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Time.com Hires Design Studio Big Human For This Fall’s Big Relaunch | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Time is moving forward with its plans for a major redesign and relaunch of this fall, announcing today that it has hired design studio . It’s an interesting choice, because most of Big Human’s past experience has been on the tech and startup side — include Jetsetter, 1stDibs, and Samsung. (Big Human’s founder Rus Yusupov .) In fact, the studio has never worked for a news site before — something that managing director Steve Spurgat said is an advantage. “Some of Big Human’s biggest success stories are set in industries we had never tackled before,” Spurgat told me via email. “Jetsetter was our first travel site, and we were with them from when they were a small team up until their recent acquisition. 1stDibs was our first ecommerce site, and our redesign had an huge impact on their numbers.” The Time.com team has been — the company said in May that it was hiring 30 new staffers, an increase of about 50 percent. Managing editor Edward Felsenthal and head of product Daniel Bernard (who both joined recently) told me that the redesign goals include placing a bigger emphasis on the mobile experience, as well as (in Felsenthal’s words) “drawing on our really massive social reach.” Time says that Time.com had 27 million unique visitors in July, up 40 percent year-over-year, with mobile and tablet traffic accounting for nearly 30 percent of that total. Asked about why they chose Big Human in particular, Bernard pointed to the studio’s success with e-commerce. Not that Time.com will be unveiling a bunch of new commerce features — instead, Bernard said that perspective can help Time.com figure out “how do we merchandise our news and surface things a lot of different ways?” Spurgat added: We of course examine what other news sites are doing well and not so well, but we treat much of our ideation as if Time.com is the first news site in the world. It’s amazing that a brand like Time, with its deep-rooted history and prestige, is onboard with that approach. In the history of online news, I doubt you’ll find such a big news brand working so tightly with a twenty person agency that’s famous for working with startups. Meanwhile, the company that it has hired Jeffrey J. Bairstow as its executive vice president and chief financial officer as it prepares to spin off from Time Warner. |
Judge Allows Quinn Emanuel To Continue Representing Snapchat In Lawsuit | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | A judge denied alleged Snapchat co-founder Reggie Brown’s motion to disqualify Quinn Emanuel from representing Snapchat today. Quinn Emanuel will continue to represent the company as the case moves forward. Brown claiming that he came up with the idea for a disappearing messages app that eventually became Snapchat. Brown says he was wrongfully kicked out of the company by co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, and is seeking a full, undiluted one-third stake in the company–currently While admitting that , Spiegel and Murphy contend that he . Brown’s representatives, Lee Tran & Liang (LTL), Quinn Emanuel from representing Snapchat. Brown had previously consulted with and sent files to Quinn Emanuel attorney Anthony Alden. LTL argued that because of this, Quinn Emanuel could not switch sides and represent Snapchat. However, Brown signed a waiver stating that Quinn Emanuel was not representing him and Quinn Emanuel could represent other parties down the line if it so chose. Quinn Emanuel claims they set up an ethical wall, sealing Alden off from the rest of the firm, and that because of the waiver and ethical wall, the firm should not be disqualified. “We’re pleased that the Court enforced Mr. Brown’s clear and unequivocal promise not to seek to disqualify the firm,” Quinn Emanuel partner Bruce Van Dalsem said. While this ruling will likely not have a major impact on who wins the overall case, it saves Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy a good amount of time and energy, as they do not have to go find new representatives. The waiver and the ethical wall were the major points the two sides argued over in oral arguments in front of Judge Joseph R. Kalin this past Thursday. “Most of the documents are arguing the merits of the case and not necessarily the disqualification of counsel,” Kalin noted. have submitted from the discovery phase in motions that should be solely related to the issue of the potential disqualification of Quinn Emanuel. The lawyers argued over a number of details, particularly precedents for the waiver, and both sides accused the other’s client of trying to gain an unfair tactical advantage. LTL argued that Snapchat hired Quinn Emanuel because Spiegel and Murphy heard in depositions that Brown had consulted with a Quinn Emanuel attorney. Quinn Emanuel fired back that Brown was pressing to disqualify Quinn Emanuel merely as a tactical move to disrupt Snapchat because he had signed Quinn Emanuel’s waiver before speaking to Alden. “The advantage waiver was satisfactory and effective under the circumstances,” Kalin wrote in his ruling. “Furthermore, the court is satisfied that Alden has not had and will not have any improper communication with others at the firm concerning the litigation due to the timely and adequate ethical wall constructed by Quinn Emanuel.” In fitting story lines for this case, Quinn Emanuel represented the Winkelvoss twins in their famous suit against Facebook, and the Lee Tran & Liang firm was founded by former Quinn Emanuel attorneys. “We disagree with but respect the Court’s decision,” LTL attorney James Lee tells me. “We will evaluate our options but regardless of what we decide to do, we look forward to litigating this case on the merits to get Mr. Brown his rightful 1/3 in Snapchat.” A trial date has not yet been set but I’m told we can expect it to be sometime in the March or April of 2014. Brown, Spiegel, and Murphy were not present at the hearing, which was expected. The two sides will have months to discover new evidence and prepare their arguments before arguing them in court, but we know the core of the case. The majority of the case will focus on a few key moments in a five month period in the spring and summer of 2011. Brown’s representatives will likely argue that he came up with the idea and was joined by Spiegel and Murphy. The trio then moved to Los Angeles together and entered into a joint venture, using Spiegel and Murphy’s old LLC, Future Freshman, for convenience and cost purposes, but never with Brown sacrificing all claims to equity. They will say that Spiegel and Murphy wrongfully outed Brown from the company Snapchat’s representatives will claim that while Brown came up with the initial idea, which was not a particularly novel idea, it was Spiegel and Murphy who made the application what it is today. Furthermore, they will likely argue that when Spiegel and Murphy converted their old venture, Future Freshman LLC, to the Toyopa Group (an entity which they eventually converted to Snapchat Inc.), Brown had no equity in the group; Brown’s equity claims are tied to a patent that was never approved, and thus his claim is to one third of nothing. |
OMGPOP Team Tried To Buy Back Its Site, But Zynga Killed It Instead | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | OMGPOP almost got an extra life, but Zynga said ‘game over’. Zynga just to shut down OMGPOP, the game developer of Draw Something it in March 2012. But multiple sources familiar with Zynga tell TechCrunch the OMGPOP team was in direct contact with Zynga leadership in an attempt to buy back the site or continue operating it, yet Zynga refused. Our sources tell us that multiple OMGPOP team members independently tried to buy back the OMGPOP.com site, games, and intellectual property. These team members wanted whatever Zynga was willing to sell, even if that didn’t include the more valuable Draw Something assets or user data. Even more employees offered to work on OMGPOP.com for free. However, Zynga said this would all take too much legal work and wouldn’t agree to sell anything. Instead, , and today said the whole OMGPOP.com site will go dark September 30th. Several OMGPOP games (excluding the Zynga-rebranded Draw Something and its sequel that shall continue running) will on August 29th. This includes Cupcake Corner, Gem Rush, Pool World Champ and Snoops) That leaves well over locked out of the games they enjoy. That’s a bit sad, considering our sources say OMGPOP.com and its non-Draw Something games were earning a decent amount of money — enough to be run independently of Zynga and make a profit. That will never be, though. We’ve reached out to Zynga for comment on the news. Now let’s be clear. Zynga has to trim the fat. If it doesn’t, it risks the whole company going under, which would . But refusing to give the axed OMGPOP team a second chance on their own doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of sympathy. Nor does it make it seem like an inviting place to work or sell your gaming startup to. [ : After further thought, Zynga’s refusal wasn’t just some cold-hearted grinch move. The fear might have been that if OMGPOP succeeded with the reclaimed assets, it could have been embarrassing for Zynga. It could have exposed Zynga’s deficiencies, so it was safer just to put OMGPOP to sleep.] Despite the injection of former Microsoft Xbox head , one source familiar with the internal workings of the company says Zynga is “ruined”, and more specifically faces serious internal challenges going forward. Things apparently went downhill after Zynga’s December 2011 IPO when former CEO Mark Pincus cashed out nearly $200 million in stock. Morale is now supposedly very low, with employees doing as little as humanly possible to get by. People aren’t concerned with making fun games or long-lasting infrastructure, but just with to keep their jobs. , it can’t just be about getting financials going in the right direction. He’ll need to fundamentally transform the attitude of the team and convince them there’s still time to hit “Continue”. |
Y Combinator Startup 7 Cups Of Tea Connects People In Need Of Emotional Support With Trained Listeners | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | It’s almost a cliche to complain about the alienating effects of technology, but the Internet is an amazing resource for combating isolation. Sites and online forums mean people who suffer from stigmatized conditions like depression can find support that was unavailable just a decade ago. Now startup wants to help connect people in need of emotional support with the site’s trained listeners. Founded by clinical psychologist Glen Moriarty, 7 Cups of Tea positions itself as an alternative for people who need more immediate support than an online forum but don’t want to see a therapist (though if necessary, listeners will refer callers to mental health professionals). Users can start with text chats and then switch to voice calls when they feel more comfortable, as well as request specific listeners. 7 Cups Of Tea, which is named after and soft-launched at the end of June, currently has over 100 listeners and gets 1,000 call requests a week. “The vast majority of people are not struggling with any really significant disorders. They are just going through a hard time. Maybe their kids are overwhelming them or their marriage is not working out right. They might have a lot of questions about things, like ‘is this normal?’ and feel like they can’t talk to anyone about it,” Moriarty says. “They just want to share it with someone.” Sometimes callers want to connect with listeners who have had similar life experiences. 7 Cups Of Tea recruited many of its current listeners through organizations like the , , a student group for mental health advocacy, and the Down Syndrome Association. Other listeners include military spouses, graduate students in psychology and caregivers of people with long-term health issues. One of Moriarty’s main is to help people who feel isolated find support. “One person had two sons with Asperger’s Syndrome. He texted five of his friends because he needed someone to talk to and none of them responded. It’s the loneliest feeling,” says Moriarty, himself the father of twins born prematurely. “With our site, I don’t have to worry about burning my friends out. I can’t call my therapist at 11 o’clock at night, but I can just go on and see if there is a listener available.” Potential listeners must complete an online training program and speak with Moriarty on the phone before they start taking calls. “I try to assess why they are interested in being a listener and just make sure that they understand the basic concept. If someone is telling you a story, try to understand what it would feel like to be them,” says Moriarty. “I think most people feel relieved when they get that: ‘I’m not alone, I feel validated.'” 7 Cups Of Tea conducts a background check on all listeners to ensure the safety of users. After each session, they are ranked by the caller on helpfulness, professionalism, empathy and response time. If someone is undergoing a crisis that is beyond the scope of 7 Cups of Tea’s listeners, they are referred to hotlines for specific issues or resources to help them find professional therapists. Safeguards are in place for listeners, too. Calls are connected through a bridging service that allows both people to remain anonymous and listeners can use a nickname on their 7 Cups of Tea profile. Sessions with harassing or rude callers are disconnected immediately. 7 Cups of Tea is aware that helping others cope with problems can take an emotional toll on even the most empathetic person and provides support for the site’s listeners. 7 Cups of Tea’s team is still working on monetization strategies. Listeners can currently elect to charge a fee and if they do, the site takes a commission. Moriarty says the site’s current focus, however, is recruiting listeners to ensure users get their calls answered as soon as possible. “We just want to be a place where you can get support,” says Moriarty. “Late at night, when you are all alone, the kids are in bed and you are exhausted and just need someone to fill your tank back up, give us a call.” |
YC-Backed One Month Rails Teaches You How To Build Your Startup While You Learn To Code | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | If you build it, they will come. But what if you don’t know how to build it? That was the problem facing Mattan Griffel, founder of a new YC-backed startup called that is launching today. “I didn’t study computer science or anything, but I had this great idea for a startup,” he said. “I just didn’t know how to build it. I spent the next few months looking for someone who could build it for me, and never quite found the right person.” Eventually, says Griffel, he realized he had to build it himself if he wanted to get it done, and started scouring the web for resources to help him learn to code. “I realized that when you don’t know anything about coding, you don’t know what language to learn or what you need to know,” said Griffel. Codecademy and Learn The Hard Way are different from One Month Rails in that they teach a comprehensive curriculum for becoming a coder in general, but don’t necessarily teach you what you need to know to build your intended product or web app. According to Griffel, nobody knows which resources to use, or which courses to take to develop the skills they need to build what they want. One Month Rails teaches Ruby On Rails in less than a month, with a webbed structure so that you learn to build what you want without learning every single lesson under the sun. This way, you can have a functional web app up and running in no time. But why Ruby on Rails? Griffel explains that not only is Ruby on Rails highly popular right now (making it easier to troubleshoot problems with a simple Google search), but that Ruby on Rails allows a single developer to handle the front-end, back-end, and everything in between. As it stands now, the YC-backed startup has over 9,000 paying student customers, with a month of tutorials costing $49.95. Eventually, the team will expand beyond Ruby on Rails to Python, JavaScript, etc. [gallery columns="4" ids="856594,856595,856596"] |
Five U.S. Startups Wanted For U.K. Plc Sales & Marketing Opportunity | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | The U.K. government’s latest tech-related initiative has political photo opportunity written all over it. Said scheme — (TGTA) — is heavy on jingoism (yes that’s “GREAT” as in Britain GREAT as in technology, see what they did there?) — and light on payload and pay-off. But then the business of government is mostly a marketing exercise these days, so none of this should surprise. TGTA calls on U.S. startups who don’t currently have a U.K. presence, but do have some presence in New York, to enter the competition to win a return ticket to the U.K. in October — season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (well, rain, spiders and gutters filled with sodden leaves, actually). There will be five ticket winners in all, one U.S. startup in each of following categories: hardware, education, lifestyle, finance and media. (British startups feeling left out will have to console yourself with an ‘advisors’ choice’ award for a “successful British tech company that has established a dynamic presence in the New York market”. No free plane tickets for you, either.) What do the five U.S. winners get, apart from a free “premium economy” plane ticket apiece? The trip will involve meeting a few bods at No.10 Downing Street, getting some legal and biz dev advice, an intro meeting with a “major British brand” and a tour of a few London co-working spaces, along with a few other bits and bobs (see below for full prize list). But really that’s just garnish. The real prize is getting to spend a working week running around in UK Plc’s hamster-wheel of spin. Yay! Doubtless the winners will receive a lot of ministerial handshakes in front of carefully selected news media. Politicos love nothing better than a well-composed photo opportunity. Or at very least a barrage of self-congratulatory press releases. So expect plentiful digital emissions from and come October, about how the government is luring U.S. entrepreneurs across the pond, helped by London’s trendy Tech City initiative. Spin, spin, spin! (For some political context, the Conservative-led U.K. coalition government is currently trying to make the most of a national economic situation that’s become less dire than it has been for the past three years. So just really dire then. Ergo, it’s especially keen to shout about job creation and business innovation. So yay startups!) Now this marketing exercise is not entirely without merit. Making some has arguably helped attract big name tech investment to East London — which has (also arguably) been helpful in terms of concentrating talent and attracting additional investment to the area to up its credentials as a tech/startup hub. Even though rents have also been pushed higher in the process, actually making life harder for some East London-based startups. (Think of it as the swings and roundabouts of Tech City spin.) So a scheme to market the U.K. Plc business opportunities at a handful of U.S. startups isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s just a “drop in the ocean” — as even British Consul General in New York, Danny Lopez, concedes, when asked about what outcomes the government is hoping TGTA will deliver. “Ultimately the outcome is to increase trade flows,” he tells TechCrunch. “Clearly a very short-term outcome is that those five worthy winners that come over to the U.K. on a bespoke business development package that we put together will hopefully, if it’s right for them, set up in the U.K. and that increases figures. The reality is that’s a drop in the ocean when you look at the context of how many companies we help in the year.” Five U.S. startups getting a freebie trip to London isn’t going to move anyone’s needle. But a flashy awards bash gives the U.K. government something to talk about when it hob-nobs with — and tries to butter up — U.S. startups. In other words what Lopez carefully describes as a way to “showcase and increase exposure” can be basically summed up as a UK Plc sales & marketing pitch. Learning about what foreign startups want, in terms of government policy, is another likely offshoot of the TGTA initiative — which is a good thing, if it ends up “feeding into policy points”, as Lopez puts it. “We will get to celebrate a number of New York based companies who’re looking to the U.K. but we will also, by working with them, learn more about the sort of challenges they face and what more we can do as a government to help them,” he says. Now, the U.K.’s current immigration policy has been criticised by VCs and entrepreneurs for making it harder for them to bring in the required talent to build their businesses. And it’s likely a lot of the startups Lopez and co are hob-nobbing with will be making that point over their U.K.-taxpayer funded Pinot Grigio and canapés. (Even as accelerate off in a very different direction.) Asked if the government is actively looking at how its current immigration policies impact startups — with a view to potentially making them more startup-friendly — Lopez says: “All we can do from what we do here is feed those views, which is why I’m very keen that we have an initiative like [TGTA]. I can’t comment on immigration reform, clearly that’s the remit of the Home Office, but when it come to what investors tell us that’s what we’re trying to do — collect views and be able to feed them through.” “It is something that is being raised by companies as something that we should look at,” he adds, after being pressed on the immigration point. Why is TGTA’s focus on New York, rather than any/all U.S. startups? Presumably because it’s relatively close to the U.K., versus Silicon Valley, so may be slightly more inclined to care about expanding across the pond. Lopez puts it another way — saying the New York focus is a result of a noticeable “explosion” of disruptive activity in the city over the past two years, and some native synergies between New York and London. “Whenever my team speaks to companies here they will say that mobile technology disrupts fashion, media, finance, in a way that means that the two epicentres of those three industries in the world — London and New York — have so much in common,” he says. “So if you’re based in New York and thinking about international expansion, London kind of makes sense — and vice versa.” He won’t disclose how much taxpayer cash the U.K. government is spending on its latest swathe of spin (aka TGTA) — but does note that sponsors are paying for core elements of the awards, including the flights (Virgin Atlantic is stumping up the cash) and accommodation for the duration of the stay (Royal Bank of Scotland funded, apparently). TGTA’s includes David Karp, CEO/Founder of Tumblr; John Borthwick, CEO/Co-founder of Betaworks; and Ben Lerer, CEO/Co-founder of Thrillist Media Group and Lerer Ventures. Here’s the full run down of what the five U.S. winners will get: |
Zynga To Shut Down OMGPOP’s Online Gaming Portal, OMGPOP.com | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Long before OMGPOP found its sudden (and rather fleeting) success as a mobile game developer with Draw Something, it began its life as an online game network at OMGPOP.com. After Zynga only to a year later, it was unclear what would happen to this last lingering monument to the company. On September 30th, it’ll be shut down for good. It’s the final period in OMGPOP’s story, a Zynga-branded version of Draw Something left as its only legacy. Zynga is quick to point out that players will still be able to play Draw Something (both the original and the sequel) and Draw My Thing (the game that inspired Draw Something. I mean, besides Pictionary.) after the main portal goes dark. Some games (Cupcake Corner, Gem Rush, Pool World Champ, and Snoops) are gettin’ the axe a bit earlier than the rest, dropping off the Internets at the end of August. |
Can Mayer’s Aggressive Acquisition Spree Drive Revenue Growth At Yahoo? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Yahoo continued its acquisition spree last week, . The company’s product will be all but instantly axed. Yahoo’s senior vice president of mobile wrote the blog post announcing the purchase, so it is not hard to see where RockMelt’s employees are headed. It joins a string of companies, often small and directionless, that Yahoo has scooped up to help fuel its new mobile focus. Yahoo has been successful at finding firms that might be packed with developers that are otherwise hard to hire, and buying the operation wholesale. I’ve lost track of the number of acquisitions, but it’s nearing two dozen since Marissa Mayer took over at Yahoo’s helm. It’s time to ask a new question: At what point does Yahoo’s aggressive purchase of outside firms to bolster its internal development corps help it grow its revenue? It is fair to say that under Mayer, Yahoo has undergone transformation in several ways: Internal culture and morale have improved, the company has made , and, yes, it has greatly expanded its pool of mobile developer talent that has helped the company . However, those successful efforts have not yet translated to new top line incomes. In short, Yahoo’s reformation has been undertaken during a period of revenue decline; Yahoo’s business is bringing in fewer dollars than it once did. In the second quarter, for example, Yahoo’s . Every new CEO should be granted a period of clemency, during which they can make initial reforms to the company that they now run. It takes time to institute change, and so for the first few quarters of a new CEO’s tenure, a respectful position of reasonable doubt is fair. However, that time expires, after which the CEO’s strategy can be measured on its own merits. Mayer has executed her plan well, as we noted before. If she had not succeeded at creating a better vibe at Yahoo, I’d argue that her ability to hire through acquihire would have been greatly lessened; a less cool Yahoo would be a less exciting potential new home for an ailing startup. We can therefore begin to judge the strategy’s efficacy. You might argue that it will take more than four quarters to reform a company as old, and large as Yahoo. That’s a reasonable point, but we can also look for signals as to the company’s direction. Revenue at Yahoo managed to grow by a slim $21 million in the fourth quarter of 2012, on a year over year basis. But thus far in 2013, Yahoo has posted two quarter of consistent revenue decline, again comparing year ago quarters to the current. Perhaps more troubling, Yahoo has had its revenue decline sequentially as well, with the most recent quarter bringing in less than the directly preceding now for both of 2013’s reported quarters. Yahoo is in no short-term danger. It’s a , and one that has time to find new revenue sources. However, there is a question of pace at work here. When does the new mobile development talent, bought with dollars that could have been returned to shareholders, help Yahoo grow? Until Yahoo can demonstrate consistent revenue growth, Mayer’s strategy will remain unvalidated, and investors could lose at least some of the new faith that they have found in the company. There are two simple ways that Yahoo could grow its top line, when thinking from the perspective of the companies that it has recently purchased: New talent drives higher usage of new and existing mobile applications, boosting ad income; or, Tumblr is functionally monetized, adding a new revenue column for Yahoo. However, Yahoo is likely hesitant to extract headlong financial return from Tumblr, and building mobile application market share in an ecosystem where every competitor has their own platform, and you don’t, isn’t a simple task. There is no indication that Yahoo is done hiring through purchase. Criticism of that strategy is , as is defense of what we could call the Mayer Way. Is the criticism fair, that Yahoo is becoming a receptacle for failed companies? Somewhat, but : Wouldn’t it just be cheaper and easier to hire programmers on the open market or right out of college? Actually, no. The competition for developer talent in Silicon Valley today is insane. Take this describing the day Zynga laid off several hundred employees. Recruiters tried to hire freshly axed programmers in the comment section of news stories about the firings. The Verge goes on to stating that Yahoo is locking newly purchased engineers into two and four-year contracts. AllThingsD thinks that Yahoo . If it had 100 employees, Yahoo paid $600,000 to $700,000 per. If they only signed two-year contracts, before salary and the rest Yahoo shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for each new Yahoo-er. That’s not cheap. Yahoo needs to show in the second half of 2013 that it can grow its revenues, charting a new direction north. It would be even better, frankly, if Yahoo could directly draw a line between its current expenditures and new incomes, but that might be hard to directly demonstrate. I wouldn’t even expect that. But spending cash to increase overhead in the face of sliding revenue is a tough course to chart indefinitely. Undoubtedly Yahoo is better off now than it was before the arrival of Mayer. But a business is the sum of its cashflows, and while they slip, no company can claim full health. |
A Look Into What The Manning Verdict Means For The Tech Industry | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | It’s a situation that has captured the interest of many people but has especially meaningful implications for the tech industry (and the people who use its products), so it was a big pleasure to have stop by the TechCrunch TV studio this week to help elucidate what it all means. As the co-founder and COO of the and a at the , Reitman has been keeping close tabs on the Manning case since Manning’s leaks of classified U.S. military documents first came to light — in fact, in her spare time she founded the to help support Manning in his trial. There are few people more well-versed in all aspects of this subject than she. Watch the video embedded above to hear about why people who love technology should care about what happens to Bradley Manning, the implications of this verdict on future tech-related trials (and there will likely be many more), how the legal system needs to become more tech-savvy, how average people can get involved to ensure justice is served for Manning and others, and much more. |
Verizon Reportedly Provides British Spy Agency Access To Its Undersea Internet Cables | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | It became that the GCHQ, Britain’s NSA equivalent, was directly tapping into the fiber optic cables that carry Internet traffic around the world. However, at that time, what telecommunications companies take part in the program was not known. We now know. As , the German newspaper Süddeutsche published the list of companies that take part in the program known as ‘Tempora:’ BT, Vodafone, four small providers, and Verizon. Verizon stands out as a key ISP in the United States, and company that calls the United States home. To have it allow a foreign government to tap into its fiber cables feels slightly different than a domestic firm allowing the same from its home government. Edward Snowden leaked the material that led to the uncovering of the participants of Tempora. According to the leaks, Verizon’s secret name as part of the program was ‘Darcon.’ The article goes on to note that having the participating companies now exposed will lead to “dismay” at the GCHQ, as consumers may be not too pleased to learn that “their private data and intimate emails have been secretly passed to a government spy agency.” The British really do have a knack for understatement. When the GCHQ program first came to light, it was noted for its relative youth – less than two years – and the time that it holds information that it intercepts: 30 days. The NSA is generally thought to retain data for a far longer period. Tempora exists alongside other GCHQ efforts that go by the names ‘Mastering the Internet’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation.’ Not exactly names that are hard to grok. As a three, they appear to provide the GCHQ with essentially limitless access to the communications information of British citizens – if they desired to run the search, of course – with the that “recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites” are collected by the efforts. And now the firms taking part in Tempora are publicly known. It’s now up to the citizens of Britain to stand up and say their piece. Either this sort of activity will be tolerated, or it will not be. The British and American governments are also said to have deep ties when it comes to surveillance, causing that the partnership is in fact too deep for comfort. Placing the above into context, the NSA is widely reported to engage in the same sort of fiber cable tapping. The that “President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans’ private conversations.” This particular cookie jar appears to have been too tempting for the GCHQ to avoid as well. |
CBS Blocks Time Warner Cable Subscribers From Watching Full Episodes On CBS.com | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | A dispute between CBS and Time Warner Cable over retransmission fees for its broadcast content has spilled over onto the web, with a blackout of television programming also being extended to CBS’ online properties. In the wake of Time Warner Cable dropping the CBS and Showtime signals in most major markets, the broadcaster has decided to block access to full-episode viewing on CBS.com. Earlier today, Time Warner Cable from cable systems in markets like New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver, Detroit, and Dallas-Fort Worth. That happened after months of negotiations in which the two parties were unable to reach an agreement over fees paid to transmit networks to cable subscribers. Soon after, reports began to surface from viewers in markets like New York and Los Angeles that affected viewers weren’t able to stream full episodes on CBS’ online property, CBS.com. Instead, the website showed anti-Time Warner Cable ads in the place of full-length programming. New wrinkle in blackout: at home with my @TWC broadband, videos on are blocked. In their place: anti-@TWC ads. — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) A spokesperson from CBS confirmed the reports with the following statement: If Time Warner Cable is a customer’s internet service provider, then their access to CBS full episode content via online and mobile platforms has been suspended as a result of Time Warner Cable’s decision to drop CBS and Showtime from their market. As soon as CBS is restored on Time Warner Cable systems in affected markets, that content will be accessible again. The decision to block viewers from streaming full episodes on the web is controversial, but not unprecedented. Back in 2010, amidst a skirmish between News Corp and Cablevision over retransmission fees for Fox and other networks, Cablevision subscribers were . The popular online video site was put in the unenviable position of blocking viewers at the behest of its corporate parents, but access was quickly restored after a bit of backlash. It doesn’t appear that CBS is likely to reverse course so quickly. Over the last several years, we’ve seen a number of these disputes flair up, and when networks and cable distributors can’t reach a deal, it means that the TV networks go dark for a few days, or sometimes weeks. And then, after some time, they come back online again, with the cable companies paying more and generally passing on the higher rates to subscribers. But in the wake of these blackouts, cable companies frequently suggest other ways their subscribers can access that programming — for instance, through free, over-the-air digital antennas, or by watching ad-supported streams online. (The subtext behind those suggestions is that viewers already have free access to that programming, so like, why should the cable company have to pay retrans fees to bring the content to viewers?) CBS is taking away one of those options, by restricting viewership through its online property. Of course, the controversial aspect of that decision — and the decision by News Corp to block Cablevision subscribers all those years ago — is that . As a result, CBS is blocking broadband-only subscribers from watching its content, along with those who are paying to watch it through their cable subscriptions. That’s probably a tradeoff that CBS is willing to make. The number of broadband-only households out there might be growing, but it’s still incredibly small. And besides, they’re not the ones paying CBS’ bills anyway. Even so, cutting them off sets a precedent that we could see other broadcasters follow during the next retrans blackout. |
University Of California Approves Major Open Access Policy To Make Research Free | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Good news for fans of the scientific method: the largest and most influential university system on the planet will be giving out its research for free. After 6-year-long fight with the for-profit academic publishing industry, the University of California Senate for research on all 10 campuses. The policy is major win for those who want to see academic research made public, rather than behind the pricy paywalls of big publishers. , Harvard Library penned a memo urging the university’s 2,100 faculty to boycott for-profit academic research databases and instead submit articles to lower-cost open access journals. Universities pay millions for access to their colleague’s research, with subscriptions costs up to $40,000 for a single journal. Publishing, too, can cost many times more for more prestigious closed-access journals. Nature reports that it can cost $5,000 to publish in the biology journal, Cell Reports, but only $1,350 for the most popular open-access journal PLoS ONE. “It’s still ludicrous how much it costs to publish research,” molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Eisen. The open access movement has friends in high-places. Recently, in response to a WeThePeople petition, the White House pledged a whopping $100 million to promote open access and to require all federally-funded research to be free of charge. There are issues with open access; it costs money to curate high-quality peer-review and market the research. Many academic papers take years to write, and its a risky proposition to leave it in the hands of an experimental publisher. But, speaking as a writer who likes to include academic research in my articles, open access could not come soon enough. Media outlets get inundated with research findings, but often can’t get access to the articles to report on them critically. Open access may not be perfect, but it is the future. The more people use it, the better the journals will become. And, ultimately, there will be little need for closed access at all. |
Developed By Literacy Experts, Learn With Homer Launches On The iPad To Change How Kids Learn To Read | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Stephanie Dua spent the last ten years pushing for educational reform, first as the CEO of the Fund for Public Schools under former Chancellor of New York’s Department of Education, Joel Klein, and Caroline Kennedy, before becoming senior advisor to David Coleman at Student Achievement Partners (SAP). But as much time as she spent as a reformer on “the inside,” when it came time for Dua’s daughter to learn how to read, she struggled to find any quality materials for parents that could help get their kids started on the right path. With the help of former Google engineer Iris Tang, Dua created , a business and reading app for the iPad of the same name, which launched on the App Store this week. The idea was to transform how kids age 3 to 6 learn how to read, but not just by creating another eBook or cute little game-ified learning app for the iPad. Instead, Dua and Tang wanted to bring together the latest educational research, learning techniques and teaching practices to create a better learning experience for both kids and parents. And one, importantly, that is aligned with the new standards of the Common Core, so that parents have assurance that their kids will start school (or kindergarten) ahead of the curve. To do so, the app blends a whole mess of custom learning content and stories taken from fairy tales, fables, and various mythologies with some killer, custom illustrations and art to make the content more engaging for young eyeballs. Alongside these stories, Learn with Homer includes a phonics program that aims to teach kids how words not only look, but how they sound and how they’re strung together. The motivation, Dua tells us, is to create a “comprehensive literacy program” for the iPad, where kids are not just memorizing words by sight as their parents read to them at bedtime, for example, but actually learning the sounds of the words as they go. The iPad then offers “field trips” that aim to bring the platform’s lessons into the real world by showing pictures of a fun range of animal characters and allowing kids to hear their own voices and words imitate those characters. Parents can also make recordings of their kids during the process, measuring their progress as they move through Learn With Homer’s 30 (free to download) lessons. Parental units can also add up to three kids per account or access free storage for up to 500 of these recordings — as well as drawings. To that end, Learn With Homer offers printable mazes and other engaging puzzles, artwork and lists of books that you can buy online to supplement your wee ones’ learning activities. “The single biggest predictor of children’s academic success is their reading level at third grade,”
Dua tells us. “Through Learn With Homer, we want to help kids and parents in the early years, when it matters most. So every element of the experience serves a learning purpose, but also allows kids to have fun. Our parent testers were blown away by how much their children enjoyed using Learn with Homer — and even more by how much their children learned.” It’s tough to create an engaging, gamified product experience, while prioritizing the learning experience in a way that doesn’t cheapen either side and maintains the balance. Learn With Homer does both, and the design is actually stunning. You don’t have to play with this for long before realizing how much parents are going to love this. Learn With Homer is backed by $2.2 million in seed financing raised from a flock of venture and angel investors, including: Great Oaks Venture Capital; Paul Francis, Entrepreneur and early CFO of Priceline; Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters, Founding Partner of Angelic Ventures; Rob Soni, Entrepreneur, Investor, former Managing Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and General Partner at Matrix Ventures; and Matt Turck, Managing Director, FirstMark Capital (who invested personally). For more, find |
What’s Asseta, A Marketplace For Used Manufacturing Equipment, Doing In Y Combinator? Um, Making Money | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Thank you, Y Combinator, for not just investing in a million photo-sharing apps. While you might not be personally excited about an online marketplace where you can buy and sell used manufacturing equipment – and, at launch, primarily semiconductor equipment – a new startup called demonstrates the potential in taking the now familiar concept of a transparent buyer and seller marketplace to a new vertical, which has yet to be flattened by the power of the web and the one-to-one connectivity it allows. Like many traditional businesses which have since seen their old ways of doing things transformed in similar ways – anywhere there’s a middleman that can be eliminated, that is – Asseta, too, is taking on its own fragmented market of competitors. Today, there are hundreds of used equipment brokers employing sales people who manage the sale of these goods, often without letting buyers know where the equipment comes from, who the sellers are, and definitely not what the real, underlying price of the item is. Asseta’s founders know how this works, of course, because three of the four worked for one of the largest brokers in the business – a company responsible for 1.6 percent of the $6 billion (as of 2010) market in used semiconductor equipment sales. Explains CEO Anton Brevde, there was no specific event that prompted him and the other founders, including his ex-brokerage co-workers Jonathan Pease and Garrett Beck, or CTO Danial Afzal, to leave their current jobs and build Asseta. “It was just seeing how much money [our former] company was making, and how inefficiently the processes and the company was being run – it just didn’t make any sense,” says Brevde. “We realized there was a bigger opportunity here…we were all young, and understood the potential of technology. We decided we could do a better job.” The website today is filled with items regular folks won’t know much about, but the site is also familiar in a way, with its image-heavy (almost Pinterest-like) look-and-feel, and navigation by category much like you’d find on any marketplace website or e-commerce store. However, despite the appearance of being simply an “eBay for X,” Brevde says that there’s much more that needs to be done to make a marketplace like Asseta work for the enterprise. eBay has so far failed to address enterprise needs, in fact, he notes, with its consumer-friendly focus. That’s why, in addition to the enabling the communication between buyer and seller, the company is now working to add other components to the site like approvals, contracts, and then finally payments. (Today, it handles these things offline instead.) To use the site, would-be-equipment buyers can search the now 10,000 live listings from Asseta customers, which includes those from a dozen or some initial partnerships the company formed through their previous industry relationships. Product info (e.g., make, model, year) is provided on each listing, including, most importantly, price. When a buyer is ready to purchase, they just contact the seller through the system and then Asseta gets involved to help facilitate the sale, and handle the payment, shipment and fulfillment. Commissions are usually 5 to 10 percent, lower than the standard 50 percent on average in the industry. Buyers can also sign up for notifications for equipment they want but Asseta doesn’t yet have. Meanwhile, sellers can upload listings individually or import a spreadsheet. Asseta handles a lot of the grunt work here, including going on site and taking photographs. Equipment on the site ranges form a few thousand dollars to several million, and, as previously noted, it’s mainly semiconductor equipment at present. But the company is now beginning to list other equipment in printed circuit board assembly, optics, LED, and solar, each of which are good-sized markets of their own. Says Brevde, those other industries will naturally come to the site because of the overlap in technologies, and then Asseta will be able to convert them into uploading the equipment they have for sale, too. Though he declined to provide the number of transactions or exact dollar amount they’ve processed since launching the online marketplace this June (previously, they had been testing the model offline), he would say that Asseta has already completed “six figures in sales” and is profitable since the marketplace debuted. Outside of YC and YC VC funding, the company was bootstrapped. As noted above, Y Combinator’s backing of Asseta is somewhat unusual – used manufacturing equipment is not normally an industry that the incubator goes after. Brevde admits that they were kind of “an odd one out” during the current YC class. “We’ve been working on making it easier to understand what we’re doing, because in the beginning it was a lot of blank stares,” he says. The team decided to join YC, however, because they had never before done a startup, and Asseta is about making a major transition in an industry from one business model to another. “It felt like we were starting over from scratch,” says Brevde. “Being mentored from the people who built Yahoo mail and Gmail really helped.” Y Combinator partner Garry Tan agrees that Asseta is in “an unusual and unsexy space,” and it also represents the first time YC has invested in anything of this sort for used equipment. “But the team is composed of domain experts — guys who know this industry inside and out, and that’s why we funded them,” says Tan. “Software is eating every market, sexy or unsexy.” |
AOL Lays Off Members Of AIM, Video Production, And HR Teams | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | made another round of cuts today. The news was , which said the layoffs “won’t break any records for AOL” and that the cuts include some recent hires. A spokesperson for AOL (which owns TechCrunch) declined to comment, but a source with knowledge of the company confirmed that there were layoffs today, and that, as reported, they affected the AIM, video production, and human resources teams. ( last year.) Although my source did not say how many people were affected, they did note that there are other areas of AOL that are still hiring. By the way, the company will be on Wednesday. Since the quarter ends on July 31, the report won’t cover today’s layoffs, presumably, but it should give a general sense of whether the cuts indicate broader issues or if this is, from a company perspective, a relatively minor administrative move. |
File Transfer & Syncing Service Pixelpipe Shuts Down – Acquisition In The Works? | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | San Francisco-based startup , which previously offered services for uploading photos to a variety of online destinations, before moving to support a wider variety of file types under a cloud-to-cloud rebranding known as , shut down today. The company says it will now be “joining a much larger organization,” but the details are not yet finalized. However, there are hints that at least some of the work Pixelpipe had accomplished won’t be all for naught, as the company’s brief but vague notes that the team will be “working on similar themes to what we have delivered with both our Pixelpipe and Pi.pe services.” Founded back in the later stages of the Web 2.0 era, Pixelpipe as a personal media syndication utility that let users distribute audio files or images to a number of popular online services, including Flickr – or, to give you an idea of the timeframe – to sites like friendster, Pownce, Friendfeed, 72photos, Acrobat.com, Fotki, Buzznet, and others. The company continued on for many years, raising $2.3 million in , and becoming fairly well-known – though never hugely popular – as a utility for quickly getting photos into the cloud, via desktop or mobile. Then, in , it made a slight pivot, or perhaps “expansion,” if you will, to focus on moving data between cloud services, instead of from a desktop computer or mobile phone into the cloud, as with Pixelpipe. There are actually few ways to do this today – if, for example, you want to export your Facebook photo collection and move it to Flickr, or put all your Dropbox photos and files into Picasa (now G+ Photos) or Google Drive, for instance – it’s still hard to do after the fact. Though other tools like IFTTT have come along to automate actions that can occur at the time of upload or posting, as the case may be, managing larger libraries of cloud data is something consumers don’t really have many good tools to do. (Or maybe, don’t want to do?) As of this May, the company’s users had transferred over 50 million files to date, up from 8 million in October 2012. Between the two services, the company had just over 1.2 million users, and the average Pi.pe user imported around 700 files and exports over 850. had supported a ton of services including 500px, Amazon Glacier, Box, CX, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Flickr, Google Drive, Mixi, MySpace, Orkut, Photobucket, Picasa, Shutterfly, Smugmug, Sugarsync, Trovebox, VK, Walgreens, YouSendIt, and YouTube. It had also recently added , and had iOS and Android applications for Pi.pe (to replace the Pixelpipe app) in the works. Obviously, we’re all placing wagers here on whether or not it turns out to be Yahoo who bought this one up. (We’re digging.) Pixelpipe CEO Brett Butterfield has responded, but only to say that he cannot talk about the deal until it’s been completed. “I will however say that it’s good news,” he notes. Now, the company says that today it’s shutting down both the Pixelpipe and Pi.pe services, and yes – it’s effective immediately. Both sites are redirecting to the , copied below. Service update from Team Pixelpipe The Pixelpipe team is pleased to announce that we will all soon be joining a much larger organization. While the details are still to be finalized, we can say that we will be working on similar themes to what we have delivered with both our Pixelpipe & Pi.pe services. We are very proud of the many millions of files that we have been able to share over the years & thank all of our loyal users. Today we are shutting down both the Pixelpipe & Pi.pe services. We hope that you have enjoyed using our free services & will only wish us the best as we transition to our new roles. Please follow our blog for further updates, you can direct any questions or comments you may have to aloha@pixelpipe.com Liberate Your Media! – Team Pixelpipe |
EAT Club Suspends Food Bus Operations In SF After Getting A Cease And Desist From The City | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Lunch goers in San Francisco startup neighborhoods like SOMA and the FiDi have lost one of their better food options today, as the food bus has suspended operations after receiving a cease and desist from the city. The shutdown of its San Francisco service follows a disagreement over how to classify the EAT Club vehicle under city food codes. , bringing a wide variety of quality meals to food deserts in San Francisco. The idea was to bring all of the awesome foods available from a wide variety of restaurants throughout the city, and make them available through a single mobile app. It did that by carting around food from three or four different restaurants every single day, in heaters or refrigerators designed to keep food at the perfect temperature when customers picked it up. Since no food was actually prepared on the bus, folks at EAT Club argued that it didn’t fit under the usual codes for food trucks, and so hadn’t been licensed as such. The startup believes that it’s best classified as a “delivery vehicle” and therefore shouldn’t need a license to operate in the city. There’s just one problem — while the EAT Club food bus carried food from a restaurant to areas where customers would purchase its goods, it didn’t rove the streets to do so. Instead, it just kind of sat in one place all day waiting for customers to place orders on its app, then come pick up food from a static location. And, according to San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, it’s not allowed to do that. The department issued a cease and desist to EAT Club, telling the startup that it needs a Mobile Food Facility Permit. Until EAT Club does so, the Public Works Department demands that it “cease operations in the public right-of-way.” In other words, don’t park in the street all day serving food, guys! While EAT Club has stopped serving San Francisco from its food bus, the company will continue operating its legacy food delivery business in Silicon Valley. And it’s looking for ways to make the bus work in the city. That means continuing to meet with city officials to work out some sort of compromise, or finding other ways to actually use the bus for deliveries — like maybe taking it to various startup or corporate offices during lunchtime. EAT Club has raised $6.5 million from investors that include August Capital, First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Zulily and Blue Nile co-founder Mark Vadon, and other angel investors. To see what the EAT Club bus was about in happier times, check out this video: ==
* The FiDi is my favorite acronym in the history of lame city acronyms. |
Ask A VC: Greylock’s Josh Elman On SoLoMo, Growth Hacking And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | On this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Greylock’s , , in the studio to answer reader questions on his views on local marketplaces and more. Elman tackled how he feels about the SoLoMo trend, and whether local networks are gaining traction at the expense of Facebook. Elman, who worked on , also talked about growth hacking. Check out the video above for more! |
Travel Startup WeHostels Goes Big On Mobile With An App For Booking Hostels On The iPad | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Travel startup wants to make it easier for people to book affordable lodging while on the go. Over the past year it has done that, betting on mobile in a big way by releasing and . Today, it released a new version of the app just for the iPad, taking advantage of the device’s larger screen to give users more information about the places they’re looking to stay at. The WeHostels iPad app gives users access to more than 40,000 hostels, budget hotels, and bed and breakfasts around the world. All places listed are rated by community members, and allow backpackers and other travelers to have an idea of where they’re staying before they show up to a hostel. Users can book instantly on the app, also ensuring that they’ll have a place to stay. The app takes advantage of the iPad’s larger screen, both for displaying maps when searching for a place and for the information provided when checking out various hostels and budget hotels. Searching in a given location will allow users to see a list of options and their ratings, while also providing a map view so users know where they are. When you choose to look at a certain place, the app displays photos, ratings, location, and general information, as well as reviews from community members who have stayed there. The app also allows travelers to book a room from the same page, closing the loop on the transaction quickly and easily. That could lead to more bookings for WeHostels, as it attempts to gain ground in the race to provide temporary accommodations. There are more than 140 million iPads out in the wild, and yet WeHostels is one of the few travel lodging apps that have launched an app specifically for the device. That contrasts it with companies like Airbnb or Couchsurfing, which don’t have iPad apps yet. WeHostels has from investors such as Ventech, Quotidian Ventures, CAP Ventures, TA Venture, and Torrenegra Labs. |
YouTube Expands Live Streaming To Channels With Just 100 Subscribers, Opens Custom Thumbnails & Merchandise Links To All | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Google today a number of updates to that will allow more video producers to use YouTube for live streaming. All channels in good standing with at least 100 subscribers will be able to from their accounts within the next few weeks. By bringing the number of required subscribers down to 100, Google is opening up this service to a large number of new users. , Google dropped changed the limit to include channels with at least 1,000 subscribers, so there is a clear trend here. It’s not clear, however, if Google will ever open up live streaming to all users on YouTube. With today’s update, YouTube is also giving its users the ability to upload for their videos. Until now, YouTube its users to make sure that they shoot their video with thumbnails in mind, so that they can select a good one directly from the video. Starting today, users can simply upload a custom thumbnail for their shows. As Google notes, though, it will revoke the ability to upload these thumbnails from creators who don’t follow its . Another new feature in today’s update is the ability to use annotations to link externally to online stores and the user’s associated websites, which will give users new ways to monetize their shows. Users can now also program related videos for their viewers. This allows them to create a playlist of shows for their viewers and YouTube will “show viewers of your videos the next episode from the series and a link to the whole playlist. Just mark your playlist as a “series” in the playlist settings.” As a YouTube spokesperson told me, today’s update essentially turns everybody with a verified account on YouTube into a partner. All of these feature are (or will shortly be) available to all users, with the obvious exception of live streaming, where you do need to have at least 100 subscribers to activate it. |
The FBI May Be Working To Install Surveillance Taps On Major US Telecom Carriers | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | According to , the FBI wants to follow the NSA into broad surveillance of Internet data by forcing large telecommunications carriers to put in place what is described in the story as “eavesdropping technology.” Once installed, the technology would grant the FBI sweeping new powers to collect metadata on the Internet activities of American citizens. At work here are so-called ‘pen register,’ and ‘trap and trace’ orders, under the legal authority of which metadata can be collected in real-time. And in large amounts. Getting one of the orders, according to CNET, is exceptionally easy. Trap and trace authority allows for the collection of metadata – but not content – of incoming communication, according to the U.S. Code of Laws. Pen register allows for the collection of phone numbers called from a particular line. If CNET is correct, and the authority given by the pen and track orders can be used to collect Internet metadata, we are seeing law intended for telephonic information bent to vacuum up different digital information. This is misuse of law. Thus the two points fit together: The FBI forces the telecommunications companies to install the technology that it wants to use to track metadata, and then uses the pen register or trap and trace authority to collect as it pleases. The metadata scope of what the FBI could collect under that connection of installed tech and legal authority could, in CNET’s view, include “IP addresses, e-mail addresses, identities of Facebook correspondents, Web sites visited, and possibly Internet search terms as well.” CNET claims that carriers are fighting the installation of the FBI’s technology. This is to be encouraged. However, it is worth noting that there is strong precedent for their cooperation, perhaps the prime example of which is the infamous at the AT&T building in San Francisco. From that location, the NSA is widely believed to have full access to the fiber optic cables through which Internet traffic flows. The report that the FBI is working to expand what I would call real-time collection of metadata from telecommunications companies is troubling in that it underscores how intent the various arms of the United States government are in their pursuance of more and more information concerning the private lives of its citizens. At the same time, the revelation, if borne out, is not a surprise. In this case, however, we lack a set of documents to corroborate the current allegations, so we’ll refrain from stating that the full CNET report is correct in every aspect. CNET, in its work to better the public understanding of government surveillance, has had to issue certain retractions following . A growing question out of the NSA leaks, and now the allegation that the FBI wants to get deeper into this game is the definition of metadata, and the simple truth that your metadata might be my content. The rules that separate the two feel flimsy, and not fully formed. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | null |
A Tag-Team Look At The New Nexus 7 | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Google recently updated its Nexus 7 tablet, with a new design and brand new specs including a more powerful processor and much better screen. The device also has the distinction of being among the first in line for new Android updates, so it’s an early-adopter’s delight. But despite all the new, the Nexus 7 doesn’t really dramatically change the tablet space; it slots in more or less where the original version did, as a tablet that’s good for the price but unlikely to provoke any passion. Well, maybe it doesn’t for you. But for a market teeming with people who are itching to buy tablets over more traditional computers, the new Nexus 7 represents a major step forward over the original without a corresponding increase in price. I suspect that a considerable chunk of people are going to look at this thing, mull their options, and take the plunge. And, you know what? They could do worse. If anyone gets this instead of a computer, they’re in for a rough surprise.
The Nexus 7 has a lot going for it on paper, not least of which is the super high resolution display. The 7-inch screen has 1980×1200 resolution, making it officially the sharpest knife in the drawer, if the drawer is filled with tablets and sharpest knife here refers to sharpest screen. That’s not all that the Nexus 7 brings to the table; its other big selling point is price. In the U.S., the 16GB version retails for $229, which is $30 more than its predecessor, but still $100 cheaper than the iPad mini with the same amount of onboard storage and wireless connectivity. So that’s double the screen resolution, for a third less money. Yeah, that’s fine, get on with it. It’s also smaller and lighter than the iPad mini (and has a smaller display, too). You’d think that would give it portability/usability benefits, but oddly it doesn’t. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the Nexus 7 is larger than the iPad mini, even though objective measures prove that isn’t the case. Is it the gargantuan top and bottom bezels? The slightly thicker case? Hard to tell exactly, but ergonomically it’s just not up to scratch with the Apple tablet.
Anyone ever tell you you’re sort of a tablet snob? Sure, it’s no iPad mini, but are you shelling out iPad mini money for this thing? No, you’re not. I agree that those bezels are huge and they make the Nexus 7 feel strangely long when you hold it vertically, but I certainly wouldn’t call them dealbreakers. Holding this thing is like holding a slightly heavier Paperwhite Kindle, which is most definitely a good thing — there’s definitely some heft there but I find it more reassuring than anything. The soft touch finish on the 7’s rear is a welcome addition too, as it helps you get a better grip on things if you’re playing games or furiously swiping through one of Darrell’s many Apple patent articles. Pricing arguments start to feel hollow when the difference is $100, and it’s only $50 if you go with Apple Certified Refurbished products. The Nexus 7 was a pricing bomb when it first hit and the full-sized iPad starting at $399 was the alternative from Apple, but no one’s going hungry over the difference now, so you can stop with the cries of class bias. It feels cheaper, too, but that’s because it is cheaper. And it doesn’t feel as cheap as some other third-party Android tablets I’ve held, so the build quality is actually a net plus for the new Nexus 7. Also top and bottom speakers make for better sound orientation when watching movies, but they don’t beat the sound quality on the iPad mini’s two bottom-edge stereo speakers. I’ve got to give it you on that one. The stereo speakers that Asus loaded this thing up with produce reasonably loud, crisp sound, but they do fall flat when compared to the sort of sound that the iPad mini’s downward-facing pair can pump out. That’s honestly quite a shame considering that 7-inch 1920×1200 display is pretty great for taking in a mobile movie or two. This Nexus 7 comes with Android 4.3 (though you might need to update out of the box to get it up to speed), which brings a few new features for users including restricted access for multiple user profiles! Exciting! … sort of. If you have lots of mischievous children who share your device. Or if you want to keep your tablet porn habit hidden from your loved ones. It’s a nice addition, but Google certainly is not going to sell any tablets on the strength of Android 4.3 alone, unless dev shops are looking for new testing devices to cover their bases. We’re not going to talk about cameras because if you’re buying a tablet based on its picture- or video-taking abilities you’re doing it wrong. I’ll expound a bit since Darrell’s being sort of a grump — neither the 5-megapixel camera nor its 2-megapixel front-facing brother managed to produce anything worth writing home about. They’ll certainly do in a pinch if you’ve got absolutely nothing else on hand that could do the job, but you’ll definitely want to whip out your phone instead when the urge to snap selfies becomes too much to resist. Don’t listen to Chris: If it’s a choice between taking a pic with your tablet and missing the moment, you’ll always have your memories. As for the other aspects of the Nexus 7’s performance, it’s absolutely fine in most cases, with some slowdown in Chrome when scrolling that’s a little disconcerting. Overall, nothing to write home about, but no problems that would annoy the average user to the point of making them want to return the device, either. Adequate, in other words. Some people maybe nonplussed by the Nexus 7’s spec sheet since it isn’t loaded up with the absolute latest and greatest chipsets, but its 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro and 2GB of RAM kept things chugging along with a minimum of headaches. I’m not much of a mobile gamer, but I didn’t notice any lag or performance issues while putzing around in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City or losing at Riptide GP. And loading up and playing several high-definition films (that I, uh, own) didn’t present many issues for the 7 either. There was the occasional visual stutter, but that’s at least partially because most of the video player apps I use haven’t been optimized for Android 4.3 yet. And there’s the battery, which has actually shrunk a bit since the last Nexus 7. I’ve been able browse web pages, fire up non-graphics intensive apps, answer emails, and basically mess around for about a day and a half before having to recharge. Loading up those videos definitely takes a toll on things though (especially if you’ve got that screen brightness cranked up) — I generally managed to get between six and seven hours of non-stop video going before everything went dark. The Nexus 7 is good for a few, very specific things: it makes an excellent e-reader; if you like digital comics they look amazing on this screen; and if you’re into acts of piracy such as torrenting it’s much easier to accomplish on Android than on iOS without getting a proper computer involved. But ultimately the Nexus 7’s screen isn’t enough to lure me away from the iPad mini permanently; if anything, it has only whetted my appetite for a Retina iPad mini, which indications suggest we’ll probably see before the end of the year. I’d characterize it a little differently — the new Nexus 7 is a great generalist tablet. It’s reasonably handsome (those bezels aside), it can hold its own when it comes to pure horsepower, and that price tag can be awfully hard to resist. Is it a perfect tablet? Obviously not, but it’s definitely a worthy purchase for first-time tablet owners or people who want a hardy companion to throw in a bag every day. |
Gillmor Gang Live 08.02.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | – Bret Taylor, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Find us on facebook at Facebook.com/gillmorgang |
Sorry, Windows Phone Fans: Instagram Hasn’t Anointed A Third-Party App | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Turns out Instagram isn’t kingmaking among the third-party developer community on Windows Phone. Today the Windows Phone community is buzzing with the news of a meeting between developer and Instagram that has led some to believe his forthcoming application for Microsoft’s smartphone platform will carry some sort of blessing from the photo sharing social network. Here’s , called #6tagram: The app “official” but it will get to wear the title “Supported by Instagram” on its sleeve, making this app the first fully featured Instagram client for Windows Phone that has Instagram’s blessing. That almost sounds like a sort of endorsement. I reached out to Instagram, and was told via a spokesperson that the company has “not selected a third-party developer to build an official or unofficial Windows Phone app.” So, whatever sort of meeting took place, it has not led to Huyn’s upcoming application landing any sort of special treatment, or status. The spokesperson continued: “Third–party apps wishing to use our platform must do so within the terms of our public API.” Screenshots of the app that Huyn is working on do appear quite nice, and if you are on Windows Phone and wish to use Instagram, it could be a viable option for you. However, it will have to live on its own merits, and not with extra updraft from Instagram itself. This matters because if Instagram started to pick favorites on platforms that it doesn’t formally support, it could chill developer activity. There are shared overtones there with Twitter and its choice to later impose its own clients as official, crowding out third-party talent. This is precisely what Instagram is not doing on Windows Phone, at least not yet. Though, I suspect that whenever Instagram does make the hop to Windows Phone, third-party clients will be effectively over. How about tomorrow, Instagram? And, just as I published the above, Huyn that indeed, his application will not be any sort of official app. Consider this case closed. |
This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Nexus 7, Moto X, And 3D Printing Gives You Cancer | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Here comes the , the fanciest phone out of Motorola in a long time and here already came the , a device that may beat out the iPad Mini. We talk about both of them. Then we move on to how 3D printing is killing us all and how that’s pretty terrible. We discuss all this and more on this week’s . The show features John Biggs, Matt Burns, Natasha Lomas, Chris Velazco, and Darrell Etherington as Uncle Jesse. So sit back, relax, and listen to us make fun of each other while discussing this week’s developments in gadgetry. Enjoy!
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Google Launches City Experts Program To Encourage Higher Quality Google+ Local Reviews | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Google has quietly launched a new program called to encourage more high-quality local business ratings and reviews on Google+. The program is currently limited to select cities in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Japan, and will reward users who have left at least 50 reviews to date, and who produce at least five new reviews each month. Those who meet these guidelines will be provided with perks, like exclusive access to local events, “custom swag” (meaning free, Google-branded items), and “special online recognition.” Participants will also receive monthly newsletters including a variety of offers, plus be alerted to local contests and events they can get involved in, a company representative explains. In addition, we’re told that Google City Experts will be invited to an exclusive Google+ Community, where they can meet other nearby Experts to discuss tips and tricks for using Google+ Local and Google Maps. The 50 reviews required as a starting point to join this program can include those members have left in the past, or can be written after signing up. But in order to maintain an active membership, City Experts have to create at least five good reviews per month – meaning well-written posts with added photos. These requirements are meant to guard against spammers, and others who may be encouraged to write a few reviews in return for free stuff. “Quality reviews” must be three or four sentences long as a minimum, while also being helpful and balanced reviews, , rather than the astro-turfing and fawning praise that’s often surreptitiously left by business owners, their friends and employees on review sites, or the attacking and negative reviews left by angry customers, or sometimes, even a business’s own competitors. The program takes advantage of which states that only a small group of so-called “creators” generate most of the content on the web, while the larger majority just consumes what others have produced. By asking that the Experts have at least 50 reviews under their belt to start, Google is limiting the program’s reach to target that smaller group of heavy, regular reviewers. Announced to little fanfare earlier this week, the program is currently offered in the United States (Austin, Chicago, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco), the United Kingdom (Bristol, Edinburgh, London, Manchester), Australia (Sydney), and Japan (Tokyo and Osaka). However, Google intends to expand City Experts over time to new areas. Even if you’re not in one of the preferred cities, you can still sign up with your Google account by selecting “other” from . Google has been consolidating its efforts in bringing local business ratings and reviews under the Google+ branding and roof for some time now, having already transitioned businesses , and later Google+ Business pages with Google+ Local pages. More recently, , letting them manage search, social, maps and AdWords from one interface. It also for relevant business searches. And it , to keep users in Google Maps instead. The only exception to the “everything Google+” push so far appears to be the which is notable mainly for the fact that Google is still holding onto the Zagat brand for now. Combined, these efforts are clearly about competing with other reviewing services, like Yelp for example, which has been pushing forward with initiatives of its own, having itself, added partnerships with Eat24 and Delivery.com, not to mention the it . But despite solid from Yelp lately, Google still holds a much larger portion of today’s local advertising pie. Pushing reviewers to beef up the quality of the ratings on its service, then rolling that program out at a worldwide scale will be another challenge for Yelp to overcome. |
Google Will Soon Let You Locate, Ring and Remote Wipe Your Android Phone From Its Upcoming Web-Based Device Manager | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | Apple users have long been to use iOS’s built-in device locator and remote wiping features, but Android users had to to . That’s changing soon. Google today that it’ll launch a new Android Device Manager later this month that will allow you to locate and ring your misplaced (or stolen) device and perform a remote wipe so your data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands. The service, Google says, will be available on devices running Android 2.2 or up and judging from today’s announcement, the Android Device Manager site will feature a dedicated area for pinging your lost device. It’s not clear what else users will be able to do on the new Device Manager site, however. Overall, of course, this new service looks a lot like Apple’s Find My iPhone feature. You’ll be able to make your phone ring at maximum volume (just in case it’s stuck between your couch cushions), for example. The locator feature will highlight your phone’s location on a map (no surprise there) and remote wiping just takes a few clicks. Unlike on Apple’s platform, though, it doesn’t look like users will be able to send messages to their lost phones or use something akin to Apple’s remote lock tool. There is nothing really new here, of course, and some OEMs already offered some of these features on their Android phone, but Android users will sure be happy to hear that Google is finally making its own tool available to its users. |
Cloud Cannon Turns Any Static Website Into An Editable Dropbox-Based CMS | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | is a CMS designed specifically for designers who know how to work with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and any static content. Instead of having to turn your beautiful designs into a dynamic CMS, you just have to put your files into a Dropbox folder — Cloud Cannon will take care of the rest in seconds. Clients can then edit paragraphs in the browser, insert images and more, as if it were an editable CMS. There isn’t much else to say about this beautiful use case of the Dropbox API, because it’s as simple as that. Many have already hosted static content on their Dropbox accounts, but George Phillips and Mike Neumegen take it a step further by allowing administrators to edit the site directly in the browser, similarly to what you would do on a website. And if the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t suit your needs, you can always edit the source files in the web-based text editor (or in your Dropbox, of course). You can manage client accounts to restrict the editing parts if you are working with a client. Only the content area will be editable as you need to add a div to any part of your HTML. If you need to host a blog, you can use static blog engine . Cloud Cannon works with custom domain names or free .cloudvent.net subdomains. The service isn’t free — subscriptions range from $5 a month for a site to $49 a month for 20 sites. The startup doesn’t actually use Dropbox’s server infrastructure because there are some bandwidth restrictions for public folders. Cloud Cannon uses the Dropbox API to sync everything to its own servers, much like Marco Arment’s . Dropbox only acts as an interface between the user and the hosting server. Yet, because it only supports static content, the startup doesn’t actually need big servers if they are configured properly with accelerators. One of Cloud Cannon’s main advantages is that users don’t need to turn into system admins and manage their own hosting solution. But even if you need a little more flexibility, this product is a very cool, well-designed hack that is worth . |
Virtual Fitting Startup Virtusize Tries On Japan Via Partnership With Online Fashion Retailer Magaseek | Steve O'Hear | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Sweden’s , one of a plethora of startups trying to solve the problem of how to “try on” clothes online, is rolling out in Japan via a partnership with Japanese online fashion retailer Magaseek. As of today, its “Fit Visualiser” solution is available on 20,000 items on Magaseek’s online store, so customers can better understand the size and fit of items before they make a purchase. It follows a similar tie-up with the UK’s ASOS earlier this year and also paves the way for Virtusize to make the claim to being the largest virtual fitting solution in terms of availability — though I suspect a number of competitors may dispute that definition. I’m also told the startup is on track to break even this fall. Differing from , which uses robots, or that enables a shopper to upload and see a 3D visualisation of themselves in order to virtually dress up in potential purchases, Virtusize lets customers compare specific measurements of an item they are looking to buy with a similar item they already own. The startup says that by displaying and overlaying 2D silhouettes of both garments, customers can more accurately compare sizes and, ultimately, choose the item that would fit them best — an approach that has obvious cost savings over the up front work involved in 3D visualisation of a retailer’s entire catalog. However, it also means that Virtusize’s solution focuses more on how a garment will fit a customer, not so much what it will look like on them. In addition it requires a customer to already own a supported garment in order to compare sizes or that they measure a favourite (and similar) item of clothing at home and enter the data manually. To that end, Virtusize’s closest competitors are probably and , both of which recommend size based on what the consumer wears in other brands. Founded in 2011, Virtusize originally launched with Nelly.com (the largest online retailer in Scandinavia) as a pilot customer. It’s since rolled out in the UK via a high-profile , along with adding Finland, Denmark, Norway and Hong Kong to its list of countries where it’s present — and now Japan, of course. The latter has seen the company open an office in Tokyo, noting that Japan is the third-largest consumer e-commerce market (though China is hot on its heels). Since we covered the ASOS launch in April, I’m told that the company’s Fit Visualiser is now available on 4,000 items from ASOS’ own label and has launched with two external brands at ASOS.com, Lipsy and Little Mistress. The startup makes money by charging web shops a monthly subscription fee for using its solution. The fee is determined by monthly page views on the product pages where Virtusize is available. Virtusize has raised £1 million in seed funding. Among the startup’s backers are Swedish listed investment company Öresund and a number of angel investors, including Fredrik Åhlberg, former Head of Growth at eBay Europe. |
Google’s Stealthy Helpouts Live Video Commerce Service Makes Its First Public Appearance, Landing Page Now Live | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Last month, our own Rip Empson broke the news that Google , a Hangouts-based marketplace “that enables individuals and small and large businesses to buy and sell services via live video.” Today, Helpouts made its first public appearance. The service’s , and while it remains invite-only, its are public and give us a closer look at what Helpouts will look like once it launches. Google describes Helpouts as a way to allow professionals and experts to “share [their] knowledge with people who want to learn from [them] by giving a Helpout.” The service obviously isn’t available yet, but Google says it is “currently inviting people with expertise across a number of topics to be able to offer Helpouts when we go live — and to make money sharing their skills and knowledge with the world.” Interested experts can already leave their names and email addresses to be included in the beta test. According to the Helpouts Help pages, experts can choose to list their services under Home & Garden, Computers & Electronics, Health & Counseling, Nutrition & Fitness, Fashion & Beauty, Art & Music, Cooking, and Education. Payments will be handled by Google Wallet. In the document a source provided us earlier this year, health services were prominently featured in the screenshots, and judging from the site that went live today, this is still a prominent feature of Helpouts. Google is working with HireRight — a provider of background-screening services — to ensure that the health-care professionals who sign up for Helpouts are vetted. Google is also Infinity Contact, Capita Customer Management, and VXI to “provide customers with support and services related to Helpouts by Google.” |
Tech In A “Surprising Slump”? Hardly | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | What is the forecast for tech? It depends on whom you ask. For some, . For others, . Cisco is in the tank and , even as Microsoft . Yahoo . Some companies are from Asia to monetize their social products. Even the tech deities about . Twitter and Box are , and the new name of the tech game is stacking revenue. For some, of course. Even Foursquare is . We’ve seen billion-dollar , and we’re not talking Instagram. There is , there is , there is , and yes, there are some things . But one word that you don’t usually see stapled to the technology industry is “slump,” at least not lately. 2008 and the resulting financial ice-over are a half decade past, and the stock market is setting fresh records. Slump? Some think it, especially . His recent piece paints a bleak picture of the technology world, inferring that things are pretty rough at the moment. A sampling, for tone: In a surprising turn, the tech industry is in a slump even as the U.S. economy picks up steam. […] There even have been signs that tech’s dysfunction was having a wider effect. […] Being labeled a “drag” is the ultimate insult for an industry that likes its growth fast and furious. But why has tech lost its mojo? It’s an interesting thesis. We shall not post a point by point analysis, as that would be pedantic of us, but the concept is worth exploring. In brief, though O’Brien raises interesting points of softness in the technology sector, there isn’t much evidence that tech is experiencing anything on the level of a slump. Key to O’Brien’s view of the technology industry is that it lies in contention with the rest of the economy. This feels all but odd, but it is his own framing. To wit: And tech stocks have lagged the broader stock market this year. As of early August, the S&P 500 was up 19.68%, but tech stocks in the index were up only 11.1%, one of the lowest-performing categories Two things about this stand out, first that an 11.1% in sector stock prices is a great year, and also that the companies that help comprise the S&P 500 index are hardly representative of the larger technology industry. Unless you feel that Automatic Data Processing, BMC Software, and Cognizant Technology Solutions are bellwethers. There are a number of firms on the list that you would recognize, but we are hardly dealing with the growth side of technology industry. That isn’t what the S&P 500 measures to boot, but that’s a different kick. O’Brien goes on to quote an analyst, Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy to say things that sound vaguely intelligent: “What I’ve seen is that a lot of the tech heavyweights are having challenges. There’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace that many people are grappling with.” That somewhat aligns with the idea of a slump, so I suppose we can view it as relevant. Strong stock market performance of the largest cap tech companies that isn’t quite as good as the rest of the market is not in any material way a slump. Let’s keep going. O’Brien’s article notes that, according to Zacks Investment Research (you’ve heard of them, right?) “profits in the tech sector in the first and second quarters declined from a year earlier 4.5% and 10.6% respectively.” What, precisely, Zacks considers “the tech sector” isn’t clear. And I wasn’t about to sign up for its for-pay stock market advice service to find out. Let’s take on the point that tech earnings are slipping. According to , analysts anticipate that technology sector profits “will fall by 9.5% in the second quarter.” If you control for Apple’s decline, that decline is less than 7 percent. Also, , tech-sector revenue is up year-over-year, and has been in all recent quarters. So, there’s that. Naturally, we are again only discussing the incomes of public technology companies, and not the myriad firms that remain private. Slump? That feels more like a minor correction among one subset of technology companies: The mature giants. Surely they are not what we mean as the total “tech industry.” In no way. They employ huge swaths of its workers, but they are also not the only companies kicking out profits, hiring on overdrive and growing as quickly as possible. To fairly demonstrate a slump, we must show that other slices of tech are slipping, and that the decline isn’t so mild. A few quarters of unimpressive profit after strong expansion is more correction, or breath, than slump. Let’s keep going. O’Brien states that, in “the first half of 2013, venture capitalists invested $12.7 billion, down from $13.6 billion.” Here we have our first ironic moment, as the decline in venture capital investment – 6.6% using the provided numbers – is all but the same in the slip in tech companies’s earnings once you strip out the harder than expected Apple landing. Is a 6.6 percent decline in six months year-over-year investment a slump? No. And companies that deserve it are not having too much of a hard time raising cash, either, at least according to what I hear. The article goes on to ding the industry for its slow pace of acquisitions and mergers, saying that although “there were a handful of large deals in July, the number of tech deals overall fell sharply from the same month a year earlier, from 341 to 240.” The month prior, went for $2.5 billion to Salesforce, and Google . Just in July. Oh, and Yahoo in May. So that’s three $1 billion+ acquisitions in under two months. Slump! Massive decline in acquisitions and the like? The pace may have decreased, but deal flow appears healthy. Just because parts of technology aren’t going quite as gangbusters as before, doesn’t mean we’re in a slump. “Meanwhile, tech companies going public remain rare,” O’Brien goes on to state. Others the , when Marketo and Tableau Software went public, on their first day. And for fun, of tech companies that have gone public globally since Facebook did the deed just over a year ago. And Box and Twitter are marching toward the public market. A $15 billion Twitter IPO would be a blockbuster event, and Box is generally thought of as a new wave of tech companies that are — cover your ears — serious. We could be in the middle of a cooling-off period. But that doesn’t mean all momentum has stopped, and that tech is sitting back on its haunches licking Tesla-induced wounds. Things could change. But I don’t see enough evidence yet to convince us that the industry is in a trough. But what about hardware, you might ask. Well, tell us, O’Brien of the Los Angeles Times: “Worldwide tablet shipments fell nearly 10% in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an August study from IDC.” According to the IDC tablet market data that I , the tablet market grew 59.6 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2013. That’s, well, strong. There is a reason that we do not compare sequential monthly or quarterly data in products that are cyclical. What else could be causing this theoretical slump? “In the U.S., others have pointed to the faster-than-expected collapse of PC sales,” O’Brien states. This appears valid, but we have to admit to ourselves that the PC market is hemorrhaging primacy in the face of smartphones and tablets, which are massive revenue drivers for OEMs around the world. So Samsung doesn’t make as much from selling PCs to you and me, but it is killing the smartphone market. So, I don’t think that this tells us much. And the goddamn PC market hasn’t been healthy for some time. This isn’t new. Cisco, as O’Brien quotes, namechecks the larger economy as a partial driver of its market difficulties: “This recovery is more mixed and inconsistent than the others I have seen.” So, the global economy is bad, which drags down technology spending, and thus adds friction to major companies. That sounds reasonable, and un-slumpish. A slow economy hurts all sectors, and to call out tech firms for being affected by it is a bit overly sharp. Let’s keep going. In a slump, you circle the wagons. Cash is short, wages are falling, innovation is perhaps slowing as costs mount and budgets are cut. People are forlorn and too much good work goes to waste as research spend shrivels. Only that’s simply not happening, according to O’Brien: “Indeed, competition among rivals such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Samsung is too intense to throttle back on investing in innovation.” What part of tech is slumping? Zynga, certainly, after the platform that it built its empire on . Cisco, perhaps, but in its last set of earnings it reported an 18% gain in profitability. A few startups that I could name that you don’t know. Yahoo is , but is really in a period of rebirth of sorts rather than slumping. I think that we can say that most positive vital signs that we can see or put a finger on right now lean toward younger, more quickly growing firms, like Box. But that’s how it has always fucking been. Tech companies eventually lose — Wang — become zombies — AOL — or, as with Apple and Microsoft, utterly reform themselves. Apple by becoming the world’s preeminent consumer device company, and Microsoft ditching software and becoming a company that vends “devices and services.” Tally the revenue and profit from private technology companies, if you could, and add that to the public sums and see if things are actually in decline. I doubt it. Are we living in the world in which Apple exploded past records every quarter? No, because other companies have appropriated some of Apple’s cool for themselves. That’s how competition works. Slump? Try hiring a developer in any major market. Billion-dollar deals, impending multi-billion-dollar IPOs, mostly steady venture capital inflows, and double-digit stock market gains for the biggest tech companies are our current situation. That doesn’t mean there aren’t weaker spots in technology now than a year ago. But this, for the moment, feels more like a slight slowdown than the end of a golden era. |
Facebook And 6 Phone Companies Launch Internet.org To Bring Affordable Access To Everyone | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Facebook has a partnership with Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera and Qualcomm to launch , a project aimed at bringing affordable Internet access to the 5 billion people without it. The companies will work together on data-compression technologies and cheap, high-quality smartphones to make the web cheaper. While it might seem like the whole world is connected, just one-third of the globe’s population has Internet access, and adoption is only growing at 9 percent. Internet.org aims to speed up that rate. Zuckerberg writes “There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.” Zuckerberg has laid out his thoughts on accessibility in a paper called “ ” The three major initiatives of the partnership are: through cheaper smartphones, and working with mobile operators to extend Internet access to underserved communities. so people don’t run up high costs. Internet.org partners may look to build data-compression tools, bolster network efficiency, and improve data caching. to grow mobile businesses sustainably. Partners will aim to create mutually beneficial incentives for app developers, device OEMs, and operators that will get more people online. The companies will also work together to help mobile devices support more languages to demolish barriers to usage. The push is rooted in altruism and global community, but may eventually serve to boost the businesses of all mobile companies. By enlarging the pie — getting more people online — everyone in the mobile business could benefit. That includes Facebook and the device manufacturers spearheading this project, but also the carriers, app developers, e-commerce companies, advertisers, and even artists who distribute their work via mobile. Google has long been a pioneer in accessibility projects. Its latest, , aims to bring Internet to disconnected community by beaming them a 3G signal from giant balloons. In the past Google has offered , while has worked with international carriers to let people tweet without paying for data. Zuckerberg says Facebook has invested $1 billion into over the last few years, though they’ve mostly focused on connecting people to its own service. The Facebook Zero program provides free access to a stripped-down feature phone version of the social network through carriers in the developing world. The idea is that if Facebook can get low-tech mobile users hooked early, they’ll stick with it and stay connected to their social graph as they move on to smartphones. Cynics will assume Facebook wants to promote accessibility for one reason: eyeballs to advertise to. But whether or not you believe it, Facebook is truly trying to achieve its mission of connecting the world. There might be positive business side effects to that, but they’re not the driving force. In fact, Facebook admits that helping businesses, including itself, is one of the three core components of Internet.org. That way this can be a sustainable initiative, not just some temporary flag waving. In his whitepaper, Zuckerberg explains: “I’m focused on this because I believe it is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. The unfair economic reality is that those already on Facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined, so it may not actually be profitable for us to serve the next few billion people for a very long time, if ever. But we believe everyone deserves to be connected.” Zuckerberg goes on to note that, while everyone might soon have a smartphone, much of the world can’t afford data access. “There is no guarantee that most people will ever have access to the internet. It isn’t going to happen by itself. But I believe connectivity is a human right.” It’s also good for the world economy. Zuckerberg cites a McKinsey study illustrating that the Internet accounts for 21 percent of GDP growth in developed nations over the last five years, and only one job is lost for every 2.6 jobs created by the Internet. “The knowledge economy is the future,” he writes, echoing the logic behind his founding . In his road map for accessibility, Zuckerberg says that data access needs to be roughly 100x cheaper for companies to be able to offer basic, text-based services, such as search, messaging, social networking, and knowledge bases for free. Steps toward this goal include: If the plan works, mobile operators will gain more customers and invest more in accessibility; phone makers will see people wanting better devices; Internet providers will get to connect more people; and people will receive affordable Internet so they can join the knowledge economy and connect with the people they care about. Zuckerberg concludes his paper saying “I think that connecting the world will be one of the most important things we all do in our lifetimes, and I’m thankful every day to have the opportunity to work with all of you to make this a reality.” Nestled in the highly wired Bay Area, Facebook’s team members have felt the joy of growing closer to their friends and family through the Internet. Many of us have, too, but it’s bittersweet knowing there are people who can’t afford that opportunity. Internet.org could help share the experience of connection with the whole planet. |
Social Publishing Platform Percolate Adds New Tools For Managing User Generated Content | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | helps companies publish engaging content to social networks — or at least, that’s the goal. What it hasn’t done until now is help those companies take advantage of the additional content that fans, consumers and everyone else are also posting. The idea of allowing brands to harness user-generated content is a pretty familiar — for example, that’s one of the main goals of . However, Percolate co-founder and President James Gross said the process around getting permission to use that content, and then add it to your media library, can be pretty clunky. (For many companies, it means asking permission via tweet, then taking a screenshot of the exchange.) With Percolate’s new features, businesses can easily send Twitter or Instagram users a quick “We’d love to use your image” message with a link. If the user is interested, they can follow the link, which asks them to give the company the right to republish the image. That might seem like a bit too much work for the user, especially since they’re the one giving the company the rights to their content, and I suspect there will be at least one or two people who say, “Ugh, nevermind.” However, as Gross demonstrated for me, it really only takes a few clicks to give approval, so it’s not that onerous either. The key, he said, was to make the process easy while eliminating any legal questions. Among other things, this could make it easier for brands to share content produced around their social media campaigns. For example, a company could ask fans to tweet photos using their product with a certain hashtag. Then the team could search for all the photos with that hashtag, and if it finds one it wants to republish, it can make the request as I described above. Percolate has also launched a new smartphone app that allows customers to directly upload photos from their phone to their Percolate media library. So if your company is holding an event, your employees can take photos using the Percolate app. Then it should be easy to tweet from those photos via percolate from the company account — and they’ll be in your media library, so you can find them in a few days when and if you want to use them in a blog post. Again, none of this was impossible before, but Percolate streamlines the process. Earlier this year, the company also expanded its “visual strategy” by . An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Gross as the company’s CEO. |
New Revelations Detail How The NSA Scans 75% Of The Internet Through Telco Partnerships | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Tuesday the existence of several NSA programs that were either previously unknown, or little was known about. Meet Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew. The programs allow for far greater surveillance than the government has admitted to, and, importantly, detail how the government forces Internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over raw data. The programs have the ability to “reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic,” according to the Journal, “including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans.” That content includes the writing of emails – not merely their metadata – and touches phone calls placed inside the U.S. that use digital telephony. Back in 2006 when it was discovered that the NSA had , it became widely suspected that the NSA was directly, or indirectly, being fed huge amounts of raw Internet data. The above programs confirm that fact. The Journal goes on to explain the process by which the NSA collects information: It commands ISPs to send it “various stream Internet traffic it believes most likely to contain foreign intelligence.” Following, the agency makes a copy of the information, and then runs searches on it, perhaps using an email address. Other NSA programs , which allows NSA operatives to quickly access private email. The NSA recently stated that it . That figure, I presume, is what the NSA touches after the information has been sent to them, and then culled to their liking. However, the total data inflow to the NSA is far, far higher than the 1.6 percent. The 75 percent figure that the Journal reported tuesday refers to domestic Internet traffic, some of which is foreign in origin, simply passing through fiber in the country. So, the NSA was perhaps technically telling the truth, or something near to it, without admitting far deeper and pervasive surveillance efforts that do involve the collection of endless domestic communications information. That, it appears, is being collected, but not touched in every case. However, the data is pooled on NSA servers, and that simply is not fine with me. Most startling in the Journal report is news that during the 2002 Olympic games in Salt Lake City, the NSA worked with the FBI to track all email and text message communications of everyone in the area for a six-month period. Quest Communications was the provider they employed. If you were looking for a cut-and-dried example of the NSA abusing its rights and absolving the right to privacy and the Fourth Amendment in practice, there you go. Also, during that time, the government was in fact reading the emails of American citizens, as it continues to claim not to do. At some point the NSA must stop lying before it has no credibility left. |
TechCrunch’s Picks: The Top 8 Startups From Y Combinator’s Summer ’13 Demo Day | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Convenience tech, developer assistance, and services for senior citizens were the big trends amongst the 45 startups that pitched on the record today at ‘s Summer 2013 Demo Day. After conferring with 25 of the most prolific venture capitalists and huddling the TechCrunch team, we’ve picked the eight startups we believe have the most promise. We got more consensus than usual that these eight startups are special. They could make us healthier, safer, and richer, while helping businesses with efficiency. Though mobile is still a focus for YC companies, financial services were popular this season, and there were plenty of “Uber for X” startups on stage. You can read our write-ups of all 45 startups that pitched in , , and today. Most were polished, and showed off big ideas or smart business modela. Here are our highlights, in unranked order: SpoonRocket’s Demo Day pitch was filled with hype like “Fast Food 2.0” and “Uber for food”, but their early data backs up those claims. The company cooks and delivers meat and vegetarian organic meals for $6 each, in supposedly as little as 10 minutes. By cooking just two different meals a day in bulk, it can pass on savings to customers, and in-car heaters keep food warm. SpoonRocket says it already has a $2 million a year run rate and is growing 112% per week. In its first market, Berkeley, California, it says it does more deliveries per day than GrubHub does in a month, and the local college students aren’t even there yet. It plans to expand to urban centers across the country, though less dense area may be tricky. SpoonRocket wants to make the world eat cheaper, faster, and healthier. Check out our earlier coverage of SpoonRocket . Panorama has a big ambition: To bring data analytics to every school in the United States, by powering polls of students, teachers, and parents and logging and analyzing the results. The startup started small, as a side project for Panorama Education’s three co-founders during their junior year at Yale, helping out school districts in the New Haven region with data analysis. By the time the founders graduated this past May, Panorama had evolved into a much bigger entity, having earned more than $500,000 in revenue. And the growth keeps coming — more than 3,600 schools nationwide are now paying customers of Panorama Education, and the company is profitable. Going forward, Panorama endeavors to power “a national dataset that every school will use to improve its performance.” Check out even more coverage on Panorama Education . Amulyte is targeting the 20 million senior citizens in the United States, providing a pendant and online portal that tracks their movements to provide help in case they fall. The pendant connects to cellular networks and has GPS, Wi-Fi and an accelerometer to detect falls. If a senior falls, it will alert contacts immediately and keep track of any movement. The pendant sells for $149 and the service is $29 a month to provide a little peace of mind to seniors and their families. The company is working with a retirement home on a test of the service and to get it deployed in the market, but it sees a $10 billion market opportunity just in the U.S. alone. Check out our earlier coverage of Amulyte . Sending money across international borders is a huge $500 billion a year remittance industry characterized by exorbitant fees. Buttercoin aims to disrupt it by letting you send money quickly, inexpensively, and legally via bitcoin. The company says its technology lets it send bitcoins 200,000 times faster than its competitors, and the whole thing is legal thanks to partnerships with licensed financial service providers in each country. Buttercoin has found a way to transfer money at no cost to itself, and only charges a small fee to competitors when customers convert money into or out of bitcoin. By drastically reducing the fees people pay to send money home or transfer it around the world, Buttercoin is trying to become the default for international remittance. While it sounds complicated, we’re told is the real deal. Check out our deeper write-up of Buttercoin . True Link Financial is building a “safe” credit card for cognitively impaired senior citizens who might not have the ability to see through scams or recognize when people are trying to take advantage of them. They give out credit cards to the elderly and route all transactions in the Visa network through their own servers, where they double-check the transactions to see if they’re reasonable (like spending a few dollars at an ice cream parlor) or to see if they’re from known scams. The company says credit card companies make $1.9 billion a year from this demographic. Check out more coverage of True Link right . It’s a big hassle for technologically savvy businesses to integrate with antiquated shipping services like UPS, USPS, and FedEx. removes the friction by sitting between developers and the shippers, and offering a RESTful JSON API to connect them. This lets developers access the best shipping rates, tracking information and more. It charges $0.05 per shipping label, and is aiming to take a nice cut of the $26 billion shipping industry. It’s been growing 179 percent month over month, has handled 70,000 shipments, and from investors, including SV Angel. It’s facing competitors like and , but hopes to win the market by specializing in top-notch support so businesses always know where their shipments are. Check out our earlier coverage of EasyPost . Standard Treasury is working on APIs for commercial banking that help ease transactions like transfers. They’re currently in negotiations with 16 banks, including three of the five largest ones in the country. Those contracts could be worth anywhere from roughly $2 million to more than $15 million and they have potential banking clients asking for APIs down the line that tap into mobile and core banking. Check out our earlier coverage of Standard Treasury . Everyone has a time in their lives when they just need to talk about their troubles — when they’re going through a divorce, an illness in the family, issues with anxiety, and the like. There are typically two options for them: Family and friends, which is free but often comes with baggage; or therapy, which is expensive and often intimidating. 7 Cups of Tea aims to situate itself in the middle of those two options, with an online marketplace that connects people anonymously with trained “active listeners” that provide an empathetic ear for free or a voluntary fee or “tip.” 7 Cups, which takes a 40 percent commission on all transactions, has seen solid growth since it launched eight weeks ago: It now has 160 active listeners on its platform and is now fielding more than 1,800 call and chat requests per week. Check out our earlier coverage of 7 Cups . |
YC-Backed Buttercoin Uses Bitcoin To Attack The $500B-A-Year Remittances Economy | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | With Bitcoin’s promise of frictionless transactions, particularly across international borders, it’s inevitable that a team would use the math-based currency to attack the global remittances market. The World Bank estimates that migrants will send about $515 billion to relatives in developing countries by 2015, which is about 10 times the size of the U.S.’s budget for foreign aid. The old stand-bys like Western Union can charge around 10 percent for transactions in the market, an amount that co-founders Cedric Dahl and Bennett Hoffman find obscene. But Bitcoin, that allows for anonymous and irreversible transactions without the need for a third-party facilitator like a bank, promises transactions at a substantially lower cost. plans to open in India within the next three months and then to operate in six countries in nine months’ time. Their model is to open a local Bitcoin exchange in each country. When they enter a market, they pair with local money transfer businesses to have legal compliance in the country. But these local partners don’t touch the Bitcoin-to-local currency transactions; they merely get a 50 percent cut of ‘s fees in exchange for having the proper licenses and relationships with regulators. The pair got into Bitcoin after a several year hiatus, during which they built a hacker house in Austin and filmed a documentary on Parkour. They had previously sold an analytics company and while at Microsoft, Dahl managed a $120 million budget and worked on applying analytics to marketing. But Bitcoin intrigued them. “We realized somebody had to put the big boy pants on in the space, do the tech right, and be compliant,” Dahl said. “Someone had to remove the existential risk in Bitcoin.” They initially started with a mining operation called CoinHarvest. (Bitcoin ; people actually have to buy hardware to expend a huge amount of computational power to have a chance of winning some Bitcoin as the currency’s supply expands at a predictable pace.) But they then started considering opening a white-labeled platform for creating Bitcoin exchanges, before settling on the remittance market. Their product isn’t launched at this time, but they’re planning to release it within the next three months. To do that, they’ve raised about $1 million from investors including Google Ventures’ Kevin Rose and Chris Hutchins, Floodate, Initialized Capital and Rothenberg Ventures. They brought on an economist in Kevin Zhou, who worked at Standard & Poors, and set aside about half the capital for market-making. |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Menlo Ventures’ Mark Siegel | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Menlo Ventures’ Managing Director in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Siegel joined Menlo Ventures in 1996 and focuses on investments in data storage, cloud computing, big data and digital advertising. His active investments and board seats include Dropcam, eXelate, Invidi, Media6, Mixr, Pluribus Networks, Tintri and Voltage Security. Some of his previous board seats include 3PAR (acquired by HP), Pliant Technology (acquired by SanDisk), RNA Networks (acquired by Dell), BlueGill Technologies (acquired by Checkfree), and Rubric (acquired by Broadbase). Prior to becoming a VC, Siegel was a product manager for Oracle’s Massively Parallel Processing Group and then managed a consulting group at Oracle dedicated to serving early customers of this product. Siegel has some interesting thoughts on and some of the startups that are capitalizing on this in mobile, social, cloud computing and data. I’m curious to hear more about his thought process and how startups can expand on the potential new opportunities in this “economy.” Please send us your or put them in the comments below! |
Big Brother Isn’t A Reason For Journalists To Quit The Internet | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | In fear of Big Brother, award-winning technology law blog, Groklaw, . TechCrunch, however, will not be following its lead. There is always a risk that an abusive government agent may try to intercept or intimidate our sources, but it’s the kind of risk that media outlet has faced since the printing press and will continue to face into the foreseeable future. In a heart-felt blog post, beloved progenitor, Pamela Jones, explains that the only way to avoid the possibility of being monitored by the National Security Agency is to go completely off the grid. “My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it’s possible. I’m just an ordinary person.” Since Groklaw’s (impressive) brand of source-driven journalism was heavily reliant on email and online chatter, Jones claims, “The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can’t do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.” , the decision to shut down has struck some journalists . Any media outlet worth their salt regularly deals with confidential sources, often in a legal grey area that threatens both big businesses and the government itself. This most definitely poses risks. Recently, in the most extreme case, British spy agencies and destroyed hard drives to prevent further leaks of information. But, this shouldn’t deter us. As the reporter tied to classified government leaks, Glenn Greenwald, after his partner was detained in Heathrow Airport, “If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. The logic of Groklaw seems to imply that all media outlets should shut down. There’s a few holes in this logic. First, over email. Journalists can use end-to-end encryption, which is mostly spy proof (probably how Greenwald communicates with his source, Edward Snowden). It’s true that some secure email have shut themselves down, but that’s only because the government can force them to turn over emails with the senders knowing. Individuals can and do send encrypted messages all the time that are stored on their local computers. Indeed, one secure communications provider, Silent Circle, shut down, in part, to “drive” users towards these independent types of communications. Second, it is highly unlikely the NSA would care about a journalist like Jones or any of her sources. Jones informs people about tech law. The British government got in enough trouble when they detained their biggest threat for 9 hours in an airport; attacking the thousands of writers who deal with sensitive government matters is just plain impossible in a democratic state. Unless Jones has a scoop on some new super-secret government project, she’s just one of thousands of journalists the U.S wouldn’t target, even their wildest anti-Democratic dreams. So, unless you believe we’re on the road to North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine why any media outlet should should shut down. I fancy myself a tad neurotic, but I won’t stop writing anytime soon and have no fear for myself or any of my sources. So, please come back Jones; the Internet hearts you. |
Powa Technologies Picks Up A $76M Series A Investment To Take Its Mobile Payment And E-Commerce Platform Large | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | , a UK startup that’s been working on an integrated mobile payments and e-commerce platform with some augmented reality thrown in, is today announcing its first round of outside funding — and it’s a doozy. The company says that it has picked up a Series A round of $76 million to take its technology global, and to a retailer near you with what CEO and founder Dan Wagner describes as the ultimate “killer app” for commerce. The funding is coming from a single investor that Powa has declined to name, describing it only as “one of the largest investment management funds in the world.” But well-placed sources tell us it is , a Boston-based investment specialist with billions of dollars under management. Prior to this round, Powa’s growth was funded privately, largely by Wagner himself investing under $20 million to date. Powa first emerged in the public eye in looking like another Square-style mobile payments clone (complete, even, with of photographs with hands that looked suspiciously like those used in Square’s promotional photos). One exception was that mPowa, as the service is called, was aimed early on at bigger corporations, as well as the small businesses that have been the focus of Square, iZettle, PayPal’s here, SumUp and the rest. Since last year, mPowa has inked deals with companies like and to resell the product. But the bigger plan, according to Wagner, will go well beyond mobile payments. It will extend to include a wider transacting platform that brings together online and offline retail transactions with a further product called . This has yet to be released, but Wagner describes it as a technology that can recognize “any image” taken on a mobile device and subsequently send a user to a site to buy it. Wagner says that those who have signed on for the full Powa platform include Electrolux, the BBC, and Harper Collins, among others. “We were always dangerous to competitors,” Wagner told me in an interview. “Now we’re deadly.” The company is nothing if not aiming very high. Part of the funding will go towards staffing up the company, which is currently at 130 but soon hiring 250 more in the UK and 200 more employees elsewhere in the world. (One executive that’s getting announced at the same time as the funding: George Thaw, the former COO of SAP, who will be the CEO for channels, overseeing Powa’s re-seller and system integrator initiatives. Wagner tells me there are some more interesting executive recruits to be announced soon.) It’s a piece of news that is good enough in these teetering-economy times that no less than the UK’s prime minister, David Cameron, has provided a statement endorsing the company: “We have seen some great British success stories in technology lately, as well as more encouraging news for the economy. So I am delighted that Powa is further contributing to that with the creation of 250 jobs to expand their growing business,” he said. “E-commerce is vital to our economic success. One in five of our small businesses export. If we could change that from one in five to one in four we would wipe out our trade deficit at one stroke. That is why this expansion of Powa is such good news – helping British Business increase trade both at home and abroad.” Powa is not giving an exact valuation except to note that the $76 million values it in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Wagner also says that this is his first step to raising the profile of the company en route to a public listing — whether that would be in the U.S. or UK has yet to be determined. He says he chose to go the route of an investment management company rather than a VC or private equity house so that he could continue to have “complete freedom” to make business decisions. Powa retained Barclays to help find a backer and eventually help prepare Powa for listing. For as crazy as such a large investment sounds for a company that may only vaguely ring a bell, Wagner is not someone to be overlooked. He’s a serial entrepreneur with pretty extensive e-commerce and analytics experience, who well understands that one of the Holy Grails for a lot of businesses has been a solution that integrates everything, including legacy and new streams of revenue, in a way that is painless for everyone involved. Wagner’s first company, the market analytics startup M.A.I.D., was sold to Thomson Reuters many years ago for $500 million; his second company, , has developed e-commerce sites for companies like Tesco, Orange, and the Universal Music Group — which could give some clue to where he holds contacts today and who Powa may count as clients in the future. |
Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 2: Meet Meta, Lob, Amulyte, Weilos And More | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Just as the wheels of time continue to turn, the 49 new startups out of continue to churn. Batch One is now behind us, and a new group of startups are taking the stage. As per usual, TechCrunch is here to bring you complete coverage of each of these companies, ranging from a “hearing aid 2.0” to a “Netflix for fashion” to “credit cards for old people.” [ : For our favorites from across all three batches, check out And without giving away too many hints, there might even be a Google Glass competitor in this batch. Batch 2: Go! Amulyte is targeting the 20 million senior citizens in the United States, providing a pendant and online portal that tracks their movements to provide help in case they fall. The pendant connects to cellular networks and has GPS, Wi-Fi and an accelerometer to detect falls. If a senior falls, it will alert contacts immediately and keep track of any movement. The pendant sells for $149 and the service is $29 a month to provide a little peace of mind to seniors and their families. The company is working with a retirement home on a test of the service and to get it deployed in the market, but it sees a $10 billion market opportunity just in the U.S. alone. Check out our earlier coverage of Amulyte . It’s the age old cliché: The woman with a closet full of clothes, but absolutely nothing to wear. Some estimates say that the average woman only uses about 20 percent of the pieces in her wardrobe on the regular. Le Tote aims to solve that problem, by providing women’s apparel and accessory rentals for $49 per month. The service, which Le Tote likes to call “the Netflix for women’s fashion,” has proven quite popular since it launched in October 2012: The company is making $70,000 in monthly revenue and is growing by 30 percent month-over-month. Its user base, which currently spans 48 states, has a retention rate of 93 percent. Check out more coverage on Le Tote right . IXI-Play is building a smart, Android-based robot for young children. They can play games with it; they’ll show the robot cards and it will mimic emotions on them. It sees, hears, speaks and moves. The toy itself retails for $299 but it will also come with an app store and other accessories. It’s a hardware platform that can have customizable skins for different characters so it can either build its own IP or license out IP from other toy companies. Paper menus are static, costly to reprint with updates, and only work with a waiter. Butter Systems wants to “put a tablet on your table” with its mobile menu system for restaurants. Butter Systems menus are built for cheap Android tablets, can be updated on the fly from a web portal, support vivid brand customization, assist with translation into other languages, and let businesses highlight promotions and discounts. Most importantly, it lets customers order right from their tables. Sam Brin, Butter Systems’ co-founder (and younger brother of Google’s Sergey Brin), says his product boosts average check size by 13 percent. It doesn’t have to replace waiters, but can help cut down their workload with buttons like “Check please!” They’ll have to keep people from stealing the tablets, and compete with , , , and more. Tablet menus do seem inevitable, so it should be an interesting battle to watch. Check out more coverage of Butter Systems right . Asseta wants to be the go-to marketplace for used capital equipment, a $100 billion industry that is ready to be disrupted. Seeking to become the “eBay for used capital equipment,” it wants to connect sellers that have equipment they’re not using with buyers who want to buy it at a discount to its new price. The big problem with previous marketplaces of this type is that companies weren’t properly incentivized to list their used equipment, but Asseta has collected more than 28,000 equipment listings. So far, it’s done $212,000 in sales, and sees a $5 billion market opportunity, based on the $100 billion in used capital sales and its own 5 percent commission. Check out earlier coverage of Asseta right . Everyone hates email, which has led a lot of people to try to kill it. The latest is Hum, a product designed for collaboration. It organizes conversation into threads, lets you drop work requests into each others’ feeds, and syncs everything across your devices. Hum is focused on real-time conversation and presence. It makes it easy to see who else is currently viewing a thread. You can “read later” any threads you can’t get to right now, or pin important conversations to the top of the app. The company made a lot of bold claims about how it will transition you away from email as you use it more, but didn’t provide many specifics. Hum will have a steep uphill battle against incumbents like Yammer and Asana, and email, which has been harder to disrupt than most people realize. True Link Financial is building a “safe” credit card for cognitively impaired senior citizens who might not have the ability to see through scams or recognize when people are trying to take advantage of them. They give out credit cards to the elderly and route all transactions in the Visa network through their own servers, where they double-check the transactions to see if they’re reasonable (like spending a few dollars at an ice cream parlor) or to see if they’re from known scams. The company says credit card companies make $1.9 billion a year from this demographic. Check out more coverage of True Link right . Many local businesses aren’t ready for the digital age, and some are getting overwhelmed with pitches from startups they’ve never heard of or don’t understand. LocalOn wants to break through by working with newspapers that already do businesses with local merchants. Together LocalOn and the papers offers businesses white-labeled tools for building websites and other utilities web hosting, directories member billing, and widgets. LocalOn also sells to the newspapers themselves. While it’s a crowded market that’s tough to scale, someone has to get these businesses set up on the web, and then hopefully mobile. Check out further coverage of LocalOn right . Weilos is a mobile-first service built to help users lose weight through accountability. It works by connecting users with coaches whom they report to through their mobile phones. The accountability is motivating its users to quickly drop pounds, with active users losing an average of 1.3 pounds per week, compared to 0.3 pounds per week with Weight Watchers. One of the reasons that Weilos works is that its coaches have been there — they’ve all lost weight themselves. Weilos is going after a HUGE market — the 200 million Americans in the U.S. who are overweight, and who spend $61 billion on things that don’t actually work. Check out even more coverage of Weilos right . SoundFocus is starting out as an app, but eventually it will be far more than that. The company has developed software that detects the certain volume levels and frequencies for your particular ears. One of the founders, Alex Selig, grew up with hearing loss and after finding out that 600 million people in the world suffer from it, and that four out of every five people with hearing issues don’t have a hearing aid, he felt he had to act. The app first gives the user a simple test, and once it understands your particular hearing ability, tunes your music from your iTunes music library or Spotify so that you can actually hear better. In the last week, SoundFocus reached 100,000 songs. Eventually, the team will offer an adapter, and after that, wireless earbuds that will offer the same audio-tuned experience for all of your gadgets, not just the iPhone. Those headphones will only cost $70 but the total addressable market here is $9.5 billion. Check out more coverage of SoundFocus right . Building a mobile or web app today typically requires a back-and-forth dance between a designer and a web developer before the product can actually go live. Webflow aims to replace the web developer role entirely, letting designers create content for any device and push it live themselves. According to Webflow, this “automates away the middle man” (a characterization that web developers may chafe at, to be sure) because “everything developers can do in code, designers can do in Webflow.” It’s attracted a lot of attention so far: In the two weeks since Webflow launched, 25,000 people have used the service, many of them using the app for more than three hours a day. Check out further coverage of Webflow right . Lob is an API for mobile and web apps to incorporate printing. They call themselves “Stripe” for printing, paying homage to the payments startup that is one of Y Combinator’s brightest up-and-comers. The company says that it’s a hassle for startups to handle their relationships with local print shops, negotiate pricing and send files back and forth through e-mail. So they’ve built an abstraction layer that does this with one simple API call. They say that they’re growing at a rate of 200 percent week-over-week. Check out earlier coverage of Lob right . Estimote is building a wireless sensor network for retail companies to let them deliver content to customers’ phones based on their precise locations within a store. Estimote utilizes Bluetooth low-energy technology (the same core tech that has been utilized in Apple’s iBeacon feature in iOS 7) to identify people’s locations down to the inch. Ultimately, this aims to fulfill the same promise that NFC and QR codes have tried (and mostly failed) to deliver. So far, the response has been encouraging: The startup says it is already shipping devices to major retail partners all over the world. You can check out further coverage of Estimote right . DoorDash is a local delivery service that hopes to enable every restaurant to get into delivering food. Unlike Seamless or GrubHub, which have menus but don’t manage deliveries, DoorDash provides a better service by partnering with restaurants and handling the logistics of getting food from the kitchen to the customer’s door. The company is averaging 44-minute delivery times, thanks to its logistics software — and it’s doing that in the suburbs, not in cities, like most of the big new delivery startups. But it sees a bigger opportunity than just restaurants: Positioning itself as the “FedEx of today,” it hopes to provide a logistics framework that goes beyond food and can be used for any type of on-demand order. You can find more coverage of DoorDash right . One Month Rails wants to teach you exactly what you need to know to build what you want to build. The company offers a one-month course, for $49.95, that reminds me of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but for learning to code. Users can sign up, learn how to code in Ruby on Rails, but without going through a fully comprehensive curriculum like Codecademy and Learn The Hard Way. Instead, the user only needs to learn the essentials to build their intended finished product. For now, the company offers Ruby On Rails courses, but eventually the same product will be available for Python, JavaScript, etc. Head on over for further coverage of One Month Rails. Many immigrants to the United States send money to their family members who remain back in their native countries — it’s a way of helping to support the people who raised them by helping out with food and bills. But the current status quo for sending money is Western Union, which comes with its own set of problems: The recipient has to travel to the Western Union location which is often far away, wait in line for as long as several hours, sacrifice a 10 percent transaction fee, and then carry cash back home through a possibly dangerous area. Regalii aims to cut out all these issues by allowing people to send money for food and bills to their family members through SMS, for a flat fee of $3 per transfer. The payments can be used directly at stores that Regalii partners with to purchase food and other supplies. The service has taken off in a big way since it launched: It’s growing at a rate of 67 percent week over week, with 1,100 customers being served last week alone — and that’s just by serving one neighborhood in the Bronx of New York City, sending money back home to the Dominican Republic. Meta is building the augmented-reality glasses that perhaps many Google Glass users were hoping for. Their initial device, which TechCrunch colleague Greg Kumparak said was a bit of a prototype, has seen about a half-million dollars of sales in the last week alone. While wearing the glasses, you’re able to manipulate augmented reality objects. Kumparak said he was able to move a floating rectangle around and expand and close it based on how he moved his fists. Check out earlier coverage of Meta right and . [ : Read our highlights from across all 45 pitches here – |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 2 | null |
Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 3: Meet Senic, Buttercoin, Crowdery, Reebee And More | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Third time’s the charm. We’re here ( , ) at Y Combinator’s Summer 2013 demo day, covering the wide range of 48 startups pitching their wares to a large crowd of investors, fellow founders and members of the media. [ : Check out So far we’ve met an augmented reality glasses company, seen Sergey Brin’s little brother launch a restaurant menu company, and seen a baby giggle at a Robot toy. But it’s not over yet. Batch 3: Go! BloomThat is positioning itself as an “Uber for flowers,” providing on-demand delivery of flowers and making it as easy as sending a text message. The idea is to provide a better product than is currently available today online, delivering more beautiful flowers in just 90 minutes. The cut flower business is an $8 billion industry today, but BloomThat thinks it can be an even bigger opportunity if its service catches on. More than 40 percent of its orders come from existing customers, with some ordering once a week on average. In other words, by providing a better product faster, the company is generating new demand. Imagine if it were available nationwide. Check out further coverage of BloomThat right . A/B testing is a crucial step for people who create software in deciding how an app will look and feel. Crowdery wants to power a similar A/B testing process for companies that create physical things — like clothing items and accessories — to determine what customers will want to buy before the brand puts things into physical production. Crowdery works by leveraging the “power of pre-orders” that’s helped Kickstarter launch so many successful products. Ultimately, Crowdery’s aim is to help companies like J. Crew make more products that people will want to snap up right away — and prevent them from creating things that will languish on shelves for months and ultimately end up in the discount bin. If you want to check out further coverage of Crowdery, head on over . DataRank offers companies a social media analytics dashboard that helps them analyze conversations online about their brands and competitors. They say their quality score algorithm is much more accurate than what you’ll see from rivals. They’ll factor in data points like the commenter’s influence, how much a comment was shared, demographic data like the commenter’s age and location, and recency. The in-store promotion flyers you get in newspapers and at the door of big box stores are a critical way for local businesses to get people inside their brick-and-mortars. But the decline of the print industry and rise of mobile are a threat to the store promotion flyer industry…unless it changes. That’s Reebee’s goal. It takes those flyers and lets you access them from your phone or tablet. Reebee does this itself for free, but also partners with big retailers and gives them premium placement and analytics on who views their flyers in exchange for a fee. While there are others trying to take flyers mobile, it plans to innovate with flyer personalization and coupons. Head over to learn more about Reebee’s flyer app. Hackermeter wants to become the go-to marketplace for companies to find great talent. The company believes that resumes are broken, in part because they don’t tell companies how good developers are before they hire. Hackermeter seeks to solve that, especially for employees that are early in their careers. The company does that by allowing developers to take challenges and create portfolios, and then match up the best developers with the right jobs. It’s a two-sided marketplace, with companies on one side and developers on the other. It already has 14 companies signed up, including Square, Asana and Mixpanel. On the developer side, it’s already gotten developers to do more than 4,000 challenges. It hopes to make $10,000 to $20,000 per developer hired using the platform, which means a market opportunity of up to $2 billion per year in the U.S. Check out further coverage of Hackermeter right . Panorama has a big ambition: To bring data analytics to every school in the United States by powering polls of students, teachers and parents and then logging and analyzing the results. The startup started small, as a side project for Panorama Education’s three co-founders during their junior year at Yale, helping out school districts in the New Haven region with data analysis. By the time the founders graduated this past May, Panorama had evolved into a much bigger entity, having earned more than $500,000 in revenue. And the growth keeps coming — more than 3,600 schools nationwide are now paying customers of Panorama Education, and the company is profitable. Going forward, Panorama endeavors to power “a national dataset that every school will use to improve its performance.” Check out even more coverage on Panorama Education right . Casetext is attacking the duopolistic hold that WestLaw and LexisNexis hold on the legal research market. It was co-founded by the heads of Stanford’s Law Review and Harvard’s Law Review who got together to actually code the site. They say that clients no longer want to have legal research fees passed onto them, and top law firms are looking for cheaper alternatives. Casetext leverages some of the crowdsourcing techniques that Wikipedia has used to generate the annotations and analysis that have made LexisNexis and WestLaw so indispensable. You can find even more coverage on Casetext right . Sending money across international borders is a huge $500 billion a year remittance industry characterized by exorbitant fees. Buttercoin aims to disrupt it by letting you send money quickly, inexpensively, and legally via bitcoin. The company says its technology lets it send bitcoins 200,000 times faster than its competitors, and the whole thing is legal thanks to partnerships with licensed financial service providers in each country. Buttercoin has found a way to transfer money at no cost to itself, and only charges a small fee to competitors when customers convert money into or out of bitcoin. By drastically reducing the fees people pay to send money home or transfer it around the world, Buttercoin is trying to become the default for international remittance. While it sounds complicated, we’re told Buttercoin is the real deal. Head for more coverage. CoreOS provides a new server operating system for running thousands of servers themselves. The company is made up of server infrastructure experts who had previously worked at Google, Novell and Rackspace, and now they’re looking to package up a new Linux distribution that will allow others to build their own massively scalable server infrastructure. The company has already gotten two signed evaluation agreements with large enterprises and sees itself as an alternative to existing enterprise Linux vendors and cloud service providers. Previously only Google needed this type of scalable infrastructure, but now others can benefit from the software that CoreOS has offered them. In the same way that Warby Parker sends several pairs of glasses for you to try before you buy, Lumoid is a service that sends you several consumer electronics products to test drive before you make a buying decision. The idea is that gadget reviews like the ones provided by TechCrunch, Engadget and CNET are great, but nothing can quite replicate the experience of trying something out for yourself. Users pay a fee of around $10 per day to try out a gadget. If they decide to keep it, the amount they’ve paid so far goes toward the purchase price. Lumoid is launching with a focus on cameras, but eventually plans to branch out into other gadgets. Senic is a startup that is trying to revolutionize the market for ultra-precise measurement tools in construction and home projects. Raised in a family that built a measurement tools company in Germany, the company’s co-founder Toby Eichenwald recognized that the industry was moving in a different direction with the advent of the smartphone. So they’ve built a laser range finder that can measure distances up to 200 feet with an accuracy of about 2 millimeters. They’re retailing it for $99. You can head right over to check out more coverage of Senic. |
Small Firm Creates A 3D-Printed Scale Model Of The Hyperloop | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSgPGBmUp1E] This video shows you probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a physical representation of the . It is a 3D scale model made by a nascent company called and it showcases the teams 3D modeling prowess and, more wistfully, shows what the Hyperloop could be. The Odgen-based team printed the model on three different printers using three different materials. They added a bit of color to the seats, smoothed them out, and now are the proud owners of a small, non-working model of the Hyperloop suitable for children’s parties and futuristic stop motion animations. Now if they could just 3D print these things full-sized using aluminum tubing and billions of dollars of right-of-way land grants then I think they’d really be in business. Regardless, it’s a noble effort. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGvqJOa5-jE#at=23] |
Google Expands Google+ Photos App To All Chromebooks, No Longer Limited To Just The Pixel | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | The Chromebook world is a weird one where apps trickle out slowly and in a manageable stream, with the most interesting ones costly coming from Google itself. The latest is software that was originally demoed at the Chromebook Pixel launch, then released for that computer exclusively, and now has . The Google+ Photos app, for those who haven’t been following its long and winding saga, is a standalone app that takes the best of Google+’s photos features and adds things like automatic backup from SD cards, offline viewing of recent uploads, and auto-sorting of the best shots as well as simple sharing. Maybe the best part of Google+’s Photos app is that it uses the company’s new Auto Enhance magic to subtly improve the quality of any uploaded photos without any action required on their part, so long as it’s enabled, and the Auto Awesome feature that generates GIFs and collages. At Google’s I/O keynote, the features around images were probably the best part of, at least from a truly useful consumer development standpoint. Photos in the age of digital photography are just sort of a bulk nuisance item that we plan to, but never actually get around to organizing, sifting and editing. Google+ now does a really good job of handling a lot of that heavy lifting. Chromebooks are still niche devices, but software like this makes them ideal travel companions or even better tools for users with light demands and little know-how of programs like Lightroom or Photoshop. Keeping the Photos app exclusive to the pricey, even-more-niche-than-niche Pixel wasn’t doing anyone any favors, so it’s nice to see it become more widely available. |
Google Updates Play Services With Improved GPS, Google+ And Photo Sphere Integrations | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | , the company’s client-side library for allowing Android developers to easily use Google-powered features like Maps and Google+ in their apps, got a major today that includes a number of interesting new features. Many of these, Google notes, are meant to provide greater power savings, but the company says it has also made a number of performance improvements. With this update, for example, developers can now use hardware-based GPS geofencing on devices that support it (including, for example, the Nexus 4). Battery consumption is one of the banes of location-based services, but Google says this technique can result in significantly lower battery usage. To save even more battery, Google Play Services 3.2 now also allows the selection of a low-power mode for the , which manages Play Services’ location technology in the background. And a new Snapshot feature now allows developers to just display a bitmap image of the current map instead of an interactive map to improve performance and battery life. Besides these location features, this update also brings a new and easily integrated, simplified sharing control to Play Services for developers who use Google+ sign-ins. In addition, Google says, it has “taken the opportunity to add some butter to the Google+ sign-in animation” (a reference to Project Butter – Google’s initiative to make Android’s animations a bit more fluid). For developers who want to integrate Photo Sphere, Google has added a compass mode, so users can now view them by simply moving their phones. |
High Leverage Individual Max Levchin To Speak At TechCrunch Disrupt SF | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Technical co-founder, angel investor and PayPal mafia don once wrote a blog post about a concept he called He described these individuals thus: “People who act on their big ideas. They are capable of articulating a theory of how the world works today and how it should change, and then proceed to actually change the world, or at least attempt to. They are the people that can describe big changes that impact major swaths of humanity (we will privatize space flight! we will sequence the human genome! we will find safe alternative to oil! etc), and then actually proceed to replace “we” with “I” through their actions, be it entrepreneurship or investing or volunteering.” Though Levchin did not pinpoint himself as a “high leverage individual,” he is the epitome of such a person. Before he could legally drink, Levchin wanted to transform the way people exchanged value using the Internet, whether it be actual value like money via PayPal or recreational value like gaming through Slide. Though , what is admirable about Max Levchin is that he kept acting on his theories, i.e. building them and supporting other high leverage individuals, when they set out to do the same. His latest project, , is his most ambitious endeavor yet. It’s an incubator that focuses on harnessing the sheer amount of behavioral data produced by today’s tech advancement to make products more efficient and, yes, to change the world. The first product to come out of HVF, , aims to make paying from your phone as easy as tweeting from your phone by utilizing cues from social networks to determine whether you’ll make good on a loan. And, in a complete 180°, HVF’s second product, , wants to help women get pregnant through timing their cycles and then literally paying for (through a user pool) in vitro fertilization if the cycle timing doesn’t work. Imagine how many couples trying for children can rest a little bit easier with that kind of guarantee. You don’t see many tried-and-true serial entrepreneurs and investors going after the fertility market, and perhaps that’s why Max is: “In the next decades we will see huge number of inherently analog processes captured digitally,” he . “Opportunities to build businesses that process this data and improve lives will abound.” It doesn’t get more analog than human reproduction. Levchin will be talking about his past and our data-driven future onstage at . We’re honored to have him. A computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor, Max Levchin focuses on building and investing in enduring technology companies. Max’s latest undertaking, HVF, is an innovation lab focused on solving big problems and improving lives by extracting insights from the vast quantities of recordable information around us. HVF launched its first project, Affirm, in early 2013, and recently launched Glow at the end of May. A graduate of University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (CS’97), Max co-founded PayPal and was its CTO, from founding through its acquisition by eBay. Max currently serves as the chairman of the boards of directors of Yelp and Kaggle and a director of Yahoo! and Evernote. |
PiP Uses Facial Recognition To Reunite Lost Pets With Their Owners | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | Having your dog or cat run away is pretty traumatic. And even if somebody finds your furry friend, they might not know where to find you. If your pet ends up in a shelter, chances are high that it will be euthanized, so Philip Rooyakkers, the CEO of , decided to see if he and his team could use facial recognition instead of tags to more easily report and find more lost pets. PiP launched its . The company is looking to raise $100,000 in the next month to raise the final funds necessary to bring the app to market. I ran into Rooyakkers at the in Vancouver last week, and he told me that the company’s technology, developed by the image-recognition expert Dr. Daesik Jang, is able to recognize 98 percent of dogs and cats. With the help of some extra metadata (breed, size, weight, gender, colors etc.), this means PiP can recognize virtually every lost pet. Here is how it works: Pet owners sign up for PiP and upload photos of their pets to the system. The technology then analyzes the pet’s unique facial features and stores the data in its database. Anybody can download the app to report found pets. Pet owners pay a subscription to PiP (the plan is to charge $1.49 per month, with 2 percent of all proceeds going to local pet rescue charities) and the moment their pet goes missing, PiP will alert local animal control and rescue agencies, veterinarians and social medial outlets. This “Amber Alert” for missing pets is at the core of what the service does. It will also scan social media for postings about found pets. “We will not only broadcast across all social media that the pet is missing, but everyone with the app (in that locale) will get a pop-up Amber Alert. We will contact the owner directly to listen, provide PiP’s immediate response, and offer support,“ Rooyakkers said in a statement today. Whenever a pet is found, PiP will use its facial recognition software to see if it can find a match in its system. To avoid false positives, Rooyakkers told me, somebody will always look at the metadata to ensure everything checks out. Obviously, there are a few other ways to identify lost pets, including . However, there are numerous standards for microchips, so not every shelter or clinic can scan every chip. Facial recognition would also allow anybody to scan dogs or cats right after finding them without the need for any special equipment, which should make reuniting them with their owners faster and easier. |
Apple Credits Security Researcher Balic, But Not For Vulnerability Related To Developer Center | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | A recent posting on Apple’s page issues credit to Ibrahim Balic, 7Dscan.com and SCANV of Knownsec.com for the discovery of two web security issues. Balic, you may recall, discovered a vulnerability that he later publicly claimed was responsible for the weeks-long . The posting was who claimed that Apple was crediting Balic with reporting the issue that took down the Dev Center. However, my sources confirm that Balic’s report is not responsible for the outage. The issue that Balic reported had nothing to do with why Apple took down the developer center. That was a completely separate vulnerability. Indeed, the entry related to Balic is annotated with the iAd Workbench portal address, not the Developer Center address. The vulnerability reported directly below Balic’s entry was credited to 7dscan.com and SCANV and is annotated with Apple’s Developer Center address. It seems far more likely that these two researchers are the ones who discovered the remote code execution vulnerability in the Developer Center which caused the outage. For researchers who are in this game, the credit from a company is the reward, so they most likely reported it to Apple. Once it had been confirmed, Apple was worried enough to take the Dev Center down to fix the problem. The fact that Balic was not responsible for the aggressive response and rebuilding of the Developer Center by Apple was previously at AllThingsD and . Our also spoke at length to Balic about his breach of the iAd portal. He also expressed skepticism that Balic’s report was the cause of the Developer Center outage. It turns out that this was the correct deduction. Balic maintained that he was simply performing research (for which he has by other companies) and retained no user information. He with the security issues related to the Dev Center in a YouTube video after he says he got no response from Apple. When contacted to inquire about the actual cause of the Developer Center outage, Apple declined to comment. Image Credit: Flickr/ |
Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Glio, 7Cups, Prim, Teleborder And More | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | It’s that time again. ‘s Summer demo day is upon us, and we’re here live to bring the best and brightest new startups into your world. Forty-nine new companies will pitch their wares for the very first time today, but for now we’re focusing on the first batch, which So sit back, relax, and grab some popcorn as we take you through the wonderful world of YC startups. [ For our highlights from across all 45 pitches, check out But now, Batch 1: Go! GoComm bills itself as “Yammer for the mobile workforce” with a tool for managing large events. It works like a transparent Twitter-like feed to coordinate with teams that lives on your mobile phone. Co-founder Travis Dredd was inspired to build the company after his experience serving as chief of staff for the Democratic National Convention. During the DNC he didn’t have the tools to coordinate with all the members of his team and the press when the convention needed to be moved from a football stadium into the nearby arena. With the product built and working with clients, the company has already become profitable — having signed one large, $150,000 a year contract — and sees the opportunity to go after the $450 million events space. It also can be applied to industries like construction, security and hotels, according to Dredd. With the stated goal of being the “Mint.com for legal spend,” SimpleLegal is a software platform that reads and analyzes the paper data that companies receive from their law firms. According to SimpleLegal’s founders, who have spent a combined 10 years in the legal industry, law firms on average over-bill their clients by 10 percent. By automatically flagging inappropriate charges, SimpleLegal says it can cut down on those costs in a big way. The startup has seen 50 percent week-over-week growth in the five weeks since it launched its platform. Read our earlier coverage on SimpleLegal . RealCrowd is a crowdfunding site for commercial real estate investments. The team, which includes two longstanding real estate investors who have helped close more than $3 billion in investment transactions, is looking to help a broader set of investors participate in multi-million-dollar real estate investments. In their first couple of weeks, they’ve racked up 500 accredited investors to participate in the site and have raised $7.5 million. An offering three days ago has attracted $550,000 of a $1.35 million target. Check out our earlier coverage of RealCrowd . Every company is building a mobile app, but it’s tough to know what to change to optimize sales and other key performance indicators. has developed an SDK that developers can install with their apps to run real-time A/B tests on changes to on-boarding flows, button placement, images, colors, fonts, and whole features without the need for engineers. Developers can then watch the results of their tests and roll out the changes that benefit their business. Apptimize was started by algorithmic trading expert , and ex-Googler and mobile security engineer . The company says 1,000 developers have now installed their SDK, pushing them to 1 million user devices. They’re competing in a crowded market of A/B testing suites, but many are run by big post-IPO companies focused on the web, or small startups who haven’t gotten serious traction. If they can win the space, they could score a cut of massive ecommerce marketing budgets and make apps better for everyone. Check out our earlier coverage of Apptimize . Watchsend is an analytics tool that captures video of mobile app interactions, allowing developers to determine where users are running into problems in their apps. That provides more data than developers would get from more traditional analytics tools like Mixpanel or Flurry. The founders built the tool after they ran into their own problems determining what was wrong in their own mobile app. The company could now tell where users were dropping off and what problems they were having. Just two weeks after launch, Watchsend has 50 companies using its analytics and is looking to get more signed up. Check out our earlier coverage of WatchSend . If you want a case for your smartphone, walking into any mall or Best Buy shows you what you already know — there are thousands of options out there for you. GraftConcepts aims to be the go-to case to let you have all those options available at the same time, with a two-piece iPhone case design that allows you to interchange the back plate for your case easily. It’s already seen a ton of success — GraftConcepts has sold $2.25 million in product to date, and is on track to sell a total of $7.5 million worth of its flagship product alone. Those numbers are impressive, but the addressable market is even more so: Today, some $29. 6 billion in smartphone cases are sold every year. Check out our earlier coverage of Graft Concepts right . Glio is a local listings site like Yelp for the Brazilian market. They’ve grown 40 percent month-over-month and more than 100,000 users have used Glio over the last month. The co-founders include a former Brazilian poker champion and the team applied to Y Combinator three times before getting in. Eventually, they’re looking to expand to other South American markets. Check out our earlier coverage of Glio . Yelp is around to help you figure out what restaurants to go to or businesses to patronize. When you’re making a buying decision on, well, anything else, Toutpost wants to be your go-to service. The way that Toutpost says it will incentivize people to contribute user-generated reviews is by tapping into the argumentative know-it-all in all of us — by pitting two products against each other (say, a Sony Playstation versus an Xbox) and encouraging people to debate their pros and cons with each other. It’s been successful so far: In the six weeks since Toutpost launched, the site has attracted 6,000 users. Check out our earlier coverage of Toutpost . SpoonRocket has figured out a way to deliver healthy organic meals for just $6, and in fewer than 10 minutes. The company, which is just operating in Berkeley right now, claims to do more orders in one day than GrubHub does in a full month. That’s 850 meals per day, or a run rate of $2 million. How does SpoonRocket do it? The team controls the entire process: It writes the code, makes the food and does the deliveries. It hopes to go nationwide, expanding the market opportunity to 300 times its existing market, or $600 million annually. Check out our earlier coverage of SpoonRocket right . People spent $15 billion on laundry last year, and most still dislike the experience. Prim wants to make laundry lovable. You throw your laundry in trashbags, book a pick-up time on its website, a driver comes and picks up the bags, they’re washed and folded at a high-quality local laundromat, nicely bagged in nylon satchels, and delivered back to you at a time you choose within 48 hours. It’s $25 a bag, with $15 for additional bags. I’ve used Prim and it was a huge help. By negotiating bulk orders with laundromats, Prim can charge about as much as you’d pay to drag your laundry to a laundromat’s wash and fold service, and you get delivery included. Prim is seeing 65 percent of customers return for more service, though its 10 percent a week growth is low by Y Combinator standards. It faces local competitors in San Francisco like , , and , but hopes its founders’ computer science background and online customer acquisition skills will help it beat them. Check out our earlier coverage of Prim right . Everyone has a time in their lives when they just need to talk about their troubles — when they’re going through a divorce, an illness in the family, issues with anxiety, and the like. There are typically two options for them: Family and friends, which is free but often comes with baggage; or therapy, which is expensive and often intimidating. 7 Cups of Tea aims to situate itself in the middle of those two options, with an online marketplace that connects people anonymously with trained “active listeners” that provide an empathetic ear for free or a voluntary fee or “tip.” 7 Cups, which takes a 40 percent commission on all transactions, has seen solid growth since it launched eight weeks ago: It now has 160 active listeners on its platform and is now fielding more than 1,800 call and chat requests per week. Check out our earlier coverage of 7cups right . This startup provides a seemingly simple, but very important service: Providing a hosted status page indicating metrics such as downtime for any company that has a website, service, or application. This way, customers can plainly see if an app is “down for everyone, or just me” — and gather more data about what exactly is going on. For a monthly fee that ranges between $19 to $249 a month depending on the size of the company and services provided, StatusPage provides a website with an easy-to-understand dashboard, as well as the ability to access information via email and text. Check out earlier coverage of StatusPage . Kivo has built a tool to improve collaboration on documents between teams. By keying into Microsoft Office, it’s created what it calls a “Git for documents.” In the same way that Git has solved the versioning problem for collaborative development. Kivo helps teams manage documents that multiple users can edit, all at the same time. Today, Kivo has already signed up a bunch of consultancy firms like Deloitte and McKinsey to enable their teams to work on documents in Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and Excel together. But there are a billion users of Microsoft Office tools out there. At $10 per user, the revenue opportunity for Kivo is pretty huge. Check out our earlier coverage of Kivo . It’s common knowledge by now that immigration is a huge problem for many companies — if you’re not a behemoth like Oracle or Google, if you have an employee that you’re trying to secure a visa for, the process can be hugely time-consuming and difficult. Teleborder aims to ease that pain by providing a software program for companies that purportedly scales, automates, and replaces all the functions typically done by an immigration lawyer — gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government. Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, giving it a $4.5 billion addressable market in the United States alone. Check out our earlier coverage of Teleborder . Floobits lets pair programmers use native text editors to collaborate on code in real time. They say they have 7,000 users signed up with eight hours a day on average per usage. The two co-founders Matt Kaniaris and Geoff Greer used to pair program together while at Rackspace, and after leaving, they realized that they wanted to build something that could help others do the same. The service offers freemium pricing, where free accounts have up to five workspaces available. But to work privately, a paid account starting at $15 per month is required. Check out our earlier coverage of Floobits right . It’s a big hassle for technologically savvy businesses to integrate with antiquated shipping services like UPS, USPS, and FedEx. removes the friction by sitting between developers and the shippers, and offering a RESTful JSON API to connect them. This lets developers access the best shipping rates, tracking information and more. It charges $0.05 per shipping label, and is aiming to take a nice cut of the $26 billion shipping industry. It’s been growing 179 percent month over month, has handled 70,000 shipments, and from investors, including SV Angel. It’s facing competitors like and , but hopes to win the market by specializing in top-notch support so businesses always know where their shipments are. Check out our earlier coverage of EasyPost right . Standard Treasury is working on APIs for commercial banking that help ease transactions like transfers. They’re currently in negotiations with 16 banks, including three of the five largest ones in the country. Those contracts could be worth anywhere from roughly $2 million to more than $15 million and they have potential banking clients asking for APIs down the line that tap into mobile and core banking. Check out our earlier coverage of Standard Treasury . [ : To see our favorites from across all three batches, read |
Yahoo Shuts Down Its Email Service In China | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Yahoo’s email service in China has shut down, with a asking users to transfer their accounts to Alibaba’s . The closure of Yahoo China email was announced on April 18 and is part of its gradual ceasing of services in China since acquiring a stake in Alibaba, one of the country’s largest Internet companies, in 2005. In January, for example, Yahoo China , citing an “adjustment in our product strategy.” A notice on Yahoo China email’s site says that users with the suffixes @yahoo.com.cn and @yahoo.cn can register and transfer their data to a new Alimail account, where they will continue to receive emails send to their Yahoo addresses until December 31, 2014. The Sunnyvale-based company paid $1 billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba in 2005. Since then, Alibaba has grown into the backbone of China’s . In September, Alibaba closed an initial repurchase of its shares from Yahoo for $7.6 billion. Yahoo’s remaining 24% stake in the Chinese company, which is expected to go public within the next two years, is to be worth about $14 billion. The Sunnyvale-based company isn’t relying solely on its investment in Alibaba, however, to ensure a footprint in China. Yahoo , a Beijing-based startup that focuses on social-network data. Eight Ztelic developers and engineers joined Yahoo’s research and development team in Beijing, while Ztelic founder (and returning Yahoo) Hao Zheng was slated for a “critical leadership role in our ,” a Yahoo spokeswoman told us. |
Beats Electronics May Give HTC The Boot In Favor Of A New Investor | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Whether you like the company or not, people are snapping up Beats Electronics’ wares left and right. It’s no surprise then that Beats is looking to branch out into some new frontiers, and it may not want to do it without getting rid of some old baggage first. The is reporting that Beats is considering buying out Taiwanese gadget maker HTC’s remaining stake in the company and is also trying to lock down a new investor to help fund its expansion into consumer electronics and auto tech. At this point, there’s no word on how much such a deal would cost, or if HTC is even willing to sell. To really get a feel for the situation though, we need to do a little rewinding. This whole sordid situation started back in August 2011 when HTC revealed that it (about 50.1%, to be specific) in Beats Audio, a deal that cost the Taiwanese company just north of $300 million. It wasn’t long until the first Beats Audio-powered smartphones started rolling off of HTC’s production lines, and since then just about every one of the company’s notable smartphones bore that familiar red logo somewhere on its body. Of course, that relationship wasn’t without its rough patches. Between the moment HTC finalized its deal with Beats Audio and today, the company has been absolutely battered — sales revenue is down, profits are down, and more than a few pundits have already written the company off (or are close to doing it). The situation that HTC found itself selling nearly half of its stake back to Beats Audio in mid-2012, which reportedly resulted in a net loss of about $4.8 million for the Taiwanese gadget maker. What’s still unclear at this point is what this turn of events could mean for Beats Audio in smartphones going forward. If Beats indeed buys out HTC’s stake, it’s not inconceivable that other smartphone manufacturers could swoop in and license whatever Beats Audio assets the company originally made available to HTC. And for all we know, HTC may be one of them — it could just decide to fold Beats Audio into its phones like nothing ever happened, albeit without most favored nation status. It’s near-impossible to make a call there without a closer understanding of the agreement the two companies forged, but I wouldn’t expect the Beats Audio brand to remain dormant in the mobile space for very long (if at all). But Beats’ bid for another investor comes at a pretty peculiar time. There’s little doubt that HTC wanted to lock up a partnership with Beats because of the marketing clout the brand would bring its mobile gadgets, and now Beats is looking for a way out just as HTC is trying to tap into another vein of star power to revitalizing its anemic marketing efforts. For better or worse, the company is spending nearly a billion dollars on a massive marketing push that will apparently see Hollywood hotshot Robert Downey Jr. spout of the company’s name. I may be veering slightly into the realm of the hyperbolic, but HTC can’t afford for this kooky new approach not to work. Couple that with the fact that a Beats buyback would be yet another sizable signifier of lost faith in HTC and things are starting to look seriously dire. I’ve reached out to HTC for a comment on all this, but it’s pretty late and the company hasn’t yet responded at time of writing — I’ll update the post with a response if/when I get one. |
Fly Or Die: Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | The , while having a numerically challenging name, is a slick little guy that’s not too big, not too small, but right. Still, is that enough to compete with not only the but also Samsung’s own ? To start, the specs on this bad boy are sure to please. John Biggs felt that the 8-inch 1280×800 display was beautiful, which is no surprise considering Samsung manufactures some of the best displays in the industry. The tablet comes in 16GB and 32GB options, and starts at a perfectly reasonable $299 price point. without any 4G/LTE connectivity (which isn’t an option in the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0), the tab itself is inherently limited. Moreover, neither of us are particularly pleased with the plastic build materials or the Galaxy S 3-style design language. Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue with Samsung as a whole, which has risen to be the undisputed market leader in mobile computing. The company very strategically offers a variety of products in each category, with different uses and price points for each. The GalTab 3 8.0 is yet another sheep in the Samsung-flavored herd, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t help you get to sleep at night. If you’re part of the Apple ecosystem already, it’s hard not to justify the extra $30 for an iPad mini. If not, however, the GalTab 3 8-inch is a reasonable consideration, especially alongside Samsung’s Galaxy Note line of tablets. |
Inside Patch’s Leaked Revenue Numbers And Its Hunt For Profitability | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Patch, AOL’s hyperlocal news project, is undergoing steep layoffs as it aims for profitability by the end of the year. Leaked memos detail Patch’s revenue both in its lower reaches, and what its sales bosses expect it to accumulate daily. This grants us a window into Patch’s health, and why the project is cutting as deeply as it is. The core result of analyzing its financial health is that if we presume the upper end of rumored cuts to staff, fair cost per employee estimates, and reasonable top line sums based on what has leaked from AOL, Patch has a shot at reaching the black before the end of calendar 2013. The memos, obtained by , outline several important metrics: How much money Patch has brought in recently and how much money it wants to bring in daily. With these two figures, we can do some number work and parse out the ranges of Patch revenue. We can then contrast those figures with reasonable estimates of Patch’s cost structure, given that we have a recent employee number, also via the leaked memos. If you don’t care about the monetization of media and the future of news, prepare to be fantastically bored. (Standard disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch.) Here’s our first key bit of memo, written by Jim Lipuma, head of U.S. ad sales for Patch on Tuesday: “Over the last 5 sales days, we have amassed our worst results of the year.” Let’s fit that with what Lipuma said on Friday: “We had $36K day yesterday, when we need to be having $100K+ days. I understand why yesterday happened, but we cannot settle for days like this going forward.” So, the $36,000 day was part of the worst period of ad sales of the entire year. The $100,000 figure is interesting, as it sets high-end expectations for what Patch should earn on any given day. So, we have upper and lower bands on what Patch should and should not earn day to day. We need another data point, however, which Lipuma happily provides in his memo: “This is the time to drive the ball and swing big. Do it for yourself, your families and the 1,200 people who call themselves ‘Patchers.'” Now we can dig into the math. There are two main ways for us to estimate Patch’s revenue: By discounting weekends, and by not. If we discount weekends, we assume a five-day sales week, in which incomes are derived Monday through Friday and in no meaningful capacity on Saturday and Sunday. However, given the scope and scale of both AOL and Patch, this might be too conservative, so we will also run estimates of revenue for Patch that treat weekends as normal sales days. The functional truth will likely land in between. However, as noted, we are looking for a revenue range for Patch to help us better understand its financial health, not detail its every vein and dollar. Let’s start low. Lipuma noted that the preceding five-day period was the worst sales period of the year. It included the aforementioned $36,000 day, a figure bad enough that it acquired internally public scorn. Let’s be generous and assume that the $36,000, one-day sales figure was on the low end of that five-day period, giving us an average of, by our own choosing, $45,000 per day during the period. $45,000 per day for a five-day period is a total of $225,000 in revenue. Counting weekends as normal days, there are 73 five-day periods in the year, and if we do treat weekends as non-working days, then there are 52. Thus, at the $45,000 per-day figure, Patch generates between $11.7 million and $16.4 million in yearly revenue. Now, Patch wants to earn more than $100,000 per day in sold ads. That’s more than twice our lower-band estimate. Let’s skew that figure a touch higher for sport, and assume a $110,000 per day ad-revenue figure for Patch. Again, taking weekends into account and not, Patch would generate between $28.6 million and $40.15 million in yearly revenue. A number in between is perhaps more interesting. Assuming $75,000 in ad revenue per diem, Patch would, discounting for weekends and not, generate yearly top line between $19.5 million and $27.4 million. AOL had hoped that Patch . The margin of that miss wasn’t disclosed. The above calculations assume on Patch’s ad revenue. Patch sites sometimes also include and so forth. However, I think it’s safe to estimate that the lion’s share of Patch income is from advertisements. So we could extend the above numbers north 10 percent or 20 percent if we wanted to just to be safe, but I don’t think that it is necessary. A caveat: AOL has spoken heavily on the topic of partnering Patch sites with outside parties. This could generate material revenue. However, we have no way to estimate those incomes. And, as always, let’s state that some Patch sites do in fact make money and do well. The issue at hand is the larger sickness of the Patch project, which is about to undergo another leeching to reduce its size. Now, to the other side of this equation: costs. Lipuma mentioned 1,200 Patch employees. The old metric of each employee costing $100,000 per year in salary, benefits, and office space cannot apply here. If it did, Patch would have personnel costs of $120 million before any other expenses. That level of outlay would not only sink Patch overnight, it would tear down the entire Brand Group at AOL. That leaves us, again, to scratch our heads and ask what might be reasonable. Happily, we have some outside data to guide us. Salaries for Patch editors and lower ad sales appear to land in the $35,000 to $45,000 per year range. Given that, let’s assume $50,000 per employee per year in expenses, once their total cost of employment has been considered. Don’t forget: We are being slightly generous with revenue and parsimonious with cost. In the realm of broad inference, it’s nice to be polite to your subject. At the $50,000 figure, Patch remains in the soup, as it has costs of $60 million per year for its employees, assuming that it is keeping the full 1,200. We’ll, it’s not. So, assuming the are undertaken, Patch will be left with 650 employees. At $50,000 per, that’s $32.5 million in personnel costs. We have revenue estimates up top that make that number quite feasible. So, if AOL does cut as deeply as expected, it is possible that Patch could turn a profit Naturally, the above figure explains the layoffs: There is no way to ramp Patch revenue — which is now currently in a trough — quickly enough to reach profitability with its current cost structure by the end of the year, as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong promised. So, layoffs. To make all this a bit simpler: Assuming full layoffs, $75,000 per day in average sales not discounting for weekends, and strong ‘other’ income that AOL has repeatedly mentioned as possible, Patch could make financial sense. — The next piece to this is that by cutting editorial staff, Patch will likely trim its pageviews and, thus, at least in theory, its advertising inventory. In the medium term, that could limit revenue growth at the group. And the value of a network of hyper-local websites diminishes as its reach retreats. The idyll of hyper-local news content and community becomes less polished if only select markets can support such an enterprise. AOL intends on as part of the layoffs. There is another thing to mention, which is the tone of the more recent Lipuma memo that has almost the taste of threat: “Time is an asset that we cannot waste. Make it an awesome Tuesday and get on pace this week. You will be thankful that you did, come Monday.” I wouldn’t think that can help morale. The bottom line: At $36,000 per day, the recent poor tally, Patch doesn’t function. At more than $100,000 per day, things appear doable. At $75,000 daily, I can see them breaking even by the end of the year. The kicker to the above is that Patch can make it, if not at the scale that Armstrong had in mind at the start for the project. Whether that is to be commended, given the painful expense of the larger experiment I leave to you to decide. |
OpenDesk.cc Is Like Ikea For Open Source Zealots | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Furniture is probably the last thing on the mind of most open source proponents but now it doesn’t have to be. line of furniture that you can make yourself or order unassembled from a maker with a CNC machine. Not only is the furniture cheap – free if you have the wood and hardware – it’s actually cool-looking. Created by & and Development 00, OpenDesk is the first project that is compatible with , a site that allows you to search for fabricators in your area. You could also find someone with a to cut the pieces for you and drop them off at your domicile or office. The designs in .dwg and .dxf formats, machine readable models that allow you to power a robotic CNC. You can also download an PDF of the plans if you want to try to build the hardware by hand. They have a number of pieces including a couple of cool desks and a stool. While Ikea is probably still safe in the cheap furniture racket, it’s clear that DIY furniture is becoming simpler and simpler to build. Add in a robotic metal-cutter and some 3D printers and you could feasibly build an entire office set – down to the pen cups – in a few days. |
Behind The Scenes At Homejoy, A Cleaning Startup That Says It’s Really A Tech Company | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | If I were ranking startups based on how much I value their services, would place pretty darn near the top — every month or so, one of their cleaners comes by my apartment and in two or three hours it becomes more sparkly than I’ve ever been able to make it. All for just 20 bucks an hour. Homejoy’s been growing quickly, too — from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and others, and about 10 months , the company says it now has a workforce of more than 50 employees in its San Francisco office. And yet … when I’m asked about exciting startups, Homejoy isn’t the first one that comes to mind. Some of my hesitation, I suspect, is related to the criticism leveled at a number of startups, that they’re basically , rather than (A criticism that’s probably too big and complicated to be mentioned in passing in a post that isn’t going to address the issue at all.) (Oops.) But there’s also the question of whether Homejoy is even a tech company at all. Maybe it’s just a cleaning service with a decent website? (The same question might be asked of , or of startups offering related services, such as .) Apparently this is something members of the Homejoy team were thinking about too, because they emailed me recently to suggest a guest column about why Homejoy really is a tech company. I made a counter proposal: How about I come to their office and see the technology in action? They agreed, and earlier this month, that’s exactly what I did. My tour guide was Mark Linsey, Homejoy’s vice president of engineering. (He’s second from the left in the photo above, which features Homejoy’s five-person engineering team — and yes, .) He told me that he was the company’s first technical hire, joining as a consultant in January and then going full-time in March. Linsey, whose includes time as a technical program manager at Amazon and co-founding the social marketing startup (which, like Homejoy, was ), said he was convinced to stay by the size of the technical challenges that Homejoy was facing. Like Amazon, he said Homejoy’s innovation is less about putting up a website for selling things (in this case home cleaning), and more about the backend technology. “At Amazon, there’s a whole software stack and product team for their warehouses and their internal logistics that they wouldn’t be able to deliver the prices they do without,” he said. Similarly, he claimed that with Homejoy, “It’s like an iceberg. The customer-facing website is 5 to 10 perent of the whole.” So (to strain the metaphor) what technology is hidden under the water? For one thing, Linsey said Homejoy is “a very data-driven company.” Matching the right cleaner to the right customer involves a lot of factors — not just how the cleaners and customers are rated, but also the routes that can maximize a cleaner’s efficiency throughout the day, not to mention likely transit times in a given geography. To illustrate this point, Linsey showed me the interface that Homejoy created for cleaners to identify exactly where they are and aren’t willing to work. Originally, he said, cleaners identified their working areas based on zip code, but that turned out to be too broad (for example, many of the cleaners rely on mass transit, so in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, many of them can only work near a stop). Now Homejoy gives them a tool where they can draw the exact, custom borders of their work area. Linsey also showed me the “demand map” that Homejoy has created to display where its customers and cleaners are. The map works at a several scales, showing supply and demand across the entire United States (and in Canada, ), or zoomed in to a specific geography — he showed me the Bay Area, which was crowded with multicolored pins. One color represented past customers, another showed upcoming appointments, and yet another stood for users who expressed interest in Homejoy but are outside the existing coverage areas. The map is important for choosing new markets and finding new cleaners, Linsey said, recalling one occasion when the map revealed that Homejoy was starting to get a lot of jobs in the middle of the San Francisco Peninsula, an area where it didn’t have many cleaners (they were more concentrated in San Francisco to the north and the Palo Alto/Mountain View area to the south), so that’s where it focused its recruiting efforts. The map, like a lot of Homejoy’s technology, was built by Linsey and his team. There’s also a custom CRM system for tracking cleaners, clients, and jobs, and a custom phone system, allowiing cleaners and clients to communicate without actually knowing each other’s phone numbers. (The phone system is nicknamed Zoidberg, a nod to both the TV show Futurama and to , the system that the company used before building its own) None of this eliminates the need for a large customer service team. In fact, Homejoy let me listen in on a call with an initially unhappy client. On the call, a cleaner’s car trouble meant that the company had to scramble to find a replacement (it helps that Homejoy pays some of its top cleaners to remain available on-call), and the aforementioned unhappy customer ended up getting a free cleaning — which seemed to to make up for a lot of the stress. As for how Homejoy’s approach is working for its cleaners, well, the ones I’ve spoken to have been pretty happy with the service. Special Projects Manager Marlo Struve told me that cleaners make between $12 and $15 an hour, and she noted that they have the freedom to determine where and when they’re willing to work. She also sent me the following quote from cleaner John J. (the company doesn’t identify cleaners by their full names): “Before [Homejoy] I had to solicit jobs myself and now Homejoy is like a household name. It’s really picking up and I don’t have to do as much [soliciting] as I used to [for my services].” Linsey added that if I had stopped by the office in the company’s early days, I would have seen a very different picture. The work that’s now accomplished by his team’s tools was originally done by co-founders/siblings Adora and Aaron Cheung, who worked out of their apartment and manually matched up cleaners and jobs. Homejoy’s early approach, he argued, embodied Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s advice that entrepreneurs should “ ” (advice that includes doing a lot of work manually at first, then building technology to automate the bottleneck). Both Linsey and Struve said that without the technology and systems that were built after Homejoy’s launch, the company could not have grown from one to 26 cities in just over six months. (And by the way, the list of markets where Homejoy is now available includes cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, and Tampa Bay, so maybe this isn’t just for startup douchebags after all …) And for what it’s worth, I was pretty impressed by what I saw — not just by the technology, but by Linsey’s enthusiasm in outlining the problems Homejoy has already solved, and the ones that it still needs to face. “There’s a lot I think we can improve on in terms of gathering data,” Linsey said. “I also think that Homejoy is not going to be exclusively a cleaning company forever — there are other services on the horizon.” |
Vancouver’s GROW Conference Shines A Spotlight On Canada’s Growing Startup Scene | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | When it comes to the tech conference circuit outside of Silicon Valley, Canada is probably not top of mind for most people, but I’ve got a feeling that’s slowly changing. Last week, Vancouver hosted the fourth edition of the , a two-day event (plus one for outdoor activities around the city) that brings together startups from all over Canada and the West Coast. Four years ago, the inaugural event attracted 400 people. This year, over 1,200 made the trip to Vancouver’s Convention Center, which will also play host to TED next year. To me, GROW has become one of the premier networking conferences, as it’s a great way to take the pulse of the Canadian startup scene. As with many things Canada, it’s easy to underestimate the role of the tech industry there. In British Columbia, more people than in fields like mining, forestry and oil gas. Local successes like , and even smaller companies like , seem to have provided a bit of a boost to those who previously only thought about starting their own companies. The slow decline of Blackberry, virtually everybody told me, has had very little effect on the Canadian startup scene in general. Getting angel funding and raising a seed round seems to be getting a bit easier, though virtually all of the companies I talked to – whether they were in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal – noted that raising a significant Series A round still meant heading to Silicon Valley and knocking on doors there. Sometimes, the Canadian government still has to learn a bit, of course, as in the case of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities shutting down coding school earlier this year (it’s back up and running now). Overall, however. Besides the networking, one thing that always makes GROW stand out for me is that the conference program tends to have a strong focus on providing very practical advise for startups. Maybe this is a Canadian thing, but the event keeps the hype low and usefulness high – something that’s even true for most of the startups that attend. From Google Ventures’ Daniel Burka and Jake Knapp talking about how to build prototypes quickly and effectively, TechCrunch contributor talking about how to get users hooked to your app and 500px CEO Oleg Gutsol talking about how to build a better user experience, GROW’s focus is on helping startups to get started. Sometimes that means going very technical and looking at how to build the right APIs for a service or how to analyze user metrics, while at other times it’s about raising money and building the right team. This focus on practicality is something we don’t see that often outside of vendor conferences and it’s a nice break from the more VC-centric events around Silicon Valley. If you are considering to go to GROW next year, by the way, I highly recommend the day before. With well over 100 entrepreneurs and VCs on it – and three dedicated rail cars for attendees – it’s a networking bonanza that’s hard to beat (and alcohol flows pretty freely, too). This year, a number of Canadian startups like , which had just raised a $1 million seed round) and , which would go on to win GROW’s startup competition, as well as a few Silicon Valley VCs and virtually every well-known startup from Seattle and Portland made the eight-hour trip. |
The Internet: We’re Doing It Wrong | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | This week Facebook’s ; Github went ; and all Google services collapsed for a few minutes, . Just another week on the Internet, then. We love our centralized services, until they let us down. Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. In his most recent (always riveting) State of the World conversation, he : They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off. Other proto-Stacks want to join their number. Once upon a time, Twitter was essentially an API: then they “the increasing importance of us providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools.” Meaning they want to be a Stack. Github used to just host git repositories; now it does issue tracking, project management, and more. Call it a specialized business Stack for software development. And Yahoo is either a second-tier Stack or a Stack wannabe, depending on how generous you’re feeling today. The essay “ ” was all over my Internet this week. Its money quote: Most services I rely on daily are owned by Google. My world revolves around GMail and Google search. I could start listing Android features I adore, but this succinctly states why Android makes sense for me: The number of Google products I use each day boggles my mind. No other company has embedded itself this deeply into my life.” Indeed. It’s very convenient to live in a Stack. It’s easy, it’s seamless, it’s comfortable. And it means putting much, or very nearly all, of our increasingly important online existences into the hands of a few titanic megacorporations. It means relying on their benevolence, not just today, but for the foreseeable future. Remember back in the early days of Google Plus, when Google started disabling users’ accounts for violating Google Plus’s astonishingly poorly-thought-out real-name policy? Remember how those users sounded? They believed in Google. And then Google turned on them. Just like it recently people who wanted to run their own servers…or, in other words, wanted to build their own personal nanoStack. But life inside the Stacks is so much easier, so much better, so much more , than life in the untracked wilderness outside. Better to live amid the comforts of city-states ruled by benevolent tyrants than to have to hunt your own food, make your own camp, and maintain your own mail servers, amid the beasts and bandits in the trackless wastes outside their walls. That’s why the hackers who want to will never be more than a curiosity, right? That’s why (which really wants to be a Stack itself, anyway, just a classier one) only just hit of the population of Facebook…after it introduced a free tier. That’s why new initiatives like , “a secure and distributed blog platform for the open web,” which is , will never get anywhere significant. Right? https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/368376423381078016 Which, I mean, that would probably be a disaster too. — Paul Ford (@ftrain) These online anarchists, these idealists, don’t just claim that people should control their own data, and where it lives, and who’s allowed to access it; they claim that people to. They claim that people don’t, and shouldn’t, trust for-profit megacorporations. They claim that client-server Stacks are only big because they’re good for business, while really, in a pure true noble world untrammeled by money and capitalism, everything would be purely peer-to-peer. Unfortunately these claims are nonsense. Webmail is inherently insecure; and yet, among a group of those people most aware and most perturbed by this fact–the clients of Silent Circle’s — 98% of Silent Mail customers opted to let Silent Circle hold the encryption keys, which made using the service much easier. When users manage their own keys, they have to log into a special system to exchange cryptographic keys with each person they want to email with. Most damning of all, look at Github. It’s a great site, great service, great business. I use it every day. But its name and are also, in a way, fundamental oxymorons: Today is our quarterly reminder that Linus gave us a completely distributed VCS, so we stored all of our repos in a single point of failure. — Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) The sad truth is that the overwhelming majority of people, including highly technical capable people, don’t peer-to-peer protocols. They don’t to own their own data. They just want ease. Convenience. Someone else to take over and take care of their data problems. They want the Stacks. …Mostly. However. There have been a couple of odd and interesting exceptions. Consider Skype. It was brilliantly peer-to-peer…for a while. But a few years ago it too turned to centralized servers. Not, its principle architect , to make surveillance easier, but because in today’s mobile world, where any given node is very likely a phone with limited battery, bandwidth, and processing power, peer-to-peer protocols are less effective. But is that only a temporary truth? Might they raise their hydra heads again in five or ten years, when even phones can serve as supernodes? Consider Bitcoin. Most of all, consider , and the hundreds of millions of users of its distributed swarming protocol. It is the anti-Stack; it is popular; and it is a sign that another way is possible. Might the city-states yet be overrun by Khan-like nomads? Might you one day only need to install a StackSeed app on your phone, or computer, in order for it to become a node in one of several ever-shifting peer-to-peer clouds, striping multiple copies of your encrypted data to a motley crew of other member devices, flickering chaotically around the planet like weather? Maybe. But only if, somehow, ad-hoc encrypted peer-to-peer services become as seamless and easy to use as today’s Stacks. It seems unlikely, yes; but look at Skype, look at BitTorrent. It doesn’t seem . Maybe, just maybe, the reign of the Stacks will be temporary after all. . |
Security Researcher Hacks Mark Zuckerberg’s Wall To Prove His Exploit Works | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Earlier this week, security researcher Khalil Shreateh a Facebook bug that allowed a hacker to post on anyone’s wall — even if they weren’t that person’s friend. While he was able to prove to Facebook that his bug was legit (despite an initial response that it wasn’t a bug at all), Facebook wasn’t too happy with the way he did it: by using the bug to post on Zuckerberg’s otherwise friends-only wall. Security research can be a pretty tough balancing act. If you don’t follow a company’s responsible reporting terms to a T, you might be robbing yourself of your fair share of recognition and, if the company is one of many that gives bug bounties, a chunk of cash. Alas, exploiting your way onto Zuck’s timeline… doesn’t exactly comply with Facebook’s reporting rules. In his initial report of the bug, Khalil demonstrated that he was able to post on anyone’s wall by submitting a link to a post he’d made on the wall of Sarah Goodin (a college friend of Zuck’s, and the first woman on Facebook.) Unfortunately, the member of the Facebook Security team who clicked the link wasn’t friends with Goodin, whose wall was set to be visible to friends only. As a result, they couldn’t see Khalil’s post. (While Facebook Security can almost certainly over-ride privacy settings to see anything posted on the site, they didn’t seem to do that here) “I don’t see anything when I click the link except an error”, responded Facebook’s Security team. Khalil submitted the bug with the same link again, explaining that anyone investigating the link would need to either be Goodin’s friend or would need to “use [their] own authority” to view the private post. “I am sorry this is not a bug”, replied the same member of the Security team, seemingly failing to grasp what was going on. Khalil responded by taking his demonstration to the next level; if posting on one of Mark Zuckerberg’s friend’s walls didn’t get his point across, perhaps posting on Zuck’s own wall would? On Thursday afternoon, Khalil posted a note into Zuckerberg’s timeline. “Sorry for breaking your privacy [to post] to your wall,” it read, “i [had] no other choice to make after all the reports I sent to Facebook team”. Within minutes, Facebook engineers were reaching out to Khalil. He’d made his point. Through Facebook’s whitehat exploit disclosure program, security researchers are paid at least $500 for each critical bug they report responsibly. $500 is just the minimum — the size of the bounty increases with the severity of the bug, with no set maximum. Alas, there would be no bug bounty for Khalil. Amongst other terms, Facebook’s bug disclosure policy requires researchers to use test accounts for their investigations and reports, rather than the accounts of other Facebook users. By posting to Goodin and Zuck’s walls, he’d broken those rules pretty much right out of the gate. His reports also didn’t include enough detail of how to reproduce the bug, says Facebook: Unfortunately your report to our Whitehat system did not have enough technical information for us to take action on it. We cannot respond to reports which do not contain enough detail to allow us to reproduce an issue. When you submit reports in the future, we ask you to please include enough detail to repeat your actions. We are unfortunately not able to pay you for this vulnerability because your actions violated our Terms of Service. We do hope, however, that you continue to work with us to find vulnerabilities in the site. Since Khalil’s initial post went up on Friday, there’s been a healthy debate as to whether or not Facebook should be paying him a bounty. On one hand, he broke their disclosure rules (perhaps unknowingly — as many have pointed out, Facebook’s disclosure terms are only available in English, which doesn’t seem to be Khalil’s first language); on the other, he was seemingly trying to report it responsibly rather than selling it to spammers. Even Facebook’s own engineers have entered the discussion. On Hacker News, Facebook Security Engineer laid things out : For background, as a few other commenters have pointed out, we get hundreds of reports every day. Many of our best reports come from people whose English isn’t great – though this can be challenging, it’s something we work with just fine and we have paid out over $1 million to hundreds of reporters. However, many of the reports we get are nonsense or misguided, and even those (if you enter a password then view-source, you can access the password! When you submit a password, it’s sent in the clear over HTTPS!) provide some modicum of reproduction instructions. We should have pushed back asking for more details here. However, the more important issue here is with how the bug was demonstrated using the accounts of real people without their permission. Exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat. We allow researchers to create test accounts here: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/accounts/ to help facilitate responsible research and testing. In this case, the researcher used the bug he discovered to post on the timelines of multiple users without their consent. Facebook has released an on this story, again stating that it came down to a lack of detail’s from Khalil and a lack of followup from Facebook. While Facebook again says they won’t be paying out a bounty, they’ve pledged to clarify the language used to explain their rules and to better communicate what information they need and why. What say you? Should Facebook bend the rules and shell out? Would breaking the rules set a dangerous precedent? |
Goldfinger: The Next iPhone | MG Siegler | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | “Gold? All over?” M asks James Bond upon hearing how Jill Masterson died in 1964’s . While Bond goes on to explain that the gold coating on Ms. Masterson caused her to die of “skin suffocation”, the same fate will not befall the next iPhone. But only because the iPhone will not require oxygen. Yes, there will be a gold iPhone. That’s the latest I’m hearing from multiple sources after several weeks of and possible suggesting the same thing. At first, Apple would break from the tradition of offering the simple choice: black and white (or “slate” and “silver” if you prefer for the iPhone 5) for their flagship device. Gold simply seemed too gaudy, perhaps even . But a few compelling arguments countered my disbelief. And now, upon checking, sure enough, there will be gold. On Friday, Rene Ritchie of iMore, made for the golden iPhone yet. After hearing from his own sources that the gold iPhone seemed to be real, Ritchie checked with his colleague Ally Kazmucha, who noted that gold would be one of the “easiest colors to anodize onto an iPhone”. Much easier than say, black (which is likely why the current black iPhone 5 has more of a “slate” back color). But simply doing something because it’s easy is not good enough — certainly not for Apple. Much more compelling is the argument that gold is one of the most popular after-market color adjustments for current iPhones (including gold cases). And gold has been in the midst of a renaissance after years of being banished to “gaudy and tacky” hell, as I noted above. Perhaps most importantly, I’m told that the golden iPhone will not be a totally blinged-out gold. Originally, Ritchie included on the top of his post that resembled an iPhone with a golden shell akin to a brick of gold bullion. I was told this image was inaccurate and that the actual gold iPhone would be much more subtle in color. Think: less “gold” and more “champagne”. In other words, more like the . (Incidentally, this model of the iPod mini was the shortest-lived, presumably because it was less popular.) The gold tone also apparently shifts depending on how light is hitting it. Ritchie actually said he heard the same feedback on his blinged-out golden iPhone and has since updated his mock-up to be far more subtle. Perhaps it will be more marketed along the lines of “ and ” — though I doubt it. Anyway, I love the notion that this new iPhone (widely assumed to be called the “iPhone 5S”, though it’s not clear if that’s set in stone yet) may have two distinctive new physical features: a gold color and a fingerprint scanner. Hence, the references. On the topic of the fingerprint scanner, after several months ago, there hasn’t been much recently. This may suggest that plans have been altered or, perhaps more likely, that Apple has successfully quashed the leaks of what would be the flagship new feature of the device. Rarely do code leaks lie, and a few weeks back. While I initially if such a fingerprint scanner would be used for payments as well as security and identification, I think explains why that’s likely not in the cards, at least at first. Of course, fingerprint verification paired with the iCloud Keychain credit card sync feature in iOS 7 could be the first logical step. Finally, I think one more reason why we’re seeing this golden iPhone now may be related to the rumored “iPhone 5C” device — that is, the lower-cost iPhone. While I have no concrete information about that device, there seems to be way too much smoke around it both existing and launching in several colors, for there not to be fire. (I also wonder if the by Apple to sell more iPhones from their own Apple Stores has to do with the strategy for the iPhone 5C roll-out.) On his , John Gruber and I talked a bit about how Apple might differentiate the rumored iPhone 5S from the rumored iPhone 5C. Beyond , color seems likely to be a key differentiator. It’s entirely possible that Apple decided to keep the focus on white and black (again, silver and slate) for the high-end model, while choosing more playful colors for the lower end. But some people, bored of black and white, may have opted for the 5C simply to add some color to their iLives. So the gold iPhone 5S (with a white front plate, one would assume) would seem to be a decent compromise in that scenario. Also, of course, a gold option may serve to placate some of those who feel an iPhone 5S isn’t enough of an upgrade from the iPhone 5 simply because it largely the same. Or perhaps those making such calls at Apple are simply more Johan van der Smut, aka , than Auric Goldfinger. “I love goooooold!” : A number of folks have noted that a gold iPhone would likely do well in the Chinese and Indian markets as well, where the color is very popular. This is especially interesting given the talk about the “iPhone 5C” being key in these markets as well, with a presumed unsubsidized lower price-point. One line of thinking was that the lower-cost iPhone would all-but replace the higher cost one in these markets. But perhaps the gold option would still be enticing enough for some buyers to lure them to the higher end model. That’s all pure speculation, of course. Another thought: given Apple’s recent push to (the new OS X naming scheme, the “ ” ad campaign, etc) maybe the gold iPhone could continue this trend. California is, after all, “the Golden State”. |
What Games Are: Something’s Adrift With Oculus Rift | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | It is, of course, a bit of a coup. I’m referring to the news last week that the legendary John Carmack, hero of coders everywhere, . Feet first no less, as CTO. This after a long period of tacit involvement and support for the Kickstarted device designed to finally make VR gaming happen. Rejoice ye! While talent endorsements as big as this are always welcome, Carmack’s news is not a great surprise, per se. He’s widely considered the founding father of the first person shooter and is actively involved in new developments in the genre. To that end he’s shown some interest in working with the Rift already, as have many others. For the Rift has been a sensation for some time. Ask any game development student what game they want to make and you’ll get many answers that involve the Oculus Rift. Usually they conceive of awesome shooting or absorbing adventure games, starting with “Imagine a world where you can walk around…” and going from there. It’s not hard to see why. Virtual reality has been a dream of every geek since, well, the very beginning. From Tron to and a million other sources, it’s been around. It featured on BBC science shows in the 80s, showing people wearing massive headsets that rendered a wireframe world for their eyes. “Imagine a world where you can walk around…” excited reporters would say. Especially when we’re approaching the age of wearable technology and augmented reality, Oculus Rift seems timely. We have Star-Trek style touch screens that we can swoosh and swipe, and the ones we have are in many ways better than those envisioned by Roddenberry, et al. We have overlays, exotic new interfaces and so on that seem to bridge a gap. Now all those demos from the early 90s showing people flying around in landscapes could finally be real. We could finally get to “Lawnmower Man” our way through some sort of cyber-universe for fun. In fact last year I received a demo of an early version of the Rift while at (a games industry event). It made me pretty nauseous within about 10 minutes of playing but was also very cool. Just as people got used to 3D movies, there’s no reason they couldn’t get used to this. I definitely want one. Yet there’s something about Oculus Rift that’s just not right. It’s an incredible idea in many ways, is funded and has boat loads of talented developers working on or with it. Take a step back from what Rift does and consider where it does it. What do you see? A hulking PC at a desk powering it and its games. It is essentially just a display (not to be unkind) that needs to be connected to a PC, and I don’t know if you know this but PCs are on the slide. The problem is the paradigm. Oculus Rift’s problem is essentially that it’s a peripheral for a device category which is ever-so-slowly passing into the West. The business case doesn’t make sense. , the third-party peripheral industry tends to be a niche business. Such devices tend to fragment and serve only specific markets, leading to limited support from game developers. So they tend to be devices whose purpose is entirely about servicing a very specific kind of game. Even joypads, which have been available for the PC forever, have difficulty in getting full support from game makers for this reason. So add the decline in platform to the limited support for peripherals, and I have very serious questions about the Rift’s viability. (Also, for much the same reason, with the Leap Motion). I understand that the device had sufficiently strong appeal to draw in a couple of million dollars via Kickstarter, and that it’s the sort of project that excites some games and technology journalists. Yet it seems more quixotic than transformative. Rift stands in stark contrast to two other big tech successes from Kickstarter, the OUYA and the Pebble. The other two are busy fomenting category-sized revolutions (microconsoles and smartwatches) around self-contained systems. Live or die, their fortunes are not tied to the health of another market, and that means they have the potential for explosive growth. That’s how crazes start. But the Rift? Outside of the core core core set of people who dream in VR, who honestly cares about buying a new device that hooks up to their PC? The last big innovation in PCs was netbooks, then ultra-thin laptops, and that sort of thing. And then along came tablets. The narrative timeline for the PC does not look good. The overall downward trend in new sales is inescapable. Dell’s income is dropping like a stone. HP and other big PC makers are all looking for a way out. Even Apple is selling less Macs. Yet PC does still have considerable support in gaming circles. Indie game makers tend to prefer it as the art house venue for their efforts. Steam is where the most passionate audience lives. Massive multiplayer gaming is also largely still a PC-only affair, as is Facebook gaming. Certain competitive eSports games like Starcraft do likewise, and there’s plenty of casual gaming still happening on laptops in front of TVs. But nobody’s going to buy a Rift to play Starcraft or FarmVille 2, and many of those who play Steam games do so for weird indie hits. Rift’s target market is the shooter crowd but there are far more of those people on console than PC these days. Many players don’t really like the first person experience in general. Many play games on weaker systems than would be able to pump out great content for Rift. All those pesky netbooks. Perhaps people love the idea of VR, but to sell them on the idea that they should buy one needs something more self contained. It strikes me that to work, Oculus Rift needs to sever the umbilical chord. It needs to be self-sufficient, a device that just works and delivers games on its own terms rather than attached to a dying paradigm. Gaming PCs may still sell, but they do so to an increasingly inward-looking culture. At a time when tablets and other smaller, neater devices exist, there’s little room for something that promises the future by hooking up to the past. |
Britain Detains Partner Of Journalist Who Exposed NSA Spying. Are They Crazy Or Stupid? | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | The partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who published classified information on U.S. government surveillance, in London’s Heathrow Airport. On Sunday morning, David Miranda was detained for the maximum allowable time under British Law; his property was confiscated and has yet to be returned, according to Greenwald. Miranda was visiting Laura Poitras, a documentarian who has also worked on exposing classified intelligence practices. However, there is no indication that Miranda, who was transferring in London en route to Brazil from Berlin, should have been subject to Britain’s Terrorism Act of 2000. Greenwald’s , in the Guardian, is admirably measured and worth quoting in full: “If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world”. In a separate statement to his newspaper, Greenwald said, “This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process.” Greenwald, who first interviewed rogue whistleblower Edward Snowden, has been ground zero for the international attention brought upon the National Security Agency, which is suspected of monitoring millions of Americans, by collecting data on phone and Internet browsing behavior. Details of the interrogation are still unknown, as Miranda has no way of contacting Greenwald. I can’t tell if British authorities are crazy or stupid. On top of being horribly anti-democratic, how could authorities think it was a smart idea to detain the family members of a critic with the largest soapbox on the planet. Immediately, on the usual lull of a Sunday afternoon, the story is front page news at , as both British and Brazilian lawmakers express outrage. [tweet https://twitter.com/fivethirtyeight/status/369191616369553408] [tweet https://twitter.com/pierre/status/369195635561353217] If authorities were brazen enough to detain someone so closely connected to the leaks, it means they’ve probably extended their legal powers to intimidate others with less fame. Now a bright and unwavering spotlight is on their questionable tactics. Even worse for authorities, most of the debate around NSA spying ( ) has been whether agencies have too broad of a definition for who qualifies as a suspect. As the New York Times , Miranda’s detention is under British law, which means the definition of ‘terrorist threat’ is most definitely being abused. This reflects badly on both British authorities’ general competence and their regard for the freedom of the press. Heads are going to roll. [Photo Credit of adorable couple, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian] |
Required Reading Regarding Mobile | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | TechCrunch . It’s clichéd, overplayed, and the obvious new normal: Mobile is the big, fundamental force driving consumer tech. Yes, we all know that, but even taking a few steps back for a minute, we should stand in awe of just how much of a massive platform change this is. “Tectonic” might be the right word. Readers of this site and column will already know this, but what I wanted to do this week is briefly highlight some of the best bloggers, operators, investors, and analysts writing about mobile today. As I’ve been focusing more of my work over the last year-and-a-half to cover the product side and investment side of mobile, I’ve been trying to learn by reading from experts below, specifically trying to focus on the of app and testing various techniques in order to lock in . In the list below, you will recognize some of these names, but I wanted to put them all in one place, in alphabetical order by last name, for reference. Steve is lucky because he gets to go first and has been a contributor to . When he’s not doing all that, he’s been at the helm of BD for GroupMe for a number of years, seen the acquisitions to Skype and then Microsoft, and blends an investment-banking sense of analysis with his knowledge as a mobile engineer. Steve recently wrote a terrific post looking at the future of iOS and Android, arguing that these operating systems were expanding from phones and tablets into other converged arenas, and listed a number of technical changes coming to iOS that will impact markets (such as payments, among others) for years to come. Read more . Yes, everyone reads Chris’ blog, but one of his recent posts on mobile made a number of interesting distinctions between platforms, devices (phone vs. tablet), and more. Read more . (aka Asymco). Again, most everyone knows Asymco and its groups for cranking out some of the best global mobile analysis, so I’ll simply link to them . Everyone is beginning to read Evans, who has a well-designed blog rich with new spins on data. Fred Wilson began referencing him a lot in his posts, and Evans just churns out series after series of great insights and charts. Required reading, right . When Bill writes, everyone reads it. With a long background as a VC and a previous career as an equity researcher (which involved lots of writing), Gurley’s most recent take on how deep this transition to mobile is and its implications circulated widely and includes a rich comments section. More . TechCrunch’s mobile editor (and engineer by trade), Greg has been tinkering on various mobile devices for years and recently hacked a TARDIS on Android that captured the attention of legions of Doctor Who fans worldwide. Here’s a link to Greg’s author . As the CEO and co-founder of Bump, one of the early popular iPhone applications, David has seen the ups and downs of the app roller-coaster ecosystem. Recently, he wrote a about the cognitive load many apps ask users to shoulder and what the ramifications of this type of design can be. Bubba worked at Facebook on mobile, most recently on Home, which made him an Android expert. Now a VC at Draper Fisher Jurvetson on Sand Hill, Bubba has been blogging a lot about Android, and it’s great stuff. I’d assume there will be more coming. Bubba among the investor base at large when it comes to mobile investments: www.bubba.vc When I asked around about other must-read mobile analysts, many friends wrote back about Chetan. I hadn’t read his stuff before, but clearly I was missing out on his . Better known as “Stammy,” he’s been a repeat founder and currently on the Twitter design team. He just penned an epic post on why “ ,” which nearly everyone read (and which I with and which TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez , as well). He writes at , out of Asia, blending a mix of Apple analysis with strategic outlooks on the other big tech players and the device ecosystem. I’m sure there are many others that I haven’t been exposed to yet, so if you have a favorite writer or source on mobile, please comment below. |
3D Gesture Control Is An Area Of Focus On Innovation We Likely Don’t Need Or Want | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Minority Report was an enjoyable action flick, but it may hold the blame for getting the idea stuck in our collective heads that 3D gesture control is the next frontier for computing. The Kinect from Microsoft helped further this idea around as well, with a pretty good (though highly limited regarding needed space, applications, etc.) gesture experience. But a lot of startups and other companies are chasing this carrot – and it begs the question of whether there’s even a carrot to chase. Maybe the most headline-grabbing of those going after the gesture control birdy is . The company raked in lots of pre-order interest for its device, which uses infrared tech to track finger and hand movements in 3D space and them map those to controls for apps on a computer. But then it arrived, and the reality was nothing like people had imagined, even after the device delayed its release for an extended beta to amp up the consumer user experience. Leap Motion had good reason to go back to the drawing board: there’s a huge risk with this kind of device because when you aren’t just blown away by a device like this, it ends up in a drawer and no one ever uses it again. Unfortunately for the company, that’s likely the fate of a lot of their controllers, I realized after a couple of weeks of using one. Early reviews were not very kind to the Leap Motion, but really a lot of them may have been over-generous. The controller is impressive enough during its demo when it’s showing you the finger points and hand model skeleton its detecting, but already it’s apparent that the detection is finicky. The controller is finicky in its appraisal, and requires your hands to occupy a sweet spot relative to the gadget itself to work really well. Even when you’re in that zone, the problems don’t end. How each app uses gesture input varies, and things like web browsing with it are a definite pain. In the end, the fact is that on balance you get more frustration than pleasure out of the experience, and that’s not good for long-term adoption. The experience of Leap Motion is flawed enough that it makes me wonder whether gesture control is actually something that it’s even possible to get right. Minority Report painted an idealized picture of how that might look, but it is, after all a work of fiction, and think about what the Tom Cruise character is actually doing in many of those scenes; wouldn’t it be easier to work with a traditional multimonitor setup and keyboard and mouse to accomplish the same thing? There are a lot of people looking at gesture control right now, including Waterloo’s , the new , and pmdtechnologies from Germany with their . Microsoft is also refining and improving upon its . Gesture input is a tempting area of focus, since it has clearly been a focus of lots of imaginative work for speculative and science fiction. Kinect and Wii showed us that large groups of people could enjoy that kind of device interaction, but those are in very specific contexts. Even if executed well, I’m not sure any solution is going to be anything other than a niche curiosity – we’ll probably see input take other, unexpected courses of evolution instead. They MYO and others could still prove me wrong (and I hope it does), but if you’ve got a farm to bet, I wouldn’t bet it on a gesture control revolution. |
WebDev Video Tutorials Startup Learnable.com Gives Australian High School Students Free Classes To Address Looming Crisis | Mahesh Sharma | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Hoping to address the software developer skills crisis choking Australia’s startup ecosystem, is giving away $10 million in credits to high school students to access its library of web development videos, ebooks, and access to its community of other students and subject matter experts. Spanning 10,000 students, the Melbourne startup hopes to reverse the engineering deficit and replicate the success of Aussie successes, , , and We Are Hunted (recently by Twitter). The initiative will give 10,000 students three-years free access, worth $1,000 each, to the site’s 4,162 video courses, covering a range of platforms, coding languages, and business topics; ebooks published by Sitepoint — whose originally spawned Learnable; and crowdsourced design marketplace . Learnable.com co-founder Leni Mayo, who is also an angel investor and the co-founder of 99Designs, hopes that more local computer science graduates will cut Australia’s growing dependence on imported technology talent. He said Aussie kids are missing out on the digital revolution, and the land down under risks falling off the economic map. “Australia is near the bottom of the OECD in creating students interested Science, Technology, Engineering and Math4 (STEM),” Mayo said. “In Vietnam, computer science education begins in year four [and] in the UK coding is now a key component of the new school curriculum from primary school. If Australia wants to be globally competitive, it is vital we include programming in schools as early as possible.” Australia’s computer science industry has a serious perception problem. The island-continent’s universities and technology industry have struggled to sell the benefits of a computer science degree, with most Antipodean high school students preferring to pursue more immediately prestigious professions such as law, medicine, or business. However, the education institutions only have themselves to blame as they have overlooked domestic students in order to lure lucrative foreign students, who can pay up to ten times more for their education. This shortage is not only affecting the ability of local businesses and corporates to keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology but is also stifling the growth of the local startup ecosystem, where there is a serious shortage of tech co-founders (just attend any Startup Weekend event and you’ll see). In July, the Australian government’s workforce and productivity agency the the poor supply of domestic ICT graduates had created an unhealthy reliance on the 457 skilled worker visa as the country’s primary source of tech talent. Despite this, the government, pandering to the xenophobic vote, recently tightened the immigration rules, making it harder for local businesses to import foreign tech workers. The system is at breaking point. The report said that between 2002 and 2009 the number of domestic higher education completions more than halved, to 4,497. Conversely, Australia’s total ICT workforce is projected to grow by 33,200 workers, or 7.1 per cent, between 2012 and 2017. The government agency recommended that this be addressed by improving the perceptions of ICT as a career choice, as well as promoting diversity in the workforce — currently women occupy less than 20 per cent of positions in the majority of ICT occupations, almost half the rate compared to other industries. Specifically, it said education stakeholders should pilot an online semester-long ICT module for secondary students that can be completed and assessed online. The Learnable.com initiative could be the first step to solving the problem. |
Barnes & Noble Undercuts Amazon, Kobo By Dropping NOOK Simple Touch GlowLight To $99 | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | The Nook Simple Touch GlowLight is ereaders on the market. It has a very nice form and a great screen. And now it’s also the cheapest of its kind. B&N just announced a $20 price cut, bringing the . The ad-supported Kindle Paperwhite is $119 and the Kobo Glo is $129.99. This price drop is right on schedule for B&N. The bookseller’s schedule has historically seen price drops and new model announcements before or during the back to school season. Amazon tends to wait until the Fall to announce new models and drop prices. Powered by a front-lit screen dubbed GlowLight, the Nook Simple Touch GlowLight emits a pleasant glow that’s sort of different from traditional backlighting. It’s easier on the eyes but the light cuts the battery life in half — which honestly is not that big of a deal since it still lasts 2 months. At $99 the Nook Simple Touch GlowLight is setting the new standard for ereaders. Front-lit screens offer a more versatile reading experience to their non-lit counterparts. It’s entirely possible that new Nook ereader models are on their way. B&N is winding down its Nook Tablet operations but will continue developing ereaders in-house. And the bookseller will need new models to keep the heat on Amazon. Lower prices alone will not be enough. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 20 | null |
As Court Releases Files In Case Alleging Google Tracked UK Safari Users, Search Giant Wants To Move Case To U.S. | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 8 | 18 | Some new developments this weekend in the case of for secretly tracking their online activity by working around privacy settings in Apple’s Safari web browser. The UK courts released court documents related to the case, giving for the first time more details of the allegations; and Google has apparently finally issued its own response: it wants the complaint to be dismissed in the UK and moved to its own local jurisdiction in California. For all the advances of Android and Google in Europe, the case is liable to become one more publicity problem for the search giant, who has in the past accused of flouting consumer privacy and dodging local taxes, and is also the subject of an EU antitrust investigation over its search practices. Those who have filed the suit have, unsurprisingly, balked at Google’s suggestion to try their UK case in the U.S. “What are they suggesting- that they will force Apple users whose privacy was violated to pay to travel to California to take action when they offer a service in this country on a .co.uk site?” notes Judith Vidal-Hall, one of the claimants, in a statement issued today by Olswang, the law firm representing the 12 plaintiffs who collectively call themselves the Safari Users Against Google’s Secret Tracking. Alexander Hanff, a privacy advocate, tells me that Google’s response “was not a statement of case and therefore cannot be made public.” However, Hanff has been documenting and publicising the case on a (the intention, it seems, is to turn this into a potential class action suit, covering millions of people in the UK who use iPhone smartphones, iPad tablets and Mac computers). On that site, he’s a statement on Google’s response from Olswang: “Google refused to accept service of the lawsuit in the UK, instead forcing the victims to serve on the company in California,” it reads. “The search giant has dismissed the Safari claims as not serious, saying that the browsing habits of internet users are not protected as personal information, even when they potentially concern their physical health or sexuality.” The claim that the group wants to bring against Google is based on the outcome of a similar case from the U.S., where Google admitted to the use of secret tracking cookies on computers and mobile devices running Safari, which technically has a facility to block these tracing cookies. In 2012, in that case. The UK plaintiffs, whose own claim covers between summer 2011 and spring 2012, may be looking to get financial retribution in this case — as you can see in , the amount of damages is still “unspecified” — but just as equally, they appear also to be looking for a wider change of Google’s practices. “Our letter to the Information Commissioner conveyed our client’s position that fines won’t work and urged him to change Google’s behaviour through an enforcement notice or other alternative sanctions,” Dan Tench, a partner at Olswang, noted in the statement released today. “The response [from Google] was that they found our client’s position simplistic and difficult to implement. But a leading QC disagrees and has advised that the Information Commissioner does have stronger powers.” He adds, possibly with a little more threatening tone, that a stronger stance has been taken by regulators in France — the implication being that defendants may be willing to take this to European regulators if they get no dice in the UK. “We note that France’s regulator, CNIL, has been more robust, announcing a final ultimatum to Google to ensure quickly that its privacy policy complies with European law,” writes Tench. “Our regulator should listen to consumers and recognise that other sanctions are needed to get Google to behave.” Hanff notes that although Google’s response is not public, should a hearing in the UK go ahead, “it will likely be public so journalists and interested parties would be able to attend.” The documents in the case that have been published — those from the claimants — provide more detail about the case, including more information about the violation in question: it concerns a “DoubleClick ID Cookie” that was installed on Apple devices and computers. “Google used the ‘Form Submission Rule’ exception within Safari (which allows users to click on Like buttons and similar interactions) to then trick the browser into thinking the user had visited the first party domain that the DoubleClick cookie is sent from allowing Google to set the ID Cookie and update it as a 3rd party cookie via other web sites,” Hanff notes in his of it. We have reached out to Google for more direct comment, as well as to Olswang, and will update this post as we learn more. In the meantime, we’re embedding the full set of documents below. [scribd id=160927588 key=key-2amfayc0mriikro666b mode=scroll]
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Twerk, Selfie, Bitcoin, Others Added To Oxford Dictionary As Silicon Valley, Middle Schoolers Push English Language Forward | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | The is , from bitcoin to twerk. Before you completely lose it, the Oxford Dictionaries Online is separate from the Oxford English Dictionary, though both are published by the Oxford University Press. The ODO changes much more frequently, and has added text-speak acronyms like OMG and LOL in recent years. The OED adds words much less frequently and never removes a word once it has been added. The new words are an odd mix of techie and tween-y. Here are some of the words that are being added: , n.: a digital currency in which transactions can be performed without the need for a central bank. , n.: abbreviation of ‘bring your own device’: the practice of allowing the employees of an organization to use their own computers, smartphones, or other devices for work purposes. , n.: a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world. , n.: a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data. , n.: a course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people. , n.: a smartphone having a screen which is intermediate in size between that of a typical smartphone and a tablet computer. , v.: withdraw one’s liking or approval of (a web page or posting on a social media website that one has previously liked). These ones are pretty straightforward, covering a nice, broad range of words that people make up in the tech world. , adj. (informal): silly, disorganized, or lacking concentration. , exclam. & n. (informal): (used as a substitute for) speech regarded as meaningless or stupid, or to comment on a foolish or stupid action. , exclam. & v. & n. (informal): (used to express) great delight or excitement. , v.: dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance. Here’s where it really gets fun–slang that you’d think no self-respecting adult would use, but is actually commonplace in Silicon Valley. , n: a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication. Ah, to use emojis or stickers in your social network or messaging service?? An age old business question that harkens back to the Rockefellers and Carnegies. , n.: fear of missing out: anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website. I know what you’re thinking–really, Billy? You’re putting FOMO in both sections? But don’t sit there and honestly say you haven’t heard numerous VCs say said they had FOMO about a round. , n. (informal): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website. And, of course, the , . Images via the spectacular ,” , , and . |
Cooper-Hewitt Adds The First Piece Of Code To Its Design Collection | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | Programmers know how beautiful well-written code can be, but most users will never see the source code behind their software. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, however, wants to showcase the artistic potential of computer programming. It just acquired and its source code, the first time the museum has added a piece of code to its collection. Developed by , Planetary was first released in 2011 and has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times. The app ( ) uses astronomical bodies to visualize your iTunes music library. For example, artists are represented by stars, albums by planets and individual tracks by moons. Orbits are determined by the length of tracks and albums and the brightness of stars vary according to how often you play each artists’ music. Cooper-Hewitt has made Planetary’s source code, which was originally written in C++ using the Cinder framework, available at its . By making it open source, the museum says it wants to encourage people to view the code as a “living art” that highlights the possibilities of programming as an interactive and collaborative art form.
The acquisition of Planetary is also an experiment in preserving and curating software, which, like almost all technology, starts to become outdated as soon as it is released. “The release of the source code allows us to test open sourcing as a new model for long-term software preservation. It also allows the museum to consider programming languages as ‘materials,’ and future researchers to undertake new forms of design research, software and critical code studies,” said Sebastian Chan, Cooper-Hewitt’s director of digital and emerging media, in a statement. Planetary’s code was gifted to the museum by its creators Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden and Jesper Anderson, the three principals of Bloom Studio. The startup was based in San Francisco from 2011 to 2012 and developed applications that promoted new ways of visualizing information. Planetary also drew on the talents of artist , who was Bloom Studio’s creative director. For more information, check out Cooper-Hewitt’s . |
Google Dumps Video Responses From YouTube Due To Dismal .0004% Click-Through Rate | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | Google is ditching video responses from its video sharing site on September 12, encouraging users to fall back on hashtags and descriptions to surface videos in searches. The cited reason is a minuscule .0004% click-through rate on video responses submitted by users. To illustrate, says the YouTube team, only four out of every 1 million users bothered to click on those little boxes underneath the main video. Efforts will theoretically go into providing new and different tools to increase fan engagement for creators. The notice was posted on because that’s really who this affects. Video responses were designed to create a way for big-time YouTubers to foster a conversation and increased interaction with their fans. A video response would appear attached to a video, increasing exposure for the responder and demonstrating that a conversation was happening around the posted video. Now, YouTube says that the best thing to do is to encourage fans to use the video titles, hashtags and descriptions to explicitly associate them with the video that they’re responding to. Then, creators can search for those videos to find them and move them into playlists and channel sections. Current video responses will still be “available and discoverable,” says YouTube, but since they weren’t really being watched in the first place it’s hard to care much. Google is in the final stretches of overhauling YouTube to be the channel-based juggernaut it thinks it can be — a true competitor to television. But if it’s going to do that it’s not just going to need to find a way to duplicate what TV already does well but to enhance the things that it can do without the strictures of the channel structure. In other words, yes, make people comfortable by starting with channels, but utilize the unique network effect of YouTube, which has made it the and so many other superlatives. Anyhoo, it will be interesting to see where YouTube takes the video-engagement tools from here. Hopefully people will click more when they do. |
Parallels Launches Access For iPad, A Virtualization App That Gets Windows, Mac Apps To Work Like Native iOS Apps | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 8 | 27 |
Timed to coincide with this week in San Francisco, one of its bigger rivals, , today is unveiling a new app that takes its own virtualization software to a new screen: the iPad. More than a year in the making, Parallels Access for iPad is not the first tablet-friendly product released by the company — an existing-but-now-discontinued product, , works on both the iPad and iPhone. However, it is the first one dedicated specifically to making software and documents from Windows and Mac machines work in a “native” way on the iPad. It does so by transforming everything into an “app” experience, complete with iOS gestures to control them. The move taps into the bigger trend we have been seeing among enterprises adopting tablets, as more portable laptop replacements, and also the consumerization of IT, where workers use their own tablets to supplement their work PCs to get things done when on the move. “We are now in an always-on age where people are increasingly demanding access to their applications and data regardless of physical location,” said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels, in a statement. “With Parallels Access, you can tap, swipe and pinch your way around Mac and Windows applications to ultimately be more productive at work, and lead a more connected life.” The new app, which is priced at $79.99 for a one-year subscription covering one device (each subsequent device that gets virtualized costs another $79.99), comes with a number of features: This effectively makes the files and applications on the virtual machine appear like a set of apps on the iPad home screen. These then can be tapped like apps to launch. This is a nice feature that effectively creates a dock that hides when you’re not using it, where apps that you have open can sit for easy swapping. As with other Parallels virtualization software, you can use the selection tools that are part of the desktop apps that you are using, but Parallels has also developed features that effectively apply the gestures that you’re used to on the iPad to the virtualized files. For example, you can select words with a finger and then drag them, and use the same actions to copy and paste as you would in an iOS app. Similarly, you can double tap to zoom, and scroll around documents as you would on an iPad-native page. All pages can be expanded into full-screen mode, too. The keyboard effectively is an iOS keyboard, but Parallels has also incorporated shortcuts that port over the entire keyboard of the virtualized device as well, with shortcuts to F keys and the rest. For those who find the idea of using iPad gestures and tools too jarring when editing a PowerPoint or Excel document, they can revert to using the same actions they would use on the virtualized machine — much as they would have with Parallels Mobile. One of the engineers that headed up the development of Access tells me that the app was over a year in the making, as Parallels worked out the precise way of rendering whatever was on a virtual machine as a “native” iPad experience. With more enterprises adopting tablets instead of laptops for roaming workers, and consumers making the leap to buying tablets as second computers, Parallels Access makes these tablets supremely more useful, and highlights just how versatile they can be. Of course, they also highlight how Apple had yet to bridge this virtualization gap. A Parallels spokesperson tells me that the app is launching with full Mac support, and with the Windows virtualization support in beta. The company is also planning to support other platforms (Android? Windows 8?) at some point in the future. |
StackOverflow Co-Founder Jeff Atwood Builds A $150 Mechanical Keyboard | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | If anyone knows far too much about their keyboard, it’s a programmer. Professional programmers type a lot. A lot. So much that a flame war over which text editor/input method is best for coding (Vi! No, Emacs!) has roared on for It makes some sense, then, that a well-known coder has taken to building his own keyboard. Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the super popular coding Q&A site Stack Overflow and author of the blog , has just debuted a project he’s been working on for the past year and a half: a keyboard called CODE (lovingly dubbed after one of his favorite books on programming… and, you know, the word “code”.) To get the job done, Atwood teamed up with Weyman Kong of — a guy who builds custom keyboards for a living. Here’s Atwood’s on why he decided to build a keyboard: I was indoctrinated into the keyboard cult when I bought my first computer. But I didn’t appreciate it. Few do. The world is awash in terrible, crappy, no name how-cheap-can-we-make-it keyboards. There are a few dozen better mechanical keyboard options out there. I’ve owned and used at least six different expensive mechanical keyboards, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, either: they didn’t have backlighting, were ugly, had terrible design, or were missing basic functions like media keys.
Taken for face value, it’s just another keyboard. Hell, it probably looks a bit antiquated, like something you’d see in any dusty old computer lab around the world. Love it or hate it, that actually seems to be the point; it’s a throwback to the keyboards of yesteryear, tweaked with a few lil’ touches that only someone who types all-damn-day can appreciate: In fewer words, it’s the dream keyboard of a guy who has probably typed more than you and me combined. While that $150 price tag seems a bit steep (especially if you’re just using whatever keyboard came with your desktop, or the one built into your laptop), it’s right around the going rate for a mechanical/backlit keyboard from one of the big guys. Logitech’s G710? $150. Razer’s BlackWidow? $139. Not bad for something that’s made in smaller batches, though it’s probably well outside what most people would pay for a keyboard. You can find Atwood’s post here. |
Courting All Bookworms, Kobo Debuts 3 New Reading-Friendly Arc Tablets, A New Aura E-Reader, And A Plan To Gain An Edge Over Amazon | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | , the e-reader and tablet company owned by Rakuten (aka Japan’s answer to Amazon), is today taking the covers off four new devices — three new Android-based Arc tablets and a new Aura e-reader. And it is using the occasion to kick off a redoubled effort to focus on a specific segment in the market — die-hard bookworms — to help itself gain an edge over Amazon and differentiate itself better in the market. Now, in addition to its catalogue of 4 million books, Kobo has built in integrations with Pocket, new reading-focused storefronts (starting with a store for children’s books and one for magazines), and two new Android feautures, a launcher Kobo calls “Reading Life” and a new Reading Mode, both designed to put reading front and center on tablets more than it has ever been done on tablets before. “As Netflix is to video and Starbucks is to coffee, we want Kobo to be the name people think of for reading,” CEO Michael Serbinis said in an interview. . Despite analyst speculation that e-readers are dying, they continue to be an important route to tapping dedicated customers, Serbinis tells me. “In the U.S. specifically there has been a slowdown in e-reader sales but for those who buy them we see very high purchase intent.” And Serbinis notes that even if it sounds limiting to focus only on a small and shrinking segment of the market that are avid readers, so far this has actually paid off well in its e-reader lineup. When the company launched its limited edition, power-reader-friendly , sales expectations were not very high. “We thought that they would be one to four percent of sales,” he said. “The quickly became a quarter.” If the existing Aura HD was an attempt to recreate some of the aesthetics of a hardback book experience, the new 6″ Aura launching today, Serbinis says, takes its cues from the world of tablets, with an edge-to-edge display, and at a thickness of 8mm and weight of 174g, a thinner and lighter body. Like the HD it is front-lit but without as high-resolution a screen. . Sebinis says that the three new tablets — 7″, 7″HD and 10″HD models, going on sale in October — are all multipurpose Android devices, running Jelly Bean and full of all the specs you would expect in devices like this. But like the Aura e-readers, they are built with a very specific intention in mind: targeting those who buy these devices to consume books, magazines and other reading materials. “We think there is a space for us. No tablet has really been designed for readers,” he notes. Kobo came to this conclusion, he says, by canvassing users. “We have a lot of data from users around the world and those who download apps on our tablets read for minutes, not hours. They read once a week versus daily.” So Kobo asked its top 10,000 customers, why don’t the read on tablets? The answer, he says, was that it was too distracting. Too many alerts and other things happening on the screen, and “also they are generally too hard on the eyes, and weight is a problem. Basically, it’s pretty obvious tablets up to now have been multipurpose first and reading second.” So Kobo decided to concentrate on these points. The screens on the HD devices, he says, are “better than Apple’s Retina display,” at up to 2560×1600 on the 10HD model. And on top of this, Kobo has developed a launcher that it calls “Reading Life.” This is essentially a user interface that sits on top of Android, that tracks what you’ve been reading, and offers recommendations for new titles to read, presented in a “Pinterest-style” scroll, he says. (It’s not an integration with Pinterest, although he doesn’t rule that out for the future. More on that below.) It’s in Reading Life that Kobo is also integrating Pocket, the app that lets users tag something online and save it to a list to read later. Swiping to the right takes you back to a “standard Android experience.” On top of Reading Life, there is another reader-friendly service that Kobo is incorporating, which it is calling Reading Mode — essentially this is like an automatic airplane mode that you can turn on to cut off alerts from other applications, and at the same time it uses sensors on the device to optimise lighting on the screen. The third thing it does is automatically turn off all other processing functions on the device that is not needed for reading mode, also to help extend battery life. Serbinis says that Kobo has patents filed for this, and “We will be building this out as a feature on our devices” in the future. . In addition to the new devices and the new reading applications, Kobo is kicking off its new strategy to present storefronts for specific reading categories. The first two coming out are for children’s literature, with 100,000 titles at launch, and magazines. The magazine storefront, starting with “hundreds” of magazines from Hearst, Conde Nast and other top publishers, signals some other interesting developments for Kobo. It has been developed with technology from , a French startup it acquired last year that offers a technology for “guided” reading on magazines — essentially more tablet friendly than straight PDF renders but at the same time preserving the layout of the original magazines and therefore less like apps, Serbinis says. I also asked Serbinis about a number of other topics, which give a bit more insight into how Rakuten, and Kobo, see their business developing in the future: . Absolutely no plans to follow Amazon and Barnes & Noble down this road, he says. “What we’ve found is that the customers looking for a device and everything that it can do. They don’t want to be shorthanded on all the things that their $199 or $299 will buy them. Theyt want access to gmail, YouTube and importantly Google Play apps. With the very first Kobo Arc we were pretty set on offering that and have not deviated. We see ourselves as a Google partner. Yes, we’ve provided Reading Life to make it great for reading but it’s open Android and upgradeable. We never went down that road on purpose.” . This, of course, is one of Rakuten’s key, strategic investments, and Serbinis says that there are discussions with Pinterest already, but nothing concrete yet. “What makes Rakuten successful is that they’ve built an amazing ecosystem in Japan and they’re building that around the world. It’s a direction that we will support as Rakuten continues to expand, including preloaded shopping apps. It’s part of our future. When we think of some of these experiences, I’ve always thought that reading is an entry point, it’s how someone tells us, I’m interested in something. You can see the bridge from from content to commerce in that. One place you may see it first is in magazines. When you see an ad for a tennis racket in a paper magazine, you are at a dead end, but now all these tools are tappable. It’s a tap through to make a purchase or set up a demo or whatever. That kind of deeper integration is definitely in our sights.” He notes that there are a couple of reasons why this is not there yet. “Part of this is technology and part of this is the industry catching up with tech and retooling. I suspect it’s within the next six months because the tools are now available with this launch the initial hurdle of getting that content. Now we’re through that it’s time to educate and help publishers leverage these tools to do the more fun and imaginative things.” These tablets and the new e-reader remain Wifi only, he says. “We’ve talked to carriers pretty extensively and the price points are important. Offering 3g devices take you well beyond that price point and adding extra cost is not something that makes sense for us. But it’s not out of the question.” He says cellular connectivity will be important to crack certain markets. “In India you just don’t see the same kind of Wifi penetration that you do in the UK, U.S., and other countries. So 3G becomes more of an important feature to support so it’s something that we’re strongly looking at.” Distribution. How best to battle Amazon on the retail front? Serbinis describes this task as “David battling Goliath,” and he says that the solution is “you have to leverage a bunch of friends.” “While we don’t have the massive direct channel, we have partners that have the best book-buying and book-loving customers. For our competitor they are running out of direct channels as they expand internationally that means it’s more expensive for them.” All the same, Kobo will be going “beyond booksellers” in the future. “We are looking to different kinds of partners, educational institutions, government and telcos. There are ways we can partner with them and being a neutral content provider is a pretty attractive thing.” In the UK, the Kobo Aura is selling for £119.99, the Kobo Arc 10HD for £299.99, the Kobo Arc 7HD £159.99 with 16GB and £189.99 with 32GB and the Kobo Arc 7 for£119.99. Prices in the U.S. start at $150 for the 7″, non-HD tablet. |
Developers Are Pissed That Microsoft Won’t Give Them Windows 8.1 Until Everyone Else Gets It | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | Windows developers are not happy that Microsoft will not provide them with a copy of the newly “completed” Windows 8.1 RTM build. Instead, Microsoft has decided to make the developers who are part of TechNet and the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) wait like the rest of us until . The decision isn’t sitting well. Developers are accustomed to getting their hands on the RTM build when it’s done, so that they can update their apps to work with the final code. It is worth noting that Windows 8.1 has a of new APIs and capabilities that developers need to learn and employ. Developers will not have a chance to hone their applications against the RTM build’s set of new tools until general availability. The reason? Windows 8.1 is actually not done. Wait, you might be saying. How can it not be done if it has been released to manufacturers, which is when an operating system is, in fact, “done”? Paul Thurrott has a : “[T]he firm also confirmed my report that it would continue updating Windows 8.1 between RTM and general availability (GA), and for this reason it is not providing early access to the ‘complete’ RTM bits.” Right. So Microsoft, in a bid to appear on time, decided that Windows 8.1 is “done.” But it isn’t, so developers can’t have it. A Microsoft spokesperson provided a short statement, that proposes developers lean on the Windows 8.1 preview for application testing: We are moving to a world of more continuous updates delivered in-product. This rapid release schedule means our customers, including our large community of developers, are getting access to updates at a much faster pace. We are working to streamline that experience by delivering product updates through the Windows Store. For developers who want to begin building and testing apps for Windows 8.1, they already have all the tools they need using Visual Studio 2013 Preview and Windows 8.1 Preview. In other words, test against the preview, and you’ll be fine. Developers, however, are not enthused with the proposed middle ground. Comments range from open disbelief to outrage. Some pointed to the money they are paying for access to the MSDN, funds that were in some cases likely spent for the very operating system access that is currently being denied. From a : “This move is going to do serious damage to an already fragile Microsoft-Developer relationship.” Computer World was , and has a decent compendium of complaints, if you want more flavor. Microsoft wants as much developer support for its Windows 8 platform as possible. The operating system contains an application store that is at the heart of Microsoft’s plan to build meaningful tablet market share. No apps, no sold tablets. And, of course, fewer happy developers means fewer new apps. Developer happiness therefore matters in a competitive platform landscape. This is why companies on the scale of Microsoft and Google have teams designed to woo developers to their platforms. Windows 8.1 is a key piece of software for Microsoft that will dictate how it performs in the tablet market in 2014, and will also help set the rate of decline for the larger PC market. The better Windows 8.1 is, the slower the decline of desktops and laptops. Microsoft released a on how to prepare an application for Windows 8.1. Developers openly dissented: In an [sic] world inhabited by pink unicorns and pixie dust, the advice in this post would be sufficient. However we live in the real world last time I looked out the window. In the real world, developers must have access to the RTM bits before GA. Not the best day to be on Microsoft’s developer outreach team. |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Snags 72k Shares Of Vested Stock, Eddy Cue Sells $12.4M | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | Apple executives were granted more than 120k shares of vested stock in transactions that took place last week but were disclosed today. CEO Tim Cook converted 72,877 units of restricted stock that were originally granted on a schedule. SVP Eddy Cue units out of a grant of 100k that was . The remainder of those shares will vest at this time next year. Cue sold 24,500 shares at an average price of $504.18 to net around $12.39 million. Cue withheld 25,420 shares at a price of $501.02 per share for taxes. Cook shares at a current market rate of around $19 million to satisfy taxes and didn’t sell any of his 72,877 vested shares. Cook has another 840k shares scheduled to vest in 2016 and 2021in 100k increments and annual installments of 80k units as of August 2014. This new scheme is a modified bonus that was tweaked to be more in June of this year. Apple’s return performance will be compared to the S&P 400, and if Apple is in the top third of the group, Cook will get his full annual award of 80k shares. The lower it goes, the more it will be reduced. |
For The Conscious Consumer, An Online Retailer Called Zady | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | A new ecommerce site called is bringing the conscious consumerism movement to the online retail space by showing shoppers exactly where the goods the carry come from. To that end, the site aims to blend commerce with storytelling in the form of brand profiles and lifestyle articles. Zady — a word that with a slight spelling tweak means “grandfather” in Yiddish and “prosperous” in Arabic — carries a range of artisanal women’s and men’s clothing, along with home and office supplies. The focus is on beautifully made products from smaller-scale makers, like Nashville’s denim brand . The company is a joint project between co-founder Soraya Darabi and Maxine Bédat, the founder of , who have been friends since high school. Zady raised a $1.35 seed round in March prior to the site’s launch. While Americans have shown a growing interest in knowing the origins of their food and in buying locally, the mechanisms of clothing production are still relatively opaque. A handful of companies including and have exposed their own supply chains through interactive maps, but they are in the vast minority. And clothing is much more complicated than fruit: the cotton for a t-shirt might be grown in one locale, shipped to another for dyeing, and yet another for production. Like other retailers seeking a greater level of transparency, Zady’s site maps each product geographically, dropping a pin on the brand’s headquarters and then extending lines to the source material and manufacturing locations. Although inventory is international, Zady does promote American-made products in particular. “Production has moved so far overseas,” Darabi said. “In our parents generation, JFK allowed 5% of design apparel to be designed overseas, and now it’s 95% plus. For shoes it’s 99%.” Zady will clearly appeal to those Whole Foods-type shoppers looking to use their consumer dollars to have a say in the manufacturing process (either practically or symbolically). The products on the site are good threads, though, and with a price point similar to that of J.Crew, Zady could very well capture a broader audience that’s simply looking for quality, classic designs. The site’s content-commerce model is not unheard-of in the online retail world. also tells the stories of the little-known brands it carries and fleshes out the lifestyle side of its label with auxiliary stories that aren’t meant to push product. Zady launched with features on work-life integration and the history of denim, stories that both speak to the brand’s philosophy and give visitors a reason to stay on the site a bit longer. “Content is key and a very important part of what we’re building,” Bédat said. “There are stories for every single product that we’re creating. There’s additional content that Soraya is focused on that really speaks to our reader and to the general conscious consumption lifestyle.” With reputable, paid journalists coming on board to write, Zady is working on producing high-quality content, which will undoubtedly help solidify the brand and its mission in shoppers’ minds. It seems unlikely that these sites will become media destinations in their own right, no matter how much original content they generate, but they are a nice add-on for shoppers who are already there. It’s the online equivalent of the coffee table books in Warby Parker’s office showroom. It helps the shopper complete the picture of their aspirational Zady life. “[Our] brand couldn’t be Zady without these stories,” Darabi said. “Unless you actually dig into who they are, you miss the emotional connection.” |
Syrian Electronic Army Apparently Hacks DNS Records Of Twitter, NYT Through Registrar Melbourne IT | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | The Syrian Electronic Army has claimed responsibility for hacking the domain name servers of two of Twitter’s sites, and a third appears to have been redirected to servers hosted by the SEA. In addition, attacks have been made on The New York Times and Huffington Post UK name servers. [ The New York Times says it was , Melbourne IT. Once the Syrian Electronic Army had gained access to registry records, it was able to change both contact details and domain name servers. Now, the SEA is to a variety of international Twitter domains: After the claimed responsibility for of the New York Times, additional issues began being popping up in relation to the hosting of Twitter images. Those issues were followed by a attributed to the hacking group, claiming that it had control over the Twitter.com domain. At this time, it appears that the name servers of Twitter have not been changed, only . The SEA then followed up by for Huffington Post UK and New York Times domain name server changes. Another tweet from the account points to an outage of Twitter.co.uk, whose DNS records have also apparently been altered to refer to the SEA’s servers. The Twimg,com domain, which serves up Twitter images and avatars, also that point to servers that are apparently SEA-owned. A Twitter representative told TechCrunch that the company was ‘looking into’ the possibility that the SEA had changed DNS records. “The site is down for some, not all and we are working to fix the problem,” said NYT spokesperson Eileen Murphy. “Our initial assessment is that this situation today is most likely the result of a malicious external attack.” Interestingly, both The New York Times and Twitter name servers appear to have been registered through the registrar . This led some to posit that a breach at the registrar allowed changes to be made, possibly with an administrative account. This would explain why the changes are being made across several companies. The New York Times has now confirmed that this is true. According to a report from The Next Web, Melbourne IT Twitter’s . The firm inherited VeriSign’s high-end DNS business when it acquired it in 2008 (thanks ). And Melbourne IT’s domain business itself was actually earlier this year. Chief Information Officer Marc Frons of The New York Times to employees that attributed the attack to “the Syrian Electronic Army or someone trying very hard to be them.” New York Times employees were then instructed to be careful when sending sensitive emails until the situation had been resolved. This is the second time that the Times has been down in a month, with the previous outage coming on August 14th. The Times has been working hard to circumvent the loss of control of its DNS servers by tweeting links directly to its IP address and posting news at . The Wall Street Journal has taken advantage of the situation by its paywall and perhaps even against tweets about the New York Times hacking incident. The SEA has made news over the past several months with high-profile media hacks including one of which caused a in stock market trading briefly in April. The SEA sent a tweet out about a fake attack at the White House. : Twitter has on the DNS record issues with Twimg.com.: At 20:49 UTC, our DNS registrar experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter’s domains used for image serving, . Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted. By 22:29 UTC, the original domain record for was restored. No Twitter user information was affected by this incident. It has yet to respond to the changes to contact information on the Twitter.com record. : Melbourne IT is now providing a statement, which we’ve pasted in below (h/t ) The credentials of a Melbourne IT reseller (username and password) were used to access a reseller account on Melbourne IT’s systems. The DNS records of several domain names on that reseller account were changed – including . Once Melbourne IT was notified, we: – changed the affected DNS records back to their previous values – locked the affected records from any further changes at the .com domain name registry – changed the reseller credentials so no further changes can be made We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law enforcement bodies. We will also review additional layers of security that we can add to our reseller accounts. For mission critical names we recommend that domain name owners take advantage of additional registry lock features available from domain name registries including .com – some of the domain names targeted on the reseller account had these lock features active and were thus not affected. |
TC Cribs: Pinterest, Where Making Beautiful Stuff Is A Way Of Life | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | From the outside, is known for being one of the Internet’s go-to places for beautiful things. But on the inside, the company is also killing it — and tech folks have sometimes been known to neglect decorating to focus on making great products for their customers. So we weren’t sure what to expect when we headed over for a tour of the company’s headquarters, which is fittingly situated smack in the middle of San Francisco’s “Design District.” But as it turns out, the crafty ethos that millions of people know and love Pinterest for is alive and well amongst its own employees. In fact, the office’s beautiful interior design can be largely credited to projects created by Pinterest staffers during the company’s , day-long -esque sessions that encourage everyone to halt work on their normal projects and do something out of their comfort zone. We happened to film this Cribs as the latest Pinterest Make-a-thon was just getting underway, so there was a lot going on — and I was even able to lend a helping hand to one of the crafts (perhaps unfortunately for them, but hey.) Check it all out in the video embedded above. |
Playing Ballmer Bingo, Could Microsoft’s Next CEO Come From Google? | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | There are whispers bouncing around Silicon Valley that a Google executive might be selected as Microsoft’s next CEO. The concept isn’t out of the question, especially following Marissa Mayer’s move to Yahoo. That transition has gone, by most accounts, well. To become the next CEO of Microsoft, a number of traits are required: Experience leading teams at scale; experience working with and inside large technology companies; technical competence; and an X factor that we’ll simply dub “swagger” to annoy the pedants. Thus, if we are to listen to the clucking about a Google exec hopping over to Redmond, we can vet their with the above credentials and speculate about their chances, if any, of taking over the top spot at Microsoft. The list is short, because Microsoft is a company that did not have $20 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, but $20 billion in net profit. It’s an enormous and complex operation, and not one to be trusted with someone who could be viewed as an experiment. My colleague Frederic Lardinois, who covers Google, and myself — I cover Microsoft — have combed through the possibilities for your enjoyment. The Googler’s name most often rumored with regard to Microsoft is . He has led Google’s social networking efforts around Google+ for the last few years. But he’s a controversial figure inside of Google and how successful his work has really been remains up for discussion. The fact that Gundotra is a former Microsoftie obviously increases his chances. During his long tenure there, he eventually became the company’s general manager for platform evangelism, which has always been a high-profile role during the years of his tenure at the company (though nobody seems to be putting Microsoft’s current chief evangelist Steven Guggenheimer on the short list to become the next CEO). Gundotra does not, however, have any CEO experience and while he has led a large team at Google and runs a service that touches many of the company’s products, I’m having a hard time seeing him at the helm of Microsoft. Be nice to Guggs. He’s good people. But you have a point that his role at Microsoft, while important, does not seem to be on the ramp to the top chair. Vic runs Google+. That’s an important role inside of Google, but it doesn’t seem to be something on the same plane of scale as Microsoft. I don’t see this happening. Another Googler being bandied about is Andy Rubin. After Larry Page’s last mini-reorg, which put Sundar Pichai in charge of both ChromeOS and Android, things have gotten pretty quiet around the previously ubiquitous Rubin and it’s not even clear what he’s doing today. This definitely feels a bit like the story and her last few months at Google before she became Yahoo’s new CEO. Rubin’s background in both software and devices could make him a decent fit from the product side. He was one of the co-founders and CEO of both Danger and Android, after all (though he left Danger in 2003, five years before it was acquired by Microsoft). Like Gundotra, however, he doesn’t have the experience of running a massive company like Microsoft, which — assuming the board isn’t feeling very adventurous — would quickly disqualify him from the job. But his “devices and services” background could make him a better fit than Gundotra. Rubin is an interesting option, mostly because he has CEO experience, the status required to pick up a job like boss of Microsoft, and could be bored. A lethal combination, naturally. That said, disappearing inside of Google X might not mean anything other than Rubin’s work on a project that Google isn’t ready to speak about. Still, losing Android wasn’t a simply lateral move for Rubin. Looking at the rest of the Google team, a couple of other names stand out, including Sundar Pichai, who feels a bit like the CEO in training and therefore unlikely to leave, or Urs Hölzle, who runs Google’s massive technical infrastructure but doesn’t feel like a good bet for a CEO position right now. None of them, however, look like ideal candidates to fill Ballmer’s gigantic, if contentious, shoes. What’s interesting in this is that Google’s bench isn’t as deep as you might expect. Frederic says this could be due to the simple fact that its founders are still on board, and its executive chairman was once the CEO. Yes. This does limit the pool. Other names perhaps make more sense. Externally, Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogles, former VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, current Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano are options. However, it is hard to find a clear fit. The person that Microsoft needs would be intimately aware of how broad the larger tech companies have become — Apple, Google, and Microsoft compete on productivity software, mobile phones, music sales, video content deals and dozens of other things — and be able to manage that somewhat controlled chaos. Someone, say, who has run or is running a company like that. Only those people already have jobs that they like. So this leaves us with internal candidates mainly. Think Terry Myerson, Satya Nadella, and the like. The problem with those names is that they were recently ensconced in new roles. Moving them would require more internal changes at Microsoft in a time when it needs stability. Of course, the CEO change is turbulence itself. Ballmer Bingo is fun, and worth playing because it reacquaints us with the heavyweights in tech that are either sitting on the sideline, or underutilized. Let the leaks begin. |
Yahoo’s Redesign Isn’t Over Yet, More Sites & Ad Formats To Come | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | Yahoo rolled out a major redesign to several of its web properties today – a move that’s part of a project apparently code-named “Grand Slam.” At least that’s how it was recently described in a of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, which said Grand Slam is “an effort to bring a more coherent look and identity to Yahoo’s pages.” The updated, revamped sites today include , , , , and , but the company says that these redesigns will continue across all of Yahoo’s properties, with the goal of making the Yahoo experience one that’s “more personal and consistent.” The makeover isn’t just one of look-and-feel, however, but is one that will also include changes to Yahoo’s advertising, with support for Stream and Billboard ads, and more yet to come. The Yahoo Weather makeover is one of today’s standout upgrades. It’s familiar to those who have downloaded the Yahoo Weather mobile application on iOS or Android, as it features Flickr images in the background, overlaid by the same modern-looking, minimalistic weather dashboard that appears in the mobile apps. Meanwhile, Yahoo Sports’ revamp also includes a refreshed Yahoo! Fantasy game, which Yahoo claims makes it easier to use. The other sites have seen similar changes, with the goals of making both navigation and accessing content simpler. Yahoo has been making a series of changes to its online web properties in recent months. In February, it kicked things off with a new, more personalized Yahoo.com home page, which as well as direct feedback about the kind of news they want to see. Later, the company , again with the overall cleaner look and also with semantic-based technology under the hood, which understands the “who’s” and “what’s” of the topics the stories cover, allowing visitors to dig even further into the subjects they care about, or eliminate others. But this redesign is more than just a visual makeover. As noted on , the company is also bringing its native advertising format to all the new properties as well. These native ads now appear across the updated sites. these Stream ad units as mirroring unpaid in-stream content by displaying a thumbnail image, hyperlinked headline and text. The advertisers can link to any URL they want, including websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and more. The ads will be labeled as sponsored content to the end user, and will include different coloring for the AdChoices icon. The Stream Ads are also being made available for Yahoo! Mail on desktop and on the Mail app for Android, where they will appear at the top of user inboxes, also identified as Sponsored Content. Stream ads are designed to work across desktop, mobile and tablet, the company tells us, including on Yahoo’s flagship mobile application. The Billboard ad format, which can include interactions like watching movie trailers or buying tickets in the ad, will also be available across Yahoo’s newly updated sites. Today, Yahoo Sports features an example of the Billboard ad, with a large banner from Samsung, which includes a video of a Samsung commercial, for example. That’s why Yahoo’s alluding to other, new ad formats is interesting. The company did not disclose details, only saying that “for every improvement we’re making to our user experience, we’re also thinking about how we can innovate the ad experience as well.” Today, Yahoo’s ad revenues are still challenged, however. The company display revenue was $472 million in Q2, a 12 percent decrease from from Q2 2012. The company has been infusing itself with new talent, through an unprecedented acquisition spree. During the second quarter, it used a net $1 billion in cash for acquisitions, including a net $970 million to acquire Tumblr. |
NYT Resorts To Bypassing DNS Servers Amid Potential Hacking, WSJ Drops Its Paywall To Capitalize | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | According to statements from a spokesperson, the New York Times may have been hacked, resulting in the loss of access for many customers. Specifically, it appears that the attack has resulted in the redirection of its domain name servers, which has caused the Times to resort to some interesting methods to deliver the news. The hacking has been called the Syrian Electronic Army, as some DNS lookup results point to servers in control of the sites. Amid the outage, the Wall Street Journal has , allowing readers full access to its articles without a subscription. This is the second NYT outage this month, and the second time that the WSJ has moved to capitalize on the outage by removing its paywall. The top on the WSJ homepage at the time of publish was the NYT outage. While its name servers, which translate the plain language ‘Nytimes.com’ domain into a target IP address, are down, the Times has resorted to tweeting out the addresses to stories with the direct IP of its servers in place of its domain name. This allows access to the sites articles via shared links, and users can browse the Times via the http://170.149.168.130/ address on mobile and desktop devices. If you still have access to the Times, it may be because changes to servers propagate across the ‘net slowly. Some users may continue to see the homepage for some time. “The site is down for some, not all and we are working to fix the problem,” said NYT spokesperson Eileen Murphy. “Our initial assessment is that this situation today is most likely the result of a malicious external attack.” |
Assessing Zuckerberg’s Idea That Facebook Could Help Citizens Re-Make Their Government | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | Mark Zuckerberg has a grand vision that Facebook will help citizens in developing countries . It’s a lofty and partially attainable goal. While Egypt probably won’t let citizens vote for their next president with a Like, it is theoretically possible to use Facebook to crowdsource expertise. Governments around the world are experimenting with radical online direct democracy, but it doesn’t always work out. Very briefly, Zuckerberg for e-government to Wired’s Steven Levy, while defending Internet.org, a new consortium to bring broadband to the developing world. “People often talk about how big a change social media had been for our culture here in the U.S. But imagine how much bigger a change it will be when a developing country comes online for the first time ever. We use things like Facebook to share news and keep in touch with our friends, but in those countries, they’ll use this for deciding what kind of government they want to have. Getting access to health care information for the first time ever.” When he references “deciding … government,” Zuckerberg could be talking about voting, sharing ideas, or crafting a constitution. We decided to assess the possibilities of them all. For citizens in the exciting/terrifying position to construct a brand-new government, American-style democracy is one of many options. Britain, for instance, has a and has no constitution. In other cases, a government may want to heed political scientists’ advice and develop a “ ,” where more than two political parties are incentivized to work collaboratively with citizens, business, and different branches of government to craft laws. At least once, choosing a new style of democracy has been attempted through the Internet. After the global financial meltdown wrecked Iceland’s economy, the happy citizens of the grass-covered country decided to redo their government and solicit suggestions from the public (950 Icelanders chosen by lottery and general calls for ideas through social networks). After much press about Iceland’s “crowdsourced” constitution, it after most of the elected leaders rejected it. Crafting law, especially a constitution, is legally complex; unless there is a haphazard citizen suggestions into legalese, the results are disastrous. “Collaborative drafting, at large scale, at low costs, and that is inclusive, is something that we still don’t know how to do,” says Tiago Peixoto, a World Bank Consultant on participatory democracy (and one of our ). Peixoto, who helps the Brazilian government conduct some of the world’s only online policymaking, says he’s optimistic that Facebook could be helpful, but he wouldn’t use it to draft laws just yet. While technically it is possible for social networks to craft a new government, we just don’t know how to do it very well, and, therefore, leaders are likely to reject the idea. In other words, don’t expect Egypt to decide their future through Facebook likes. Facebook does have an impressive impact on voter turnout. One large-scale randomized experiment found that , boosting turnout a sizable 2.2 percent during a national election. Certainly once countries get more connected, Facebook will augment good ol’ fashion elections. Moreover, as Facebook saturates an electorate, . Last election, CNN analyzed the semantic data of status updates to figure out how the general population felt about certain ideas and candidates. Status updates are a much better source of info for issues that are difficult for survey respondents to recall, and can be analyzed in much higher volume than phone-based polls. However, Peixoto cautions that Facebook could be an unrepresentative boondoggle. First, Facebook is all text-based, so the large numbers of illiterate people in developing nations would be entirely excluded. Second, Facebook tends to show people what they like. Facebook users are incredibly biased towards gay rights and . But, in developing countries with a history of misogyny and racism, giving undue power to the most vocal critics could be a disaster. And it’s not even certain that marginalized individuals would be willing to speak in places where it’s dangerous for gays and women to be outspoken. TechCrunch’s policy channel, CrunchGov, has a vested interest in e-government. We’re actively building tools to make it a reality. Last winter, we launched a crowdsourcing legislative platform, Project Madison, a tool to make federal policymaking more transparent, inclusive and intelligent. Theoretically, Facebook could be a huge help in driving more representative expertise. Peixoto says that on social networks “you can brainstorm and you can aggregate preferences.” So, with some research and a lot of , Facebook could be one powerful tool in the tool belt of democracy. Concludes Peixoto, “Facebook is in a privileged position to improve the way democracy online works.” |
Comcast Ventures’ Adit Singh Heads To Foundation Capital To Focus On Enterprise Investments | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | After raising for its seventh fund, Foundation Capital is adding a new partner to its ranks — Adit Singh, a former investor and senior associate with Comcast Ventures, will be an investment partner at the firm. We’re told that in his new role, Singh will focus on identifying and investing in startups specializing in enterprise IT infrastructure, systems, software and services. Enterprise and IT make up about 60 percent of Foundation’s investments, says Singh. In particular, he’s focused on digging deep on the next evolution of data center, including startups disrupting virtualized storage networks and the software defined data center. During his time at Comcast Ventures, Singh specialized in companies in the cloud computing, data center, networking, management, security and virtualization sectors. He sourced and helped manage investments in Nebula, Tely Labs and Maginatics. He was also an observer in Compass EOS, ConteXtream, Benu Networks and Immedia Semiconductor. Singh also co-founded Bitsplay Systems, a networking appliance company that was optimized to stream video from data centers. Additionally, he was a former EIR at Foundation, a product manager at Enphase Energy and a chip designer at Cisco Systems. Foundation has been staffing up new talent for its investment team, most recently adding former Twitter product lead Anamitra Banerji as a partner. Part of this is likely because of the fact that two of the firm’s partners, Paul Koontz and Rich Redelfs, have chosen not to continue to make new investments on behalf of Foundation in its new fund (but Redelfs and Koontz are continuing to serve on a number of boards from past investments). |
FeeX Raises $3 Million To Help You Avoid Paying Hidden Retirement Fees | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | , which helps users save on hidden retirement fees, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Blumberg Capital. Co-founded by Uri Levine from , the startup aims to raise awareness of excessive fees through its crowdsourcing platform. The funding will go towards the company’s U.S. launch in early 2014. Retirement fees in America could add up to anywhere from , but according to a , seven in 10 Americans are not aware of the fees charged to maintain their 401(k) accounts. Many workers also lack a frame of reference to find other options. FeeX co-founder and CEO Yoav Zurel tells me that by accumulating retirement fee information with FeeX, users can compare what they are paying to others with comparable accounts. FeeX shows you the real accounts of others with similar financial characteristics. For example, it might show you users in similar employment or who have invested the same amount in their 401(k) plans. After linking up your own account, the platform places you on a “Sucker Meter” based on how much you pay in extra fees. After seeing the comparison, users can either confront their current companies about lowering fees or switch to a different company. In order to use FeeX, users have to connect their personal retirement accounts, which may be a deterrent for potential users. To protect privacy, Zurel tells me, all online accounts are completely anonymous. Others can only view how much each account is paying, without viewing names, social security numbers or other sensitive information. With more than 6,500 users in Israel, Zurel says privacy has not been an issue for most people. There are already several that help manage 401(k) plans, such as and . FeeX works by drawing information through crowd sourcing, which users find more trustworthy, Zurel tells me. He also says FeeX differs from many financial advisors and aggregators by being objective, because the service doesn’t take cuts from financial institutions. “Most of the platforms use a lead generation business model, which basically means you move from one financial institution to another and the platform will get a sales fee. So immediately when someone uses this kind of model, it is not objective,” Zurel tells me. “We have no financial relationship with any financial institution.” FeeX is free right now, but Zurel says the company is looking to monetize through small and medium businesses. FeeX will provide services for 401(k) and 403(b) plans first, then expand to credit card fees, loan fees and more. |
Keen On… Promoting Yourself: How Social Media Won’t Help You Get A Job | Andrew Keen | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | If you want to learn how to promote yourself, read ‘s CrunchBase . Alternatively, you could read Schawbel’s new book (out next week), entitled, appropriately enough, . The 29 year-old Schawbel – the Managing Partner of the consulting and marketing firm – has made a successful land grab at becoming Millennial authority on the work habits and fashions of his fellow Gen Y’ers. And now with , Schawbel turns his considerable talents to advising Millennials about how to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace. Partnering with American Express on researching , Schawbel has some up with some intriguing conclusions about the new rules for career success in our digital economy – particularly in terms of the real value of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. “Social media is not respected in the work place,” he told me. Indeed, he has found that 40% of students believe that too much social media usage has hurt what he calls their “soft skills”. Geeks, Schawbel insists, aren’t taking over the workplace. Instead, the key to success in today’s economy is replicating Dan Schawbel himself and mastering a niche so that you become a trusted authority on a specific subject. So, Gen Y’ers, if you want a decent job, get off Twitter and Facebook and learn what Schawbel calls “interpersonal skills” (ie: how to talk to other people). The bad news, he reminds his fellow Millennials, is that not everyone gets a trophy in today’s workplace. But the good news, Dan Schawbel believes, is that those who “take responsibility” for their own skills and knowledge can still become winners in today’s networked economy. |
One Hour Translation’s Patented Tech Enables Speedy And Accurate Real-Time Translation Of Online Content | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | Founded in 2008, is one of the oldest and largest online translation companies, with more than 15,000 active translators in 100 countries who cover more than 75 languages. The Cyprus-based company processes 100,000 projects a month for customers ranging from large corporations (including Toyota and Shell) that need enterprise-grade multilingual content management systems to smaller companies in search of a more polished alternative to cutting-and-pasting content into Google Translate. Over the last five years, CEO and founder Ofer Shoshan, who bootstrapped One Hour Translation, has seen an increase in demand for online translation as companies seek to diversify into global markets. “When there are financial crises in certain markets, we see customers from those markets that want to start getting international customers,” says Shoshan. “In this context, the translation market has done well. It’s a huge market, worth more than $30 billion last year.” Though there are many online translation services now available (including , and ), Shoshan says that One Hour Translation’s advantages are its scale, speed and patented technology. The company’s proprietary products includes (short for Web site translation), its latest offering. WeST allows administrators to add multilingual support to their sites by inserting a few lines of code. Once implemented, WeST maps all site text and automatically sends updates to human translators. This allows content to be translated on an ongoing basis. One Hour Translation’s Translation Memory cloud, another of its patented technologies, reduces the cost of translation by eliminating charges for repeated phrases. The company’s platform also allows real-time peer edits of translations for quality assurance.
Though technology facilitates the speed and accuracy of its translations, One Hour Translation’s most important resource is still its 15,000 translators, who have to pass an exam before they start working for the company. Translators only translate content into their native language and include people who specialize in copywriting and app localization, as well as legal, medical and financial documents. Want to try out One Hour Translation? The company is offering free home page translation (up to 200 words to any single language) for the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who . |
After Years Of Bootstrapping, MyFitnessPal Raises $18M Round From Kleiner Perkins And Accel | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | , a service that allows users to track their calories and share that information with friends, has raised $18 million in its first round of funding. This seems like one of those stories where a company goes years without raising any funding (MyFitnessPal launched in September 2005) before raising money from top-tier venture firms. The round was led by with participation from , and Kleiner’s John Doerr and Accel’s Andrew Braccia are joining the board. MyFitnessPal has previously said that it has . As part of the funding announcement, it also says that its users have lost a total of 100 million pounds to date, and that over the past year, it has been adding 1.5 million users every month. As for why it’s raising money now, co-founder Mike Lee told me that he and his co-founder/brother Albert Lee have always had “a thousand item to-do list, and we could only do three things on it.” Over time, he said, “things kept dropping off the list, which kept getting bigger and bigger.” So raising money will allow the company to expand the team and to add the features that the Lees have been planning. It also allows MyFitnessPal to put more resources behind , which doesn’t just involve creating translated versions of the website and app, but also support for local foods and units of measurement. As MyFitnessPal has grown, a number of other services have sprung up to help users track their health, some of them creating their own devices and others relying on the smartphone. The company actually that helps it integrate with outside services. “Clearly there’s this explosion of activity happening around the quantified self,” Lee said. “The amount of data that we will have about our personal health is only going to grow. … We really want to advance our ability to help users make meaning from all this data. We really want to analyze the data to help our users be successful.” As for making money, even though the company has been profitable since its inception, Lee acknowledged that MyFitnessPal hasn’t taken a particularly sophisticated approach in this area thus far: “We have not been focused on monetization to date, especially for a bootstrapped company. We literally slapped ads on.” So he plans to do “a lot of thinking” around the business model — the key, he said, is that MyFitnessPal is addressing a real pain point for users. |
Ride Easier With The Rubbee Easy Electric Bike Conversion Gadget On Kickstarter | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 11 |
Electric bikes are becoming more popular as the cost to own one goes down, and the cost to own a gas-powered vehicle goes up. If you ask a true cyclist what they think of an electric bike, you might get your head bitten off, but there’s no doubt that there’s a market out there for them. wants to appeal to that market with an easy conversion device that turns your existing bike into an electric one in just a few seconds. The Rubbee is a portable, 14lb attachment for your existing ride that offers up to 15 miles of travel on a full charge with a top speed of 15 mph, thanks to a built-in battery pack of 20,000 mAh that chargers fully in around 2 hours. It’s an elegantly simple solution that easy installs and uninstalls without the need for wires and tools like a standard conversion kit, and it features a design intended to reduce wear on your bike’s wheel, which is used to charge the Rubbee’s battery pack through kinetic force. Plus, you can make sure that the tire doesn’t touch the Rubbee at all if you need a break during a ride. It fits nearly every type of bike, and has an integrated rear LED for safety at night powered by the same battery that drives the wheels. The best part for people who want their bikes to still look like their bikes, however, is that it’s actually surprisingly minimal in terms of how it changes the look of a bike aesthetically. The Rubbee is the product of a team of four co-founders with engineering expertise, and a background in electric vehicles, mechatronics and logistics. The London-based team has spent two years perfecting the Rubbee from its earliest prototype, and now says the Rubbee is ready to into full production, with proven suppliers on board to provide parts and assembly. The most daunting aspect of the Rubbee is the price: £799 ($1,240 USD) is currently required to back at a level that includes pre-orders, which is around the same price as a dedicated e-bike will cost at some online distributors. But the Rubbee adds flexibility – buying an e-bike means you can’t also use it as a mountain bike, for instance, and you can share the Rubbee with a group pretty easily, too. Project funding closes in just four days, and the team still has to raise about £6,000 to reach its target, but this is just a first step for a tech that could become even more low-profile and consumer friendly. |
ActiveNotifications Lets You Bring The Moto X’s Best Feature To Other Android Devices | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs0JD5KITfM&w=640&h=360] I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Moto X lately (full review coming shortly), and while the spec sheet isn’t to everyone’s liking, it packs some smart features that I’d love to see on other devices. Motorola’s motion-sensitive Active Display notifications is at the top of that transplant list, and thankfully a developer over on has already cooked up a pretty solid approximation with an app called . The app was originally only available for devices running Android 4.3, and there aren’t too many of those floating around right now — unless you had a Nexus device or one of the two Google Edition phones you were just plain out of luck. A newly released update though broadens that playing field substantially, as it can now be loaded up on any device running Android 4.1.2. or later. In case you’re running an even older build (think Android 4.0) and don’t mind a little weekend troubleshooting, there’s also an alpha build for you to tinker around with. I’ve spent the past few days fiddling with the app on both a Nexus 4 running Android 4.3 and Galaxy S 4 running Android 4.2.2, and you know what? It’s not bad at all considering these devices lack the additional hardware that makes the Active Display feature really shine on the X. Once ActiveNotifications is installed and you select the apps you want it to display notifications from, a familiar-looking notification shade will occasionally spring to life to show you what’s been going on on your phone. After that, it’s just the same as on the X: swipe up to select the notification and jump into the app, and swipe down to unlock your device normally. Throw in support for the proximity sensor so the display won’t fire up while it’s in your bag/pocket, and you’ve got yourself a pretty impressive knock-off (and I use that word with the utmost respect). There are, as always, a few caveats to be mindful of (and the developer makes no bones about the fact this is an experimental app). It’s better to run the ActiveNotifications on devices that have AMOLED displays as only certain parts of your screen get lit up — running the app on the Nexus 4 caused the entire screen to light up, which won’t do your batteries many favors. ActiveNotifications can also only show one notification type at a time: you’ll see a Gmail icon for instance, but not a Facebook icon even if the messages hit your phone at the same time. Given the blistering pace of updates being pushed out though, it shouldn’t be long before the gap between ActiveNotifications and the real deal closes dramatically. Motorola’s brass likes to talk up the additional processing cores in its X8 architecture that make features like Active Display work — one core is apparently dedicated solely to monitoring the phone’s myriad sensor data, which includes information on movement and spatial orientation. Even without those extra components, ActiveNotifications makes for an experience that gets pretty close to what Motorola has been trying to nail for the past year. Not bad at all for an app that’s less than a week old — you can check it out in the Google Play Store . |
Four Online Brands That Are Building Their Reputations Offline, Because It’s Called Street Cred For A Reason | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | As a consumer, online-native luxury brands mess with my feelings. On the one hand I tell myself, “Hey, I’m a modern woman. I believe in the power of minimizing overhead!” But when push comes to shove, I want to feel the quality of that leather or wool in your hands. Check the stability of the heel. Because as with OkCupid, true love happens in person, and even Forever21 photographs well in advertisements. Even for clothing and accessories brands that gain an outstanding amount of traction online, an offline presence will often follow, even when the company is still quite young. Here’s a look at four labels, both high end and more affordable, that began online but are using a brick-and-mortar presence to give weight and credibility to their brands. Founded in 2006, the British luxury jewelry retailer Astley Clarke began as a multi-brand retailer before transitioning to focus on growing its own label, which is what it is best known for today. For Astley Clarke, which already has concessions in London department stores Harrods, Liberty, and Selfridges, moving offline is part of a broader expansion, which also includes online markets overseas. Scott Thomson, Astley Clarke’s managing director and a recent hire to oversee the expansion, told me that the plan is to open a UK flagship store in 2015 and one in New York in 2016. The company will also be selling through 15 more UK stores by the fall, with the hope of getting on the counters of stateside department stores like Bergdorf Goodman by early spring 2014. Concessions, he said, help to cement the brand offline. “Creating a brand in a digital space requires a clear set of skills, offline it requires exceptional execution,” Thomson said. “The service to the retailers and consumers, staff training, attention to detail, quality of props and in store branding all have to be excellent. Online is about managing a space the size of your screen, in the physical world there are many more moving parts and you have to have to be looking behind you as well as in front.” Thomson said that down the line, Astley Clarke wants to ensure that at least 40% of its product is sold globally online, as compared to the less than 5% of luxury jewelry that is purchased online in the industry overall. Like so many start-ups, Sydney-based site Shoes of Prey was conceived when co-founder Jodie Fox got fed up with not being able to find a truly perfect pair of shoes. Customers use a 3D modeler to customize a shoe’s color, material, and style for a total of, as they advertise, 190 trillion possible iterations. I’m not going to double check the math on that, but the point is customization, which is a design model best delivered online. Six months ago Shoes of Prey opened its first flagship store in Sydney, along with a few pop-up shops in Japan. The tactile element of shopping is still key, Fox told me, and having a brick-and-mortar presence solves the problem of people asking what their shoes would look like in real life. But because the shoes are custom-made, Shoes of Prey approached its offline branding as a kind of fantasy workshop. Customers sit around a table on stools made out of black silk and patent leather, where they can use the store’s iPads to design their own shoes. Shoes are available for fit, and leather samples are kept on hand for reference. “It’s not a traditional store at all. We built a retail store out of everything a shoe is made of,” Fox said. “In the middle of the table, there’s a two meter high sculpture of shoes. I wanted people to see the product but it’s not about pulling it off a shelf. It fosters creativity so people feel inspired and open up their minds a bit.” Like Shoes of Prey, the menswear brand Bonobos created its brick-and-mortar Guideshops as alternative retail spaces. Customers book an appointment with a personal shopper/”Guide,” who takes them through the collection and helps them find the right fit. There is no inventory on location, so when you order in-store the merchandise is shipped from Bonobos’ warehouse as though it had been bought online. The Guideshops are brilliant for a number of reasons, the first being that every customer feels like they’re being given VIP treatment. You’re basically David Beckham walking into an Armani store after hours. For guys who don’t like to try on clothes, it’s an efficient way to figure out what works best and order that online forever. The second reason is that for all the plushy brand appeal they generate, Guideshops are relatively cheap to run, with their small footprints and smaller staffs. Bonobos is looking to put down more locations nationally through the year. For the designer Esteban Cortazar, online was an opportunity for rebirth. Cortazar shuttered his namesake brand when he went to work as Creative Director of the Emanuel Ungaro, but when he left the fashion house three years later at age 26, he largely went off the grid. In 2012, he relaunched his eponymous line through Net-A-Porter and has since gone on to design a second 18-piece capsule collection for the e-tailer. In addition to giving him a wide customer base from the onset and negating the need for a runway presentation, Net-a-Porter has supported Cortazar financially. And as the designer , the site places orders based on his sketches, cutting out the need to produce samples. Though Cortazar’s collection hasn’t moved offline yet, he has had interest from retailers and plans to go independent of Net-a-Porter in the future. Whether he goes old school with runway shows and standard industry production cycles or runs his brand with blend of offline and e-commerce practices remains to be seen. |
The Science Of Reddit: Why Some Ideas Dominate The Net | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | The Internet is not a perfect meritocracy, where the best ideas naturally rise to the forefront of the national conversation. It is easy to game the popularity of some ideas by exploiting the fact that Internet users are overly optimistic sheep who blindly rate the value of stories positively if they first see that others already liked it. In a brand-new study, , MIT’s Sinan Aral, that he could experimentally boost the popularity of articles 32 percent on a news aggregator, like Reddit.com, by posting them with an initial few likes. The first-of-its-kind study not only helps us determine why some ideas are more popular than others, but also alerts us to the ease at which important sites are gamed by nefarious groups.
Aral and his colleagues posted news stories to an unnamed aggregator over the course of several months, experimentally manipulating the initial number of likes and comments on each story. On balance, stories which were given an early boost ended up being more popular, compared to those that had no initial likes. “Positive and negative social influence created asymmetric herding effects,” writes the research team. “The positive manipulation created a positive social influence bias that persisted over our five-month observation window.” Indeed, Internet users are so systematically optimistic that they tended to reverse the articles with initial negative ratings. Thus, while the Internet tends to exaggerate positively valued stories, the same bias does not afflict negatively valued stories. While Aral doesn’t speculate on the underlying psychology that fuels this bias, have found that users like to share positive stories. “When you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer,” said University of Pennsylvania social psychologist Jonah Berger. It makes sense: sharing a story impacts our own reputation. No one wants to be the Internet’s sad sack. The study reveals why ideas with a rabid core of supporters will tend to dominate online discussions. A hyper-active minority exaggerate the popularity of an idea and trigger the Internet optimistic hype-machine. Indeed, while libertarian Ron Paul had minor national support as president, online discussions, receiving a greater share of positive social media chatter than the person who actually won the Republican primary, Mitt Romney. The same goes for gay marriage. Up until a year ago, the public was largely split on the issue. Yet, Internet users, which tend to be young and liberal, helped turn the web into a machine for viral pro-gay marriage content. Pro-gay marriage groups on Facebook had between 7 to 100 times more followers. Content, such as news of this rainbow-colored house across from the ant-gay Westboro Baptist Church, tends to get in front of our eyes. This means that the preponderance of viral content will reflect the most hardcore users, not the general public Our sheep-like tendencies can also be exploited by nefarious partisans. Back when Digg.com was king of the news aggregator hill, a clandestine conservative contingent, Digg Patriots, to vote up (and down) stories. It not only wreaked havoc on Digg’s reputation, but got the group’s ideas far more coverage than they otherwise would have had. “When small groups agree to vote an item up early on, it can inspire herding and accumulating positive votes. This creates an incentive for manipulation. If this process holds for articles, then the signals of quality on those articles can be biased and inaccurate,” Aral writes to me in an email. Digg Patriots ultimately got caught, and news aggregators have attempted to design algorithms that identify and neutralize conspiratorial groups. Arals study proves that it’s still possible to game the system, but not whether it can be done on political issues or whether it’s enough to make stories go viral. A 32 percent boost in popularity is nice, but a true viral story will get between 100K to several million views. Still, it does show that the Internet is not a perfect marketplace of ideas. Ultimately, the net will reflect humanity’s own psychological biases. |
Backed By Social+Capital, Brilliant.org Is Finding And Challenging The Brightest, Technical Talent In The World | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | Pharrell Wu began doing math at age one and was trading stocks at age three. Living in the Philippines, Wu became bored with the math curriculum at his school and started Googling for hard math problems on the one computer his parents owned at home. He came upon , a recently launched online community that challenges and brings together technical minds to solve math and analytics problems, and started completing problems. Brilliant’s founder, Sue Khim, saw that Wu was crushing college students in some of the math exams and immediately matched the young boy with a mathematics professor from the University of Michigan for private tutoring sessions to study undergraduate level linear algebra. According to his now mentor, Wu is already at the level of an exceptional undergraduate math major, and is scoring better on tests than almost all of the professor’s college students. There are brilliant technical minds like Wu across the world, and the Internet is bringing them together, explains Khim. Brilliant.org is hoping to be the community where these individuals (both young and old) come together to challenge themselves, find like-minded talent, and find opportunities to use their skills. Khim says the inspiration for Brilliant came in the realization that the current model to find technical talent who will become leaders in science, medicine and technology is broken. In many countries, high school students are encouraged to focus on studying for one national exam, which will determine where they go to college. In university, these students are measured on rote learning skills that are irrelevant to how they will be using skills to solve real problems. “There is a mismatch between nurturing intellectual skills in top students versus what they actually have to spend time on to be successful in the system,” she says. But unfortunately, she explains, there is no way to get noticed if you don’t succeed in this system. So Khim decided to create a place where these students can succeed, challenge themselves and realize their true potential. She has enlisted a number of math professors, scientists and other technical minds to create difficult problems on the site. Brilliant features weekly Olympic-style challenges that offer rigorous problem sets in math and physics. Users can not only solve problems but share their solutions and their processes in solving the sets. In March of this year, Khim presented Brilliant at the and caught the eye of investor and Social+Capital founder . Palihapitiya has been particularly focused on investing in some of the disruptions around education and saw huge potential in what Khim was trying to do. Although the site only had a few thousand users at the time, Palihapitiya told Khim that he believed Brilliant could one day have millions. He, along with Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, Learn Capital, RTA Capital, and Hyde Park Angels, seeded Brilliant to help scale the site. After less than a year, Brilliant has 100,000 users from 135 countries and is doubling users every two months. Khim thinks that the site could hit 1 million users within a year. Users range from 13 years of age to the elderly. When a student arrives on the site, he or she takes a brief diagnostic exam that will assign a level of mathematical or problem solving skill (1-5). Each week, the student will gain access to problem sets tailored to their abilities and designed to be more challenging and interesting than problems they would get in school. Students get three chances to arrive at the correct answer to each question in a problem set. When they solve problems, they receive points that can be traded in for academic opportunities and other prizes. If the student performs well in their current level for two weeks in a row, Brilliant will bump them to the next level. As Khim explains, at first Brilliant started employing professionals to develop challenging problems in physics and math, but now, more and more content is being user-generated, and professors and technical minds are actually enjoying creating the problems to see if anyone can solve them. For example, Brilliant is currently running a theory programming tournament called . Users write an algorithm to fight to the death (online of course) against other algorithms. In terms of the competition, there are many problem-solving websites and competitions (Art of Problem Solving, Project Euler, TopCoder, Kaggle, IXL, Peking online judge and other online judge sites, etc.), but not a lot of very active problem-solving communities. Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, and other forum-based sites all have math/science communities, but these sites are built for a different purpose. Khim sees her closest analogues as offline math clubs, competitions, and science clubs. While the site is still young, Khim and Palihapitiya already have their business model. Eventually Brilliant will connect these great technical minds with universities (as they are already doing with Wu) and with companies and organizations that need this talent. There has never been more of a demand for talent in math, science and engineering, explains Khim, and she believes they can build an audience around this. “This won’t be just another job board,” she says. “This will be the pipeline to opportunity.” Khim is onto something. Beyond the story of Wu, there are already who are similar that Brilliant is helping find and provide opportunity to brilliant minds who may have otherwise gone unnoticed. As she says, these are the minds that will be solving major problems in the areas of finance, science and medicine for our world. As for Wu, it’s unclear what his journey would have been if he had not been noticed by Brilliant, Khim and her team. He’s now doing graduate-level mathematics work with the professor in weekly Google Hangouts and plans to come to the U.S. to attend college in a few years. He has ambitions of becoming an investment banker, but who knows which research institution or university or technology giant might beat Goldman Sachs to the punch. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnQCYZ8Oz8Q&w=640&h=480] |
Systematic Surveillance Will Eat Itself | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | As the digitally connected world grapples with that our overreaching governments are using technology tools ostensibly designed to increase our convenience to up their own — by peeking into our business, apparently regardless of whether they have probable cause to lift the lid — it’s worth taking a step back from current snowballing concerns about technology eroding privacy. That’s not to say there are no reasons to be concerned; there absolutely are. But there is reason for positivity too. New technologies typically trigger moral panics. Whether it’s the invention of the printing press; the telephone or radio and TV; high speed travel; the electrification of homes — you name it, new inventions have been marshalling societal doomsday merchants for centuries. Probably forever (let’s not forget Socrates’ concerns that written words would degrade our ability to remember and intelligently interrogate knowledge). Likewise the increasingly pervasive interconnectness afforded by the Internet and the proliferation of connected device types has led to plenty of concerned social commentary already — whether it’s fear that social networking is making us more narcissistic; or kids more vulnerable to bullying; or encouraging the rise of misogynistic or racist or extremist viewpoints. The scaremongering goes on. And now we can apparently add mass government surveillance programs to the file ‘bad stuff technology is doing’. But like most of the things on that list, that’s a simplification which ignores the fact technology is merely a tool that supports multiple applications. Now there’s no doubt that the traceability and stackability of digital communications and interactions has and is enabling mass surveillance of citizens — making it easier for governments (and of course companies like Facebook — which are now, in any case, effectively the outsourced, data-harvesting arms of government agencies like the NSA) to spy on the stuff we do online. Our digital traces can be captured and stored – apparently ad infinitum — because storage has become so cheap, and is only getting cheaper. Technology allows even the most apparently incidental/trivial data-points to be siphoned off and joined to all our other dots, to flesh out dynamic maps of our digital lives — just because it’s possible to do that. You could even argue that technology’s recording abilities/capacity encourage a ‘just in case’ mind-set which says ‘store now, data-mine later if the need arises’. (Or, in the business context, ‘grab everything now, figure out what’s needed to monetise later’.) That of course skews the relationship between the state and the individual – apparently allowing for an individual to be held to account in perpetuity, regardless of whether they are justifiably under suspicion. We are all pre-emptively judged sinners if surveillance is systematic. Judgement Day has been digitally reimagined as an all-day recurring calendar event. How quaint — by comparison — appears the Biblical equivalent which only occurs once, as a final reckoning, at the very end of time. But there’s something else to remember here too. Just as our digital interactions and online behaviour can be tracked, parsed and analysed for problematic patterns, pertinent keywords and suspicious connections, so too can the behaviour of governments. Technology is a double-edged sword – which means it’s also capable of lifting the lid on the machinery of power-holding institutions like never before. In the case of technology-enabled mass surveillance, the spy becomes the spied upon – as happened the moment Edward Snowden leaked data on the NSA’s surveillance programs. Ok, so it required a human whistleblower to decide to step forward and shine a light on those dark goings on. And each such reveal is typically only a snapshot of extant processes — i.e. which the whistleblower had access to up to the time the leak was made public. So it’s far more partial than the data which flows, blood-like, through the pipelines of the surveillance systems apparently monitoring us. But the point stands: the same infrastructure that allows government agencies to capture data on any digitally connected person, also allowed Snowden to comprehend the extent of the NSA’s surveillance, and take away enough evidence to put that knowledge in the public domain. Technology allows for bigger, more significant data leaks; makes whistleblowing easier too. Wikileaks is another (obvious) example of how technology-enabled data leaks can hold the powerful to account by making their actions and processes more transparent than they would otherwise be (whether Wikileaks has overreached its own power-debunking role is a whole other debate, however). Another smaller example would be the data leaked on UK MPs’ expenses in 2009 – data that was ultimately sold to journalists, who then made the story public. In that case journalists had previously tried to legally obtain MPs’ expenses information under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act and had their attempts rebuffed. The establishment closed off sanctioned avenues of journalistic investigation. Circumventing that required two things: a human whistleblower, and cheap and easy digital storage technology that allowed enough data to be taken out of a closed system to reveal systematic abuse of a taxpayer-funded expenses system. The wider point is that if governments are (mis)using technology to spy on us, they can’t escape the countervailing reality: the omnipresent risk of that same technology-powered all-seeing eye being turned back on them – spilling their secrets for us to judge. And there’s the cause for hope. Technology can certainly allow governments (and companies) to overreach and infringe on our rights as citizens (or users) – it is a powerful tool, after all. But, in the right hands, this tool can also reveal in microscopic detail what governing institutions and powerful companies are up to. The NSA’s extensive apparatus of surveillance may thus ultimately reach so far it ends up checking its own advance by forcing a publicly shamed government to avoid democratic censure by policing itself. In other words, so long as there are whistleblowers like Snowden — people of conscience — then surveillance systems will end up eating themselves. Or that’s the hope. Snowden’s leaks have led directly to . The President can deny it all he wants — and — but there is no doubt these reforms have been announced as a direct result of the NSA’s processes being made public, which in turn has piled domestic and international pressure on the Obama Administration. And thrown a negative cloud of suspicion over U.S. technology companies — the collateral damage of a policy that lumps the rest of the world into a catch-all category labelled ‘potential terrorists’. Bad for business means bad for government — a situation that cranks up the pressure for a policy rethink. Likewise, in the commercial context, the rise of and pro-privacy movements like — powered by startups like Snapchat and free-thinkers like DuckDuckGo — puts disruptive business pressure on the overreaching excesses of data-harvesting giants like Facebook and Google that want to grab and store every little thing we do. Startups can and do play a role in checking inroads into our privacy by offering alternatives that don’t demand we give up so much — which in turn can help to amend the behaviour of dominant players. So, while digital technologies can be press-ganged into the service of totalitarianism, and used to trample the rights of free societies, it only takes a few free-thinkers to apply technology’s reach and capacity in the opposite direction to fight the creep of Stasi-like systems. Snooping and leaking are really just flip sides of the same coin. Snowden is therefore much more than a patriot; right now he’s the better angel of America’s nature. [ by via Flickr] |
Come Build At The Disrupt SF Hackathon! More Tickets Just Released | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | Fame. Riches. A colossal mountain of pizza. A room full of coders who have 24 hours to build the most mind-blowing thing they can. Sound like your kind of night? Come to the Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon. We’ve just released another batch of tickets. (The last batch sold out so fast that I thought something technical had gone wrong — it hadn’t. So don’t delay.) If you’ve never been to one of our hackathons (we tend to throw one on the weekend before each of our biggest conferences), it’s hard to adequately explain what you’re missing. We’ve seen projects of all shapes and sizes, from to . We’ve had impromptu, 50-person NERF battles break out at 2 a.m. We’ve had projects spin out of the hackathon and . Plus, everyone who gets on stage and presents a finished project gets into the main Disrupt conference for free! That’s a $2000 ticket, on of the chance to win some massive prizes. If you’ve got something you’ve been dying to build, you’d be crazy to build it here. The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs September 7 and 8, and we’ve just released . What are you waiting for? |
Harry Houdini, Lock Picking, And Entrepreneurship | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | TechCrunch . It’s summer here in Silicon Valley, and for my column this month, I’ll try to finally polish and publish some of the old posts that have been collecting dust in my “drafts” folder. Usually, I try to make the column timely, but not this time. Almost two years ago now, my wife and I visited a museum in San Francisco to an exhibit called “Art of Magic,” honoring Harry Houdini. I dragged my wife to the museum to see this because I had been watching “Pawn Stars” (favorite show!) on the History Channel and was obsessed with the program. In one episode, a customer came in with original handcuffs and a straightjacket used by Houdini. The show’s characters all marveled at the legend of Houdini, the nostalgia, the myths. While all this information is available on , the art exhibit highlighted an interesting theme: Houdini’s masterful command of new mediums and platforms to manipulate and leverage his audience’s deepest hopes and fears. Reflecting on that experience, and as it’s the annual time for Defcon, where the art of lock-picking is a time-honored tradition, I wanted to cast Houdini in a different light and showcase how some of his techniques could, in fact, be leveraged by modern-day entrepreneurs. It may be a stretch, but please bear with me. The common thread weaved through most of Houdini’s famous tricks seemed rooted in the juxtaposition of his audience’s fear of death versus their hope for liberation. The part of Houdini’s history that impresses me most is how and why some of his tricks became iconic signature moves. For instance, he rose to fame as the “Handcuff King,” setting up elaborate schemes to unchain himself from all sorts of iron shackles, but he didn’t just adopt handcuffs as some ruse — it turns out that, as a young boy growing up poor, he took a job as an apprentice with a local locksmith to earn extra money for his struggling family. Houdini also became famous by taking himself handcuffed and dipping into water, invoking a fear of drowning — he had studied old waterboarding-like contraptions used to torture people in the middle ages, and knew the audience would be captivated by the sight. Or, randomly, Houdini visited a psych ward early in his career and happened to see a few patients violently trying to free themselves from their straightjackets, and after practicing escaping from a similar jacket for nearly a decade, he finally unveiled his new trick, usually in public squares, hanging upside down, his head dangling above the crowds, freeing himself and stretching out his hands in victory. I am still processing why Houdini is so fascinating to me. Pictures like , where a crowd fixates on him with their undivided attention, are truly incredible. I think Houdini interests me because, as a performer, he captivated his audience and was so precise with his choreography, enabling him to tap into very deep parts of the human psyche with a scalpel’s precision. In a way, this is what the great entrepreneurs do. They are deeply motivated and practice for years. They are in tune with their customers hopes and fears. And, there’s a bit of magic in all of the myths they create. It’s why pictures of a young Steve Jobs sitting on a wood floor with one light stand and some books still continue to fly around the web and evoke both nostalgia and disbelief. The reason I originally drafted this post is because, almost two years ago, after visiting this exhibit, I was hanging out with an investor and former founder/operator in the Valley who used to go to Defcon as a teenager and pick locks all the time. I told him about Houdini, and he shared stories about how lock-picking was one of the first types of hacks he did as he began to fiddle with computers over two decades ago. We traded a few emails that week and, in one exchange, he asked me what entrepreneurs and investors could learn about Houdini’s background, his rise, his creativity, and his stage presence. Because, in a way, to the crowd, great entrepreneurship looks like magic, a of light-bending and mirror tricks that together form a new reality. In this way, magic and making are more alike than they are different. Here was my email response to the question: Houdini’s lock-picking as a boy, his experience in the psych ward and seeing the straightjackets, and his research around the magic and fear of drowning all led him to craft a product (his “act”) that combined all three to prey upon primal fears and hypnotize his audience. In retrospect, Houdini’s signature acts now seem obvious, but one has to wonder if he could have brought all the elements together without having those strong experiences earlier in his life. Houdini was a student of magic, amassing over 4,000 books on the subject, the largest ever collection of that genre in the world. It reminds me of when DJ Shadow was becoming famous, how he would scoop up and buy vinyl record collections and build a stockpile years ahead of his competition. Even as a child, Houdini could’ve futzed around, but given his family’s financial troubles, he remained active and enterprising, eventually landing an apprenticeship in a profession (locksmithing) that would lay the foundation for his signature moves. He kept moving, kept occupied, and kept in motion. – Houdini’s genius was in combining all the elements, physical and psychological, to put his audience into a trance, to fixate all of their attention on him. That is what the greats do, their work draws in all of our attention, and we stand in awe watching instead of doing. It is what separates the few greats from everyone else. Houdini was a master at winning the crowd over. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from a movie. In , Proximus says to Maximus, “I was not the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd, and you will win your freedom.” / Creative Commons Flickr |
New Rule: Congressmen Who Thought Iraq Had WMDs Can’t Talk About NSA Effectiveness | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | Senator Saxby Chambliss is either a blind war hawk or is deliberately misleading the public. Last week, after the National Security Agency had intercepted an al-Qaida conference call plotting attacks against U.S. embassies, Chambliss claimed it was proof that mass surveillance programs were effective. But that the NSA’s controversial phone and Internet monitoring programs “played no part in detecting the initial tip.” The press should have known — and reported on — the fact that Chambliss had a history of hawkish interpretations of intelligence reports after he voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Indeed, the most ardent defenders of the NSA are exactly those members of Congress who wrongly believed we needed to invade Iraq after believing that there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Since the public can’t scrutinize classified documents, we have to trust that elected representatives are capable of critically evaluating intelligence reports. Anyone who voted for the Iraq War has lost the public’s trust and shouldn’t be allowed to comment on the NSA — without getting hammered by the press and party leaders. It’s not just Republicans who voted for the Iraq War. “Please know that it is equally frustrating to me, as it is to you, that I cannot provide more detail on the value these programs provide,” Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the NSA’s most ardent supporters. Feinstein argues that NSA surveillance prevented the Najibullah Zazi 2009 New York subway bombing, reveal that it was local law enforcement that got the first tip during the course of searching his co-conspirators’ computers. Feinstein was wrong about the impending threat of Saddam Hussein in 2002, so why should we believe her now? Feinstein’s Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, Ron Wyden, who voted against the Iraq War, has seen the exact same intelligence reports on the NSA and concluded there is no evidence mass surveillance was critical to stopping attacks. “I’ve seen zero evidence it is needed,” he tweeted. [tweet https://twitter.com/RonWyden/status/365955284478345216] , Wyden further argued, “Saying that ‘these programs’ have disrupted ‘dozens of potential terrorist plots’ is misleading if the bulk phone records collection program is actually providing little or no unique value.” Perhaps we should heed Wyden’s advice. Back in 2002, during the ramp-up to the Iraq War, : “First, I am not convinced, regarding a clear and present threat, Saddam Hussein currently imposes a clear and present threat to the domestic security of the Nation. While my service on the Senate Intelligence Committee has left me convinced of Iraq’s support of terrorism, suspicious of its ties to al-Qaida, I have seen no evidence, acts, or involvement in the planning or execution of the vicious attacks of 9/11.” Voting for or against the Iraq war should have permanent consequences for each member’s reputation, and the press needs to qualify the statements of our elected officials every time they speak on intelligence issues. Yet, a member’s vote on the Iraq War isn’t completely sufficient for us to trust them, either. Representatives can be influenced as much by personal convictions as the political calculations of re-election. As a result, two former judges of the court charged with approving NSA requests, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a “public advocate” — a lawyer specially appointed to defend civil liberties. This independent advocate would be free of both the military hierarchy and the political machinations of Congress. We hope Congress will let this advocate speak to the American people and voice his own confidence in the value of our intelligence systems. If both an advocate of the people and a critic of the Iraq War saw evidence that the NSA had, indeed, foiled attacks, citizens would have all the confidence they needed to make a more informed choice. Until then, Feinstein and Chambliss need to step out of the limelight and let someone with credibility talk. And if they dare to keep on talking, the press shouldn’t let them get away with it. |
30 New Franchises | Contributor | 2,013 | 8 | 11 | There is a perfect storm of three distinct disruptive forces that has the potential to topple nearly every major enterprise software incumbent. And the traditional approach of dealing with technology shifts — through acquisition — looks like it’s headed toward failure. As such, there is an unprecedented opportunity to create many new multi-billion-dollar enterprise franchises that are on the right side of these forces and are willing to go the distance in the face of ridiculously high acquisition offers. Let’s examine these forces individually. Seemingly a little long in the tooth as a disruptor, SaaS has finally gone mainstream in the Global 2000. The primary disruptive force of this technology is the speed of innovation. The feedback loop is especially powerful: As opposed to using focus groups and surveys to figure out how users are interacting with the product, SaaS companies can see what their customers are doing real-time by capturing and analyzing every click. They quickly extend their products through a “cell division” that continuously builds out and A/B tests the features that are getting the most engagement. On-premise and client (PC) software-based product cycles can’t possibly compete here as new releases are typically pushed 10 times faster at 45-60 days vs. 18-24 months. There’s always one version/code base so it’s much easier to support, patch bugs, and roll out new features to all customers at once. The old joke of “How did God create the world in seven days? He didn’t have an installed base!” certainly applies – but SaaS also demands entirely new skills sets associated with running a 24×7 services business. Dev/Ops, customer care centers, network operations and delivering uptime via failover, mirroring and hot backups are all new and essential. It’s easy to see how the early SaaS pioneers gained so much ground with this innovation but even they are unprepared and poorly architected to take advantage of the additional disruptors that have hit more recently… : As I detailed in a prior post, the humongous Internet powers, Facebook and Google, are literally breaking new ground in re-imagining the design, components and cost of running a hyper-scale data center. The cloud infrastructure they are pioneering has the primary disruptive force of massively driving down cost. Facebook, for instance, is experimenting on the bleeding edge of solving the new cost bottlenecks of power and cooling. I recently that it actually rained one of their datacenters. The cloud service providers (CSPs) are following their lead using commodity components, open source software, data center design and testing software defined storage and networking products to enjoy the same, devastating cost curve. The corporate datacenters (aka “private clouds”) will slowly disappear as Global 2000 companies migrate to these irresistible new cost curves. Don’t be fooled that security and reliability concerns will keep large enterprises away — as the CEO of IronPort, I watched in horror as large enterprises started pointing their treasured Mail Exchange (MX) records to cloud services like Postini – a much superior and vastly cheaper cloud based architecture versus our perimeter appliances. And email is the most sensitive and mission critical of applications… : About two years ago, all of our consumer companies went through an “Oh shit!” moment with mobile. One year mobile was 10 percent of traffic and the next year, when everyone was expecting ~20 percent, it was 30 percent on its way to 50 percent. Facebook, for instance, famously bought Instagram for $1 billion and then continued their pursuit of talent to redesign for mobile. The new mobile operating systems and devices are proliferating an entirely new interaction and design paradigm that has the primary disruptive force of a reimagined user interface. The innovative use of touch/gestures (e.g. pull down, swipe, pinch etc.) pioneered by the consumer applications will become de rigor for enterprise, as well. Although it’s still early, the mobile sensors (e.g. GPS, accelerometer, video etc.) will also become integral and spawn new innovations in the enterprise as they have enabled new consumer franchises like Lyft and Instagram. The No. 1 problem facing so many of the startups I talk to is hiring the design talent (e.g. mobile app, front-end engineering and user interface) to take advantage of this trend. In addition to being in ridiculously high demand, most of these people are “arteests” who eschew just cash and stock as incentives because they want to work for a purpose and in an environment where design is an overarching priority/core competency – not something that is grafted on afterwards. These environments are hard to find. So exactly why won’t these big incumbents make it to the other side? There are just too many things changing at once. Beyond the technology changes, there are structural impediments as well. The incumbent sales forces have become farmers instead of hunters. They still sell on relationships (e.g. A round of golf, anyone?) and bundling/discounting instead of product attributes. They sell to the CIO instead of the line of business buyer who is making the decision. The quotas and incentives are too different. The accounting systems don’t speak recurring billing and revenue. Ugh – it’s just too much change. A handful of exits have been priced based on a NTM revenue average of 11X vs. around 4X for the rest of SaaS companies. Examples include Workday, Splunk, ServiceNow, Marketo and Tableau. Not to mention the SuccessFactors deal (done at 11X) has officially kicked off the next wave of consolidation. On the private side, companies like New Relic, AppDynamics and ZenDesk have seen private transaction multiples of between 9X and 11X. There is outright panic going on right now at the large incumbents as they pay ridiculous premiums for the early SaaS companies. And so why won’t these acquisitions pan out? Most of the early SaaS companies weren’t architected to take advantage of the cloud infrastructure cost advantages most completely missed the boat on mobile. It’s hard enough for new, cool enterprise startups to hire the necessary design talent, but the large incumbents really have no hope. As I’ve said, there is a perfect storm of three distinct disruptive forces brewing which has the potential to erupt into a new multi-billion-dollar wave of enterprise franchises. In particular, there will be at least 30 new enterprise franchises that will go the distance and resist high acquisition offers, as they either supply or ride this trio of disruptors to dominance. Among others, the new suppliers are companies like Cumulus Networks, Okta, New Relic and Nimble Storage. The “riders” are awesome trifecta companies like Box, Evernote, Base, Expensify and Tidemark. Where will these 30 New Franchises come from? A double investment cycle in SaaS, as the large incumbents buy the early SaaS pioneers and fumble them, will pave the way. Like Lenny from “Of Mice and Men,” they will smother these companies with too much negative attention, mismatched sales forces and misunderstood business models. Following a short vesting period, the product and management talent — who are used to working at a completely different pace — will ultimately leave the incumbent, resulting in a bevy of entrepreneurs that roll out to start even more of these franchises. I can’t wait to meet them! |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 27 | null |
Cascade Is An Enterprise Management Platform That Focuses On Boosting Employee Morale | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 29 | Cloud-based enterprise management software wants to set itself apart by creating happier and more motivated companies. Its two founders, a former banker and a photographer who once served as a creative consultant to Samsung, say that their platform not only helps drive results, but also increases workplace morale by helping each staffer feel a personal connection to their organization’s goals. Responsis, the Sydney-based startup behind Cascade, began marketing the platform at the beginning of this year and have signed up 10 clients so far, including UNICEF Australia. Founders Tom Wright and Eric Perriard, who bootstrapped Cascade’s development, first met when they were university students. After graduation, Wright started his banking career and Perriard took a position at manufacturer PPG Industries, which he eventually left to become a photographer and Creativity Trainer at Samsung in Seoul. The two reconnected when Perriard moved to Sydney and took a new corporate position. Both were frustrated that the workplace problems they encountered at the beginning of their careers still existed. “The main thing is that people feel disconnected from their organizational strategy. When the CEO stands up at the end of the year and says we hit results, they’re looking for a reaction from people who don’t understand how they were a part of that,” says Wright. “I was living it every day myself,” he adds. “I had a good-sized team working for me and whether I had a good idea or not, it was dispiriting to see people who work for you disconnected from what you are doing, even things you are proud of.” Cascade wants to solve that problem by taking real-time metrics about the strategic alignment of an organization, visualizing it and making the information available to everyone in a company. The platform is designed so that it only takes one minute a day for employees to enter data, which Cascade analyzes to help companies predict if and when they will reach performance targets on time. Wright and Perriard say Cascade sets itself apart from its competitors by focusing on showing individual employees exactly how their tasks contribute to a workplace’s strategy instead of (for example) managing customer relationships, accelerating workflows or scoring performance. Cascade’s use cases include companies undergoing a major transition such as a merger. One of the platform’s clients had to combine three companies with locations scattered across the Asia-Pacific region and used Cascade’s multilingual software to see real-time feedback about its strategy from different teams and their London headquarters. Its founders say non-profit organizations like UNICEF can use Cascade to ensure transparency in how they use donated funds. “Non-profits can assess if they are aligned with public promises and prove it in a very metric way,” says Wright. Cascade takes an upbeat approach. For example, employees can see how they are contributing to their workplace’s target, but the data visualization doesn’t explicitly tell them if they are falling short of their target (though they can make the inference). The platform also emphasizes transparency by allowing users to see everyone else’s data. That means workers can track their manager’s progress in addition to their own. “It doesn’t matter who you are. If you are a receptionist answering the phone, you have to be able to understand why you have been told to answer it in 30 seconds or less, otherwise you are just doing what you have been told,” says Wright. “The engagement piece is really the main thing and we do that by trying to challenge the culture a little bit at companies.” |
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