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Fring, An Early Mover In Mobile Messaging And Video Apps, Sells For $50M To Genband To Build Out WhatsApps For Carriers | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 9 | 12 | , an early startup that focused on creating group messaging and video calling apps for mobile phones, competing against the likes of Skype and WhatsApp, is calling it a day as an independent entity: it has been to , a provider of services like IP gateways and billing and other services to mobile, fixed and cable carriers. Terms of the deal have not been officially disclosed, but we have heard from a source that the price was $50 million — a number reported also by . That represents a poor return for Israel-based Fring, which had from investors including Pitango, North Bridge and Veritas. Texas-based Genband, meanwhile, had of funding from One Equity Partners, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Venrock in January of this year; this is its first acquisition since news of that raise broke. So why the sale? Although Fring was one of the very first companies to offer OTT messaging and video services, it was quickly overtaken by newer competitors. Fring today has 50 million users using 150 million voice minutes and 10 million video minutes each month, CEO Roy Timor-Rousso tells me, but that’s actually fairly small compared to companies like WhatsApp and Skype (both with around 300 million+ users) and Viber (200 million users). The news highlights what could end up being a wave of consolidation in the mobile VoIP space, Timor-Rousso says. “I think that free mobile VoIP a very crowded space. There are a lot of services with very little differentiation among them and the technology barrier is very low, so I wouldn’t be surprised if other players in our industry will have to consolidate or find other models to operate and grow into the future. As one of the leading brands in the space, Fring took a hard look and made an active strategic decision when we did the market analysis.” On the other side of the equation, Genband looked like an IPO target at one point after its last large raise, but it seems that for now its CEO, David Walsh (who comes from majority shareholder One Equity Partners), is looking to maximise how the company makes revenue. Fring will bring it one more product to add to its existing portfolio. “Fring is one of the pioneers that helped change the way consumers communicate on-the-go and is perfectly aligned with our strategy to bring service providers rich, simple-to-use, mobile communications solutions,” Walsh said in a statement. Genband currently has some 700 carrier customers already taking other white-label and OTT services. “We look forward to leveraging the full potential of fring’s OTT solutions in the marketplace by pairing them with GENBAND’s cutting-edge cloud and WebRTC offerings.” While Genband will add Fring to its existing portfolio of carrier services, Timor-Rousso tells me that Fring will also continue to offer its free iPhone, Android and Nokia apps directly to consumers. “The entire team, including Fring as a business and product offering, is migrating into Genband,” he said in an interview. “I’m leading the company with my management team. We continue as before.” Fring will continue to introduce new features to that consumer brand, which will stay free, but Timor-Rousso calls carrier services “our growth engine, what we’ve been working on the last year or so.” For their part, carriers have been seeing people migrate to newer brands like WhatsApp and Skype and away from their own services and for the last couple of years, have been trying to create competing messaging apps to bring them back into the fold. Timor-Rousso says that Fring’s first deal resulting from that pivot will be announced next week: it will be a video and messaging app for a “tier-one European mobile operator.” He says that Fring was not looking for a buyer, but rather a strategic partner or investor, when Genband made its offer. “Our first interaction with Genband was a customer but after we met, we very quickly understood that we had aligned strategies, so that conversation quickly switched into first investment and then a full acquisition offer.” |
Tow Choice Wants To Take The Hassle Out Of Calling For Roadside Assistance | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | Once, on a brisk autumn night months and months ago, I went for a run around a park and promptly lost my car keys in the dark. The next hour was spent Googling local tow services and hoping that my phone’s battery wouldn’t die. The hour after that was spent sitting at a picnic table under an ancient oak tree trying to keep warm. If only existed back then. I met with co-founders Dave Kozuki and Robert Cheng at Disrupt SF’s Startup Alley, where the jovial pair expressed their desire to build an Uber for tow trucks to better serve motorists in need. Despite invoking Uber’s name, there are a few thoughtful differences that make plenty of sense given the sorts of situations users are likely to find themselves in. There’s no native app to download for one, since it’s sort of silly to force stranded drivers to deal with some protracted onboarding process. Instead, everything runs in an HTML5 web app that lets users plot there positions on a map and send out a distress signal to tow drivers within a pre-determined radius. Those tow drivers do have to download and install a native mobile app, but once they’re within range of a stranded driver they’ll respond to that and provide two things — their ETA to the car’s location and a quick price quote. They’ve only got a limited amount of time to get their offers in, and once that window is closed, users can choose the offer that best suits them. To keep the process as simple (and as uncontentious as possible), all payments are handled right up front and Tow Choice takes a 20 percent cut from each of those transactions. To be completely honest, I’m getting to be really tired of the whole “[startup name] is the [more established startup name] of [industry]” schtick but I won’t begrudge these guys since I’m basically smitten with this idea. While popular services like AAA serve over 50 million customers in the United States and Canada, that still leaves a considerable chunk of people who could stand to benefit from a simpler, more consumer-friendly way of flagging down nearby tow trucks. Of course, a clever idea does not an overnight hit make. Tow Choice has already facilitated more than 500 tow referrals in the team’s native Oahu, but the big money will come when the team manages to build out local networks of tow operators as it expands into new markets. For now though, the team is taking the slow and steady approach — Kozuki and Cheng plan to bring the service to Portland, Ore., in the coming weeks, and we’ll have to see how things proceed from there. |
Microsoft’s Now-Deleted Anti-iPhone Commercial Is The Funniest Thing From Redmond Since Windows RT | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | It’s Friday, kids, so calm down and have a laugh. Do this: Stop caring about Apple and Microsoft and Google and the phone in your pocket and the platform of your dreams and all that. Instead, giggle at the in which Microsoft takes on Apple in a way that I honestly did not see coming. Microsoft knew that the clip would cause controversy, and they yanked it quickly, likely as planned. Whatever. It’s still farking hilarious and worth watching. If you can’t laugh, you can’t take a joke and that means you are three points of calcification from being a statue. Laugh! Enjoy: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CjKAEFtF3U?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Go nuts if you want but I’m busy laughing. Have another coffee. |
Harbingers Of Apps To Come, Here Are Four Google Glass For Fashion Hacks We Saw At Disrupt | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | With an abnormally high population of Google Glass owners in one convention center and open to participants at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, it should come as no surprise that a number of hacks combined the two. Between the use of Glass at fashion weeks past and present and magazines’ inclusion of the technology in , the precedent (often kitschy but not always) is there. Glass makes every bit of sense for fashion apps, as it has the potential to make the physical world shoppable online. So let’s go out on a limb here and say that these hacks are just the first of many. I caught up with the groups after Disrupt to talk about their hacks, all of which treat the Glass shopping experience differently. Yosun Chang, a developer with experience in augmented reality, has been working on Android apps for Google Glass since she received her pair in July. StyleZapper, one of two hacks Chang worked on at Disrupt, uses a platform she created called , which uses Glass’s gyroscope to point a crosshair as the user moves her head and “fires” with a tap of the sidepad. “It’s easy to move your head up and down, so I hacked together a weird new way to browse for clothing or any other online shopping,” Chang said. “You have a wall that you might consider choosing from, and instead of looking down at the screen, you’re just moving your head a little bit to point the cursor at the item you want to shoot to buy or something. It’s kind of experimenting with what Glass can do.” Using head motion to navigate on Google Glass is intuitive, she said, since the device aligns with a natural gesture. Of course, the possible uses of GyroFire are much broader than a shopping app, and Chang said she is thinking about developing a simple shooting game called Target Practice. “I like to compare it to five to seven years ago. If people were to tell you that you’ll be getting all your messages on a 3×5-inch device, that would sound crazy,” she said. “There’s a form factor shift that might be happening, where Glass might be five to seven years from now the new form factor. When you’re wearing it on your head, it would be natural. Instead of scrolling through a website, people could be moving their head around, shooting things they like. A much cooler demo would be at a store. I could point Glass at a real item in the store and tap to buy. That’s pretty much possible right now.” The STREET | STILE hack created by Marley Kaplan and Lance Nanek derives from the now-ubiquitous street style photography practice of stopping someone on the street to take a photo of their outfit. Glass wearers can take a picture, then speak to identify the clothing (“Alex Wang dress,” for instance), which would pull up similar shopping results. The app would also serve as a community where others can vote outfits up or down. “I thought it would be a great way to enhance street style,” Kaplan said. “Rather than taking a picture and writing down what the products are, why not use technology to close the loop on the product to purchase and include sharing to let people vote on if they’re interested in that style or not?” So while the ritual of approaching someone to snap their outfit is the same, the disruptive element is what happens after that photo is taken. This is in contrast to a hack like Glashion (up next), which allows the user to take a photo unbeknownst to the subject. “Around Google Glass, there’s controversy about invasive tech… The use of it in this sense is for a fashion blogger or media outlet, who does [already] go ask, ‘Can I talk to you?’ It allows you to use Google Glass to find the product, or a similar product. I see it as using technology to enhance this fashion content rather than to be an invasion of privacy,” Kaplan said. Kaplan is right that street style photography is a compelling content feature, so a Glass community gathering around a crowdsourced app of that nature is entirely feasible. Kaplan said that she and Nanek were not planning to build out the app, although (as with anything) they would consider it with enough interest. As makers Billy Mauro and Felipe Servin said, is for girls who want to know what other women are wearing but feel uncomfortable asking. Or for non-awkwards who just don’t have time to do so. This app lets users take a stealth photo of an item of clothing, and a Glashion stylist will recommend product matches, which they can scroll through and tap to buy or receive directions to the closest store that has it in stock. The idea, the team just after their Hackathon presentation, is to meld online and offline shopping behaviors. Relative to the other hacks that took on fashion and Glass, it’s maybe the purest application of using the device to shop: point, shoot, buy. It’s also an idea that they’re hoping to take to market, Maura and Servin said. “We’re building it out. We are meeting with the CEO of PopSugar and are going to talk to him about it. We have an invite to Google. We would hope to get Google Ventures to fund us.” This hack has a little bit of everything. Like the other products, users take a photo of an item, which ShopStyle For Glass then matches to similar products, which it can then find in nearby stores and provide directions to them. Longer term, the app uses pattern recognition based on user behavior to profile a person’s likes, which are funneled into a daily feed. The products also change based on how the user shares them, and makers Alex Santamaria and Alfred Juarez said they are looking to encourage sharing by making the process as frictionless as possible. They’re already one step ahead because the user doesn’t have to pull out their phone to do so. There’s also the possibility to reduce friction even further by using Glass’s eye track to gauge how much they like an item based on eye dilation, which takes place when a person is interested in something. It’s either awesome or terrifying. Take your pick. |
Ask A VC: Early Twitter Investor And Spark Capital Partner Bijan Sabet On Founder Personality, Investment Syndicates And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Spark Capital founder and general partner Bijan Sabet joined us in the studio to talk about investment syndicates and much more. Sabet was one of the early backers of Twitter (which just for a public offering yesterday) in 2008 and served on the company’s board from 2008 to 2011. Sabet also led investments in Tumblr (acquired by Yahoo), Jelly, Stack Exchange, RunKeeper, Foursquare, Boxee (acquired by Samsung), OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga) and thePlatform (acquired by Comcast). Sabet talked about his firm’s relationship with in general and discussed founder personalities as well. Check out the video above for more! |
Woot’s Founding Team Returns As Mediocre Laboratories To Experiment With E-Commerce | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | A little more than a year after Woot founder Matt Rutledge he sold to Amazon, he’s bringing the team back together to hack e-commerce once again. The new company, called “a mediocre corporation,” is being designed to build up and test out new ways of selling products to customers online. Mediocre brings together a number of folks from the founding team behind Woot, the long-running e-commerce site that created the daily deals category of online commerce. That includes Matt’s brother , who served as the company’s creative lead, as well as , both of whom . Also joining them are former Woot CFO and IT director . “We really tried to lower expectations with the brand,” Rutledge told me. The team drew inspiration from Ev Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corporation, but since “obvious” was taken, they decided to set the bar low with “mediocre” instead. Launched in 2004, Woot made one item available for sale every day. The site started with consumer electronics — putting a limited number of TVs, PCs, and other items on sale for well below their usual price. It also garnered a following for selling a monthly “ ” made up of leftover inventory and (sometimes) office supplies. Over time, the offers improved and inventory began selling out in minutes. And before long, Woot began introducing new vertical categories with which it could make new items available. Then Woot hit the big time in 2010, as it was . The Amazon deal helped Woot to reach massive scale, but it also meant that some of the things that made it great (like focusing on one deal a day) began to fade away. As Amazon added more categories and items, the original reason to visit Woot — i.e. to find out what’s on sale and grab it quick — disappeared. With that all behind them, the guys are ready to test out new models of selling goods online, through a series of “experiments” that the company will incubate through its “ ” division. Each of those experiments will have its own consumer-facing site, which will test out some hypothesis or online business model. Structuring the operation that way will give Mediocre the ability to be nimble and try different things out — something that it wasn’t really able to do at Woot. Given the constraints of “one deal per day,” as well as the subdomain structure that it set up when it launched new categories, Woot didn’t give itself too much wiggle room to experiment. This time things will be different. The company currently has about a dozen employees, with its headquarters in Dallas, and the team already has some ideas for what it wants to build. Rutledge wouldn’t give me a timeline for the first launch of an experiment or an estimate of how much time will be spent on each. That said, what they do know is that they will be very transparent and seek input from the community — you know, the way Woot used to. The first thing that the company will build is a forum, where its customers and users will be able to make suggestions for things that it can build and provide feedback on experiments that are currently in progress. Back in the day, it was the sense of community that really set Woot apart. Well, that and the hilarious descriptions of the items it put up for sale. That creative touch will be back as well. Regardless of what they might come up with, at least we know it’s not going to be boring. |
Ark Launches Rapportive-Meets-Mailbox Email App In Pivot To Marketing Intelligence | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | Need to do some homework on who you’re emailing? You could search their name on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but on mobile that’s a lot of taps, and it’s hard to know if you’ve got the right John Smith. So has just launched a that pulls in all the social profiles of the people you’re emailing so you can quickly do research on business contacts or stalk your friends. If the Ark name sounds familiar, it’s because the company launched as a people search engine on stage in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in May 2012. Soon after it raised a seed round. The let you pull up all your friends who live in New York, who are single, or who Like the same band as you. It was built on Facebook’s data and worked a bit like the yet-unlaunched Graph Search…which ended up being a problem. Facebook shut off their access for using people’s friends data in ways that stepped on its policies. Without its core data set, and with the eventual launch of Graph Search, Ark needed to find a new way to add value. So it’s announcing its pivot into marketing intelligence. The problem it wants to solve is still in people search, but from a new angle. “When I search your name in Google, it goes ‘I don’t know [who you are], here’s 10 links,'” says Ark CEO Patrick Riley. “We wanted to resolve those entities…consolidating all your profiles into an uber-profile between multiple social networks.” Why? Because tying together all of someone’s online presences and the public data they hold is very lucrative. Brands and marketers want to know as much about you as possible so they can target you with relevant ads and promotions. They might know your name, or your email, or your Twitter handle, but nothing else. Ark could tell them the rest, though in a relatively respectable way because it only indexes publicly available data. So Ark is launching an API that helps companies learn more about people. For example, a brand has 100,000 Facebook Likes, but doesn’t know much about these fans. With a list of their names, Ark could bring back aggregate insights about their demographics, locations, interests, and more. Or if a big box retailer had a list of email addresses of their customers, Ark could help it match them to people’s online identities and social presences where they could target them with ads, follow them all on Pinterest, or whatever will help them. But first it needs more data, and it needs to prove its ability to accurately say that this Facebook profile, Twitter account, email address, and other profiles all belong to this John Smith, not one of the million others. That’s why Ark used its API to build a mobile email client and call Ark Mail. Below you can watch a video of Ark announcing its API and launching the Mail app on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. You sign up with your Gmail, AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company), or Yahoo, and Ark will pull in all your email into its app from then on. At first glance, it looks like Mailbox. It’s got slick design, batch actions, folder and label support, and handy gesture controls. Added bonuses include the ability to undo anything, including delivery of emails up to 10 seconds after you hit send. Ark can save you if your finger slips, you forgot that attachment, or you spelled your boss’ name wrong. And for privacy buffs and NSA-haters, Ark doesn’t store your emails on its servers. “In the post-Snowden world, we don’t want to do it in the cloud,” Riley tells me. “It’s scary to think of a third-party having a copy of all your emails.” But the real innovation in Ark Mail is that you can pull open a profile for anyone you’re emailing with and see links to all their social profiles so you can research them. You can preview their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other profiles right inside Ark. That could make your cold sales email more savvy, or your friendly message more personal. The apps are free and won’t show any ads. Instead, they’ll serve to improve Ark’s data by helping it better associate names and email addresses, and see which emails addresses are still active. It will also generate marketing intelligence sales leads for Ark. Riley explains that he hopes potential clients realize that “if we can make email better, we can make anything better.” Ark is still working out a few of the kinks in its entity consolidation system. It has a tough time distinguishing between Joe Plumber And Joe Plumber Jr. because they’ll have similar social graphs and might link to each other. It hopes the data it pulls in through the email client will help it get smarter. When asked whether Ark will ever be able to beat Google in finding information, Riley explains that the world’s top search engine is biased. When you punch in a flight number, it’s happy to give you useful information about whether your plane is on time, but if you search a name, it pimps its own social network even though you’re probably more interested in someone’s Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profile. “It doesn’t want to send a lot of traffic to other places,” Riley says. “It wants it for Google+.” So when creating Ark, he asked himself “What would Facebook and Google build if they weren’t at war with each other?” Ark email, along with the API and web-based people search engine its working on, are the answers. Riley concludes, “I think there’s a need for a search engine that’s looking at social data in a very neutral way. There’s still a case to be Switzerland.” |
null | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 9 | 12 | null |
The Government Wants To Define Who Qualifies As A Journalist | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | Journalists and netizens have mixed feelings about a long-sought federal media shield law that is headed to a vote in the Senate. would protect designated journalists from revealing their sources against a subpoena. are thrilled about the law, which was derailed in 2009 after WikiLeaks ignited a global debate about a new kind of journalism. But, after 3 years, no member of Congress seems willing to add in protections for leakers like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. “The world has changed. We’re very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn’t be protected, WikiLeaks and all those, and we’ve ensured that,” Schumer said. “But there are people who write and do real journalism, in different ways than we’re used to. They should not be excluded from this bill,” said author Senator Charles Schumer. Schumer, , fought California Senator Diane Feinstein to to include bloggers (thanks, Chuck!). Feinstein wanted to law restricted to “real reporters” who earn a salary. The current amended law [ ] would give protection to bloggers and whether any new form of writer qualifies for protection. Paul Boyle, Senior Vice President at the Newspaper Association of America, believes the law would have protected two AP journalists from federal investigators, who were going after them for exposing a thwarted terrorist plot. Still, there’s no love for Assange, Snowden, or any of the future data leakers that may contribute valuable information to our democracy. “Once we reach the point at which we even allow Congress to set parameters for who should, and who should not be considered a journalist, we’ve gone too far,” Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. “Because we know that setting that precedent will lead to further encroachments down the road. If congress defined the act of journalism, rather than the person, we wouldn’t have to worry about ad-hoc judicial determinations of who qualifies for First Amendment protection. But, that would require the government’s willingness to extend the First Amendment to WikiLeaks. They are evidently not prepared to do that. The bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by a vote of 13-5 and is on the way to a full vote in the Senate. |
Gillmor Gang Live 09.13.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | – Keith Teare, John Taschek, Dan Farber, Roberts Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. |
With Automatic Photo Import, Days Gets One Step Closer To Having Users Share Everything | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | with a very difficult mission: to change the way you think about photo-sharing. While some think that pictures of your feet or coffee are too mundane for photo-sharing to Instagram or Facebook, Days asked you to share as many photos as possible, mundane or otherwise. To help usher in this type of behavior, Days didn’t allow photo imports, as they wanted users to share pictures the same way they take them, which is a lot. Today, however, the app is updating with a new feature: photo imports. But it’s not like most other photo-sharing apps, where you simply choose the photos you want to upload from your camera roll. Instead, you turn on photo import once and Days automatically begins uploading every photo you take. Founder Jeremy Fisher believes that you should share almost everything, and delete the bits you don’t want. This goes against the grain of most of our behavior, which is to take far too many photos in the camera roll, and select only the choice bits to share. However, the alternative must be a deterrent to Days usage. I’ll explain. Days is an app that doesn’t aspire to real-time, selective photo-sharing. The idea, rather, is to share lots of photos in a collection, a Day. This day isn’t shared in real-time — users can choose to publish their day the day after. Fisher explains that it’s not about bits and pieces in real-time but about sharing a comprehensive story. Fisher also wanted the content to be real, even if we might think of it as boring. Because it’s being shared as a story of your day, context makes seemingly mundane or boring photos interesting all of the sudden. To accomplish this, Days originally didn’t allow photo import, to ensure that the content wasn’t edited or filtered. But to accomplish this feat, of having users share everything, Days asked users to take all of their photos in Days instead of the camera app. With swipe to camera from the lockscreen, as well as habit, this likely proved difficult. Thus, the strategy has changed to auto-import everything from the camera roll into a draft. Days still has a task on its hands considering that there is already a dominant photo-sharing tool on the market in Instagram and that it has taught users to share worthwhile photos of every little detail. Still, the new photo import feature should help quite a bit. To check out Days, head on over to the . |
Mailbox’s Gentry Underwood Would Rather Move Slow And Get It Right | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | In an interview backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, said that the company is actively working on an Android version of the app, and mentioned that ephemerality may be involved in forthcoming “whiz-bang” features down the line. doesn’t have the same “move fast” mentality as some other companies, most notably Facebook. The company was and only implemented Dropbox integration for attachments in July. Most recently, the company announced cloud search for Gmail which was surely one of the most clamored-for features since Mailbox’s launch in February of this year. Underwood explained in the interview that with cloud search, there are “a lot of edges to get right.” According to the founder, having one foot in the cloud and one on the phone can be very difficult and hard to get right. “Mailbox is always going to be biased towards building the right experience, no matter how long it takes. We think that’s a defensible position in the long run,” he said. As for a timeline for Android, Underwood didn’t mention it. However, he did say that there are a few Alpha versions going around internally and that the team is actively working on the application for Android. Though Underwood finds the idea of ephemeral messaging very interesting in terms of communication’s evolution as a whole, he has a lot of priorities in the pipeline before a “whiz-bang” feature like “exploding, private, or secured” email messages. However, down the road at some point, he said it could be a “possibility.” For now, Mailbox is focused on laying down the foundation, expanding beyond Gmail and iOS devices alone to reach everyone using Mailbox. And from what I gathered in the interview, that will eventually include desktop as well. |
Intel Has Acquired Natural Language Processing Startup Indisys, Price “North” Of $26M, To Build Its AI Muscle | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | has quietly made another international acquisition in its push into artificial intelligence technology: it has bought , a Spanish startup focused on natural language recognition. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is reportedly “north” of €20 million ($26 million). It comes just two months after news broke that , an Israeli maker of gesture-based interfaces, reportedly for about $40 million. Intel has given us direct confirmation of the deal and noted that the majority of employees joined the company. “Intel has acquired Indisys, a privately held company based in Seville, Spain. The majority of Indisys employees joined Intel. We signed the agreement to acquire the company on May 31 and the deal has been completed,” a spokesperson noted in an email to me. She also added that the financial terms of the agreement are confidential and it is not disclosing the price. “However, I can confirm that the value of the transaction is not material to Intel.” Among those who have now moved over to Intel, Pilar Manchon, CEO of Indisys, is now in Santa Clara working in Intel’s R&D department. No further details, either, on how the technology or existing products may get used. “Indisys has a deep background in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and machine learning. We are not disclosing any details about how Intel might use the Indisys technologies at this time,” the spokesperson said. (If you read further down I give some obvious areas where the tech may get used.) Prior to Intel’s statement to us, there were press reports (in Spanish, ) of a deal; from Inveready, one of the Indisys’ early investors, noted it was selling its stake to Intel. (Inveready, who declined to comment for this story, has a track record with Spanish startup exits: it was also a backer of PasswordBank, for $25 million.) Based in Seville, Indisys’ dialogue-based systems have been used by Spanish companies like the retailing giant El Corte Ingles, insurance group Mapfre and the banking giant BBVA, across multiple platforms like web and mobile. Indisys is a developer of natural language recognition technology, but also Siri-like intelligent assistant (IA) interfaces so that people can interact with it. Pictured here is “Maya,” one of its creations. Other clients like Boeing have been using Indisys’ technology for a project called Atlantis, to create interfaces to control unmanned vehicles. While many of its reference customers are Spanish, the company says has developed multilingual technology. Indisys writes that its IA “is a human image, which converses fluently and with common sense in multiple languages and also works in different platforms.” As with Intel’s Omek acquisition, there are likely a couple of reasons behind the purchase of Indisys. The first is that it is part of Intel larger moves into and “perceptual computing”, Intel’s term for gesture, touch, voice, and other artificial intelligence-style sensory technologies. This is also the focus of a Intel launched in April 2013. The second is that voice recognition technology is being worked directly into Intel’s processor business. Indeed, just earlier this week, that showed off the company’s advances in gesture and natural language recognition business. While there has been speculation that Intel would license technology from companies like Nuance to build it into its own systems, the Indisys deal is an indication that Intel is getting more serious and wants to build and ultimately control this technology itself instead. Intel was not a stranger to Indisys: its venture arm, Intel Capital, led a investment into the company in November 2012, raising just over $6 million in total. Indisys has been in operation since 2003, and that last funding injection was specifically to help build out its business into international markets. Given that Omek was also a portfolio company, it’s another sign of the tight integration between what Intel is doing on a strategic level as a business, and what it does on a VC level, something you can’t say for all corporate VC arms. |
Seenth.is App Helps Music Fans Wrangle Their Favorite Artists’ Multiple Social Media Feeds | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | lets music fans hone their obsession by making it easy for them to track the most interesting social media updates from their favorite performers. The (an Android version will be released later this year) aggregates and filters content from sources including , , and accounts of musicians and fans and presents items based on relevancy rather than chronological order, so you can see which items are likely to go viral before they do. The Stockholm-based co-founders of Seenth.is (pronounced “seen this”) designed its algorithm to “solve the social media information overload that’s plaguing all of us,” said CMO Robert Furelid. The app soft-launched with 200 artists at the beginning of July and has grown quickly since then, with 400 additional performers added so far based on trending searches.
Seenth.is is based on tech co-founders Jesper Benon and CEO Marcus Myrberg developed for a company that provides social media monitoring services for public relation firms and other clients. The idea behind the app was hatched when head of business development Benon wanted to find concert reviews for electronic dance music trio Swedish House Mafia. While scrolling through comments left by thousands of fans on various sites, Benon began conceptualizing an app that would aggregate and sort through similar information for different artists. Seenth.ith’s creators intend for it to serve as a “second screen” experience to concerts or streaming music players like or . By helping its users sort through a mass of tweets, videos, photos, news articles and blog posts to find the most topical content about their favorite acts, Seenth.is hopes to stand out from other music discovery services including app , location-based concert app or musician profile Web site .
Seenth.is currently has three main features. The Artist Feed gathers together all the different social media channels used by one performer or group, while the Fan Feed aggregates and filters online chatter from their listeners. Real-time updates from concerts appear in the Live Feed. The Explore window adds a discovery element by recommending new acts based on the genres and artists you have followed. You can save items from different feeds by starring it. Seenth.is’ next update will include a new feed that collects all your starred content in one feed and a more intuitive Explore window. Furelid says the Seenth.is team is currently focusing on expanding the app’s roster of artists and cementing collaborations with musicians and DJs (he can’t disclose partners yet, but says fans can probably guess by following the app’s and feeds). Seenth.is is currently bootstrapped and has already launched its monetization model, which inserts ads into feeds and allows artists to participate in a revenue-sharing model. |
CrunchWeek: The New iPhones, Twitter Preps For An IPO, And Tech Execs Talk NSA | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | This time, I was joined by and TechCrunch’s Europe-based Editor At Large to discuss the and the debuted by Apple, Twitter making its first concrete step toward an initial public offering by , and all that at the Disrupt conference. |
Silicon Valley Luminaries Got Grilled On The NSA At Disrupt, Here’s How They Responded | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | On Monday, TechCrunch founder the CEOs, VCs, and other Silicon Valley leaders who he was interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt about the NSA scandal. “I’m scared of our government and I’m disgusted by what little Silicon Valley has done to fight it,” Arrington wrote. He continued: “I’ve brought this up in every one of my preparation meetings with the people I’ll be interviewing. There has been some pushback. Some people don’t want to talk because lawyers. Others say this isn’t their fight and they can’t effectively lead their organizations from behind bars. Others say they are willing to speak their mind.” Over the course of the three day conference, Arrington interviewed 13 of the most influential people in the tech industry on stage, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Dropbox founder Drew Houston and Paypal co-founder Max Levchin also discussed the NSA with other TechCrunch writers. Let’s take a look at the highlights from their talks. Full videos of each speaker’s comments regarding the NSA, and some analysis, are below. Arrington called out in his original post, saying, “I am going to ask Ron Conway, who has pushed for gun control via his Sandy Hook Promise for nearly a year now, hasn’t said a word about Silicon Valley’s role in the wholesale destruction of our human rights by the United States government. He could do so much by leading an effort at real transparency, and a real pushback against the government. But he hasn’t lifted a finger. I want to know why.” Conway argued for a balance between national security and personal freedoms, and claimed he’s too busy advocating for gun control and immigration reform to devote time to the NSA issue. Arrington pressed Conway the hardest, repeatedly questioning why Conway hadn’t taken action on the NSA issue. Conway was candid, noting that immigration reform is a bigger issue for him personally, but didn’t delve into a ton of detail on his personal beliefs about the NSA and the right balance he would like to see. and , who are with Conway, mostly stayed out of the NSA discussion while Arrington and Conway locked horns. Zuckerberg and Mayer hold the most interesting positions for this debate, as both Yahoo and Facebook were implicated as participants in the PRISM program. Both companies have strongly denied involvement with the NSA and have pressed the government to allow them to reveal more information about the requests the NSA makes for information and how they handle them. Zuckerberg was surprisingly candid on the topic, saying, ““I think the government blew it.” It would have been nice to hear more from him about Facebook’s involvement in the PRISM program. Zuckerberg was happy to slam the government on its handling of the scandal, but didn’t talk in much detail about Facebook and how it interacts with the NSA and what steps he is taking regarding the PRISM program. “With the appropriate safeguards, I’m comfortable with people knowing the two and from of my phone calls,” , a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said. Doerr advocated for “independent and rigorous judicial oversight” of the programs, and he and Arrington seemed to just agree to disagree on the NSA. TechCrunch writer asked Houston how the NSA leaks have affected Dropbox’s business. Houston said that “day to day, it doesn’t have much of an effect” on Dropbox’s operations, and added that he’s frustrated as a citizen by the government’s lack of transparency. In the conference’s opening interview, Arrington asked what Lee was doing to protect himself and the city from NSA snooping. Lee offered an interesting split between his thoughts as an individual and his role as Mayor, citing his experience in installing cameras around San Francisco to prevent crime and catch criminals while preserving some level of privacy. , a partner at Sequoia Capital, told Arrington, “I’m not as far left as you but I’m not far right.” He added that he is concerned that, “the delicate balance between freedom and safety has been lost. It’s upon guys like us that we make sure the issue stays in the limelight.” , the co-founder of Meraki, said that as far as he knew, the NSA’s intelligence-gathering programs had nothing to do with products Meraki made. He didn’t comment on the larger implications of the NSA scandal. Neither one seemed particularly riled up by the issue. Levchin talked to TechCrunch co-editor Alexa Tsotsis, and was the strongest supporter of the NSA. He discussed applying to work at the NSA while in college, and seemed to have a high personal respect for NSA employees. While Levchin had an interesting perspective, I think he overlooked some of the negative behavior of the employees, like , and failed to address the issue at its highest level. Just because Levchin respects the employees who are working to defend the United States doesn’t mean that the program and agency at a high level don’t need serious scrutiny and changes. His comments drew the ire of Arrington: THIS attitude is why we’re in a world where Silicon Valley is tyranny’s enabler shameful — Michael Arrington (@arrington) Arrington seemed to be joking a bit, but also expressed some frustration, noting, “I’m not getting anyone to care so far on stage,” as he spoke with the two Greylock partners. Hoffman said LinkedIn, at which he is Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, has no direct server access for the NSA. Salesforce.com CEO was the only interviewee who Arrington didn’t grill on the NSA. Early in their interview, Arrington remarked, “And we’re gonna get to the NSA stuff later,” before launching into a question about Apple. That question led Benioff to share some amazing stories about Steve Jobs, and the two got so caught up discussing Jobs that they ran over time and skipped the NSA topic. Mayer repeatedly spoke about treason, and said she and Yahoo have no choice but to comply with the NSA. When pressed, she noted that treason usually results in jail time, although many bloggers and pundits openly question whether the government would prosecute and incarcerate CEOs like Mayer and Zuckerberg for speaking out about the NSA program. A number of outlets have pointed out that Mayer’s comments the , and a that Mayer’s comments about treason weren’t “purely academic.” Her comments drew some criticism from legendary blogger : I agree with Max Levchin – says on NSA, surveillance etc. Not sure I (& ) agree with at all. — Om Malik (@om) noted that he agreed with what Doerr and Levchin had said before him, noting he wants to “avoid another terrorist attack.” “I would bet we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars because of 9/11…I think it was a big lesson for us,” he said. “We need to be secure, and that means giving up some privacy.” He made interesting points about different kinds of freedom, and how Americans giving up online privacy may be allowing us to avoid things like frequent security checkpoints in the real world. |
Expedia And Zillow Founder Rich Barton Wants To Fund ‘Power To The People’ Startups | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | So when we ran into Barton backstage at this week’s Disrupt conference (where he was judging the startup Battlefield), we asked him to stop by the TechCrunch TV setup and talk about his investment strategies and what kinds of founders and startups are catching his eye. Barton says that the common thread in his investments is the idea of bringing “power to the people” by making certain kinds of key information accessible in new ways. Hear more about that in the video embedded above. |
Naval Ravikant On How AngelList Syndicates Can Shake Up The World Of Venture Capital ‘Scouts’ | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | So when AngelList co-founder and CEO came offstage from his this week, I asked him to talk a bit more about the latest developments at AngelList and how the Syndicate feature is coming along now that it’s funded . You can check out the whole chat in the video embedded above. One interesting point he made is that while AngelList Syndicates make it possible for an individual angel investor to operate like a “mini VC” firm, he still thinks that traditionally structured venture capital entities serve an important purpose. Starting at around 3:27 in the video above, he said:
“Traditional venture is for professionals. People who are in there all the time, they have their management fees because they also need to eat, and they’ve got to make a living. They’re making investments on a regular basis, and investors count on them to invest large amounts of money.” The impact of Syndicates may be felt most profoundly at the seed level — and make it so that standalone angel investors may not find the need to make the kind of leap into traditional VC funds through and the like. As Ravikant discussed at around 4:50 in the video, it will be very interesting to see if “super high-value angel” investors like continue to now that AngelList Syndicates are an option. |
Gillmor Gang: Inch by Inch | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — added up the Apple announcements, the Twitter IPO, and why Chromecast’s Cloud-to-Device model will stick. No consensus on this last point, but since AirPlay does a little of both strategies, we’ll know soon enough. The biometric capabilities and low-power bluetooth chip of the new iPhones may not seem a breakthrough, based as the tech is on well-trod ground. But mobile is about the signature of its omnipresence, and the thumbprint will save bucketloads of time that will endow the new habits with strategic signatures and business models they suggest. Meanwhile, I’m off to AutoRip me a new one. @stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
First-Time Chilean Entrepreneur Raises $16M To Disrupt Latin America’s Insurance Market | Contributor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Sebastian Valin, founder and CEO of ComparaOnline Think about that pure, unbridled feeling when you knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur. Now think about the most unsexy business you could possibly start. Did you think of an insurance product and financial services aggregator? Did that get you excited? It got one 29-year-old Chilean civil engineer excited enough to start Latin America’s first insurance product comparison site, . It got seven of his family members and friends excited enough to invest $800K in an idea only the Geico gecko could love. And it got venture capitalists in two hemispheres excited enough to invest $16 million to date in a first-time entrepreneur with no track record or domain expertise. is living out the kind of quintessential entrepreneur’s path that should make Silicon Valley veterans wax nostalgic for the days when it was all nerds in hoodies, alone in a garage in the suburbs somewhere, living off a can of beans and a burning idea to build the next Friendster. Our hero’s journey starts in 2008, when Valin graduated with a civil engineering degree and plans to build big things. Then he got introspective, and decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur instead. “In Chile in those days none of my friends were entrepreneurs, so it was a very strange thing for me to do, but that’s what I really wanted to do,” says Valin. “So I rented an office from my uncle, dressed like I was going to work, made a schedule, didn’t take any vacations — just to be self-assured that I was not going to be a failure.” After a couple of months of working as an entrepreneur with nothing to do, Valin offered to help his little brother find car insurance for a Toyota Yaris he’d just purchased. He spent a week navigating what he describes as an excruciating and entirely offline process of calling an auto insurance broker, reading them his brother’s information, waiting for an email with a quote, and repeating the process with the next broker. “And at the end of the week, I understood that it’s impossible to be smart about how you buy insurance.” Sebastian Valin’s brother hugging his new Toyota Yaris Valin imagined a website that would let you put your data in once, get all the quotes you need, and purchase a plan online. “For about a day I thought I had come up with a new idea, but I was happy to find the idea was not mine.” Valin started researching insurance and financial services comparison websites in Europe, like the UK’s . He sent a few emails, got a few responses, and spent the last of his savings on a ticket to Europe to meet with a few of the companies and learn how the business worked. None of the ones he met with had immediate plans to move into the Latin American market. Valin returned from the tour flush with plans to start ComparaOnline, an auto insurance price-comparison site that would service the Chilean market. He flew through D.C. on his return trip to catch up with a friend at Wharton, who advised him to buy a book called , by Rhonda Abrams. The Wharton friend later became his first angel investor. Armed with a business plan that projected break-even by month 24, Valin raised a total of $800K from family members and friends with no expertise in technology or entrepreneurship, hired a team of 15, made deals with half of the car insurance companies in Chile, and launched what Valin says is Latin America’s first auto insurance price comparison website. “But the business model I saw in the UK was a mess in Chile,” Valin says. “I started a copycat, but six months later, I realized it was a crappy business and we were headed for failure.” So he pivoted. The auto insurance comparison sites in the UK, Valin explains, operate as a lead generation business, paying upwards of $20-$30 per qualified click from search leads, selling them to the insurance carriers, and taking a cut when the carriers convert the lead. “But when people here in Chile are buying insurance, they absolutely want to talk to someone who can explain the product,” Valin says. “They want to have confidence they’re talking to a person they can trust. That’s a very Latin American cultural thing, I think.” So he convinced his partners to let ComparaOnline do the work of the sales process, built a call center, and started operating as a digital broker. By 2011, ComparaOnline was the top online insurance brokerage in Chile. And at month 24, the site broke even, just like the original business plan had called for. Valin decided to raise capital to expand into other Latin American markets with the core product offering. “The products are very tailor-made, and there’s lots of knowledge required. So we decided to replicate the auto insurance business model abroad, versus expanding into additional markets in Chile.” Valin closed a Series A with in Buenos Aires, which had brought the startup’s funding to $5 million. Kaszek Ventures is run by veterans and . is one of the blazing success stories of the Latin American startup industry after going public in 2007. ComparaOnline is their first investment in a Chilean startup, and Szekasy sits on the board. But Valin needed more money than he’d anticipated for the international expansion, so he announced an $11 million Series B on September 4. This time , a venture fund in Palo Alto dedicated exclusively to financial businesses, led the round, with founder joining the board. Kaszek Ventures re-upped for the Series B, and Rise Capital, an emerging market fund led by Tiger Capital veteran , joined late in the negotiations to finish out the round. ComparaOnline headquarters in Santiago Valin also carved some room out for , a passive co-investment arm of . “I’m , and giving them a little ticket in this round is kind of a way to give them thanks for all they’ve done for us, because they’re always helping us without taking anything back.” Valin has now set his sights on expanding into the Brazilian and Colombian markets. In Brazil, he faces a self-described nightmare. “When Groupon started in Latin America, everyone was building a Groupon in Brazil, and I think the situation in Brazil is similar for financial services,” Valin explains. The competition includes comparison websites , , , — startup Monashees Capital — and newcomer . “But we knew that before we entered the market and decided to go with it, because we believe there are some things about ComparaOnline that will make us lead.” In addition to ComparaOnline’s agnosticism — they don’t favor any carrier or plan over another, and are quite clear about that in the site’s messaging — Valin points to ComparaOnline’s customer experience and operations processes. “If you submit a quote to our sit and, for example, Minuto Seguros, you’ll get a sales call from either company, but ours is instant. Another difference is the product our sales rep is using on their computer. Our CRM is proprietary; we’ve been building it for four years, and I think it’s our Coca-Cola secret. And it shows in the conversion rates.” ComparaOnline also , a credit and insurance comparison lead generation site, from Latin American product comparison pioneer . CortaContas, Valin reasoned, would give him local market knowledge in Brazil and a head start on striking partnership deals. He’ll need it to catch up with Segurar.com, which offers more products than any of the competition in Brazil. They sell auto insurance, travel insurance, life, accidental death, homeowner’s, pet insurance and a dozen other products, with plans to bring another half-dozen products online in 2013, and they’ve done it with just over $3 million in investment capital. Segurar.com, a startup with and a deep bench of advisers and founders (including Tommy Mottola!) also wins the award for the — a at will impel you to agree — and they’ve invested the lion’s share of their spent capital to develop it. Segurar and ComparaOnline are both going after a ballooning demographic of young Brazilians who have money to spend and want to spend it online. Fifty million people moved from Brazil’s lowest “D” and “E” classes to the “C” middle class in the last decade. More than half of Brazil’s population is now considered middle class. And with online, about half the population, Brazil represents the seventh largest Internet market in the world. (Brazilians also the most online friends [481] than anywhere in the world.) Brazilians use the Internet more than TV, print, or any other medium, and Internet users spend about 46 hours a month online, almost double the global average. About a third of Brazil’s wired population has made a purchase online, contributing to almost $19 billion in online sales in 2012, with estimates that number will almost double by 2015. And a 2011 survey by eCMetrics that almost all of them (81 percent) use the Internet for price-comparison research. Cross those stats with some information about the insurance market. Most Brazilians don’t have any kind of insurance, but the market is expected to double in size by 2020. Auto is the biggest category of insurance sold in Brazil, but only one in four cars has an auto insurance policy. Travel insurance is the second biggest category. (Health insurance is an entirely separate issue – very complicated, highly regulated, and overseen by a different agency in Brazil). In Brazil, insurance carriers cannot sell directly to the consumer. They require a broker to sit between the insurance carrier and the consumer. So in the case of auto insurance, for example, you have an army of individual brokers, operating on a largely local basis (think State Farm agents), and charging a cozy average of 23 percent commission. Segurar.com, by contrast, charges 10-12 percent commission. Valin would not reveal ComparaOnline’s take but said that it varies per product, and is always cheaper than traditional brokers. A note on the upsell. Individual auto insurance brokers are not particularly interested in selling other insurance products — who would bother with a $10 commission on pet insurance — leaving a whole lot of products on the table that comparison sites can bring to the market with the wonderful efficiencies of the Internet. Which means that if you’re living in a peripheral area of Brazil, or want to buy something other than auto insurance, or want to buy insurance outside of normal business hours, or just want to see who’s selling the cheapest plan, you make up an unattended segment of the consumer population. And that is what I would call a sexy market opportunity. Bring on the competition. The ComparaOnline team in Santiago, Chile |
Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams Lays Out His Plan For The Future Of Media | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams has an ambitious new plan: to shift our daily reading habits away from consuming incremental news bites and towards engaging with enlightened ideas curated by an intelligent algorithm. Ordinarily, such a goal would seem utopian, were it not for the fact that Williams is among a handful of Internet pioneers who have disrupted the media industry multiple times. Before Twitter terraformed the landscape of news distribution, Williams’s first smash hit, Blogger, became the branded namesake for an upstart generation of amateur writers to challenge the established players Most importantly, Medium, his new platform for publishing mostly long-form content, has quickly garnered popularity — and infamy. In only a few months, its most popular contributions are making front-page headlines and snagging millions of views. In our Silicon Valley bubble, its contributors semi-regularly spark industry wide-conversations among the Internet elite. “The site from Twitter’s co-founders is one year old, and still mysterious,” ‘s Alexis Madrigal recently, in one of many stories attempting to understand the Internet multi-millionaire’s enigmatic new project. Now, for the first time since Williams launched the beta of Medium last year at our own TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Williams is ready to talk. Williams is taking aim squarely at the news industry’s most embarrassing vulnerability: the incessant need to trump up mundane happenings in order to habituate readers into needing news like a daily drug fix. “News in general doesn’t matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import,” he tells me during our interview inside a temporary Market Street office space that’s housing Medium, until the top two floors are ready for his growing team. “Even if it’s fiction, it’s probably better most of the time.” It’s true. The daily news cycle doesn’t always do its job at enlightening American democracy. In the aptly titled research paper, “Does the Media Matter”, a team of economists that getting a randomized group of citizens to read the did nothing for “political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data.” News, alone, is evidently insufficient to make us a more informed society. Instead, Williams argues, citizens should re-calibrate their ravenous appetite for information towards more awe-inspiring content. “Published written ideas and stories are life-changing,” he gushes, recalling his early childhood fascination with books as the motivation to take on the media establishment. The Internet “was freeing that up, that excitement about knowledge that’s inside of books–multiplied and freed and unlocked for the world; and, the world would be better in every way.” In Williams’s grand vision, the public reads for enlightenment; news takes a backseat directly in proportion to how often it leaves us more informed and inspired. In addition to better content, the news itself might be better written by industry professionals. Climate deniers from conservative outlets, he argues, are a prime example of how the media has failed in its obligation to inform the public. During an extended rant on global warming during our conversation, he didn’t complete the explanation on why industry-professionals-as-writers would solve the problem. But, it’s easy to imagine that if believe in man-made global warming, it would be difficult for media outlets to find a credible writer to claim otherwise. The elephant in the room was that Williams was not-so-subtly attacking me and my colleagues, especially considering he had that “the state of tech blogs is atrocious — its utter crap.” I asked him to explain what he meant, trying not to sound offended. Diplomatically clarifying his words, he responded: “Part of the reason a lot of tech blogs are bad is the people writing them don’t really understand what they’re writing about. And so I want to change our definition of professional writing. At least expand it.” Clearly taking a position on the long-standing debate between journalists and industry insiders, Williams says that the kinds of weekend columns TechCrunch runs from noted businesspeople “are absolutely more valuable” than some of the daily news written by reporters with little business experience. However, Williams was clear: “please don’t set this up as Evan thinks tech blogs are crap and therefore is fixing them with Medium. People are going to publish crap on Medium.” Williams was referring to a number of infamous Medium posts that were brazenly elitist and spread misinformation. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Shih’s “10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition,” was widely criticized for, among other things, perpetuating Silicon Valley’s abject misogyny and callousness toward the homeless. In another embarrasing moment, Medium contributor Michele Catalano that nefarious government spies seized her computer after she searched Google for “backpacks” and “pressure cookers” . Both posts were later modified or taken down. Though the missteps of thoughtful counter-posts on Medium and a handful of media outlets, Williams didn’t try to spin the reactions a win. “People are going to publish crap on Medium…. And guess what? There’s crap on Twitter. There’s crap on blogs. There’s crap on the Internet. And if we try to keep crap off the Internet, the Internet wouldn’t be important,” he argues, with a noticeable defensiveness in his voice that belies his leaned-back posture. “The system’s working if there’s great stuff that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day and/or gets more attention than it would otherwise.” Okay then, so what’s Williams’s solution for putting a spotlight on the good stuff? “Everyone has a story or insight that is worth repeating and they just don’t have the venue to get it heard,” adds former Wired.com Editor Evan Hansen, a senior editor at Medium, charged with building out its tech, science, and business coverage. Medium sees itself as a hybrid between professional outlets like and the unwashed blogger free-for-all of (which is owned by TechCrunch parent company, Aol). Instead, Medium wants to be the platform for everyone’s one truly viral idea. Health startup entrepreneur Nick Crocker probably never thought his about a walk through the junk food aisles at his local grocery store would snag over 1 million(!) views. Crocker’s rather elegantly crafted “The World Is Fucking Insane” is a photo-heavy, first-person journey though grocery aisles lined with monster stacks of chemically altered sugary foods on his way to pick up some milk. Its visual simplicity evidently expressed the public’s latent frustration for America’s health crisis in a way that other statistics-packed medical news did not. In another example, Aron Solomon on smartphone taxi app, Uber, after it unintentionally instituted surge pricing during Toronto’s massive summer storm. A few news outlets covered the embarrassing incident, but nothing else went viral like the voice of an innocent bystander outraged at the negligent price gouging in his hair-raising post, “The Don’t Be An Asshole Rule.” Most importantly, both of these posts were composed in the heat of the moment. At Medium, there’s no need to register a website, sift through a mountain of design options, and re-organize your schedule for the habit of blogging. You just write. “If it’s on a whim, that whim is killed the moment you’re forced to find a unique sub domain and find a template,” explains Williams. The sheer simplicity of Medium’s writing platform is garnering accolades from respected writers and designers. Medium is “the best composition experience on the web, hands-down” early Facebook designer Julie Zhuo, in a Medium post about Medium (so meta). “You see exactly what your post is going to look like. There is no translation, no guess-work, no typey-typey into some fat text area and wondering whether it’ll do ‘s and :)’s correctly.” tech columnist Nick Bilton also gives Medium a thumps up. “I really like Medium — it’s one of the rare instances where the technology is truly in the background,” he writes to me in an email. “I’d love to be able to replace WordPress with Medium on my personal site.” Fortunately for WordPress, Medium has no plans to become a separate blogging platform — but, it might become home to the occasional industry muse who doesn’t want to hassle with setting up a blog. Still, Medium isn’t betting that viral posts from one-hit wonders are a sustainable foundation. It has allocated a sizable budget to pay for professional magazine-style exposes. Most recently, it bankrolled a massive 10,000 word, movie-worthy script about a 62-year-old commando whose tantalizing life has included a mission to recover $3 million in gold bullion in the Peruvian mines. “ ” was edited by the same acclaimed author whose 2007 piece about freeing Iranian hostages eventually became the Academy Award-winning fictionalized re-enactment, . Over the next 18 months, the partnering studio, Epic, promises five more . War correspondent, David Axe, is also bringing some heavy long-form explainers a . Despite Medium’s implied reluctance against professional writers, it’s clearly willing to invest in public Internet journalism. “I always felt you couldn’t live without the big expensive scoops as a serious brand in media,” explains Hansen. “If you pursue the low end all the time then the advertisers want nothing to do with you. People with money and affluent readers and people with positions in the areas that you cover of authority and influence don’t read you. You become kind of like, you’re nothing.” Hansen maintains that Medium is still experimenting. Wherever its ends up, Medium evidently wants to be the home of any bold, viral idea — and it’s willing to run a financial and engineering bulldozer over any barrier to writing. Yet, even if writers are willing to come to Medium , how will readers find them at a still-obscure publisher? Traditional news editors stake their reputations on having an intuition for what drives eyeballs to their sites. Editors don’t, however, know whether readers leave more informed. Williams thinks Medium has an answer: an intelligent algorithm that suggests stories, primarily based on how long users spend reading certain articles (which he’s discussing publicly for the first time). Like Pandora did for music discovery, Medium’s new intelligent curator aims to improve the ol’ human-powered system of manually scrolling through the Internet and asking others what to read. In the algorithm itself, Medium prioritizes time spent on an article, rather than simple page views. “Time spent is not actually a value in itself, but in a world where people have infinite choices, it’s a pretty good measure if people are getting value,” explains Williams. In fairness to news editors, we do know how much time readers spend on an article: We know that less than 60 percent will read more than half of an article, and a significant slice won’t read anything at all. “I’m going to keep this brief, because you’re not going to stick around for long. I’ve already lost a bunch of you,” tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, in a cathartic post for Slate that was aptly titled “You Won’t Finish This Article: Why People Online Don’t Read To The End.” But, because advertisers pay for page views, the incentive is to fish for clicks, no matter how much we try to feature other kinds of higher-quality content. For example, after Miley Cyrus’ infamous burlesque dance in front of the MTV’s Video Music Awards’ impressionable tween audience, brilliantly lambasted CNN’s decision to make a burlesque show front-page news. “So, you may ask, why was this morning’s top story, a spot usually given to the most important foreign or domestic news of the day, headlined “Miley Cyrus Did What???” and accompanied by the subhead “Twerks, stuns at VMAs”?,” wrote The Onion, in a parody OpEd by CNN’s managing editor. “The answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world.” (Another gem of an Internet response was a Tumblr of .)
I think most of us in the news industry would love if our audience only cared about deeply substantive stories, but . So, what’s Medium’s plan to make money without advertising? The short answer is that no one really knows. “Well, it’s got to be sustainable at some level. So I think revenue is in the model,” says Hansen, with a casual attitude that indicates just how little focus Medium is currently devoting to the issue of monetization. One option is selling eBooks off of its cinematic scripts. A portion of the readers may be willing to pay for the convenience of a Kindle version of “Mercenary,” for instance. But, traffic has to be outstanding for that kind of venture to make money. Pageviews to Mercenary have been okay. “It hasn’t blown the lid off,” admits Hansen, in reference to other Medium pieces that snagged a few million pageviews. Other monetization options include licensing its technology, and revenue sharing with established media brands that want to post stories on and from Medium (Mother Jones has placed some stories on Medium, while Gawker has wholesale reblogged popular Medium posts on their own site). Though Medium doesn’t have a solid business plan yet, there is a method to the madness of thinking about product first and money second (or third). Williams has a fascinating way of grouping business types in Silicon Valley between those who successfully managed companies through the dot-com bust (“Web People”) and those who packed up their empty bags and left (“Dot-com People”). He explains that Web People “loved the web. We loved what was possible and we loved the creativity and we were in it to create; we weren’t in it to make money.” So, when the bubble burst, Web People stayed — some ultimately making the (very) profitable products we all use today. “The Web People are more sustainable because they kept going. Because they’re driven to create, they’re attracted to the web because of its creative potential. They weren’t scared away when it seemed like it wasn’t an instant path to riches.” he explains, “They were persistent.” “I think more people would be in a better place if more people shared their ideas,” says Williams. Seen this way, Medium is just the next logical step in Williams’ three-product cycle to inject better ideas into the world. Blogger helped open the doors for pajama bloggers to compete with the media moguls. A few years later, Twitter gave the power of broadcast distribution to everyone who had 140 characters to share. Now, to complete the circuit, Medium wants to make viral information more substantive — the hope in the Pandora’s box of communication. “It’s also an optimistic stance to say that we can build a system where good things can shine and get attention. And there’s an audience for ideas and stories that appeal to more than just the most base desires of human beings.” Or, in essence, Medium’s biggest bet is, “people will read long things — they’ll read a lot.” And that there’s a business in this. |
He’s Electric — Will A Revolutionary Black Box Turn Dale Vince Into Europe’s Elon Musk? | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Dale Vince sits in a spartan office in the corner of , one of the UK’s few green energy electricity networks, and taps away on an Apple Mac at his standing desk. The office is bare, other than a normal desk, a couple of chairs and a Union Jack flag hung on the wall. But the Union Jack is not sporting its normal Red White and Blue. This is a Union Jack fashioned in various shades of green. For Vince is a died-in-the-wool ecologist. While running his company, he blogs from a site called “ ” which has an image of him looking like Che Guevara. He considers the drive towards an electric future as important as Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla electric car company. Vince is deadly serious about being “green” and now his plans extend beyond wind turbines into a radical new technology he hopes to roll out across the UK and which he is only now talking about for the first time. With his gleaming white teeth and tanned appearance Vince looks more like a well-preserved rock star. In fact he remains the sole shareholder in Ecotricity, Britain’s largest green energy company. He is regularly listed as one of the richest people in Britain. But the mainstream energy industry considers him a an upstart. He’s unrepentant about his public image as a rebel. As he proudly says on his blog, “I’m a hippie, I run a business .. to bring change to the world. My interest is the next Industrial Revolution… how to live without burning up the planet.” Born in 1961, Vince was the son of a haulage contractor, an experience which, perhaps, gave him a restlessness for the road. He “dropped out” at 15 and spent a decade as a new age traveller, eventually beginning a love affair with wind power after living on a hill, in an ex military vehicle, using a small wind turbine for power. His alternative lifestyle led him to be of those to occupy RAF Molesworth to protest against the basing of US cruise missiles there and he was among the those at the so-called Battle of the Beanfield, near Stonehenge, in the mid-1980s. But it was his business building wind turbines to take to festivals such as Glastonbury so that people could power sound systems that led him to found Ecotricity. Indeed, his passion for wind power generation eventually led him to attend the Kyoto conference in 1997, which produced to Kyoto Protocol recognizing global warming. Today, he is best known in the UK for being an unrepentant champion of wind power against the countryside lobby who see wind turbines as despoiling the rolling hills of the English landscape. But in those wind turbines lies a significant – and unusual – business. Ecotricity operates a not-for-dividend model – reinvesting income from customers’ bills directly into new sources of renewable energy. It claims to have invested almost £400 per customer per year for the past few years in building new sources of sustainable energy. This has been estimated to be as much as 10 times more that more than any other British energy company. Vince’s first turbine went up in Stroud in 1996. Today, Ecotricity has over 70,000 customers and 55 turbines. It has led Vince down some unusual paths. He backed the development of the to smash the land speed record for a wind powered vehicle. And he came to the rescue of his local semi-professional football club Forest Green Rovers when it hit financial difficulties. Today, he has re-made FGR FC as the UK’s “greenest football club” with ultra-low energy LED floodlights, an electric bus for away matches, electric cars for players and a pitch made of organic grass. But Vince’s parallels with Elon Musk perhaps became clearer when in 2010 he developed an electric sports car, the . On first encountering Vince, you’d perhaps laugh at the Musk comparison. Unlike the latter’s clean shaven and designer-suited appearance, Vince dresses in jeans and a T-shirt, and occupies a paired-down, almost basic, office in Stroud, deep in the English countryside. Not for him a grandiose HQ, but a corner of the building staffed, mostly, by Ecotricity’s call centre operators. But like Musk, Vince’s electric car project started with big ambitions. It cost £750,000 to develop, and had a top speed of 135 miles per hour. But what Vince quickly realized – as Elon Musk did – was that he would have to put in millions to even get close to selling electric cars. Instead, he turned his attention back to creating a revolution in home power generation, home electricity storage, a new “green” mobile phone network and a radical way to generate electricity from the sea. Today, despite his unassuming appearance, Vince speaks quietly, though confidently, about how he plans to introduce new technologies into the UK’s homes and how – if they take off – he may be able to enter new global markets with his radical approach, generated from a part of his company called EcoLabs. Harnessing the power of the world’s wind is, in part, how he hopes do it. First, he plans to start with generating more wind power from urban homes. Urban wind power has famously failed to make much of a mark on electricity generation. A fad for small, chimney-mounted turbines failed to take off when they were found to be almost useless in the mostly windless urban environments. But Vince says the technology was “dismissed too soon” and approached in entirely the wrong way. “The big wind turbines are pretty efficient now. But for small scale wind power there are not many solutions,” he says. To address the problem, he has come up with a radical new approach: a small, vertical access, wind turbine he’s dubbed the – a name which came to Vince after a simple spelling mistake in an email. “We decided to do it as there was a hardware gap. The small home turbines were not working. WindSave [an early UK urban turbine project which failed] was supposed to be good but it was a disaster, bad for the Wind industry and bad for anyone that bought one.” Vince thinks that these small turbines could generate 6KWs of power from their positions on the tops of houses and be up to 40% more efficient than similar sized windmills on the market. To achieve his aim, 12 months ago he recruited engineers to start producing an Ecotricity-branded, vertical axis urban turbine. Vince says wind power experts tend to regard vertical axis turbines as being less efficient than a traditional horizontal one. “There is a huge advantage in producing a turbine with a vertical axis” he says. “The mistake was in scaling down big turbines. A horizontal axis machine has to face the wind, but they tend to be in built up areas where wind behaves far more differently than on wind farm sites.” In other words, a vertical turbine literally “doesn’t care” which direction the wind is coming from. Because of this, it doesn’t waste time having to turn to face in the right direction of the wind. It can turn more or less constantly, so long as there is wind. The first prototypes are going through testing and accreditation and could be sold as early as next year direct to consumers or as part of an Ecotricity account – though that remains undecided. Certainly they could also be ideal for small businesses. Indeed, Ecotricity has a 15KW version on the drawing board. According to Vince, this larger version could have an application in the offshore world, which could lead, he says, to a “huge reduction” in the size of the generator. And, he says, “if you can shrink the generator you can make a bigger, more efficient machine.” As well as aiming to revolutionize both urban and big-scale on-shore wind power with his super-efficient vertical axis turbines, Vince plans to take on the challenge of wave power. Historically, generating electricity from Wave power has been harder and less efficient than many predicted when the idea was first floated. However, Vince and his team have some up with a radically simple approach, which could revolutionize the sector. It’s called the C-Razor. This is a wave energy device Ecotricity plans to test in different locations around the UK before rolling it out commercially. But this is not a normal wave energy device. The current thinking around generating electricity centers around wave power – effectively putting turbines into the water which move as the sea pushes against them. The problems with this approach are rife – electrical turbines and water do not mix, obviously. Vince wants to employ a simper idea. “The C-Razor is basically a pump. It side-steps the fundamental challenge of underwater generation. Making electricity in the sea is very hard, and expensive. We address the problem by using the power of the waves to pump high pressure water onto the shore.” From there it becomes a simple issue of turning a turbine and generating electrical power. In fact, Vince has plans to create what is effectively a sea water “battery” by pumping the water onto a cliff top tank, and opening the valve to the turbine when the wave power is low. This simply cuts out the intermittent periods when there is less generative power in the waves. “This is the holy grail of the industry,” he says. “It’s sea energy on demand. We think this could have global ramifications if we can make energy at the right price. As it’s so brutally simple, we think the economics will be right.” However, the most interesting new idea to emerge from Ecotricity’s ‘skunk works’ that he calls EcoLabs is something Vince dubs a “UPS”, or Uninterruptible Power Supply. More simply, he calls it . This will be a kind of Internet-connected battery with inverters that could live inside an ordinary home — a sort of big black refrigerator. “We could use it as an energy company to deal with the intermittency of the wind,” says Vince. Tantalizingly, he says such as device could “change the shape of demand” and could insulate houses from peaks in demand. “Its intelligent. It lets people live the way they live right now rather than having to change their behaviour. At the moment behaviour is a big barrier.” The ramifications of such a device could be pretty big, if his numbers are correct. “By our calculations,” says Vince “if everyone in the UK had a Black Box we could reduce the load on existing electric power-stations by 15%”. Fascinatingly, this also happens to the the amount that existing nuclear power contributes to the UK electricity grid and represents the looming energy gap as older nuclear stations get taken offline. If Vince’s Black Boxes took off, their impact could – he believes – mean that the current grid in the UK would have many more years of demand left in it, without the need to add more generation. As Steve Jobs used to say: Boom. In the UK – indeed, around the world – there is a huge debate about whether to built new nuclear power stations to replace older versions. After the nuclear disaster in Japan, it’s become a debate which has concentrated the minds of many a politician. It’s hard to say whether Vince’s numbers stack up, and will no doubt require independent assessment. But it is a fascinating vision. After all, as Vince says, uranium is not an indigenous energy source in the UK, or indeed much of the world. But wind power plus a big battery in every home, could well be. The first trials of the Ecotricity BlackBox will be later this year in the UK. Following that thought, Vince’s quest for simplicity in the distribution of electricity has lead him towards a fiendishly simple solution to keep electric cars charged up and on the road. Currently most charging stations for electric cars have been put in towns and cities. However, he points out, this is the last place they should be to address so-called “range anxiety.” Instead, Ecotricty plans to create an “Electric Highway” – a series of charging stations for electric and plug-in hybrid cars placed where they are needed, in between the UK’s cities. And what’s more, they will be free. Charging up at an Electric Highway outlet could charge a Nissan Leaf – one of the latest plug-in electric cars – to 80% full from a flat battery inside 20 minutes. Or the time is normally takes to fill up with gas, take a comfort break and grab a coffee on your average long distance journey. In practice it’s likely to be quicker than that given that most car journeys are not long distance. In the UK for instance, 96% of car journeys are less than 100 miles. Most modern EVs – outside of the Telsa – have a range of about 100 miles because they are designed for city driving. Vince says Nissan and Renault, increasingly seen as leaders in electric cars, are already involved in the Ecotricity project, which plans to roll out over the next year. It’s at this point you start to realize Vince’s dabblings in an electrical super car all those years ago might not have been so crazy after all. Where Elon Musk has pursued his electric car dream, Vince has thought about some of the wider problems with current electric networks and power generation. Indeed, he says it was the direct experience of creating an electric car that lead to his idea of an Electric Highway. “The question is, what’s halting the take-up of the availability of EVs and overcoming range anxiety? The charging points are not on the motorways – they are in the wrong places,” he points out. That range anxiety, believes Vince, has meant that consumers have been misled about the performance of electric cars. He believes that the Tesla S range of 300 miles, while relevant for the US, is “excessive” for most other countries, especially small European ones. “All it means is that you are lugging around a lot of weight in batteries that 96% of the time you are not using,” he says. Warming to his subject, he points out that while “the Tesla spec sounds nice, you have to wonder about it given that companies like Renault are bringing out much cheaper models which are mass affordable EVs. “Maybe the Tesla will simply become more like a Porsche? It’s the big, mainstream car makers that will change the market for EVs,” he says. But urban turbines, sea power and a vast electric network are not all Vince has up his sleeve. He’s even now looking at creating a electric tractor. Dabbling in side-projects aside, ultimately Vince is most excited about creating products which will delight his Ecotricity customers under his “green” brand, Ecotopia. With the launch of a new online customer self-service system he wants to create “a kind of eco-cloud of services” which will eventually publish the realtime output of its wind farms. Indeed, in many ways it seems like Vince wants to surround his customers with eco products. A new mobile phone MVNO called EcoTalk – which would be linked to Ecotricity’s per generation services, and thus effectively wind-powered – is planned for later this year with a mobile network partner, as yet unnamed. Is there nothing Vince is not working on? Perhaps even food? “We want to take our brand into other areas of people’s lives. Some 80% of people’s personal carbon emissions come from spending their money on three things: energy, transport and food. We began in energy, we’ve moved into transport, and food is one of our next frontiers,” says Vince. “Ecotopia is about people being able to do good with their shopping bills, EcoTalk is about doing good with your mobile phone bill. All of these things will be inter-connected.” With this all-encompassing green vision of a company which reaches into lives with a single green power and technology brand, perhaps it’s easier to liken Ecotricity to Apple. Vince clearly wants to build an ecosystem of products locked into and around the Ecotricity eco-system. A younger Dale Vince, once lived on a hill to harness the wind for his own needs. Today, he’s catching the wind for the rest of the UK. |
Hackathons And How To Find A Parking Spot In Rio De Janeiro With Team Rua Aberta | Contributor | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | I’m sitting in an office on the 13th floor of Mayor Eduardo Paes’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. I’ve come to speak with Pedro Paulo, the Staff Secretary who presided over Rio’s first city-sponsored hackathon, an overnight Red Bull and hot-dog infused tech fest that opened up a cache of city data to 75 Rio citizens eager to make their city better with apps. Pedro Paulo sits across from me at his desk, waxing philosophical about how Mayor Eduardo Paes is eschewing classical, top-down political governance and instituting an era of tech-driven dialog with his municipal subjects. There’s the hackathon, and a new website called that lets you suggest and vote up ideas to improve the city. The mayor is Tweetcasting and live streaming, and he hosted his first public Google Hangout last month. Last year he went to Long Beach to give a , and last week he went to Google Zeitgeist in Arizona to talk about “Polisdigitocracy,” which an official press release defines as his “new concept for participatory management, which is specifically relevant to cities and leverages technology in order to generate more transparency, allow for better monitoring and promote better dialogue between government and population.” Polisdigitocracy (n): See hackathons. Pedro Paulo tells me they saw other cities doing them — New York, San Francisco, Chicago — and decided Rio could do one better. He says city officials were so impressed with the quality of ideas that emerged from the hackathon that they plan to develop a full 40 percent of the projects into viable applications – evidence of a veritable dialog-via-apps with the city’s citizens. The winning app, called “Open Road” (Rua Aberta), tackles a problem that Rio residents call the city 400 times a day to complain about – illegally parked cars. I’m imagining something like in San Francisco, which lets you see real-time availability for metered and garage parking spaces, but Pedro Paulo is describing an app that sends you an SMS when you’ve parked illegally. And asks you to move your car. Only it’s hard to hear him, because there is a crowd of protesters with bullhorns 13 floors below. Hundreds of Rio’s public school teachers are demanding an audience with the mayor to discuss their terms to end a month-long strike that has left without teachers. I wonder if there is an app for that. City-sponsored tech events can seem more like municipal glitz and press release potpourri than opportunities to effect real change. The suspicion would not be unfounded in a city where hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets since June demanding dialog, while the mayor is at Google Zeitgeist talking about Polisdigitocracy. But what emerged from Rio’s first hackathon is a model of what digital citizenship looks like in a city awash in protest culture. Let’s exit the mayor’s office and head to Ipanema Beach for coffee with the winning team, and I will make my case for an app that asks you to move your car. But first, a detour to a call center. 1746 banner over the Mayor’s headquarters. Locals call the building “ ” in reference to the red light district that was evicted thirty years ago to make way for it. The city used to have a different phone number for each of its disparate municipal departments until March 2011, when they created one ring to rule them all. Like New Yorkers who dial 311, Rio’s residents can now call 1746 to reach 80 different departments, from the trash company to the cemetery. Trash removal is the most popular service request by a landslide, followed in distant second by irregular parking, public lighting, and rodent removal. Mundane in isolation, the aggregate data – over 7 million calls to date – constructs a pulse of the city’s needs and its ability to attend to them. This is the data goldmine city officials opened up for the Hackathon 1746. They directed participants not to the most popular requests, but to the requests the city has the hardest time addressing. “They gave us four challenges,” Leonardo Eloi, the project manager from the winning team, explains over coffee in Ipanema Beach. “One challenge was tree pruning – they have a backlog of two-and-a-half years wait list. Another problem was public lighting. Another was problems with potholes on the street, and the last one was irregular parking.” The team showed up at the Hackathon with plans to build a crowdsourced map of where the potholes are and help the city prioritize road repairs, but as they learned in Pedro Paulo’s opening remarks at the Hackathon, there’s already an app for that. “So we were like, our pothole idea – forget it. Let’s start to interview the government people that are at the hackathon,” Leonardo says. “We talked to the director of 1746, the Municipal Guard, the guy from the – because what’s the point in offering a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist? We wanted to solve something that wasn’t just a problem for Rio residents, but something that’s simultaneously a problem for residents, for the government, and for 1746.” Leonardo and colleagues are what you could call subject matter experts at solving problems in Rio. Three members of the team – Leonardo Eloi, Nicolas Iensen and Igor Campos – work together at , a privately financed social mobilization platform that has become an extremely useful organizing tool since the city erupted into mass protests this June. Mayor Eduardo Paes meets the Open Road team. More than 100,000 Rio residents have used Meu Rio to organize around more than 200 issues. Unlike stateside platforms like Change.org, Meu Rio balks at the idea that signing a petition or liking something on Facebook qualifies as meaningful participation. Instead, they’ve rolled out tools that let campaign organizers access contact information – including Facebook pages – for city officials in departments relevant to the issue at hand. They’ve leveraged their connections to organize face-to-face meetings between campaigners and the city. And they’ve started launching standalone projects like (“On Guard”), a neighborhood watch platform in the historic Santa Teresa district that lets concerned residents keep an eye on a warehouse that stores a dwindling supply of historic artifacts. A thousand locals signed up to monitor the webcam feed in the first 24 hours after the De Guarda site launched. The Meu Rio guys invited two more people to fill out their hackathon dream team – Ygor Barboza, an Android programmer with an office job downtown – on the street where the first protests took place – and Paulo Fernando de Lacerda, a data systems analyst who works for the government: “Seeing as how we were working with an immense data table from 1746.” “The funny thing is that we didn’t tell anyone we were from Meu Rio,” Leonardo says. “Our perception is that the government thinks we’re annoying. We were afraid they’d say, “Hey, let’s ignore the Meu Rio guys.” “We wanted to be judged for ourselves and our work,” says Igor, an interface designer for Meu Rio. “But maybe it was good for them to see that we’re not just here to confront them, but to collaborate.” “Some people in government don’t get it,” Leonardo says. “They think we’re the opposition. It’s not opposition. It’s dialog.” Team Open Road sees a sign on the way to the hackathon. On their way into the hackathon, Team Open Road saw a sign. “I saw a truck parked in a handicapped spot,” Leonardo tells me, “and the guy didn’t have a parking sticker or anything. So I took a photo on my iPhone and sent my complaint to 1746. This was at 7:46am. It took until 9:20am for 1746 to field his complaint and direct it to the appropriate department. So what was the point?” They struck up a conversation with a Municipal Guard at the hackathon and asked him what happens when he writes someone a parking ticket. He said, “There’s usually two excuses. Either, ‘I didn’t know I couldn’t stop here,’ or ‘It’ll just be a minute.’” The first excuse is a legitimate one in Rio. “Nobody remembers the specifics of what constitutes a legal parking space on the books,” Leonardo explains. “It’s really complex. Can you park on the left or the right side of the street? What hours of the day can you park there? Do you have to park parallel, or at 45 or 90 degrees? And sometimes there’s no sign to tell you.” Not to mention that about a third of Rio’s residents – 2 million people – live in favelas, where paved roads and parking spots are often in excruciatingly limited supply. In Rio’s largest favela, the German Complex, don’t have street access to their homes, much less room for a parking spot. So Rio has an excessive number of irregularly parked cars,” Leonardo says. “Downtown, in Copacabana, here in Ipanema Beach, you always see cars parked on the sidewalk, cars parked next to each other the wrong way, cars boxed in, a bunch of problems.” Leonardo says the data cache confirms his personal observation: 1746 receives the most parking complaints downtown, followed by Copacabana Beach, then a neighborhood called Tijuca, sandwiched between the famous Maracana soccer stadium and a dense urban forest. Sidewalk parking: not atypical in Rio. It’s a big headache from Rio’s Municipal Guard, which purportedly has more important things to worry about than writing parking tickets. “And when the Municipal Guard has to talk to a driver who’s like, ‘I didn’t know, I’m sorry,’ that generates a social cost,” Leonardo explains. “The discussion gets heated, you get a headache, you’re annoyed.” The problem for 1746 is more of an operational headache. When someone sends a parking complaint to 1746, a call center rep manually copies the information, including license plate number, and routes it to the Municipal Guard, who routes it to a regional department, who sends it to the guard on duty who is physically closest to the illegally parked car. It’s a massive game of telephone they play 400 times per day. If the offending car hasn’t already vacated its illegal spot by the time the complaint makes its way through the system, the guard on duty will write a ticket, or call a tow truck if it’s blocking a driveway, for example, or in a handicapped spot. If the offending car is still there by the time the tow truck arrives, there’s no saying the tow truck can even reach it. No room for a tow truck. “Then we discovered that the cost to tow the car and bring it to the tow lot is much more expensive than the amount you pay to take your car back out,” Leonardo explains. “You have to spend a lot of money renting the spaces for the tow lot, and it’s really far away. Then you’ve got to pay for a driver, the truck, the gas, the environmental impact. So it’s not worth the cost.” “We learned it’s even worse when they tow an old car that has a lot of unpaid tickets. Because every year in Rio you have to pay an annual registration fee for your car. And sometimes people don’t pay it and get their car towed. And to take your car out of the tow lot, you have to pay off your whole history of tickets. So for a lot of people, if they don’t have the money, they leave their car.” This leaves the tow lot at full capacity. The city is so reluctant to tow cars, Igor explains, that “sometimes there’s a tow truck at the entrance of a tunnel, and he’s only there to let people know that if they do something funny, they’re going to get towed.” Not a scalable solution. Park and check in “So it’s not good for the city to tow the car,” Leonardo says. “It’s not good for the citizen to get their car towed. It’s not good for the Municipal Guard who has to deal with it, and it’s not good for traffic.” “And even if you give the driver a ticket, the concept that a ticket is a way of educating a citizen – that’s debatable,” Igor says. “But what if you have an app that gives you a tap on your shoulder and says, ‘Hey, you’re inconveniencing someone.’ That’s a lot more humane than this vision of punishing the person.” First, let’s help the driver who doesn’t know where they can actually park. The Open Road team populated their app with the city’s existing map of legal parking spots. The data is far from complete – it only maps out legal parking spots in downtown and Rio’s trendy South Zone – but it’s a starting point. When you find a spot, you can use the app to see if you can actually park there. Then you check in, and the app asks you, “How was it finding a spot?” And you can say it was easy, hard, or so-so. That check-in populates the Open Road database with real-time parking information. “So we’re developing a collective intelligence about the parking situation,” Igor explains. Both the city’s data on where the legal spots are, and the collective wisdom of where the best place is to park, depending on the time of day.” You can tell the app how you found your car. “This is also good for the city, because they’re going to be able to understand where there’s the most demand for street parking, where there’s available parking, where you need to put up better signs,” Leonardo says. Let’s say you check in to a parking spot that has a four-hour time limit and requires a parking ticket. The Open Road app will tell you that. “In our dream version of the future app, you can buy a new ticket directly from your phone,” Leonard says. “But for now the app sends you an alert when your time is almost up, and shows you the fastest route to get back to your car. The faster you get there, the quicker you free it up for someone else.” Ygor, the Android developer, gets a word in to explain you get another alert when you’re back at your car. “The idea is that when you get back to your car, the app asks you how you found your car.” According to Leonardo, the app displays a list that gives users options, such as whether your car is okay, whether if it got scratched, whether it is even still there, or if there is a flanelinha. Flanelinhas are aggressively helpful guys who guide you into your parking spot – it’s often a tight squeeze in Rio – and charge a dollar to keep an eye on your car. If they don’t have an official uniform, they’re offering their services illegally. “So you can also pass information to the city on what areas have flanelinhas, and what time of day you should put a guard there. And you can share with the Security Secretary what areas of the city have the most incidents related to car damage or theft.” Now you have an app that tells you where you can park, where the spots are depending on the time of day, whether it’s a safe place to park your car, and when your time is up.
But let’s say you park on the sidewalk or block a driveway anyway – just for a few minutes – because you know it’s going to be a long time before anyone gets around to ticketing or towing your car. This is where things get a bit creepy – or fun, depending on your appetite for privacy. Rio’s IBM-powered Operations Center houses the biggest surveillance screen in Latin America. City Hall promised the Open Road team access to the data, so they’ll be able to route illegal parking complaints directly to the nearest available guard on duty – effectively cutting out the message-passing from 1746 to the Municipal Guard, to the regional office, to the officer on duty. They’re also going to get access to the database of all the registered cars in Rio, including the owner’s name and cell phone number. So the moment the guard gets an SMS with the location and license plate of the illegally parked car, the car’s owner will get an SMS asking them to move their car. Now. Because a guard is 50 meters away from writing a ticket. Whoever gets there first wins. And if the car owner gets there first, everyone wins, because the city doesn’t have to call a tow truck. And since Open Road knows exactly what happened, they can send a report back to the person who reported the car and let them know what happened. Game dynamics: Race the municipal guard back to your illegally parked car. “We have to humanize the problem,” Leonardo says. “Because if I file a complaint and I never hear what happens, I’m not going to file another one. What’s the point?” Now that five civic-minded guys have designed a win-win-win solution to one of the city’s biggest unresolved complaints in the 28 hours that lapsed at the hackathon, we return to the sticky question of whether Open Road will ever see the light of day. Team Open Road says they’re ready to turn in the minimum viable product, or if the city gives them the appropriate resources, take it all the way to implementation. “But there’s no free lunch,” Leonardo says. “There’s work to do. The 1746 database is a mess. We need to harmonize the database of mapped parking spaces. We need to make adjustments to the Google Map. We need to talk to the transportation department and see what their API is like, if they even have one. It’s very possible they’re going to have to build one. That’s a state-level department, so someone is going to have to negotiate with them for that to happen. The map of municipal guards on duty is easier, because it’s city-level data, and it’s ready.” “And who’s going to pay for the SMS? We need to make an agreement with the government. So it depends more on the government than on us at this point. We can do something simple, but our issue is, we’ll go at their speed. The ball’s in their court.” If the city comes through on its promises, they might have just the kind of hot data project they can expand to other cities. And Mayor Paes can have a real-life example of Polisdigitocracy. |
Wait, When Did Software Become So Boring? | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Maybe I’m just jaded and cranky. But as I wandered through Startup Alley at this week, and even as I watched many of the Battlefield contestants, I found myself fighting eye-glazing ennui. Apps and services that help you connect and collaborate with others. Tools that help you build or use apps and services that help you connect and collaborate with others. Sigh. Been there. Done that. Oh, sure, connection and collaboration are great, but this is beginning to feel like territory tramped down by ten thousand prospectors already. Maybe there’s still some gold in , but it feels like there’s precious little exploration left to do. Granted, I did like the Disrupt Cup winner, Layer. Well, sort of: This Layer thing looks like an idea that would have been really great if it had launched 2-3 years ago: — Jon Evans (@rezendi) And I was impressed by a couple of the hackathon projects: 2 of the Disrupt hackathon projects (Cloudiverse and AdFree) seem more interesting to me than any of the exhibitors/Battlefield contestants. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) (Note, however, that I forgot to include the word “software” there.) But to my mind, the consumer-software gold rush that began five years ago, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G and its App Store, hit the point of diminishing returns some time ago. It’s time to look for new forbidding mountains. Which mostly means it’s time to look at hardware. That’s how it always works. Hardware engineers are the explorers, opening up new territory like ubiquitous broadband and/or smartphones and/or cloud-scale data centers, and software engineers are the prospectors who flood into these new lands and stake and mine their claims. Individuals move faster than organizations, which may explain why enterprise software has gone from boring to thrilling over the last couple of years, just as the consumer wave crested and waned: These enterprise guys sound genuinely excited about their future; consumer startups here kinda seem to be faking it. When did that happen? — Jon Evans (@rezendi) But if you want to see what happens , look at the hardware. (Stipulating that a line between “hardware” and “software” is at best a crude approximation as basically all hardware projects involve a lot of custom software, too.) Everything that excited me at Disrupt was hardware: and its evil sibling ; the new ; , which offers secure DRM-free 3D printing via a printer-top box; : and of course , albeit with ‘ caveats: The original patent on the wireless charger demo'd at TCDisrupt. It's an interesting concept. — 📎Josh Myer (@xek) (FWIW, I'm really uncomfortable about the Cota wireless charger. A 10W+ 2.4GHz radiator could easily chew up WiFi for a block.) — 📎Josh Myer (@xek) I suppose my fundamental complaint is that, in stark contrast to these hardware companies, almost all of the software companies exhibiting at Disrupt seemed to me to be built for today, or even yesterday, rather than tomorrow. We’re heading into a future of drones and sensors. That is not a particularly insightful comment; it’s seemed painfully obvious to many people for some time now. Cota was pitched as a phone recharger, but I bet it’ll wind up being more useful for recharging wireless sensors, which — prediction alert! — I suspect will outnumber phones within the next decade. of all sizes are already practically . So where is the software being built for that future? Why still so much connection, collaboration and even, God help us, photo-sharing? True, there was a panel on Bitcoin, which is genuinely innovative and disruptive software; Naval Ravikant ( ) just compared Bitcoin today to TCP/IP in 1995. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but that's a bold statement. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) yes, there’s ; but right now those feel like exceptions proving the rule. Okay, so we have to wait for the hardware folks to start opening up the new territory. But in the interim it feels like not much is happening. My own degree is actually in hardware (electrical engineering), but I abandoned it almost immediately upon acquisition in order to become a software prospector. For the first time ever I find myself faintly regretting that. Maybe I am just jaded and cranky; or maybe software has now eaten enough of the world that the process is becoming less disruptive, less interesting, and more tedious status quo. I hope not. Bring on the drones and sensors. Yawn, Phoebe, . |
VivaKi Partners With SparkReel To Help Marketers Manage Crowdsourced Videos | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | As the amount of user-generated video continues to grow, a startup called aims to help companies harness those videos for their own promotional efforts. Now the startup should get a big boost thanks to a new partnership with , the digital innovation arm of advertising giant Publicis. VivaKi is making the deal through its ventures group, which is headed by Michael Wiley. Despite the name, Wiley said his group doesn’t normally invest cash for equity – instead, it connects startups with the parts of Publicis where their technology and services might be useful, and it also works with startups to develop new products and features that might specifically address client needs. (Wiley said VivaKi has started to make traditional equity investments too, but that’s a separate process.) So why work with SparkReel? Wiley said VivaKi is focused on four major “pillars” — mobile, social, “next generation storytelling,” and data/analytics. With tools that allow marketers to collect fan videos directly and also to aggregate them from social platforms like Instagram, Vine, and YouTube, SparkReel occupies “three of the pillars for sure, if not all four,” he said. (Since the videos can be posted from desktop or mobile, and since SparkReel also offers analytics showing where videos are posted and what people are saying about them, I think it’d be fair for the startup to claim all four.) To illustrate what SparkReel can do, co-founder Matt Gibbs sent me a few of examples via email. He said Men’s Fitness Magazine used SparkReel to power its fitness challenge, with 400 posted videos posted driving 80,000 views. Verizon Fios, meanwhile, held a contest tied to Iron Man 3, where fans could share their “superhuman” moves for a chance to win tickets to the red carpet premiere. And Keystone Mountain used SparkReel for a Facebook community where guests at Keystone’s terrain park Area 51 could share their “top shreds.” “Brands aren’t the only ones excited about simplified video sharing,” Gibbs added. “SparkReel also helps turn wedding guests into a team of crowdsourced videographers.” (I’m guessing that part may be little less interesting to VivaKi, though hey, maybe I’m wrong.) Including SparkReel, there are now a total of nine companies in VivaKi’s ventures program: Chute, CrowdTwist, Flite, Jana, Mass Relevance, , SeeMore Interactive, and Voxsup. |
Why Startups Fail: A Postmortem For Flud, The Social Newsreader | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | In late July, , the social news reader for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, was headed to the deadpool. Startup failure is an all-too familiar, even cliche, story in Silicon Valley. But when San Diegoan co-founders Bobby Ghoshal and Matthew Ausonio officially shuttered the Flud app and website in August, after three years of development, it was a disappointing final chapter for a product that had attracted more buzz in a year than the average startup sees in its entire lifecycle. It was also a surprising conclusion, considering that Flud had managed to raise $2.1 million in seed financing from investors Detroit Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, Behance co-founder and CEO Scott Belsky and JFJF Ventures, among others. Furthermore, that FLUD was continuing to see interest from investors and was in the process of raising up to $8 million in new funding. But Flud never closed on the round and today, the startup . In fact what eventually killed Flud, was that the company wasn’t able to raise this additional funding. Despite multiple approaches and incarnations — — in pursuit of the ever elusive product-market fit (and monetization), Flud eventually ran out of money — and a runway. To date, the founders have yet to speak publicly in any detail about Flud’s closure and why the company wasn’t able to turn a promising start into fame and fortune. Last week we caught up with Ghoshal, who graciously agreed to peel back the curtain and offer a bit of a postmortem on Flud– for sake of clarification and, of course, edification. Startups are hard — don’t let anyone tell you differently — and everyone fails. Some just learn to fail better than others, and that’s what makes the difference. Flud’s story has much in common with another recent casualty in the mobile space: Sonar. (which is a must-read for all entrepreneurs, investors and startup peeps), former Sonar co-founder and CEO, Brett Martin, offered insight into why his own mobile, location-based startup went bye-bye. Sonar and Flud were both downloaded by millions of people, were promoted by Apple and Google, raised multiple millions and received high praise from the media — and yet you know how both stories ended. As , one of the keys to building a successful startup isn’t necessarily having a brilliant idea, but to “make something that people actually want.” When Ghoshal and Ausonio began developing the idea for Flud in the summer of 2010, their big vision was to build a product that wouldn’t just be another RSS-based news reader or social magazine, but an actual social news ecosystem (and a design-centric, i.e. visual, one at that) — an “Instagram for news,” if you will. While it’s easy to say, as an armchair observer, that part of the reason Flud failed was because the market was already saturated by similar products and the competition was too strong. After all, when , Flipboard and Pulse were already well-established, had millions of users and mostly dominated mindshare in the newsreader market. Plus, Flud had to work against the fickle, uncertain and ever-evolving relationship people have with news and news consumption tools. They always say they want a better newsreader, are willing to try something new, but then they cling like pocket lint to what’s familiar. Look at what : Most digitally-savvy people seemed to agree that, while Google and RSS were fantasti-awesome for many years, eventually smarter, real-time tools offered greener pastures. Seemingly in agreement, , finally turning it off this summer, and, , the Web went bananas. It was as if Google had just turned off their electricity and punched their mom in the face. But, really, when Flud launched its iPhone app in December 2010, there was plenty of demand for a “better” way to consume the news — in truth, there still is. As an illustration of this, when we talked to Ghoshal at the end of December, the app was It’s also why (at least in theory) Flud struck a chord with the media: among the “Best UI Designs” of 2010 and “the future of news.” Hell, even some guy named Rip Empson (I know, right?) itself as a “force to be reckoned with” in the news arena. In retrospect, it’s pretty apparent that we were, in a word, “not exactly correct.” (Hey, even the best get it wrong sometimes, right guys? Right? Hello?) Nonetheless, and of course with a little of my own, requisite defensiveness, the demand for a better newsreader was there. And, going one step further, I’d argue that the initial vision behind Flud — the vision of building a full-service, design-friendly social news ecosystem — had appeal. And still does. Just ask the big social networks. Today, Facebook as it inches into territory where Flipboard, Pulse and Feedly are arguably still the best options, if not the best-known names. In regard to Pulse, LinkedIn bought the popular newsreader for $90 million earlier this year to help it develop content hub and news reading strategy. Not only did LinkedIn think it was worth $90 million, but has kept the apps alive . But who cares about them? (Yes, that’s half a rhetorical question.) , Brett Martin details the results of Sonar worrying too much about competitors, like Highlight, Banjo and a host of others. Like Sonar, Ghoshal says that there was always noise about how well Flipboard and Pulse were doing, but it was always more psychological. In the end, you can’t let what other companies are doing drive the direction of your business — the more you let them into your head, the worse it gets. It’s impossible NOT to pay attention, naturally, but your response should be “Hrmm, that’s interesting — not ‘Oh, F#$%^&*” … Know a good idea when you see it (a “good” idea being a better way to solve the problems your users are having NOW, and if you want to push it, the problems they’ll be having in a few weeks, but NOT the problems they’ll be having in a year, that’s hubris. You’re not Steve Jobs), but don’t let it lead you away from your overall vision. Instead, if a startup is lucky enough to hit on an idea or a product that users actually want to use, what’s far more important than what the competition is doing is understanding what customers want and narrowing the gap between what customers want, what parts of the product they’re actually using and what your product’s functionality/feature set as it exists at the time. Don’t waste too much time worrying about press and coverage. If you build a great product, press will come — take it from me, I’m a doctor. Then again, Ghoshal tells us, believe in your product and vision enough so that you’re not surprised by press if it does come, and so that you’ll be ready. Ghoshal says that, leading up to Flud’s launch of the app three years ago, he and his co-founder were working on it part time. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but in part because they didn’t expect to get any press and hadn’t done a press-fueled launch before, little problems at the beginning snowballed quickly. Flud was lucky enough to get a ton of press around its early product launches. However, from then on, when the team would launch a new product, they would reflexively go after press, Ghoshal says. They would get press, users would overload the app, the system crashed, and when they finally got it back up, there were still too many bugs left, and, in a world of eleventy billion apps, people tend to be pretty unforgiving of glitchy user experiences. (As they should, by the way.) The Flud CEO then concluded, chuckling: “One of the most important things I learned,” he says, “is that when you launch a new product — especially if it has some real ‘novelty’ to it — the best thing to do is shut up about it.” “We really didn’t test the initial product enough,” Ghoshal says. The team pulled the trigger on its initial launches without a significant beta period and without spending a lot of time running QA, scenario testing, task-based testing and the like. When v1.0 launched, glitches and bugs quickly began rearing their head (as they always do), making for delays and laggy user experiences aplenty — something . Not giving enough time to stress and load testing or leaving it until the last minute is something startups are known for — especially true of small teams — but it means things tend to get pretty tricky at scale, particularly if you start adding a user every four seconds. Ghoshal also says that what testing they had done was too narrow in scope: “We also hadn’t tested our assumptions on what people would care most about in a newsreader — we knew that they’d want to share with friends after reading something, but we didn’t think they cared about things like influence. They did, and by the time we added that, some people had already moved on.” This relates to the advice above: Know what your customers want and how they’re using the app, and as Brett Martin says, optimize for actual user behavior and, as much as possible, focus on removing friction from their existing behaviors. Not focusing on more abstract things, like tech or an amazing set of APIs. Flud was too concerned with press and not concerned enough with testing new features beyond a few trusted people, he says. And, after that, “things spiraled pretty quickly, because our new users heard about the bad experience from early users, reviews didn’t help, so we lost a lot of mindshare.” Even after Flud added much-needed features like email notifications to its early product, it was too late, he said. “It’s really hard to recover from that early spiral.” In response to these early problems, the team went heads-down to focus on rebuilding the tech side of Flud, while its competitors focused on user acquisition, the CEO says. But this was a reflexive decision, and it led to Flud going too far in that direction. As Martin says of Sonar’s experience, for startups, there’s an ongoing, internal battle over whether to focus on growth or engagement, and how to balance the two. However, if a startup is building a social product, he says, growth is what’s key — engagement doesn’t matter. Ghoshal’s account echoes that of Sonar — perhaps not surprising considering Flud was essentially trying to reimagine what a social network should be in the context of news consumption. In the long run, the Flud CEO believes that the team did eventually succeed in building a much better product on the tech side, but when it came time to raise capital, “investors don’t want to invest in a third-tier newsreader.” To Martin’s point — all they cared about was growth. And because of it’s early struggles, Flud had a steeper hill to climb thanks to plateau-ing user adoption. Once Flud saw that investors were balking at its consumer product, it had to take stock in the business. The team quickly realized that money was getting tight and it had to move quickly to find a new market where customers would pay — in other words, where it could build a real business. Early on, Ghoshal said, a number of enterprise players had reached out to the company, saying things like, “even though Flud is a consumer product, our executives just bought iPads, and they want to use the app, but they need to use it behind a firewall.” Essentially, these companies wanted Flud to build a white label product, keeping the user experience the same, but optimizing it for “big company” use cases. At the time, Ghoshal says, he didn’t see the opportunity, so Flud turned down those opportunities. But when it came time to pivot, they went back to those initial leads and found the demand was unchanged. Flud moved quickly to launch a new enterprise version, which launched in December of last year with 1,500 companies on its wait list. Impressively, in the four-plus months that its enterprise product was live, the four-person team was able to bring in about $500K in bookings. However, the team hadn’t given itself enough time — it ran out time and money before it could really get the ball rolling in any significant way. In spite of Flud’s failure, Ghoshal believes that there’s still a huge opportunity for a “consumerized,” social, news-sharing network for medium-sized and businesses. “The enterprise is hungry for a product like this,” the CEO says, “and it’s something not many are talking about. Big companies have a content sharing problem that Yammer isn’t adequately solving.” These companies want to offer a product through which employees can read content about their customers, along with internal news and content shared by executives and managers. They want to be able to track what people are reading and offer better, more personalized content. “There’s a huge opportunity for a product that offers businesses, particularly enterprise businesses, a better way to read, share and syndicate content internally,” the Flud co-founder tells us. While Flud began to do just that, it also ran into problems that any consumer-facing startup moving to target the enterprise has to deal with, and it didn’t have the resources to see it through. As many know, Ghoshal says, building a product for the enterprise is an expensive proposition and startups need to make business development hires, deal with the hand-holding and time required to negotiate the more complex integration processes in enterprise — not to mention the capital demands that come from dealing with longer sales cycles. In the end, though it was seeing encouraging data from its early customers and had nibbles of interest from investors, “they all wanted to see three to six months worth of data, but we only had two months worth,” Ghoshal explained. Investors wanted to see more validation, which Flud didn’t have, and that, in the end, is what finally killed the company. The decision to shut down or sell a company is a nerve-racking, white-knuckled process down to the last minute. The process is all-consuming, and leaves many in bad sorts. While one would assume that it would be tough for employees and founders to move on to the next opportunity, once there’s finality, it can be a lot easier to move on. The whole Flud team has moved on to different projects, and Ghoshal says he’s beginning to work on his next startup, though he’s not ready to talk about what that is just yet. In the meantime, the founders are in the process of looking for a buyer for Flud’s assets and are in conversations with several potential acquirers. His advice to startups on what to look for in a potential acquirer? “I think for most, it’s a matter of figuring out which company would benefit the most from your product,” he says. “It’s probably obvious, but the company that’s going to give you the best value is the one that wants to sell the product right away … and isn’t going to just give you cash and then shut it down.” For more, check out , and for another great (postmortem) read, check out . While the failure rate of startups hasn’t changed, it’s great to see that more entrepreneurs and startup peeps are willing to admit that it’s happened to them and share what they learned so that others — when they do fail — at least won’t make the same mistakes. |
The “Zizz” Is An Intelligent Sleep Mask That Helps You Get Better Zzz’s | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 this past week, a Warsaw-based startup called was showing off an intelligent sleeping mask that uses sensors to monitor the wearers’ sleep cycles, including REM and non-REM sleep, in order to determine if you’re getting quality Zzz’s at night. The mask uses small electrodes pressed to your head surrounded by cushy material called viscoelastic foam for comfort, and then pairs with an accompanying mobile application so you can view data regarding your sleeping and waking behaviors, and identify possible problems like sleep apnea. “There are three electrodes which measure your brainwaves, eye movement and muscle tension,” explains co-founder Kamil Adamczyk, who’s now completing medical school in Poland. He says the mask’s electronics send a signal to an amplifier, analyze the signal using various artificial intelligence methods, then send the signal over Bluetooth to the users’ smartphone.” IQ Intelclinic’s other co-founder, Krzysztof Chojnowski, has a PhD in electronics, which is how the company is able to make their own electrodes for use in the mask. The company has been working on the technology since March 2013, after the founders met while attending university. Adamczyk says he was inspired to build something like this because, as a medical student, he wasn’t getting enough sleep. “We decided to create a device for people to help them sleep less, but much more efficiently” he says. These days, he says he sleeps only three hours a night then takes short naps during the day. Since the device works with an app that can identify when you’re in REM and non-REM sleep, it lets you configure settings so your alarm only wakes you after you complete a full sleep cycle. To do so, users turn a dial in the app’s settings to get them a “buffer” of sorts around the exact alarm time. Then, instead of waking you at a pre-determined time like alarms do today, it wakes you after you’ve completed your sleep cycle. You can also configure the device to account for other sleep disturbances like jet lag, or use it for power naps or sleep, like Adamczyk does. The prototypes on display in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley were charged using a battery, but the company will launch a Kickstarter campaign for a device that charges via microUSB instead. IQ Intelclinic has $65,000 (USD) from local angels, and hopes to raise $100,000 through crowdfunding in order to start shipping. The device, which they’re calling the “Zizz,” will sell for $225, though early backers will be able to buy in for $180. Says Adamczyk, the company eventually wants to be able to detect serious sleep disturbances as well as other things, like seizures, for example. But this would require FDA approval, which they don’t have at this time, given how early they are into development. You can learn more on the company’s website , or sign up to back the device. |
Netflix Scores Its First Emmy With House Of Cards Directing Win | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Netflix has after director David Fincher won the award for Best Director of a Drama Series, beating out directors from Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey and Homeland. Its Emmy win marks an important milestone for Netflix as it moves beyond rerunning TV shows and films on its streaming video platform to creating original content. House of Cards, which launched in January, reaped 9 of Netflix’s . The others were three nominations for Arrested Development and two for Hemlock Grove. As Ryan Lawler when the nominations were first announced, Netflix’s Emmy nods come just two years after the company first announced its plans to get into original programming with House of Cards, and little over a year after its first original series, Lillyhammer, premiered. Today’s Emmy win is a strong indicator that Netflix can compete with television’s major players, even though it redefines “primetime” by presenting shows in much different ways than traditional networks. Netflix does not have linear programming and all episodes in a season are made available at once. The positive critical reception Netflix has received for its original series, including House of Cards, Arrested Development, Hemlock Grove and Orange Is The New Black, calls back to the way HBO and other cable networks changed the TV landscape in the early 1990s. Before then, cable networks were known mostly for syndicating TV shows and running second-rate movies. Then HBO began releasing original content, including The Larry Sanders Show, that did well with both viewers and critics. For many TV critics, the premiere of The Sopranos on HBO in 1999 heralded a new with cable networks launching series, such as Breaking Bad, The Wire and Mad Men, that are more narratively complex and darker in tone than previous well-received TV dramas. One key difference between Netflix’s original content and cable shows like “Breaking Bad,” however, is that Netflix withholds viewership numbers. For example, even Orange Is The New Black distributor Lionsgate doesn’t know how many people watched the series. As Lionsgate president of worldwide televsion and digital distribution James Packer , this makes it difficult to sell shows in countries where Netflix has limited reach because distributors without data. It also makes it difficult to gauge the cultural impact of a show. With other streaming services like and following Netflix’s lead by offering their own high-quality original content, however, there’s a chance the next Golden Age of TV may happen on streaming video instead. |
Poshmark, The Mobile Marketplace For Women To Sell And Swap Clothes, Crosses 1M Items Sold So Far This Year | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | App downloads are key metrics for all mobile-focused startups, but not many early-stage companies in the space can cite revenue-generating figures alongside their user growth. But , the mobile marketplace out of their own closets, says that over the past year it’s enjoyed a strong showing at both levels. In an interview this past week, Poshmark CEO told TechCrunch that his company’s app, which is currently available only on iOS devices in the United States, now has 250,000 women with active personal “boutiques” to sell items out of their own closets. Those numbers are impressive, but the real power is in the transactions occurring within that user base: More than 1 million items have been sold on Poshmark since January 1st of this year, Chandra says. That puts Poshmark as a company on track to see 10X revenue growth year-over-year in 2013. Now, it’s important to note that the items on Poshmark run the gamut in terms of pricing — you’ll find anything from an $800 handbag to a $10 costume jewelry piece — so it’s hard to pin down exactly how much money the company is bringing in at the bottom line (Poshmark collects a 20 percent fee on all transactions.) And certainly Poshmark, which has in funding and has a staff of 50, likely still has a fair amount of growing to do in order for its business to become profitable — and to ultimately live up to the eBay-sized visions of Chandra and his investors. Meanwhile, competitors such as , , , and others are also hustling hard to win the next generation clothing swap and consignment market. But for now Poshmark seems to be on a good track, and Chandra seems to be up for the challenges ahead. “Fashion is a $350 billion industry in America,” he says. “We feel like we’re just in the first innings of women’s fashion. We’re very proud of where we are, but we want to 10X it again, and 10X it again.” |
The Ambient Economy | John Biggs | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Access to information is addictive. The moment we have more of it – and more of it available at opportune times – the more we crave. I learned this first-hand when I began wearing a smartwatch in earnest. While I’ve long rejected the idea that a smartwatch is a valuable addition to the infonaut’s arsenal, I now realize that being able to see, at a glance, who is calling, texting, or emailing is something that changes nearly everything. We are entering an era of ambient information, an era that engulfs us in snippets of data culled from the riot of information around us. And this era, as evidenced by the advent of Google Glass and “hands-free” user experiences on phones, is fast approaching the commonplace. In short, something big is about to happen and our attention is about to me monetized. Think about what I learn from my smartwatch or the notifications on my phone. Right now I get emails, messages, and the like. But if hundreds of startups (and probably , , and ) have their way, recommendations and enticements may soon be popping up on our devices. In a Starbucks? Apple’s Beacon system should be able to notify us what song is playing and whether the Pumpkin Spice latte is back. In a clothing store? A company called can watch you try on an item and then remind you that you liked it a few days later – and even offer a quick discount. If there has been any upside to the Internet of Things, it’s that very smart, very connected devices now cost pennies. Furthermore, the computing power needed to pick you out of a crowd is now trivial, especially given foot traffic in the average store. You will soon be in a maze of invisible trip wires, all trying to get you to buy something. The Pebble is successful because it is forgettable. I can strap it on and wear it for a good seven days without a charge and when it informs me that something is up – that I have a text or an email or a call – it does so in a discreet manner. I can only imagine what it would look like if it were trying to get me buy a Subway sandwich for 50 cents off or convince me to get some new jeans at the Gap, but if those companies are smart they’ll partner with some source of ambient information broadcast. A buzz here or there would nudge me into Chipotle for some beans or into Joe’s Pizza for a slice. A nudge in the drug store will encourage me to pick up some condoms and corn remover (“Try Trojan-brand condoms/corn remover kits. 50 cents off today!”). A friend’s testimonial can pop up when I visit a house of ill repute and/or a car dealership. You get the idea. This concept gets increasingly scary when you look at a smarter device like Google Glass. A section of talked a bit about the problem of selective GPS. In an interview, geographer notes that the scariest part of getting directions from a faceless corporation is what bias that corporation can inject into your walk. While Google probably won’t realize you’re going out for lunch and lead you towards a preferred advertiser with your Glass anytime soon, there’s definitely the possibility of that happening. Likewise the same tools that can avoid obstacles can force you to face them head-on. Imagine a parent being led, again and again, past a McDonald’s because of a feedback loop embedded in the program and you’ll see what I mean. This becomes more dangerous when we trust our devices to lead us and inform us with less oversight. Notifications on a phone are one thing; notifications in our eyes are another. My watch buzzing to get my attention gives me a valuable bit of information, but it can also exhaust my attention. They also add bias. I’ve noticed more and more restaurants fail to appear on my favorite local app, Yelp. Whether this is because Yelp needs to monetize or because it refuses to show me dumps is immaterial – the fact that it controls what I see and can expect to see is frightening. Ambient information is a powerful tool. It helps us make decisions with an accuracy heretofore unavailable to our puny minds. More than anything it offloads cognition and decision-making onto a device that rests unobtrusively just out of sight. Like the ever-present servant, it whispers “Remember, user, thou art really close to some nice barbecue.” Who benefits from this information is the real question. [Image via on Flickr] |
Vonkil’s Batthead Is A Rechargeable, Remote Controlled AA Battery | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 22 |
I spent my formative years using up AA batteries , and I can’t count the number of times my parents said they wished they could zap my trusty Game Boy dead. While there’s nothing they can do to salvage my childhood now, the folks at Vonkil Technologies have worked up something that should help a new generation of parents remotely kill toys at will. Enter the Batthead, the star of a that wants to make your rechargeable AA batteries much, much smarter. Here’s the concept in a nutshell: they have essentially taken a rechargeable AA battery and crammed a Bluetooth 4.0 radio and an accelerometer into it. You probably see where this is going — thanks to a companion app, users can remotely enable and disable those batteries in a bid to preserve more power for when it’s really needed. Of course, parents can don their troll hats and remotely shut down their kids’ toys from afar using their iOS devices (the Vonkil team says that Android support is in the works too). The accelerometer adds a curious bit of awareness to the fold, as users can set the batteries to activate only when they’re moved or oriented in a certain position. I can already hear you murmuring about the questionable value that brings to the table, but the notion of a flashlight that turns on automatically when you pick it up still strikes me as awfully neat. Now I can’t blame you if this all sounds a little familiar. A seemingly similar concept called the was successfully Kickstarted earlier this year (although backers are still waiting for those first shipments to go out). The big difference though comes down to execution: while the TetherCell is also remotely controllable from an iOS device, the fact that the product itself is just a sleeve that wraps around a AAA battery means there’s only so much the team could physically squeeze into the thing. Since the Batthead contains a rechargeable cell in addition to that slew of sensors, we’re ultimately left with a more capable power source. Of course, there are some caveats to be aware of. Don’t go expecting these things to outperform your trusty set of Eneloops, for one. The team hasn’t yet disclosed that rechargeable cell’s capacity yet (I’ve reached out and will update the post if and when they do), but I can’t imagine that longevity hasn’t taken a hit considering how much space all those other bits must take up. And then there’s the price differential to consider, too — a single, early-run Batthead without an accelerometer will set you back $19 CAD, while the fully tricked out version will cost you $40 CAD. Not exactly the most cost-effective way to power your myriad remote controls, but it just may be worth it for some tinkerers and connected home buffs out there. |
The NSA Review Panel Is An Even Bigger Joke Than We Previously Thought | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Today that President Barack Obama’s promised NSA review panel is channeling the entity that it is supposed to inspect, hiding behind layers of government bureaucracy and obfuscating its work. The AP states that the review panel is lodged in offices provided by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Even more, the DNI is running its media strategy, vetting requests through its own press office. Any whiff of independence that the group might have hoped to engender is now certainly gone. Not that it got off to a good start. The panel was stacked with, as I , “a slurry of insiders, former insiders, and a previous colleague of the president.” So, it was hardly the “high-level group of outside experts” that the president had promised. Now, ensconced inside the entity that it is supposed to vet, surrounded and apparently managed by those very organs, the panel is rapidly approaching punchline status. The AP has more, almost comically. I quote to preserve the dryness of its writing: James Clapper, the intelligence director, exempted the panel from U.S. rules that require federal committees to conduct their business and their meetings in ways the public can observe. Its final report, when it’s issued, will be submitted for White House approval before the public can read it. So, in short, Clapper, the head of the DNI, exempted the group that he is currently housing, that is supposed to be vetting his work, from rules requiring their work to be public. Transparency! And, whatever they come up with will of course have to be approved for publishing. “We need new thinking for a new era,” the president stated when announcing that the panel would be formed. We do, he’s correct. But when those hired to think are old friends of either the agency in question or former associates of its boss (the president), and whose thoughts are potentially withheld from the public, we don’t make any progress at all. The point of hiring “outsiders” to vet the NSA and our lager surveillance activities is that they don’t have allegiance to the folks inside. We didn’t get that. But to top that failure off by absconding the panel behind the very curtains it was supposed to cast open is simply disgraceful. At least we have something to laugh about over lunch: “Remember when they said the panel was going to be full of outside experts, and provide a real check to the NSA’s views on privacy?” Ha ha. |
What Games Are: The Perplexing OUYA Reflex | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Since first surfaced, I’ve always been a big advocate. Why? Some of my reasons are to do with finally seeing digital-native distribution come to the TV, which is long overdue. Others are to do with watching how the world of apps has transformed the pricing structure of games, resulting in more games for more players. Some are to do with interesting game design challenges that they present, the possibilities of the new and the strange. My primary reason, however, is the sense of developer democracy. I am old enough to remember how designing and developing games used to be. I remember just how awkward working for consoles was, how there were endless hoops to jump through, and how it was universally accepted at the time that you had to personally deal with platforms to get your game to the public. You needed a publisher who knew a guy at SCEE and that was that. At that time games had become a messy business of concept approvals, publisher milestones and licensed properties. Each platform used its own custom tech, which meant getting them to work properly was an exercise in dealing with provided tools that were often tortuous. More importantly there was the sense of lock-in and shut-out. It was impossible to get development kits unless you already knew people, and they cost $30,000 each. Even on the PC you still needed a lot of publisher help because there just weren’t many options for selling directly to the public. It was a closed, complex and pretty corrupt business back in those days largely because of all the gatekeeping. It left many would-be indies out in the cold and discouraged innovation while breeding terrible working practises. “You should consider yourself lucky to work in games” was the overriding mantra while you worked 90 hour weeks on tatty versions of games that supported equally tatty movies. It was just how life was. However cracks started to emerge. Many studios who were simply unable to function in the console business shut down, and this led to greater startup climates. Starting with venues like Steam and certain Flash sites, some on-the-ground momentum started to build. Then Facebook happened. iPhone happened. Steam got good, then great. And in the process a lot of power transferred over to developers. Gaming became more chaotic and democratic, more innovative and far more investable. Where it had been the case for a generation that venture capital would never invest in games, suddenly it would. As the gatekeeping fell by the wayside we saw large studios emerge and excitement in the air. It was the age of Zynga and Mojang. And while there are certain signs that the cost of doing business in new channels is becoming more challenging, that sense of can-do still prevails. We’ve seen how changing the power relationship over to developers results in great companies, great innovation and the expansion of games as an art form. Everywhere except in TV gaming, that is. Console games largely remain a closed shop of mega-studios and expensive ambitions. Talking with people who work in that AAA world often feels a bit like stepping back in time. They’re still having the fight to be the biggest and the baddest, and on a single game to get there. The sense of you-should-be-so-lucky is alive and well. The reward for working on such mass teams is usually a pink slip, or failing that a small raise. TV gaming is yet to be disrupted, to empower developers to run their own businesses direct with their customers as has happened everywhere else. So you would think that, for the legions of indies who want to make the next but feel shut out by The Man, there would be overwhelming positivity for projects like the OUYA. Not so much. Consider the recent brouhaha over OUYA’s “ ” project. It’s a fund that the company has established to match any Kickstarter game projects that opt to publish exclusively on OUYA for a time. If you raise $50k then OUYA will give you another $50k in exchange for a temporary lock-in. OUYA wins by gaining some cool exclusives and developers win by obtaining funding and making a game that will easily port to other formats over time. Implicitly the OUYA team would also probably talk up the game as a part of their , which is essentially free marketing. Free money, high-profile marketing, a non-proprietary platform to develop for that could launch your business. Win-win right? Well in fact the reaction to the FTG fund has been very negative in both the gaming press and developer community. The words “ ” and “ ” appear in many headlines or copy covering it. The reaction has been so huge in fact that it caught up several developers, some of who had applied to the fund, others who had worked with OUYA directly. Most especially the story of Ryan Green’s game . He had to take to the pages of Gamasutra to patiently explain that, no, his game is not a cynical exploitation. It’s actually about his son who is dying of the big C. My point is that there is a tendency to overreact when it comes to microconsoles. OUYA most especially because it tends to be at the forefront, trying a lot of experiments etc, but also in general. The world is falling down in people who want to believe the worst of these tiny little machines, and their reasons perplexing. Of course there are mistakes. And yes, it seems a couple of developers tried to massage their Kickstarters a bit to get access to the FTG fund. But still. Several mid-to-high profile indie devs have taken to Twitter demanding that public apologies and whatnot for amounts to an excellent way for indie projects to get funded. The horror. When people ask me about how microconsoles are doing so far, or declare them as dead, or how they feel betrayed, I always give the same answer: “You try funding, launching and building out a platform in 12 months with a tiny team, and see how perfectly you do it.” Set against watching vastly better funded companies like Microsoft with its campuses and its giant facilities, any new platform has to be scrappy. Or as Zuck said it, moving fast and breaking things. Take one look at Facebook today and Facebook back when and you see exactly what it means. Microconsoles are young, weird and trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. They’ve moved very quickly to latch onto an opportunity enabled by affordable low-powered hardware. This means that some parts of that program will come out half-baked at first and then iterate, as happens with all new technology businesses. But the gaming world doesn’t seem to understand that, and it’s a key difference between tech and gaming communities. Tech journalists are used to the new idea that shows promise, the device or service that might one day become something. They tend to be very forgiving of things being a bit broken as long as they have optimistic ambitions for the future. Sometimes perhaps they are too wide-eyed, but still. The gaming community, on the other hand, operates by a totally different set of criteria. Certain influential sites that lead tribes of players and build a community of fans (like Giant Bomb, Penny Arcade, Rock Paper Shotgun) in a way that is fundamentally different to the tech model. It’s mostly extended fandom, media critique, sometimes gossip and cheerleading. Games journalism is often obsessed with legitimacy and trying to establish a narrative of the medium. The community tends to look backward fondly and forward skeptically. It takes a lot to wow them, and it’s not just a matter of features. While working on PS2 was very painful, for players it was arguably the greatest console ever. It had a huge catalog of diverse games and established many modern classics, such as . The sense of polish, production values and a premium experience has long been the secret to the console industry (as compared to the PC, which has often been rougher) and it’s treasured. Gamers still rankle heavily about the need for patches in modern games, for example, remembering a better time when cartridges just worked. With some exceptions, most of the gaming community is not used to “move fast and break things”. It remembers the platforms that failed, of which there were many. Systems like the Saturn, the 3DO, the CDi, the CD32 and many more only ever managed a handful games before dying. Failures have tended to fall into either the “principled end” model or the “shady bastard” model. In the former we see projects like the Dreamcast or the Indrema. In the latter it’s slapped-together formats like the Gizmondo (complete with links to the Swedish Mafia). There are many examples of both. The memory of platform failures is strong, enough to make the gaming community wary of any newcomers. It doesn’t give its loyalty easily because it has been disappointed many times. Nobody wants to buy into a platform that will end up as a Dreamcast or a Gizmondo. So a key part of the reason why any platform gets short shrift unless it comes from a Sony or an Apple is that sense of reliability. And this (to me at least) explains why indie game developers in particular have reacted so curiously to microconsoles. Both Sony and Microsoft have mixed histories when it comes to dealing with independent developers. That version of Xbox Live as seen in Indie Game: The Movie (for example) hasn’t been around for quite some time and the Xbox 360 felt like an indie ghost town for everyone bar Minecraft. Meanwhile Nintendo has almost no history with indies at all. All three have recently started to change their tunes. They’ve worked to bring indie developers into their folds and – for Sony especially – this seems to be working. Between execs like saying things will be better and indie heroes like Jonathan Blow bigging up the PS4, the mood for console is positive. Indies now consider platforms like the PS Vita to be desirable venues even though Sony has sold very few actual units. An informal system has sprung up where console platforms look at what’s hot on Steam and then tap successful developers from there to publish with them. Platforms now offer increased support to these developers and are removing many of the old roadblocks, such as lowering the prices of dev kits. Consoles have become cool once more and the community has responded in kind. But I ‘m dubious. A lot of the new generation of game makers are too young to know what a full console cycle feels like. The hype may be exciting but, historically at least, the have been very deep. Young guns often don’t understand that the point of having a few is not to effect a big change in the platform, but to just have a few arty games that win awards. Also mobile is scary and full of people who want to talk monetization. Tablet is scary. Facebook is scary. Microconsole is scary. But everybody thinks Nintendo is cool, so it must be good to be on Wii U yeah? It’s like that. Ahead of new console launches the industry tends to become exuberant even though the financial argument rarely makes sense. Consoles don’t sell a giant number of units (in their 8 years of operation Microsoft and Sony combined sold less consoles than Android phones now sell per quarter) and so their games tend to experience a lot of short-head downward pressure. While the early phase may seem like virgin territory and breed a few key successes it’s usually only 2-3 years after that when conditions flip. Execs in charge feel they have enough arty games to tick that box and seem legitimate to journalists. They back away from support, refocusing their digital divisions to become profitable. They steward. They constrain. It doesn’t make sense to run an Apple-sized curation operation when they don’t sell Apple-sized numbers of units, so they rationalize. It’s a similar story on Steam. Greenlight is flooded with wannabe games trying to get onto the Steam platform, and PC gaming has become such that if you’re not on Steam you’re probably screwed. Developers rarely have the power to chop and change their distribution to other PC stores (and Microsoft’s failure to make the Windows 8 Store work is a big problem here). Yet developers remain emotionally attached to those older paradigms, as do many players. Some people can’t see past the fact that most microconsoles are built on Android and may in some former life have had similar guts to some mobile phones. It’s been a weird couple of years for the gaming community between tablets and Zynga and gestural controllers and TV TV TV. The community wants gaming to make sense again, like it used to. Microconsoles seem to be just one more thing that’s piling on some unspecified destruction of gaming as they know it. The microconsole idea is fundamentally different to many of the failed platforms of yesteryear, but much of the gaming community does not yet see that. It’s seeing the past, the Gizmondos and the Dreamcasts, and assuming that the new is the same as the old. That kind of skepticism can be overcome but it takes time. I mean, sure, the first generation OUYA is a beachhead product (I say again, you see how well you’d do in that timeframe), but it was supposed to be. “Move fast and break things” means built to mess around with, to find the fun and help steer. So is the fund and the idea that the hardware will update every year so rather than every seven years. In a sense the whole platform is currently a big project between many companies trying to figure out this big new idea. The community’s reaction is valid. It can’t be wished away, but it can be addressed. Yes there are some snafus to be resolved. But trust is earned over the long term by watching games like come out and more and more like them. With continued demonstration of good intent and ambition the gaming community will eventually be won around. As Valve showed with Steam, skepticism can be beaten by continuing to push and adapt, to listen and respond, game after game. Over time the community will shift from saying “not as bad as I thought” to “quite good” to “actually pretty cool” if microconsoles’ course holds true. It may take a couple of years, but eventually the people will come around. |
Dattch, A Pinterest-Inspired Dating App For Gay Women, Closes $160K To Fuel Its UK Beta | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | London-based startup is a dating app with a difference. I don’t mean the fact that it’s exclusively for lesbians, bisexual and/or bi-curious women — though that certainly makes it stand out from the ranks of straight dating apps. What really sets it apart is its mostly female team who set out to design a dating app specifically for gay women. Dattch is currently one of 17 startups in the cohort, and has just closed a £100,000/$160,000 angel/small seed round, with three angel investors — including and . That investment bolsters the €40,000 invested by Wayra as part of its incubator program, where Dattch will remain until January. Being a dating app specifically designed for gay women may not sound too remarkable — but in fact the gay female dating scene is spectacularly badly served, says founder and CEO Robyn Exton. “Every single dating product that’s been produced for gay women is horrific,” she tells TechCrunch. “The biggest problem [with rivals’ products] is they don’t have any consideration of how these women are different.” Other apps apparently targeting lesbians and bisexual females typically reskin a gay male offering and slap a femme-friendly name on it ( to , for instance. Or . “There’s no consideration of how a female user might differ,” she argues. Exton points out that lazy reskins of gay male platforms have resulted in lesbian dating apps that ask incongruous questions like ‘how much body hair do you have?’ — because they’re just reusing the same gay male templates. Not exactly tailor made for a female target audience then. Add to that, another big problem is fake profiles — created by (straight) men who are pretending to be female so they can pitch for a threesome with their ‘boyfriend.’ Or angling to ‘convert’ lesbians. Which makes the whole online dating game a tedious minefield for gay women who have to spend time figuring out who’s fake and who’s for real before they can start thinking about whom they fancy. “It doesn’t happen super often, but the fact that it does happen means you don’t trust the messages that come through,” she adds. “It’s just a really bad experience all in all.” Exton, who has prior experience in the online dating space, including building a (straight) dating product, decided there had to be a better way to serve a community of users who absolutely have an appetite to meet each other, but probably don’t have the same appetites as gay men (especially when it comes to body hair). And certainly don’t want to waste time weeding out straight men. And so was born. [slideshow include=”881120,881121,881122,881123,881124″] “The actual trigger for me doing Dattch was hanging out with some of my girl mates, and a friend had broken up with her girlfriend and we were like ‘come on, you’re just going to have to sign up to a site’ and she was really reticent to do it because they are and were all utterly shit,” says Exton. The business opportunity she saw for Dattch was to take the exact opposite approach to cynical reskins, and build something that reflects what gay women actually want from a dating app. “Nobody was thinking about a female user, and actually how do women behave? What kind of triggers are they looking for?” she tells TechCrunch. So what are gay women looking for? Firstly, lots and lots of photos. “The key behaviours that we saw and that we’re now focusing on is that they like to browse for hours. They will look at every single photo, every single image, and it’s not just what you look like; women want to know the small things about you. But not in an awkward text description — they want to be able to absorb this content,” says Exton. Not just photos of potential dates, then, but photos of where you live, what you wear, things you like, places you want to go. “Women will be just as interested to see what your living room looks like, and what your favourite drink is,” she says. “What we’ve done now is to allow people to import these images that show who you are, rather than describing it. So it gives all the content for women to browse through.” “Women want to look at tonnes and tonnes of profiles, and then decide who they want to talk to,” she adds. Dattch is taking its design inspiration from female-friendly image curation site Pinterest. “Our profiles are these Pinterest-style boards that just give you tumbling images… It’s the idea that girls are creating these mood boards of themselves — so you look at it and you can take on board a lot of information, quite quickly, about the kind of person this person is.” The app’s other focus is on enabling its users to chat with each other via a text-based messaging feature. But even there the photos come into play — providing context and conversation starter topics for users. “Women want to chat a lot but they’re also not very good at starting the conversation — which I think is also symptomatic of the kind of profiles that exist. So when you’re on a platform like it’s fairly clear why you’re talking to each other. You don’t really need to have the softer entry stuff — it’s like ‘hey, what’s up. Wanna meet?’. It’s literally that kind of platform. But with girls they are actually looking to have a conversation,” says Exton. “The idea [with Dattch] was to start allowing people to pull in [contextual photo-based] content and then it’s easier to start a conversation. And you actually get a gist of who someone is and what you can start talking to them about.” Another Grindr factor that Exton argues doesn’t apply well to the gay female scene is proximity-based social networking. “In private beta we were showing you the closest user to you. And that’s basically not relevant for women. It’s like 1 percent of the time women are going to meet up within 30 minutes. Like gay guys often will. For women you’re probably looking at about a week before someone goes on a date, so seeing the closest person to you doesn’t add to that experience. “Now you just see generally women in your area… It doesn’t have to be that closest person. Then you’ll be able to customise it — in two builds from now — where you’ll be able to pick the distance you want to see people within, and then you’ll probably be able to pick an age range.” On the fake profiles issue, weeding out the men has been, and continues to be, a key priority for Dattch. Initially it was via a manual “profile validation” process that relied on cross-referencing with users’ Facebook profiles. It has since incorporated Facebook Connect to make the process easier, but it is also erring on the cautious side, as it tries to establish a trusted platform for female users, so it is also currently doing phone calls to verify gender (which sounds like a delicate balancing act, between building that user trust and being off-putting). It won’t be making calls forever, though. “Our first few thousand users are critical so it’s really important to us that we make this work — we can work out a way that will scale it once we’ve got it cracked. But the next version gets closer to automating it. Facebook Connect automates it for us but for the people who don’t want to use Facebook we’re working out how to automate it,” says Exton. Dattch ran in private beta for six months from last December, capped at 1,000 users. It’s since opened up as a public beta, targeting London initially and launching a redesigned app earlier this month (in which it’s still ironing out a few bugs). User numbers now are in the “thousands” — with the aim being to grow to tens or hundreds of thousands by year’s end. “In the U.K. Grindr has 180,000 users in London so eventually we want to [reach] that many users in London as well,” says Exton. For now, although anyone in the U.K. can download , it’s targeting the majority of its user acquisition efforts on London, with some small marketing efforts planned for a few other U.K. cities this year (namely Brighton, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow). Launching in the U.S. is on the cards for next year, where it will opt for a geofenced city-by-city rollout. Australia is also on its roadmap. After that Exton believes there’s also potential to enter China, where she argues that because there isn’t the same LGBT infrastructure — in terms of gay bars — “apps become really relevant.” Discussing the angel round Dattch has just closed, Exton says that targeting a less well-served market has sometimes counted against it in conversations with investors. “It’s not been the simplest to raise for a lesbian app,” she says. “Some people have been quite uncomfortable with what we do. “No one has done this before, no one has created an app for this market, so I think it’s a new market so possibly there’s a bit more caution around it,” she adds. |
Hackers Bypass Apple’s Touch ID With Lifted Fingerprint | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Fingerprint scanners have always been vulnerable to hackers who are willing to go the extra mile to bypass them. Over the years, we’ve seen everything from people using , and more sophisticated techniques to bypass these biometric scanners. It’s not really a surprise then, that Apple’s on the new iPhone 5s is vulnerable to these kinds of hacks as well. As Germany’s Chaos Computer Club (CCC) announced today, it has managed to by creating a fake finger that uses lifted prints to fool the scanner into believing it’s dealing with its rightful owner. But let’s put this hack into perspective. Getting this to work isn’t quite as easy as the CCC hackers make you think it is in their press release or : First you need some kind of colored powder or superglue to lift the fingerprint. Then you have to scan the fingerprint, invert it and print it with a resolution of 1200dpi or more onto a transparent sheet. After that, you build your fake finger by smearing pink latex milk or white wood glue into the pattern that the toner created onto the transparent sheet and wait for it to set. Finally, the CCC writes, “the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone.” This method should work for virtually every fingerprint scanner on the market today. If somebody is willing to go through all of this to break into your phone, chances are you have bigger issues than fingerprint security. Also, given that most iPhone users probably don’t even use a PIN code to secure their devices today, Touch ID still marks a massive step forward in smartphone security — even given the remote chance that somebody would lift your fingerprint and go through the trouble of bypassing it. If people are making latex replicas of your fingerprints, you have bigger problems than your iPhone's security. — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) Breaking: you can also access someone's phone if you kidnap them and torture them until they give up their password and/or fingerprint. — M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) |
Into the Gloss, An Editorial Beauty Site, Raises $2M To Build Its Team | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | The editorial beauty website has raised $2 million in venture capital funding led by Forerunner and Lerer Ventures, along with several angel investors. Since it was founded in September of 2010, the site has been making waves in the style space for its insider access-type interviews with editors, designers, writers, models, and other creatives about their beauty routines. Into The Gloss founder and creative director Emily Weiss said that since site’s founding it has been bootstrapped and profitable, mainly from advertising partnerships (the site runs both sidebar ads and sponsored content). The team currently comprises five people, and this infusion of cash will largely go toward making eight to ten hires across editorial, tech, and design, Weiss said. Although it may not be well known to most TechCrunch readers, Into The Gloss has been making waves in the fashion space for its sophisticated approach to beauty coverage that in many ways translates print aesthetics and taste into an effective online format. Unsurprising given that Weiss, Editorial Director Nick Axelrod, and Digital Director Michael Harper came to the venture from Vogue, Elle, and Nylon.com, respectively. What began as three or four posts a week has become roughly three per day — not exactly a high volume site, but Weiss has that quality over quantity has always been the aim. Unlike editorial sites that run on a blogger’s news cycle, Into The Gloss focuses more on original, evergreen content that usually involves a photo shoot and an interview. A of model Arizona Muse’s favorite products, or a liquid liner from Nasty Gal’s Makeup Artist in Chief, Stacey Nishimoto. When the site Refinery29 raised venture capital funding, they were en route to becoming a major media company. Refinery is now ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing media company in the United States, having done $16.6 million in revenue in 2012. I asked Weiss if Into The Gloss was going in a similar direction. “Though Into The Gloss began as a blog, we’ve always seen it as a multi-dimensional brand. We have ambitious plans for the future capitalizing on our unique positioning in the beauty landscape.” The site has been gradually ramping up its volume and range of posts in the last few years. We’ll be watching to see what moves they make in the coming months. |
Betabrand’s New Think Tank Mashes Up Kickstarter-Style Fundraising With Cult Clothing Manufacturing | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | San Francisco-based cult clothing retailer is debuting a new way for customers to engage in developing new products — an online think tank. The online-only clothing retailer, which launched in August 2010 and has and others, already allows its customers and fans to participate in the creation and promotion of its products. For example with its Disco Open Source Project, users can create their own specialty clothing using its disco fabric. With its Model Citizen program, customers can submit their own photos modeling the clothing they’ve bought on Betabrand. In both cases, Betabrand allows its customers and fans to act as pro bono designers and also its biggest advocates. Betabrand’s Think Tank allows customers to vote on what ideas should become prototypes. Once these are protyped, then other customers can actually choose to fund that clothing by committing to buying the piece if and when it meets the funding goal to manufacture. Basically, each piece of clothing needs to reach a tipping point in buying commitments to then be funded by Betabrand to develop and manufacture. If and when you choose to commit to buying an item (literally funding the project), you’ll receive up to 30 percent off the item for committing early. Here’s an example of a submitted and created by one of Betabrand’s community members. Another example is this , created by Betabrand founder Chris Lindland, is at 84 percent funding to goal, with six days left to fund. The blazer would normally cost $188 but any backers would pay $150. Lindland tells us that in the three weeks of launching the Think Tank, four to six new products are actually being funded per week. As he explains, the Think Tank is the perfect way to prototype and create buzz around ideas, including ones submitted by users. It’s also a valuable data play, he adds, because the company is able to see what buyers are interested in before putting resources toward designing and manufacturing new clothing and products. While some of Betabrand’s products (i.e. ) have bordered on wacky, the company is truly advancing the concept of blending crowdsourcing, customer demand and manufacturing. Not only is Betabrand building a community around its products, but it’s attempting to create engagement that most online retailers are unable to attain. Lindland is attempting to hack the manufacturing process for clothing to create products that his customers actually want. It’s similar in some ways to what is trying to do. Will it work? Early results are good, he says, with a growing number of customers committing to buying items. |
BBM’s Android And iOS Launch Weekend Going About As Badly As Possible | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | BlackBerry trumpeted its intention to deliver the long-awaited Android and iOS versions of its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service this weekend, and so fans around the world eagerly awaited the mobile software’s debut. But debut the apps didn’t, at least not as intended and not for the vast majority of expectant fans. As of right now, BlackBerry’s BBM apps for iOS and Android are nowhere to be seen, after the iOS version’s staged rollout of midnight local time at each country around the world got put on hold somewhere around India, and the Android version was a no-show altogether. The Android BBM app was originally slated for a Saturday launch, but the iOS version beat it out of the gate, and both got “paused” after a leaked version of the official Android .apk decimated BlackBerry’s servers. Late yesterday , which it says is due to overwhelming demand. “Prior to launching BBM for Android, an unreleased version of the BBM for Android app was posted online,” reads a statement from its official blog. “The interest and enthusiasm we have seen already – more than 1.1 million active users in the first eight hours without even launching the official Android app – is incredible.” After that original post, those waiting for the official apps had nothing to go on for roughly 15 hours, followed by the most recent official word on the situation via BBM’s verified Twitter account. The most recent news is no news, however, with simply a restatement of its message from earlier that the company is working hard to restore the rollout. We will provide you an update on timing as soon as we can. Teams are working non-stop. Sign up for launch alerts at — BBM (@BBM) I’ve been eager to get on board with either the Android or the iPhone version, because it means I can finally talk to my father again after so many years of silence. I’ll be able to BBM him for the two months it’ll take for his new iPhone to ship to him, and then I can safely delete the app again. I asked my sister’s boyfriend, who just got an iPhone 5s, whether he’s excited about being able to take his BBM network with him as he switches. Here’s what he had to say: I only have 3 people on BBM now. 2 are [your sister, work and personal ] and the other is your dad. I used to have 30 BBM contacts. The launch of BBM for iPhone and Android, should it ever actually happen, will be a nice escape raft for people still clinging to the sinking ship, but that’s about it. The other ship BlackBerry is conceivably aiming to float here, the one where it builds a competitive cross-platform messaging platform to rival WhatsApp and others, has already sailed long, long ago. |
Apple TV 6.0 Update Pulled After Users Report Bricking, Other Issues | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | On Friday, Apple launched its 6.0 software update for its set-top box, but soon after, some users reported that the update bricked their devices while others were a bit luckier and just lost their connection to the Internet or had to restore their machines. Some users are also reporting extremely and many seem to have some or all of the movies and TV shows they downloaded from Apple’s servers. Now, it looks like Apple has , which was the first to introduce its new service to the set-top box. Apple’s own support forums are currently about these issues. For some users with multiple Apple TVs at home, the update seems to work on some and fail on others. It’s unclear what exactly causes these issues, which seem to affect both the Apple TV 2 and 3. While the Apple TV is typically a standalone device, getting it back to work may mean that you have to connect it to your PC or Mac to restore it. To do so, you need a micro USB cable, connect the box to the PC, bring up iTunes, select the Apple TV in the Devices list and click ‘restore.’ That’s not very complicated (and easy for anybody who has ever tried an Apple TV jailbreak), but it’s also not something most users would even think about doing. For some, however, even this procedure . So far, we haven’t heard anything official from Apple, but it’s clear that the 6.0 update has been pulled for the time being (it’s currently not available for my personal Apple TV either). We will update this post once we hear more. |
Mobile Apps, Card Interfaces, And Our Opposable Thumbs | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | TechCrunch This is a post about “cards” as an interface in mobile apps. I am not a designer. I am also unable to mention every single app that uses cards — feel free to mention others in the comments. Additionally, I don’t know which apps should be credited with popularizing cards, or when that happened. For this post, it doesn’t matter. I’m also going to be talking about cards in the context of iOS, because that’s what I know, though it applies to any mobile device. With those disclaimers out of the way, I want to share why I believe “cards” are becoming more prevalent as a mobile interface. As I was tweeting about cards over the last few weeks, a friend pointed me to a great by noted mobile expert , in which he demonstrates his design thinking in designing the app in an age when mobile users look at their phones hundreds of times per day, often for only a few minutes at a time. Wroblewski’s post is worth reading and includes a short, insightful video on users’ “finger behavior.” The essence of all of this boils down to the following, which we all intuitively understand: We use our phones most often with one hand, and more specifically, we navigate with one finger — the thumb. It’s all in the thumb, says Wroblewski, and I would bet scores of other designers agree. This may be why we see navigation buttons on the bottom of apps (Instagram), or anticipatory cards that push relevant information to users (Google Now), or drawers or “hamburger” icons to reveal settings or menus (Facebook), or radial buttons that open up a series of possible actions (Path), or advanced left-to-right swiping gestures in email apps (Mailbox), or why photo-sharing network apps use the “flick up and down” gestures to scroll through images (Frontback). The list goes on and on. All of this thumb-swiping makes me wonder: Should nearly every mobile app be rethought of in this “thumb-dominant” context? Surely some apps require more digits for interaction, and some require that users type more (maybe both thumbs, or some eccentric combination), but beyond those, if the thumb is essentially the mouse for touch-enabled mobile devices, the “card” on a mobile device becomes more and more important as a digestible unit of information on a small screen for users who are on the go and mostly glancing through their apps before settling into the ones that truly engage them. I have been thinking about cards because the company I work for ( ) uses them. As an audio/news player, the app uses a cards interface to let users swipe left-to-right to skip tracks, to swipe upward to bookmark, and to swipe down to reveal advanced controls. This isn’t to say every app should use cards, of course, but users do seem to like the simplicity of the dimensions and seem to intuitively understand the physics of turning a card over for more information and controls. And, well before mobile devices, cards were always all around us — business cards, playing cards, and so forth. In fact, one of the reasons I got interested in this concept, not being a designer, of course, is the memory of baseball cards, that most everything I needed to know about a player could be contained on both sides of a small playing card. A two-sided card seems to fit nicely in this mobile age. Perhaps that’s why Tinder’s user interface is so popular as its users quickly through picture tiles, or why Apple’s Passbook and Reminders apps use a cards interface with information and controls on both sides, or why a NYC-based entrepreneur named is trying to rebuild mobile web pages into cards as the focus of his new startup, . Going back to some of the pre-iPhone iPods, even back then we could scroll through album art. Perhaps that was the beginning of cards. Perhaps we’ve been trained to swipe cards on mobile devices for over a decade now, and that interaction appears to be here to stay. Whatever the origin, it may be moot — the snacking, on-the-go, one-handed behaviors of mobile users today seem to indicate that, for now, a one-thumb navigable card is the interface of choice, and until the next designer invents that new atomic unit and corresponding gestures to go along with it, we will have to sit tight and keep shuffling the deck. : / |
Hands On With The Brooklyn-Made Makerbot Digitizer | John Biggs | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | The looked too good to be true. It was a solid, compact 3D scanner that could replicate a solid object without much fuss and had a level of detail unparalleled in the home scanning market. Now it’s clear that this is much more than a compelling idea. I saw the Makerbot in action yesterday and spoke with Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis about his experience building the entire system – from PCBs to case – in America and how it felt to be a manufacturer in the heart of Brooklyn. “It feels great,” he said. The whole system is surprisingly light and uses Class 1 lasers and a special camera to gather a point cloud based on the object you’re scanning. You tell the system how light or dark the object is and then click a button. A few minutes later you have a complete object that you can modify, edit, or augment digitally and then print using almost any printer. It also exports files into Makerbot compatible .thing files. A turntable rotates the object slowly so every surface is scanned. The will ship in October and sell for $1,400. Pettis promised that they would have enough on hand to meet demand and that his factory was working overtime to get the devices ready. |
Introducing Apple’s New “Kids” App Store | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Apple has finally take steps to better cater to the children who have adopted its devices, and especially family favorite the iPad, with the launch of a Kids App Store. Arriving this week alongside the launch of iOS 7, the Kids App Store store is not a separate mobile application, to be clear, but is rather a new section within the Apple App Store itself, which now features an added “Kids” category where apps are broken down by age range. This section of the store separates the apps into three age ranges, spanning those 5 and under, those between 6 and 8, and finally, those for kids between 9 and 11. The company first revealed this “Kids” section at its earlier this summer when the revamped iOS 7 mobile operating system was first revealed. The updated mobile App Store app also saw a number of other changes, including the removal of “Genius” from the bottom menu in favor of apps “Near Me” for example, support for automatic app updates, and more. In addition to better organizing the mobile apps targeting children for ease-of-use, the Kids App Store also comes at a time when Apple has begun to allow children under 13 to sign up for and hold iTunes user accounts, as long as they’re funneled through an “approved educational institution.” As , Apple will face a lot more scrutiny now that it’s making mobile apps available directly to younger children. Apps aimed at the under-13 set, for example, will need to follow the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requirements. These state that developers can’t ask for personal info from kids, expect for “the purpose of complying with applicable children’s privacy statues” – that is, not in order to gather information for targeting ads. The apps can’t transmit or share personal information without parental consent, either. And in addition to now being required to have clear privacy policies, apps in this section can’t use ads that ask kids to complete some sort of in-app activity and have to ask for parents’ permissions before they link outside the app to the web or other software, for the purpose of commerce. That’s right: no more spammy pop-ups, or tricks and nags to get kids to buy…at least not in this section. For many reputable kids’ app developers, compliance with the new policies was not a serious issue. “The changes were minor,” says Mindshapes Joint CEO Chris Michaels, whose company has three applications in the Kids category upon launch. “We have included a privacy policy within the app, per Apple’s requirements. We had already implemented other features for compliance, notably parent gating on any transactional or outbound link-based content, earlier in 2013,” he said. Toca Boca’s CEO Björn Jeffery added that while many kids app developers, like his company, had complied with most of Apple’s rules much earlier, “a few of the more shady developers probably had no intention of even trying to comply.” And as word gets out that the “safe” apps for children are found in the Kids section of iTunes, those still trying to monetize via children’s in-app actions and purchases may see their businesses affected negatively. “Apple is clearly doing the right things and trying to stamp out some of the abuse that has happened in this sector with unscrupulous app developers tricking kids into making in-app purchases,” said Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder at StoryBots, noting also that his company only had to make minor tweaks to become compliant with the new policies. In the case of a large publisher, like Disney, its apps were already COPPA-compliant as of this summer, and it added an “age gate” for anything related to in-app purchasing, registering, or email capture. Basically, this is a pop-up window that features a code generator where you have to read and enter a code before you can proceed. Other apps use special actions, like a press and hold gesture, or require parents to have a separate in-app account. Across the board, most of the well-known kids brands told us similar stories about the changes – that they involved minimal efforts on their parts, and these “new” policies are things they were doing anyway. Only now there’s more structure to the system, and they’re no longer lumped in with apps that don’t play by the rules. In both the mobile iOS 7 App Store and updated iTunes desktop software, the Kids section breaks out the specially vetted applications separately from the more general “Education” section, which still remains. Though there’s a lot of crossover between the two categories, the Kids section is really a curated subset of the Education section, where apps can extend beyond the early learning crowd to include those aimed also at adults and “lifelong learners.” At launch, the Kids store includes thematic app collections, including “Create & Play,” “Shapes & Colors,” “Explore the World,” “First Words & Numbers,” “Musical Apps,” “Learning Made Fun,” “Interactive Kids Stories,” and more. Big name kids brands are also given their own collections, like Disney, Toca Boca, Duck Duck Moose, SagoSago (a Toca Boca brand, ), Sesame Street, PBS Kids, and others, giving them a higher profile as a kids’ app maker than in the past. While the majority of the apps have an educational bent to them, some of the games showcased are more entertainment-focused – like the ones where your child can “Facetime” Elmo or Cookie Monster, for example. But as noted above, these apps don’t continually pester children to tap on ads or buy additional items (like those Talking character apps at Out Fit7 do). Not only are the purchases hidden away in a gated “parent’s area,” as noted above, many of the apps in this section are paid apps, indicating their increased quality. As a parent trying out many of the featured apps over the past few days with my preschool-aged daughter, it has been smooth sailing. Instead of the continual frustration that accompanies the low-quality, advertising-filled free apps we’ve tried in the past, she’s able to just enjoy the storytelling and interactivity without being pushed and tricked into purchase behaviors she can’t yet understand. I’ve cleared out the iPad of those older apps, and have filled it only with newly vetted ones from the Kids store. It’s a weekend project I’d recommend to any parent with a little free time this Sunday, too. Though it’s still early days, Alan Shusterman, CEO at Duck Duck Moose, whose apps were featured by Apple in 14 collections, says he’s already seeing a positive impact on sales. Sara DeWitt, Vice President, PBS KIDS Digital, said they are too, and expect that trend to continue. And Yves Saada, Vice President, Digital Media at Disney Publishing, says that Kids category aids in discoverability, and the company is already seeing an increase in downloads. Others, like Toca Boca, say there haven’t been major spikes yet, but over time they expect the category to continuously get a visible spot in Apple’s store, leading to more sales for developers in the long run. To access the new children’s app store in iTunes, click on the list of Categories and choose “Kids.” |
Apple? They Make The Cheap Plastic Phones, Right? | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Apple could learn a lot from the fall of Burberry. The once-exclusive fashion brand became associated with trashy youth by greedily licensing out its signature tan chequered pattern for use on baseball caps and other cheap clothes. Suddenly, the rich clientele it had catered to for a century wanted nothing to do with Burberry. Could Apple’s iPhone brand have the same trouble after selling the cheaper, color-splashed iPhone 5c? Obviously there are a lot of differences between Burberry and Apple. Apple isn’t licensing the iPhone name to be shoddily produced by another company. And people buy iPhones for their utility, not just their fashion. But by selling cheaper (than the 5s), loudly-colored phones, there’s a chance it could negatively impact the perception of the status of the iPhone brand to more sophisticated luxury consumers. Burberry was once the height of upper-class , with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn donning its iconic trench coats which retail for thousands and thousands of pounds. Owning a piece of Burberry-cheqed clothing was aspirational, a sign of success. Yet in the 1980’s and 1990’s the brand began juicing short-term profits by licensing its pattern and logo to manufacturers of everything from cut-rate clothes to liquor to dog toilet paper. of the “ — British slang for trashy people trying to appear classier than they are through gaudy fashion. Soccer hooligans, sketchy streetpeople, and a C-list celebrities causing trouble became associated with Burberry. The brand reached its low when a washed up British soap opera actress who’d had her septum removed due to cocaine abuse hit the front of the tabloids with her child, both in the Burberry chequered print. While cheap licensed products and counterfeits flooded the streets, tarnishing the brand’s image, sales of the expensive fashion-wear that’s the foundation of Burberry’s business took a nosedive. Burberry was no longer a sign of high-status, and fashion mavens began to look elsewhere. is how its designer Sir Jonny Ive describes the new iPhone 5c that debuted last week. “Those cheap-y, plastic-y phones” is how a less tech-conscious friend of mine described the 5c to me last weekend over brunch. “I don’t like the new iPhone (meaning the premium 5s) because they made those cheap-y, plastic-y phones too”. This sure as hell isn’t an expansive empirical study or representative sample of opinions of the 5c. It’s a one-off anecdote. But I doubt my friend is the only one who feels this way, consciously or sub-consciously, and it’s a perception Apple should be concerned with. There are lots of reasons to sell a plastic iPhone. It gives consumers a choice beyond just an older model. It’s more durable than a glass iPhone 4S. It could help Apple expand its marketshare, thereby keeping iOS the first choice of platforms for developers. Its bright colors and price point could appeal to kids as they . Apple’s colored iMacs and iPods certainly sold well. And it keeps Apple from having to sell the pricey industrial design that went into the iPhone 5 (now taken off the market) at a discount. Done tactfully, the iPhone 5c could be a huge short and long-term win for Apple. It might become the best-selling iPhone ever. But being “unapologetic” about the plastic iPhone has its pitfalls. Even if the phone is well made (check out our ), and the $99 on contract price point doesn’t actually put a “cheaper” phone in Apple’s lineup, just the fact that it costs less than the 5s causes some people to perceive the iPhone 5c as “cheap”, and perception matters. Again, the $99 on contract iPhone 5c is not cheaper than buying a year old iPhone like Apple used to sell, but it may be perceived as cheap. The colors it comes in don’t do it any favors. They scream PlaySkool souvenir kid’s toy — the opposite of sophistication. Considering Apple has become one of the world’s most valuable companies by selling sophistication to those who can afford to pay a high margin, this is risky business. But rather than try to mitigate the perception of the iPhone 5c as cheap, Apple’s $29 colored rubber cases make it even worse. They’ve been promoted in eye-bleed color combinations like a green phone with a pink case. The sight of those highlighter iPhone 5c’s in the hands of kids and others who couldn’t afford a 5s could leave wealthier consumers less enamored with the iPhone brand as a whole. Is this judgement and classism terrible? Yes, but that won’t stop people. Burberry was able to save itself by hiring a new CEO, Angela Ahrendts, who led an effort to buy back 23 of its licenses and fight counterfeiters. Ahrendts also scaled back its signature plaid so it appeared on of Burberry clothing instead of 20%. It signed on new faces for the brand like Emma Watson, and sued people who used its trademark illegally. Burberry is even and the 5s to capture photos of its new fashion line. Soon, Burberry regained its image as a sought-after upscale brand, and sales of its pricier items soared, and Burberry revenue has more than . However, the chav image still haunts Burberry to this day. Still, Apple should heed these lessons as it promotes the iPhone 5c. It’s fine to appeal to a larger swath of the market and give people choice in pricing. But it must strive to maintain the iPhone’s image as the classiest handset on the market. That might mean toning down the color clashing when it promotes the 5c cases, carefully choosing where it promotes what model, and realizing it can be proud of its plastic without unapologetically alienating high-end buyers. Otherwise, a few years down the road it might be the one saying sorry to investors. |
You Win, Republicans. My GIF Reaction To Their GIF OpED | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | GIFs are the hot new thing. News organization BuzzFeed.com, which has staked its future on dozens of GIF and listicle posts a day, . Attention-starved politicians want in on the action. So last week, Republicans published out a GIF-filled against Democratic opposition to an oil pipeline. It was an instant success; the post snagged headlines from a dozen tech and mainstream outlets. The Internet went bananas: Here’s a of what the Energy and Commerce Committee put out (full post ): I was all like, “No, I’m not going to click on this transparent click-bait piece of propaganda. Democracy deserves better.” Then, at some point in the day, I was burnt out from work. In a moment of weakness, I decided to see what all the fuss what about. I clicked and was instantly all like: It was addicting. Ordinarily I fill my downtime with a mix of episodes and cat videos. Instead, I was learning. Ten minutes later, I awoke from my daze with the full (if biased) history of the Keystone XL pipeline. Despite my knee-jerk belief that GIF posts were devolving news into an adolescent version of itself, I’m now convinced that these playful little guys deserve a seat at the big boys’ table. Let’s face it, we’re all on information overload, and we can’t read every piece of serious news out there. It’s okay to laugh and learn at the same time, especially when we would otherwise just choose to laugh. Ben Smith of BuzzFeed crafted an eloquent defense of this new type of journalism, “Once you stop laughing and start thinking, the extreme virulence of the social web just might revolutionize the way you think about the world too.” In the end, I don’t care how people share important nuggets of information, just so long as they do, especially if it reaches a demographic that never would have read it in the first place. So, kudos Republicans. May we all enjoy many more GIFS. [Image Credit: Reactiongifs.com, Giphy.com] |
BlackBerry Cancels Its 2Q2014 Earnings Call | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | its second-quarter earnings call, which was scheduled to take place along with the release of its financial results on Friday. The company said the cancellation was because of it signed earlier this week. Fairfax agreed to pay $4.7 billion for the beleaguered phone maker. Further details about its second-quarter results will be released when BlackBerry files financial statements next week. The company has already issued a grim outlook for it 2Q2014 earnings, which are far below analysts’ expectations. BlackBerry said it will report quarterly revenue of about $1.6 billion, a dramatic decline from $3.1 billion in the first quarter. GAAP net operating loss will be between $950 million and $995 million, due largely to underwhelming BlackBerry Z10 sales. This is the latest announcement in a difficult week for the phone maker. On Sept. 20, BlackBerry temporarily trading of its shares to confirm reports that 4,500 employees–or about 30% to 40% of its total workforce– . T-Mobile also said earlier today that . |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | null |
Amazon Faces High-Stakes Challenge In Scaling Mayday On-Demand Support | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | What happens when it’s easier to call tech support than to Google your problem? Amazon might discover the costly answer to that question depending on how much the owners of its new use its Mayday on-demand video customer support feature. And whether they behave themselves. is available at the tap of a button in the Kindle HDX’s Quick Settings menu. 24 hours a day, year round, it pops up a little video window on-screen showing a support agent. They can’t see you but can hear you, talk to you, draw on your screen to guide you, and even take control of your screen to help you out. As , Mayday might not be able to solve one of the most common types of tech problems: broken Internet. That won’t stop it from answering plenty of other queries from the old, young, and frequently confused. You can watch videos of Mayday in action If Amazon can scale Mayday it would be amazing. Both in the sense that it would make many people’s lives with technology easier, and it would be a remarkable logistics feat. It could become an industry benchmark for premier service. I’d love to see this succeed. Today, most companies put lots of support info online, but if you want handholding from a human, you have to work for it. Look at Apple’s Genius Bars. You have to make an appointment, trek out to a retail store, and show up on time. That erects a barrier to use while giving people an option when they really need assistance. With phone based customer support, you have to look up the number, wade through phone menus, wait on hold, and then explain what you’re looking at to a support agent that is essentially flying blind. All this friction sucks. So why does it exist? It’s cost-effective. Having tons of support people available on-demand straight from your device would be awesome…and could be very expensive for Amazon. Mayday could become a big selling point for the device and save the company from losing money to returns, thereby paying for itself. But it’s a gamble on whether people will bash that button too often. The question is how much Amazon will have to compromise on its vision. The company has told reporters it wants Mayday to let you get support within 15 seconds at any time, even on a busy Christmas morning, and have no limit on how often you can call for help. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went to bat for Mayday, telling TechCrunch that it functions similar to the company’s other call centers. He seemed confident Amazon could pull it off. After all, it’s managed quite a few miracles in ecommerce scaling. Still, it may need to include fine print that it can suspend Mayday service for abuse. If you Mayday because you’re lonely, or want to show someone your cat photos, it might need to cut you off. If you try to show the representative porn through the screenshare or verbally terrorize them, it might need to ban you for life. But what if you’re just really lazy and call in every day with semi-legitimate questions? Amazon will need to determine where to draw the line. Maybe the fundamental challenges of scaling Mayday signals Amazon doesn’t have a massive amount of active Kindle users today, as . Amazon is notoriously secretive about Kindle sales and engagement numbers, so we don’t know what level of HDX devices it might sell and have to support. But if anyone can figure out how to make this all work and save us from support call menu hell, it’s probably Bezos. Turning cost-prohibitive fantasies into margin-less realities is his specialty. And if the problem isn’t the volume of Mayday requests per customer but the total thanks to high sales, things could be worse. Just ask the Microsoft Surface. |
Elop Conspiracy? Not So Much | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | If you read the news yesterday, you might have run into a few articles discussing the exit of former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, the terms of his exit, the , and how he was a mole in the Finnish company determined to bring it down in flames. Well, maybe not that last bit, but people did write it. There is in the market that, perhaps, Elop (a former Microsoft employee) purposefully tanked Nokia, thus forcing a sale to an outside party (in this case, Microsoft), triggering a bundle of cash for himself. Fun to think about, but is it fair? Let’s find out. As earlier this week, “Mr Elop’s contract – according to a 2012 SEC filing – stipulated that if he resigned after a change of control he would be entitled to 18 months of compensation and” accelerated equity vesting. So, if Elop left the firm following a “change of control” he was entitled to a chunk of money, coming in the form of salary, management incentives, and stock. But he had to quit. The accelerated vesting portion of the above matters as, it turns out, that’s the largest piece of the total compensation package. Nokia changed its contract with Elop at the same time that the Microsoft deal came together, essentially altering the wording so that it would allow Elop to receive the accelerated vesting without resigning. Note that in the above, Elop had to resign. He didn’t. Instead, he stepped down from his role as CEO to become Nokia’s Executive Vice President of Devices & Services group (what Microsoft is buying). We now turn to to get our heads around the situation. Strap in for some dry English: Under the terms of the amendment, Mr. Elop resigned from our Board of Directors and from his positions of President and Chief Executive Officer as of the date following the date of the Purchase Agreement, September 3, 2013. This is as stated above: Elop had his contract modified at the time of the Microsoft deal. Nokia, below, enacts changes that to allow him to not resign, and still get the equity . What you need to get from the next two paragraphs is the nuance of the previous contract situation between Nokia, and Elop [emphasis mine]: payment of 18 months of his base salary and management short-term cash incentive accelerated vesting of his outstanding equity awards Elop would get the money, however, even if Nokia didn’t sell itself, or a big part of itself, which matters, as it indicates that Elop would have been entitled the funds regardless of the sale to Microsoft (this cuts at the conspiracy theory a bit, of course): So, if Elop quit “for cause” he got the full bank account, but if he was fired by Nokia “without cause” or change of control, he only got the cash and not the stock. So, being fired would have been financially detrimental to Elop. That’s reasonable. Now, however, regardless of how Elop leaves, he gets the full accounting. Generous? Slightly, but keep in mind that the new agreement was inked at the same time the deal with Microsoft was. So, the risk here was essentially nil, with Nokia stating that Elop would be compensated as he would have if he had quit. Here’s the bit about how much money Elop gets his hands on: Who pays the tab? Interestingly, Nokia is only paying the tip, with Microsoft picking up 70 percent of the costs at hand. Why all the above? It’s a good question. The Financial Times has notes from , the chairman of Nokia’s board, explaining their thought process: “He explained why Nokia had amended Mr Elop’s contract at the same time as the Microsoft deal, saying that otherwise Mr Elop had the right to ‘call a breach if we change[d] his role considerably'” So, bumping him down from CEO would have been an issue (he could have deemed the demotion of “breach” of contract), and (as noted in the first quoted paragraph of the filing), both Nokia and Elop felt that the move didn’t count as a resignation. So, to keep the deal train on the rails, the contract was amended to ensure that Elop got his full potential exit stash, while not forcing him to actually resign. Note that in the above filing language, if Elop resigned, he was entitled to all the money. So, Nokia had incentive to keep the guy around. Thus, the late contract changes solved all problems: Nokia got to keep Elop until closing the Microsoft deal, Elop got all his money, and the sale had no legal hangups. The kicker for Nokia is that it got Microsoft to finance 13.17 million Euros of the package. The equity that Elop gets as a result of not resigning and the contract shuffling is 14.6 million Euros. So, Nokia is paying Elop to stick around using someone else’s bank account. Nice trick. Microsoft has essentially unlimited foreign cash reserves, so it won’t miss the few dollars. All the above is a boring and tedious exercise in corporate contracts. You are welcome. We now turn to the second question. If the last-minute changes to Elop’s contract were boring and not impactful (except to Elop and a single Microsoft bank account), what about the supposed alleged initial sin of having performance incentives for Elop that could be triggered by a sale of Nokia itself? We must rewind slightly: . Risto Siilasmaa (again, Nokia’s chairman), told the press that Elop’s contract was all but the same as the contract of his predecessor. That wasn’t true. It is quite likely true that the two were greatly and substantially similar, but, there was a key difference: Elop gets quite a bit more money than his predecessor would have in similar circumstances. In fact, if I have this straight, the CEO before Elop would not have been entitled to the quick vesting in the event of a sale, change of role, resignation, or breach of contract by Nokia. So, Elop is doing better than the guy before him would have in the event of a sale of Nokia, and would have come out ahead – again, it appears – in other circumstances, as well. This is where the conspiracy cranks to over 9000: Nokia baked financial incentive into Elop’s contract should he sell the company. Therefore, didn’t it incentivize him to sell the company? Oddly, not really. Recall this: “Under his original agreement, Mr. Elop would be entitled to these same benefits if he terminated his employment for cause at any time regardless of a change of control.” The man had the same bucket of cash if he checked out without selling a damn thing. It appears instead that the sale of the company was one of several contingencies that were discussed as potentialities, and Elop wanted to have his financial ass covered for all of them. The dollar amount, please recall, ain’t that much: $25 million or so between two companies moving more than $7 billion across the table is crumbs. And Elop will be taken care of in Redmond as well, where he might become the new CEO. So, to believe that there is a material conspiracy at hand you have to believe that Elop negotiated his contract at the start of his tenure as CEO of Nokia with the aim in mind of fucking the company, that he wanted a clause that would allow him to hurt Nokia until it was sold off, so that he could pocket $25 million. Kicker: He was a well-paid CEO. Note that his salary as listed above for an 18-month period was 4.1 million euros. Kill the company for another 13.7 million euros that he would have received to boot if he had stayed or quit? It just doesn’t feel reasonable. So much of the vitriol toward Elop concerning the payment appears to be misplaced anger: People are utterly pissed at the decline of Nokia as a global smartphone power, and they place that blame on Elop. Therefore, for him to receive a single damn dime is too much for them. And, as most folks don’t take the time to dig into the weeds to uncover the details, it appeared to some that he was being bought off for selling the local corporate crown jewel. When Elop came to Nokia, he released the now famous (infamous?) that essentially stated that if Nokia didn’t dramatically change its operations, it would die. Full stop. Dramatic language? You bet: I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform. And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. […] While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind. […] We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. It was almost brave in its stern condemnation of Nokia’s market position and prospects. Elop and the company’s board eventually picked Windows Phone as their future platform, a decision that brought with it a huge amount of Redmond cash. Nokia now controls around 90 percent of the Windows Phone market, which could hit 10 million devices in the fourth calendar quarter of 2013. Nokia is diminished, and will now be snapped into pieces and sold off. Fallen giants don’t always die as a unit; in this case, Microsoft is buying body parts instead of a corpse. I bring all this up to indicate that Elop didn’t act in a manner that befits the idea that he was out to hurt Nokia. That would have been simple: Do nothing and watch it die. — To sum, the recent contract changes to Elop’s deal with Nokia were to prevent breach, and not force him to resign before exiting to Microsoft. Microsoft is bearing nearly all the financial burden of the change. And, Elop had a better (in personal financial terms) contract than his predecessor that covered multiple contingencies, including a sale of Nokia. There is not much else to say. |
SecondMarket Launches A Bitcoin Investment Trust For Accredited Investors | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | As Bitcoin, the math-based currency that enthusiasts say could revolutionize online transactions, becomes more mainstream, its supporters have been looking for ways to make it more accessible to investors. Today SecondMarket, a platform where privately-held or growth-stage companies can raise capital, says it is . It’s an open-ended fund that lets institutional and accredited investors dabble in the crypto-currency without necessarily having to go through the headache of managing wallets or direct transactions. It invests exclusively in Bitcoin and investors who buy shares in the trust will be able to gain liquidity through regular auctions beginning next year on SecondMarket. Unlike the have been exploring, this one is only available to accredited investors, who are required to have higher annual incomes or net worth. Because this fund is only open to accredited investors, it doesn’t have to pass the same exploratory process that a wider ETF would need to go through with regulators. SecondMarket says that the new trust’s sponsor is Alternative Currency Asset Management, a subsidiary the company created. They also put a $2 million seed investment into the trust. It’s worth noting that Barry Silbert, SecondMarket’s CEO, has been a longtime enthusiast of the currency. He personally has made several angel investments in Bitcoin-related startups and . Bitcoin is a math-based currency that some say could . Its value as measured in U.S. dollars reached an all-time high earlier this year, the currency settled back at a . The market capitalization of all Bitcoins in circulation currently sits at around $1.5 billion. |
Nest Labs To Open Up Its Learning Thermostat To Developers | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | The Nest Learning Thermostat is about to get a little smarter (and perhaps ). Speaking at CEDIA Expo 2013, Tony Fadell, the company’s co-founder and CEO, that’s aimed at developers looking to integrate the Learning Thermostat within their ecosystem. Want one app to control your smart lighting, fan, security system climate control? This API could be the missing link to a truly smart home. The CEDIA Expo trade show is the perfect venue for this announcement. The show is headlined by the large home automation companies. Control4, AMX, Creston are the big draws, and attendees flock to the CEDIA Expo to learn about the latest in home automation. And now, with Nest, developers and installers can incorporate the swanky (and smart) thermostat into high-end home automation installs. But Nest foresees a bigger draw for this API than just home automation companies. “We not looking for just large companies,” said Greg Hu, Nest Senior Product Manager, adding “companies not historically in the home automation space. This is for any company or product helping to drive comfort in the home.” He added that with this API, companies making web-connected home lighting or fans could incorporate control of the Learning Thermostat. “Since we launched in 2011, there’s been steady demand from the developer community for Nest to create an API,” said Matt Rogers, Nest founder and vice president of engineering. “While we’ve always wanted to create a Nest Developer Program, our first priority was to build a great product, customer experience and team. We’ve defined what the Nest experience should be. And now we’re getting ready to open our doors.” This API is Nest’s answer to the Learning Thermostat’s lack of Z-Wave or ZigBee wireless communication. Nest came under fire from the CEDIA crowd when the Learning Thermostat launched since it wouldn’t work within even $100k home automation systems. The thermostat wasn’t friendly with others. It wouldn’t talk to other home automation products using the legacy home automation protocols. This API could change everything. In theory, with this API, the Nest Learning Thermostat could become just another step in a home theater macro or security system profile. Click “Watch a Movie on a Control4 remote (or Control4 iPad app) and the lights will dim, the projector will blink to life, the receiver will click to the correct input, and, for some reason, if the person wanted, the Nest Learning Thermostat could drop the temperature a few degrees to encourage cuddling while watching the movie. “We’ve been working with Nest to bring our customers and installers a level of integration that previously hasn’t been available with the Nest Learning Thermostat,” said Eric Anderson, senior vice president, products at Control4. “For customers, the partnership means they’ll be able to control their Nest thermostats through any Control4 interface such as a remote, touch screen or mobile app.” With long time Apple veteran Tony Fadell at the helm, it should not come as a surprise that Nest is following Apple’s game plan. The company released its first shiny object, improved upon it and released a second generation — all the while ignoring the outside noise. Now, some two years after the first generation hit, the company is opening up the device to developers in an attempt to create a thriving ecosystem. . Fadell failed to announce the Protect or indicate if this API will work with that product at launch. |
Apple Uses Bluetooth LE To Enable Apple TV ‘Touch To Set Up’ Via iOS 7 Devices | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Apple is leveraging the Bluetooth LE technology that it has been building into every iPhone since the iPhone 4S to enable automatic setup of an Apple TV 3G. Just touch a device running iOS 7 to a newer Apple set-top box to have it automatically set up Wi-Fi networks, region settings and Apple Store accounts. This essentially means — as far as we can tell — that Apple is using technology similar to the kind it ‘, a Bluetooth LE device that broadcasts a data payload to any compatible BT device in the area. This can enable complex interaction without having to be on the same Wi-Fi network or even paired with a target device. But it also may use the iPod Accessory Protocol, also supported by BLE. The ‘one touch’ setup was Aaron G and noted in an article earlier today. The Apple gives us some clues that point to BlueTooth LE being the technology driving the interaction. A technology that Apple uses in its iBeacon protocol. From what we understand, this is turning the Apple TV into an iBeacon in Apple’s consumer sense of the word, but it uses similar technology. To make it work, you enable Bluetooth on your iPhone 4S, iPad 3G, iPad mini or iPod touch 5G and newer. Then, you tap it to an Apple TV 3G that’s sitting on the setup screen. Your devices will enter an out-of-band pairing and you’ll be prompted to enter your Apple ID on your iOS device. You can then choose to have it remember that data for purchases on your Apple TV if you wish. The Apple TV will then auto-configure itself, bypassing the super awkward process of entering your Apple ID and Wi-Fi information using Apple’s stick of gum remote. The Apple TV has to be on version 6.0 or later and iOS devices on 7.0 or later. The fact that the help doc tells you that you must turn on Bluetooth is a dead giveaway that this is based on the tech that Apple has been building into its devices for longer than it has needed it. Apple built support for Bluetooth LE into its devices for a while and iBeacon support into the latest iOS and Apple TV software. We tried out the new setup method and it worked as advertised. We did discover however that physical contact was not required, as the Apple TV paired with our device up to 8 inches out. We were able to tap it and get it to work, but also simply moving it within a foot or so seemed to work. This is consistent with a part of the iBeacon process called ranging. The instruction to ‘tap’ the device to the Apple TV is likely just to ensure proximity. So, while this isn’t ‘iBeacon’ yet, it’s definitely a process that will feel familiar once those start showing up in the wild. For more on iBeacons, you can , a hardware device that uses Bluetooth LE to help retailers communicate with consumers based on in-store location and more. |
In Search Of The Perfect Polo: Hands-On With Vastrm’s Home Try-On Service | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Y Combinator alum has been pretty busy lately. In addition to locking up another $1 million in seed funding from A16z, SV Angels, Ignition Partners, and Will Smith (to name a few), the startup redesigned its website slightly modified its sense of purpose. The team has always been about giving its customers the perfect fitting polo, but now they’re working to make the process even more personal. The process is largely unchanged from when Billy , but the biggest recent addition was the launch of a try-at-home option. In exchange for a $20 deposit, you’ll get a trio of shirts in sizes of your choosing so you can try to pin down your perfect polo. Vastrm toyed with the idea for a long while and tested it with a slew of early beta users (CEO Jonathan Tang said 55 percent of testers tried the feature), but the full-on launch took place fairly recently. But how well does it really work? I recently gave that home try-on service for a spin and so far it seems like a much-needed addition to the mix (don’t worry, I won’t subject you to photos of me wearing them). After all, for a startup that’s focused on crafting custom fitted polos for its customers, it only makes sense that they embrace a Warby Parkeresque model to ensure that ideal fit. It’s not so much meant to help you figure out if you’re a small, medium, or large. Instead, you’re supposed to figure out, say, what kind of medium you are. Different brands have different conceptions of what “medium” means after all, so Vastrm has introduced subtypes like slim, sport, and relaxed (for the portly polo-wearers out there) to give customers a more granular grasp on what suits them best. To my surprise, I fell in between a small sport and a medium slim. I’ve never been able to squeeze into a small before and I’m not exactly what I’d consider “slim”, so it’s unlikely I would ever even bother trying on those sorts of shirts in a store. Those subtypes, along with any other tweaks you want to make (think sleeve length, waist width, chest changes) are folded into your so-called FitID, a persisting recipe of preferences that can be saved and applied to all your future orders. All in all, it was a dead simple experience and one that should serve Vastrm’s early customers very well… as long as they’re fine with the ultimate asking price. While some seemingly similar bespoke clothing companies like Indochino can compete on price — $449 for a fitted suit isn’t too shabby — $95 for a simple fitted polo means Vastrm’s wares aren’t going to be for everyone. So what’s next for Vastrm? I had to ask Tang if focusing purely on bespoke polo shirts is, well, problematic. After all, isn’t there some sort of upper limit to the number of expensive polo shirts a person can feasibly own? While Tang doesn’t necessarily agree, he did concede that the Vastrm formula and the structure the team built around it could easily be rejiggered to churn out other custom garments. “The whole backend is really solid,” he said, adding that he wanted to expand the assortment to include long sleeve polos and hoodies. The team ran a Crowdtilt campaign to — within a week they sold about $40k of hoodies, but only time will tell when they’ll officially try to disrupt other aspects of your wardrobe. |
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Amazon Outs New Kindle Fires While Samsung Goes For The Gold | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | What would a Wednesday afternoon be without the TechCrunch Droidcast? Don’t answer that. Sadly, I couldn’t be around to take part in this glorious meeting of the minds (I was checking out startups , in case you were curious) but our very own Matt Burns and Anthony Ha stepped up this time around and the results were… . You should probably just listen for yourself. In any case, we’ve got a doozy for you this week. Samsung outed a golden flagship smartphone just days after its rival did the same, and the company’s Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Gear smartwatch are finally stepping out into the real world. Meanwhile, Amazon pulled back the curtain on some surprisingly impressive new Kindle Fire HDX tablets overnight and our trio can’t help but dig into the finer points of Microsoft’s new Surface tablets and their favorite pies. Intro music by . |
Both Apple And EA Deny Money Exchanged To Keep Plants Vs. Zombies 2 Off Android | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Apple and EA are both categorically denying a report that surfaced late yesterday that money exchanged hands to keep Popcap hit Plants Vs. Zombies 2 an exclusive to iOS. Reached for comment on the matter, both EA and Apple told us that “it’s simply not true.” The report, from , had quoted EA Labels head Frank Gibeau as telling employees at a closed meeting that “Apple gave us a truckload of money to delay the Android version [of Plants vs Zombies 2].” Since the meeting was a closed session, EA would not comment on what was said there, but our sources are telling us that Gibeau did indeed make a statement similar to that. But we’re also hearing that it was intended as an off-the-cuff joke of sorts, and was taken out of context by either the report or the source used for the quote. But both EA and Apple absolutely denied that any payments were made to EA by Apple in exchange for iOS exclusivity on PvZ 2. Since the game is not out for Android devices outside of China and launched on iOS several weeks ago, the reports were quick to garner attention and credibility. But whatever Gibeau said in the meeting, both companies are flat out saying that there was no agreement to pay EA. Here’s the major catch to most of these arguments about Apple and exclusivity: It really does not need to pay developers cash to launch on iOS first, they do it anyway. The marketing power of the App Store is tremendous, and on a per-customer basis, iOS users spend more money and buy more apps than Android users. That’s also true on the whole for now, but could change as the sheer volume of Android devices neutralizes the smaller ‘per-device’ spend on the platform. That’s not to say that there isn’t some effort by Apple to make sure that its platform is the most welcoming for marquee titles. Apple has a long history of working with publishers that it sees as doing good or high-profile work to promote their apps via large banners and editorial recommendations on the App Store. And I’m sure that the App Store division is doing its best to make sure that the top apps and games land on iOS first, if not only. If you want to call offers of promotion and praise in the App Store incentive to hold off releasing for Android, that’s fine. But it’s still not cash, and it’s not clear if that happened in this case, regardless. Those recommendations are worth big money to many developers, but they’re also not limited to big-name companies. We’ve seen one or two-man operations featured by Apple in many sections, including the big valuable top banners in its App Stores on Mac, iPhone and iPad. In the games industry — and this is where it becomes easier to see why the gaming press would see this as reasonable — it’s all too common for platforms to pay publishers for exclusivity. Both Microsoft and Sony have their own studios that produce games, but also to juice the desirability of their consoles by paying to keep games exclusive for a period of time. But we’ve yet to hear any confirmed reports of Apple doing the same for the App Store. As Android grows in addressable market, perhaps it will ‘go there’ at some point. But in this case, both companies deny anything like that is taking place. |
Target Launches Its First Subscription-Based E-Commerce Service, Focus For Now Is Baby-Care Items | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | As Amazon’s online business continues to cut into traditional retailers’ revenues, Target today makes a move to fight back. The Minneapolis-headquartered retailer has just launched a pilot program for subscription-based commerce called . Initially, the service is focused on new parents, with various products related to baby-care, including diapers, wipes, training pants, and other essentials. At launch there are about 150 items that can be ordered on a subscription basis, including some of Target’s larger bulk-sized offerings. Customers can choose to have these items delivered in regular four to 12-week installments, and Target will send out reminder emails at least 10 days ahead of shipments to allow customers to make adjustments if need be. The free program includes a variety of products from a dozen well-known baby care brands, including Huggies, Pampers, Seventh Generation, Enfamil, Similac and others, which users can browse now on Target.com where they can filter products by category, brand, price, rating, or associated deals. Shoppers can pay for the items using the credit or debit card of their own choosing or, of course, can opt to pay with their Target card or Target VISA to save an additional 5 percent. The subscription-based service is clearly Target’s answer to , which also lets shoppers subscribe to regularly used items. With Amazon’s program, customers receive free shipping, and discounts of up to 15 percent when they have five or more subscriptions arriving monthly. Target Subscriptions, meanwhile, also offers free shipping, but isn’t currently touting any particular deals beyond its usual “price cuts” on select items. (At launch, there are just two deals available – both on baby wipes.) Amazon is a serious competitor in the subscription-based commerce space, given its scale. Not only does it offer the Amazon Subscribe and Save service, it also offers shipping discounts through Prime, and subscriptions through its , like , which has featured autoship options since fall 2012, and reports 30 percent month-over-month growth in that sector. Plus, Amazon has a program focused on the new parent/budget-shopper demographic specifically with , whose members receive various savings in addition to the Subscribe and Save discount. A number of startups have also tried their hand at subscription commerce in recent years, with ideas ranging from the sample box – such as – to those focused on everyday needs, like . Even Walmart has experimented in this space, with its . So if anything, Target is late to hop on the subscription bandwagon. But taking the longer view, it’s fair to say the market is still a new one, and remains somewhat unproven at least in some verticals. (Watch as all the “Birchbox for X” startups begin to fold, for example.) But online shopping overall is a large and growing industry, and consumers are becoming more comfortable with the idea of subscriptions, thanks to other services, like Prime, but also content subscriptions for things like movies from Netflix or music from Spotify, for example. Target previously tested the service among employees ahead of today’s public debut. And given its “pilot” designation, the company isn’t talking in terms of expected revenues at this point. The retailer won’t confirm plans to expand beyond baby-care for now, but says it will take the learnings from this pilot program into account to help it shape future plans, and will share those details when they become available. The company also declined to discuss whether or not it would consider other new e-commerce services, like grocery delivery or same-day delivery, . Incidentally, the announcement of comes on the same day that Target launches another tech-led initiative, . As , the TV and movies on demand service is Target’s response to Walmart’s Vudu, Netflix, and iTunes. Though unrelated to the e-commerce service, it’s another example of how the retailer is taking steps to face down competition from various tech companies and other industry players. |
Google Starts Supporting Google+ Hashtags In Search Queries | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Google+ started in May, and today the company announced that Google Search will now allow you to search for Google+ posts by using these hashtags. Given that there’s a little bit of Google+ in , it’s no surprise that these Google+ hashtags are now finding their way into other Google products. This new search feature is now live for English language users in the U.S. and Canada on google.com and google.ca. In Google Search, users will now be able to search for hashtags like #AmericasCup and get a list of relevant Google+ posts in the right sidebar. Google won’t highlight posts from Twitter or Facebook in the sidebar, but it has put links to Twitter and Facebook right underneath the Google+ posts so users can search for these terms on those social networks, as well. The links in these Google+ posts are all active and you can see how many +1s and comments a given post received. You can’t, however, interact with the post right on the search results page as there is no way to follow, +1 or comment on these search results without going to Google+ first. It remains to be seen how popular this feature will be. Most users, I think, would probably prefer to see this feature work for Twitter hashtags. It’s doubtful that all that many Google users were clamoring for a better way to search for Google+ hashtags on Google Search, but maybe this will give this feature a bit more visibility. For content owners, however, this feature definitely gives them an incentive to use hashtags in their Google+ posts (and to use Google+ in the first place). The top-right corner of the search results page, after all, is prime real estate, and getting your link to show up there could drive significant traffic for popular hashtags. |
Automattic Acquires File-Sharing Service Cloudup To Build A Faster Media Library And Enable Co-Editing | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | , the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired , which launched in beta in June. The acquisition will help Automattic improve two features of WordPress.com in particular: the media library used for uploading visual content and post editing to give multiple users the ability to edit at one time. Cloudup is an offshoot of ed-tech company , which was founded in 2010, meaning it includes the same team and existing investors. LearnBoost co-founder and CTO Guillermo Rauch said the classroom management service will continue to operate under Automattic, as well. Out of the gate, the Cloudup team will focus on revamping the post editor and replacing WordPress.com’s media library with Cloudup. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg said that the service is much more advanced, elegant, and intuitive than WordPress.com’s current media uploader. “Not many people say their favorite [WordPress.com] feature is the media library,” he noted. It was an understatement. Cloudup’s technology will enable multiple parties to edit and write at the same time, meaning a writer could be drafting the text while a photographer uploads images to the same post. The service also allows for sharing a file before it is done uploading, meaning that a second party can begin viewing the file before it is complete. Mullenweg said that he sees WordPress.com’s forthcoming co-editing capabilities as different from services like Google Docs. The latter fundamentally treats documents as documents, he said, whereas a blog post or page is a much richer experience due to its video, image, and gallery features. Mullenweg did not give an estimate on when users will see the fruits of the integration, but he said their intention is to have it up as soon as possible. According to Rauch, the Cloudup beta is a complete product, as some of the open-source technology that powers the system has been in development for years. Still, Mullenweg said there will likely be significant work to be done in scaling the Cloudup infrastructure and integrating it with WordPress.com and with by WordPress.com. Cloudup, which has accumulated around 10,000 active users since June, will continue to be available independently of WordPress.com. Automattic will continue running it and adding new features, and the service will soon be open to the public. Although it would be an easy source of revenue, Mullenweg said that there are currently no plans to monetize on the service. “We think Cloudup is something intrinsically useful to have in the world, and Automattic’s core businesses in WordPress.com, VIP, VaultPress, and Akismet are doing more than well enough for us as a company,” he said. Mullenweg has said that his goal is to see WordPress.com power the majority of all sites on the Internet — they are currently at just over 20 percent market share — and that the first step toward that end is simply improving WordPress.com as a platform. Cloudup helps accomplish that. For sites like TechCrunch, which uses the platform, the ability to co-edit a post and upload photos faster would certainly be an improvement in the flow of using WordPress. This is Automattic’s 12th acquisition after , , , CodeGarage, , Blo.gs, , , BuddyPress, and . Mullenweg said the acquisition was for both talent and technology, as he had been aware of LearnBoost’s open source ethos and had followed Rauch’s work for a number of years. This acquisition brings Automattic’s total employee count to just over 200 people. While the majority of Cloudup employees are San Francisco based, three are international. One will be Automattic’s first Brazil-based employee, which extends the company’s reach to 29 countries. Growing the Automattic team to the thousands of employees will be 95 percent hiring, Mullenweg said, with only a small percentage coming from acquisitions like this. |
Apple Launches iOS 7 Tech Talks For Developers In SF, NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin And London | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Apple has just announced a series of Tech Talks for developers building apps for iOS 7. This is a relatively common occurrence as Apple likes to get evangelists out to talk to developers and help them on a more personal basis than just WWDC. The talks are important because Apple extremely quickly this year, leaving many developers in the lurch. Now they’ll be able to get lab and talk time with Apple engineers in order to hopefully get the most out of iOS 7. The talks will be held in San Francisco, NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin and London and — for the first time — are split between ‘App Developer’ days and ‘Game Developer’ days. Typically the subject matter had been interleaved in one rolling session. Now, Apple is splitting it out. This actually makes a lot of sense because the technologies used in games and apps do differ quite a bit. A regular app developer might never have to tap into Game Center, Sprite Kit or OpenGL ES technologies, where a game developer is steeped in those frameworks. Note that you cannot choose to attend both the app day and game day programs, you must pick one or the other to attend in each city. There will be videos of the event presentations posted shortly after the last event on December 18th, so even if developers don’t get in, they’ll be able to see the program. These events typically hold around 400 attendees per session. You can apply if you’re over 13 today or earlier, and attendees are from qualified applicants. So this isn’t a time-sensitive draft like the WWDC ticket fiasco, where they sold out in around 90 seconds. Apply and you have a chance to go. If you’re a developer looking to go, you can see the full schedule of talks for each day and apply . |
Instacart, Growing Rapidly In Chicago, Adds Recipes To Its Grocery Delivery Service | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Today , a grocery delivery service, added an initial set of recipes to its service, helping customers purchase groups of items that combine into finished dishes. For the non-chef among us (hello, my name is Alex), this is a boon. The news is small for the day: Instacart has curated a list of recipes that its users can access. However, the company told TechCrunch that it intends to greatly expand that list, and eventually allow its users to upload their own recipes. Instacart is a physical grocery delivery service that is expanding its digital platform. Recipes are an interesting addition and an anti-pivot of sorts. Instacart customers want to quickly order food that can be used to feed themselves and others, and recipes make that a simpler process. If Instacart can grow its recipe list in an inexpensive way, and effectively bake it into its search process, I can see it being a popular option. Also, I am likely willing to buy more total items – thus increasing Instacart’s revenue – if I know where they are going. When I buy only what I need for the day, I spend less per order. Instacart doesn’t like that. But according to Mehta, in the first few days of Instacart’s arrival in the City Warm Forgot, it is already a larger market than Mountain View, Palo Alto, and the East Bay combined. That’s good news for Instacart, as Chicago is its first market outside of the larger San Francisco Bay Area. |
Gmail For Android Updated With Card-Style Layout | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Google’s is being updated today with a new design which will bring Google’s now preferred “card style” user interface to the Conversation View within the app. This layout, which Google popularized through its Google Now search application, has become the new go-to design paradigm at Google, arriving across other Google products and services, including , the new Google Wallet apps, Maps, Google+ and elsewhere. It mimics the idea of using index cards, and fits somewhere between minimalism and skeuomorphism, as into Google’s design process explained. In Gmail, cards will be used to better highlight multi-person, threaded messages in the app’s “Conversation view,” allowing for a “new, cleaner design,” states the company in this afternoon. In addition, the app will include other design tweaks, like checkmarks for multiple message selection which makes it easier to see which emails you’re about to move, delete or archive en masse. And the app will alert you in your inbox if account sync is turned off for some reason, to help keep you from missing messages. Though some users are already seeing an app update in , not everyone is seeing the updated design just yet. The rollout is a staged one, so your mileage may vary, as they say. News of the updated Gmail app comes on the heels of some on Monday. Even now, it seems the damage to the Gmail brand continues – many people have called me today, for example, saying, “oh, I thought I’d dial you since I just don’t trust Gmail right now.” That may be why now is a time for a little good news from Gmail… well, good news if you actually the card-style layout, that is. |
Google+ May Finally Matter Thanks To YouTube Comments | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | You didn’t really need a Google+ account until now. You might have one whether you wanted it or not. But requires a presence on Google+. And there’s no real alternative to YouTube for video. Google+ may have mattered before in theory, but now it matters in practice. Google+ is really a designed to help Google personalize all your products and improve ad targeting. The more it knows about you, the better it is at giving you a good experience and making money. Long-term, social is not an option for the search giant. It’s a necessity. Before Google+, Google knew who you emailed and maybe Gchatted with. Depending on whether you browsed while signed in to a Google account, it would know what you searched for and mapped. If you were on Android or used its other products, it might have known a bit more. But it didn’t know or had to guess about your age, education and work history, interests, and social graph. So Google+ launched in 2011 under the guise of a social network. That’s a convenient way for a company to get you . Personalize a profile with biographical info, add friends and colleagues, follow brands, and +1 and comment on your feed. Sounds great, seven years late. Facebook and Twitter handled much of this and had already built strong network effects. You could go elsewhere for social networking, so didn’t you need a Google+ account yet and Google wasn’t getting the juicy data it wanted. Google began requiring a Google+ account to sign up for Gmail at the start of 2012. Many would argue that Gmail is the best email provider, but there are alternatives. And if you did end up with a Google+ account (though not yet required for Gmail users), there wasn’t anywhere it was mandatory to use. Even passively, though, having a G+ account lets Google start tying usage data from across its products to your identity. Google went a step further pushing G+ when it unified Google Talk (Gchat) with Google+ Messenger which requires a Google+ account. Still, there’s plenty of other messaging options like SMS, Facebook, and WhatsApp. But if you want to watch home-made cat videos, or music videos, or viral videos, you’re going to YouTube. It dominates the space. Sorry, Vimeo and Dailymotion. And if you want to comment on a YouTube video, Google announced yesterday . The whole YouTube (and Blogger) commenting system will shift to be powered exclusively by Google+. All comments must be tied to an account. For users, this change will likely be wonderful. First, it should banish some of the trolls spewing racism, sexism and homophobia. The anonymity of a one-off YouTube account created a safe haven for filth. People will still be able to create a pseudonymous G+ account and comment from that, but having to switch back and forth between that and their real accounts could be enough to silence some of the slurs. A more compassionate Internet, ahoy! Relying on G+ will also give YouTube signals for ranking and sorting conversations in comments. Up top above random strangers, it can show comments from people you know, who are famous, that you’ve whitelisted, or who replied to one of your G+ posts. [Disclosure: Nundu Janakiram, a YouTube product manager on comments, is a friend and former roommate, but he’s had no influence or input on this article.] But for Google+ itself, becoming the backbone of YouTube comments makes it mandatory for a much wider audience, and could breathe life into what many consider a ghost town. It’s not a ghost town. There are some lively, in-depth conversations going on between some smart people on Google+. But for many, their feed looks more like the occasional link post from a friend and a stream of photos, stemming from the social network’s early support for high-resolution shots and its new native filters. There’s no denying that despite Google saying Google+ as an identity layer has 500 million “users”, the G+ stream could do with more engaging content. That would convince people that their profiles were worth filling out, quenching Google’s thirst for data. Initially, the YouTube integration will drive Google+ sign-ups from a critical demographic — the youngins who spend all day on YouTube. Capturing that audience is crucial to G+’s social network avoiding a reputation of being old and boring. With time, the integration could fill G+ with more content — something sorely lacking due to low visitation and the lack of a real for letting users push content there from other apps. You’ll easily be able to syndicate comments you leave on YouTube to Google+, effectively sharing the video you were talking about, too. Those comments on YouTube or shares to G+ could inspire replies you’ll come back to check, generating more engagement. Knowing who you converse with about videos will strengthen Google’s understanding of your social graph. The move could also bring more celebrities onto Google+. Recruiting public figures has been a fertile strategy for Twitter and Facebook. Since video uploaders get comments on their own videos ranked high, you might see more celebs uploading YouTube clips from their own accounts, and commenting on those of their famous friends to get more exposure. Normal folks might gravitate to Google+ if it means getting close to the stars they love. We can only guess how the all-seeing, all-knowing Google will use our YouTube viewing history to target ads now that its tied to our identities. If you watch a lot of videos tagged “cycling,” perhaps it might know to show you more ads for local bike shops and events. It could also use viewing data to put you in a cohort and show you ads that worked well when blasted at other people who watch the same videos. It’s been over two years since Google launched Google+, what it internally refers to as its “social spine.” The goal always seemed to be to weave it through all of Google’s products cautiously enough and with enough added benefits to avoid epic backlash. True traction and engagement has been slow, though. YouTube holds a huge growth opportunity, yet its users are among the prickliest in the company’s ecosystem. But by using the power of social to sanitize YouTube comments, one of the dirtiest corners of the web, Google+ may win a place in the hearts and identities of millions. |
Instagram Gets A Mild iOS 7 Redesign With Edge-To-Edge Images | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Instagram has been updated for Apple’s iOS 7 today that puts photos front and center. The app has not been re-written or torn down for the logic of iOS 7 so much as trimmed and tucked to fit with the aesthetic. Instagram’s previous designs had already been winnowed a bit to make them feel more in line with the Android app, so the design didn’t have to pull a full 180. Instead, borders were removed to take the images full bleed, buttons were flattened and menu bars trimmed of borders. The new profile view shows off the app’s adherence to iOS 7’s new default white background as well. [gallery ids="883658,883659,883660,883661,883662,883663"] What you won’t find here, however, is a major change that takes into account iOS 7’s new layering features or its heavy use of dynamics and physics. There is certainly lip service paid to conventions like the circular profile pictures, but this isn’t a complete turnover of thinking with iOS 7 in mind. It must be said, however, that not every app needs to make design decisions that use every tool in the toolbox. Instagram is about the photos and the team says that the changes it made are designed to put your photos first, which makes sense. To that end, they’ve also increased the display resolution of images and tweaked the grid to make images bigger. “We led our redesign with a focus on clarity to keep the feel of Instagram clean, simple and grounded in the photos and videos you discover and share,” says a company blog post. Nonetheless, it should make Instagram feel more at home on your iOS 7 device. Notably, Instagram’s very three-dimensional icon remains the same, and still sticks out amongst all of the other re-thought apps on my springboard. |
Valve To Launch A Prototype Steam Box And Multiple Steam Machines In 2014 | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Following the announcement of , Valve just unveiled the long-anticipated Steam Box — sort of. Instead of releasing a Valve-branded Steam Box, the company will actually work with multiple manufacturers to release a series of for your living room. Yet, Valve also presented a specific prototype, a Steam machine designed by Valve. This particular machine is closer to what everyone expected. For now, only 300 copies will be produced and sent to lucky beta testers. The company doesn’t say whether those prototypes will eventually become the Steam Box, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone. As for the Steam machines, Valve promises “an array of specifications, price, and performance.” It could be pretty similar to the Chromebook lineup. Customers will be presented with multiple performance tiers — it should make it easier to buy a traditional gaming computer. Hardware will be hackable and you will be able to install another operating system for example. As a reminder, SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system for your living room. It is optimized for gaming, movies and music. While many games are not available on Linux, SteamOS allows you to stream your games from your Windows or Mac machines using your local network Today’s announcement is very short and doesn’t say which OEM will actually build Steam machines. All we know is that they will ship in 2014. The Valve-branded prototype could come to beta testers earlier as the company will select beta testers on October 25th. On Steam’s website, users can find a with three icons that represent three different announcements for the living room — SteamOS and the Steam machines were only the first two announcements. Valve hints at a new input method for the third one. On Friday, Valve should answer the last standing question — which game controller will ship with the Steam machines? |
Wealthfront Launches Wealthfront.org To Give Web-Based Investment Tools To Non-Profits | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Automated investment services company has made its name as an alternative to traditional financial advisory services for individuals, especially “Generation Y” techies just starting to pull their nest eggs together. Today, the company is looking to expand its user base in a different direction with the launch of , a site that will provide investment advisory tools to non-profits. While Wealthfront’s core product gives free services to accounts with less than $10,000 in assets, the non-profit product bumps that up to the first $1 million in assets. Above that, Wealthfront.org will charge its standard 0.25 percent fee. Wealthfront COO said in an interview this week that while Wealthfront.org is not itself a non-profit, the company is looking at this as a philanthropic endeavor. “This is not a revenue-motivated play. This is not build to be new business line for us,” he said. “We look at this as one way for us as a company to give back.” While major non profit organizations such as the often have their own asset managers on staff, there are hundreds of small- to medium-sized 501 (c)(3) organizations who have endowments that could benefit from being professionally managed. But because non-profits must be conservative with their capital, it’s a space that most traditional financial advisory firms don’t work to address. At launch, Wealthfront.org has signed up several non-profits including the and , among others. The .org launch comes as Wealthfront is seeing solid growth in its core product. The company, which has raised , now has $350 million in assets under management — a nice ratio for a startup with a full time staff of just 30. There are, of course, a number of competitors in the space who are looking to become the next-generation financial advisory platform of choice, including , , and . But today, the launch of Wealthfront.org is a nice way for this company to show that it’s thinking of more than just its own profits as it looks to grow. |
Social Events Platform DoubleDutch Raises $10 Million Series C Led By Bessemer | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Rapidly growing mobile events application platform raised $10 million in Series C funding TechCrunch learned, in an oversubscribed round led in large part by of Bessemer Venture Partners, who will now join the company’s board. Previous investors from DoubleDutch’s A and B rounds, Floodgate Fund, Bullpen Capital and others also participated. The funding comes at a time when DoubleDutch has moved to singularly focus on developing its mobile event technology, while abandoning its other products including a fairly popular . When speaking with CEO Lawrence Coburn this morning about the funding, he characterized the decision to shutter Hive as one of the toughest he’s ever had to make – especially considering that were raised based on Hive’s promise and potential. Ultimately, however, Coburn said it was the right thing to do. Hive, which closed this January, had 1,000 or so free customers and a small number of paying users. Meanwhile, the events product had been growing at 40 to 50 percent per quarter, including deployment, users and revenue. “On the CRM side, we were squarely in Salesforce’s radar,” explains Coburn. “The one thing I couldn’t get my head around was how did our mobile CRM give us a defensible position against Salesforce? Really, it was a beautiful UI [user interface] that sat on top of Salesforce,” he says. “It was a presentation layer over their tech.” The concern was that if Salesforce decided to focus on this, DoubleDutch could be dead in a year. So Hive closed down, and the business which did have both growth, revenue, and “a similarly sized market with better characteristics,” as Deeter puts it, remains. The DoubleDutch Events application is sold to event organizers as a white label product with a bit of co-branding (“powered by DoubleDutch”), allowing customers to not only transition away from paper-based event guides, but also to do more with the data collected within the mobile technology platform. From a product perspective, the app’s architecture has been built from the ground-up with a focus on social and networking, which differentiates DoubleDutch from some of its competitors. “Every event has a dedicated activity feed. We have game mechanics deeply built into the app. We have the concept of user profiles and connections – all these things you would expect to see in a social networking platform – are the foundation of our app,” says Coburn. “Every other player in the category, their inspiration was the paper event guide.” By having an event platform built in this way, DoubleDutch’s app can take advantage of the data it has on hand to do other sorts of things, too. For example, since users have profiles and make connections using the app, DoubleDutch is able to make recommendations of people to follow. It’s also developing a business model around leads data, by transitioning exhibitors away from clunky, hardware-based badge or business card scanners to mobile. The company’s leads package has been used at over half a dozen events so far, letting exhibitors use a scanning feature in the app that also does real-time scoring around the value of the leads using a variety of signals. This tells the booth rep immediately who they’re talking to, and whether or not they should grab a senior exec, for example. But what’s even more interesting, is that DoubleDutch is able to surface leads of those who didn’t actually come to the booth, as well. To do so, it figures out who may be good leads based on things like who you’ve traded contact info with in the app, what sessions you’ve attended and nearly a dozen other signals. While pricing for the lead package in an app varies, revenue from this data-based upsell is a multiple from the data made by licensing the app. For instance, at a recent event with 50,000 people and 500 exhibitors, 200 exhibitors bought lead packages at $300 each. That means the customer (the organizer) made $60,000 in revenue just off the data. DoubleDutch takes a revenue share of this data, which it doesn’t disclose. Leads are only the beginning of DoubleDutch’s plans, too. Coburn says that the goal is to make DoubleDutch more of a platform, where its APIs and SDKs allow developers to build other custom features. Deeter adds that there are also huge opportunities for the company to monitor and manage other event-related sales and marketing activity, and tie into communities beyond the event to keep them engaged. “In those two broad buckets, there’s a decade of product roadmap here,” he notes. While the company isn’t revealing revenue specifics, DoubleDutch is reporting 40 percent quarter-over-quarter growth and nearly 500,000 event participants who have used its apps to date in north of 1,000 events. Its clients have included many big-name brands, including Cisco, American Express, Box, IDG, SAP, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and . Revenue is “deep in the millions,” and growing well over 100 percent year-over-year. The event business is a competitive space, with incumbents like QuickMobile to take on, companies like CVENT , acquisitions aplenty including , apps building networking tools around the experience (e.g. , , etc.) and several freemium offerings. But Deeter sees huge potential in what DoubleDutch in particular has on hand. “Paper is just going to go away in that business. The transition over the next couple of years will be massive…there’s no reason to go back,” he says. “It’s a massive market that’s ripe for transition, and DoubleDutch has the opportunity to play in the leadership position right out of the gate.” With the new funding, the plan is to continue the product development described above, expand to Asia via a Hong Kong office opening this year, transition to a SaaS-based business model, and grow the 62-person team to about 90. |
A Year Of Spam: The Twoo Experience | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | , “the fastest growing place to meet new people,” has been spamming people . Users have been complaining that they get unsolicited emails from the app, that the app messages all of their contacts without their understanding, and that it’s unclear how to delete their accounts. I covered Twoo’s questionable growth techniques , when co-founder and CEO said it was “just not clear enough.” He claimed, “We do not send any messages without the prior consent of the user,” and said the company “had already decided to add an additional confirmation step to avoid any unintended actions.” And yet, a year later, problems with Twoo persist. The connect with friends via email component, which is what users have complained about the most, looks functionally the same as when I wrote about the company a year ago. Search (don’t dare trying just “Twoo,” it’s an island of misfit grammar), and you’ll see user complaints from the past three years. are you crazy? sending emails to _all_ emails in my gmail-account? I even got 5 invitations from myself! — Andreas Beer (@tueksta) Hahahaha. Speaking of Twoo’s spam practices, they even sent an email invite to my e-printer… gosh that was confusing! — Benjamin Lupton (@balupton) Dear , plz stop emails. Am irritated with ur automated mail system. Getting mails even after un-subscription. — Vijayakumar Selvaraj (@mrvijayakumar) Similar complaints have surfaced in over one hundred comments on my original Twoo story, and in Apple App store and Google Play store reviews (although there are a number of positive reviews in those stores as well). Twoo offers a number of explanations in its and –#7 is “Twoo sends invitations to my e-mail contacts without my permission.” In the Privacy Policy, the company states: “Twoo offers members an easy import tool to invite their mail contacts to register on Twoo. If you decide to import your contacts, you confirm that you have their consent to do so and you accept that an automatic e-mail invitation and reminder will be sent on your behalf to the contacts you have selected. Twoo stores the contact details of your friends only for the purpose of automatically connecting them with you after their registration.” A year ago, I wrote, “At the very best, the site is unnecessarily confusing. At the worst, it is purposefully complex in order to message unsuspecting users’ contacts to increase its membership.” It’s now clear that the latter is true. Twoo uses these confusing tactics, from auto-selecting every address in your contacts book to making a “next” button that looks like it skips the email connect step but actually is just another “connect” button, to grow its user base–according to the site, Twoo has over 15 million (!!) active users. While tech publications cover more , Twoo is rarely covered. And while this is certainly not affecting users at the same scale as the , Twoo is driving some people crazy, with little recourse. The company is located in Belgium, and the only contact information I could find on the site was the generic email address . It looks like Twoo responds to some complaints via Twitter; most of its replies point users to its terms of service, or links to unsubscribe or delete their accounts, but several users say they receive mail even after unsubscribing and/or cannot delete their accounts. At the time of publication, neither Twoo nor Bogaert had responded to multiple requests for comment. I should have included in the post that Twoo by Meetic, a European dating company the majority of which is owned by IAC, for $25 million in December 2012. Since posting, , a similar to Alexa, reached out to me with data on the percentage of traffic that came to Twoo.com from email over the past 3 months: A quarter of Twoo’s traffic comes from email. Groupon and LinkedIn are both known for their email-heavy strategies, and they only receive 22% and 12% of their traffic, respectively, from email (again, according to SimilarWeb). |
IBT Media Buys Newsweek From IAC | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | I guess today is the day for announcing : just that it has reached an agreement to acquire Newsweek from . Back in 2010, with IAC-owned website The Daily Beast. (The magazine subsequently .) However, earlier this year, that buying Newsweek was a mistake, one he would correct by . “We are thrilled to welcome this iconic brand and global news property into our portfolio,” said IBT co-founder and CEO Etienne Uzac in a press release. “We believe in the Newsweek brand and look forward to growing it, fully transformed to the digital age. We respect the brand’s long history of delivering high-quality, impactful journalism and believe this aligns well with IBT Media’s culture and mission. We look forward to working together to create a profitable and successful enterprise.” Newsweek will continue serving existing subscribers and will also hold to existing foreign license agreements, says IBT, adding that the publication will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the larger media company. IBT’s publications include the International Business Times, which . In published by Capital New York, the Newsweek was apparently told, “IBT will be talking to staff during [the 60-day transition period] about potential job opportunities at the new venture.” The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Daily Beast is not part of the acquisition, and in fact that it’s selling Newsweek in order to focus on The Daily Beast. |
CrunchWeek: MotoX Says Hello, Ridesharing Regulation Wars, More Google Surveillance Suspicions | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | This time around, Rao, and I discussed the much-anticipated , the brand new smartphone from Google that happens to be assembled , the new ride-sharing rules as part of the between regulators, old fashioned taxis, and the Uber/Lyft/Sidecar startup contingent, and the latest instances that show how increasingly paranoid people are that — and that lawmakers’ lack of understanding of how technology works is not stopping them from issuing . |
Obama Administration Vetoes Ban On Certain iPhones And iPads | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | President Obama’s administration has vetoed to ban the import and sale of a number of Apple products, including models of the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. The ITC announced the ban in June after finding that those devices had violated a patent held by Samsung. In a letter to the ITC (embedded below), US Trade Representative Michael Froman writes that he has decided to “disapprove” the ban “based on my review of the various policy considerations discussed above as they relate to the effect on competitive conditions in the U.S. economy and the effect on U.S. consumers.” However, he also said Samsung “may continue to pursue its rights through the courts.” After the ITC decision, Verizon’s vice president of public policy and general counsel Randal Milch arguing that even though this specific ban would not affect Verizon (it mostly targeted Apple devices on AT&T’s network), “patent litigation at the ITC — where the only remedy is to keep products from the American public — is too high-stakes a game for patent disputes.” He also noted that this would be the first presidential veto of a decision by the ITC since 1987. by
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The New York Times Company Sells The Boston Globe (And Related Properties) For $70M | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | The New York Times is the Boston Globe and the rest of its New England Media Group to John Henry, the billionaire who’s principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $70 million in cash. The news has prompted some rather depressing comments about the Globe’s relative worth. For example, Ken Doctor at the Nieman Journalism Lab that the price is $12 million less than the five-year contract that Red Sox pitcher John Lackey signed in 2009. But harshest comparison may with the Globe of 20 years ago, which The Times acquired for $1.1 billion. Along with the Globe newspaper, the sale includes the BostonGlobe.com website, Boston.com, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Telegram.com, and the globe’s direct mail marketing company Globe Direct. In , The Times said its New England Media Group’s revenue was down 7.4 percent year-over-year, with a 2.3 percent drop in circulation revenue and a 9.5 percent decrease in advertising. (In contrast, The New York Times Media Group saw revenue increase 0.8 percent, with a 6.6 percent increase in circulation revenue.) At the end of the last quarter, . “As a result of this agreement, we will be able to sharpen our company focus on and investments in The New York Times brand and its journalism,” said Times President and CEO Mark Thompson in . In a statement , Henry said, “This is a thriving, dynamic region that needs a strong, sustainable Boston Globe playing an integral role in the community’s long-term future. In coming days there will be announcements concerning those joining me in this community commitment and effort.” Other recent sales by The Times include for $300 million. |
Gillmor Gang: What’s Up Doc | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | The Gillmor Gang — Bret Taylor, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — gather in real time to try out Bret’s new startup, Quip. The last time we saw Bret, he was selling Friendfeed to Facebook and becoming CTO. Now, he’s back (sporting Marc Benioff as one of his investors) at the intersection of mobile and collaboration. As if Microsoft didn’t already have enough problems. @scobleizer channeled the latest Moto X superphone, which lurks like NSA in your pocket always-on and always listening to your every command. We’ll see whether it’s enough to differentiate from the iPhone and Google’s other new devices, but the fact that it’s Google owned and operated suggests we’ll soon see more and more apps writing to its always-aware paradigm. Whether it’s a platform play or a moon shot like Quip, the convergence of best-of-breed and mobile dominance is well underway. @stevegillmor, @btaylor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
The Business Of Fear | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | I spent much of this week at the information security conference, after attending the head of the NSA’s ; and I am pleased to report, O my readers, that here in Las Vegas I have finally achieved enlightenment. That being: the fundamental problem with the National Security Agency, which it shares with most “security” companies, is that it’s not really in the business of security. It’s in the business of fear. That’s why it’s so loath to reveal anything about its vast and classified machinery; that’s why, until Edward Snowden, the mere of the massive metadata dragnet that captures virtually every phone call made in America was a jealously guarded secret. No one could seriously believe that this secrecy made the nation more secure, on the whole. Few-to-zero terrorists are dumb enough to think that their phone calls are inviolate. Whatever tiny, incremental benefits we might gain from the increased ability to track such morons are hugely outweighed by the risks inherent in concealing such a program and relying on those involved with it to do the right thing, forever, beneath the so-called “oversight” of a secret one-sided star-chamber court. But the NSA is like any security company. It monetizes fear. The more frightening that the world seems, the more enemies that appear to exist, the more money and power that is piled on its doorstep. And so–just like all the Black Hat companies advertising anti-hacking tools–it has an enormous incentive to play up any and every fear to the maximum possible extent…and no incentive whatsoever to provide a measured, reasoned analysis of real risks. What is the oldest and most primal of fears? The fear of the unknown. That’s why the NSA–and, again, security companies–fight so fiercely to create a fog of . That’s why they are so loath to reveal anything about the true nature of the man behind the curtain. On some level the NSA must realize that the public deserves greater transparency and public oversight; but such is a direct and terrible threat to their money and their power. We can see that already. When General Alexander that the FISA 215 metadata dragnet led to only 12 reports to the FBI last year, he was trying to show that it didn’t threaten civil liberties; but at the same time, he set himself up for a reasoned cost-benefit analysis that will not necessarily swing the way he wants. “You’re spending all this time and money tracking every telephone call in America, on a questionable legal basis, and all you get out of it is one report to the FBI a month — and that there was any reason to keep this program secret?” Similarly, he that 54 “terror-related activities” were disrupted by the NSA over the last twelve years. You’ll note that that’s a very fuzzy phrase with no specific definition. If specifics actually were available, then almost by definition, our fears would be much diminished…along with the NSA’s power and mystique. To be clear: there are real threats out there, just as there are real hackers attacking corporate networks. We need organizations, and tools, and software, that can defend ourselves against them. Like the NSA. They do good work. But at the same time, they’re continually, and hugely, incentivized to keep secrets that they don’t need to keep, and to exaggerate fears and dangers. That’s why they’ve gone so far beyond the boundaries of what’s right. There’s no sense in making any moral judgments here. I’m absolutely prepared to believe that the NSA is populated by good and noble people. But if you give any person or entity a colossal incentive to do something, then the overwhelming majority, including good and noble people, will eventually find some way to rationalize it to themselves. That same incentivization is why capitalism works so well at lifting people out of poverty. (To forestall the inevitable naysayers: . At least up to a point.) Therefore, the security-industrial complex must play up how fearsome those bogeyman called “child pornographers” and “terrorists” have become; and to maximize those fears, they must hide or play down the actual facts, numbers, and risks. Fortunately for them, most people don’t think rationally about their fears. That’s why shouting “terrorists!” “kidnappers!” “child pornographers!” is so effective at getting people to cede their authority, even though those actual risks are really, really, low. https://twitter.com/umairh/status/362661529058938880
https://twitter.com/umairh/status/362662039858053120
https://twitter.com/umairh/status/362669918979760135 But even people willing to sacrifice their liberty for perceived security are not necessarily willing to sacrifice , so those in the business of fear have to convince them that that their own blindness somehow protects them. It’s amazing how effective this has been until now, given that it’s obvious nonsense–but it’s possible that we’re finally reaching a critical mass of people unwilling to be blinded. The question isn’t how we fix the symptom, which is the NSA’s jealous secrecy and exaggeration of fears. The question is how we somehow keep them from being so strongly incentivized towards secrecy and fear in the first place. The same applies to every tech security company. I don’t pretend to have any answers, but I’m pretty sure, now, that that incentivization is the fundamental problem with the security-industrial complex. |
FlightCar Offers Users Up To $400 To Rent Their Cars Out For A Whole Month | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Got a car you don’t ever really drive? Wanna not pay for parking or worry about shuffling it around on the street every couple of days? Have an interest in actually making some money from that car that you’re not actually using while it’s sitting around on the street? Well, car rental startup might be able to help you out with the launch of a new program in which it keeps users’ cars for a month at a time and rent them out to travelers. The program, called , is designed to appeal to a group of users who own a car in or near the city of San Francisco and find it kind of a hassle and want to profit off of that asset. It works like this: car owners submit their cars to be rented from the airport, and someone from FlightCar comes and picks the car up and keeps it in the startup’s secure parking lot near the airport. Travelers are then able to rent that car during the month that FlightCar has it. Depending on what type of automobile you have and how new it is, FlightCar is offering between $150 and $400 in guaranteed payments to rent the car out for the month. That is a slight deviation from the startup’s usual peer-to-peer plan, where travelers drop their cars off when flying out of town for blocks of time, and get free parking and a small bit of money if the car is rented out while they’re gone. But let’s say the owner wants to get away for a weekend? What happens then? Well, car owners can use their car for free for up to four days per month, if it’s available during that time. If not, the company will offer users a car in the same class for use. Anyway, for FlightCar, this is a way for it to boost the number of cars it has to rent, while also ensuring more regular inventory. In fact, according to CEO Rujul Zaparde, it’s the supply side of the equation that FlightCar has had the most trouble with — the marketplace has been mostly sold out since launch. The new program was launched just about a week after car-sharing marketplace RelayRides started moving in on FlightCar turf with an . At least for now, however, RelayRides isn’t paying car owners leaving their cars with its airport service — just giving them free parking. FlightCar has raised $6.1 million from investors that include General Catalyst, Softbank Capital, First Round Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Brian Chesky, Ryan Seacrest’s Seacrest Global Group, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Emmett Shear, and Erik Blachford. |
Fly Or Die: Rithm | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | has been cultivating a community of recommendations for quite a while now, but only recently has the company taken its userbase’s disposition towards music recommendations and turned it into a brand new app: . Rithm pulls from many of the messaging and social apps we love today, like Snapchat, Vine, and basic messaging apps like Whatsapp and Viber and applied that logic to music. The app lets users send music messages, along with a picture, video or dancing animated cartoon. By looping in with Rdio, Spotify, iTunes and Soundcloud, Rithm lets the user search for any song their musical heart desires and add a little creativity to the mix. Users can even draw on top of photos (Snapchat-style) and the recipient will see that drawing play out to the song. There are a few UI tweaks that can be made to improve the general workflow of the app, but aside from that, it’s a new take on messaging that I’ve grown rather fond of. It’s incredible how much is added to a simple message by tacking on a song, and it offers a bit more creativity for the sender as opposed to a simple picture or video message. John’s a bit too old to understand the value here, but he wasn’t too grumpy to be convinced that music messaging may very well be the next big thing in a generation obsessed with being digitally social. Hopefully, Rithm will bring down the number of Instagram screenshots of people’s favorite song within the Music app. The app is available now in the . |
Lync, Azure, Office 365 And The Shifting Center Of Microsoft’s Gravity | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | You might have missed it, but Lync, Microsoft’s enterprise-focused communications suite brought its parent company $1 billion in revenue during its 2013 fiscal year. That a milestone of that sort could all but slip through the news coverage of Microsoft’s is almost interesting. The reason for the mild coverage of Lync and its performance is in fact a non-puzzle: One billion dollars in revenue stacked next to Microsoft total fiscal 2013 top line of $77.8 billion isn’t much, and enterprise-facing products from incumbent firms aren’t sexy, thus often getting lost in the press mix. However, the Lync number, when placed next to two other figures helps to draw a picture of Microsoft that details a company in transition. As in the face of a sliding personal computing market, hurting OEM revenues for the company, new business products at Microsoft will command increasing internal primacy as its business adapts to current and future market conditions. Or, more simply, the core fiber of Microsoft is changing. Microsoft estimated that the larger PC market contracted by 9% during its fiscal year, stating that declines in its revenue relating to sales to OEM partners was due to “the impact on revenue of the decline in the x86 PC market.” That’s correct, Microsoft. A few numbers: Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing product, recorded $1 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, it was ; Office 365 is currently generating revenue at a per year at the end of Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter, up 50% from the number quoted at the end of the company’s fiscal third quarter; Lync grew 30% in the fiscal fourth quarter, and brought in $1 billion in revenue for the fiscal year. These are numbers that Microsoft is proud of, not because in terms of relative scale they are tectonically impressive – the Windows division’s fiscal fourth quarter revenue alone totaled $4.4 billion – but more that the represent the fact that it has business units in the pipe that can replace other incomes that are aging; Microsoft can, therefore, at least in theory, continue revenue growth even as its core Windows operations atrophies during the opening chapters of the post-PC era. Office 365’s $500 million yearly run rate change in a single quarter is impressive, but Lync’s most recent quarters detail that it too can put points on the board: It has grown by 30% or more for the past three quarters – before that I don’t have data, so the spree could in fact be longer. Here’s Microsoft at the end of the fiscal third quarter: “Specifically, Lync revenue grew over 30% again this quarter.” The ‘again’ in that sentence indicates that the preceding quarter met the same 30% benchmark. And, here’s Microsoft detailing its performance in the fiscal fourth quarter: “Lync revenue grew over 30%.” So, Lync grew at least 30% for three quarters, ending at full year revenue of more than $1 billion. Mathematically that puts Lync revenue over $250 million for the last quarter, and likely nine figures more. A simple progression assuming 30% quarterly growth and a starting estimate for fiscal first quarter Lync revenue of $150 million tracks out to $195 million in the second quarter, $253 million in the third, and $329 million in the fourth. However, those estimates are conservative as they sum to a mere $927 million for the full year. Therefore, Microsoft’s Lync revenues were higher. However they do demonstrate the pace of Lync’s expansion. The standard quip is that once an internal business unit tracks in $1 billion in revenue in a year, it garners status inside of Microsoft of having ‘made it,’ in a way. This is why Microsoft product groups are keen to announce the milestone, even if they can only do so in the form of projection as is the case with the Office 365 team. This is about more than just dollars, however. Lync, Azure, and Office 365 have their hands in subscription and continuing income – those are distinct – that is key to Microsoft’s transition to becoming a company that sells services, and not merely software. Lync itself is weakest in this regard, finding home in certain Office 365 SKUs, but it does generate revenue on a recurring basis per account. Therefore, Microsoft’s perhaps most interesting new businesses are aligned with its new business model. That’s important. Yammer is another business group that falls into this narrative, though we know less about its incomes than I’d like. Given that, we cannot safely say that it is tracking growth on similar lines as Lync, and so forth. Microsoft as a company has most of its work still ahead of it as it works to change the software market to a service economy, but it is cultivating new products providing it with revenue growth that provide more than a mere shot in the arm. I titled this post “Lync, Azure, Office 365 And The Shifting Center Of Microsoft’s Gravity” because we are in fact seeing a change in Microsoft’s soul. You can’t change your entire business philosophy and not have it impact what matters internally. And Microsoft isn’t selling Windows as a Service. Put simply, if the three business units that we have discussed can continue their current growth rates, Microsoft will quickly have new heavyweights internally that are in a way removed from the sales of software to new personal computers. Office 365 the least removed, of course. So, say hello to three teams at Microsoft that are working to stem the impact of the revenue and mindshare obsolescence of the personal computing market for the company. They can’t reform Microsoft alone, but I’d say that the company could not pull off the feat without their help. And let’s be frank, Microsoft needs the boost. |
What Happens At Def Con Stays With Us All | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | There’s nothing like attendance at the annual and security/hacker conferences to hike your paranoia into the red zone and keep it there forever. You come away with the sense that nothing, anywhere, ever, is safe–and that’s just from talks given by people willing to publicize their work. Compared to the secret legions of the NSA and other governments’ equivalents, and invisible armies of mercenary selling exploits to , Def Con may well only be the iceberg’s tip. What follows is a brief and highly subjective summary of the talks that people seemed to be talking about most, and/or the ones I found most interesting: warned the world of a potential : the RSA encryption algorithm, which is “ ,” may be within the next five years, along with the standard Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol. A is available — but guess what? Many of its crucial patents are owned by none other than everyone’s favorite crippled dinosaur, BlackBerry. Even if some bright mathematician doesn’t destroy online security as we know it, HTTPS still has plenty of other vulnerabilities. The can use a vulnerability in compression algorithms to pluck email addresses and other data from encrypted connections. A fake termination of a TLS session (note to power users; what you’ve been calling SSL has probably really been TLS for some time now) can lead to (for five minutes) or an Outlook one (for much longer.) Oh, yeah, and client-side TLS sessions . There are more than 7 billion SIM cards out there, including, probably, the one in yours. Did you know that each one is a tiny little computer in its own right, is under the complete control of your carrier, and can cause phones to make and receive calls, send and receive SMSes, open up URLs, and many other actions? Karl Koscher and Eric Butler (the creator of ) walked their audience through a on how to program these quasi-obsolete but ubiquitous devices…which is particularly relevant in light of on how approximately 1/4 of all SIM cards in existence can be exploited via a serious security flaw. CDMA phone? No SIM card! You’re… . Sorry. Primus locks were supposed to be high-security. Not any more: nowadays Primus keys can be with a 3D printer. We’re not far from the days when people can simply take a picture of a key and have a perfect physical copy mailed to them a few days later. Even if your door is secure, your home is not: smart TVs can be , and your and are no less vulnerable to hackers. But at least we can rely on Apple products to stay safe, right? Guess again: if you plug your unlocked iOS device into a charging station, then that station can on your device – in other words, take it over completely. If you’re a Person Of Interest you’d best think thrice before plugging your iPhone into a hotel charger ever again. …well, at least one water plant, as by Kyle Wilhoit of Trend Micro. Meanwhile, Lucas Apa and Carlos Penagos explained to the world how from many miles away. So you can’t trust your Internet connection, your phone, your home, your iPad, or your local infrastructure. And those are just the bugs that people are willing to talk about. Sinauridze, . |
TV Expert: Time Warner Cable-CBS Blackout To Result In ‘Best Of All Possible Worlds’ For Cable Subscribers | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Subscribers to Time Warner Cable might not be able to watch CBS shows over the next few weeks, as a result of the between a network and a pay TV operator. But at least one expert believes that the blackout, while disruptive in the short term, is actually good news for those who pay TV viewers, whether they’re Time Warner Cable subscribers or not. Late last week, the inability of the two parties to reach an agreement resulted in Time Warner Cable blacking out CBS in many of its major market, and CBS blocking online access to its shows on its own website. , professor of media studies at the University of New York, believes that while painful in the short term, the blackout will have long-running benefits for cable subscribers. In a phone interview early Sunday morning, Pangloss told me that he believes the skirmish will result in the “ ” for all parties involved. That includes both CBS and Time Warner Cable, as well as consumers who pay monthly to watch programming that is otherwise available for free online or over the air. Pangloss is the author of the upcoming book “Blackout Nation: The Inside Story Behind Big Cable’s Programming Renaissance,” which he wrote after studying the relationship between network programmers like CBS and distributors like Time Warner Cable for more than seven years. The book takes a qualitative look at the results of more than two dozen recent blackouts of the last several years — and what it concludes might surprise you. In every case, Pangloss says, the temporary blackout of a broadcast or cable network due to contract negotiations with an operator has resulted not only in greater profits for all parties involved, but also better programming and a more valuable cable package for consumers. And he believes that the most recent skirmish between Time Warner Cable and CBS will be no different. “At the end of every blackout, we’ve seen the networks walk away with more money, which ultimately gets re-invested into better programming for consumers,” Pangloss told me. He pointed to the as one example of a blackout that had big benefits for subscribers to fans of Viacom channels. The deal helped MTV to bring back shows like Teen Mom, now in its third season, while also delving into innovative new territory with shows like Catfish: The TV Show and upcoming . While less immediately obvious, the increase in revenues has also resulted in more audacious programming and creative freedom for shows appearing on Viacom networks. For instance, Nickelodeon hit Dora The Explorer has taken its episodes to the next level with even more adventure, as the team behind Dora and Diego are pushing the envelope for children’s programming. The 14-day blackout of Fox on Cablevision is another case where the jump in revenues could be directly linked to better programming for viewers. Without that blackout, Pangloss says, it’s unlikely the network would keep bringing back the Simpsons season after season. And Gordon Ramsay fans would have nowhere to turn as his four shows on the network — , , , and — probably would not have all been picked up. The investment in new, innovative programming is good not just for those who are affected by the blackout, but also viewers on other cable systems as well, according to Pangloss. He suggests that in a way, they are paying it forward — at least until the same network goes dark on someone else’s cable system. One other side benefit of a blackout is that viewers end up discovering new shows they didn’t know existed when their favorite networks go dark. Pangloss theorizes that Big Bang Theory fans might find themselves watching ABC’s Wipeout instead, and find that they really enjoy it. That results in viewers watching more shows across a wider variety of networks. For all those reasons, he thinks blackouts might even be the best way to create value for everyone involved. That’s because, in addition to lining the pockets of the programmers, they also improve the overall value proposition of the cable package. In the wake of a blackout, viewers might notice their cable bills go up a little bit, due mostly to the cable company passing its costs on to consumers. But without those price increases, Pangloss says, the engine that keeps the networks pumping out superior programming would stop humming. As for critics who believe that cable might be getting too expensive, Pangloss has built a model which shows that the cost of cable would have to double or triple before consumers would consider no longer paying for it. But even then, they’d see that the value of the package they’d subscribed to would have increased two or three times as much — making it still a great deal. “Without a doubt, cable or satellite TV is still an incredible value,” Pangloss said. And the value of the package only increases, he says, each time a network is able to extract more money from consumers, creating the “best of all possible worlds” for the everyone in the cable ecosystem — the programmers, the distributors, and the viewers who pay for it all. “The cable package that consumers have today is the best possible package that could have been put together… Inevitably, the programming that we have now is better than what we would have had without these price increases. It’s basically a win-win-win for all involved.” Photo Credit: via |
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Taking A Roundtrip With Facebook | Contributor | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | It’s finally happened. Some fourteen and a half months after its IPO, Facebook shares closed on Friday above its for the first time since the date of its IPO. Investors who bought shares in Facebook’s IPO and held until now are a whopping 5 cents in the money, with Friday’s $38.05 closing price. The challenges of the Facebook IPO, primarily the company’s lowering of revenue guidance while marketing the deal and the NASDAQ trading glitches, are well chronicled. The IPO was clearly not executed well. Now that the company is back to the $38/share starting line, however, it’s a good time to take a step back and distill lessons from the IPO and Facebook’s last 14 months as a public company. I believe Facebook shares would be much higher today, probably closer to $45/share, had the company priced its IPO lower, at $20-25/share, and started with lower revenue guidance. While I can’t prove this, I’ve spoken to several public investors and other buy & sell side experts, and most agree. Had Facebook priced its IPO lower, it would have signaled powerfully to the largest and most long-term oriented institutional investors that the company was seeking to attract and retain these investors by allowing them to initiate positions in the stock at an attractive entry point. Similarly, had Facebook kept financial guidance more conservative, potential IPO buyers would have gained comfort that Facebook was leaving plenty of slack, allowing for future earnings outperformance and guidance raises, despite future environmental uncertainties such as mobile. The net result of this approach would have been an initial book of IPO buyers more concentrated among the largest and best (ie, most long-term oriented) institutional investors. The likely rush of retail buyers into the stock would have undoubtedly ensued, but the notorious fickleness of retail buyers would have been much less tested had the IPO price been lower, despite whatever uncertainties were cast over the market by the NASDAQ trading glitches. A better book of institutional investors and less jittery retail investors, all of whom would have had lower average costs to their Facebook positions, would have led to less initial tumult and shareholder turnover. Additionally, starting from a lower level of financial guidance, would have given Facebook more room to delight shareholders with outperformance, solidifying the shareholder base rather than prompting huge investor turnover. Facebook is a once-in-a-generation company. Add the story line of an attractively priced IPO, a strong and loyal shareholder base from day one and a company that weathered the early mobile uncertainty well because expectations were set lower, and the net result points to a much higher stock price today. Facebook is a remarkable company that would be nearly impossible to replicate. The revenue and profit growth the company has achieved have been matched by few other companies in technology over the years. Despite these unique qualities, Wall Street seeks predictability above all else. The life of a fund manager is complex. Large cap growth fund managers have a few hundred companies they can trade. At any one time, the typically manager will only follow closely about 30-40 companies in her universe and own 10-20 of them in size. In short, there is a lot of competition for her time and attention. The easiest way to turn a fund manager off is by missing numbers and not raising guidance. Once she has lost faith in a company’s ability to clearly predict its future and guide accordingly, her attention will be very difficult to regain. Although Facebook has had many strong quarters since going public, particularly lately, the company started public life on rockier footing. The strong emergence of Facebook’s mobile usage had a negative connotation initially because investors were concerned with mobile monetization and, hence, Facebook’s ability to keep up with financial projections. The narrative would likely have been much more positive had Facebook kept more slack in the system, giving investors more confidence that core web Facebook usage would cover revenue and profit estimates for some time, while mobile growth and mobile monetization remained as looming upside to the story, not a requirement to hit forecasts. Facebook’s utter dominance of the social networking arena and its growing importance in the internet advertising market, leading to jaw-dropping revenue and profits, drove private market sales in Facebook up ever higher in the years and months leading up the company’s IPO. What tends to excited Silicon valley venture and cross-over investors – rapid growth, very large market opportunities, great teams and competitive advantage – typically underpin the investments made by public institutional investors as well. Public market investors can trade in an and out of stocks every day, however, enabling for constant comparisons of one company’s stock versus another. As a result, Wall Street public investors tend to focus on price as another variable much more intensely than Silicon Valley investors. The signal coming from the pricing of private market trades of Facebook’s stock leading up to its IPO, many of which were done at very high prices, was of limited value when predicting what public investors were willing to pay for Facebook early on. Everyone knew (and still knows) that Facebook is a remarkably attractive company, but valuation was the key component missing from the Silicon valley analysis relative to Wall Street. Entrepreneurs running private companies face challenges similar to public companies like Facebook. Each successive financing round represents a chance to recruit new investors. Deciding who is the right fit is key. The best investor relationships are long term in nature. Entrepreneurs need to listen to the market, but taking top dollar isn’t always the best answer. As Facebook has shown us, sometimes pricing a financing at or near the top of what the market will bear, can have near calamitous implications. Still, one of the best elements of the 14 month roundtrip Facebook has taken with its IPO investors is a reminder that Silicon valley is full of comeback stories. Facebook is undeniably a remarkable company. While its management team may have made some mistakes navigating its IPO, this same team has remained incredibly focused on building Facebook into something even more special. Perhaps the next 14 months will reward IPO shareholders for their patience. |
Who Will Disrupt Real Estate? | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | I don’t even want to imagine what looking for a house was like . Over the last few years, Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and others have done a lot to make more information available to those who want to buy and sell their homes. Today, I can easily get an alert on my phone when a house comes on the market. Indeed, I’ll probably know about it long before our real estate agent does. In a competitive market, that can be a big advantage over less tech savvy buyers. It’s just as easy to look at comparable and figure out if a price has any wiggle room for negotiations or if a house is badly overpriced for its neighborhood. That’s all great – and I really can’t imagine what house hunting would be like without Redfin’s mobile app, for example. It seems, however, that this is about as far as real estate startups go. With their IPOs, Zillow and Trulia have obviously shown that you can build a very successful startup in the real estate information world – though it’s worth noting that both of them have lately put a lot of emphasis on rentals, too. In their current form, however, most real estate startups remain squarely within the confines of providing users with more information and traditional agents with leads. That’s great, but there’s so much more startups could to do shake up the real estate market. Redfin, too, is rumored to be looking at an IPO, but unlike most of its competitors, the Seattle-based company describes itself as “technology-powered real estate brokerage” and as such, it has the advantage of being able to give its users just about the same kind of information an agent would get from a local . Even though many users probably look at Redfin as a direct competitor to Zillow, the company actually works with local agents to let you schedule tours of houses and walk you through the buying process. In the end, though, Redfin’s website is basically a sophisticated lead generation tools for its agents and while the company clearly has traction in the relatively limited number of markets it operates in, it won’t put your local Century 21, Prudential or Windermere office out of business anytime soon. So where is the real disruption in real estate? Startups are taking on and apartment rentals all the time, but when it comes to private properties, we’re still basically stuck with the same sales model today as somebody who bought a house in the 60s. We’re still working with agents and pay them fees (directly as least as sellers – and indirectly as buyers), even though we often know more about a house and neighborhood then they do. They do, however, have the key to the house we want to see and unless there’s an open house, there is basically no other way to get into a place that’s for sale. Real estate transactions are big and complicated (and you can bet your agent will often remind you that it’s the biggest financial decision you’ll ever make), but where is the startup that tries to change this or at least tries to make some aspects easier and more transparent? Sure, it’s a well-regulated industry with plenty of (local) quirks, but the same could be said for taxis and it looks like some companies have been able to change that landscape pretty effectively. If Airbnb can rent out houses, there sure must be a way to at least make home showings easier in the age of (once it starts shipping) and internet-connected surveillance. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of good real estate agents out there, but I can’t help but think that in the long run, real estate agents will go the way of travel agents. There will also be a need for a few good ones that can help you out in special circumstances and some people will always want to rely on them instead of handling things themselves. It took some ambitious startups to change how we book our travel today and it’ll take even more ambitious startups to change real estate as we know it. There is a huge opportunity here, however, and I’m looking forward to seeing somebody try to really shake things up. |
LearnXinYminutes Is The Occasional Coder’s Best Friend | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | If you’ve never written a line of code, let me let you in on a not-so-secret secret: once you’re pretty good at one programming language, picking up others becomes a lot easier. That’s not to say that mastering one language makes you a master in all of them. Hardly. Each language has its own style quirks, syntactic requirements, and nuances — but the biggest hurdles in learning to code come in the early days, in wrapping your head around the abstract key concepts (things like variables, arrays, functions, and loops) that are largely universal. It might take you a few months to start feeling halfway decent with, say, Python… but once you’ve got that base knowledge and go on to muck around with, say, Ruby, you’ll probably hit that halfway decent level within a few days. That’s why exists. LearnXinYminutes isn’t a good way to learn your first programming language, but it’s a great way to get your feet wet with your third. It doesn’t explain any of those aforementioned oh-so-important concepts, instead expecting you to come with that knowledge at hand. (Don’t have that base foundation you’d need for LearnXInY to make sense? Check out or CS 101 course, or a combination of the two. It’s absolutely friggin’ amazing how easy it is to learn the fundamentals these days. Even if you never plan to code for a living, you should still learn the basics — if nothing else, you’ll walk away understanding with a better understanding of why things work the way they do.) LearnXinY — the name being a play on all of those cheesy “Learn [Programming Language Here] In [Unit Of Time]” books that seem to be locked in a race to the bottom, always promising more knowledge in less time — is a really, really solid programming language reference site; a set of cheat sheets, if you will. They’re programming guides for people who can already program. There’s no flare; no flashiness. It’s black text on a white background. Hell, it’s probably the simplest thing, technologically, that I’ve written about in ages. But that simplicity is exactly what makes it great. I find myself using it on at least a weekly basis, so I figured I ought to help spread the word. Each language on the site gets a single page, some of’em longer than others. All of them, however, are high-level crash courses on one language, written as compilable/runnable code. Start at the top of the page with no knowledge of a language, and by the bottom you’ll be ready to dive into that language’s docs and start tinkering. They’ve got 23 guides at the moment, touching on most of the big guys; C, Javascript, Python, PHP, and Ruby are all there. I’ve come to dig it not just for learning languages, but for quickly refreshing me on those I’m already familiar with. I don’t get to code nearly as much as I’d like to these days. Once it’s been a few weeks since you’ve used a language, it can be crazy easy to forget even the most basic stuff. What do I use for comments again here… slashes, hashtags, or quotes? Does this language use parentheses in comparisons? Are arrays zero-indexed here? LearnXinY gets you back up on that bike in just a few minutes. Someone mentioned the site to me about a month ago, and I’ve had it bookmarked since. In that time, it’s picked up guides for 4 or 5 new languages, and added Chinese translations to about 1/3 of its offerings. |
What Games Are: The Win Imperative | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Many readers will be familiar with the idea that games and reward go together like two peas in a pod. Click a button, hear a satisfying ding. Kill the monster, get a magic sword. Make the longest word, earn a badge. These ideas have been with us for a long time and even seep over into the real world in the form of exercise apps, diet trackers and many other . But reward by itself isn’t that rewarding. You can develop badges and stars as far as the eye can see, but the playing public often finds them boring. Conversely, many games do not dole out loot and upgrades for good behavior, yet they are highly engaging. Many games even leave all activity up to the player with little or no signposting of what to expect, and some of those are firm audience favorites. The reason is that it’s not the reward that’s interesting, it’s what it signifies: satisfaction of a job well done, a stroke of luck, a problem solved, a situation overcome, an enemy defeated. In short, it’s about winning. . But let’s be clear for a moment. I do not mean that players secretly play in order to defeat one another. Nor that they play in order to gain high scores. Winning frequently gets an undeserved bad rap because it’s associated with what Po Bronson calls “ “. It seems narrow (others have suggested “success”, “achievement” or “progression” for these reasons) but is actually very broad. In the context of game design, to win means to accomplish something significant, to purposefully overcome a testing situation and make a mark. It’s to positively alter the state of the game and know that you did. Winning is often not ultimate. cannot be ultimately won. There is no final state to that game where the invaders take the hint and go invade another planet. The player only has a few lives whereas the invaders are endless, so one way or another he will eventually lose. Equally, also has no defined end state, but it’s almost the exact opposite of . The player can’t really lose and feels no sense of threat. He exists in a kind of equilibrium. However these games are still full of wins and losses. That sneaky shot you pull off in Space Invaders that gets the last enemy before it gets you is a win. That little project you developed in your city to reroute the water supply toward your factories is also a win. Winning is experienced both at micro as well as macro, indeed it needs to be. Without little wins a game can feel pretty hopeless, which disincentivizes play. Winning is also often self-directed. While most games have formal systems that define win and loss states, some (like ) don’t. Players explore, craft and avoid hazards, and over time engage in projects to construct whole worlds. Roleplaying games often have a considerable breadth of side quests and exploration opportunities for the player. These have little to do with the formal main line of the game, but big deal. They feel highly win-ful. Finally, winning needs to feel authentic. Slot machines don’t seem like the sort of game that fits with winning. Objectively speaking they are stacked luck engines that sap money over time. Yet, in the subjective eyes of the person actually playing, this is not true. A slots player plays to win, hoping to attain big prizes. He believes that he has enough agency to make it happen, and so he grinds the game for a while to build up to a win. His belief in his own skill is objectively false, but that sense of faux-skill is enough. The win, if it comes, feels real. When wins become routine, a game turns boring. A lack of challenge, of anything meaningful to do or a sense that all you’re doing in the game is biding time tends to undermine wins. So does the sense that the game is making you wait, or that you are simply wandering around. The main reason narrative-led games struggle to engage players toward the end of their story is usually to do . Although the tale may be interesting, the wins tap out somewhere in the middle, leading to a sensation of performing rote activity just to get to the finish. Depending on the player and the length of the game, that can be asking a lot. It’s also why many a cheap social or app game fails. There’s a common attitude among developers that all they have to do is provide a basic game dynamic seen in hundreds of previous games, then add rewards and somehow dominate the market. What happens is that the first game of this type that the player encounters is the one that they find fun, but not others. This is why most of the activity in the social and app spaces boils down to who has the best marketing. Sometimes fall-off is unavoidable because of a game’s design. , for example, struggles to provide a challenge to players because of how the game is structured. looks to be going a similar way because, although it’s beautiful and elegant, its core dynamic is not as intrinsically fascinating as . And there’s little scope for content extension in that way. One secret to game design, then, is not to worry about reward layers. Instead it’s to worry about whether the is fascinating, fair and enticing so that the player wants to win. Less early attention on the trinkets and badges, more on the robustness of the mechanics (also known as “ “, or “the hard part”, of making games). And add rewards later. As players we love our but we often don’t consider ourselves to be win-motivated. It makes us sound callous and feeds into the idea that we waste time in games when we could be doing better things. Winning has an image problem. Yet sometimes what we need is the brain-stimulating activity of matching fruit and progressing on a map, building a character, growing a city or shooting aliens. We need to win, and it’s imperative that we do so. We need to feel that what we do matters, even if only virtually. Games allow us to escape from the chaos of life into states of order. In games we get to do and be and cause change. We become heroic in our own eyes in contrast to the modern world of office jobs, mortgages and health insurance. The game of life is, for most of us, badly designed and full of frustration. A great game, by contrast, is full of win. |
From Fail Whale To Uncaged Bird, Twitter’s IPO Drumbeat Will Get Louder | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | TechCrunch Do you hear that faint drumbeat? In the background, barely noticeable, amid the frenzy around Facebook’s stock price resurgence, or the noise of your Twitter stream, there is a slow, steady drumbeat afoot looking out to 2014 and the public offering for the microblogging platform. In the rocky year since Facebook’s much-discussed IPO, the rollercoaster of the stock price has highlighted both challenges and opportunities facing Twitter as it prepares itself for the next test. Perhaps from this post onward, prepare yourself to read a lot more posts leading up to this event, even more Twitter icons on television, even more Twitter handles in the mainstream media, a mainstream book on the formation and early days of Twitter by a New York Times writer, and a sharp hum of increasing chirping among the chattering classes all the way to the scrappiest of incubators. The drumbeat to Twitter’s IPO has begun. The irrational exuberance that fueled Facebook’s IPO and subsequent price fluctuations appears to have, at least for the time being, been vindicated, as Facebook’s share price is now either at or above its initial offering price a year ago. During that time, many doubted Facebook’s overreach and greed at the time of offering, marveled at the savviness of the Instagram acquisition, remained worried about how mobile applications seem to unbundled Facebook’s core value proposition, and internalized the stock’s fall and correction as indication that the Valley was regaining interest in enterprise-oriented businesses over consumer ones and, of course, that Twitter may suffer as a result and through no fault of their own. Well, what a difference a year makes. While it remains to be seen if Facebook can continue to diversify their revenue streams and apply leverage through mobile ads, one has to believe that, at least for the near-term, Wall Street is going to give the social network back its sky-high multiple, especially when considering Instagram continues to grow on the main mobile platforms and could itself turn into a revenue-generating juggernaut if and when Zuck wants to flip the switch. Therefore, in a world where Facebook has stabilized, the Twitter birds can now safely come out of the birdhouse, peek around, and see clear skies ahead. The time is right. Lucky for Twitter, its older brother down south blazed a trail for it, and took some lashes in the process, providing some key lessons that should be studied. First, instead of gunning for a valuation public markets would only support for a few business days, Twitter would be wise to make sure both retail investors and the investment bankers underwriting the offering are given a chance at the upside action. It may be easy to charge back against the advice, claiming real founders want to buy money as cheaply as possible, but there is an unquantifiable risk to employee morale in having public stock fluctuations become a story spun out of control. Second, of course, Twitter is in the process of solidifying and diversifying the nature of its ad products, which work seamlessly on mobile. In fact, I cannot think of another service where the ad units looks just like native content. Third, while Twitter has embarked on a strategy of lock-in over the past 18-24 months, there remains more to clean up, and it all won’t be rosy, but these types of decisions will need to made in order to diversify away from ads to publishing, transactions, and other activities that could exist within Twitter’s own walled birdcage. I’m just going to be lazy and assume they’ll do everything that needs to be done, as they’ve made it through many and emerged stronger. They’ll fix the , and they’ll “read it later,” and every other little thing you can imagine. And, they don’t need to figure out mobile because it was designed from mobile from the beginning. Not too shabby. The company has come too far to do anything else, and, well, the world needs Twitter more than anything. And here’s the part that’s hard to analyze – the fact that using Twitter essentially changed and bolstered my work and career, whatever it turns out to be in the end. I can’t put a value on it. I can’t put a value on remembering when, back in 2008 when I was living in Boston and trying to . Back in 2008, when friends back east would laugh at me for using Twitter. “Why would you want to do that?,” they’d ask. I usually responded with answers around utility, such as “It’s how I get my news.” But that’s the just surface. Over five years of heavy use, it is how I connect with things that interest me, how I , how I meet new people and monitor their moves, and how I interact with the web at large. It is my own personal window into the web. I’d gather many of you reading this feel somewhat similar. And, that’s the only thing that concerns me. Once Labor Day rolls around in a few weeks, I’m expecting all sorts of news stories, magazine features, television programs, books, speaking tours, and chattering about the Twitter IPO — all deserving. There will be noise, oh yes, but that should distort the signal that Twitter, as a company and product, is just beginning. The noise is inevitable, and while this post may contribute to a bit of that noise, my hope is that this post will also dampen the frenzy a bit, a quiet yet important reminder of what recent social network IPO history has gifted us. I hope that expectations are tempered around the initial offering, that it’s more like LinkedIn’s IPO than Facebook’s, that folks on the inside won’t mind leaving some breadcrumbs on the porch for the bankers and mom-and-pop investors to scoop up, not just because it’s a noble thing to do, but because making everyone a part of the action is what Twitter is about and will set a strong foundation for what will otherwise be, in my mind, a perpetually undervalued asset. |
Can An Algorithm Be Empathetic? UK Startup EI Technologies Is Building Software That’s Sensitive To Tone Of Voice | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Often it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it that matters. Especially if you’re being sarcastic to a customer services operator. Such nuance is obviously lost on automated speech systems, more’s the pity (and, indeed, on some human ears) but don’t give up hope of being able to mock your future robot butler with a sassy response. UK startup , one of 17 in the current cohort, is developing a voice recognition platform that can identify emotion by analysing vocal qualities with an accuracy rate it says is already better than the average human ear. EI Technologies’ algorithm analyses the tonal expression of the human voice, specifically looking at “acoustic features”, rather than verbal content — with the initial aim of powering a smartphone app that can help people track and monitor their moods. The idea for the app – which will be called Xpression, and will be launched in a closed-alpha by the end of the year, specifically for members of – is to help “quantified selfers” figure out how their lifestyle affects their well-being. But its primary function is to be a test-bed to kick the tyres of the technology, and allow EI to figure out the most viable business scenarios for its emotional intelligence platform, says CEO Matt Dobson. Ultimately, the startup envisages its software having applications in vertical industries where it could help smooth interactions between humans and machines in service scenarios, such as call centres or the healthcare space. Understanding tone could improve automated response systems by helping them identify when a customer is actually satisfied with the response they have been given (pushing beyond current-gen semantic keyword analysis tech that crudely sifts call transcripts for swear words or other negative signifiers). Or, in a mental healthcare scenario, it could be used to help monitor a dementia patient’s moods. A third possible target market is the defence industry — it’s not hard to see use-cases around tracking soldiers’ stress levels and mental well-being, for instance. “Initially it’s all about building awareness of capability in your potential customer base,” says Dobson, explaining why it intends to launch a quantified self app first, rather than heading straight into one of these industry verticals. “At the moment people don’t know this sort of technology exists, and therefore how do you understand how it might be used? We’re starting to have those sort of conversations and it’s a matter of trying to bring it to market in a way that you can prove how good this technology is, and also learn how it works well for ourselves — because there’s no benchmark out there that can tell us how good it needs to be to do this.” Augmenting natural language processing algorithms by adding the ability to recognise and respond appropriately to emotion, as well as verbal content, seems like the natural next step for AI systems. ’s Replicants were of course . Not that grand dreams of sci-fi glory are at front of mind for EI Technologies at this early stage in their development. As well as core tech work continuing to improve their algorithm, their focus is necessarily on identifying practical, near-term business opportunities that could benefit from an empathy/emotional intelligence system. Which in turn means limiting the range of emotions their system can pick up, and keeping the deployment scenarios relatively specialist. So an empathetic Roy Batty remains a very distant — albeit tantalising — prospect. Currently, says Dobson, their algorithm is limited to identifying five basic emotions: happy, sad, neutral, fear and anger – with an accuracy rate of between 70% to 80% versus an average human achieving around 60% accuracy. Trained psychologists can apparently identify the correct emotion around 70% of the time — meaning EI’s algorithm is already pushing past some shrinks. The goal is to continue improving the algorithm — to ultimately achieve 80% to 90% accuracy, he adds. The system works by looking for “key acoustic features” and then cross-referencing them with a classification system to match the speech to one of the five core emotions. EI’s special sauce is machine learning and “a lot of maths”, says Dobson. They also enlisted U.K. speech recognition expert Professor Stephen Cox, of the University of East Anglia, as a paid adviser to help fine-tune the algorithm. Dobson notes that Cox has previously worked with Apple and Nuance on their speech recognition systems. Developing the algorithm further so that it can become more nuanced – in terms of being able to pick up on a broader and more complex spectrum of emotions than just the core five, such as say boredom or disgust — would certainly be a lot more challenging, says Dobson, noting that the differences between vocal signifiers can be subtle. In any case, from a business point of view it makes sense to concentrate on “the big five” initially. “It’s better to be more accurate or at least as accurate as a trained human, rather than trying to expand your basic emotions initially,” he says. “You’ve got to look at the value and think – there’ a value when a process can tell someone’s getting angry with it. Whereas where’s the value in knowing the difference between boredom and sadness or loneliness? It becomes a bit less obvious when you start to look at it.” (Philosophers and sci-fi fans may disagree of course.) EI Technologies is not the only startup in this area. Dobson cites Israeli startup as one of a handful of competitors – but notes they are targeting a slightly different result, seeking to identify how someone wants to be perceived, rather than focusing on their immediate “emotional layer”. He also mentions MIT spin-out as another company working in the emotional intelligence space. One way EI Technologies is differentiating from rivals is by its intention to have its system work on the client device, rather than using cloud processing which requires connectivity to function. That will then free it up to be deployed in a variety of devices – not just smartphones but other devices such as cars where cellular connectivity isn’t always a given, says Dobdon. The startup, which is in the middle of its stint at Wayra London, is backed by around £150,000 ($230,000) in seed funding – which includes Wayra’s investment and also finance from the UK government’s . Dobson says it’s planning to raise another round of investment in February next year, unless a VC comes calling sooner.”If we had top up finance just now we could accelerate our programme,” he adds. [Image by via ] |
After Skeuomorphism | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | When I was working on my review of Logic Pro X something struck me – where were the sliders? Historically, pro audio software has tried hard to mimic analog – and digital – workstations used by audio engineers. Those boards made you press buttons, twiddle knobs, and plug in patch cords. Logic X hid those. They were there, certainly, because the outcry would be heard around the blogosphere: Where are the sliders! The sliders were there, but they were hidden. The average user didn’t need them. Non-linear editing ensured that edited audio was a continuum, not a live thing. The need to precisely control individual instruments using sliders was no longer exactly what most users needed. But they were still there, hidden below the surface. Perhaps Apple thought professional audio folks would forget them. Slowly but surely we are entering another era of computing. Microsoft added the game Solitaire to Windows in order to train people how to drag and drop files on the desktop. That was almost two decades ago. There is no longer any need to train the average computer user how to use a mouse but, for those same decades, the necessity to support those original users brought us metaphors that are soon to become memories: trash cans, control panels, radio buttons, and, obviously, sliders. Those users still thought of machines in pre-information age terms. Buttons clicked. Knobs turned. Electricity jumped from contact to contact with a physical flick of the finger. That’s what Windows was about and that’s what iOS was about. That’s why Logic had sliders. Now, however, buttons don’t mean anything. When’s the last time you pressed a button at your desk? Aside from the odd hunt behind your iMac for the power button, I would say the last refuge of the momentary switch is the elevator. Heck, even crosswalk buttons don’t work anymore and most microwaves have touchpads. That’s why Windows 8 is so important. And that’s why the new iOS is equally important. Look at the live tiles – remember, those aren’t buttons in Windows. Where’s the trash can in iOS? All that’s left is the barest outline of an Oscar the Grouch’s house. Photorealistic icons are gone, replaced by arrows that tell you how to slide to unlock. What happened to the bouncy, rubber-banding silver button that so infatuated us a few years ago? It turned into the barest hint of an interactive element. Whereas Solitaire taught users to point to a single item on their desktop, these new buttons train users to use all their senses, to intuitively control an environment with the cues that are so infinitesimal that only someone from a future generation could grasp them. We are that future generation. That’s right. We made it. We’re in the future. Clearly design changes like the wind. Today’s high-tech interface is tomorrow’s Computer Museum exhibit. Today’s MacBook Air or Microsoft Surface will be a slab of plastic and silicon rotting in a crawl space in some suburban basement. The butterfly dies on the wheel. But the death of the skeumorphic butterfly is far more important. It’s a sea change in how we look at the world. It is a step forward towards a future of 3D information control. It is a step forward towards the control of huge amounts of data with our fingertips. It is a step forwards towards an always on network that listens to us even when we don’t mean it to. That’s why skeumorphism is dead: our hi-fis didn’t know what we wanted to listen to. Now Pandora does. We are endlessly suffering from the ravages of interstitial technology. The airplane is only now evolving from 1970s technology. Medicine is only now embracing robotics and microsensor arrays. The car is only now escaping the ghetto of combustion. The same thing is happening with information technology. We are in an endless race towards a future that intuits our needs and recalls our whims. We will, in the end, find ourselves in a world that is better and easier and, at the same time, more complex than we ever imagined. The death of skeuomorphism is long overdue. There’s a method to the madnesses foisted upon computer users by the big corporations but these madnesses took root long before Windows 8 shipped. It came from the curved edges of 2000-era web design. It’s grown in the flat, geometric logos of the current Internet giants. It’s flourished in the new UIs of apps that came out in the past few months. A new generation doesn’t want sliders. So that’s where the sliders went. They didn’t go obsolete, they went away. Let’s see what happens when that same impetus towards simplification hits everything – even the buttons in the elevator. |
Review: Exo, A Cricket-Based Protein Bar That Won’t Destroy Your Productivity | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | My sweet tooth is the enemy of productivity: sugary snacks are a one way ticket to and squishy love handles. As TechCrunch’s resident healthnut, I regularly get pitched by food startups claiming to solve the workplace snacking problem, but their “healthy” alternatives invariably raise my blood sugar like a Snickers bar fried in Pepsi. Last night, I’m happy to say, I tried a new protein bar that was sufficiently tasty, didn’t raise my blood sugar, and was packed with raw healthy ingredients. There’s just one catch: it’s made from pulverized crickets (video below).
The admirably bold Exo team wants to bring crickets to the American diet, and has successfully raised $20,000 on Kickstarter in just 3 days to build a factory that churns out bug-based snacks. “Exo will introduce to the West one of the most nutritious and sustainable protein sources in the world: insects,” their Kickstarter page. According to Exo, their cricket flour has more protein than beef, and perhaps more importantly, doesn’t contribute to a food system that . Livestock produce as much carbon as a car, eat food that could otherwise go to starving children, and are pumped full of drugs that threaten humans with deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria. So–just putting this out there–we probably want to find an alternative and bugs could be it. The bar itself is a mix of cricket protein, dates, cocoa, coconut and almond butter. The Exo has the taste and texture of a mildly sweet protein bar. . The early version the team sent me was very crumbly and a bit crunchy (coconut chips). Not going to lie, I’ve had better tasting snacks, but they all raised my blood sugar. Many have the food profile of a Twix, and the high-fructose corn syrup makes them about as healthy as Halloween leftovers. The truth is, the only way to get nutrition in a way that doesn’t destroy your body is minimally processed all-natural ingredients that resemble the original food as closely as possible. This is why the : no grains, dairy, sugars, or heated ingredients My go-to energy bar, the date-based , was acquired by General Mills in 2009. Exo uses one of the few acceptable sweeteners: raw honey (the other trendy honey-like sweetener, ). And, unlike LaraBar, it’s got 10g of protein, which will satisfy the fitness folks in your life. I don’t know if Exo will satisfy the sweet tooth of a mass market addicted to super-sugary snacks, but I do the idea that they could have found a sustainable protein. At the very least, it is tasty enough for a workplace looking to be healthier. My recommendation: buy a bunch for the office and see what your co-workers think (and then let us know!) |
With Findery, Caterina Fake Wants To Create A Lasting Community Around Stories | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | When Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield founded Flickr in 2004, creating a community around photos was a huge challenge. “There were very few people on internet to begin with, and within that group, there was a small group of people who engaged in social networks,” explains Fake. With Fake’s newest startup, she has been embarking on the same challenge she faced nearly ten years ago: creating a community around user-generated content. “Growing a bona fide community, even now, from scratch is difficult,” she tells me. Findery, which l last Fall, ha stayed relatively under the radar considering both Fake’s notoriety as an entrepreneur and the like Redpoint, True Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel, and Keith Rabois. After last October’s launch, Fake and her team of 12 engineers and designers have been heads down on doing what she does best: fostering organic growth around a community. In short, Findery’s web and mobile web apps lets you take photos and notes from specific locations and tag them on a map anywhere in the world for other people to see and discover. You can open the site and find all of the notes that have been left in your area, or you can search for an area and find the notes and pictures left in that location. The site uses Google Maps as the foundation for finding the notes. The startup has done little to no marketing or advertising to date, focusing on organic growth. Findery currently has tens of thousands of users leaving hundreds of notes each. The average user, says Fake, is highly engaged with the site, leaving lengthy notes in their home town or even travel. In this on Findery, a woman is taking a cross-country trip to visit her niece and is leaving notes along the way. SF Made is to mark spots in the city where makers are located. This user, based in Dubai, is creating a to the city. Many who have entered a similar local, content-focused approach have been tempted to take short cuts on adding content and users, Fake explains. Some of those could be importing Yelp reviews, and more. But while there have been temptations, Fake and her team have resisted this in favor of having original content be the foundation for the community. The other area where Fake is definitely not focusing with Findery is around photo-sharing, which was the primary product focus of Flickr back in the day. “This is not about social peacocking,” she says, referring to some apps that offer the ‘look at me’ experience. “It’s not about showing off where you went for dinner, or putting your social life on display, this is more about telling the story of your life and connecting this with places.” Many startups and companies have solved the problem around where to find the best donut or restaurant but Fake sees the real opportunity in discovery around personal stories and human experiences. Here’s an around all the offices of LinkedIn. Fake credits much of the talent she scooped up from Flickr and Yahoo who have strong backgrounds in community development. The secret sauce to creating an engaged community is to employ people who have experience with humanizing the internet, says Fake. While Findery has been completely web-based, the startup will be launching an iPhone app in the coming months. For now, all contributions have been made via web and mobile web. Creating communities from scratch around content and sharing is an ambitious project in a Facebook-dominated world. Monetization isn’t clear cut as well. Having tens of thousands of users is an accomplishment but these days, apps are judged by how many millions of users they collect within a year. And as Fake explained above, she doesn’t want to take any shortcuts. But it’s clear that Fake has a vision for Findery. And a passion for creating communities. And she has some of the best talent helping her along the way. Of course, it wouldn’t be surprising if there was some acquisition interest around Findery, and Fake, who has built and sold two companies previously. For now, Fake and her team delights in the stories that are shared through Findery. From to to a Fake says that Findery brings “endless surprises.” |
Hell No Moto X | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Motorola last week, and our own Chris Velazco found the phone impressive enough. But the more I think about it, the less impressed I am by Motorola’s big brand relaunch under the Google banner. The Moto X never really excited me to begin with, and it’s likely not meant to, with a slew of options squarely aimed at shoppers who value surface-level customization over the latest and greatest specs and mobile tech. Even beyond personal appeal, though, I think the Moto X falls flat, and ultimately wastes a chance that a once-great company had to really make a dent in a market that has become somewhat boring. Chris mentioned in his overview piece detailing the new device that Motorola’s X team was asked to describe the product they wanted to make; their answer must have been “a so-so mid-to-high end smartphone with an okay display and an old version of Android and a cheap swappable back case gimmick.” Google execs hinted that it would leapfrog the competition in terms of durability and battery life – what we get is a promise of 24 hours of usability (decent, though not world-changing if accurate), and a water-repellant coating, but no actual guarantees of water resistance. Does it look like a bad phone? It does not look like a bad phone. The screen could be better, with 720p max resolution and pixel density of 312 PPI, compared to a whopping 441 on the Samsung Galaxy S4, but it should be fine, as long as it doesn’t have the odd colour saturation and tonal issues I’ve found to plague Motorola smartphones in the past. And it’s got Android 4.2.2, which is Jelly Bean, though not the most current version, which is a bit of a head-scratcher given that this is now a Google-made device in essence. Chris makes much of the Moto X’s many software features, including the always-on listening mode, as he . But as with most manufacturer-specific additions to Android, a lot of these seem unlikely to dramatically change anyone’s smartphone using experience. Voice commands are handy in some unique situations, but are not useful in any way when you’re actually out among humans using your phone. The one addition that sounds truly beneficial is the Active Display, which shows notifications on the lock screen. But if Google doesn’t make this native in its next version of Android OS, I’d be very surprised indeed. Google had a chance to reinvent a brand and an entire market with Motorola, but instead we got a phone that looks to be on par with some of the better Android phones available, but not better than the best out there, like the Galaxy S4 and HTC One. It definitely doesn’t seem to have what it takes to turn around the flagging fortunes of a once-great mobile phone brand, and at $199 on contract I wonder if it’ll even be able to trade its “Made in USA” cachet for decent domestic success. I was looking for a phoenix from Motorola after Google’s acquisition and clearing of its existing, decidedly lackluster device pipeline; what it looks like we got instead were some ashes artfully arranged in a bird-like pattern, but still subject to being blown away by the slightest gust of wind. |
Snapzoom and Shuttr Allow Smartphones To Take Clear High-Resolution Macro and Long-Distance Shots | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Last week I , the tiny Bluetooth remote control for smartphones that lets users take better self-portraits and group shots. But can be used for more than just selfies. Other accessory developers have been experimenting with Shuttr to see how far it can extend a smartphone camera’s capabilities. For example, when Shuttr is combined with adapter and an optical scope, it creates an inexpensive and portable way to take clear, high-resolution macro and long-distance shots. Snapzoom is a universal adapter for iPhone and Android devices that enables smartphones to take pictures through binoculars, telescopes and microscopes. Shuttr allows photographers to avoid camera shake and take better high-resolution photos with their Snapzoom/smartphone setup. The combo can be used for macro photography, give researchers an inexpensive and portable way to take microscopic photos or (on the other end of the scale) even capture detailed shots of the moon’s surface, including the one below by Snapzoom co-creator Daniel Fujikake. “Even though I have a sturdy tripod the slightest shutter button touch can ruin the shot and the Shuttr helped me get my sharpest moon shots yet,” says Fujikake. Snapzoom was created by Fujikake and his brother-in-law Mac Nguyen. The two live in Honolulu, Hawaii, and wanted to find a way to film their surfing sessions with wide-angle lens on their smartphones, but could not get close enough to capture good footage. Then they figured out that using a pair of 10x binoculars as a telephoto lens with their smartphones magnified the image enough to fill the frames, with quality far better than the camera’s interpolated digital zoom. The Snapzoom was developed to work with almost every smartphone model, including Android, Windows and iOS devices (even with cases on) and most single and double eyepiece optical scopes. Snapzoom was successfully funded on Kickstarter two months ago and is currently . The adapter’s pre-order price is $69.99 or $144.95 with a pair of 8×25 Nikon Trailblazer travel binoculars. Shuttr has also reached its funding goal, but its . Both items are scheduled to ship in October. |
Unroll.me, A Startup That Battles Junk Mail And Manages Subscriptions, Says It Has 100K+ Subscribers | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | We’ve written about , a service that helps users manage their junk email and subscriptions, before — most recently when it was . Now the company is sharing some stats about its growth. For one thing, it says it has more than 100,000 subscribers. It also says that more than 106 million emails have been diverted from inboxes thanks to Unroll.me’s “unsubscribe” feature, and that more than 225 million emails have been summarized in Unroll.me’s digest emails. CEO and co-founder Josh Rosenwald said the company hasn’t paid for any marketing, so all that growth has been word-of-mouth. In fact, he said the Unroll.me team has focused almost entirely on the technology, rather than growth, until now — though that will start changing “now that we’re kind of hitting a groove.” The service first launched in beta in June 2012 and came out of beta in June of this year. There are other services that try to sift the genuinely personal content in your inbox from things like marketing emails, newsletter subscriptions, and social network notifications — they include OtherInbox (which was ) and . However, co-founder and CTO Jojo Hedaya said those services are trying to reinvent the email client, while the Unroll.me team thinks “the email client is just fine.” So instead of trying to create a whole new interface for navigating your email, Unroll.me just aggregates your into a single, daily email, with short previews of each mail — you only open the messages that you’re genuinely interested in. And you can manage your subscriptions through the Unroll.me site, adding emails to the daily “rollup” and unsubscribing from the ones you really don’t want. |
UrbanSpoon To Focus On Quality Restaurant Reviews After Selling Rezbook To OpenTable | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | After stepping out of a heated battle over the restaurant reservation space, Urbanspoon is taking a new approach to its review services — editorial content. Yelp had last month, which suggests it will replace industry default OpenTable with an in-house, mobile-focused competitor. When it last Wednesday, OpenTable got some portion of the reservation usage it might lose if Yelp leaves. By selling its reservation system, Urbanspoon owner IAC needs to refocus. Ask.com CEO will take the lead on creating more editorial content, and tells us that he ultimately wants to become the established brand for restaurant information. For reference, Urbanspoon was to become a part of CityGrid’s advertising network. Now the site will operate under the umbrella of . While Urbanspoon users will still be able to book reservations using OpenTable, its main focus will be creating editorial content around restaurant information. Urbanspoon will provide this through community reviews like before, but will also add articles using an editorial staff and independent contractors. Users can expect to see a revamped site by the end of the year, as well as more long-form content and features. For example, Leeds says the site could start giving individual reviews for each menu item at a restaurant. Leeds is also planning to integrate expert posts on specific cuisines and cities. “Call it the Kayak for restaurants if you will,” he explains. “You don’t get travel at Yelp, you don’t get plumbing at Kayak, they’re focused on a certain thing. And Urbanspoon has always been the place where people can get information from restaurants.” While this might convince users to go with Urbanspoon for dining options over Yelp, the company still faces direct competitors from a variety of other popular restaurant review sites, like Google-owned , and of course Yelp. Leeds sees higher-grade content as the site’s best option. He tells me Ask.com metrics have shown 35 percent growth in 2012, after increasing its editorial content. Ask.com is applying a similar strategy to its other properties, including About.com and Consumersearch.com. “This dynamic where people come to Ask to ask questions and we give them answers that are provided by other high-quality sites seems to be a model that we can extend to other properties with high-quality content. And Urbanspoon fits that mold perfectly,” Leeds tells me. With 26 million total users on Urbanspoon and over 100 million monthly users on Ask.com, he’ll have a good-sized audience to get the revision going. |
While We’re Trying To Follow His Game Of Checkers, Jeff Bezos Is Playing Chess | MG Siegler | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | A few years ago, I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a company like Amazon could operate, let alone flourish. I spent the majority of my time following Apple, a company which in many ways was the antithesis of Amazon. Apple was all about huge margins, big profit. Amazon seemed to avoid profit like the plague. The more razor-thin the margin, the better. They were Apple. And clearly, I’m not the only one confused by Amazon. When of The Washington Post being acquired by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the flow of snark was fast and furious. “ ” “ ” Etc. Etc. I as well, but only to ensnare some folks in a conversation about what : Jeff Bezos is no fool, he’s a genius. And if you can’t spot that, you’re the fool. Certainly, I used to be. While the game Amazon is playing is not as straightforward as Apple’s, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game to play. In fact, you could argue that it’s a game to be playing right now in the respective life cycles of the two companies. I understand, of course, that Amazon isn’t buying The Washington Post, Bezos personally is. And in an age where Newsweek (incidentally, once owned by The Washington Post) is getting sold for perhaps fifty cents on , and The Boston Globe is being sold for effectively , this move may seem to make less sense than Bezos’ Amazon operations. But I would not bet against Bezos here either. Here’s the thing that most people, and certainly many in the tech press, don’t seem to understand about Amazon, and by extension, Bezos: when it comes to business, there’s a game being played almost flawlessly. The goal is actually to make a huge profit too early, and . You want to avoid showing your cards too early as you continue to lay the groundwork for an ever-larger business. Occasionally, you’ll have to show those cards and win a hand to prove that you can. But the rest of the time you call and fold, as you await the monster to take the entire pot. I know that sounds crazy. Cash is king, right? Not always. Just look at Apple. They are the kings of cash. $13 billion in profit one quarter, $9 billion the next, and so on. The vault is so full of gold coins that even would need a lifeguard to swim in it. And yet, Apple’s story the past year has largely been one of a company in flux. Will they ever right the ship? Is it over? These silly doomsday projections are mainly a result of Wall Street swinging from ultra-bullish to extremely bearish on the company in that same timeframe. The “problem”? Apple was too successful, too quickly. Because the iPhone was such a good business — — Apple posted profits that were only surpassed by a few of the best quarters from the largest oil companies. As a result, the company shot from a has-been to the most valuable public company in the world. But growth and more importantly, growth potential is what matters most to Wall Street. And when you happen to stumble into one of the best businesses in the world (the high end of the carrier-subsidized smartphone market), the only way to keep that growth going is to find an equal or greater business (or several smaller ones that add up to a larger one). It’s not clear if Apple will ever find this business, even with the fabled television and watch products. The iPhone business was just good. But Amazon has no such problems on Wall Street. Again, they’re Bizarro Apple. They’re not showing their cards. While their businesses keep growing from a revenue perspective, profit has gone from negligible to non-existent to an actual loss this past quarter. And Wall Street loves them for it! Why? Two reasons. First, they know that Bezos is devouring Amazon’s profits by pouring them into infrastructure build-outs. Data centers, shipping centers, etc. These are one-time costs that should pay off in the long run. Second, they believe that at some point in the future, Amazon will flip a switch and, voila, profit. In fact, Amazon has the ability to do it at almost anytime, as Bezos has made clear in the past, but people seem to forget. As Adam Lashinsky reminded us in last year: Bezos even takes a practical approach to his love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Having worked at a hedge fund in his twenties, he understands the investor mentality probably better than most CEOs. Perhaps as a result, for the first many years of Amazon’s existence, Bezos frustrated investors by refusing to realize Amazon’s profit potential. Then, around 2007, Amazon’s investments began to bear fruit, and investors were delighted. The stock is up 10-fold in the past six years. “We believe in the long term, but the long term also has to come,” says Bezos, explaining that periodically Amazon wants to “check in” with its ability to make money. Thus, in 2007, Amazon more than doubled its profit, to $476 million, on a 38% increase in sales to almost $15 billion. A game. Here’s what else you may not realize: while Amazon may be earning little-to-no profit each quarter, they continue to bring in money that they can actually use. How? As former Amazon employee : Almost all customers paid by credit card, so Amazon would receive payment in a day. But they didn’t pay the average distributor or publisher for 90 days for books they purchased. This gave Amazon a magical financial quality called a negative operating cycle. With every book sale, Amazon got cash it could hang on to for up weeks on end (in practice it wasn’t actually 89 days of float since Amazon did purchase some high velocity selling books ahead of time). The more Amazon grew, the more cash it banked. Amazon was turning its inventory 30, 40 times a year, whereas companies like Barnes and Noble were sweating to turn their inventory twice a year. Most people just look at a company’s margins and judge the quality of the business model based on that, but the cash flow characteristics of the business can make one company a far more valuable company than another with the exact same operating margin. Amazon could have had a margin of zero and still made money. Forget profit, the emphasis has been on since 1997, . And so I repeat, Bezos is a genius. He’s flying under-the-radar until he can buy the radar. And probably the company that makes all the radars as well. With Amazon, it’s not “now or never”, it’s “next”. It’s certainly possible that Amazon slips up and they are never able to live up to the ambitions that Bezos has been building towards for the past two decades. But even pure mishaps like the LivingSocial and didn’t do much to deter the trajectory. So while The Washington Post purchase may sound insane, it’s probably a much more by Bezos. He’s likely once again playing chess while we’re all trying to parse the way he’s playing checkers. And if it fails, what’s $250 million for an ever-more-wealthy billionaire anyway? Have you seen Amazon’s stock price recently? |
Bezos In 2012: People Won’t Pay For News On The Web, Print Will Be Dead In 20 Years | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Before Jeff Bezos the Washington Post for $250 million, he had some choice words for the ailing print news industry. with the German paper, , the newly-minted media mogul said at the time that no one would bother paying for news online and print would be dead in 20 years (translation from our awesome writer, Frederic Lardinois). “There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service. Printed papers won’t be normal in twenty years.” said Bezos. That’s a pretty long timeline (think what happened in technology since 1993), but it does given an indication that Bezos may pressure his new newspaper to accelerate abandonment of their print version. During the last quarter, to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post’s print division posted a 4% decline in revenue. Revenue from online publishing, mostly from Washingtonpost.com and Slate properties, increased 8% to $25.8 million. Perhaps most importantly, Bezos claimed that, “On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change”. Last March, the Washington Post put up a metered paywall, charging readers who access more than 20 articles a month. While Bezos may not interfere with editorial, it is within his role as owner to see the paper to profitability. If Bezos thinks paywalls are misguided, we may see the Washington Post drop theirs. Bezos did not think Kindle was the salvation of papers, since “the problem is that many readers still prefer the printed version.” There will be a significant transition period where publishers will need both digital and print. Interestingly enough, Bezos says “We [Amazon] realized that people are willing to pay for newspaper subscriptions on tablets. In the near future, every household will have multiple tablets. That’s going to be the default and will provide momentum for newspapers, too”, so we may see some creative subscription models on the Kindle or bundled with other products. I’m curious to see how Bezos will be applying these ideas to his newly-purchased newspaper. Either that, or he will be ‘clarifying’ his words very soon. [ ] [ ] |
What Did Bezos Actually Buy? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Jeff Bezos, not Amazon, is to purchase the venerable Washington Post. But it’s not only the paper that Bezos is picking up for his quarter billion. As part of the purchase, the Amazon founder will also become owner of a host of smaller local papers, the Washington Post website, and a printing outfit by the name of Comprint that the “publishes several military publications.” That’s a slurry. In short, Bezos now owns a minor newspaper empire, crowned with the Washington Post itself. But just how healthy are the assets that Bezos has purchased? Let’s take a trip through the numbers. Keep in mind that the Washington Post company is only so specific in its breakdown of revenue from its newspaper division. So, our looking glass is slightly dim. In the second quarter, the newspaper division at the Washington Post company had revenue of $138.4 million, which was essentially unchanged from the year ago quarter. This is to say that the newspaper business that Bezos just bought a large piece of isn’t in as steep a decline as you might have assumed. Print advertising revenue for the Washington Post itself was $54.5 million in the quarter, down 4% from the same quarter a year before. Again, that’s somewhat stable. The Washington Post and Slate.com, roughly, saw their online incomes rise to a combined $29.8 million, an increase of 15% in the quarter. Bezos did not buy Slate, however, so that figure is inflated compared to what the Washington Post will be able to generate on its own. That said, the Washington Post is the larger of the two, and so presumably commands a larger share of that specific revenue pool. Online advertising revenue for the newspaper division rose 25% in the second quarter. However, online classified revenue fell 7%. What does all that mean? Essentially that the online portion of the Washington Post is growing at a decent pace, even as one of its revenue streams – online classifieds – stutters. Print revenue is drifting downwards, as circulation slips. In the first half of 2013, the Washington Post saw its daily circulation decline 7.1% to 447,700. It’s difficult to tell how much money the Washington Post loses, if any. The larger and now all-but -former newspaper division lost $49.3 million in the first two quarters of 2013. However, of that loss, $39.7 million was related to pension expenses. Also, in the first half of 2013, $19.6 million in “early retirement and severance expense” was recorded. If there had been no retirement costs, and we deducted the pension expenses, the newspaper division would have been profitable, it appears. Turning to pensions, a states that: [T]he Purchaser shall assume all liabilities that relate to providing post-retirement welfare benefits to Post Employees, and the Seller shall retain all liabilities that relate to providing post-retirement welfare benefits to Former Post Employees. So, Bezos will not be responsible for endless legacy pension costs. And, , Bezos will be given “what amounts to $50 million” to help with the costs of newly acquired employee’s pension promises. That sweetens the overall deal, and lowers its effective price. Given the inherent opacity of the financial information that we have, it isn’t precisely clear just how strong of a financial entity Bezos has purchased. However, I think that if we speak broadly, we can state that the Post’s rising digital revenues are encouraging, and could more than cover its falling print income. Therefore, if Bezos can control continuing one-time expenses, and stabilize its cost structure, the Post might not bleed cash. For a newspaper of its scale, that’s actually a somewhat impressive statement. Still, the same pressures that have long weighed on the newspaper industry remain in place. The obvious thought is that given the close connection between Bezos and Amazon, the company that he founded, there could be additional revenue streams that would bolster the Post as a standalone entity. For example, Bezos could provide access to the Post’s paywall as part of the Amazon Prime service, carving out a small slice of that yearly revenue that could provide material benefit for his new paper. However, when it comes to paper, that cost is coming down. As the company’s second quarter earnings report stated: “Newsprint expense was down 17% and 14% for the second quarter and first six months of 2013, respectively, primarily due to a decline in newsprint consumption.” Yes. |
Ashton Kutcher And Josh Gad On The Making Of JOBS | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | On August 16, Steve Jobs biopic “ will hit theaters nationwide. The movie follows the story of a young Jobs deciding to start Apple, building the world’s first personal computer out of his garage, and going on to lose the company he built only to be asked to take the helm once again, years later. Ashton Kutcher, who took on the role of Jobs and even ended up in along the way, sat down with TechCrunch alongside co-star Josh Gad (who plays Steve Wozniak) to discuss the biopic. “We’re taking on two people who are enormously important, who are still a part of the cultural zeitgeist, one of whom is still living and breathing,” said Gad. “So we didn’t take that lightly.” For Kutcher, however, his biggest challenge was pleasing both groups of people who knew and interacted with Jobs, the group that loved him and the group that didn’t like him so much. “He was a polarizing character,” said Kutcher. “He had a 95 percent approval rating from his employees but he would berate somebody for doing something wrong. I wanted to tell that story honestly in a way that both sides said ‘Yeah, that was Steve.'” Kutcher said that having a lot of friends in the tech world that worked with Jobs helped him better understand the man, and it drove him to honor their love for him while still portraying an honest tale of who he was. There had been a bit of drama over Steve Wozniak’s refusal to participate or consult on this film, instead being a “tutor” for Aaron Sorkin’s Jobs film. Yet, Kutcher and Gad didn’t express that they felt hindered by that. “I think we successfully let Woz function the way he wanted him to, which was to be Steve’s conscience,” said Gad. “He is the Jiminy Cricket of the story.” But outside of the roles, and the movie itself, Kutcher says his big screen turn as Jobs has most certainly made him a more well-rounded investor and advisor. “The biggest thing I’ve drawn from this that I can share with entrepreneurs is a focus on making this thing so intuitively dumb,” said Kutcher. “A lot of engineers are the most brilliant people you know, and they think it’s easy to figure it out. But it’s easy because they made it. It needs to be so simple that everyone can use it or otherwise it’s not ubiquitous and it’s not accessible.” |
Meet Tastemade, The YouTube Network For Food Lovers | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | As YouTube networks go, there are some that are designed to attract talent from all over the spectrum, and then there are those which focus on specific verticals. With that in mind, Santa Monica, Calif.-based has become the leading next-generation video network for foodies in just 12 months. We visited Tastemade as part of our emerging to ride the “next wave” of video viewing online. Like Machinima, Tastemade is focused on a single group of viewers: the company fancies itself as a lifestyle network for food lovers, gathering up creators who have built their followings around their love of cooking (and eating). It also has its own regularly scheduled programming that it creates for the network, in the company’s custom-built studio space. The Tastemade space used to be an old MTV Studios production studio back in the day, according to co-founder Steven Kydd. In that space, the company has built out five different sets that it can film in, including its ‘Brooklyn Kitchen’ set (which is about five times the size of any Brooklyn kitchen I’ve ever been in), a cooking school set, and even one that looks just like a fancy cocktail bar. Behind the scenes, the company has also built a sound-proofed prep kitchen for chefs to use to actually cook the meals that they’re showing off on camera. While the space can be used to film on-demand episodes of creator cooking shows, Tastemade also uses it to host live filmings of certain programs and events. For instance a live “ ” in which it filmed episodes from a bunch of Japanese creators cooking and collaborating with each other. So why food? Tastemade was founded by a couple of former Demand Media executives, who wanted to work on building a new media business, and themselves are passionate about food. It’s also a hugely monetizable business, and the team wants to build a huge brand online, in the same way that big cable brands emerged a few decades ago. “We believe that just like 25 years ago, some of the biggest brands in cable were formed in those early days, that same opportunity exists today on digital platforms,” Kydd told me. Watch the video above to learn more about Tastemade and what it’s doing. And be sure to check out the rest of our series on the new YouTube economy, with videos released every Monday and Wednesday over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here’s the whole series that we’ve put out so far: |
Mobile Weather App Minutely Lets You “Correct” The Weather, Visualize Storms In 3D | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Mobile weather applications may be becoming , but few can also make claims as to advancing the technology behind the display of the weather on users’ smartphones, as well. But that’s the case with , a newly launched mobile weather application for iPhone and Android which not only offers the usual assortment of weather info, like temperatures, forecasts, and precipitation details, but also a 3D view into the weather itself in an application built on top of Unity. Yes, – the cross-platform video game development engine, which is rarely (if ever) used to build non-game mobile applications for smartphones. In fact, when Minutely’s co-founder and CEO Justin Re told Unity CEO David Helgason about his plans, he was told that such an idea was just “crazy.” But with the debut of Minutely’s mobile application, that crazy idea seems to have paid off. is the new app and rebranding from a company called , which had previously raised $1.3 million and a weather app by the same name back in April 2012. But Re explains that Ourcast’s problem, basically, was that it was built by engineers. “It didn’t have a very good product focus,” he admits. “It was more of a utility app.” Ourcast was interesting, though, because it could predict the weather down to the minute, through a combination of weather data, algorithms, and crowdsourcing from the app’s network or users. But the company wanted to do more. “We started looking at everyone [making weather apps] and what they’re trying to do,” explains Re. “And we took all the best features from the other apps – including our own – and combined it into one.” The company also wanted to do something with a more visual element to it, but found they were restricted by the nature of the available tools for traditional app developers. That’s how the team ended up turning to Unity, which allowed them to map out not just the x and y axis of the radar data they pull in, but the z axis, too. This gives the new app Minutely its unique 3D view into storms, which will also be one of its key selling points to consumers. However, while 3D weather maps is Minutely’s standout feature, the overall app experience is also well-designed, and definitely a step up from the company’s earlier efforts with Ourcast. The app’s homescreen features at-a-glance information including current temps, highs and lows, a 2-day forecast, an animated weather icon (e.g. sunny, overcast, heavy rain, etc.), and a chart that displays both the temperature and chance of rain over the next 24 hours. From this main screen, tapping on various elements or “view more” links will offer more details, like a written-out “full forecast” for the day, an extended forecast for the week ahead, a rain gauge, or, if you tap the weather icon, a way to report the weather yourself. This is another one of Minutely’s notable features – it’s also a crowdsourced weather application, where user reporting actually helps to inform its model. That is, if a certain number of users report data that contradicts what Minutely’s weather feeds and algorithms say, the weather report changes. (The number of people needed for that impact to occur will grow over time as the product becomes more widely adopted.) What’s nice about Minutely’s variation on the crowdsourced weather reporting interface, as compared with for example, is that the interface for reporting this data is extremely simple. You just tap on the animated homescreen icon, choose a picture, then tap “report.” Weathermob instead asks users to choose three icons – a weather descriptor, sentiment, and what the weather is good for (e.g. grilling out, golfing, etc.) For those who want to submit more details with their weather reports in Minutely, they can do so via the prominent “Report” button, which also allows you to add a photo, write a message, or share to Facebook or Twitter. In addition to helping make Minutely’s weather reports more accurate, these reports display on the app’s map interface, though they can optionally be turned off here if getting in the way of seeing the radar data and storms. The 3D visualization of the precipitation is the app’s big whiz-bang feature of course, and Re says this will be improved in time. Because the app is built on Unity, they’ll be able to display the rain as droplets and the snow as flakes, and so on, to give you a better feeling of what kind of weather is happening where. It’s worth noting that the 3D element actually works better on Android, and doesn’t run well on anything below an iPhone 4S. It’s also hard to say how practical such a feature is – many may find the traditional 2D maps meet their needs, as is. But assuming users are really sold on 3D, the company may decide to break that off as an in-app upgrade in the future. But at the end of the day, it may not be the 3D interface that’s the bigger sell here, but rather, the crowdsourcing. Following the of Waze by Google, there’s a renewed interest in what else crowdsourcing can do via a network of mobile devices. Weather is an obvious fit. Ourcast had grown to some 30,000 active users, but those who remaining will be pushed to the new Minutely app starting tomorrow since the company can’t maintain both apps going forward. Minutely soft-launched a few days ago, ahead of today’s more public debut. The company, a distributed team of five full-time in Melbourne and San Francisco, plans to raise its Series A later this year. Interested users can download Minutely from . ( , Android .) [vimeo 71023249 w=400 h=300] |
Jeff Bezos To Acquire The Washington Post For $250M | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Yes, you read that right. The Washington Post Company just that it has reached an agreement to sell its newspaper publishing business to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. “I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post (after a transaction that would be in the best interest of our shareholders),” said Post Chairman and CEO Donald Graham in a press release. (The Graham family has owned a controlling stake in the Post since the 1930s.) “Jeff Bezos’ proven technology and business genius, his long-term approach and his personal decency make him a uniquely good new owner for the Post.” In the same release, Bezos promises that “the Post’s values will not change.” He has supposedly asked Post CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth, President and General Manager Stephen P. Hills, Executive Editor Martin Baron, and Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt to remain in their roles. In addition to acquiring the Washington Post itself, Bezos is also buying the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing. Slate magazine, TheRoot.com, Foreign Policy, Kaplan, Post–Newsweek Stations, Cable ONE, and other parts of the business will be remaining with the Washington Post company. Since it has sold off its namesake newspaper, the company will be changing its name to a yet-to-be-announced title.. Other recent media sales, such as by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, were less surprising since the owners had publicly declared their interest in selling. (The Post’s editorial staff was .) Just to be clear, this is a purchase by Bezos as an individual, not Amazon. Earlier this year, . In , Bezos wrote: I won’t be leading The Washington Post day-to-day. I am happily living in “the other Washington” where I have a day job that I love. Besides that, The Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I’m extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on. There will of course be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention. |
Fail Week: When The U.S. Government Knocked On Tim Draper’s Door About That $6 Million | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | That silence about failure is something that . People who are working through struggles in building a business should know that they’re not the only ones who have had dark days. So we asked some of the most prominent people in the tech industry to talk about a time in their careers that was marked by epic failure and dark days. We got five really good stories, and we’ll be airing them over the coming days in a series we’re calling “Fail Week” (yep, it’s our own answer to .) In this first episode, hear legendary venture capitalist talk about the time that the government knocked on his door about the $6 million he owed them — and put him on their “dirt list” of people they were watching. According to him, before you succeed, you must “fail and fail again.” |
DEA Reportedly Hiding NSA Data Used To Prosecute U.S. Citizens | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | The Snowden effect continued to roll today, with fresh revelations detailing how the pervasive surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA) is in fact linked to domestic criminal prosecution. The idea, and the defense, that NSA activity only impacts non-United States citizens and terrorists, is now utterly specious. The NSA is one of the member agencies of a DEA unit called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The SOD, according to Reuters , is at work “funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help” start, and win criminal investigations of United States citizens. Therefore, there is a direct connection between the NSA and its surveillance efforts and regular criminal prosecution in the country. The read the Reuters piece as an indication the NSA is leaking phone record information to the DEA, through the SOD, but we’re not convinced that it’s a proper reading of the source. However, the SOD does operate the ‘DICE’ database, which the DEA told Reuters has around 1 billion records, both telephonic and digital. The majority, but not all, are sourced by the DEA itself. What’s most surprising about today’s revelations is the process by which the DEA covers the tracks of its information. Using “parallel construction,” where information came from is hidden. Reuters tells a story in which a judge was told that a tip kicked off the investigation at hand. However, after pressing, it was admitted that the data had in fact been first captured by the NSA, and distributed by the SOD. By creating new pasts for received data, the DEA can avoid potentially awkward questions about the legality of its evidence. And the data that the NSA collects could be very useful to the DEA. The NSA, for example, collects metadata on every phone call placed in the United States. It is not clear what the NSA shares, or how often. However, it’s the fact that NSA data is being handed to the DEA through the secret SOD that is troubling prima facie. This is not the last time that we will have a conversation similar to this one. According , other agencies inside the Federal government are clamoring for the information that the NSA has collected, and continues to collect. It has also recently been reported that members of Congress are being denied access to information about the NSA’s activities, both by having requests ignored, or simply denied. Glenn Greenwald has , letters sent by members of Congress asking for specific information. Others have reported similar issues in more pedestrian fashion, including Rep. Justin Amash, that access to certain information was provided for a mere three hours, and that many Representatives missed the chance, and that those who did see the document in question were not allowed to discuss it with those that did not. There is work afoot, as you might have expected, to keep information regarding the NSA’s activities out of the public eye. To some extent that is perfectly reasonable, given that such agencies are clandestine by nature. When Congress, tasked with oversight of American intelligence operations, , denied information, and then provided only select facts for limited periods of time, something is wrong. And, given that the NSA is slipping the DEA information about domestic phone calls, we’ve never needed more stern hands on the NSA’s wheel. |
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