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What Is The Future Of VC? Find Out At Disrupt SF
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Leena Rao
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Many compare the process of picking a partner at a VC firm (or an angel) to back your idea to the act of getting married. You better be ready to be comfortable in the trenches with this person, because the startup journey is a roller coaster. Amidst the , what it really comes down to is picking the right partner to help you go down one of the most challenging paths of your life. At the end of the day, outsourcing services such as recruiting and marketing can help, but founders need to have an experienced and successful by their side who has been through the challenges of finding product-market fit, raising funding in tough climates, dealing with layoffs and much more. The VCs who will be sitting on the investor panel at Disrupt SF next week — Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), John Lilly (Greylock Partners), Bryan Schreier (Sequoia Capital), and Mike Volpi (Index Ventures) — have not only been in the trenches themselves, but have been helping some of the Valley’s new generation of successful founders, including Drew Houston, Kevin Systrom and others travel down their respective paths of entrepreneurship. Lee, who has helped lead investments in One Kings Lane, Rent The Runway and Trendyol, joined Kleiner Perkins in 1999 after founding a company and working in several operating roles at The Gap, Odwalla and others. She most recently founded her own seed-stage firm Cowboy Ventures. Lilly, who has led Greylock’s investments in Instagram, Dropbox, MessageMe, and Tumblr, was previously CEO of Mozilla, and also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007. Schreier has led Sequoia’s investments in Dropbox, and Hearsay among others, and prior to joining the firm, was the Senior Director of International Online Sales and Operations at Google, launching Google’s Europe headquarters and leading sales in China. Volpi serves on the boards of Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, and Zuora, among others. Is there a resurgence of consumer after some of the fallout with the Series A Crunch? Are value-added services worth it? Are VC returns going to bounce back? Is there a diversity problem in the VC ecosystem? We’re going to be tackling these issues and more. These VCs will take the stage next week , including Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, Michael Moritz, John Doerr, Doug Leone, Dick Costolo, Marissa Mayer, and Jeff Weiner. Disrupt SF takes over The San Francisco Design Concourse starting this Saturday, September 7 to 11. Tickets are currently on sale . If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found . Photo Credit/Flickr/
Aileen Lee is an investor at StyleSeat Inc. She is also a Founder of Cowboy Ventures, a digital seed-stage focused fund founded in 2012. She is also a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which she joined in 1999. She was also founding CEO of RMG Networks (formerly Danoo) the leading digital out-of-home media network backed by KPCB and DAG. Prior to joining KPCB, Aileen worked at Gap Inc. in various Operating roles. She has also worked for Odwalla and for The North Face in Brand and Product Marketing. Aileen began her career at Morgan Stanley in Technology Mergers & Acquisitions. She has a Bachelor of Science from MIT. An MBA from the Harvard Business School. She is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
, Partner John Lilly is a Partner at Greylock since 2011. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO. Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple’s research labs. John is currently on the Board of Directors of Citrus Lane, Clearslide, Code for America, Mozilla Corporation, and the Participatory Culture Foundation. He is a board observer at Tumblr, and led Greylock’s investments in Dropbox and Instagram. John holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering and an MS in Computer Science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction, both from Stanford University. He is currently a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Institute of Design in the Engineering School. He is also an adviser to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program as well as StartX (formerly SSE Labs), an incubator with ties to Stanford University. He is a co-inventor on seven United States patents.
Bryan Schreier is a partner at Sequoia Capital. Bryan currently sits on the board of Dropbox, Hearsay, Qualtrics, MindSnacks, and Inkling and is a board observer for Trulia. Previously, Bryan was Senior Director of International Online Sales and Operations at Google. He also launched Google’s Europe headquarters and was interim President of Sales in China. Prior to Google, Bryan worked in Morgan Stanley’s Technology Investment Banking Group. Bryan has a Computer Science degree from Princeton University.
Mike Volpi has been a partner at Index Ventures since 2009. He is focused on investments in the enterprise software infrastructure and consumer Internet sectors. Mike led the investment by Index Ventures in Cloud.com (CTRX) and StorSimple (MSFT) and is currently a director of Sonos, Soundcloud, Lookout, Path, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Hortonworks, Pure Storage, and Elasticsearch. Mike also serves on the board of EXOR SpA (EXO:IM) Mike performed in various executive roles for 13 years at Cisco Systems from 1994. He served as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, where he was responsible for Cisco’s corporate strategy as well as business development, strategic alliances, advanced Internet projects, legal services, and government affairs. During this tenure, Mike was instrumental in the creation of the company’s acquisition and investment strategies, as Cisco acquired more than 70 companies during his tenure. He then became Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Routing and Service Provider Technology Group, where he led Cisco’s business for the Service Provider market, and was also responsible for all of Cisco’s routing products. In 2007, this was an $11 billion business for Cisco. Mike began his career as a product development engineer in Hewlett-Packard’s Optoelectronics Division. Prior to Index, he was the CEO of Joost – an innovator in the field of premium video services delivered over the Internet. Mike has a B.S in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. on Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a trustee of the Stanford Business School Trust and he also serves on the board of WITNESS, a non-profit organization focused on human rights.
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Foursquare Automates Process Of Becoming A ‘Superuser’
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Colleen Taylor
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It’s become clear in recent years that real strength is its database of more than 55 million places. Foursquare’s database API for many other apps, from big names like Instagram to small up-and-comers. Today, Foursquare is announcing an update that should streamline the process of keeping that information organized and up to date: It is automating the process of becoming a “superuser” with the ability to edit the location database. In a Wikipedia-esque fashion, Foursquare gives special privileges to edit and organize location data to a vetted group of “superusers” that today number around 40,000. Superusers have through a manual review process that requires the sign-off of Foursquare’s six-person support team (which has, not surprisingly, created a bottleneck). Today, Foursquare is switching that duty over to an automated process. It’s a small change that most users won’t notice, but it’s key to Foursquare’s larger strategy. Adding more superusers should help things run more smoothly on the venue database, which is clearly a top asset for Foursquare as a company.
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Uber Strikes Back Against The Competition By Offering Free uberX Rides In New Lyft Markets
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Ryan Lawler
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Just last week, ride-sharing startup Lyft announced that it was , launching in Indianapolis, St. Paul, and Atlanta ahead of the holiday weekend. Well, local incumbent Uber isn’t going to take that lying down. The company has launched its low-cost uberX service in three new markets, and will be giving free rides to users for the rest of the month. Uber announced on its local blogs in , , and that it will complement its existing black car and SUV services with low-cost uberX rides in those markets. That’s notable because two of the three are some of the newest markets launched by competitor Lyft. (uberX has already been operating in Atlanta since June.) Fighting against comparably priced competition may be one thing, but Uber is making Lyft compete with free — at least for the month of September. Along with the uberX launch, the company is also offering up to five free rides worth $20 each in Indianapolis and St. Paul through the end of the month, and up to three free rides to uberX passengers in Phoenix through September 18. Today, Uber offers service in more than 40 cities worldwide, including 22 cities in the U.S. But in most of those cities, it partners with third-party black car companies for drivers. With uberX, the company usually offers a mix of commercially licensed drivers who pick up riders in hybrids, along with non-commercially licensed drivers picking up passengers in their own cars. It’s not clear how many of each Uber has in its new markets. Of course, Uber has some money to burn while keeping the competition at bay. It just raised a from Google Ventures, giving it a pretty massive war chest. Uber has also announced plans to in any new market that its competitors enter. When it made that announcement this spring, it said it would wait until local regulators gave “tacit approval” of ride-sharing before moving in, essentially waiting 30 days before doing so. But with these latest launches, it looks like Uber isn’t even waiting that long, and has decided not to give the competition too much of a head start before jumping in with its own low-cost services. As a result, we can probably expect Uber to continue to be aggressive and introduce uberX in additional markets, as it sees ride-sharing companies like Lyft and SideCar enter cities that it already operates in. Which, of course, makes this round of ride wars really interesting to watch. Ride on, game on, and may the best app win.
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Chrome’s Native-Like Packaged Apps Come Out Of Dev Preview And Head To The Desktop, Now Called “Chrome Apps”
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google officially its Chrome Apps today, a “new” breed of native/web app hybrid for Chrome OS and Windows that isn’t actually all that new. Google’s Chrome offered so-called for quite a while now and today’s “launch” is, for the most part, about bringing these packaged apps out of the developer niche and to consumers. Chrome Apps are essentially installable web apps that get additional privileges to access some native hardware features. They allow developers to run their web apps outside of the browser and without the usual Chrome user interface. They also make it easier for developers to make their apps available offline and to access local storage, as well as connected devices and cameras over USB and Bluetooth. Just like Chrome itself, these apps update themselves and just like Chrome extensions, they are automatically synced between your machines. Here is a short video that explains how these Chrome Apps work: On Windows, these apps don’t integrate into the start menu or the task bar. Instead — and this has also been available for — Chrome adds its own to the taskbar, which looks quite similar to the Chrome OS app launcher. On the Mac, the app launcher is still behind a flag on the stable version of Chrome, but Google says it will launch both on and on Linux soon. To celebrate today’s launch, Google added a to its Chrome Web Store. The collection features the likes of (which launched its packaged app in July), and former Disrupt Battlefield winner .
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Rapt.fm Launches In Beta To Enable Live Rap Battles To Happen Anytime, Anywhere
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Colleen Taylor
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We first met Detroit-based startup back in November 2012, when we were swinging through town for the TechCrunch Northern Meetups. It’s safe to say that was the first startup CEO I’d ever met whose . And the product, though then still in an early private alpha version, was very cool as well — a website that lets people all over the world engage in live rap battles in front of an online audience. Since then, a lot of growth has happened over at Rapt.fm, and yesterday evening the startup finally opened up to in public beta. This means that anyone, anywhere, at any time, can head over to the site and view or engage in competitive lyrical wordplay. This is no small feat for a bootstrapped startup — enabling live video, music, and an audience that can respond in real time takes some technical chops. Torenberg (aka T-berg) has been visiting San Francisco and Silicon Valley this week, so he stopped by TechCrunch’s San Francisco HQ to talk about the beta launch. He gave TechCrunch TV a look at the latest version of the Rapt.fm, engaged in a live rap battle with Rapt.fm developer Jarrett Abello (aka Johnny Gigantic), and also talked about the future of the company and its revenue plans — and how, much , the platform’s vision can go well beyond rap. Check it all out in the video below.
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The Mediated Life Is Not Worth Living
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Jon Evans
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I spent last week in ephemeral , where on Saturday night I and 60,000 others stood within a ring of hundreds of vehicles transformed into spectacular art, and watched a gargantuan wooden effigy erupt, burn, and collapse, beneath one of the most ridiculously dazzling fireworks displays in ever. It was quite a moment. And I looked at the crowd around me and I thought to myself: The problem was that half the people around me couldn’t really appreciate the moment because they were too busy trying to capture it, in some crude or clumsy way. A forest of thousands of phones and point-and-shoot cameras protruded from the crowd, held by people with unrealistically optimistic expectations of their sensors’ low-light capabilities. Meanwhile, a camera on a boom swung back and forth from the burn to the crowd, who cheered as if on command when it faced them; and high above, a brightly glowing drone armed with a buzzed amid the smoke. These days nearly everything we do is mediated by and filtered through technology–and this is not necessarily a good thing. Our social interactions are increasingly conducted and assisted , which all too often distract us from actual conversation and connection. We snap-judge businesses on their Yelp reviews, even though we know we have no reason to trust the reviewers. We stop experiencing things in order to record our experience, and in doing so, miss the very thing that we’re trying to capture. We measure our fitness with our Fitbits and Jawbones, so we avoid those activities — yoga, weight training, martial arts — which those data collectors can’t easily track. John Lennon once said, “the message of rock n’ roll is: Be. Here. Now.” All too often, though, today’s technology doesn’t help us do that at all. On the contrary, it gets in the way; it distances, it distracts, it deflects. It so often seems so . But that doesn’t mean we should roll back the clock. Fine, yes, let’s not pretend that disruptive/innovative new technology is always, automatically, an improvement on the status quo. Sometimes it makes things worse before it makes things better. But on the other hand, those backward steps are often prerequisites to the running jump required to vault over an . We have a long way to go before personal technology is seamlessly integrated into our immediate experiences, rather than getting in their way and filtering the life and spark from them. But I think we’re slowly getting there. Eventually, as we weave technology into every aspect of the human condition, personal tech will do what we want and need it to, in context, with the slightest and most subtle of triggers, and very little physical or cognitive distraction. Whichever companies make that happen will be capitalizing on a market opportunity. That’s why this is the year of and . I would have felt better about that Burning Man crowd if they’d been watching/recording the experience through Glass rather than their cameras. Don’t get me wrong: Glass still comes with serious social disruption costs, and privacy concerns. But it’s a stumbling, awkward, step in the right direction, and in the long run, I think we’ll look back on it (and Google Now) as part of the lead-up to that running jump I’m talking about. Until then, though, let’s not pretend that we need to record, filter, and mediate everything that happens to us with today’s awkward, crude, and unsuitable technology. Do yourself a favor: if you’re seeing or doing something genuinely awesome and/or interesting, then put your phone away–at least every now and again–until the day a better solution finally arrives. yours truly, on .
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Vimeo Offers $10,000 For Exclusive Rights To Indie Films From The Toronto International Film Festival
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Ryan Lawler
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Video distribution company is seeking to add more exclusive content to its platform, offering some independent filmmakers a $10,000 advance to make their movies available online through . The offer for direct distribution sales will be available to films premiering at the this week. Vimeo has always been known as a sort of art-house YouTube, where artsy video creators uploaded their content, thanks partly to the availability of high-def playback and a clean, well-lit environment for browsing and navigating content. That attracted a lot of content creators who frankly just wanted a nice video playback experience for the HD videos they shot. But recently, Vimeo has sought to provide more ways for content creators to monetize their videos, that enables filmmakers to go direct-to-fan and make their videos available on-demand to viewers for a fee. In an effort to lure new video producers on board, Vimeo offered what is more or less an industry-best 90-10 revenue split with those who uploaded videos to the platform. So far, that’s attracted a catalog of about 2,000 titles that can be viewed on demand. Now, Vimeo is looking to not only boost that number, but acquire some hot indie content that is being debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. As part of its offer to filmmakers, it’s promising an advance of $10,000 for any film that had its world premiere at the festival. In exchange, Vimeo gets to be the exclusive distributor of those films online or on other digital platforms for 30 days, or until the film makes back its advance — whichever comes first. After that, filmmakers are free to sell the film on iTunes, license to Netflix or Amazon, or make their movies available wherever they want online. It’s important to note that Vimeo only has exclusive rights for on-demand digital sales, so filmmakers are free to pursue theatrical distribution if they wish. They can also set their own prices and viewing format (rental or purchase) on the Vimeo platform — so long as those prices are above $4.99. And while Vimeo keeps exclusive digital rights for 30 days — which really isn’t a very long time in the film community — part of the deal is that the filmmakers agree to keep their movies on the Vimeo platform non-exclusively for two years in total. For Vimeo, the offer is designed to bring in a range of new, highly acclaimed indie film content — which it hopes will attract even more users to its transactional video service. But for filmmakers, Vimeo hopes to provide a new direct-to-fan distribution channel, with more than 100 million monthly uniques viewing its content across a wide range of devices.
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Spotify Makes Its Biggest Hardware Play Yet With Spotify Connect, Syncing Music At Home And Beyond
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Ingrid Lunden
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is today adding a new feature to its that represents the streaming company’s most ambitious move yet to position itself as the go-to music app on connected devices — and in the process entice more people to pay the $9.99 per month required to use the app. It’s launching , a new button in the app that will let users seamlessly shift Spotify music playing between their handsets and different Wi-Fi-connected devices in the home, starting with audio devices from 10 manufacturers. Spotify Connect also has a social twist: if you have other Spotify users on your Wi-Fi network, they, too, can take control of the decks through the feature. (But just make sure you only let friends connect to your Wi-Fi whose musical taste won’t clash with yours because Spotify, maybe betraying its benign Scandinavian roots, is relying on a kind of civility code for how this gets used. Adding in any kind of blocking or controlling feature would just “make things needlessly complicated,” Pascal de Mul, Spotify’s global head of hardware partnerships, told me in an interview.) Ultimately, the aim is for Spotify — now live in 28 countries and with a catalog of 20 million tracks — to become as widespread as possible, and therefore the most convenient music app for consumers to use. “Remember when every music device came with a tape deck or CD player or radio? We would like that ubiquity for Spotify, to be that way on every device,” said de Mul. (He used the word “ubiquitous” a lot.) But not all platforms are created equal. Spotify Connect is coming out on iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices today, and de Mul tells me that the company is working on updates for its and that will also add the new Spotify Connect feature. But for now there are “no plans” to update its Windows Phone or BlackBerry apps. I had a look around Spotify Connect, and it works like this: if you’re listening to some music on your phone, and you come home and want to continue listening but through a bigger sound system, you select the little speaker icon to the right of the music navigation bar. Up pops a screen with a list of devices that are connected to the network. You select the device and the music instantly transfers to playing on that device. Your handset, using the Spotify app, becomes the controller of that music. When the desktop app with Spotify Connect comes out, you can include that in the list and use it to control the music, too. For someone that had to call Sonos support more than once to get her system to work properly (to be fair… we had a tricky analog integration) this is dead simple to use. For now, the initial list of device makers are Argon, Bang & Olufsen, Denon, Hama, Marantz, Philips, Pioneer, Revo, Teufel and Yamaha, with more brands getting added before the end of the year — basically hardware makers that have built in chips made by companies that have cut deals with Spotify to embed its technology. That list of chipmakers, meanwhile, right now only has two names on it, SMSC (now part of Microchip) and Frontier Silicon, but just as Spotify is talking with more hardware makers, De Mul says he expects that chipmaker list to grow, too. For now, those who are Spotify Connect compatible will include a compatibility badge on their packaging. Spotify Connect is not the company’s first foray into home entertainment systems, but it represents a new chapter in how Spotify wants to be in better control of the experience in the future. Before today, if you wanted to stream Spotify music in your home, you had a couple of options. One was to buy specific connected hardware that would have made a bespoke integration with Spotify, and you would connect to control those devices using Airplay or Bluetooth. But de Mul notes that this was not ideal. “Yes, we have made partnerships with a lot of hardware makers, but in taking stock of that, we’ve realized that it’s a time-consuming process that was only getting us into high-end devices, those where device makers felt justified in making the extra investment.” And besides, he told me, Spotify wants to target users buying devices at all price points, not just the most expensive ones. The other issue, he said, was that updates to these bespoke integrations were not easy. “All that stuff lagged in the innovation cycle,” he said. “Every time we did something new it would take a while for it to come up in new devices.” What this means is that while these existing integrations can continue to be used with Spotify, they won’t work with the Connect service, and they won’t be updated with any other new features, either. The other important aspect of Spotify’s hardware strategy up to now has been tied up in its relationship with hardware makers that specifically make app-based systems. The biggest of these, and Spotify’s first-ever hardware partner, was Sonos. While Sonos has been a very important partner for Spotify, and de Mul described it as “very awesome,” he also noted that . Part of this goes back to Spotify’s intention to centralise and better control the experience on its service: with Sonos you control the music experience using the Sonos app, and of course Sonos only works with… Sonos, “and we want ubiquity.” : Spotify says the quote is taken out of context, in that it cannot share future plans, not that it doesn’t have any at all. “We will continue to support and improve the Spotify experience on Sonos,” a spokesperson noted, once again not confirming any timescale or specifics. So, some pretty clear signs of Spotify centralizing and consolidatng in the home audio space today, but what is perhaps more interesting is how Spotify Connect will longer term link up with its wider connected device strategy. The company has been making some inroads with connected cars — for example a to integrate and stream Spotify music on Ford’s SYNC in-car system. And from the likes of LG and Sony. Car and connected device integrations also fall under the remit of de Mul (who himself worked for Philips before joining Spotify three years ago), and the landscape that he sees ultimately has all of them working in complete synchronicity. There remain some big challenges, however. The first is whether consumers are interested enough in something like Spotify Connect to pay for the premium app to get it if they don’t have Premium service already. So far, there are no plans to take services like Spotify Connect out from behind the paywall. But that’s not to say it won’t ever happen. “We’re always evaluating putting more services into the free tier,” de Mul noted. “There is always a balancing between what we do for free and what for premium. In the U.S. we already have radio for free on mobile, so we’re trying to have those discussions. You will see more features moving to free.” The second is whether consumers will be willing to make the investment in devices that will work with Spotify Connect. If Spotify and its investors have the patience, it may also just take time for users to make the leap to buy compatible stereo equipment, since, so far, things like speakers and amplifiers haven’t proven to have the same kind of purchase cycle as a computer or laptop. The third is whether Spotify will extend this service beyond Wi-Fi and into cellular networks, so that even when Wi-Fi is not present the service could still work — such as in a car. “We are talking to everyone, including carriers,” de Mul said. “Everyone is playing every card.”
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Microsoft Enters Into $7.2B Deal To Buy Nokia’s Devices And Services Business And License Its Patents
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Colleen Taylor
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In a surprise move, Microsoft Monday evening that it has inked a deal with Nokia to acquire “substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents, and license and use Nokia’s mapping services.” The total price of the deal is EUR 5.44 billion in cash, which is currently worth $7.17 billion in U.S. dollars. The Devices and Services business acquisition accounts for EUR 3.79 billion of that, with the patent licensing deal making up the remaining EUR 1.65 billion. Nokia and Microsoft , but this is clearly a much more serious collaboration of the two companies. Also as part of the deal, Nokia’s CEO will be stepping aside as Nokia President and CEO to fill a new role at Microsoft as “Nokia Executive Vice President of Devices & Services.” Being that Elop has emerged as a for the at the helm of Microsoft, this could be a strong signal about the future of Microsoft’s executive leadership. In a press release announcing the news, Microsoft CEO said the following: “It’s a bold step into the future – a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies. Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft’s share and profits in phones, and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services. In addition to their innovation and strength in phones at all price points, Nokia brings proven capability and talent in critical areas such as hardware design and engineering, supply chain and manufacturing management, and hardware sales, marketing and distribution.” Although this seems like the end of Nokia as we know it, it sounds like for now the company is still planning on moving forward as a standalone entity of some sort — although with a very different strategy. Risto Siilasmaa, Nokia’s board chairman and current interim CEO following the departure of Elop, was quoted in a press release as saying “this is an important moment of reinvention and from a position of financial strength, we can build our next chapter… the deal offers future opportunities for many Nokia employees as part of a company with the strategy, financial resources and determination to succeed in the mobile space.” This is breaking news with potentially large ramifications — we will update this post with more information, and follow up with more analysis and news.
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Inside Hack Reactor, The Coding Bootcamp That Wants To Be The CS Degree Of The Future
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Colleen Taylor
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is one San Francisco-based startup that’s aiming to help build the bridge between people who want to learn how to code and the many companies who are so keen to hire programmers. It’s an intense, that is essentially a programming bootcamp filled with intensive classes and project-based instruction for six days a week from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. The Hack Reactor program does not come cheap — standard tuition for the three-month-long program is $17,780, though scholarships are available — but it seems that it can really be worth it: Hack Reactor that 100 percent of its graduates are now employed as software engineers, with an average salary in the six figures. The program’s tagline spells out a grand vision of being “the CS degree of the 21st century.” It’s part of a growing trend of coding bootcamps that could all be potentially disruptive to the standard university system (which many say is .) So we swung by Hack Reactor HQ with our TechCrunch TV cameras to take a look for ourselves. Check out the video embedded above to hear us talk to Hack Reactor co-founder Shawn Drost and a couple Hack Reactor students about the experience.
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With Time Warner Cable Deal, CBS Seeks To Ensure Its Digital Future
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Ryan Lawler
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CBS and Time Warner Cable finally today, ending a long, protracted blackout of the broadcast network on TWC’s cable system. While getting the deal done will mean that Time Warner Cable viewers will be able to watch Week One of the NFL season next week — and no one wanted to miss that — the deal is also designed to help CBS monetize its content on a growing number of new platforms. Increasingly, agreements between networks and cable operators are getting hung up on the question of digital rights whenever those contracts come up. In the case of CBS, the network has been pretty cautious about how viewers watch its shows on their computers and on other devices. While the other broadcasters made their content available through Hulu and Hulu Plus, CBS forced viewers to watch its shows on CBS.com. It was also one of the last networks to embrace the growing tablet market, waiting until this spring before finally . (Just for comparison, ABC introduced its with the launch of the iPad, way back in 2010. Hulu Plus wasn’t far behind, a few months later.) Interestingly enough, CBS’ digital platforms became a battleground in the dispute with Time Warner Cable. At the same time that the cable operator blacked out the CBS signal in many of its major networks, CBS kept Time Warner Cable broadband subscribers from . With the latest retrans deal, it appears CBS continues to seek control over its digital rights. While terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, CBS CEO Les Moonves wrote in a that the deal would give CBS the ability to monetize its content on “all the new, developing platforms that are now transforming the way people watch television.” https://twitter.com/MatthewKeysLive/status/374643394858872832/photo/1 That could mean a bunch of things. For one, it could mean that CBS, like Fox before it, could seek to limit its viewership online to those people who pay cable operators like Time Warner Cable to view its content. A few years ago, Fox made the (then) unprecedented decision to require viewers to log in or authenticate with their cable subscription password to view shows the day after they aired. Don’t have a cable subscription? Well then, you’d have to wait until a week later to watch the latest episode of your favorite show. Authentication isn’t exactly a new thing: the concept has been around ever since Comcast and Time Warner announced their plans for TV Everywhere back in 2010. But Fox was the first broadcaster to embrace the cable login as a way to screen out non-cable subscribers on Hulu and its own properties. While it doesn’t appear that CBS plans to roll out its own password-protected pay wall quite yet, it’s building a foundation that would enable it to do so. A CBS spokesperson confirmed to me that in all its most recent deals, there is a framework for TV Everywhere-type authentication. The Time Warner Cable deal is no exception. Being able to monetize on emerging platforms could also mean having the freedom to license TV rights to new, emerging players in the market. CBS, of course, has profited handsomely from the emergence of digital distributors like Netflix. In fact, digital licensing is one of the fastest-growing parts of its business, especially with the emergence of players like Amazon Prime Instant Videos and Redbox Instant by Verizon. Even more streaming services are set to emerge: Intel has been working to secure deals with content providers for an over-the-top cable alternative that it plans to roll out. Sony also is working on a streaming video service, for which it has reportedly . With more services emerging, CBS will want the flexibility to license its programming on new services in addition to the old. CBS and Time Warner Cable weren’t the first partners to get hung up on the question of digital rights, and they’re unlikely to be the last. Until the industry can agree on a more standard template for who can do what with which content on whatever platform, those blackouts and disagreements will likely continue.
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Online Marketplace GlobeIn’s Network Of Artisans Has Grown To Nearly 30 Countries
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Anthony Ha
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Startup is building an online marketplace for artisans from around the world. When it first launched in February, it said it was working with more than 100 sellers in nine countries. Now from 29 countries, including recent additions like Mexico, Guatemala and Canada. That growth is particularly impressive given the type of artisans that GlobeIn is trying to serve — the kind who might not be online at all if not for the startup. To bring them online, GlobeIn has a network of “Artisan Helpers” — travelers who photograph the products, record stories, and help the artisans use the required technology. I spoke to Vladimir Ermakov earlier this summer to check on the progress that the site has made thus far. He was happy to talk about the number of artists and works on the site, but he was less forthcoming about the number of actual visitors or purchases, because he said the company has been focused on building out its network of artisans and improving the product, rather than on consumer marketing. Ermakov was rattled off descriptions of some of the artisans he’s interacted with personally, including from Uzbekistan (who are selling unique musical instruments, including some made from catfish skins) and from Russia (with products that incorporate traditional lacquer miniature painting). There are larger organizations on the site, too, including (which creates purses and other products from recycled goods) and (which makes jewelry from recycled bullets and bomb shells). As some of those descriptions may suggest, GlobeIn isn’t just touting the uniqueness of its products, but also the effect that it can have on artisans’ lives. Ermakov said that while GlobeIn isn’t a nonprofit, it is a “mission-driven” company. Another sign of that mission: Artisans are supposed to receive 100 percent of the asking price for their goods, with GlobeIn taking an additional fee that it adds to the list price. This approach extends to how the site treats visitors, too — Ermakov said he doesn’t look at them as just “potential customers” but as people who might get more involved, perhaps by becoming an artisan helper. Users can already create profiles with a counter allowing them to take credit for a certain number of “artisans impacted”. “We’re working on features that will make people participate much more and become much more a part of the movement, part of the global mission,” Ermakov said, adding, “We definitely want to deliver very engaging, exciting product before we spend too much effort on marketing.” Beyond that, he said GlobeIn is also growing through partnerships, for example with fair trade groups or with micro-lending organizations.
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Apple, Microsoft And Google Could Learn Something From Mozilla’s App Store Prototype
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Frederic Lardinois
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App Stores are broken. It’s virtually impossible to find the interesting apps among the thousands of low-quality offerings. If an app isn’t in the top 10 of its respective category, chances are you won’t find it. Apple’s “Genius” feature was so dumb, it was dropped in iOS 7 and replaced with an even less interesting “Apps Near Me” feature that shows you the apps the people around you are using. Microsoft is trying to fix the top 10 myopia by launching a more curated app store experience in Windows 8.1, but even there, existing rankings still play a major role. Mozilla, which is only now getting into the mobile game thanks to its Firefox OS initiative, has had the advantage of seeing what its competitors have been doing for the last few years. While the current Firefox OS Marketplace isn’t all that revolutionary (though it’s focus on web apps gives it an interesting new spin on the app store concept), the organization laid out last week that puts some interesting new twists on what its competitors are doing. In today’s app stores, Mozilla argues, “you only see the content picked by whoever maintains the app store. It’s hard to feel that personal connection.” Even if you want to browse for new apps, you don’t know what to search for, unless your friends tell you about an app or you read about it somewhere. In its prototype, the Firefox OS Marketplace team is using a news feed-like experience to tailor the app store experience to the individual user. The idea here is to allow users to follow content they are interested in without implementing a complicated “follow” mechanism. In the prototype, users simply express their interest by clicking on a small heart-shaped icon “to see the updates and related content in the future.” In the long run, however, Mozilla envisions that users will curate the majority of the feed. It’s not clear what exactly this curation process will look like – and it’s something some third-party app stores have also tried – but it’s a concept few of the other vendor stores have tried so far and given the importance of social signals. Android’s store, of course, tells you when an app has also been downloaded by your friends, but that’s still a very different experience from essentially offering curated lists from your friends. The Mozilla team also notes that in its research, user engagement with app stores tends to drop over time (something I’ve definitely noticed in my own usage of them). There’s just very little fun in using them. Mozilla thinks having “whimsical” micro-copy and animations will help it retain users, but for the most part, I think its idea to allow users to “constantly discover diverse content including apps, collections, articles, reviews, videos and more” in the store could be the winning concept here.
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Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss On Why There Will Be 30 New Franchises In The Enterprise
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Leena Rao
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The future of enterprise software is anything but boring. Andreessen Horowitz partner aptly predicted his guest post titled “30 New Franchises” a few weeks ago, there a massive opportunity to create new multi-billion-dollar enterprise franchises despite incumbents throwing massive amounts of money to acquire these franchises. These companies, such as Box and many others, are choosing to stay independent. Weiss himself should now–he sold his enterprise company IronPort Systems to one of the most well known incumbents in the space, Cisco, back in 2007. And we decided to at Disrupt SF around Weiss’ predictions, with the CEO’s of Box, Zendesk and Nebula (you can still buy tickets ). We sat down with Weiss to hear more about his theories behind “30 Franchises.” You can read the entirety of our conversation below. Describe the basic premise around your about 30 New Franchises. Absolutely! So I think I am just trying to point out a couple of things around the enterprise opportunity. Quite honestly I think this is the best time I’ve ever seen to be an investor in enterprise technology. I don’t know how long you’ve been a beat reporter for enterprise, but I can’t imagine a more boring job over the last 20 years. Just think about Oracle, Microsoft, beating earnings by a penny, they buying another company. There was just nothing that dramatic or that interesting going on. And now all of a sudden it like that all the major enterprise companies are vulnerable, and not just a little bit vulnerable, but vulnerable like everything is changing underneath them. Let’s talk about Microsoft for a minute. Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise was always predicated on 97 percent PC market share, and everything was kind of born out of that because the Microsoft stack was not just what was on the PCs, but it was all the email and with Exchange and SharePoint. And plus, once they were in the enterprise, they were also able to shove in all kinds of other products. Now between the tablets — as fast as we went from PCs to laptops, we’re going to go from laptops to tablets, and Microsoft is nowhere to be found; and not only are they nowhere to be found, but they made, I believe, such a strategic error by holding back Office thinking that that was going to be their trump card. When we finally come out with a tablet it’s going to run the office, and it won’t run anywhere else, well, that went over like a lead balloon, right? Right. So now, again, they are going through a big transition, and then you think about Oracle who had been buying up every single one of the on-prem software makers including PeopleSoft. There are four or five of the companies that they bought across every application stack. And then lo and behold, all of them are going SaaS, and hats off to Larry Ellison that he did invest early. I think he is a majority owner of NetSuite. So I kind of joked that at some point he may just go over and take the CEO role at NetSuite. There may be a jump as he realizes that this isn’t a whole rollup that he did with Oracle. Almost like a Computer Associates-like rollup. It feels like NetSuite might actually be the better bet because that platform and that business is much more attuned to all the businesses that he will probably be buying. That might be a better vehicle than Oracle itself, which is a really interesting issue. So it’s a long way of saying that the incumbents don’t have the skills, don’t have the wherewithal necessary to compete in this new world, and I don’t think the acquisitions are working. Having been at Cisco when they bought a SaaS company which was IronPort, they don’t have the systems to sell IronPort, the salespeople, the comp plan, it just goes a different culture of running a 24×7 services organization as opposed to selling boxes into the data center. So I think that’s a good segue into my next question, which is, what changed? I would say there was a flurry of acquisitions happening with incumbents picking up whether they’d be a billion-dollar company or several-hundred-million-dollar company or even a smaller acquisition. What changed in companies like Box and so on and so forth turning down acquisition offers, and instead pursuing independence? There is a lot of talk about how the enterprise as consumer cooled off in the public markets. Enterprise has heated up I think because of companies like Workday and others. And so, is it because there is now this real sort of excitement from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley around enterprise and they actually feel like they can stay independent and not have to go down the route of acquisition? Well, I think you’ve got two interesting data points. One of those data points are Salesforce and Workday, and those two founders of those companies are not going to sell. If you know the story of Marc Benioff and coming out of Oracle and the story of David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri you’ll understand. With the later two founders, they got their company kind of stolen out from under them, and these are two entrepreneurs that said, all right, never again. We’re not selling, not for sale for any price. And look at the prodigal that was in the other side of those two companies. One is 10 billion, the other one is just 30 billion. And so if you have the guts, like Aaron Levie, to stay the course, there is a major franchise on the other end of that line, and these are entrepreneurs that are not going to sell at any price. So where does this lead incumbents if they can’t apply some of these game-changing technologies in SaaS mobile, the data center. Are they just going to become the dinosaurs? Sure, so for years Computer Associates’ side of strategy of buying up the old — because these technology changes take years and years and years. And so the Computer Associates strategy was, we’re going to buy these technology companies. We’re going to mop up all these — kind of all this old technology and raise the service prices and just kind of live off those annuities and they look for years off of that and they are like, you could certainly see Oracle follow that strategy. There are going to be people that are going to be living on Oracle for years before they go off and all the kind of the legacy PeopleSoft and they can certainly raise prices almost with impurity. So I think that’s a potential strategy. I think they can try to change as well, like they can try to make the leap. I just think the premise of the 30 New Franchises is, it’s going to be really, really hard for them to cross the chasm. There’s just too many things changing at once, and I even look at a company like Salesforce. Salesforce was never architected for the type of cloud computing that’s going on at Facebook and Google, and so they’re going to have to react to that. And they also were never architected for mobile, and that’s another thing they are going to have to react to. If you are in an incumbent, you can certainly react to one big technology change and maybe you can react to two. The premise of the post is, I don’t think you can react to three. So you mentioned how some of these franchises are competing for talent especially in the design area. I want you to sort of expand a little bit on that. How does 30 New Franchises affect talent and recruiting in the enterprise? So the interesting part about mobile, and this is very specific to mobile and the mobile experience, is that you have a very small palette to work with. The mobile phone is almost like a remote control, when I think of like a TiVo remote control: you push a button and something happens. And you look at some of the great mobile apps like Lyft or Instagram; where literally you walk outside, you push here I am, and a car shows up to pick you up or you push Instagram. And that type of ease-of-use with just limited functionality has been so far removed from the enterprise world. And so in order to get those kind of innovations that a Lyft or an Instagram put on a mobile device for consumers, you are going to need kind of a completely new class of UI designer that are incredibly hard to hire. And you can imagine these folks coming out of Rhode Island School of Design or other places where they just kind of the best user interface places in the world that are in hot demand. And this demand comes from consumer companies which hit the personality of a designer a lot better than an enterprise company. How do you get them to go work for an enterprise company? It’s not like you can just go pay the money, it has to be a culture where their work is appreciated and where a great design is revered. I remember hearing those early stories of Apple where, if you worked in manufacturing in Apple, it was like the worst job in the world, right? I remember this story about Steve Jobs — didn’t want a seam on a couple of the aluminum products, whether it’d be an iPod or a MacBook, and they had to get flying in these aluminum extruding machines from Sweden in order to accomplish it. And I remember the manufacturing people were just going nuts and he was just like, I don’t care, like go figure it out, that’s your job. And I just don’t think enterprises — enterprises are just, in general, designed for manufacturability, designed for efficiency, and not designed for aesthetics or designed for ease-of-use. And this is a bit of a sea change when it comes to mobile. And so I think they are going to have a really hard time hiring them. Something that I put in the post was, all of our consumer companies, even though they had great designers for web, had a complete “oh shit” moment around trying to find designers for mobile. And even if you look at a company like Facebook, they must have hired on or acquired 10-plus mobile teams over the last few years if you look at all the teams they acquired in addition to buying Instagram. That’s a real reaction to mobile. None of the enterprise companies have had that kind of reaction yet. For example Box acquiring Crocodoc–that’s a bet on mobile. I would not doubt it. I think that Box is expanding its use-case and then also getting much better at mobile. But Box was kind of made for mobile. I mean, the great thing about the whole thing about Box was that it makes it very easy to transfer files on and off your computer and your mobile phone and make it a seamless experience. Some of the companies you mentioned are early stage, some of the companies you mentioned are later stage, who may be at the brink of, within the next year, becoming a public company or going up on that path. Is there a risk for some of these later-stage companies that could become these franchises, turning into the incumbents, and do you think that the CEOs of these companies are thinking more thoughtfully about how not to be blind to disruption? Well, I think they have now — there has been enough folks that have sold. When you sell a company to somebody that doesn’t know what to do with it, it ultimately dies. Sometimes it dies a slow painful death. I think there are now enough companies that have sold the SaaS company to an incumbent where you can’t sell the product, it doesn’t mesh with their existing product line, it’s painful. I think that the Salesforces and the Workdays of the world will have a much easier time of integrating a company and making that company successful, because it kind of looks and smells like what they are already doing. In the early days of Cisco, when Cisco was acquiring other switch and router technologies, those executives stayed on for 10 or 15 years at Cisco and helped Cisco become the company that it is today. When you go so far afield to acquire companies that are just doing some things that are so different than what you are doing, if it doesn’t snap into an existing product line or if it’s not something that’s easy for the existing Salesforce to sell, it’s just a bad experience for that acquired company that acquired management team. And so I think word has gotten around a bit that if you are going to go — it’s not just like you are selling your company, all your employees are now going to have to go through this experience. The combination of it being a bad experience if somebody doesn’t know what to do with this particular type of company, it’s less of an appealing option to sell the company because I think most entrepreneurs say, okay, I am graduating to a bigger poker table, right? Like I was playing kind of in the regionals and now I am going to the world series of poker when I sell a company to a company and I feel like I am kind of moving up. But if you are selling a company where the likely case is it’s just the money and they are going to slowly kill the company, that’s not a very exciting prospect. So the combination that you have Salesforce and Workday, that have these amazing market caps, it looks like they are plowing new ground in the enterprise, and you have these affordable experiences of selling companies to incumbents that don’t know what to do with these startups, because it just looks and feels and smells so different than what an incumbent is used to doing. I think that that’s the opportunity for the 30 New Franchises. Where do you feel like there is still a huge opportunity for disruption in the enterprise? I don’t think I really emphasize just how magical I believe a CRM app can be. You know that I’ve just called that person, you can look at my dialer and the notion of dialing out on my phone to a customer is actually something I should be logging into my CRM app and it does it automatically or when I arrive at a customer’s side, it knows my location from GPS and pulls up everything I need, including new sources and other things that might have happened in the last 10 minutes that I might be able to surprise the customer or delight the customer with.
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If You’re Buying Textbooks This Week, Get Educated, Not Schooled
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Eliza Brooke
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When a semester’s worth of textbooks can add up to a couple (or three or four) hundred dollars, hitting the checkout line at the campus bookstore is a distressing experience for many students, to say the least. Analog solutions to this problem include: borrowing from the library, borrowing from friends who’ve already taken the class, and photocopying from those foolish enough to buy the book in exchange for beer. Or, you know, you could turn to the plethora of digital resources out there for help. If you really don’t want to spend money on books, is a free service that aligns its e-textbooks with other popular texts by chapter across 20 subjects. In classes like Accounting and Psych 101 where many textbooks provide the same information, this can be a big money saver. Boundless is also launching a premium option, which includes study help in the form of active recall quizzes at the price of $19.99 per book. Like flossing your teeth, it’s one of those things that most of us probably are not going to do, but that would probably pay off big time later in life. Textbook giant , which , gives students a lot of options. You can buy new or used, rent a hard copy, or rent an e-text from 60 days up to a year. There’s a certain advantage to that last option, which is that you’re never going to forget to turn your rental back in and get charged the full amount. Just saying. You can also sell textbooks through the site. Just in time for this school year, Google has also with e-text rentals available in the store. They’ve partnered with major publishing houses like Pearson, Miley, Macmillian Higher Education, McGraw-Hill, and Cengage Learning, meaning you’re likely to find your bio textbook in the mix. The savings range from only $14 on a $106 Biology book to a 50% markdown on a $189 Precalculus text, which is pretty good. For students at schools that use edtech company , shopping at the campus store may actually be to their advantage. Formerly a Chegg competitor known as BookRenter, Rafter is by helping school administrators lower prices for their students, who would otherwise turn to off-campus solutions like those suggested in this article. Rafter is currently used by schools like the University of Arizona, NC State, Purdue, and Seattle University. Last but certainly not least: Google “full text.” MIT of all institutions has on the Shakespeare front, although the lines aren’t numbered, and Dartmouth has . As an English major, discovering that too-obvious-to-be-true education hack saved me in college. And by that I mean my bank account. Lots of money.
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Turning Apple TV Into Ouroboros
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple has been ‘pulling the string’ on the Apple TV for seven years now. Think about that one for a minute: it’s had a set-top box since before the iPhone. During that time, the landscape of online video entertainment has completely changed, largely as a result of the iPhone, iPad and iTunes Store. While Apple has a long way to go in order to make the Apple TV a decent solution for countries outside of the US, it has made some progress and continues to very slowly iterate on the original premise of an in-home media streaming device. A large part of that is iCloud, which now allows users to watch any purchases they’ve made from iTunes on any device, including ATV. But there’s still a lot of work to be done if the device is going to become a major pillar of Apple’s business, as I believe that it could be — and should be if cards are played right. The Apple TV, whether it comes in its current hockey-puck form or married to a flat-panel display, has the potential to create an of ecosystem lock-in that could pin closed many doors for other laggards like Google and the much more competitive Amazon. If the iPad benefited from the iPhone and its app ecosystem and the Mac benefited from the iPad’s millions of newly exposed users, so could an Apple TV that offered hundreds or thousands of ‘apps’ that were familiar to users. Those users would happily buy into a system that offered them easy and convenient access to their in-network content as well as their ‘out of network’ content. This cyclical thinking has worked well as Apple expanded from phones to tablets, and should continue to work on the strength of those efforts. In order to do so, Apple will need to make some aggressive moves to mature the device. In fact, it needs to move away from being a device at all and finally make the jump to being a platform. I’m not sure anyone disagrees with that, as everywhere you turn people are talking about the potential of apps on Apple TV. Unless you’re blind, you can see the possibilities inherent in turning Apple’s following of hundreds of thousands of developers loose on a screen that’s hosted in your living room. Unlike , however, I’m not so sure that a full Apple TV SDK is on its way ‘soon’, for a variety of reasons. First, I’m hearing that the current tools offered to Apple TV partners are fairly crude, far from a true software SDK of the likes that developers for Apple’s App Store and Mac App Store have access to. When say that they built apps in-house, what’s meant is that Apple does have some tools and frameworks to offer, but they’re far from the options that are out there for app developers. Even taking a superficial look at the apps, you can see that these are not truly custom solutions, but modified versions of stock Apple TV menu system. Here’s the HBO app for Apple TV: Now compare it to the Vevo app: There’s a bunch of stuff that can doubtlessly be played with and tweaked by the partners — within Apple’s style guide for current ATV ‘apps’ — but we’re not looking at the freedom that developers on the App Store get. I haven’t been able to uncover anything about Apple’s timeline when it comes to opening up a set of tools for developers to create apps for ATV, but whatever they are, it’s unlikely that they’re the current tools that partners are using to make apps. Apple has a reputation for creating extensive, mature and easy-to-use developer utilities and documentation. The existing tools are, apparently, not…that. Beyond the fact that we’ve seen little evidence of a real SDK out there for Apple TV, there are a host of other issues that will have to be overcome on the hardware side before the device is ready to support an app ecosystem. Matt Braun is the developer of , a very cool group-play app that heavily utilizes AirPlay and the Apple TV. Braun, as a game developer, notes that there are some distinct disadvantages of the Apple TV platform that make it a tough sell. First of all, the current hardware only has 8 GB of flash memory, which is already used to hold current preferences, buffer video and more. “Frequently a rented video that’s been buffered will get kicked from memory after watching an episode of a TV show or two on Netflix,” says Braun. “With console quality games weighing in in the neighborhood of a high-def movie, the most obvious thing that’d need to happen is an increase in storage capacity.” The single-core A5 processor in the current Apple TV would need an upgrade as well, as it’s nowhere near the capability of the iPad 4’s A6 or modern console processors. Apple currently has the capability to enable many types of app scenarios that utilize the iPad or iPhone as the processing power and AirPlay as the delivery mechanism. If you turn that over in your head a bit it becomes evident that Apple has two options: Note that I don’t mention a full-on Apple television. I don’t because I essentially don’t think that matters from this perspective. It matters for Apple in terms of markets and margins, but the hardware for developers would no doubt be very similar either way. Unlike iPhones and iPads, there are only a handful of actual display resolutions for TVs on the market and those could likely be optimized for fairly easily. This isn’t a fragmentation nightmare as it is on phones and tablets. If you believe that Apple’s going to take the second tack above, it’s going to have to set the ground rules very carefully. Simply ‘porting’ apps to the Apple TV isn’t going to cut it. This is going to necessitate a whole new way of thinking about the visual language and control schemes of apps. “Ease of use is the biggest defining characteristic,” says Braun. “Currently you really have only directional and selection buttons to work with, and an app needs to be workable — and fast — with limited input controls.” Expanding out from that would require a completely new method of controlling apps on the Apple TV, one that was both familiar and flexible. My vote has always been for a that’s bundled with hardware. And then there are those . But whatever it is, it’s not going to be a stick-of-gum remote. Regardless of what happens with apps, those alone won’t work. The foundation of Apple TV must be built on continuing channel deals with partners. That’s what has been going on for the past couple of years as the market becomes increasingly friendly to a-la-carte programming. Most users see the model of being able to purchase a subscription to a provider’s content without the intermediary of a cable or satellite TV provider as inevitable. Unfortunately, the economics still aren’t really making sense, and until they do it’s going to be an uphill battle to launch solutions that pull viewers away from those bundles — even if they still require validations and packages. It’s a matter of familiarity and mindshare. As Apple is able to get HBO, to launch apps on the Apple TV, it’s building a pattern of behavior in its users. If I subscribe to HBO currently and log in to my Time Warner account to watch the app, that’s all well and good for both sides of that deal. But every time I click on the app, that’s one more time I’m not watching the channel on cable. Now, imagine if HBO decides to flip the switch to offer a-la-carte subscriptions at some point. I’m already conditioned to watch on-demand content on Apple TV — and now that content can be accessed without a cable sub. A simple popup informing me that I can save $x by subscribing directly with HBO would allow me to downgrade in a heartbeat and switch to a handy one-click subscription based on my Apple ID. If I was a cable TV provider, i’d be getting hives every time a new icon appeared on the Apple TV, whether I was getting that customer’s money anyway… So, Apple will continue tiptoeing through the licensing minefield, preparing its users for a future killing blow. There are also a bunch of other items that will need to be tackled, but shouldn’t be too much of a problem for Apple’s engineers. Navigating large libraries of movies, for instance, is an absolute pain in the butt. It’s not pleasant at all and the user experience is very poor if the library of films on your local computer is over a few hundred. The key there would be to do what iTunes already does and merge personally owned movies and your iCloud library in one holistic offering. Then display them nicely just like the ‘Movies’ app on the Apple TV does and present more sorting options and we’re in business. This gives Apple a way to absorb media from outside its network and solidify those offerings as something you access ‘via Apple TV’. The holy grail, of course, would be for Apple to strike a licensing deal that allowed it to offer an iTunes Match-like system for movies that uploaded the content to its servers and allowed you to watch them from anywhere. I’m not holding my breath, but it’s something to wish for. Basically, Apple needs to make the Apple TV better for those users who have bought into its ecosystem hard. Making that experience more pleasant can only increase the spending there. Who knows, maybe the Apple TV will eventually be good enough to create its own ‘iPad-style’ halo effect — causing people to gravitate towards other products in Apple’s oeuvre. I used to think that an SDK would come in the current Apple TV configuration in order to prepare a seed packet of apps for the eventual launch of a full-blown Apple television. But now, I’m leaning towards thinking that were going to see a big upgrade in hardware before we see apps, especially when it comes to control and navigation. Almost all set-top boxes are terrible, with a few exceptions (like Roku, when is Amazon going to buy them anyway?) which hit around the ‘decent’ mark. Apple has the tools and the market position to make the Apple TV something really great. But, like the eye of , Apple must turn its full attention to ATV before we see big jumps in capability. In the end, the ‘killer app’ for the Apple TV is probably not an app. Instead it’s probably some sort of watershed moment in ‘cable channel’ deals that doesn’t require an additional subscription fee. Along with that comes the ability to interleave those licensed channels with your own content in a seamless interface. And that’s a much harder problem than slapping an Apple TV on the back of a flat panel. Image Credit:
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Sebastian Thrun And Gavin Newsom To School Us At Disrupt SF
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Alexia Tsotsis
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Former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun there will only be ten institutions in the world that offer higher education, and that — a startup that offers STEM-heavy free online courses — will be one of them. Thrun may be on to something: As the platforms for information distribution broaden due to the Internet, more heavily regulated legacy industries like finance, health and education will inevitably see their outdated structures dissolve and be replaced by something new. The jury is still out on what exactly that something new is for education, though startups like , and are paving the way, from elementary school onwards. But despite technological advances, many universities are reluctant to give up on their elite status as the keepers of knowledge. And many K-12 schools struggle with paradox of choice when it comes to which startup platforms to experiment with. How do you know what will help students learn and what will eventually be a time suck? “We might have a system with vastly different tiers, in which some people get the ‘full campus experience’ with nice buildings and live professors while (many) others study as best they can from home with packaged classes and giant peer review forums,” educator Nicholas Jenkins asserts, “But let’s hope we end up somewhere in the middle. Debt is going to be as big a driver of these changes as technology. Or rather, the impacts of debt and technology will converge to drive the transformation.” Jenkins is a Stanford Professor who emailed me earlier today, pitching the Stanford English department’s latest attempt at leveraging technology for learning: . Thrun will be joining California Lieutenant Governor and Gavin Newsom on stage to school us on how the education space will play out over the next two years, two decades and two centuries … Because it will take a long time — and a — to build the next great educational institution. Sebastian has set his sights on democratizing higher education. Co-founder and CEO of Udacity, Sebastian is also a Research Professor at Stanford University and a Google Fellow, as well as the inventor of the autonomous car and project lead on Google Glass. Thrun is a former Director of the Stanford AI Lab. He led the development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which is exhibited in the Smithsonian. His research focuses on robotics and artificial intelligence. Gavin Newsom, 45, was elected as the 49th Lieutenant Governor of the State of California on November 2, 2010. His top priorities are economic development and job creation, fighting poverty, improving access to higher education, and maintaining California’s environmental leadership. He is the author of “Citizenville: How to Take the Town SquareDigital and Reinvent Government,” which explores the intersection of democracy and technology in this ever-connected world. Before becoming Lieutenant Governor, Newsom served as Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco. After only 36 days as mayor, Newsom gained worldwide attention when he granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This bold move set the tone for Newsom’s first term. Under his energetic leadership, the economy grew and jobs were created. The City became a center for biotech and clean tech. He initiated a plan to bring universal health care to all of the City’s uninsured residents. And Newsom aggressively pursued local solutions to global climate change. Newsom is married to Jennifer Siebel Newsom. They have three children: Montana, Hunter and Brooklynn.
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Security Researcher Discovers Bug That Would Let Hackers Delete Any Photo Off Facebook
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Greg Kumparak
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In a nice example of how Facebook’s bounty program work (in contrast with ), a security researcher has unearthed a bug that would let anyone delete just about any photo from Facebook — whether the photo was yours, mine, or Zuckerberg’s — and was paid a solid chunk of cash for the discovery. According to the terms of Facebook’s white hat program, those who find bugs and follow Facebook’s rules in reporting them are paid a bounty. The minimum bounty for any bug is set at $500, with Facebook paying more based on the bug’s severity. Most payouts I’ve heard of tend to be around $1,500. In of this bug, security researcher Arul Kumar says he was paid — roughly 25x the base bounty. Why so much? It’s likely because this bug was really, simple to reproduce. Seemingly a matter of changing a few parameters in a URL, it would have been trivial to create a tool that allowed a malicious user to delete other user’s photos en masse. The bug, says Arul, relied on a weakness in Facebook’s support dashboard, which allows a user to see the status of reports they’ve sent for review (for reporting things like inappropriate profiles or photos, or spam.) If a user reported a photo and Facebook decided not to forcibly delete it, that user would get a link that let them send a quick takedown request whoever had uploaded the image, complete with a one-click delete button. This link, it seems, was the weakness. By changing a pair of numbers in the link’s URL, Arul says he could take down any photo, from any user — regardless of who that photo actually belonged to, and whether or not that photo had ever actually been reported. He could send a takedown request for a photo on some celebrity’s account, for example, to his own secondary profile. The target account wouldn’t see a thing until their photo was already gone.
Funnily enough, Arul demonstrates his exploit on Mark Zuckerberg’s account — the same thing that kept a researcher from claiming a bounty a few weeks ago (as Facebook prohibits researchers from testing their exploits on any real accounts). The difference here, though, is that Arul never actually affected Zuck’s account. Whereas the previous researcher used his exploit to post news of his bug to Zuck’s otherwise private wall, Arul arms the bug to show how it all comes together but never pushes that last button to delete the photo. The bug should now be fixed.
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Hex Airbot Shatters Crowdfunding Goal For Its Cheap, 3D Printed Drones
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Chris Velazco
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first turned heads earlier this year at China-based hardware accelerator and now the team behind it is finally pushing to bring the inexpensive flier to market by way of a recent-launched . The basics will probably sound a little familiar: like other consumer-oriented drones on the market, users can control the Hex from smartphones with Bluetooth 4.0 support, and the team is also selling camera modules to bolt on the thing as it goes off on its seven-minute flights. Throw in a flight-stabilization system to simplify the controls and you’ve got a fun little toy to harass the neighbors with. But is sheer novelty enough? To be quite honest, there’s no shortage of startups and incumbents out there trying to make a name for themselves by trying to bring remote-controlled drones to the masses — there’s France-based Parrot and its popular line of AR drones, to say nothing of India’s and A16Z-backed to name just a few. Competition is getting to be awfully stiff (even if your average person on the street would be probably hard-pressed to come up with reasons to use one), but the Hex team thinks it has a few advantages over the rest of the pack. The drone’s body is entirely 3D printed for one, which Hex’s Arnie Bhadury says makes the process of tweaking the thing and prototyping new designs substantially easier. “It’s very easy to iterate and update the product just like any modern-day software,” Bhadury said. “It also allows customization and personalization from the user’s point of view.” Considering how cheap 3D printing new cases and components could be, it’s not impossible to see how selling those sorts of accessories could become a new revenue stream for the young company. It’s hard to argue with the price tag, too. The most basic version can be had for a scant $50, which is enough to make it a tantalizing weekend project for wannabe hardware hackers and air jockeys who want to fiddle with the airbot’s Arduino-compatible board. Naturally, prices for more robust rewards can get pretty steep — it’ll cost you $469 for an airbot plus a video transmitter module and a pair of video goggles to see exactly what’s going on up there — but the project already seems to have struck a chord. The team’s Kickstarter campaign is only a week old, but they’ve already managed to shatter their modest funding goal. They’re hoping to pick up $10,000 in funding from drone enthusiasts, but the current tally is sitting over $180,000 with plenty of time left on the clock.
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Enfojer Wants You To Turn Your Instagram Snaps Into DIY B&W Prints
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Natasha Lomas
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We’ve had an , so here’s pretty much the reverse: a . Phone-owning humans’ love affair with digital photography continues charging along at full tilt — fuelled by the ubiquity of cameraphones and the apps that allow easy digital photo remixing, whether it’s filters, or ‘s dual aspect, or ‘s serendipity. All that snapping means a mountain of photos on mobile devices and social networks (not to mention sitting unloved on servers in the cloud). Sure you can browse them digitally, and repurpose a few as e-wallpaper, but this kind of photography is mostly a communication medium. The photos keep flowing to keep the conversation going. But what if you want to stop and linger on a few choice shots — and maybe even see real-world photo filters in action? The is a photo enlarger designed to make it (relatively) easy to translate digital photos into analogue black and white prints — so you can put a few digital shots up on your wall and get involved in the creation process yourself. It doesn’t reproduce colour, to keep the photo development process simple (and non-toxic), and does require you to get your hands dirty with dipping prints in and out of developing and fixing fluids but its creators claim to have streamlined the process so it’s suitable for Generation App. Once all the kit is set up they reckon you can turn an Instagram into a B&W artefact in a mere six minutes. Enfojer can enlarge images from any smartphone (the cradle is compatible with phones up to 141 mm x 71 mm) or film up to 6×6 format. Prints can be created up to 20x20cm. The smartphone photo enlarger uses the phone’s own LED screen as the light source to expose the photographic paper. The device also has a wide angle polycarbonate “toy camera style meniscus lens” — which blurs the image slightly so it doesn’t end up looking pixellated. Think of it as an analogue filter (to go with your digital filters); “we tried sharper and better ones, but the results were too sterile,” note Enfojer’s creators. The rest of the required kit is classic darkroom stuff like photo developing trays, fluids and a red LED light to work to. Of course there’s no shortage of services offering to pro print your Instagram photos for you, in a variety of ways — such as , , to name three — but Enfojer has an educational/enthusiast angle since it’s DIY photo printing. Enfojer’s creators say they’re aiming the device at “budding photographers” who don’t already have access to a pro photo enlarger and are interested in learning about the dark (fading) arts of analogue photography. They also reckon it’s a cheaper photo-printing option than “average” photo printers. Which may well be true, since printer ink is apparently more expensive than blue diamond dust. Enfojer’s Croatian creators are seeking $100,000 on Indiegogo to fund manufacturing costs of the device — but it’s not a fixed funding campaign so they’ll get to take home whatever the crowd decides to shower on them. Backers can pay to bag an Enfojer on its own for $200, or pay up to $450 for a full kit that includes several trays, tongs, a tray rack, darkroom light and a pack of photographic paper.
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Video Site Viki Had Talks With Google And Yahoo Before It Took A $200M Deal With Rakuten, Which Plans To Use The Translation Platform In E-Commerce
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Ingrid Lunden
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Rakuten’s — the video streaming site where users worldwide contribute subtitles to premium content — is a clear sign of how Rakuten wants to use digital content to build out its e-commerce marketplace. But the deal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Before talks got serious between Japan’s Rakuten and Singapore-based Viki, Viki CEO and co-founder Razmig Hovaghimian tells me the latter was in the process of raising a Series C round to keep growing its business and make more inroads to new markets. (Past investors in Viki, which had to date raised , included Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and Charles River Ventures, along with a number of individuals). And it wasn’t just VCs in the picture. A source also tells me that other suitors besides Rakuten included Google and Yahoo. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (“Mickey”) and Hovaghimian wouldn’t confirm what other companies had approached Viki. There really there is no surprise in either of those names, though. Google owns YouTube; Yahoo has how to make more in video content; and, like Viki, both are ad-based businesses looking for ways of growing revenues outside the U.S., which is exactly where ad-based Viki is growing the most. It will be interesting to see if their attention turns to other international video sites instead. Meanwhile, in interviews, both CEOs did talk to me about how Viki came to find itself getting courted by Rakuten, what Rakuten’s bigger plans may be for the site, and why Rakuten decided to buy it rather than simply make a strategic investment as it did with Pinterest: . Not too long ago, Viki added , Blake Krikorian (ex-Sling and now at Microsoft) and Dave Goldberg of Survey Monkey. Given the timing of those appointments I asked Hovaghimian if they played a role in the acquisition. Turns out that in fact the connection came from MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, one of the company’s earliest investors and a board member. “He’s helped me open up the Japan market, and I got the introduction to Mickey from him,” he said. It came at the same time that Hovaghimian was travelling to Silicon Valley speaking to VCs and other interested companies, he said, and not looking for a buyer. “It can be exhausting fundraising in Silicon Valley when you are not there,” he admitted. While Viki “works very closely” with Yahoo in Asia and is one of YouTube’s approved multichannel networks, he says that Rakuten was a better fit “at a culture and chemistry level.” It helped that both companies are based in Asia, he said. “It took 10 meetings over one month, and it just felt right and clicked, so the process moved very quickly,” he said. “I liked the person [Mickey] and his company’s vision. They’re swinging for a home run, from Japan. We had a lot of inbound interest and that was exciting, but Rakuten happened to be the most exciting of all of them.” . Hovaghimian notes that both the Yahoo partnership and the YouTube deal — which hasn’t really been promoted much since it only got just before all the M&A and funding business — will remain intact, as will partnerships with the likes of Netflix and other would-be Rakuten competitors. “I wanted to go for a long game,” he says of the original intention of raising a Series C and not entering acquisition talks with other parties. In that regard, Rakuten is going to give Viki a long leash for now, letting it continue to grow its footprint, long-tail catalog and user numbers under Hovaghimian’s leadership. “This way we don’t have to worry every six months about raising more money.” He says that the way to think about Viki’s longer term strategy with digital content is “moving up the funnel,” with subsequent partnerships giving it more content to offer out to its users both to watch and group-subtitle. It’s still a big step behind YouTube in terms of traffic — in July, it had marked 400 million words translated by its users over 163 languages, covering content from 100 partnerships with premium content brands and millions of views on its most popular programs. But advertising is very promising already, with CPMs on ads run alongside its videos “like Hulu in some regions,” with some campaigns coming in “north of $50 on CPMs” and some inventory selling out. I asked Mickey why Rakuten decided to full-out acquire Viki rather than invest, as it did when it took a in Pinterest last year. “Pinterest was too expensive for us,” he joked, with the pinboard-based sharing site very much the site of the moment at the time of the deal. “Also it was not directly strategic to our core ecosystem the way that Viki is.” He says he sees Pinterest mainly as a “facilitator and traffic generator” with Pinterest already providing strong traffic to Rakuten’s affiliate marketing network. This has yet to be turned on in Japan, however, since Pinterest has yet to officially launch in that country. . More importantly, Mickey points out that Viki has a clear complement to what Rakuten is already trying to do with video — it owns a Netflix-style , and there are , the e-reader and tablet company owned by Rakuten. But Mickey sees this as more than just about video. “The biggest difference between Pinterest and Viki is that Pinterest is a U.S.-centric service at this moment while Viki as very global. Rakuten is expanding to many countries and our vision is to provide our e-commece market place all over the world. The translation part will become very important,” he says. “So we are buying the business and the ability to apply that translation technology to more than just video. It is not just about video.”
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Plated, The Startup That Delivers Fresh Ingredients To Your Door, Launches In SF
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Jordan Crook
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With the advent of online shopping and Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, humans are growing ever willing to pay for convenience and walk less. In the wake of this phenomenon, has risen up out of TechStars accelerator in New York to deliver perfectly proportioned ingredients direct to your home for your very own cooking pleasure. Other companies are catching on, most notably Blue Apron, but Plated continues to push on, today announcing expansion into the San Francisco area. Before this launch, Plated was only available in a few select areas, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago and the surrounding areas. Now, the service will hit the west coast serving San Francisco, Sacramento and Oakland. At demo day graduation from TechStars in late June, Plated announced that it had served over so far. The company also raised a . Plated will continue to experience competition, not only from older companies like Fresh Direct but from those picking up on the aggregate-and-deliver business methodology. Right now, Blue Apron is serving 100,000 meals per month, at the same $10/pp/per meal price, in almost all of the United States. On the other hand, Plated offers gluten-free options and more selection and is coming soon with a vegetarian option. We’ve Blue Apron and will bring you a review of the Plated service within the next few weeks, but if you live in SF and want to try it yourself… well, .
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Swayy Launches Into Public Beta To Curate Content For Your Social Media Audience
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Stephanie Yang
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While managing social media for different organizations and brands, I’ve spent hours scouring the web for relevant content to share on Twitter and Facebook. It takes a long time to find the right articles, schedule them accordingly and gauge social media reactions. , a content discovery tool, is launching its public beta to help brand managers and small businesses streamline the process down to a couple of minutes each day. By analyzing your posts, audience engagement and your followers’ interests, Swayy provides custom curated content that matches your brand’s image. After linking your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account to the dashboard, Swayy provides a list of trending sources and topics that match your audience, so you’re tuned in to what your followers are interested in. But the platform’s main feature is its scrolling list of suggested content to share. Swayy crawls about 50,000 pieces of content every day from around the web, extracting key words and topics. Based on its processing engine, Swayy matches content to your trending topics and circles. From the social media dashboard, you can share or schedule articles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Swayy measures the audience reactions based on retweets, responses and favorites, then adjusts its content offering accordingly. The platform also shows some basic analytics so users can track their progress over time. Co-founder Lior Degani tells me the idea is to find content to fit your audiences interests instead of your own. “You follow things you like to consume or things you will find interesting in the future,” he says. “We will analyze your community and provide you with the content just to feed your audience. So it will be easier to feed them, to keep your Twitter account and Facebook account and LinkedIn active with content.” The new public beta features some changes based on user feedback, including the ability to add your own topics and a new semantic language engine. Previously, Degani tells me, the content provided was more category-oriented, but has been altered to pick out more specific topics. At first glance, Swayy is a bit underwhelming, compared to similar tools such as or . However, Degani tells me that Swayy is not looking to take on the social media management space, which also includes , and more. Instead, Swayy is focused on becoming a content curation tool for businesses that lack a social media or branding team. The content curation market is no less crowded, with competitors such as , and . Swayy also provides access to articles based on social media circles, but is more focused on sharing across social media outlets to gain traction with an audience. Its platform is tailored to posting content and measuring reactions. However, Swayy doesn’t let users browse news feeds like other social media tools, which can be a great source for content. You also can’t engage in conversations, which some brands like to do to connect with their audiences. Ninety-nine percent of Sway’s users have free accounts, but its premium plans range from $5/mo. to $19/mo. Swayy is in the middle of its first funding round, and has gained about 6,000 users since launching its private beta in March. Users have shared about 20,000 total articles a month using Swayy’s platform.
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Xiaomi’s App Market Has Nearly 2X The Average Downloads Of Competitors, Could Help Boost International Success
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Darrell Etherington
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Xiaomi, the , is receiving lots of attention thanks to the somewhat to the Chinese company. Xiaomi is looking to sell around 20 million smartphones by the end of 2013, and is doing so well that it’s challenging Samsung, a formerly dominant force among OEMs, at home in China. The company sees tight margins on hardware – intentionally – but it might have another ace up its sleeve in terms of appealing to potential international carrier partners. was intrigued by recent statements made by Xiaomi CEO Bin Lin, who revealed that its customers are twice as active on the mobile web as those of any other OEMs. Numbers available publicly from the company detailing downloads from its MIUI app store show that the company has already managed 1 billion downloads in just over a year of operation, and Xiaomi also claims a rate of downloads of 5 million per day, the company claims. Using those figures, and comparing it to those available from Apple and Google about their own download milestones, Singh is able to figure out that Xiaomi users are installing new applications on their devices at a rate of nearly twice that of their competitors using either the App Store or Google Play. Xiaomi phone owners average around 26.5 million apps downloaded per quarter per device, while those in Apple and Google’s mobile software ecosystem average around 13 to 15 million titles downloaded in the same span per gadget. Xiaomi runs s skinned version of Android, which means if it ships overseas it’ll likely lean more heavily on the Google Play store than on its own MIUI application marketplace in order to offer up more localized content, and Singh also notes that with a wider, more mainstream user base, those app install numbers are likely to fall. But if Xiaomi can replicate some of that additional app-download juice in other markets, it’ll be able to offer up an additional incentive to carrier partners, too. The key to convincing international carriers to take a gamble on yet another smartphone OEM, and to push those products alongside and above surer bets like Samsung and Apple hardware, will be convincing carriers that it’s in their best interest to do so, and that means convincing them that it’s possible to get a higher ARPU from Xiaomi smartphones than from anything else. Higher app and mobile we use mean more data used (and more pricey data consumed), which, paired with lower subsidy costs thanks to cheaper wholesale hardware prices, could make Xiaomi a very attractive alternative indeed.
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Josh Constine
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Your Nosy Boy/Girlfriend Can Unlock Your iPhone 5s With Your Thumb While You Sleep
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Josh Constine
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The passcode can’t die yet. The iPhone 5s’s Touch ID fingerprint security system can be unlocked with your finger even if you’re asleep. That means a jealous lover could hold your phone to your thumb while you slumber and read all your texts, call logs, emails, and more. Apple confirms that a dead thumb won’t work. Chloroforming the victim might, but international spies will have no luck cutting off a Prime Minister’s thumb to access their secure files / selfies. Apple also doesn’t send a copy of fingerprints back to its servers, and instead stores them in a “secure enclave” in its A7 processor designed to be inaccessible by hackers or other apps. Apple worked hard to make the the easy to use. So easy a 5s can be , your , or even your…member, if it’s registered with your phone. The real issue, though, is that Touch ID has no way of telling if someone is passed out. Frat dudes, heads up. You could wake up from a night of drinking to find your bros messaged all your exes and creatively rewrote your Facebook profile. Yet the biggest threat is likely that of misuse by significant others. It’s common to hear the story of a suspicious girlfriend or boyfriend who went through their guy/girl’s unlocked phone while he was asleep, found them flirting with someone else, and dumped them. Numeric passcodes would prevent this. But Touch ID is vulnerable to “sleephacking.” As long as someone knows what finger[s] you’ve registered with Touch ID, they can pick your phone up off the nightstand, press it against your sleeping finger, and voilà, the phone unlocks. If you have shady personal stuff in your phone, you should…not have shady personal stuff in your phone. And if your significant other will rifle through your phone while you sleep, you’ve got bigger problems. But if you’re stuck sleeping by someone unscrupulous, you might want to go into your settings, enable passcode lock, and delete the fingerprints you have on file. Really this all boils down to the idea that no password that humans have developed yet is both convenient and 100 percent secure. Not long strings of characters, not facial recognition, and not fingerprints. The lack of perfect digital security has become part of our culture — a risk and inconvenience no one is above for now. On that note, I’ll leave you with this touching painting/poem by graffiti artist :
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Ask A VC: Telefonica Ventures’ Tracy Isacke On Corporate VCs And More
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Leena Rao
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In this episode of Ask A VC, Telefonica Digital’s Tracy Isacke joined us in the studio to talk about the telecom giant’s venture arm. Isacke, who has led the company’s acquisition of San Francisco-based TokBox in 2012, as well as investments in Joyent, Boku, Addfleet, Expect Labs and Everything.me, talked about why Telefonica started investing in startups, and how much money the firm puts into companies. As she explained, Telefonica invests in startups across the globe and runs an accelerator. Check out the video above for more!
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Mozilla Launches Preview Of Firefox For Windows 8 Tablets
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Frederic Lardinois
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Mozilla’s Firefox for Windows 8 tablets has finally made its first public appearance outside of the relatively obscure and unstable development channel. As Mozilla , the chrome-less tablet version of Firefox that runs in Windows 8’s Metro/Modern UI mode is . From there, it will slowly make its way to the beta and release channel. It’s not expected to arrive in the stable release version before late January 2014. Just like the Metro version of Internet Explorer, Firefox also does away with almost all of the interface elements that typically line our browser windows. Instead, it uses swipe gestures and two large buttons on both sides of the screen. The large ‘+’ button on the right is for opening new tabs and the one on the left is the back button (though the browser also supports the same swipe gestures as Internet Explorer 11). The browser uses the same Gecko rendering engine as the desktop version and includes support for WebGL and Mozilla’s for high-performance JavaScript apps. In addition, it features hardware accelerated HTML5 video and support for WebM and H.264. It also supports the Windows 8 share “ .” Just like Internet Explorer or Chrome for Modern UI (which Google launched ago but has only been developing quite slowly), Firefox for Modern UI doesn’t share bookmarks, history and passwords with the desktop version. Instead, users have to use Firefox Sync — or other syncing tools — to share information between the two browsers. In case you’re wondering, the Modern UI version — just like any other third-party browser –won’t run in Windows RT. Mozilla stressed that this is obviously a pre-release version. It seems like the team feels the user interface is ready for prime-time, however, as today’s announcement notes that the team plans to focus “almost exclusively” on improving performance and responsiveness. To give it a try yourself, just download the (it’s just one download for the combined desktop and Modern UI versions) and make sure you make it your default browser. Then look for the Aurora tile in the Start menu and you should be ready to go.
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Ad-Tech Company Rocket Fuel Nearly Doubles Stock Price In First Day Of Public Trading
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Anthony Ha
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Rocket Fuel’s first day of public trading seems to have lived up to the company’s name. The ad-tech firm last month, and last night sold 4 million shares at a price of $29, raising a total of $116 million at a valuation of nearly $1 billion. Today the share price went up as high as $62.50 before closing at $55, about 90 percent higher than the IPO price. This seems like particularly good news after a period where other ad tech companies, including Tremor Media and YuMe, had . In fact, Rocket Fuel CEO George John that the recent ad-tech disappointments on Wall Street made him less confident about the offering (though he also said he’d become “pretty confident” again that investors would embrace the stock). The company’s name comes from the team’s background — John, for example, worked on artificial intelligence at NASA. Rocket Fuel says it uses artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology to . Founded in 2008, Rocket Fuel raised funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Labrador Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, Northgate Capital, and others. According to , the company saw revenue of $107 million in 2012, more than doubling its revenue for 2011, with an EBITDA loss of $3 million.
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Gillmor Gang Live 09.20.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor.
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Yep, That’s Really Apple CEO Tim Cook On Twitter
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Sarah Perez
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Yes, Apple CEO has started tweeting. The account, which we at TechCrunch (and everyone else following Twitter’s magical recommendations service ) spotted this afternoon, is now confirmed by Twitter. Initially, it did not have the standard blue “verification” check mark, which is why there could have been some doubt — high-profile individuals often see fake accounts spring up claiming to be the person in question. But Tim Cook’s account appeared to be the real deal, especially since Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller, who does have a verified account on Twitter, retweeted him. Cook identified himself on the service as “CEO Apple,” a “Fan of Auburn football and Duke basketball,” and being from “Cupertino.” At the time of writing, Cook’s account has more than 30,000 followers. The account was originally created in July 2013. As to Cook’s first ? It’s just a mention that he was greeting customers at Apple’s Palo Alto retail stores today, which had been reported earlier by . (Schiller and SVP Eddie Cue were there as well, giving further credence to the tweet’s veracity, ahead of the official confirmation.) Visited Retail Stores in Palo Alto today. Seeing so many happy customers reminds us of why we do what we do. — Tim Cook (@tim_cook) Of course, news of Cook’s newfound fondness for Twitter comes as the company is launching a series of new iPhones, with the candy-colored iPhone 5c models aiming at affordability, and the faster, fingerprint ID-laden iPhone 5s models, including the “golden” iPhone, attracting Apple’s more high-end customers. Apple has historically held a close relationship with Twitter over the years, too. It went with Twitter as and sharing service in iOS 5, and didn’t get around to integrating Facebook . Now, in iOS 7, the integration between the two companies . Apple’s assistant Siri can search Twitter for tweets about people or topics. Its web browser, Safari, incorporates something called “Shared Links” to highlight news that’s making the rounds on Twitter’s network, and the Music app will display songs trending on Twitter through the Twitter #music station on iOS 7′s iTunes Radio. Cook’s Twitter account isn’t the only new account to come out of Apple this week: It also launched the Twitter account to accompany iOS 7’s launch, and its is even showing up as “Promoted” (i.e. a Twitter ad).
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BlackBerry Confirms Massive Layoffs, Reveals ~$1 Billion Loss In Q2 2014
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Chris Velazco
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BlackBerry temporarily halted trading this afternoon to deliver some grim news. Today the company confirmed of massive layoffs — some 4,500 employees will be let go by the end of the year. To put that in perspective, BlackBerry’s total headcount sat at 12,700 as of March 2013, so this next spate of firings means that between 35 and 40 percent of the company’s workforce will soon be out of luck. What’s more, the company pulled back the curtain on its fiscal Q2 2014 earnings results (remember, their fiscal timetable doesn’t completely match up to the calendar on your wall) and reported a GAAP net operating loss of between $950 million and $995 million. Why? According to a statement released by the company, it’s largely because of underwhelming BlackBerry Z10 sales. Quarterly revenue is down dramatically, too. Last time around the company reported revenues of $3.1 billion and 6.8 million shipped smartphones, but BlackBerry barely managed to hit half of that revenue figure in Q2. All told, BlackBerry raked in $1.6 billion in revenue over the past three months, and revealed that it sold 5.9 million smartphones. It’s important to note, though, that the company only “expects to recognize hardware revenue on approximately 3.7 million BlackBerry smartphones,” and that most of those devices in question run the older BB7 operating system. At this point, it’s not hard to look at the curious Z10 as an albatross around BlackBerry’s neck, which is why the folks at Waterloo are looking to reposition the device as an entry-level smartphone for the masses. Meanwhile, the recently announced BlackBerry Z30 phablet is going to take over as the flagship BB10 going forward, though at this point I’ve got to wonder just how much more attractive this larger device is going to be compared to its predecessor. Curiously enough, there’s no word of the Q10 at all in the statement; while that’s not concrete evidence for BlackBerry usage trends at large, it’s still interesting to see that the more traditional BB10 device doesn’t seem to be causing the same sorts of issues as the all-touch devices sold alongside it. So now that all this bad news is out in the open, what is BlackBerry going to do to turn things around? Putting the layoffs and the Z10 repositioning aside, Waterloo’s brass has decided to trim the (already small) size of its device portfolio from six phones to four — that’s two low-end and two high-end smartphones. Expect to see a pronounced shift in favor of BlackBerry’s enterprise activities to boot and a bid to court “productive, professional end users”. I guess that means may be one of the 4,500 to be ousted before the end of fiscal Q1 2015. It’s been over a year since the last time the beleaguered Waterloo company halted trading ahead of some important news — the same scenario when CEO Thorsten Heins released a statement confirming that RBC and J.P. Morgan were being tapped to help conduct a “strategic review.”
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Everyone Should Be Welcome In Tech
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Alexia Tsotsis
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Sexism in tech can be as subtle as a false assumption about engineering competence or as blatant as a couple of hackathon apps our stage last week. Changing our hackathon rules will hopefully preclude sexist presentations. The salient issue is that we need to get more female participants onstage and in the audience at tech events — and change our culture to the point where being a woman in this industry is normal. ( : We need to get more women in tech, if only to avoid the annoying, tired discussions that happen about there being too few.) There’s no single change we can make to alter the entire tech industry immediately, but we hope they’ll add up over time. Here’s what we’re doing for starters, with more announcements to come. We’re adding more structure to the way our hackathons are run. , who just joined to help us run our competition, will now be assuming responsibility for hackathon content. Part of her current job includes outreach to any sort of startup-related groups in search of great applications to the startup battlefield. She’ll now also be looking for hackers to bring in from all walks of life and, yes, genders. We’ll also be donating $50,000 annually to an organization that is successfully making careers in tech more accessible to everybody. In 2014 this will be which will use the money to provide a programming education for women in California. We’ve already worked with a variety of groups to make our events more diverse, but we’re going to be more organized about this effort moving forward. We’re also going to start doing more partnerships with others around their events. Please contact us at if you have ideas. Our success in this initiative will be judged by those who show up to hack. Zooming in from this bigger goal, we’re overhauling our conference policies to specifically reject any form of harassment by any attendee. People tend to ignore the fine print, and we have relied on the honor system and one-off rejections to keep our conferences safe for everyone. But we clearly need to do more, and putting everything in legal terms is one important step. You can view the general policy on our events pages, like for the Disrupt Berlin hackathon next month. The main text is housed ; look for it to be included in all terms for attendees, sponsors, speakers, etc. Because our hackathons have gotten so large and unwieldy, we will also be instituting a for all hackathon projects that make it onto the stage. We’ll have more details as our team finalizes the new system. Culture changes slowly, but it happens if enough people instigate it. Help us make the tech industry a more inclusive place.
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Romain Dillet
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Five Sites That Put The Human Back In Personalized Shopping
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Eliza Brooke
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I visited the e-commerce recommendation site this morning and started scrolling through their new arrivals in women’s clothing — and grew more and more surprised at how much I liked everything. That was until I remembered that I had done their onboarding quiz a month ago and that their algorithm was actually just generating the items according to my answers. That’s pretty cool. But here’s the thing: Will an algorithm tell me that those grayish pony hair shoes are not only incredibly ugly but also amazing and that I should buy them RIGHT NOW? Maybe one day. But not now. Enter startups that take the traditional personal shopping experience — in which a living, breathing human finds you clothes and tells you to buy them all — and replicate it online by connecting customers with professional or part-time shoppers. Keaton Row $1.6 million from Menlo Ventures for its women’s personal shopping site, while , a site that had personal shoppers sending their clients full seasonal collections in the range of $2,000 to $3,000, after a two-year run. On the men’s side, newcomer Brandid in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Battlefield last week. DDIY (Don’t Do It Yourself) concepts will always have their detractors: It’s lazy! Bougie! Who wants to pay that 15 percent shopper surcharge?! While some personal shopping websites like Brandid give shoppers free rein to find products for their clients on any e-commerce site, customers send requests to its network of specific luxury stores. That includes Bergdorf Goodman, Opening Ceremony, Moda Operandi, Helmut Lang, and Rag & Bone, the employees at which are trained to use PS Dept. Once the request is sent, the customer uses in-app messaging to look over options with the stylist. PS Dept isn’t so much for the fashion clueless as it is for those who may just be out of range of a store location, since picking a store to send a request to does require a base level of brand knowledge. That said, the app does have a window shopping feature that allows for boutique discovery. takes an offline approach by serving as a hub for connecting customers with personal shoppers throughout the country. It’s pricey: If I were shopping near TechCrunch’s Manhattan office, I would be looking at up to $300/hour in personal stylist rates, on top of the price of clothing. But the idea is that, like a personal trainer, customers will learn how to shop better for themselves so that they can apply that to solo outings in the future. , on the other hand, flies on the cheaper end of women’s clothing, at about $65 per piece (plus a $20 styling fee per shipment). The site uses onboarding questions about personal style, budget, and body type to give the company’s in-house stylists a starting point. The shopper will then pick out five clothing items to send to the customer, and which ones they keep and send back also help inform the system about her preferences. Stitch Fix received $4.75 million in Series A funding earlier this year, which was co-led by Baseline Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners with the participation of Western Technology Investment. The funding should help it scale by building its stylist base. Even with the time saved by algorithmic learning, the model still requires hands-on time from the shoppers, a potentially limiting factor. On the men’s side, 500 Startups graduate is a monthly subscription service at pricing levels starting at $69/month. It uses an algorithm that takes into account data points like measurements, style preferences (from an onboarding quiz), and social media to generate a roster of pieces the guy might like. A stylist then has the final say on which piece to ship. The idea is that the system is both efficient and has a human touch. Last February, Bombfell a seed round of $730,000. Whereas PS Dept is going to appeal more to people who already know fashion, takes the opposite tack by approaching women who read Vogue. Maybe the most honest feature on this particular site is an onboarding question that lets customers mark, on a sliding scale, the degree to which they want to highlight or draw attention away from certain body parts. (Yes, I’m an advocate of maintaining a healthy body image. But sometimes you’d rather not play up your arms. That’s okay.) The advantage of Keaton Row is that customers are paired with a dedicated stylist, rather than having a different shopper with each purchase. They’ll come to know your taste well in the long run, meaning they’re more likely to nail it on future requests.
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NFL MVP Adrian Peterson Launches Fitness Training App
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Billy Gallagher
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NFL running back has teamed with a new fitness and sports training app for aspiring athletes. This is the third time that Driven has paired with a professional athlete to release a branded app; earlier this year, the company produced apps with NBA star and pro golfer . Eight years ago, Don and Joe Saladino opened a personal training gym called in Manhattan, and quickly attracted A-list celebrities, including Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Gosling. These busy clients started asking the brothers for a way to take their workouts with them when they were traveling, so they created an app to upload individual workout programs. A year and a half ago, they realized the app could have a much broader appeal, and created Driven Apps. The company works with top-tier athletes to produce a branded sport-specific training app for the masses. The apps offer users daily workout routines, content from the professional athletes, and a way to track your progress; the workouts update with the user’s progress, so the Adrian Peterson workouts would get harder as you get stronger and faster. Peterson tells me he wanted to make the app to “show people the kind of work that I put in to come back stronger from the ACL injury.” He said making the app was “intense” and noted that he hopes to inspire people with it. On December 24, 2011, Peterson tore his ACL in a game. Eight months later, he started in the Minnesota Vikings season opener, and won the 2012 most valuable player award after he came just nine yards shy of breaking the single-season NFL rushing record and powered the Vikings to a playoff berth. Peterson says having faith was the biggest factor that helped him recover from the ACL injury so quickly and effectively. He said he hopes to show people, especially students hoping to improve their football games, the right “direction into how to approach each exercise and the mindset you should have.” I’m not usually one for celebrity-endorsed apps, but Driven’s method makes sense to me. If I’m trying to improve my golf game, which currently consists of whacking the ball from one sandtrap to the next, spending a few dollars on the Ernie Els-branded app is well worth it. Driven Apps CEO says the company aims to release apps across all major sports, and wants to integrate the apps with wearable devices so that users can track their progress more accurately. The Els, Peterson, and Wade apps are available in the app store for $5, $3, and $4, respectively.
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: iOS 7, iOS 7, And A Hint Of 3D Printing For Good Measure
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Jordan Crook
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of iPhone owners, and that’s just after two days. The , with Apple promising 200 new features. The font is different. The colors are brighter. The icons are childish. And the whole system seems to bounce and bobble against the movement of your hand. It’s a brand new world. Because Darrell’s obsessed with Apple, and because Apple had a big week, we discuss iOS 7 and very little else on this episode of the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast featuring , , , , and . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Verizon FiOS Expands Mobile TV Support To Android & iPhone, Now Lets You Watch Live TV Outside The Home
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Sarah Perez
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For the first time ever, customers of Verizon’s FiOS TV service are being allowed to watch live television on their mobile devices when they’re out of their homes, and disconnected from their home’s Wi-Fi network. Currently, this new capability applies to just nine cable TV channels, including BBC America, BBC World News, EPIX, NFL Network (iPad-only), HGTV, DIY, the Tennis Channel and Scripps Networks Interactive channels, Food Network and Travel Channel. The support for live TV viewing comes in the form of a newly updated iOS app, FiOS Mobile, which is now available for both iPad and iPhone as well as within newly launched Android and Kindle Fire applications. The app , offering customers 75 channels of live television. However, although the app didn’t require any additional software running on users computers or hardware beyond a supported HD DVR, the iPad did have to be connected to the home’s Wi-Fi network to work. With the update, for the above select channels, that requirement is no more. In addition, the app now offers 76 total channels while in home, and has added support for local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, plus Spanish-language channels such as UniMas and Univision, in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The app also includes the functionality previously found in the FiOS Mobile Remote and Verizon Media Manager apps, in order to combine all the mobile services offered under one roof. This includes on-demand content, like FiOS’s 45,000 Flex View titles (movies and other programs on demand), as well as free and paid subscription content from HBO, Cinemax, Starz, Encore, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel and others. The company says additional content and local channels will be added throughout this year and 2014. And though it could not speak to the size of its mobile install base for competitive reasons, Verizon says that it has 5 million TV customers, 5.8 million users with Internet connections, which gives you an idea of the potential market for live mobile TV outside the home. Verizon is not the first company to bring live TV to mobile devices outside the home – if anything, it’s lagging a bit – but it is rather representative of a growing industry trend, where cable companies and networks are readjusting themselves in the face of changing consumer behaviors. Subscription services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video, have been fighting for consumer attention, and are even starting to fund their own programming – some of it quality programming enticing young generations to . Netflix, for example, for its drama “House of Cards,” following 14 nominations, Other cable and satellite providers have already moved to offer live TV outside the home, including Time Warner Cable, which out of home in April, including at launch 16 local news stations, and 8 networks. (It now has 12.) , and Cablevision also offer their own out of home lineups, of varying sizes. (Dish uses Hopper with Sling, however.) The networks themselves have been getting in on the mobile action too, with premium channels like HBO and Cinemax offering their own apps, kids’ programming providers like PBS, Nickelodeon and Disney offering select shows and episodes, and there’s even some support for full length programming from the major networks and other cable channels within their own standalone applications. In fact, the increasing variety of options has been fueling a new kind of mobile startup to form – one that attempts to organize all the programming options for you, then tell you what other mobile application or streaming service lets you watch these shows and movies. For instance, to offer a personalized programming guide, following in the footsteps of competitors like . And these compete more broadly with apps like , , (Fanhattan), and others that want to provide mobile video and mobile TV guides. The updated FiOS apps can be found .
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Microsoft Updates Bing On iOS, Highlights Siri Integration
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Alex Wilhelm
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With the release of iOS 7 to the general public, Bing now has a inside of Apple’s chief operating system. When you Siri, you will very often Bing. That might sound odd, but Apple is more concerned with Google at the moment than Microsoft — especially given Apple’s lack of an enterprise services business — so Bing it is for its search needs. Apple could build its own search engine, but why spend $10 billion when someone else already has? Today, Microsoft, trumpeting the Siri integration, announced to its standalone Bing iOS application containing a number of feature improvements that should help current users better find the stuff they need out on the Internet. These changes come on the back of , that saw it cut its column interface design from three pillars to two. In the updated Bing iOS application, users will now be greeted with four tiles on the main screen of the app. The tiles — Weather, Popular Now, Nearby and Images — are designed to get users information without forcing them to type. Provided that you just want information, and now, they could be good options. They are an obvious mirror of the Bing functionality that is provided by Local Scout in Windows Phone. The new Bing iOS app also allows users to share images that they found in the app to — you guessed it — Twitter and Facebook. A new menu will also allow for syncing saved images and screenshots to SkyDrive. The update is modest, but important as it is Bing now playing on what could be called its home court. Microsoft yesterday detailed how key it is for it to control its own platforms, as then it can push its own services. However, in iOS, Microsoft has secured a prominent role for Bing on the second-largest mobile operating system. That combined with its comfortable lodging inside of Facebook, and you have to respect at how effectively Microsoft has pushed Bing into parts of the mobile technological web. You can grab the new Bing app .
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Meet Grove, Sequoia Capital’s New Startup Events And How-To Content Hub
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Leena Rao
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VCs are starting to get into content. First Round its own version of Harvard Business Review. Andreessen Horowitz on Wired editor Michael Copeland to lead its content strategy. And Sequoia, who earlier this year hired Ben Worthen away from the Wall Street Journal, is debuting , its new portal for how-to content, videos and events. Sequoia has been one of the few firms of late that has attempted to avoid putting the focus on the firm’s partners in favor of focusing on the Sand Hill Road giant’s portfolio. But one of the key pieces of feedback that portfolio founders had begun to share with the firm over the past year was that they wished there were a centralized place where they could find advice and how-to’s on important topics like hiring, fundraising and other business advice. While Sequoia partners blogged sporadically and the firm shared small tips on how to structure a business plan, there wasn’t a single destination where all of this content lived. “The industry is evolving and the world is changing and founders have consistently said they want to hear more for us,” Sequoia partner explained to us in an interview. “So we began thinking of how we can share some of the lessons we have learned as founders with the community in a way that is consistent with our culture.” The firm decided to take a more entrepreneur-centric approach that would give founders a platform to find practical business advice. More like a Wikipedia and less like a blog (i.e. TechCrunch), we’re told. Thus, Grove was born. It’s a mixture of deep-dives into company-building topics, videos elaborating on these issues, and a destination for events that Sequoia will be planning. For example, one of the first pieces of content addresses how a startup should approach pricing. It includes a summary of the factors that influence pricing; how customers perceive value; and experiences from companies such as eBay, Evernote, LinkedIn and Weebly. Other topics include how to make non-obvious hires, how to present to investors, winning your first customer, tips on scaling, increasing revenue and more. Within each guide, Sequoia links to recommended reading, featuring advice posts from Paul Graham, Chris Dixon and others. Grove itself will be edited by Worthen, we’re told. Sequoia-backed Qualtrics founder and CEO Ryan Smith explains that Grove makes it more of a streamlined process to ask questions from many of the successful CEOs in the portfolio. He adds that this content is public for any founder or startup to see. Another area where Sequoia will be expanding is in its events for founders. Each month, Sequoia will hold a “drinkup” with a Sequoia partner and portfolio founder, and these events will be free and open to the public. We’re told they will be kept intimate (contained to dozens of guests) with the focus on attracting founders and entrepreneurs. And the added benefit is deal flow and developing a relationship with potentially successful entrepreneurs at an early stage. As we mentioned above, each VC firm is thinking carefully about how to create a hub for marketing content that is actually helpful to the startup ecosystem. First Round has taken a more intensive approach with its Harvard Business Review-esque site. Google Ventures Startup Lab has started publishing some of its videos and tutorials, which feature Googlers and other technology execs talking about how to navigate things like A/B testing, holding productive meetings and more. I suspect we will see more VCs throw their hats into the content ring, as there is increasingly more pressure to provide value-added services to founders. And providing this content to the public is good for the startup ecosystem.
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iCracked Launches A Way To ‘Uber’ Someone Up To Buy Back Your Old iPhones
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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iCracked, the Y Combinator company that has quietly built up an empire on repairing broken iPhones and iPads, is launching a way to With the new iPhone 5s and 5c out this week, it’s an opportune moment for the 30-person startup from Redwood City. iCracked basically started out of a dorm room at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where co-founder AJ Forsythe gained a reputation on campus as someone who could fix iPhones on the cheap. He parlayed that skill into a business that’s on track to do eight figures in revenue this year by selling repair kits and deploying contractors or “iTechs” to fix or buy back devices on the spot. They have more than 400 of these skilled contractors throughout the world. To date, they’ve had a buyback service where you can mail in your phone. But that business is relatively small with a few thousands devices sent in each month. But today, they’re launching a way that you can call up someone on-demand in the next few hours to take iPhones or iPads off your hands. Depending on the storage, condition and model of the device, they’ll pay up to a few hundred dollars for the latest iPhones or iPads. It’s available in the San Francisco Bay Area now, but they’ll widen out the reach of the program later on. They’ll expand to Southern California next month, then New York. The hope is that by lowering barriers, they’ll get many, many more consumers to trade in their phones or tablets for cash. “The problem with most of the competing buyback programs is the amount of friction it takes to get paid,” said the company’s chief commercial officer. So the way it works is, you go . You share a little bit about your device — is it an iPhone or iPad? What model is it? How much storage does it have? Then you fill out your location, and share your contact information. An iTech will later contact you to set up an appointment. They’ll get dispatched in the next few hours, take a few pictures of your device, check the IMEI number (or unique serial number) to make sure it isn’t stolen, then you’ll sign away the device. The coolest part is that iCracked will hand you a branded debit card carrying the value of the device. The company spent a year working on this because they didn’t want the financial risk of having contractors walk around with hundreds or thousands of dollars in cash. When an iTech accepts a device, they can load the debit card with money on the spot and hand it over. Then you can use it like a regular debit card from your personal bank by taking out cash at an ATM or buying goods at a store. The whole in-person transaction should take 15 minutes at most. The new service ties into iCracked’s ambition of being the ‘AAA’ for people’s devices. “We just want to create this business where no matter you are in the lifecycle of your device, you can call on iCracked for whatever you need, whether that could be repairs, buybacks or warranties,” Iliya said. iCracked has just taken seed funding from Y Combinator, its affiliated Start Fund, and other angels like Elad Gil and Roger Dickey.
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Microsoft May Pay Up To $200M For SF’s Secretive Osterhout Design Group In A Wearables Bet
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Ingrid Lunden
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Google may have and Apple may be rumored to be making a . Now Microsoft may be effectively buying itself a wearables play by paying up to $200 million for a trove of assets and patents from San Francisco’s quiet , a longtime U.S. military contractor. The deal is not yet closed but we’re hearing that term sheets are down. They are still negotiating on price and what will ultimately be included in the deal between Osterhout’s many patents, which number at , its staff and more. From what we understand, the price discussions are centering around what Microsoft will buy from ODG: whether it will include only patents, or whether it will also include existing contracts, and staff. Google, Samsung and LG apparently also expressed interest in the company, but Microsoft is the one that pursued it the most aggressively. ODG has been around since 1999, and as befitting its line of business working on military technology, has been very much under the radar. The only investor in the company listed on its is David Spector, a former partner at Sequoia who is now working on his own startup, . We have reached out to ODG and Microsoft to comment for this story and will update if they respond. Microsoft is at a turning point as a business, where it is taking a bigger step into two key areas around hardware and enterprise services. This deal, originally championed by Xbox and Kinect head Don Mattrick before he left to be CEO at Zynga, is one that could help it in both of these areas. Osterhout has built a military contracting business over the last several years that has about $40 million to $50 million in contracts. The U.S. government is one of the company’s largest clients. Osterhout pitches its technology — which, for example, could be used in headgear that can help the wearer detect the direction of fast-moving objects, or those that are behind closed doors — not at consumers but at large enterprises and other organizations. Microsoft already has a huge government business. But what makes this potential acquisition so interesting is that it could be used in other areas, too, such as Microsoft’s consumer business, as exemplified by its Xbox operations. As you can see, in the recent reorganization that Microsoft laid out yesterday (right), Hardware (1) remains a key part of the company’s structure. Looking at the of what Osterhout, its eponymous founder , and his teams over the years have developed, you have the very definition of “gadget,” running seamlessly along a spectrum that includes the soldier of the future at one end, and children’s toys at the other. “Very Robocop. Very Terminator,” is how a source described Osterhout’s wearables to us. From pens that can be turned into guns, darts and computers; through to one of the earliest touchscreen facial recognition and iris ID handhelds, it’s a range that in some ways feels straight out of a James Bond movie. No surprise, then, that Ralph Osterhout has also worked on . All the same, in terms of what Osterhout is working on right now, it’s not exactly a Google Glass killer. In fact, the glasses the team was working on did use the Android OS. “This company doesn’t care about what Google is doing with Google Glass,” another source said. “That is not a big market now, and will take a long time to become one. This company cares about the stuff that matters.” Apart from that, in picking up the patents, Microsoft could beef up another part of its business, that of Licensing (number 2 in the above list). Osterhout’s patents cover “everything related to products like Google Glass”, we’ve been told — potentially setting the stage for what could become the next IP battlefield, with the military-focused ODG’s IP the latest weapon in Microsoft’s artillery.
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Chipworks: Apple’s A7 Chip Made By Samsung, M7 Co-Processor By NXP
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Matthew Panzarino
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Here’s a bit of supply chain nerdery for you on the iPhone 5s front. Teardown experts Chipworks have and discovered that it is indeed still made by Samsung. There had been significant rumors before the release of the iPhone 5s that pointed to Apple shifting its SoC manufacturing to new supplier TSMC. Though that still may take place down the road, this particular chip is still made by enormous partner, and Apple rival, Samsung. Chipworks on the discovery: We have confirmed through early analysis that the device is fabricated at Samsung’s Foundry and we will confirm process type and node later today as analysis continues. That being said, we suspect we will see Samsungs 28 nm Hi K metal Gate (HKMG) being used. We have observed this same process in the Samsung Exynos Application processor used in the Galaxy S IV. Our engineers will be deprocessing the Apple A7 as soon as they can to confirm this or to provide different information. The general logic behind Apple moving to another supplier like TSMC for future SoC production is that the company is looking to diversify its sourcing. So far, the majority of its silicon has been obtained via Samsung and Qualcomm. While Apple has no beef with Qualcomm, it has engaged in heated battles with Samsung’s smartphone arm over patent infringement. Samsung is an enormous company, and it has stated that this legal wrangling doesn’t affect its relationship with Apple as a supplier. But you know that tension has to sting a bit in negotiations. In addition, diversification could allow Apple more leverage when negotiating prices for new components. An enormous portion of Samsung’s current silicon business is done via deals with Apple. It also sells a ton of chips to its own smartphone wing. The Chipworks teardown also manages to uncover Apple’s M7 “motion co-processor,” as well, which turns out to be a chip made by NXP and not an Apple branded part at all. At least, not yet. Luckily, we’ve been able to locate the M7 in the form the NXP LPC18A1. The LPC1800 series are high-performing Cortx-M3 based microcontrollers. This represents a big win for NXP. We had anticipated the M7 to be an NXP device based on input from industry analysts and our partners and we are happy to see this to be the case. The M7 is dedicated to processing and translating the inputs provided to it by the discrete sensors; the gyroscope, accelerometer and electro magnetic compass mounted throughout the main printed circuit board. The of the iPhone 5 had failed to uncover exactly what chip was taking on the role of Apple’s “M7” marketing construct. This led to some confusion and speculation that the chip was in fact on the A7 die. But the Chipworks folks have confirmed that this is an external chip and that it will likely hook into a series of standard sensors from STMicroelectronics and AKM for compass, magnetometer and accelerometer duties. Be sure to to take a look at the rest of the detailed breakdown if that’s your sort of bag.
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With 300K Downloads, London-Based YPlan Launches Stateside In New York
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Ingrid Lunden
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Countless social-planning apps have tried, unsuccessfully, to capture the attention of users in a way that would produce enough engagement, which in turn would result in partnerships with vendors and merchants, which in turn would generate revenue. However, London-based , a mobile app that presents users with curated shortlists of same-day events, seems to have a nice little formula in place that could see it win where others have failed. Within nine months of its debut in the UK, it has picked up 300,000 users and lucrative partnerships, including one with Apple to distribute tickets to its hugely popular in the city. Today, YPlan kicks off its big ambition to crack the U.S. with the same model, starting first with the Big Apple, New York City. No, it’s not the first events app to come to New York. It will compete with the likes of , and others. But unlike Sosh, which focuses on food- and drink-based experiences over a period of time, YPlan’s secret sauce is in timeliness. When you open the app, you’re offered a curated list of 10 to 15 events in your city that are happening either that night or very soon. From there, you can purchase tickets directly within the app to the event of your choosing, whether it’s a concert, a rooftop party or whatever. Co-founder says that 90 percent of users both in London, and in the NY beta test they’ve conducted, are buying tickets within 48 hours of the event. Vitkauskas doesn’t see Sosh, or the many listings-based apps that are out there, as head-on competitors because of that magic combination of offering shortlists, real-time availability and a chance to buy tickets within the app. “YPlan will not be showing you 50 events per day. The really core focus of the data is that less is more,” said Vitkauskas. “We’re razor-focused on being the answer to the question, ‘What am I going to do tonight?'” The company has just crossed 300,000 activated downloads, meaning people have at least fired up the app once, and Vitkauskas adds that “the majority” of users come back and engage regularly. YPlan has raised a total of $13.7 million, with in June led by General Catalyst Partners, and it has amassed a group of other A-list supporters. Existing investors Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments also participated in the Series A round, along with a swathe of co-investors, including A-Grade, Kevin Colleran and David Morin’s Slow Ventures, and Shakil Khan, investor and advisor to Spotify and Summly. To add to that, the company has just announced that Sean Moriarty, the former CEO of Ticketmaster, is an investor and joins the board of directors to help YPlan handle ticketing as the company scales. Eventually, YPlan will bake in some more social features, allowing users to blast out the events they’re interested in to a group of friends or colleagues to get them in on the mix. And it may also look to extend beyond events. “We’re thinking about extending the proposition to a full night out with YPlan, but that’s not the deal right now,” he says. “We believe there is a big enough opportunity and a narrow enough use case to go out in London and NYC to an event. Once we nail that and scale it out, we will look to expand the proposition.” If you want to check out YPlan, head over to the .
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Bugsnag, The Error-Reporting Platform Used By LinkedIn And Others, Raises $1.4M Seed Round
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Sarah Perez
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Crash detection and reporting are tough but important problems to solve, as companies look to increase the stability and reliability of their online and mobile applications. One newer startup taking on this challenge, , has already found traction in this space, having signed up a number of notable customers, including LinkedIn, Svbtle, and Kiipt, among others. Today, the company is announcing $1.4 million in seed funding in a round led by Matrix Partners. Others participating in the round include angels with cloud and SaaS experience, like Slicehost founder and director Jason Seats, and Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin. Bugsnag itself was founded last summer by and , both who left mobile gaming startup where Smith was CTO, in order to create an affordable, full-stack monitoring service for businesses in need of collecting diagnostic information about their applications. The platform , following three months of beta testing, where it was then tracking on average 800,000 crashes per day thanks to customers like LinkedIn, Codeacademy, Treehouse, Customer.io, and DNSimple, to name a few. Today, it measures 5 million crashes per day and has detected over a billion since February. To differentiate itself from other bug-reporting platforms, like , Twitter-owned , or , which focus on mobile, or and , which cater to web developers, Bugsnag offers web, mobile and most , desktop support (OS X). Explains Smith, Bugsnag is slightly different from other full platform services, like Splunk or New Relic. “They’re not bug detection, they’re normally logging or performance. And they’re not as actionable,” he says. “Their logs go into a log file, or their performance metrics goes into a dashboard. You need a team of dev-ops guys or sysadmins to go dig into that every day to grab meaning out of it.” Instead, Bugsnag wants to do the digging — and derive the meaning — for you. In the Bugsnag dashboard, developers can track exceptions, filter errors with full-text search, search by error type, message or location, and configure notifications. These can be set to alert you upon the first occurrence of a bug, every time, or only when there’s an unusual spike in activity. And hooks into other programs are provided, as well, including favorite developer tools like Pivotal Tracker, GitHub Issues, Campfire, Hipchat, JIRA, Web Hooks, and of course, alerts can arrive via email, too. The company also provides plugins for Rails, Django, PHP, Android, iOS, JavaScript, Node.js and Unity, and allows developers to build their own using its . The service has some secret sauce under the hood, as it can group exceptions together intelligently, so developers aren’t overburdened with duplicate alerts and emails. And even better, it can actually tell you how many users are currently affected by a particular exception, so you can prioritize which to fix first based on their real-world impacts. At the time of its original launch, Bugsnag was working with a couple thousand customers, including several paying customers. Today the service offers a free hobbyist plan, as well as a 14-day free trial, followed by a $29/month plan for 25,000 exceptions, with additional exceptions 25 cents per each additional 1,000 tracked. Other plans, including those that let customers pay by monthly active users (in 100K chunks) are available, as well. There are now 3,000-plus active customers, and while Bugsnag isn’t disclosing its revenue situation, Smith notes they were “Ramen profitable” ahead of the raise, and has been seeing 30 percent month-over-month revenue growth and about the same in terms of users, from beta launch to July. With the new funding, which also see Matrix Partners’ joining Bugsnag’s board, the immediate plans are to hire more engineers to help the company improve its mobile monitoring offerings. The now four-person team hopes to add eight or more new employees by year-end. They also just launched the above-mentioned desktop support, as well as improved iOS support, which includes debugging support for iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s’s new 64-bit processor — something that some competitors are now scrambling to do. In the near term, the plan is to make the service and dashboard even easier to use by providing developers with actionable answers rather than just data, says Smith. Longer-term, Bugsnag wants to expand to other areas in need of actionable monitoring, including server monitoring and infrastructure. “Right now we have the backend and mobile monitored…but there are a ton of problems that happen on infrastructure that affect the application,” says Smith. “The kind of engine we’re building behind the scenes looks at the trends and tries to tie everything all together. The more we improve our engine, the more parts of the stack we can apply it to.”
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With 1M Users Now On Board, Learnist Brings Its “Pinterest For Learning” To Android
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Rip Empson
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When first emerged back in 2008, it had set its sights on building a full-service, social learning service that would give students a better way to study for standardized tests, among other things. It enabled students to study solo or in groups by connecting with live instructors or perusing its library of video content. Yet, five years later, Grockit found itself in survival mode, never quite finding the explosive adoption that could justify the $25 million in capital had raised over the years from big-name investors like Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman. Last year, the team began to experiment with new tools, chief of which was Learnist, a digital clipboard that was later dubbed its “Pinterest for education.” Over the next six months, Learnist took off and, eager to ride the wave, Grockit put all of its efforts behind the new product, , test prep business, technology and platform to Kaplan in July. Today, as it looks to expand its international reach and support the fastest-growing mobile platform, the team is bringing its learning network to Android. With the launch of its new Android app, users will be able to find multimedia learning experiences and expert knowledge in areas that interest them, collaborate with like-minded learners, and connect and share content across social networks. from Discovery, Summit, Atlas, Benchmark and others, Learnist is eager to ride the growing adoption of mobile learning tools both in and outside of the classroom and bring its network to a wider audience. Learnist was initially developed for K-12 teachers and students, allowing users to create “learn boards” for everything from reading assignments to Common Core-supported Math lessons, but the founders have since expanded that scope in an effort to attract a wider set of life-long and casual learners. In much the same vein as Coursera, Learnist is looking to create a network that applies to both formal and continuing education and can be used alongside classroom tools like Schoology and Edmodo to create a more holistic classroom learning experience, for example, while giving casual learners a place to store and view their various learning projects. Since launching its iPhone and iPad apps last year, the knowledge-sharing network has attracted more than 1 million users who are now using the platform to aggregate and share their projects across a range of topics. Grockit/Learnist co-founder Farb Nivi says that, long-term, he wants Learnist to become a “smart RSS feed for learning,” allowing anyone and everyone to share pieces of content and discover topics and lessons that are relevant to them. The goal, he says, is to build a library of quality crowdsourced content, surfacing content that matches users’ browsing patterns and areas of interest. In the day or so that Learnist has been on Google Play, China has quickly become the largest source of downloads (outside of the U.S.) for the app. It’s this kind of international reach that Learnist hopes to tap into, adding to the 40 countries that its users represent today. Nivi believes that Learnist is now well-suited to provide a solution in regions where the demand for online learning is being pushed forward by growth in digital publishing and distribution tools and the rapid adoption of smart mobile technology. With its new Android app, Learnist users can embed 40 different types of media in their learn boards, and with the recent launch of “Learnist SmartRSS,” users can now tap into content uploaded from the hundreds of media companies that have created profiles and are now publishing to Learnist. Looking ahead, users can expect Learnist to continue to hone its search and discovery tools, as it quietly becomes yet another entrant ( ) into the race to build a better search and discovery engine — with, in Learnist’s case, a digital clipboard in tow.
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Posthaven Rises From Posterous’ Ashes To Launch “E-Mail To Post” As It Reaches Financial Sustainability
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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, the blogging platform co-created by Y Combinator partner after his previous startup and by Twitter, . They’re also launching the feature that effectively made Posterous a serious competitor against Tumblr in the early days of micro-blogging — . Posthaven is a basic blogging platform that’s meant to last forever, because it is member-supported at a and not venture backed. The product is a labor of love that Tan and his old co-founder Brett Gibson once their old company was bought by Twitter. Tan had , more than a year before Twitter acquired the company in March of 2012. It was a classic founder’s disagreement over the direction of the company. Once Posterous was sold, Tan deliberated over how to keep the service alive. When it became clear that he couldn’t buy back the product, he decided to take a different route , a place where old Posterous users could migrate all of their work. Instead of raising venture funding, Tan’s keeping Posthaven as a permanent side project that co-exists with his day-to-day work as a partner advising Y Combinator startups. “Posthaven is like the anti-rocket ship,” Tan said. “We’d certainly like it to be something that a lot of people use, and if we keep working to make it a great product, that will happen. But we don’t want to trade off stability and the ability to stay online in exchange for faster growth. That’s really what outside capital is — a lot more growth, but with some expectation of return.” Now the company’s picked up enough paid users to reach profitability, he says. That will fund the server space and development of new features like multiple contributors, email subscriptions and theme customization. The big feature this week, however, is e-mail to post. That was what jumpstarted Posterous’ traction to begin with about five years ago. “It resonates with non-technical people because it doesn’t require learning any new behavior,” Tan said. “It was really something ‘normals’ could use.” Back in 2008 when Posterous was founded, smartphones and apps were also new, so people were more familiar with e-mail as a way to post content off their phones.
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Microsoft Isn’t Axing Windows 8.1 System Builder SKUs (Completely) After All
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Alex Wilhelm
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Yesterday the pricing scheme for Windows 8.1 and stated that, instead of selling “upgrade” and standalone versions of its operating system, all purchases of the new code . Therefore, if you want to move a non-Windows 8 PC to Windows 8.1, or want to build a new PC from scratch, the same software will work in each case. This led to confusion, as it appeared that Microsoft was halting sales of its “System Builder” builds of Windows, at least to consumers. After much digging (I was not the only confused party), I’ve managed to figure out that I was wrong yesterday and that Microsoft isn’t killing System Builder SKUs entirely. Instead, Microsoft is shifting gravity away from System Builder builds except for OEM partners and others that buy its operating system in bulk from distribution partners. For the average person, Windows 8.1’s two normal SKUs (regular, and “Pro”) will replace what System Builder SKUs provided previously: the ability to build a new PC from scratch and install Windows on it. I apologize for the error. So you will be able to buy a System Builder copy of Windows 8.1 in certain locations, such as Amazon. However, you will not find that code at Best Buy or any other normal retailer. There you will only find the two normal versions of Windows 8.1. The question now becomes why you would want to buy a System Builder copy of Windows 8.1 when the regular build will do what you need? Perhaps a minor cost differential, or you just really don’t want support from Microsoft with your operating system. What matters here is that Microsoft has killed System Builder SKUs of Windows — in spirit — for everyone but OEM partners, though the enterprising will still be able to dredge up a copy. The more important news here is that Windows 8.1 won’t be sold as an upgrade, but I wanted to correct the record after my mistake.
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Mullenweg Wants WordPress To Power A Majority Of All Websites
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Eliza Brooke
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Just months after Tiger Global Management for a secondary stake in Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, the investment management firm has done it again. We learned yesterday that Tiger had made another $60 million investment in the company. Tiger bought the shares from , who also sold $15 million in shares to . Polaris, which has invested in Automattic since its $1.1 million in 2005, retains about one third of its shares. “Their [Tiger’s] deep resources, market experience, and long-term outlook make them an ideal partner for the next phase of Automattic and the continued growth of the WordPress ecosystem,” Automattic founder and president Matt Mullenweg wrote in a . “What we’re building will take time and it won’t be easy, but things worth doing seldom are.” When Mullenweg says growth, he means . First he wants to grow Automattic from a 200-person company to one that employs thousands. He also wants to see WordPress.com powering the majority of all websites on the Internet. WordPress.com has had great adoption so far, he said, but it still isn’t a tenth of what the team hopes it can evolve into. It’s a tall order, and Mullenweg acknowledged that they have a long way to go. WordPress.com is currently the platform of choice for 19.9 percent of websites, 17 percent at the close of 2012 and 14.9 percent in 2011. Automattic can only date WordPress.com’s market share back to 2010, when it stood at 12.3 percent. In that comparison of CMS market shares, WordPress.com is second only to “None” — i.e. the lack of a content management system. Today 65.9 percent of websites do not use a particular CMS, down from 78.1 percent in 2010. WordPress.com is well ahead of Joomla, at 3.3 percent. Dave Barrett of Polaris Partners expressed his confidence in WordPress.com’s ability to take the lead in the market. Barrett, who is stepping off the board of Automattic now that Polaris has sold two-thirds of its shares, will remain active with the company as an adviser. “If you ask anyone five years ago if 20 percent were possible, they would say that’s a stretch… I do believe that it’s entirely possible and that they can be the absolute dominant [party] in website creation,” Barrett said. Mobile will be central to the next phase of WordPress’s growth, Barrett said, as will social collaboration and building virality into the platform’s usage. The platform’s freemium model is also an important factor in its capacity to occupy a larger part of the market. “I think in the last couple of years they’ve turned into a great software and SaaS company. They were always a great product company,” Barrett said. Mullenweg said he has no future projections for WordPress.com’s market share growth rate at the moment, nor did he give a timetable for hiring those “thousands.” At present, Automattic employs just under 200 people, with about 70 joining so far this year. “We’re hiring as fast as we find great people. We don’t have quotas or explicit goals, but I expect that if we fulfill the opportunity in front of us someday Automattic will comprise thousands of people,” Mullenweg said. WordPress will be releasing its 3.7 and 3.8 later this year. Mullenweg said that the former will focus on improving WordPress.com as a platform, while the latter will iterate on the interface of the dashboard to make it more friendly for experienced users and make it more intuitive for new users.
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FWD.us Gives First Hard Numbers On Its Impact On Immigration So Far
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Josh Constine
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Is FWD.us really making a difference? Today it released its first quantified stats on its contribution to immigration reform, announcing that it drove 33,500 calls to Congress this summer and a total of 125,000 actions including social media shares. That’s not a stellar call count, but it represents solid work by the like Mark Zuckerberg. In passing immigration reform, every little bit counts. The quantifiable look at FWD’s impact comes after of its strategy to do whatever it takes to pass immigration reform. It’s been most maligned for buying campaign ads for right-wing Republicans, such as Paul Ryan, who commend them for supporting scorned initiatives like the Keystone XL pipeline. FWD defends the practice as necessary to convince GOP members that if they vote for immigration reform, they’ll have help retaining their office. But FWD also focuses on direct lobbying and grassroots efforts like pushing people to call their House representatives. That’s where the . Unlike many campaigns where organizations ask volunteers to look up their local representatives’ phone numbers and call, FWD simplified the process by simply asking supporters to enter their own numbers. FWD would then call them, give them a quick brief about what to say to their rep’s office, and then instantly patch them through. It’s not brand-new technology, but that tool helped it route 33,500 calls to members of Congress between August 1 and September 10. FWD tells me 110,000 total people have taken action on behalf of the group, including making calls, tweeting at or emailing Congress, or sharing resources to social media. During Congress’ August recess, FWD drove a total of 125,000 actions. FWD’s president Joe Green tells me “We’ve been inspired by the response.” However, in the grand scheme of political call drives, 33,500 isn’t as impressive. Now to boost the number in the future, FWD is launching a formal membership program aimed at keeping supporters engaged. It asks members to take two actions per week to support immigration reform. In return it’s offering access to strategy briefings, special events, prizes and meetings with FWD founders. Is all this grassroots activity actually bringing immigration reform closer to passing in the House? That’s more complicated. FWD’s stance is that all of its efforts are steps on the road to reform, and it assures me that people in Washington believe it’s succeeding. Others are more skeptical. For immigration reform to go in effect, it doesn’t need to necessarily win hearts and minds. It needs to persuade hold-out representatives in heavily white, gerrymandered Republican states to actually vote for it. Virginia Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte, the Congressman assembling immigration reform in the House, a flat-out “no” when asked if FWD.us was having an influence on Republicans blocking the bill. Calls to Congress about policy are also believed to be most impactful when they’re about issues flying under the radar than big, salient topics like immigration reform. FWD insists it drove calls to the right hold-out representatives, but many were surely directed to Democrats who already support reform. While social media support and calls to representatives around the country may be helping some, it might be FWD’s most controversial tactics that help get the job done. If Republican reps are afraid they’ll be booted from office by their constituents for voting for immigration reform, they won’t do it. That’s where the Silicon Valley piggy bank could come in handy. If FWD can assure that the representatives will have plenty of campaign ads extolling their other accomplishments to their districts so they keep their seats, they might be willing to stick their neck out for immigration.
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iPhone Activation Servers Crumble Under The Weight Of iOS 7
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Matt Burns
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Happy day! Except for me. And legions of other iPhone owners who, for various reasons, had to activate their iPhone in the iOS 7 install process. Our phones are stuck in iOS 7 activation limbo. Since early this morning, the activation servers are either down or very slow to respond, essentially rendering the phones useless and stuck in the install process. The situation is so bad, , notifying employees of the server issues that are preventing iPhone activation. Apple better get its servers in line by Friday. There will be millions of new iPhones wanting to be activated. In a perfect world, upgrading to iOS 7 would not require activation. However, if the install process fails, the best option is to restore to factory settings, which requires reactivating the phone. Or, perhaps, an owner decided it was a good time to do a fresh install, whipping the phone completely and starting fresh. Or perhaps someone somewhere made a bad choice and bought a new iPhone today and needed to activate it. Whatever the case, as noted by Apple’s internal memo and approximately a gazillion tweets, Apple’s iPhone activation servers are currently unresponsive for a lot of iPhone owners.
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Sarah Perez
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Free Apps And Games On The App Store Are About To Test Your Data Caps
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple has increased the size of its download limits on cellular networks to 100MB from 50MB. The change comes as iOS 7 launches to the public as a ~700MB over-the-air upgrade to iPhone and iPad users. The increase in size was first and we subsequently confirmed the new, higher limit. Apple’s initial download limit for apps was 10MB while not connected to WiFi networks, forcing developers to take extensive measures to ensure that apps scooted in just under the line. This has become especially prevalent among developers of free apps and games. The thinking was that free apps acted as an ‘impulse download’. You are far more likely to get downloads of your app if you make it accessible not just on WiFi connections. If you take a quick poll of the App Store’s top and featured free apps, you’ll see a remarkable similarity in their download sizes: 43.6MB, 45.8MB, 46.4MB, 43.9MB. These are all apps like Battle Camp, CastleVille, Dragon Flinga, Deer Hunter, basically crap that you download on the fly to waste time. [gallery ids="880212,880213,880214,880215"] What this means is that all of these apps are going to balloon right up to the maximum 100MB limit as soon as they can. These are not coincidental sizes — at just under 50MB each they use every last scrap of data that Apple will allow them to ship over the wire. The side effect of this, then, is that downloading these impulse apps is going to have a big effect on your data plan. I’m not saying you do, but if you downloaded 5 of these apps a month, that’s 500MB. That’s more than double the lower limit of AT&T’s lowest data plan allowed for the iPhone. You could obliterate your cap with just 3 downloads a month if you’re on the lowest plan. All of this comes as carriers get more skimpy and anemic with data, not more generous. Though some carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint are attempting to use ‘unlimited’ data plans to buy market share, the majority of users in the U.S. are on terrible data plans that parcel out the megabytes like gold. All of you international users with your twenty quid unlimited plans I don’t want to hear it. Anyhow, this isn’t a wave your hands in the air and scream moment, but it’s definitely interesting to see Apple loosening these restrictions and how they run up against the carrier agenda when it comes to data plans. And it’s something to be aware of because these free apps will likely double in size very quickly.
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What We Know About Selfie.com
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Jordan Crook
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Selfie.com. It exists … shrouded in mystery and excitement. In a world where photo-sharing reigns supreme, where Instagram and its mighty legion of copycats, wannabes and tweaked iterations lead a massive charge, a new photo-sharing service rises out of the huddled mass to deliver the best that photography has to offer: selfies. Well, that’s what we gather from the name and the that was just put up yesterday. The founder, Hugh Dornbush, hasn’t disclosed anything else and has gone into super stealth mode, seemingly in March of 2012. According to , Selfie Inc. received at least $543.6k in April 2013 with Hugh Dornbush listed as CEO and his father Charles Dornbush listed as a director. The investors are undisclosed. Dornbush is an entrepreneur who hails from New York, where he founded in June 2008. OMGICU is a celebrity-sighting website that lets users report celebrity sightings and post photos and videos. You can even check out which celebrities have been spotted nearby recently. The app and website are both still alive, but the iTunes listing shows that OMGICU hasn’t been updated since 2011. Dornbush has also held positions at DrillTeam Marketing and Rave Wireless, as well as getting a Bachelors in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from NYU’s Stern Business School, according to his . The other founder is Alex Lasky, who founded Addictive Networks and Bthere TV, and also attended NYU, according to . As far as Selfie itself, nothing of real interest has been disclosed. [gallery columns="4" ids="880117,880115,880113,880112"] A source, wishing to remain anonymous, claims to have heard about and seen an early version of Selfie, saying it was “really cool.” No details, though. In fact, there’s no word on whether Selfie will be a mostly mobile product or mostly web. (You have to assume, if selfies are indeed involved, that there will be some form of smartphone in the mix.) Still, the holding page alone has piqued many people’s interest, including SV Angel investor David Lee. just requested the username davidlee at — David Lee (@davidlee) So, world, are you ready for a service dedicated to selfies? With narcissism at an all-time high thanks to social networks in general, the implications of a service like Selfie could be…. Hold on, I think I see a mirror.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Nvidia’s Tegra Note, Cyanogen Goes Legit, And Nexus 4 Sold Out Forever
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Darrell Etherington
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Back on schedule this week after TechCrunch Disrupt, me and Chris Velazco catch you up on the latest in Android news. We’re somewhat , but we get ourselves under control pretty quick. The is a reference tablet design that the company is saying could retail for $199 and boast some decent specs, and there’s and news that they’ll offer their software conversion tool in the Google Play store. Also the Nexus 4 looks perhaps permanently sold out ahead of a Nexus 5 unveiling, and .
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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Rep. Goodlatte Demands “Further Protections” From NSA Snooping
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stated that he is “convinced that further protections” of the civil liberties of U.S. citizens are necessary following review of the . Rep. Goodlatte’s follows his attendance of a classified briefing discussing current governmental use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to collect information. Without making a direct allusion, the congressman notes the changing temperature of oversight regarding United States surveillance activities spurred by the leaks originating by former NSA contractor : “Over the past few months, the House Judiciary Committee has conducted vigorous oversight of our nation’s foreign surveillance programs.” I’m not sure if the Chairman considers Snowden to be a patriot or a traitor, but there is no doubt that he is calling for change due to the leaks that the whistleblower unleashed. What sort of increased protection does Rep. Goodlatte have in mind? Three things: “robust oversight, additional transparency, and protections for Americans’ civil liberties” while providing sufficient legal power to keep the country secure from foreign aggressors. That’s a strong list, but one that is generic in its formulation. Rep. Goodlatte makes no specific policy proposals. However, his demand of increased protection implies that there has been too little protection in the past. And, as a prominent Republican, he embodies the trend of party-splitting that the NSA discussion has sparked. That split was best embodied , which the House , with both parties voting for and against it. Rep. Pelosi, a leading Democrat, was . That Rep. Goodlatte’s demands that we reform surveillance and rein it in to better respect our should-be-ironclad rights is good news. Every voice in favor of privacy is one worth amplifying.
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Facebook Doesn’t Want To Be Cool, It Wants To Be Electricity
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Josh Constine
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Critics say Facebook is doomed because it’s not cool to teens anymore. But Mark Zuckerberg said he doesn’t care about Facebook being cool, because now its goal is to be a ubiquitous utility. “Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?” No, because it became essential to modern life, Zuckerberg implied in in Washington, D.C. Most critics decrying Facebook’s loss of swag from random teenagers, or that may be biased because teenagers by pretending they don’t like or use Facebook. Yet none of this is real evidence that Facebook has seen any meaningful loss in engagement. Facebook, meanwhile, has of teens ditching the social network on earnings calls, with Zuckerberg most recently saying “b ased on our data, that just isn’t true,” and followed up saying teens have remained steadily engaged with Facebook this year. Zuckerberg believes Facebook is effectively “post-cool” — insulated from trends, and, to some degree, its competitors. Zuckerberg joked “People assume that we’re trying to be cool. It’s never been my goal. I’m the least cool person there is. We’re almost 10 years old so we’re definitely not a niche thing anymore so that kind of angle for coolness is done for us.” Instead, he says he wants to create something that’s a basic necessity. Responding to Bennett, Zuckerberg says that every economic epoc builds a new fundamental service like electricity. “Our society needs a new digital social fabric,” explained Zuckerberg. “We can help build it.” When Bennett pressed Zuckerberg on the potential trade-offs between transparency and privacy, he argued that “I tend to think of it as a net positive”. Forced to decide between hiding information and “the choice to be connected to people they care about,” users will tend to shift towards more sharing. By many counts, Facebook is succeeding at growing users and getting them to share more often. It has 1.15 billion users and 699 million use it daily. He also said today that 50% of social apps use Facebook for login. For now, Facebook’s biggest threat isn’t being usurped by some hip new social network, but stagnation. It must relentlessly hire visionary product builders, designers, engineers and businesspeople. When necessary it must acquire the companies where this talent resides. And it must do everything it can not to get too comfortable. Because eventually a massive shift will come that could wash away much of today’s web. Facebook will either see it coming and build or buy to adapt, or stubbornly stick to the old ways and be made irrelevant like Myspace.
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Apple Reinvents Its Wheel With iOS 7, Takes Developers Along For The Ride
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Matthew Panzarino
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Today brings the release of the most dramatic iOS update that Apple has ever made. More people will experience this change in a shorter period of time than at any point in computing history. “Measured by the number of people that are going to see a big change within the same 24-hour period,” says Evernote CEO Phil Libin, “I think iOS 7 is the biggest day in technology ever. There’s never been another day like this in the history of the universe where hundreds of millions of people will see a big change to something that they’re used to. Nothing of this scale has ever occurred.” To give context to that statement, remember that six years ago Windows dominated the platform landscape, with OS X owning around 5% of the market. Now, iOS and Android combined have edged Microsoft out as the biggest segment of operating systems. A recent measurement put their and Windows at only 35%. Even if those numbers are off a bit, it’s very clear that most of our computing lives are now accessed via mobile devices — and the software that runs on those devices. Then you start to think about the way that we see updates or changes to those platforms. Windows transitions between versions can take years from the time they’re announced. Windows 8 is on the low end of the curve. In the mobile world, the newer, better versions of Android like Jelly Bean take months, if not years, to reach meaningful market share. Yes, Jelly Bean is much better looking, more capable and very, very good compared to older versions of Google’s OS. But by only around 45% of Android users have even seen it on their devices, and it was released 16 months ago. The absolute latest version of Jelly Bean has yet to register on Google’s charts. Then we have iOS. Due to Apple’s extremely focused devices strategy and tightly controlled model that shrugs off carrier concessions and partner licensing, iOS has adoption rates that are off the charts in comparison. Recent predictions from mobile app performance management company Crittercism estimate that (if iOS 7 follows the trend of iOS 6) the new OS will hit 80% adoption rates within three months. Recently, Apple said that they would cross the 700 million mark for iOS devices sold next month. Not all will be iOS 7 compatible, obviously, but since iPhone sales have increased exponentially for the last several years, many of them will. What all of that adds up to is that a massive number of people will upgrade to iOS 7 over the next couple of weeks. Likely in the hundreds of millions. All of them will be exposed to a shockingly different and new version of their most personal computers. It’s created the perfect storm of opportunity for developers making apps for Apple’s platform, and some of them are taking full advantage. This is a rare opportunity for them to — as an anonymous developer said recently — “re-compete for their spot in the universe.” This kind of chance doesn’t come along too often, and many developers big and small are striking while the upgrade iron is hot. When Luc Vandal and the Edovia team ran into a roadblock in 2012 while trying to work on the next version of their popular , they set it aside. It wasn’t until rumors started bubbling up about iOS 7 being a major update that the juices started flowing again. Since they didn’t know exactly what the update would bring, they did some preliminary work and rewrote the backend of the app. Then WWDC rolled around and Apple unveiled a radical new look and feel for the OS. “iOS 7 is like 2008 all over again,” says Vandal of the year that Apple introduced the App Store. “An opportunity to start fresh, rethink your app(s), position your company and your apps. It was a good timing if you ask me because iOS was getting long in the tooth and felt like redoing the same stuff over and over.” Vandal is convinced that this kind of disruption in the look and feel of iOS makes their job easier. Both in terms of justifying a major redesign and in offering those major updates as new for-pay apps. That’s a tack that many developers are taking with iOS 7, as the design efforts go beyond re-skinning and many times involve rewriting the apps from the ground up. “As far as iOS 7 itself and the changes it brought, it took a while to get used to it and understand the subtleties,” says Vandal. So we started from the idea that content was king and tried to reduce the chrome to a minimum. We also tried to adapt to the layers philosophy, which makes sense in the end. We tried to be consistent and think in terms of layers, keeping in mind that there was still content underneath and had to keep some form of context that made sense. I think we got it right.” Another draw of iOS, says Vandal, is that it makes it much easier to justify it as a minimum version, leaving older editions of iOS behind. This comes by way of improved frameworks and classes in iOS that replace large amounts of old code with built-in features. Vandal is still very hopeful that future versions of iOS will bring refinement, however. The current version is still not firing on all cylinders but he’s pleased with the direction Apple is headed. “I can’t wait to see what iOS 8 brings us,” he says. Screens is an incredibly useful app, and the new iOS 7 edition is cleaner and more purposeful. The screens themselves become the interface elements, rather than encapsulating them in graphic representations of monitors, as with the iOS 6 version. It’s fast, responsive and it feels familiar and very fresh at the same time. That opportunity to break down the structures of what you’ve created and create anew has also proved attractive to big brands like American Airlines. By the time that news of iOS 7 broke, American Airlines had already been pondering a . The most recent shift had seen American adopting its newly minted livery and branding in the app. But iOS 7 presented particular opportunities. “When this came out, we realized that it was an opportunity to jump in with a fresh look that wasn’t “’09’,” says Phil Easter, American Airlines’ Director of Mobile Apps. “So at WWDC, we saw a lot of interesting stuff that we wanted to play with.” In the end, the biggest takeaway for Easter and his team from the announcement of iOS 7 was the focus on data. “Before, it was about eye candy an ‘twinkley-ness’ and sparkly objects on the screen. Over time, what we’d seen from Microsoft [Windows Phone] was that the consumer wanted data, and we’re very data driven,” says Easter. In fact, the mobile American Airlines app drives about 10x as much traffic as the desktop app in the 24 hours leading up to travel, as people refresh and triple check flight status. So the data that the app is presenting to the user needs to be ‘crisp and fast’, says Easter. “And I think that iOS 7 is about data first, and not about making pretty icons.” In order to present more data to the user, the AA app switched from a largely page-driven system to a ‘linear’ data display that has you scrolling downwards in a main view to get your at-a-glance status. The design was a result of work to leverage what American sees as a more data driven iOS 7 and some conversations with Apple regarding tweaks that needed to be made to help the app be true to iOS 7. At this point, Easter says, American feels like they have a very good ‘first app’ for iOS 7 that, most importantly, has been tested very well. “There’s reports from…out in the ether that a lot of apps are just going to crash [on iOS 7],” says Easter. “Airline apps get hit hard, because people loathe airlines. So if you’re not solving world hunger with your app you’re gonna be in trouble.” Easter says that, with 9 million downloads of the app, they simply couldn’t afford to have a day one disaster. “These are travelers, you know, they’re paying for a service and if their app didn’t work I’d be walked out the door.” One thing that Easter believes could be a problem on launch day is that Apple didn’t really launch a campaign that instructed developers to check and re-test all of their apps on iOS 7 in preparation for the launch. Instead, Apple treated this like ‘any other iOS release’ instead of the major change that iOS 7 is. Easter says that American did issue a compatibility update, but says that there were still a bunch of things in the app that didn’t work on iOS 7. So it will be interesting to see what the landscape looks like after launch, and how many developers will be caught unawares by crashes. In order to educate its customers about the new look and feel of the app on iOS 7, American is putting together an . I get the feeling that this will be an interesting transition, especially with big brands like American that haven’t changed the look and feel of their apps in years. Easter also sees some interesting opportunities around Apple’s new Bluetooth iBeacons for checking in locally. “Apple basically killed NFC, this was the last chance for [it] to have any legs,” says Easter. That, coupled with TouchID could make Americans more willing to accept the fact that their ‘credit card’ is on their phone. “Our employees, assets and employees are always moving,” says Easter, “so this idea of identity, that we can track them at a gate to serve persons with disabilities or minors…I’m very giddy about the data that we can start getting.” iOS 7 also gave the AA team the opportunity to focus on the accessibility aspects of the app. Resulting in Apple’s Voiceover accessibility system being enabled throughout the app for the visually impaired. And there is an ongoing effort to continue to make the app better for those with other disabilities. “We’re like a tiny country with the number of people that we transport, so that’s a huge [chunk] of our demographic,” says Easter, who gives credit to Apple for being a proponent of accessibility efforts. The new app is well done, and shockingly attractive in comparison to the older AA apps. I’ve been a user of them for some time and this version is undoubtedly a major improvement. I was blown away when I launched the app for the first time, as American has taken full advantage of the parallax and edge-to-edge nature of iOS 7 to deliver the best looking airline app that I’ve ever seen or used. I’ve only fooled around with some sample flights supplied by the airline, but if it launches well it’s going to make a lot of travelers happy. Easter also has a piece of advice that’s interesting in the context of our cross-platform world. “A lot of enterprises use tools other than native, and I think [iOS 7] is the demarcation for that theory,” he says. “If you’re not doing native [development] then you’re going to have a hard time adapting to the platform.” “Tools that abstracted and ported to mobile platforms…you could get away with that. But when you look at our app…there’s no way you could abstract that. It just brings on the point that if you have the money to invest…your developers need to be native. Some of the other shops that aren’t native may have a tougher time and they may have to go all native just to adapt to the [iOS 7].” The effect of this could be to build on platform lock-in, especially for smaller shops without the resources of AA. If a small company only has a couple of developers, then iOS 7 is a likely starting point, and once that’s begun, it’s going to be much harder to port those apps over to other platforms. A large component of that is the way that iOS 7 is forcing development teams to re-think and re-evaluate their apps. Some of the larger publications are seeing so much benefit that they’re putting all of the chips on iOS 7. In a major statement about the confidence companies have in Apple’s ability to ship, the for iOS will be iOS 7 only. NYT Senior Software Engineer Chris Ladd says that this enabled the Times to take advantage of not only the new design but also the new APIs in iOS 7. “At the time that we went out to WWDC, we were in the middle of a redesign project of both apps,” says Ladd. “Sitting back and rethinking, we’ve got these apps, they’re good apps…but let’s sit back and rethink ‘what do we look like on iOS’?” The original plan was to redesign the apps in an effort that would span six months and see new apps across the Times brand in Q1 of 2014. But when the team saw iOS 7 at WWDC, they did some testing and prototyping. The response was so positive that the Times decided to accelerate a redesign that was supposed to take just six weeks. What resulted is a rethinking of the app, not a re-skinning, as we’ve seen with many of the pre-iOS 7 app updates. And there is no way we’d be seeing this new version this soon if not for iOS 7. “So, did iOS 7 change the way that we develop? Absolutely,” says Ladd. Previously, the NYT had supported both iOS 5 and iOS 6. Moving to iOS 7 exclusively allowed them to utilize the new features of iOS 7 and to do away with a lot of the cruft of the old. Ladd gives several reasons that moving to support iOS 7 only benefits the Times apps. First, there’s promotion opportunities from Apple. The company is well known to feature apps that go whole-hog in supporting the latest versions of the OS exclusively, and that leverage new APIs and features right away. There’s no guarantee that the Times will be featured by Apple, but this increases the possibility. “It’s cheaper to support one version, one major version of software,” notes Ladd. “And you end up tying yourself in knots dev-wise to write around all of the old APIs, with all of the cool stuff you’re doing.” When the team made the choice to go iOS 7-only, it was also able to throw away “thousands of lines of code”, which lightened the app’s structure and made it a leaner offering, and less unwieldy to work on for the team. The New York Times was one of the first apps on the iPad. Back when it was still a secret project the app team was shipped in to work on building it in a secure windowless room with access to the hardware, says Ladd. And some of that code was still in the app, so iOS 7 was an opportunity to sweep out the corners. Apple’s recently is also one that Ladd and the team have been testing in the office. It should allow holdouts to download the last compatible version of their app for their devices if they haven’t updated iOS. And, of course, the huge adoption curve of iOS doesn’t hurt either. With over 85% of users on the latest version within weeks of release, the app will still address the majority of readers. “One of the most exciting things about iOS 7…is the concept of automatic updates,” says Ladd. Even though the Times app has an aggressive update rate, automatic updates should make it even faster. “Just knowing that we’ll be able to polish and update this app and that it will get out to users fast is a huge win for us,” he adds. “I’ve actually found it pretty magical, myself,” says Ladd. “When I’m at work I’ll be building and running a fresh copy of the app…but when I’m just at home on the weekend…I’ll pick up my iPad and open it up and the news is right there. And I know it didn’t update since I opened it. I don’t know exactly how they do it. I think it must be the motion of when you pick the device up couple with time..because it’s not regular. As a user, that’s one of the most magical things about iOS 7.” With iOS 7, Apple is bundling background updates together to minimize CPU and radio activity, conserving battery life and making for a more efficient way to have apps ‘at the ready’ when you open them. How those updates are triggered, however, isn’t yet defined completely. From what we understand, it’s a combination of factors that includes a prediction of the next time you’ll launch each app based on when you’ve launched it before. It will then background-update shortly before then to give you fresh data when you launch it. There is also the ability for developers to trigger a background update via push notification, but iOS does not act on it immediately, it waits to bundle it with other updates. This, says Ladd, is a testament to the way that Apple approaches these kinds of problems. It balances the desires of developers with usability concerns. This was evident in the way that developers approached the desire for updating apps continuously in the background, and the way that Apple answered it with a (theoretically) more efficient system. “When somebody is asking you for something,” says Ladd, “they might not be asking for what they really want…really they want you to solve a problem for them. Apple is really good at stepping back and asking what is the actual problem here and what is the easiest and cheapest way to solve it.” Of course, as we’ve seen with the ‘old app’ feature, that balance isn’t always struck correctly, erring too far on the side of the user and leaving developers in the lurch. But, in this case, the backgrounding APIs seem to be working as advertised. “We want the New York Times on iOS to absolutely feel at home on iOS…but at the end of the day we want it to look like us,” says Ladd. “A big part of our design thinking includes a lot more of the nuanced typography that you see in the paper, the full bleed cover of the magazine and the magazine’s fonts.” This tension between stripping down the design of apps completely and still retaining the focus of your app is a recurring theme that we’ve seen with developers. Many of the developers we’ve spoken to have said that re-interpreting their apps while retaining the heart of what they are has been the most difficult with iOS 7. The change in feel is so radical, and so minimal, that the instinct is simply to winnow the app down to its bare elements. “While a lot of the interactions are similar to iOS 6, iOS 7 looks and feels new and fresh. It’s likely many users will perceive apps that don’t take advantage of iOS 7’s design queues as old and stale,” says . “Using completely stock UI widgets for everything isn’t the answer though — I think it’s important to maintain your app’s own personality. So, it’s a balancing act, and quite a tough one.” Edwards cites the status bar, which now merges with each app to create a unified feel, as a particular challenge. “In iOS 6, the status bar was treated as its own entity, often blending into the hardware. iOS 7 merges the status bar and nav bar into a single unit, making it the app developer’s problem — we now have to include and design around a busy line of icons and text, and we have very little control over the way it looks,” says Edwards. “If there’s one thing I want in iOS 8, it’s for the status bar to revert to how it was in iOS 6, or for a better solution to be found.” timed the launch of his and new app with the release of iOS 7. “Thankfully, Perfect Weather was one of those rare cases where just tweaking the visuals made it feel right at home on iOS 7. We had already settled on a gesture based UI that uses depth and physics in a way similar to iOS 7, so we didn’t actually have to rethink the app for iOS 7,” Barnard says. “A lot of developers will probably say the same thing and be wrong, but I think time will prove that Perfect Weather stands up well with the new UI paradigms of iOS 7.” Barnard also notes that getting to a stable release was made more challenging this year because some ‘obvious’ bugs weren’t worked out in Apple’s recent iOS 7 Gold Master release. “We’ve been scrambling to fix some things were so obvious we assumed they’d be fixed in the GM,” he says. A comparison of how ‘minimal’ Barnard and his team thought iOS might go with how the design ended up on iOs 7 demonstrates just how surprising the changes Apple introduced at WWDC were: But pushing those changes hard undoubtedly made it difficult for some developers to get all of the changes in place before launch. Some high-profile developers like Tapbots’ Paul Haddad have stated that they will continue to work on their software until they feel comfortable with the quality before releasing an ‘iOS 7’ version. “I’m strongly against taking a saw to an app and removing every single tiny shadow and gradient,” says Apple Design Award winner . Orbuch and worked to give to-do app a new look, while not stripping out all personality. “Nobody wants every app on iOS 7 to look the same, in fact, not even Apple–this is something that I think has often been misinterpreted,” says Orbuch. “We moved pretty far away from the stock iOS 6 UIKit elements in past versions of Finish to provide our own distinctive feel and functionality, and it wouldn’t make sense at all to switch back to stock elements just because those elements changed. I rebuilt our interface with lots of subtle and major changes and improvements that add up to a much cleaner and lighter feel, and I’m really excited about it.” The general consensus is that iOS 7 is actually harder to design for than iOS 6, even though its interface elements are simpler in nature. The simplicity of the thing makes every choice extremely important, and tempts designers to settle for ‘minimal’ when the answer is not nearly so, well, simple. The first wave of apps for iOS 7 will likely be a mixed bag of ‘resins’ and truly ‘re-built’ apps. But there are some companies using iOS 7 as a catalyst to kick off a completely new brand image. One of those is CNN. CNN is smack in the middle of a ‘re-platforming’ effort across desktop, mobile and mobile web. And iOS 7’s design cues will inform all of those other platforms as it changes the way that it presents content to its customers. The redesign of the iOS apps were going to happen regardless of iOS 7, but now they’re able to take advantage of the aesthetic break by creating a new palette of color, using translucency and dynamism in the app and taking advantage of the backgrounding APIs to deliver news faster. If a breaking news alert occurs, CNN sends a refresh to the content on the app so when a user taps on the breaking news alert they have immediate access to the latest content on the top stories page. Previously, unless the app had been run in the last 10 minutes, this required a refresh of the app. The new is also more in keeping with the responsive designs rolling out on the web and mobile web for the rest of the CNN Next update. CNN says that the layout of iOS 7 is much more friendly to this kind of modular thinking and should make the app much more cohesive when used alongside the responsive web editions of CNN’s offerings. The fact that iOS 7 is influencing other components of a brand’s mechanisms was also a common thread in speaking with developers. Evernote CEO Phil Libin says that the re-write of the iOS 7 app is “the most dramatic development project that we’ve done,” and notes that it will influence the other versions of the apps on other platforms. Virtually no code is shared between and the previous iOS editions. Libin calls it a ‘once every 5 years cleanup’. “We wanted to do it because it’s such an opportunity,” says Libin. “The central thing about iOS 7 is that it feels a lot faster. Doing things in iOS 7 feels a lot more immediate…minimizing the amount of motion and gestures and visual noise. So our primary goal was to make it feel much faster, be much faster in reality, but also feel much faster.” To that end, Evernote got rid of all of the physical metaphors it was using before in order to embrace the new dynamic UI. Those added ‘weight’ to the app, says Libin, and they had to go. Over the next year or so these choices will influence the versions of Evernote’s apps that roll out over the next year. But it wasn’t all easy going, Libin says that they struggled with it for the first couple of weeks. He used iOS 7 on his primary devices and they tried to get a feel for “what the platform wanted to be, what it wanted us to do,” he says. The main challenge, says Libin, was time, because it was such a massive change. “It was probably the hardest project we’ve done.” And the project, says Libin, will be seen by more people in a shorter period of time than any release before it. Windows and Android take a year or more to change that many people’s personal platforms. “It’s unheard of in 24 hours,” he says. Libin also cites the 64-bit architecture as very important for Evernote’s future apps, as it will allow them to do more stuff on the client side, rather than server side. Evernote is also using Airdrop and has more plans for it and iBeacon to add features for users “I haven’t been this excited for a new platform in a while, in terms of how quickly it’s going to make our app better over the next few months,” says Libin. The sentiment that iOS 7 will inspire ‘shock and awe’ in users is one that I’ve heard repeated in one fashion or another by many developers over the course of these past few months. And I don’t think that term was meant as a completely complimentary one. Simply put: iOS 7 is such a big change that most developers have no idea how users will react to it, or to the apps that they create which fit in with its aesthetic. Everything is unsettled, and the mobile landscape on iOS has been fractured into a bunch of tiny pieces. This is the time for developers on the platform to strike, to make a statement. This is when new winners will rise and old leaders will fall. The opportunity with iOS 7 now has never been larger, and even Libin’s rather dramatic statement rings true — at least inside the iOS community. And, in the end, it’s also a test for Apple. Will its users update to the new iOS as fast as they have previous versions? The framework is set for easy upgrade, but will people take advantage of it even though it’s going to completely change the way that their devices and apps look? Do they even know it will? Even if users choose to upgrade, there’s still the question of how they will react. Will the opportunities created here for developers to re-imagine their apps also cause them to alienate people comfortable with the overall feel of an iOS that hadn’t changed in six years? So far there are just questions, and a lot of big bets from developers large and small. The next few weeks should give us some answers.
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BlackBerry To Cut Up To 40% Of Staff By Year’s End
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Chris Velazco
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Hey BlackBerry fans, here’s a bit of good news: BBM will officially land on Android devices starting on September 21, with the iOS version going live the next day. Hey BlackBerry employees, here’s a bit of bad news: there’s a decent chance that you or some of your co-workers are going to lose their jobs. Those two stories broke within minutes of each other today, and together they paint a peculiar portrait of a company that was once the de facto ruler of the smartphone roost. The first reported on the layoffs earlier today, claiming that the company could ultimately cut up to 40% of its total workforce (which equates to thousands of employees) by the end of the year in a bid to cut costs and keep itself afloat. These larger waves of layoffs were preceded by a smaller spate of firings earlier this summer which saw 250 employees let go from the company’s Waterloo R&D and product testing facility. The last great BlackBerry exodus started in earnest over the summer of 2012, when it was revealed that some 5,000 employees would be fired by the end of that year. Now it seems that process will begin anew, though at the time the remnants of the company were hopeful that the impending launch of BlackBerry 10 would finally move the needle in a more positive direction. Here were are some eight months later and BlackBerry still hasn’t managed to regain its former stature (especially now that Windows Phone finally seems to be picking up some steam). Meanwhile, BBM has always been a cornerstone of the BlackBerry experience, and its migration to other platforms is being looked at by some as a harbinger of bigger and better things. When CEO Thorsten Heins revealed that tentative BBM launch window at BlackBerry Live back in May, he said it was because of a “state of confidence.” “The BB10 platform is so strong and the response has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become an independent mobile messaging platform,” he continued. While it’s heartening to hear that iOS and Android users clamoring for yet another messaging app won’t have to wait too much longer, BBM’s chances of striking a chord with the masses are questionable. There’s the sheer pervasiveness of the competition — there’s WhatsApp, Viber, Imo, Tencent, LINE, and KakaoTalk just to name a few. And now for the certain subset of BlackBerry users (I’m sure there are at least a few) that cling to their devices because of BBM, well, they’ve got an exit strategy that didn’t exist before. BBM’s more secure approach to messaging and its future support for Channels (which will allow for smoother brand-consumer communication) may win it some fans, but it remains to be seen how much of a splash BBM can make outside of the company’s own hardware ecosystem. And that’s to say nothing of the rumors that BlackBerry as a company will be cut up into slivers and sold (with the BBM business ), which kind of makes these new waves of layoffs look like a bid to appear more comely to potential buyers by lightening up the ol’ balance sheet. In the end, both stories depict a company that is scrambling to survive. It may be that the scrappiness of a smaller team and a wider audience of people who appreciate a service BlackBerry has created may be enough to turn the tides for the beleaguered smartphone player, but I suspect for now things will continue to get worse before they get better. I’ve reached out to BlackBerry for comment, and will update this post if/when I get a response.
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A Few Tricks All The New iOS 7 Users Should Know
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Greg Kumparak
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At long last, iOS 7 has arrived. That is, it arrived for everyone who didn’t say “Developer? Oh, yeah, I’m totally a developer. Cough” and wiggle into the Beta months ago. iOS 7 is a strange new land, especially on day one. Out with the gradients, in with the trippy fluorescents. Your favorite app? It probably looks completely different now. It can be confusing, but we’re here to help. iOS 7 has all sorts of nifty little tricks tucked away in places that are in no way immediately obvious, especially if you haven’t followed Tim Cook’s every word along the way. If you’ve been using iOS 7 for a while, you might know some of these. Hell, you might know of these. But we tried to cover the bases to make sure that most people learn a thing or two. (Know all of these? You’re way cool, high five. Share another trick down in the comments!)
Gone are the days of having to swipe or tap your way to iOS’ dedicated search page. You can now access Spotlight search from anywhere on the homescreen. Just swipe down in the middle of the screen. You can use Spotlight to quickly search across your device’s apps, emails, and contacts — but curiously, it seems that Apple has removed Spotlight’s ability to search the web. I’m pretty sure I never actually used that, but this is the Internet so I’m supposed to complain now that it’s gone.
Toggles! At last! Fixing what is perhaps one of iOS’ most glaring, long-lasting omissions, iOS 7 puts one-click access to things like Airplane mode and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth toggles just one swipe away, instead of hiding them in settings. To get to the new Control Panel, just swipe up from the bottom of the screen anywhere you might be. You’ll get buttons for Airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, Orientation lock, and sliders for brightness and media control. Oh, and there’s a flashlight in there. So if you were thinking about building a dedicated flashlight app, now is probably not a good time. (Pro tip: The control panel is available from the lockscreen. Also: if the control panel is sliding out and interrupting your Candy Crushin’ time, you can block it from sliding out while in an app in your settings.)
iOS has always been kind of weird about telling you when a message was sent or received. It’ll tell you when messages came through — but only if it’s the first one that’s come through in a while in a given thread. If you sent a bunch of messages around 12:45, for example, you’d normally only get that first 12:45 timestamp. With iOS 7, you can reveal the timestamp for each and every message. Just grab one of the speech bubbles in a thread and swipe to the left. Tada! Timestamps! Never argue about when a message was sent again! (Because, yeah, I’ve had those arguments. Seriously. Sigh.)
Building a house boat? Hanging a picture? Just want to show off one of the stranger new tricks that your iPhone has picked up? iOS 7 has a built-in bubble level, of all things. I thought it was a pretty strange addition at first… but then I found myself using it one day. Then again the next. To get to the level, open the compass app. Though not immediately obvious, there’s a second page to the app; swipe to the left, and you’ll be at Apple’s level. (Pro tip: Double-tapping the screen resets the level to consider whatever angle the phone is currently at to be 0°. That design choice, expressed through a series of colored flashes, isn’t super intuitive.)
Safari has a new, scrolling 3D tab interface that allows for just about as many tabs as you want. Alas, these tabs also have new, tiny “X” buttons that make closing them quickly a bit of a pain. Forget the X button — it’s for chumps. Swipe the tabs away to the left, instead. It’s a whole lot faster, and requires less precision when you’re trying to dump a bunch of tabs on the go.
“Surely, there’s got to be a way to block phone numbers,” said every iPhone user ever. Really, just type “How to b” into Google and let it autocomplete. First result? “How to block a number.” Second result? “How to block a number on iPhone.” Third result? “How to be happy.” This feature is in greater demand than happiness! Yet, until now, there hasn’t really been an easy way. With iOS 7, it’s finally a pretty straightforward process to block people from calling, messaging, or FaceTime-ing (FaceTiming? Facing? Agh.) you. You can find the block list at either Settings > Phone > Blocked; Settings > Messages > Blocked; or Settings > FaceTime > Blocked. Note, however, that the block list is universal — block them in the phone settings, and they’re blocked on FaceTime, too.
Want to see which app is using up all of your cell plan’s precious megabytes? Want to keep Pandora from streaming unless it’s on Wi-Fi? Pop into Settings > Cellular and scroll down to the bottom. You can see which apps have used the most cell data and block any app from using cell data at all. (Note: An app needs to have used cell data at least once for it to show up in the list.)
We’ve had a of requests for this one since this post first went up, so here you go. Apple changed the App Switching/App Closing mechanism up a bit with iOS 7. It used to be that to close an app, you’d double tap the home button, wait for the app drawer to slide out, then press and hold on an icon until the little “X” appeared. With iOS 7, the whole thing looks and works a bit more like webOS of yesteryear. Double tap the home button to bring up the fullscreen app switcher, which provides a screenshot of each running application in a sideways-scrolling carousel. To close an application, simply swipe the app’s screenshot up and off the screen. (Note: You really shouldn’t to close apps all that often. Unless the app has crashed and refuses to fix itself or it’s doing something that is eating your battery, iOS 7 is designed so that most apps use little to no resources when in the background.)
Know any other tricks that we should list? (“LOL SWITCH TO ANDROID” doesn’t count.) Drop a comment and we’ll add the best.
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Twitter Revamps Its Apps For iOS 7, But Bigger Changes Are Yet To Come
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Sarah Perez
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Amid preparations for its , Twitter rolled out updated iOS applications today which feature several small changes, including of course an updated design to better reflect the new style of Apple’s iOS 7 mobile operating system. But these updates are merely a hint of what’s ahead for the company in its push to make its products more mainstream-friendly. The service, which now boasts some users, announced the launch of the upgraded applications on its , noting how its apps are now integrated with core iOS features. For example, Apple’s push-button assistant Siri can search Twitter for tweets about people or topics. Apple’s web browser, Safari, incorporates something called “ ” to highlight news that’s making the rounds on Twitter’s network, and the Music app will display songs trending on Twitter through the Twitter #music station on iOS 7’s Pandora-like service, iTunes Radio. Though these will be welcome changes for most Twitter users (unlike, perhaps, that blue line connecting conversations!), the company has been testing a much grander app redesign behind closed doors. Those participating in have already seen a hint of what’s to come, which includes a radical revamp of the Twitter interface that will eliminate the standard four buttons at the bottom (Home, Connect, Discover and Me) in favor of a “swipeable” menu at the top which lets you move between streams. Currently, that Android beta (see below) includes streams like Home, Notifications, Messages, Activity, Trending, Find People, and Me – quite a collection of choices for a company that’s trying to distill the experience for simplicity. Of course, this beta build, though likely representative of the general direction Twitter is heading given its goal to make the product consistent across platforms, could very well change between now and the final launch. In addition, the company is to be working on an interface featuring richer media-filled streams, and even a way to tune into Twitter while watching TV to see related tweets and conversations. Twitter has been betting big on TV integrations as a way to reach a broader audience as well as generate ad revenue, and has already been like a “TV trending” box at the top of users’ Twitter timelines. And earlier this summer, CEO Dick Costolo spoke of a “live events” tool which would let users scroll back in time to see spikes in conversations around some sort of planned event or breaking news. In terms of television programming, he described the events option as being able to “follow along with Twitter in a DVR mode.” These more interesting features and user interface changes are not available in today’s iOS 7 update, as Twitter has smartly decided not to pile on with every other tech company under the sun with what may one of its biggest product updates of the year. But in the meantime, you can grab Twitter’s latest app upgrades .
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If You Watch One Partially Cacophonous NES Player Piano System Video Today, Make It This One
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John Biggs
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1wlaj7RyKI] The folks at RoboBand have created a robotic band that plays the soundtracks to famous Nintendo games using a , a Yamaha Disklavier, and a robotic drum kit. The system took the audio output from the NES, converted it to MIDI, which in turn either controlled the solenoids on the drum machine or the piano keys. The result is a sometimes cacophonous, sometimes sublime rendition of some NES classics including the Legend of Zelda, Duck Hunt, and the Mario series. To their credit, the band admits that things weren’t perfect. “In full disclosure, there is normally a half-second audio delay that was removed in editing, but it’s still very playable live,” they wrote on YouTube. Given that most sprite-intensive NES games ended up with more than a second lag, it’s a pretty impressive feat regardless. Personally I’d love to see some Metroid played this way. It would be like watching The Matrix at one of those silent movie theaters with a dude up front playing the organ.
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Google Updates Chrome For iOS With Improved Voice Search And Google Apps Integration
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Frederic Lardinois
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When it comes to voice search, Google still runs circles around its competitors. Today’s update to adds a new layer of intelligence to this feature and now lets you use pronouns. The company previously introduced this capability and already uses it on the desktop and Android. Thanks to this, you can now ask it “Who is the president of the United States?” and you can then use the pronoun in the next question instead of Barack Obama’s full name. That’s a nifty feature, but the tool that many users will likely appreciate even more is the ability to quickly log in to Google Apps with just a click (and if you have multiple accounts, you can also add those to Chrome and switch between them if necessary). Links to some Google services, including YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Drive and the Google+ app now also take you directly to the native app if you have it installed. You can customize which native apps Chrome opens from the browser’s Settings menu. Just like most other popular apps that are getting updates today, Google also redesigned Chrome to match Apple’s sparse iOS 7 design. Given that Chrome already featured a pretty barebones design, the change isn’t all that noticeable and mostly involves fewer gradients. The new version is now .
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Facebook’s New Mobile Test Framework Births Bottom Tab Bar Navigation Redesign For iOS 5, 6, & 7
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Josh Constine
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Facebook lost its ability to “move fast and break things” when it switched its apps from HTML5 to native. But it’s gotten its mojo back. a big featuring bottom-screen “tab bar” navigation built with an advanced native mobile testing framework. Facebook knew to ditch the pull-out navigation drawer by testing different interfaces in 10 million-user batches. [If you don’t see the new Facebook app in the App Store, give it an hour as the rollout seems to be a bit slow] The isn’t just for iOS 7. It’s rolling out to iOS 5 and 6 too, but with a black tab bar for navigation at the bottom of the screen that matches the old iOS style instead of the white tab bar for iOS 7. However, the tab bar won’t be coming to Facebook for iPad, as it sees the drawer as still a good fit for bigger screens. For the little ones, the new tab bar delivers a super-charged “More” button. It appears on the far right next to one-tap buttons for News Feed, Requests, Messages, and Notifications. More reveals your app bookmarks just like the old drawer did, but will save your place in whatever product you browse. Previously, if you opened your drawer and switched to look at Events or Photos, you’d lose your place in the News Feed or whatever else you were doing. The new More button essentially opens tabs over the top of the feed so your state and context are preserved. It even works between sessions so if you leave Events open in More, your parties will be waiting there at the ready any time you tap More. As for aesthetics, Facebook has also made the top title bar translucent and redesigned many of its icons like the one for messages to match the line and arc style of Apple’s new mobile operating system. But Facebook didn’t flatten everything, leaving some texture and depth to the feed. You can see video of the redesigned app here. The real story today isn’t the app, though, but how it was made. Facebook has never been afraid to try new things and see what sticks. It invented the to let it simultaneously test thousands of variations of Facebook on the web with subsets of users. It would collect data about usage and performance to inform what to roll out to everyone. On mobile, it hoped to do the same thing, so it built its iOS and Android apps using a Frankenstein combination of native architecture and HTML5. The latter let it ship code changes and tests to users on the fly without the need for a formal app update. “With HTML5 we’d ship code every single day and be able to switch it on server-side”, Facebook product manager Michael Sharon tells me. That meant it could push a News Feed redesign one day to 5% of users, then to everyone a week later, and then fix a bug a few days after that. But beyond testing, HTML5 was a disaster. It made Facebook’s apps sluggish and unresponsive, which hampered engagement, ad views, and their app store ratings. Users hated Slowbook. Mark Zuckerberg would later say on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that “ as a company…was betting too much on HTML5″. So Facebook entirely on native infrastructure last Summer. They were twice as fast. Suddenly their app store ratings shot up, and News Feed stories on average. It was a huge win for Facebook. Except that it had to sacrifice HTML5’s testing abilities. Sharon explains “One thing we lost was the ability to do testing. We use testing kind of religiously in both the web and HTML5 apps, and this is something we wanted to get back to as much as possible.” Having to wait until its monthly app update cycle came around to test new versions of its apps was torture for the typically nimble company. It wanted to push changes and get immediate feedback. To solve the problem on Android, Facebook launched a in June 2013 that let it use Android’s more permissive stance towards developers to let power users sign up to play with potential new features and catch bugs. But iOS refuses to sully its simplicity with such beta capabilities. So over the past year Facebook quietly built out a new native mobile app testing framework and sprung it into action in March to build the app update released today. How it works is that when you download Facebook for iOS, the app actually contains multiple different versions of the interface. However, you’re grouped with a few hundred thousand other users and you all only see one version of the app. This way Facebook can try out tons of variations all at once, without multiple app updates or any confusion for users. We’ve all been Guinea pigs in the mobile testing framework since March, but none of us knew it. Sharon was adamant that these different tests aren’t half-baked betas, saying “We’re not shipping a subpar version of our app. We’re shipping full production-ready versions that could become the main experience”. When added up, Facebook would test major changes with between five and ten million users at a time — more than many apps have in total. “I wouldn’t say we’re ‘data-driven’. We’re ‘data-aware’ or ‘data-informed’,” Sharon says. That means that while Facebook collects a bunch of testing data that sways its decisions, it won’t chuck out its intuition or a design it believes in just because the data says so. The first big mission of the new testing framework was rethinking how users navigate on mobile. It wondered if there was something better than the navigation drawer that slides out from the side of the app. It used the new testing framework to experiment with dozens of different interface designs, and compared them on metrics including “engagement metrics, satisfaction metrics, revenue metrics, speed metrics, perception of speed metrics” until it found that when looked at holistically, the row of buttons at the bottom of the feed or main screen was the best design. This is what’s . And that’s how Facebook got its testing groove back.
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Lively Raises $4.8M, Launches Sensor Network For Older Folks
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John Biggs
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“Help the aged,” sang the bard, and that’s what aims to do. After all, one time they were just like you, drinking smoking cigs, and sniffing glue. This $150 device, on the other hand, ensures that they’re up and about and staying active while you’re away, giving you a bit of peace of mind while the older folks are at home. The system consists of a sensor array that communicates with a wirelessly connected base station. When various items are moved around the house – keys, a medicine cabinet, the refrigerator door – the sensors report back and then the app shows you just what they are up to. Are they eating? Taking their meds? Driving to the liquor store? You’ll know about it. Founded by former adBrite CEO Iggy Fanlo, Keith Dutton, and David Glickman, the company closed a $2.5 million seed round in 2012 and just announced a $4.8M series A led by Cambia Health Solutions and Maveron. They just launched their product which includes the dongle and two months of free service. They took part in a failed Kickstarter in . The team prides itself on a sort of minimalist monitoring that will help older folks maintain dignity and privacy. “This is not ‘big brother’ monitoring. Lively’s passive sensing tracks just enough information to interpret meaningful activity that shows how you’re doing without sharing too much. It doesn’t require any video cameras or anything that you have to wear,” said Fanlo. “Creates new avenues of connection: Lively provides a better way for older adults to share how they’re doing with a connected device that uses passive activity sensors you apply to moveable objects around the home.” Fanlo created the company after going through a divorce and missing his extended family. As a result, he thought he wanted to find a solution to loneliness and looked first to the aging community. “It was a difficult and in many ways a dark time for me. I was looking at health & wellness. I sought out two things in my preliminary search: the intersection of large and growing market AND an area generally ignored by entrepreneurs. Within health & wellness, aging jumped off the page. That was all good and well, but how is that inspiring even for me. Well, as I visited several facilities and spoke to many people the social side of aging, the isolation, the potential loneliness struck a chord. I had felt that very strongly only a few years before and I saw a light at the end of the tunnel… For many of those over 70, 80 years of age, there might not be another good opportunity to really stay connected. I had my inspiration.” Interestingly, the service offers , printed photo booklets created by friends and family and mailed monthly to the Lively user. In this way you get sort of a two way street – data comes out of the home while notes, pictures, and comments come in. Sadly, Lively doesn’t really have an emergency notification system in case someone has fallen and can’t get up nor is it particularly useful if a loved one wanders off – without a GPS tracking system, it’s useless in that case. However, it does help note movements and activities around the house specifically which could make it valuable if you want to make sure mom is taking her vitamins and dad isn’t watching too much TV.
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Software For Auto Repair: With New Funding In Tow, Estify Sees Big Opportunity In An Unsexy Market
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Rip Empson
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The collision industry probably doesn’t rank at the top of the “Sexy Markets” list for startups, but sometimes the most obscure, fragmented and pulchritudinously challenged industries can offer the most opportunity to those willing to grit their teeth and immerse themselves in the mess. , a graduate of business accelerator, is doing just that. Co-founders Jordan Furniss, Derek Carr and Taylor Moss went looking for the most unsexy market they could find, with bonus points awarded for both size and level of inefficiency. They quickly found their Shangri-La: The collision and auto repair market. But the co-founders are web developers and designers by trade, and, knowing that this put them at a disadvantage in an industry where engineers are scarce and trust is crucial, they immersed themselves. After months of talking to shops, owners, mechanics, parts providers and insurers and identifying the biggest pain points, they began developing Estify. Sure, the startup may not become a billion-dollar company, but this is a great, quick lesson for entrepreneurs: It’s impossible to avoid failure, but before you start building an app or product, take time to understand the market you’re tackling, what it’s problems are and how its businesses work. Go be an apprentice if you have to; it’s the least you can do, and a step that points you in the right direction. While the auto repair industry may be unsexy, Furniss tells us, it’s also probably likely that the town or city you live in has at least one auto repair shop. In fact, there are about 45,000 in the U.S. today, the co-founder says, and most of them are using the same tools for inventory, interfacing with insurance companies and data entry they have for years. The company is also expanding its potential addressable market by not only going after the 45,000 repair shops, but by offering its service to the whole pipeline, Estify wants to reach the 200,000 shops, insurance companies, independent appraisers and parts providers out there. To do that, the startup has built a suite of cloud-based services that aim to help make shops, and related service providers a way to increase efficiency and save money. By helping collision repair shops automate the data entry process, among other things, Furniss claims that the company’s SaaS product can save these businesses up to two hours on every estimate they process — something repair shops have traditionally done manually. The startup recently emerged from limited beta, and had been testing the product with a handful of early customers, so it doesn’t have many paying customers yet. However, Furniss says that the company spent its long beta period attempting to validate its pricing model and functionality and has been encouraged by the feedback. In one weekend, he says, the founders received emails from over 100 different shops that wanted to use the product, with a handful of them offering to pay for a full year in advance. To help it push forward with a full-scale launch, add to its current team of six and start selling more broadly to repair shops, insurance providers and parts dealers, Estify recently closed on a $800K round of seed capital, led by ff Venture Capital, with participation from Romulus Capital, REES Capital and Amplify.LA. As to what Estify actually does? At launch, the startup will be offering a suite of web services containing three main products, which can all be managed and viewed through its web-based dashboard. The first tackles what Furniss says is one of the biggest problems faced by repair shops — called “rekeying.” Essentially, rekeying is the process of duplicating the estimate that the insurance company originally wrote into the collision shop’s own estimation processes. “It’s almost hard to fathom for those with tech backgrounds,” he says, “but these two systems don’t communicate and there’s no data bridge between them, whatsoever.” The process can add up to two hours to the estimate writing process, so Estify tries to solve this by allowing shops to bridge the gap and eliminate the redundant work of “rekeying.” The second product, Reconcile, tackles a similar pain point, in that it helps repair shops be more efficient about how they deal with estimates and the interface with insurance companies. Virtually every collision shop has to work with insurance company, Furniss says, since they are typically the ones paying for the work. Of course, insurance companies want to spend the least amount money on each repair as possible, while the shop generally wants to be as thorough as possible and get paid for the parts and work. “There’s a whole negotiation process that takes place with every repair and then what the insurance company says and what the shop says,” the co-founder explains, “need to be reconciled down to the penny.” This is a tedious process and shops spend hours on it with each repair, because if they don’t, they stand to lose $1,000 per repair, on average. So, the startup gives shops software to reduce this process to something that can happen in seconds, allowing them to make more money per repair while saving time — at least that’s the idea. The third area Estify attempts to help shops increase efficiency has to do with parts. When a car is being repaired, a shop gets its parts from various providers in the area, often dealerships, which usually happens via phone and fax. Naturally, faxing the list of parts a shop needs to dealers until finding the right part is, well, time consuming, slow and inefficient. To help speed the process up, Estify’s service automatically pulls the list of parts from shops and sends them out to a network of part providers, geographically targeting the proximate dealers. Instead of calling or faxing, dealers can just respond online, saying they have the part and can send it by such and such a time. Besides helping repair shops get better answers more quickly, Furniss says, the idea is also to create new opportunities for parts providers. To monetize, the startup has opted for a monthly subscription model, allowing shops, dealers and insurers to use any combination of the three, paying for what they use, with the monthly rate falling somewhere between $99 and $500. By the industry standards, Furniss says, “we’ll be able to do fairly well revenue-wise if can get a couple thousand customers on board — at least that’s where we want to start.” It may be obscure and it may not be sexy, but as long as Estify continues to apply the to its software and product development, it could turn out to be a fairly attractive business. By removing some serious pain and friction from critical processes and operations these businesses deal with on a daily basis and doing that with a web-based solution, Estify can be scalable and potentially tap into some decent margins. As it rounds out its feature set beyond repair shops — and builds out mobile offerings — it can expand its functionality and potentially reach a wider audience and bigger market. And one that isn’t exactly saturated with competitors. At which point the collision repair and parts industry doesn’t sound so bad after all. Estify
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Where Webvan Failed And How Home Delivery 2.0 Could Succeed
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Contributor
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Webvan is well-known as the poster child of the dot-com “excess” bubble that led to the tech market crash in 2000. Business schools around the nation study Webvan’s overly ambitious rush to the biggest IPO to date in Silicon Valley, as a prime example of what to avoid doing while scaling. Ironically I recall guest teaching the first case study on Webvan at Stanford, the day before the market crash in 2000. While it’s true that the impatience to go public helped steer Webvan off a cliff, the once darling company made two other critical, but often overlooked mistakes.
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Chasefuture’s Platform Coaches Mainland Chinese Students On University Admissions
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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The allure of top-tier Western universities isn’t lessening anytime soon for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese high school graduates emerging out of the country’s best schools. That’s why a host of different startups helping mainland high school students with admissions like have cropped up in the last year or two. , a one-year-old startup from serial entrepreneur Greg Nance and Han Shao, is looking to be the go-to place for students across mainland China to study abroad in the U.S. or Europe. They are a platform that connects alums and admissions officers from top-tier Western universities to serve as mentors for students across China. “We basically bootstrapped our way to a top position in the study abroad consultation market,” said Nance, who moved to Shanghai a year ago after finishing up at Cambridge University’s business school. , which has 450 paid clients, is aiming to 10X that year to more than 4,000. They connect applying high school students to real admissions experts and mentors who are alums of their desired schools. Two-thirds of the company’s clients are in China, while the rest are mainly international students in the U.S. aiming for masters or Ph.D’s. So far, they’re sending 17 students to USC, 16 to Columbia University, 16 to Imperial College in the U.K., 11 to the London School of Economics, three to Cambridge’s business school for a master of finance. They have basic products that help with admissions essays and choosing schools, then higher-tier packages that can cost several thousand dollars depending on how much hands-on help a client wants. But they’re also particularly picky about who gets to join the program, with a 10 percent acceptance rate. (One could argue, of course, that they’re cherry-picking the candidates with the best chances anyway.) Nance says the company’s addressable market in China is maybe a quarter million students, who are looking to study abroad. To attract mentors, they look for alums or existing admissions experts who they pay about $40 an hour as a base. Nance says this is more than double what other competing platforms pay. If they are able to refer other quality mentors, they get a bonus as well.
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JustFab’s Checkout Tactics Are JustShady
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Alexia Tsotsis
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This Hacker News complaint about scamming a user’s girlfriend — which gets whenever JustFab raises money — is a little off, because JustFab is not a scam in the traditional sense. The company is, however, abusing a tricky UI, loaded with design gimmicks like and — all in the name of getting customers to sign up for a JustFab VIP membership they may not have wanted. Used at least lightly by many e-commerce sites, dark patterns are ways web designers use the irrationality and laziness of any given human in order to increase the bottom line. Many argue that they’re unethical. In fact, the EU has passed that its countries push through laws protecting consumers from misleading subscription interfaces, which Germany was to enact. It’s pretty damning that the JustFab checkout in Germany. And in the U.S. Not wanting to just take Hacker News’ word for it, I used my Aol credit card to buy a pair of shoes on JustFab earlier today, trying as hard as I could to avoid becoming a VIP member. The site makes you “check out as a regular member” if you want to avoid VIP, and link is positioned to the right of the shopping basket in small, lighter-colored typeface. Not an accident. When I finally maneuvered to a place where I could pay the full, non-member price for a pair of shoes, JustFab gave me this sneaky terms and conditions language: “I accept the terms of the Just Fab VIP Membership Program!” and a small check box. Checking the box, which surreptitiously looks like a normal box, would sign me up for a VIP membership at checkout, something I purposefully was trying to avoid! Even if you do check the box, it’s not clear that you’ve signed up for a VIP account. This makes it very confusing, especially since you have to sign back in to skip a month. And know you’re subscribed in order to make the phone call needed to cancel your VIP membership. While I successfully managed to avoid becoming a VIP member, users who aren’t tech reporters might have a more difficult time doing so. And that’s a problem, even if those users are “a tiny minority.” For what it’s worth, comments on the site’s Facebook page are about the brand, though there are I later ran a second test, where I intentionally signed up for membership so that I could see how easy it would be to cancel the subscription. TechCrunch editorial assistant Greg Barto described the process of canceling VIP membership over the phone as a “2” on the 1-10 scale of difficulty, though you have to remember to call. Unfortunately, I cannot cancel my orders of the Anitra and the Tami flats until I physically receive the items. If all this “information is quite clear on the site,” as investor Josh Hannah in the Hacker News comments thread, then why did JustFab have to change its interface for Germany’s consumer protection strictures, as shown above? Because it’s remarkably easy to forget to log in every month to “skip” a committed buying period, or make a phone call to cancel, and JustFab knows it. When does a convoluted user interface become outright manipulative? Should consumers either resolve to be intelligent and hyper-vigilant about the dark patterns among us, or avoid “too good to be true” online offers altogether? Perhaps the best plan is to forever shy away from all forms of e-commerce that include recurring charges? And maybe it’s time for the U.S. and others to enact for e-commerce before TechCrunch writer has to pay for Amazon Prime a third time, because he, yet again, forgets to cancel the free trial they give him every Christmas. : JustFab’s co-CEO Adam Goldenberg gave us this statement in response to this story. It doesn’t really answer any of my questions, and conveniently forgets that I bought the shoes with full intent to return them: “We are sorry to hear you weren’t happy with your JustFab experience. We have millions of members and 2 million Facebook fans who love our service. It is our high level of service and fashionable styles that keep our members coming back – in fact we sold over 4 million pairs of shoes to repeat buyers in the past year alone. Customer satisfaction is a priority for us and by offering our VIP members items that would typically cost $60 – $100 retail at $39.95, we are giving our members a great value. VIP members are also not obligated to purchase every month. A member can choose to opt out, or “skip the month” and not purchase nor get billed a monthly credit. We hope you enjoy your JustFab shoes and handbags and please let us know if you have any further questions.”
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Wish, The App For Logging What You Want, Launches A Complementary Gifting Feature
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Eliza Brooke
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Well, folks, it’s September. The holiday gift giving season is ON! Wish, the mobile shopping app that lets users create lists of items they would like to purchase later, has launched Gifting, a feature that enables others to purchase and ship products to their friends. It draws from users’ existing wishlists and uses them to predict other items they would like. It’s a frazzled gift giver’s dream. Gifting has been part of the plan since the inception of the app, Wish CEO Peter Szulczewski said, which makes every bit of sense, since it’s the natural other half to wishlist creation. At this point, Wish is seeing half a million people on the app daily, at an average session length of 29 minutes. According to Szulczewski, sending presents was already a use case among Wish users prior to the feature’s launch this week. In looking at transactions, the team realized that people were requesting different shipping addresses for their purchases in order to send items to their friends. In addition to allowing users to create and share targeted wishlists (the easiest way to get it right), Gifting also predicts items that friends most want and uses social integration to notify users on their friends’ birthdays. “We use collaborative filtering in the same way that Amazon.com uses it,” Szulczewski said. “People that buy this will also buy these items.” As Szulczewski explained, the Wish demographic skews toward the young and female. Gifting is a way to access an older demographic, like fathers who don’t really know what to buy their daughters, nieces, or granddaughters. While there are a slew of gifting apps out there — like Giftly for gift cards, the locally-focused Yiftee, Karma, and Wrapp — the fact that Wish draws on pre-existing knowledge of the recipient’s likes ups the giver’s odds of nailing it. Wish has been bulking out its features this summer, having launched in late July to provide users a platform to resell their clothing. The plan is to grow internationally. Currently 55% of usage comes from North America, although there are growing communities in Europe and Latin America, which Szulczewski said present huge opportunities to grow the brand.
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Palantir Is Raising $197M In Growth Capital, SEC Filing Shows
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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Palantir, the big data company that has counted the NSA, the FBI and the CIA among its clientele, is raising up to $196.5 million in growth capital, . The company declined to say who the new funding was from, according to Lisa Gordon, who handles media and government relations for the company. Another source close to the company says the round is also not finalized yet. Morgan Stanley , according to the filing. Forbes that a round could value the company at between $5 and 8 billion. Founded back in 2004, the company was the brainchild of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, who believed that the payments company’s anti-fraud technologies could be used to fight terrorism. Current CEO Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale (who went on to found Asia and Silicon Valley-focused investment firm Formation 8), Stephen Cohen and chief technology officer Nathan Gettings put together an initial product. It’s now become an analysis platform that government agencies use to manage the war against terrorism and drug trafficking. Palantir’s platform pulls disparate reams of data and puts them together in a way that makes otherwise hard-to-detect patterns and connections much more visible to users. It’s since grown into a business that Karp It is not yet profitable, however. The company’s earlier investors include Founders Fund, Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman and Ben Ling among others.
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Microsoft Extends Its Trade-In Program: $200+ For Your “Gently Used” iPhone 4S, 5
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft wants to take your Apple product off your hands, today to allow owners of dated iPhone hardware to cash in their now-passé electronics. If you own an iPhone 4S or 5 that is “gently used” and not much worse, Microsoft will . The kicker? The funds come in the form of Microsoft Store credit, so you are trading in your Apple hardware for the chance to buy Microsoft goods. What does Microsoft want? That you drop that iPhone off with them and wander out with a Surface 2 pre-order or a Lumia Windows Phone handset. Microsoft has cash and wants market share; this is a natural outgrowth of those two facts. Microsoft also has in place a deal that will . In short, if you have an Apple device that Microsoft competes with – recall that Microsoft doesn’t build PCs that are not tablet-based, through its Surface line – it wants to buy it from you and get you onto its own hardware. In a way the move is ballsy: Microsoft is betting its own money that you will be content with its wares after a long stint on Apple silicon. And it is paying to make the wager. Precisely what Microsoft intends to do with all its accumulated Apple hardware remains opaque. Microsoft is in the process of purchasing Nokia’s handset business, and recently announced new Surface hardware that replaces its first-generation attempts at OEM supremacy. Expect more moves like this to support Microsoft’s yet-nascent devices business.
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Former Microsoftie And Googler Lucovsky Leaves VMware For New Project, No Word On Chairs Thrown
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Matthew Panzarino
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VMware VP of Engineering Mark Lucovsky is leaving the virtualization giant for a ‘new chapter’ he’s . Lucovsky has been with VMware for around four years and before that held positions at Google and Microsoft. VMware that “during his more than four years at VMware, Mark Lucovsky has been an important contributor to the company’s developer efforts as a Vice President of Engineering, including his work to help establish VMware’s Cloud Foundry which is now part of Pivotal. We thank Mark for his contributions and wish him well.” At Google, Lucovsky served as an . Since he went there from Microsoft, where he worked on Windows NT, a lot of people read into his hiring as a harbinger of a ‘Google OS’. Lucovsky spent 16 years at Microsoft working on a variety of projects including the ‘ , which never quite materialized. He was awarded the title of ‘Distinguished Engineer’. Though he worked on many projects during his Microsoft tenure, the most memorable anecdote of his career there undoubtedly came when he told CEO Steve Ballmer that he was . A statement given in a corporate poaching case between Microsoft and Google back in 2004 paints a vivid picture: Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google. At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” …. Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.” Lucovsky only used the cryptic hashtag to indicate what he might be up to next, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more. It is doubtful any chairs were thrown when Lucovsky turned in his notice after 5 years with VMware.
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Agolo Aims To Algorithmically Curate Your Twitter Feed
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Chris Velazco
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For all the good it’s capable of, Twitter is all too often a cacophonous mess of marketers, celebrities, talking heads, and friends who all like to jabber at the same time. Sage Wohns and Mohamed Altantawy are co-founders of a New York startup called and as far as they’re concerned, not every bit of information pouring forth from that social firehose is worth paying attention to. Instead, they want to home in on just the stuff that’s important to you and make sure you see if before it’s too far gone to catch up with. Sounds logical enough. After all, if you’re up to your neck in a Twitter debate centered around, I don’t know, whether the Palm Pre was a bigger smartphone flop than the BlackBerry Z10, you’re probably not going to pay much attention to the snarky quips your followers are flinging at each other. That’s where Agolo comes in. Co-founder Sage Wohns showed me an incredibly early version of Agolo several months ago, and it bears very little resemblance to the service the team ultimately hopes to bring to the masses. The original concept saw users tweeting the @agolo Twitter account asking for advice on local venues and happenings — as long as you defined a location in the tweet or enabled the proper location settings, you’d almost immediately receive a reply with three of the most popular options nearby. To their credit, the service still works rather well (I used it to track down some lunch the other day), but the pair have bet the startup’s future on the notion that people often miss the things that they care most about because of the sheer volume of tweets being sent and delivered every second. It’s madness. But Wohns and Altantawy are conducting a private beta for the new Agolo, which quietly keeps tabs on your Twitter followers, the people you follow, and the things you talk about the most. By gathering that information and chewing on it with the help of some clever natural language processing algorithms, Agolo is able to cobble together a profile of you that includes your preferred topics of conversation and the sorts of events that you like. The real gist of the revamped Agolo is that it’s able to sift through all that stuff in realtime, so you’re ultimately left with a mobile web app (native apps are said to be in the works) displaying a curated feed of tweets that align with what Agolo thinks your interests are. If you’re a big music fan for instance, all of your friends’ tweets mentioning upcoming concerts will be flagged for your perusal. There’s one more hook, though: while the service highlights relevant conversations and events that you may otherwise miss, the team also wants to make it easy to take action. Going back to that concert example, Agolo will be able to provide links to ticket vendors so users can close the loop that much faster. Sounds like a pretty natural way to make money, right? Since Agolo can highlight certain trends or events and make it easy for users to jump in and engage with them, Wohns said that they’re starting to build up “key affiliate partnerships to monetize some of the actions we recommend.” At this point though, there’s one major drawback to the Agolo system — it only works with Twitter. It’s not a bad place to start considering how the service facilitates conversations and sharing at a breakneck pace, but it only accounts for a fraction of the social conversations that take place at any given moment. Ultimately, the small team hopes to be able to digest Facebook and LinkedIn messages, along with that bane of my existence: email. I suspect it’ll be quite some time before they manage to get that far, but they may just be on the right track.
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Airbnb Victory In NYC: Environmental Control Board Reverses $2,400 Fine On Renting Out A Room In An Apartment
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Ingrid Lunden
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A big regulatory victory for today: the company has managed to win an appeal in New York City over a fine against a host called Nigel Warren, whose landlord was $2,400 in June after Warren rented out a room in his apartment. If the fine had stuck, it would have set a business-threatening precedent for Airbnb in the city. “This decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we,” David Hantman, Airbnb Global Public Policy Director said today in a . The key, as Hantman points out, is that “as long as a permanent occupant is present during a stay, the stay does not violate New York’s short term rental laws.” How that will be enforced is another question. For now it looks like the case pertains only to shared spaces, meaning that if a full home is on offer, it could be exempt from both the violation and the requirement of having a permanent occupant present. The backstory: Earlier this year, Airbnb provided legal support to Nigel Warren in the case against him, when a judge decided that Warren was violating rules on short-term rentals by listing a room in his apartment on Airbnb. As Ryan , those laws were originally designed not for small-scale room lets like the kind on the peer-to-peer site, but for landlords who would buy up property to list spaces as hotels. Essentially, the law made renting out space for less than a month illegal. There have been exceptions made for shared spaces, and Warren apparently , but Warren’s landlord had been (and Warren took the costs upon himself). When Airbnb announced its participation in the case earlier this year, it said it would be in it for the long haul, even going so high as the trial courts — although it hasn’t come to that in the end. The bigger picture here stands on two levels: First, how and if Airbnb can leverage this win into a bigger play for more regulatory clarification on city and state levels in New York and beyond. This is something the company — like Uber, another groundbreaker that is changing the game for how services are consumed and sold — continues to work on trying to achieve. Second, if those rule changes don’t come quite as fast as Airbnb hopes, will Airbnb continue to stand by the side of its users to help defend them? The ruling from the New York City Environmental Control Board is embedded below. Airbnb’s statement is below that. [scribd id=171537974 key=key-s0zsq5ipr1s45gtqwjq mode=scroll]
(David Hantman) In June, I wrote about Nigel Warren, a New York host who was fined by an administrative law judge for renting out a room his apartment for a few days. I said at the time that the decision was clearly wrong on the law and bad for New York, and we were proud to support Nigel and his landlord as they appealed this ruling over the past few months. Yesterday, the New York City Environmental Control Board reversed Nigel’s fines, agreeing with our arguments and delivering a major victory for Nigel, New York and the Airbnb community. In the appeal, we and Nigel argued – and the appeal board now agrees – that under New York law as long as a permanent occupant is present during a stay, the stay does not violate New York’s short term rental laws. Much of the New York law is confusing, with some provisions applying to certain buildings and not to others. But this shared space provision was crystal clear. We intervened in this case because the initial decision on Nigel’s case was so clearly wrong, and we are pleased to see that the Board agreed. We know there is more work to do. This episode highlights how complicated the New York law is, and it took far too long for Nigel to be vindicated. That is why we are continuing our work to clarify the law and ensure New Yorkers can share their homes and their city with travelers from around the world. But in the meantime, this decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we.
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Ask A VC: Emergence Capital Partners’ Kevin Spain On The Next Disruptions In Health Tech And More
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Leena Rao
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In this week’s TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we had Emergence Capital Partners’ Kevin Spain in the studio to talk about his perspective on investing in health tech and more. Spain, who has led investments in the LinkedIn for physicians Doximity, and social health management platform Welltok, talked about where he sees some of the next disruptions in the health tech world. He also sees potential in applications using Google Glass, and mobile-first technologies. We also chatted about corporate acquisitions and the acquisition environment in general (prior to his career in VC, Spain was a senior member of Microsoft’s Corporate Development group). Check out the video above for more!
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Shyp Raises $2.1M To Pick Up And Ship Your Stuff
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Greg Kumparak
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I don’t consider myself a lazy man. To the displeasure of many a recent startup, I like to do stuff for myself. I like to . I do my own . If I need something from , I go to the store down the street. If I want a , I think “I should go to Philadelphia!” and then don’t and then eat Quiznos and feel sad. But , do I hate shipping things. I’ve never really understood why. I have things sitting around my house that I’ve intended/promised to ship for months. I’m fully aware and appreciative of how wonderful it is that we can put a box on a truck, have it disappear for a few days, and then have it arrive on . It’s magic. I just suck at actually doing that. Shyp is a startup squarely aimed at my particular breed of lazy. You push a button, they show up and pack/ship your items for you, charging you just a couple bucks more than what you’d pay to ship it yourself. If you’ve been paying extra close attention lately, the name “Shyp” might ring a few bells. Earlier this week, a bunch of headlines were written about the hyper-connected author Tim Ferriss having used the new laws to help a startup raise $250k in 53 minutes (making him one of the first, if not first, to utilize the change) by way of a blog post and AngelList’s Syndicate program. That startup was Shyp. One small detail got buried as that story spread, though. Shyp didn’t raise a seed round of just $250k — that $250k was just a chunk that they set aside to experiment with the new laws. They actually raised almost 9x that much, closing their seed round at $2.1M in total. I couldn’t find any solid confirmation as to how exactly their entire round came together, so I dug a bit deeper. Here’s what it ended up looking like, as I’ve pieced it together: So, how does Shyp actually work? You open the Shyp app and snap a picture of the item you’d like to be sent away. This picture is sent out to Shyp’s network of contracted employees (which they call “Shyp Heroes”), any of whom can then elect to pick up the package. They show up at your location, grab the item, put it in a padded bag, and take it back to be packed and shipped. If you’re shipping one item, they charge you the amount that UPS or FedEx would charge, plus a $5 pickup fee. If you send two or more separate items, they waive the fee. Packaging costs are included, and each item is insured at up to $10,000 from the second it leaves your house. Wondering how they can afford to do that? So was I. Shyp tells me that the key there is in the volume. By shipping (hopefully) hundreds of boxes a day, they’re able to ship each package at a discounted rate. They charge the end-user the retail price they’d otherwise pay anyway, and make their profit in the difference. The economics seem challenging, to say the least. Assuming that their discount margin nets them a few bucks per package on average (it’d vary based on the size of the item and box), they’ve then got to pay for packaging and logistical overhead, and actually, you know, pay the people picking up the boxes. Shyp tells me their “Heroes” are paid per pickup. Unless these people are somehow doing dozens of pickups per hour, they’d need to be paid at least a buck or two per pickup to start breaking minimum wage. Shyps founders and its investors seem certain it’ll all work. During my conversations with Shyp, I mentioned , a TechCrunch Disrupt alumni company that, while not a direct competitor, is of a similar vein. Shiphawk acts as a sort of Kayak/Hipmunk for shipping, fetching quotes from established packing/shipping companies for people looking to ship things like art. Turns out, Shiphawk (unintentionally/unknowingly) had a bit of a role in Shyp’s fundraising story. Says Shyp co-founder Jack Smith: It’s interesting that you bring up Shiphawk actually. Kevin (my co-founder) was watching TC Disrupt NYC live online earlier this year and heard [AngelList co-founder] Naval [Ravikant] critiquing Shiphawk’s pitch. He said: Kevin emailed Naval live and said “um you just described our business, check out Shyp”. Naval loved it, asked to meet, then subsequently invested. (I’ve confirmed this with Naval.) Cold calls for the win? is currently running a small, private Beta in San Francisco, having contracted around 10 “Heroes” to start moving things around. They’re doing pickups in SF only for now, pledging to roll into a second city “very soon” based on the zipcodes of users that sign up for .
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Microsoft Increases Windows 8 And 8.1 App Roaming Limit To 81 Devices
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Frederic Lardinois
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At its Build developer conference earlier this year, Microsoft that it planned to increase the roaming limits for apps purchased in its Windows Store. As the company , that limit is going to be 81 (and yes, that’s Microsoft trying to be funny). Starting October 9, users will be able to install all Windows Store apps on this many devices – provided they are all associated with a single Microsoft account. For all intents and purposes, that means users can install their apps on as many Windows machines as they want to. Even the most hard-core Windows geeks are unlikely to have 81 Windows 8 PCs in their houses, after all. Microsoft could have just gone ahead and told people there was no limit to the number of devices they could use an app on, but then it would have missed a chance to work the upcoming Windows 8.1 release into today’s announcement. Microsoft says it made this decision based on the “growing feedback from many developers and from our most enthusiastic customers” who complained that the previous limit of five devices wasn’t enough. The company also argues that this change could bring more revenue to developers of ad-supported apps. Developers will still have the option to limit the number of devices their apps will run on. Microsoft offers an that will allow developers to build a service-side verification system to set those limits for their users. Apple currently allows its users to install a single app on up to 10 devices.
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Gillmor Gang Live 09.27.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
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– Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/GillmorGang
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Ebay Acquires “Content Meets Commerce” Shopping Site, Bureau Of Trade, As Its Personalization Efforts Heat Up
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Sarah Perez
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eBay has acquired online marketplace for men’s shopping , the company announced today. Founder Michael Phillips Moskowitz is joining the eBay Marketplaces team, where his focus will be on helping eBay improve its personalization efforts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was an all-cash deal and an “acceptable” and positive (if not stellar), outcome for Bureau of Trade’s investors. The startup had raised $1.2 million in seed funding in a round led by Foundation Capital, with contributions from Founder Collective, FF Angel, Courtney Holt on behalf of the Techfellows Fund, and other angel investors. The deal speaks to eBay’s increasing efforts to modernize its website by experimenting with new kinds of shopping experiences. The first results of Moskowitz’s work at eBay will be seen as early as this fall, we’re told. Though Moskowitz declined to discuss Bureau of Trade’s sales or user numbers, he said that the company’s blending of content meets commerce had proven to drive up the sales price for items on the site. “The average good on eBay will sell at X purchase price. That same piece of merchandise when covered by the Bureau – when written about by us – created in many instances a 50 to 100 percent price increase. That’s profoundly valuable,” he says. He hints that there’s something interesting in the works with what he’s learned through Bureau of Trade that’s now coming to eBay, but couldn’t provide details. Bureau of Trade remains online for now, and will have some sort of “big surprise in store this fall” with regards to its future. Sometime in either November or December, the site will introduce “something you’ve never seen before,” Moskowitz teased. (TechCrunch has seen quite a lot, actually, but he swears it will be new.) In fact, Moskowitz says he can’t even tell us his title at eBay, because it’s a role that has never before existed and would give away too much. eBay, he notes, now has his startup Bureau of Trade, plus other acquisitions like Svpply and Hunch, which he describes as a “triumvirate that’s uniquely positioned to do something catalytic and game-changing later this fall. We’re all working together symbiotically,” he says. As you may recall, eBay had first announced a last October, which featured an image grid and improvements to site search. That revamped homepage was then , with eBay touting the more individualized feel it offered consumers, with product feeds that included items, brands and trends that matched users’ own interests and passions. Moskowitz’s previous experience before Bureau of Trade includes time at Palo Alto design firm IDEO and as co-founder of menswear label Gytha Mander. Going forward, he will remain in New York, where, , he will “be helping eBay’s 120 million active users (as of June 30, 2013) discover items that match their individual tastes and preferences.” Five members of the 10-person Bureau of Trade team will also join eBay. Said Richelle Parham, CMO for eBay North America, eBay will now benefit from Moskowitz’s perspective of “exceptional goods with a story” in-house. For background, Bureau of Trade – about the same time eBay launched its new homepage. The startup was an experiment in wrapping together content and commerce to see if doing so would boost sales. According to investor of , whose firm led roughly 90 percent of the startup’s $1.2 million seed round, that thesis was proven correct: content absolutely helped drive sales and at higher prices. Whether or not that could scale, however, would have taken more time and investment. At the time of the acquisition, the company was trying to grow its audience, which was in the six figures. Moldow said that Bureau of Trade’s unique position – one that he said somewhat reminded him of the parodied on Seinfeld – was why his firm even took the risk on Moskowitz’s content/e-commerce business. It wasn’t an e-commerce company, he said. E-commerce businesses have high acquisition costs, low product margins and high churn. “That type of business would not interest us, but this was a social company, a content company, and a media business – it had a commerce element for monetization,” he explained. Moldow facilitated the introduction between Moskowitz and eBay after meeting with Devin Wenig, eBay’s President of Marketplaces. Wenig was already aware of and liked what Bureau of Trade was doing, probably because a majority of the merchandise the startup listed on its site was sourced from eBay sellers. We reached out to eBay to find out more about their plans with Moskowitz, but the company has so far declined to provide much beyond what they’ve said publicly. All eBay would say for now is that later this fall, it will be rolling out additional updates and new features to the eBay homepage, which will involve some of Bureau of Trade’s learnings. “Michael and his team are playing a pivotal role in this next phase, working closely with our product team to ensure these changes offer the optimal shopping experience combined with an editorial viewpoint for our global community. Stay tuned,” an eBay spokesperson told us. remains online, and does not include a mention of a forthcoming closure, acquisition or transition plan. Moskowitz says he didn’t realize eBay was making the announcement today. But when the time comes to announce Bureau of Trade’s next steps, it will be broadcast on YouTube, on Esquire.com, and on the Bureau website itself. More to come.
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Swiftype Raises $7.5M From NEA To Develop A Smarter Search Engine For Web And Mobile Sites
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Leena Rao
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, a Y Combinator-backed startup that creates a smarter search engine for websites, has raised $7.5 million led by NEA, with angel investors participating. The startup previously in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ignition, CrunchFund and angel investors. NEA partner Jon Sakoda will join Swiftype’s Board of Directors as part of the financing. , Swiftype basically adds a more intelligent, high-quality search engine for mobile and web-based sites and allows users to query and collect information more efficiently. The startup actually builds search engines in real-time, organizing pages based on importance rankings from your site. After creating your search engine, the Swiftype dashboard allows you to customize search results by editing titles or deleting entries. You can even drag and drop queries from the dashboard in order of the ranking you want them to appear in. Installation is relatively simple — developers need to paste the supplied JavaScript code into a website. The origin of the startup came from Matt Riley and fellow co-founder Quin Hoxie, who were both working as engineers on Scribd’s in-house search. They looked at a bunch of different options including open source solutions but realized there was an opportunity to provide a search technology that allowed for more curation and control. “Search can be one of the most powerful marketing tools,” says Riley. “It’s the clearest form of intent for site owners.” It’s the data on the backend of Swiftype’s dashboard that can make a big difference for site owners. Not only can sites customize search results for certain keywords, but you can see what people are searching for and much more. You can also see what results aren’t very helpful to users and tinker with search rankings. The startup is also debuting its “Swiftype Platform,” which allows OEM partners to resell the service as a part of their solution to existing customers and partners. Swiftype is actually being resold to website security company CloudFlare’s customers. Through this partnership with Swiftype, CloudFlare can now offer site search as a service to its existing customers and new sites that sign up for CloudFlare. In terms of the competition, Google, and all offer site search to companies, but some of these options can be complicated to implement and require servers and more. Swiftype search can be added in minutes via its API, which Riley says helps scale search automatically and add users much faster. Currently, the company’s API and developer tools power more than 200 million queries per month, up more than 20x in the past year. Swiftype is used by 100,000 sites including Best Buy, Twitch, Twilio, and Asana. Prices range from $20 to $300, with custom packages for enterprise solutions. It’s impressive that Swiftype is seeing major brands likes Best Buy adopt its technology. E-commerce sites, in particular, could really benefit from some of the analytics and data insights Swiftype can provide. And mobile search could be an interesting opportunity for the startup to help create more optimized experiences for owners. We’re told the new funding will be put toward hiring additional engineering staff and building out the startup’s infrastructure. Watch the demo of the product below. *Disclosure: CrunchFund was started by TechCrunch founder [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pITuOcGgpBs&w=560&h=315]
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Alex Wilhelm
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TechStars London First Cohort: Our Three Favorite Startups From Demo Day
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Darrell Etherington
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The TechStars inaugural London Demo Day boasted an , but we put our heads together and came up with a consensus decision on our top pick, as well as a couple of runners up for the show. The best presentation and interview went to , a startup that’s getting some decent early traction with around a dozen b2b customers that reach around a million users. The OP3Nvoice platform offers APIs that make voice and video data searchable by translating its audio to text. It’s targeting this very broadly at developers and businesses that want to be able to turn any unstructured audio data — recordings of meetings, for instance, or audio books, phone calls, conferences, interviews, and so on — into data their business can analyse and act upon, rather than leave untapped. OP3Nvoice is effectively acting as a connecting layer between these business clients and a range of “hard science” companies that have developed automative speech recognition (ASR) technology — providing the glue (APIs) to stick the two together. “We licence the ASR engine — the thing that takes the audio and turns it into text,” confirmed CEO Paul Murphy in an interview. It’s effectively a partnership at this point, with OP3Nvoice feeding data back to its ASR providers so they can continue improving their technology. “These hard sciences are coming out of universities, they’re coming out of research labs and these guys don’t actually understand how to make their stuff accessible,” Murphy said. “And there’s a massive market for this stuff. Because the idea of being able to just make audio and video content searchable — this is the first thing we’ve done and the response has been amazing. People say, ‘yes we’ve always wanted this but we’ve had no idea how to do it.'” Murphy said the idea for OP3Nvoice actually came out of another business (which still exists) that he founded in 2011, called CallTrunk. That was a phone call recording platform for consumers. But while users liked the service they complained they couldn’t find their call recordings — so the idea for building an audio search was born. Organising the world’s information and making it searchable is of course the mission of a very large company former startup now based in Mountain View. But OP3Nvoice’s b2b focus means it’s not going to come into direct conflict with Google, said Murphy. “Google will do this for public data — there’s no question about it. The thing is that so much of this data is private,” he said. “We actually have a very deep stack. Our platform can make phone calls, our platform can make recordings, our platform can manage and distribute the audio and video. These are all things that private companies need because it’s just hard to do.” “We’re not going to index YouTube because there’s no point. Google will do that. That’s great. But once YouTube’s indexed then everyone else is going to want to index their stuff,” he added. While there’s huge potential in making audio and video recordings searchable, with so much of that type of data now being generated and stored online, Murphy hints that there are other areas it could also expand into in future. “One of the thing we’re really good at is taking hard science and making it useable,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re working with a lab in Germany right now that does emotion detection. They built this stuff for one use-case, and we looked at it and said, ‘hang on — there may be hundreds of people who want to be able to do something with this data but you can’t just give them a spreadsheet full of numbers, you need to give them an API that a developer can deal with’. So that’s potentially another thing that we could expose.” Indie gaming is a growing trend, which currently accounts for around 68 percent of all mobile gaming, according to PlayCanvas. This startup, from former Activision and Sony Computer Entertainment developers, aims to profit from that trend by providing developer tools that live in the cloud and make cross-platform browser-based collaborative game development a reality PlayCanvas already has the support of Activision, Mozilla and ARM, and has built a tool that makes it possible for artists, developers and other game design professionals to work together in the browser to make fully playable HTML5 games, which it then publishes on the web. These games can be played on any device, so there’s an instant result already in place, but the larger opportunity here is enabling the somewhat fragmented independent development community to come together despite physical and location barriers to build things collaboratively with a cloud-based development platform that has no barrier to entry. This startup earns a mention because it could enable the future of games development, providing a way for devs to work together no matter their end publishing goal, once the startup starts supporting other languages. It also already includes a number of different monetization tools, so that indies can be making revenue from day one for their work. Gaming might be just about ready for its Google Docs moment (it’s already happening for and ), and PlayCanvas seems to have the team, expertise and user acquisition model to make it happen. On the web and increasingly on mobile, it’s relatively easy to see real-time analytics for products via any number of providers, but the same has not been true for TV broadcasters and advertisers. That’s what iptvbeat wants to address with its platform, which it calls “Google Analytics for digital TV. With iptvbeat, any provider of satellite, cable, IPTV or any over-the-top solution can track viewers in real-time and see all activity related to what shows are being watched, how many people are viewing and what the rate of churn is in real-time. The existing dominant TV analytics provider is still Nielsen, which requires that specially designated “Nielsen families” install hardware in their homes and use a special Nielsen remote to actually track their viewing, which results in an incredibly small sample population speaking for all viewers. iptvbeat estimates that in the UK, there are around 60 million TV viewers currently, with only around 5,000 Nielsen households total, of which only less than half are even using Nielsen setups to watch. That results in “out of date” and “inaccurate” info for broadcasters, which is received a full 24 hours after a program is actually aired, in a CSV format that’s not easy to parse immediately. By contrast, iptvbeat shows them 100 percent of their viewership, in real-time, via web-based reporting tools that show the info digitally in easy-to-read graphs and charts which can be adjusted based on a client’s needs. iptvbeat CEO Robert Farazin explained in an interview that the company relocated from the U.S. back to Europe to pursue deals with smaller regional carriers in markets where there aren’t just a few massive, dominant players in order to build traction. The plan is to continue with that strategy until they reach critical mass, and then re-enter the U.S. market and approach the big fish like Comcast and AT&T.
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Steam News Breaks While We Record, Surface Sequels And Adobe Gets Mighty
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Darrell Etherington
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A rare treat this week as you can hear the TechCrunch team react to breaking gadget news (the , to be specific) live as it unfolds. It’s like being inside our brains without the echoes and cobwebs. We also cover the big , the , and . This week, we have a very special episode of the Gadgets Podcast with a ragtag team of lovable characters, including myself — — and special guests and , so you just know it’s going to be the heartwarming comeback story of a lifetime.
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right , as well as the .
You can subscribe to the .
. Intro Music by .
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Evernote Updates Its Business Product With Social Features And Salesforce.com Integration
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Anthony Ha
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Evernote today announced version 2.0 of its business product, appropriately called Evernote Business 2.0. CEO Phil Libin introduced the product onstage at Evernote’s EC3 conference and said it will be released next week. In its first nine months, 7,900 companies have signed up for Evernote Business (which was ). Libin emphasized that at its core, Evernote Business is just the consumer Evernote app, but with additional features like shared notebooks that allow teams to work together. That’s still true in version 2.0, but the company has added some additional features on top of the app, many of them social. For example, he said that Evernote can now suggest other users in the company who may have the expertise to help answer specific questions. Those recommendations are based on the information in users’ Evernote notebooks — not their private notebooks, but the ones that they’ve chosen to share. Libin added that his team made a point of only recommending five people per topic: “Regardless of the size of the company, most likely that’s all you need. If the top five people can’t help you, showing you 20 isn’t going to make the situation any better.” Evernote Business users can also upload profile pictures now. If they haven’t uploaded a photo, they’ll be represented by an image of a single letter (it looks like it’s the first letter in their name). Libin sounded particularly proud of those letters, saying the company spent months working on them with multiple designers, resulting in what he described in “the world’s most beautiful” alphabet. “This is the kind of thing you would expect from a great consumer product,” Libin said. (People’s desire to get the same great experience they’ve had on the consumer side in their work as well was a recurring theme in Libin’s presentation.) The new features also include things that IT people have been asking for, such as directory management and LDAP, Libin added. And, as hinted at by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s presence at the conference, Evernote Business will integrate with Salesforce, so users can see relevant Evernote data when they’re in using Salesforce’s sales software, and relevant Salesforce data when they’re in Evernote. Libin actually addressed these announcements when I spoke to him at the conference yesterday (after Evernote ). He said that even though Evernote is adding more social features, it remains a fundamentally “introspective” product, and that these features are designed to “make your interactions as efficient as possible so that you can just get on with being productive.”
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Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa Outlines Its Next Reinvention
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Catherine Shu
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In , Nokia chairman and interim CEO Risto Siilasmaa gave more details about the company’s plans now that it has exited the smartphones business. This marks the for the 150-year-old company, which began as a paper mill in the 1860s and moved on to rubber products before morphing into an electronics maker. Without its Devices & Services division, which , Nokia now has €13-€14 billion in annual revenue, a workforce of 56,000 and much more cash in its war chest thanks to Redmond’s $7.2 billion payment. Siilasmaa reiterated the importance of its HERE, NSN and Advanced Technologies units to Nokia’s future, but he did not say what the Finnish company plans to do in 2016, when its agreement with Microsoft will allow it to start selling phones under the Nokia brand again. Though the sale of its Devices & Services division was the final outcome of Nokia’s failure to compete in the smartphone business, Siilasmaa took an optimistic stance. “Nokia will look very different without the mobile device and services business. But it will be a strong company, with healthy finances and three strong businesses — NSN, HERE and Advanced Technologies — each a leader in technology and innovation,” he said. Calling networks division NSN “the first element of Nokia Reinvented,” Siilasmaa said it will continue to be managed as an independent unit and focus on mobile broadband and LTE. NSN currently has more than 600 customers in 120 countries, serving 2.5 billion subscribers. Nokia’s already has the benefit of counting Microsoft among its key customers–Redmond will license HERE services that are used in Nokia devices. Nokia has shown keen foresight in acknowledging the importance of mapping and location-based services. Its $8.1 billion acquisition of Navteq in 2007 and Apple’s . “We believe that location technologies and services will be pivotal in the next phase of the mobile Internet, where more and more devices are connected to the cloud. We also believe that location will become an essential building block across all industries,” said Siilasmaa. Nokia’s newest unit, which it calls Advanced Technologies, will focus on developing new tech, with a focus on technologies for video and audio encoding such as the H264 standard, low-power connectivity such as Bluetooth LE (low energy) and imaging. Though Siilasmaa did not mention it in today’s blog post, Nokia that it will invest further R&D in areas such as nano technology and graphene, perhaps to build more of the flexible displays and devices that it and which its Cambridge lab has already been working on. Nokia is a . Advanced Technologies will also drive the enrichment of Nokia’s intellectual property portfolio, the core of its patent licensing operation, which Siilasmaa says will be expanded in an effort to drive revenue and profit for Nokia.
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WeatherSphere’s RadarCast App Will Help You Navigate Around Upcoming Storms & Snow
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Sarah Perez
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, a small Mountain View-based startup founded by former eBay engineer Raghav Gupta in fall 2012, is focusing on developing mobile applications that look at the weather space from the technology point of view. Today, the company has a handful of paid applications in the Apple App Store, which consistently rank in top charts in the Weather (paid) category. Gupta stopped by TechCrunch’s at the Disrupt SF 2013 conference this week, to talk about what his company has been working on lately. He explains that the idea to do something in the weather space came to him in 2011, after the deadly tornado in Joplin, Missouri. “At that time I was building and releasing free location-based social networking apps, and one of those apps was for alerting users to nearby bad weather,” says Gupta. “One day, that app suddenly got a massive burst of downloads that overloaded my servers, and I had to successively increase the price to $4.99 to staunch the tide of new users. Turns out, nearly everybody in that area desperately wanted to get real-time information about the location of the tornadoes, and to get alerted when they were asleep at night.” As he began to research the space further, he found that most of those looking at weather technology tended to be either the government (via NOAA) or older companies like Weather Channel – an app, in fact, that WeatherSphere’s apps now outrank in the paid weather app chart in the iTunes App Store. Today, the company has six weather applications in the App Store in total, four which are fairly popular, including ($0.99, #1 in paid weather apps), ($1.99, #3), ($3.99, then subscription), and ($1.99). RadarCast currently shows where storms are moving in real-time, provides rain start and stop times and shows weather radar data as an animation from past to future at street-level resolution, among other things. Gupta tells me that they’ve updated the app this week to offer a feature users have been asking for: overlaying driving directions on the weather map, so they don’t have to switch between apps all the time. This feature, called “TurnCast,” can now provide safe driving directions by taking into account the storms that could impact your trip – even if the storms aren’t in the area yet. “For example, lots of people drive from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe every year during winter, and many get stuck on the highway due to heavy snowfall,” says Gupta. “The benefit of using TurnCast is that when you are planning your trip in San Francisco, it will show you an alternate route if snow is expected to start falling on the highway two hours after you start driving.” Motorcyclists, bicyclists, and others can also use TurnCast to avoid heavy rain or patchy rain. A standalone app for navigation called “TurnCast” will break out this feature into its own application in around four weeks’ time in the iOS App Store Navigation category, where it will include turn-by-turn voice navigation functionality and voice alerts like “heavy snowfall 5 miles ahead, re-route?”, or “wildfire across roadway 3 miles ahead, re-route?” Across all WeatherSphere apps, the company has 1.6 million paid downloads and 450,000 paid active users. Gupta says they’ve turned down some funding offers from local VCs are currently profitable. The company is now looking to license its data to interested partners.
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SnapEDA Wants To Help Fuel Hardware Startups With A Github-Like Community For CAD
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Darrell Etherington
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There’s a growing number of startups out there that are focusing on building new hardware, and that’s an immensely different problem compared to building a software business, in terms of sourcing resources to use to build the products involved, sourcing talent and solving problems. That’s why Natasha Baker founded a website and community dedicated to helping hardware engineers connect, and helping businesses connecting with them. Baker was at Disrupt’s Startup Alley this year, showing off her platform, which she says is essentially a Github for hardware. It’s a community based around sharing CAD design for components in circuit boards and electronics, including tools that allow schematics to be downloaded in a variety of formats compatible with all leading CAD programs, and community validation tools that allow users to flag problems with schematics or to verify that they work correctly. “What we’re trying to do is show people everything they need to know, so data sheet specs, pricing, and availability,” Baker said in an interview, discussing the parts pages aspect of the site. “But our main value add, the thing that hasn’t really been done before is offering CAD files that are convertible to every format.” Aside from providing crowd-sourced, multi-format exportable design files for chips, SnapEDA also aspires to be a true community for builders and electronics engineers. Part of that is allowing people to vouch for designs and components, but another part is allowing them to build personal profiles on SnapEDA, which lists their community contributions, as well as tags that describe their expertise. The long-term vision is to use those to help connect them with companies who need to find specific talent. Baker says that it’s a big challenge for companies to find the right people to help them design and build hardware, so there’s a big opportunity in becoming a specialist network for that. “A lot of the startups don’t know where to find designers,” she said. “Or they have designers, but they don’t know where to find the layout engineers [those who actually plot out the circuit board layout]. So our goal is to connect people who are specialized in different areas of electronic design. Electronic design is so niche, but there’s so many specialities even within electronic design.” Someone needs to provide a central resource not only for connecting these individuals but also for keeping track of what hardware engineers are doing, and which ones are actually qualified to fill the needs of emerging hardware startups. “We try to aggregate all the actions that people have taken on the site,” she said. “Because just the way that Github has made it so that people look at your online profile before they hire you as a software engineer, we think the same thing is going to happen for hardware.” SnapEDA also has a manufacturing platform, where they produce their own boards for customers. They have both low-cost options sourced from China, as well as manufacturing partners based in Portland or Toronto for customers who would rather source things domestically. Startups supporting hardware startups are becoming more numerous as the opportunity expands, with others like Upverter trying to capitalize on this growing movement. SnapEDA has a good model to follow in Github, but we’ll have to wait and see if hardware has matured enough as a startup category to fuel a big need for this kind of product and community. So far, the company is bootstrapped, but Baker says they’ll start looking for funding pretty soon.
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Estimote Details iOS 7 iBeacon Support For Its Contextual Proximity Shopping Devices
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Darrell Etherington
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a Y Combinator graduate and Hardware Alley exhibitor here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, was able to talk about something today that it’s never been able to before: how its product will work with Apple’s new iBeacon tech in iOS 7. iBeacons allow developers to communicate with iOS devices via Bluetooth Low Energy, in order to provide them with contextual info based on their immediate surroundings. Back in July, John Biggs wrote about , which is essentially a rock-shaped device which uses Bluetooth low energy to allow a retailer to do things like communicate deals to shoppers based on which aisle they’re in, for instance, or by letting them even send a payment token from a smartphone, with variable proximity programmable by the retailer, so you could either tap to pay or just get close to a terminal. The tech was impressive enough as it is, but now that Apple has introduced iOS 7 and made its iBeacons feature official, Estimote’s Chris Waclawek explained that it’ll be much, much easier for companies to build software for iOS devices that can work with Estimote in a variety of ways. The company plans to make a variety of different kinds of hardware that can take advantage of iBeacon, to make things like abandoned shopping cart follow-up a realistic and easy-to-implement possibility for brick and mortar stores. This would work by allowing retailers to detect how long they’re spending in fitting rooms, for instance, so that they can tell when a shopper has spent say 20 minutes trying something on, and then walked out without purchasing that item. They could then follow-up with a specific coupon for that article, allowing them to try to complete a sale that otherwise would’ve definitely been beyond reach. Waclawek explained that Apple’s decision to embrace Bluetooth LE for these kinds of uses by developers means that NFC and QR codes are definitely dead at this point, since Bluetooth allows for much greater range and doesn’t require combining with any other tech for handshaking or anything else. He’s clearly excited by the prospects now that iBeacons is out and developers will have access to the tech.
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Prep Pad Is A Connected Kitchen Scales That Quantifies The Nutritional Mix Of Your Meals
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Natasha Lomas
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Cooking is set to get a whole lot smarter if connected kitchen device startup, , pulls off its grand vision. Here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s hardware alley it’s showing off the Prep Pad: a Bluetooth kitchen scales plus app combo that’s due to land this November, costing $150. The connected kitchen device startup has pretty humble beginnings in this space. Formerly known as Chef Sleeve, it manufactured plastic covers to protect iPads used in the kitchen to view recipes while cooking. From there it expanded to other culinary-related iPad accessories — such as iPad kitchen stands, and a chopping board with a built-in iPad slot. But those products were just its first phase. It’s now thinking a whole lot smarter by bringing connectivity and dedicated apps into its kitchen-focused mix. If you’re getting a spot of deja vu, that’s because at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, the startup discussed its plans for a connected scale as part of the next phase of its product portfolio. Four months later, here at Disrupt SF, it’s got the finished product on show. To get to this point it took to Kickstarter to help fund manufacturing costs, raising close to $50,000. The Prep Pad consists of an aluminium frame topped off with a paper composite surface that can be hygienically wiped down, plus the electronic guts (weight sensor with +/-1gram accuracy, microcontroller and Bluetooth LE connectivity). It’s actually making the device itself, not just the software, here in Silicon Valley. “We’re bringing back consumer electronics to Silicon Valley,” says founder Santiago Merea. “That gave us an edge and we could develop it in record time,” he adds. “We did our Kickstarter campaign [back in May]. We started developing the product… We actually did it in six months — the software and everything.” The basic idea of the Prep Pad is to give people more control over their eating habits by visualising the nutrition content of foodstuffs in real-time, allowing the user to adjust ingredients to achieve a more healthy balance. It uses Bluetooth to send weight data to the corresponding app (called Countertop), and then turns that data into a visual nutritional pie. The user specifies what foodstuff/liquid they are weighing in the app, either by manually selecting it within the app, or scanning a product barcode, or there’s also a voice-capture feature. The app then builds a visualisation of how balanced that particular combination of meal ingredients is. It’s a gadget that looks perfectly positioned to capitalise on the quantified health trend, complementing activity-focused devices like the FitBit and Jawbone UP. In addition to a visual pie displaying protein, carbs and fats, Countertop displays a balance score (out of 100), plus the total calories per meal count. The balance score is customised to each user, depending on the answers they give to a series of questions during the app set-up process about their exercise level and health goals, such as whether they need to gain or lose weight. The app lets users hide particular ingredients, so they can see how each ingredient affects the overall nutritional mix of the meal they are making. There’s also a recipe cards feature (below right) that allows users to save a series of ingredients and share those as a recipe with others. The Prep Pad is just the beginning of phase two for the company. Under its new moniker, The Orange Chef is gearing up to launch a whole range of connected kitchen items — with its next product after the scales likely to be a smart “visual” thermometer that will tell the user whether their steak is cooked, for instance, rather than just providing basic temperature data. “We’re not going to tell you the temperature, because no one cares about that,” says Merea. “In the same way that we don’t show weight here [on the main Countertop app view]… Weight is not part of the equation at all — it’s in the background. We went even further. That’s the design that we have — we hide weight, we hide temperature. “So we’re not going to show you the thermometer temperature, we’re going to show you visually if your steak is done or not, because that’s what you are about. And then how do you like it — so it’s going to learn from you.” Beyond that? “We’ll continue connecting the kitchen,” Merea adds. “Every accessory that you can think of in the kitchen we’re going to make it smart. That’s our plan. To make a very smart kitchen that works all together. And not only that connects it, it is not just a connection, it’s how can we leverage this technology to make it better, to make the cooking better, to make it easier, to make it fun.” The Prep Pad is now available for on The Orange Chef website.
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And The Winner Of Disrupt SF Battlefield 2013 Is… Layer!
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Chris Velazco
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After three days and some truly incredible pitches from each of our 30 Battlefield competitors, the time has finally come to crown a Disrupt Battlefield champion. Competition among this year’s pack of six finalists — Dryft, Fates Forever, Layer, Soil IQ, Regalii, and Cota by Ossia — was as stiff as ever, but even with a batch as strong as this, only one startup can take home the Disrupt Cup. Each of the companies took to the stage earlier this week in a bid to prove their worthiness, and to top it all off this year’s batch of six had to present once more in front of our final panel of judges that includes Michael Arrington of CrunchFund (and TechCrunch founder), Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz, David Lee of SV Angel, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures. Needless to say, this process isn’t exactly for the faint of heart. The judges spent a considerable amount of time deliberating backstage, and they’ve just now come to a decision. Without any further ado, meet your TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 Battlefield winner. , founded by Tomaž Štolfa and Ron Palmeri, is a communications platform that can be added to any mobile app by adding fewer than 10 lines of code into the mix. Once that Layer code snippet has been carefully plopped into place, users will be able to send text, voice, and video messages, and share files across different applications. The grand Layer vision involves support for web apps, too, but for now the team is going to focus on releasing an SDK for iOS and Android developers to tinker with. And what of their scheme to keep developers around and dependent on Layer? Early adopters will be able to deploy Layer for free, but will have to pay some modest cloud infrastructure fees once they really start picking up steam. You can read more of our Layer coverage . , created by Swype co-founder Randy Marsden and Rob Chaplinsky, is a replacement software keyboard for Android tablets that essentially adapts to the user’s hands. Unlike a traditional on-screen tablet keyboard, the Dryft keyboard appears when the user actually sets their fingers down on the screen. Once their fingers are in place, Dryft keeps track of each individual finger and carefully displays those letter keys in relation to those finger locations. By tracking inputs on the tablet’s touchscreen and checking for corresponding taps using the accelerometer, Dryft is also able to reduce the number of typing errors. You can read more of our Dryft coverage .
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Estimote Wins Best Hardware Startup At TechCrunch Disrupt SF
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John Biggs
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Manufacturing and logistics giant PCH International alongside hardware incubator Highway1 have announced that , a tool for , has been chosen for Best Hardware Startup at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013. “I was excited to see a company jump on Apple’s ibeacon technology so quickly to make a location service,” said Brady Forrest, VP of Highway1. “Estimotes are part of the new breed of hardware startups – one that uses hardware to build a unique data set & charge money for web services. We think that touring Shenzhen will help them expand their supply chain.” Estimote is selling a small device called the Beacon. It allows customers to interact with a retail space using their smartphone and supports touchless payments and will push discounts and information to phones at the customer’s request. The founder, , says the devices create an OS for the physical world. “The small beacons we produce broadcast venue-specific data to smartphones that are as far away as 160 feet (50 meters) and as close as 2 inches. They trigger different actions on consumer phones depending on their arrival time and distance from the product, and even precise behavior like trying on clothes or touching the product. The more beacons, the richer the experience, but even a few dozen will be enough to create great micro-location apps in the store,” he said. The company will receive a five-day trip to Shenzhen, China where they will visit manufacturers, accelerators, and distributors.
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An Apple ID Is Now Required For Online Genius Bar Appointments
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple is now requiring that all users online sign in with an Apple ID. Previously, users could instead fill out a form with name, address and email in order to book an appointment. When you visit Apple’s online Genius Bar appointment page now, you’ll be prompted to enter your Apple ID and password in order to confirm it. The reasons for this are manifold but there is an ongoing effort to tie in a user’s Apple ID with all of their actions in Apple’s ecosystem. This new procedure is in place for Genius Bar and Workshop appointments and there is now a profile page that allows you to see all of your appointments past and present. The Apple ID is quickly becoming a core piece of Apple’s purchasing experience inside and out of the Apple Retail Stores. Yesterday, Apple introduced the Touch ID fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 5S, which can act as an Apple ID in order to make purchases on the iTunes Store, for instance. An additional reason for this change, we understand, is to give the control of a Genius Bar appointment to a user directly, who must know their credentials and enter them before being able to confirm a payment. There is also the convenience of having a customer’s data automatically filled out with a simple entry of the Apple ID. This could allow Geniuses to look past purchases and communicate with the user much easier now as well. There’s also an outside chance — likely a small one — that having someone sign in with an Apple ID might make them more reluctant to drop an appointment than if they entered info casually, reducing no-shows at the bar. Apple customers can currently make Genius Bar appointments online on Apple’s site or in the Apple Store app. : As commenter Lukas Thomas points out below, this would also theoretically prevent scalping issues like the ones that were reported sporadically in China.
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Legislation Tracking And Prediction Startup FiscalNote Raises $1.2M From Mark Cuban And Others
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Anthony Ha
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, a startup that helps businesses stay up-to-date with state and local legislation, is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from investor Mark Cuban, New Enterprise Associates, and First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund. When co-founder and CEO a couple of months ago, he told me that many businesses are affected by this legislation, but they’d need a large staff (in his words, “different interns hitting refresh on all 50 states”) to actually keep track of it. With FiscalNote, on the other hand, they can go to one site that aggregates all of the legislative data posted to public sources. In addition, FiscalNote is developing something it calls its PoliticalGenome Project, which looks at the language of a given bill and at the history of the legislators who will be voting of it, then makes a prediction of that bill’s success. Hwang said that one of his main goals with the new funding is “really boosting the algorithm” and expanding the nine-person startup’s machine learning and natural language processing team. In addition, Hwang wants to expand beyond legislation to include other industries and other geographies. FiscalNote is currently conducting a closed beta test with a group of customers that it says includes legal and marketing departments within Fortune 500 companies, national advocacy groups, and financial institutions. Hwang previously served as president of the 750,000-member youth lobbying group called the National Youth Association, while his co-founders Jonathan C. Chen (CTO) and Gerald Yao (CFO) worked at Bloomberg and the National Institutes of Health, respectively. The company’s advisory board already includes Chris Lu, former White House Cabinet Secretary for Barack Obama, and Youngsuk “Y.S.” Chi, chairman of publishing company Elsevier, and it recently added LegalZoom CEO John Suh.
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iPhone 5S And 5C Will Still Not Do Simultaneous Data And Voice On Verizon Or Sprint
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Matthew Panzarino
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One of the longest-standing gripes about the iPhone on Verizon and Sprint networks will not change this time around. The new models of iPhone for those carriers will still not enable you to use both voice and data simultaneously to chat while browsing the web, Apple confirmed to us. Initially, FCC charts, dug up by , appeared to indicate that both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c had support for simultaneous voice and data while on a CDMA network. The chart below is , and you can see it uses the ‘VD’ symbol for both voice and data in the operating mode column. A for the CDMA iPhone 5c indicated the same operation mode. By comparison, the iPhone 5’s charts use the indicator ‘VO’ for voice only when tested on the CDMA network. Unfortunately, those charts appear to be in error, as Apple confirmed to us that the iPhone will not allow simultaneous data and voice on CDMA. The problem, says the company, does not reside with the iPhone but the networks involved. That’s partially true, as it would actually be possible for Apple to allow this functionality by adding additional radios. But it does not in order to keep the phone thin and light. It is also unlikely to make that concession because Voice over LTE capability is likely to come to carriers and devices sooner rather than later. This would mean that devices would only lack simultaneous access when they fell back to older network methods like 3G. You can read a very thorough explanation of the reasons behind this . If you’re a Verizon iPhone user then you know just how annoying it can be to have your Internet connection cut off while you’re on the phone. Talking while grabbing a piece of info from email or searching for a restaurant location happens a million times more often than you’d think it would. It also hurts when you’re driving while using navigation and a call comes in. Instantly your map tiles stop loading and you’re driving through a gray grid of Tron wasteland. Unfortunately, those inconveniences will remain for yet another generation.
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Zuckerberg’s Manifest Destiny: Connecting The 5 Billion People Without Internet
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Josh Constine
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Facebook didn’t stop when it hit 1 billion users. And it won’t stop even if it connects everyone with web access. “To make the world more open and connected” really means — every human regardless of location or income. That’s why CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’s “retooling the company to take on a lot of harder problems” — specifically spreading the Internet itself. Last month, with a 10-page whitepaper he wrote himself. It’s a web access initiative and partnership with six telecommunications and mobile companies. Together, they’ll build new data-compression technologies, network infrastructure, and business models that make it possible to not only get everyone a smartphone, but make the data that powers them affordable. This is critical because most of the cost of owning a smartphone is the data, not the hardware. Some will say it’s simply Facebook’s plot to get more users, but at its core, the mission is truly altruistic. Internet access leads to education, empowerment, and economic mobility. Everywhere it’s come it’s increased GDP and helped people stay in closer touch with those they love. Could it earn money for Facebook? Sure. But that doesn’t make it the driving motive. Though Zuckerberg is championing the cause, it won’t just be some hobby of his. It’s Facebook’s new mandate. But really, it’s an extension of what the social network been doing since 2004. “The tactics change all the time”, but not the mission, Mark Zuckerberg said on stage. You can watch the full interview below The still-young CEO discussed how businesses break down into two categories. “There are companies that define themselves by the way they do things, and companies that define themselves by a concrete way they change the world.” The latter is preferable to him. It’s why Zuckerberg grew up idolizing Bill Gates and his mission to put “a computer on every desk and in every home.” Creating a mission that matters requires doing something audacious, and the values that get you there aren’t always universally popular. “I’m of the belief that values are only useful if they’re controversial,” said Zuckerberg. He chided companies for posting hollow lists of values like “be honest,” saying of course you have to be honest. Facebook’s controversial value has been .” Employees are encouraged to build, experiment, and iterate rather than sit on new products until they’re perfect. Zuckerberg laughed. “It gets us into tons of trouble,” and he admits it’s still important to “slow down and fix your shit.” But the philosophy has helped Facebook evolve quickly and avoid being disrupted. It’s also led Facebook to 1 billion active users. But Zuckerberg says “A billion isn’t a magical number. No one wakes up and says ‘I want to get one-seventh of the world to do something.'” Yet in a moment of humility, when Michael Arrington asked if Zuckerberg wants everyone on Facebook, he said “Of course we do, but I don’t think that’s realistic.” There will always be people who don’t like a particular tool. You don’t have to look far on the Internet for people who hate Facebook, yet we’re wired to share. Whether its via SMS, email, Twitter, or its own social network, Internet.org and Facebook’s task is to give people access and let them choose how to communicate. All humans want to be connected, Zuckerberg concluded. And with a glint in his eye about his own purpose on this planet and that of his company, Zuckerberg exclaimed, “That’s why we’re here.”
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Giving You A Flavor Of Startup Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco
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Mike Butcher
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It’s not possible to cover every single company in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt…. but we can give you a flavor of a handful with a quick run-though. Here’s just such a selection in the video above.
“We are building the world’s preferred buying experience for retailers and consumers. Think Starbucks mobile app. Apply it to all retailers. This is Yoyo – the smart way to buy, get rewarded and share.”
“ZEEF is a curated, ranked link directory built by passionate experts. At ZEEF, experts can choose a subject, set up a page and share their knowledge. Consumers can find the most relevant (SEO & spam free) links by subject & category.”
“Thor Drive is the awesomely secure, blindingly fast, thunderingly powerful cloud storage service.
We offer: Godlike security for your puny files Lightning fast transmission speeds(2x that of other cloud storage services, in case you were wondering) File sharing Unprecedented reliability (No server crashes!).”
“Vello allows Gifters to send a personalized present in seconds by recording a short video greeting to go along with the purchase of an e-gift card. The Gifter can then invite others to join in, no matter where they are, to add their personal contribution to the viral video greeting (as well as the monetary present). Vello seamlessly stitches all the videos together and delivers a beautiful, personal, and unique gift. Vello can be used for any special occasion including birthdays, retirements, holidays, employee recognition, weddings etc.”
“LCB is a modern and effective online marketing instrument for increasing sales/orders on a client’s web-site by automatic formation and dispatch of unique offers to site visitors which are based on LCB-identified interests of each visitor in particular products on the client’s site.”
“Trovea is an curated online marketplace for emerging fashion and lifestyle brands from all over the world to sell internationally.”
“Pharmly is a pharmaceutical marketplace that allows medical facilities to source drugs from the $300B pharmaceutical wholesale marketplace when their primary supplier cannot meet their demand due to drug shortages.”
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India Pavilion At Disrupt Showcases A Diverse Range Of Companies [TCTV]
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Mike Butcher
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TechCrunch is coming to India with a in November, so it’s only right that we ran though the companies on the India Pavilion at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. As you can see, they are a diverse bunch, from CRM to running Android in the cloud.
“Agile CRM is an all-in-one complete CRM solution having contact management, marketing automation, web analytics, telephony, 2-way emails, real time activity alerts and much more. With Agile CRM, small business owners can now have a simple and easy social marketing process that lets users send emails and tweets automatically with no human intervention and more.”
“AppSurfer runs Android on the cloud and makes it accessible from any device or platform. AppSurfer provides tools for developers to demo their apps from the web itself, without installing. These demos can be embedded on blogs, product pages, press releases etc. AppSurfer demos help developers generate a continuous stream of downloads from the web.”
“ShepHertz’s endeavor is to make App developers successful on the Cloud, irrespective of the technology or platform on which they are developing. All our products focus on making App developer’s life easy and augment their business. ShepHertz is a access channel and technology agnostic cloud computing platform (BaaS & PaaS) service provider.”
“Voicemail service with a virtual assistant”
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As October Launch Approaches, BotObjects Releases Another Build Video
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John Biggs
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is a 3D printer company that promises “full-color” printing in a system that uses a set of colored filaments to extract colored plastic in layers. Like the , the ProDesk3D deposits plastic in layers and can print colors in bands around an object and not really in specific spots on a model. That said, they’ve (I can’t embed it here, perhaps by design); the founders have offered me a hands-on after quite a bit of back and forth. After following this company over the past month or so, I’ve seen a number of 3D printers express skepticism at its product. I’ve seen a lot of vaporware in my day — I was one of the first guys to poo-poo the back in the day — and, at the very least, these guys are willing to work the crowd. The printer, as shown in these videos, isn’t printing in full color — it’s essentially only good at building bands of color around a device — but it could be programmed to add spot color in the right places. While I can’t claim to have seen this thing with my own eyes, from my understanding of the technology we’re looking at a working model that will be ready to ship in a few weeks. Is this a real color 3D printer? If you accept the clear limitations of the current incarnation then sure, it’s entirely feasible to create nicely colored plastic objects using this technology. If you’re looking for something more detailed, however, you will have to use to print in real, full-color sandstone. I’m cautious but optimistic on the BotObjects ProDesk3D, which is about all I can be without seeing it in the flesh (or plastic).
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We Catch Up With Our TechCrunch China Partner, TechNode, At Disrupt [TCTV]
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Mike Butcher
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is TechCrunch’s partner in China – many Techcrunch posts directly into Chinese on . So during TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco we caught up with Kevin Chen of Technode. Together with founder , Chen writes for the bilingual blog that has been covering the VC and startup market in China for the last five years. TechCrunch went to China to stage a Disrupt in 2011, and we should note that this Fall, we will do a small event in Beijing, and next year we will bring a full-on Disrupt back to China. Chen himself has written a sort of crash course to the Chinese tech scene called: which we highly recommend. Check out our video interview with him.
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