative journalism will take a body blow. From a pure journalism perspective, current treatment of reporters inside the courtroom would be laughable if it weren’t so blatantly intimidatory. I quote, to preserve the original voice, : Journalists sending me emails telling me soldier stationed right behind me with a gun. I tell you, OVER THE TOP JUDGE LIND #Manning And, for taste, : Armed military police officer leans over my shoulder & informs me not to have browser windows open during court proceedings #Manning So, we aren’t being fed what could be called a full dish of the proceedings, because armed folks are telling people to knock it the hell off. We can disagree all evening about the guilt of Mannning, and the efficacy of leaks to the national discourse, and their potential denigration of our national security, but at least we can agree that threatening the press with soldiers isn’t in the best of taste. When the verdict is given, we’ll update this post and bring you the news. That is, if the government allows the press to report it.
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Zynga’s New CEO Don Mattrick Says It Won’t Be Quick Or Easy To Get The Company Back On Track
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Anthony Ha
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Don Mattrick, at the beginning of the month, offered his initial on-the-job observations today during the conference call discussing . Mattrick (on the right of the photo with Zynga founder and former CEO Mark Pincus) started out by offering some positive commentary, saying that the company “caught lightning in a bottle” and “achieved in only a few years what most companies took a decade or more to do.” However, he acknowledged, “We’re missing out on platform growth that Apple, Google, and Facebook are seeing. In short, we can do better.” So how is he going to try to turn things around? He said he’s going to be working with the company’s leadership to “challenge previous assumptions” and to focus on “business fundamentals — which, candidly, we’ve struggled with over the past year.” Mattrick predicted that there will be two to four more quarters of volatility as the company tries to find a new direction. “Getting a business back on track isn’t easy and isn’t quick,” he said. Pincus, now Zynga’s chief product officer, was also on the call, and among other things, he said he was impressed that Mattrick set up his desk in the middle of the Farmville studios. Both Pincus and Mattrick described their relationship as one between “partners”. Mattrick said he’s also going to discuss his priorities on this call — I’ll update this post when he does. Later in the call, Mattrick said his priorities for his first 90 days on the job include “getting under the hood” to evaluate the business, identifying the real market opportunities, improving product quality, looking at how people are deployed across the company, and reassessing the product pipeline. He also suggested Zynga is a young company that has “the ability to break some bad habits” but that while he’ll be in listen-and-learn mode initially, “When it becomes clear what change is necessary, I’ll move quickly and decisively to do what’s in the best long-term interests of our players, our employees, and our shareholders.” He concluded, “There are some good winds at our back, and my job is to get our sails up and Zynga pointed in the right direction.”
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Zynga Won’t Pursue Real-Money Gaming License In The U.S.; Shares Drop 13% In After-Hours
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Zynga is giving up what many investors had hoped might be its trump card: a real-money gaming business in the U.S. The company, which has been testing out real-money casino games in the U.K., said it won’t be pursuing a U.S. license after all in its Sources tell us this is a decision to focus and not spread the company too thinly between real-money gaming, diversifying onto mobile and maintaining a core on Facebook. If it weren’t for the political and legal complexities of opening up real-money gaming in state after state, the business could have been interesting for Zynga, especially considering how long Zynga Poker has dominated both on the Facebook platform and on iOS and Android. None of Zynga’s social casino games, which use virtual currency, are affected by this. Shares declined 13 percent in after-hours to $3.02. , Zynga said: Zynga believes its biggest opportunity is to focus on free to play social games. While the Company continues to evaluate its real money gaming products in the United Kingdom test, Zynga is making the focused choice not to pursue a license for real money gaming in the United States. Zynga will continue to evaluate all of its priorities against the growing market opportunity in free, social gaming, including social casino offerings. Zynga has long been exploring real-money gaming. It partnered with to offer titles in the U.K. Then last November, the company took its first steps toward real-money gaming in the U.S. from the Nevada Gaming Control Board. It’s not that this option is forever off the table. It’s just that the company is in the middle of a significant platform transition now, and real-money games — which would probably only be available to players in Nevada at first anyways — could be distracting.
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Y Combinator-Backed Lob Debuts A Cloud Printing & Shipping Service For Developers
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Sarah Perez
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Want to build your own Postagram? You could with , a new developer API for integrating printing and shipping services into applications that’s officially opening its doors today. The company makes it possible for a business to implement a programmatic means of printing, packaging, and shipping items on demand, including things like business cards, photos, posters, letters, postcards, checks, stickers, and more. During its brief testing period, Lob saw sign-ups from customers like CrowdTilt, ZenPayroll, LendUp, and others. Founded just a couple of months ago by University of Michigan grads and , Lob is participating in Y Combinator’s summer 2013 program. Today, it already has hundreds of customers and is generating revenue, the founders say. Prior to Lob, Zhang worked as a product manager at Microsoft, where he saw first-hand the need for such a service. “I was working on a campaign at Microsoft where we had to put together offers for all these different customers – all having to go to different destinations, all of which had to be customized,” Zhang explains. “And when it got to the part where we had to have them printed and mailed, we realized there was no good way to actually automate that process.” Instead, the company had interns sitting in a mailroom for a couple of weeks, stuffing envelopes. Meanwhile, Avidar’s background includes time spent first at Citigroup then at Amazon Web Services, where he learned more about how cloud platforms work. He says that basically, with Lob, they’ve taken the AWS model and applied it to a different type of industry. The service arrives at a time when many of today’s printers aren’t as technically savvy as the startups and other businesses that need to use them. Their older systems use SOAP and XML, limiting access to what’s possible. Meanwhile, the need for online printing grows – it for 18 percent of all printing in 2011, and is expected to reach 30 percent next year, and 50 percent by 2017. But unlike services provided by consumer-facing retailers like FedEx Office (formerly FedEx Kinko’s), or Uprinting.com, for example, Lob is not meant to be a consumer-facing solution, but rather a tool for developers. Using the company’s RESTful API, developers can send one-off print jobs as needed, or can when buying in bulk. The founders see a few primary use cases for its service. One is fulfillment for businesses that don’t want to hold inventory – like a company that sells posters, for instance. Because Lob supports variable data and customizations, another area being targeted is in industries like finance or real estate, where businesses may be required to send things like bills, invoices or statements through the physical mail. It could also be useful in HR, where companies are continually mailing out forms to employees, like new hire packets. And finally, Lob can be used to send out physical checks, like those handled by a payroll service. Lob’s API offers an address verification service (free for U.S. address and $0.15 for each international address), plus Smart Packaging, where it will pick the best packaging type automatically unless a developer specifies otherwise. And it routes jobs to the nearest printer in its network to save on shipping times and cost. Avidar says that Lob’s network of printers is one of its strong suits. The printers are not ordinary print shops, but ones which have been standardized by having custom integrations built into their systems and workflows. The are the HP Indigo’s and the Heidelberg’s of the world, he adds, not the Vistaprint’s. The Sunnyvale-based startup is only a couple of months old, and has been growing by 300 percent every week during its brief alpha and beta trials. Today, the founders are the only two full-time employees and they want to keep things small for now, and hold off on fundraising as they have paying customers. Interested users can or read through .
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Nexus 7 Trade-Ins Suggest Lots Of Upgraders To New Model, Little To No Interest From The iPad Crowd
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Darrell Etherington
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The new Google Nexus 7 is a big improvement over the original with a bunch of additions like LTE and a super high-resolution display – the best in tablets, in fact. And that’s driving a lot of first generation device owners to trade in their old Nexus 7, according to gadget buy-back site . There was a 333 percent spike in the number of Nexus 7 tablets traded in compared to the same day last week, for example. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, that spike was even higher – a 442 percent jump in Nexus 7 tablets happened between the day before Google’s official unveiling of the new model, and the day of. The Nexus 7 trade-in activity spiked so high that it made up nearly a quarter of all trade-ins for non-iPad tablets since the site began accepting them earlier this year. Wednesday, the day Google made its announcement, was also the biggest Nexus 7 trade-in day at Gazelle to date, beating the next biggest day by 380 percent. That previous record was set when the new Nexus 7 leaked on July 17, which clearly prompted early adopters to take advantage of a small head start ahead of the big reveal. The news means that Google Nexus 7 owners are probably happy with their devices and eager to grab new ones, by trading in their last-gen devices to fund their purchases, but there’s another stat that tells another side of the story: Gazelle saw no appreciable increase in iPad trade-ins on the new Nexus 7 launch day. That means Google probably isn’t luring iPad owners away from the iOS fold. It’s probably not surprising to longtime tablet space watchers that the new Nexus 7, with all its apparent merit, isn’t an iPad killer. The Apple camp seems happy where they are, but the tablet market has plenty of room to grow; we’ll see if Google can expand outward, or if it’s mostly eating its own Nexus tail with this new model.
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With New CEO Mattrick At Helm, Zynga Reports Loss of $16M And Revenue Decline Of 31%
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Zynga’s revenues for the second quarter of 2013 declined 31% year-over-year to $231 million in the midst of a challenging transition that saw former . The company had a net loss of $16 million compared to last year’s net loss of $22.8 million during the same quarter (which also had $95.5 million of stock-based compensation expenses). If you account for that then, the company’s net loss was $6.1 million compared to last year’s net loss of $4.6 million based on non-generally accepted accounting principles. Zynga said when it laid off last month that it expected to see a net loss of between $39 million to $28.5 million so this is actually a slight earnings beat. “We need to get back to basics and take a longer term view on our products and business, develop more efficient processes and tighten up execution all across the company,” wrote Mattrick in the release. “We have a lot of hard work in front of us and as we reset, we expect to see more volatility in our business than we would like over the next two to four quarters.” Last quarter, COO David Ko said the company was in the midst of a “pause” to re-evaluate its entire game slate and that this decision would be financially apparent in this quarter. This quarter’s revenue is projected to be even lower in the range of $175 million to $200 million, with a net loss of $43 million to $14 million. Through the company’s pivot onto iOS and Android, Zynga has had to compete against older and historically smaller rivals from the Facebook platform like King and Kabam. Both of those companies have fared well with King’s Candy Crush Saga bringing it the top grossing spot and numerous Kabam titles in the top 25. In contrast, Zynga just has its longstanding Poker franchise in the U.S. top grossing 25. Even today, nearly 70 percent of the company’s monthly active users remain on the web. The losses in Zynga’s user base from not being able to hold onto its core Facebook customers are staggering. The company’s level of daily active users is not much higher than half of where it was a year ago at 39 million this quarter compared to 72 million in 2012. It also saw 187 million monthly active users, down from 306 million users in the same time period a year before. The company’s launches like Draw Something 2 have also underperformed without any slots in any of the top 100 charts and Zynga’s other big mobile launch, Running With Friends, remains in 45th place in the U.S. top grossing chart. Zynga had six major releases this quarter including War of the Fallen, Draw Something 2, Battlestone, Solstice Arena and Running With Friends. But older franchises like FarmVille and FarmVille 2 continue to do well as both games have grown combined bookings by 29 percent year-over-year. Zynga’s struggles in diversifying away from Facebook and missing the pivot to mobile ultimately convinced Pincus to give up the CEO role, although he remains chairman of the board and serves as chief product officer. It’s now Mattrick’s 15th day on the job.
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Amazon’s Q2 Disappoints, Sales Up 22 Percent To $15.7B, Net Loss Of $7M
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Leena Rao
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Amazon just , with sales increasing 22 percent to $15.7 billion in the second quarter, compared with $12.83 billion in second quarter 2012. Net loss was $7 million in the second quarter, or $0.02 per diluted share, compared with net income of $7 million, or $0.01 per diluted share, in second quarter 2012. Analysts $15.74 billion in revenue, and $0.05 on earnings per share. Operating income decreased 26 percent to $79 million in the second quarter, compared with $107 million in second quarter 2012. “We’re so grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle devices and our digital ecosystem. This past quarter, our top 10 selling items worldwide were all digital products – Kindles, Kindle Fire HDs, accessories and digital content,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, in a statement. “The Kindle service keeps getting better. The Kindle Store now offers millions of titles including more than 350,000 exclusives that you won’t find anywhere else. Prime Instant Video has surpassed 40,000 titles, including many premium exclusives like Downton Abbey and Under the Dome. And we’ve added more than a thousand books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows to Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, bringing together in one place all the types of content kids and parents love.” Bezos didn’t address why Amazon missed on expectations for the quarter, but perhaps this will be revealed in the call. According to analyst estimates, the ecommerce giant was expected to post net income of $28.3 million. It’s been an eventful quarter for Amazon. Towards the end of the first quarter, Amazon purchased social reading service Goodreads, which now has Amazon also expanded its , including expansion to India. Additionally the company bought from Samsung. Other news included the expansion of its grocery delivery service to L.A. and San Francisco, a new an online store for and of course there
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Jordan Crook
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Facebook’s Desktop Ad Revenue Grew Only $69M In Q2, Mobile Rev To Outpace Desktop By EOY 2013
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Alex Wilhelm
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Facebook with its report that mobile advertising represented 41 percent of its total ad revenue in the second quarter of 2013. In the first quarter of 2013, it totaled a then-hailed 30 percent, bumping that key ratio by more than a third in just a fourth of a year. On a dollar basis, Facebook’s mobile advertising grew more than four times as much as its desktop-sourced advertising incomes in the most recent quarter. However, looking backwards, last quarter’s mobile ad growth is less astounding when placed into context. From the third to , Facebook juiced its ad revenue as a percentage of total ad income by 9 percent. From the last quarter of 2012 to the , growth was 7 percent. Taking into account the 11 percent gain reported yesterday, Facebook has averaged 9 percent growth in its mobile ad revenue as a component of its larger ad top line for the past few quarters. This allows us the ability to make basic predictions. Facebook yesterday noted on its earnings call that mobile advertising revenues will eventually outstrip desktop ad income. But when? Well, we can predict. If mobile advertising revenues continue at their average rate of the past few quarters, Facebook should earn precisely as much from desktop and mobile advertising platforms in the current quarter. The math is simple: Facebook ended the most recent quarter with a 41/59 split between mobile and desktop ad income. If mobile revenues are growing by 9 percent quarterly — again, on average — 41 and 9 make 50, leaving the remaining 50 percent for desktop ad revenues. Adding another 9 percent to Facebook’s mobile ad revenue as a percentage of its total ad income, and we could wrap the year where the second quarter finished, but in reverse, with mobile revenues comprising 59 percent of total ad income, and desktop just 41 percent. This feels, prima facie, optimistic. Are we being too generous? There is always a risk in any form of prediction, as future market dynamics are outside of our vision, and will always remain so. That said, we can take mild refuge in the fact that our average rate of mobile ad growth, again as a percentage of Facebook’s total advertising top line, is the most recent quarter’s rise; this means that we are anticipating Facebook to under-perform its most recent quarter moving forward. This gives us some breathing room in our predictions. Here’s the chart: If mobile revenue is so strong, where does that leave desktop advertising incomes? Well, as it turns out, Facebook’s desktop advertising business is all but not growing. We can deduce this by subtracting the percentage of Facebook’s mobile ad revenue from its total advertising income, leaving us with its desktop-sourced figure. Let’s have some fun: That’s not much. Not only is Facebook sourcing a growing percentage of its revenue from mobile platforms, but its revenue growth is increasingly coming from a smartphone near you. Let’s get to the bottom of the final number: In dollar figures, how much did Facebook’s mobile ad revenue grow from the first to second quarter? I’m glad you asked. Let’s find out: So, Facebook’s mobile revenue grew by a quarter billion dollars in the second quarter. Not bad, given that as a percentage gain it works out to around 75 percent. And, perhaps more importantly, the $282 million figure is more than four times our previous $69 million sum. Therefore, mobile ad revenues on a dollar basis grew four times as fast as desktop advertising incomes in the most recent quarter. Mobile-first, indeed.
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Canary Shatters Its Indiegogo Funding Goal For Its Smart, Dead-Simple Home Monitors
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Jordan Crook
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There are some 90 million homes in the U.S. without any security system whatsoever. Many of them are renters who don’t want to invest heavily in a place they don’t own, among hundreds of thousands of home owners who are simply priced out. There has never been a convenient, all-in-one system that could offer home security at an affordable rate, much less one you could pick up at the local Best Buy. But that all changes with Canary, the latest crowd-funding sensation to hit Indiegogo. We caught up with NYC-based founder Adam Sager to discuss the project. is a little console, slightly smaller than the size of a paper towel roll, that’s packed with a host of sensors, a mic, and an HD camera. For $200 down, this little guy will connect to the Wifi, sync with your phone, and constantly your home. I say watch, and not monitor, because Canary can only see as far as its sensors will allow, whereas most home security systems are wired in to monitor every crack and crevice of a home. Canary can only hear as far as the mic allows, or the camera sees, or the sensors can sense. However, Sager believes that when you place the Canary in the central part of your home, near the front door perhaps or watching over the living room, that a real threat, like a burglar, will likely set off the Canary no matter where it enters from. Plus, if you have a larger space or want added security, you can always link more than one Canary (up to four, Sager tells me). Canary’s sensors include night vision, motion detection, temperature, air quality and humidity, along with a live feed to the HD camera at any given time. The phone will instantly alert the user whenever the home experiences a random change, like a temperature fluctuation or sudden movement. But Canary is also smart enough to learn your home, sensing the difference between a burglary and a pet. It even understands when regularly scheduled events occur, like the arrival of a nanny or a dog walker at the same time each day, so that you don’t have a panic attack each time Rover needs to take a wizz. Canary’s distribution model is different from any other home security system in that you will eventually be able to go pick one up at a local electronics store on the cheap. This has never really been available before, and the potential market is huge with 90 million homes completely unprotected and priced out of the alternatives. Sager admits that margins on the hardware itself won’t be that high, but the plan is to offer value-added services like monitoring (delivered by a TBD third-party) for $10/month. Canary has been on Indiegogo for four days, and has blown far beyond its $100k goal to be at $550k at the time of writing. It only took a few hours to reach $100k, according to Sager. If you’d like to back the project, head on over to the website or check out the .
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Photobucket Co-Founder Alex Welch Lets You Demand Photos From Friends With Lasso
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Billy Gallagher
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Six years after , is launching a new way to share photos with your family and friends. Rather than making photos available on Instagram, Flickr, or any number of social networks according to privacy settings, Welch’s new venture, , lets friends ask for photos from each others’ camera rolls. Welch, who left Photobucket in 2009, decided about a year ago that he wanted to build a better camera roll for iOS with a few friends. He says they ultimately decided that the biggest thing missing from their camera rolls was their friends’ photos. If you look at the pictures people share publicly as the tip of the iceberg of total photos they have, Welch argues that many people would be willing to share a lot more of those moments. ”You’re probably okay with sharing those photos with select people, but there isn’t an easy way to do that,” he tells me. I’ve played around with the app a bit and I like it. You simply swipe a contact’s name to the right to send them photos, and to the left to request photos. When they’ve added new photos, a little subtle icon pops up next to their name. The speed of sharing will be huge for Lasso. If people can ask close friends what they’ve been up to in their new city or on vacation, and they can quickly shoot over a dozen photos, Lasso could start attracting a nice user base. There are a ton of ways I currently share pictures with friends besides social networks–SMS, Snapchat, and email immediately come to mind. And yet, looking through my camera roll, I realize there are a ton of images that I haven’t shared that my friends might enjoy. Lasso has raised a $1.25 million seed round from Welch, , seed fund, and , which Welch says will mostly go toward more product development. Lasso will expand beyond photos soon, explaining that the concept can be applied to “any piece of digital content,” from videos to documents to apps your friends are using. “What are things that you do or that you have every day that you’d be okay sharing with me if I specifically ask for it,” he says. The iOS app , and Welch says the Android app should be released in the next couple of weeks.
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Chinese Internet Giant Baidu Enters The Smart TV Wars With Launch Of TV+
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Catherine Shu
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Baidu, the Internet giant that operates China’s largest search engine, has to compete with rival platforms from , as well as other companies including , Samsung and Apple. Called TV+, Baidu’s first smart TV will be and feature content from iQiyi, Baidu’s online video platform. Baidu plans to merge iQiyi with online video provider PPS, which it . The combination will create China’s largest online video provider, unseating Youku-Tudou, and giving TV+ an edge in terms of content. In addition to on-demand video, TV+ will also feature free access to movies and TV series. TV+ competes with a rival smart TV OS and set-top box by Alibaba, which was . Alibaba’s smart TV takes advantage of the company’s e-commerce and online payment assets such as Tmall, Taobao and Alipay by allowing users to shop and pay bills via their televisions. Called Wasu Rainbow, Alibaba’s smart TV also has an app store for video games and access to its Xiami music streaming service. Smartphone maker Xiaomi, , also plans to market its own smart TV OS and devices aggressively. The smart TV platforms of Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi will compete with products from Samsung and Apple for the living rooms of China’s affluent Internet users. , China has the highest usage of smart TVs, at 44 percent penetration. Comparatively, the US and UK are at just 11 percent, which was attributed in part to the prevalence of legacy TVs in the more developed markets.
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With New Business Suite & Samsung Partnership, Mobile Security Company Lookout Prepares To Take On The Enterprise
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Sarah Perez
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, a mobile security company which previously focused on consumer protections and anti-malware services, is today taking a step to expand its footprint further with the launch of a new, standalone product for business. Arriving later this year, Lookout for Business intends to allow larger organizations the ability to secure mobile devices attaching to the network – like the employee-owned smartphones and tablets arriving via BYOD (bring-your-own-device) programs. For those unfamiliar, Lookout’s Mobile Security applications for Android (including Kindle) and iOS devices have historically helped to identify and block threats on consumers’ phones and tablets, including blocking and alerting to mobile malware, phishing attempts, malicious websites, and apps that try to grab too much of a user’s personal information. The company also offers mobile backup solutions as well as its own take on Apple’s “Find my iPhone,” with a service that can track down and remotely wipe lost or stolen mobile devices. It makes sense for Lookout, today with 45 million users on board its flagship product, to now turn more of its attention to the business world, where the line between consumer and enterprise is blurring as consumer devices become employees’ phones and tablets. Here, the Lookout for Business platform will allow I.T. departments to augment their existing MDM (mobile device management) programs with protection against mobile threats like spyware, malware, phishing attacks, and new ones yet to arrive. Lookout chose a different path to the mobile security enterprise market than others by first developing a product that consumers would adopt on their own. When the company was founded back in 2007, its focus was Windows Mobile (no, not Windows Phone!) security solutions. But when the iPhone and Android later appeared, Lookout realized it had reached a fork in the road. According to Lookout CTO Kevin Mahaffey, though focusing on businesses may have seemed like the obvious next step, Lookout chose to address the consumer market first. “That was kind of weird – from the outside, at least. We made a bet on this shifting of how I.T. works,” he explains. In other words, Lookout bet on the trend now commonly referred to as the “consumerization of I.T.” No longer would I.T. departments be able to lock down employees’ devices in the same way they once locked down PCs, though the first generation of MDM companies may have certainly tried. This was a notable power shift in organizations, where before I.T. dictated policy. Now, CEOs told I.T. staff: “well, I’m using my iPhone. Figure it out.” (Yes, speaking from experience on that one.) But the employees bringing their own devices to work would either find their private data and devices in I.T.’s hands when they submitted to having their personal phone secured, or they would end up carrying two phones. Neither solution is ideal. This was Lookout’s opportunity. It first aimed to build a service consumers would adopt on their own, then use that to shuttle their way into the business world. In part thanks to Android’s app marketplace (a marketplace which received even the most basic protections in terms of banning apps from making changes without user consent!), it soon became easy enough to convince consumers that smartphone devices needed protection too. According to Mahaffey, around a year and a half ago, the company’s consumer-first strategy began to pay off. It started to receive inbound requests from businesses looking to buy licenses in bulk, and to date, they’ve received “thousands of inbound requests,” he says. In addition, the company claims that over half of the Fortune 1000 already has employees using Lookout on their work devices. Though the company isn’t yet discussing the specific feature set of the Lookout for Business offering, there will clearly be a lot of overlap with the technologies Lookout has already developed. For instance, the company offers remote wipe, and lost device location services (as do many MDMs), but it also has developed a different strategy to fight mobile malware and threats. Traditional anti-virus vendors for PCs used signature-based protections via downloads of a virus definition file. Mahaffey explains that Lookout didn’t want to use the same methodology when building for mobile, because mobile simply changed too quickly. The solution, it turned out, was to build a data set of every application – every binary – in the world. Today, Lookout uses that data to develop its own matching technology that can identify bad blocks of code known to be associated with malware or even just resemble it. And it can catch it earlier, too. “For example, if an enterprise has an application on their network that doesn’t match any signature, but also doesn’t do anything bad, most anti-viruses would say that it’s okay,” says Mahaffey. “But our backend system can tell it has a fingerprint that’s similar to someone who has written malware in China, and that this application is nowhere else in the world.” I.T. could then flag and block the app, even before it had begun its strike. Of course, Lookout took a risk by arriving to the enterprise later than others. It will face a lot of competition from various mobile security products in the industry, including anti-malware products from traditional firms like Symantec, Trend Micro, McAfee, etc., as well as those from bigger, established players like IBM, MobileIron, Air-Watch and other MDM makers. But the bet Lookout is making now is that enterprise will go for best-of-breed products for mobile (which it believes it is), or businesses will see room to fit in Lookout in a lineup which already includes an existing MDM system. But the company’s secret to enterprise entry may actually be the back door: the employees. Like any good “consumerization of I.T.” product, the battle was first fought for consumer mindshare, not for room in the I.T. budget. The Lookout for Business product will likely have some feature that will help switch on or over those consumer installations to bring aspects of the device under I.T. management. (While still respecting user privacy, of course, lest there be a backlash.) Ahead of the public launch of Lookout for Business, the company says it has also secured a partnership with Samsung, which will see its service pre-loaded on all new devices – Samsung’s secure device offering for enterprise. On KNOX, Lookout will provide real-time, cloud-based scanning to protect against malware, web-based threats and privacy breaches. If , and Samsung is the leading OEM, that’s a good partner for Lookout to have on hand. Lookout for Business is currently in private beta trials after having quietly launched a page on the Lookout website detailing its forthcoming product roadmap in this area. The company will offer more product details and pricing before year-end.
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In An Apparent Bug, Some Twitter Users Report Avatar Photos Being Replaced With Default ‘Egg’
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Colleen Taylor
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A number of Twitter users Tuesday evening that their personal photo avatars had been abruptly replaced by the that accompanies profiles from users who haven’t added a custom photo of themselves. What’s happened to all those artfully posed selfies? Was all that time constructing a flattering yet also somehow self-deprecating and goofy profile image in vain? ? Let’s all knock on wood and hope that we never find out — and that the images are restored soon. We’ve reached out to Twitter for an of what’s happened, and when and how it will be resolved. We will update this post with information as soon as we hear back. Twitter has acknowledged the issue and is working on a fix. Some avatars are appearing as eggs and users are unable to update profiles. We are working to resolve this. Thank you for your patience! — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) The nightmare is over and the issue has purportedly been resolved. If you have an account that was affected by the bug, if you upload a new photo now, it should stick. Profile updates have been reenabled on . Thank you again for your patience! — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) Here are a few Tweets from users noticing the change: Whoa. Turned into an egg. That's weird. — Andrew Hunt (@ahuntre) Look!! Look friends ! I've been turned into an egg! Twitter, why?? Why? — gayle frank (@dogmagayle) Not sure I am an egg. Just tried to change my profile pic and I am still an egg. I was just looking up how to make hard boiled eggs too! — Michael Buckley (@HeyBuckHey) So who else has their Twitter avatar turned into an egg all of a sudden? — Jeremy Goldman (@jeremarketer) https://twitter.com/vincent_brokus/status/375081875858939904
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RocketSpace CEO Duncan Logan Talks Expansion Plans And What ‘Office-As-A-Service’ Actually Means
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Anthony Ha
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, a San Francisco office company that has hosted companies like Uber, Zaarly, Podio, and Pocket Gems (though not always the main team), recently — two spaces, actually, one for early-stage startups and one for more mature companies. The move seemed like a good opportunity to both tour the new office and talk to founder and CEO Duncan Logan about San Francisco real estate, his future plans, and his description of RocketSpace as an “office-as-a-service”. To be honest, I went in suspecting that “office-as-a-service” was just a fancy way of saying “real estate company with other services”. However, Logan rattled off a number of other programs that Rocket Space has built on top of its desk/office rental business, including corporate innovation/partnerships, RocketU training, and the startup accelerator. As those other services grow, he said that revenue from rentals is becoming “a smaller and smaller percentage every month” of RocketSpace’s total business. Logan added: If we were just about the real estate we would be rolling out RocketSpaces everywhere. While we do intend to expand to other locations, it’s really about building a brand which is really focused on the best startups. We think, as a young company, you are a product of your environment and you should choose that environment really carefully and surround yourself really carefully … and that’s more our focus than filling real estate. As for where RocketSpace goes from here, Logan named a number of cities where the company might open a second location, including New York, Austin, London and Toronto. He said he’s hoping to sign a lease on a second US location by the end of this year and actually open the new office in early 2014. Oh, if you want to see what the old RocketSpace looked like, you can .
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For Authors, Amazon’s Kindle MatchBook Offers Plenty Of Upside
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today, Amazon introduced a brand new model of its Kindle Paperwhite e-book reader, which looks pretty nice. But the bigger announcement was a brand new , which allows authors and publishers to offer heavily discounted Kindle editions of their print books past and future. After digging into the requirements and features of the program, it seems evident that this is going to be a fairly nice program for existing print and Kindle authors. “I don’t see a downside, at least for me, since, as you say the royalty rate stays the same. It’s more sales (at least in theory),” says David Schwartz, author of , “and that’s the goal.” The Kindle Matchbook program has a set of requirements for participating, but none of them seem particularly onerous, and they align philosophically with the promise of leveraging your back inventory for more revenue. In order to enroll, you simply have to be selling a physical book of some sort on Amazon, and be a member of the Kindle Direct Publishing program. We were able to confirm with Amazon that it does require that users be a member of the more exclusive Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. This means that if you have a physical book that you’d like to sell an ‘add-on’ Kindle edition of, you’re not required to promise Amazon a period of exclusivity. KDP Select members are often limited to selling books on Amazon alone for around 90 days. The promotional prices that can be set for a book include four tiers: $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free. Enrolling a title is super simple, just visit the listing and tick a box. The low-friction nature of the opt-in is very ‘Amazon’ in execution and should drive authors to investigate the feature. Once you select a title you set your ‘Promotional List Price’ to one of the tiers. The only restriction here is that you pick a discount that is at least half off of your regular list price. Amazon says the 50% requirement is to ensure that it’s a ‘compelling’ discount. Amazon currently has two royalty rates available, which differ in regional availability. So you’ll still get your 35% or 70% slice of that e-book sale. So a lower payday, for sure, but definitely worth it for those ‘back catalog’ folks. You might see a slow rollout of the feature because publishers have to opt-in at a high level before they can toggle on the bundling for individual titles. MatchBook should have around 10,000 titles when it launches in October. But Amazon Publishing authors (who get the feature by default) and indies can flick it on right away, and should. There’s really very little to be worried about on this end unless you don’t offer a print version of your book at all. But Amazon even has a solution for those folks, as it offers a program for . And, as Editorial Director of New Island Books , the program also gives authors an incentive to digitize books that they haven’t already. Thereby tacking on an additional source of revenue with the upgrade bump for first-time users or digital ‘holdouts’. Personally, I believe that this could drive sales of paper books well into the future. If I know that I can get a Kindle edition for a one or two dollar premium, then I’m more likely to opt-into the print version. This way I can read on planes or at the beach where my electronics aren’t allowed or recommended. And sometimes a paper book is just more pleasant to handle. It also taps into the collector market for those that must have a hardback copy of a book. I’ve never been the type but know plenty of them, and I do own first printings of precious volumes like the Oz books that I would gladly read in Kindle form again but don’t want to tote around for fear of damage. Not that Amazon is offering discounts on classic editions of books like that, but the philosophy works for super-nice editions of modern titles purchased through the site. Of course, that all depends on whether people are purchasing both the print and digital editions that weren’t already planning on doing both. Schwartz says it’s difficult to tell on a wider scale, but he has seen some anecdotal evidence. “I have friends who have purchased both editions of Gooseberry Bluff, but others who don’t have a Kindle and waited for the physical book. But I think this may be a good thing for people who are unsure of making the transition to e-books, since it gives them a way to buy the physical book but try out the virtual one for less. And I’m sure that’s part of the goal.” For now, the program seems to be a nice step for authors and publishers with deep back catalogs, and seems that it could definitely encourage some to purchase titles digitally that they’ve owned for years in physical form. Delving back through my (somewhat checkered) Amazon purchase history I found several titles that I wouldn’t mind reading again, but have packed away in a bin or box somewhere. Amazon is betting that I’m not alone, and publishers should probably take heed. Image Credit: / Flickr CC
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GraphDive Raises $2M For Social Media Analytics And Targeting
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that uses Facebook Connect data to give businesses a better understanding of their online visitors, has raised $2 million in new funding. Co-founder and CEO Shahram Seyedin-Noor said the company allows website owners to do more with the social data that’s already provided by users who log in to their sites via Connect. It analyzes a user’s account activity and infers their interests and key demographic data — age, income, education, and relationship status. (In its effort to build an “interest graph” connecting related interests, Seyedin-Noor said GraphDive could be compared to Gravity, ). So far, the company offers three services that take advantage of that data, one for segmenting users into different groups, another for delivering personalized recommendations to those users, and a third for Facebook ads targeted at new users that are similar to the most valuable of a businesses’ most existing users. How accurate is the analysis? Well, you can test it out yourself by logging in to and seeing what the system infers about you. That’s what I did, and demographically, on three out of four counts, it pegged me correctly — the only incorrect inference was that I’m married. It also provided a list of my interests, which started off accurate and gradually became more shaky. Overall, it seemed to paint a pretty solid picture of who I am. It’s clear how this could be useful to businesses, but what about consumers? Well, Seyedin-Noor argued that GraphDive is “the anti-spam company,” because it allows users to see content, recommendations, and ads that are actually relevant to them, and because those users have opted in by signing up for a particular site through Facebook Connect. Seyedin-Noor added that the company, which he founded with Sina Sohangir in 2011, has seen 10x growth in terms of daily API usage in the past three months. Customers include Walmart and Lyft. The new round was led by Start Capital and angel investors including Pejman Nozad, Ullas Naik, and Naguib Sawiris. Previous investors (GraphDive raised a $1 million convertible note last year) include Crosslink Capital, Correlation Ventures, and Plug & Play Tech Center. Future plans include adding new platforms, such as Twitter and Google+, and other languages. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-qNwvwiXFk&w=420&h=315] An earlier version of this post confused the initial backers with the investors in GraphDive’s new round.
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Studio 9+ Accelerator Raises $2.5 Million To Fund Its First Class of Entrepreneurs
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Stephanie Yang
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founder ‘s new accelerator has raised another $2.5 million in funding from several angel investors, bringing total funding for Studio 9+ to about $4.6 million. The program is also extending its application deadline to Sept. 10 to include two more companies in its first class of participants. , Studio 9+ provides mentorship through three segments, each lasting three months: creating a minimum viable product, tuning for market fit and building out the company. In exchange for funding and participation in the program, Studio 9+ asks for 18 percent equity. The program already has selected 10 startups out of more than 100 applicants, and is moving the deadline to coincide with next week. The funding will go toward providing each of the 12 teams with $110,000 throughout the nine-month program. Relan tells me the focus for Studio 9+ moving forward is keeping its classes small so it can provide more mentorship funding than other similar programs. Although nine months is much longer than most accelerators, Relan’s previous incubator YouWeb kept entrepreneurs engaged in the program for a year. Angel investors participating in this round include , , , , , , , and .
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LinkedIn To Raise Up To $1.15B To Fuel Acquisitions, “Infrastructure” Investments
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Alex Wilhelm
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LinkedIn has more than $1 billion by selling stock in its company to both the public, and banks that will underwrite the issuance. $1 billion will be sold to common investors, and the banks participating in the deal have the option to buy up to 15 percent of the offered shares in addition, bringing the total capital infusion to a potential $1.15 billion. In the listing, LinkedIn estimates that following the offering, its cash, equivalents, and short-term investments — colloquially just called cash by investors — will rise from $873.4 million to $1.85 billion. The second figure does not include the potential for the additional $150 million sale of stock to investment banks. In that case, LinkedIn would have essentially a flat $2 billion in cash. The company does not need the money to fund its current operations. LinkedIn directly states: “Based on our current cash and cash equivalents balance together with cash generated from operations, we do not expect that we will have to utilize any of the net proceeds to us of this offering to fund our operations during the next 12 months.” So, what will the funds be used for? Aside from increased staffing and product development, LinkedIn notes two efforts that make the raise itself quite sensical: infrastructure and acquisitions. In the view of TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden — and I agree with her — the term “infrastructure” could indicate that LinkedIn has its eyes on a new data center, perhaps in Europe. The company states that international expansion is a target for its incoming monies. That LinkedIn wants a larger checkbook with which to shop is not surprising. At its current cash tally, LinkedIn is incredibly under-gunned in the war to pick up the best new and upcoming firms. In an age when Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo (in a sense) have cash north of $10 billion, a piddling $873 million simply won’t cut it. I’m being slightly facetious, of course, but the point stands. Is LinkedIn buried deep in a potential deal that requires it to raise cash now? Not according to what it told both the government and investors: “We may also use a portion of the net proceeds for the acquisition of, or investment in, technologies, solutions or businesses that complement our business, although we have no present commitments or agreements to enter into any acquisitions or investments.” So, LinkedIn is reserving the right to buy whatever it damn well pleases, but isn’t yet in a dance too deep with any one firm. It’s a fine time for LinkedIn to raise the capital: It had a good recent quarter, and is trading more than twice its 52-week low. Shares in the company slipped in after-hours trading on the news, shedding around 2 percent.
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Amazon’s AWS Command Line Tool Hits General Availability, Lets You Control 23 Services From Your Terminal
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Frederic Lardinois
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Graphical user interfaces are great, but sometimes, the good-old command line . Amazon today that its command line interface for AWS has . For a while now, Amazon Web Services has made this command line tool available as a developer preview. The tool allows developers to control 23 of AWS’s services from the command line without the need to touch its somewhat convoluted web interface. Few people, of course, manage their AWS accounts from the command line, but having these tools available allows developers to automate many of their processes. As Amazon notes, today’s release includes some updates to the that use a file system command syntax to allow developers to “list the contents of online buckets, upload a folder full of files, and synchronize local files with objects stored in Amazon S3.” As with all things AWS, configuring the tool , but Amazon offers an easy step-by-step and extensive documentation to help new users . The tool is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and also comes pre-installed on the most recent versions of the , Amazon’s supported and maintained Linux image for use on its EC2 cloud-computing service.
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Optimizely Co-Founder Pete Koomen On Using The Art Of A/B Testing
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Colleen Taylor
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The book has some rave reviews ( has called it “smart” and “valuable”), so we recently invited Koomen to swing by TechCrunch TV and share some key takeaways. We also caught up a bit on the latest at Optimizely as a company, which just crossed over the 100 employee mark. Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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Announcing The Disrupt SF Hackathon Judges And A Ton Of New Prizes (And The Very Last Batch Of Tickets!)
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Greg Kumparak
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The first batch of tickets for our Disrupt SF Hackathon (happening this weekend!) sold out so fast I thought something had gone wrong. We’ve released a few batches since, each bigger than the last… and yet, each one has sold out almost immediately. If you’ve never been to one of our Hackathons, here’s the gist of it: take around about thousand coders and designers, give them a pretty much endless stream of pizza, and tell them they’ve got 24 hours to build the craziest thing they can think of. At the end of the day, every team gets 60 seconds to pitch their Frankenstein’d speed creation in a battle for $5,000 and an opportunity to present their work in front of the main Disrupt conference’s massive (and massively influential) audience. You lot are clearly pretty damned excited about this thing, so we went ahead and made it . First up, we’re proud to announce the fantastic panel of judges we’ve enlisted to help us pick the winner. Here they are: Marci Harris is co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, a civic startup that connects people and elected officials to foster accountable, responsive governing. A lawyer and former Congressional staffer, Harris has been recognized as one of Fast Company magazine’s Top 100 Most Creative People in Business (2012), Tribeca Film Festival Awards for Creative Disruption (2012), DC’s Tech Titans by Washingtonian magazine (2013), and one of the 2013 “Fastcase 50.” She chairs the Entrepreneurship Subcommittee of LaunchTN, and mentors at the Code For America Civic Accelerator, Tennessee Tenn, and the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Syracuse’s Newhouse School. April Underwood (@aunder) is Director of Product at Twitter, where she is responsible for the Twitter advertising experience. April has held previous roles at Twitter in Product and Business Development focused on partnering with the world’s top web properties. Prior to Twitter, April worked at Google, where she was responsible for content acquisition and monetization of Google Maps, Gmail, Google News, and other Google consumer products. April holds an MBA from University of California at Berkeley (Haas) and a BBA in Management Information Systems from University of Texas at Austin. Kent Brewster is a front-end engineer, API agitator, and recovering technology evangelist. He was an early Hack Day winner at Yahoo; you may have heard him speak at SxSW or FluentJS about the mistakes he made building the Pin It button for Pinterest or Netflix for the iPhone, and some of his difficult-to-detect JavaScript may already be running on your site. Elias Bizannes is an entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. He is the founder of San Francisco incubator space “StartupHouse“, the international bootcamp “StartupBus” and also created Australia’s “silicon beach“. He previously worked at venture capital firm Charles River Ventures, search engine startup Vast.com, and professional services PwC Jon Sakoda is a partner at NEA. Sakoda joined NEA in 2006 and focuses on investments in SaaS, Infrastructure Software, and Big Data Applications. His investments include Blue Jeans Network, Desire2Learn, Hearsay Social, OPOWER, ScienceLogic, Suniva, and WibiData. Sakoda also co-manages NEA’s seed investment program.
Prior to joining NEA, Jon was an entrepreneur and co-founder of
IMlogic (acquired by Symantec Corporation) and served as its Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Products. Second: As we’ve previously announced, everyone who gets on stage and presents a completed hack will get a ticket to the Disrupt SF 2013 conference itself — tickets which generally go for around three thousand bucks. The top three teams will get to present their hacks during the conference, with the top team of the day taking home five thousand bucks to divvy up as they see fit. But it doesn’t stop there. Some of our API sponsors have decided to crank things up a notch, offering their own prizes to the teams that best integrate that company’s API. With these additions, there’s thousands upon of dollars in gear and cash on the line here: The team that builds the best Chevrolet in-vehicle app and the team that best use Chevrolet’s Remote API will each win $2,500
The most “Innovative or Useful” use of Clover’s or APK gets $5000
The best use of the gets a $1000 Amazon gift card.
Each Hackathon team that presents will get a $200 credit to hire freelancers on Elance. The Top 3 teams that “best leverage online talent in support of their hack” will split $5,000, as determined by Elance.
One “Mashery Red” BIG Jambox
Two $500 Apple gift cards for the best use of NewAer’s SDK
$1,000 for the best use of
Pioneer will pick two teams who best use their in a way that’s compatible with their AppRadio platform. First place will get $2,000 and an AppRadio 3 car stereo. Second place will get $500 and an AppRadio 3 stereo.
$1000 dollars cash for the app that makes the best use of , and $100 for any other team that uses the API.
Trip for 2 to Las Vegas (airfare/hotel/ meals), including tickets for SAP’s annual TechEd conference, for the best Mobile/Web app utilizing wearable computer (Fitbit) or Connected car (OpenXC) data on SAP’s HANA cloud data platform (valued at $7,500)
The best use of wins a $5,000 Visa gift card and a one hour chat with PopSugar CEO Brian Sugar
Two Lego Mindstorm EV3 Kits for the best use of
$500 for the best use of the
Two Xbox 360s and two Lumia 920 phones for the best use of Crazy, right? The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs September 7 and 8, and we’ve just released . What are you waiting for?
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Sony Hopes You’ll Carry A Lens In Your Pocket
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Matt Burns
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Remember that time when your smartphone camera just wasn’t good enough? That time when you wanted a picture that was just slightly better? You know, the time you lugged a pocket camera to your kid’s karate lesson or significant other’s colonoscopy. Well. Sony will soon have a product for you, friend! The Sony QX10 and QX100 are corners of the Internet following their last month. The products are essentially two-thirds of a camera designed to connect to a smartphone wirelessly or through a dock. Sony has created a whole new system that replaces a phone’s camera with a new sensor and glass. For better or worse, of course. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKGEEPIAPys According to Sony Alpha Rumors, the QX10 will feature a 1/2.3-inch 18-megapixel sensor paired with an f/3.3-5.9 lens. The QX100 will have a high-quality 1-inch 20.2-megapixel Exmor R sensor and a f/1.8-4.9 Carl Zeiss lens. Reportedly, the QX10 will be $250 and the QX100 will be $450. The QX line is based on fantastic Sony point-and-shoot cameras with the QX10 looking most like the WX150 and the QX100 grabbing most of the RX100m2’s magic. The concept is solid, but the market might be tepid. With the right software, a smartphone packs all the goods necessary to process a photo. These products essentially allow smartphones to capture higher-quality images It’s just too bad these first-generation models are so expensive. Let’s not forget this has been done before. Will.i.am and Fusion Garage (and CrunchPad engineer) Chandra Rathakrishnan with the fashion-focused i.am+ foto.sosho V.5. But it doesn’t appear to have ever hit the market. Thankfully. It was ludicrous and smelled of vapor from the start. Sony’s take is much more legitimate and original. As when the products first started leaking online, Sony has created a product that moves the camera hardware outside of the smartphone, creating a platform that’s device-agnostic and gives consumers the option of using this device on future hardware. Don’t expect these little lenses to be a huge hit right out of the gate. Sony probably doesn’t. This is clearly a low-volume product designed to test the market. But Sony as of late is back to its slow and steady product cycle. This product line is a clever cross between two of the company’s main product categories with mobile and digital imaging. Sony is going to do its damnedest to get consumers to carry a lens in their pocket instead of a pocket shooter.
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After $258M Google Ventures And TPG Investment, Uber Hires Finance, Business, And Growth Execs
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Leena Rao
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After from Google Ventures and TPG, Uber is revealing a of new hires today in finance, business and international growth at the executive level. Uber stole Brent Callinicos from Google, where he was VP, Treasurer & Chief Accountant. He will be Uber’s new Chief Financial Officer. Former COO of Klout, Emil Michael, will be the company’s SVP of Business. Prior to Klout, Michael was SVP of Field Operations at TellMe Networks. Lastly, Ed Baker, who previously served as Head of International Growth at Facebook, is joining as Head of Growth. Previously he was co-founder and CEO of friend.ly (which was acquired by Facebook in 2011). These are all huge talent wins for Uber, which was valued at pre-money in this latest round. With the new funding, CEO Travis Kalanick had said that Uber will be moving into new markets and begin marketing efforts. With the latest Google Ventures investment, Uber appears to be on a rocket ship to potentially becoming a public company. Clearly, as Uber continues to expand into new markets, domain experience in the areas of business development, finance and growth are going to be critical to the company’s future success. Callinicos was responsible for treasury and risk management at Google, and joined the company in 2007 after 14 years at Microsoft, where he was corporate Vice President and Divisional CFO for Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division. He also served as Microsoft’s treasurer. Michael comes not only with leadership experience as the COO at Klout, but helped lead field operations at TellMe, which should help Uber in the management of its rapidly growing number of hubs around the world. And Baker’s experience in helping Facebook to grow its user base beyond 1 billion should aid Uber in its expansion efforts. My hunch is that we can expect more Silicon Valley talent to be added to Uber’s ranks.
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Mobile Calendar App Event Book Gets A New Design And ‘Location Book’ Features
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Anthony Ha
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While startups are trying to replace your mobile calendar by , there’s a new-ish iOS app called that seems to be built around the belief that what calendars really need is to become simpler and easier to use. Created by Abhinay Ashutosh, . Since then, Ashutosh said the app has been downloaded more than 60,000 times, and he said that he has incorporated “user feedback from tens of thousands of folks” to release version 2.0 today. The Event Book interface is divided into different “books”: The Day Book shows you your agenda for the current day; and the Week Book, the Month Book, and the List Book display all of your calendar items in a single list. In most sections, you can swipe across to see the next day, week, or month, and you can adjust between “long” and “short” views to determine how much information is displayed. In the Month Book, the number of dots under each day to indicate how many events you have scheduled. None of this is exactly revelatory, but I think it looks pretty slick — if you don’t like the design of the native iOS app, but you’re not necessarily looking for lots of “smart” bells and whistles (something ), this could be the app for you. When I asked how he sees Event Book fitting into the larger calendar market, Ashutosh said it offers “a unique blend of features and design”: “The app does this by combining thousands of points from users about what features they want most along with a killer, light, and themed design to create an app that really keeps you on top of your schedule while keeping up with your preferences and styles.” As for what’s new, Ashutosh said that version 2.0 has a new design, as well as the ability to customize that design with new themes. There’s also a new “book,” the Location Book, which integrates with Apple Maps and Google Maps to allow users to save their favorite locations, add them to events, and bring up directions. For example, many of my meetings take place at the TechCrunch office, so the Location Book allows me to save the address and easily add it to any future events. (Not that I need directions in that case, but hey, it saves me some time.) You can .
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Why Microsoft Had No Choice But To Purchase Nokia’s Handset Business
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Alex Wilhelm
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The news that Microsoft has from Nokia came as a surprise, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. The underlying reason that Microsoft had little choice but to buy Nokia is plain: Nokia had too much control over the Windows Phone platform, and Microsoft could not afford to lose its primacy over its mobile efforts. How did we end up in this situation? Simple: Microsoft granted Nokia to adapt Windows Phone to its own preference, and Nokia over time became the most popular Windows Phone manufacturer. Then it became essentially the Windows Phone hardware company. This is where its rights to change Windows Phone came to bear as a problem for Microsoft: If Nokia were the only Windows Phone OEM that mattered, and it could change the operating system, Microsoft had little control over its own platform. Sure, it built the developer tools, but if it could not control the user experience, in a real way its mobile operating system was outside of its own control. That was not acceptable. Microsoft claims that it wants to work with other hardware providers to build Windows Phone handsets. And HTC might stick around, but Microsoft has now cornered its own market, and that will limit external interest. It cost Microsoft billions in cash, and likely a continued profit drip as Nokia, let’s be frank, loses money and it seems likely that the assets that were purchased won’t be cash-flow positive. But now, instead of losing control of its platform, Microsoft controls it in a way like never before. And like it never has with Windows, despite its efforts in that domain to tighten its grip with the Surface project. Microsoft is a company that until eight minutes ago depended on external hardware providers to act as conduits for its software products. Surface was a first salvo against that past. Nokia as a purchase is its complete repudiation. Windows Phone could, if past trends persist, could ship 10 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013. Now, those will be Microsoft handsets (yes, the deal doesn’t close until 2014, but we’re speaking functionally, not pedantically). The platform wars are now better defined: Apple, Google, and Microsoft control mobile software and hardware internally, which allows them to push their own services to mobile users. Mobile is the key future platform. Therefore, companies in tech can be cleaved into two camps: Those who have their own mobile platform, and those who have to schlep on the platforms of others. Yahoo, for example, is a bet that the latter can work. Microsoft doesn’t seem to agree.
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Announcing Your Disrupt SF Finals Judges: Marissa Mayer, Roelof Botha, Keith Rabois, David Lee, Chris Dixon And Michael Arrington
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Alexia Tsotsis
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You’ll see some startups trying to solve big problems in networking, business software and security next week during our Battlefield competition at — industries which at first glance may seem boring or overly complex but are extremely important to the world. You’ll also see Battlefield companies working in more unusual areas, like government and agriculture, where there’s huge potential but many challenges to creating a business. And you might find other startups simply fun and entertaining, because that’s what their products are designed to do. From first-time founders to long-time veterans, from bootstrapped products to well-backed ones, the Battlefield this year is the most exciting and diverse yet. Or so we think, after our editorial staff spent the last few months picking them out from our hundreds of applicants. Now we’ll see what our panel of finals judges say about these companies. is taking a break from reinventing Yahoo and reprising her role at the event, along with , and As an accomplished Sequoia Capital partner, Botha is an invaluable board member for Square, Tumblr, Unity, Evernote and more. Dixon, the entrepreneur turned investor and tech pundit, is joining us once again to add a bit of homespun advice. We also have the privilege of SV Angel head David Lee’s early-stage wisdom. And the man himself, TechCrunch founder , will be on board dishing out startup advice in addition to conducting his iconic interviews. We’re also excited to have a new finals judge at SF this year. will be joining us to offer his experience gained from his long career in tech — most recently at payments company Square and now in his partner role at Khosla Ventures. The final 6 companies out of the 30 will present to these judges on Wednesday afternoon, after the previous days’ judges and our editorial staff reviews the presentations on Monday and Tuesday. Then we’ll collectively figure out and announce the winners. General admission tickets that grant access to the three-day event and nightly parties are still available. And for the first time, tickets to just the nightly parties are also available. As always, if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found . Students can also come and be a part of Disrupt SF, for $300 . These companies have been working non-stop to make the most of their short time on the Disrupt stage. Only one can come away with the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 cash prize. Here’s a bit more about who you’ll see on stage during the finals. J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He also co-authored a book on initial public offerings. In 1999, he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP of Business Development and General Counsel. In 2000, he cofounded Achex, an online payments company, that was later acquired by First Data Corp for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online. Arrington worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner-backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including Verisign. In May 2008, Time Magazine named Michael Arrington as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital, and works with a broad range of companies. Some democratize technology access (Square, Eventbrite, Unity, Nimbula); some create global user communities (YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram); and others disrupt markets through innovative business models (Evernote, Weebly, Xoom). Roelof also sits on the boards of Aliph, Mahalo, and TokBox. Roelof is a champion of consumer Web plays and considers himself as “just another consumer.” Roelof led the initial financing of YouTube on behalf of Sequoia Capital in 2005. Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal, where he led the company through its IPO in 2002, and the acquisition by eBay before joining Sequoia Capital in 2003. Roelof loves to hear a founder recount what inspired them to strike out on their own and to gain an understanding of how the founder is uniquely solving a customer pain point. David Lee is a Founder and Managing Partner of SV Angel, an angel fund with investments in companies such as Twitter, Foursquare, Flipboard, Dropbox and Airbnb. Prior to SV Angel, David was at Baseline Ventures, a leading seed-stage venture firm. He was a founding member of Google’s New Business Development team and led business development at StumbleUpon prior to its sale to eBay. He also was a corporate attorney at leading technology law firms. David has an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow; a J.D. from NYU; and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Previously as a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer led 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. Keith Rabois is a member of the Khosla Ventures investing team, joining in March 2013. Most recently, Rabois was Chief Operating Officer at Square where he oversaw the company’s business operations including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management. Keith specializes in transforming early-stage startups into successful businesses and has deep expertise in the financial services industry and government affairs. An accomplished executive, entrepreneur and angel investor, Keith has held leadership roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and began his career practicing law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Keith was an early investor in several high-profile Internet companies including YouTube and currently serves on the board of directors of Yelp and Xoom. Keith holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an undergraduate degree in political science from Stanford University. Chris Dixon is a Partner at and co-founder of Founder Collective. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode
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Keen On… Smart Machines: The Next Big Thing For Smart Human Beings
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Andrew Keen
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“ “, says economist in his new book of the same name. And success and failure in a world dominated by digital technology, he says, will be defined by our relationship to smart machines. If our skills “complement” smart machines, Cowen writes in , we are likely to be successful; if not, he warns Luddites, “you may want to address that mismatch”. But Cowen isn’t a dystopian and he doesn’t believe that smart machines are taking jobs from human beings. ‘The smartest and most successful people in the future, he believes, will manage the smart machines. And as these smart machines become more central in how we manage our education and healthcare, he says, “human psychology” – the art and science of motivation – will become increasingly valuable. This is what he calls “the next big thing.” In the future, Cowen insists, power will lie with the humans who partner with rather than own the algorithm. And in this age of the smart human/machine partnership, traditional algorithm-centric companies like Google will be old businesses – “like GM”, he predicts. “Marketing”, Cowen writes in , is the “seminal sector for our future economy.” But Cowen’s intriguing definition of marketing lies in figuring out how to motivate people and to get them to feel better about themselves. Everyone in the future economy – from doctors to educators to entrepreneurs – will be coaches. But who is going to own the operating platform in the age of the smart machine? That’s the trillion-dollar question which even Tyler Cowen isn’t smart enough to answer.
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet And Trinity Ventures’ Patricia Nakache
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Leena Rao
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This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we are fortunate to have two guests in the studio—Spark Capital’s and Trinity Ventures’ . You can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Sabet was an early investor in Twitter (Spark Capital, which just this year, backed Twitter in 2008) and served on the company’s board from 2008 to 2011. Sabet also led investments in Tumblr (acquired by Yahoo), Jelly, Stack Exchange, RunKeeper, Foursquare, Boxee (acquired by Samsung), OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga) and thePlatform (acquired by Comcast). Prior to joining Spark, Sabet was Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at GameLogic (acquired by Scientific Games Corp) after serving as an EIR at Charles River Ventures. Nakache, who focuses on investments in digital media and internet services, joined Trinity in 1999. She previously worked at McKinsey as a consultant helping companies in technology, financial services and retail to address their strategic and operational issues. Her current portfolio of companies include Beachmint, Care.com, Kixeye, InfoArmy and others. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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Burning Man Founder Is Cool With Capitalism, And Silicon Valley Billionaires
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Gregory Ferenstein
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“We’re not building a Marxist society,” jokes Burning Man Founder Larry Harvey in response to a series of recent stories detailing the annual festival’s and its buddy-buddy . More seriously, he says, “you can make a lot of money and do good with it. Elon Musk has made a lot of money.” Musk and his elite brethren have become part of of the week-long rave fest in the Nevada desert, known for its principle of “radical inclusion” and the tens of thousands of Bohemians who load up broken campers to let their inner free-spirit out during a retreat from the button-down corporate world. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly helicoptered in to hand out grilled cheese. Larry Page, who was spotted one year donning a skin-tight silver onesie, said , in part, because he was a Burner alum. Musk reportedly first dreamed up the solar-powered project that would eventually become his idea for the super-fast transit system, Hyperloop, on a road trip to Burning Man in 2004.
In recent years, Burning Man ticket prices have soared and Silicon Valley-themed camps are awarded with sizable real-estate on the desert campus. So what does an art and music festival –- made famous for its drug-fueled, 24-hour mobile dance clubs and its elaborately dressed half-naked artists — want with millions of dollars and the tech elite? I sat down with Harvey on the last day of Burning Man, surrounded by the hymn of de-toxing party monsters deconstructing their themed camps with fork lifts, to find out. “The opportunities of all these folks coming out who have command of wealth is to help us in extending our culture throughout the world,” explains Harvey. “A typical pattern is that they might stay for a day or two, and then it dawns on them that there’s a manifold of profound things to be gained.” Harvey and Google execs are known to wax philosophical over dinner at his personal camp. As sappy as Harvey’s perception sounds, the experience evidently inspires tech founders’ affinity for radical experimentation. “Maybe we can set aside part of the world,” Google CEO Larry Page recently . “I like going to Burning Man. As a technologist maybe we need some safe places where we can try things and not have to deploy to the entire world.” To that end, Harvey’s friends in the tech community are heeding his call to expand Burning Man-like villages around the world. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is setting up within his project in Downtown Las Vegas, aimed at . Hsieh has spent a portion of his personal $350 million investment on a tight-knit community of startups that feed off of one another’s idealism and experimental creativity. The otherwise run-down outskirt for low-budget Las Vegas tourism is starting to resemble the Burning Man campus, with monster-size art sculptures and retail shops in shipping containers. Burning Man has come under criticism for the fully catered luxury camps that greet wealthier participants. I was granted an at one of these so-called “turnkey” camps this year; other than fancy dining, the experience seemed pretty typical: bike around the campus during the day, meditate on a personal struggle, then rage all night. It is true, however, that few high-end participants have time to create the elaborate art structures that they themselves enjoy. “It’s okay if they don’t drive an art car,” says Harvey. Although, apparently, the experience does compel some to give generously. Harvey admitted that one of the Google executives donated hundreds of free bikes to the festival. “I’d like them to have a soulful experience. I’d like them to feel connected to the great human experience in ways that will constructively influence the course of world affairs.” Burning Man’s ban on selling anything (except for ice) has created the misperception that the festival is . Burners persist on a gift economy, where food, services and labor are generously doled out. Unlike a barter economy, immediate reciprocation is actively discouraged. Half-naked attendees who solicit attendees to stop by for a gratis drink and body paint don’t have to think twice about freely enjoying one of the elaborately constructed group showers/dance clubs (yes, you read that right). But, Harvey insists that Burning Man was never anti-money. “Anything much more ambitious than a family picnic would require that you responsibly deal with money.” Instead, the millions in revenue that goes to infrastructure and payouts to the local authorities are meant to conceal the complexities of money from participants, so they can concentrate on uninhibited experimentation. “We just create things and give people time to pursue their own projects, and we don’t ever think about monetization.” His unorthodox business philosophy finds a home in the tech industry’s risky reliance on free services, largely built from the contributions of users. For instance, Google Engineer Michael Favor, who piloted an early version of Google Maps 3D walk-thru at Burning Man, explained, “The power of Google is that they don’t do all the work. People posting content do. The same is true here at Burning Man. Citizens create the vast majority of things.” [ ] To be sure, Harvey is no fan of laissez-faire capitalism. “[Burning Man has] always been a sustained critique of the commodification of society and culture, that it isolates people from one another in their role as consumers.” As a counter example, he argues that crowdfunded artwork through sites like Kickstarter is a way to build community and make money at the same time. “Even before an artwork gets here, hundreds of people have contributed to it and identified with it.” Intentional or not, however, Burning Man’s lucrative potential has entrepreneurs looking for inspiration and generous venture capitalists, which Harvey insists represent at most “a distinct minority” of the festival’s temporary population of nearly 70,000. I scanned the dust storms looking for opportunistic tech people but came up empty-handed. During my visit to the massive “ ” multi-camp site, all I found was techies heads-down in rather unusual projects. One veteran Bay Area engineer proudly showed off his automatic water mister and “Orgasm Yurt” (a female-only joystick-shaped personal massager, tucked away inside a foil Yurt, complete with shag bedding). If semi-wealthy tech carpetbaggers had crowded out Burning Man’s usual fare, I couldn’t find them. For those of us steeped in the unbridled utopianism of Silicon Valley, Harvey’s philosophy is no shocker. So long as capitalism is centered on innovation, the philosophy goes, money does not exclude social good. With this rather idealistic underpinning, billionaire friends and a cash-cow event series are necessary to spread a cultural vision. Regardless, the festival’s impact has made friends in high tech places. And to the extent that Burning Man culture seeps into technology’s influence in our lives, expect our world to get a little more…exciting. [ , ]
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Led By Pixar Alum, ToyTalk Debuts Its First Product: The Winston Show, A Game You Can Talk To
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Greg Kumparak
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Two years ago, Oren Jacob left his role as CTO at Pixar after working at the studio for over 20 years. After a brief stint as Entrepreneur In Residence at August Capital, he announced that he was off to start his own company: ToyTalk. ToyTalk has kept their projects mostly under wraps.. until now. Before today, most of what we knew about the company could be gathered from its name: they’d be making toys, and those toys would talk. Today, the company is debuting its first product: , an iPad game for young kids. Now, calling a “game” might be a bit of a misnomer. It’s… not quite a game, in that it doesn’t really fit into any of the normal genres. It’s part trivia game, part comedy routine, and part… I don’t know, educational tv show? According to Oren, even ToyTalk wasn’t quite sure what to call it — though in the end, they’ve gone with calling it a “show”. The best example I can think of would be to mash up and into some sort of quirky, witty, kid-friendly hybrid. In fact, (and other shows like it) was a source of inspiration for . Oren saw how kids — particularly those around 6 or 7 years old — would actually to characters like Dora, or Steve, shouting answers to their questions back at a deaf TV. If only those characters could actually listen! And respond! Thus, is an iPad show that asks questions and, through a pinch of cloud-based voice recognition voodoo and a handful of really hardcore technology on ToyTalk’s end, listens and responds to what you say. It stars Winston, the show’s namesake…. chubby, yellow monster thing, and his companion Ellington, a lil’ orange blob that speaks only in bloops and bears a striking resemblance to the company’s logo. has a handful of different mini-games (or ‘skits’, as ToyTalk calls them), each with its own style of dialogue. In “Writer’s Room”, Winston reads a story, breaking at the end of each passage with a set of choices on how to proceed — a Choose Your Own adventure, of sorts. In “You Vs.”, kids face off against a range of opponents (from historical figures like Marie Antoinette to the more unexpected guests, like a Mosquito) in a quick lesson cleverly disguised as a trivia game. Other skits, meanwhile, get a bit more conversational and open-ended; Winston might ask a kid what their favorite type of ball is, with ToyTalk having prepped clever retorts or bits of trivia for every type of ball they could think of internally. And if Winston doesn’t have an appropriate response? He falls back to something generic (“Kind of like when you’re in a loud bar and you didn’t hear what someone said but you want the conversation to keep going, so you just smile and nod,” as they put it) — but on ToyTalk’s backend, that missed answer is noted. If enough kids all say that same answer, ToyTalk knows that they’ve missed something they shouldn’t have, and will record new response dialogue accordingly. All in all, they’ve recorded around 3,000 lines of dialogue. Almost everything in the game — from the scenes, to the animations, to the audio response — are streamed in from the cloud, allowing ToyTalk to add new content on the fly. Building the technology that allowed for that (and the tools to create and package the content) took up a pretty good chunk of ToyTalk’s stealthy last few years, but should lead to the company grabbing at least a couple pretty intense patents. Looks like they’ve got already. Likewise, all voice responses are uploaded to and processed in the cloud (Curiously, ToyTalk declined to tell me who was powering their voice recognition). The downside, there: it requires an internet connection at all times, be it WiFi, 3G, or 4G. Of course, the game isn’t capturing audio at all times while running — instead, it waits until the kid presses an on-screen microphone button. This was done for multiple reasons: it’s more bandwidth-friendly, a whole lot easier to parse, and it allows multiple kids in front of one iPad to talk to each other before deciding on a response. It’s also less of a privacy risk, as it’s less likely to record things that aren’t meant to be recorded. Speaking of privacy, it’s something that ToyTalk is taking pretty seriously. Kids need their parents to sign them up for an account before they can play, and the company put a bunch of effort into ensuring that they’re fully . If a parent ever wants to delete all of a child’s data from ToyTalk’s servers, it’s one button away.
For the curious: Oren isn’t the only Pixar alum at ToyTalk. His Cofounder, Martin Reddy, led Pixar’s software development teams on nearly half a dozen flicks, from Finding Nemo to WALL-E. By their estimates, about a third of ToyTalk’s 20+ employees are ex-Pixarians. (Is Pixarians the right term? Hell if I know. ) If you recall, ToyTalk released a that pretty strongly suggested that they’d be doing something that combined physical toys (like a stuffed animal) and a webcam into some sort of mysterious augmented reality experience. For now, at least, it looks like they’re focusing entirely on software, removing the physical toy from the mix. While it may seem a bit strange to encourage kids to talk to characters on an iPad (as opposed to, say, going outside), it’s better than encouraging them to sit quietly in the corner and fling birds all day. tries to get kids to emote, and be creative, and maybe learn a thing or two (Did you know that a female cat is called a queen? Because I learned that today. THANKS WINSTON, YOU MY BRO.) But do kids actually to talk with characters on their iPad? That’s something that ToyTalk is still trying to figure out. To help them work that out, and the content it launches with will be free indefinitely, with the potential to add new, premium content down the road. ToyTalk has raised around $16M to date, with investment from Charles River Ventures, Greylock, True Ventures, First Round Capital, and a bunch of angel investors. You can find The Winston Show on .
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Yahoo Picks A New GeoCities Logo
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Mahesh Sharma
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After months of hype, questionable marketing spend, and 30 days of ‘meh’, has unveiled the next big move in its ambitious transformation: a slimmed down logo. Honestly, the new logo reminds one a lot of fonts used in the 90’s, especially the , where many of us first learned to build these funny things called ‘web pages’. Unfortunately, this is no longer the 90’s and this logo is feeling pretty dated. The logo is set in Optima, has had bevels applied, and is a flavour of purple called Pantone Violet C. It has a distinctly old-fashioned-internet vibe when it comes down to it. The slightly tilted exclamation point remains…an exclamation point. In case you’re wondering, it was tilted by exactly nine degrees. Many were hoping that it would go away, but Mayer had said a few weeks ago that it would stick around. One other thing retained is the slightly larger ‘O’ at the end of the logo. This has long been taken to be an onomatopoeic representation of the famous Yahoo ‘yodel’ from its commercials. The old Yahoo logo, though dated in its own way, The new emblem feels buttoned up and slimmed down. Perhaps the company is trying to project a tighter, more controlled image now. In that, at least, it may have succeeded. In case you miss the new gif-based image in the top left corner of the screen, the playful exclamation point dances around the Y-A-H-O-O like a lost Pixar lamp looking for its home. Gifs are something Yahoo has heavily adopted since its acquisition of Tumblr, and is no doubt aimed at catching the sleep eyes of millions of netizens waking up to a brand new day. In 2009, Yahoo shuttered GeoCities, which it had purchased ten years earlier. That was also the year that it picked purple as its new color. Though the logo a ‘nod’ to the company’s history, its original color of choice was red. On her Tumblr, Mayer said she and the logo design team rolled up their sleeves one weekend this summer and weighed every detail of the new badge. They decided: – No straight lines.
– Letters with thicker and thinner strokes, reflecting the subjective nature of Yahoo’s editorial.
– And a mathematical consistency, for coherency. And of course “a pantone that needs no number and no introduction ;),” Mayer wrote. “We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo – whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh,” she wrote. “Having a human touch, personal. Proud.” Aside from the fact that the logo had remained relatively unchanged since 1995 (when a seemingly unstoppable Microsoft prepared to transform the world of personal computing) she said that 87 percent of staff were demanding a new look, either iterative or radical. The , to say the least. Yahoo logo ranking right up there with Twitter’s blue lines. — Jessica Guynn (@jguynn) If you’re interested in the learning more about the story behind this facelift, intern Max Ma has prepared — replete with the tunes of Perth-based pop group Empire of The Sun. Meanwhile, on Google.com, it’s business as usual.
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Stanford University Is Going To Invest In Student Startups Like A VC Firm
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Billy Gallagher
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is going to start directly investing in students’ companies. Stanford is also giving a $3.6 million grant to , a non-profit startup accelerator for Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs. StartX founder and CEO tells me Stanford will only invest in StartX companies and alumni companies. University spokesperson Lisa Lapin tells me Stanford’s investment fund will have an uncapped size. Vice President for Business Affairs Randy Livingston and his office will oversee the school’s investments, and Stanford will not take a lead role in funding rounds. Stanford Hospital and Clinics will be investing in companies alongside Stanford in the Stanford-StartX Fund; it is the first time the University or the Hospital will have a dedicated fund to invest in Stanford startups. StartX, which was as a student initiative, has three classes of companies per year, and takes no equity from the companies. The accelerator is financially and legally independent from the University. It will receive a $1.2 million grant annually over the next three years from Stanford. StartX companies must have at least one founder with a Stanford affiliation. The majority of StartX companies have a founder who is currently or was previously an undergraduate or graduate student at the school. Before this, the four year-old program had received $1.65 million in funding from Kauffman Foundation, Microsoft, Blackstone Foundation, Cisco, Intuit, Greylock Ventures, and AOL, so $1.2 million annually is a substantial increase. StartX’s said the money will go toward adding more full-time staff to support StartX companies and may go toward expanding the program to accommodate more companies. Teitelman says the program is opt-in for StartX portfolio companies, and that the fund will only invest in companies that have raised over $500,000 with a minimum percentage of the capital coming from VCs and/or professional angel investors. For initial investments, that percentage threshold is 30%. The fund will then keep investing in future rounds where it is permitted. The fund has no cap in terms of total dollar amount it can spend or total companies it can invest in. This is obviously great news for StartX, a very young program that seems to be quickly improving. The accelerator’s biggest challenge is that Stanford entrepreneurs have so many other opportunities, on campus and off. With dozens of classes dedicated to entrepreneurship every quarter and an alumni network that connects students to billions in venture capital and some of the brightest mind in the tech industry, some of the most ambitious entrepreneurs will eschew StartX for anything from Y Combinator to simply on their own. Nonetheless, StartX seems to be gaining more traction and prestige on campus. It saw seven alumni company acquisitions in 2013, including Luma , Apple , and Yahoo . Stanford University’s strategy, both financially and as an academic institution, is much murkier. Right off the bat, I don’t understand why students would want Stanford’s money over other VC firms. Equity is a precious thing to give up, and VC firms’ offer the advice and mentorship of partners with immense experience in addition to their capital. Stanford professors already give their expert advice and mentorship to students for free (well, for the cost of tuition). I also don’t really understand what Stanford gains from this. It’s not like the school is hurting for cash–last year, it became the first school to raise . Stanford’s has been a strategic advantage for attracting talented students (especially graduate ones) and has made over a billion dollars for the school. Here’s : any invention made with a significant amount of Stanford resources is owned by Stanford, not the inventor. Stanford then patents the invention and sells its rights (sometimes exclusively back to the inventors). The most famous example of this, of course, is the patent for Google’s PageRank algorithm. Plenty of Stanford grads have formed massive tech companies without ever having their IP owned by the Office of Technology Licensing. If Stanford could invest early in those companies, it could rake in even more money. But at what price? The school, dubbed “Get Rich U” by , is above all else, an academic institution. But the same academic institution helped build Silicon Valley, starting with Hewlett Packard in the 1930s and the Stanford Industrial Park in the 1950s. That tension between academia and industry was highlighted this past spring when a number of , a mobile payments startup that counts numerous Stanford professors as investors. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, a Stanford alumnus, questioned, “Is Stanford still a university?” in a piece titled in reaction to Clinkle. Now, the University will be investing in the companies students form. The University’s professors may also invest in students’ companies, while trying to teach and advise them. And many of these students will take time off from school to launch startups. It’s a tough line for Stanford to walk, as the school’s leaders want to embrace a hallmark spirit of innovation and empower students to take advantage of all the opportunities that the tech world provides to them. The primary mission of the University is still to educate students, and it has always done that in a unique, close-to-industry fashion. Update: Teitelman responded to me with some interesting counter points, and agreed to let me publish them. He writes: “We’ve had an extremely positive response from our companies and the VC community about the Stanford-StartX Fund. StartX companies are eager to take the money as it’s coming on friendly terms, and fast (so they can focus on product, not fundraising). They know that the returns will benefit Stanford, Stanford Hospital & Clinics, and StartX, and that’s also appealing to them. At StartX we have an incredibly extensive network of mentors, VCs, and experts that all of our alum companies can access. We are partnered with Stanford and we have very detailed information and access to most of the valley and beyond. This has proven to be a huge asset to our founders.”
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Federal Jury Orders Motorola Mobility To Pay Microsoft $14.5 Million In Patent Case
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Catherine Shu
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A federal jury has found Motorola Mobility failed to license standard patents at a reasonable rate and ordered the Google-owned handset maker to pay Microsoft about $14.5 million in damages. This is the second of two federal court decisions determining that the royalties Motorola Mobility charges for “standard-essential” patents used in Microsoft products, including Xbox consoles, are too high. Though the award was just half of the $29 million in damages Microsoft had sought, the company hailed today’s ruling as a landmark victory “telling Google to stop abusing patents.” But the patent battle predates Google’s 2011 acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Microsoft for overcharging on patent licensing. Microsoft’s when a federal judge decided Microsoft had to pay just $1.8 million a year in royalties to Motorola Mobility, instead of the billions Motorola had initially sought. The most recent ruling concerns Motorola Mobility’s demand that Microsoft pay annual royalties of up to $4 billion for patents that are part of H.264 and 802.11 wireless standards, both used in the Xbox consoles and Windows. Microsoft said that the amount, which is about 2.25% of the product price, was too high. The two decisions in Microsoft and Motorola Mobility’s court battle are expected to have significant implications for patent law and what constitutes the “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” (known as FRAND) rates that holders are allowed to charge for patents considered “standard-essential.” “This is a landmark win for all who want products that are affordable and work well together,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement. “The jury’s verdict is the latest in a growing list of decisions by regulators and courts telling Google to stop abusing patents.” Motorola Mobility said it would appeal the decision.
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Square Opens Girls Coding Camp To High School Students
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The good corporate citizens at Square are aiming to bring more bring more diversity to Silicon Valley by expanding their computer science education program for girls from college to high school. Twenty college and eight high school females will be schooled in the art of computer coding by Square engineers and other teachers. College students enjoy a four-day camp, while the new program for high schools will last eight months. San Francisco has a lack of AP Computer Science classes, which usually prepares students for an end-of-semester standardized test that permits them to get college credit for introductory courses. Square’s eight-month program is designed to prepare them for the test. There is no word yet on how Square will expand the program to the other several thousand female students in San Francisco not chosen for the camp. Representatives from Square say they are exploring how to expand access to the curriculum. The announcement itself preceded a roundtable discussion led by Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of about a dozen female entrepreneurs talking about their struggles with and solutions to society’s sexism (also, everyone at the table loves Square’s payment system). The girls’ camp would be Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s second female coding cause, after he donated to the with this Twitter co-founders, Biz Stone and Ev Williams. More details about the program and application dates can be found .
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Pew: 86% Of U.S. Adults Make Efforts To Hide Digital Footprints Online; Fear Of Creeping Ads And Hackers Outweighs Spying
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Ingrid Lunden
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In one of the latest developments in the fallout of the PRISM story, the ACLU is in the Obama Administration to try to get federal courts to put a stop to the NSA’s metadata program and delete all existing records. But if you ask the general U.S. population, as surveyed by the , the average U.S. citizen appears to be more concerned about the data-collecting abilities of advertising networks like those of Google and Facebook, faceless malicious hackers, and even friends and family, than they are the government. In this of its ongoing Internet & American Life research, Pew found that 86 percent of surveyed adult Internet users in the U.S. have made efforts to obscure their “digital footprints” — which could include simple measures like clearing cookies in your browser or something more involved like encrypting your email. Some 55 percent have taken this one step further by trying to block specific people or organizations — services like Disconnect.me, for example, have built an entire business on creating these tools. But it is a sign of just how nebulous and pervasive privacy concerns are today that these efforts are not directed solely at state or government groups — despite all the recent attention from the PRISM revelations and the government’s role in gathering data. “[Users’] concerns apply to an entire ecosystem of surveillance,” writes Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and one of the report’s authors. “In fact, they are more intent on trying to mask their personal information from hackers, advertisers, friends and family members than they are trying to avoid observation by the government.” In fact, it seems that fear of losing money, or information that may lead to the loss of money, is at the root of how people feel about security and privacy online. That’s not a surprise for a generally law-abiding population that long ago, with the rise of social networks and mass media that favors confessional, tell-all formats, gave up the idea of privacy for privacy’s sake. Those surveyed by Pew named hackers and criminals as their biggest threat, at 33%, with advertisers a close second at 28%, and “certain friends” at 19% (clearly, the kind of friends that you keep even closer than your enemies). After other categories like employers (11%) and exes (19%), government and law enforcement languish at the very bottom of the list, at 5% and 4% respectively: But that doesn’t mean that law and government don’t come into the equation in another way. Because there are so many possibilities for how and where your data and personal information may get compromised, some 68% of adults said they believed that there weren’t good enough privacy protection laws in place. Certain groups are taking this sentiment farther, of course: in one recent example, to try to block the latest round of privacy changes from Facebook. Pew’s reports are interesting because they are as much about how users are behaving, as they are about how users perceive things to be. In this case, Pew has collected a lot of data about security and data breaches, but it’s based on what users themselves suspect to have been a breach. The big question remains whether the resulting data is vastly underestimating, or overestimating, how big of an issue this really is. That’s when it may be important to look also at data from others like , and (yes) , to triangulate on the issue. Here are some of the other stats from the report. — Some 21 percent of respondents (there were 792 for this survey) said their email or social media accounts had been hijacked. Ten percent said they’d had identifying data stolen — this could come from social security cards, payment cards or bank account information. — Six percent have been scammed online and lost money as a result; 6 percent also said their reputations had been damaged. Some 4 percent say that certain online activities had led them into danger offline. — Of those who have made an effort to try to protect their online identities, it looks like cookie control is the easiest and most popular defense, used by 64 percent of respondents to clear cookies and by 41 percent to disable them altogether. The breakdown of other methods: — Signs are pointing towards more awareness — and more worry. Fifty percent of respondents say they are “worried” about what personal information of theirs is online, and Pew points out that this is a leap from the 33 percent who thought this in 2009. Despite that, we are still seeing a lot of strong growth in areas like social networking and e-commerce, two trends that seem to run counter to how people are feeling about their security. This spells either a collision course at some point in the future or a realization that some online activities are not as bad as others. In either case, users want to be the ones deciding how data is used, not anyone else. “These findings reinforce the notion that privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition for internet users,” writes Mary Madden, senior researcher at Pew Research. “People choose different strategies for different activities, for different content, to mask themselves from different people, at different times in their lives. What they clearly want is the power to decide who knows what about them.”
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Secret-Sharing App Whisper Snags $21 Million From Sequoia, Adds Roelof Botha To Its Board
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Ryan Lawler
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Secret-sharing app has closed a new round of funding, bringing in $21 million at a $75 million to $100 million post money valuation. The round, as , was led by Sequoia Capital, with existing investor Lightspeed Ventures participating. With the financing, Sequoia Partner is also joining Whisper’s board. Malik had a few weeks ago that the startup was raising from Sequoia, at a $100 million valuation, but our sources tell us the valuation could be slightly lower, in the $75 million to $100 million range. A source tells us that Whisper sold $15 million in a primary sale with a $60 million pre- and $75 million post-money valuation, while founders and early investors sold off an additional $6 million in a secondary offering. According to this information, the combined stock sales brought the total to $21 million. , Whisper, which launched last November, provides an easy way for users to add text to images and share them anonymously. It’s reminiscent of the long-running website , where users send anonymous secrets on postcards. But the app is decidedly mobile and provides features that allow users to respond to one another both publicly and privately. If Instagram is the highlight reel, then Whisper represents the behind-the-scenes of the human experience, eliciting confessional text like “I’m afraid my best friend is becoming my worst enemy”; “I wish I knew why I want what I want”; and images like the ones embedded in this post. Like many social networks, the Whisper app has been exceedingly popular with young users — those in the 18-24-year-old bracket. But while most applications in the last generation of social apps had been based on user identity, Whisper differentiates itself by making communications anonymous — a rejection of pervasive identity on par with Snapchat’s disappearing messages. Users either upload their own photos to Whisper or search via the app for those that exist on the Internet, and afterward can overlay text on top of them. The app surfaces the most popular secrets that users shared based on responses and “hearts” received, and also allows users to see which secrets have been shared from other users nearby. Whisper users can respond by creating and uploading their own secrets publicly, but the app also has a private messaging feature that users pay $5.99 a month for. Apparently, it’s that combination of virality and monetization that has investors interested in the app. According to Whisper is seeing 2.5 billion page views a month (which is more than ). And more than 40 percent of users create content on the app, with the average daily user visiting Whisper for 30 minutes. With Botha on board, Whisper will get help from a VC who is well-known for identifying great opportunities in social networking and mobile. Botha, who is the former CFO of PayPal, has gone on to invest in a series of startups with huge, high-profile exits, including YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram. He also sits on the boards of EventBrite, Square, TokBox, and Jawbone. The Whisper investment is notable because it will be Botha’s first investment since the Instagram and Tumblr acquisitions, and we all know how those went (sidenote: Botha will be next week). The new funding comes just a few months after Whisper had raised a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein participating. In the same way that Instagram was able to connect people through photos, Whisper has the opportunity to connect people through anonymity and shared experiences they wouldn’t normally share with the people they know in real life. And if Instagram has taught us anything, it’s that the power of a network built around tangible experiences can take on viral effects and one day be worth as much as $1 billion. We’ve reached out to Whisper who wouldn’t comment on the rumors.
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From Jailbreaks To App Store Awards, Developers Grow Up iPhone
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Matthew Panzarino
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“This is going to sound a little odd,” Ari Weinstein says, “but when I was a kid coding…was a lot harder.” is just 19. He’s about to start as a freshman at MIT after deferring for a year to do a little fooling around. And he’s been playing in Apple’s ecosystem — in one form or another — since he was 11. That was when he took an interest in the project and created an easier way to install the open-source operating system on Apple’s music player. Weinstein is just one of a growing group of young developers that are choosing Apple’s iOS platform, and specifically the iPhone, as the place where they cut their teeth. These young coders and designers use the iPhone from a young age and — when they get the urge — begin hacking and noodling on them. Eventually, they graduate to publishing apps, some garnering attention and awards from Apple. Young developers are already working on the apps that will end up on our home screens. And those apps aren’t simple student projects, they’re award winners that are well designed, well executed and well received. This is what the next generation of top developers who will be building the apps for everything in your life looks like — and they’re building for iOS. Android has long had a reputation for being difficult to design and develop for, but Google has done a lot to change that reputation over the last couple of years. It continues to introduce and its market-share is becoming a draw that many feel they can’t ignore. And there has been a surge of developers and designers like who are ‘discovering’ the platform and beginning to evangelize it. But the fact remains that some of the best young developers in the world prefer iOS and if Google wants to capture the hearts and minds of the coming generation of touch-interface craftspeople, then it needs to start young. The interest in hacking and extending Apple’s hardware set Weinstein up nicely to get involved with the iPhone when it popped onto the scene in 2007. With no native SDK or App Store, it was up to those with the desire and skills to crack the iPhone’s system partition to give everyone the ability to play in its normally off-limits playground. After developing the extremely popular iJailbreak tool out of his efforts to open up his iPod touch, Weinstein — one of the major forces in the iPhone jailbreak community. That’s when Weinstein and the other members of the team released a jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS, a little under a month after its release. Millions of people visited the site within the first couple of days. Now, four years later, Weinstein has released an app on the App Store called . It’s a way for you to transfer items from your iPhone to your Mac and vice versa. And, though I have reason to believe that Apple knows exactly who Weinstein is and where he got his start, it has featured the app on the Mac store and placed it in the ‘new and noteworthy’ section of the iOS store. Why? One reason is that it’s a genuinely useful app that has already made its way into my daily workflow. DeskConnect came out of a LinkedIn Intern hackathon after Weinstein found himself frustrated about how hard it was to move files and URLs between his phone and computer. He built the app and partnered with frequent collaborator Ben Feldman and designer Jay Moon — a freshman at Stanford — to release it on the store. The app is basic, but reliable, with a quick and clever system that sends your file to an intermediary server and then transfers it post-haste to any other instance of DeskConnect. That includes an iPhone app and a Mac menu bar icon. After experiencing some transfer delays initially — which Weinstein says are largely due to the servers being crushed by initial attention — it’s been cruising along quite well for me. There’s a general adage that developers prefer to create for the platforms that they use, and that holds true in the case of DeskConnect. Would Weinstein have created this app if he hadn’t been hooked early by iPod hacking and continued on with the iPhone? By his own admission, he’s always ‘loved iOS and the iPhone’ and wanted to create things with it. So, perhaps he would have written the app anyway, but the early infatuation with Apple’s hardware guaranteed that it strengthened Cupertino’s ecosystem, rather than anyone else’s. Oh, and that fooling around Weinstein was doing before MIT? Working out west for a WiFi startup as an intern. After 30 days as a grunt, the startup liked his work so much that they offered him a position and he stayed on for the rest of the year. The Apple Design Awards have been something of an icon among aspiring developers for years now. The award, which is symbolized by a smooth block of aluminum that features a subtly glowing Apple logo, has marked software that Apple feels is an example of what it wants developers in its ecosystem to build The ADA can be awarded to products that are beautiful to look at — or that are cleverly made — and is often used to bless apps that utilize Apple’s latest and greatest OS X and iOS features. won his first ADA this year — at age 16 — for . Shipped under the Basil Ltd mark and designed in conjunction with his partner , the app hit #1 on the productivity charts in under a day and featured in the App Store by Apple. “I think it was general [user experience] familiarity and really valuing the quality of UX,” says Orbuch of why Basil went to the iPhone for its premiere app. “I’d used an iPhone/iPod Touch for a while, and felt like I had a sense of, and really liked, the HIG [Apple’s design document that guides developers – ] in general.” “When I first conceptualized the sliding timeframe concept that would become Finish, I inherently thought about how it would work on an iPhone screen—it was just completely obvious. I never really considered anything else because of that familiarity, and the fact that everything would run perfectly on iPod Touch without any extra work is great too—iPod touches are huge with high schoolers, even though we’ve moved far beyond that now.” “There wan’t really a ton of “decision” to it up front,” he says. “It was just like, ‘obviously iOS, why wouldn’t we?'” Orbuch also touches on why they didn’t go to Android. He cites very little experience using it and the difficulty of predicting how apps will run on a variety of devices. “Looking back now, I think I shied away from Android because it just felt like too much of a black box. Besides hardware fragmentation and all that that there’s a bunch written about, I had very little experience using it and just wouldn’t have really known where to start, and there wasn’t the assurance of consistency in experience on everyone’s phone.” Orbuch acknowledges that there is a massive audience for Android, but notes that the testing procedures for making sure that Finish would work properly on the wide range of devices would have been prohibitive for the two-man team. “If something has a huge install base but you can only be confident that you can create great UX on a tiny percentage of that install base, the overall size is totally irrelevant—something I think is often ignored when saying how big Android’s numbers are.” In addition to the benefits of a focused array of devices that may not be as intimidating to new developers, the App Store also offers an unprecedented level of distribution for independent developers. They’ve always had the web, but there’s an insane amount of power in the App Store’s ability to funnel an audience — and importantly for sustainability, a paying audience — to apps from small teams. Orbuch also credits the fact that you can go live in nearly two hundred countries with minimal effort on the developer’s part as a prime benefit of the App Store. That kind of global distribution was difficult to achieve previously due to the complexity of payments and security. “Sure, there are plenty of frustrations re review guidelines, rejection, time for approval, etc,” he says. “To us, though, those are relatively minor annoyances…without a centralized store, there’s no way any of this could have happened.” And Basil isn’t the only studio that’s found acclaim on the App Store. is the founder of , an app studio that builds for others and markets its own apps on the App Store. Olson is also the recipient of an Apple Design Award, for his work on the app Grades 2, which was given the honors in 2011. Olson dreamed up the idea for , a calculator for necessary test scores, when he was a sophomore at UNC Charlotte. “When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, I knew or a fact this was the future,” says Olson. “I was big into PDAs as a kid and even helped a fellow design an art app for the Palm pilot when I was like 13. After Apple announced the iPod, I knew they wouldn’t stop at music. They had to make the ultimate PDA. With the iPhone, they did that and more. I was instantly sold.” Android was also considered and discarded by Olson “because Apple, more than any other company, has taste. Their culture revolves around great user experience. That’s the kind of culture I wanted to be part of.” Though he isn’t against Android, he says that several things prevent him from developing for the platform. Those include the fact that, in his opinion, Android doesn’t have the design-focused culture and tight-knit community that iOS does. Android, he feels, has also made it difficult to release successful paid apps with business models other than advertising. And, once again, he doesn’t use an Android device because he feels Apple’s product is superior. Olson credits the web for his first taste of being able to build things and get them out where people could use them right away, but says that the App Store changed a lot for the business. “The problem on the web was distribution and getting people to pay for stuff, which is a big reason the App Store appealed to me,” he says. “Millions of credit cards [are] ready to pay for good products.” “The iPhone is a perfect place for young developers,” he says. “The App Store is a marketplace where my apps can compete and win against bloated competition from bigger companies. The Apple developer community is small enough that you can get to know most people in a year or two online and at conferences like WWDC — which offers a great scholarship for students, by the way.” Because Apple fosters a strong focus on user experience, many developers are positive about the way that the App Store treats ‘standout’ apps. “All you need to do is build a great experience and have a little initiative to go out and get to know the influencers in the community and you can start to release successful apps,” says Olson. “The community is so great. We are all in this together and constantly help each other build more successful apps.” Ryan Orbuch also credits the distribution method and exposure of the App Store with the success of Finish so far. “The centralized distribution that you don’t really have with web gives a lot of scale potential if you can make something truly quality, and the overall meritocratic nature of how apple features apps — plus the amount of visibility that a feature can give helps to reinforce that,” says Orbuch. “Finish has been featured a bunch of times, and it’s the ultimate in credibility—it’s an empirical, inarguable thing thats especially huge at this age.” That being said, there are still many challenges for the App Store waiting in the wings. For one, regardless of the success that some have had, discoverability remains a problem. Apple is still to better surface ‘deserving’ apps, but thousands more are added every week and there are no signs that finding good ones among the bad will get any easier. Developer education is also at the forefront of the battle when it comes to Apple ensuring that there will continue to be talented young developers that use its platform. “There is room for better ways for kids to learn programming,” says Ari Weinstein. He acknowledges sites like Codecademy, PeepCode and others. And, indeed, MIT has its own Open Courseware resources which offers basic programming instruction. But, says Weinstein, there is a serious lack of programs that connect the dots between basic programming skills and actually building a complex app. There’s still a lot of room for programs that fill the gap between those basic skills and ‘how to put it all together’ in app form. “Programming, even outside of apps, is a great skill,” Weinstein adds. “Even if you’re not using it for computer science. So many problems in the world can be solved with technology…I’m really interested in that.” Olson agrees that there is a lot to learn, and that it isn’t a light job. “Learning to code for the iPhone was by no means easy coming from a web development background. It took two failed attempts before I was able to finally break through and learn it,” he says. “The idea of Grades was what motivated me to finally buckle down and learn it. It took a good four months to get comfortable with the platform.” “But as a whole,” he says, “Apple has such great developer tools and resources. They also pour lots of time into their Human Interface Guidelines to help make great interfaces too.” And, he adds, “the opportunity is so vast to those who are willing to learn the stuff and put in the work.” There is a massive opportunity here for Apple, and for competition like Google, to foster the next generation of developers with better education programs and learning tools. Apple already offers student scholarships for its developer conference and extensive online guides, but a true ‘school for developers’ would be an enormous feather in its cap. And it would help solidify it as the platform of choice for young developers obsessed with producing high-quality work. I’ve written before about growing up with touch interfaces, and how the next generation of users will be comfortable moving beyond the basic conventions that most of us are just getting used to. But it goes beyond the consumers, it’s also about the next generation of builders. The iPhone and the App Store democratized and accelerated independent software publishing in a massive way. It put college students and hackers on (relatively) even footing alongside giants of software like Microsoft or Google. A distribution platform with an audience as large as the App Store is a pretty incredible tool for these developers. Especially when you consider that when I was 15 the Internet had roughly 40 million users, and Apple just announced that 600 million iOS devices had been sold in total. Each one with access to the App Store. Web proponents will no doubt point out that it was the original indie platform, but the App Store educated customers on software and made them comfortable paying for it with a tap. Just as Amazon made shopping online a comfortable household activity — Apple did the same with the App Store. Google has also made concerted efforts to approach and include young developers with its and offers an in conjunction with schools and other organizations. And it’s good that it is also taking fostering young developers seriously, because it’s the next generation of coders growing up using these devices that will shape the future of its platform, as they have already begun to do for Apple’s. Image Credit: /Flickr CC
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SourceAudio, A Platform For Selling Licensed Music, Raises $1.2M
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup aiming to connect buyers and sellers of licensed music, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Grotz, who previously co-founded , said the company isn’t building a consumer music store, but rather a platform that will allow musicians and music companies to build their own sites where the people who are looking to license music for their ads, TV shows, or whatever can search for tracks. Normally, a publisher would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a site to host music on their own, Grotz said. SourceAudio, on the other hand, has built what he called a “unified platform.” Customers can customize the look of their site, but the underlying technology is the same. The company says it already hosts 600 catalogs with 5 million tracks from 3,400 music labels. It charges based on the number of tracks hosted, with pricing starting at $29 each month. Grotz said all the music in the system could also provide an opportunity for large media companies to tap into the full library. The long-term vision, he added, is to become “the iTunes or Amazon of the multi-billion dollar global music licensing business.” The round was led by Emerson Investment Group, which invests primarily in public companies.
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The Bitcoin Revolution Hits TechCrunch Disrupt Next Week
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Once a consuming hobby for a coterie of anarcho-libertarians and and others predicting an econo-apocalypse, Bitcoin started crossing over into the mainstream in a big way this year, . While the math-based currency is trading at about half its peak U.S. dollar value this year, there are startups betting that this was just a temporary spike and then correction. They’re predicting that Bitcoin is still on a long path toward changing the way transactions and micro-payments are handled online. The currency allows for irreversible and anonymous transactions without the need for a third-party facilitator like a bank. So at Disrupt this year, we’re bringing together a panel to chart out where math-based currencies might head next. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss quietly amassed what amounted to be about 1 percent of all bitcoins in circulation earlier this year and are setting up an exchange-traded fund around the service. Outside of running one of the more influential bioinformatics startups in the Valley, Balaji Srinivasan also runs the Stanford Bitcoin Group. Also joining the panel is Naval Ravikant, the long-time investor who went on to create and run AngelList. He is also a big Bitcoin believer. If you’re stoked to attend, we have and can head here. Students can also come be a part of Disrupt SF. We have limited student tickets available, so be sure to to find out how to get yours.
Cameron Winklevoss is a principal of Winklevoss Capital Management, a private investment firm that partners with a select number of early stage companies to provide not just capital, but a full service approach to driving growth. The company’s portfolio includes Hukkster, an online shopping tool for sale alerts; SumZero, an online community of investment professionals; and Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency that uses peer-to-peer technology for frictionless payments. Cameron graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Economics and received his MBA from Oxford University. He is also an NCAA rowing champion and member of the 2008 Olympic team.
Tyler Winklevoss is a principal of Winklevoss Capital Management, a private investment firm that partners with a select number of early stage companies to provide not just capital, but a full service approach to driving growth. The company’s portfolio includes Hukkster, an online shopping tool for sale alerts; SumZero, an online community of investment professionals; and Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency that uses peer-to-peer technology for frictionless payments. Tyler graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Economics and received his MBA from Oxford University. He is also an NCAA rowing champion and member of the 2008 Olympic team.
Balaji S. Srinivasan is the co-founder of Counsyl, a genomics startup that began in a Stanford dorm room and now tests more than 2.5% of all US births. Counsyl won the Wall Street Journal’s Innovation Award for Medicine, was named one of Scientific American’s Top 10 World Changing Ideas, raised more than $65M in funding from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund among others, and has become one of the largest clinical genome centers in the world. Prior to co-founding Counsyl, Dr. Srinivasan taught data mining, statistics, and computational biology in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. He holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford. He was an NDSEG, NSF, and VIGRE fellow and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Reviews Genetics.
Naval Ravikant is the founder of Angellist. Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList.
Previously he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace). Previously, he was a Venture Partner at August Capital and led investments in Scintera, Neopath, Technorati, Microdisplay, DeviceScape, and Mimosa. Startups Naval has advised in areas ranging from founding to product design to fundraising including iPivot (sold to Intel), Intrinsic Graphics, Andale, XFire (sold to Viacom), HedgeStreet, Engage, Photo.net, LoyaltyLab, Jaman, Hive7, Dulance (sold to Google), Bix (sold to Yahoo!). Ravikant, both Winklevosses and Srinivasan join a full Disrupt line-up including speakers like: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Marc Benioff, Ron Conway, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Vinod Khosla and yet to be announced.
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Samsung’s Galaxy Gear Is Here And Better Than Expected
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Chris Velazco
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The first time I caught wind of the , I laughed heartily. Of course Samsung was trying to make a smartwatch — what haven’t they tried to make over the past few years? It didn’t help that some preliminary reports may have done more harm than good for the Gear’s early reputation. Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting much. But now, after spending a little time with one on my wrist, I’m convinced. I was wrong… but not entirely. Credit where credit is due, Samsung knows how to put a gadget together. I was initially wary of the size, mostly because those pointed to a totally gargantuan device that didn’t actually seem fit for human consumption. But, between the plastic wristband and a surprisingly light main body, I could easily imagine myself forgetting I was even wearing a Gear. It’s definitely heavier than my Pebble, but not nearly enough for me to complain about the difference. Rest easy, folks, your wrists will be well-tended to. Still, the Gear is hardly the sleekest thing you’ll see on store shelves — its aesthetics have more in common with those bulky sports watches than something you’d wear to a nice dinner, a sense of style that only gets reinforced by the built-in pedometer and readily available fitness apps (but more on them later). It’s also worth noting that the camera jutting out of the Gear’s band looks ridiculous on certain colored devices, but it’s just a fashion risk you’re going to have to take if you want to be able to boss your phone around from your wrist. And that 1.63-inch AMOLED screen is no slouch, either. It’s sufficiently readable under harsh event lighting, and that 300×300 panel is perfectly serviceable. Speaking of serviceable, the 1.9-megapixel camera seemed to work just fine — you snap commemorative shots by tapping the screen — but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for quality once you get them off the Gear. There’s still the whole battery thing to worry about, too, though. Samsung says people can get about a day’s worth of “regular use” out of the thing, but no one I’ve spoken to has been able to give me a firm idea of what “regular use” actually means, and I spotted at least one dead Gear during that post-event scrum. Hopefully Samsung had the forethought to under-promise and over-deliver on that front or else this font of positivity will dry up real quick. But, as always, hardware is only a part of the equation. Right now, the Galaxy Gear’s software is simultaneously its biggest liability and its greatest advantage. For one, it’s sort of difficult to use. Navigating the Gear is all based around swipes and taps, and the units I messed around with didn’t always seem capable of keeping up with my commands. Transitions between pages could be sluggish and jerky unless you made it a point to move really slowly. S Voice too was similarly jerky, though in fairness we were in a crowded room full of gadget nerds clamoring for a turn with the thing. And, perhaps most troubling, the Gear didn’t always fire up that screen when I lifted my arm to peer at it. So yes, Samsung still has plenty of fine-tuning to do, and I’m willing to forgive some pre-release hiccups as long as they get sorted out before launch. So why the praise then? Because Samsung managed to coax more than a few developers into creating simplified versions of their apps for the Gear. There are the usual suspects like RunKeeper (which keeps a running tally of your time, among other things), and more curious fare like Path (which lets you create new moments for your feed instantly) and Vivino (I wish I had a wine bottle around to scan). Samsung says it’ll have about 70 such apps ready in time for the Gear’s launch, but prolonged developer support is what’s ultimately going to make or break the Gear as a platform. But wouldn’t you know it, there’s a caveat there, too. You can only have 10 apps loaded onto the Gear at any one time, which is much more of a hassle than it seems. I was ready to completely dismiss the Galaxy Gear as a fool’s errand, a knee-jerk reaction to some persistent rumors made by a company that sometimes seems to have more money than sense. And even now, I’m not completely convinced that Samsung is on the right track. Limiting compatibility to a single device (even one that’s probably going to sell in ridiculous quantities) seems awfully problematic given Samsung’s generally slow record for software updates. But having said all that, I really think Samsung is onto something here. For the briefest of moments while playing with the Gear, I felt a pang of jealousy. My Pebble is pretty damned basic by smartwatch standards, and I thought what limited functionality it brought to the table was plenty for me. But now I can have a package that does much, much, much more for a negligible increase in weight. How is a strident dork like me supposed to pass that up? I probably can’t. The bigger question is whether regular people latch onto this thing the way Samsung is hoping it does. For a gadget that, in exchange for $299, lets them accomplish a fraction of what they could if they had just pulled their phones out of their pockets? We’ll see. [slideshow include=”872296,872297,872298,872299,872235″]
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The Death Of Nintendo Has Been Greatly Under-Exaggerated
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MG Siegler
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I love Nintendo. I love Nintendo. I love Nintendo. I feel the need to say that over and over again to begin with because this post will inevitably be read by some as some sort of anti-Nintendo screed. I know that because every single time anything critical of Nintendo, groups of folks reveal themselves that make Android and iPhone diehards look like placid hippies. Those people are going to hate this post. But it needs to be written. Both because I do love Nintendo and because if they don’t change course — and fast — I’m ultimately going to be proven right. I wasted so much breath blowing on Nintendo cartridges as a kid, so now it’s time to waste some breath trying to jolt them out of the death spiral they now find themselves in. And make no mistake, they are in the beginning of a death spiral. “Nintendo is fine!” “They’re profitable!” The rhetoric out of the Nintendo apologists camp is as worrisome as it is predictable. See: Nokia and BlackBerry (né RIM) as prime recent examples of the problems with this mentality. See any number of companies throughout the history of ever for others. You’re profitable and a healthy business until you’re not. The mistake often made is to think that dramatic shifts in business can’t happen quickly. They can happen quickly. And Nintendo is in a market that is experiencing such a shift. As anticipated by some ( ), the Wii U is a dud. It’s actually much worse than a dud. As of right now, it’s a colossal failure. Maybe some key holiday releases alleviate the issue. But the fact is that it’s a poor concept accentuated by poor hardware. If Nintendo was smart, they’d write it off right now. But they won’t. They’ll wait. And wait. And wait. They’ll cite history as their guide that their consoles can take a while to become profitable. But they’ll be wrong this time. Meanwhile, the Nintendo 2DS will come out and will probably sell quite well at first thanks to a well-timed Pokemon release. But all the 2DS really is is an admission that the 3DS is ultimately a failure. “But! But! But! Profitable!” Sure, a few years after release. Nintendo isn’t releasing the 2DS just for the hell of it. They realize the metrics that really matter: that the 3DS is tracking roughly in terms of sales. That’s not only not a good trend, it’s a devastating one (after a few early price cuts, to boot). A couple more of those and we have a company on the brink. “But! ” The concept of “long-term thinking” is what people always cite when something is failing right now. The issue here is that, again, Nintendo doesn’t actually have a lot of time to fix what ails them. Sure, no one likes the knee-jerk reaction, the quick fix. But sitting around and “waiting it out” is far worse in this case. “But! But! Cash hoard!” Oh. Right. You know who else has a cash hoard? . It’s doing them a lot of good right now. It will help with their sale price, that’s about it. In other news, Steve Ballmer was sitting on his cash hoard when he was kicked out the door… The excuses go on. The key here is that Nintendo is on the path of failure for a couple very simple reasons: It’s hard to say which is worse. I’ll go with number two because I do think Nintendo could weather number one — as they have in the past — for quite a long time. Nintendo no longer is just competing with the others in their direct space — meaning gaming consoles and handhelds — meaning Sony and Microsoft. They are competing with every single smartphone and tablet currently on the market. And soon, they’ll likely be competing with a number of other set-top boxes as well entering the gaming space. Nintendo’s greatest weakness is the illusion (bolstered by years of reality) that they have years to figure out their competition and outlast them. They do not. Apple and all the various Android OEMs release new hardware — if not more often. This will ultimately end the successful runs of Sony and Microsoft in the gaming space as well, unless they change course. For years now, Nintendo’s lone bright-spot has been handhelds. The DS was insanely popular. But the world has changed. Now the DS, the 3DS, and the 2DS are just another device a kid has to carry around (and that parents have to buy). Why do that when your ? “Because those games suck.” Maybe. But they’re quickly getting better. And they’re far, far, far cheaper (both to make and to buy). And far, far, far more ubiquitous. As Benchmark Capital partner ( ) Mitch Lasky recently : To quote my six year old daughter, barely looking up from her iPad: ‘What’s a Nintendo?'” There is no question that Nintendo’s strength is in its IP — its games. But that strength is being over-emphasized by those — like me — who grew up playing those amazing Nintendo games. . . . . . The list goes on and on. But unless those characters are constantly updated in tales on relevant consoles, they will fade. It’s sad, but true. “What’s a Nintendo?” That’s why we keep hearing the calls for Nintendo to make games for iOS. It’s the OS behind at least three relevant gaming machines: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch (and soon, ). The immediate reaction from the Nintendo crowd is that this is blasphemy, the equivalent of saying that Apple should license its software to third-parties. Imagine this possibility: it’s a totally different situation. As John Gruber : Also, Mathis’s analogy to 1990s Microsoft analysts seems inapt. He’s correct that it was common advice then for Apple to do what Microsoft was doing: license their operating system rather than make their own hardware. Microsoft is the most successful company in the industry, therefore Apple should do what Microsoft does and just license software to commodity hardware makers. But if we applied that line of thinking to Apple analysts giving advice to Nintendo today, would not the advice be for Nintendo to stay the course? Apple is the most successful company in the industry, therefore Nintendo should continue doing what Apple does by making its own hardware and software. The advice isn’t the same because nothing is the same. It’s a sexy and seemingly straight-forward connection to make, but it’s deceiving. And by the way, Apple didn’t get to where it is today because of the Mac or their Mac OSes. It’s because of the iPod, the iPhone, and iPad. Which is really the key for Nintendo too. On their current trajectory, I think that Nintendo end up releasing games on smartphones. But I fear it will be more in the mold of Sega, when it’s already out of the game, so to speak. The only way Nintendo really thrives — and I agree with the Nintendo diehards here — is if they pull off something truly special. Nintendo needs to make a case for why stand-alone gaming should still exist. I’m not sure this is possible, mind you. But I think this is the only way they exit our current era as a leader, rather than a has-been. The Wii seemed close, but ultimately turned out to be pretty much the definition of a fad. Still, that thinking-outside-the-box allowed them to — albeit briefly — surpass both Sony and Microsoft. The Wii U is not thinking-outside-the-box. It’s trying to shove their IP . It seems like they took one look at the touch-based landscape and figured they had to make a move. The issue here is that their product is so inferior to the products made by Apple and others that it’s just sort of sad. Nintendo not only swung for the fences with this product, they called their shot beforehand, swung-and-missed, and spun around and fell on their asses. Total disaster. Nintendo needs to get back to the NES and SNES era. Hell, even N64 would do. They need to lead by being actually ahead in the gaming space, not by pretending they are because of their first-rate IP. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s possible. Again, the competition is no longer just other console makers on their five, six, or seven year cycles. It’s Apple and Samsung with one year — or six month — cycles. It’s a whole new world. So how does Nintendo compete in that world? I wish I knew. My best advice is to team up with a current tablet/smartphone manufacturer and make the best — and I do mean — hardware for gaming. Speed. Buttons. Responsiveness. Definition. Clarity. Etc. Ideally, they’d do this themselves, of course, but I no longer have faith in Nintendo being able to compete in this . Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t — again, are kids going to carry around two devices? Or, even better, Nintendo needs to come up with something that neither I, nor anyone else reading this, could possibly come up with. The next wave of gaming. Think more: . (Side note: immediate thought of — the horror, the horror.) Or they need to sell to Apple. I still believe Nintendo could thrive as a game studio allowed to run independently under a larger parent — think: Pixar inside of Disney. (Remember that too!) If Apple wants software to move hardware, it’s hard to imagine a better buy. And it would allow them to use a nice chunk of their overseas cash hoard to boot! Yeah, yeah: “Nintendo will never sell.” “Never” has a funny way of morphing into “not yet” in certain situations — see: the point of this post. All I know is that Nintendo’s current trajectory is one towards failure. The diehards refuse to believe it because they seem to mistake the company’s stubbornness for steadfastness. “Just you wait,” they say. Meanwhile, those diehard Nokia and BlackBerry supporters are still waiting. Others seem to believe that the company has an Apple-like comeback in them in this new era of gaming. We all forget because we all just watched it happen. Nintendo isn’t just failing because their hardware is sub-par. They’re failing because they continue to try to re-tool the Model T while the competition is building Ferraris. Meanwhile, those they don’t yet perceive as competition are building Teslas. And others still are out there building rocketships. All the while, Nintendo is sleeping at night on their pillow of profits dreaming like Mario . This all adds up to a rude awakening. And — mark my words — it will happen. The earliest memories I have of any electronics is of my first Nintendo. And that has made watching the company these past few years all the more frustrating. Even more frustrating than blowing on those old NES cartridges.
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Online Travel Marketplace Vacatia Raises $5M To Simplify Buying And Selling Timeshares
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Stephanie Yang
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With Airbnb, HomeAway, Roomorama and plenty of others, there’s no shortage of vacation rental platforms for travelers to browse. Add to the list , a secondary marketplace aimed at timeshare owners who want to sell their fractional interests to other travelers. The startup has raised $5 million in seed funding from investors, including , CEO of Zillow; , former CEO of Expedia; , Trulia board member; , former president of LoopNet and more. The idea behind Vacatia is to provide an active, open and liquid marketplace for professionally managed resort rentals, CEO and founder Keith Cox tells me. While buying timeshares from developers is no problem for most people, owners who want to sell often have a hard time finding buyers, Cox says. “If we could create a very strong platform where buyers and sellers could engage each other and make for a liquid marketplace … then if we can activate that secondary market, it would bring more equilibrium and efficiency to that market,” he tells me. To list a property online, Vacatia users create a free account, upload information about the shares they are selling and publish the listing at the price they want. Vacatia will then add information about the resort to further simplify the listing process. Users can also elevate their listings by submitting additional information for Vacatia’s verification process. Once a buyer and seller are connected, a seller can either accept, counter or reject a buyer’s offer. If the seller accepts, both parties are introduced to a title company to take then through the escrow and closing process. Vacatia then takes a cut of the profits from the seller based on the sale amount (if the timeshare sold for $10,000, Vacatia would take $1,000). There are several other platforms for listing and selling timeshares, including , and . But Cox tells me Vacatia wants to differentiate itself by maintaining a free and open marketplace for all sellers, buyers, brokers and developers. Vacatia has implemented a preferred broker program, which discounts its sales fees by half for participating brokers. Right now Vacatia only allows resale listings, but Cox says he wants to expand into listings from primary developers and homeowners associations so users can buy directly from developers. Additional investors include , , , , , Douglas Dillard, Jr., and firms Maveron, Bee Partners, Peterson Ventures and Meyer Ventures.
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BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Says The Site Is Profitable, With 85M Uniques And 300+ Employees
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Anthony Ha
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founder and CEO Jonah Peretti that laid out some details about the site’s growth, as well as its plans for the coming year. For one thing, Peretti said that BuzzFeed posted “record profit in August” and that the company has “gone from zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees.” As far as I can tell, that’s the first time Peretti has acknowledged that BuzzFeed is profitable, aside from in summer 2011 that was followed by a period of aggressive hiring. Profitability is particularly impressive since it all comes from custom ad campaigns (such as ), rather than all the other stuff that online publications (including TechCrunch) do to make money. This year BuzzFeed will run between 600 and 700 programs, Peretti said, compared to 265 last year. Regardless of whether you love, hate or love-hate BuzzFeed (I like it, and not just because works there), I think it’s a rare feat to build a profitable media business of this size purely online. Traffic has been growing, as well, with 85 million unique visitors in August, which Peretti said is three times bigger than a year ago and eight times bigger than two years ago. (Just to double-check, I asked comScore for its numbers on BuzzFeed, and it reported that the site saw 31.9 million global unique visitors on desktop in July, up 133 percent from July 2012.) Peretti added that even though BuzzFeed will continue to experiment, there are some avenues that it definitely won’t pursue: We will NOT launch a BuzzFeed TV show, radio station, cable network, or movie franchise – we’ll leave that to the legacy media and Hollywood studios. We will NOT launch a white labeled version of BuzzFeed to power other sites or a BuzzFeed social network – we’ll leave that to pure tech companies in Silicon Valley. We will NOT launch a print edition or a paywall or a paid conference business – we’ll leave that to other publications.
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TC Droidcast Episode 5: Samsung Galaxy Gear And Note 3, Sony’s Crazy Cameras And The KitKat Crunch Heard Round The World
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Darrell Etherington
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We’re sure glad the weekly falls on a Wednesday, because this was a big one for Android. Samsung and Sony both had events at IFA in Berlin and revealed new hardware, and we’re joined by none other than ‘s as a special guest this week to break it all down. The is probably the most buzzed about news of the week, and the announcement held a few surprises . Samsung also revealed the , with a bigger screen yet smaller footprint, and Sony showed off that make your pocket camera a pro shooter, along with a . We also get into (yes, the candy brand) to secure licensing rights for the name of the next version of Android (4.4), and everyone comes away hungrier than they were before.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by .
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Topsy, Now With Every Tweet From 2006 On, Has Other Social Media Indexes In The Works
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Sarah Perez
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Twitter has established itself as top social networking destination, mentioned the same breath as sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, as well as a go-to destination for breaking news. But as a search engine that could be the Google for real-time media, Twitter still fails. For Twitter data partner , that was an opportunity. If the web is now being cobbled together by status updates and hashtagged posts as much as it is by PageRanked websites, then a lot is being lost. In Twitter’s case, the company has only been scratching the surface of a history of tweets stretching back to 2006. An archive, to date, containing some 425 million tweets. Topsy, one of only Certified Resellers of Twitter’s data, says it has now indexed every tweet ever posted – something Twitter doesn’t do, and couldn’t easily reproduce due the infrastructure and costs involved. (Topsy has raised $35 million in venture capital since 2008 to get to this point, the company says.) Meanwhile, today’s Twitter is more interested in the “now,” and the “recent,” not the distant past. A visit to pulls up tweet results that only stretch back a matter of days, not months, and certainly not years. And with every passing season, that time frame compresses even more. Twitter’s index currently only goes back a week, . In , it stretched back a week and a half. Before that, it was a month. Topsy was able to dig into Twitter’s archive all the way back to 2010, with an expansion announced in August. Now, it can go back the full seven years. That makes it the largest and most comprehensive archive of Twitter’s data that has ever existed for free, public access. Outside of Twitter, only and have had access to this data before – but it was not in a format everyday users could access and search. And it definitely wasn’t free. According to Topsy co-founder and CTO Vipul Ved Prakash, the ability to index every tweet from Twitter’s beginning onwards – now 425 billion items across 3,500 servers – was a big data feat. “The third generation of our indexing technology has increased the density of the number of documents we can index on a server, so that means we can now run a massive index that includes every tweet,” and, he adds, Topsy will eventually be able to scale that to trillions of documents. Topsy’s competitors not building infrastructure-based businesses, Prakash challenges, won’t be able to keep up. Though companies often like to make bold claims such as this, there is some truth to that statement. Today’s web is changing. Twitter, for example, is now pumping out some 400 million to 600 million new tweets daily, each of which becomes indexed on Topsy within 150 milliseconds. Put another way: the amount of data that Twitter will produce between now and this time next year is more than every tweet it has produced to date. And when you also take Facebook into account, you realize the web Google understands is now just a slice. “The amount of data being created on Twitter plus Facebook today is more than the data being created on the rest of the web” Prakash explains. “Social data has become the bigger public corpus.” (There’s your answer to “ ?”) And if the social web is now the larger web, then it’s not surprising that Topsy’s ambitions expand beyond Twitter. The company’s technology is already capable of indexing every public page on other social media sites, like Facebook, in addition to links users tweet. It also has an archive of all of Google+ public posts. “We’re building some indexes in the background that will be available in the future,” Prakash hints regarding Topsy’s future plans. However, he declined to talk in detail about what the company had built in terms of a Facebook index, saying it was “unreleased,” noting that “public pages are accessible publicly” and that “if we’re creating value for a social network – if it makes good business sense – then we will have deeper access to data.” Topsy’s value to social media networks, like Twitter (or potentially others), is about the opportunity of what can be done with the data after collection, like offering detailed stats around the data, similar to what it does now for tweets. Topsy can count how many times a term like “Obama” was ever mentioned on the network, or inform hedge funds how users feel about the new iPhone. Brands can monitor their social media presence, to figure out how to better target ads or influencers. Journalists can do story research. And so on. “Processing the exhaust of social networks is a different kind of business that the business the social networks are in,” Prakash says. Twitter is concerned with building a publishing platform, and monetizing engagement around tweets, not necessarily in providing analysis of its archives. Though it has a history of moving into businesses its ecosystem partners once led, Prakash is not concerned that Twitter will do so with it because it complements Twitter, but doesn’t replace it. Still, Topsy has ended up in a symbiotic relationship with Twitter – it pays an undisclosed fee for API access (the “firehose” of Twitter data), but Twitter also pays Topsy through a separate contractual agreement in order to build special tools like its or , for example. Meanwhile, Topsy’s analytics customers pay $1,000/month per seat for access to Topsy, and API customers pay based on the amount of data that’s returned. Maybe one day Twitter will think that’s an interesting business it would like to be in itself? And if Topsy’s infrastructure can’t be easily duplicated, would Twitter like to just acquire Topsy, then? “There’s some possibility of that happening,” Prakash admits, but claims the two companies haven’t discussed this possibility. For now, Topsy is burning capital as it scales, while declining to talk customer numbers, revenues or even percentage growth. Longer term, a historical archive of social media is valuable may be value to specific businesses and marketers, but whether or not everyday, mainstream users will feel the same is still in question. That could change over time, though. “In the next 10 years, social media could start looking like the internet…it’s a different ecosystem, where you have big silos of data, but a new market is forming here,” says Prakash. “Our ambition is to have every public social post in our index.” Blogging! — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) I’ve got a secret dream to one day be a Startup Battlefield judge — Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) Jaiku? What did twitter ever do to you? One addiction is enough for me anyway! — Sarah Perez (@sarahintampa) not using twitter, foo’ — Eric Rosser Eldon (@eldon)
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Alex Wilhelm
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Party At Disrupt
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Jordan Crook
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As a man named R. Kelly once said, “After the show, it’s the after party. And after the party, it’s the hotel lobby.” So goes the story of this year’s from September 9 – September 11, where for the very first time we’ll be offering standalone tickets to the Disrupt after-parties which are available to the general public. In the past, Disrupt after-parties were only available to Disrupt attendees. A ticket to Disrupt costs anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000, and grants attendees access to the Hackathon demoes, the full three-day conference as well as each night’s party. However, if you can’t make it out to the whole conference and simply want to hang out at one (or all) of the parties, you can purchase tickets to each. you can head . In either case, there will be booze, good conversation, and a high concentration of geeks in one place. The choice is yours. @ hosted by New Relic
@ hosted by SAP
@ hosted by Auction.com
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Skout Borks Its Code, Spams Its Users, Cops To The Error And Apologizes
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Alex Wilhelm
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Skout is a mobile app that wants to . It’s raised and is more than half a decade old. It also had a recent spate of spamming-the-hell-out-of-its-users that it has now publicly apologized for. It’s an episode worth digging into. A over for dinner complained that Skout had sent a message, using her name and such, to a friend of hers, who had asked about it. She hadn’t sent the note herself, making the situation odd. Was Skout sending out messages under the names of its users to drive engagement? Ironically, her friend sent her the same note, also unwittingly. Something was afoot. My friend’s inbox had a problem that was now familiar: It contained dozens of the same message that she had “sent” her friend and that he had sent to her. The same note, again and again, from other users. [gallery ids="872246,872248,872247"] This had the appearance of Skout essentially spamming its users using other user profiles to drive activity. We’ll get to intent and cause in a moment, but whatever the case, the situation drive engagement. My friend logged back in, as did her compatriot, and here we are now writing about Skout. So, what happened? According to Skout, this is an episode of the Honest Fuckup. Following a bit of email, Skout that it had noticed the episode via my comments, and had essentially just screwed up quite publicly: What’s up with the What’s up messages? Turns out we had shipped the wrong code from our internal testing environment. This has now been corrected [..] The message that actually got sent out was “What’s up!”. We understand this was confusing and have corrected the message today. It was never meant to say “What’s up!”, and is a total SNAFU on our end. We work hard and long hours to make Skout better, faster and more fun — for you guys. Sometimes moving fast introduces bugs, such as this one. And I’m glad we were able to correct it fast. Harumph. Some of this feels off. A company with Skout’s scale certainly tracks its metrics. It must have noticed the spike in messages being sent. Surely it saw that they were all the same. It claims to have not noticed until I emailed them: “Big thanks to who notified us about this!” Odd. Whatever the case, Skout has copped to a large public mistake, which should be commended in a small sense, even if we perhaps lack the full story behind the incident. Why does Skout matter? I haven’t used the product except in the context of this story, but Andreessen Horowitz is perhaps the smartest money in tech at the moment: Companies attached to it are frankly more interesting by association. Also, with $22 million from the crew at a16z, you would probably think that this sort of mistake would not occur. Asleep at the wheel or mendacious, I can’t tell you, but if you do Skout, you probably won’t get any more spam of this ilk again. Skout provided TechCrunch with a follow-up statement that is worth reading: At Skout, our community comes first. With millions of highly engaged users from Hong Kong to NYC, we take great pride in treating our members with the highest respect. The only way to build a long term sustainable network, like Skout — is to stay true and focused on the vision that connecting people with each other will create a better world, and provide a delightful experience in that process. Intentionally spamming our own users would not only go against our standards, but also be incredibly shortsighted. And that is something we would never do. I’m moving my view of the situation into the “honest mistake” category following continued discussions with the firm. And, public points to Skout for taking the issue head on.
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Groopt Revamps Its Collaboration Tools As It Shifts Focus To Nonprofits
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Anthony Ha
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Startup is hoping to become the platform that nonprofits and member-based organizations use to both build their websites and communicate/collaborate with members. I actually , and the vision wasn’t all that different. It started out as a collaboration tool for fraternities and sororities, and at the time it was trying to expand to serve any large group. However, CEO Patrick Allen told me recently that the team soon realized, “We need to figure out our niche. We can’t just be a group platform for everybody.” So Allen said the company cut back its spending and shut down the existing product (it continued to operate a website development business to bring in revenue) to focus on a new version of the product built specifically for nonprofits. Why nonprofits and similar organizations? Allen elaborated via email: Our nonprofit clients told us how painful their database solutions were and how it was impacting their ability to grow; they’re too complex, they cost too much and they deliver far too little. If the non-profit sector can snag even 1% of GDP from the for profit sector… that’s $150 billion extra dollars flowing where it’s needed most. Groopt currently offers two main products — Groopt Communicate and Groopt Websites. Groopt Communicate allows organizations to send targeted messages to their members via text or email, schedule events and send reminders, conduct polls, and more. (Allen seemed particularly proud of the iPhone and Android apps, which now include a full mobile calendar for groups.) Groopt Websites, meanwhile, allows users to work with the Groopt design team to build their own website, no coding required.
from on . There’s a free version of the service, then the paid plans start at $4.95 per month. Groopt is also offering TechCrunch readers . The company’s next step is to launch manage their membership, events, and fundraising — Allen said that’s coming soon. The wording of this post has been tweaked to more accurately reflect the features of Groopt’s products. Also, I incorrectly described Groopt as being solely focused on nonprofits — Allen said it’s actually trying to serve nonprofits and other member-based organizations.
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ZappRx Lands $1M To Rethink Prescription Processing With A Pharmacy-Agnostic Mobile Checkout Platform
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Rip Empson
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Today, technology is in the process of transforming healthcare. The whole nine years: From software, medicine and insurance to fitness, care delivery and the very science behind all of it. By now, this probably sounds like a familiar refrain, and for good reason. s, Quantified Self-inspired wearable tech, social health communities or new digital medicines like sensors and “smart pills,” change is coming fast. Of course, future promise notwithstanding, big problems remain. Outdated business models, misaligned incentives and archaic infrastructure abound in healthcare. The system’s focus is shifting from treatment to prevention and towards a patient-centric model, towards better outcomes and lower costs but progress is slow. Ask ZappRx founder Zoe Barry about the inefficiency and need for better tech in healthcare, and she’ll probably point you in the direction of your local pharmacy. Most people have experienced firsthand how frustrating the simple process of filling and picking up a prescription can be. Usually, it starts with a long line, before you learn that there’s been a miscommunication between pharmacist and your doctor, or that you don’t have health insurance, there’s a problem — oh wait, everything’s fine, just wait over there for 10 minutes. The whole process is slow, dumb, inefficient and hasn’t changed much since the Millard Fillmore administration. Barry founded ZappRx after witnessing a college student looking to fill prescriptions before heading back to school be subjected to an unusually inept and frustrating version of the Pharmacy Shuffle. The young woman was even attempting to pick up an ePrescription, but still, the process failed. Yes, doctors are increasingly turning to ePrescribing solutions to digitize the process, but how much good does an electronic prescription do if it’s being used on top of archaic infrastructure and one-way APIs? The data-flow is still pretty much one-sided. Spend 10 minutes in your local pharmacy and you’ll see most prescription verification, confirmations, ordering, fulfilling and so on happen over the phone or via the fax machine. Just as Y Combinator and Rock Health grad, Eligible, wants to do with APIs to help reduce the time it takes for hospitals and insurance companies to confirm coverage and eligibility (for surgery and other procedures), Barry has built ZappRx to take the giant pain in the ass out of pharmacy visits. Recently, I’ve begun to notice what has seemed like a step in the right direction. Some of the big pharmacy chains now offer mobile apps to help people manage their prescriptions. My local Walgreens, for example, sends me SMS alerts when a prescription is ready to be picked up. It’s a step in the right direction, sure, but a small one. In reality, consumers don’t want to get roped into one particular app or proprietary system. They want to download one app and use it any pharmacy they go to, and that’s what ZappRx offers. Furthermore, most of the major pharmacies offer little to no security in their mobile apps, if they do offer them. This is another place Barry believes ZappRx can offer a better solution, as the startup’s platform and apps are HIPAA-compliant, meaning you get control of your data — not your pharmacy — and you won’t find ads, coupons or promotions sitting right next to your medical data. On the other hand, the current system, being largely phone and fax-based, offers doctors very little real visibility into what happens after they write the prescription — or into medication history. Did their patient fill the prescription? The only way is to call the pharmacy. ZappRx wants to offer pharmacies that backend processing they don’t currently have, and transactions, while making it easier for doctors to track pickup and fulfillment and communicate electronically with the pharmacy. The app also enables pre-processing, which is huge time saver on both sides. Pharmacies can get a jump start on filling prescriptions, dealing with any hiccups and working more around their schedule, rather than on deadline while an angry customer screams at them and their doctor. And, meanwhile, customers get to skip the line. And while this may all sound like minutuae and like something that has a negligible effect on service quality, ZappRx estimates that the inefficiencies in this model cost drug stores an average of $1.2 billion every year. Of course, with the largest pharmacy chains in the country, like CVS, Walgreens, Walmart and Target, owning the lionshare of the market (and tens of thousands of stores collectively), as good as ZappRx’s solution may sound, pharmacies still need to get on board. The startup is currently in the process of working on deals with a few of the big players, although the founder declined to comment on specifics. Meanwhile, as it works to secure key revenue-generating partnerships with pharmacies, ZappRx’s model has nonetheless scored some validation, as the startup this week announced that it has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Atlas Ventures, Life Sciences Angel Network, Hakan Satiroglu and a handful of other angel investors. ZappRx also added Jay Silverstein, a founding member of Oxford Health, NaviNet founder and CEO, Will Cowen and Keas.com founder George Kassabgi as advisors. For more, find
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Elon Musk Shows Off His Crazy Iron Man-Inspired 3D Modeling Setup
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Greg Kumparak
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Elon Musk, the world’s busiest rich dude/mad scientist, has just posted a video showing off the Iron Man-inspired 3D modeling setup he Because people don’t compare him to Tony Stark* enough, right? By combining the gesture-sensing Leap Motion controller with an array of different display technologies (like the Oculus Rift VR handset, a 3D Projector, or a crazy translucent glass display that looks like it was pulled right out of Starks’ lab) and a modified version of the Siemens NX design suite, SpaceX’s engineers are able to zoom around and inspect their models without ever touching a mouse. It’s a bit unclear, though, whether or not they’re currently able to actually models within the gestural setup, or just inspect models they’ve made with more traditional tools. While the video shows Elon and his engineers doing things like scaling, rotating, and even cutting away at meshes, it never demonstrates anyone building something anew. As anyone who has ever worked with 3D modeling software could tell you, this stuff tends to get complicated, with each app having dozens upon dozens of menus and a few zillion hotkeys to memorize (especially when you’re designing with any sort of precision in mind). Squeezing anything but the most basic modeling concept into a set of motion gestures seems… difficult. After stepping in and around their designs, SpaceX’s team is able to send their models straight to a (presumably crazy expensive) machine (read: a 3D printer that prints in metal) to be made into real-world prototypes. Welcome to the future. Your jetpack will ship out next week. [* Which actually makes perfect sense, since, you know, Jon Favreau’s version of Tony Stark ] Yup. We saw it in the movie and made it real. Good idea! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
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Hardware Is Eating The World
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Matt Burns
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It’s clear more than ever that hardware is in vogue. The rise of crowdfunding graciously coincided with the shrinking of processors and sensors. It’s never been easier to create a smart device. And on Wednesday, September 11, hardware companies will fill the halls of The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center for . The atmosphere takes on a distinctly science fair vibe, with drones flying around, LEDs flashing, 3D printers churning out models of TC East Coast Editor John Biggs’ head. TechCrunch events have always featured hardware companies. . . . . We strive to find the very best startups for Startup Battlefield and that often includes guys and gals that build tangible objects. This year is no different. Some amazing hardware companies will launch on the Disrupt stage. The hardware theme runs throughout the conference, and it all starts with the Hackathon. Chevy is asking attendees to build applications for its in-vehicle infotainment systems. Meanwhile, Pioneer — the folks that make radios and speakers — will be onsite looking for teams building applications for its AppRadio platform. LiveBolt, a sort of DIY Lockitron, . Don’t shy away from making hardware at the hackathon. I’m also excited to have several notable leaders in hardware at Disrupt next week. I’ll kick off the final day of Disrupt with Nick Woodman, the 36-year self-made billionaire behind GoPro cameras. The company was called Half Moon Bay for the better part of its life, but recently outgrew its digs on the beach and moved inland to San Mateo (but not before opening half a dozen offices around the world). Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky will join John Biggs on stage afterwards to no doubt nerd out about the joys of watches, Kickstarting and rapid prototyping. This isn’t the first time we’ve brought hardware companies to Disrupt. But this the first time we’ve gone so big with the theme. Silicon Valley is returning to its roots in a way by building things, objects you can touch and physically hold in your hand. Sure, software is still dominant in the Valley and there’ll be no shortage of it at , but this year, expect hardware to make a prominent appearance. And that makes this DIYer from Michigan very happy.
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How To Get In On The New York Fashion Week Action, Techie Style
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Eliza Brooke
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It’s . New York Fashion Week, that is. And if you’re a user of the Internet, it’s pretty hard to miss this season. As Women’s Wear Daily , ramped-up social media and live streaming have led Fashion Week to become a veritable “digital spectator sport.” In the last few years, tech has begun to carve out an increasingly large presence at Fashion Week, and this year marks an unprecedented degree of involvement from both tech companies and designers. In 2009, Alexander McQueen live streamed his Spring/Summer 2010 show through SHOWstudio. Then came Marc Jacobs, Emporio Armani, and Dolce & Gabbana for Fall/Winter 2010. Today, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week has a live stream trained in on all of its shows. Gone are the days of dressing in all black and pretending to be a PR assistant to get into the tents. As I write this, there is a camera panning around the Nicholas K show as the seats slowly fill up. Diane von Furstenberg just sent out an email blast telling us we can watch her September 8 show on Facebook. Facebook! It’s democratization, and it’s also excellent advertising. Fashion voyeurs, here are your resources for getting in on the action from afar. Open a window on your computer and . As a consumer, a universal live stream is a major upgrade from having to wait around for images and video to load on Style.com. On the flip side, it raises further questions about the necessity of editors attending shows, the schedule for which has become increasingly packed and unrealistic. On a personal note, I’m still looking for bars in New York that are showing the stream, so if you know of one, please leave a comment below. Pinterest has launched a featuring boards from magazines, designers, beauty companies and models. The images are a combination of professional shots and behind-the-scenes snaps. If you’re going to be pinning, it’s a well-organized catalogue from which to pull. Fashion insiders are again donning Google Glass this season to give viewers a first-hand look at their world, which is, if you think about it, a truly good use of the tool. Following on the heels of von Furstenberg, who wore a pair and put them on her models last year, Nina Garcia is providing an editor’s-eye (and front-row) view of the action (#benina). Netrobe is also releasing Google Glass videos taken by the blogger . Since not every makeup artist, designer, and editor is going to be wearing Google Glass, Instagram is in some ways as backstage as you can get. Plug in #NYFW, or some iteration thereof (#MBFW, #SS14), and have at it. Into the Gloss shared some great recs when it comes to , , and who will undoubtedly be making some especially pretty pictures for the next month. Call it Fashion Week blogger tech art, sponsored by Sony. According to , Tumblr has paired 20 New York-based bloggers with 18 designers and two organizations for “apprenticeships” in the two weeks leading up to Fashion Week. Miguel Yatco of with Oscar de la Renta and with Anna Sui, for instance. The exhibit, which opens tonight at Milk Studios and runs through the week, is the result of those partnerships. Since it’s Tumblr, odds are the work will take the form of photos and GIFs. In sum: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF6BHmdRdK4&w=640&h=360] [Images from Jak & Jil; Marie Claire]
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Rotten Tomatoes Founder Positions New Site To Be “Google News For Movies”
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Billy Gallagher
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founder has redesigned his new site, , to be the “Google News for movies.” Movies With Butter originally launched with more of a Digg/Reddit strategy, allowing users to vote which stories would be on the homepage, but Duong says it didn’t work because the site couldn’t gain enough users to vote on the stories. He founded Rotten Tomatoes in 1998 and was quickly joined by a few of his friends, including Binh Ngo with whom he started Movies With Butter. Duong and company sold Rotten Tomatoes in 2004 to IGN Entertainment for an undisclosed amount (the property has since been sold several times, and is currently owned by Warner Brothers). The duo quietly launched Movies With Butter in 2011. Duong says he and Ngo think they can build a better algorithm than Google News, which doesn’t have a film-specific section, based on their knowledge from Rotten Tomatoes. The site is all algorithm-based right now and updates every 15 minutes, moving stories up and down as they become more and less popular. Duong points out that so many movie news sites have a lot of overlapping news stories, and hardcore fans and industry types could use an aggregator to more easily digest different news stories, the same way that many in the tech industry use Techmeme to filter through overlapping stories from the various tech blogs. “Rotten Tomatoes is more aggregation of movie reviews. Movies With Butter is an extension of that–it’s an aggregation of movie news,” Duong tells me. In addition to the news aggregator and staff blogs, the site has a film database that focuses on upcoming and very recent movies, a Tomato Meter that shows what fans are reviewing over on Rotten Tomatoes, and a Facebook Meter that tracks the Facebook likes that film’s Pages are getting from fans. The pair have bootstrapped the site so far, and Duong says they aren’t looking to raise right now but may be open to funding in the future. He says the team is adding more stats, especially social media stats, so that fans can gauge what the buzz is on upcoming movies across a range of platforms.
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Get Your Friends, Co-Workers Out Of “Password Remembering Hell” With Matrix-Backed Mitro
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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At TechCrunch, we have a host of passwords for Twitter, Dropbox and so on that get shared amongst the staff. But inevitably, there’s always a scramble when a new employee signs up and doesn’t have access to the account. Or when someone just plain forgets their passwords. Enter , which is a company from several former Googlers that is trying to attack the problem of password sharing for the families, friends and the enterprise. It’s an extension that works with a web browser to save passwords and help people log into sites automatically. “Passwords are breeding like rabbits and no one takes security of these things seriously,” said Mitro co-founder and CEO Vijay Pandurangan. Founded by three former Google engineers, New York-based is backed by $1.2 million in seed funding from Google Ventures and Matrix Partners. Right now, it works with Chrome, but Firefox and Android are in beta. The company is also working on versions for iOS and Safari too. In , you can set up teams of people that you share passwords with. When you or they visit a password-protected destination that you’ve shared a log-in for, the browser extension will kick in and ask you if you want to sign in using . That way, you don’t ever have to remember a password when you get there. For users, their passwords get encrypted through keys that are stored on servers. When a person first creates an account, generates a public and private key. The private key is encrypted using a passphrase key, and then both the public key and encrypted private key are stored on servers. When passwords are shared with other team members, the service also generates new public and private keys for those users as well. A team’s private key is encrypted for each member, so only that individual can decrypt it. Mitro also tracks devices, so if a user logs in from a new device that the server doesn’t recognize, it will send an e-mail verification. The company also supports two-factor authentication if users want an extra layer of security where they’ll need both a password and a temporary code generated by their phone. For those who are less concerned about security, there’s also a “Remember Me” option for the browser extension, so that people don’t have to keep typing in their Mitro passwords. The service is totally free right now. But one could easily imagine that the startup could implement freemium pricing later on with extra features for paying users.
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NSA Subverts Most Encryption, Works With Tech Organizations For Back-Door Access, Report Says
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The National Security Agency’s most wanted man and newly minted Russian resident, Edward Snowden, has revealed new details about the ability of intelligence agencies to crack supposedly secret communications. “The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents,” the New York Times. According to the documents, the NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption” algorithms and technologies used to keep banking, email, commerce, and data transfers secret. Here are the essentials of the story: According to the story, authorities asked the Times not to publish the article. The Times withheld some information for security purposes, but (obviously) went ahead with the piece. As we’ve written about before, the NSA in the 1990 with a hardware product that would permit backdoor access to cell phones, the failed “Clipper Chip.” Apparently, the NSA found a new way to gain back-door access. “They went and did it anyway without telling anyone,” cryptographer Paul Kocher told The Times. Snowden still says that “strong” encryption can’t be decoded by the NSA. “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.” So apparently, there are still ways of keeping messages safe. It is important to note that all of the legal requirements for search still apply to decrypted information. [ ]
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The Data Visualization Technology That Makes The America’s Cup Accessible To The Rest Of Us
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Colleen Taylor
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The experience of watching televised sporting events has evolved dramatically in recent years, with data visualization technology making it much easier for spectators at home to understand what’s really going on. Innovations such as the yellow “first down” line in televised football, the pitch and strike zone visualizations in televised baseball, and NASCAR’s racecar tracker have changed the way we all watch sports — and it turns out that one man, tech industry veteran , has led the development of them all. He’s kind of a big deal. Today, Honey is working on his most difficult project yet: Making the elite sailing race taking place this month in San Francisco understandable, accessible and enjoyable to the masses. It’s a project to which Honey is uniquely suited, since in addition to being an Emmy-winning television technologist, he’s an award-winning sailor whose accolades include for circumnavigating the world in 48 days. Honey has brought together a team of like-minded sailors and engineers to make the thrills and challenges of sailing easy for everyone to see. So TechCrunch TV headed down to the America’s Cup headquarters at San Francisco’s Pier 27 to get a first-hand look at the technology and talk to the people involved. Check it all out in the video above.
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Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal
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Sarah Perez
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Chicago-based payments gateway is currently shopping itself around to potential acquirers, TechCrunch has learned. The company has been on the block for some time, having previously tried to work out a deal with Google which fell through. More recently, it had been in acquisition talks with Square, which also fell through, possibly because Braintree is asking for too high a valuation. Talks with PayPal, however, may still be ongoing, we’ve heard. According to industry sources, Braintree has been asking for $1 billion, which seems unrealistic. There are only a few companies that could afford (or want) the payments gateway at that price, and Google, Square and PayPal are on a very short list. Founded in 2007, Braintree now processes $10 billion in payments annually, the company reported in . The service is used by a number of startups and tech companies, including Airbnb, Fab, LivingSocial, Uber, Twilio, GitHub and others. In addition, Braintree operates Venmo, a mobile payments solution the company last year for $26.2 million. Though Braintree was an early mover in the online payments space, these days the competition with other services like Stripe and Balanced have been making things tougher on the company. Stripe has been especially successful in gaining traction with big e-commerce players, and signed a deal for Shopify integration, which was notable. Meanwhile, Braintree has been following some of Stripe’s moves, such as with the of its Marketplace in August, which came after the of Stripe’s own Marketplace debut in June, for instance. Braintree’s exec team has seen a lot of transition in recent years, too. Founder Bryan Johnson left his position as CEO in late 2011. Current CEO Bill Ready took over and his includes a history of getting companies acquired – for example, he saw iPay sold to Jack Henry & Associates in June 2010. To date, Braintree has raised $69 million in outside funding from Accel, NEA, RRE, Greycroft and others. We’ve contacted Braintree, and PayPal for comment. A spokesperson for Square responded that the company does not comment on speculation or rumor.
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With 100K Titles In Tow, Oyster Brings Netflix To Book Lovers With New All-You-Can-Read Subscription Service
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Rip Empson
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While the pace has slowed of late, thanks to Kindles, Nooks, iPads and the steady advance of mobile technology, the eBook market (and the demand for all shades of digital prose) has grown exponentially over the past few years. , the total revenue generated from eBook sales in the U.S. topped $3 billion in 2012, which equates to a 44 percent jump from the year before. , eBook sales in the UK quietly turned in a record year, leaping 134 percent from 2011 to 2012. Judging by how long it’s probably been since your friendly neighborhood teenager picked up one of those “analog content consumption mechanisms” fondly known as a “print book,” and considering the continuing maturation of distribution channels and services for digital video and music, it’s no surprise books are following a similar path. On the other hand, with the success companies like Netflix and Spotify have had in making enormous libraries of digital media accessible (and affordable) for Average Joes, it seems surprising, then, that similar mobile-friendly subscription models and social discovery/sharing technology hasn’t yet been applied to books (to nearly the same extent). Well, Literati and book lovers rejoice. Thanks to , a plucky young, NYC-based startup, the wait is over. As confessed technologists and bookworms, co-founders Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker began work on Oyster last year after becoming fed up with trying to find a quality, all-in-one mobile reading experience and library. While eReaders and digital books are hardly in short supply — thanks to the Amazons of the world — Oyster wants to create the first, real dedicated subscription service for books, while offering the same kind of personalized, social content discovery one has come to expect from Netflix and Amazon. Founders Fund, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Shari Redstone’s Advancit Capital, Chris Dixon and Sam Altman (among others) last fall, the startup is finally ready to begin pulling back the curtain on its new book-happy subscription service. S invitations to its platform, which is available on a first-come, first-serve basis. After signing up for a membership, users will be able to access Oyster’s library and mobile reader through its new iPhone app (with versions for iPad and Android on the way). What does that mean? In short, Oyster’s appeal is its straightforward subscription model, which offers unlimited access to its library of 100,000 titles for $9.95/month. From there, members can peruse its library, check out recommendations from its Editorial Staff if in need of some guidance and be off and reading with a few quick taps. At launch, Oyster’s library offers titles from a wide range of genres, from sci-fi to biographies, including both classics and bestsellers. While 100K titles on-demand is a good start, the founders know that — at least at the outset — they’re competing for mindshare with the likes of Amazon’s colossal marketplace. As a result, the founders are focused on continuing to beef up selection and will be adding new titles every week as they move forward. Thanks to its size and reach, Amazon and iTunes cast a hefty shadow over the market, but part of the reason we haven’t seen a book-focused subscription service like this is due to the leg work that’s required to give readers access to premium content at any sort of scale. When news of Oyster’s plans to offer an unlimited subscription model began to emerge last year, this was the one big piece that was missing. But since then, the founders have inked deals with a handful of big names in the publishing world, like Harper Collins, Houghton Mifflin, Worman, Melville House, Rodale, Open Road Media, RosettaBooks and F+W Media. As it moves forward, the team will look to continue adding to its list of publishers both big and small. On the other end, in an effort to create an awesome reading experience and increase stickiness, Oyster has baked a social discovery layer into its platform, allowing readers to keep up with what their friends are reading (and recommending) while curating their own “Reading List” on their personal profile. Much like Netflix, the app allows readers to peruse its library by genre and title, while offering personalized recommendations and suggestions on topics based on what’s playing in theaters and what’s getting buzz in the news. Like many of today’s recommendation enginers, Oyster learns as it goes, parsing data on your reading habits and preferences to offer better suggestions to your reading list. The more active you are within the app, the more you read, the better its recommendations become. The same can also be said of its social discovery layer; as more users sign up and begin reading, the more they will begin to see recommendations and selections from friends pop up on their radar. Readers can follow their friends to get quicker access to their reading lists and recommendations (and vice versa), and, like Spotify, they can also flip on a privacy mode to keep your behavior and selections from being broadcast to Oyster’s network. However, unlike Netflix and Spotify, it’s not clear as of yet how Oyster is structuring its deals with publishers — in other words, whether it’s paying publishers or authors every time their book is selected (like Spotify) or whether the content is paid for up-front a la Netflix. The other potential appeal for the more casual readers out there is that Oyster enables you to choose specific chapters from titles, making it easier to skim through that self-help or cooking 101 manual and find what you’re looking for. Or move onto the next. This makes browsing much easier, so that when you’re not sure about whether or not a certain title is what you’re looking for, you can peruse without having to pay full price. Combining the ability to go anonymous when browsing and reading with how Oyster has optimized its app for the mobile reading experience, from its typeface to using vertical swiping for page-turning (rather than the usual horizontal model), which ultimately makes way more sense if you’re going to be reading a book on your phone. It’s these little things, along with the promise of more targeted and personalized recommendations (especially of the social variety) as its network expands and a library that offers impressive selection for a new platform, that makes Oyster an awesome option for avid readers. It’s definitely worth checking out. For readers looking to request an invite to the platform,
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Evomail’s Gesture-Based Email App Arrives On Android
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Sarah Perez
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, one of the many newer startups trying to rethink the email inbox for mobile, has . Originally designed as a Gmail client for iPad, the service seemed inspired by a number of well-known apps and email clients, including now Google-owned , as well as Dropbox-acquired , which popularized the use of gestures as a way to interact with your email. The iOS version of Evomail, now -optimized as well, introduced a variety of features including push notifications for new messages, folders and labels, snoozing functionality, and gestures that let you swipe to delete or archive, shake to press and hold to label, star, reply, forward, or mark as read and more for example. These same features are now available on Android. When the company first debuted its app in May, typically found the interface clean and polished and the app enough to use, but also encountered several bugs. Co-founder and CEO Jonathan George explains that today, the major issues have been addressed, thanks to Evomail’s fast weekly release cycle. George previously co-founded Boxcar, the that was in July 2012. He says he thought up the idea for Evomail the evening he signed the acquisition papers. “Email has received many new coats of paint over the years, but no one has really gone in and renovated the entire house,” he explains. “We did just that by building EvoCloud, which is a layer on top of email.” EvoCloud is meant to address the problems that email previously faced due to fragmentation of mail servers — that is, if you needed to build out a feature requiring server support, you would have to have all the providers build support for it as well, and upgrade their own systems. Instead, EvoCloud centralizes the mail providers into one layer, allowing the company to build its own server functionality like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, or their new tabs interface, and then make that available to anyone – even those who aren’t using Gmail. Today, Evomail supports a number of mail systems, including of course Gmail, but also Yahoo, iCloud, and other IMAP-enabled services. The company plans to soon begin selling freemium subscriptions to offer users access to features their mail provider may not have offered. As of last month, the company was reporting 25 percent week-over-week growth on the iOS side, but declined to detail the the number of downloads or actives the app now has. However, the app trails the big-name providers Gmail (#2), Yahoo (#6), Hotmail (#47), as well as Mailbox (#60) in the U.S. app store. The iPhone and iPad versions flirted with the top 100 during launch, but now they struggle to maintain a ranking in the top 500 in the Business category (per App Annie’s stats.) Reviews for the iOS version are middling, reflecting the company’s still very early nature. Users continue to report bugs and crashes, but others say it’s “getting there.” The app’s design goes a long way to sell its concept, but without the stability and speed, it will be hard to keep users from removing it from their phones. On Android, Evomail hopes to at least have an early mover advantage, by beating out other popular email clients, like Mailbox, to the platform. With an earlier pre-release beta, the app performed the functions as expected, but still seemed very laggy compared with the native Gmail app and others. However, the company says it’s squashing bugs all the way up until today’s launch, so it’s not possible to do an in-depth review at this time. Likely, it’s still much in the same boat as the iOS version, though: “getting there.” Depending on a number of factors — your email provider, inbox size, how much email you receive (I could be an outlier here, of course), and more — your mileage, as they say, may vary. But given the stage that Evomail is in, the progress the company has made in only a few months’ time is notable. The Witchita-based startup, also co-founded by David McGraw and Dominic Flask, is essentially bootstrapped, having a tiny team of four and just $100,000 in seed . To take on a problem as massive as email under these circumstances is crazy and risky…attributes that, frankly, it’s nice to see. Evomail for Android is .
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Insurance Zebra Launches A Kayak For Auto Insurance
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Sarah Perez
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Austin-based , as the name implies, isn’t exactly tackling the sexiest industry, but it’s definitely one that’s trying to help the everyday, mainstream consumer. The startup’s goal is to be the Kayak for auto insurance, so to speak, as it aggregates quotes to allow consumers to find their best options. But the company is doing something differently than others in this space – it’s letting consumers shop anonymously, while also seeing how their answers to the Insurance Zebra’s Q&A change their rate quotes in real-time. Insurance Zebra founder and CEO Adam Lyons previously worked in the car insurance industry on both the underwriting and brokerage side of the business, which is how he came up with the idea for this service. He sees the potential for the car insurance industry to go online, the way the travel industry already has, as sites like Orbitz or Kayak helped move consumers away from using individual travel agents. The company raised a earlier this year, led by Austin’s Silverton Partners, with participation from Mark Cuban, Floodgate, and Birchmere Labs. Today, Insurance Zebra is launching in California and Texas, the two states with the largest number of drivers. California, in particular, is one of the more difficult states to tackle given the complexities of its regulations. That’s another reason Insurance Zebra chose them for a launch pad, outside of the obvious — it’s a tech hotspot where a number of early adopters would be likely to give online insurance shopping a shot. The site today offers up quotes from 33 different insurers, representing around 90 percent of the market. With two pieces of information — a car and a ZIP code — drivers will see quotes begin to flow in. As you proceed to answer more questions, the accuracy of the quotes will improve. Using the site now, you’ll see several big-name companies like State Farm, Geico, Allstate and more represented, as well as a lot of specialized insurers like those for high-risk drivers, for example. According to COO Joshua Dziabiak, the company has relationships with some, but not all, of the companies whose quotes it provides, but it does have other big-name insurers on board who are still in the process of being integrated. For those situations where doesn’t have a direct relationship with an insurer, he explains that they’re using public data to determine the rate quotes. “What we’re doing is leveraging public rate filings. Every carrier, by law, is required to submit these extremely long rate manuals to each state, which are made public through the state’s Dept. of Insurance website,” says Dziabiak. “What we’ve done is built a technology that reverse engineers those rate manuals and spits out rates quotes.” While there are a number of tools to compare insurance quotes today (including those from insurers themselves, like touts), Insurance Zebra’s advantage is not just in the real-time updating of quotes as you move through the Q&A sections, but also that it allows you to shop anonymously. “There are lead aggregators out there where you put in your information and all of a sudden your phone starts blowing up from all sorts of agents,” explains Dziabiak. But Insurance Zebra lets you get the quotes without becoming a lead to be resold. Instead, the site itself is appointed with around 14 carriers right now, meaning it’s set up like a standard insurance agent. Like any mom-and-pop shops, it has the same licensees and commission structure. It doesn’t charge a consumer anything extra, but takes a commission on the sale when you buy. Meanwhile, for those insurance companies where Insurance Zebra doesn’t have a direct relationship, the service lets the driver call the company via a Twilio-provided line. That way, the company can track the number of referrals and call durations at least, which could help it close deals further down the road. During a private beta period, Insurance Zebra showed testers 280,000 quotes and found that it could achieve close to 95 percent accuracy, assuming consumers didn’t lie or inadvertently enter incorrect information. Now that the service is open to the public, the plan is to expand nationwide soon. In the next six to eight weeks, Insurance Zebra will begin to open up to the rest of the U.S., though it will do so quietly as there will be other bugs to work out in each state, Dziabiak notes. Interested users in California or Texas (or those who want to pretend) can .
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How Social+Capital Is Building The Next Generation Of Entrepreneurs In Residence
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Leena Rao
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has been commonly referred to as the unconventional VC. And he’s been about his ambitions to turn his fund, , into a vehicle that backs ideas and startups that are changing the way we live, diagnose, learn and more. So it’s no surprise that Palihapitiya and his team are taking a more unorthodox approach to the entrepreneur in residence program in the VC ecosystem. When you look underneath the hood at what Palihapitiya is doing with the program, it’s clear that he is building a mafia of some of the best technical talent (especially from Facebook) and bringing them under his wing. It’s reminiscent of what . Chris Farmer, a VC who has held investment roles at General Catalyst and Bessemer Venture Partners, writes in this that at the time, data showed that Benchmark had the highest density of EIRs and highest proportion of EIRs that actually start companies. The entrepreneur in residence program has been in place on Sand Hill Road for quite some time. Essentially, VC firms give successful executives and entrepreneurs a salary in turn for a place to park for six months to a year to figure out what their next company/move will be. They network, meet with the firm’s portfolio, talk to other entrepreneurs and more. There are three possible outcomes: The entrepreneur will found a company within the firm (which the firm will hopefully back); the entrepreneur will join one of the firm’s portfolio companies; or the entrepreneur could take a liking to the VC world and join the firm full time as a partner (which just happened with Simon Rothman and Greylock). In theory, Social+Capital’s EIR program is similar in that it is giving top talent from companies like Facebook a way to be thoughtful about their next step while still getting paid (though Palihapitiya says it’s not any sort of salary to write home about). But what’s different, he explains to me, is the density of the program and that he is choosing to bring on mostly technical, product-focused individuals. In fact, most of the EIRs aren’t known as entrepreneurs in residence but engineers in residence. His best outcome for these technical minds is for them to found a company that is tackling a major problem. But figuring the why-and-how angles to approaching these problems from an engineering standpoint takes time. And he wants to make sure that the engineers who can build the next radical, game-changing company in health care or education have the opportunity to do so (and don’t rush to join another big company as an exec). While Social+Capital itself only has four investment partners, including Palihapitiya, the firm has employed many more EIRs in its two-year history. On average, there are about four EIRs at the firm at any given time. And Palihapitiya says he would have as many as 10 in one class. Currently, the firm has around 10 portfolio companies that are working from its Palo Alto offices. Past EIRs have included Jassim Latif (ex-Googler), Abhik Pramanik (ex-BranchOut engineer) and Jeremy Karmel (ex-BranchOut Engineer). More recently, Palihapitiya has been recruiting talent from his former employer, Facebook. Current EIRs include Kristina Holst, a key engineer from Facebook who helped build Home, and many of the network’s developer tools. She also happens to be a skilled poker player and made it to the final table at the World Series of Poker earlier this year. James Wang is a former Facebook engineer who worked on Palihapitiya’s international growth team. Josh Wiseman, a Facebook engineering manager that worked on a number of Facebook’s marquee products including Timeline and Chat, left the social network for an EIR role at Social+Capital earlier this year. Ray Ko was the director of growth and analytics at Facebook and joined the firm in June. Yun-Fang Juan, who helped create Facebook Ads, starts her gig at Social+Capital in September. The roster of talent speaks for itself. “I don’t know of any other firm who has the density of senior-level product and technical talent just hanging around trying to solve real problems,” Palihapitiya tells me. Palihapitiya’s theory is that many senior-level engineering and product leads at companies like Facebook, Google and others are being bombarded with offers from other companies. It’s hard to know what you really want when you are in the midst of this jungle, he explains. He wants to give these execs a way to decompress from the company lifestyle to figure out what they really want to do and what problems they want to solve. Wang told me that he did consider a number of interesting startup offers when he decided to leave Facebook. He was looking for VP of engineering roles at promising companies in Silicon Valley but nothing seemed like the perfect fit. He ended up connecting with his old boss, Palihapitiya, earlier this year who pitched him on the idea of joining Social+Capital. “He told me that he was really passionate about the idea of applying technology and giving new lifeblood to areas like health care, education and other industries,” recalled Wang. And because Wang already had an interest in health care and education, he was intrigued. Wang started his position at the firm in March, and began spending time with its startups and networks. But instead of being drawn to some of the health-focused ideas, he found that he was interested in some of the educational startups, including Remind 101, which is a . Holst has also been going through a period of discovery around what she wants to do next. Like Wang, she was leaving Facebook and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Over a poker game, Palihapitiya convinced her that Social+Capital would be a good place for her to figure that out. What really convinced Holst was the opportunity to tackle big challenges in difficult markets like health and financial services. Holst is still considering what she will take on as her next challenge, but she’s been particularly drawn to financial services. She’s been actively helping (and coding for) investment management startup Wealthfront with its mobile efforts. Holst and Wang also say that Social+Capital’s network and openness have been a way for them to learn about new ideas and opportunities. The partners’ calendars are public and EIRs are encouraged to sit in on any meetings that they find interesting. It’s still early days on evaluating whether Palihapitiya’s EIRs end up creating the game-changing ideas that he talks about. Two of the EIRs in the past class have teamed up on a startup that is still in stealth, he says, and Holst and Wang have not yet decided what their next moves will be. Nonetheless the network of talent that Palihapitiya is fostering and housing is impressive. As I mentioned above, in many ways he is creating his own mafia of some of the best technical and product minds in the Valley. The firm is slowly building out a group of talented people and putting them in scenarios where they might end up working together to create startups dedicated to tackling big problems. If Palihapitiya pulls it off, this could be the making of a new mafia in the startup world. “I want to create a platform where smart, technical people and great engineers are able to spend six months to a year just looking at the landscape to figure out whether they want to join a company or start one,” he says.
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Matt Burns
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