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Enigma Launches A New Developer Program That Gives API Access To Civic-Minded Hackers
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 9
| 11
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It’s been a very busy few months since the Enigma team took home the , and co-founder Hicham Oudghiri took the stage here in San Francisco today to deliver an update on the company’s trajectory… and unveil a new program for developers looking to turn raw public data into something seriously valuable. Despite how much it’s grown these past few months, Enigma hasn’t forgotten about the civic-minded hackers striving to something with access to public data. To that end, Oudghiri pulled back the curtain on a that will see the company offer full access to the Enigma APIs in a bid to give back to the transparent data community. For better or worse, though, it’s not going to be a free-for-all — interested developers can apply for access through October 15, at which point the Enigma team will pick its favorite pitches and give them access to that firehose of public data. But why API access? It’s partially a gesture of goodwill to a community that concerns itself with public improvement through data, but it’s also a reflection of the shifting priorities within Enigma as a whole. The team’s early pitches were centered around pitching the Enigma data de-obfuscator as an investigative tool meant for journalists and financial intelligence firms — early buy-in from the New York Times and S&P Capital IQ made Enigma’s value as SaaS play pretty apparent. These days though, Enigma is prominently positioning itself as a platform that offers access to all the data that it’s been able to unearth so far, and Oudghiri was quick to point out that the lion’s share of the company’s business has come from opening up API access to that stream of public information. “It’s not just about search and discovery anymore,” Oudghiri said. “Well, it is, but it’s also about using this data in applications that make things way more efficient.” That’s not to say that Enigma is planning to give up that pay-per-seat SaaS approach (Oudghiri tells me the company has “tripled the number of web seats we’ve sold”), but the addition of some major API clients like Stanford University means that Enigma can spend a little less time signing up clients for its investigative service. Granted, it’s not a whole lot of extra time, but the Enigma team is using it to collaborate with a handful of partners to demonstrate the power of this data. It recently teamed up with Chart.io to , and with this new developer program, Enigma wants to see what the rest of the community can do.
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VC Titans Tom Perkins And Don Valentine Articulate What Makes A Good VC
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Romain Dillet
| 2,013
| 9
| 11
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Today at Disrupt SF, venture capital pioneers and shared their opinions about what makes a good bet when it comes to choosing companies to fund. As a reminder, Perkins co-founded in 1972 America’s premiere venture capital business, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, while Don Valentine founded Sequoia Capital in 1972, which then invested in Apple, Atari, Cisco and others. Valentine and Perkins were also interviewed at length in , a documentary that presents the stories of America’s original venture capitalists and the companies they helped form. Prior to becoming VCs, Perkins was HP’s first general manager and Valentine was senior sales and marketing executive for Fairchild Semiconductor. But today’s panel was mostly about their VC experiences. “I feel you invest in the idea because bad people don’t have good ideas,” Perkins said. “I’d look at the back pages to see if the numbers were big, and then if they were I’d look at the front pages to see what the business was,” he continued. Valentine expressed similar sentiment, but explained that most of what he focuses on is looking for real visionaries, rather than those who simply push the needle forward in more gradually progressive ways. “The key to making great investments is to assume that the past is wrong, and to do something that’s not part of the past, to do something entirely differently,” he said, explaining that he tends to bet only on risk-takers. “I asked what was the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done, knowing in my heart of hearts that i’d pick the one who’d done something most outrageous.” “I’m very discriminate,” Valentine added, when Perkins pointed out that he refuses to invest in Harvard Business School graduates. “I’m against all business schools.” Valentine shared some info about what the right mix for a successful company is, based on his experience, and on what isn’t important or what can actually be harmful. “Great companies are built with different products by different people […] the last person [needed] is the HR person,” he said. “They’re the destroyer of companies. They’re the ones who write the binders and tell you what everyone gets paid in grade seven.” Valentine said that HR is the reason HP missed out on Steve Wozniak , since he didn’t fit the identity of what made an HP employee in the company’s eyes at the time. Because of that, Wozniak founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs. Perkins essentially admitted that ignoring Wozniak was a huge error in judgment. “We didn’t even look at Steve Wozniak,” he said. “Big mistake.”
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Eliza Brooke
| 2,013
| 9
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Zuckerberg Says The “Government Blew It” On The NSA Scandal
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013
| 9
| 11
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“I think the government blew it,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bluntly said about the NSA scandal . “We take our role very seriously,” he said. “It’s our job to protect everyone who uses Facebook. It’s our government’s job to protect all of us, our freedom and the economy. They did a bad job at balancing this.” Zuckerberg said he believes people deserve to know more about government programs and said Facebook is pushing for more transparency. He took issue with the U.S. government’s response to the initial NSA leaks, saying the government wasn’t spying on American citizens. “Oh that’s really gonna help companies that are trying to serve people around the world,” Zuckerberg cracked. “I think that was really bad.” The young CEO said said he is frustrated that Facebook isn’t allowed to publicly disclose how many NSA requests it grants and denies.
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Startup Alley Shows Its Diversity With Companies From Cairo To Moscow
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013
| 9
| 11
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Running across a tiny startup from Cairo or one from Moscow is part and parcel of Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt, which often has companies from the farthest-flung corners of the world. I came across when I was in Cairo this year so it was great to run into them on the Alley. Likewise, I was impressed by , the SatNav embedded in a newly designed motorcycle helmet I found in Moscow. Rubbing shoulders with them in Startup Alley was from San Francisco.
“Based in San Francisco, Scoot & Doodle is a social-creativity platform where friends and classmates think visually and work creatively together inside live, collaboration studios that provide an innovative space to share, brainstorm, create, and problem-solve together, whether at home, at school or on-the-go.”
“Instabug offers services for mobile app developers to help them testing their applications, starting with a revolutionary in-app feedback mechanism. To know what Instabug is doing, imagine yourself using a mobile app and you want to send a feedback! You could do it your way: where you take a screenshot of the app, close the app and compose an email with your feedback and all device details as well as the steps to reproduce the error and send it to the developer. Or you could do it the Instabug way; by just SHAKING the device! by doing this you get our feedback form within the app itself where you write your comment and we also attach a screenshot of the app that you can also annotate to highlight the part relevant to your feedback. For developers, we provide a detailed report for each feedback sent with all device details such as the device model, OS version, memory and storage usage, as well as the wifi and carrier and the user’s location. It’s all the details of the testing environment.”
“Livemap produces a motohelmet with a navigation system. Motorcyclists still need an effective navigation tool except the usual paper maps or touch-screen navigators. Using maps requires frequent stops, navigators distract the biker’s attention and are not safe to be operated on the go. There is a device that would perfectly meet the bikers’ requirements but up to the present day only fighter pilots could enjoy its advantages. Yes, we mean helmet-mounted displays.”
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With Gathr’s Custom Bundles, AOL Tries To Build A Subscription Business Beyond Dial-Up
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013
| 9
| 29
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One of the more awkward things about AOL is the fact that . Given the subscription business’ roots in dial-up Internet, it’s not surprising that — but with the launch of a new service called Gathr, the company is trying to turn things around. “It’s really about bringing in new subscribers,” said David Smith, vice president of marketing at AOL’s paid services and membership division. What are these new subscribers actually going to pay for? AOL (which owns TechCrunch) is pitching Gathr as a way to access your favorite online services in a single place for a discounted price, with partners including Pandora, iTunes, Redbox, and Amazon. Bundling isn’t a new concept, but Paid Services and Membership President Bud Rosenthal argued that people think of it as “something that’s done for them.” When you pay for a cable TV bundle, you end up with lots of channels that you don’t care about. Or if you want a specific feature for your new car, it probably comes bundled with other features that are less important to you. With Gathr, on the other hand, users get to choose the services. I currently count 19 of them in Gathr (Smith and Rosenthal said there are plenty more lined up), and users can combine any three, paying a combined $15 per month. Gathr also offers prepackaged bundles, tailored to different interests. For example, I’m trying out a “4 Fun” bundle that includes five one-day DVD rentals from Redbox (I don’t own any devices that can play DVDs, so, uh, maybe I should have thought this through), a subscription to Pandora’s ad-free service Pandora One, a $25 e-gift card to Restaurant.com, and a bonus $10 gift card with Amazon. Entertainment is the category with “the sex and sizzle,” Rosenthal acknowledged, but Gathr goes beyond that, with partners such as Norton AntiVirus and LifeLock. Behind the scenes, he said AOL is paying wholesale prices for these services, and everything on top of those prices is profit. He noted that many partners already have a big audience in the U.S., so continued domestic growth can be a challenge, and these discounts can help convince “fence sitters.” In addition, he said that even though Gathr offers users a dashboard for managing and accessing their subscriptions, those users also need to create accounts with and log into the partners’ services themselves: “We’re not disintermediating the partner and the consumers.” Smith said that Gathr is currently in a “marketing beta” in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Seattle, with AOL testing out the response to a number of promotional tactics (including TV ads) before a broader national launch next year. Anyone in the U.S. can , however.
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MLB’s iBeacon Experiment May Signal A Whole New Ball Game For Location Tracking
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013
| 9
| 29
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There’s been plenty of buzz about iBeacons and Bluetooth Low Energy radios — they’re supposed to do wonders for in-venue positioning, and plenty of companies have already expressed interest in deploying them in the field. But what is it like to actually stroll through a beacon-laden area? Curiously enough, Major League Baseball took on that challenge and recently decided to show off its vision of a Bluetooth-enabled ballpark at Citi Field in Queens, NY. “What we’re moving toward is building a platform for any team to put their own custom Bluetooth beacons in their parks,” said MLB Mobile Product Dev SVP Chad Evans as he clutched his iPhone outside the venue. Let’s be clear about something first: Very little about MLB’s big Bluetooth push is final at this point. It almost seemed that, with this experiment, MLB’s tech team was thinking out loud. A handsomely revamped version of the MLB At Bat app is perhaps the furthest along. Evans says the design language of the app, which now features a seemingly Googlean stream of cards that display your ticket barcode and seat locations (among other things) is near final and will roll out to consumers in the coming months. The visual polish of the software was balanced by the unfinished nature of the hardware that made all those whiz-bang features possible. At this stage it’s all prototype gear, small boards lashed together and housed in milky-white plastic cases to protect them from the elements. With all that said, MLB’s little experiment shows plenty of promise. Walking across the threshold into the park proper prompted a notification on Evans’ demo iPhone welcoming us to the venue. Stopping in front of the old Shea Stadium Home Run Apple and holding that same phone to a demo stanchion kicked off a video that described the Mets’ home for 44 years. Once we passed into the park’s rotunda and paused in front of the escalator, the app recognized us as a first-time visitor and offered us $2 off a Nathan’s hot dog. Eventually, Evans said, the app and those Bluetooth beacons will be able to direct users to the closest route to their seats. One has to wonder how much further MLB could take this concept. If you could track app users as they bounded from location to location in a ballpark, you could probably develop a pretty granular profile to help target for ads or other engagement opportunities. Repeat visitor to the Mets Team Store? You could get pushed a loyalty discount. Were you spotted making more than a few trips to the bathroom? Maybe you shouldn’t be pushed any more drink specials. Granted, the second example is pretty extreme, but Evans didn’t completely rule out the possibility of more fine-grained location sniffing… if the organization can figure out how to accomplish that sort of thing without creeping out the fans. Once you start seeing what MLB (and plenty of other organizations like it) can do with iBeacons, it makes sense why Bluetooth Low Energy is suddenly so in vogue. The level of targeting and reach that a smartly assembled array of Bluetooth beacons provides could profoundly change how companies try to interact with us for better or worse. It certainly doesn’t hurt that support for Bluetooth LE is something both Apple and Google have committed to either — iDevices as old as the 4S can take advantage of these features if they’re running iOS 7, and Google confirmed that Bluetooth LE support would be one of the main additions to Android 4.3. That means a huge swath of the devices out there and in the pipeline will be ready to, well, play ball with this newfangled approach to interaction. Evans admitted that MLB has explored a few other location-based content delivery systems in the past, but solutions like NFC’s stop-and-tap-and-wait approach never reached the level of ubiquity and reliability to make it worth a major rollout. Even platform-agnostic modes of interaction like scanning QR codes and AR applications apparently just weren’t elegant enough to get the job done. But with iBeacons, MLB may have finally found exactly what it’s looking for. For now, though, the name of the game is fine-tuning. Evans noted these Bluetooth-powered experiences will start rolling out sometime in 2014, but it’ll be some time before the functionality spreads to the rest of the nation’s major league ballparks. After all, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to crafting a smart location-centric experience like the one demoed on that warm September afternoon. Part of the plan, naturally, has to encompass the sorts of content that users are given access to, but there are plenty of technical concerns to tackle, too. Consider the issue of range, for one. MLB doesn’t want to accidentally trigger a response within the app if you’re too far away from an attraction or a point of interest. Even the materials used in the construction of the park can affect these radios’ reach, so each one has to have its power output and transmission rate tweaked so they can collectively hit the right spots. You can bet that Fenway Park — opened in 1912 and festooned with architectural holdovers from years past — is going to require a significantly different layout of Bluetooth transmitters than my native Citizens Bank Park (go Phils!). If this sounds like a painstaking process, you’d be right, but Evans is convinced that taking the time to meticulously hone the hardware is well worth it. “We’re baseball, we’re not a small startup,” Evans conceded. “We want to be nimble and quick and take new opportunities, but we also don’t want to roll something out that’s going to confuse fans.”
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AppSeed Relies On Computer Vision Tech And Your Phone To Speed Up UI Design
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013
| 9
| 29
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Digital designers point your eyes at this neat project which is utilising computer vision tech to speed up the early stages of the design process. The basic idea is to give designers a way to quickly transform the sketches in their (paper) notepad into a functioning UI prototype to test work flow and get feedback on early-stage design ideas. How does it work? The plan is to make an app, called AppSeed, which lets designers use their phone to snap a photo of their design. AppSeed’s computer vision algorithms will then isolate and identify the different UI elements in the sketches, and make them work as intended — so, for instance, a quick sketch of a text box becomes a field where text can be inputted. AppSeed’s creators are using the open source computer vision library, , plus their own algorithms to isolate and identify UI elements. The software will either guess what an element is, based on analysing things like its shape and or relative location. Or prompt the user to specify its function from a list of UI elements if that portion of the design isn’t immediately obvious to its artificial eye. “The app uses the OpenCV library to identify enclosed shapes and then decides what the UI is based off its location, size and shape (but only when obvious). So an arrow shape in the top left is likely a back button while a series of three short horizontal lines in the same spot is likely a menu button. An empty rectangle that is about 50px tall and very wide can be assumed to be an input text,” explains AppSeed’s Greg Goralski. “The app makes things into buttons by default and of course the designer can set the UI directly (which is the main way things get set). It uses two techniques, find contour and template matching, to identify shapes and specific elements.” The focus for AppSeed is squarely on the early stages of UI design — the “initial brainstorming and iterating stage” as Goralski puts it. “The more ideas you have at the start of a project, the better the final product is. We want to make that part easier, faster and more intuitive.” It’s interesting that an app for digital designers is convinced that paper will continue to play a key role in the process — despite there being no shortage of electronic alternatives for sketching directly into a computer (tablets, smart pens, design software and so on). But for brainstorming early design work, Goralski reckons old school ink is hard to beat. “We can definitely have digital files brought in directly, but feel that the sketching process with pen and paper will be with us for a long time,” he says. “Pen and paper (along with whiteboard and marker) are so quick and intuitive that they are a natural place to start a project. Digital tools are great, and have been around for a long time now, but pen and paper feels right, is easily collaborated on and is almost always with you.” The design that’s been transferred from paper to AppSeed will run as a UI prototype within the app but can also be shared as an HTML5 prototype so others can test its work flow without also having to have AppSeed. There’s currently no full list of UI elements that will be added to the finished app (assuming it gets funded), as the team plan to take feedback from backers to find out what they want, but Goralski says likely additions are: Maps, Streetview, slider, popups, side menus, switches, lists, back button, social media connects, open camera (and other buttons), as well as gestures such as swipe, pinch and tap. After the AppSeed prototype stage is done and dusted, designs can then be handed off for the next stage of the design process by being sent to Photoshop as a layered file (i.e. with each button or element separated onto its own layer for easier manipulation). Goralski says the main competitors to the AppSeed concept are and but he argues that by bringing computer vision tech into the mix AppSeed is going one better. “Both [rival apps] take pictures of a sketch to bring it onto the device as we do. The difference is that we then isolate the elements with computer vision. It is this step that gives us the ability to actually make the draw shape into the UI element. This is a powerful difference,” he tells TechCrunch. At the moment, the Canada-based AppSeed team have a functioning prototype of their app but are looking for a funding bump to turn that into a fully fledged iOS app (with an Android version planned as a stretch goal for the crowdfunding campaign). They’re seeking CAD$30,000 to build the initial iOS app — and have taken less than half that amount in pledges, with around a third of their 30-day campaign left to go. Pledges for a Kickstarter edition of the app start at $8, ($30 gets you the app plus a sketchbook). They’re aiming to ship the app in January.
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Azimo Raises $1M Seed Funding To Take Its Money Transfer Service To Europe
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013
| 9
| 29
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It seems there’s still money be made in money transfers. , the UK-based social money transfer service that competes with legacy players Western Union and Moneygram, and to a lesser extent, PayPal, has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the European arm of VC firm eVentures. Existing angel investors also participated in the round, including CapitalOne founder Matt Cooper, which brings the company’s total funding to-date to around $1.5 million. Azimo says the new capital will be used to expand the service to other parts of Europe, in terms of who can send money (the service already supports 190 destination countries around the world). TechCrunch understands that Germany will be first, with Ireland, France, Spain, and Netherlands pegged to follow on the startup’s roadmap. Launched in August 2012, Azimo aims to disrupt the remittance industry by letting users transfer money internationally to friends, family or other contacts via the Web, its mobile apps or , charging between 1% and 2% of the transaction, which is significantly cheaper than the rates charged by the likes of Western Union, PayPal or the indeed the banks. The recipient receives the money either in their bank account, at local cash collection points, or as “mobile wallet” top-up credit. Talking up the size of the online money transfer market as a whole — $500 billion, citing the World Bank — Azimo claims 30,000 registered users, and says that 60% of customers make a repeat visit in their first month. To mark its one year anniversary, the company is waving its fees from today till the end of October. I guess that’s one way to spend VC money. In a canned statement, Azimo’s fund raise seems to have got the approval of the UK Government’s Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Vince Cable, who says: “This German investment into a British startup demonstrates that the UK has the infrastructure, the skills base and the competitive edge to capitalise on our expertise in both financial services and digital technology and UKTI is working to ensure that the UK is leading the way in the FinTech revolution. Competition in the financial services sector is vital to ensure consumers get the best deal possible and I commend Azimo on securing this financing.” Of course, Cable is right, the UK does punch above its weight in financial services, and this is also translating to FinTech. To that end, another potential competitor in Europe is the VC-backed . However, Azimo is more about consumer transfers via collection points akin to Western Union, while largely targets bank transfers, particularly by businesses, not least . Cue the now obligatory statement from Joanna Shields, CEO to Tech City UK, the British government organisation charged with trumpeting startups in London: “Fin-tech is a lucrative and exciting growth market with many start-ups and young businesses creatively disrupting traditional models and re-imagining our relationship with money. I hope that Azimo’s success and this funding milestone will inspire other investors to join in the new wave of financial innovation happening in London.”
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The Upcoming Glass Development Kit Launch Will Finally Allow Google Glass To Live Up To Its Potential
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013
| 9
| 29
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The limited launched of Google Glass earlier this year was greeted with a lot of hype and the inevitable backlash, but one thing this first version of Glass didn’t show yet was the full potential of the platform. That’s because developers can’t do all that much with Glass right now. They can push messages and receive images, videos and audio from the device through the so-called , but that’s about it right now. Even though Glass runs on Android, the company hasn’t made its long-announced (GDK) – which will allow developers to write complex Android apps that run on Glass itself – available yet. For many developers, the Mirror API was quite a disappointment, especially after Google showed off some of Glass’ more advanced features in a and then didn’t develop a similar experience in the first prototype. Now, however, it looks like it’s just a before Google will release the GDK and allow for Glass users to install “real” Glass apps on the device. Google started encouraging developers to hack Glass and run Android apps on it at its I/O developer conference earlier this year, and in July, it told people to the standard Android SDK to work on Android apps for Glass. With the release of the GDK, Google will open the doors for a whole new group of Glass apps that are currently either impossible to build or just available to those who are willing to hack their $1,500 spectacles. The GDK will allow apps to access the , gyroscope, accelerometer and other low-level hardware on the device. Most importantly, however, developers will also be able to render complex OpenGL-based graphics on the devices. Right now, all they get are HTML-based cards for their apps, but with the GDK, they will be able to build real-time augmented-reality apps, games and more complex and innovative user interfaces. I’ve seen a number of these apps as hacks over the last few months and they make for a completely different user experience on Glass than the usual interface. To get a glimpse of what’s possible with the GDK, just take a look at the Glass . That’s currently the only full-blown app on Glass that uses most of the graphics capabilities of Glass and the built-in sensors. The other Glass feature that shows you some of the potential of the GDK is the famous that introduces you to the Glass team. All of these new capabilities will likely stir some of the controversy around Glass once again – especially once the first real-time facial recognition apps find their way onto the device without the need to hack it. Still, the GDK will finally free Glass from being what’s essentially a fancy Google Now client with some third-party apps to a full-blown platform for developers.
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Video: Every iPhone Ever Gets Speed Tested Side-By-Side
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013
| 9
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Sure, each new iPhone is faster than the last.. . But how do these speed increases actually translate into day-to-day use? It’s one of life’s oldest questions; one that scholars and scientists have spent billions trying to answer, to no avail. Fine. Maybe not. But it is that’s cool to see put to the test in a two minute video on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Managing to pull together each of the eight generations of iPhones released since 2007 and a bunch of extra hands to keep everything in sync, the guys over at the YouTube channel have put together a side-by-side speed test showing how quickly each model handles a basic action — from booting up, to loading a website.
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What Games Are: Steam’s Big Bet
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013
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There had long been hints that Valve was up to something. Hints like Gabe Newell decrying the state of Windows 8 and speaking in favor of Linux. Hints like Big Picture, the TV-like dashboard. Hints like the Xi3’s boxy little machine. With new consoles and microconsoles starting to pop into existence, this week Valve finally revealed its answer: SteamOS. Steam Machines. Steam Controllers. Boom. Its ambitions are not to launch a console but a whole solution for home gaming entertainment. In a sense it has to. For Valve and many other studios the decline and fall of the PC is a slowly dawning apocalypse. Sales of gaming PCs may be up while the rest of the market is down but there’s a point at which the support that comes from the wider PC ecosystem starts to dwindle. Perhaps video cards start not keeping pace. Perhaps driver software becomes less updated. Perhaps commoditized components stop being cheap and PCs become much more expensive. The knock-on effects of this decline could wipe out Valve, Blizzard and a number of others. However Valve’s second, and largely unique, problem is that a recovery in the PC space implies tighter integration of the platform by Microsoft. With the purchase of most of Nokia and a search for new leadership underway the Wyrm may finally be starting to turn at Big-M. Windows 9 (or 8.5, or whatever) may well turn things around. If it does though it will be for a Microsoft that’s far more interested in device-and-service thinking. It will mean more prominence for the Windows Store. It doesn’t compete much with Steam today but one day it will. Finally Valve’s third problem is its ecosystem. It has a massive following of both players and developers. Steam is perceived as art house venue of games and every indie wants to be there. That ecosystem has evolved hand-in-hand with the PC paradigm since its inception and is resistant to fundamental change. Steam’s adoption took forever and required deeply discounted sales to overcome suspicions. Nowadays it’s huge but that doesn’t mean its audience is ready for a big shift. These problems have essentially defined Valve’s next generation solution, but they breed problems of their own. A few weeks ago at LinuxCon 2013, Gabe Newell gave a talk about the future of . Obviously this was something of a preach-to-the-choir crowd and so the talk was warmly received, but outside of its domain does anyone really care? Linux may be powerful but it’s also geeky. Getting into it requires rolling up your sleeves and doing some digging. It’s cool for motivated people but for everybody else (even the comparatively savvy gamer crowd) it’s a chore. This is why, although it has had Linux support for a while, Steam is still largely a Windows client in most people’s eyes. It’s just easier to make and run games in Microsoft’s house. With SteamOS Valve is trying to be the Android of the game consoles, to do the hard work of taking a cool kernel and make it user-friendly. The company sees itself as providing a nexus solution to everyone’s problems, and maybe even harboring hopes of Android-sized success. Manufacturers can use SteamOS as the core of a gaming deck that they would then sell, creating a class of home-hub devices that would be a bit like consoles but also their own thing. There would be choice and range in the market yet a common platform to power them all, much like today’s PC. And there would be neat features like streaming games across your home network. Like an Apple TV and iTunes. Sure, but the big problem with that vision is developer support. The majority of games in the Steam catalog are old, all created for the Windows PC paradigm. They’re built to work with mouse, keyboard, DirectX or OpenGL and so on. Support for updating them to work on modern Windows machines is hard enough, but to shift platform? Many don’t. As an anecdotal example, I own about 150 games through my Steam account. Only about half of them work with Mac. The other half are either pending support or simply won’t ever have it. The Mac is arguably much more stable and better supported than Linux PCs tend to be, and yet plenty of game makers are not bothered. They can’t make the business case for it to be worth the effort. So what hope does Valve have of convincing risk-averse game developers to create full ports of existing games for SteamOS? Or even convincing them to make original games designed specifically for the OS? On the face of it, very little. Game makers tend to be look-before-you-leap types (as I have often argued, to their cost) which means new platforms often have to deal with chicken/egg paradoxes. You can’t get interest in your platform without great games, and you can’t get great games on your platform without proving it has significant interest. For non-dedicated gaming platforms like PCs, iPhones and Facebook this problem tends to resolve on its own because so many people buy into the platform for other reasons that game makers overcome their skepticism. However dedicated platforms usually have to solve it by opening their wallets. that Microsoft is ploughing into Xbox One for game development? This is why. If a platform essentially offers to pay game makers enough to make it worth their while, they’ll dive in. But is Valve really willing to do that? Sure it has its own key franchise in Half Life 3, but I seriously doubt it will make the mistake of making that game Steam Machine exclusive. If it is relying on providing the platform and then hoping developers will support it, it will need to sweeten that deal somehow. Irrespective of the support question, the strategy of being the Android of game consoles reminds me of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center adventure. The basic gist of WMC was a mini-PC sitting under your TV and acting as a powerful hub for all your entertainment. It was primarily for movies and recording TV but had other conceivable uses too, such as games. This idea has always been compelling to some people yet it’s never really taken off. One reason is that the hardware has sucked. It’s been expensive, underpowered and far more fiddly than it was supposed to be. The living room is not the desktop and does not induce nearly as much tolerance for messing around to make something work. Does anyone really want to have to faff about with their home hub while their family looks on? People want a product that they are confident will not be like that. Existing console platform manufacturers tend to shy away from multiple-manufacturer ideals for precisely this reason. Similar to the difference between today’s iPhone and Android, working with partners tends to detract from control over the user experience and leads to fragmentation. Standards can not be enforced nor compliance ensured. The cognitive load that this places on the user is high, which the user then finds discouraging. The guarantee that every game will just work can not be assured. So one of my big fears for Steam Machines is that the balance of power between Valve and its partners will favor the partners. The partners may want, for example, to bundle their own dashboards in their machines and develop their own brand relationship with their customers. We see that happening all the time on Android, so why not SteamOS? All that deluded cruftware that you get when you buy an OEM PC? Imagine that under your TV. My second fear is that Steam Machines will turn out underpowered. Valve may want them to be top-notch but partner manufacturers often have to rationalize the cost of production and shave a bit here and there to make a profit. Ecosystem-led approaches tend to result in halting periods of innovation as a result. For some audiences this wouldn’t be a problem, but for PC gamers it is. The perception of being behind is not one they enjoy. Look at Microsoft’s attempts to make Windows-powered tablets and phones work. For years the idea was to partner with everyone and let hardware sort it out, as it had in PC. The result was years of bad Windows Mobile phones and awful touch PCs. Instead the company had to pivot from software to devices and just make the units themselves (or with Nokia). It had to because it’s in the nature of OEMs to sit back and make smaller innovations with low-powered (and often just crappy) tech. But to compete with iPad Microsoft needed something much bolder. While they may have their flaws, one thing that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be good at is delivering super-lush (and reliably so) games. Like the Surface or the iPad, the vertical control over the platform has a lot to do with that. I suspect a similar story will play out for Steam Machines, and that Valve will eventually conclude that it should just make its own. It goes against the DNA of the company in many ways (it’s used to working with lots of others) but still. My biggest fear for Steam Machines, however, is price. Sony is able to sell PlayStation 4’s for $400 because it’s taking a significant cut from each game. The console is probably being sold at cost price, or even below, because higher prices tend to make customers queasy. Unless a platform has a deeply held marketing story of being much better (say Mac vs PC) then it can be very hard to make a case to customers that they should pay more. I just have a hard time believing that there are many gamers out there willing to spend $900 on a console, when one of the big cheering points of PS4 vs Xbox One was the $400 vs $500 starting price. Gamers who want big games will be able to buy a dedicated console for half my guesstimated price of a good Steam Machine. Meanwhile the ones who want indie or casual games will be able to buy something an OUYA for $100. All in all I think this hub strategy means Valve’s primary customers for Steam Machines will be the people who are already invested in Steam, and only a subset of those who haven’t already shelled out a couple of grand on a big PC gaming rig. Which leads me to… For a long time I’ve wondered who would properly reinvent the modern joypad and do something cool with it. Joypads have been ungainly multi-pad multi-button affairs for a long time, holding on to legacy features like D-pads long past their sell-by date. So I love the idea of the Steam Controller. While the initial renders of it look kinda kooky, I’m excited. And yet: Do PC gamers want to move away from their mice and keyboards? Irrespective of the problems looming over the PC landscape and how they might be an issue for game makers down the tracks, don’t people who go out and buy gaming computers do so because they like to game on computers? Do they actually want to go console at all? Joypads have been available for PC forever yet haven’t ever really made the leap into being considered a part of the default spec. They still lack support in many games, and there’s a strong resistance to them from the pre-existing community. It simply believes M+K to be best, and for many types of game it is. And also: Do PC gamers want to move out of their bedrooms and into the communal living room? The guy who plays MMOs night after night in private doesn’t necessarily want to do that in shorter bursts on TV because his family wants to be able to watch Netflix. The quirky indie fan might prefer the experience of being absorbed in by a screen close to her face. Closer screens blot out the world more effectively than the at-a-distance feel of TV gaming. Admittedly that’s a somewhat archaic view of modern family life, yet one that still makes me ponder. While it is possible to cross-sell users from one platform to another (Apple and Nintendo do it all the time), with PC gamers there’s often a component of the deliberate choice. They have often played many a console game (such as the good folks at ) but ultimately decided they preferred computer gaming. They are the reason why gaming PCs boom as all other PCs fall. So I just don’t know that joypad gaming will ever be for them. Valve’s biggest asset is the legion of fans willing to give Gabe the benefit of the doubt. That’s no small thing. It’s other big asset is its methodical approach and willingness to keep driving at a problem until it’s solved. It did it with Steam, turning a much-hated e-commerce barrier into a thriving community over the course of half a decade. So while I may have questions over what the company has recently announced, I firmly believe that it will answer them in the long term. Steam Machine’s likely success comes down to the price of the consoles and the support of game makers. This is why perhaps the most interesting announcement from all of this week’s news was game streaming. You’ll be able to stream your Steam games to your SteamOS console under your TV and play them across your local network. Hopefully that won’t be as laggy as remote solutions like OnLive turned out to be. While customers might struggle to buy into the idea of a $900 console, they’d be much more amenable to a $100 Apple TV-sized streaming unit. I could, for example, see a partnership with folks like OUYA to develop a SteamOS player. I could see something similar for Android tablets, particularly if the Steam Controller could be made to work with those systems. Perhaps by doing something in that vein the company could get access to the living room without all the overhead. And then what about the actual PC? If Windows is slowly sunsetting that doesn’t necessarily mean that the PC form factor will go with it. The PC game player will still want a gaming computer to enjoy her MMOs in her bedroom. While SteamOS has been pitched as more for the living room than the desktop, why not also have a desktop edition? As for game support Valve has one big advantage that it’s not yet using well. Through efforts like Steam Greenlight Valve has brought its community into the publishing process, which has given many indies exposure. The missing piece, , is crowdfunding. There’s no good reason other than reticence why Steam isn’t essentially the Kickstarter of games (even more so than Kickstarter itself), and if it were then the resulting funds would encourage game makers to get on board with Steam Machine. If Valve could pin crowdfunding to its new console platform together then the sky could be the limit. However it remains to be seen whether the company is willing to take that step.
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Generation Touch Will Redraw Consumer Tech
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Contributor
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Ten years ago, young adults and those in their late teens were among the fastest and earliest adopters of new social networks — Friendster, Myspace, and ultimately Facebook — and many other products that define us today. So we should be looking to today’s generation, who people often refer to as Millennials, to predict how we will all live and connect 10+ years from now. This generation has grown up differently than everyone who came before it (including me). They have grown up in a world of constant mobile connectedness. They are as different from prior generations as were Baby Boomers who grew up with the first televisions, and earlier generations who grew up with the very first cars or electricity. They have never really known a world without Internet, mobile devices or social media. In the past decade alone, many of the fundamentals of technology have changed, and as a result, so has this generation’s priorities: I like to call this group “Generation Touch” or GenT. What excites me the most about GenT is how differently they think about the software and products they use. At 16, I couldn’t imagine anything greater than to finally borrow my parent’s car and drive to hang out with my friends. But to GenT, their freedom exists in the form of the Internet and their devices — and it’s the new consumer products we see growing quickly that embody these trends. This generation has very high expectations. They expect everything to work by touch. They assume no privacy by default, but also understand the intricate dynamics when they share something. They demand immediate response no matter where they are. They create more and more connections with other people — and they’re doing it in ways that can be hard for previous generations to understand. Touch is fundamentally important here. Generation T understands and anticipates gestures at a level beyond that which people who grew up with a mouse and keyboard expect. It’s apparent when you realize that the most popular and addictive apps that this generation uses have novel ways of using touch to create deeper connections. Vine or Instagram require a physical press and hold to start video capture, and a constant connection to keep capturing, broken and restarted as one releases and press again. Snapchat only shows a picture when you maintain direct contact with the screen during the fleeting moments before the snap expires. When you swipe right in Tinder (to signal you are interested in someone) you have already physically connected with that person by touching their face before you even get a response. Already I’ve heard “I’d swipe right for you” entering mainstream conversation. As we tap and swipe our screens, these visceral feelings radically change our connection with the software. If you are building anything new on mobile or tablet today, it is critical to think about gestures and how to enhance that connection in every way possible. GenT also exists in a world constantly connected, but — perhaps unsurprising to our generation — they often feel alone. Because of that, they have been gravitating to products that help them create true personal relationships and enabling “real talk”. The social networks they grew up with made it so easy to share anything with large groups that to GenT, they have started to feel more like popularity contests than communication utilities. So, how do they take a step back? How do they find the private, real, conversations in a noisy world of social sharing? It’s the third phase that comes after social: a technology that still lets GenT interact, but can also take them away from the noisy world that they’ve been living in. We’re seeing just the beginning of that third phase today. Myriad companies are building their products using strategies aimed at the GenT consumer. For example, in communication, the explosion of companies such as , , , , , , , and are evidence of the growing consumer demand for new forms of online communication — immediate, private, personal, and emotional. These technologies allow consumers the ability to express themselves through much more than just words but with stickers, pictures, selfies, video, and much more. What is most interesting (or perhaps is just normal) is that this generation is not adopting most tools used heavily by the generation before. They barely use email or instant messaging at all, and avoid SMS as much as they can since it still costs them money. As they get new smartphones, they get much more excited about downloading their new apps and setting up usernames than getting their new phone numbers. This is similar to 8-9 years ago when incoming college students were only excited about their new email addresses so they could finally sign up for their Facebook accounts. The companies that depend most on users actively using their email or IM accounts at the core of their networks — Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft/Windows Live, and even Google/Gmail — have already lost that part of the daily engagement of this generation. In order for them to be relevant 10 years from now, they need to be creating new products that capture this generation’s interest — starting with new forms of connecting with their friends and beyond, or defining new gestures to wrap around important experiences. Even current leaders like Facebook and Twitter are going to have to work hard to stay relevant in this new world. Tencent is a great example — not sure if you’ve realized, but Facebook isn’t the only company that just crossed $100 billion in market cap. Tencent has been a web mainstay in China with several massive communication networks. But today, it’s seen as through Wechat – a new mobile communication network that now has more than 400 million users worldwide. As an investor, I couldn’t be more excited about what is happening right now. I feel like so many existing experiences can be reinvented with the right simple gestures on mobile, and the needs and wants of Generation T are going to become the foundation of many massive companies of the future.
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The Harsh Realities Surrounding Mobile App Investing
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Semil Shah
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TechCrunch from True Ventures likes to say: “Mobile is the only under-hyped thing in tech.” I think he’s right. Yet, for mobile developers and mobile founders out there, an overheating iOS app ecosystem hamstrung by challenges makes for a tough , a game many technology investors have often decided is not worth the risk and prefer to wait and chase things that break through the wall. Investors need scale. However, of course, some mobile-first apps do continue to get funded out of the gate, and here’s how I briefly explain to others what those are. I wanted to write this for mobile entrepreneurs out there who are looking for investment, to give them one person’s view into how to read the tea leaves. (These aren’t data-driven facts, but rather observations I’ve made operating in iOS and concurrently being on the investing side evaluating them.) First, to set context, most “successes” on iOS tend to be in the gaming category. It makes sense. While the category itself is crowded, winners can and do emerge and will continue to do so. Gaming apps make up the majority of the apps available, as the store approaches the one-billion mark. So, if you’re a gaming app, you picked a great category, but so did many other competitors, just at a time when the leading gaming company is struggling in the public market and struggling to keep games fresh on mobile. Of the non-gaming apps that tend to do well, I’ve found they fall into one of three categories. One, they leverage the most important sensor on the phone: The camera. The iPhone 4 put an HD-like camera with a network in every user’s hands, and software developers found and continue to find creative ways to entice people to consider an alternative to the default camera. Instagram is the shining-light example here. Pictures have become a dominant mobile communication medium, and it’s early innings for digital images. Unfortunately, many others recognize this and many users do experience fatigue around another photosharing app, though FrontBack made something that started to break out again. The second type of app that tends to break out some type of network effect, usually around some type of messaging function that creates a better, more immersive experience than basic texting or iMessage. The network effect comes in when the new app becomes more useful as more of the people you know start using it. While there is a chicken-and-egg problem of getting people to onboard and engage, people do need to communicate, share pictures, and more, so a slew of new creative messaging apps were created and are outstanding. is the example, combining the camera effect with the network effect of messaging. Other new messaging platforms, like MessageMe, create a significantly better experience than iMessage and allow for fun picture communication, among other things. The third type of app that’s doing well and attracting investment dollars aggregates consumer demand via mobile and then — and this is key — pairs it with an offline service to fulfill the demand. Think of services like Postmates or Lyft, among many others — they use mobile audiences to generate demand and create a sort of marketplace for the fulfillment of that demand. Network effects kick in here, too. The real work for mobile developers here is in the design and value-proposition delivered to the customer, paired with the intense, operational logistics that must be sorted out behind the scenes. These types of businesses are currently possible in certain cities right now because of deeper structural changes in the labor market, which I’ve expanded on in detail . Finally, a way that mobile apps grow is because they piggy-back off the success, legacy, and awareness of a web or global brand. Everyone has the Amazon app because you became addicted to Amazon on the web. It’s easy for an app like that to spread. But, what does a new founder do to learn from this? Some founders will start on the web to iterate and build an audience as a means to mobile distribution, but not every startup can take on that task given the runway they have or technology defensibility in their plan. Given this framework, the key question for mobile developers to ask are: Does my app fit into one or more of these categories, and if so, how? If not, should I consider altering the product a bit to bend to it? Most apps will undergo this kind of scrutiny when under consideration, though most investors are looking for tend to be apps that have already broken out or are on the verge of it. In many ways, given the iOS App Store realities, it pays to sit back and wait and compete and pay-up than try to predict what can happen. The other hard question mobile developers have to ask is around . There are plenty of apps that receive attractive investment that don’t initially fit into this framework. In my limited experience, I’ve made these by trying to apply a formula as a test. I like to see the following ingredients: (1) a daily active use case, paired with (2) a technology delivered to a mobile form factor, and where the combination (3) creates a moat of defensibility around the investment, all other distribution risk factors known.
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VetCloud Hopes To Unlock The Dormant Data In Veterinary Clinics Around The World
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Darrell Etherington
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Unlocking the value hidden in data that has long gone unaggregated and unanalyzed is a hugely attractive proposition of big data and cloud-based SaaS startups, and newcomer is no exception. The startup was part of TechStars London, and while it’s targeting a very specific niche, it could hold the key to a problem that any government in the world would be happy to have help with. On the surface, VetCloud is simply a front-end replacement for veterinarian practice management, scheduling and CRM software. It’s cloud-based SaaS tool is a huge improvement over the kinds of software in use at most vet clinics around the world, which are often stuck in the 90s and not even Windows-based. VetCloud offers the chance to take vets into the 21st century, with actual calendaring and cloud-stored patient and client records for easy portability, retrieval and updating that doesn’t require access to an on-premise server. But the vision behind VetCloud is much bigger than just the practice management tools it offers. Records and info at vet clinics are still primarily siloed and unstructured, kept in paper files and offline records. By aggregating and analyzing the data entered via its cloud-based platform, the startup hopes to change that, and leverage the data it collects to be able to do things like identify shifts in pet health trends as they happen, or spot the next major livestock disease outbreak while there’s still time to control it. The big-data approach also helps with the bottom line by providing tools that can analyze a vet’s practice and give them suggestions about how best to make money, perhaps by suggesting partnerships with pet supply companies. “One of the problems that we see is that vets have always done business a certain way, and that way’s not making them money anymore,” explained VetCloud’s Sarah Cochcrane in an interview. More and more, vets are losing out to pet supply and food shops and clerks, who are bending the ear of pet owners and offering more advice about what products and brands to buy, resulting in fewer add-on service and sales opportunities for the actual professionals who spent years studying the medicine and science behind pet care. VetCloud’s founding team is based mostly in Serbia, where they’re working with government to roll out the product among practices in the country. In some markets, that’s going to be the best way for VetCloud to grow, according to CEO and co-founder Ivan Vesic, but others will require selling directly to vets and practice managers, which is what the startup is looking for funding to help it do. Initially, it’s going to focus on small and mixed animal clinics, with expansion to large animal practices planned for a little later down the road. Just as with EHR pushes in the U.S. and elsewhere, getting large-scale buy-in for this type of platform will be a challenge, but there are fewer privacy worries to contend with when compared to human medicine. And the benefits of being able to track drug interactions, treatment regimen effectiveness or disease spread across countless clinics nearly in real-time truly would be revolutionary for the veterinary industry.
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After Near-$1B Inventory Write-Down, BlackBerry Starts Selling Unlocked Smartphones Direct To U.S. Buyers
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Darrell Etherington
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Well that was quick: Not long after in its retail stores (but continue selling them online), the Canadian smartphone maker has revealed a new direct selling model that it likely hopes will shore up that retail channel loss. BlackBerry now offers unlocked Q10 and Z10 smartphones via its own site, for $549.00 and $449.00 respectively. Those may not be quite bargain basement prices, but they’re cheap enough compared to other unlocked flagship phones from manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Sony and HTC, and the move is almost certainly tied to BlackBerry’s n reported last quarter. The massive write-down was blamed almost entirely on poor performance of the Z10, the BlackBerry 10 flagship device launched last January by the beleaguered BlackBerry, and the first smartphone to be powered by its brand-new operating system. The Z10 was clearly not the rousing success its creators hoped it would be, and the write-down plus the $449 outright price now on offer via its site reflect the fact that there are probably tons of these things just sitting around burning precious and expensive warehouse space. BlackBerry’s decision to price the Q10 slightly higher might be due to a marginally better reception for the keyboard-sporting design. Having reviewed both devices, the by a wide margin, if only for basic advantages like longer battery life. While the pricing and U.S.-only availability of these unlocked devices doesn’t scream “fire sale” just yet, it is worth noting that this is a similar strategy to the one BlackBerry took (back when it was still RIM) , another big hardware miss for the company. Based on that example, if you’re looking for an unlocked GSM BlackBerry smartphone (unclear why you would be), it’s probably better to wait a little while and watch the company deeply discount both the Z10 and the Q10 in time for the holiday shopping season. There’s no sign of the Q5 in the direct sales channel just yet. And BlackBerry’s Z30, a new smartphone similar to the Z10 with a built-in bigger battery and larger, lower-pixel density display went on sale in many markets recently, so it also isn’t listed as one of the phones you can buy unlocked from BlackBerry. The company likely won’t have made the same mistake of producing lots of inventory for that device, given the Z10’s track record and the low-key launch it enjoyed, but it’s totally possible those could end up on BlackBerry’s virtual store shelves too, if that’s something you’re into.
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Peerby’s Local Lending App Is Ready To Help Neighbours Participate In The Sharing Economy
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Darrell Etherington
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You’ve got stuff, but not all the stuff you need. Dutch startup and first cohort member is hoping to unlock the use value of that stuff with a collaborative consumption model that features some crucial differences when compared to others who’ve tried to turn caring into sharing for neighbourhoods. On Peerby, which has already launched successfully and grown at a fairly rapid clip at home in the Netherlands, users post requests for items that they need from their surrounding community, rather than just offering up a list of available “inventory” based on what they owned and are willing to share, the way it works on other networks that have attempted similar things in the past like Neighborgoods and StreetLend. “We’re launched basically in the whole of Holland,” Peerby co-founder and CTO Eelke Boezeman told me in an interview. “And we’ve got about 15,000 members there. We also have an active community in other places including London, Berlin, Spain and New York. We don’t restrict it, and while we’ve focused on growth in Amsterdam, it’s growing organically elsewhere, too.” Peerby’s request-based system for local borrowing and lending has earned it fairly high success and engagement rates – the startup claims that over 80 percent of its requests are fulfilled by Peerby members within 30 minutes of their posting. They maintain that this is because on Peerby, you aren’t dependent on having to find what you’re looking for before you request it. In some ways, the model Peerby has chosen is similar to what Localmind did for local Q&A, with its crowdsourced software for community intelligence platform, which was acquired by Airbnb late last year. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/50021521 w=640] So how do you make money from something that is more successful the more it can encourage people to act somewhat altruistically and spend less money rather than more via sharing with their neighbours? Peerby sees multiple routes to revenue, including premium subscription plans for members who want more, possible rental mechanisms for high-value items, offering insurance coverage on things like cars, and group buying mechanics that can enable a whole community to go in together on something everyone in the neighbourhood needs. “We’re going to look at renting, because for a power drill, sure it just lies around and you might as well lend it out,” Boezeman said. “But if it’s your racing bike, that’s a different story. We’re also maybe looking at subscription. But the key thing is that when I joined Peerby, I never thought this would work. Now, every day we have 25 exchanges, and that’s for a system that people still definitely aren’t used to.” Peerby’s organic growth has helped it get to this point, but to grow further it needs to push more actively to expand its communities in London and other international destinations, and that’s what it’s currently seeking 600,000 EUR to accomplish. It may not be the first network based on the idea that borrowing from neighbours is better than buying things you’ll rarely used, but it may have the right timing and recipe to capitalize on the growing interest in collaborative consumption.
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“That’s The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard Of.”
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MG Siegler
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When Twitter last week about its forthcoming IPO, I got a bit . In 2006, when Twitter was entering the world as a side project of the podcasting startup , I had just left my first “career” in the film industry to try to make it in the tech industry. Web development was my day job at the time, but tech blogging became my passion. Twitter was one of the first things I really zeroed in on. Truth be told, I was actually a little late to the game. While I recall reading about Twitter in 2006 — with most everyone wondering if the service was — it wasn’t until January of 2007 when I actually signed up. tells me I was user number 652,193. Pretty early, but hardly early adopter-early by today’s standards. Still, I’d like to believe that I “got it” right away. A quick scan of my Gmail archive shows a barrage of recorded IM conversations with twitter@twitter.com in early 2007. This was actually the main interface I would use to Tweet: Google Talk. These were the most mundane updates possible. One example: “ “. I would actually Tweet things like that — . To no one in particular. I probably had two or three followers at the time. The Gmail scan also revealed a few other interesting Twitter tidbits from the era — including the company updates that used to be sent out every few weeks by Biz Stone himself. (I particularly liked the one from 2/20/07 when it was announced that the team was entertaining offers to sell Odeo while gearing up to head to SXSW — perhaps the first real for the company.) Another find was an email conversation with a friend trying to explain what Twitter was. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.” While that friend was not particularly well versed in tech and certainly wasn’t working in the industry, that was the common refrain I felt like I would hear (and read) over and over again in those early days. Twitter was stupid. And I was an idiot for liking Twitter. As time passed, the argument against Twitter . It was no longer “the dumbest thing” that “no one would ever use”, it became “ ” that “ “. Then came the downtime. The dark days. Twitter nearly fulfilled the fate that so many had laid out for it because it was simply unusable a not insignificant amount of any given day. And yet somehow, it emerged. And then it really started to gain steam. Of course then the knock on Twitter shifted again. Now it was the service that was “ “. The being thrown around were just , you see. Twitter was a house of cards. And yet, here we are. Twitter has not only endured, it has thrived. It’s a force in both politics and my old stomping ground, Hollywood. You can’t turn on a sports telecast without dozens of mentions of Twitter. Hell, you can barely turn on TV at all without it being . It’s the watercooler, the newsroom, and . have it bringing in a billion dollars in revenue next year. It has hundreds of millions of users. All of this makes me happy not because I was right — okay, that’s part of it. And it’s not because I got rich as a result — though I do technically now own some shares via an acquisition or two. The story of Twitter makes me happy because it’s the perfect example of a startup being scoffed at, beaten up, beaten down, underestimated, left for dead, and still emerging from the other end not only alive, but seemingly stronger from the journey. It’s very easy to get cynical in this business. Over the years, I’ve sat through hundreds, if not thousands, of pitches (both on the writing and investing side of things) that many people would have classified as “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.” Most of those startups would go on to be forgotten in time. But all you need is one, like Twitter, to catch fire, sparking a million new ideas as a result. All of the best new ideas sound stupid to most people at some point. This isn’t rocket science: if an idea is immediately obvious to so many people, it would have been done already. My point is simply that not only is hearing “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of” not a bad sign, it has the potential to be a great one. It was exactly six and a half years ago that I first wrote . Okay, I’m being liberal in my use of both “professional” and “article”, but at least my timing was good. What a wild ride. .
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Sarah Perez
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Facebook And Internet.org Detail “1000X” Technologies They Hope Will Bring Earth Online
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Josh Constine
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Air Traffic Control, HipHop, WebP, and Supplemental Downlink are some of the futuristic technologies that Facebook and its Internet.org partners will deploy to bring the Internet to the five billion people still not connected. A 70-page whitepaper by Internet.org partners Facebook, Qualcomm, and Ericsson details how spectrum must change to accommodate 1000 times more web traffic, and Facebook Home’s role as a data efficiency experiment. Last month Facebook, Qualcomm, and Ericsson along with Samsung, MediaTek, Nokia, and Opera , a partnership aimed at making the Internet accessible and affordable for everyone on the planet. At the time, it briefly discussed how network, data compression, and app efficiency technologies would all need to come together to make the web cheap enough to connect the whole world. Today, Facebook and Qualcomm went a step further with this detailed whitepaper that outlines specific accessibility technologies they’re already testing, and those they plan to build. Ericsson then provides some tips to the mobile industry for understanding what its customers really want. You can read the , or check out our embed below. Facebook was getting serious about accessibility initiatives long before the launch of Internet.org. As the company has grown from the $85 server it was first launched on, it’s searched for ways to make its service more efficient. It launched the HipHop translator for PHP years ago so employees could code in an easy language but have their work transformed into the much more server-efficient C++ language. This let it run 50% more traffic per server, but that wasn’t enough. It built and open-sourced the HipHop Virtual Machine execution engine and achieved a 500% increased in server throughput. Meanwhile, it launched the Open Compute Project to help everyone build greener servers and data centers, with a focus on cooling, power transformations and “a “vanity free” DIY server design. Open Compute technologies have made Facebook’s Luleå, Sweden data center one of the most efficient in the world. Facebook now houses 250 billion photos (that’s a quarter trillion — a new statistic), more than 250 petabytes of data, and takes in over a half petabyte of new data each day without stumbling. But what’s most newsworthy and fascinating about the whitepaper the deep look into how Facebook is currently experimenting with the future of data efficiency. To more easily test data efficiency and stability across the wide range of connection types found around the world, Facebook created Air Traffic Control. It’s a system designed “to help engineers simulate different network conditions right inside Facebook’s offices. Aspects that can be controlled include band- width, latency, packet loss, corrupted packets, and packet ordering.” Facebook explains that Air Traffic Control lets it test different mobile radio technologies like @G, EDGE, 3G, and 4G over wi-fi; simulate what it’s like using Facebook’s apps in the network conditions of countries like India, and see how different network capacity and congestion should as peak usage impact the user experience and data connections. Facebook is also transitioning in part to Google’s WebP efficient digital image format. Photos are the number one source of data usage on Facebook, and cutting this down could make it more profitable while allowing it to include some photos for people on a data budget. Facebook says “At this point, most of our images are converted into WebP for the Android application, and our goal is to roll out WebP to other platforms as well. When the images are converted to WebP, this will save over 20% of total network traffic, without loss of quality.” Though we’re scheduled to see more smartphones than features phones in the world in 2015, it will still take a long time to phase out everyone’s dumber devices. So Facebook has been focusing some of its accessibility development on Facebook For Every Phone, the stripped down app that runs on devices currently in the hands of many of the 5 billion it hopes to connect to the web. Since feature phones have severely limited processing power, Facebook has worked to handle as much computation as possible on server-side. It also has built Facebook For Every Phone to minimize transfers from the server and reuse as much cached content as possible. Facebook has also been using the Home ‘apperating system’ it launched on Android in April as Guinea pig cage for Internet.org-related technologies. While Home has failed to gain much traction and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was disappointed by that, at least it’s aiding Facebook with research and development of accessibility technology. For example, since Home tries to always have fresh photo content waiting in the lockscreen Cover Feed, Facebook worked to avoid silently running up a huge data bill for users. So Home detects whether a user is on a wifi or mobile connection and determines whether to pull down higher or lower resolution photos. When it discovers the device is connected to wifi, “Facebook begins aggressively prefetching and caching images. This means that a device builds up an inventory of photos that it can rely on when data is no longer plentiful.” Facebook also adjusts how frequently it fetches text-based data depending on a user’s connection. These improvements are already active in Home, and Facebook says they “are expected to be brought to other Facebook applications soon.” One day these technologies could let people in the developing world have a richer experience by only sucking in tons of data when it’s free over wifi. Facebook Home uses intelligent caching to avoid redundant image downloads, and supports exporting the cache to a removable SD card to free up space in a device’s internal memory. That could be a win for accessibility initiatives because many phones in the developing world come with very little internal memory. Home also puts a virtual cap on total data usage so that users don’t suddenly cost users a ton of money if they don’t realize they’re doing something data intensive. A similar cap could ensure developing world users still have data left for the most critical services like communication, and don’t blow it downloading a photo. Battery life could also be an accessibility issue, as some parts of the world don’t have easy, cheap, reliable access to electricity for charging. Since wifi uses less power than a mobile connection, it can help people around the world keep their phones from going dead. For now, avoiding background power over-use was a big priority for the launch of Facebook home. It tries to fetch News Feed stories from wifi whenever possible, and minimize “radio wakeups” by batching data pull-downs. Facebook explains that waking up a device’s network connection radio can burn .02% to 0.1% of a device’s total battery, even on devices running Ice Cream Sandwich or even newer operating systems. That’s why when it worked with HTC to build the HTC First “Facebook Phone” that comes pre-installed with home, it implemented shorter network time outs so the radio would go into power-saving stand-by mode more quickly. In other hardware innovation, Facebook worked with GPU vendors “to tune the workload so that the power draw kept the Application Processor in optimal power mode while not compromising the experience on the device.” For example, rather than GPU composing Chat Heads so the chat feature can run overlaid on other apps, the back-end hardware does the composition more efficiently Facebook also has a power measurement testing lab to experiment with power consumption in different situations. This lets it catch and expel regressions that would cause a device to fail to go to sleep properly. By working to make Home more data and battery efficient, Facebook is laying the groundwork for Internet.org to create a mobile ecosystem where everyone has a device with cheap data and plenty of power, no matter where they live or how much money they have. Later in the whitepaper, Qualcomm outlines what it calls the “1000X Challenge”. If data usage doubles every year, in a decade we’ll need the capacity to support 1000 times more traffic than today. Qualcomm is challenging itself to build the technologies necessary to achieve that capacity. Some of the innovations it’s quoted as working on include: Another crucial technology will be licensed “small cells” or low-powered radio access nodes with a range of about 10 meters. These can be integrated in wireless network and placed indoors to create a “hetnet” , or heterogrenous network of cells of different sizes. But the most important building block to succeeding in the 1000X Challenge will be a redistribution of wireless spectrum. The industry will need a ton more spectrum to accommodate the world. Qualcomm proposes that new bands be cleared and auctioned off for industry use. One band specifically that could be repurposed with the 3.5GHz band allocated to the U.S. Government. It could support small cells, but still have part of reserved for use by the government when needed. Ericsson concludes the whitepaper by citing a large survey regarding what people want out of wireless connectivity. It champions consistent Internet connection, fast speeds, and few crashes rolled into a service where the user doesn’t need to know anything about the cloud. While it could be years for the technologies described by Facebook and Qualcomm to trickle down to the unconnected corners of the earth, its important that they’re cranking on the development process now. If they run out of users to sign up become no one else can afford a data connection, their businesses will falter. But while the Internet.org mission does admit it’s trying to create more profitable mobile companies, it’s not what defines the project. Internet.org is powered by . With the knowledge brought by the Internet comes empowerment, compassion, and financial stability. Internet.org’s partners have yet to go into detail about exactly how those factors will boost the world economy and not just their own bottom lines. But the idea is that Internet access brings productivity that increases everyone’s output. If tech giants can focus on accessibility for everyone now, one day we might achieve a thriving, connected global society previous generations couldn’t dream of.
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Reddit Bans Search For Navy Yard Gunman
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Reddit has thus far kept its promise to ban amateur manhunts. The site , known as a subreddit, which attempted to crowdsource the search for the gunman who on Monday. The gunman has recently been identified, without Reddit’s help, as Aaron Alexis. During the Boston bombing last spring, a community of Redditers a missing Brown University student, Sunil Tripathi, as a suspect. Even though there was little evidence to Tripathi’s guilt, the popularity of Reddit’s vigilante theory managed to smear Tripathi’s name across major media outlets. Reddit General Manager Erik Martin eventually issued and decree that future subreddits would be banned. “We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch-hunt. We were wrong,” said Erik Martin, at the time. “The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive Internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different.” In an email to TechCrunch, Martin explained that the Reddit on the Naval Yard shooting was banned because: #1 It was a troll subreddit. #2 We banned it because it violated site rules by encouraging the posting of personal information. “NO PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT LEADS UNLESS YOU’RE REALLY SURE” (from sidebar). We don’t allow the posting of personal information under any circumstances. Martin also redirected us information on safety risks and missing-persons information related to the shooting. In the past, Reddit has become a . It appears Reddit wants to redirect the community’s energy toward more productive ends, harnessing its collective power for good.
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Secure Cellphone Maker GSMK Talks Cryptography In A Post-Snowden World
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John Biggs
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In a world where your every move is tracked, what would you pay for a secure cellphone? Dr. Björn Rupp is willing to bet it’s about $3,500. His company, builds cellphones that are secure from the ground up. Running a home-brew version of Android, they allow for completely secure, end-to-end communication with most, if not all, of the smartphone features the security-conscious crave. The trick? Both parties in the conversation have to have their own Cryptophones, making them like a sort of James Bondian walkie-talkie. I spoke with Rupp at his offices in Berlin where we sat behind his spy-proof, bulletproof glass windows and talked about the future of secure communications and how the Snowden affair affected sales of his pricey — if not important — cellphones. Björn Rupp: What we’ve been doing for 10 years now is secure communications in the broader sense. GSMK was the first, and still is the only company that offers defense-grade security on the commercial smartphones. So, we take a standard commercial smartphone hardware platform, and we replace in higher format. There is voice encryption, message encryption and secure storage. And we invested our work in making sure that the phone itself is secure: no mobile viruses, no SIM duplicate texts. Also, no remote operator updates that some operator somewhere wants to do an official authorized update, which unfortunately happens to steal all your data, et cetera. And so, that’s kind of what we do and what we have been doing for 10 years, and we have all these published source codes. You don’t have to trust us. You can verify on your own that the implementation, that the algorithms, are correct, that there are no back doors, which is of course always a concern in the industry. We figured rather than have suppliers trust us, we found it better to give them the ability to review on their own, have the experts review if its implementation is correct. BR: Not any smartphone, because if you want a hardened operating system, obviously, you need to have deep-level access to the OS. BR: The thing is you could provide application-level security in the form of a download. But the problem is that that would not meet the level of security that our customers would expect from us. The problem is even if you have an encrypted communication link using application-level security, a determined attacker would then not go for the encrypted link. He would say, “Okay, it’s encrypted, I can’t break it.” But the intrepid attacker will attack the phone itself. And I don’t have to tell you about how many Android exploits there are out there. So it’s easy, it’s really easy to explore the commercial smartphone and open the microphone. And then you can just get the audio from the microphone even before it is encrypted. That’s why we really put a lot of emphasis on the 360-degree security. Because otherwise, if you don’t provide that level of security, this hardened operating system, secure storage and so on, you’d create a false sense of security where people think, “Wow, great, I’m encrypted now.” But really, the determined adversary won’t care. He would attack the phone. It’s a proven scenario. You’ve seen that over and over again. Just like in the computer. What I always worry about when people are using P2P and think they are safe now. I think of human rights activists in certain areas. They feel very confident that they use email encryption. But what they often don’t realize is that their laptops aren’t just secured at all. And someone who has in their cross hairs, and these guys had just encrypted e-mails then probably it’s a huge people. They’ll just plant a Trojan or a virus or whatever on the device and then get the data form there. For our customers, whether they have this device or not can mean the difference between life and death in many cases. And so we don’t produce toys, but we produce tools. And we have to be able to stand behind that. The history of this company and the history of the people behind it is one of in-depth expertise in IT security. BR: No iOS, exactly. We’ve been working with Windows Mobile, Windows Phone since 2003. There was an offered platform and we had an agreement where we could actually use that. And now, the other obvious option is Android. Our phones look just like any Samsung Galaxy phone. But you can see that on top of the regular role of Android communication buttons, you have a second role, which includes the secure equivalent. Here you have messaging. You have secure messaging, secure calls and so on. So you have your complete secure compartment, password-protected of course, for entering encrypted calls, secure storage and so on. And we also have a few other nifty things like these new things. The baseband firewall constantly monitors what’s going on in the interface. So if someone here were trying to intercept us with an IMSI catcher, the phone would notice and tell you an unencrypted call is not recommended. And the phone will also detect active attacks against the baseband processor using over the air attacks. It’s cutting edge technology just to let you know that someone is actually attacking you. BR: Well, I mean I might not be the best guy to ask because my business does of course lead me to all kinds of interesting locations, but I have seen that often. BR: And when you’re near certain buildings, you can prove that there are people who are also interested in what is going on inside these buildings. BR: Yeah. Of course, given that these are the recent weeks, the focus has been on strategic surveillance by government agencies. But I’m actually surprised that no one’s really stressing how much tactical espionage is going on as well. I mean, there are other issues just because the stuff has become so cheap. When you look at 10-20 years ago, these IMSI catchers or interception equipment was so expensive that it was exclusively made for law enforcement agencies. Nowadays, you can build an interceptor on your own with a laptop, a cheap Motorola phone, and of course some knowledge. But hardware is no longer an issue; just a few thousand euros or dollars, you’re in the game. And that means that the technology has now reached the reach of regular criminals on the street. And of course, when you look at some of our bankers, our investment bankers, they have a multi-million-dollar transaction pending. They have potentially two choices. They either meet in London for discussing certain confidential aspects of the transaction, valuation, and due diligence and so on. Or they just use an encrypted phone because there have been documented cases where, of course, the temptation for the other side was just too high. BR: Well, I have broad range of clients of course ranging from government agencies, large corporates, all the way down to private individuals. And of course there are different motivations and different scenarios. When you look at banks, for instance, or energy companies where there’s also lots of competition in certain areas, there is an obvious business case. That’s easy to justify because these people know that they’re being bugged, either by their local counterparts or other interested parties. Whereas for private individuals, I guess the question is, what value do you put on your privacy? There might not be a clear-cut case where John Doe on dispute can put a number to that. But I think it really touches on the philosophical aspect in the basic foundations of our society. You should have constitutional rights to communicate for you as everyone else, something into that. In principle, everyone should be protected by the right, but recent events have shown that that is not always enforceable. So, protecting yourself against that by technological measures is one of it. In principle, that shouldn’t even be necessary. But unfortunately, it’s the same as email. You’d better encrypt your email even though many people don’t. That was a good idea. It’s a good question. And I think maybe what the recent events have shown us is that we’re just at the beginning of it. And we’re in this building in our society, how sensitive that matter really is. I mean, lots of people still post very private stuff on websites that they don’t even realize what the company is providing the services that they’re relying on. These are the full sharing or whatever, what they do with that. You can analyze photos, and I don’t have to tell you it’s possible. But I think that we’re just at the beginning of heightened awareness where people realize what the risk is by just taking their communication electronically. Up until recently, most people just saw it as reasonably safe and, yes, there is the occasional hacker and blah, blah, blah. For many people, there was implicit trust in the service provider, and I think that is — BR: Yeah. It’s not just the government, of course. I mean there is also economic motivation for many companies to mine your data and to do with that whatever maximizes their profits. Of course, again, the recent weeks have put a lot of focus on large-scale government surveillance and that’s obviously a huge problem because it touches the foundations of our free society. But there are many other aspects of the game that also should be looked at very carefully from my point of view. BR: Well, getting encrypted phone is never a bad idea, of course. But I guess from a very basic, simple step that everyone can take is just to think twice before you give out your data. Be sparse with your personal data whether that means leaving cookies all over the web. Or whether that means handing over all kinds of documents or other electronic materials to service providers where you might get some value out of it but you don’t realize what price you’re paying. There are easy steps to take like encrypt your emails. There is free software out there that allows you to do that. You can use to anonymize your browsing and so on and so on. But before you can even take these measures, just always think twice: “Do I really have to give out the data to someone? What are they likely going to do with it? Do they really need it? Do I want to provide the data to that company or to that agency or whatever?” There are many conscious choices that you can make that people just hadn’t thought about so far because they were not very sensitive about what the consequences of them are today. It’s all the modern intelligence support systems and data mining software. You can just combine all this data in so many ways that are just not foreseen by the average user or the average person on the street. BR: We’ve been in the business for 10 years now. But what we have seen over the last years, it’s definitely again just rising awareness. Even for a small or medium-sized enterprise that does business at certain countries abroad, you just think, “We need to encrypt the phone.” Assuming you have your top salesperson in Beijing and you discuss the best and final offer with the CEO back home here in Europe or in the U.S. or wherever you think “it might be a really good idea to not do that in the open.” I mean there were just too many of these companies that have noticed that their best and final offer was refused as a competitor comes in at just a few bucks cheaper. And so, we’ve seen lots of increase in these. BR: We’re active in over 50 countries worldwide, and it’s hard to say. Europe is our home market, but the U.S. is also a very important market for us for sure. We have a big presence there. Also in countries in Asia and other regions across the world, so it’s really hard to say. Of course, again, Europe and U.S.A. are important markets for us, but I wouldn’t say that per se, a specific region is more paranoid than another. Even though, of course, there is, as you’ve probably experienced on your own, there is let’s say a certain attitude towards data protection and privacy here, for instance, in Germany, that goes above what you would find in other countries. But still, privacy is a right that everyone would like to enjoy, no matter what country you’re in. It just maybe makes a difference how immediate you see the threat to that privacy being endangered. For instance, South America, we hardly have to do advertising because every couple of weeks, there is news that, “This official has been tapped. This industry executive has been tapped. And by the way, here are the juicy details of the latest phone call with the, blah, blah, blah.” So I mean, the people think they’re being tapped. BR: Not really. We’ve worked very hard to make sure that an encrypted call is just as easy to make as a normal call. But of course, if you want to enter into encryption, you need to have a partner with the other side that also has an encrypted phone. So you’ll still have people; your circle of friends, business partners, whatever will just only have a regular phone. And so, with these, you cannot make encrypted calls of course. BR: That appeared to be the case a few years ago. But as I explained, in the past few years, we’ve seen that propagate. Again, 10 years ago, it was large corporations. Now, it’s also small and medium enterprises. And we’ve just recently had people who are just doing business trips and just said, “We’ve had issues with security so I need these things.”
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iStoryTime Debuts A “Netflix For Ebooks” For Kids
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Sarah Perez
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If a startup called , then is the children’s alternative. One of the oldest players in the kids’ interactive e-books app market is (aka iStoryTime), a company founded in 2009 and backed by . The company has been steadily growing its collection of digital, interactive e-books and apps, now reaching some 200 different applications across all the major mobile app stores and digital book marketplaces. Recently, it made a move to consolidate access to its collection of stories in where parents can buy books a la carte, or, as of this month’s version 2.0 update, choose to engage with advertisers to earn book credits, or even subscribe to the entire collection. The company’s name alone may not ring a bell among parents, but there’s a good chance many have at least one of the iStoryTime apps installed on a mobile device somewhere. That’s because iStoryTime works with major studios to license content, including all of DreamWorks’ movies, plus content from Sony, PBS, Jim Henson, Cartoon Network, Mattel, and others. Its collection of apps and e-books offers a ton of recognizable kids’ brands, including Smurfs, Madagascar, How To Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, Ice Age, Barney, “The Croods”, and many others. Apps are available in iTunes, Amazon’s Appstore, Google Play, and Microsoft Surface’s app store, while e-books can be found on platforms like Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iBooks, and Amazon’s Kindle. Basically, it’s a good many of the kid-focused studio brands (which aren’t Disney), in every major mobile marketplace. “For a long time, we’ve been doing one app, one story,” explains iStoryTime co-founder Graham Farrar, who previously was a part of the founding team at Sonos. “Now we’ve launched our iStoryTime library as the second phase of our strategy – we’ve built the content library, now we’re building the distribution side,” he says. The one app, , includes all the company’s licensed titles under a single roof. It ships with four free titles (Madagascar, Ice Age, Smurfs and Robin Hood), and then offers up each additional interactive book for sale, priced on average at $3.00 for a full-length narrated book. Many of these books also include animated stills in addition to the narration – a feature now common to interactive e-book apps today. The company soft launched version 1.0 of the iStoryTime app a few months ago, with the option for parents to purchase books through the app’s included, but child-protected, in-app store. That’s actually a feature which makes iStoryTime stand out from a number of kids’ app makers, which far too often put the in-app upgrades in front of children’s eyes to their great dismay as parents continually tell them “ .” Instead, says Farrar, separating the kids’ side (the bookshelf) from the parents’ side (the store), offers a better experience for both sets of users. “The freemium business model is great, but there’s a lot of fatigue around every time the kid clicks something, they’ve got to pay for it,” he says. Children using the app see no ads or prompts to purchase, while parents can browse through the e-book selections in the store, receive alerts and notifications, and even preview the books before buying. In the recent version 2.0 update, iStoryTime introduced an interesting feature through a with TapJoy. Parents can optionally engage with advertisers behind the parental lock in order to gain points which can be applied to storybook purchases. For example, a parent may be asked to “like” Samsung on Facebook, watch a commercial, try out Hulu, get an insurance quote, and other activities, to earn these points. The points are transferred into the app’s wallet, and can then be used to buy books. Parents can also purchase books via standard in-app purchases or subscription-based payments, starting at $5/month, with discounts for buying in 6 or 12 months chunks in advance. Farrar declined to provide conversion metrics given the newness of this subscription option, but would say that the app has seen nearly half a million downloads in the three months since launch, and the titles are seeing 2 to 3 times more revenue than they see in iBooks. (Combined, the company’s titles have seen over 6 million downloads to date). Farrar admits that some of iStoryTime’s stories may be lacking in educational value, in terms of the lessons or morals provided, versus some of the company’s competitors. But, generally speaking, reading is still better than having kids playing video games or watching videos, he feels. We’ve tried a number of “edu-tainment” options in my household – most recently iStoryTime competitors and , as well as combination story/game apps , and others. And it continues to be a wonder every time my kid launches a simple narrated storybook over the more interactive and engaging content found in apps like or , for example. But it could be that she, and other kids, are drawn to the variety offered by library collections, while the story/games become tiresome upon repeated viewings. iStoryTime should compete well, if that’s the case, with some 50+ titles available at launch, and plans to grow by at least one more per week. Plus, iStoryTime’s already familiar characters should prove an added draw. Later this year, the plan is to introduce an “instructional” mode within the app which could help to add more educational elements to these now mainly entertainment-focused stories. That is, the app could pause the story to engage with the child, asking them how the character may be feeling, or augment the material with other content based on the . Interested parents can download the new iStoryTime for iOS app .
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The Uber App Now Lets You Tell Friends When You’ll Get There With A Live ETA Map
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Matthew Panzarino
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The Uber and, presumably, is today getting a couple of new features centered around estimated times of arrival. The app now lets you share your ETA with contacts from the app, letting them know exactly when you’ll arrive. The app also lets you text a live map of your trip to your contacts, letting them check in on you to see where you are in relation to your destination. Another new option lets you plug in your destination to get an estimate of how long it will take Uber to get you where you need to go. The convenience factors here are nice, for sure, but there are some interesting things to consider about the data being gathered and how it might be used. One intriguing possibility here is that if Uber has no doubt been gathering data on ETAs and such from one location to another in a city. Obviously, the company knows exactly when a trip begins and ends. Doing so may be able to help it generate a strong map of inner-city traffic, data that would parallel that which is , the mapping company recently . This update is the first time that Uber is making an effort to expose that data to users directly by telling them how long it will take them to get to a location and sharing that data out to others. That data could also be used to create overall maps of how city traffic and cab traffic ebb and flow. If you factor in thousands of rides a month over a year, that’s a lot of data with a very unique collection vector. The flow of traffic from point-to-point in urban centers follows a completely different pattern than those of cars coming from outside the city or even those going from one location to another. This isn’t “garage to parking spot” traffic, in other words; this is “place to place.” In fact, Uber already does do some other things with this data, including in cities . Perhaps that’s why they have a on staff. Anyhow, the app updates are rolling out today, but the data part of it is more interesting. We’ll have to stay tuned to see how Uber or its partners use the information down the road. And, of course, every ETA map shared acts as a nice little person-to-person advertisement for Uber.
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With New File Preview And Mobile Experiences, Box Highlights Recent Acquisitions
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Anthony Ha
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showed off new versions of its file preview feature and iOS apps at its BoxWorks conference this morning. In doing so, it was also highlighting what recent acquisitions have brought to the company. The new preview, for example, was built on HTML5 document-viewing technology from Crocodoc, which earlier this year, and it was demonstrated by Crocodoc’s Ryan Damico, who is now Box’s director of platform. In terms of how the file-preview experience has changed, there are a number of new features, including the ability to copy-and-paste text directly from the document, but a big emphasis appears to be on the UI and performance — Damico said it was “redesigned from the ground up.” To illustrate what the new file preview is capable of, Damico opened what he claimed was the longest PDF that he could find on the web, the 750-page SharePoint deployment guide, as well as a PDF with 50 custom fonts. Both opened without any delays or apparent rendering issues. Meanwhile, the new iPhone and iPad apps were built with technology from French file storage startup earlier this year. (In fact, both deals were announced in May) and demonstrated by Folders’ Martin Destagnol. Again, performance was a big focus — even thought the Wi-Fi was as spotty as conference WiFI usually is, Destagnol was able to swipe through multiple high resolution photos with delays of only a few seconds. He also pointed to new support for PowerPoint, which apparently doesn’t suffer from the usual bugs that occur when you try to open a PowerPoint presentation on an iOS device. Both of these new features should go live later this year, the company says. During the press Q&A after the keynote, CEO Aaron Levie was asked about these acquisitions and how he looks at “build vs. buy” decisions. “Philosophically, we’re very oriented around building,” he said — that’s the best way to build “deeper” experiences. He added that Box has 160 or 170 engineers working on its platform. At the same time, he said there are companies with teams and technologies that can “extend us further on our core efforts,” and both Crocodoc and Folders are “quintessential examples” of this. Levie noted that at the time of the acquisition, Crocodoc provided its document viewing technology to around 100 partners, and he said Box will continue to work with those partners — though he (jokingly) guessed that Dropbox won’t be among them for much longer. During the keynote, Box also announced and .
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Keen On… The NSA: Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Our Secrets?
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Andrew Keen
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Best-selling author is one of the world’s leading authorities on the NSA. At Disrupt SF 2013, he spoke on a great about online security, and afterwards I had the good fortune to interview him. So can we trust Silicon Valley with our secrets, I asked Bamford. Given the NSA’s seemingly infinite appetite to watch and read everything we do online, can we trust the big technology companies to stand up to the snoops? His response wasn’t particularly reassuring. Once we can develop quantum cryptology, he said, then perhaps our secrets will be safe online. But that technology lies in the future, and so Bamford feels that the best way to control the NSA is through politics rather than technology. “The political will” to manage the NSA is now greater than it’s been in the last 30 years, he said. So, for Bamford at least, the real battles over online privacy will be fought in Washington, D.C., rather than in Silicon Valley. And what about Edward Snowden, I asked Bamford. Traitor or hero?
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Box Will Add Metadata To Give More Context To Cloud Documents
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Anthony Ha
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announced onstage at its BoxWorks conference that it will be making the documents stored in its cloud storage system smarter, thanks to upcoming support for metadata. At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal (at least if you’re like me and find the word “metadata” to be inherently off-putting) but Chris Yeh, the company’s senior vice president of product and platform, said this is actually “the most important change” to the Box platform in quite some time. That’s because Box documents can now include more context than just a file name and date stamp. It will also allow companies and products using Box documents to create workflows around that metadata. Ted Blosser from Box’s platform team rattled off a number of examples to show how metadata can enrich a document. With an insurance claim, companies could add the claim number, the policy number, and the status. With a legal document, they could add plaintiff details. And all of that metadata is then searchable. To show off one of the more meaningful ways that metadata can enrich a document, Box brought Toyota’s Greg Cannan onstage, where he argued that “cars are becoming more and more sophisticated but the manuals aren’t.” Cannan predicted that if the manual keeps getting thicker, it will no longer fit into a car’s glove compartment. One solution: Bringing the manual to mobile devices. So Box showed off an instructional mobile app that was built on top of documents and metadata stored on its platform. With the app, it was easy to look up how to pair a Bluetooth device with the car, and then with a simple edit Blosser was able to change the image used in those instructions from a red interior to a tan interior. This functionality will be available in the Box UI and its API early next year, Yeh said. During the press Q&A, one of the reporters suggested that many users don’t know what kind of additional metadata they might want to add. Levie responded that for now, this is really designed for companies that already know what kind of metadata would be useful and they’d otherwise have to build separate systems to add it. Over time, he said he wants to add “more innovative ways of expressing what’s in the document,” for example by automatically extracting information from a document populating relevant metadata fields. During the BoxWorks keynote, the company also announced and showed off upcoming document preview and mobile experiences (which I’ll cover in my next post).
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SlideIdea Adds Interactivity, Polls & Feedback To Boring Presentations
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Sarah Perez
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A small, Shanghai-based startup called made its official debut at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley this past week, with a new take on presentation tools built for iPad first. Though this space is rife with competitors, including not only Apple’s own Keynote app, as well as , , , and others, what makes SlideIdea interesting is its “smart widget” platform, which lets users add interactive elements to presentations in order to better engage and solicit feedback from the audience. Like many of the existing presentation apps out there, SlideIdea makes it easy to create slides directly on the iPad. In this case, the app’s so-called smart widgets speed up the process of slide-building by allowing you to quickly add text, shapes, charts and other interactive functions, and drag them around on the screen, resize them with gestures, and more. “For instance, you could simply slide up a bar chart, edit the numbers, and the chart will be created,” explains Isaac Wagh, SlideIdea’s marketing lead, who spoke to TechCrunch on behalf of founder Jason Li (for whom English is a second language). “Whereas if you used a normal program, you’d have to start with a spreadsheet and go from there,” he adds. The more interesting element to SlideIdea’s smart widgets is the set of interactive elements that can be added to the presentations. Included at launch are tools for polling the audience via a voting widget, support for messaging, feedback tools that involve animations, and a game. Called “Lucky,” the game lets the presenter shuffle through and choose a winner from the audience of logged-in users — great for handling a raffle at the end of a talk, for example. The way all this works is that for each presentation created, there’s also an accompanying short URL (e.g. sld.im/12345) provided. You can share this link with viewers however you choose, and by clicking through, the audience can access the presentation online, leave comments, submit feedback, answer questions, and more from smartphone, tablet or PC. Wagh says the plan is to turn the smart widget platform into more of a marketplace in the future, where others can offer various smart widgets for sale, such as those specific to particular industries, perhaps. This will be one part of the startup’s monetization efforts, while the other will be a subscription-based service targeting schools and enterprise. For the latter, additional security and privacy tools will be included, along with collaboration support, more cloud storage, and potentially a different or expanded set of widgets. SlideIdea was founded in March 2012 by Li, whose I.T. background and history of guest speaking prompted him to design this service, as it’s something he wanted for himself. Since then, the company has grown to a team of over a dozen, all based in Shanghai. Already, there are a few schools in the area using the platform, following beta tests among some 100 early adopters, mainly teachers. Today, SlideIdea is offered for free, and there’s no cap on cloud storage. However, the introduction of premium plans in the future may cause that to change. The app quietly launched on the iTunes App Store last month ahead of September’s public debut at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley. As noted above, SlideIdea will go up against a number of challengers, including Apple’s Keynote, and not to mention industry giant PowerPoint and other office apps. But the company is planning to reach all the major platforms, including Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone 8, making it more of cross-platform tool. (Being based in the world’s smartphone market doesn’t hurt, either.) Currently, SlideIdea is entirely bootstrapped and available for and . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO8QnlT5ySw?feature=player_detailpage]
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Ginger Software Adds Sentence Rephraser To Android Proofreading Keyboard To Reword Your Written English
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Natasha Lomas
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If you’re already worried that journalists are writing for robots, it’s time to press the panic button: here’s an algorithm that can apparently rewrite journalists. Israeli natural language processing (NLP) technology startup , which makes , has added a new feature to its software that rewords entire sentences. It’s claiming this “contextual rephrasing tool” sets it apart from the NLP competition in both the mobile and desktop space. Ginger Software, which was founded in 2008 and has raised $20 million in venture capital, was previously focused on providing proofreading tools for Microsoft Office and browsers but says it is increasingly shifting its focus to mobile. The new keyboard feature, called Sentence Rephraser, draws on Ginger’s NLP platform to rejig sentences to ensure they are grammatically correct, eschew errors and misused words, and use appropriate idioms and local expressions. Or so they claim. To avoid ironing out (all) individual writing quirks — and churning out identikit robo-writing — the software is also apparently designed to adapt to the user’s own way of speaking over time, adopting the proper names he/she uses and even taking on board some of their slang to ensure that at least some of the writer’s voice shines through. “Sentence Rephraser analyzes text sentence by sentence to identify more linguistically stylized, enhanced ways of getting the original message across,” says CEO and founder Yael Karov. “Enhancement here means that Sentence Rephraser adds synonyms, idioms and missing words to enrich the text, thereby adding more depth to the original message and optimizing communication.” How does the rephraser feature work exactly? Ginger’s NLP platform draws on an index of more than 1.5 trillion sentences to identify phrases that “have similar context” to the user’s original text, explains Karov. “It then presents the most prevalent phrases to the user as options for rewriting the text.” The new feature is fully integrated with Ginger’s previous , and can be used in either a live ‘as you type’ mode, for on the fly enhancements, or via a review mode once users have finished composing their text — if he or she wants to feel a little more in control of their own writing. Isn’t this feature at risk of being a bit annoying — a la Microsoft’s old Clippy Word assistant, which was perpetually noticing you were writing a letter and trying to reword it? Not so, says Karov, stressing that the keyboard’s UX has been designed to prioritise preserving the user’s “natural workflow”. “Although Ginger identifies corrections and enhanced phrasing while users are actually typing, execution is without auto-correction so that users can focus on their writing,” she says. “Specifically with the rephrase functionality, users are alerted to enhanced suggestions only when the ‘Rephrase’ button becomes highlighted (which happens live, as the user is typing). “Suggestions are presented only after users opt to receive them by tapping the highlighted ‘Rephrase’ button. This enables users to access the tool only when it is convenient to them, when they are interested in receiving suggestions for enhanced phrasing.” In other words, it’s not as in-your-face as Clippy, which can only a good thing. If algorithms are going to be rewriting humans, at very least they can do so courteously — without rubbing it in our faces. Ginger reckons the Rephraser feature will appeal to “anyone who writes English on their mobile device” — non-native English speakers are an obvious target but equally she believes it can be a useful tool for anyone who wants to speed up the business of typing on a touchscreen. In other words, write like a stroppy teenager and let the keyboard convert your street slang to the Queen’s English. Except… language is a fantastically complex beast. Which is a good thing for those of us who earn a living by (re)arranging words. So with that in mind I decided a quick test was in order. How well did the Sentence Rephraser fare at rewording sentences? Not very well, in truth. Accepting its suggestions on your English assignment would also likely have you pulled in by the teacher for plagiarism. For example, when I wrote the phrase “quickly come to” it stepped in and suggested the following trio of increasingly bizarre alternative phrases — all of which are a huge leap on from the original sentence (intended to be something colloquial like ‘quickly come to the meeting — it’s starting now’): In matching a few inputted keywords to its sentence database Ginger’s algorithm is taking a big logic leap by anticipating where the sentence is actually going, and also generating some very formal-sounding suggestions — which can also steer the sentence logic way off course. In the above example it was nowhere near my intended sense. And while formality might be fine in certain contexts, it feels hopelessly tone-deaf in the mobile context of sending a quick SMS or Facebook Message. I mean rotary? Really? After that episode, the keyboard stopped offering any enhancement suggestions — so it was either malfunctioning, or couldn’t come up with any plausible alternatives to the text I was inputting. It would appear that humans who make a living wrangling words aren’t about to be put out of business by Ginger’s Sentence Rephraser. Not yet anyway. But then, when it comes to good writing/writing good, even an algorithm has to start somewhere — so presumably this feature is only going to get better. Version 3.0 of Ginger’s keyboard software for Android can be .
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Hands-On With The botObjects ProDesk3D
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John Biggs
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After months of speculation and quite a bit of skepticism, we’re pleased to report that the is real, it works, and it really does print in color. How, exactly, is still under question – we weren’t given direct access to the innards of the machine – but we saw it working with our own eyes. Videographer Steve Long went to a meeting with the company where he reported that the body is four inches wider than the . It has an aluminum body and two print heads, hidden by a plate, that can print 25 micro layer thickness. When the printer changes color it moves the head to the side and purges the old color and brings in a new one. “Print head will in a single layer print out all parts of a certain color on that particular layer – green, for example- then purge, and go on to the next color and fill in the rest, etc,” he said. “When I arrived at the location the ProDesk 3D was already in action printing a nautical shell + gear design. The final product you see atop the device in the shot with the orange cover. The print head has a specific noise (almost like a standard paper printer). Part of the noise is due to the speed the head moves along the X & Y axis. It was very agile and quick. I was able to see one colored layer at the base and the printer was working on the second as I was taking photo stills,” said Long. It will have Mac and Windows apps when it launches and the firmware is configurable so you can set the base leveling routine and control the fan speed. They don’t yet have a community site per se, but they’re thinking of bringing in a community manager eventually. Why is the company so camera shy? We’re not exactly sure. But Martin Warner, co-founder, suggested that their plans were once compromised by a journalist sneaking into their development center with a video camera up his sleeve. Whether this is some Münchausen-esque PR antics or the real deal we’re not certain, but we are certain that this thing works.
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Luma For iPad Is A Personalized TV Guide For Streaming Video…With A Few New Tricks
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Sarah Perez
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Movie and TV recommendations app has been working to solve the “what to watch” problem for years. The company first launched as Inveni.com, a free web service backed by nearly $2 million in founder and , which helped users create their own “taste profiles” in order to serve up streaming video recommendations. Now the same technology that Inveni once used forms the basis for , a newly launched iPad app that connects users to their favorite shows on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Max Go, iTunes, Crackle, and other TV channels. The result is a personalized TV guide where, instead of titles and times, you’re offered lists of shows you’ll love, and options as to all the various places you can currently view them. The Minneapolis-based company was founded by former W3i co-founder Aaron Weber, who explains he’s long been interested in personalization technologies. According to the company’s own internal data, it was taking users on average eight minutes to decide what to watch. “We thought that was ridiculous and there were no tools to actually solve this problem,” he says. “So we’ve spent the last three years working with engineers and creating all these different solutions to the problem.” When Inveni was first getting off the ground, the personalization problems around TV and movie recommendations were only just being addressed. Netflix, for example, offered to a team of engineers who could improve its algorithm by 10 percent. “When I looked at [the Netflix prize] and what people were doing, as an entrepreneur, it became clear that this was not an engineering / science-type problem that needed to be solved. This was a data problem,” says Weber. To improve recommendations, a company really needs more user preference data, he explains. But more importantly, what made Inveni, and now Luma.tv, different is that it does object-to-object recommendations via crowdsourcing techniques rather than pure algorithms. What that means is that Luma.tv asks workers on a large crowdsourcing platform to manually match up a movie or TV title with other, similar shows or films that a user who liked that title may also like. More crowdsourcers then go in behind those initial recommendations to refine the data. The exact details of the crowdsourcing process are something of Luma’s secret sauce, and the company has filed for a patent on the techniques involved. “We found that algorithms doing the mapping, or movie genomes – they get you close, but it’s subjective. This is art,” Weber claims. “The crowdsourced group is helping us by confirming things are similar and also by making the connections themselves.” Today, Luma has around 300 movie experts matching up movies and shows, who have mapped out almost 600,000 connections between items. Algorithms then fill in the long tail, making about 11 million metadata connections. While Inveni once targeted users streaming videos on the web, Luma is a rethinking of the problem for the multi-platform, mobile-first era. Currently, the iPad app connects users to the other services they have, and in some cases, pay for, like Netflix or HBO, so they can go from Luma directly to the app in question and start watching the show. But in about a month’s time, the company plans to add live TV into the mix as well, through integration of APIs from cable and satellite partners (like Direct TV), and connections to other platforms, like Google TV. The company plans to talk with Dish and Tivo as well, and says supporting Chromecast on the forthcoming web version of the Luma service is also something that’s now on the radar. In addition to its crowdsourced-backed technologies, Luma wants to also offer different types of viewing suggestions that haven’t yet been seen before, like the ability to offer , for example. That means it could change its recommendations based on whether you were looking for shows to watch with the family versus watching alone by combining taste profiles. At launch, Luma.tv offers access to over a dozen different video sources, but expects to reach about 40 by year-end. Though the underlying technology differs here, the startup broadly competes with others in this space, including , , , (Fanhattan), and more. Eventually, Luma.tv hopes to monetize through promoted content within the app, but in the near-term will likely first offer users tools to help them preview and compare streaming services like Amazon’s Prime Instant Video, Netflix and others, then earn affiliate income when users sign up. The Luma.tv app is a .
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Google Analytics To End Support For IE8 By Year’s End
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Frederic Lardinois
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, which launched in 2009, isn’t exactly a modern browser by any standards and it’s slowly turning into the new . Google stopped supporting Google Apps on IE8 , and today, the company that Google Analytics will also stop supporting it by the end of the year. The Google Analytics team says it made the decision because it wants to be able to “accelerate the pace at which we can innovate new product features” and to “facilitate adoption of newer web technologies in the design of the Google Analytics product.” It’s worth noting that Analytics will continue to measure traffic from IE8. , IE8 currently has a worldwide market share of just over 8 percent. The most recent version, IE10, now commands just over 11 percent of the total browser market, while IE9 is just being used by 5 percent of Internet users (in North America, the numbers are a little bit higher). While IE8’s usage stats are pointing down, it’s been a very slow trend (much slower than the adoption of IE10 over IE9). Just a year ago, IE8 was still at over 13.5 percent in StatCounter’s rankings. Because Windows XP users can’t upgrade to anything above IE8, we’ll likely see it it in the rankings for quite a while longer, too. Google, of course, has long been a proponent of modern web standards, and it said its main reason for launching Chrome was to push web development forward. Old browsers, however, simply don’t support the features that modern web apps need in order to provide the kind of desktop-like experience Google and other developers want to achieve.
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Wearable Baby Monitor Developer Sproutling Raises $2.6M From First Round And Others To Raise Parenting IQ
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Leena Rao
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Wearables aren’t just for adults anymore. There’s a new crop of startups hoping to give parents peace of mind and deliver more insights about young children and their sleeping patterns through wearable devices for babies. , a new startup coming out of stealth today, is hoping to raise parenting IQs through a new wearable baby monitor that not only answers the question: ”Is my baby okay?” but also leverages the multitude of sensor data to deliver insights about babies’ sleep patterns and more. The startup, which is a graduate of hardware incubator , is also announcing $2.6 million in funding from First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Accelerator Ventures, Lemnos Labs, BoxGroup (David Tisch) and Shawn Fanning. Sproutling says that many of the current baby monitors sold are poorly designed with no alerts if the baby is in distress, no real data, and more. Sproutling’s offering comes with a small kidney-shaped wearable, Bluetooth-enabled device, that slips onto a baby’s ankle, a base station, a small camera and a companion app for your mobile phone. The device will not only alert you if your child stops breathing, but will track the child’s heart rate, ambient light level, temperature of the room and of the baby, and more. You access all the information on your phone — and the app will send you an alert in case there are any warning signs with the baby. Part of tracking the other data besides breathing, such as sleep, is designed to help parents optimize sleep for their children and detect patterns to help children sleep more soundly (i.e. ideal temperature, timing and more). There are features of the app that are parent friendly such as the ability to see the video feed clearly even if you aren’t wearing your contacts. In terms of design, the actual wearable and camera were designed by the same designers who created the infamous Rolls Royce of strollers, the Bugaboo. The startup is still in its early days, however, and will likely not ship the system until Q2 of next year. Co-founder Chris Bruce tells us that the vision for Sproutling is to create a variety of devices and services that help use data to raise parenting IQ. This baby monitor is just the first of a number of smart devices that will be developed. As a relatively new parent myself, I would have loved to be able to use some of the data from a wearable to help determine optimal sleep patterns for my child. I’m not sure if it would have helped my daughter sleep through the night earlier in her development, but to me as a fledgling parent, knowledge is power.
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PushPage Raises $1.7 Million For Its Q&A-Style Personal Homepage Platform
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Sarah Perez
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Cambridge-based is launching its personal homepage and Q&A platform today, backed by $1.7 million in seed funding. The product, live now on both web and , offers users an online presence where they can publicize their likes and interests through a series of interview-like questions PushPage provides, as opposed to the sorts of community-based questions you would see over on a site like Ask.fm, for example. The end result are personal homepages that are a bit more professional in nature than the likes of Ask.fm, or its Q&A predecessor, Formspring. While those sites tend to appeal to younger demographics — and often school-aged kids gossiping anonymously about their friends — PushPage, then, is the grown-ups’ alternative. The company was founded in mid-2011 by Harvard grad (and former Facebook intern) Meir Lakhovsky and Cornell grad Jared Jaffe. Lakhovsky explains they were inspired to create PushPage because they realized that even among a group of their friends and co-workers, they really didn’t know very much about each other. “Meanwhile, when you pick up a U.S. Weekly or Rolling Stone, you can read a piece on Selena Gomez and learn everything about her from her favorite restaurants, TV shows, and outfits to her funniest moments, biggest passions, quirks, pet peeves and more,” says Lakhovsky. “We wanted to bring that idea of a celeb-style rapid fire interview to our friends and peers, as these answers are interesting and spark new conversations.” The service is now in beta, and already has seen over 5,000 people creating PushPages on the platform, answering questions about their interests, hobbies, recommendations and tastes. When users first sign up, they’re asked several questions to get started, some more practical than others. For instance, you may be asked about your favorite restaurant, TV show or song, or “something interesting about you most people don’t know?,” if you want to dive a little deeper. To keep the content fresh, users are sent a new question to answer each week. On the site, you can also browse friends’ pages and see . And you can answer questions or find and add friends . The founders see PushPage as a way for celebrities and other notable people to reach out to their fans (e.g. see author , TV personality , musicians , etc.), but also as a way for members in closed communities to get to know each other better. While anyone today can create a PushPage for free, private-labeled versions are available for companies, schools, fraternities or sororities, non-profits, and other organizations. Small “PushPage Communities” up to 15 people are free, then pricing starts at $60/month for small-to-medium sized organizations. By adding a few links to your bio, the site can serve as an alternative to other personal “about page” providers like About.me or Flavors.me, but it seems that, more often than not, it’s being used as a complement to those sites, or other more robust homepages. Still, the idea is very reminiscent of platforms we’ve seen before, and the startup will have to work hard to carve out its own niche in what’s now a busy space. Investors in the startup’s seed round include: Rose Park Advisors, Bob Pittman (CEO Clear Channel, founder MTV), Irving Azoff (former CEO/chairman Live Nation), Scott Sperling (President THL Partners), Lance Kalish and Ido Leffler (YesToCarrots founders), John Kim (founder, DirectDigital), Howard Wolk (president Cross Country Group) and Meridian Capital.
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Bump Mobile Contact Sharing App Acquired By Google, Will Stay Alive For Now
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Josh Constine
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After raising nearly $20 million and becoming one of the most downloaded mobile apps but failing to find real revenue, Bump Technologies has been acquired by Google. Its namesake app Bump lets you physically tap phones together to share contact info and more, and it will stay open for download. Congratulations might not be the right word, but Bump could have a bright future at the Googleplex. Bump’s David Lieb writes “We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms. So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google.” It appears that the whole 25-person team including Lieb and fellow co-founder Andy Huibers will be coming aboard at the search giant. Bump and the it released last year “will continue to work as they always have for now; stay tuned for future updates.” The blog post doesn’t mention what will happen to the Bump Pay app the startup built on top of PayPal that lets users make peer-to-peer mobile payments by knocking fists. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, so it’s hard to tell exactly how strong of an exit this was for Bump and Y Combinator, Sequoia Captial, Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and many angels. : Sources familiar with the deal say the acquisition was definitely not a home run for Bump, but that it was no acquihire either as we suspected. They didn’t specify an exact sale price but pegged the deal in the ballpark of $35 million. That would be modest premium on Bump’s $19.9 million in funding but not a glowing multiple VC would want to brag to their LPs about.] Bump gained huge popularity by being an early App Store hit. Instead of having to clumsily type out a new friend or professional colleague’s contact information, you and someone else could both open Bump, bump fists together while holding your phones, and the contact info, photos, audio, video, or other selected files would be shared between you instantly. As of March it had hit 1 billion photos shared and 125 million downloads, up from 100 million in August. With time, though, other ways to quickly share contact information emerged. Meanwhile, Bump remained free and wasn’t earning any meaningful revenue so paying its strong mobile engineering team may have burned through the $16.5 million round led by Andreessen that the startup raised in November 2011. Then Apple dropped a bomb on Bump. It announced a new feature called that would make sharing files between nearby phone a native feature. That could have curtailed Bump’s steady growth. It was time for Bump to throw in the towel. Based on these factors, the acquisition may have been more lucrative than a basic acquihire, but not big enough to be considered a home run. From one perspective, the sale might be considered a failure. Bump could have minted if it found a way to monetize its huge user base, but couldn’t find a way to go it alone and so instead folded into a tech giant. From a different perspective, Bump’s soft landing could be said to have kept investors from losing money while giving its team an opportunity for greater impact thanks to Google’s resources. What may have interested Google actually isn’t Bump itself, but . The app uses geolocation to determine which of your Facebook friends you’re nearby, and then offers to create a collaborative photo album with them that includes all the shots any of you took at that party, concert, or day in the park. The idea is that your friends might not broadcast all those photos to social media, but you’d still want to see them as you all shared the experience together. The was to strip as much out of the photo sharing process as possible to make it seem almost automatic. Google might look to turn Flock into a part of Google+ as a way to simultaneously compete with Facebook’s photo sharing and Dropbox’s photo saving services. was a pioneer in collaborative photo sharing centered around events, but the late-comer social network has still failed to gain serious engagement. , making it more dire for Google to get deeper into the space. The acquisition also scores Google that it could use to help nearby devices sync up. These include an app noticing that sensors on two devices share similar readings to determine that they’re in proximity. Google could use these patents to improve Android and create richer alternatives to near-field communication (NFC). With Bump and Flock’s features combined with Google’s built in-audience, the ideals of the startup embodied could make a bigger impact without having to generate revenue directly.
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The Danger And Opportunity Of The Intermediate Metric
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Contributor
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Are social media companies overvalued? The question is not just a matter of revenue multiples (low or high), but rather whether that revenue is actually generating new sales for advertisers. Google convinced the world to believe in the click, Facebook has done the same with the Like, Twitter with the follower, and Pinterest is planning on unveiling the same with the Pin. Creating these “intermediate” metrics between impression and ultimate purchase is a great move to boost revenue, but must stand up to scrutiny as software eats the marketing funnel. For startups seeking to build a valuable advertising business, creating an intermediate metric is crucial, but so is ensuring that that metric holds up to scrutiny. Let’s rewind a bit, though. Without commerce, without transactions, there would be no advertising. The point of an advertisement is to generate sales. Full stop. Brand building, goodwill, mindshare, buzz, and a lot of other niceties might come about, but even those are meant to eventually lift sales. Without a transaction at the end of the line, advertising has no raison d’être. The challenge, though, is that it’s often difficult to draw a straight line between “person sees an advertisement” and “person buys a product.” Impression and transaction are the two endpoints of the advertising-commerce lifecycle. And, the chronological delta between impression and purchase can be wide. A 15-year-old might be bombarded with BMW advertisements for 10 years before she finally pulls the trigger on a fancy, brand-driven car purchase. Deciding to buy Advil vs. Tylenol might take years of external inputs and supermarket trips. Enter the intermediate metric, which is anything that falls on the continuum from impression to purchase: clicks (the Internet’s first intermediate metric), likes, bookmarks, views, shares, app downloads, recall, followers, retweets, mentions, pins, etc. Intermediate metrics help publishers (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Pinterest, etc.) attempt to show their impact when sales are not readily measurable — either because of chronological disconnect or because the transaction data is not readily accessible. Or, cynically, and in some instances, because there are no downstream sales — making the intermediate metric the best way to obfuscate while purportedly showing performance. Intermediate metrics help advertisers show internal and external stakeholders that they’re doing a great job. It’s hard for Clorox’s marketing team to be given an instruction of “sell 20 percent more bleach this quarter and you get a big quarterly bonus!” A national “must wear white to participate” tomato fight might increase sales of Bleach without Clorox lifting a finger. So many advertisers will compensate and reward their teams for the achievement of intermediate metrics. The greatest intermediate metrics allow for the broadest attribution tracking possible (accounting for marginal intent generation), while being somewhat unique to the medium. At scale, Quora might charge for a promoted corporate answer; Gmail might charge for a bolded email; Waze might charge for a “route added.” These would all be intermediate metrics, knowing that none of these actions yield an immediate purchase but hopefully contribute to one. Without an intermediate metric, there would be a publisher-advertiser marketplace failure, since immediate “transaction” tracking would undercount efficacy and cause metrics-driven advertisers to abandon the platform. The smartest thing that Google did was charge for the click, not the sale, because it isn’t Google’s fault if your site converts poorly (or if a sale/action is not relevant, as it is for, say, auto research). The smartest thing that Facebook did was define the like not just as an intermediate metric, but as a quantum of self-worth. Watching Samsung hit 20 million Likes must have made HTC mighty jealous and want to respond accordingly. When I asked a large restaurant chain where they spend most of their money online, the president said “Facebook. We get a lot of likes, and that must be better than not a lot of Likes.” A click — Google’s classic intermediate metric — isn’t too relevant for a restaurant that doesn’t deliver or allow online transactions. Facebook has a potentially broader audience, yet less transactional intent — so ultimately those likes will need to turn into revenue. As Twitter goes public, it probably needs a stronger intermediate metric that can resonate with the long tail of advertisers. It might not make sense for regular people to “follow” an advertiser like Oreo in the same way they might follow their favorite moviestar, thus making followers a poor metric; in fact, (an actual snake) has more followers than . The famous was retweeted only 16,000 times. The most retweeted brand advertisement on Twitter (from Nokia) has yet to top 50,000 retweets. Yet perhaps Oreo was seen by millions of people on Twitter, yielding a spike in supermarket sales, and thus followers and retweets — the intermediate metrics with which pundits seem to be measuring Twitter, are the wrong intermediate metrics. The danger of intermediate metrics is that they feel quantitative — these are numbers, people! — but they might actually be meaningless. Ironically, both parties, advertisers and publishers, often have a vested interest in separating them from sales — for the short term — lest the music stop. Separation allows for “quantifiable metrics” when sales are just too hard to perfectly measure, so advertisers can keep spending and publishers can keep charging. If a company’s revenue is based on selling questionable intermediate metrics, be cautious — no matter how quickly that revenue is growing. Sometimes metrics are purely about internal vanity and do not last. As an example, “number of app downloads” feels like a key performance indicator, whereas for many companies (Supercuts has an app?!), “apps” make little sense as a paradigm. Depending on how this intermediate metric (app downloads) stands up against actual incremental sales, the whole app download market could suffer. The same goes for many other intermediate metrics. When advertisers start thinking of the intermediate metric as the final action (the R in ROI = achievement of intermediate metric), the market is inflated. For any company — whether buying traffic or selling it — intermediate metrics are often a crucial strategy in building a broad revenue model and in having a metrics-driven approach to customer acquisition and retention. But it is unwise to divorce the intermediate metric from the final, and crucial, metric of the transaction — to ignore it, or to exaggerate it, is penny wise and pound foolish. Plenty of startups and established industries (television advertising!) will be obliterated when data finally lights the path from impression to transaction and, in some cases, reveals it to be seldom traveled.
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The Science Behind Using Online Communities To Change Behavior
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Sean Young
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Is it just me, or is it impossible to talk to technology entrepreneurs without mentioning user engagement and behavior? I’m a behavioral psychologist, so that might be why I keep having conversations about engagement, but I don’t think that’s the only reason. I think it’s because entrepreneurs have realized that behavior change and engagement is critical to technology development (and to everything else in our lives). Whether we’re trying to get people to download or keep playing our fantasy sports applications, convince ourselves to avoid that extra scoop of ice cream, or get our neighbor to stop hitting her snooze button at 5:00, 5:10, and 5:20 a.m., we understand how difficult it can be to engage people and change behavior. Before talking about how to do this, it’s important that we’re on the same page that being able to change behavior is a powerful skill that could be used for good and/or evil. As entrepreneurs seeking to improve the world, we first need to make sure that 1) the products we are creating will benefit (rather than harm) society, and 2) the behavior(s) we want to change to be able to help us achieve those objectives. Once we’ve gotten past those steps, how do we change behavior? Fortunately, there’s a science behind how to change behavior, and the answer to engagement and behavior change lies in understanding people’s psychology. By addressing people’s psychological needs and reasons for changing behavior (including their social environments, cultural values, and emotions), we can be more effective at behavior change. Once we understand people’s psychologies, then technologies — online communities in particular — become really useful as platforms to rapidly change behavior. Although social media and online communities might have been developed for people to connect and share information, recent research shows that these technologies are really helpful in changing behaviors. My colleagues and I in the medical school, for instance, by getting people to do things, such as test for HIV, stop using methamphetamines, and just de-stress and relax. We don’t handpick people to join because we think they’ll love the technology; that’s not how science works. We invite them because the technology is relevant to them — they’re engaging in drugs, sex and other behaviors that might put themselves and others at risk. It’s our job to create the communities in a way that engages them enough to want to stay and participate. Yes, we do offer to pay them $30 to complete an hour-long survey, but then they are free to collect their money and never talk to us again. But for some reason, they stay in the group and decide to be actively engaged with strangers. So how do we create online communities that keep people engaged and change their behaviors? Our starting point is to understand and address their psychological needs. In most of the studies, we first need to answer their questions about privacy issues (what is being done with their data) and then build a trusting community. Unlike other communities, where people typically join out of interest, we need to create their interest and keep them engaged enough to want to stay and participate. To do this we have to slowly educate them about behavior change so that they feel comfortable and not pushed into changing. Little things such as liking a comment saying, “Everyone having a good day?” help them to feel safe and let them know they can be themselves and have fun connecting with others, without being forced to talk about health. After addressing these needs, we can then educate them and provide concrete, easy steps for how they could change their behavior. You might think that most people wouldn’t actively participate in an online community unless they wanted to be there in the first place and thought it was relevant to them. Well, results from our three-month study released this September in Annals of Internal Medicine, found that over 80 percent of people who joined our groups were actively involved, and people in the intervention study groups were more likely to change their behaviors compared to people who were not. Interestingly, we keep finding that these research groups become actual online communities; in our first study, the actual intervention ended over two years ago, but people continue to actively use the community to reach out and support each other. Throughout our research, we find that newly created online communities can change people’s behaviors by addressing the following psychological needs: Sharing our thoughts, experiences, and difficulties with others makes us feel closer to others and increases our trust. When we trust people, we’re more open-minded, more willing to learn, and more willing to change our behavior. In our studies, we found that sharing personal information (even something as small as describing what you did today) can help increase trust and change behavior. Most of us inherently strive to fit in. Social norms, or other people’s attitudes and behaviors, heavily influence our own attitudes and behaviors. Each time a new online community or group forms, it creates its own set of social norms and expectations for how people should behave. Most people are willing to change their attitudes and/or behavior to fit these group norms and fit in with the community. When people feel good about themselves, they are more open to change and feel empowered to be able to change their behavior. When an online community is designed to have people support and care for each other, they can help to increase self-esteem. Anyone who has trained a puppy knows that you can get him to keep sitting as long as you keep the treats flowing to reward him, but if you want to wean him off the treats and really train him then you’ll need to begin spacing out the treats to make them less predictable. Well, people aren’t that different from animals in that way and can be trained with reinforcements too. For example, “liking” people’s communications when they immediately join a network, and then progressively spacing out the time that their posts are liked (psychologists call this variable reinforcement) can be incorporated onto social network platforms to encourage them to keep posting content. Eventually, these behaviors become habits. While increasing self-esteem makes people feel good about themselves, increasing empowerment helps them know they have the ability to change. Creating a sense of empowerment is one of the most powerful predictors of whether people will change their behavior. Belonging to a network of people who are changing their own behaviors, support our needs, and are confident in our changing our behavior empowers us and gives us the ability to change our behavior. Throughout my research career I’ve found that understanding psychological needs is the core of behavior change and engagement across all domains. People are complicated, so this list is by no means comprehensive, but addressing these needs should get you a long way toward how you can use technologies to change and sustain behavior.
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NSA’s Targeting Prowess Doesn’t Extend To Ads
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Alex Wilhelm
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If the NSA only invited TechCrunch to its birthday party, it’d have to eat its cake alone. While we aren’t big fans of the NSA, it appears to fancy our readers, as it consistently advertises on our site. This makes me slightly uncomfortable, as I have spent a good portion of my time these past few months and the NSA for what I view as unconstitutional abrogation of our rights. And here is the NSA, spending dollars to reach our audience, . I suppose it is vaguely democratic to grant them part of our space to make their case, but as this is a financial relationship (they pay us, either directly or through a third-party), it’s not a question of free speech. I’ve never felt a conflict of interest with an advertisement before, due in no small part to the fact that I tune them out like the rest of you. But to have the NSA directly hawking its wares on pages that sport my name doesn’t sit right with me. Here’s the NSA advertising its on our Microsoft subject page: My name appended to a page that sports bright (lurid?) NSA branding. Please, no. Today brought fresh revelations on how the NSA collects data on United States citizens. Here’s reporting the tracking of our social graph, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden: Since 2010, the has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information […] Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners. Because of my distaste for the NSA and its surveillance programs, I don’t want it making payments (again, either directly or through some third-party targeting or retargeting) to any group that I have a financial relationship with. And as TechCrunch pays the rent, some NSA dollars have likely leaked into my own bank account. That’s revolting. Also revealed recently is the fact that the Justice Department the day right after he went public. That . And the what we already knew, that the NSA directly taps the core fiber cables of the Internet. — Oh, and one more thing. Have you checked out the NSA’s ? Probably not, as the current iteration lacks enough reviews to have an averaged score to display. The damn thing is comedy. A listed feature: “NSA videos and employee testimonials.” One more: “QR code reader.” But the real kicker to the NSA’s iPhone app is that it promises to track your location: NSA Career Links 2 will not use location information from your device to create driving directions. All location information is used by a 3rd-party map application not affiliated with NSA Career Links 2 or the National Security Agency. The joke is on us, however, as the NSA essentially it tracked the location of phone calls made by United States citizens. So yeah, I don’t believe you.
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CrunchWeek: Microsoft’s New Surface 2, BlackBerry’s $4.7B Buyout, Big Changes In Fundraising
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Colleen Taylor
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This time around, , (I didn’t know that was his nickname until I saw it on his TechCrunch , but I dig it) and I spouted off our opinions on from Microsoft — and if they can the lackluster Surface 1 sales, in a deal valuing the company at less than $5 billion, and how the SEC already seems to be impacting the .
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Advertising’s Logged-In User Revolution Is Brewing
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Contributor
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Native advertising may be the buzzword stealing the attention of the advertising technology landscape, though a much quieter revolution is brewing around the space: the fight for the logged-in user overtaking cookie-based advertising. You see it manifesting itself from all corners: Google’s relentless investment in Google+, Facebook releasing Custom Audiences, and most recently Twitter’s acquisition of MoPub. Data management companies like Datalogix and Catalina Marketing are creeping up, matching what takes place online into offline purchases. At the center of this brew: the logged-in user. An ever increasingly valuable asset in the world of digital advertising with an inherently limited distribution, the logged-in user is quietly becoming the lynchpin from which mobile advertising will blossom. Cookies have historically been the little text file that can, producing a swarm of cross-publisher tracking data that have fueled the $40 billion+ digital advertising industry in the United States over the past 20 years. Monitoring your behavior from site to site, the cookie was able to compile unique information about your browsing habits across ad networks. This meant that companies like American Express could drop a tracking cookie once you logged into their site to uniquely identify you as an existing Amex customer. Then while later browsing the Internet, Amex could work with an ad exchange to bid on all users that had their existing cookie. Voila: retargeting! This approach has built the display advertising industry, but it’s facing two major problems: One, cookies from external sources are dying; two, cookies do not translate to mobile. Enter the logged-in user revolution. Without trivializing the evolution of the ad unit driven by native advertising, logged-in users are rapidly becoming the asset from which mobile marketing will be evaluated for its efficacy, regardless of the format with which the ad is presented to the user. The reason for this? Logged-in users are uniquely keyed by their email address. ROI has always been at the core for measuring ad spend. The logged-in user is driving us to improve the resonant impact of advertising on purchase behavior. Traditional media formats like TV and radio have needed to rely on post-exposure surveys because they have never had ways to isolate unique ad impressions. TV and radio ad spend ROI has always been a best guess, as the Nielsen panel, which dictates the $60 billion+ spent on the medium, only pulls from 25,000 households (0.2 percent of the U.S.). Google entered the picture and changed direct response advertising from an inferred impact model into a direct keyword to conversion ROI report. The limitation of search, however, is that consumers are most often not in the mindset of making a purchase. For this reason, brand advertising has typically commanded two-thirds of marketers’ budgets. This comprises $91 billion of total ad spend in the United States each year. Dollars that search does not gain access to. Dollars that will be driven by the logged-in user. The goal of brand advertising is to drive a lasting image, memory or emotion between a consumer and the brand driving the advertising. This resonance then turns to increase consideration of that brand, driving purchase intent and ultimately transforming into a transaction/purchase with that brand. The challenge with the dollars spent to drive this resonance, however, was that the scale of information and data would often break down between initial exposure and ultimate transaction. Cookies would expire and surveys would be too narrow to follow, but that problem begins to disappear with the logged-in user. Solving for the impact of resonant advertising is what makes the logged-in user so powerful. Each logged-in user is keyed against a unique identifier: Their email address. Transactions in both the digital and offline space are increasingly tied to CRM systems keyed off of an email. From beginning to end, advertising experiences that have a logged-in user have the data to close the circle on understanding how ad exposure leads to purchase behavior and evolution. The new wave of ad tech companies poised to win are those who are set up to be privacy-friendly brokers of matching the data of publishers’ logged-in ad impressions against shifts in behavior in sales. Privacy and opt-outs are paramount to the success of these programs, setting the foundation for evaluating the impact of ad spend using mechanisms previously unavailable to advertisers. The Facebook Exchange (FBX) has found that it doesn’t matter the ad unit, it’s about how you convert the user to a conversion event. Companies like Triggit have found that ROI is driven through effective targeting. Expanding beyond the FBX, Videology quietly acquired Collider to drive the idea that content isn’t so much king as the reporting behind who was the recipient of that content. Taking this beyond the walls of their own experience, publishers with a logged-in user who can be anonymously quantified in ROI are beginning to enter the ad network game. Driving an understanding of the map between unique user identification and its value to a brand, acquisitions like MoPub allow Twitter to extend the reach of their most valuable asset: the logged-in user. Partnering with large panel data services such as Datalogix and Catalina Marketing, consumer technology firms are poised to close the loop on the impact of advertising on their platforms. Combining point-of-sale data against email addresses, they are able to match ad impressions and engagement data against logged in users to determine the full picture of advertising ROI. Native advertising formats are becoming increasingly effective at driving up front engagement with advertising, driving the activity to manipulate purchase behavior. This trend will continue for the near future, but as we evolve the native advertising discussion let’s not lose sight of what will ultimately drive the price of an engagement: its value to the advertiser. That value? It will come from those publishers that own and understand the logged in user. The revolution is coming.
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Good News: We’re Not Axing Net Neutrality. Bad News: US Gov Probably Shutting Down
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Alex Wilhelm
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The intersection of fiscal politics, national crisis, and technology regulation , as there should be no overlapping space between the three issues. And yet. Good news: We’re not ending net neutrality. The bad news, depending on your politics, is that we’re likely going to shut down the United States government. That said, the current Washington dynamic has offered up a new fact: Technology policy and regulation is game for political football. That’s a damn shame. Long gone now, it seems, are the days in which technology managed to steer mostly clear of politics. Perhaps there never was such a time, and we have merely invented it. But whether it did or did not exist before, it is certainly gone now. Let’s review. A House bill that would fund the government, but remove funding for the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), was slapped down in the Senate. The House began to compile a bill to replace its first effort that . One of those wishes was the ‘blocking’ of net neutrality. So, tech policy was lashed aside fiscal policy as a gimme to House members who think that the regulation is somehow anti-Internet, and likely accept large donations from telco firms that are opposed to it. Happily, that idea is dead. Instead, and nearly every other political outlet, House Republicans will strap a one year delay of ObamaCare to their bill to fund the government. Senate Democrats and the President have flatly stated that any such bill is dead on arrival. So, net neutrality managed to dodge whatever might have come its way, but the government itself is still hosed. I don’t see a way that we avoid shutdown. But Verizon won’t be able to charge Netflix exorbitant fees to send its content to its subscribers. That’s good. And other ISPs won’t be able to slow the content of rival companies, which is also a pretty decent outcome. Anyway, that’s where we are at. It’ll be an interesting week.
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NSA Uses Facebook And GPS Data To Identify Suspects In Networks Of Americans
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The National Security Agency has slowly been mapping it’s own massive network of suspects with associations to US citizens. The New York Times obtained documents that how the NSA is utilizing social data to map intelligence connections. From the “Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.” Since data leaker Edward Snowden originally revealed the NSA dragnet phone record and Internet surveillance program, it has been known that the government looks at citizens that are (a friend of a friend of a friend). It’s never been revealed what types of data the NSA used to prioritize which targets were most valuable until this NYT story. However, it’s no surprise that intelligence analysts use public and private data., including that from social sources. Specifically, the data includes “bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents.” In response to the story, the NSA says that all mining “queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.” proposed in congress. However, all reform will likely wait until President Obama’s NSA task force issues reform recommendations.
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Should Facebook Start Its Own Version Of Google Ventures?
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Leena Rao
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Over the past year, Facebook has seen its fair share of departures from employees and executives who are either starting a VC fund or camping out at a firm to figure out what their next startup or company will be. In the past two weeks, product manager , and rumor has it he is starting a VC fund. Facebook engineering and product lead Greg Badros his departure, and it sounds like he’ll be focusing on investing. Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya has been technical talent from Facebook into his EIR program. And there are many more of Facebookers going to VC firms or starting to invest of late. Our question is, why doesn’t Facebook just form its own venture group so some of these employees could stay connected to the company? There are many more reasons beyond just retaining talent for Facebook to form a corporate VC firm. Facebook has a substantial opportunity to do what Google Ventures has done in the VC world. Considering the interest its staffers now have in venture capital and advising startups, Facebook could build a new brand of venture capital. The social network has an enormous amount of talent that has been through the trenches of growth, parsing through large amounts of data, advertising, product development and more. As VCs become more hands-on, Facebook could tap its wealth of knowledge and experience to help portfolio startups. Similar to Google Ventures, Facebook could draw on its enormous base of employees to help grow startups. Facebook has already become an ecosystem with many former employees starting companies, so a company could easily grab great deal flow from its alums alone. Facebook had already been participating as a partner in larger funds operated by other VC firms. The social network invested in , which was a $250 million fund dedicated to backing social startups. Facebook also helped administer the a $10 million seed fund that was jointly funded by Founders Fund and Accel Partners to back startups developing websites and applications related to the Facebook Platform. Facebook The opportunity for investing is so much broader than startups built on the Facebook platform. From , Facebook alums had raised $271 million of venture capital funding since 2006. As of the first half of 2012, the Facebook mafia had pulled in $130 million in VC funding in 2012 alone. We’re sure that number increased significantly over the past year. Facebook alums and current employees who landed windfalls in the IPO are already actively seed investing. If you take a look at AngelList, there are hundreds of current and former Facebookers who are angels. In Google Ventures’ case, Google is the firm’s sole LP. While Facebook hasn’t stockpiled the amount of cash that Google has, Facebook could do something slightly different with its employees who want to invest, such as make certain employees LPs of a fund alongside the company itself. When it comes to talent, a corporate VC arm makes sense for Facebook when you consider a number of factors. First, talent that wants to potentially go into venture as an investor can stay within the Facebook umbrella. Clearly we this happening as experienced operators and product managers at the network are starting to move over to traditional VC firms or start their own firms. From what we’ve heard, a lot of Facebook’s top employees have been working there since college or right after graduating. Some feel they’ve “done their duty” to make the world more open and connected. It’s not that they dislike Facebook, but they want to try something new. If Facebook created a VC firm, it could be an outlet for taking on fresh challenges without leaving the company entirely. “FBVC” could create a home for more than just potential investors. For example, Google Ventures employs a number of designers in-house to help its portfolio startups. Many of these designers came from Google. Facebook has had trouble retaining design talent lately, with departures of , and Facebook Stickers lead Sophie Xie all leaving in the last two months. Xie just completed a month of contract design work for ex-Facebooker Carl Sjogreen’s new startup Perhaps a role as Facebook Ventures’ in-house designer could have let her dabble with different companies while remaining part of the Facebook family. A Facebook venture group would also provide an alternative place for the company’s employees to park themselves for a year in an EIR role to figure out what they want to do next. Palihapitiya believes that talent needs this time to really determine what the next role could be. And this would give EIRs the opportunity to team up with other Facebookers to start companies. In the past year, Palihapitiya has been able to bring over a number of key product managers to his firm to simply network and figure out what they can do next. Best case scenario, these Facebookers will team up on a new idea or startup, and Facebook could grab some meaningful equity. Another talent benefit for a Facebook Ventures arm would be to create a second home for great talent that Facebook wants to pick up, but doesn’t want to work on executing product or business. It’s worth noting that not every successful technology company has a VC arm. Yes, there’s Amazon, Google Ventures, Intel Capital, and Microsoft Ventures; but Apple doesn’t have a VC arm (Apple does apparently, that makes private equity deals). Apple’s general investment strategy has been to acquire talent and companies that fit its technology and product strategies, and the company has notoriously been a closed environment. Once you leave the company, you are closed off. Google is on the other end of the spectrum as it has created an ecosystem with its various offshoots, such as Google Ventures. One complication Facebook would have to deal with if it entered venture is avoiding the perception that its platform favors companies it invests in. That could sour relations with the ecosystem it’s built around its login, sharing, backend hosting, and advertising services. Startups might be less enthusiastic to build on Facebook if they feel they’re handicapped unless they have Facebook on their cap table. But as Facebook grows into a bona-fide Internet giant, it needs to do everything it can to avoid the type of stagnation that leads to disruption. For many companies its size, that means acquiring and acqui-hiring to bring in the best talent. And there are few better ways to get a close look at startups to potentially buy than by dangling cash to invest. Facebook will ultimately have to decide whether it wants to go down the Apple route or the Google path. Perhaps it’s too soon, but the company is about to turn 10 years old.
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Gillmor Gang: Sensorship
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — new iPhone + new OS = continued Apple domination. Twitter vacillates between NYSE and NASDAQ. Age of Context The Book ships as publishing gestation shrinks from 9 months to 2 weeks. It is only toward the end of the show that someone in the chat notices @scobleizer isn’t wearing Google Glass. Apple keeps on piling up yardage, reminding us not only of Steve Jobs’ prophetic vision of the future, but his persistent hammerlock on our wallets. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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The Genius Of Twitter: A Paean
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Jon Evans
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It’s the first app I launch in the morning, and the first I install on a new phone, and my most-visited web site. Which is strange, because I don’t much like most social media. I’m on Facebook only reluctantly; 90% of my posts there are automatic reposts from my tweet stream. I want to like Google+, but I keep failing. Twitter, though, is the hub of . Now that Twitter is officially on track to IPO it’s being lavished with praise, which irks me. The implication is that an IPO is somehow a culmination and a triumph, whereas to me it’s pretty much a meaningless business-space phase change. I don’t really care about the business of technology, except inasmuch as the businesses are vehicles for the promulgation of new and/or cool and/or interesting and/or important technology; and if I’m being honest, I don’t think other people should care either. Granted, the spectacle of venture capital and business machinations and public offerings can be appealing, and I’m sure it’s extremely interesting indeed to the small number of people in line to receive large sums of money or the enormously larger number who aspire to do so themselves some day. But what matters far more than money is how and how much you changed the world. Now, I think that we can all agree that while Twitter is a pretty big deal it hasn’t changed the world as much as Apple or Facebook or Google, or (less visibly) ARM or Cisco. What I’d like to point out, though, is that Twitter is weirder, much less inevitable, and way more out-of-left-field than all of the above. For that reason its accomplishment is in many ways more extraordinary than theirs. company was always going to get huge and rich building routers, or smartphones, or the low-power chips inside them, or the world’s primary social network, or the world’s finest search engine and/or distributed computing network. Once the technology reached the point where such things were possible, they became all but inevitable. If Apple had gone bust in the 1990s (as it very nearly did), today’s phones wouldn’t be as near as slick and well-designed, but they would still basically do what they do. Who knows? Maybe BlackBerry would have taken up the torch of design. But Twitter? Twitter was never inevitable. The world was in no way crying out for the platform that gave us , , and (to say nothing of .) If Twitter had never existed, Facebook would still have eventually adopted its News Feed; blogs and RSS would probably have expanded; and maybe Google+ would have been a stronger competitor. But we would feel no aching Twitter-shaped void in our world. Twitter was always surprising, always the dark horse, always counterintuitive. Hell, it’s counterintuitive. I was talking to friends of mine not so long ago, of are smarter than me (and better writers too) but who still fundamentally don’t get Twitter’s appeal. Of course they don’t. I didn’t either, until my sister somehow talked me into signing up for it five years ago. Thanks, Jen. Now I’d prefer not to imagine life without it. To an extent Twitter is like , different things to different people. To , at least, it’s where I simultaneously bookmark links of interest, keep track of scores of my friends’ lives, converse with those friends without knowing or caring where they are, share pictures and articles with them and with hundreds of people I don’t know, do research (“Dear LazyTwitter…”), and follow a small number of interesting people and/or news filters I’ve never met. Of course I could do all these things elsewhere; but the whole appeal of Twitter is that I do them all at the same time, in the same place, with terse brevity. For me it’s like being able to dive into a sparkling river of (usually) witty, pithy, gem-laden conversation whenever I want to, engage with it however I like, and leave again at my leisure. People say we live in the attention economy; well, Twitter offers some of the best value-for-attention you can get. Like everybody else at first I thought that famous 140-character limit was a flaw. Now, though, I believe it’s their finest feature. https://twitter.com/seriouspony/status/380199781588418560 So here’s to Twitter, and to their real accomplishment: not their IPO, but using today’s technology to give the whole world something that we didn’t know we wanted, and making it so delightful that it now seems very nearly indispensable. All this while trying to be, to their eternal credit, “ .” I hereby call for a long, loud round of applause. Twitter’s fail whale has become something of an endangered species; truth be told, on the rare occasions I do see it nowadays, I find myself feeling more nostalgia than irritation. Disclaimer/disclosure: while I don’t know for sure, I expect this number includes an acquaintance of mine who was/is a very early Twitter employee.
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Bizness Apps Launches DIY Website Builder, Looks To Become A Full-Service Digital Marketing Suite For SMBs
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Rip Empson
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Once upon a time, if you wanted your own website, you either had to speak fluent Internet, or write a large check to someone who did. However, thanks that have sprouted over the last five years — like Weebly, Wix and Squarespace, to name a few — the barriers to building a snappy website have vanished. Today, website creators are free, and the only technical skill required is the ability to locate the Internet. Today, as smartphones flood the market, a similar story is unfolding in app development. With their customers going mobile, businesses are eager to do the same. A bevy of services emerged to meet the growing demand, offering businesses a quick and easy way to create their apps for iOS, Android and beyond. launched in 2010 to do just that, providing companies with a low-cost way to build their own mobile apps and website without needing to know how to code. But with so many options for DIY site builders, both mobile and desktop, these services have to differentiate themselves from the competition if they’re going to stand out — and survive. As a result, many choose to specialize, offering the same basic features as everyone else, while focusing on adding more features and value around, say, social networking, flier creation or shopping. , to differentiate itself in this crowded market, Bizness Apps to allow both companies and businesses to build mobile apps for their existing clients or SMBs in their local area. Shortly thereafter, the startup to help its white-label resellers sell apps and websites to startups and other SMBs, and today Bizness Apps is adding the last piece of the puzzle. In a platform play that aims to round out its self-service development suite and sees it moving into the realm of the Weeblys, Wixes and Squarespaces of the world, the startup is today launching its own drag-and-drop, DIY website builder, . The website creation service will allow SMBs to quickly design and publish a fully-functional website for desktop, smartphones and tablets in under 10 minutes, says founder and CEO Andrew Gazdecki — regardless of technical skill. In an effort to provide businesses with a feature set that’s comparable to its competitors, the website builder will offer a library of hundreds of templates, designed to make it easy to get started, along with SEO tools, post-publish editing capabilities, social media integration, custom contact and lead form creation and analytics. The new product intends takes a similar strategy and focus to its white label reseller program, which provides companies and individuals with the ability to launch their own mobile marketing businesses and develop mobile apps and mobile websites that can be customized and branded according to their client’s preferences. The white-label resale tool allows these pop-up app development businesses to set their own prices and provide services developing apps for their local small business market. The reseller program has also been the company’s most lucrative product, driving the majority of its revenue, the CEO tells us. The startup raised a small, $100K round of seed funding after launch, but has been bootstrapped since and is now profitable thanks to a reseller-driven $8 million annual run rate, which the company expects to hit $9 million by the end of the year. But what makes the CEO think that its new DIY website builder will find an audience and can compete with the most popular services, which today dominate most of the mindshare in the market? Gazdecki says that he sees the small business market existing in two segments, one of which is willing to use DIY marketing tools, and other, which would rather pay a premium to essentially, “hire a pro,” as they say. While Weebly and Wix are mostly focused on the former, the CEO says that Bizness Apps wants to leverage its existing reseller network to provide a more hands-on approach to mobile and website development — even if that requires charging a higher price, and therefore the risk of losing looking for free DIY options. Furthermore, even though the company is playing in an “extremely crowded market,” he says, 58 percent of small businesses still don’t have a website and the chief reason for this is that they lack the confidence to build their own. At its core, Bizness Apps’ mission is to allow anyone to start their own local marketing company and help local businesses get online, go mobile and manage customers through its three main products. “In the end, we’ve found that small businesses would rather have marketing services built into this kind of platform,” the CEO tells us, “even if it means paying an extra fee.” Today, the company has 5,000 active resellers around the globe, hailing from over 50 countries and offering services in dozens of languages. Just as its reseller program aims to solve related pain points by giving clients the ability to learn how to market their business and how to approach and sell to small businesses — beyond offering branded apps and websites — looking forward, Gazdecki wants to include more features that help customers get more value out of the platform. Its resellers often add custom features depending on the market and the client, like a mobile food ordering system, payment gateway and menu integrations for restaurants — so that they don’t have to fumble with receipt printer integrations, among other things. Down the road, the CEO says he wants the new website builder to incorporate features like online food ordering, reservations and eCommerce tools. The company offers its original DIY app product for $59/month for each platform, which includes a native iPhone app, Android app, iPad app, Android tablet app and mobile website, and will be selling its website builder under a three-tier pricing scheme, starting at $10/month under its “small business” option. Its business tier will run $100/month, and includes 10 websites, marketing materials, sales training and a free Bizness CEM account, whereas its “White Label Reseller” plan includes all of the previous options, with the ability to create an unlimited number of websites. For more on Bizness Web,
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Stephanie Yang
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Livefyre Opens London Sales Office To Expand Amongst European Publishers
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Mike Butcher
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Following it’s of Storify just the other week, a commenting platform used by TechCrunch and other websites, has announced that it’s opened an office in London to serve the UK/European markets. It’s already bagged some customers, including News UK, Times Online, The Sun, Fabulous magazine, The Scottish Sun, Decca Records and Time Out Global. They are joined by France’s Liberation and Germany’s Motain. Robb Miller, managing director of Global Sales will head up the European sales operation. Livefyre a $15 million round in February, bringing its total funding to more than $20 million. Livefyre’s StreamHub platform allows publications to automatically add social media content to their site. Storify has been used by journalists and brands throughout Europe including the BBC, the British Prime Minister’s office and the Royal Family, Germany’s Bild Zeitung and Die Zeit – even FC Barcelona. Other commenting platforms, including and , have so far avoided any ‘boots-on-the-ground’ expansion to Europe, although European publishers had tended to be laggards in integrating social platforms. That said, has App Store partners in Europe who represent them, in the shape of . And Gigya also has UK offices. Anecdotally, Livefyre has recently come under pressure from publishers disappointed in its readers having to frequently re-authenticate to comment, while mere Facebook commenting often appears to enable easier engagement. Whatever the case, Livefyre has a sales operation. Facebook does not.
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Before & After iOS 7: How Your Favorite Apps Are Changing
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Josh Constine
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Flat. With one word Apple didn’t just change its look on mobile, but mandated an industry-wide face-lift. For , chrome, navigation buttons, and textured title bars are getting replaced with more content, gesture-controlled navigation, and single-colored panels. Here’s a before and after look at the redesigns rolled out to some of the top third-party iOS apps, along with our analysis and thoughts from developers. “We redesigned to focus on the content over the chrome — what the writer intends to convey and not the UI” says ‘s Marc Bodnick about the question-and-answer app’s makeover. The startup rebuilt from the ground up in three months, and says it will be available for iPad and iPad mini by the end of the year. It’s not just the look that’s changing for many apps, but the feel. In iOS 6 and before, you’d often find yourself diving deeper and deeper through layers of navigation to get to a specific piece of content. To escape and access another part of the app, you’d have to click the back button over and over. Now many apps are moving towards a swipe-based interface, where different app features exist on parallel screens you can horizontally flip through with a flick of the thumb. For example, on Quora you can now swipe between different feeds like Top Stories and Questions & Answers. You can tell which pane you’re on and that there are others available thanks to a little title and set of dots at the top of the screen where the search box used to be. Instead, you’ll access that and everything that was previously housed in a row of navigation buttons at the bottom in a slide-out navigation drawer reminiscent of Facebook’s iOS app. Removing those buttons frees up more space for reading about whether it’s feasible to be Batman and other Q&A content. Other apps are taking the same navigation approach. Quora 3.0 feels like thumbdancing — graceful rather than bumping into things in the dark. Definitely a more pleasurable browsing experience. I think we’ll find a lot of iOS 7 apps give off that vibe. It won’t be all good, though. In the rush to update in time for the new operating system’s launch, some developers have gotten a bit heavy-handed with the flatness. With so little chrome, pieces of content can accidentally blend into each other. Less experienced mobile users like senior citizens might feel a bit lost without the skeumorphic cues to guide them towards what to tap or touch. If developers don’t put in clues, some people might miss buttons or those parallel hidden planes of apps because they didn’t know they were there. But many developers felt they had to be ready for the iOS 7 launch. Quora’s Bodnick tells me Quora didn’t have the benefit of being around in the early days of the App Store and has been playing catching up ever since. With iOS 7, though, he says “We’re going on the offense. We’re going to be among the first apps on iOS 7.” Apparently a lot of developers had the same idea, which might negate any serious advantage being available day 1 will have. And that really underlines the next problem Apple needs to solve. Now it’s got a modernly-designed OS that supports beautiful apps, but how do you find those apps when there’s nearly a million of them in the store? Well, here’s a look at some of the top apps that got an overhaul today, with before iOS 7 shots on the left and after iOS 7 shots on the right : made its top navigation bar translucent to give more feed browsing context, redesigned some icons, and moved from a slide-out navigation drawer to quicker-to-access “tab bar”. has brought its styling in-line with iOS 7’s, and made its buttons more like symbols drawn flat on its backgrounds instead of etched into the chrome. , the read-it-later app, has scrubbed its title bar clear of texture, and eliminated much of the chrome so it just feels like a floating list of stories. , the peer-to-peer payments app, has dropped its side bars and stripped down its buttons. has ditched its tan background to make room for larger content entries, a clear example of the content > chrome trend , the enterprise communication app, has made space for its feed by switching from navigation buttons to a drawer, similar to Quora. ‘s flight search app has been completely flattened, removing the shading and depth from its navigation chrome to match iOS 7. , the note-taking suite, has banished its background and moleskine-textured title bar for a very flat aesthetic. , the blogging platform, has squashed its layers together in contrast to its old elements that looked visibly stacked on top of each other.
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Apple iOS 7 Review: A Major Makeover That Delivers, But Takes Some Getting Used To
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Darrell Etherington
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This is a big week for Apple; it has two new phones hitting store shelves, and a brand new operating system that becomes available Sept. 18 for compatible devices. The new mobile operating system is a big visual change, and is likely to feel somewhat disorienting to users upgrading from iOS 6, but in most important ways, it’s not that dissimilar from what you’re used to, and many of the changes are definitely for the best. If you’re coming brand new to iOS 7 and have been ignoring the Internet for the past three months, you’re going to be in for a visual shock. Apple has completely overhauled the look of iOS with version 7, starting from the lock screen and extending to the icons of default apps, system fonts, status bar indicators, system elements like Notification Center and more. There are new sounds, too, including ringtones and notification cues, in case a host of new info for your eyeballs to process wasn’t enough. The look is bound to be controversial; Apple has opted for bright, bold colors with more clean lines and far fewer textures, shadows and gradients. There is still some depth to the OS, however, with transparency effects giving a sense of background and foreground elements (the dock row is an opaque rectangle through which your home screen wallpaper is visible, for instance). Apple’s visual overhaul received a lot of knee-jerk criticism when it was revealed at WWDC earlier this year, but in practice, the visual changes are actually quite pleasant, and grow on a user with time. Looking back now, iOS 6 feels dated, despite the fact that when I first started using iOS 7 I felt it was inferior in terms of look and feel to the older OS. Apple’s new look with iOS 7 takes acclimating, but on the whole, it’s an improvement. This is a brand new feature for iOS 7, and one that’s incredibly useful. The Control Center provides quick access to commonly-used settings toggles including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Rotation Lock and Do Not Disturb mode, as well as to the media player controls, AirDrop and AirPlay, and some key apps including Calculator, Timer and Camera. There’s also a flashlight, which may sink a thousand small app developer ships, but which is a huge convenience for users. Control Center simplifies and makes much more useful what was a somewhat confusingly arranged media player/AirPlay/brightness & volume control quick access feature attached to the app drawer in iOS 6. Separating it from that function and making it accessible throughout the iOS user interface via a simple swipe up from bottom is a really big improvement. Apple’s AirDrop feature made its debut on the Mac, as a feature addition to OS X. Now the simple sharing service makes its mobile debut, allowing them to share files with anyone on the same network with a single tap. The recipient then approves the request, and the file is added to their own iPhone. It’s a very easy method for sharing pictures from one device to a family member’s or friend’s, and requires fewer steps than sending an email. You can make AirDrop available to anyone on your current network, or lock it down to just your Contacts. This feature is great, but leaves me wishing Apple had set it up to work between iOS and Mac, which isn’t yet possible. Aside from a visual update, like the one everything in iOS 7 is getting, Siri adds new voices designed to make it seem more human, and additional data sources including Bing, Wikipedia and Twitter. It can now return phone calls, playback voicemail and generally do more that you’d like a hands-free assistant to be able to do, perhaps while driving, for instance. The additions to Siri have prompted Apple to remove its beta tag, and indeed it does seem more generally useful, and pushes you out to exterior sources far less frequently, which is good because it leads to far less of a “let me Google that for you” effect. I’m not sure Siri is quite the virtual assistant I want it to be just yet, but it’s getting there. Apple’s multitasking hasn’t been great in the past, acting basically as a quick app switcher. In iOS 7, the multitasking gets smarter, learning your habits and updating content in the background depending on when you regularly use your apps, and when you’re connected to power and Wi-Fi, so as to avoid data and energy burn. The new app switcher design is also much better, showing you a preview of the app in the state it was in at close, rather than just a completely static app icon that tells you nothing at all. Swipe up to close open apps from this screen. These features may be familiar to webOS users, but they’re smart, no matter where they came from. Apple’s mobile web browser gets an overhaul with iOS 7, one which lets the chrome melt into the background. When you’re on a page, the address bar and bottom navigation bar fade away, giving you a full-screen experience. The address bar is also finally a unified search bar, too, which is cause enough to break out the piñata and celebrate. Apple has also put a private browser right in the main app, meaning you won’t have to go to Settings every time you want to get incognito, and there’s a new tab browser that lets you page through and view multiple open tabs at once much more easily. Shared links uses the built-in iOS Twitter integration to gather a reading list from the people you follow on that social network, which is a nice built-in content discovery twist. Apple’s iOS camera software is brand new in 7, with an interface that brings all modes out into the open instead of hiding features behind buttons. Even though everything’s now a scroll away at most, the interface is very different from the one it replaces, and this could cause some hiccups for new users. The key component to be aware of is the new slider for different camera functions – video at the far left, and panorama at the far right. It may not be immediately apparent that this list of modes is itself scrollable, as there’s no obvious arrows or control buttons. Other changes here are the presence of live filters, which you can apply before filming, and the ability to take burst shots and slow motion video on the iPhone 5s. All phones capable of installing iOS 7 get a variant of burst mode, in fact, which takes pictures in rapid succession, but not at the 10fps rate of the iPhone 5s, and without the auto selection feature that suggests which shot is best. In the 5s, people will really notice a difference with much faster auto-focus, faster capture and other improvements. Apple’s new photos app applies some basic organizational logic to your picture library, making it easier to find specific moments, and to browse based on locations and date, which is much better than having to organize events yourself. You can zoom out and see your entire history of mobile photos as measured in years, too. Other improvements include the addition of a shared photo album tab, which works with iCloud photo sharing, and photo maps that allow you to browse your picture history on a built-in Apple Map. It’s a lot more interesting than the fairly boring interface it replaces. iTunes is the leading source of digital music content, so Apple introducing iTunes radio, a no-limits streaming service available free via an ad-supported model, or without ads if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber is a big deal. This is a U.S. account-holder only service, so international iOS 7 users will have to wait, probably until licensing agreements are put in place. The recommendations iTunes Radio serves up based on genres and artists I like were very (frighteningly?) accurate, and that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable lean-back listening experience. I’m still an Rdio fan when it comes to streaming music services, and their new personalized radio stations are also impressive, but Apple will provide everything most users need in custom Internet radio with this new feature, which is also available in an upcoming iTunes update on the desktop. The new Notification Center in iOS 7 is a big change from the previous version. There’s a new “Today” panel that shows you events and birthdays going on for any given day, as well as weather conditions, stocks, and upcoming things to note for the next day, including alarms and calendar events. Swiping brings you to the list of “All” and “Missed” notifications, which shows you things sent by your apps, either in total, or just those that are new since the last time you checked your device. In settings, you can turn off or on each element of the “Today” view, and limit lock screen access to both that and your general notifications list. Today is a part of notification center that has some real potential, especially if Apple broadens its functions and makes it more of a Google Now competitor, but overall the Notification Center update isn’t all that exciting. Notifications themselves still seem mostly not super useful, so perhaps providing more context or similar is the way to go. Apple has provided some small updates to the App Store and to Find My iPhone with iOS 7, including tools that make it easier to protect and recover lost or stolen devices. The App Store has a new “Popular near me” feature, which so far hasn’t been showing all that much beyond transit apps based on my location. It’s another way of making discovery easier on the iPhone’s ever-growing software library, though, and with use it’ll likely get more intelligent. Plus, if you’re a visitor looking for relevant apps in a new spot, transit information apps would be high on the list. Find My iPhone gets new advanced security features, like the inability to wipe or turn off Find My iPhone without an Apple ID or password. It can also display a message on a device that’s been wiped, so you don’t need to choose between trying to recover your lost hardware and protecting your data. Plus, anyone with your phone will have to enter your Apple ID and password to make it usable again. All of these are great features that address the growing savvy of criminals around Find My iPhone and how to circumvent it. There’s a lot more going on in iOS 7, including new sounds, dynamic wallpapers, changes to the design of Calendar, Notes, Reminders and more, but the big shifts that go beyond new design are those listed above. There’s no question that iOS 7 will be a dramatic change from the iOS many users already know and love, but on balance it’s an update packed with plenty of new features that make using Apple’s mobile devices easier and more enjoyable. iOS users with an iPhone 4 or later, iPad 2 or later, iPad mini and iPod touch (5th generation) will be able to download the update, but Apple hasn’t put a specific time on when exactly, so watch this space for updates.
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iPhone 5s Review: Apple’s Latest Smartphone Goes For (And Gets) The Gold
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple’s new iPhone 5s is set to go on sale this Friday, Sept. 20, and the phone is already generating a lot of buzz. The 5s is the more advanced of two new Apple iPhones, and offers a lot of technical advantages over the iPhone 5c also launching the same day. Apple has worked some behind-the-scenes magic with its latest and greatest, and made some design changes for the better, too, all of which adds up to a new smartphone market king. The iPhone 5s inherits the design legacy of the iPhone 5, which means aluminum, chamfered edges and glass. But unlike with previous “s” class updates like the 4S, Apple has gone further, updating the look of the phone as well as its internals. For the sliver model, that just means an updated home button to house the new fingerprint scanner, but there’s an all-new gold finish, and a “space gray” version to replace the black model of the iPhone 5s. It’s hard not to wax too poetic about the iPhone 5s design; the color-matched conductive ring around the home button/fingerprint sensor adds a lot to the overall good looks of the device, and the new space gray finish that I reviewed is more visually striking than the black it replaces. It also seems more resistant to wear, as the iPhone 5 in black scratched when I even thought about it encountering some grit, while the 5s finish remains impeccable after a week of use.
Some small details that stand out as especially impressive in the space gray iPhone 5, which strikes me as similar to a gunmetal type of colorway from watch casings: The mottled mirror finish on the Apple logo, ‘iPhone’ brand name and phone edges is especially appealing. Based on my brief time with the new gold finish, I’m impressed with how that turned out as well (despite initial misgivings when the rumors about its introduction started swirling), with the gold circle around the home button/fingerprint sensor being the standout visual feature. Apple’s iPhone 5s still feels great in the hand, with a screen size that doesn’t preclude single-handed use for people with average- to large-sized mitts, but the small change from a concave home button to a flat one definitely affects the overall impression of using the device. It’s a small change, and not necessarily better or worse, but it does feel somewhat strange after six years of a curved button. The case for the iPhone 5s (which is backwards compatible with iPhone 5) is a leather, rigid thin case that adds virtually no weight or heft to the device, but that does feel good in the hand. It looks good, too, but be warned that this is leather, so it will wear. My red review unit has dark edges now from being pulled in and out of jean pockets, but this is something Apple points on clearly on packaging and it’s inevitable with a leather product. The star of the iPhone 5s show at Apple’s unveiling was the new fingerprint sensor, a hardware addition that replaces the home button with a scanner that can read your fingerprint and compare it to stored information on the device to unlock the phone and make purchases through the App and iTunes Stores, should you so choose. At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss the fingerprint sensor as a whiz-bang feature designed to attract eyeballs and do little else. But this isn’t that. The fingerprint sensor, unlike some other questionable recent smartphone tech like gesture control or eye-tracking, doesn’t feel like a gimmick or tech demo; it feels like a mature feature that actually enhances the overall experience of using an iPhone in a noticeable way that you encounter very frequently. Registering your fingerprint is easy to do via the Settings app, and the phone does a good job of providing you with directions to get through the process, which takes about a minute. You can register up to five different digits – yours, or those of family members or friends – and decide whether you want the fingerprint to unlock the device, authorize iTunes or app purchases, or both. Fingerprint data is stored only locally on a siloed portion of the A7 processor, and isn’t sent to Apple’s servers, nor is it made available to app developers. Once registered, you simply hold your finger on the iPhone, and it should unlock very quickly. It’s about as fast as swiping to unlock without a passcode, and much faster than entering even a simple four digit code. As Apple is fond of saying, “it just works,” recognizing your registered fingerprints regardless of how you place your digit on the sensor for the most part. I did encounter a few rare “try again” messages, but the frequency of those decreased over my time with the phone until they were non-existent, something which Apple says is due to the sensor being able to improve its success rate by learning more about your print over time. Apple’s added this ‘helper’ chip to its A7 system-on-a-chip to make processing motion data gathered from the gyroscope, accelerometer and compass more efficient and less taxing for the battery. The M7 will make its presence truly felt in third-party apps that rely on these sensors to provide information about activity, and to inform features and functions, but it also has some immediate advantages for iPhone 5s owners. The M7 is capable of informing the iPhone when it’s at rest for long periods of time, likely by the bed or in other situations where it doesn’t need to be receiving constant data updates, and to conserve power usage accordingly. This results in very impressive standby time, despite additional power requirements over the iPhone 5 and 5c due to the A7 and new fingerprint sensor. The iPhone 5s boasts the same screen as the iPhone 5 and 5s, which is Apple’s 4-inch Retina display. At 326 ppi and 1136×640, it falls somewhere middle of the pack in terms of pixel density, and somewhat below the maximum resolution achieved by larger-screened Android devices, some of which now boast full HD (1080p) resolution. That said, the display experience doesn’t feel compromised by these relative limitations. It still displays text crisply, and it has some of the best color rendering of any screen on any mobile device. It’s true that people who tend to use their phones more like tablets (perhaps two-handed, viewing a lot of longer-length video media) would prefer something like the HTC One’s 4.7-inch, 1920×1080 display, but the iPhone 5s screen still takes the cake when it comes to one-handed usability. Retina displays were designed to be future-proof to some extent, offering resolution at the upper limit of what the human eye is capable of discerning, and the iPhone 5s display continues to shine despite not having changed in terms of basic tech since the last generation of hardware. Like the iPhone 5c, the iPhone 5s ships with iOS 7 pre-installed, and that brings a whole host of new software features we . Some of the new software is especially impressive on Apple’s iPhone 5s, however, and really demonstrates how well Apple is marrying its next-gen hardware with its new, next-gen OS. The multitasking interface really shines on the iPhone 5s, since the new design offers thumbnail previews and is a fairly processor-intensive feature., Scrolling through the open apps is smooth on the iPhone 5s, and really demonstrates the muscle under the hood. Apple has also added iMovie, iPhoto, Garage Band, Pages, Keynote and Numbers to its list of free first-party software. The media apps specifically also perform well optimized for the new A7 processor, helping to demonstrate the new creative potential Apple has unlocked with 64-bit mobile architecture. The iPhone 5s boasts an improved camera, and one that fits with Apple’s traditional view that more megapixels does not necessarily equal better pictures. The 8MP iSIght camera on the rear of the device has the same amount of megapixels as its predecessor, but the size of each of its pixels is larger, which leads to better low-light photos. That combines with a larger maximum aperture of f/2.2, which means the camera sensor can get access to more light via the lens opening. Apple’s better camera hardware extends to the new ‘True Tone’ flash, a dual LED flash with both white and amber tones, which can match ambient light and also combine both tones in varying degrees to better reflect the environment. This is supposed to result in subjects which are less washed out when you’re taking photos in dark conditions with the flash turned on. In practice, I still found that the best solution was to leave the flash off, but as you can see from the side-by-side of my iPad mini case, the iPhone 5s flash (on left) does a much better job at rendering natural lighting than does the iPhone 5c’s (right). Also new to the iPhone 5s is image stabilization that happens automatically in-camera, using four exposures taken in rapid selection from which the best, most-stable parts are chosen. It recombines elements from each, rather than just picking the best. Similar is how the new Burst mode works, which can take full-res pics at a rate of 10 snaps per second (better than most DSLRs). The 5s then automatically picks one it deems ‘best’ based on a number of factors, like whether someone’s eyes are closed, and also makes available the entire series for you to page through and extract individual pics to your camera roll from. This will also come in handy for making GIFs, which makes me wonder why Apple didn’t include a GIF-maker in its own first-party camera app. Photos below are unedited, and the flower pics are the ones chosen by the iPhone 5s from a group of burst mode shots.
Last but definitely not least is the iPhone’s new Slo-Mo camera mode. The feature works by filming at 120fps in 720p, then playing content back at 30fps, resulting in a slowed down playback that you can tweak with a built-in timeline slider. The effect is extremely impressive, but trying to take it off your phone requires that you slow down the footage again manually in software like FCP X, although an update that preserves the effect for iPhoto could conceivably be on the way. You can also share the video as-is from your device itself via the iPhone’s share menu, and this is far and away one of the most impressive new features on the iPhone. It might actually get me shooting video on my device, which is saying something since I don’t usually do that. I do take a lot of pictures, and generally speaking I carry at least an advanced pocket camera like the Sony RX100. But Apple’s really done some amazing work here; the quality of still captures from this phone is excellent, as you can see from the unedited examples below. The FaceTime HD camera on the front is also much better for making video calls, which will also help make FaceTime a more enjoyable experience. Apple’s A7 processor is, like many of its predecessors, designed for future applications, and as such won’t really show its true potential during an initial week of usage. That said, it’s already plenty impressive. General performance is perceptibly improved, with apps launching quicker, camera and other functions recycling with less downtime, and just overall helping the phone to feel fresh and new. iOS 7 brings a lot of visual flourishes, transparency effects and animations to Apple’s mobile software, and the A7 has clearly been designed from the ground up to ensure that all of those added visual tweaks don’t make the device so much as blink. Add to that the ease of use and consistent performance of the fingerprint sensor, and you’ve got a phone that behaves like Apple wants its hardware to, offering a pleasant and worry-free user experience. LTE gets up to 13-band support depending on model, and that makes the 5s the perfect world-travelling phone. As with the iPhone 5c, I tried an EE UK LTE data sim and found it worked instantly with my unlocked U.S. model iPhone, though roaming agreements mostly don’t include LTE as of yet so your actual mileage may vary when on vacation. Apple’s iPhone 5s has a lot more moving parts and a big beefy new processor, but it’s advertising slightly better battery life than the iPhone 5. In practice, it does indeed beat its predecessor in terms of general usage. A full charge was good for around 15 hours of actual usage, with over a day and a half of standby time, with a heavy usage period that involved a lot of video viewing on a plane bringing that down to just shy of a day with nearly 11 hours actual active use. It’s very close to what I experienced with the iPhone 5c, and shows that both these new phones have made some good changes with regards to power management. Some of that could be attributable to iOS 7, but Apple’s new M7 coprocessor is also a likely cause. The real test will be longer-term, when we see the CoreMotion API used in tandem with the M7 to increase the power efficiency of third-party apps; small gains all around could add up to sizeable ones for the overall iOS user experience. With the iPhone 5s, Apple once again wins the right to claim the title of best smartphone available. The hardware may resemble its predecessor in many key ways, as with the 4-inch Retina display, but it improves dramatically in areas like the camera where it makes the most difference to every day users, and in the addition of the fingerprint sensor, which is already a feature I miss when I switch back to older generation devices or the iPhone 5c. And thanks to the 64-bit A7 processor, this phone, more than any iPhone before it, is likely to be the device that grows more appealing as the software ecosystem catches up, which is great news for buyers looking for something that isn’t so easily replaced by the next big thing that comes along.
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How To Decide Between The New Apple iPhone 5s And iPhone 5c
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple is launching two new iPhones, the and the , and the big question for many is going to be which is worth their hard-earned clams. Both present attractive packages, as detailed in our reviews, but is there a strong reason to choose one over the other? Here’s a breakdown of the main considerations for those facing that choice. The iPhone 5s improves the smartphone camera experience enough to make this a key point in its favor. While all flash photography that doesn’t involve expensive umbrellas, off-camera units and softboxes is inherently evil, the 5s True Tone flash really is loads better than the one in the 5c. Flash aside, the 5s camera sensor and lens assembly is much better, and the processor means faster autofocus and faster shutter activation. Slo-mo video and burst mode are also big positives in favor of the iPhone 5s. If you’re really into mobile photography (or any kind of photography), the iPhone 5s is worth the premium. For the money, Apple’s iPhone 5c is a very capable device. It’s $100 cheaper than the 5s at equivalent storage sizes, and it’s not missing too many tricks at the moment compared to the 5s, besides the camera features mentioned above, and the secret payload of the A7 and M7 processing components. The iPhone 5c’s design is surprisingly appealing, and were the 5s available in both finishes, I’d be hard-pressed to choose one over the other. Bottom line, if you’re currently happy with an iPhone 5, 4S or 4 but are looking for a change or have an upgrade coming, but aren’t overly concerned with being cutting edge, the 5c is the phone to get. The 5s has a secret payload, as mentioned above, which is built-in to the A7 system-on-a-chip and M7 motion coprocessor. App developers will start designing software intended specifically to leverage the A7’s 64-bit processing power, and power-saving/motion tracking features made possible with the M7. If you want to make sure you have hardware that can take full advantage when these titles start to hit, you’ll need the iPhone 5s. Ultimately the phone that’s right for you is the one that holds the most appeal to you personally – and yes, before you comment, I fully realize that might be an Android phone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Apple’s new strategy of releasing two new iPhone devices means a lot more people will be trying to make up their minds between them. Hopefully the considerations above help that decision along.
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Kevin Systrom Sees Instagram Turning Into A Fashion Commerce Platform
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Ingrid Lunden
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is not yet launching ads on its photo and video-sharing network, but it has plans to in the next year. This evening Kevin Systrom, its co-founder and CEO, made an appearance in London where he described how in some ways it is already on the way there. On Monday, Systrom went to watch a presentation of the Spring/Summer 2014 collection from Burberry as part of London Fashion Week, where he was joined by Andrew Bosworth, who runs all ads for Facebook. On Tuesday, in a conversation with supermodel and entrepreneur Lily Cole at the National Portrait Gallery (where there are Instagram photos and videos blown up and displayed on the walls right now), Systrom spoke about how that event prompted a bigger conversation about the role of commerce and ads on Instagram, and how far they will go. Systrom pointed out that today, Instagram is already used as a marketing marketing platform for fashion people — A free marketing platform, with up and coming designers using it to get their clothes out into the world. “We never set out thinking of Instagram as a platform for commerce, but in some ways Instagram is becoming that for folks in fashion,” Systrom said. Cole is an A-lister in the paparazzi-filled UK, and knows a thing or two about having her image appropriated for commercial use even when she doesn’t intend for it to be. She asked Systrom if that concerns him, the difference between artistic and commercial use of imagery. “Is there a problem with that boundary?” “I don’t think it’s so much a boundary as it is a balance,” Systrom replied. “If Instagram were full of commerce and there were ‘Buy now!’ links everywhere and that’s all you ever had, I don’t think it would get to the true spirit of communication.” But how Instagram is already being used by brands could be a clue to how Instagram will approach ads, when they come. Systrom’s comments point to a soft-touch approach, where users may be given options to follow advertising, rather than have ads thrust upon them. “I’ve seen plenty of times when a brand, whether it’s Kate Spade or Cole Hahn, they’ll post an image of some shoes, and the comments are 50 people asking, ‘Where do I get these?’ ‘What sizes do they come in?’ ‘Do they come in this other color?’ ‘When are they available?’ And that’s awesome. It’s not just about imagery, that’s about the conversation as well… As long as you curate what you want to follow and don’t want to follow that’s really the balance.” He also pointed out the bigger commerce opportunity on the platform. “Businesses have been started because of Instagram, not just photos that we are seeing here [in the NPG],” he noted, citing the story of , started through images posted Instagram. “That’s the power of sharing that imagery. That can inspire entrepreneurs. In some ways, business balanced with art is the world we live in and Instagram is just a mirror representation.” Later, the conversation wandered away from commerce and fashion, and into more serious waters: Instagram as a political force — fitting fodder in a gallery hung with portraits of the great and the good from UK history. “There are a handful of examples,” he noted, citing how a user called used his Instagram account to provide some of the first pictures from North Korea at a time when it was closed off to the media; similarly also provided insight into the struggle there, well before the problems in Syria became a more prominent part of our collective consciousness and national discourse. “One of the fascinating things is that Instagram is still available everywhere,” Systrom noted (coincidentally, on the same day that Iran around Twitter and Facebook after a brief glitch broke it a few hours). “The history of social media is that [the sites] are blocked in certain countries where freedom of expression is not encouraged.” Instagram, perhaps because of the picture-nature of it, hasn’t been touched, and it “is giving people a visual voice. It’s a way of taking that image and broadcasting that to the world. In some ways that’s the most exciting part of Instagram.” But while Twitter has taken an early move to verify users on its site — one way of both crystalizing powerbrokers and another of just making sure people are who they say they are — Instagram is not going there, yet. “My question is how do we verify,” he told me later in response to questions about possible moves. “I don’t think verified accounts could solve the problem of knowing people are posting from where they say they are, but I do agree that verified accounts in general, when you’re trying to find a celebrity or politician, eventually I see that as a possibility. But we’re trying to fix the real problem, which is search quality.” He notes that it helps Instagram to be a part of Facebook, where people use real identities (which leads one to wonder if profiles may one day be merged together). Earlier in the evening, when he was still talking to Lily Cole in front of a room of fashion types and scruffy journalists, Systrom seemed surprised by the fact that he helped create and now runs this huge photo-sharing juggernaut. He blinks when Cole mentions 150 million users, and emphasizes that “we are at service. Every day we wake up and try to make it better for them. We may take care of this, but it has a life of its own.” Equally, he seems a bit bemused about his own life. “Did I expect this as a kid? Noooo. I think every passing day things get a little more surreal,” he said. “But i’m the luckiest guy in the world to be combining my passion for photography with a job that I get to go to, to work with some of the most talented people in technology who inspire me.” Systrom’s visit to Burberry S/S’14 was his first time at a fashion show, he said. It may well have been fieldwork for him, taking in the scene and the companies that may someday become his paying advertisers (recall Bosworth). But in his recounting of the event, he focused elsewhere. Systrom described how there were “a lot of Instagrammers” covering the event (including someone from Burberry, as you can see from Burberry snap to the right here). Also, how Apple had teamed up with the label to shoot the show with iPhone 5s handsets ( that champagne gold color actually will go very well with a Burberry beige). “There was a big tripod with a little tiny iPhone on the top,” he recalled, squeaking his voice on ‘tiny’. “I walked over and there was some unnamed celebrity sitting next to the camera. I took out my phone and they thought I was coming over to take a picture of them, but I took a picture of that iPhone. It was one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen. Forget about Instagram for a second. Social media and our devices are changing fashion.” Images: , ,
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iPhone 5c Review: Apple’s Colorful Take On The iPhone Is A Refreshing Change Of Design Pace
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Darrell Etherington
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Apple’s iPhone release schedule has been predictable in the past when it comes to number of devices: each year, a single new smartphone. For 2013, that’s changed with the iPhone 5c, as for the first time Apple has eschewed simply bumping down the outgoing iPhone as a lower cost option, and has instead released hardware specifically designed to be more affordable. The iPhone 5c is the result of this rare change in Apple’s game plan, and it makes a good argument for being flexible with product lines. Arguably the iPhone 5c’s most noteworthy feature is its new design. Apple went plastic, or should I say went back to plastic, after switching to metal and glass with the iPhone 4. To date, Apple’s choice of materials has been one of its prime differentiating factors, at least from an aesthetics point of view, vs. the Android crop of competitors. So does dipping back into a polycarbonate shell threaten the image Apple has tried so hard to cultivate? The answer is a resounding ‘No.’ Apple notes that the iPhone 5c is actually polycarbonate because it wanted to get the colors just right, and doing so in metal just wasn’t feasible. Further, it points out that there’s a steel frame (which doubles as an antenna) girding that polycarbonate shell, which results in a phone that feels sturdy in the hand, without the flex or perceived fragility of other plastic device designs.
In fact the iPhone 5c is slightly heavier than the iPhone 5s, weighing in at 132g vs. 112g for the all-metal flagship iPhone. The added weight gives it a nice heft; it’s just a shade lighter than the iPhone 4S, which lends it a feeling of substance. The material of the case, while glossy and smooth, doesn’t feel prone to slipping from your grip, and the rounded edges and corners are also a very nice fit for the contours of your hand. Some interesting details I noticed about the iPhone 5c vs. the 5 and 5s: its lock/power button appears to be the same as the volume buttons, which could help Apple save on manufacturing costs, and there’s a simple, four-hole single speaker grill on the bottom, whereas the metal designs have two grills, each with two rows of holes. It doesn’t seem to make much different to speaker performance, however. If you’re familiar with Apple’s iPhone Retina displays, than the screen on the 5c needs no introduction. If the 5c is your first iPhone, or your first Retina-capable iPhone, than the screen will truly impress. Other manufacturers have exceeded Apple’s PPI count with screens of their own, but the 4-inch Retina shows no signs of age despite now being year-old technology. Apple’s iPhone display makes text ultra crisp and clear, but it also offers the best and most consistent color and tone balance of any mobile screen in my experience. And the Retina screen gains additional new life thanks to iOS 7, the mobile OS overhaul that Apple is launching alongside the iPhone 5c and 5s. Both ship with iOS 7, and one of its key improvements is that has a new, lightweight system font that shows off the Retina’s text rendering prowess extremely well. We’re treating , but it’s worth highlighting some of the software features that really pop on the iPhone 5c. First, Apple has decided to ship each iPhone 5c with a color-matched lock and homescreen wallpaper pre-installed and activated on every new device, which has a small but significant effect on consumer experience. It gives the 5c a subtle, ‘your own phone, right out of the box’ type of feel, which is ideal for a device that seems to be aimed at a very broad group of users who might not be instantly comfortable or familiar with customization options. Another big improvement for all iPhones with the iOS 7 update is the new Control Center feature, which provides quick access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb and other toggles, as well as apps including the Calculator, flashlight activation and AirPlay/AirDrop controls. It’s a much smarter, much easier to get at version of the app tray Apple previously used to provide access to some of these features, including music playback controls. The app tray was one of the least understood features of iOS among users in my experience, co Control Center, combined with the new multitasking windows accessible via double-tapping the Home button, should go a long way to helping new users get accustomed to Apple’s mobile software. The iPhone 5c inherits the capable camera of its predecessor, the iPhone 5s. That 8 megapixel shooter remains one of the best smartphone cameras in terms of practical use, if not on paper, that’s currently available on a mobile device. That means it’s packing a backside illumination sensor, a f/2.4 aperture and a hybrid IR filter. But software is where the 5c gets some serious camera improvements.
The camera app in iOS 7 offers features like built-in filters, which can be applied during or after photo capture, and there’s improved face detection, which can now capture up to 10 individual faces even during 1080p video recording, as well as 3x zoom during video shooting and improved video stabilization. As you can see from the video demo segment, the HD video quality is very nice (the vertical pan is somewhat shaky though, as is to be expected shooting freehand). New in the iPhone 5c is the FaceTime camera, which improves over the iPhone 5’s front-facing shooter with larger individual pixels and better backside illumination, all of which adds up to better low-light capture. The effect is immediate when you’re using FaceTime or other video chat services, since colors are better-rendered and there’s less grain on the image. Apple is focusing on exactly the right areas with the FaceTime camera, since low-light is the most common use case with the front camera when video chatting indoors or capturing party selfies. should come out much better with an iPhone 5c. As you might expect, the iPhone 5c performs a lot like the iPhone 5, which is to say it’s lag-free, fast and responsive. You won’t want for processor power with current generation games and apps, and at least for now, the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit apps (which are new with the iPhone 5s and its A7 system-on-a-chip) won’t be felt by any consumers. That said, it’s conceivable that as devs start to build experiences designed for 64-bit mobile computing, the 5c could feel the pinch with some edge case software, probably of the advanced creative variety. One big area where Apple has improved the iPhone 5c is with the range of its wireless connectivity options. Both the iPhone 5c and 5s can support up to 13 LTE bands, which makes them much more likely to support LTE on multiple networks. Right now, carriers don’t have very many LTE roaming agreements in place, so when travelling internationally you’ll probably still get bumped down to 3G, but as those agreements fall into place that’ll change, with more global LTE coverage available on both devices. As a special treat, if you’re purchasing an unlocked device, it should be LTE compatible with other networks out of the box. For instance, I purchased an EE 4G LTE data-only SIM for the UK in my U.S.-model iPhone 5c review unit, and it instantly connected to the EE LTE network. This is great news for both travellers and people who’d like more options for reselling their device or moving country-to-country down the road. Here’s something I think many of you will be happy to hear: In my experience, the iPhone 5c got better battery life than the iPhone 5 during general usage. On average, I got around a day and a half of standby, with between 6 and 15 hours of actual usage depending on my activity mix (more HD video streaming towards the lower end). On my brand new iPhone 5 hardware, I’d been getting less than that under similar conditions. Apple is advertising slight gains to battery performance with the iPhone 5c vs. the iPhone 5, but in terms of lived experience the 5c definitely seems like a step up, and the improvements to the standby power management algorithm in iOS 7 really seem to be cutting back on idle power draw. Apple’s iPhone 5c sparked a lot of debate prior to its launch, prompting observes to wonder what it might mean for Apple to build a “cheap” iPhone or target a new market segment. What Apple has delivered is far from a “cheap” device, in terms of both quality of experience and hardware, and in terms of price. The 5c is probably more broadly appealing than the iPhone 5s just by virtue of its lower cost of entry, but it’s still premium hardware and is likely better thought of as an analogue to the iPhone 4S relative to the iPhone 5 back when that device launched. But the 5c also has a focus on color, personality and a sort of ‘lightness’ of design. The phone feels ‘young’ overall, and it’s likely that’s the kind of consumer that’s going to enjoy this device; the youth market and those just getting their first smartphone or moving up from their first budget Android device to the big leagues. The iPhone 5c is an improvement, even if slight, to the smartphone I’d still call the best available if Apple hadn’t also released the iPhone 5s. I’ll say that with the caveat that I believe the iPhone is still the best smartphone available for the largest number of smartphone buyers, in terms of both usability and design, even with the dramatic changes wrought by iOS 7. Given the choice, I’d choose an iPhone 5c over an iPhone 5, based on design alone, and ignoring its other benefits. In other words, if you’re in the market for a new smartphone, Apple’s iPhone 5c should be right near the top of your list.
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NSA Spying Justification Declassified
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Gregory Ferenstein
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), America’s super-secret spy court, has the legal justification for the National Security Agency’s phone record dragnet program. , judges had declared that every single call record was relevant to the fight against terrorism, and thus legal for spy agencies to collect en masse. Perhaps most importantly, the NSA’s authority to collect the data. FISC Judge Clair Eagan explained why the NSA could collect phone records (meta data) under section 215 of the The Patriot Act: “Because it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection of a telephone company’s metadata to determine those connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives as part of authorized investigations, the production of the information sought meets the standard for relevance under Section 215.” Specifically, the on a 1976 case, , which held that because callers use a third party (a telephone company) to transmit their signal, they cannot expect total privacy. Additionally, the government is not “searching” the number specifically, only collecting it in bulk. “The Supreme Court conclude that a person does not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in telephone numbers dialed, and there, when the government obtained that dialing information, it ‘was not a ‘search,’ and no warrant was required,” she explained. Perhaps even more important, none of the telephone companies . “To this date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order,” explains the ruling. “Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an Order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so.” No shocker, civil rights groups are outraged. “It’s disappointing that the telecoms did not stand up for their users,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, Kurt Ospahl, told Wired. President Obama significant reforms to the NSA surveillance practices and is awaiting recommendations from an independent task group. Any reforms will likely wait until the group has submitted its findings. [ ]
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Yep, Social Discovery Startup Sonar Is Dead (And Its CEO Explains Why)
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Anthony Ha
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So, uh, what’s going on with ? The startup, which promised to connect users with relevant people nearby (using data from Facebook, Foursquare and elsewhere), seemed to have disappeared from the web, as noted earlier this month. But we’ve been trying to get in touch with the team to figure out if the startup was truly dead or just preparing for a relaunch. When I spoke to former CTO Paul Fisher last week, he didn’t sound entirely sure himself. Well, co-founder and former CEO Brett Martin just eliminated that ambiguity with about “the rise and fall of @sonar”. And in an email, he told me, “To my knowledge, there’s no one working on it full time. I stopped working on it a few months ago.” You may have noticed the odd caveat there (“to my knowledge”). Martin said that’s because Sonar was “a corporate entity that was owned by various parties” and “those parties could be doing something with the asset that I am unaware of.” (I reached out to Nihal Mehta, who invested through ENIAC Ventures, and he said there were larger investors who are “dealing with the assets.” He added that ENIAC would “back Brett again in a second — it just didn’t work out this time.”) So what lessons does Martin draw upon in his blog post? Well, there are a bunch, so you should probably just , but one of the big themes is distraction. The things that Martin said “I wish I spent less time on” include focusing on events, working with agencies, pursuing side projects, and worrying about the competition. On the last point, he noted that “the insider media had fabricated Highlight as heir to the throne” in the run-up to last year’s South by Southwest conference. (Not that we had .) What actually happened, in Martin’s view, was that “Highlight never went anywhere but we definitely wasted a ton of energy and sleep ‘responding to the threat’ when we should have been figuring out how to make our own business work.” Martin also said that, “when the ambient social networking space iced over in the spring of 2012,” Sonar spent nine months unsuccessfully trying to get acquired by a daily deals company. As for what finally killed the company, he wrote, “I ultimately stepped away from Sonar when I came to the conclusion that, despite all that we had invested, everyone stood a better chance starting anew.” , he’s now working on a new company. Fisher, meanwhile, recently left to , but he said it wasn’t because Sonar was shutting down (not at the time, at least), but because of the opportunity in his new role: “It was a tough decision to leave [Sonar], as I have always been a believer in the team and the incredible product we had built.” He added, “Sonar was an incredibly talented team, and even if the company doesn’t continue forward, I have incredible respect for the entire team and its investors.”
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TC Cribs: eHarmony’s Santa Monica HQ, Where Love Is Definitely In The Air
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Colleen Taylor
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Welcome to a brand new episode of , the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the walls of the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what it’s like for the smarty-pants staffers who work there every day. It’s not often that a tech company’s office can be described as “romantic,” but that’s exactly the theme of the decor at the Santa Monica, California headquarters of online matchmaking pioneer . As you’ll see in the video above, eHarmony likes to keep its users front and center, so the office is covered with photos of smiling happy couples (many of them in wedding attire) who have met each other using the website. eHarmony’s overarching mission goes beyond setting up fun first dates: As VP of product Arvind Mishra told us during the Cribs tour, the company’s main goal is to lower the overall divorce rate by making sure people are well-matched from the very beginning of a relationship. Check out the Cribs tour to see the hundreds of happy couples that practically serve as eHarmony’s wallpaper, catch a sneak peek of founder (of fame) hanging out over lunch with his staffers, and more.
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EA Anoints Dark Horse Candidate And EA Sports EVP Andrew Wilson As New CEO
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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EA elevated Andrew Wilson, the company’s executive vice president overseeing EA Sports, . The other widely rumored internal contender was President of EA Labels Frank Gibeau. Wilson is a young and hungry up-and-comer within EA who was looked at slightly later in the selection process, which has been going on for six months since previous CEO John Riccitiello stepped down. He’ll be leading EA into a challenging era. The company not only has to manage multiple franchises on consoles; it is also trying to find its way in a new world where games are services and are free-to-play. , Wilson reiterated that his top priority going into the next few years will be to focus on the company’s “continued transformation for our digital future.” Wilson joined the company more than a decade ago, and led the company’s Asia online publishing group before serving as executive producer of EA’s very lucrative FIFA franchise. Notably, FIFA also saw respectable traction with in-game purchases. After that, he became the executive vice president overseeing EA Sports and then shepherded the company’s online, games-as-a-service platform Origin into existence. In that sense, he has overseen products using the ‘packaged goods’ model of gaming and he has successfully worked in ‘free-to-play’ world as well. He’s also the first studio executive to serve as CEO. That hybrid mix of skills will be key to EA’s future. Financial “shortcomings” led to the sudden resignation of EA’s last CEO Riccitiello, Essentially, EA is like a massive ship that has to balance stagnant growth for console platforms with the rise of emerging platforms like tablets and smartphones, which require entirely different revenue models. Executive chairman Larry Probst . He said that Wilson is “a compelling and charismatic communicator who cares deeply about organizational development, teams, and the individual careers of people who work for EA. Most of all, he has a powerful sense of respect for and commitment to our consumers.” Probst added that EA’s board of directors looked both inside and outside the company at a number of candidates. He said, “Andrew’s appointment is a clear demonstration of the deep bench of management talent at EA.”
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Google Expands Chrome Data Compression Feature On iOS
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Sarah Perez
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Google has begun expanding access to its feature to more users, specifically those on iOS devices who have the company’s app installed. The feature’s existence was announced some time ago, but TechCrunch understands that Google is now rolling out notifications about its iOS availability to more users, making many aware of the feature for the first time. As someone who recently recovered from a stroke induced by a $600 mobile bill courtesy of my household’s data-hungry smartphones and tablets, consider me personally interested in advancements in mobile data compression technology — in whatever shape or form they arrive. In Google’s case, the company that it was releasing a new feature for the Chrome Beta for Android browser that would speed up web browsing and save on bandwidth. Essentially a Google proxy, the feature routes web requests through Google’s servers where the company’s compress and optimize the content. The connection between the browser and Google’s servers is also handled by the for further optimization. This process can reduce data usage by 50 percent, as it both compresses and minimizes HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, removing unnecessary whitespace, comments and other metadata not essential to rendering the pages, the company explained. To some extent, the feature is similar to Opera’s “Turbo” mode in its desktop and mobile browsers, as well as the compression capabilities that ship with Amazon’s Silk browser, though Google’s technology is designed to not slow down browsing quite as much as Opera’s, in particular, once did. Earlier this summer, that it would begin rolling out its experimental data compression technology to Chrome users on iPhone and iPad, but we hadn’t heard much about that expansion since. However, we’ve confirmed that more users are now being introduced to the option because Google is starting to alert them via notification pop-ups asking them if they would like to opt in to this “limited preview.” These seemed to have been kicked off following a recent update to the Chrome iOS application in mid-September. The notifications read “you’re invited” and encourage users to “save bandwidth and browse more securely” by tapping the big blue “Enable” button below the alert’s text. If you choose to opt in, you’re taken to a Settings interface where you can toggle “Reduce Data Usage” on or off, and presumably later view the ongoing savings Google provides. Unfortunately, without the invite, there doesn’t appear to be a way to toggle the feature on by yourself. Similarly, if you initially decline the invite, you can’t seem to pull up the option a second time. (Got a workaround? Let us know.) Google is running a staged rollout on iOS because it’s unable to test new features like this, as it does on Android, where a beta version of Chrome is supported. It’s unclear how many users are being invited into the early tests so far, but it appears to still be a rather limited trial given social media postings and other tips. Stay tuned.
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Inside Microsoft’s New $40 Billion Stock Repurchase Program
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Alex Wilhelm
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a new $40 billion share repurchase authorization with no expiration date. With the move, Microsoft in effect to buy its own shares whenever it wants to. The announcement came with a dividend increase of 22 percent to $0.28 per share. Its stock has responded by doing very little, rising just 0.39 percent in regular trading. It trails the NASDAQ’s rise of 0.76 percent during today’s normal hours. It almost feels odd that investors would less than shrug at the company’s news. The $40 billion program was not a surprise. Microsoft yet-current $40 billion program (not the one announced today) will wrap on September 30. So Microsoft had to either announce a new program or stop repurchasing its shares, which it would not do. The company’s massive cash accumulation is implicit pressure to return wealth to investors. And share repurchases are an important instrument of shareholder reward, along with dividends. In a , Microsoft stated that all but $3.614 billion of the current $40 billion program had been repurchased. It is certainly possible that Microsoft will finish executing the full $40 billion by the end of September. The company purchased $771,593,256 of its own shares in June alone, for example. However, the new $40 billion program was preceded not only by the 2008 to 2013 $40 billion repurchase plan, but $40 billion plan. Here’s announcing its then-new, and now all-but-defunct share repurchase effort: Microsoft Corp. today announced that its board of directors approved a new share repurchase program authorizing up to an additional $40 billion in share repurchases with an expiration of September 30, 2013. […] In addition, the company stated that it has completed its previous $40 billion stock repurchase program. So, it’s $40 billion dollar repurchase plans all the way down. That makes today’s news somewhat predictable and, therefore — at least theoretically — included in Microsoft’s stock price before the announcement. The dividend change was also expected; while it was higher than some had anticipated, it was not enough to truly rock the boat. Previous Microsoft stock buyback programs had end dates, meaning that they predicted a certain purchase-rate per year. For example, the current $40 billion buyback program that ends later this month had a five-year and eight-day period of activity. Therefore, Microsoft stated that it would buy up to $8 billion in its own stock per year, or $667 million per month. The newly announced $40 billion effort has no expiration date, making it perhaps less active on a recurring basis. Alternatively, Microsoft could accelerate its share repurchasing under the new program, but it remains unclear what the company intends. As a final note, at $0.28 per share quarterly, Microsoft currently has a dividend yield of 3.4 percent. Apple almost yields 3 percent. Some tech companies are all grown up.
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Apple’s ‘App Resurrection’ Feature Great For Customers, But Opaque To Developers
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Matthew Panzarino
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In the early hours today, a discovered that Apple had updated the App Store to allow users on old iOS versions to ‘ version of apps. At first glance, this is a great feature and should benefit customers with devices stuck on old versions of iOS. But the opaque nature of how the feature is implemented for developers raises questions and could cause some problems for users too. The way the feature works is actually very simple and seamless for the user. If a user has a device that only supports an old version of iOS — say an iPhone 3GS on iOS 6 — and tries to download a new version app which has gone iOS 7 only, it will get the last viable version of the app. So the last edition uploaded by the developer that supported iOS 6. There’s no fuss, the user just gets a version that works. That’s actually pretty clever, and should eliminate a lot of the reluctance by some developers to adopt iOS 7 technologies immediately. Many developers that I’ve spoken to are also planning on shipping iOS 7-only versions of their apps as well. This feature will also benefit them as those old hardware users will still be able to download and use the old versions of their apps. And, if one takes a bit more cynical tack, you could also think — just in case iOS 7 adoption rates aren’t as quick as they have been in the past. Those early bird developers won’t be left in the lurch. The issues with the process for developers were recognized quickly by some . “The likelihood of any complex app, especially anything API driven, working after several years of neglect are slim. Those that do work may be incredibly unreliable and buggy,” says Richter. “Where does this leave things? Users will blame the developers for releasing substandard products, because the average user doesn’t understand the process of software development. This will result in apps being reviewed poorly and an increased support load for developers.” To give you a brief example, any old version of Your Favorite Twitter Client that hasn’t been updated to work with the new v1.1 API will be very buggy or broken completely if you try to download it on an old version of iOS. Sources in the developer community have confirmed to us that there is no option available in Apple’s iTunes Connect dashboard that allows a developer to see which version of their apps are being served to which iOS versions. That opacity alone has the potential to confuse customer support issues, as old versions of the app may very well contain bugs or issues that have gone un-addressed as developers move on to the latest versions of iOS. But there is also no way for developers to re-upload old versions of the apps with those issues fixed. Simply put, a user on an old version of iOS could download an app with issues that are impossible for a developer to ever fix. You can see the nightmare scenario that is cropping up in many developer’s minds here. And sources that are familiar with the system used to roll out this ‘app resurrection’ feature have confirmed that this is the way that the system works. There will be no way for developers to access the version used or to upload new binaries to fix old problems, nor any way to ‘kill off’ old buggy versions. It’s not clear, but seems very likely, that Apple has stored all of the old versions of apps submitted by developers, enabling them to implement this feature. It’s very important to note that the vector for problems is narrowed by a couple of factors. First, iOS adoption has always been very high. Something like 80-90% of iOS users (which were capable of doing so) had upgraded to iOS 6 within the first week or two. If iOS 7’s launch goes off well, the majority of devices from the iPhone 4 and up will be running the new OS very quickly, eliminating the need for these resurrected apps. That still leaves whatever percentage are unwilling or unable to update. This includes users of the iPhone (there are still some), iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch first through 4th generation and original iPad. While iPod touch users stand to gain the most from this new feature, iPhone and iPad users also get a nice boost to usability for old devices. And they get it without any complex user interaction. They just download the new app from the App Store and get whatever edition sill runs on iOS. Unfortunately, the developers of those apps don’t get quite the same treatment, and are handed a bit of a raw deal here. A couple of straightforward additions to the iTunes connect dashboard would enable them to identify the exact versions of old apps that are causing problems, and even to upload versions of apps specifically for old devices. That doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case for now, but one can always hope. “It is no secret that developers are the bottom of the pecking order, first and foremost Apple cares about Apple, then about consumer users, and finally developers,” says Richter. And that statement appears to be accurate in this case, where the new system improves download rates for Apple and customer experience for the user, but could cause major support issues for its developers.
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Adobe’s Creative Cloud Surpasses 1M Subscribers, But Q3 2013 Revenue Falls To $995.1M
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Frederic Lardinois
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Adobe today reported quarterly earnings for its third financial quarter of the year. While the company another decline in revenue and earnings per share to $995.1 million and $0.32 respectively — something most — the company also announced another quarter of impressive growth for its subscription service. More importantly, though, Adobe also today reported that Creative Cloud now has passed 1 million subscribers. Earlier this year, Adobe said that it expected to have 1.25 million paid subscribers (both individuals and teams) by the end of the year, a number that now seems to be within easy reach. “We exceeded one million subscriptions during Q3, demonstrating that the transition to Creative Cloud is happening sooner than expected,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s president and CEO in a statement today. Adobe is betting big on Creative Cloud and it’s now the main way for its users to get access to its software. While most users and pundits expected Adobe to make this move over the coming years, the announcement that it would stop selling shrink-wrapped software came as quite a surprise to many when Adobe announced it at its . Adobe, however, has always argued that Creative Cloud’s momentum was so good, it decided to take the risk and change its business model sooner than anticipated. With this change in business model for its most important product, Adobe is obviously giving up short-term revenue for long-term subscription income. This will bring down the company’s quarterly earnings for the time being — something that’s clearly reflected in today’s report — but it’s not a surprise for investors who have generally been supportive of the company’s move. Indeed, Adobe’s stock hit record highs earlier this week ahead of today’s earnings report and it’s up sharply in after-hours trading.
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Adobe Gets Serious About Hardware, Will Start Selling Its Mighty Digital Pen And Napoleon Ruler In The First Half Of 2014
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Frederic Lardinois
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Adobe’s first foray into hardware is about to . When Adobe its thin-tipped at its MAX conference earlier this year, they were still considered experiments. Even then, though, Adobe’s David Macy that these projects were more than just hobbies, so it is not a huge surprise that the company now says it will in the first half of 2014. Earlier this month, I sat down with Michael Gough, who leads Adobe’s Experience Design (XD) team which incubated this project, and take the latest versions of Mighty and Napoleon for a spin. Adobe won’t say when exactly the devices will launch or how much they will cost. Gough, however, told me that the company is looking at them as a premium product, and, after holding them for a while, they definitely feel like that. Both the Mighty and Napoleon have gone through a few design revisions since the company first showed them earlier this year. The Napoleon ruler, for example, now only features a single button to switch between different tools and shapes and the Mighty pen, which still retains its triangular form, is now charged through the back instead of the front. “We want to do hardware to push us,” Gough told me. The way we interact with software is changing and to stay on top of these developments, Adobe wants to try new things. Until earlier this year, Gough told me, Adobe was still planning to go it alone and develop the project completely in-house. After MAX, though, the team decided that its core competency wasn’t really hardware, and that it would rather focus on the user experience and design instead of the technical details of the hardware. After talking to a few potential partners, Adobe decided to work with , a company that’s probably best known for its Kickstarter-financed digital pens for the iPad. Adobe plans to produce its hardware with the help of an OEM in Taiwan, though it’s still finalizing the production details. As Gough told me, the final version will likely talk to the iPad over Bluetooth to transfer data about pressure and signals from a built-in accelerometer. One of the breakthroughs with the Mighty pen is its very thin tip. By default, the iPad and most other tablets are programmed to ignore these kinds of small tips because they are optimized for our fingers. Because of this, virtually every tablet stylus uses a very thick rubber nib or, like the , tries to emulate a thin tip with the help of a clear, fingertip-sized tip. If you want to use the iPad for drawing, neither of these solutions are ideal. Unsurprisingly, Adobe won’t divulge how it gets the iPad to recognize the Mighty’s small tip beyond saying that the “magic” of getting it to work is in the front of the pen, so the team had to move the charging port to the back. In Gough’s view, the company’s job today is to adapt to how creatives use their tools but also to the changing perception of what a “creative” is. “We want to start building the tools for this next generation of creatives, which is frigging everybody today,” Gough said. Tools, in his belief, define a generation and today, that’s mobile, so Adobe, too, has to offer the right tools on this platform. Besides the hardware, though, Adobe is also working on two iPad apps to showcase the hardware’s capabilities. Project Parallel (Adobe always calls unreleased but public products “project [x]”) is an iPad app for sketching that’s optimized for the Mighty and Napoleon. I had a chance to play with a pre-release version and it’s a basic tool that really comes to life thanks to the combination of the hardware and connectivity with the cloud. Using Napoleon, for example, it’s easy to draw straight lines on the iPad, for example. When you put the device on the screen, it’ll automatically draw a line (or any other shape) in front of it and you just need to follow it with your Mighty pen. The app also does some basic snapping for users who want to do line drawings, making it easy to draw parallel lines, for example (hence the app’s name). One nifty feature of Napoleon and Project Parallel is that it can grab any kind of outline from the cloud. That’s where Adobe’s second software announcement today comes in. Project Contour — as the name implies — is an iPhone app for creating these outlines. But there’s a cool twist here. You just have to take a picture of an object and the app will automatically generate the outline for you. All of the info is then synced between the devices and apps through the cloud (with Behance being the logical repository for them, though Adobe hasn’t finalized the details here, either). Gough envisions a world where anybody can make shape packs for Creative Cloud and share them. The company plans to launch an SDK together with the two devices. Adobe’s long-term plan isn’t just to build a pen and ruler, but to create a platform that any pen can connect to. For the time being, after all, Adobe is a software company and most of its revenue will soon come from subscriptions to its Creative Cloud — and the more developers build hardware that uses Creative Cloud as its platform, the better it is for Adobe.
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Garmin’s New Forerunner 220 & 620 Running Watches Are More Colorful And More Capable
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Chris Velazco
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There’s plenty of commotion surrounding the smartwatch space these days, but let’s not forget that some of us have essentially been strapping tiny computers to our wrists for years now. GPS-enabled running watches are a serious tool in a runner’s arsenal, and Garmin recently outed two new ones — the — to help runners get a better grip on their performance. Both gadgets offer a similar level of basic functionality — each pack a 1-inch color display (which is somehow a first for these things), an accelerometer for tracking motion, Bluetooth 4.0 low energy support for smartphone syncing, and alerts for when you’re pace gets shaky. Both also look substantially better than their Forerunner forebears, to the point where you wouldn’t feel totally out of sorts wearing these things out on the town. The 620 takes it even further though with the addition of a curious Recovery Advisor, which gives runners a rough estimate of how long they should take it easy before embarking on their next one. Throw in support for Wi-Fi syncing (which seems a little extraneous considering that a solid chunk of users probably bring smartphones on runs anyway), and the ability to estimate the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use while in motion, and you’ve got yourself a pretty tidy package. Of course, all those extra training tidbits will cost you — while the more basic 220 watch retails for $249, its more robust brother will cost $399. Still, I have to wonder how much time these standalone running watches have before they get completely overshadowed by their smarter cousins. After all, devices like have already gained the support of a few fitness and running app developers (think Runkeeper and MyFitnessPal) and that nebulous Apple iWatch supposedly plays up the exercise angle in a big way. Don’t get me wrong — professionals and hardcore runners will never give up their standalone devices, but when future Couch to 5Kers finally graduate to a higher level, the smartwatch landscape could look totally different. On the other end of the wearable gadget spectrum, quantified self players like Fitbit and Jawbone could pave the way for increased pressure on Garmin, especially since the latter has been to boost the potency of its wearables.
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Distill Raises $1.3M To Make Technical Recruiting, Hiring Dead Simple
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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With recruiters viciously competing for the best talent in the Valley, startups end up with plenty of paperwork and files to contend with. A San Francisco-based startup called is looking to make recruiting dead simple and just picked up $1.3 million in funding in a round with Felicis Ventures, China’s Innovation Works and DN Capital. “Hiring and recruiting is painful wherever you go. It doesn’t matter what stage you’re at,” Chen said. “We want to bring a level of analytical rigor and data analysis to the hiring process.” The company has built a video interviewing and scheduling service that makes it easy to vet candidates and their problem solving abilities side-by-side. The startup’s two founders and built up technical teams at companies like Tapjoy and StumbleUpon after working at Google and Yahoo. They became familiar with the frustrations of hiring and scheduling interviews. Distill’s product takes the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and puts them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer can walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session. There is also a co-browsing experience in case an interviewer, for example, wants a design candidate to walk them through an interface or their portfolio. While they’re naturally starting out on the familiar turf of technical recruiting, Distill aims to serve a market that’s much broader than the world of startups and large tech companies. “People do ask about why they should use this over Skype and Google Hangouts,” Chen said. “But there’s a lot of friction. You have to get the candidate’s Skype name, then pass all of that information onto interviewers. We’d rather have video become secondary and focus on the collaborative part of an interview.” Distill also compiles all the relevant data and interview output in one place, so recruiters and managers don’t have to go scavenging for it in multiple places. The way they handle IDs and connecting candidates with companies also prevents the awkwardness of staying linked to a candidate on Skype even if they didn’t get the job or took a competing offer. Distill’s whole experience is browser-based, so clients don’t have to download any software or plug-ins. Interviewers send candidates a simple link to start an interview. An extra scheduling tool also makes it easy to sync up people for meetings. But this tool is not just about finding holes in people’s schedules — tries to match interviewer and candidate skill sets. Each interviewer can be tagged with skill sets they have, like programming languages they are adept in. “There are recruiting coordinators at bigger tech companies and their job is literally to schedule all day long — on-site interviews and recruiter meet-and-greets,” Chen said. “It could be more simplified.” The company has been in private beta for the last few months with companies like ClearSlide, Disney, Box, ModCloth and FiveStars. Other startups interested in the private beta can sign up at
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After Bono’s Visit, Ghana’s MEST Moves Up A Gear With New VC Head
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Mike Butcher
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It’s been fascinating to track what has become a groundbreaking nonprofit project to teach tech startup entrepreneurship from the ground up in Ghana, Africa. We first covered the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) last year in a , Accra. Then last month, world famous U2 lead singer Bono to the project. TechCrunch likes to lead where Bono follows… But today MEST is moving up a gear with the appointment of Neal Hansch as managing director of the MEST Incubator. With 15 years experience in tech, he was most recently a General Partner with Rustic Canyon Partners (RCP), an early-stage-focused investment fund with $500 million under management. Prior to RCP, Neal was a corporate development executive at Macromedia (acquired by Adobe), a venture capitalist with Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), and an investment banker at, Robertson Stephens & Co. He says he plans to help “accelerate and extend its reach across Africa and onto the global stage.” Part of that will be about building a new fund to surround MEST’s startups, which has seen genuine success stories emerge in the shape of Retail Tower, Dropifi and Saya, which made the finals of the San Francisco Disrupt Battlefield, barely months after launching in Ghana. Begun in 2008 by Metwater founder Jorn Lyseggen, MEST has trained more than 125 technology entrepreneurs, and its associated incubator program has invested in 15 startups in Ghana. MEST companies have gone on to raise external capital from Silicon Valley and European institutional investors and appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt and DEMO, among others. Not too shabby for a country of 24 million in an emerging market like Africa.
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Google Expands Role In Digital Education, Teams Up With edX To Build A YouTube For Free Online Courses
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Rip Empson
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It’s turning into a busy week for Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers, and the tech companies that love them — particularly Google. On Monday, Udacity co-founder and CEO Sebastian Thrun and California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom announced the , a consortium of online organizations dedicated to closing , developing standards for career readiness and providing the content that will help get students ready for the workforce. Google and AT&T are some of the names already endorsing the Alliance, while rumors have been circling that Coursera and other MOOC providers are on board as well. However, at this point who will be participating and what it could mean for education is still up in the air. It’s an alliance-in-progress. Today, Google took another big step into the open courseware game, — the Harvard and MIT-backed, non-profit organization that currently stands as one of the Big Three MOOC Providers, along with Udacity and Coursera. Together, the two companies plan to launch , a site that will allow teachers, businesses — and really anyone — to create their own digital course and share it with the world. As of now, the site is slated for launch in the first half of 2014. For edX, MOOC.org represents another step towards going beyond the boundaries of its current model, which includes partnership with institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other elite universities. In April, the organization merged with Stanford University-based startup Class2Go to build an open-source version of its platform that can be used by any institution around the globe. The goal has been to allow developers access to edX’s code to allow any institution to host and distribute digital courses for on-campus and distance learners — both online and offline — and create better ways to collect student data. With today’s partnership, edX is expanding that mission, as its partnership with Google will enable any institution or business to post courses on MOOC.org and presumably open the doors to public access of edX’s content. It will also offer a more diverse range of content from non-profit institutions to higher education institutions and businesses, edX President Anant Agarwal said. However, while edX has been building out its own open-source platform, Google said in its blog post today that it will be hosting MOOC.org in its own cloud and — not only that — it will also be lending a team of developers to the partnership to help develop Open edX, the organization’s aforementioned open-source MOOC platform. In turn, for Google, its partnership with edX represents yet another step in its own foray into digital education — one that includes , , and the launch of its , in September of last year. In its blog post today, Google explained that, over the last year, Course Builder has served as as an experiment in how to build and optimize an open, digital course platform at scale. Since launching, Google said that the platform had become host to a variety of courses on “everything from game theory to philanthropy” and is now being used by both universities and non-profits alike to experiment with MOOC content and “make education more accessible … enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of its cloud services.” As to Google’s role in the MOOC movement and digital education, the company says that it will continue to “make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform.” Of course, this partnership, like the Open Education Alliance, is still a work in progress. Details on what type of content, how it will be structured and just what businesses and teachers will be able to get out of the platform remains unclear. Google did, however, choose to comment on the state of MOOCs and their role in the future of online education, saying, “our industry is in the early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today.” It’s still far too early to say what the ramifications are for Google’s partnership with edX and its participation in the Open Education Alliance. Certainly, if both can work towards promoting a “new meritocracy in higher education,” as my colleague Greg surmised in his recent post, they could collectively bring enormous changes to higher education and the scope and breadth of education as it exists today. Certainly, Udacity, edX and Google seem hellbent on recalibrating the focus of higher education and learning content, focusing on content that will help students learn how to become part of a modern, and increasingly more technical, global workforce. Whether the increasing role of Google and other tech companies in the educational landscape will be welcomed by academia is one thing, however, at the very least, these two experiments could serve to boost the profile of MOOC-style education, particularly of edX itself. It also seems to indicate the increasing likelihood that, whoever should win the battle to become the world’s largest open course platform, Google will be there to lend a hand — and share a piece of the pie.
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TurnCast Is A Sat-Nav App With Predictive Weather Smarts To Reroute You Before A Snow Storm Strikes
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Natasha Lomas
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U.S. weather app maker , a bootstrapped startup based in Mountain View which has around 1.7 million users across six extant apps and turns a profit, is launching a new app called TurnCast which combines real-time and predictive rain and snow data with voice-prompted navigation — so drivers can change their travel plans based on what’s going to fall out of the sky up to two hours in the future. The app, being demoed here at TechCrunch Disrupt’s startup alley as a feature in one of WeatherSphere’s existing apps (ahead of its standalone launch, due in three weeks), beats crowdsourced weather alert services like Waze (and indeed Google Maps) by offering a predictive alert capability at street level, not just real-time weather notifications. “Lots of people get stuck in snow storms every year because they didn’t know the weather when they started. So, if you’re sitting in San Francisco planning your trip, this application will tell you that you should take this different route; go via South Lake Tahoe, instead of North Lake Tahoe, because it knows that it will start snowing after two hours,” founder and CEO Raghav Gupta tells TechCrunch. “Even if you look at the weather right now, or the traffic right now, it’s not backed up at all. So Google Maps and Apple Maps will take you the straight route. But this application will tell you to take a different route. And if you’re driving along and the weather changes it can reroute you, based on weather.” How accurate is TurnCast’s predictive data? Gupta tells TechCrunch the accuracy is 95% at half an hour ahead, dropping off after that with a prediction cap at two hours — presumably before it becomes too speculative. The raw weather data comes from — the key data source for all U.S. weather apps, according Gupta. But WeatherSphere differentiates its offering by applying its own compression and mobile optimisation algorithms to that data. Key differences vs rival U.S. weather apps are the street level predictive capability, higher resolution weather data, and the data being optimised for mobile display (vs rivals’ made-for-TV weather systems that have been ported to mobile), according to Gupta. “The NOAA data tells you a snapshot of where it’s raining exactly, at about a kilometre resolution. We take that, plus a bunch of other data sources, plus we apply our algorithms,” he says. “Nobody else has the real-time data that we have, not even WeatherChannel. Nobody else has the accuracy on the map, and nobody else has the user experience that we give. Plus we are the only ones doing weather prediction at street level.” “All other apps you have to see [weather data] only the past. We are the only one who can show you a seamless progression from past to future. This was the number one feature requested by users — ‘tell me where it’s going to go’,” he adds. The app, which is due to launch in around three weeks on iOS (costing $2), with an Android app to follow, will include spoken updates such as “rain stops after five miles” or “heavy snow fall ahead” as well as the driving directions as motorists are travelling along. It will also include the ability to bookmark map locations — so app users can get rain or snow alerts for frequently visited locations. Gupta spent six years at eBay in the search team before leaving to work on his own projects — including dabbling in location-based social networking. It was that experience that sparked the idea to get into weather apps, after he noticed how much chatter sprung up around weather events. “I had lots of users who were discussing weather. It was groups, based upon location. Whenever there was a bad event, people used to discuss about weather,” he says.
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Social Media Marketing Platform MarketMeSuite Raises $1.25M From Talus Holdings
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Catherine Shu
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Social media management and marketing platform has landed a new strategic investment of $1.25 million from , a media technology holding company. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup says the new funding is earmarked for adding new functionality to its platform, marketing, and customer service and support as MarketMeSuite seeks to speed up its growth and increase its paid customer base. This latest round brings the total MarketMeSuite has raised over the past 13 months to $2.25 million. In August 2012, MarketMeSuite in a round led by Boston-area VC Jeffrey McCormick, founder of , shortly after it relocated to Massachusetts from Norwich, U.K. MarketMeSuite says it is now used by more than 30,000 small- and medium-sized businesses. Though there are many platforms designed to help marketers juggle and optimize interactions on different social media accounts (others that have also recently received funding include , and ), MarketMeSuite seeks to differentiate itself with its Inbox for Social dashboard, which is designed to make managing interactions and targeting incoming leads across multiple social media platforms as simple as checking email. In a statement, MarketMeSuite CEO Tammy Kahn Fennell said, “This strategic investment will help us expand the MarketMeSuite platform and create even more ways for our customers to organize, prioritize, engage and find real value in social interactions. Our new partnership with Talus and its network also aligns us with a host of new strategic partners and opportunities.” Backed primarily by Blackstone affiliate GSO Capital Partners LP, Talus Holdings’ portfolio includes other online marketing startups such as , a platform that helps small businesses and publishers market locally, mobile ad startup and , a mobile marketing company that lets users scan graphics to gain more information about products.
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The Final 6 Disrupt SF Startups: Cota, Dryft, Fates Forever, Layer, Regalii And Soil IQ
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Alexia Tsotsis
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This year’s has hit attendance records and been one of the most exciting we’ve ever had. Over the past few days, 3200 people have walked through the concourse to watch Valley titans and newcomers hash it out with the TechCrunch team — including Marc Benioff’s moving story today about . Tomorrow, we’ve got talks from new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Mark Zuckerberg, so we think it might be our best day yet. Just a hunch. Another great reason to tune in tomorrow: the Startup Battlefield grand finale…. Our expert judges and team have whittled down our 30 finalists to six startups who will hash it out tomorrow for a chance to win the grand prize: the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 stipend. Our esteemed finals judges Michael Arrington (CrunchFund), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz), David Lee (SV Angel), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!) and Keith Rabois (Khosla) will rub their brains together to pick a winner. Here are the companies: A “SmartThings for your Garden” — and one day, farm — these soil sensors transmits soil data like temperature and fertility back to a paired app. A mobile payments system targeted towards Latin America, Regalli allows users to send money back home for the purposes of paying bills or buying groceries. Wireless power that uses the Wifi spectrum to charge your phone. An easy way for developers to integrate a full featured, portable communications platform into their projects, a Stripe for messaging. One of the first multiplayer video games designed specifically for tablets. Dryft is a personalized onscreen touch keyboard for tablets that dynamically tracks your fingers for fast and natural and typing.
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TaDaweb Lets You Create ‘Small Data’ Mashups Without Writing A Single Line Of Code
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Jay Donovan
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There is much talk about “Big Data” and the power it can provide. But with can come associated with the cost and complexity of wrangling all that information. According to — a company displaying this week at — the data many businesses are trying to analyze is simple and the results being searched for are known. It’s . Therefore it may not require the organizing of so much data to get the insights required. With that in mind, the best way I can think of describing how TaDaweb’s service works is to think of it as mashup creator that lets non-technical business personnel target public data feeds from which they want to extract very specific, but constantly changing data. There is a graphical interface to accomplish this, meaning that technical knowledge is not needed to make the mashups. “It’s kind of like if Pinterest and Yahoo Pipes had a child,” the CEO Francois Gaspard said. The business example that Gaspard gave me regarding the use of this service was that of a company monitoring the changing prices of competitors’ services. Using TaDaweb, one business could highlight the public pricing listed at the websites of competitors and that info is extracted and pulled into a report of sorts — called a TaDa — that can be monitored or shared. Another example was — appropriately for this event — creating profiles of speakers by extracting multiple data sources about each speaker (CrunchBase, Twitter, Google Search) to create profiles of relevant, timely info about each speaker. The benefit, according to TaDaweb, is that their service offers an automated way for non-technical users to generate reports or data views that are dynamic and relevant, due to the real-time nature of their content. The flexibility of being able to target multiple data sources already out on the web with their GUI is also key to their strategy. The service is currently free, with coming soon
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You Had Me At Vello
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Jay Donovan
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With short-form internet video reaching more and more consumers ( , ), timing for bringing their video greeting card app to market is excellent. In short, Vello is an app that creates these video greeting cards by allowing one or more people to capture six second videos of themselves celebrating or communicating to the greeting card recipient. The app then strings each contributor’s video together into one long video and delivers it to the recipient as email link that can be clicked and watched. Additionally, each person can contribute money to a gift card that is delivered along with the video, and therein lies the monetization strategy, however the gift card is not mandatory. That’s really about all there is to it. Indeed a simple concept (with undoubtedly a complex engine behind it). But if this iOS app — which is still in the approval process at this point — is as easy to use as the team promises, I could see how it could catch on. But perhaps other potential exists as an acquisition target of social networks which could further streamline the integration and extend the reach. Vello should be live in the iTunes app store in the coming days.
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Inbox Is An Elegant, Unified Mobile Messaging App That Wants To Be Mailbox For SMS
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Natasha Lomas
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Is there room for another mobile messaging app? It’s undoubtedly a very crowded space, packed with veteran behemoths and fast growing upstarts duking it out for users’ attention. But New Jersey-based startup, , which dropped by the at TechCrunch Disrupt to demo its iOS app ahead of launch, reckons there’s room for a little more disruption. CEO and founder Maher Janajri says his underlying vision is that despite the rise of multiple OTT (over-the-top) messaging players the category remains pointlessly fragmented, leaving scope for an app that draws in different messaging types and extends their capabilities in various neat ways. The basic problem as he sees it? “Why do I have three apps on my phone that effectively do the same thing?” Inbox takes some of its messaging cues from email management app , with the mission of applying a similarly elegant management functionality across the messaging board — not just to email, but to SMS and OTT messaging. The basic idea is to collapse the functionality gaps that keep these different channels stuck in separate silos. Janajri explained that he finds SMS too limiting, with no option to ‘notify me later’ for an incoming SMS, for instance. It’s those sort of inconsistencies Inbox wants to iron out. That said, breaking the SMS wall down isn’t currently possible on iOS because of system restrictions. Android’s openness has no such limit, though, so that platform will allow inbox to loop in old school texting too. Despite that troublesome inconsistency, Inbox is not going to be Android only. Indeed, its iOS app will come out first. It’s therefore offering more than just more nuanced SMS, with a feature set includes a bundle of neat stuff such as the ability to remove a message you sent from someone else’s phone with a simple swipe to delete action. Other savvy, privacy-focused features with a Snapchattish feel include the ability to conceal the contents of your messages under redaction-style bars by shaking your phone (if you’re worried about shoulder-surfers, for instance). Concealed messages can then be peeked at individually by holding your finger on the screen — a gesture every Snapchat user is familiar with. Inbox also includes a handsome-looking photo-editor for picture messaging, fully kitted out with filters, fun effects, meme generation tools and more. The iOS app will include a disappearing photo messaging feature that notifies users if the other person screenshotted their self-destructing photo — sends them a copy of that screenshot so they know exactly what the other person captured, which goes one better than Snapchat. The app combines these features with an elegant design — that looks almost Windows Phone-esque. On the design side, Janajri said: “We wanted to do something different. When people first saw this they were like, this does not look like an iOS app at all. Very flat. It also coincided well with iOS 7. I wouldn’t say that was inspiration it was more kind of coincidence… We feel like it’s different, it’s refreshing.” Inbox allows users to choose whether to use it anonymously (i.e. by being contactable via just an Inbox moniker of their choosing) or to provide full contact information (such as their name, mobile phone number and any email addresses) to contacts. It’s also actively drawing email into its mix by automatically giving its users an email address, as an integrated part of their account — which may seem odd to veteran email users still maintaining a portfolio of multiple email accounts but isn’t so strange if your target demographic is to a younger type of user that’s more likely to be Snapchatting and WhatsApping than sending emails. “We want to give those younger demographic users an email address without them having to sign up for it,” he says. “They just get it. Janajri is gearing up to launch Inbox on iOS imminently — likely in the next week or so. An Android app will follow which will be able to deliver on the full message convergence vision by incorporating SMSes into its unified inbox. However it won’t be offering that feature in the first version of the Android app. What about the business model? Monetising in the near term is likely to be via stickers — a fast-becoming staple revenue generator tool for social messaging services. “It’s actually not us [wanting to push stickers in], it’s a pull,” says Janajri. “The people who are on it are saying ‘where are the stickers?’ So that’s probably going to be near-term revenue.” Inbox has come out of New Jersey accelerator , which invested $25,000 in early funding. Janajri says its launch strategy to build out a user-base once the app goes live in the App Store will be focused on marketing it to existing “tight knit communities”, such as universities.
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eGood Is A Mobile Payment And Loyalty System That Helps Users Give Back
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Rip Empson
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, a new startup from Glendora, California, was chosen as one of the top startups to emerge out of Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF today for its charitable spin on mobile payments and loyalty. In other words, eGood is building an in-store check-in and loyalty platform that enables those patronizing their favorite local businesses to not only buy a coffee, but give back to a local charity while doing it. eGood is starting in Southern California (where the company is based), with plans to use the new $3 million in seed financing they announced earlier this week — a round that was led by serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Wolfgang Buehler — to expand its footprint in the region and throughout the U.S. Beginning with its first local partner in Los Angeles, Hama Sushi (and its other early partners in Southern California, like Golden Spoon frozen yogurt), local businesses — from coffee shops to hardware stores — will be able to sign up for eGood’s service and easily make donations to good causes. Once listed, business can choose local charities and non-profits, so that when consumers choose their business and check-into their store, any purchases they make there will include donations to the local charity the business is supporting. Once users choose their local coffee shop, for example, they’ll be able to check-in at Rip’s Local Coffee, with the business donating up to five percent of the purchase customers make to a local non-profit or charity. As of now, eGood does not offer the ability for businesses to match user donations, or to let consumers choose the charity they’d like to donate to, which the founders tell us is part of an effort to encourage all businesses to “add purpose to their profit equation.” The company is still experimenting with its model and may add one or both of these features in the future, they added. While eGood would like to eventually allow consumers to add in a local charity of their choosing to contribute to with each purchase, for now, they’re focusing on testing a fundraiser app, which will allow businesses to contribute larger amounts — 10, 20 or 30 percent of purchases — to the beneficiary of their choice. “Most importantly, it’s an easy way for businesses to do some good,” says CEO Zack Swire. “Whether they’re big or small, merchants can support good causes as part of their daily operations in a way that makes sense and gives their own business a bump without becoming a burden.” eGood is also looking to add value to local businesses by serving as a loyalty platform, allowing that local coffee shop to offer their customers, say, a free coffee after 10 check-ins. It’s a way to thank their customers for being faithful patrons and for supporting the local charity of their choice. Naturally, it also allows local businesses to help bring customer and local attention to that charity or non-profit, in turn making customers feel better about shopping there and giving a bump to their own reputations as a “socially conscious” business. Furthermore, it acts as free advertising for the non-profit and, in theory, builds loyalty among customers who appreciate social action. After all, given the choice between two coffee shops, one that offers them the ability to buy a cup of joe and facilitate a donation to charity by doing so and another that offers the same old regular experience, the founders are betting you’d choose the former. For me, personally, they’re probably right. But, as far as eGood’s functionality as a loyalty service is concerned, how well does this model actually work? It’s still early, but Swire tells us that early testing has been promising. Classic Coffee, the startup’s first test partner, for example, saw 5,900 check-ins for charity since launching the campaign six months ago — compared to 1,776 check-ins on Foursquare over the course of two years (without using eGood). In other words, on a per-day basis, the business saw 25-times as many check-ins using eGood. While eGood very definitely offers a consumer-facing experience, and one that it hopes encourages loyalty (and support for local charities), it’s also fundamentally a local services provider. In other words, it has to play in the same space as Groupon and any other business that provides a mobile solution — whether for payments, loyalty, support etc. — to local merchants. That means scaling is tough and requires capital, as eGood has to go recruit merchants, store-by-store, town-by-town, city-by-city and so on. Another way of looking at it is that eGood is a mission-based local advertising company that makes businesses put their money where their mouth is. For the right type of business, this will be a non-brainer and should make early adoption easy. Selling the bigger players on this when there are now so many easy ways to donate and increase one’s reputation as a socially conscious business — not quite as easy. Nonetheless, eGood is sweetening the deal by offer a B2B version of their app as well, which offers businesses the ability to track transactions, customers, view analytics and take advantage of other loyalty features. The startup also offers service reps to help businesses with setup and integration, offering businesses advice and help on how to capture and record transactions, customer check-ins, data and so on. Right now, eGood has started beta testing with 25 local businesses, but as it goes live with its beta later this fall, it will allow businesses to have their customers suggest their favorite local shops and causes and remove the barriers to the sign-up and on-boarding process. For more, check out eGood’s pitch on stage at TC Disrupt SF today below:
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Forget “Cheap”, The iPhone 5c Is Clearly The iPhone Jony Ive Wanted For iOS 7
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MG Siegler
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The “c” in the iPhone 5c title doesn’t stand for “cheap”. It stands for “clueless”. As in, we were all clueless in our speculation on Apple’s motivations for creating this device. (Okay, it actually seems to stand for “color”, but humor me.) After sitting through Apple’s unveiling today and more importantly, watching the , it seems decidedly more clear to me why Apple actually made the iPhone 5c. I think it comes down to the star of those videos: Jony Ive. I’ve seen a lot of Jony Ive videos in my day. And to my eye, it sure like he’s decidedly more excited about the iPhone 5c than he is the iPhone 5s. He (and Apple) would probably say that’s unfair — after all, how do you pick one of your children to love more? But just watch the back-to-back. You’d think it would be the opposite. After all, the iPhone 5s is the new pinnacle of Apple’s flagship hardware. But remember that it is largely the same design as the iPhone 5, a device dreamed up by Ive before he was in charge of the design of software for Apple as well as their hardware. In other words, I view the iPhone 5c as the iPhone 5 that Ive would have built had he been in charge of iOS design at the time of its creation. And thanks to the executive shake up last winter, I believe he now got to do just that. “We believe the iPhone is an experience. And experience is defined by hardware and software working harmoniously together. We continue to refine that experience by blurring the boundaries between the two,” Ive says early on in the video. The words are spoken as only a man now in charge of both hardware and software design can speak. When iOS 7 was first unveiled this summer at WWDC, many were shocked at the colorful new palette. But longtime Apple observers will recall that this is actually nothing new for Apple and Ive. , the product which rebooted Apple, came in thirteen very colorful variations. In fact, that was a key selling point. While Ive spent the subsequent years at Apple shifting from polishing white plastics to bending aluminum (or, , in his parlance), it seems that he’s returning to his roots, so to speak. It’s not unlike an artist going through in their work. And this is a good time for Ive to return to his colorful period, because again, now he has control of the software side of the equation as well. “I think that designs with a real coherence are the result of developing form, material, and color in unison. Each element informing, and in many ways defining the other,” Ive says in the video. If you truly believe that design is not just the superficial — not just how something when it’s on a table — but rather how it , as Ive’s longtime collaborator and boss Steve Jobs , the hardware and the software to be fully intertwined. And Ive gets to fully design for that symbiosis for the first time with the iPhone 5c. But how is any of that going to help Apple sell more iPhones in China or India or in the developing world? It’s probably not. It appears now that this was always misdirection triggered by . Oh, Apple is working on a new, plastic iPhone? It be a cheap one to sell in the rest of the world. Nope, it mustn’t. Instead, what we get is a replacement for the iPhone 5. The fact that Apple is but still selling the iPhone 4S (yes, the “S” versus “s” is perplexing to everyone) is telling. Ive wanted to try his hand at designing a phone to perfectly envelope his software and he got his wish. As a result, Apple can now offer customers something substantially sexier than “last year’s model” when they walk into a store looking for a $99 (subsidized) phone. At the same time, it eliminates the confusion that would have been caused by the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5 looking nearly identical to one another ( ). And it likely keeps their high margins on the device intact. It seems like a win-win-win for Apple. But it’s not going to be viewed as a “win” by tech pundits and Wall Street. Because they want their damn cheap iPhone. In other news, many of those same clowns are still waiting for their iPhone with a physical keyboard. The point, as always, is that Apple doesn’t do things because rivals are forcing their hand. That’s always going to be a losing strategy and the company seems to know that. If they had launched a “cheap” iPhone, the clowns would have been excited until earnings rolled around and they saw Apple’s margins dropping as a direct result of such “innovation”. That’s lose-lose. Of course Apple thinks China and the rest of the world is important. Tim Cook has said that ad nauseam. But they’ll address that with what they view as the right product at what they view as the right time. Maybe that will be too late. Maybe it won’t. But again, the iPhone 5c very clearly is not that product. This is Jony Ive’s iPhone. It’s his return to colors and “beautifully, unapologetically plastic.” “It’s the vivid realization of hardware and software together in one device.”
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Yoyo Raises $1.2M To Launch New Kind Of Mobile Payment And Loyalty Platform
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Mike Butcher
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Roaming the noisy byways of TechCrunch Startup Alley I found a startup today that plans to create a new kind of mobile payment and loyalty platform. has today – at Disrupt SF – announced it’s raised $1.2 million in a seed round to launch a platform designed to create – they say – a faster, simpler way to buy goods, via a mobile app, which also combines with an automatic loyalty point collection system. They plan to target high-volume, low-value transaction retailers. Think of the Starbucks mobile app and apply it to all retailers — this is Yoyo’s pitch. Imperial Innovations Group, the technology investment group from Imperial College, put in an initial investment of $390,000. Yoyo will first launch in the autumn to students of Imperial College London — where 20,000 students and staff on its main London campus will buy, earn and share with Yoyo through 30 retail outlets — and at select London retailers. For retailers, Yoyo integrates at the point of sale to provide information and intelligence the buying habits of its customers. Users customers get an app which means they can collect rewards from multiple retailers but don’t need to carry paper loyalty cards anymore – and also share these with their friends. It’s also possible to create a personalised marketing campaign via the app. Yoyo was founded in 2013 by a team of entrepreneurs drawn from the ranks of Visa, Paypal and Barclaycard, including Alain Falys, co-founder of OB10, the world’s largest e-invoicing business; Dave Nicholson, co-founder of Zopa (a peer-to-peer lending platform in the UK); and Michael Rolph, who ran merchant acquisition teams at Paypal, BarclayCard and First Data. Investors include Mathias Entenmann (former Head of Paypal International and ex CEO of Payback), the founders of early stage investment vehicle (Chipper Boulas, Alain Falys, Anil Hansjee, Richard Muirhead), and former executives from Barclaycard, Worldpay, Visa, First Data and Western Union. You can hear the Yoyo pitch at the beginning of this video:
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Soil IQ Makes A Smart Probe For Your Garden
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Kim-Mai Cutler
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is a company that’s bringing the “Internet of things” trend to urban and rural farming. They’re building a probe that streams soil fertility and weather data back to a paired app. Founded by a Princeton grad and soil scientist who has worked with hundreds of Kenyan farmers to increase crop yields, mission is to help people to grow food more sustainably. “The reality in this country is that most of our food is produced on factory farms,” said CEO . “They’re great for producing corn, soybeans and grains, but not so good for producing healthy food.” In response, has built a wireless soil sensor for small gardens and farms to help regular people grow a healthier supply of fruits and vegetables. Their probe is powered by a solar panel so it can run indefinitely. They’re planning on retailing it for about $49 to both consumers and larger partners. Then, not only are they targeting U.S. consumers, the company has a dual mission. They’re also working with one of their investors, Orange Telecom, to help deploy these probes to farmers in East Africa. Aramburu previously started an organization called where he worked with more than 1,300 Kenyan farmers to increase their yields. But now he says he’s trying to focus on food production for the 100 million households in the U.S. So he shifted into building Soil IQ. The probe can track and stream soil nutrient content, pH, temperature, moisture and light data. They’ve built an analytics platform that makes recommendations to home gardeners about how to optimize seed selection, fertilization and watering. It can work with either soil-based or hydroponics gardens and either food or medicinal crops. They’ve even rigged it to send SMS or Twitter alerts when plants need attention. They also have a big ace in the pocket through a partnership with Yves Behar, the famed industrial designer behind and chief creative officer behind Jawbone. He’ll help with fashioning Soil IQ’s app and product. The business model has a number of different angles. Not only is there the hardware revenue, could also license out their dataset, assuming enough people use it to produce interesting data on which crops grow well in different environments. If they also build up enough of a consumer base, they could also earn affiliate revenue from promoting other products like organic fertilizer or seeds. The company has raised about $200,000 from Orange and other angel investors.
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InsideMaps Uses 3D Home Models Captured In Minutes To Build The Future Of Furniture Buying
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Matthew Panzarino
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The team, which is launching its app today on the Disrupt SF 2013 stage, is applying 3D mapping and capture technology to an interesting problem: How do you visualize furniture purchases in your home before you buy them? According to InsideMaps, you do it by using your smartphone to scan the inside of your home, allowing them to create a 3D model in the cloud that you can then place virtual bits of furniture inside to see how it fits. This may not seem like an earth shaker, and let’s be honest it is not. But as the son of an interior designer and fine finishes guy who worked in the trade every summer, I can appreciate it as a deceptively useful tool for some folks. Specifically, says CEO George Bolanos, there are a few segments that InsideMaps is aiming at: end-user customers, interior decorators and real estate agents. Balanos is the founder of Wanadu, a web conferencing company that was acquired by Cisco’s Latitude. He went on to a role as Director of Technology at Sony Mobile. InsideMaps’ co-founder and CTO Jörgen Birkler comes from Sony Ericsson Silicon Valley where he served as Head of Applications & Services Development for the Xperia line. The app launching today is a fairly simple affair. You fire it up, give it a few bits of information about your home and then begin scanning each room. You’re given the option to do a single or to zap the whole house at once and you’re turned loose to shoot what is essentially a series of panoramic shots of a room from the inside, culminating with a spin in the center. Those shots are then uploaded to the InsideMaps cloud for some special sauce application. That consists of utilizing data captured by the gyroscope and magnetometer inside your device (which is why they have to be fairly new smartphones) to craft a model. That model is then checked against a series of visual touchstones in the images. The heights of doorknobs, window sills, etc. While they do this, they’re also gathering data about the average sizes of openings like doors and more, so they can apply machine learning to improve the quality of the models down the road. Currently, the processing takes around 20 minutes for a room or 4 hours for a whole house. InsideMaps is using Amazon Compute Cloud to perform the model-making process, in part because of its instanced GPU setup, which comes in handy for jobs like these. The app runs on Android for now, but the team is at work on an iOS version. As mentioned above, you need to have a device no more than around 2 years old to have the sensors needed to make the app do its magic. Once the models are built they can be viewed in any browser using WebGL, with no additional plugins necessary. Users can access them via URL, which is sharable, or send ‘rendered’ 2D snapshots of a piece of furniture in place to friends. The business of furniture The monetary model of InsideMaps is refreshingly concise for an early stage startup. They’re currently working with large furniture distributors to cut deals that will provide a link on their site to the InsideMaps app. This will act as a funnel that allows users to scan their home and then utilize 3D models of the furniture of that maker to fit them into their homes. I queried Bolanos about how they were going about creating the models of the furniture to use. It turns out that the team made a happy discovery once they started looking into this: most furniture makers already create 3D models of their wares. For ‘augmented reality’ or 3D rotation widgets, sure, but they had the models, and InsideMaps can tap into those without having to reinvent the wheel. Once the pipeline is set up, InsideMaps is planning on utilizing a revenue setup that combines referral, affiliate and sponsorship models. This creates a ready-made meritocracy where results beget income. It’s a far more honest and straightforward system than a lot we tend to see these days. Currently, InsideMaps is walking to big retailers including a deal with a subsidiary of the largest furniture retailer in the U.S. But the direct sales market isn’t the only one that the team is excited about. Bolanos says that InsideMaps is equally intrigued with how the app will work with interior designers and real estate agents. They’ve already begun testing it with real estate agents actually, and it’s working out ‘well’. The idea is that an agent could gift a 3D model of a home to a new homeowner, or provide it in advance in the interest of ‘listing transparency’. In addition to helping people visualize the space in 3D, something a large number of people have a difficult time with, InsideMaps is also able to tap into the ‘new homeowner’, who is 10x more likely to buy furniture during their first 10 years of home ownership. Eventually, InsideMaps hopes to get the processing down to about 2 minutes per room, with the hope that you’ll have that model processed before you’re even on to the next one. The panel first asked if the app can do paint and wallpaper as well. Balanos replied that they can indeed, they just ran out of time. The panel seems to be very interested in InsideMaps turning what they see as a tool into more of a service. A service which can then be used to build out a transactional model for people to have their homes scanned.
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Beestar Launches With Ultra-Precise Quantified Self Device Aimed At Pro Sports
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Jordan Crook
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In a world where the “quantified self” is now mainstream, Beestar is launching to offer one of the most precise location and activity trackers in the world. And not only that, the technology provided by Beestar is embeddable in almost any type of sports equipment, from tennis rackets to ski equipment and everything in between. As it stands now, most professional sports teams and clubs have proprietary systems that cost exorbitant amounts to track the progress of each player’s speed, agility and strength, and most only work during the games or matches themselves. Beestar implements this same service, with more accuracy, in a single, multifunctional device called the Quasp. The Quasp precisely measure acceleration patterns, reactivity in change of direction and sports team tactic quantification through highly accurate location tracking. As opposed to usual GPS offerings that only measure within 3-5 meters of the target, the Quasp can locate the target at the centimeter level. Beestar offers three separate tiers for the service. Quasp light, the entry-level version, offers all the above tracking services through an iPhone or Android app, letting users view progress and performance stats after the fact. Quasp Pro, on the other hand, lets users track the same stats in real-time with the help of an extra piece of hardware, the Quasp access point. Past that, Quasp Pro also offers quantified shocks during tackles or impacts, real-time tracking of the whole team at once, and simultaneous client application access so multiple coaches can see what’s happening on the field or court at the same time. Quasp Pro also lets users synchronize with video streaming, though the camera isn’t included. Quasp Pro also lets teams and sports clubs build on top of the Beestar API to offer location or acceleration tracking applications to others. For example, a football club could offer a special spectator app to let viewers keep track of players’ speed, etc. Beyond Quasp Pro, teams can sign up for Quasp Premium for remote data storage and historical data access and analysis. According to the founders, the greatest challenge here (beyond sizing down the Quasp to be wearable and still offer 15 continuous hours of transmission) is convincing traditionally conservative professional sports clubs to upgrade to a new, software driven service. ” More than once, it appeared that coaches or trainers or even physiotherapists feared that an advance system like the QuASP could take control away from them, threatening their position as expert,” said co-founder
Emanuele Francioni. “We are working on our communication strategy so to stress that the QuASP cannot substitute human expertise, but if used properly can be the ace up every team’s sleeve.” Eventually, Beestar believes their technology can be used in the advertising and indoor positioning verticals, but scaling starts with the sports industry. To learn more about Beestar, check out the website . Q: Is this a platform just for pro sports or are you trying to sell it to consumers?
A: We’re launching on Indiegogo with the Quasp for consumers, with offerings for professional and semi-professional teams to measure speed, acceleration and position. Q: How do you ensure that the software isn’t overly complicated?
A: We have a hub that effectively does the differential calculation. Internally, the hub has a web server so you can query these measurements in a normal application. All you need to do is connect to the access point through Wifi. The service is just about these three measurements, speed, acceleration and position, so it’s inherently simple. We’re working on the application for consumers still. Q: GPS has to work all the time which will kill battery. How long will the battery last?
A: We’ve worked hard to ensure battery life isn’t an issue for these devices. This particular tennis version of the Quasp has 13 hours of battery life. Q: What’s the business model?
A: We have online and offline versions. You can either broadcast the data on the sensors with the Quasp access point built for professional athletes, or you can upload the data offline, which isn’t in real time. We still want to keep the consumer market, so we’re letting users upload that info to their smartphone or iPad. Q: What’s the pricing?
A: The device is $299 and the subscription costs $5 per month.
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The Russians Have Come… Skolkovo Startups Hit TechCrunch Disrupt
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Mike Butcher
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Russia is a booming market for startups as the county’s Internet access and 4G networks ramp up. It’s now the biggest single market in Europe, passing Germany a year ago. At the same time the government realises it needs to ween the economy off its historical addiction to oil, gas and heavy industry. Thus it’s helped set up the to incubate tech companies. Skolkolvo brought a selection of its startups to Disrupt, so we went trawling the booths for a few Russian gems. Here’s what we found.
“Choister is a service that helps search, analyze and compare all available educational programs.
Whether you are looking for a degree or a certificate, online or offline, full-time or part-time — Choister will make it easier for you. Choister finds all the educational programs, structures the data, helps users make smart choices, and then sends the motivated students to the schools’ websites.”
“Let clothes map to your body, looking for e-commerce partners – Virtual fitting for e-commerce.”
“3DBin is your user-friendly / low-cost / high quality software solution for 360° objects photography. We automatically process and weave together your object or product snapshots to create animated flash files for your website or use it as your tool for on-line auctions sites like eBay. Using 360 views allows your visitors to see more details with a full 360° view of your objects or products. Take a free spin with 3DBin the 3D marketing solution for customer satisfaction.”
“Our project aims at delivering the state-of-the-art translation automation tools in a cloud translation ecosystem. Our goal is to increase productivity of translators and project managers using an effective innovative Translation Memory technology supplemented by the whole range of linguistic products, e.g. terminology management, machine translation, QA, integration APIs, etc.”
“Penxy is an iOS app that turns your mobile device into a wireless presentation remote. Simply upload a presentation file to the cloud and display it on any TV or projector via a computer’s browser. You can advance the slide on the app with the swipe of a finger, and see the slide advance on screen a second later.
Also Penxy can livestream slides and voice over the internet to any number of remote viewers.”
“Next-gen 3D-visualization technology”
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Crowdtilt Goes Mobile With First App, Will Soon Let Anyone Launch A Crowdfunding Campaign On The Go
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Rip Empson
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As we’ve discussed before, thanks to a handful of names, including Kickstarter and Indiegogo and the gaggle of startups that have emerged in their wake, crowdfunding is on the “Big screen.” Yet, the team behind Crowdtilt — also known as the Y Combinator-backed startup building a “group fundraising” platform for projects that don’t work on Kickstarter — believe that this is just the beginning. The Kickstarters and Indiegogos have owned most of the headlines about crowdfunding, but there’s more and more spillover from projects that don’t fit, with many bypassing platforms altogether. That’s why Crowdtilt — an open-source, customizable crowdfunding platform to let anyone and everyone launch their own campaign without having to touch a line of code. Called the “WordPress for Crowdfunding” and using Crowdtilt’s API, Crowdhoster allows you alone or groups of friends to build and launch their own crowdfunding pages all on their own. Today, the startup is taking Crowdhoster Crowdtilt into phase two, with the long-awaited mobile piece of their platform, designed to continue following through with the company’s mission to build the most open and accessible crowdfunding tool out there. It’s an ambitious mission, and Crowdtilt is beginning with an iPhone app that puts Crowdtilt on your phone, and slowly see Crowdhoster woven into the feed after launch. Yes, the app itself isn’t live yet, but it is coming to the App Store next week and to Android (and Google Play) in the near future. What’s different about Crowdtilt’s new mobile app? Well, for starters, it’s one of the only apps out there that lets you launch your own crowdfunding campaign from your phone. Kickstarter’s app, in comparison, offers more of a gallery view of existing campaigns, allowing users to view and contribute from the app — but not start a new campaign. So that’s where Crowdtilt really wants to differentiate from other mobile crowdfunding options and “be a viking,” . At launch, another potentially appealing feature for crowdfunders is that, once you open the app, you’ll be able to view a visual list of (public) campaigns, which can then be browsed (and swiped) through, vertical stream-style. Users can make contributions to existing campaigns as they go, or hit the “add” button in the center of the bottom toolbar to launch their own campaign. Rather than requiring one to fill out a bunch of forms, Crowdtilt has gone with a UX that is reminiscent of those mad libs, in that you can quickly fill in the price or total you want to donate, who it’s for, within the text of the “setup” screens. Users can authenticate through Facebook and Twitter to bring their friends with them, following them within the app. So, on top of the main public stream of campaigns on crowdtilt, there will be a separate feed for your friends. As with Crowdhoster, people will be able to set their campaigns to be either public or private, and only public campaigns will show up in the main feed, and private campaigns will only show up in the feeds of friends and those who’ve contributed to campaigns or are following the fundraiser. The cool thing is that Crowdhoster has data on all those who build crowdfunding campaigns using the DIY builder and can serve those in its public feed — as long as the campaign hasn’t been set to private, of course. As of today, it seems that most people prefer to set their campaigns to private and while the team wouldn’t share the exact statistic, we’ve heard that the ratio is more or less in the 70 to 30 range. But it still makes Crowdtilt one of the only mobile apps out there that allows users to view crowdfunding campaigns in the style of an aggregated feed, while launching campaigns as they go. As to integrations and brands that will be using Crowdhoster at launch, Crowdtilt co-founder and CEO James Beshara said on stage today that companies like Microsoft and Soylent have already built campaigns using Crowdhoster Web, but they’re looking for the kind of friend-to-friend fundraising campaigns that have become popular on Crowdtilt to explode once the app launches next week. As to integrations that will differentiate the mobile experience, Beshara says that the app will include integration with Bing to let users quickly pull images from the engine’s image search, which will go right on the campaign page. Users can also snap photos themselves to use on the campaign page so that friends can see the pothole they want to fill on their street, or the boat they want to reserve for that big party. Long term, Crowdtilt’s new app will come with the traditional 2.5 percent fees that one finds for any Crowdtilt campaign, however for the first few weeks (to encourage people to sign up), the startup will be waiving its fees. And with support , Crowdtilt is making it easy to start a fundraising campaign for a non-profit organization — something that typically requires a ton of paperwork to make happen. The app is scheduled to go live next week. Stay tuned for more. (More .)
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Tidepool Optimizes Your Workday For Cognitive Highs And Lows
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Gregory Ferenstein
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Everyone has cognitive highs and lows. Some of us are night owls, while others are early birds. is a mobile app that learns when you’re at your cognitive peak and makes recommendations for how to structure your daily workflow. “For example, the Snoozer game assesses cognitive processing speed, a cognitive ability influenced by circadian rhythms, sleep, emotions and diet, among other factors,” explains Tidepool Co-Founder, Vamsee Nalamothu. Snoozer is a simple reaction game where users tap enlarged clocks as quickly as they can. As users play the game at different times throughout the day, Tidepool learns when you’re at your cognitive peak (or low). “We are collecting information on processing speed over time along with these other variables,” says Nalamothu. “When we collect the information needed, including a game of emotions to be released by the end of September, we will provide users with novel information on how they can improve their productivity.” In the future, Tidepool wants to incorporate all types of data, such as sleep and exercise data, which may be pulled in from health trackers. Personally, I know that if I do a quick Crossfit workout of seven minutes of in the morning, I get a surge of mental energy. Tidepool, if successful, would recognize this and other more subtle changes to my mental state, and make suggestions accordingly. Tidepool also attempts to help users understand their personalities. Before users can play any of the games, they have to go through a series of psychological diagnostics. The diagnostics ask users to rate themselves on outgoingness, anxiety, friendliness and several other intuitive descriptions. I’m a “cool cat,” which means I “excel at envisioning big ideas and then influencing and persuading others to come along with you.” Thanks, for the warm fuzzy, Tidepool! Brain training/personality assessment is a growing industry. Brain trainer, , for instance raised a cool $31.5 million in 2012. Tidepool, itself, has $1.5 million. , but the field is relatively new and . You can download a beta of the Tidepool app .
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John Biggs
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Trail’s Platform For Teaching Digital Literacy Skills To U.S. Job Seekers Exits Beta & Launches In Spanish At TC Disrupt
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Natasha Lomas
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is a rare thing indeed: a startup not aiming to appeal to elite geeks. Quite the opposite in fact: Trail targets the circa 60 million+ Americas who aren’t digitally literate and could benefit from help to learn how to use the Internet. Its core service, , , offers free lessons to job seekers on using the Internet to find work. And indeed, more broadly, on how to use the Internet itself — from basic stuff like what a URL is, to covering off more sophisticated aspects of the digital world such as privacy, security and how to be media savvy. “Simply put, it’s for those who might need to master URL before they get to HTML,” explains Trail CEO and co-founder Christina Gagnier. JobScout’s 39 lessons are self-paced so users can progress at a speed they are comfortable with, use learning aids such as screenshots, quizzes and challenges, and incorporate social gaming features such as badges as learning incentives. There’s also a social element, where JobScout users get to network digitally with each other — and learn social networking skills along the way. Trail’s JobScout service is seeking to disrupt the traditional approach of workforce institutions to the jobless — i.e. of running in-person training programs, which are obviously expensive to scale up. It also competes with existing digital literacy services, run by libraries and the like. Gagnier says these typically take a walled garden, rather than an open approach — meaning users have to come to the library to use them, or be a library card holder. “We have an open approach,” she says. “We have mobile apps, we’ve used gamification — and the experience is far above what those platforms offer, and it’s cohesive and coherent — so we’re hoping we can edge into this market,” she says. Trail is coming out of beta and launching its Android app today at TechCrunch Disrupt, along with a Spanish language version of its platform — which will set it up to expand outside the U.S. Its initial focus has been on California but Gagnier says it intends to expand the service nation-wide and then roll out internationally, over the next six to nine months, likely targeting Mexico and South America initially (hence its translation to español). Trail’s softly-softly approach to launching to date has been what Gagnier terms a “non-traditional beta”, that’s seen it piloting its service with libraries across California (its funding to-date has come from a federal grant, the Library Services and Technology Act grant, administered by the State of California) — to learn about the sorts of things its users need from its digital literacy and online job-search lessons, and also find out about the kinds of data that institutions that typically help the jobless/digitally disconnected want to see too. Why does it need that data? Because Trail intends to become a business in its own right, as well as a quasi-social services platform. [slideshow include=”871935,871938,871940,872614,872615,872616″] To that end, it’s building out an analytics platform — called Compass — that it will look to sell as a service to relevant organisations such as government agencies, NGOs and institutions that need data to help them shape job-related services. Part of its slow-burn launch has been spending time talking to organisations that work in the job-seeker space to gather intel on what it is they want to know about America’s unconnected — to feed into this “full scale” analytics platform. Examples of the types of in-demand data it’s hoping to be able to provide include things like number of jobs applied to, whether job seekers are scheduling interviews, and whether resumes are being created, Gagnier tells TechCrunch. “We’re also working on helping organisations track where people have access to the Internet are they going to an offline institution to get that access. So helping organisations paint a better picture of who they’re serving, and how successful they’re being in the job search process,” she says. “Our users of the site, about 35% to 40% of them at this time are actually non-Internet users. So their first interaction with the Internet and learning how to use it is with the JobScout platform… Compass allows institutions whether it be a library, an education institution, a workforce development centre, a social services office, or a non-governmental organisation, or any kind of government agency to meaningfully track how users are interacting with the JobScout site.” JobScout is not currently tracking how many people have found a job using its service but offering that metric is on Trail’s roadmap, it’s just got to figure out the best way to capture that data. It’s initially working on developing self-reporting mechanisms, says Gagnier, but is also looking at partnering with hiring organisations “who would commit to hiring JobScouters and providing feedback on whether or not they hired JobScouters”. “That’s in our roadmap to happen,” she adds. That being said, she does stress that the thrust of JobScout is not simply about finding a job — but offering its users help to learn how to use the Internet to improve various job-search related skills. So that specific ‘yes I found a job’ metric — however sought after — is by no means the be-all and end-all of JobScout’s mission. “A core part of the mission of our platform is digital literacy learning. So the metrics that we’re tracking are a combination of success in achieving digital literacy skills and then immediately applying those skills,” she says. Beyond analytics, Trail also sees potential monetisation opportunities in being able to provide access to a demographic that’s traditionally difficult for digital advertising to reach. “We are the first experience of the Internet for a large group of our users. And as we roll out the platform nationally and internationally we presume that our group of non-Internet users will be much larger and so we think there will be a variety of opportunities for us in terms of introducing meaningful products and services to the people that are using our platform as well,” says Gagnier. Trail also intends its platform play to extend beyond the job-seeking skills space. Gagnier says it has plans to launch a HealthScout offering in the next six months aimed at helping people navigate wellness, healthcare and health insurance information online. It also has another two platforms on its roadmap: a CivicScout to address civic engagement, and a FinanceScout offering aimed at providing personal finance information for the unbanked. “Trail’s ultimate vision is to help people use the Internet, help people to discover the Internet. And so for one person that might be healthcare, someone else that might be jobs, for someone else it might be personal finance. Our larger vision is to have an integrated platform experience where you can use JobScout or HealthScout and earn badges in a more meaningful and cohesive way,” she adds. Currently, Trail has around 20,000 users of its JobScout web platform and apps. Around 40% of these users fall into the 16-30 age-group, with another prominent group of users being aged 55+. JobScout’s web platform has had the most use to date, but accessing the service via tablet devices is second most popular — something Gagnier puts down to public libraries offering their users the ability to check-out a tablet for use within the library, and families buying a low cost tablet device to be their main Internet access device, using it with public Wi-Fi networks to keep costs down. I’ve tried to teach people in the past to use the Internet and it’s really hard — how do you know it’s going to work. How do you know your interface will be easier and will do it better than other companies? We’ve been beta testing in California libraries for about a year — so we’ve been getting feedback for the past year. Do you have any metrics to say people are much more likely to be able to do a specific task with your product than they were on their own. How are you measuring success? We have a unique challenge in that there aren’t really direct competitors… that kind of is our brand experiment — how can we drive people? That’s why we use social gaming. It’s a wonderful initiative… but how is this really a business? Libraries and governments are hard places to get to pay… As we were testing we had organisations come to us and say how can we test this?… People came to us — that’s how we got our market model. [Also] we have a tiered subscription model What’s your biggest barrier to entry in getting people who need your help? How do you find the right people? First by using trusted institutions [like libraries]… and then by providing mobile apps [to make the product accessible].
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Curiator Is A Pinterest-Style Marketplace To Help You Discover, And One Day Buy, The Art You Like
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Ingrid Lunden
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, a new app launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, is not the first website that aims for people to discover and buy art, but it hopes its beautiful design, interactivity, and intelligent algorithms will mean that it will be the first to actually work. As co-founder Moenen Erbuer sees it, the art world was one of the earliest industries to take advantage of the growth of the Internet; but as we have seen time and again in technology, sometimes being an early mover is not always the best position. “The online art world is stuck in 1995,” he says simply. Indeed, before I turned my attention to the world of technology, I worked for an art magazine, and I remember all too well the clunky websites full of too-heavy image files, glitchy marketplace joint ventures full of false purchases and dodgy work, and “galleries” of digital-specific art that too often bore little relation to beautiful work that you could see, if you could make a trip to a gallery in the flesh. It wasn’t pretty. Co-founded by former Google engineer Tobias Boonstoppel and Erbuer — who himself comes from a background in design working at digital agency AKQA — Curiator is made with all the polish and savviness that you would expect from people who know both how the Internet works, and what makes people click with digital content. Taking a page from Pinterest with its and dynamic grid, Curiator borrows in other ways from some of the later innovations in how many visually led e-commerce sites pick up information about new users: It initially takes the user through a page where it asks you to make a selection that you like from a page of options. Curiator then uses this to produce a wider selection of work that you may like, which becomes the basis of your collection. As with other social media services, you can follow other people’s collections, and others can follow you, or you can browse art by categories, specific names or through the whole river. One of the most eye-catching parts of the site is its sharing tool. When you see a picture you like, you click on it and drag. Up comes a menu on the picture that lets you drop the image directly into your own collection; or to share it to Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest; or to download the image; or send it by email. It’s a nice way of making it very easy to move picture data around. The social aspects, both with sharing work and also following people and being followed, is part of what sets Curiator apart from what it views as its closest competitor, Artsy, which Moenen describes as “having gone all-in on a recommendation engine and too focused on sales.” For now, Curiator is focused mainly on getting more people on its site, uploading pictures, sharing them and adding them to their collections. This will help make the site not only richer for everyone to use, but will help Curiator pick up more data on what users want to have. This, in turn, will help Curiator with the next step in its development: adding a marketplace so that users can not only share artwork that they like to have in their “virtual” collections but also then use those “wishlists” — which may include museum pieces and other work that is not for sale — to generate lists of art that there for the buying to become a part of users’ actual, offline lives. The impetus for Curiator comes from two different areas. The first was Moenen and Boonstoppel’s own experiences, and those of their friends, in trying to collect art. “A lot of people who have made a little money start buying art, but it’s an intimidating institution, going to galleries, fairs and auction houses. You see something you like, but don’t know if the price is right, or if it’s any good. If you’re not serious about art already, it’s hard to be confident about your own taste,” Moenen explained. He says that some people resort to hiring consultants, but that’s not to everyone’s taste. Others look to their friends to see what they buy. “So we decided, could we create a product that does both of those things, but for everyone?” The other is that the two have dabbled in other projects before where people could send links to each other, which, when opened, created a way to let you track what that friend browsed via that link. This gave them ideas about how they could apply those learnings in a single site, even though none of that earlier code is being used in Curiator. So far, in its limited beta, Curiator has seen some decent traction for the site, with a 17 percent retention rate, with many more people contributing work than they had anticipated. Users can either upload through the site, or use a Curiator bookmarklet to collect works from around the web. There are no plans “ever” to add features like advertising to monetize the site, Moenen says. “We want the interface to be like a museum. When you start to put in ads, quality control is a challenge.” Check out the video below, and also some questions from the judges: Questions from the judges: Referral sales, getting a commission from sales from galleries, will be an opportunity. The other will be Curiator acting as a dealer or agent for artists. The third will be offering a platform for art owners to sell their own collections. We will cross that bridge when we come to it. Ideally we want both using this. Who do you see as your biggest competition, and how do you for example battle Pinterest? Amazon, Pinterest, Artsy are competitors. Pinterest is not specifically for art. And we have special ways of indexing users and artists.
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Kickstarter Is Adding Australia And New Zealand To Expand Its International Crowdfunding Network
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Ingrid Lunden
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Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is expanding its platform to two markets . It is opening up its network to Australia and New Zealand-based projects “in the very near future,” the company says, drumming up interest two days after the site , and comes some months after it went to its first market outside the U.S., the United Kingdom. Kickstarter originally noted it would move into Australia and New Zealand in . The move is an important one for Kickstarter, which is one of the more popular and crowdfunding platforms out there. It competes against sites like Indiegogo, which positions itself as “international” by nature. Kickstarter, which has funded over 48,000 projects and raised $780 million, has yet to launch an official presence in non-English speaking countries, although as you can see from searches such as , there are still a number of projects already underway in that country, anyway. The difference when Kickstarter launches a local presence is that those posting projects can accept pledges in local currencies — although those pledging, as before, can come from anywhere. As with other international launches, it’s likely to guess that Kickstarter will keep fees consistent. Currently Kickstarter takes a 5% fee on funded projects and no fee on those that don’t meet their goals. Payment processing fees for Canada-based projects are similar to those for UK projects. For Canada-based projects that just launched, the processing fees are 5% + $0.05 CAD for those pledges less than C$10, and 3% + C$0.20 for those greater. The increased local focus should give Kickstarter a kickstart Down Under. Currently in Australia there are only 41 projects listed for Australia, for example.
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With Its New Licensing Service, Feed.fm Aims To Spread Music Across The Web
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Anthony Ha
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just launched at Disrupt SF as part of the Startup Battlefield — and if the service takes off, you may soon be hearing a lot more music on your favorite websites and apps. Co-founder and CEO Jeff Yasuda is already familiar with the music business. He launched music services Fuzz.com and Blip.fm (which ), and he continues to operate both sites , Feed Media. But as the name suggests, Yasuda expects Feed.fm to become the main business. When I met with him last week, Yasuda alternately described Feed.fm as “music as a service” and as “ for music.” The goal, he said, is to take all the complication out of music licensing. Normally, if a website owner or an app developer wanted to use licensed music, they’d have to find a lawyer, try to understand SoundExchange, manage the payments, and more. Now, they can just pay Feed.fm a monthly fee and add the service’s stations to their site or app. They can also build stations from their own personal collections. And Feed.fm offers an analytics dashboard and A/B testing so publishers can quantify that the music is improving engagement and see how their visitors are engaging with the music. Behind the scenes, Feed.fm handles all the complicated details, paying the standard, government-mandated fees for Internet radio. (Yasuda said he’s also trying to develop direct relationships with record labels, though it’s not necessary from a legal perspective.) The service starts at $25 a month, with pricing going up based on the number of tracks played. Yasuda added that Feed.fm can also integrate with other platforms — and in fact, it’s already live with Shopify customers and and has launched a WordPress plugin. But do people really want to hear music everywhere online? I was a little skeptical since I’m the kind of person who browses the web with my computer on mute, and Yasuda himself acknowledged that people sometimes turn off the music when they play games. The problem, he suggested, is that the music often isn’t very good. By tapping into Feed.fm’s library of nearly 1 million tracks (plus, as I mentioned, any music in their personal collections), that’s less likely to be a problem. Music, Yasuda said, is a great way to make users feel more engaged. In fact, he suggested that Feed.fm is one of the few ways that publishers can improve engagement by just paying a small fee. Otherwise, he said, “You can buy an audience with advertising and you can buy retention to some extent with retargeting, but you cannot buy engagement.” He had some data to back this up, saying that in early tests, websites integrating Feed.fm saw average time spent on site increase by 20 percent to 400 percent, and some saw spending go up by as much as 20 percent. Sites that are already using Feed.fm include , , , and . Not that music will make sense on every site. He suggested that it will work best when there’s a clear, targeted audience, allowing the publisher to pick or build stations that are right for that audience. A broader e-commerce site would have a harder time with that. Feed Media has raised $1.2 million in funding led by , with participation from , (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington), Cornice Ventures, , , and individual angel investors. Feed.fm is offering free trials for a limited time to users who use the code CAPNCRUNCH. “Most importantly, we focus on customers that are actually making money.” “Our customers drive this.” Many customers asked for more details about how people interact with the content, what songs are being shared or skipped, what songs are playing when sales happen, and more. Some companies blog about it. With other companies, the music is “ingrained in what they are” and “seep into the look of the product” — they don’t have to promote it aggressively because it’s “part of the DNA.” Some brands want a big radio that sits in the middle of the site, others are more subtle. [laughs] Classical.
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Ballmer’s Biggest Regret Is Missing Out On “The New Device Called The Phone”
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Alex Wilhelm
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Wrapping its analyst meetup, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed his largest regret regarding product choices: Missing out on phones, which he claims has harmed Windows itself. According to the live transcript as provided by NASDAQ, Ballmer was blunt in his description of why the error was committed [Lightly edited by TechCrunch]: “If there’s one thing I guess you would say I regret, I regret that there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone. That is the thing I regret the most. The time we missed is the time we were working on what became [Windows] Vista and I wish we had resources slightly differently [deployed]. It would have been better for Windows.” If Gates was , Ballmer was late to phones. It’s oddly nice to hear him admit it out loud, taking responsibility for the mistake. That Vista was what cost Microsoft early aggression into phones is almost ironic. It was not Ballmer’s only comment on Microsoft’s mobile market position; he stated earlier in the day that his company has “almost no share” in mobile devices. He also promised that he is a realist, and is not confused about Microsoft’s weak position in consumer hardware. Again, nothing surprising, but almost refreshing to hear a CEO plainly detail the state of their business sans the need to hedge. Ballmer famously said early in Windows Phone’s history that the platform had gone from “very small to very small.” Today’s remarks are a continuance of that candor. At his final analyst meeting, I’d rate Ballmer’s performance as honest and heartfelt. It was one of his final shows as frontman of the good band Microsoft, and he didn’t hold back, making jokes ranging from Amazon’s lack of profits to Korean accounting standards in his standard tone. As a final note, here’s the Ballmer Business Metric: “The ultimate measure has to be what happens with profits. It’s got to be the ultimate measure of any company.” So, next CEO, you have your marching orders.
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Microsoft’s Office 365 Consumer Edition Doubles To 2M Subscribers Since May
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Alex Wilhelm
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Today at its analyst event, Microsoft announced a new milestone for its Office 365 Home Premium product: 2 million subscribers. That’s up 100 percent, or 1 million subscribers, since May 29. Office 365 Home Premium is the company’s cloud productivity suite for consumers that they pay for on a subscription basis. Previously, Microsoft touted that it had signed up its for Office 365 Home Premium in 100 days. It has been since it announced the 1 million figure. So Microsoft, presuming that it reached the 2 million mark , is adding subscribers at almost the same pace as it did around the launch period. However, as the company is simply stating that it has “more than” 2 million Office 365 Home Premium subscribers, it would not surprise me if the product was either keeping pace with its former sales levels, or has accelerated slightly. At 2 million subscribers, Office 365 Home Premium is a $200 million yearly business. Office 365, Microsoft said today, was (as a total product) the fastest Microsoft service to $1 billion in yearly revenue run rate in the history of the company. Here’s the slide that details the 2 million figure: What’s quite interesting is that Microsoft forecasts that it will suffer from short-term revenue declines by switching to subscription revenue from licensing revenue. The bar graph on the lower right side of the chart indicates that revenue will be negatively impacted for , until fiscal 2017 and beyond. This is admission that the company will suffer short-term from its decision to embrace a new business model. But, the company is wagering that the transition is worth the cost long-term, likely due to the fact that its formerly successful method of selling Software in a Box is rapidly fading. Adobe, also in the period of transition from single-license sales of software to subscription-based services, is seeing its . I would wager that this will be a trend that we will see repeated across all large firms that move to a subscription model from their prior business practices. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner claimed today that Microsoft has “made a very graceful transition from our traditional enterprise agreements and licensing agreements” as it shifts “those agreements and customers into the cloud.” That Microsoft forecasts revenue slippage during the period of transition even with self-described smooth hand-offs is interesting. Finally, it’s worth noting that Microsoft has managed to move several customer categories to subscription-based Office products in parallel. This indicates that Microsoft might not have an impossible time in its soul-defining mission to sell services and not software.
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Microsoft’s Business In Three Charts
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Alex Wilhelm
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Microsoft, like other public companies, doesn’t like to disclose more about its business than it has to, but in the middle of a reorganization and a very public CEO search, a little openness could go far to settling the nerves of jittery investors. Today at its analyst nerdmoot, the company showed three charts that strip down its business into its component parts. Here’s the slide that Microsoft showed to analysts in Redmond and to the press via a slightly : This is very interesting data. The first graph shows that Microsoft’s revenue is more than half enterprise-sourced. From that perspective, Microsoft could be viewed as an enterprise-facing company that dabbles in consumer technology. And, given that the OEM business of Microsoft could be called “enterprise” revenue, Microsoft is all the more lopsided. Another take: If you count OEM incomes as enterprise-sourced, and discount small-business incomes, Microsoft is only slightly more than one-fifth consumer-derived from a revenue perspective. That’s a sliver. Moving to the second graph, Windows is now the third-largest revenue driver for Microsoft. The growth of Server and Tools and the continued strength of the Office division make the changing guard unsurprising. But it’s also worth noting that the weakness of the PC market contributed to the slippage of Windows as the leading piece of Microsoft. Just as small and medium business revenue is minor from a whole corporation perspective, so too does the Bing and Online revenue category remain essentially a rounding error. Microsoft is investing heavily in this area, but in terms of it becoming a primal component of the Microsoft revenue mix, it simply isn’t. Finally, geographic share: 56 percent of Microsoft’s revenue comes from “Rest of The World,” which means every place that is not the United States or Canada. It seems likely that international revenue will grow its share of the Microsoft revenue mix. China, Microsoft’s Kevin Turner (COO) stated during his talk, is the company’s fastest-growing market. What can take away from all this? That Microsoft’s enterprise business units are subsidizing its work to grow its consumer products, like Bing, Windows Phone, and the like. Also, the scale of the Office division is key for Microsoft’s aggregate size – challenges to its status as cash cow must be viewed as almost existential threats to its ability to invest in new products. So, and should be treated as extremely serious. Microsoft’s analyst meeting is underway, and we’ll have more for you soon.
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WTF Is Calico, And Why Does Google Think Its Mysterious New Company Can Defy Aging?
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013
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The sad truth is that, if everyone on the Forbes 400 list simultaneously (and tragically) got cancer, or Parkinsons (or any given disease for that matter), the world would probably be well on its way to finding a cure for these illnesses, thanks to the enormous wealth that would be incentivized to back those efforts. Finding a cure for an intractable disease requires time, enormous amounts of human and financial capital, cooperation and research — and at least a few public-private partnerships. It’s costly, and it’s messy. This is why Calico, Google’s newest mad science project, is potentially so exciting. In fact, Calico could represent the company’s largest health-care initiative since sprinted its way into obscurity. Of course, Google is a different company today than it was in 2008 (when it launched Google Health) and so are we. Our habits have changed: Today, 20 percent of smartphone users have downloaded at least one health app, and 60 percent of adults now look for health information online. Led by former Genentech CEO and current Apple Chairman, Arthur D. Levinson, Calico has big plans in health care — at least over the long term. From what we’ve heard thus far, the new project will leverage Google’s massive cloud and data centers to help facilitate research on disease and aging by mining its trove of data for insight into their origins. Apple Chairman, Arthur D. Levinson Plus, thanks to its investment in , Google already has access to a fast-growing genomic database, which could come in handy as it begins to focus on, in its words, “health and well-being — in particular the challenge of aging” and dive into the science, genetics and biochemistry behind longevity and disease. In an with TIME Magazine, Google CEO Larry Page implied that dramatically extending human life is one of Calico’s main goals; not making people immortal per se, but, according to a source familiar with the project, increasing the lifespan of people born 20 years ago by as much as 100 years. “Are people really focused on the right things?” Page muses in the interview. “One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world, but when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.” While his delivery is a bit confusing, Page’s thesis seems to be an optimistic one: While curing cancer has always seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, the goal is more within reach than many believe — if only someone would just put their mind to it, he seems to say. Yes, Larry Page is brilliant, but his message also seems to imply that diseases (and their cures) are reducible — that all of the world’s problems could be cured if we just had some snappier algorithms. Really, it almost seems more of a reflection of how the enormous many-headed-beast that is Google has become, as well as a testament to its resources and the type of talent it’s able to attract — rather than pure, unbridled hubris. It’s as if they’re saying: “Hi, welcome to Google! Today, we’re going to turn your eyeglasses into a computer, tomorrow we’ll develop self-driving cars, the day after that, we’ll cure cancer and increase the average human lifespan by 100 years. Oh, and by the way, we’re still trying to organize all of the world’s information and make it easily searchable!!” N.B.D., everybody, N.B.D. Interestingly, Calico doesn’t seem to be a Google company per se, more of an investment in a new company that will be affiliated with Google and become an extension of the company’s mad science lab, . “Don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses,” Page warned readers on Google+, Google’s social network. [Yes, let’s not forget that Google also has a social network. It’s like Facebook except no one uses it!] “Please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.” Of course, with a market cap approaching $300 billion, Google could make a $1 billion investment in Calico and it would still be a very small investment “by comparison to its core business.” Not satisfied with self-driving cars and Google Glass, Page says health is something the company needs to tackle, that he wants to “solve cancer” the same way Google X has tried to experiment and innovate in wearable computing and transportation. “It takes 10 or 20 years to go from an idea to something being real. Health care is certainly one of those areas,” he told TIME’s Harry McKracken. “We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done.” Sources tell us that Calico is still very much in the exploratory phases and is seeking neither near-term profits nor has much of any idea about how to actually increase lifespans. So there’s that. It’s one thing to say “we’re going to increase the human lifespan by 20 years!” and another entirely to actually do that. Fortunately, Page and Levinson aren’t the first ones to attempt longevity: Immortality has long been the ambition of kings, super villains and pretty much anyone who enjoys waking up each morning. While Google Calico is still a work in progress, given what we’ve learned so far and heard from our sources, here are a couple of ways the company could push us towards that goal — or at the very least, extend our lifespans. It may surprise you, but in the race to immortality, humans are in second place. But who is this agile and fleet-footed creature out-distancing we ever-powerful humans, you ask? Why that would be none other than the noble Planarian worm. Yes, in 2012, scientists from the University of Nottingham a species of Planarian worm that could perpetually heal itself and divide. “Usually when stem cells divide — to heal wounds, or during reproduction or for growth — they start to show signs of aging. This means that the stem cells are no longer able to divide and so become less able to replace exhausted specialized cells in the tissues of our bodies,” explained researcher Aziz Aboobaker. “Our aging skin is perhaps the most visible example of this effect. Planarian worms and their stem cells are somehow able to avoid the aging process and to keep their cells dividing.” Cross-section of a Planarian Flatworm. Photo from The School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois Essentially, one of the keys to immortality lies in telomeres — which are essentially a region of nucleotide sequences that act as a protective cap, deterring the degradation of genes near the end of chromosomes by allowing their ends to shorten. Huh? In other words, as Science Daily points out, the telomere is like the protective plastic cap at the end of your shoelace; each time a cell divides, the telomere protects it from fraying or going on a five-day bender. However, each time it does divide, your telomere caps are reduced. Theoretically, then, if someone can figure out a way to preserve or elongate these telomeres, then we would be one step closer to a veritable genetic fountain of youth. Unfortunately, the science is still scant. Back in 1996, a team of Nobel Prize-winning scientists explained that “telomere length is clearly not directly correlated with organismal aging” [ ]. However, the Nobel Price for Physiology and Medicine in 2009 for their work, which found that telomere length could potentially be maintained by catalyzing the activity of an enzyme known as “telomerase.” However, , in most organisms, the enzyme is really only turned on during those early developmental years. Planarian worms have managed to outfox this, and by studying the mechanics of their division and how they protect against degradation, Google Calico and anyone else for that matter could be on the right track. Human Chromosomes capped by telomeres. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy’s Human Genome Program Of course, again, real progress in longevity research requires time and money. Organizations and companies have been trying to tackle this problem for years, and many have been rebuffed. For example, in 2008, pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline shelled out $720 million for a promising drug, SRT501, a modified version of a substance found in red wine that has been linked to anti-aging. Two years later, Glaxo gave up. But that was five years ago, and this is the company that managed to map the entire planet in a few years. It’s hard to imagine Google will be pumping much money into Calico at first, but if it does, it could make a real difference. For now, sources tell us that Calico will primarily function as an R&D group, exploring the latest in longevity science. However, it won’t rule out the possibility of manufacturing its own products down the line. At some level, Larry Page, the company — in Mountain View — has become convinced that Google needs to help figure out the aging problem. As Bette Davis and most 90-year-olds will tell you, “old age is no place for sissies.” It’s tough. After all, longevity isn’t any fun if one spends the last decade of life wheezing in a hospital bed. Then again, it’s how life works. As the truisms say, aging is one of the few things in life you can count on. Many people die because one of the vital organs in their bodies stopped working. In recent decades, we’ve dramatically lengthened some lives by simply replacing the faulty part: A heart, kidney, lung, etc. In the near future, we’ll be able to replace organs at scale with the magic of 3D printing. Scientists have already how to transplant a manufactured kidney, so at some point in the future, heart failure may be just as inconvenient as having to take another trip to Kinkos. Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Lawrence Bonassar, holds a working, artificial ear created from 3-D printers and injectable molds. Photo by Lindsay France/University Photography , printing up a new heart would be a welcome change for our wallets. Though until the cost of 3D printing at scale is realized (it’s going to take a while), these kinds of procedures will likely remain on the more expensive side. And the harsh truth is that fixing organs may not be enough to stave off the effects of old age in the first place. Repairing whole swaths of decrepit tissue and dying cells is likely where science will turn next. Interestingly enough, Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, that an army of nanorobots will eventually do all of our internal tune-ups. The nanobots themselves could mimic the very structure of DNA that is the foundation of our cellular makeup. While the thought is exciting, today this remains in the theoretical realm, i.e. science fiction. Despite Kurzweil being an authority on immortality, two sources close to the project say that he won’t be working for Calico; instead, he’ll continue focusing on building out his “cybernetic friend” project at Google HQ. That being said, it’s hard to imagine Kurzweil being able to stay away from the project for long, considering how much energy he’s dedicated to thinking about the problem. While Page says that curing cancer won’t be the key to extending the average human lifespan, at some point, Calico and others will have to face it head on. “If a human could live long enough, it is inevitable that at least one of his or her cells would eventually accumulate a set of mutations sufficient for cancer to develop,” a team of authors in . Thus, cancer is an inevitable part of the decay of our cells and, unfortunately, an omnipresent risk as we continue to live longer and longer. One source close to the project says that Google is exploring solutions in the area of genetically personalized medicine. Tailoring drug treatment to the unique biomarkers of the individual, such as the field of Proteomics, . There’s a lot of exciting work going on at the intersection of health care and technology. The advancements in computing, mobile technology and data analysis have allowed startups like to help push research on diseases like Alzheimer’s forward, and even predict its onset years before it happens. Companies like Proteus Digital Health are leading the charge into personalized medicine with a pill that can text doctors and family members from inside your body, to paraphrase . Startups can change the conversation around innovation in digital health by experimenting, pushing the envelope and staying nimble. However, just having the name of a tech industry giant like Google enter the fray on the digital health front is huge, especially when its chief executives are resolved to help tackle these enormous problems — from diseases like cancer to those pesky age-related wrinkles. It’s still a bit too early to say how much Google plans to — or will — move the needle in the race for immortality and beautiful skin, but it’s an important step. Throwing its name in the ring will incentivize others to do the same. Why? As Dr. Katherine Pollard of San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes , there is still a significant gap between researchers and entrepreneurs — scientists and Silicon Valley. However, at the same time, there are now more opportunities than ever before for both sides to team up to make technological breakthroughs in health care, and, in turn, making those breakthroughs more accessible to the public. This is important because it’s easy to get wrapped up in the exciting science and technology underlying these problems — and trying to solve the unsolvable — but extending longevity just for the sake of longevity’s sake (while arguably a core element of our survival instinct) is silly. There are 7 billion people on this planet, and if Google and others are going to enable the majority of them to add 10 years to their lives, it will likely create even bigger problems — chiefly in the “resources” department. Today, more than 1 billion people live without access to the most basic forms of health care. Not to criticize a beautiful thing before it even sets sail — only a cruel, heartless jerk would find fault with a project that deals, in part, with curing cancer, mind you — but this is worth pointing out. There may even be more urgent or salient problems in health care (at large) that a company like Google could help solve; one could argue that bringing basic health care to a billion people needs to come before we worry about extending one person’s life from 95 to 100.
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WSJ Confirms It’s Parting Ways With All Things D, Adding 20 New Hires And International Conference
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Matthew Panzarino
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The Dow Jones-owned Wall Street Journal has that it will part ways with All Things D. The media publication — and conference powerhouse — is still in talks with potential suitors but its relationship with the Journal is dead. The news was first reported by . Negotiations have been going on for some time and sources tell us that this is largely due to the fact that Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, the founders and standard-holders of the ATD brand, have been looking for funding to expand the business, rather than simply selling out to a larger media publication. One of the potential acquirers, we’re hearing, was AOL, which owns TechCrunch, Engadget, Autoblog and other blog properties including Patch. “We plan to embark on a major global expansion of our technology coverage, which will include adding 20 reviewers, bloggers, visual journalists, editors, and reporters covering digital,” said Gerard Baker, Editor in Chief of Dow Jones and Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal. “As part of this global push, we will also be expanding our conference franchise to include an international technology conference and building a new digital home for our first-class technology news and product reviews on The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. ” At this point the ATD brand remains with the Wall Street Journal, which would likely continue to use it in some fashion. The fate of the conferences, from what we know, is still up in the air. Whether a deal is cut to have them continue to run the conferences — or to buy them out — while parting ways on other matters, is yet to be determined. It seems unlikely that Dow Jones will want to let the lucrative events, run by Mossberg and Swisher, out of their grasp, and it’s difficult to see how that relationship would work out. It seems doubtful that they would shutter them entirely, however, as they’ve become marquee events. The Wall Street Journal says that part of its deal will be for a new conference that will focus on international markets. As far as the team goes, they are contracted with a corporation owned by Swisher and Mossberg, so they will stick together wherever the team ends up. This will be a deal for the whole kit and kaboodle, even Mike Isaac. Primack reports that ATD won’t share any content and ‘certain’ advertising functions with the Journal, but that Mossberg will also leave his column. The timeline for the shuttering, as we’ve been hearing for some time, is end-of-year. Potential funding sources that that are being discussed for Mossberg and Swisher’s new effort are Reuters, NBCUniversal, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, Cox and The Washington Post. The iconic red chairs that grace the stage at D events . The Wall Street Journal’s statement in full: For years, Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal has enjoyed working with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher to bring the best of tech coverage to readers around the world under the All Things Digital brand, however, after discussions, both parties have decided not to renew the agreement when the contract expires at the end of this year. Technology is the central driver of economic growth and the Journal is committed to being the indispensable global source of news and information in this critical area. We plan to embark on a major global expansion of our technology coverage, which will include adding 20 reviewers, bloggers, visual journalists, editors, and reporters covering digital. As part of this global push, we will also be expanding our conference franchise to include an international technology conference and building a new digital home for our first-class technology news and product reviews on The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. This new initiative will be an integral part of The Wall Street Journal and will be rooted in the Journal’s reputation for excellent, fair, objective, reliable and stimulating journalism. As part of the mutual separation, Walt Mossberg will be leaving the Journal at the end of this year. I want to offer heartfelt thanks for more than twenty years of Personal Technology columns as well as his very fine reporting on national and international affairs in the years before he turned his attention to technology coverage.”
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Playing Starcraft 2 Might Make You Smarter
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Alex Wilhelm
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This won’t come as a surprise if you’re familiar with the game’s genre, but playing Starcraft 2 might make you smarter. Starcraft 2 is a so-called “real-time strategy game,” a form of video game that involves resource management and military planning in parallel, while restricting the amount of information that each player has. The result is a gaming experience that involves planning, strategic thinking on the fly, and rapid mental and physical coordination (this is why I’m terrible at Starcraft, if you were curious). According to , brought to our attention , “cognitive flexibility is a trainable skill.” That conclusion was reached after running study participants through a controlled gaming environment, or Starcraft 1 and 2. Some participants played The Sims, while others played the Starcraft titles, racking up 40 hours of gameplay over a period of one-and-a-half to two months. All individuals that took part in the study were female, due to a “small number of non-gaming males” that might have been eligible. Those who played Starcraft instead of The Sims showed measurable improvements in certain mental functions following the period of gaming. Playing Starcraft, according to the study, “stresses rapid and simultaneous maintenance, assessment, and coordination between multiple information and action sources was sufficient to affect change.” The result of playing real-time strategy games such as Starcraft is “an underlying dimension of cognitive flexibility” across several laboratory tests. So, playing Starcraft 2 with its mental rigor helps keep your brain fit, and perhaps tunes it up a bit. Again, this is not a surprising conclusion, but is a fun data point all the same. There has long been an interesting connection between Starcraft 2 and startups, something that I . Since then, there have been , an to allow large tech companies to field their own teams, and the why tech workers seem to love the game. It’s not surprising that digital types that stick to monitors and fast typing enjoy Starcraft, but it’s also possible that there is a bit of skill or interest overlap between working in a quickly growing tech company and playing the game. And since Starcraft might help keep your mind fit, it doesn’t hurt to play a few games to stay sharp. At least that’s what you can tell your boss the next time you’re caught getting bunker-rushed before the end of the workday.
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Announcing The First Hardware Battlefield Where One Startup Will Win $50,000
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John Biggs
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Hardware is king. VCs are investing, hackers are taking notice, and a subculture of “artisanal” design, prototyping, and manufacturing has grown almost overnight. And now we’re looking for some of the best hardware startups in the world to compete in something completely new and completely cool: The TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield. What is it? It’s a competition to pick the best hardware product. The winner gets $50,000 and, more important, notoriety and access to a group of early adopters who love cool new gear. Like our Disrupt Battlefield we will run the contest in front of a pack of hand-picked judges who will award the prize live on our site. The best thing? The Hardware Battlefield is taking place at CES 2014 in Las Vegas but is open to all comers and you don’t need a conference badge to enter, attend the battlefield events, or simply spectate. Our goal is to find the diamond in the CE rough. We don’t care about Samsung, Sony, and Philips – we care about you. Entry is free and is open to all hardware companies who are planning to launch (crowdfund or ship) product in a two week window before or after January 10. You can still be in prototyping stage but you must have a working, usable product by January 7 and be ready to offer pre-orders on that day or soon thereafter. We recommend launching your crowdsourcing page during the event, however, as it will have maximum impact. We will have more detail shortly but for now we invite you to . The rules are simple: 1. You must launch your product or crowdfunding campaign before January 7.
2. You must be a single proprietor or small company.
3. This must not be a feature update to an existing product.
4. You must be able to attend rehearsals and sessions in Las Vegas prior to CES and during the show.
5. You must launch first with TechCrunch and approach other media after you appear on our stage. We will pick 15 entrants on October 30 and announce the location, time, and judges closer to the event. The grand prize winner will get $50,000 to go towards research, development, or whatever else your team needs to get by. All projects will be kept confidential until January 7. We are very excited about this new event and we want to make it the best one ever. Remember to email sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com if you’d like to sponsor the festivities and if you have any questions email john@beta.techcrunch.com. We look forward to seeing what you’re working and we hope to see you in Vegas!
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Why High-Skilled Immigration Reform Is Stuck
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Alex Wilhelm
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In April, the Senate put together a that was then sent to the House of Representatives where it currently languishes. Once wrapped into the larger comprehensive immigration reform push, high-skilled immigration reform’s success became dependent on the passage of the full bill. It wasn’t always this way. In the Senate, for example, from early 2013 would have raised the hard cap of H-1B visas to 300,000 per year over time, and grant U.S. companies free rein to apply for H-1B visas for workers who graduated from U.S. universities with technical degrees. It was a simple and bipartisan proposal. It didn’t work. Certain members of the political establishment lined up against the idea of doing immigration reform in pieces. Detractors , who wrote an op-ed that included the following bit of language: Some policy makers are calling for piecemeal changes—such as issuing visas for high-skilled workers and investors, or conferring legal status on immigrants who were illegally brought into the country as children. Congress should avoid such quick fixes and commit itself instead to comprehensive immigration reform. Following several failed attempts to pass something to help ease high-skilled immigration’s current bottlenecks and difficulties, the issue was wrapped up into what appeared earlier this year to be a possibly functional bipartisan effort to pass quite a bit of reform at once. The Senate got its bill together after extensive horse-trading. However, once it landed in the House, it was essentially ignored, with the leading party of the lower chamber stating that they wished to work on it in pieces rather than considering the Senate bill as a whole. Since then, little has happened. And as such, high-skilled immigration has stalled. Given how stuck we now appear to be, it’s worth looking back to when we almost — maybe — had something. Rep. Lamar Smith that would have allowed for 55,000 more green cards each year for foreign STEM graduates of U.S. universities. A modest but perhaps workable idea. However, Rep. Smith included in his proposal the deletion of the green card lottery (which is officially known as the Diversity Visa Program). That’s where the 55,000 figure came from: The green card lottery awards 55,000 visas per year. Rep. Zoe Lofgren then introduced a similar bill, awarding the same number of visas, but without ending the green card lottery. So Rep. Smith, a Republican, and Rep. Lofgren, a Democrat, had legislation in mind that would add the same number of visas, with only a single difference. Surely something could be worked out? No. So where are we today? Mired. In late August, asked publicly if immigration reform is dead, concluding that: Ultimately the outcome will turn on whether the GOP leadership allows votes on enough piecemeal measures — or even a vote on a — to take to conference negotiations; whether the GOP leadership will decide to go to conference at all; and whether the leadership will allow a vote on something out of conference that lacks a majority of Republicans. Today, that chance appears low. As quoted this week, Alfonso Aguilar, an activist in favor of comprehensive reform, is concerned over hearing the phrase “if we have time,” regarding progress on the immigration question. If reform of the U.S. immigration system remains a low priority, there will not be enough political will or momentum to do a damn thing. And that keeps high-skilled immigration moot as a topic, as it has now been lashed aboard the larger immigration wagon of non-change. There has been a recent media wave of discontented parties bemoaning the slow death of comprehensive reform. Politico wrote “ ,” while The Hill published “ .” All this is capped by today’s news that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Washington pushing for reform. As quoted in , Zuck discussed reform holistically. Claiming to be “optimistic,” the technology leader went on to state that “addressing the 11 million undocumented folks is a lot bigger problem than high-skilled workers.” That’s actually true, but it’s impossible to separate the two at the moment as we won’t get one without the other, unless the House moves forward with its plan to do reform in chunks and the Senate agrees to go along with the plan, forsaking its own bill. What impact might Zuckerberg have on Capitol Hill? There doesn’t appear to be much enthusiasm. Slate’s Dave Weigel has I think : “Wait so Zuckerberg gave an afternoon panel talk in DC, and that’s gonna bring back immigration reform? Hahahahaha.” In the first application period of the 2013 H-1B visa application process, , shooting past the 85,000 cap for the year in five days. The U.S. government treats the first five days of the application process as a single day, and thus the H-1B visa window closed as quickly as it opened. The demand far outstripped supply. There are strong voices in favor of high-skilled immigration reform, and there are strong voices in opposition. The pro perspective can in this case be summarized as , with companies such as Google and Microsoft calling for change. Back when the Immigration Innovation Act wasn’t dead, both companies wrote blog posts in support of its general tenets. As I : This morning, on the introduction of the Immigration Innovation Act, tech giants and published blog entries in favor of the proposal. […] According to Google, 40 percent of technology companies that have been founded in the United States, were financed by venture capital, and went public, were founded by immigrants. Microsoft was explicit: It’s critical that America address the shortage of workers with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. There are many high-skilled, high-paying jobs being created by American businesses across the country that are being left unfilled because of this gap. How fair are the above arguments? Google’s facts are sound – many technology companies were and are founded by immigrants. You can run that math yourself. But is Microsoft’s point that there is a worker gap reasonable? It is commonly argued that the U.S. has a surplus of STEM graduates that are citizens, and that to therefore import talent from abroad harms our local populace. The idea has some merit, but does conflate the ownership of a degree with a certain tier of competence. One large technology company, I was once told by one of its employees, hires every single applicant that passes its standards testing and interview process. They want all the top-tier talent they can get, and nothing less. So, the problem becomes that, implicitly, our ability to turn out STEM graduates here doesn’t mean that our kids are qualified for the positions that are open. After all, why would companies go through such work and expense to hire foreign workers if they could hire at home? Also, the idyll that we produce far more computer science graduates, say, than jobs is a bit of a myth. According , a Bureau of Labor Statistics study indicated that “the economy creates 3 jobs requiring a B.S. in computer science for every one college student graduating with a B.S. in computer science.” So, the idea of importing the best from abroad to augment our home-grown labor force doesn’t appear to be too batty. That said, we should be sympathetic to those with STEM degrees who are out of work. That empathy, however, should not decide the larger issue. Finally, speaking more broadly, I view technological progress as an inherent good for human society. That bias colors how I view this issue specifically (though being the grandchild of immigrants isn’t a small part of my perspective, either). The idea that we are keeping away from our shores brilliant minds who want to work and build here is, to me, prima facie ridiculous. The simple depressing fact is that not only does no one know, but the cynical take might be the accurate perspective in this case. There appears to be little political will to take up immigration reform in the House ahead of the 2014 elections and their potential primary battles on the right. The Senate bill remains moot in the House. And looming crises involving foreign policy and financing government currently engulf our national attention. I was worried when high-skilled immigration lost its individual agency and was instead strapped to the larger reform push. It could have worked: Momentum in favor of high-skilled reform could have helped propel the comprehensive bill. But here we are, without progress on any immigration front. And I don’t see that changing.
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The Caktus Hug Sensor Makes Sure You’re Drinking Enough Water
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Chris Velazco
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Summer’s all but over, but it’s no less important to stay hydrated. According to the CDC 43 percent of Americans drink fewer than four glasses of water a day, and while the actual amount you should drink varies from person to person, four glasses probably doesn’t cut it. That’s where , a neat Finnish hardware startup that presented at second New Jersey demo day, comes into play. Their mission? To fix that dearth of drinking with an app and a curious sensor that straps onto your water bottle. The sensor (called, adorably enough, ) is a foam-lined gizmo that wraps itself around a water bottle and quietly tracks its motion. It’s not just a pint-sized koozie though — the Hug quietly monitors the bottle’s movements so it can provide its user with a rough idea how much fluid they’ve imbibed so far. Think of it as a giant Jawbone Up that straps onto your water receptacle and you’re on the right track. As always though, the hardware is only part of the equation. A companion app (iOS only for now) uses an algorithm to suss out which of those motions actually correspond to the user lifting the bottle to drink and which are just noise caused by random movements. The app also tracks ambient temperature and keeps tabs on what sorts of exercise you’re doing (you still have to punch that in yourself) so it can update your hydration goal in real time. To hear founder Panu Keski-Pukkila tell it, the Hug (and the rest of Caktus) was born out of pure necessity. An avid extreme athlete, he grew used to his girlfriend reminding him to drink more water while he was out carving up slopes in the Alps. When she moved to New York, though, that useful feedback mechanism disappeared and Keski-Pukkila set out to create something that could fill that particular hydro-centric void. And you know what? As downright kooky as the whole thing sounds, the combo of the Hug sensor and the app actually worked really well. In a brief demo, the sensor was accurately able to determine that roughly two ounces of water were squeezed out of the bottle, and the partner app updated almost immediately. With the Hug, you’re not quantifying yourself so much as you’re quantifying the stuff that goes in your body. That said, the team is taking a proactive approach when it comes to all those fitness-tracking gizmos floating around out there. They’ve already managed to bake in Fitbit support so users won’t have to punch in how many glasses of water they’ve downed in a day. For now the device is still strictly in its prototype phase, but the team is eagerly working to get the Hug, its partner app, and a dev-friendly API ready for prime time by early next year. So far they’ve locked up $25k in seed funding from the TechLaunch accelerator, and they plan to launch a crowdfunding campaign in early 2014 to lock up the cash necessary to start producing these things
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15Five, The Employee-Manager Feedback Network, Launches 2.0 With Like Buttons, Private Messaging And More
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Ingrid Lunden
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, a startup backed by the likes of that provides a platform to help the working world communicate better with its managers, has had a dose of its own medicine. Taking feedback collected from its users since its , the company is today rolling out a rebuilt version 2.0, with a smoother interface, an easier way to get new employees involved, and more features geared at larger groups and teams with matrix reporting structures — that is, teams reporting to more than one manager. The app, founded and run by David Hassell, is also adding two new investors to the company: CTO and co-founder , whose company is one of 15Five’s customers; and another founder who wants to remain anonymous, but whose startup is also using 15Five. Their investment brings the total raised by 15Five to $1.4 million. 15Five has been picking up steam in the last year, now serving 600 businesses and increasing revenues five-fold. Hassell declines to say how many people are using 15Five within those businesses except to note that they range from small startups to groups at larger organizations like Citrix. Indeed, as with the companies of 15Five’s two newest investors, early adopters of the service have been startups and other tech companies, but that is slowly changing to include bigger organizations and those in other verticals, because everyone can benefit from improved communication at work. This was part of the reason for the new version. One of the new features creates a separation between users and groups, with users now able to report into different groups led by different managers. This is a way of better representing structures at organizations that follow the matrix-management model. Managers who do not necessarily always work with a particular person can now request to follow them on the platform for periods of time — say, when they are on a project together. Another new feature — which really should be a part of any collaboration software, and yet so often is not (hello, Convo) — is a “follow-up” section, where users can flag conversations they would like to track. Once something in the follow-up section is finished, it can be moved to another new section for resolved conversations and threads. 15Five has taken a lot of clues from social media in its very conception. After all, the infinite loop of feedback that you can have on sites like Facebook and Twitter has made the idea of providing feedback online in the workplace more natural. In this new version, it has added another feature for people to acknowledge other people’s comments: a “like” button. And you can also comment on it publicly or privately on any post. There is also an improved inbox-style dashboard to be able to see all your ongoing conversations whether you are a manager or employee. Hassell says that this new version has been nine months in the making; he calls it his second baby, since right now his partner happens to be around nine months pregnant. But while babies are perfect things, the products of a startup sometimes are not. Hassell has described 15Five more than once to me as a “lean startup.” When the $1 million round was being announced, he even said he intentionally wanted to keep funding low in the early days to make sure that what they were making was matching what users actually wanted and needed. “We didn’t invest in underlying infrastructure because we did it on a shoestring,” he recalled. But what that also meant was that in creating version 2.0, the team realised they needed to start from scratch to rebuild the whole platform more flexibly using Python. This is not an easy thing to do, but it was worth it. Hassell says that the new platform gives 15Five a “phenomenal testing framework” that now lets the company make rapid changes when they are needed. The lean model 15Five adopted from the start has also helped it to learn other things about its users. Hassell likens the tendency for services like 15Five’s to gym memberships, if not done right: “I looked at the gym membership model, and you can see that the reason they do annual plans is because they know all members are unlikely to come in all the time. I was conscious of that, and I wanted to know in real time if people were using and leaving the service.” This is partly why the company decided to offer shorter contracts of usage to businesses. Initially, he says, churn on the site was 4 percent per month, and “that was too high.” The beta tests of the new platform indicate that now it is well below 2 percent. Similarly, there is the issue of getting people in the workplace to use it. “Compliance doesn’t have to be 100 percent to work, but just has to be enough so that people are using it and getting something out of it,” he says. Hassell is aware that the use of gamification has become quite trendy in the world of HR, but he has so far resisted incorporating that into the site. “With gamification, you are playing into someone’s psychology to be competitive. But we are focused on how to make this platform so valuable that people feel compelled to use it,” he says. That said, the company is working on something that sounds more like something from the quantified self movement, he says, by providing more information to employees about their usage statistics on 15Five, and those of the rest of the company. “We’ll build it ourselves and won’t make it quite so bubbly or gamey.” 15Five is $49 per month per business for the first 10 employees, and then $5 per employee per month, with different bulk-pricing options for larger teams. Today there are lots of small companies in the 10-15-user range, he says, and then some bigger customers in the 500-800-employee range, with 20 percent at 50 or more users. The new version out today is geared toward serving bigger businesses to better serve the Fortune 500 companies that Hassell says 15Five is starting to acquire as customers. But Hassell says 15Five is not yet at the point of expanding its existing self-service model to the “full enterprise” structure that would require larger sales forces and other kinds of infrastructure. That could, however, be the next step after 15Five raises its next round.
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iOS 7 Lock Screen Vulnerability Discovered Which Gives Access To Photos And Social Sharing, Apple Is Working On Fix
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Matthew Panzarino
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Vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS lock screens have become a fixture of new iOS releases over the past few years, and iOS 7 is not exempt. A new method for bypassing the passcode on a lock screen has been discovered by idle hands and reported by . . The lock screen bypass method involves sliding up Control Center, tapping on the timer button and holding down the power button until the cancel option comes up. You then tap on the cancel button then double-tap the home button. This gives you access to the multitasking UI. While most apps are locked out, the Camera option is accessible. This allows you to access the camera interface, but with the ability to scroll through of the owner’s photos, not just the ones shot in the time since the phone was last locked — in the manner that the camera has worked for some time now. Not only can you scroll through the photos, but you can also tap on the share button to send photos out via email or social channels like Twitter or Facebook. So once you’re in you can post photos to Flickr or send them via email. Though Greenberg characterizes this as ‘hijacking’ those accounts, that seems a bit dramatic. Still, there is potential for embarrassment or harm if sensitive ( photos get stolen or shared out through your social accounts. The bypass method has been verified by us to work properly and to not be overly difficult to execute. It took me about three tries to get it right on an iPhone 5 running iOS 7. As Greenberg notes, it’s hard to tell whether this works on an iPhone 5c or iPhone 5s as of yet. Of note: once you’re on the share sheet, you can choose a contact to send the item to, technically gaining access to the contact list (but not their details) of the device’s owner. Note that this vulnerability is easy to prevent for now. Just visit and toggle off ‘Access on Lock Screen’ to patch it up. The discovery was made by Jose Rodriguez, a soldier in Spain’s Canary Islands, who has a history of discovering these tricky bypass methods. His secret? Plenty of time waiting in cars in his former job as a driver for government officials. With past vulnerabilities, a software fix has come in a ‘point’ release of iOS 7. iOS 7.0.1 is already floating out there and contains a fix for Apple’s TouchID fingerprint scanner. So any fix for this would likely come in iOS 7.0.2 or later. Apple has added a variety of security features to iOS 7, including Activation Lock, which renders stolen phones unusable, even if they’re wiped. But it looks like it needs another lock screen audit just to be sure. : Apple Spokesperson Trudy Muller told TechCrunch that “Apple takes user security very seriously. We are aware of this issue, and will deliver a fix in a future software update.” So, yes, the fix for this little bug will come in a future point release of iOS 7.
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Pinterest Will Start Showing Ads As Traffic Keeps Growing But Shifts To Mobile
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Josh Constine
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After four years, Pinterest is taking its first serious steps towards monetization [Update: as its traffic moves from the web to mobile]. CEO Ben Silbermann “we’re going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins” because “it’s so important that Pinterest is a service that will be here to stay.” The announcement signals a shift from web growth to mobile growth and business for Pinterest. The initial tests of ads will be in search results and categories feeds. For example, when you search for Halloween, you might see a costume on sale at a local shop that had pinned the outfit. The format follows in the footsteps of other social advertising successes like Facebook and Twitter. Both similarly let businesses amplify the reach of their organic content by paying for “promotion”. Pinterest was founded in 2009 to let people collect and share links and photos of things they love. For a detailed analysis of its history, check out our piece . It explains how Pinterest hit a rapid growth period in 2011 causing significant scaling challenges. In 2012 it focused on mobile, and 2013 has been about adding value to pins in the form of context, purchase links, and related content. In 2011 and 2012 Pinterest worked with analytics company SkimLinks to track traffic it was driving to ecommerce sites and earn small referral fees. Despite rumors it was earning significant revenue from the partnership, we heard the income . Pinterest stopped working SkimLinks awhile back, lending credence to the idea that referral fees weren’t enough to support the company long-term. That’s why Pinterest has had to raise , with its latest $200 million Series D led by , and joined by , , and . That capital has helped it scale its team, product, and engineering to accommodate the sizable user base it’s amassed. comScore pegs Pinterest.com at 46.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide as of July, down from a high of 54.2 million in April. The analytics firm says Pinterest.com had 3.8 million average daily visitors in July. Its users skew significantly female compared to the rest of the web. They’re somewhat centered in the 15-34 years old demographic, but Pinterest is relatively balanced across ages. 60% of its traffic comes from the United States with 25.6 million monthly US uniques in August down from 29.4 million April, while 20% comes from Europe, and 10% comes from Asia Pacific. Fellow analytics service places Pinterest’s US monthly unique visitors at 29.6 million, down from 32.2 million in May, mirroring comScore’s signals that Pinterest’s web traffic is fading. look a bit more erratic, but also show a drop from April and May to now. Note that it’s not clear what Pinterest’s mobile user count is, though it has between 10 million and 50 million installs on Android according to Google Play. Users may simply be shifting the way they access the service. [ My hunch was correct. Pinterest is experiencing the shift to mobile. While its web traffic may be declining, mobile and its total traffic is growthing briskly. After asking whether its total traffic was in decline, or only its web traffic, a company spokesperson supplied this statement: “The world is going mobile and we’re excited about that trend. Traffic continues to grow, breaking records consistently month over month and week over week. Mobile usage became the majority of traffic last summer and continues to grow in absolute numbers and as a percentage of traffic, which may account for third party discrepancies in measurement.” We’ve seen this same shift play out for Facebook and other companies, and Pinterest will have to grapple with the same changes including thinking mobile-first for product.] Though Pinterest isn’t nearly as large as Facebook or Twitter, the referral traffic it drives is lauded for its ability to inspire purchases. Now it’s time to use that reputation to seduce ad buys from brands and small businesses. Pinterest is working with a select group of brands to pilot its ads experiment, and at first they won’t pay for the promotion. Pinterest wants to make sure the ads work well first and deliver value to advertisers without disturbing users. To that end Silbermann defused fears, writing “I know some of you may be thinking, ‘Oh great…here come the banner ads.’ But we’re determined to not let that happen.” Specifically, he lays out that the ads will be: Along with building out a sales team, Pinterest will need to do exhaustive analysis to find the right balance of ads and organic content that earns revenue but doesn’t scare users away. Expect it to err on the conservative side at first. It will also need to learn to measure return on investment for its advertisers by determining which ad views and clicks lead to purchases. If it follows the Facebook and Twitter playbook, Pinterest will first hold the hands of big advertisers as they run experimental campaigns. It would then enlarge the private test of managed sales advertising to encompass more brands. Next it would look to create a self-serve tool open to all businesses wishing to advertise. Meanwhile it would set up an ads API that would let big brands and developers build tools for running huge, efficient ad campaigns efficiently. Pinterest is one of many Silicon Valley startups hoping to gain traction first and figure out monetization later. Most never achieve the former and fold before they get to the latter. But Pinterest found a place in the hearts, bookmarks, and home screens of many by translating our collecting and nesting instincts to the digital world. You might never be able to afford that dress, that car, or that vacation home, but there’s satisfaction in simply saying “this defines me”. Now it just needs to convince advertisers of the value of a spot in our homes of 1s and 0s.
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Google Makes Its New Flat Logo And “App Launcher” Style Nav Menu Official, Will Roll Out Over The Next Few Weeks
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google just got a refreshed flat logo and the black navigation bar is gone. Earlier this morning, we reported that Google’s new “App Launcher” style navigational menu was just Turns out, it is much closer to launching, as the company just . Gone is the black bar that runs atop all of Google’s properties. It’s now been replaced with a new menu that sits next to the Share and account info. The launcher, which looks just like the app launcher on Chrome OS, brings up an App grid with your favorite Google services. Google previously attempted to revamp the navigation bar back in 2011 by canning it in favor of a drop-down menu inside the Google logo. While the company officially , it later gave up on this idea. It’ll be interesting to see how Google’s users will react to today’s change. With this announcement, Google is also making its new flat logo official. The new logo had already been spotted across the web for the , but given Google’s fondness for bucket testing small changes, it wasn’t clear if this was ever going to become the official logo. We’ll have to wait and see if Google will post a behind the flatter logo, but here is what the company had to say about it so far: “As part of this design, we’ve also refined the color palette and letter shapes of the Google logo.” That’s it.
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