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Leaked Revenue Figures Illustrate Need For Hundreds Of Patch Layoffs | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 19 | Yesterday I on Patch’s revenue, yielding the point that, given the scope of the proposed cuts to its staff, the hyper-local news service does in fact have a shot at reaching profitability this year. A reader helpfully pointed out a leaked document from Patch, , detailing its year-to-date advertising incomes. It’s time for a round of “how good were our estimates?” Let’s play. Here’s the key information from Romenesko: The above numbers are accurate as of August 5th, according to Romensko. So, there were prior to the above information. That matters, because it gives us foundation to extrapolate to full-year revenue figures. Let’s get a handle on what Patch wants to earn in ad bookings in 2013. We begin by summing its year-to-date goals: $12.55 million + $4.86 million + $5.40 million = . On a weekly basis, using our 31-week figure, that’s $735,800 in ad bookings. On a 52 week, full-year basis, that works out to anticipated ad bookings of . Given how close that figure is to $40 million, we can essentially presume that AOL hoped that Patch would bring in $40 million in 2013. Now, how is it doing thus far? Not so well, it turns out. Gary Graefen, from the screen shot above, has only sold bookings equivalent to 45 percent of his goal. Let’s repeat the mathematical formula from before, but with actual bookings, and not anticipated sales: $7.96 million + $3.59 million + $2.44 million = . Again, we divide by 31 to get a weekly figure: . We can now estimate Patch’s actual 2013 revenue by taking its real weekly sales figure and multiplying it by the weeks in a year: . So we have the figure. Now, what did we predict before? 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. The real figure falls directly inside the range predicted using the fairest estimates. If you want to dig through how that figure stacks up to the expected cost of running Patch, . We don’t need to write that post twice. What matters is that Patch’s revenue for 2013 will fall far short of what AOL had hoped the service would earn in 2012. This explains, and places into context, the that Patch is currently enacting: It wasn’t making enough money to stay alive otherwise. |
Matthew Panzarino Joins TechCrunch As Senior Editor | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 8 | 19 | Matthew Panzarino has been a professional photographer, hobbyist chef, hardware tinkerer, independent Apple blogger, and most recently the . He has made a name for himself in the tech media world as a writer relentlessly covering Apple and Twitter, in addition to a broad range of startups. Less obviously, he has also impressed us with the scrappy, competitive news operation he helped build at TNW. And so, after a year of trying to hire him — which at one point involved a long drive to his home in Fresno — we’re pleased to welcome Matthew Panzarino ( ) to TechCrunch as a senior editor. He’ll continue covering interesting companies, while working behind the scenes to help the rest of the team develop great stories. Like , and . |
Personal Security Startup MyPermissions Adds Real-Time Protection For Twitter | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 19 | , a startup offering a suite of security protection and privacy tools, is today becoming the first service to offer live protection for users’ Twitter accounts. What that means is MyPermissions will now be able to alert you in real time as new Twitter applications access your personal information, tweets or direct messages or gain the ability to post tweets in your name. The move to offer better protection for Twitter is an important milestone for this security-minded company, whose very creation was inspired by a Twitter hack. Explains CEO and co-founder Olivier Amar, around a year and a half ago, one of the founders had his Twitter account hacked, and his friends began clicking on the spam tweets that an app was posting on his behalf. Already frustrated and feeling violated, what was even worse was when he realized there was no way to revoke the permissions of the malicious app responsible for the spammy tweets from the Twitter mobile interface. And so, the idea for MyPermissions was born. Today, the company offers a one-stop shop for managing your app permissions and settings via a trio of security products, including a cross-platform, cross-browser extension, as well as mobile applications for both iOS and Android. You can check to see which apps you have connected to your various online accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, Dropbox and more. Then, from one dashboard you can manage those permissions or revoke them entirely. However, in terms of providing users with live updates and alerts, until today MyPermissions’ browser extension only supported Facebook — the other apps when clicked would just take you to the permissions web page where you could make your changes directly. But now, MyPermissions can offer the same real-time protection for Twitter, too. Amar explains that this means the extension now handles the two services MyPermissions users access the most. “Facebook accounts for about 40 to 50 percent of what the users are checking regularly, and Twitter accounts for another 20 percent of the user base. That’s why we had Twitter second,” he says. Google, Instagram and others will follow. To access the Twitter extension, new users just install the web browser extension and log into Twitter. They’ll then be presented with a list of apps that have access to their Twitter accounts. (MyPermissions, we should note, does not record your personal information on its own servers). On the list of apps provided, you can see not only what apps you have previously permitted, but what level of access they had asked for, including the ability to post on your behalf, access your private inbox, and more. In my own tests, I found that I had authorized a remarkable number of Twitter-enabled apps — 168! — many of which were so old I couldn’t even remember what they ever did. The first time an app tries to access your Twitter information, you’ll be prompted whether or not you want to allow or deny that request. If you choose to allow, you won’t be bothered again, but if you deny, the app’s access is immediately revoked. Though Twitter users are often more aware of when and where they’re providing Twitter apps with access to their accounts compared with Facebook, for example, they still often forget to go back and clean up an app’s access after they stop using it. Even when companies shut down and go out of business, they will still sit there in your Twitter profile with access to your data, says Amar. In addition to offering users real-time protection and alerting for Facebook and now Twitter, MyPermissions also keeps users abreast of general security concerns or changes involving their apps, as well as trends they’re seeing across their own user base. For instance, if they see a lot of users revoking access to a particular app, they can look to see if the app is doing something malicious or has just gotten overly spammy. They can then send out an alert via email if it’s the latter, or even step in and revoke access on behalf of users if an app is known to be malware. In other cases, such as with , MyPermissions helped its user base understand what had happened in more detail, what steps they needed to take next and why. But most importantly, it aims to do all this in a way that’s easily understood by anyone, whether or not they’re technically inclined. However, MyPermissions can’t protect users from all forms of spam and hacks. If someone targets you directly and attempts a brute-force password hack or uses social engineering techniques (like ) in order to trick you into giving up your personal information, your Twitter account could still become compromised. Tel Aviv-based MyPermissions raised $1 million in seed funding earlier this year from lool Ventures, 500 Startups, 2B Angels, Plus Ventures and others. Now live with both Facebook and Twitter alerting, MyPermissions will begin to roll out similar alerting features for the other services it currently supports. Longer term, the company plans to expand its offering to different types of users and services, again with the mindset of targeting the mainstream user in particular. |
Nextpeer, Which Brings Multiplayer Mode To Mobile Games, Comes To Android | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 19 | , an Israeli startup that’s looking to make every mobile game multiplayer-enabled, is landing on Android after racking up about 10 million monthly actives in its network on iOS. The company’s SDK basically offers a deeper version what earlier mobile-social gaming platforms tried to do by letting players compete directly against friends or random players in both asynchronous and synchronous tournaments. “When people think about playing together in mobile games, we want the first thing that goes through their head to be Nextpeer,” said Shai Magizmof, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Their pitch is that multiplayer mode boosts player retention, as people can compete against real friends for the highest score. Earlier mobile-social gaming networks like OpenFeint focused on leaderboards and a news feed of player activity, which is less engaging than an actual live tournament. The startup says that the SDK integration takes a few hours of work and it manages push notifications, Facebook challenges, analytics and cross-promotions. The company started off slowly with barely just a handful of titles until a game earlier took off. Then they started racking up titles quickly, reaching about 2,000 games in the network on iOS alone. That brought them to 15 million unique players and 10 million monthly actives in the network. Now they’re coming to Android with about 100 titles in the waiting, and are planning to support Unity and build an enterprise-level SDK to allow bigger studios to customize their integrations. The company has raised about $2 million from private investors and has about 15 employees. Many, many other gaming platforms like OpenFeint, DeNA’s Mobage and Papaya Mobile have tried to accumulate a network of users through giving third-party developers social features. But the monetization part of the model hasn’t always worked given that Apple and Google already provide decent payment mechanisms for markets in developer countries and have their own competing products like Game Center. Nextpeer, which was originally going to rely on a virtual currency-centric model for monetization, has since switched toward doing cross-promotions and advertising. It’s not unlike what San Francisco-based Chartboost does across its network of 16,000 games. |
GoDaddy Acquires Local Business Data Provider Locu | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 19 | is acquiring San Francisco-based local business data provider , the companies are announcing today. The startup, founded at MIT in 2011, is currently being used by over 30,000 businesses, largely restaurants, as well as spas, salons, and other local businesses like accountants, law services, photographers, home remodeling companies, and more. Locu helps the businesses get their unstructured data into more structured formats, so they can then promote and share it with other services via Locu’s platform, including Yelp, YP.com, Foursquare, TripAdvisor and Facebook. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Locu and GoDaddy had been working together since May, when GoDaddy first integrated Locu’s Website Builder, which allowed businesses an easier way to create, manage and update their menu and services from either web or mobile. “Locu epitomizes what GoDaddy is all about – both companies are hell-bent on helping the ‘little guy’ thrive on the Internet,” said GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving in a statement. “Locu is comprised of amazing technologists who have taken the very complex problem of helping small businesses ‘get found’ wherever consumers are looking and are solving it through elegant, technology-based services.” The startup’s goal, co-founder Rene Reinsberg last year, was to take the “messy, distributed data sets” that can’t be easily understood through more automated means, like web crawlers for example, and add structure to that data through a combination of both machine learning and crowdworkers. Locu employs a team of workers who are trained in how to use its special markup language to tweak, correct and adjust the data after the machine-learning side of the system picks it up from around the web. Initially, Locu targeted the restaurant vertical, specifically restaurant menu data. It later began expanding into other local business verticals to collect their data, including price lists and specials, and began partnering with third parties to make better use of that data online. Once data was in Locu, merchants could claim their profiles then post changes, updates and deals, which would then be synced around the web to other services, like Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor and elsewhere. Businesses could also add their Locu data to their own websites via or with just a few lines of code. Just this month, , making its data available to all third-party sites, without the need for them to access its API. Though Locu has more than 30,000 businesses who have claimed their profile, the company also claimed to have data from “millions of businesses” in its database, including specific details like hours of operation, address, services lists and prices. The benefit to Locu’s system over that of other data providers is that of the speed with which it can serve updates. Historically, providers update feeds once a month, week or day, earlier this spring, “the concept here [with Locu] is to have a real-time functionality…That’s where we need to be headed anyway because today a lot of searches are happening on mobile phones so they’re immediate – you’re looking for something right now.” Locu had $4.6 million in outside funding, following its spring 2012 led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from Lowercase Capital, Lightbank and SV Angel, as well as angel investors, Naval Ravikant, Babak Nivi, Quotidian Ventures, and Matt Ocko of Data Collective. Going forward, the company will continue to work within GoDaddy to help it reach the hosting company’s small business users, while still operating out of its San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass.-based offices. The company’s current employees and founders are all joining GoDaddy, and it’s hiring now to grow its team at its new home. GoDaddy has been focusing on helping its business customers this year. The company acquired a mobile website-building startup called M.dot as another way for it to offer its small-business customers a one-stop shop for all their online activities. |
Judge Approves Facebook’s $20M “Sponsored Stories” Settlement | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | A U.S. District judge has to a settlement in which Facebook will pay $20 million for including users’ names and profile photos in its “Sponsored Stories” advertising program without their approval. The class action lawsuit was first filed by five Facebook users in April 2011, three months after Facebook introduced the targeting advertising program. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco Facebook’s proposed settlement, however, stating that offering cash payments to class members was impractical because it included up to 100 million Facebook users and citing concerns about the deal’s proposed $10 million payout to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. The includes a $20 million settlement fund from which the can make a claim to receive a cash payment. The settlement also eliminates the “clear sailing” provision, which means that Facebook is now allowed to oppose petitions for fees and expenses from plaintiffs’ attorneys. Any remaining funds will be awarded as (residual funds from class action lawsuits that are distributed among charities) to organizations proposed by either side and approved by the court. A previous ruling by Seeborg of having their information used as endorsements in Sponsored Stories. The lawsuit is significant because it underscores the challenges Facebook will continue to encounter as it balances with users’ privacy concerns. Despite the controversy that the program generated, Sponsored Stories’ model quickly proved successful–in Facebook’s , the company revealed that the program was selling $1 million ads each day. Sponsored Stories worked because it replicated the feel of word-of-mouth recommendations by including user names and info, even though that feature was what prompted the class action lawsuit. As the company continues to develop its mobile monetization strategy, it has been developing ways to use its wealth of targeting data without upsetting users by creating advertisements that feel instrusive. Facebook’s and helped fuel the growth of its mobile income as a percentage of ad revenue to 41% in , up 11% from the preceding quarter. After a botched IPO and rocky first year, investors are now showing more confidence in Facebook’s potential: the company’s shares have since last fall and hit an today. As Alex Wilhelm noted, however, , which means that a market correction might happen as investors take profit and keep a keen eye on any signs of slowing revenue growth in Facebook’s next quarterly earnings report. |
With Funding From Top Flight Investors, Fast-Growing NoRedInk Is On A Mission To Rid The World Of Bad Grammar | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | The declining quality of humanities education (and student performance) in the U.S. has become a big problem. Last year, that SAT scores in reading and writing have hit record lows, while this year, its new, Common Core-based test results, which found that only 31 percent of its students in third through eighth grade met the standard in language arts. Jeff Scheur to address the flagging performance of American students in writing and grammar proficiency — an area that is getting less attention now amidst the growing interest in STEM education as a potential solution to the country’s economic woes. Having spent eight years as an English teacher in Chicago — during which time he estimates that he graded more than 15,000 papers — Scheur is intimately familiar with students’ struggles to master writing and grammar concepts. But, while his experience might make him uniquely qualified to both understands how students are struggling (and why) and, thus, to construct a solution, that’s just the beginning. The pressures of balancing the demands of building a mission-driven product or service with developing that idea into a real company — that is to say, to make money — is something that every EdTech entrepreneur wrestles with. It’s led to the demise, or compromise, of many education companies. But last week, Scheur became the envy of many early-stage education companies, closing a $2 million round of series A financing from a handful of top venture capital firms. Not just because of NoRedInk’s roster of investors — which include Google Ventures, Social+Capital, Learn Capital, Kapor Capital, NewSchools Ventures and Charles River Ventures — but because of what it will allow the startup to do. Early-stage entrepreneurs often focus too much on fundraising and courting investors to the detriment of the product and taking on venture capital would seem to only increase the pressure to monetize and distort the company’s mission with hastily-concocted business models. The new capital will allow Scheur to put off having to monetize his adaptive grammar learning platform, which means that the company is relieved of having to charge schools, or establish premium subscriptions, and instead simply let schools use it for free. Eventually, however, NoRedInk will likely have to charge schools for use, but luckily for the company, Scheur tells us that hundreds of schools have expressed their willingness to pay for premium tools. The proof is in the pudding: Over the last year, NoRedInk has seen 12,000 schools sign up to use the free version of its platform, while students have answered 33 million questions through the site. Thus far, the heft of this adoption has happened organically, thanks in part to the relative dearth of writing and grammar-focused learning tech out there, especially when compared to the amount popping up in STEM education. Schools are starved for quality digital tools that can help students practice grammar and writing skills, while giving teachers a better sense of what students understand and what they need to improve. It also doesn’t hurt that Scheur is a teacher himself and understand what teachers and schools want from grammar learning technology. The other two factors that have contributed to NoRedInk’s rapid adoption among teachers begins with the fact that Scheur designed the platform to enable teachers to avoid practice and instruction that relies on rote memorization and rigid multiple choice-style assessment and instead focuses on high level concepts. The other is a focus on creating grammar tools that students will actually want to use, which, granted is far from being an easy proposition. To boost engagement, NoRedInk prompts students to tell it about their favorite sports teams, TV stars and subjects, serving questions that are based on their actual preferences and not those of a 50-year-old English professor. Sure, seeing Lady Gaga in grammar exercises isn’t enough to get students over the hump in and of itself, but it’s a step up from most textbooks and grammar worksheet exercises. Plus, the platform avoids multiple choice-style questions, instead allowing students to type out their answers and, when they make a mistake, the platform automatically identifies the problem and alerts the student to the error. It then serves them with follow-up exercises and tutorials that focus on the areas they’re struggling to understand and provides teachers with an overview of each student’s performance, broken down by exercise so they can tailor instruction accordingly. The idea, Scheur says, is to give kids confidence in their grammar skills — something that’s critical to understanding tricky and often non-sensical rules and concepts, especially as they build on each other and early mastery is critical to later performance. The NoRedInk founder also hopes that making grammar fun in such a way that allows students to apply their skills to writing, improving the quality and understanding of both at the same time. In September, the startup will begin releasing “grammar categories,” which will allow teachers to offer grammar challenges based around a particular group of tools and exercises for free. Scheur started with “Capitalization,” with hyphens, colons and pronoun cases set to come next, choosing the categories based on feedback from teachers. NoRedInk is growing fast, and though grammar learning isn’t the sexiest of disciplines within the educational spectrum, it’s critical to improving the system and producing students that are confident in their reading and writing skills. The sad truth is that the world is full of atrocious writers, so NoRedInk is doing all of us a favor, and for that we’re grateful. Take it from my ghost writer — she’s a doctor. |
TxtMeApp Offers An Easy Way To Drive Mobile Downloads From Desktop Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Here’s one way advertisers can convince desktop viewers to try out their mobile apps — send them a text. That’s the proposition behind ,a new product from Israel-based digital media agency (not to be confused with , the San Francisco-based advertising and publishing company that owns sites like XOJane and ReadWrite). The company delivers ads in the form of an offer wall, which is supposed to point users at apps that are tailored to their interests. If something attracts them, they just enter their phone number, then they’ll receive a text with a link to the app. In the press release announcing the technology, CEO Ariel Soudak described it as way to address a “missing link between desktop and mobile use,” adding, “TxtMeApp provides mobile app developers with a new distribution channel, online publishers with a new way to monetize their traffic, and solves the attribution gap in the web-to-mobile conversion funnel.” There are plenty of ways to translate desktop interest into mobile downloads already — with app stores, users can sync up their apps between desktop and mobile, and they can also send themselves links to download the app. However, on the Apple side at least (which is where I have personal experience), these solutions are all kind of clunky, which is why I often end up typing in app search terms into my iPhone. With TxtMeApp, on the other hand, I was downloading a new app within seconds of seeing an ad, and it required no work other than typing in my phone number. Behind the scenes, the company says its custom links can detect which device you’re using and automatically redirect you to the correct app store. And as Soudak’s comment above suggests, this is also a good way to track conversions, so you’ll know if a desktop ad campaign is actually succeeding. (Another company trying to connect desktop and mobile ad campaigns is .) Say Media says a lot of its technology is focused on tracking users throughout the whole process, allowing advertisers to “further analyze user preferences, trends and more” and also to improve ad targeting. |
Inside Funny Or Die’s Celeb-Filled Video Production House | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Funny Or Die has spent the last six years making some of the funniest content on the web, and unlike a lot of the new media companies that have popped up lately, it’s done so without leaning on YouTube for distribution. Instead, Funny Or Die has relied on hilarious, celeb-filled videos to drive content to its own website. The concept behind Funny Or Die was spawned kind of from Hot Or Not, according to CEO Dick Glover. At the time it was formed, there weren’t all the social media outlets that we have today, and there was no real place on the web to find all the best comedy content. So they set out to build it. The Funny Or Die headquarters is surprisingly small, but within a constrained space, the writing and production team are able to churn out upwards of 20 to 25 videos a month. That’s because the team has kept scrappy and small, with a kind of startup mentality you might not expect from a media company that has celebrities dropping in all the time. “The nice thing about Funny Or Die is that everything is produced in-house, so all of the writers, directors, producers, and editors — they’re all under one roof literally,” Mike Farah, the company’s head of production, told me. So how does Funny Or Die get so many stars to participate? Glover says it’s able to do so by giving them the freedom to create content that they can’t do anywhere else. That sort of creative freedom is appealing to celebs who might want to work on something different than what they usually are known for. “The incentive for them is they can do whatever they want and that’s a powerful incentive,” Glover said. “This is a community where by and large, that’s not the case with them. Yes, they can pick and choose their projects, but once you’re into a project you’re getting notes from six different people and you have demands from other people.” That’s attracting big-name talent to work with Funny Or Die, which in turn is attracting viewers and outside investment. Last year, it got some strategic funding from Turner. Check out the video above, which is the last in our series on the new digital media companies in Los Angeles. And be sure to watch all the others that we’ve published previously to learn more about how a whole new video ecosystem is forming in the city: |
Worth $100B, Facebook Has Recovered $58B In Market Cap Since Last September | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Today Facebook ended normal trading with a market valuation of $100.6 billion. The milestone capped a long return to form for Facebook, after a botched IPO and mobile concerns led investors to unload their shares during its first year as a public entity. Facebook traded as low as $17.55 on September 4, 2012. This makes the achievement of reaching the $100 billion mark today more fun, as it comes almost a year after the company was at its lowest recorded ebb. Facebook has since last fall, more than doubling in value since its 52-week low. Facebook is in fact quite close to setting an all-time high. As on the day of the company’s IPO, “Facebook shares opened at $42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $38.” Today, Facebook closed at $41.34, up 1.95 percent during normal trading. In after-hours trading, the company is up a fraction. However, Facebook traded as high as $41.94, pennies from an all-time high. What is causing Facebook’s long boom? The . The company has proven that it can monetize mobile usage at high levels, driving revenue growth. Facebook has consistently expanded its user base as well, demonstrating functional longevity. It’s a good moment for Facebook. However, the firm is incredibly richly valued, which might make it ripe for a market correction, or investor profit taking. Google Finance its trailing 12-month price-earnings ratio to be 207.87. Yahoo Finance lists a : 187.06. Investors are valuing Facebook as a growth company. Any slip in its next-quarter earnings report — anything that might indicate that Facebook’s revenue growth will slow — and Facebook could find itself trading a lower multiple. Still, today was a good one for Facebook, snagging 2 percent more value in a day of generally negative trading. Momentum alone might carry the company to an all-time high tomorrow. |
Now With 10M Users, Wanelo Adds Search And ‘Stories’ To Its Hot Social Shopping App | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Today , the online platform that lets people discover and share things they “want, need, and love,” issued an update to its that brings two handy new features, search and “stories,” to its mobile shopping experience. In general, Wanelo has emerged as a powerful player in the social shopping space since it launched back in 2010 — I’m told that Wanelo’s user count just passed the 10 million mark, which reflects nearly 70 percent growth in the past five months alone. The app’s core demographic, young fashion-savvy females, is certainly one of the most lucrative target markets out there — which may be why more than 200,000 stores have added their products to the Wanelo platform. So this morning, I swung by Wanelo’s San Francisco headquarters to speak with founder and CEO Deena Varshavskaya about all the recent growth and get a hands-on look at the new mobile features. The search feature is pretty self-explanatory — it lets users look for specific items, such as “black dress” or “pointed-toe heels” — across the shops that they follow and the entire Wanelo platform. The “Stories” feature lets users create select and group together products and tie them all together with a short written explanation. It’s a nice addition, as it will let Wanelo users flex their editorial muscles and highlight certain trends. Wanelo is certainly in a competitive space, as everyone from Pinterest to Polyvore to is working to be the go-to destination for stylish women with disposable income to burn. Varshavskaya says that Wanelo is set apart from the others in part because of the no-nonsense way that it facilitates shopping’s bottom line: actually buying stuff. “All the problems we’re solving are around shopping,” she says. “There are plenty of platforms… where you can see lots of images. But Wanelo is where you shop.” |
Apple’s iPhone Trade-in Program Is Already Being Piloted, Here’s How It Works | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Apple is about to introduce an iPhone trade-in program that will allow users to walk into a Retail store and trade up from an old model to a new one. We’ve heard some interesting details about the way that the program will work, and indeed, is working right now in some pilot Apple Stores. The program, has gotten a bit of press today, with ‘ Eric Slivka reporting that the training for the program is underway and Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac sometime in September. But the trade-in program is actually already being piloted in some Apple stores, we’ve discovered. Those stores aren’t just preparing internally for an eventual program, they’ve been offering trade-ins to customers for several weeks. According to a source, this program was presented to them as something that may not be available at every Retail Store. Some of these pilot stores have been processing ‘multiple’ trade-ins a day at this point. The program works like this. A customer brings a working, non-liquid-damaged iPhone into an Apple Retail Store. It’s then evaluated by an employee with the Apple’s EasyPay terminals, which are essentially iPod touches with credit card readers attached. The customer then answers a series of questions about the condition of the device in order to determine a value. This procedure is similar to the way that Apple handles its now, but that is by mail only, covers a wide variety of products and is not offered in-store. If a customer wishes to trade in an old broken device for which there is no monetary value, they can do so as a simple recycle. Values can range depending on a variety of factors, including device color, physical damage and liquid damage. Though the prices could very well be tweaked before the program goes wide, the range is said to be around $120-200 for 16GB iPhone 4 and 4S models. A 16GB iPhone 5 in good condition could go for around $250, less than is being offered by some of the other trade-in sites like , or . Still the in-store convenience of the program could definitely offer the advantage here. Being able to walk in and get the deal done instead of mailing it off and waiting is powerful. Once the paperwork is done, the value is added to a gift card. The balance is applied to a new device, and the customer keeps the gift card if there’s money left over. The store keeps the old phone. The trade-in program is only applicable if you’re in the store to get a new phone, so you can’t just trade it for a gift card. That value can be used in credit for a new device but only if the customer has an upgrade credit available. So there is a carrier check involved. If a user does not have an upgrade credit, they could presumably pay the early termination fee of their carrier and use the credit towards a new device on another carrier. Currently, the devices are dropped into a bag and presumably shipped off elsewhere, , for refurbishment and resale. They are not resold at the store where the trade-ins are being offered. So far, customers have been pretty excited that this option is now available at Apple Retail stores. Obviously, this is how the pilot program is working, there could be some details that change between now and when it’s set to go live. We’ll let you know if anything material changes. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the new program, but have not heard back. |
Party With TechCrunch At Disrupt SF | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | There ain’t no party like a TechCrunch party. And with that bit of trivia, I’m excited to announce that this year, tickets to after parties will be available to the general public. These parties are mostly reserved for Disrupt attendees. Buy a Disrupt general admission ticket and you’re granted access to the three day conference and all the parties listed below. But we’re trying something new for Disrupt SF 2013 and are making a very limited number of tickets available for purchase. There are three parties. Tickets are available for each and include drinks. And of course tickets are available for . For many Disrupt attendees, the parties are the most exciting part of the conference. It’s where founders, VCs, and developers let loose. While the conference itself is massive and pitches are flying from every which way, these parties are often the best place to actually do a little schmoozing. Sure, the parties are loud. And boozy. And that’s why they’re great. @ hosted by New Relic
@ hosted by SAP
@ hosted by Auction.com |
Anonymous Document Sharing Site Pastebin Surpasses 1 Million Members, Keeps Growing | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | officially announced that they’ve surpassed 1 million registered members since the introduction of the login service two and a half years ago. The service allowed users to log in using social media tools and control the pastes they uploaded to the site. Members can also edit and delete pieces of information they post to the site. Users can still paste items anonymously. Like many popular “paste” sites, started out as a repository for code, snippets of text, and chat logs. Now, however, it has become a sort of clearinghouse for Anonymous, the group, and other groups intent on maintaining anonymity. “About a year ago we added the option to create new Pastebin accounts via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google which greatly increased the number of daily signups. Month over month we are seeing more traffic records, and we are currently serving about 17 million visitors per month,” said Jeroen Vader, owner of the site. The site hosts 36 million active pastes and adds about 40,000 every day. “We have had some issues/headaches storing all this information, and at the same time making sure that the website stays lightning fast for our users,” said Vader. “For our developers it has been a huge learning curve, but we’ve got a pretty solid platform now that allows for a lot of future growth. Also we’ve had to deal a lot with DDOS attacks over the years, but with the help of some of our users, we’ve got a pretty solid system now to fight those kinda attacks.” Vader is also working on what he is calling Pastebin 4.0 which will include a comment system, friends lists, a favoriting system, and a new layout. “That and some other ‘still secret’ features,” he said. “Those will be revealed once the new site is online.” In the post-Snowden era, Vader is seeing more and more activity on the site. “Every time something really controversial gets posted on Pastebin, it often results in a lot of media attention, which can result in a temporary boost in traffic. In the case of the Edward Snowden related items there were also a few days where traffic was noticeably higher than normal,” he said. |
Google Palestine Hacked And Defaced Through A Domain Registry Attack | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Google’s primary search domain for Palestine has seemingly been hacked, with the standard Google search interface for the region being replaced by a political message from its hackers. From the information available so far, it doesn’t appear that Google’s own servers were hacked — instead, it seems that Google’s Palestinian domain was hijacked and redirected to another server altogether. How that was done, exactly, is unclear. One current theory is that Google’s top-level domain provider for the region was compromised, allowing hackers to point the domain somewhere else. “uncle google we say hi from palestine” taunts the defaced page, “to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine” Google’s Palestine domain launched back in 2009, and drew in its fair share of controversy when the header of the page was changed from “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” earlier this year. (Note that we’re intentionally omitting any links to the hacked site in case the defaced site contains any malware. The page attempts to run at least one bit of embedded media. Visiting the defaced site is not recommended.) |
Owlet, A Bootie That Tells You How Your Baby Is Breathing, Hits The Crowdfunding Trail | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | The lives of new parents are fraught with stress but now the weight of knowing whether or not your wee one is breathing can be lifted. Owlet is a small bootie that the baby wears while sleeping. It signals heartrate and respiration and you can check in on the little shaver via a mobile device. As a parent of three, I remember a few rough moments spent peeking in on the quiet little ones out of fear or curiosity. The company is of $159 to get an early-bird unit (the price will go up to $199 once they sell out). They are looking for funding of $100,000. They’ve reached $25,000 so far. The sensor measures heart rate, oxygen levels, breathing, and sends sleep alerts when baby rolls over while asleep. It also takes temperature measurements. It runs on Bluetooth LTE so you can check on your baby when it’s nearby using your smartphone or remotely via an Internet-connected computer. There are definitely similar tools that you can use but none fit so snugly in a wearable device. While baby bed sensors are nothing new, the fact that this gives a full complement of important information that can help parents and pediatricians both is pretty important. You can and they plan on shipping in November. |
Facebook Announces Shared Photo Albums To Boost Group Engagement | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Facebook is rolling out shared photo albums, as . Users can share access to an album with up to 50 contributors, who can each add up to 200 photos. For those of you who aren’t math whizzes, that means shared albums can be as large as 10,000 photos. Previously, albums were limited to 1,000 total photos and users could only add pictures to their own albums. This new feature should be good for user engagement in groups of friends and with larger albums. Facebook has done a good job of focusing its browser-based photo section around albums and larger batches of photos, while leaving (Facebook-owned) Instagram to dominate single photos. Users can beautify and share quick snaps in time with their friends via Instagram, but for larger life events (weddings, graduations, even just cool vacations), they can share much larger batches of photos on Facebook. This is a bit of a blow to apps like and , which are also trying to crack group photo albums. But many have tried and before in this space, so it’s far from a foregone conclusion that Facebook’s feature will crush these smaller competitors. The feature is also similar to , in which users can share all of their photos and videos in real time with the guests of an associated event. Facebook users can share these new group albums with the public, friends of the contributors, or just contributors to the album. The prototype for shared picture albums was reportedly built by a dozen engineers at one of Facebook’s company-wide hackathons. Facebook has begun rolling out the feature to a small number of users today. It will be available at first only as a desktop option, and will expand to all English users first before the social network rolls it out internationally. |
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Android Developers Can Now Use Google’s Play Store To Distribute Their Free Apps In Iran | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | Google today that Android developers can now make their free apps , one of the where app downloads through Google’s store were completely unavailable until now. Paid apps and apps that use in-app billing, Google notes, will still remain unavailable in Iran for the time being. For developers, this move opens up an interesting new market, though given Iran’s tendency to shut down access to Google’s services, it remains to be seen how long these apps will remain available. Google and Iran, after all, have a pretty tumultuous relationship. Just this June, Google announced that it had that, ahead of Iran’s last election, targeted Iranian citizens through phishing emails. YouTube also remains and the country has regularly blocked access to other Google services, including Search and Gmail (though Iranians, it seems, can get around most of these filters ). When those services are available in Iran, however, they do tend to be very popular. In 2012 when access to Gmail was cut off, Iranian legislator Hossein Garousi “threatened to summon Telecommunications Minister Reza Taqipour to parliament for questioning if it was not unblocked,” according to . |
Sequoia- And Khosla-Backed Cloud Phone Company RingCentral Files For $100M IPO | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | , a company offering cloud-based phone and communication systems, has for an initial public offering of up to $100 million. Incorporated back in 1999, San Mateo, Calif.-based RingCentral says it saw revenue of $50.2 million in 2010, $78.9 million in 2011, and $114.5 million in 2012. However, it’s also experiencing growing losses, with net losses of $7.3 million, $13.9 million, and $35.4 million respectively. Among the competitive advantages that RingCentral lists in the filing are its core technology, its mobile-centric approach, and its rapid release cycle. Risk factors, meanwhile, include the aforementioned losses, the reliance on third parties for network connectivity and data centers, and threats to the company’s security or IP. RingCentral raised about $44 million in equity funding. CEO and founder Vladimir Shmumis remains the largest shareholder, with 19.6 percent of the company’s stock, followed by investors Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures, which have 17.2 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively. In the filing overview, the company writes: We believe that there is a significant opportunity to leverage the benefits of cloud computing to provide next-generation, cloud-based business communications solutions that address the new realities of workforce mobility, multi-device environments and multi-channel communications, thereby enabling people to communicate the way they do business. |
Microsoft’s New Scroogled Ad Sets Fresh Low For Bad Writing, Boring Argument | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | The annals of bad Microsoft advertising have a new member today — a short clip that attempts to paint Google as evil because its services contain advertising. Contrast this with , which does not. So, use Bing in your classroom! Because Google is bad! Credit score! The ad is stilted, poorly written, and mostly annoying. The Scroogled campaign continues, . Why, you might ask? Most the , who previously worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So why would he be in favor of sustaining the Scroogled efforts? Because it’s how he communicates with the competition during political campaigns, and because it worked so well last time (Hillary Clinton, is, of course, our current president). And so, as long as Penn is at Microsoft, I think that . Oh well. Instead of competing on real features or the quality of search results, Microsoft is touting the removal of mostly innocuous ads from its search results. This is odd, as Bing’s educational program has a cool component worth advertising: Students can earn Surface tablets for their schools if they participate. That’s neat. Trying to mock Google for having small advertising on its search product is just banal. Anyway, watch the thing, laugh, and get on with your day:
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Qualcomm Ventures Managing Director Quinn Li Is Excited About Wearables | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | is the managing director at Qualcomm Ventures, one of the top wireless investment firms in the world since 2000, with portfolio companies including PayPal, Waze, and Fitbit. He also happens to be a resident of San Diego, where Qualcomm was founded and the site of our latest , where he was kind enough to grace us with a fireside chat on stage. As far as his city, Li finds many of the San Diego-based companies exciting, even naming EcoATM as a team of unique and smart founders with a special idea for trading in old phones at kiosks. But more than any other company, Li mentioned Fitbit a number of times. Qualcomm has made , the wearable quantified self device that tracks your fitness. But Li sees a greater opportunity in this space than the devices themselves: data. In the interview, Li remarks that there is a huge convergence right now in the data space around the devices we use and the way we crowdsource. Of course, smartphones are already collecting large amounts of data that, when stitched together, can paint a comprehensive picture around certain verticals. Qualcomm Ventures and Li have some experience in this space considering the map crowdsourcing startup Waze, which was just purchased by Google for around $1.3 billion, was one of the QV portfolio companies. Li sees wearable devices as another extension of this kind of data crowdsourcing, as long as the folks creating these devices can appeal to the mainstream. |
Rumors Of Apple’s New A7 Chip Could Indicate That CPU Innovation Is Flagging | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | With every new iPhone, most of the discussion centers around its look and not what comes inside. But, according to , Apple has designed a new dual-core A7 system on a chip for the . If rumors are true, the A7 could supposedly be 31 percent faster, representing a serious slowdown in spec improvement. It could indicate that the smartphone market may have matured and that existing smartphone owners won’t feel the urge to upgrade to a new model anymore. When it comes to smartphone chips, Apple is a lone ranger. It has been designing its own ARM-based chips for a couple of years. It outsources production to Samsung and other manufacturers. But the important part is that only Apple devices use Apple chips. So far, this strategy has proven to be successful. The iPhone 4S was twice as powerful as the iPhone 4, and had nine times the graphics processing capabilities. The iPhone 5 was once again twice as fast as the iPhone 4S, with twice the graphics performance. That’s why this year’s 31 percent performance boost is lackluster, it it turns out to be true. If the new iPhone is indeed called the iPhone 5S, the ‘S’ will probably not stand for ‘speed’. A 31% CPU speed increase sounds like a huge failure to me, specially considering previous generations showed ~100% improvements. — Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) On paper, Android phones are more powerful. Right now, the Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 both come with at least 4 cores and more . But Apple doesn’t want to compete in the . The main advantage is that Apple can the A7 for its own set of APIs, making it feel faster than it actually is. Even though Snapdragons have more GHz, iPhone apps are still fast because Apple takes advantage of its chip architecture like no one else. That’s why the gap isn’t as wide as expected. Moreover, Apple’s custom design strategy improves battery performance. Yet, why were the A6 and the A5 faster than their predecessors? Because smartphones were not as fast as Apple wanted them to be. If you want to use Siri or play nice games, you need the iPhone 4S. If you want to use the upcoming AirDrop feature, you need the iPhone 5. Today’s rumors could tell another story. Apple could think that the iPhone 5 can run everything perfectly fine, and there is no need to put more raw power. In other words, smartphones could have matured. As smartphones get more widespread, Apple needs to reduce both component costs and R&D costs. The company can’t invest as much money in developing its new chips if smartphones become more and more . The company wants to avoid hurting its margin more than it needs. The A7 needs to be future-proof. While the will not receive the A7 at first, entry-level iPhones will eventually get those rumored chips. It needs to be powerful enough and cheap enough so that Apple doesn’t have to develop yet another chip next year for its cheap iPhones. If Apple judges that current chips are becoming fast enough to power iOS for years, iPhone users shouldn’t expect speed increases. Instead, the company will bet on new features and software updates. With market maturation coming soon, Apple faces a difficult challenge as well. How do you convince your customers to upgrade their phones? The same thing happened for the iPod — they got lighter and lighter. In 2001, the original 5GB iPod was 6.5 ounces (184 grams). In 2004, the iPod mini was 3.6 ounces (102 grams). In 2005, the iPod nano was only 1.5 oz (42 grams). At this point, if you already had an iPod and used it as a portable music player, there was no real incentive to upgrade to a new one, except more gigabytes. The same thing is true for your microwave — you only buy a new one if your old one breaks. Yet, there is one last thing that can be improved again and again on the iPhone — the camera. Everybody uses their phone as their primary camera. It’s the camera that you always have in your pocket. While it has greatly improved over the years, there’s still room for improvement — especially now that HiDPI displays are getting more popular. This single spec upgrade will make people upgrade. That’s why the most interesting news of the day isn’t the A7 rumors, but the new for video capturing rumors. In addition to helping for image stabilization, it could allow you to take 120 fps videos. If the iPhone 5S can shoot smooth slow-motion videos, it could be the feature that stands out and steals the show at Apple’s event. In fact, the ‘S’ could stand for ‘slow motion’. |
Google Now Update Adds More Entertainment And Travel Features To The Android Personal Assistant App | Mahesh Sharma | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Google has a half-dozen new travel and entertainment features to its personalized search service . With the additions, the company is aiming to capture the attention of the real-world consumer, such as a sports fan watching an NCAA football game, or the recently landed tourist trying to find their rental car. , Google is drawing on a lot of that indicates people are increasingly consuming entertainment — TV or otherwise — while tapping away on mobile devices to get more information and connect with other viewers. The new features include: Google Now pulls information from all of your Google services in a bid to provide relevant information depending on your time and location. So for travelers, the car rentals card, which complements the boarding pass and hotel reservation cards, directs them to the rental centre; the concert ticket card will bring up the ticket once the user arrives at the venue; and the commute-sharing card informs users’ loved ones that they have just left work and are heading home. However, Google’s America-specific focus has irked users around the world. On the company’s blog post announcing the features, international users have complained about the lack of local support from Google. “Google now is very US centric. I wish Google concentrated more on providing local content on a global basis,” wrote Google+ user Kumarjit Sen. The Google Now update is for Android 4.1+. There is no word on whether the , which has been largely neglected, will get the new features anytime soon. |
Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Joins Board Of UCWeb As It Builds A Mobile Ecosystem In India | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | founder and former CEO Jack Ma has joined ‘s board of directors as the company focuses on building mobile ecosystems in India and other emerging markets. UC Browser recently surpassed Opera as the top mobile browser in India, but only by a thin margin, and UCWeb has said it plans to build relationships in different verticals in order to increase its foothold. Guangzhou-based UCWeb, which claims 400 million users worldwide, grabbed the top spot among mobile browsers in India in July, according to . UC Browser now holds a 29.9% market share, compared to Opera’s 28.6%. UC Browser’s worldwide growth has been including HTC, Samsung, Nokia, LG, Lenovo and carriers such as Vodafone, China Mobile and China Telecom. But its lead in India is still far from secure as Opera looks to take back market share by striking agreements with Indian manufacturers. In May, for example, Opera to pre-load Android devices with Opera Mini mobile browser, which is popular in India because it compresses Web sites, allowing them to load faster on low-speed networks and use less data. UCWeb named India as its second headquarter in April. At that time, co-founder and president Xiaopeng He said the company will seek partnerships across domains and verticals in order to build a thriving ecosystem in the Indian market, where UC Browser first launched in 2011. Having Ma on its board will be helpful as UCWeb works on entering different sectors. Ma resigned as CEO of Alibaba in May, but still serves as executive chairman of Alibaba Group, as well as chairman of the . In turn, Ma’s presence on UCWeb’s board reinforces its close relationship with the company and makes it less likely that UCWeb will strike strategic partnerships with Alibaba rivals like Baidu, which . UC Browser is with 33.3% of the market, compared to Opera’s 10% share. In 2009, Alibaba made a strategic investment in UCWeb, which is . In a statement, UCWeb chairman and CEO Yu Yongfu said, “We hope that Jack will bring the tremendous experience he has in building Alibaba to our company, and Alibaba’s strength as the dominant e-commerce platform in China will help accelerate UCWeb’s transformation into a one-stop shop of Internet services.” |
Website Editor Jimdo Launches An iOS App So Users Can Build And Edit Sites From Their Phone | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | , a Hamburg-headquartered company offering easy-to-use tools for building websites, already seems pretty mobile friendly. Jimdo-powered sites can also be viewed in mobile-optimized layouts, and earlier this year the company , where businesses create a landing page that highlights their most important information. What’s left? Well, actually creating and editing sites from a mobile device. So today, Jimdo is launching an iOS app enabling those very tasks. This is one of those mobile launches where (unfortunately) I wasn’t able to try the app out ahead of time, but co-founder Christian Springub said the app will allow users to start a website from scratch, add new content, update the content of existing sites, add or delete pages, view how the site will appear in desktop and mobile, and check statistics. I’m guessing it would be pretty easy to overload a smartphone screen with different menus and controls, but Springub said team members put a lot of effort into simplifying the interface. He added that they basically scrapped the initial version of the app, because it was guilty of “web thinking,” whereas the version launching today comes from a “better understanding of mobile” and how to use the touch interface. [vimeo 71247568 w=500 h=281] But is this something people actually need? I mean, I can see making minor tweaks from a phone, but why would you need to create a website while you’re on-the-go? Springub said even without the app, Jimdo is seeing users log in from their tablets, and he noted that they might create the broad strokes of a website from a phone or tablet and then refine it once they’re back at their desk. Jimdo isn’t the only company in this market that thinks mobile editing is important. . (At the time, Weebly also said it has been used to create 15 million websites, while Jimdo says 8 million sites have been built on its platform.) You can . Oh, and if you’re an Android user, Springub said Jimdo will start working on an equivalent app soon. |
Bradley Manning’s Tough Sentence Shows White House’s Uncompromising War On Data Leakers | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Wikileaks source Private Bradley Manning was slapped with a 35-year prison sentence today — the largest sentence ever of its kind. “It’s further indication that the Executive Branch is very serious about discouraging classified documents,” Yale Law School professor Eugene Fidell tells me. “It struck me that it was a little on the high side, but within the range of reasonableness.” Manning is responsible for arguably the largest data leak in U.S. history: 250,000 sensitive diplomatic cables to the rogue journalism outfit, Wikileaks. The cables preceded mass upheaval in the Middle East and are a factor in the 2009 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. As a result, his punishment has . In 1985, for instance, Naval Intelligence Officer Samuel Morison was sentenced to two years for leaking satellite surveillance photographs (President Clinton eventually pardoned him). While Obama is a , he has been aggressively anti-leak. In a cordial, but testy with Bradley Manning supporter Logan Price at an expensive fundraising breakfast in San Francisco in April, Obama had this to say: : Look, there are better ways and more appropriate ways to bring this up than interrupting and causing a scene… : I understand. That’s why I am asking you now. I wasn’t singing or chanting and I want to know. I think he is the most important whistleblower of my generation. Why is he being prosecuted? : Well, what he did was irresponsible and risked the lives of service members abroad. He did a lot of damage. So people can have philosophical views on… : But I haven’t seen any evidence of that, and how can you say that the leaks did more harm than good? What about their effect on the democratic revolutions in the Arab world? And isn’t this going to help the war on terror? : No, no, no, but look, I can’t conduct diplomacy on an open source [basis]. That’s not how the world works. And if you’re in the military… I have to abide by certain rules of classified information. If I were to release material I weren’t allowed to, I’d be breaking the law. We’re a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. The Secret Service was beginning to tug on Price’s arm, but Obama waved them off. “No he’s being fine,” he told his detail, “He is being courteous and asking questions.” : But didn’t he have a responsibility to expose… : He broke the law! : Well, you can make the law harder to break, but what he did was tell us the truth. : What he did was he dumped… : But Nixon tried to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for the same thing and he is a [hero]. : No it isn’t the same thing.What Ellsberg released wasn’t classified in the same way. Despite Manning’s tough sentence and the unlikely event of a presidential pardon, Wikileaks calls the sentence a “strategic victory.” [tweet https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/370201848415678464] And in a follow-up statement, part-time James Bond villain lookalike Julian Assange : “This hard-won minimum term represents a significant tactical victory for Bradley Manning’s defense, campaign team and supporters.” Fidell, however, doesn’t hold the same optimism. “I don’t know who it’s a victory for,” he says. “Private Manning is going to jail for a long time.” |
HP CEO Pitches Patience And Progress To Investors, Who Send Her Company’s Stock Down 7% After-Hours | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Today during its earnings call, a sober HP discussed recent progress in executing its five-year turnaround plan that remains in its early stages. HP had a that merely managed to meet expectations. The company failed to demonstrate that its recovery efforts are proceeding more quickly than . It’s a fix and rebuild year, the company stated, with some business units that are doing well, some that are essentially flat, and others that “haven’t yet turned the corner.” There are a number of fronts HP is working on, including stemming revenue declines, protecting margins, and improving its balance sheet. And there is a balance between the goals: HP is exceptionally cost focused at the moment, making it hard to balance margin performance with revenue growth. The two can often be in contention. So, in a bid to avoid non-market margin pressure that sharper revenue growth expectations might demand, the company is instead taking a more measured pace. At once it is striving to clean up its bank statement — having net debt at all is something most other tech giants do not have — and reform its company for the next generations of technology hardware, software and services. With over 300,000 employees, often cribbed from acquisitions that CEO Meg Whitman noted were not always completely integrated, it’s a complex challenge. There are two anecdotes that came up during the call that are indicative of HP’s current market position: It’s PC OEM business, and its storage business. In its “Personal Systems” division, HP noted that shipments declined an aggregate 8 percent, year over year. Driving that unit decline, consumer PC revenue fell 22 percent, while commercial PC sales fell a more modest 3 percent. All told, the PC business for HP generated only 9 percent of its profit, despite being its single-largest business unit. Here we see a business that generates more than $25 billion in yearly revenue for HP stuck between market trends, a difficult economy, and regional weakness, according to the company. Much of HP is in a similar spot. The company, however, isn’t all obsolescence. During the question-and-answer segment of the call, HP detailed how it sees itself driving revenue growth in the future. Currently, its “converged storage” business is growing, while its traditional storage sales are not. Eventually, the converged storage product becomes bigger than the traditional storage product, and the “company begins to grow.” Whitman went on to state, again, that HP must “keep an eye on costs.” This is a decent perspective for HP, a company that has huge revenue lines that are either in slow decline, or under intense market pressure. Given the scale of the firm – more than $100 billion in yearly revenue – that it is under that sort of duress might seem odd, but it’s the given explanation. As Jon Fort of CNBC , “$HPQ margins getting squeezed in PCs, servers, & revenue short in enterprise. Shouldn’t be happening to a scale player this way.” HP has a long way to go yet. To get there, the company explained the instructions it gives to its newly shaken up management structure: Set fair goals, deliver, keep an eye on the future, do “perfect” market segmentation and product pairing to that striation and, finally, manage costs. So HP will control costs while old businesses slowly fade, until newer, quicker-growing incomes can take their place, relieving some of its margin pressure. This is something akin to a long tightrope walk on a windy day while younger, more nimble competitors lob rocks at you. Still, Whitman was a pillar of confidence on the call, despite being slightly obfuscatory via an overuse of jargon. Investing in HP is now essentially a bet that Whitman’s war plan is better than the market pressures the company faces. Investors dinged the firm to the tune of 7 percent of its market cap in after-hours trading. |
Google’s Street View Ups Its Panda Count, Adds 6 New Zoos | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | For quite a while now, Google has featured Street View imagery from zoos around the world. Today, the company decided to highlight some of these image collections on its site and also added six new zoos to its lineup. The new zoos that are now featured on Street View are the , , , in Chile, in Brazil and the and in Germany. These join a number of other zoos the company recently added to Street View, including Sydney’s (which was the first location in Australia to be ), as well as zoos in Chicago, San Diego, Toronto, Singapore and Barcelona. [googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps?cbp=13,18.71,,1,10.09&layer=c&panoid=R13v2vjm3CgAAAQIt72j_g&cbll=30.740897,104.139033&dg=opt&ie=UTF8&t=m&source=embed&ll=30.687674,104.138718&spn=0.185414,0.439453&z=11&output=svembed&w=640&h=314] Today’s relatively small update comes after a flurry of activity earlier this year. In June, for example, Google to its collection, ranking from sports stadiums and Chilean ski slopes to the canals of Copenhagen (and a few zoos, too). Google’s also to bring new imagery to the service, and its back pack-like has been everywhere from the to the in recent months. |
Court Eventually Stopped NSA From Collecting Millions Of Communications | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Two new fun facts today regarding America’s surveillance state: the National Security Agency was collecting hundreds of millions of communications up until 2011, but a military court stopped them. court order, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ruled that a potentially defunct mass email snooping program violated the 4th Amendment. “The court is unable to find that NSA’s targeting and minimization procedures, as the government proposes to implement them in connection with MCTs [Multi-Communication Transactions], are consistent with the 4th amendment.” In the course of sweeping up communications directly from fiber-optic cables, including screenshots of emails, the government can inadvertently view the communications of Americans who are not suspected of terrorism. These “multi-communication transactions” disturbed the court enough to supposedly shut down a program that was reading the content of emails, not just the records (so-called “metadata”). Judge John D. Bates found that the government “advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe.” In other words, the NSA was either ignorantly or willfully misleading the court charged with limiting its power. While this is evidence that FISC does in fact have some meaningful oversight, it apparently can take a while for the court to exercise its power. It’s actually good news that the government can exercise restraint over spy agencies, but it’s disturbing how long it takes. |
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: SHIELD Me From These Idiots, I Want A Wacom And Google’s Now Octopus | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Midweek, we’re here for you! Our hump day tradition of the continues into its third episode with your host Chris Velazco, myself and special guest Romain Dillet delivering some worldly charm. This week, we’ve got some new Android-powered hardware to discuss, including the and combo Android tablet/PC or Mac drawing tablet. Both niche devices, but good examples of what Android can do when it isn’t just being used for phones or tablets. We also get into Google’s native app strategy, prompted by the update that came out today. Is Google Now the future? Are all apps destined to become features of that on-demand, contextually aware service? Spoiler: We have no idea.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . |
With $1M In New Funding, Betterfly Launches Live Video Platform Tailored To Online Learning | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Chicago-based self-improvement startup has been connecting teachers and students in real life for music lessons, relationship coaching, juggling instruction and just about anything you can imagine. But the startup is finally bringing its model online thanks to a live video platform launch today. Betterfly LIVE connects students and teachers for real-time video chat, with a platform built specifically for coaching and teaching. Co-founder and CTO Kris Petersen and co-founder and CEO Todd Sullivan found in their experience running Betterfly that a lot of their members were already using third-party video tools to connect online, rather than just meeting up on the web. “We want to take our 50,000 instructors on Betterfly and turn them into online teachers, and to help create a platform to do that,” Sullivan said. “So we launched that live video platform in May in beta, and we’ve been training our community on how to use it, on how to get new customers around the world and how to use that platform to best teach. And now that we have our main categories working well over video, now we’re launching to the public.” “The history of bringing these clients together with their students locally was that, really, there had been a turn in the community on its own where the top professionals were actually leveraging online communications independent of what we were offering them,” Petersen added. “So we were tuning into what we were seeing on the site, talking to those professionals and finding out what they were doing to understand how to teach these things over video.” Skype has been used by Betterfly and its instructors before, but there’s good reason to bring native video tech to the platform, both the founders said, and part of that is timing. makes it much easier to accomplish than ever before. In fact, Petersen says that what they’ve built likely wouldn’t have been possible a year ago. It also means fewer moving parts for both instructors and students, who now don’t even have to have Skype installed to connect. For Betterfly, it keeps students on the site, instead of funneling them to other methods where they might be tempted to just go it alone, depriving Betterfly of that key relationship. Betterfly is already offering video communication tailored toward online instruction, and plans to do more, including building in new features and workarounds to get beyond tech limitations like laggy video or less-than-stellar connections. Since it has the experts and the experience to build something designed to make it better for one person to teach something to another, it says this is where it will differentiate its platform. Talks are under way with organizations about broader licensing possibilities for the platform, too. This is essentially a pivot for Betterfly, helped by a new $1 million investment led by , away from its original focus primarily on in-person interactions. Online video instruction is not a new concept, and there are lots of startups focusing on particular niches. Building a platform that suits each will be a big challenge, but could pay off if it becomes the underlying platform for wider adoption of this kind of thing. |
US Director Of National Intelligence Launches Tumblr Site “IC On The Record” To Assuage Surveillance Concerns | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | The U.S. office of National Intelligence today to promote government transparency in the wake of the months-long scandals surrounding the National Security Agency’s surveillance tactics. “In June, President Obama requested that Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper declassify and make public as much information as possible about certain sensitive NSA programs while being mindful of the need to protect sensitive classified intelligence and national security,” an unsigned post on the site read. Launched the website POTUS promised on August 9 as part of an effort to bring greater transparency to intel programs — Ben Rhodes (@rhodes44) IC On The Record featured three new documents today, all FISA Court legal opinion documents, and highlighted seven documents that will be released soon. The site is a good idea on the surface, but such great portions of the declassified documents are (and, I presume, will continue to be) redacted that it won’t end up being a big help. It’s unclear why the department chose Tumblr, the blogging platform popular with a younger demographic that was acquired by Yahoo for $1 billion earlier this summer. The site also now has a Twitter handle. Hopefully the office will be able to string together 140 characters without redacting anything. Ironic that is not following anyone. — Justin Amash (@repjustinamash) The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Update: Michael Birmingham, a spokesman for the ODNI, sent me the following statement: “The purpose of IC on the Record is two-fold: first, to enable the Intelligence Community to respond with factual, on the record information in the context of a rapidly developing situation and second, to put this information more readily into the hands of the American public. As a platform, Tumblr is a an ideal fit to fulfill both of these needs. With regard to balancing transparency and national security, the Administration is undertaking a careful and thorough review of whether and to what extent additional information or documents pertaining to this program may be declassified, consistent with the protection of national security. IC on the Record provides a single online location to access new information as it is made available from across the Intelligence Community.” |
Foursquare Begins Crowdsourcing Local Business Data Collection With Questions That Appear After Check-Ins | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | , a company now focused on transforming itself into a source of local business information and reviews more along the lines of Yelp, is releasing a feature that it hopes will help to extract more value from users’ check-ins. The company says it may now ask users a brief question about the business they’re visiting after their check-in, which they can then respond to directly in the app. In the examples the company provided, those questions might be something like whether the restaurant has outdoor seating, or if it delivers, or whether it takes credit cards or only cash. Foursquare doesn’t want to overwhelm its users with the post-check-in Q&A sessions, however, so not only will just one quick question be asked at a time, users won’t see a question appear after each and every check-in. Instead, the company will just begin asking these sorts of things on occasion, allowing it to take advantage of those who still participate more actively in the social experience within Foursquare by checking in. The data Foursquare collects from its users will be used to enhance businesses’ profiles within the Foursquare application itself. Today, these business listings already include things like the address, location on a map, and phone number, which appear above the user-submitted tips. Currently, Foursquare says it’s asking users to provide details on venues in the food, nightlife, and shops categories. (Shops range from antique stores to gyms to florists, etc.) The Q&A feature was first rolled out to Android users a few days ago, and has just today made its way over to iOS. This seems like a smart way to take advantage of Foursquare’s user base, which is now up to 35 million. However, the company still faces a more serious problem with regards to its plans for these more productive check-ins: people have stopped checking in as often. Though they may still be launching and using Foursquare as a way to look for local business info, check-in growth is flat. This March, for example, when Foursquare was close to raising its Series D, that it was seeing around 5 million check-ins per day from its then 30 million users. Unfortunately, that’s the same number it had reported . For many, the novelty of the check-in has worn off, as have the “mayor wars” and the other gamification elements in the app, like the point system and badges. Foursquare has been trying to combat that problem by offering users check-ins that provide more value, such as when it with the added ability to socially share the check-in messages that tell you how often you’ve visited a place, or how long it’s been since your last visit, among other things. It also launched branded experiments, such as the which lets users visualize their check-in history in new ways — another not-too-subtle nudge to keep users checking in. And more recently, at live music events for a chance to earn a three-month Deezer paid subscription. A move like that could help users redevelop their checkin “habit,” even if the music venues aren’t the kinds of local businesses Foursquare really needs more data on. 2013 is something of a year of change and experimentation for the company. Foursquare’s , estimated to now be on a run rate of between $15 million and $20 million for the year. It has been trying out a number of revenue-generation tactics, including the above-mentioned branded sponsorships and promotions, and has to move into check-in retargeting and post-checkin ads. The company has some 1.4 million local merchants on the platform, which it hopes to monetize by charging for ad products on a cost-per-action basis (e.g. advertisers pay when users show up to take advantage of the lunch special). The move to flesh out Foursquare’s merchant profile data via crowdsourced Q&As comes shortly after to maintain its position as a top app in the local reviews space: it finally launched a way for users to write reviews from mobile. The change hinted that Yelp is feeling the competition from others in the space, including Foursquare, Google, Square, Groupon , which are all focused on collecting data from users’ visiting local businesses. The updated Foursquare apps are out now on both Android and iOS. |
Amid Executive Changes, HP Posts Declining Q3 Revenue Of $27.2B As Its PC Division Weakens | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Today HP announced its , including revenue of $27.2 billion, down 8 percent year over year. The company earned $0.86 per share on a non-GAAP basis. The street had expected revenue of $27.3 billion, and earnings per share of $0.86 on a non-GAAP basis. Today a number of that were not detailed in HP’s earnings release, including the move of Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish and Enterprise Group Executive Vice President Dave Donatelli to new roles. HP’s personal computing division posted revenue of $7.7 billion, down 11 percent year over year. The larger personal computing market — measured as laptop and desktop shipments, and not tablets and smartphones — is in sharp decline, with shipments falling 11 percent in the second quarter, following a in the first quarter, both measured on a year-over-year basis. In after-hours trading, following its slight earnings miss, HP is down sharply, losing around 2 percent in regular trading. HP’s top line is in slow decline. Though its revenue sources are decently varied — services, printing, and its personal computing OEM business — the firm as a whole has seen sequentially declining revenue in every quarter for more than a year. In 2011, HP’s revenues totaled $127 billion. In 2012, full year revenue was $120 billion. Analysts around $111 billion in the current calendar year, and $107 billion in 2014 top line. HP, as a noted, has more than three hundred thousand employees, providing it with ample room to cut costs. By doing so it can sustain profitability at levels previously attained with higher revenue and not lower expenses. However, that dance becomes harder in time. What HP needs to prove is that it can grow its non-PC and printing businesses to more than staunch declines in those two industries, but also to shift the company’s aggregate momentum away from measured decline. The printing group at HP posts a year over year loss in revenue of 4 percent. That, combined with the 11 percent slip in PC division revenue and the magnitude of the task ahead of HP, becomes plain.
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Tech Gets Its Own “Modest Proposal” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | In Jonathan Swift’s he postulates that one solution to the problem of poverty in Ireland is that the poor sell their offspring to rich people as food. In Patrick McConlogue’s “ ,” he makes a similar logical leap, that fixing the “lost pieces” of humanity can happen with a couple of books of JavaScript How-Tos and an old laptop. Except that McConlogue’s assertion that he can save at least one homeless person from this plight by teaching him how to code (he swears) . To make a TL:DR story short: The problem with this is pure Kantian ethics: “Act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means.” While the intentions are obviously a lot more benevolent, McConlogue’s bet comes off as tone-deaf, like the time Paris Hilton’s boyfriend paid a . You’re supposed to treat other humans like subjects, , remember? While he asserts that the title isn’t implying that some people are “justly” homeless, McConlogue, whose is a photo of him sailing, is demonstrating a profound cluelessness about poverty and the disenfranchised. In the most infinitesimally improbable chance that “The Journeyman Hacker” chooses the coding above the money and accepts the laptop, he is putting himself at risk of theft every night. Then there’s the issue of mental illness and the myriad factors beyond self-determination that would in the first place. Ever hear of Ronald Reagan? “We (society) make things complicated when this is simple,” McConlogue writes in an email to me. “I can walk by him tomorrow and ignore him, or I can offer the only things I have, the ability to write software and a small amount of cash. I choose to offer, maybe its wrong, maybe it its right but some things are matters of the heart.” Well here’s a solution: If you want to bypass the traditional, and less morally suspect, and “take action,” why not offer both the books and the cash? “Leo,” McConlogue’s homeless friend has, in the most “infinitesimally improbable” chance, of coding books and a laptop versus money. And McConlogue tells me that he’s actually bought “A Modest Proposal” to read as he works with Leo. Honestly, there might be something to this on an individual level — we’ll keep you posted. And in the meantime, in the spirit of McConlogue buying the book, I’ve made a donation representing to the in San Francisco. |
null | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 8 | 26 | null |
Okkervil River Debuts 8-Bit Point-And-Click Game Created By Lead Singer Will Sheff Ahead Of Album Release | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | Okkervil River’s Will Sheff grew up playing games like Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest, and as part of the release of his band’s new album “The Silver Gymnasium,” he’s teamed up with Eyes And Ears’ Benjamin Miles to . The game features basic but beautiful 8-bit graphics, a chiptunes soundtrack composed by Miles based on music from the album, and can be played in any desktop browser. It’s an episodic adventure, with the first episode out today and new ones planned for every two weeks hence. After playing through the first episode, I got on the phone with Sheff to discuss how he came up with the idea of creating a game tied to the album, and what the process was like (full audio interview embedded below). “I always wanted to do a video game, I’m a big fan of games and grew up playing them,” he explained. “I still enjoy playing the, and I really enjoy the ability they have to sort of play with people’s imaginations and ignite people’s imaginations and to kind of put people in a dreamlike mindspace. I never knew how to actually be able to do one […] but with this particular record since it’s very much focused on nostalgia from my childhood in the 80s and has a sort of storybook quality to it, it felt like the perfect time to try to do a game.” Sheff said he then reached out to Eyes And Ears and connected with Miles, who had himself been thinking about making something similar to the 80s-inspired adventure title Sheff was envisioning. Miles had been considering taking a break from his day job to build that himself, but the timing was perfect and the two made a creative “love connection,” Sheff says, and have been going back and forth with the creative process around the story, graphic designs and game mechanics ever since. The use of retro graphics and sound is a creative catalyst, Sheff says, in addition to being thematically relevant to the album’s 80s childhood inspiration. While the plot of the game isn’t tied directly to the album’s progression or anything quite so conceptual, the use of 8-bit graphics and chiptunes itself helps engender a strong creative bond between the game and the record. “Miles would shoot me drawings and characters and the locations and we would kind of spend a long time talking about exactly what level of detail was going to be in there,” Shef said. “Because it was kind of that, ‘there shouldn’t be too little, and there shouldn’t be too much,’ and [we wanted to] find that aesthetic sweet spot.” The choice of what is and isn’t included in the graphic depiction of characters, objects and settings is meant to help evoke a sense of somewhat eerie familiarity with an environment that’s nonetheless novel to a player. Likewise, simple, upbeat “adventure” type chiptunes compliment more somber, complex ones recorded with different tools to weave nostalgia for old-school games with a more otherworldly feeling. Hyper-realistic recorded sound effects also add an element of intentional discomfort. For a game that’s really relatively quick, a single episode of a longer work, and essentially a promotion for an upcoming album, The Silver Gymnasium has a surprising level of depth, and definitely hits a nostalgic note for kids of the 80s. Sheff also has plenty more in terms of interesting thoughts about video games and how they affect our moods and emotions, so be sure to listen to the interview below in full to glean more. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/106541412″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] |
Foundation: David Copperfield On The Art Of Magic And Eternal Curiosity | Contributor | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | In this episode of my video series, I travel to Las Vegas to interview famed illusionist, magician, and entrepreneur David Copperfield. David explains how he combines magic with storytelling, recounts the moment when Francis Ford Coppola taught him to text, and shares his theory that people who are eternally curious are never truly satisfied. David Copperfield on the intersection of science and magic: Like Einstein said, you have to hold onto your illusions. I think there is something in us, no matter how technically savvy we are, that needs to be transported. We needs to believe that there is more to life than we know about.” |
Facebook Aims To Be A News Source By Now Letting Everyone Embed Public Posts | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | With hashtags, trending topics, verified profiles, and now the ability for on external websites, Facebook is making a big push to become a primary source of real-time news, both for journalists and readers. It opened post embeds to a few partners . Now anyone can grab embed codes from public posts, and Facebook’s added in-line video playback, and better mobile display. Facebook is chasing Twitter, which has positioned itself a critical host of candid first-person news accounts as well as breaking dispatches from journalists and their outlets. Embeds, which Twitter launched back in 2010, have helped it gain mainstream relevance by spreading its wings across the web. Embeds generate product awareness, referral traffic, and eventually ad views. Facebook has essentially copied Twitter’s playbook, adding asymmetrical following (to contrast two-way friend) in late 2011, and then hashtags, trending topics, verified profiles, and embeds over the last few months — all which Twitter already offered. Facebook is even toying with a way to like Twitter while keeping the rest of the feed sorted by relevancy. These product choices have all proven successful for Twitter, so while Facebook might take some flack for stealing, they’ll probably help it too. Though Facebook’s roots are in private sharing, its goal is to connect people, and big real-time news moments bring the world together. Facebook hopes that more publishing tools for newsmakers and discovery tools for readers will make it a bigger part of the public web, rather than just a walled garden. |
Meet The Original Hyperloop… For Rocks | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ci_Ta_Ul-Y] The Hyperloop isn’t a new idea. In fact, the concept was so compelling that an engineer named built one to carry phosphate ore back and forth through a mine. Because the entire system needed to survive in a dank, dirty environment and have as few moving parts as possible, a Hyperloop-like maglev system made perfect sense. He spent four years – from 1996 to 2000 – building a demo unit that could move 3 million tons of ore per year at a phosphate mine. The resulting system ( ) is a cross between Mad Max and Epcot Center. Fairfox offered a bit of insight on his project to go along with his thorough video walkthrough recorded in the pre-YouTube days. It’s a fascinating look at the future of travel – and the potential of maglev-style systems. In short, this proves that Hyperloop-like systems work, are fairly maintenance free, and can be used to haul tons of freight. It also proves that ideas like the Hyperloop can work – for a price. Fairfax would even consider building a real Hyperloop with the right amount of investment. Stephen Fairfax: The ore car demonstration was an outgrowth of , a magnetically levitated train concept. I knew the Magplane principles, and criticized the idea that people would get on a vehicle flying at 700 MPH just a few inches from a track. I said they should start with cargo that doesn’t need lights, bathrooms, seat belts, fresh air, and similar amenities. Once the bugs were worked out, move on to passenger service if it made sense. They called my bluff when they got a contract for the ore car demo. None of the Magplane people had much experience building actual hardware. My specialty is doing the work that turns cool concepts, like a fusion reactor or an ore transport, into a working system. So I took the job, hired 6 engineers, and spent 1996 to 2000 working on the ore car demo. I designed the motors to survive in a harsh mining environment. The car was as simple as possible. Since ore isn’t in a hurry, the design optimized at 40 MPH rather than 700 MPH. We didn’t need the expense or complexity of magnetic levitation, and found some very rugged wheels made for mining applications. They worked great. The basic goal of the project was to develop a demonstration system. The demonstration was to show all the relevant technical features and performance of a system that would move 3 million tons of ore per year within a large phosphate mine. If successful, the next phase would be construction of a 30+ mile pipeline from the mine to the port of Tampa. Like Hyperloop, there was talk of using interstate highway right of way. I always thought it would be cheaper and faster to buy private easements, but we never got that far in any case. SF: The world uses a lot of phosphoric acid and phosphate fertilizer. Massive quantities of phosphate rock are moved every year. The cost of transport is a significant fraction of the cost of the final product. The ore car system was intended to dramatically lower the cost of transporting ore to the processing mill. A major part of the challenge is the frequent power outages due to lightning storms. We had to design the ore car system so that it could be restarted after a power failure. SF: Hyperloop correctly notes that a capsule moving in a pipeline can act as a plug, pushing a lot of air ahead of it. They propose an interesting solution with a compressor turbine in the front of the vehicle. I made a virtue of necessity in the ore car. The “kick” motors were spaced every 1000 meters or so, depending on topography. In a power failure, I knew that the cars would stop everywhere but over a kick motor. So we used the plugging of the pipeline to our advantage. After a power failure, we would simply start firing capsules into the pipeline using the linear accelerator at the beginning. The capsules push a load of air in front of them. As the air between the moving capsule and the stationary capsules in the tube compresses, the stationary capsules are accelerated. Once they reach a kick motor, they are accelerated some more. In this way, the system could be restarted after a complete power failure. In a similar vein, if any given kick motor failed, or a motor in the accelerator section, the system would just operate at a slightly reduced speed until repairs are complete. SF: We could meet our 3 megaton/year goal if we could keep the capsules rolling 16 hours a day, 85% of the days. That gave us some margin for failures, power outages, reduced speeds, etc. The project was technically successful, but during the four years of work the market price of phosphate ore declined significantly. There was no desire for major new capital investments. We were never paid for the final few invoices. People who know power electronics will probably criticize my choice of motor drives. I chose cheap, rugged drives. I bought the development unit used using a credit card over the internet – which was unusual in 1997! The drives were rated 100 kW average power but we used them at peak power approaching 1 MW. We designed custom control electronics that changed the rotary induction motor drives into linear synchronous motor drives. SF: If I were to do the project today the control system and motor drives would use different technology, but the basic physics and control laws are the same. It’s actually easier to do this today. My firm has worked on modern motor drives powering loads up to 180 MW, so I agree with Mr. Musk’s conclusion that the size and performance of the drives is not an issue. I would take a hard look at the use of eddy current levitation, which would allow the vehicle to fly about 30 cm (1 foot) above the tube. This would greatly reduce the dimensional tolerances required. That in turn would lower costs and make the system more robust to minor movements. A 1200 km tube is going to move, it is only a question of how far and how often. I would also like to explore the use of conventional gas turbine engines to power to the compressor and other loads. It could use clean fuel like LNG, but I can buy those engines today, with people-rated safety features already demonstrated. They hang beneath airplane wings and in power plants right now. I can trade a lot of fuel for the size, weight, and expense of batteries. I would also want to explore heat balance in the tubes, and there needs to be a lot more thought given to failure modes and effects. That’s not a criticism of the concept, just a statement of work that must be done. There’s lots to talk about. Like Mr. Musk, I have a business to run. Unlike Mr. Musk, I have not amassed a great personal fortune. I’m afraid my involvement in Hyperloop development will be limited unless there are customers who would like to fund a demonstration system. I’d be happy to assist with that venture. |
Google Updates Its Keep Note-Taking App With Reminders, Location-Based Alerts And Google Now Integration | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | When Google launched and the web , it was essentially a basic note-taking application. Today, the company is launching that turns it into a far more useful application. The update, which will start rolling out today, is centered around the new “Remind me” button, which now lets you schedule time-based reminders and location-based alerts that hook into Google Now. When you walk into a grocery store now (and your grocery list is tagged with the store’s location), you will get a Google Now alert to remind you of all the milk and cereal you have to buy. To make this easier, Keep now also auto-completes nearby places. As Google notes, you can obviously snooze any of these reminders and choose a time or place “that’s better for you.” With this update, Google is also bringing a new navigation drawer to the app that lets you quickly switch between different accounts (great if you have a home and work to-do list, for example) and allows you to see all your upcoming reminders in one place. Also new in this update is the ability to quickly add existing photos from your Android phone to Keep. Google Now is quickly evolving to become Google’s main hub for alerts of all kinds and today’s Keep integration is yet another sign that the company continues to push Now’s feature set forward. Field Trip, which , would be another natural candidate for Google Now integration, but for the time being, it’s still a separate product (as many of Google’s Niantic Labs experiments are). |
The College Students Behind Norway’s Hit Fun Run Look To Become More Than A One-Hit Wonder | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | When iOS was a younger platform three or four years ago, every few weeks a small studio out of some tiny corner of the world would emerge with a top-ranking hit. There were games out of tiny towns in Northern Germany like Tiny Wings and then there were titles like Angry Birds, which some companies like Rovio parlayed into businesses that eventually became worth nine or ten figures. These hits out of left field, unfortunately, are becoming rarer and rarer as both app stores to compete in. But they still exist. One from last year was , the work of a handful of college students in Trondheim, a city in central Norway. Produced under the studio name , The platformer title went on to pick up 30 million downloads and 10 million monthly active users. The company’s COO Nicoaj Petersen said he and his co-founders looked back into their childhoods to see what games they enjoyed and what they could rekindle in a synchronous multi-player format. They quietly launched Fun Run as a cartoonish platformer and it didn’t get much attention until a few months in. After they prodded users to compete in contests, the game suddenly shot up to the top of the charts and held onto a top 100 grossing spot in the U.S. for three months. Players were sharing their handles on Twitter, and asking others to join in. Even the most of the company still has a year left at university, they’re looking to parlay their hit game into a proper studio with future titles in the wings. They’re serious about it with scrum meetings early every morning, and sessions every day where they play the game to see how to improve it. By doing that, they’ll follow the well-trodden paths of other studios like Fruit Ninja-maker Halfbrick Studios, which is based out of Australia, and Russia’s Zeptolab, which is behind Cut The Rope. Some companies with early hits have chosen to go heavily down a merchandising path like Rovio, while other developers like Supercell have decided to focus purely on gaming. Some have chosen to take huge rounds of funding like Supercell, while others like Halfbrick have taken a decidedly indie approach without any external financing. Petersen said that all eight of the studio’s employees have pretty much shifted to building the company, and that they’ll be launching another game by year-end. They’re undecided on taking investment. It’s worth noting that Norway has yet to build a strong startup culture, unlike other Scandinavian markets like Sweden and Finland. While both of those countries have fostered companies like Spotify, Rovio and Supercell, Norway hasn’t had a big consumer-facing web or mobile hit startup in the last few years. Perhaps it’s time. |
Maker Studios In Deal To Buy Blip As It Works To Reach More Screens | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | YouTube multichannel network has to acquire long-running video distribution network . While the deal hasn’t closed yet and there are a number of issues to be worked out, it would bring more content under the Maker umbrella and could give the company more technology to distribute outside of the YouTube platform. We’ve heard that the deal largely will be a stock transaction, with Maker retaining staff, technology and content deals that Blip has built up over the years. That will add to its existing content mix, which includes thousands of YouTube channels that attract billions of views per month across the network. But the big selling point is probably Blip’s technology. This will largely signal the end of the road for Blip, which was one of the early Internet video pioneers. The company has seen a number of iterations over the years: But while Blip had launched as a promising alternative to YouTube at a time when there was no clear winner in the video distribution wars, the company has languished in the world of emerging multichannel networks built off the back of YouTube. Maker has seen successful in that world, and so it makes sense for Blip and its creators to hitch their wagons to that rising star. The big question is what Maker gets out of the deal. Theoretically, Blip’s destination site could offer a place for Maker to distribute its content off YouTube, where it could garner higher CPMs and enable it to own its distribution platform. There have been a lot of rumors around Maker or another multichannel network essentially creating a YouTube competitor over the last year, ever since Jason Calacanis wrote his famous screed about . It sounds good, and Maker is one of the networks that’s actually big enough to attempt such a thing. But the sense I get in talking to someone familiar with the deal is that Maker doesn’t really have much interest in moving all of its content onto Blip, or some other destination site that is not YouTube. What’s more likely is that Blip content gets added to Maker and is distributed as part of the YouTube multichannel network. What could be interesting for Maker, though, is the technology that Blip has built for distributing to a number of different platforms. While Maker is unlikely to attempt to move its content completely off YouTube, it’s definitely interested in finding ways to distribute to more places and devices. That means hooking up with game consoles like the Xbox 360, streaming boxes like Roku, connected TVs and Blu-ray players, and getting on more mobile devices and tablets. All of that is Blip’s bread-and-butter, and it had built out analytics and ad insertion for a number of different platforms where YouTube wouldn’t take its regular 45 percent cut. Obviously, for the time being, the bulk of Maker’s views will come from YouTube — whether it be on the web or through YouTube’s own mobile apps. Maker has enough consumer-facing brands of its own that building more focused apps makes sense, whether it be on tablets, or Xbox, or other destinations that Blip currently services. That wouldn’t necessarily be a change in strategy for Maker, but an acceleration of its plans to serve its viewers on whichever device they’re watching. Oh yeah, check out this video we shot at Maker last month to get an idea of how it thinks about its distribution plans: |
Sign Up For Hardware Alley At Disrupt SF, Be Considered A Giant Among Your Peers | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Every year I’m given the best job a guy could ever want: planning hardware alley, a one day extravaganza of some of the best hardware I’ve ever seen. This event, which happens on the last day of Disrupt, is a crowd favorite and I’d love to feature your gear. What is Hardware Alley? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of Disrupt SF, Sept 11, to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you. All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list. To find out more please .
You can reserve your spot by purchasing a . If you can’t attend Disrupt but would like to demo on the final day use promo code: H@rdwareSF13-1day. If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you. Hope to see you in SF! |
Facebook Fights Snapchat By Letting You Send Instagrams With Messenger | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Snapchat sends 200 million private photo messages a day. WhatsApp sends 325 million. These are scary numbers for Facebook that prove the visual communication is on the rise, so it’s just begun allowing for iOS users to and photos from other non-Camera Roll albums. It shows that while Poke failed, Facebook is serious about getting in on the visual communication trend. You’ve been able to send photo messages from any album for a while with Messenger for Android, but the version previously only let you choose from your Camera Roll. The problem is that when you post to Instagram it saves a copy of your creation to a separate in-device “Instagram” album. Now by hitting the paperclip icon when composing a message and then Add Photos, there’s now a drop-down at the top to pull photos from your other albums. This isn’t exactly direct Instegration (sorry), though it certainly brings the photo sharing app closer to its parent company. Facebook has been remarkably hands off since acquiring Instagram, living up to its promise. [Update: At first glance, this is a very small update. There’s not even any API or other direct connection between Messenger and Instagram. What matters is what it signals about Facebook’s intentions with visual communication. ] But in the 16 months since the billion* dollar deal, there’s been a huge shift in how people use photos. For years they were shot with care and shared with many people — similar to what we did in the analog film era. But Snapchat and the international chat apps changed that. Suddenly photos were , and shared privately not for their artistic value, but to get a message across. This has become the year of visual communication. The ephemerality of comes in handy for the most goofy, embarrassing, or scandalous. And it does add a sense of urgency. Yet an equal contributor to its rapid rise in popularity is that it forces you to communicate visually. You can’t send text alone. Instead, you use photos and videos to . In that way, photo messaging has a lot in common with stickers, the little pre-made illustrations and animations you can send in many chat apps. I get sent a lot of them and hear they’ve been a big . Both are a stand-in for boring text. Photo messages are more personalized, though. Where are you? What are you doing? How do you feel? You can answer all these questions with a quick pic. It’s not annoying like typing long messages or generic like texting back “home”, “chillin” “alright”. Each location, activity, and facial expression is unique with visual communication. That’s what makes it addictive yet satisfying. Those two words could be Facebook’s hyphenated middle name**. Its first attempt at serious visual communication, the , from the charts and I haven’t received a Poke in months. But why force people to download something new when your social network runs some of the most widely used mobile apps in the world? And so here we are, Instagram messaging in Facebook Messenger. Expect it to get added to Facebook’s main apps soon. It could get users repurposing their favorite Instagrams to convey emotions. What are you doing? Latte art. How are you feeling? Portrait of laughter. And if enough users find the drop-down option and use it, they might even start to take Instagrams with the purpose of sharing them. It could also be a great way to make sure a specific friend sees your masterpiece if you know they don’t frequent the Instagram feed. The question now is, will Instagram add private photo and video messaging? *The final cash and stock acquisition price was in the seven hundred millions **The Addictive-Satisfying Facebook |
Cyber-Security Company Sentinel Labs Raises $2.5M | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | , a startup that detects cyber-security threats in real time, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Data Collective, Granite Hill Capital Partners, Accel Partners and several other angel investors. The company also in funding last March. A graduate of Israeli startup accelerator , Sentinel Labs is trying to eliminate all admin management in finding and blocking security attacks for enterprise. Instead of going through a network, the company uses software installed on every individual device as an endpoint solution. CEO Tomer Weingarten says the Sentinel Labs team is familiar with not only defending against malware, but engineering it. “What we’ve come up with is, you have to be on the last line of defense, on the actual machine itself,” Weingarten tells me. “With our approach, we are actually able to stop the attacks … because it’s installed on the endpoint, it can also enforce. So the second it detects something, it actually kills the threat.” Weingarten says the funding will mainly go to research and development, in the hopes of transitioning from beta to launch in the next six months. It will also be used to build the company’s initial workforce and sales force in the United States. Sentinel Labs has several beta testers, but is still working on expanding the solution to almost all desktop, server and mobile platforms. So while the company boasts a very high percentage of blocked malware threats, it still has a while to go before it’s off the ground. Sentinel Labs is up against established anti-virus software companies such as and . With threats developing beyond previous cyber-security measures, Sentinel Labs is among startups like that are developing new ways to address the issue. is another security startup with a focus on serving financial institutions. |
Bitcoin Clampdown Continues As Federal Judge Says It’s A Currency | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Wikipedia Bitcoin a cryptocurrency (a currency that relies on cryptography), but now it’s official. A federal judge in Texas that Bitcoin is a currency and should therefore be regulated just like U.S. dollars or gold. The ruling represents yet another attempt to regulate Bitcoin transactions, threatening the original purpose of the currency. While it looks like a recognition that Bitcoins are worth something, the decision threatens once again Bitcoin’s utopian concept. As a reminder, the Department of Homeland Security recently issued on Bitcoin exchange service because it didn’t comply to money transfer regulations. Today’s decision goes in the same direction. BTCST, a Bitcoin-based hedge fund, claimed that “the BTCST investments are not securities because Bitcoin is not money, and is not part of anything regulated by the United States,” wrote Judge Amos Mazzant. She then stated the exact opposite of BTCST’s defense: First, the Court must determine whether the BTCST investments constitute an investment of money. It is clear that Bitcoin can be used as money. It can be used to purchase goods or services, and as Shavers stated, used to pay for individual living expenses. The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money. Bitcoin was born on the idea that nobody could regulate it. Instead of having a central bank, Bitcoins are just a chain of characters defined by algorithmic rules. Anybody can try to find new Bitcoins and anybody can verify if it is indeed a real Bitcoin or not. All of this is handled by opensource Bitcoin applications and a few proprietary variants. The Bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer payment network, and nobody can intefere with it. The only real value of a Bitcoin comes from its users. Because Bitcoin owners are treating it as a currency, it becomes one. That’s what makes it beautiful and scary at the same time. Yet, Bitcoin creator probably didn’t think that even the U.S. government would treat it as a currency and try to regulate it. |
Check Out YouTube Space LA, Its Huge New Space For Local Video Creators | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Over the past few years, YouTube has emerged as the dominant platform for distributing video online, but it would be nothing without all the creators and networks that produce content for it. The number one request from those members in LA was for production space to help them create better videos. And so, the company built out a huge, 41,000-square foot facility where creators could go to shoot, edit, and even screen their videos with other members of the local community. YouTube Space LA is meant to be a place for creators to meet, collaborate, and take advantage of all sorts of production and editing equipment available to them. As part of our tour of the LA video ecosystem, we stopped by YouTube Space LA to find out more about the facilities. Liam Collins, head of the space, said YouTube first started talking about having a greater presence in LA a few years ago, asking creators what the company could do to help them be more ambitious with their content. The answer was to have sound stages available, and decided to make the investment to have advanced resources available for them. It was also a place where creators can collaborate together. Built in a former helicopter factory, the space includes numerous sound stages, sets, and green screens that creators can take advantage of to take their productions to the next level. It also has post-production equipment, including advanced video editing and sound bays, that are free for creators to use. Check out the video above to learn more about YouTube Space LA, and tune in to all of our videos from our Los Angeles tour on Mondays and Wednesdays over the next few weeks. Here are all the videos we’ve released so far: |
Conference Networking App Topi Gets Deep Meetup Integration | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | , a mobile event networking app that wants to help you find the right people to talk to at large conferences, today announced that it has launched a nifty integration with . The new feature will allow that site’s members to more easily find each other at events and stay in touch even after the event ends or at other events in the future. Topi also now uses geofencing to allow meetup attendees to connect with each other as long as they are in the same venue. The app is available for and devices. As Topi co-founder and CEO David Aubespin told me earlier today, all Meetup organizers will be able to use the tool for free for their events. While this isn’t an official partnership with Meetup — Topi just uses their public API — he believes that this new feature will make meetups more interesting as it creates a layer on top of these events that persists after they end. If you are a member of the New York Tech Meetup, for example, where Topi is showing these features for the first time today, and you go to another event later, the tool will show you who else from the earlier meetup is around. In addition to the meetup integration, Topi is also extending its use of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in its app today. LinkedIn, for example, is now integrated in Topi’s PeopleRank algorithm, “so attendees gain even better insight into recommendations of people they might know and who they should be meeting.” PeopleRank, Aubespin told me, gets significantly smarter because of this integration, and the service is now able to suggest chat rooms based on where you previously worked or what industry you were in. This, the Topi team believes, will allow participants to break the ice more easily and start making connections at large business events. Topi also now supports Facebook events, so that it can group users into Topi chat rooms accordingly and allow you to connect with users at the event before, during and after. Its Twitter integration allows you to view all tweets tagged with an official event hashtag and to tweet from the app with the hashtag. For Topi, the idea is to work with event organizers (and potentially charge them) to provide the official app for their events. Event organizers can, for example, include their schedules, links to sponsors, exhibitors and document downloads to their events on Topi. For Meetup organizers, though, Aubespin told me, the service will always be available for free. |
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: LG G2, Nexus 7, Moto X And The Madness Of BBM For Android | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Surprise! We’ve got another podcast for you to enjoy with your earholes! This is the , wherein we discuss all things Android on a weekly basis. The Droidcast features regular appearances by Chris Velazco and me, Darrell Etherington, along with a rotating Rogue’s Gallery like Romain Dillet, who joins us this week. We’re talking about LG’s G2, just announced today (and involved in some PR shenanigans before it even became official), the Nexus 7 (Google’s latest, which Chris and I both went out and bought even though we really don’t need anymore tablets), the Moto X and BlackBerry’s somewhat baffling and imminent BBM for Android and iOS launch. We get meaty with this one, so dig in and then offer up your love, hate, ambivalence, etc. Oh, and I know no one believes me, but I seriously do love Android.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . |
Biomeme Wants To Turn Your iOS Device Into A Disease-Detecting Mobile DNA Lab | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | There’s a vast, vast sea of the smartphone accessories out there that are designed to solve first-world problems (do we honestly need another bottle opening case?), but here’s one that aspires to change the rest of the world. The folks at Dreamit Ventures-backed have developed a device that will turn your humble iPhone or iPod touch into a lean, mean, mobile DNA replicating machine that they hope will ultimately change how diseases are tracked and treated. (And before you ask, yes, Android support is in the works too.) Sounds bold, no? Those lofty ambitions all currently hinge on what’s called a real-time qPCR thermocycler, a generally pricey bit of lab equipment that amplifies traces amounts of DNA into more easily detectable quantities. They’re ideal for detecting diseases, but their heft (and hefty price tags) means that the thousands of small clinics around the world can’t afford to use them with any sort of regularity. That’s where Biomeme comes in. In less than a year, the five person team has created a version they claim is just as accurate as those expensive models but only costs a fraction of the price. That’s because the brain of the system is a humble smartphone connected via Bluetooth — here’s how the whole shebang works. Once you’ve connected your smartphone over Bluetooth, you slot it into the mobile PCR machine. Then you crack open a test kit that’s designed to detect different diseases (sold separately, think of it as health-conscious twist on the old razor-and-blade model) and do a bit of pipetting. After a bit of sample test prep — co-founder and bizdev lead Max Perelman says “even VCs” have been unable to screw up the process), you load the sample into the top of the machine and wait for your results. Inside the prototype’s 3D-printed chassis is an Arduino that runs the show — it adjusts the machine’s temperature with heaters and fans, controls the excitation light, and handles the wireless connection with the iOS device. Meanwhile the iDevice’s camera is used to detect how luminescent those target DNA sequences are, and the corresponding app checks to see how closely they match the signature of whatever disease you’re looking for. The current version of the hardware isn’t quite as polished as the team would hope and it’s chock-full of open-source, hack-friendly components, but co-founder Marc DeJohn says they’d like to keep it that way if at all possible. The team is aiming to sell its initial run of smartphone-centric PCR machines for about $1,000, but that’s just the start — should they get significant traction from the medical community at that price point, Biomeme wants to try and bring down the price to the level where you average curious consumers could pick one up without breaking the bank. That’s the overarching goal here: to democratize DNA testing. Sadly, Perelman says the United States isn’t as bullish on smartphone-centric human health initiatives as it could be, so Biomeme is tackling a less complex domestic conundrum for now: the safety of your leafy greens. The startup is pushing to make its mark in South America and Africa by creating a sort of decentralized lab system though — ideally, these clinics and mobile labs will be performing their own disease testing in the field in real-time, and uploading their results so other doctors can get a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening where. |
Ubuntu Edge Gets Its First Major Corporate Backer In Bloomberg, But Funding Still Off Needed Pace | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | The is an audacious attempt to Canonical, the company behind the Edge and Ubuntu itself is seeking an exorbitant $32 million to make it happen, and gave itself only a month to raise those funds. Now, Bloomberg LP has come forward as its first major corporate backer, with a lump $80,000 contribution in exchange for 100 Ubuntu Edge devices and enterprise workshops and technical support. Bloomberg is the first backer at the “Enterprise 100” campaign backer level, and that’s good news for the Ubuntu Edge, and would smash the initial targets of most hardware crowdfunding campaigns out there on its own, but the Ubuntu Edge isn’t just another crowdfunding campaign. That $32 million goal is looking mighty distant, having added only $1 million or thereabouts in the past week of its campaign, as . A single $80,000 injection definitely helps things, but it doesn’t put the project on pace to reach $32 million by the end of the month, even if Bloomberg or other corporate backers were to plug $80,000 into the project daily on top of the current pace. In fact, even being generous and projecting that Canonical manages to nab an even $10 million by this evening (unlikely), that gives it two weeks to raise an additional $24 million, which works out to $1.7 million per day. That’s a lot, and given that it earned $1 million in the past week altogether, not a very realistic expectation. Bloomberg says in a statement that it’s excited about Canonical’s vision of converged computing with the Edge in particular. “Ubuntu’s goal to offer a single-device solution for enterprise convergence and mobility is an exciting prospect and one that complements our vision for open development on the mobile platform,” says Bloomberg LP’s Head of Web Architecture Justin Erenkrantz in an official release detailing the news, noting that cross-platform, seamless performance is a chief goal of Bloomberg’s in terms of what it provides for its clients. Canonical better have some considerable Hail Mary plays up its sleeve if it hopes to make that goal, and and Bloomberg support, nice as they both are, just aren’t going to cut it. We’ll have to see if Canonical’s ambitious vision in this case ends up being an utter daydream, or if there’s some kind of buzzer-beating offensive play left in place to get funding back on track. |
Investors Cheer Groupon’s Appointment Of A CEO, Narrow Earnings Beat, Stock Buyback Program | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Groupon the appointment of Eric Lefkofsky as its CEO, Ted Leonsis as the Chairman of its board, revenue of $609 million in the second quarter, operating income of $59 million excluding stock compensation expenses, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.02. Investors are enthralled, sending Groupon up more than 13 percent in after-hours trading. Let’s unpack all of that, however, to better understand what just happened. Groupon fired its founder and then CEO Andrew Mason earlier this year, after Groupon reported weaker than expected earnings. Today, Groupon announced that Eric Lefkofsky will take over as its new chief executive. Lefkofsky is best known for his work at Lightbank, the Chicago-based venture capital outfit, of which he was a founder. He was also an early co-founder and investor in The Point, a firm that would eventually be renamed, you guessed it, Groupon. Lightbank’s continues to list him as a managing partner. Lefkofsky, a billionaire, is a well-respected member of the Chicago technology scene, of which Groupon and Lightbank are firm centers of gravity. Along with Leonsis, Lefkofsky managed Groupon in the time since Mason was ejected. That news was coupled with the announcement that Groupon is now authorized to buy back $300 million of its own shares over the next two years. Today Groupon managed to just best market expectations for its quarterly financial performance. $0.02 per share in earnings — excluding certain items — was anticipated and met, and Groupon’s revenue of $609 million was a nibble over expectations. Active customers grew 12 percent to 42.6 million. Groupon measures its active customers as any user that has purchased a Groupon coupon in the past 12 months. The company’s revenue figure represents a 7 percent increase on a year-over-year basis. Groupon has cash and equivalents of roughly $1.2 billion, unchanged from the same period a year ago. This provides the firm with ample room to execute its stock repurchase program on a rolling basis over the next 24 months. The company has confirmed leadership, steady, if somewhat dull earnings, and a declining international business: ‘Rest of World’ revenues slipped 25.9 percent on a year-over-year basis in the most recent quarter. Still, Groupon is now on a firmer footing than it has been this year. Now it must prove that it can at once grow its revenue and achieve GAAP profitability. |
Fail Week: When Mariam Naficy’s Startup Launch Was So Bad She Almost Gave The Investor Money Back | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | On Monday we , who talked about being in debt to the government to the tune of $6 million; yesterday we , who talked about losing “total credibility” as DoubleClick’s CEO when he had to lay off hundreds of dedicated employees during the first dot-com bust. And today, we’re hearing from , the CEO of design marketplace and stationery maker . Naficy has been lauded as a successful businesswoman for years, having co-founded Eve.com, the pioneering online cosmetics retailer that she sold when she was barely out of her 20s. So it was a very rude awakening when she launched Minted in 2008 only to receive — and practically zero dollars in sales. It was so bad, she says, that in the first weeks after launch she seriously considered just giving money back to Minted’s investors and calling it a day. Watch the video embedded above to hear about how it felt to open up Minted for business and have the concept put down in TechCrunch (and then wait around for customers that just didn’t show up), what kept her going through those dark days, how Minted turned things around when things looked so bleak, and the advice she’d give to entrepreneurs going through tough times. |
Weilos Wants To Pair You With An Online Weight Loss Coach Who Has Shed Pounds Themselves | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | A new startup currently participating in the Summer 2013 cohort of Y Combinator called wants to make weight loss attempts more sticky and more accountable by pairing those with weight loss goals with coaches who have already achieved theirs for personalized, one-on-one training. It’s yet another example of the crowdsourced services economy at work, and one that also hits the current hot spot of health, diet and fitness. Weilos is the product of a union between co-founders Ray Wu, an MD from Cornell, and Alex Perelman, a former Activision employee with an MBA and a degree in Computer Science from Berkeley. Both wanted to effect change in the world to address the growing concern of obesity in the U.S., in a way that would actually work; it’s an oft-repeated refrain, but the fact that obesity levels continue to rise proves that no one yet has come up with a good solution. Where Wu and Perelman’s concept differs from most is that it recognizes 1) there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to well-being and weight loss, and 2) the best way to promote continued use of a program is to build in some kind of direct personal interaction, and personal accountability, rather than just trust users to follow a program on their own. “The reason we’re really excited about it is because obesity, weight loss, is one of the biggest health issues we’re facing today, and we just wanted to create an effective solution that really works by empowering passionate people who have succeeded themselves and allowing them to help others,” Wu explained in an interview. “The one unique thing that we’re doing is that our coaches are people who themselves have lost weight, and the most exciting thing for me is actually meeting people and seeing how knowledgeable they are and how excited they are to help others.” Wu and his team carefully screen all coaches signing up to provide their services on the platform, and have received over 100 applications so far but approved only around less than half that to actively participate. Making sure that coaches on the platform have demonstrated their own success, and are trustworthy individuals is key to Weilos’ ability to attract users, and pre-screening, as well as coach ratings are in place to help ensure that happens. I asked Wu about the legal implications of providing a platform where amateurs provide health advice to the general populace. He says that Weilos itself is just connecting people, not providing advice itself, and that the company is very careful to advise coaches not to provide any actual medical advice to their clients. There are also tools in place to help both coaches and users report activity that might be detrimental to user health, like if someone were to use the platform to seek out or promote pro-anorexia or pro-bulimia behaviour, for instance. It’s very early days yet for Weilos, which is still tinkering with its revenue model according to Wu (“we’re 100 percent focused on making sure this truly works”) but currently allows coaches to choose to either take a monthly subscription fee from their clients or do it for free, depending on their personal preference. Asked why Weilos has an advantage over things like the quantified self device movement, that focuses on activity trackers like the Fitbit Flex or apps like RunKeeper to motivate healthy behaviour, Wu said it’s all about the social interaction. “With quantified self app, the responsibility is on you, and that can work for a small percentage of people,” he said. “But I think that more of a structured social component, where someone else is taking responsibility for your success in losing weight adds a lot, and being on your own is where a lot of people fall off with other solutions.” Weilos has had nearly 1,000 users signed up so far, and those active on the network are losing at a rate of around 1 to 2 pounds per week, which is above the averages reported for programs like . The use of crowdsourced services is infiltrating everything from transport to project management, so weight loss, a massive potential market, is a good target for someone like Weilos, provided they get the mix right and can scale while keeping the quality of coaches high. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 21 | null |
In The Smartphone Wars It’s iOS Vs. Android And Windows Phone Vs. The Rest | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | It’s , meaning that your about the latest figures: Android’s continuing massive growth, the slowing of iOS’s year-over-year unit volume expansion, and curiously, today, if Windows Phone’s numbers matter. You see, Windows Phone posted the highest year-over-year unit volume increase, , clocking in with a second quarter of 2012 to second quarter of 2013 gain of 77.6 percent. The simple kicker to that growth rate is that Windows Phone as a platform is exceptionally small compared to Android, which posted a 73.5 percent unit volume gain in the same period. Windows Phone fans are quick to grab onto good news that their platform of choice earns, and that’s perfectly reasonable. Android fans, of course, are having a field day as iOS’s market share as a percentage of the worldwide market share is down to 13.2 percent. Android itself surged to 79.3 percent in the quarter. Keep in mind that it’s far easier for Windows Phone to put large percentage growth on the board than Android due to the fact that Android has to sell a mountain more units than Windows Phone to lock down each percentage point of unit volume increase. However, it’s doing a simply exceptional job. According to IDC’s figures, Android’s second quarter 2013 unit figure of 187.4 million was larger than the second quarter 2012 smartphone market, in which 156.2 units were shipped. That’s all but insane. Another stat to help cloud your head: Despite its 77.6 percent growth in units for the year, Windows Phone only expanded its market share from 3.1 percent to 3.7 percent in the same period. That’s due to the fact that the larger smartphone market grew in the past year, up 51.3 percent year over year in the second quarter. Well then. What can we actually make of all this damn data? There are two separate narratives here that we should not confuse or conflate, because if we do we’ll end up nowhere at all. The simplest way to view the smartphone market is that it is two separate wars: iOS v. Android, and Windows Phone v. Everyone Else. The old joke fits well: Two men are being chased by a tiger. One takes a pair of running shoes out of his backpack, and begins to lace up. What are you doing, his friend shouts, they are coming! And you can’t outrun a tiger! No, says the friend with his shoes now firmly on. I only have to outrun you. That’s Windows Phone at the moment, as it faces down BlackBerry, and every other increasingly fringe smartphone platform. iOS and Android ship units on a scale that simply places them in a separate class; Windows Phone must convince developers that it is the firm third mobile platform, and that it can ship enough units to be relevant to their platform considerations. I’d say that the most recent mobile market share figures affirm both points: Windows Phone is growing, shipped the third most units, and all other platforms that have less unit volume than it saw their numbers decrease. So a simple way of viewing the smartphone market is that Android is consistently adding friction to Apple’s products, which are seeing their market share fall as the market itself expands more quickly than they ship. And that Windows Phone, while still a distant third place player, has managed to functionally cement itself as a player in mobile. That fact will be more gut-checkable once more than 10 million Windows Phone handsets ship in a quarter. However, barring a dramatic market reversal, that figure should be reached inside of calendar 2013. I’m no expert when it comes to Apple, so I’ll leave analysis of its current — though it’s hard to resist the temptation to add “difficult” — position inside of the smartphone wars to those who write about such things. However, given what IDC revealed today, we can essentially view the market as a three-way war, but not one in which Windows Phone has even begun to challenge the incumbents. |
Mobile Payments Platform For Apps Venmo Touch Expands To Android, iOS 7 | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Braintree-owned Venmo is expanding its one-touch mobile payments platform today, with a private beta release of Venmo Touch for Android arriving now, alongside the launch of an iOS 7-compatible version of Venmo Touch and the Braintree iOS SDK. This marks the first time the service has been made available on non-iOS devices, since its launch earlier this year. Venmo, which payment processor in 2012, had previously been known best for its social payments , which allows users to send their friends money – handy for quick loans, or when splitting a bill at restaurant, for example. But , Braintree announced an additional direction for the company with the debut , essentially a payments layer for mobile applications. The idea with Touch is that users can save their credit card details within one Touch-enabled application, and then that data is made available in any other app supporting the service, with no need for you to re-enter personal details. Instead, you can then just tap “use card” to pay with the credit card you have on file. The service competes with Google Wallet and PayPal, but is mainly focused on mobile applications, and not the broader web. Early adopters for Touch have included HotelTonight, TaskRabbit, and Wrapp, and of course, Venmo itself. Fueled by Touch adoption, Braintree touted it had saved some 40 million user credit cards, and had doubled the volume of mobile payment transactions to . Recently, , and began making the service available to banks and other card issuers, in addition to app developers. Today, the company says that its Android beta and iOS releases incorporate much of the feedback it has received from partners, and other enhancements. On iOS 7 in particular, this includes several usability improvements to make the actual checkout process even quicker for end users. The updated developer documentation, and accompanying downloads will be available on shortly. |
How The Curiosity Rover Sang Happy Birthday To Itself On Mars | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxVVgBAosqg#at=86] We’re a few days late in wishing the Mars Curiosity Rover a happy birthday – it landed on the Red Planet on August 5th one year ago – so to make up for it we present Florence Tan, the team lead for the rover’s on-board chemistry lab, talking about how they transmitted commands to the rover so it could play “Happy Birthday” to itself. It is at once one of the most miraculous things you’ll see all week and, in a way, the saddest. The rover sings using a set of vibrating plates designed to move soil samples through the chemistry module. While most of the signals are more “beep boop” than bebop, the module can also play notes. Thus one of our species’ crowning achievements – a rover that is the very avatar of all of our best and most far-reaching efforts – sang a 120-year-old folk song into the arid plains of Mars. The fact that this little robot will probably never make it back home and is completely alone is a fascinating study in solitude but, what’s more important, that it is able to sing to itself by reacting to commands sent from Earth is stunning. We are, in essence, on Mars with the little rover and that’s probably the best birthday present we could get. |
Facebook Publishing Optimizer PostRocket To Shut Down On August 15 | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | , a startup that helps customers optimize their Facebook posts for maximum exposure and engagement, has announced that it will be shutting down on August 15. The company was incubated by 500 Startups, and it raised from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, and various angel investors. The PostRocket team previously managed the Facebook presence of the musician Pitbull, and it dropped out of Babson College to participate in the incubator. In an email that was sent to PostRocket customers yesterday, co-founder and CEO Tim Chae wrote: “When we first started PostRocket, we wanted to not only help marketers like you succeed in Facebook marketing, but do so with an exceptional product and service to back it. We were never able to reach the high bar we set for ourselves.” PageLever, another startup that aimed to optimize Facebook posting strategies, was earlier this year. Chae said PostRocket customers will have until the 15th to pull their data from PostRocket, and if they’re looking for another product, he recommended that they switch to . Here’s the full customer email: This is really disappointing to say, but I must inform you that PostRocket will be shutting down its products and services next Thursday, August 15th. When we first started PostRocket, we wanted to not only help marketers like you succeed in Facebook marketing, but do so with an exceptional product and service to back it. We were never able to reach the high bar we set for ourselves. Our product had many issues and even through the down-time and bugs, you stuck with us. We thank you for that. We should and could have done much better in bringing you a reliable product that expanded as quickly as the landscape of Facebook marketing changed. You will be refunded any of your remaining prorated credits as of today 8/6/13 and will be able to continue using PostRocket to migrate your data or find another provider until 11:59PM PST 8/14/13, at which point all data will be erased and removed. If you’re looking for an alternative service to migrate to after PostRocket, I *strongly* recommend using Facebook’s all new native Insights product. I would have never recommended using native with FB marketing, but their new product blows any other service out the water. They are rolling out this Insights product and you should expect to receive it in the next few weeks, if you don’t already have it. Again, thank you so much for being a PostRocket customer. We really do appreciate you believing in us. We wish we could have done better for you. On behalf of the PostRocket team, Tim |
Prepare To Be Outdone By Pros And Brands, Instagram Just Enabled Video Uploading | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | Anyone can shoot a good photo with Instagram. Directing a good video is a whole other ballgame. But until now there was an even playing field. Everyone had to shoot their mini-movies in the app. But Instagram just began allowing you to . That means pros can shoot on high-tech cameras, edit on a desktop, and post their masterpieces to Instagram to outshine your crummy amateur videos. The video support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and one-touch photo straightening in IOS, but the big deal is video uploads. The app’s big competitor, Twitter’s Vine, seems to have , but otherwise everyone still has to create within Vine. Uploads will turn Instagram Video into a more serious art form but not necessarily a more unique one. The limitations of shooting videos in-app forced directors on Instagram and Vine to be creative and experiment. Now as long as it’s shorter than 15-seconds, they can post whatever they want to Instagram. They could patch together highlights of their old work, promos for their new stuff, or remix someone’s ripped YouTube video. And video uploads this will fling open the door to brands. Many were likely shy about conveying their brand through low-production value clips. Now they can have big agencies ship them clips to publish. Many suspect video to become an advertising medium for Instagram, especially since the 15-second length matches that of shorter TV commercials. This option would equip advertisers to directly load in their TV spots without help from Instagram or Facebook. Will we get to see more beautiful videos on Instagram? Sure. But will the average person be as inclined to post their off-the-cuff creations when they’re facing meticulously storyboarded, lit, and edited material? Maybe less so. Instagram was launched with an emphasis on simplicity. By allowing creators to get complicated, it could divide the community, and send video novices packing for Vine’s amateur pastures. |
Why Jeff Bezos Bought The Washington Post For $250M | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Test, test, test, , test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test. |
Bitcoin Ticker Available On Bloomberg Terminal For Employees | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Bitcoin is now officially mainstream. According to , Bloomberg terminal users can now look up Bitcoin’s pricing history. Data comes from ubiquitous Bitcoin exchange service as well as . For now, only Bloomberg employees can access the ticker. But the feature should make its way to regular Bloomberg terminal customers under the label XBT. The ticker probably shows what a bitcoin is worth in U.S. dollars over time. So far, trading Bitcoins have remained a hobby activity as volatility is very important. It’s hard to predict price changes due to the lack of tools and the relatively low number of Bitcoin traders compared to currency traders. One of the most efficient tickers is , but Bloomberg terminals could become the de facto standard for traders. The feature proves that investment banks are interested by the cryptocurrency. With the Bloomberg terminal, traders could easily compare Bitcoins with other currencies in order to them. When it comes to shorting currencies, traders do it by investing their portfolio in another currency. For example, they would sell USD to buy EUR, effectively creating a net short USD and a net long EUR position. Yet, traders still have to use Bitcoin exchange services like Mt. Gox or Tradehill for transactions. They won’t be able to execute buy or sell orders from their Bloomberg terminals. It could be the last technical difficulty before investing some time and money in Bitcoins. At first, the Bloomberg terminal remains a great tool to keep up with financial news. It even includes now. Even if Bitcoin trading won’t become the main activity on Wall Street, the ticker creates another data point for information purposes. Just three days ago, a federal judge in Texas ruled that Bitcoin is . Transactions and institutions should therefore be regulated just like other financial institutions that deal with dollars. Similarly, back in May, Mt. Gox had to state that it provides in order to continue to operate in the U.S. While the original purpose of Bitcoin was that there was no central bank and regulation, Bloomberg confirms yet again the legitimation of Bitcoins with the new ticker. Bitcoins and U.S. dollars will soon appear on the same screen, side by side. Traders, start trading. |
Skolkovo, Russia’s Massive Project To Emulate Silicon Valley, Gets A $4B Commitment | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | , the much debated public effort by the Russian government to kickstart a startup culture inside the country, ($4 billion) commitment from the government through the next seven years. With additional private investor money projected on top of the government commitment, Skolkovo’s new funding should total about $15 billion through 2020, Skolkovo is a massive government-led effort to diversify the Russian economy away from its dependency on natural resources and build an entrepreneurship culture inside the country. At its heart is a 1,000-acre site about an hour from central Moscow that is slated to become a hub for venture-backed startups, technical research and education. Right now, the site contains a lone Hypercube — a steel, glass and concrete structure housing conference rooms and co-working spaces. It is basically surrounded by vacant plains at this point. Mike Butcher . Naturally, Skolkovo has also attracted its critics. Is the project too quixotic? Is it corrupt? These are issues that Russians in the startup community debate regularly. Earlier this year, the project became embroiled in a corruption scandal, resulting in the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov. Not only that, the project’s major backer has been former president Dmitry Medvedev, who took the role of prime minister after Vladimir Putin returned to power. There were questions about whether it would be , which may view Medvedev as a threat. But this new commitment will apparently keep the project moving forward. Companies like Nokia, Siemens, Samsung and Cisco Systems have pledged to move research and development resources to the hub and Skolkovo and currently supports 13,000 jobs. Skolkovo echoes the old secret technical cities of the Soviet era. It is a special economic zone that has unique tax breaks lasting five to seven years, its own border controls and legislative incentives for startups. It also has its own special version of the ‘Startup Visa’ with laws allowing foreign-born entrepreneurs to work there from other companies. The idea is to circumvent existing laws in Russia, which are especially complex for new businesses. Many Russian startups I’ve met have decided to incorporate in Luxembourg or Cyprus where they feel the intellectual property protections might be stronger. Minority shareholders also have weaker protections in Russia as well, so venture backers might also prefer incorporation outside of Russia right now. |
Five Things Entrepreneurs Should Never Do | James Altucher | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | I’m breaking all the rules. I’m at a silent retreat for the week. No talking! My wife is two doors down. She said to me before we went silent for the week, “put your computer on airplane mode.” It’s in a beautiful area. There are paths and trees and birds and flowers and benches to sit on with sprawling landscapes and blah blah blah. I like to stay in my room and write. And I break rules. I won’t open my mouth but I will break rules. Don’t tell my wife. A friend of mine has a startup. It’s a neat little product. He’s still in stealth mode so it’s not important what the product is. But I thought of a company that could use the product and I like to help my friends. I called the CEO of the company (before the retreat). They have about a billion in revenues and are very profitable. I said, “can you use this?” And I described something that I felt they really needed that could make a lot of money. The CEO said, “we would love this”. The head of sales of the billion revenue company got all the data I needed to help my friend make a demo. I called my friend, sent a spec of what I wanted, and said “can you make a demo of what this company needs.” He said, “absolutely. It would literally take minutes to do.” Then he made the following mistakes. To be fair, I wish I had had been as smart as him when I was 26 years old. One thing he’s done at is keeping in touch with me with a “Hi, hope things are well” every month for the past six years. But here are his mistakes. This was perfectly set up for the software of his company. A week later I had to remind him about what he said. He replied, “oh yeah, sorry.” And within an hour he had something to me although it wasn’t quite what I asked for (more below). Why was he late? He was busy building a prototype of something to show venture capitalists. I get it. Raising money is important. But don’t be an idiot. A billion-revenues company is either a potential investor, a potential acquirer, a partner, a distribution channel, or something you can show off to venture capitalists to both increase your valuation and raise money. Or all of the above. The first thing he showed me had four or five glaring mistakes that were either different than what I asked or things I didn’t think to ask because they were clearly not what the client wanted. He tried too hard to fit his exact software with the data I was giving him. If you have no clients and no revenues then it becomes your job to find clients and revenues — not make people use your product. The client doesn’t pivot. pivot. There’s a big difference between winning at a hackathon and making money. The hackathon culture that sprung up in the past two or three years by venture capitalists is bullshit. It’s not business. As corny as it sounds, the reason I thought his product was good (with tweaks) and that this major company could use it was because it could actually help people live better lives and make more money. Not because you win hackathons. The first version he showed me had some very basic problems. With a little thought he could have solved those problems. Instead, I outlined how he could solve them. He solved them and I was finally able to show them to the client. Actually, that’s not true. He forgot basic aspects of my original spec (see “under-deliver”) and I had to remind him and he said, “Oops. Sorry.” And within minutes he had a new version. These aspects of my original spec were designed to protect the client from losing millions of dollars should they ever roll out my friend’s product. In the final version he showed me there were some basic things he could have over-delivered on to impress the client. They were very basic. He even said, “of course!” when I brought these features up to him. It’s one thing if he were not already developing software for this business and he was a developer of I was trying to contract. Then he might not know the industry. But he already had software designed for this very industry and it only involved seconds of tweaking for him to massively over deliver. And, I have to repeat it, a billion-revenue client was interested when he had no clients at all. He’s clearly interested. He ultimately delivered and did everything and it was great. I showed it to the potential client and they it. Good things will come of this. What do I get out of it? Absolutely nothing. Don’t be a fucking pig all the time and try to have your hand out. If you create value for others, then sooner or later value is created for you. So, what should you do? It’s really that simple to make a ton of money. Another very important thing: The site he is developing for this potential client is slightly different than his initial software. He had to tweak it to make it fit my needs. Always assume that you have what your customers want. In 99.9 percent of cases, remember, the startup pivots and not the client. All you can hope to do is get close enough to what the customer wants so that they then notice you. If you look good and they ask you to dance, then you better be light on your toes or you will fall. Now I better shut up. |
Press Corps Fails To Ask Any NSA Questions At Obama’s NSA Press Conference | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | The White House Press Corps just completely botched the one opportunity we had to learn details about the National Security Agency’s spying program, and the rationale for sweeping government surveillance. During the hour-long press conference President Obama held specifically to answer questions about the NSA, . As a result, we learned precisely zero information from something slated to be critically informative. What did they ask about ? (Full transcript from the ) The Press Corps, dominated by TV broadcasters dependent on ratings from the gossipy machinations of politics, just ditched its obligation to inform the American people. Let’s review: Today, President Obama held a last-minute press conference to announce 4 vague reforms to the intelligence community. We have more details , but essentially, it boils down to 1) a new independent NSA review board that will publish recommendations on protecting civil liberties 2) a new website detailing the surveillance activities 3) changes to the Patriot Act authorizing the spying, and 4) a new public advocate to argue cases in the secret court that grants the NSA spying requests. After the announcements, Obama opened himself up to questions. Because no one asked any details about the NSA, ? British spy agencies reportedly tap the undersea cables used to carry Internet data and share it with the NSA. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) may forbid American agencies from collecting information on domestic targets, but we have no idea whether Britain’s equivalent, the GCHQ, is listening in on American phone calls abroad or watching their Internet behavior (then sharing it with US agents). [tweet https://twitter.com/RonWyden/status/365955284478345216] ? A new NSA report [ ] released today defending its practices notes that surveillance practices helped stop Najibullah Zazi from bombing the New York City Subway. But, as Ben Smith from BuzzFeed argues, it’s likely the first tip came from local police officers, who discovered evidence from a hard-drive of a co-conspirator, collected during the course of normal policy work. Will this new agency have to prove that the programs have ever been useful? Senator Ron Wyden, who has seen the intelligence reports, likewise . “As far as we can see, all of the useful information that it has provided appears to have also been available through other collection methods,” he wrote in a letter. [tweet https://twitter.com/repjustinamash/status/365922132011646978] 3). Why is it OK to monitor activity, even if it’s not read? The NSA reportedly keeps data for 5 years. More importantly, it looks at the communications of anyone who is “3 hops” from a suspect (a friend of a friend of a friend). The average person is 3 degrees away from , which effectively allows the NSA to spy on anyone adult they want. Simply holding the data may be ripe for abuse. In fairness, Chuck Todd of MSNBC did ask about whistleblower Edward Snowden. Obama , “No, I do not think Mr. Snowden is a patriot.” It’s an important question, if only symbolically, since the U.S. will be seeking legal action regardless of how Obama talks about Snowden. This was the Press’ opportunity to hold Obama’s feet to the fire and get specifics. Instead, we got to rehash some old debates and speculate about the future. I hate to criticize a fellow journalist. Within their respective fields, the White House Press Corps is quite knowledgeable. But, broadcast reporters and their incessant need to perpetuate political entertainment television failed the American people today. Today, I’m ashamed of the press. We all should be. |
ITC Says Samsung Violated Apple Patents, Calls For Sales Ban On Older Samsung Devices | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Apple won a seemingly decisive victory against Samsung in its patent-centric court battle last year, but the legal back-and-forth is far from over. The Cupertino company asked the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. to allow a sales ban on certain Samsung devices earlier today, and now the International Trade Commission has ruled that some of Samsung’s older Android devices . The punishment? A ban on the importation and sale of those devices in the United States, should the decision pass muster during a period of presidential review. President Obama has the option to overrule the ITC’s decision in this case (an ability he took advantage of before, to Apple’s benefit), but unless he does so Samsung and its U.S. subsidiaries can only continue to sell those devices for 60 days. The ITC’s ban hinges on patents no. 7,479,949 and no. 7,912,501, which deal with touchscreen heuristics and the ability to detect when something is plugged into a headphone jack, respectively. The body also investigated claims that those same Samsung devices violated four additional Apple patents which mostly dealt with cosmetic issues like the ornamental design of a smartphone and the ability to display translucent images, but the ITC ultimately found no infringement there. Curiously, one of those four patents ( to be specific) seems thematically similar to the headphone jack patent the Samsung was found to have infringed, but Samsung managed to avoid getting dinged a third time. Of course, we have to take age into account here — Apple and Samsung have been arguing over the fate of these gadgets for years now, which means Samsung’s bottom line probably won’t be hurt too badly if the president doesn’t swoop in to overturn the ITC’s decision. We don’t yet have a full list of the devices that fall under the ITC’s exclusion order, but reports that we’re primarily looking at phones like the Samsung Continuum, Captivate, Fascinate, and the Galaxy S 4G. No one could blame you if you didn’t recognize any of those names: those devices are all pushing three years old, and it’s very unlikely that Samsung had any left sitting its in sales channels anyway. That said, the ITC’s ruling is final so there’s no way for Samsung to appeal the decision even if it wanted to — it’s all up to a higher power now. Here’s Samsung’s official response on the matter: “We are disappointed that the ITC has issued an exclusion order based on two of Apple’s patents. However, Apple has been stopped from trying to use its overbroad design patents to achieve a monopoly on rectangles and rounded corners. The proper focus for the smartphone industry is not a global war in the courts, but fair competition in the marketplace. Samsung will continue to launch many innovative products and we have already taken measures to ensure that all of our products will continue to be available in the United States.” In case you’ve got a hankering for legal jargon, the full ruling can be found below: [scribd id=159241789 key=key-peh9notrnknbdjm1g0r mode=scroll] |
Betaworks Updates Instapaper’s Web Reader, Browser Extensions And Mobile Updates To Come | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Since Betaworks read later service from its creator , the startup studio has been pretty quiet. But the first major update is now right around the corner. The web reader was updated and a beta version is . According to the , the iOS and Android versions will receive some love as well, and many long standing feature requests will eventually come to the service. Users will soon be able to sort and filter unread items in the mobile apps. Like competitor , Instapaper will have browser extensions to supplement the traditional bookmarklet on the desktop. RSS feeds will make a comeback as there used to be a way to subscribe to an RSS feed in Instapaper, but it was killed due to server charge and Arment’s design decision. Finally, Betaworks mentions new social integrations. For those last two features, Betaworks may integrate Instapaper with its other services, such as . Maybe the RSS feature will be a way to import your feeds from Digg Reader. Maybe the new social integrations will be Digg buttons. Yet, Betaworks has been very careful with Instapaper. One of the reasons the company likes Instapaper is because the service is already profitable. There is no free version of Instapaper on iOS or Android — the app costs $3 on the App Store and Google Play. Moreover, there is an optional subscription fee of $1 a month to unlock a better search feature. That’s why Betaworks doesn’t want to alienate Instapaper’s existing users. The new development team is always asking for feedback on Twitter and on the blog. Similarly, the new web reader currently coexists with the existing website. In today’s blog post, the Instapaper team mentions Arment’s ideas and to-dos for improving Instapaper. While it’s unclear whether he is still regularly giving advice for the product roadmap, Betaworks is taking into account the feedback he gave during the acquisition. The web reader isn’t the most used component of the service but was clearly neglected until now. This first update is a good sign for the overall product direction and gives us hope for future iOS and Android app updates. Love this. — Marco Arment (@marcoarment) |
Meta, The Crazy AR Glasses That Aim To Do What Google Glass Can’t, Go Up For Pre-Order | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Over a year after the announcement Of Google Glass, many folks I talk to still seem to be misunderstanding what Glass can actually “It’ll be great for Augmented Reality!” they say, assuming that Glass can render objects directly into your full view of the world (it can’t.) “Ooh! It’ll be like Minority Report!”, expecting Glass’ camera to pick up your every hand wave (it doesn’t.) Then they try on a pair and realize that… well, that’s not what Glass is. But it’s what Meta is aiming to be — and their first (read: still a bit rough) version is going on sale to the public starting today. To picture the Meta, picture a pair of glasses — or, more accurately in its current stage, a pair of safety goggles. Put a translucent, reflective surface in each eye piece, displaying images on top of your field of view as piped out of a tiny projector built into each arm of the frames. Take a couple tiny RGB/Infrared cameras — essentially a miniature Kinect — and strap them to the frame. That’s the Meta. The Meta then plugs into another device to help it with the data crunching; right now, that’s a laptop. Moving forward, it’ll be your phone. After flying under the radar for a bit over a year, Meta debuted itself to the world on Kickstarter back in May. By the end of their campaign, they’d nearly doubled their original goal of $100,000. They promised to ship those units to their backers by the end of this month, and they say they’re on track to meet that deadline — so now they’re opening up pre-sales of the next iteration to everyone. To be clear, the hardware they’re is still quite early. It’s perhaps a bit past the “Developers Only” level, but it’s still mostly meant for the hardcore early-adopters and tinkerers. Hell, its early state is reflected in its very name; this model is called the META.01, suggesting many a revision to come. The META.01 units are going up for sale at $667, with plans to begin shipping in November. The company has pulled in a few hardware designers since their Kinect-taped-to-glasses days, allowing this iteration to be considerably more svelte than the Kickstarter variant that came before it. The Meta.01s will still be a bit more cumbersome than the final hardware they’re hoping to ship, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’ve met a number of companies that promise to do this sort of thing. Each time, I expected to be blown away. Each time, the company showed up more or less empty handed. One showed up with a pair of 3D-printed glasses with a basic camera built in, but no display of any sort to speak of. One showed up with nothing but a folio full of concept sketches and promises of grandeur. Meta, meanwhile, showed up with pairs of functional (though again, early prototype) glasses, and a bunch of working (if rough) tech demos. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7I7JuQXttw&&iv_load_policy=3;w=560&h=315] The second I put on the glasses, a number hovering in front of my eyes told me the distance between me and whatever I looked at. I held up my hand, and a floating rectangle appeared in space, following my palm wherever it went, expanding and closing as I opened and closed my fist. “How well does it do Augmented Reality?”, I ask. They grab a piece of paper off my desk — standard, blank printer paper, sans any sort of QR code or tracking marker. They punch a few buttons on the laptop, and a movie trailer starts playing on the paper. It’s not rendering perfectly edge to edge, mind you, instead sort of floating in the middle — but it’s still tracking this featureless piece of piece of paper remarkably well as they wave it around our office, crappy overhead fluorescent lights and all. Tracking blank white objects — be it a piece of paper, or a big blank wall — is one of the hardest computer vision challenges around. Yet here they were. He bends the paper, the video bends with it. He crumples up the paper and unfolds it; the video starts playing again, now . What. “How about hand gestures?” They tap a few buttons. A 3d mushroom pops up, seeming to float about 2 feet from my view. “Poke it”, says Raymond Lo, the company’s CTO. I do, clumsily jabbing at where my brain perceives the mushroom to be. It takes a few seconds for me to “find” the ethereal fungus — but when I do, it’s immediately obvious. The mushroom changes shape around my finger like a glob of clay, completely intangible but seemingly somehow Meta hopes that people will someday be doing full-fledged 3D modeling with this technology, sending their creations directly to their 3D printer. The demo eventually lost track of my hand and wasn’t able to get it back — forgivable, given the early state of the project — but for a few fleeting seconds, I was getting a glimpse of AR tech that so many teams had promised me before. It’s early. It’s rough. But , is it cool. And I’m not the only one impressed, even in these early days. Steve Feiner, one of the world’s leading AR experts and head of the AR research department at Columbia University, is signed on as their lead advisor. Steve Mann, oft dubbed the “ “, is their Chief Scientist. They breezed into Y-Combinator, and I hear that investors have been knocking ever since. The META.01 glasses are on sale beginning today at Meta’s newly acquired (and hilariously self-aware) domain, . |
MIT Students Show How To 3D Print Your Own Non-Duplicatable Keys For Easy Breaking And Entering | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | If there’s one thing that sucks about breaking-and-entering it’s that it’s too difficult. Three enterprising young MIT students have , thanks to a 3D printing workaround to the sticky issue of making duplicates of so-called “non-duplicatable” keys. All you need is a flatbed scanner, an original Primus lock key made by Schlage (or just a picture of one) and some code the students revealed at last weekends DevCon hacking conference. The students in question are David Lawrence, Eric Van Albert and Robert Johnson, and they aren’t actually evil, just intent on demonstrating the fact that reliance on older tech like these so-called high security keys might be in need of an update, given recent advances in tech like the advent of affordable, easy-to-access 3D printing tools. These guys didn’t just manage to replicate the keys in software models, either – they actually submitted their designs to 3D printing services including Shapeways and i.Materiealise, and were mailed fully working copies made of different materials including titanium. With sharing sites like The Pirate Bay now supporting 3D models, you can easily imagine a scenario where someone uploads a key of their hated neighbor’s front door and points the mischief-loving crowd over at 4chan or somewhere at it for shenanigans. That sharing aspect is what makes this a little more threatening than finding someone you know with loose ethics and a hardware store who can make you a copy yourself. 3D printing is bound to result in upheaval and new concerns not only for manufacturers of cheap, easily replicated goods, but also for lawmakers and security professionals worldwide, especially with big money and talent like the trying to democratize the process. For now, most people’s business, banks and hospitals are probably safe from this kind of attack, especially if 3D printing services start watching out for this kind of thing, as the vast majority of people don’t have at-home 3D printing powers yet. But worth noting some basic stand-bys in the security world are starting to look like jokes. Oh, and don’t do crimes, people, even if they’re easy. |
Obama Says “No, I Don’t Think Mr. Snowden Is A Patriot” As Leak Risked National Security | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | President Obama said a review of the NSA could have come “without putting at risk our national security”, and therefore, declared, “No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden is a patriot” at a press conference today on spying transparency. Obama insisted he had ordered a review of surveillance programs before the “NSA leaker” kicked off a “not always fully informed” debate, but will implement spying reforms. Specifically, of how the Patriot Act authorizes the NSA to conduct surveillance, add a public privacy advocate to the secret NSA courts, build a website laying out what the NSA collects and what it doesn’t, and create an independent cybersecurity processes review agency. Obama said earlier in the conference that “given the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.” That seems somewhat incongruent with his opinion of Edward Snowden’s character, which was met with disgust by some in the media. The whisteblower revealed spying practices that potentially endanger Americans’ liberty — a founding principle of the nation, and yet… "No, I don't think Mr. Snowden is a patriot", said the man sworn to defend the Constitution about the guy who might have actually saved it. — Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) Courtesy of The Washington Post’s , Obama followed up the statement : “As I said in my opening remarks, I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks. My preference — and I think the American people’s preference — would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws; a thoughtful, fact-based debate that would then lead us to a better place, because I never made claims that all the surveillance technologies that have developed since the time some of these laws had been put in place somehow didn’t require, potentially, some additional reforms. That’s exactly what I called for. So the fact is, is that Mr. Snowden’s been charged with three felonies. If in fact he believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court with a lawyer and make his case. If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time. So there were other avenues available for somebody’s whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions. But having said that, once the leaks have happened, what we’ve seen is information come out in drips and in drabs, sometimes coming out sideways. Once the information is out, the administration comes in, tries to correct the record. But by that time, it’s too late or we’ve moved on.” Obama did provide Snowden with a light commendation, saying “there’s no doubt that Mr. Snowden’s leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response than would have been the case if I had simply appointed this review board to go through — and I’d sat down with Congress and we had worked this thing through”. Perhaps this slower, less transparent review wouldn’t have garnered as many headlines, but Obama explained “ We’ll now have to wait and see if the rapid reforms catalyzed by Snowden actually provide citizens more protection and restore confidence that the government is being honest with the American people. The issue is growing beyond one of the philosophical values of the nation, and into one with negative consequences for the economy. Critics expect American technology businesses to lose billions of dollars as clients choose foreign services they believe are less subject to surveillance. It’s not just Americans Obama has to convince that the NSA is using surveillance appropriately, but the entire world. |
Spikes Builds A Secure Browser For The Enterprise | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | The vast majority of malware on corporate networks arrives . Branden Spikes, the CEO of , believes that by virtualizing the browser and having it run separate from the desktop, his company can prevent the vast majority of these attacks. The WebKit-based browser runs in a virtualized environment either on-premise or in the cloud and mostly resembles Google’s Chrome (though with the URL bar on top of the tabs). Spikes, who was previously the CIO of SpaceX and PayPal, told me that in his view, users are ready for this kind of tool. They are already familiar with the concept of remote applications. Right now, however, using browsers on remote desktops typically isn’t a great experience, especially if you’re using a highly interactive site. As the Spikes team told me, the company puts a strong emphasis on ensuring that the browser feels just like a native app on the desktop. To do this, Spikes uses PNG for encoding text and just switches to H.264 for video. The team says this keeps the latency as low as possible and allows users to play YouTube videos or even browser-based games without any noticeable lag. To use Spikes, users simply sign in with their accounts (after they’ve downloaded the software) and the browser will start on their desktop. All of their bookmarks and other personalizations, of course, persist between sessions. The team also added a few new features to the browser that aren’t readily available in other solutions, including a new tab content menu and the ability to open multiple tabs at launch (something most browsers can do, too, but don’t emphasize). Spikes tells me that the team will also happily customize the browser for new companies that want to switch to this service. An OS X client is already in the works and after that, the team plans to launch a mobile app, as well. “You can’t secure the network with just Windows machines,” he told me. For now, Spikes is squarely focused on the enterprise market, but in the long run, the company also plans to move into the consumer space. |
Fail Week: Max Levchin’s ‘Doomed’ College Startup That Maxed Out His Credit Cards (And Got Him Dumped) | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | So TechCrunch TV decided to declare this week “ ” and run a five day long video series in which we talk to some of tech’s most famously successful people about the darkest days in their careers when everything seemed to be going wrong. This final episode features , who is of course known for co-founding such blockbuster businesses as PayPal and Slide and serving on the boards of companies including Yelp and Yahoo. But it turns out that not all of Levchin’s companies have turned into slam-dunk successes. Watch the video above to hear about the “doomed” startup Levchin co-founded in college that left him with several maxed out credit cards and thousands of dollars in debt. The company’s drawn-out failure came with some humiliating moments — a road trip from hell, a painful rejection from a potential investor, and an ugly breakup with a girlfriend who determined that Max cared more about his servers than about her. You can watch all of our Fail Week stories . |
Gillmor Gang Live 08.09.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | – Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Like us at Facebook.com/GillmorGang |
Tablet Tribulations: Asus Dumps Windows RT While NVIDIA Hopes For The Best | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Asus may have a hand in producing Google’s refreshed Nexus 10 Android tablet, but recent remarks from the company’s chief executive reveal that the Taiwanese company is turning up its nose at the prospect of making another Windows RT-powered tablet entirely. “It’s not only our opinion,” CEO Jerry Shen remarked to the . “The industry sentiment is also that Windows RT has not been successful.” And how many RT tablet models did Asus need to make before it came to this conclusion? Just one: the VivoTab RT (three models if you include its cellular variants). Now Asus may not be the most prominent of Microsoft’s RT hardware partners, but in an age where a surprising number of people are buying tablets in lieu of the snub is a prominent one. The company would apparently rather continue making full-blown Windows 8 tablets and notebooks rather than dump resources into a new RT tablet and hoping people into buying them. And can you blame them? Even Microsoft’s Surface — arguably the Windows RT flagship, mind you — is a dog. Who could forget that Microsoft had to write down of Surface RT inventory because people just didn’t buy them. Shen is absolutely right though: Asus is certainly not alone in panning RT as a platform worth building on. HP and Toshiba both had RT devices in development but axed them prior they ever hit the market. HTC reportedly canned a 12-inch Windows RT tablet, despite the fact it’s arguably too invested in Android. Even Nokia, Microsoft’s Windows Phone darling, is said to have in favor of full-on Windows 8 for its first (and oft-rumored) tablet in years. Naturally, not every company has been so quick to distance itself from Windows RT’s controversial embrace. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang yesterday that the chipmaker is working closely with Microsoft on a second generation Surface RT tablet, and hopes that the devices will be a “big success”. Of course, that very same day Huang also indirectly pointed to the original Surface as one of the reasons the company’s quarterly Tegra sales revenue is expected to be so wimpy — to hear him say it, NVIDIA doesn’t “expect as much returns on that investment as we originally hoped”. Bummer. Despite loud claims to the contrary, Microsoft isn’t going to let Windows RT go down without a fight. The problem is that even Microsoft seems unsure of which direction to take here — larger tablets like the Surface RT and its cousins haven’t managed to resonate with consumers. What about working with OEMs to create some smaller, cheaper RT tablets that could theoretically compete with devices like the iPad mini? It’s an intriguing thought… until you remember Microsoft relaxed its own standards to let device manufacturers load up full versions of Windows 8 on a generation of new, smaller tablets. Where is RT supposed to fit in now? That’s the $64,000 question, and plenty of OEMs don’t even want to try answering it anymore. |
Obama Announces Website For NSA Transparency, 3 More Reforms | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | President Obama announced a series of new reforms to increase public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial Internet and telephone surveillance program. The press conference (live at whitehouse.gov/live) is still on-going. Here are the 4 reforms he’s proposed. All are quite vague: 1). “Pursue appropriate reforms” around section 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the NSA to conduct surveillance. , The NSA interprets section 215 to mean that it can broadly monitor Internet and phone communications. It is not clear whether the NSA has the ability to actually read any of the emails, social network communications, browsing behavior, or call records without a warrant. 2). Create a public advocate to argue in front of the secret court that grants the NSA authority to target suspects (both foreign and domestic). A number of critics have called the secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a “rubber stamp” . A number of Congressman, including Steve Cohen, were considering legislation to create a public advocate who would argue for civil liberties within the Court. “One of the concerns that people raise is that a judge reviewing a request from the government to conduct programmatic surveillance only hears one side of the story, may tilt it too far in favor of security, may not pay enough attention to liberty,” admitted Obama. 3). Create a website detailing what the NSA does–and does not–collect on Americans and foreigners. “We can and must be more transparent. So I’ve directed the intelligence community to make public as much information about these programs as possible.” 4). Create an independent agency that reviews cybersecurity processes and produces timely reports. One is supposed to be out by the end of the year. “I’m tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities, particularly our surveillance technologies, and they’ll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy, particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public. And they will provide an interim report in 60 days and a final report by the end of this year, so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy and our foreign policy.” It should also be noted that Obama said, “No, I do not think Mr. Snowden is a patriot.” If you’re frustrated by this lack of detail, you’re not alone. He still has not answered the most pressing questions about why its ok to broadly spy on Americans, or any of the details surrounding the leaks. Hopefully those will be answered with this reforms. |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 7 | null |
YC-Backed LocalOn Works With Newspapers To Give Small Businesses A One-Stop Shop For Online Marketing | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | In the past few years, it seems like there’s been the explosion of startups trying to convince local businesses to sign up for their marketing or loyalty tools, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, co-founder Shahbano Imran recalled going door-to-door trying to convince businesses to sign up and discovering that “small businesses are getting pitched by 20 startups a day.” As a result, she said LocalOn’s initial efforts were “a complete failure” because “nobody wanted to hear from us.” Then she and her co-founder David Tolioupov came up with a better way to reach those businesses — working with local newspapers and merchants associations. So instead of getting pitched by a random startup, businesses are offered a set of tools from a publication or an organization that they already trust. (The revenue is split between LocalOn and its resale partner.) The approach seems to be working for the startup, which is part of incubator Y Combinator’s current class of companies. It has already partnered with 40 merchants associations and two newspapers in the Bay Area — apparently the partnership has generated $50,000 in new business for the East Bay Express newspaper over the past six months, and the OaklandGrown merchants association has seen a 20 percent increase in revenue from annual memberships. So what is LocalOn asking these groups to sell? Well, Imran seemed particularly proud of its website builder, which is part of a wave of new services ( ) designed to make it as easy as possible to build and edit a website. She gave me a quick demo of the LocalOn editor, which allows businesses to edit their site just as they would edit a presentation or document, with the changes going live immediately. It’s also easy to push new updates about events and deals to the site, which are automatically posted to social networks and local listings as well (that’s another way LocalOn’s partnerships come in handy). And there’s support for e-commerce. LocalOn offers tools for merchants associations and newspapers too, including website hosting, a member directory, member billing, and a widget where real estate agents can submit listings for vacant properties — so the organizations are be both resellers and customers. (You can see a few glimpses of the LocalOn product in the marketing video at the end of this post.) Imran told she plans to use LocalOn’s existing newspaper relationships to expand beyond the Bay Area. Focusing on newspapers might not seem like a great strategy, given the industry’s decline, but Imran said alternative newsweeklies like the East Bay Express are in better health than people think. (And the newspapers can resell LocalOn tools to both individual businesses and to merchants associations.) Looking ahead, Imran noted that there’s a growing number of interesting local products on the LocalOn platform, so the company could eventually work with its media partners to create interesting aggregated shopping experiences. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3EcWUGqfY&w=560&h=315] An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that LocalOn’s products can be white labeled (i.e, resold under new branding). |
Amazon Could Launch Qualcomm-Powered Games Console And Media Box By End Of Year | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | Amazon is working on a games console, according to rumors from and backed up by rumblings we’ve heard at TechCrunch as well. Game Informer says we’ll see the device by end of year, possibly in time for holiday shopping season, and that it will have its own dedicated controller and offer access to digital games sold online by Amazon.com. We’ve heard from a reliable source that the hardware Amazon is building could be powered by a Qualcomm MPQ chip, which is the Snapdragon processor line the chipmaking company builds specifically for smart TV and set-top box devices. That, combined with earlier rumours that have emerged suggesting Amazon is working on a set-top device as reported , combine to suggest that while gaming may be part of this potential new hardware, it won’t be the sole focus. Nor does it make sense for Amazon to focus only on games; it has a huge vested interest in pushing digital music and movies, so why not do a device that combines all three? Our source also informs us that the Amazon box is being worked on at Lab126, the Cupertino-based experimental hardware division that first created the Kindle. That’s , but our informant says those plans are still on track and that this is the gaming device being discussed now as well. We’ve also heard from separate sources reports of developers being approached by Amazon regarding developing games for their hardware, which means it could be more than just a media center PC designed to play the digital downloads it already offers. Amazon might be looking more at competing with devices like the OUYA and the upcoming BlueStacks GamePop and GamePop Mini, if it’s securing original content from small developers. Webush Securities analyst Michael Pachter that Amazon could even give away its hardware to Amazon Prime subscribers, similar to the model that in exchange for subscription to their all-you-can-play mobile console gaming subscription. We haven’t heard anything specific regarding that possibility, but Amazon’s interests would definitely lie in making more money from content, not in hardware margins. We reached out to both Amazon and Qualcomm for more information, and Amazon responded saying that it doesn’t comment on “rumors or speculation,” while Qualcomm hasn’t responded as of press time. The fact that these rumors are floating up for a second time definitely suggests that Amazon’s living hardware plans are a key area to watch, for both consumers and competitors. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Ubuntu Edge, Nexus Rumors, Beddit And Trace Tracker | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | The may be the future of the smartphone, but does it have a future? for the next generation of Google’s vanilla tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, startups are hitting up Indiegogo with new quantified self devices, including and . We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the , featuring , , and . We also invite you to check out our new which airs every Wednesday. Enjoy!
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Stealth Startup Fantex Wants To Make It Possible For Celebrities To IPO | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | If corporations can be people, why can’t people be corporations? A stealth startup called aims to allow celebrities and professional athletes to file for initial public offerings (IPOs). The quoted text and screenshots in this article are from the Fantex app the company had launched in the iTunes app store on August 27, in what was an apparent beta test. Fantex removed the app yesterday after the company declined to comment for this story. Fantex describes itself as “the world’s first marketplace that lets consumers invest real money in stocks linked to the value and performance of the brands of the world’s top athletes.” And here’s the kicker: Fantex says “all tracking stocks are offered pursuant to a registration statement that has been filed with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).” A shows the company was delivered a notice of effectiveness, which is typically done when the company has filed to register for sales to the public (as Fantex is doing), but the documents that the SEC deemed effective for sale are not publicly available. Fantex offers a disclaimer on the app that hints a bit at how the business on their end works: “Each Fantex Inc. tracking stock is intended to track and reflect the separate economic performance of a specific brand contract that Fantex has signed with an athlete. However, holders of shares of a Fantex Inc. tracking stock will have no direct investment in that brand contract, associated brand or athlete. Rather, an investment in a tracking stock will represent an ownership interest in Fantex, Inc., as a whole. These tracking stocks are offered only through Fantex Brokerage Services (FBS). FBS cannot assure you as to the development or liquidity of any trading market for these stocks.” This means there are two separate markets within Fantex. Fantex strikes deals with professional athletes who give up a certain percentage of their income (presumably over an allotted period of time, like the length of their active career) in exchange for the proceeds of the IPO. People can then buy shares of that player’s brand, like a stock, in the Fantex-consumer market. Presumably, if San Francisco 49ers tight end has a monster year and looks like he’s going to get a bigger endorsement deal or a larger contract in a few years, his stock would rise and a fan could sell their Davis stock and cash out with a real, monetary profit. People would own in Fantex that would depend on the specific brand that they choose; these stocks would then rise and fall based on their own performance, not on the overall performance of Fantex. At the time of publication there were nine athletes, all NFL players, available for Fantex IPOs in the now-removed app, including high profile stars and Vernon Davis. Dave Butz, the agent for New Orleans Saints wide receiver Lance Moore, said he wasn’t sure if his client was working with Fantex. Representatives for the other eight players did not respond to multiple requests for comment before publication, so we’re not positive if these athletes have signed on with Fantex or if they are merely placeholders in the app. However, they would be incredibly random choices for placeholder players, as some are superstars, some are solid but unnoticeable players, and others are fighting for NFL roster spots (one is a free agent longsnapper). If they were merely placeholders, I’d assume the company would fill the app with more high profile, noticeable players. While the app only features professional athletes right now, we’re told the company has aspirations to expand from athletes to celebrities. , , and founded the company. Bierne was a general partner at Benchmark Capital. French founded and served as CEO of OnLink, which sold to Siebel systems in 2000 for $609M. Mullin has been the CFO for a number of startups The rest of the team has similarly impressive resumes, including a former CTO/COO of E*Trade, a former head of product management at Yahoo Finance, and a number of ex-Wall Street guys. Put simply, this isn’t the pipe dream of a couple of 20-somethings who were watching the VMAs and thought, “man, wouldn’t it be cool if Miley Cyrus was a stock?” Fantex’s board and advisors includes Hall of Fame quarterback , former NBA sharpshooter (and Villanova MBA) , and Benchmark general partner , among others. The startup has raised $13 million in equity funding, according to from February of this year. Unsurprisingly, sources say Benchmark was in on the round. It looks like the app was put in the iTunes store as part of a semi-public beta the company is (was?) doing. While the company’s main website domain (Fantex.com) still points to a vague site that hints at a big project on the horizon and shows off the Fantex team, links in the app directed to beta.Fantex.com. Besides being a fun place to short Amanda Bynes’ stock, Fantex will undoubtedly arouse a wide range of reactions to and questions about its implications for society. For most athletes, joining Fantex probably isn’t a great idea. These are individuals who are already , and they have very unique wealth management situations in which they earn massive sums of money over a very short career. Part of the reason many athletes have money problems is that they become accustomed to a lifestyle while they are earning millions per year that is unsustainable over their lifetimes. Giving up a percentage of their future earnings to get more cash even earlier is the opposite of what they should be doing. For the buyers and sellers of the market, it may feel uncomfortable directly evaluating other humans as financial stocks. To be fair, this betting on people isn’t particularly new. Everything from the stock market to venture capital investing to sports betting relies heavily on individuals (whether they’re CEOs, founders, or quarterbacks) who have a disproportionate impact on organizations. We’ve even , , that lets people raise capital in exchange for a share of their future income–very similar to Fantex. But the celebrities in Fantex’ app are fairly high profile – they’re stars who we already over-fetishize. Soon, we won’t just be stalking athletes and celebrities out of our personal interests. We’ll be keeping a close eye on our business investments. A representative for former NFL wide receiver Donald Driver tells me Driver has no business relationship with Fantex. As you can see in the first line of images above, Driver was listed under “IPOs coming soon” in the beta app. Driver retired from the NFL in January 2013. |
Because Walking Saves Lives, Mobilizer Inc. Is A Startup That’s Aiming To Get Hospital Patients Moving | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | For sedentary medical patients, one of the easiest ways to reduce the time of hospital stays and decrease the risk of complications like blood clots and pressure ulcers is simply to get up and walk around. But with medical equipment like oxygen tanks or IV drips in tow, it can take nurses up to 20 minutes to prepare a patient for ambulation, adding up to hundreds of hours of wasted time each week. This means that when patients are finally up and moving, some are only walked as far as their door before being sat back down. , a graduate of the medical device startup accelerator, created a six-wheeled holster for all of that medical equipment in order to make medical ambulation easier and faster. The carrier sits next to the patient’s bed so that only one attendant — rather than up to five — is needed to unplug it from the wall, release the brake, and get them moving. Mobilizer, which launched in May, has raised $300,000 in funding from Innova Memphis and MB Venture Partners and plans to close another $400,000 in the coming year. CEO and co-founder James Bell said that so far Mass General Hospital and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center have purchased units, which cost a little under $5,000 apiece. According to Bell’s projections, Mobilizer will be net cash flow positive by year’s end. The company has sold almost 100 units to date. The proliferation of medical startups like Mobilizer offers an invaluable payoff: the possibility of finding ways to reduce the economic and personnel burdens on the hospital system. Medical tricorders like the and , for instance, show potential to do so by putting diagnostic tools in consumers’ hands and therefore reducing the number of unnecessary visits to the doctor. In the case of Mobilizer, getting patients’ blood flowing means turning over beds faster by speeding recovery rates, avoiding the cost of complications, and boosting staff efficiency. Although medical tech companies often struggle to get FDA approval before they go to market, Mobilizer is a , meaning the clearance process requires proving a certain level of quality and paying a fee to register with the FDA. Bell said that the plan is to create platforms for different hospital departments, tailoring the Mobilizers to their varying equipment needs. Outside of the hospital, it will be easy to scale into home care as well. And Mobilizer is looking to form partnerships with other medical tech companies. “We are establishing relationships with other companies, for example with a portable ventilator company that mounts right on the Mobilizers really easily,” Bell said. Mobilizer does have some competition in this space, but Bell pointed out that efficient solutions are not widespread in hospitals yet. He said he had heard of some centers using red Radio Flyer wagons to carry equipment, or taping oxygen tanks to walkers, which, yes, is just as risky as you might imagine. You know what? That alone is a pretty good argument for a better equipment carrier. |
India’s Visa Maze Ensnares Foreign Entrepreneurs | Mahesh Sharma | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | Carrying all the right documentation for his five-year business visa, Alex (not his real name) embarked on what he thought would be his fourth and final visit to the Indian immigration authority. He believed his wild goose chase was almost at an end. However, his awkwardly smiling assassin, the elusive office supervisor, had other ideas. “Sorry, you can’t get your visa now, please come back in some time,” the supervisor said, fatally. Alex’s plight shows the difficulties entrepreneurs face in trying to access the booming market of India today. This is his story. The economics graduate moved to India about a year ago to co-found a social business with his peers. The government made them wait the best part of a year before approving their application to be incorporated as a local not-for-profit — a vital credential to navigate the country’s Catch-22 regulatory system. With incorporation certificate in hand, Alex was confident the last piece of his visa puzzle, namely attaining a five-year authorisation to work to improve the quality of life for Indians, was about to fall into place. How wrong he was. Stepping into the office was like entering Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, on Groundhog Day, endlessly waiting for a weasley little oracle to emerge from his hovel in order to deliver bad news. Alex was forced to return to the office three times because he “didn’t have the right documentation.” On the fourth visit, the bureaucrat, ensconced in his glass bubble, again said he didn’t have the right documents and would have to come back again. At the end of his wits, Alex didn’t buy it. After failing to plead his case with the front-line worker, he asked to speak with the manager lurking in the background. The bureaucrat turned meekly, skulked over, and relayed the request to his superior who took one look at the fiery redhead on the wrong side of the counter and scurried away to his glass-walled office, deep in the bubble. The clerk returned and, as if the whole spectacle had not been witnessed, told Alex the manager was unavailable. “The manager is right there,” he said, pointing to the anonymous office. “I just need to speak with him for two minutes. I’ve already met him before. He knows my case.” “Sorry sir, he is not available,” the bureaucrat said, reciting a well-used line. “You’ll have to send him an email to organise an appointment.” Email? Alex was all too familiar with India’s digital black hole, where bits may have even travelled backwards and forwards in time, even to alternate universes, because they never seemed to reach their intended destination. He whipped out his laptop and emailed the appointment request to the teller who was sitting down before him, but also included a stern warning: “I’m not leaving until I can speak with him.” The bureaucrat retreated to discuss the latest turn of events. Alex briefly took a minute to survey his surroundings. The same situation was playing out at three or four adjacent counters. “This is the fourth time you’ve asked me to come back for a five-year business visa. I have all the right documentation, I have had it all along. Why won’t you accept my application?” railed another aggrieved applicant. Alex snapped back to attention when the manager emerged from his den. He was face-to-face with his tormentor. “What’s the problem, sir?” the manager asked. “You know what my problem is! We’ve already spoken about it, you told me to come back with more information and I did. I’ve come back four times with the correct documentation and you’re still telling me I won’t be approved?!” he said. “I’m sorry sir but we can’t process this visa application now, please come back in some time,” he said, wearing a weak smile. “Why not?” “I’m sorry sir but we can’t do this now, please apply in some time,” he repeated, like a broken record. No matter how he always received the same answer and result but despite the frustrating experience he plans to come back and try again. He’s chasing that sweet feeling of victory that can only be earned by simultaneously exerting extreme amounts of effort and patience to achieve ordinarily routine tasks. For an entrepreneur, there’s a lot to like about India. The subcontinent’s diversity, population, and economic disparity offers near endless problems to solve, as well as the scale to make a meaningful impact and return. But if you get too far ahead of yourself, the red-tape woven noose dangling around your neck will rein you back in. The rope becomes dangerously short as you enter the government maze, where searching for the right approvals demands long wait times, repeated visits, and constant apprehension as to whether the application will even be received. It’s an exercise in humility. Saju James, partner at Fragomen Global Immigration Services, said the visa process was straight forward — if you know the procedures. This means that you must give the consulates the right information, right down to using the correct vernacular in the application. “If you don’t stick to the template, exactly what the consulate is looking for, the chances of getting denials are much higher,” said James, whose firm has processed close to 1,000 work permits, less than two percent of which have been rejected. This is a legacy of the way that visa offices were run before 2009, James said, when the Indian government didn’t have direct oversight of the approval process. Previously, each visa office and consulate operated as its own fiefdom; and a single supervisor served as judge, jury, and executioner. “It was very arbitrary and the consulate officers had the power to decide, simply based on the interview,” he said. “They would say, ‘no, I’m not convinced this candidate should go on a work permit, he needs to apply for a business visa,’ and the reverse would happen as well.” That changed as the government took direct control of the process and released specific guidelines and processes to be followed. Most importantly, it started measuring workers on how many visa applications they actually processed, as opposed to simply documenting the number of hours they worked. It was a vast improvement. “The only difference is that they have not published the formats for when you apply for a visa application, so some offices still give a difficult time to applicants.” James said it was difficult to track the efficiency because the agencies themselves did not record the rejection rates. However, he estimated that the number of unsuccessful applications previously ranged into the double-digit percentages. This is all little comfort to Alex, who still goes to bed every night in fear of being woken up by that same Sonny and Cher song and seeing his visa application, as complete as it always was, lying unapproved on his cheap desk. [Image via ] |
How Amazon Is Tackling Personalization And Curation For Sellers On Its Marketplace | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | When it comes to personalization, Amazon has been one of the pioneers in mining and using data to create a more curated e-commerce experience for consumers. But by now, nearly all e-commerce companies and marketplaces have caught on and are using more personalized recommendations to enhance the user experience when shopping and browsing. Amazon has been particularly focused over the past few years on extending its personalization features for its sellers on the marketplace, both on the front-end consumer experience and on the backend. We sat down with Peter Faricy, vice president and general manager of the Amazon Marketplace, to talk about how he and his team are approaching personalization for the company’s 2 million third-party sellers worldwide across 10 global marketplaces. Read our Q&A, which begins with Faricy providing some background information about Amazon Marketplace. We have over 2 million sellers around the world selling across Amazon Marketplaces in 10 different countries around the world, and serving more than 200 million customers all over the world. So it’s that business that me and my team are responsible for. What we specifically do is we provide all of the technology and the products and services that sellers need around the world to run their business on Amazon. So we are sort of your e-commerce engine, if you will. And the technology we develop helps them run their business on the Amazon Marketplace and reach customers and grow their business very successfully. So that’s kind of the quick background, if you will. So, one of the things that Amazon has been known for is being the pioneer of personalization and data mining to make the consumer shopping experience a much more curated type of shopping experience. So I am curious, sort of your view on this, and then how has that personalization strategy changed over time? Well, in the case of the Marketplace, we think about customers in two ways; we obviously think about the Amazon-buying customers and what they need and everything kind of starts with those customers in mind. But we also think of sellers on the Amazon Marketplace as our customers. And sellers years ago began asking us questions around, what are the things that they can do to improve their business? How can they manage inventory better? What products should they be adding? How do they serve customers better? So what I think you are referring to in this personalization, we developed some super-innovative technology three or four years ago that makes proactive, data-driven recommendations to each and every seller on the platform. And they range from suggestions on inventory quantities to new selections they should consider adding, to products they should consider fulfilling using a different surface than they use today. And we have had great success with our sellers. We get a lot of positive feedback from developing these recommendations. And most of all, the way we kind of judge how helpful these are to sellers is how much they are used, and we know that sellers are actively using these recommendations to run and grow their business. The part that’s been interesting for me is that it’s all self-service. So there is– when you mention how has it changed over time, we make every single day tens of millions of recommendations across all those different sellers. And on average a typical seller might have 100-plus recommendations in their queue in these different categories we have talked about before. So we send them emails with recommendations. They can also take a look on our portal called Seller Central. On the Gateway page there is a platform called Selling Coach or Seller Coach and all the recommendations are also stored there. And then we have many sellers that also plug into our business reports in different ways, and the recommendations are also available on our business reports. So we have got to serve up the recommendations in the manner that’s most effective for each seller, but try to give them the benefit of the data we have, our evaluation of their performance, and try to help make recommendations on what they can do to grow their business. When did you start doing this? Yeah, I think we started our first test in 2009, and probably went full-scale in 2010, and now it’s available in every country that we run a Marketplace in across the world, and every one of our sellers can access these recommendations. So what about the data and the signals you are using to help sellers personalize the Amazon experience for the end user, for me, who is, say, buying diapers on Amazon. How are you helping sellers then kind of draw the customer in through personalization? Yeah, I will try to give you a couple specific examples. I mean, as a customer one of the things that you rely upon is making sure that every product you are searching for is in stock. And so sellers really value, they have told us, our guidance on when they are about to run out of stock and how much inventory quantity they should carry. And depending on the season of the year, particularly during the holiday season, it’s difficult to know how much inventory to have in stock, as the sales ramp up closer to the holiday season, in November, December. So one example is that we give — one of our most popular recommendations is called straightforward enough, almost out of stock. So we take a look at how much you are selling; we take a look at the inventory that you have in stock on Amazon, and we make a recommendation based on what we think the forward-looking demand for your product will be, how much more you should add to inventory. So that’s a super simple one, but honestly one of the most powerful ones for serving customers better, managing your inventory in e-commerce is very, very challenging, and sellers tell us they really find our recommendations useful. What are some of the other way’s that you are using data to kind of serve up additional recommendations which then brings traffic to sellers? When customers go to search for something on Amazon, and either they can’t find the product at all, which we call no search results, or the search results are of low relevancy, we have a way to measure how relevant the results are we return. We take that information and immediately surface it back up to sellers who already sell similar products and recommend that they also begin to carry these products that customers are looking for. It sounds like Amazon wants to go beyond just providing the kind of access around the stock or in the fulfillment, but also help them on the backend with their sales and business and things like that. Yeah, exactly, I think that’s a good way to say it. I mean, right now the most popular areas we are helping sellers on are things like inventory, which we talked about; helping them find new selection, new products to add to Amazon. We’ve got a lot of positive feedback on those recommendations. Also, the fulfillment recommendations are super-critical, because we do offer a service called Fulfillment by Amazon, which is very popular with sellers, and some sellers choose to keep some inventory that they manage the fulfillment on their own. But for some of the more challenging inventory to fulfill for example, they may use Fulfillment by Amazon. And so we make recommendations based on the characteristics of how difficult these products are to fulfill or the seller’s own performance of doing a great job on serving customers and getting the products there fast and easily. And so for sellers who have a more challenging time doing that we make recommendations in fulfillment. And then you know the area that’s been really growing quite a bit in popularity, is we are beginning to help sellers identify areas where they can improve the sharpness of their pricing. So, for example, on the pricing world we surface up the sellers of all the different products you carry on Amazon, which of the products that you knot the lowest price on, and that allows them to go back and take a look at those products easily and determine whether or not it makes sense for their case to lower the price for customers. When it comes to social data, I am curious how sellers are responding to that sort of data when it comes to commerce. And do you feel like additional data from the customer is something that sellers are becoming more excited about? Yeah, I think, clearly “social” being a kind of a broad term certainly in an area that sellers understand how important that is to customers. And one of the ways that we try to connect customers and sellers on the Amazon detail page, is a new feature we introduced earlier this year called Ask, A-S-K, and you could see now, but if you go down some of our detail pages, we do something really interesting which is that we allow customers to ask a question about a product. Let’s say they are buying a camera and they want to know how good this camera is for shooting their children’s sporting events. And it’s kind of one of those questions, it isn’t exactly covered by the data that is provided about the camera, but it’s kind of a more “ask a friend” kind of a question. And we serve those questions up in an anonymous way to both the sellers of the items and also customers who previously purchased that item. And so far we’ve had a great response rate. We’ve had answers come back very, very quickly and very, very thoughtful for people who already own the product or are selling the product. So in the case of sellers who participate in this I think they have been pleased that they can, in this case, use kind of a more social angle to help customers find the product that’s best for them. Do you think that social data is something to allocate from Facebook, and are there different types of social data that work and some that don’t? Well, we don’t publicly discuss what kind of data we use for the recommendation, but certainly social data that’s publicly available like you are describing is certainly one of the inputs we use. From the sellers’ standpoint, Peter, how do you balance serendipity versus discovery? I think that a lot of sellers want, I am imagining, their product to be discoverable. How do you balance that need for discovery with also having millions of sellers on the platform? Well, one of the things that our sellers love about selling on Amazon is they are really in complete control of their business. So when it comes to these data-driven recommendations we allow them to opt in and opt out. We make over 50 different recommendations today and they can choose which recommendations we service up to them based on the ones that are most important to them or most important for their product. We challenge ourselves and we measure how useful they are. We know the majority of our sellers actually use our recommendation today, because we measure and track that. Then we also track how much improvement to their business did they get from using our recommendation and we hold ourselves accountable. What would you say the most popular tool that sellers using when it comes to personalizion? using some of these personal additional tools you offer? The No. 1 is an email called the Almost Out-of-Stock email. So those words “Almost Out-of-Stock” are almost like their own brand in the seller world. So that still remains by far the most popular type of recommendation we make today, because you could imagine for sellers who either sell a lot of products in total or who are trying to manage their inventory through different types of seasonality or who are also trying to manage their inventory across multiple marketplaces. Many of our largest sellers sell on other marketplaces in addition to Amazon. So they have a really big challenge to keep up with the demands of managing their inventory well. So, the “almost out of stock” set of recommendations, this has been the most popular. But I will say what’s been increasing dramatically, is the appetite from sellers, and our ability to help them in adding new products to Amazon. And so we have millions of unique products at Amazon today and yet, I can tell you we have an opportunity to add millions more. And so we surface up recommendation for sellers and we kind of do it in a way that’s smart and effective for them. So, if there is a seller who is selling lacrosse goals, and lacrosse sticks, and we notice there is an opportunity to add lacrosse jerseys and lacrosse balls, I obviously make those recommendations to them and so sellers really find, from the feedback they’ve given us, really find our selection recommendations to be really, really helpful and help them grow their business. What else is on a seller’s mind and what are you thinking about when it comes to future products? One of the things that sellers give us very positive feedback on is that we don’t charge sellers extra in order to receive these recommendations, and so you may see other participants in e-commerce taking other strategies here. But, we’ve for as long as the marketplace has existed, we don’t charge sellers listing fees and we don’t charge sellers fees for our recommendation. So our goal is to make it very easy for them to come join Amazon and very easy for them to make money, and we know that it’s really a win-win. If we could help sellers to serve customers better, our customers will be happy, sellers will get to grow their business and of course that creates a great Amazon Marketplace. So, the fact that this is a really innovative service free of charge I think is also kind of unique even in today’s world of e-commerce. On the forward-looking front, I think without question there is a couple of topics that are on sellers’ minds; one is that many of them see the opportunity to grow their business beyond the current geography or country they are in. So we’re beginning to make more and more recommendations for sellers on products they can sell outside their home country. And I think this is a game-changer, Leena, because if you think about the history of business, the only way you could experience it geographically was to maybe go plant the flag and open up a new office and add lots of capital and lots of overhead trying to figure out how to serve a new country. Being able to reach 10 countries on the Amazon Marketplace alone, plus customers from all over the world who shop those 10 marketplaces, is becoming a bigger and bigger opportunity for sellers. So that’s one. And then I think the other is back to this topic of selection. I think there are a lot of interesting categories at Amazon that customers are really happy with and want to find more and more selection. And one example would be softlines; so clothing, apparel, accessories, shoes. That’s an area where we’re beginning to have really great customer experience, and we’re able to provide sellers with better and better recommendations of new products and new brands we love to see them add to the marketplace. |
CrunchWeek: iPhone Trade-Ins, The New New Foursquare, And Twitter’s Blue Lines Problem | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | This time around, , and I discussed the ins and outs of Apple’s , the latest big update to (and the rumors of a ), and Twitter’s latest with lots of controversial . |
Coinchat Is A Chatroom Where Talking Sense Earns You Bitcoin | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | is a Bitcoin-incentivised browser-based chatroom where you can shoot the breeze with strangers online and earn in the process. Where’s the catch? Well, there isn’t really one. The Bitcoin you’re earning through chatting with other users comes from the site’s own revenue generation — funded by ads and also a transfer fee it charges when users send Bitcoin tips. In addition to earning fractions of Bitcoin for chatting, Coinchat users can tip each other/individual messages, if they like the cut of each other’s chat, and also tip particularly useful bots (which users can create) — so that’s another way to earn a little cryptocurrency on the site. Coinchat also supports scripted games (mostly betting-type games) where you can spend a little Bitcoin for the chance to earn a little more (or lose it all). Users can also plough their Bitcoin earnings into chatroom furniture like additional font colours, if they so desire. And if you want to take your earnings/winnings away to spend elsewhere the site lets you withdraw BTCs to : a Bitcoin wallet service run by the same developer behind Coinchat. Coinchat’s founder, a 28-year-old male freelance web developer based in Australia who (in keeping with Bitcoin’s shadowy origins) wishes to remain anonymous to avoid any Bitcoin associated “drama” or the threat of “doxxing”, tells TechCrunch the service has been up and running for about five months. In that time it has amassed around 8,000 registered users — mostly in Western nations, with a sizeable community of cash-strapped school age/college age folk among its user-base. There’s also an active Spanish community of Coinchat users. The largest amount of BTC withdrawn in one go is 10BTCs (around $1,288 at current exchange rates), according to the founder. As for the chatting, the site has played host to around 3.5 million messages since April. He says users display a variety of behaviours, including some who’re obviously just there just to earn free Bitcoin, and — at the other end of the spectrum — Coinchat regulars who participate in the community, hanging out and collaborating on their own projects, Reddit-style. “There was a collaborative horror story being worked upon by coinchatters earlier for instance,” he says. Chat-based earnings on Coinchat accrue as fractions of a BTC (earnings can range from 0.02mBTC to 2mBTC per message). The rewards rates are also varied behind the scenes, presumably to keep pace with Bitcoin’s (sometimes wildly swinging) exchange rates. “There’s an algorithm that determines how much coins you earn based on a variety of factors,” says the founder, who clearly doesn’t want to go into too much detail to avoid gaming of the system. Obvious stuff like spamming, posting gibberish and cutting and pasting swathes of text to try and ramp up your earnings won’t work, though. “Make sure what you say has some quality to it,” is one basic piece of . For an idea of how much you can earn, about an hour’s chatting (and one 0.25 mBTC tip) earned me 0.535 mBTC on the site. “As long as you don’t waste your money gambling, you will earn BTC surprisingly fast,” chips in one Coinchat user when I ask about the rewards system. As for tips, as well as some pre-set tip rates, tip amounts can be set by individual users — so it’s possible to hit it big if you impress the right Coinchatter. “A few days ago someone gave away 800 mBTC (almost an entire Bitcoin!),” says another user. “I’ve seen a few times over the past month where people have given out around a Bitcoin to random people.” While Coinchat users rack up their BTC earnings, the site isn’t making its founder filthy rich yet but that’s not a concern for him; the ability to cross promote his other Bitcoin services is clearly worth the minimal running costs. “Coinchat is making a slight amount of money — even if it lost a bit of money, I’m happy to keep it running as a ‘loss leader’,” he says. “My goals are for it to become a popular chat network — everything starts out small.” Android and iOS apps for Coinchat are currently in the works, but it’s possible to run the chatroom on a smartphone in the browser as an HTML5 web app. The native apps will be faster, and include features like push notifications plus a more streamlined UI, the founder adds. |
Gillmor Gang: Contextual Adults | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — settle in for the Labor Day weekend with a tour of a busy news week. Stops along the way include iBeacon in iOS7, Twitter’s thin blue line, the politics of twerking, and devices, devices, devices. Short takes on Bill Gates’ unlikely return, Apple’s iTrade-In offer, why Chromecast will change our habits, and Google’s Chromebook move in classrooms round out a lively end to summer. It’s a world where software is free and we spend our time saving up for the next shiny dongle. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | It started with an idea: How can we get our drinks more quickly at the bar? Dreamed up at 2 a.m. in Coloft, a Los Angeles coworking space, future founder doodled up an iPad application mockup that he called Apptini to answer the question. Apptini, a portmanteau of application and martini, wouldn’t last, but the product later known as had been born. Its life became a startup story that most don’t tell: A company that didn’t make it. Technology as an industry worships success — the bigger and splashier the better. What’s often left unsaid or swept under the rug or buried under the guise of a micro acqui-hire is failure. And lots of it. Young companies die by the hundreds in Silicon Valley, but you would hardly know it by reading your local blog. Flowtab, now a shuttered product, did something following its demise that I’ve never seen before — released a . Their timeline and notes showcase the mistakes that the company made during its short life. Contracts, failed television appearances, deals that fell through, and more were published. If you work in technology, it’s a compelling set of documents. I know Townsend, and have been in bars that at one point used Flowtab technology, so when the now former founders released their material, I caught up with both of them to talk through their history. What follows is the story of their dream, their company, struggle, failed pivots and an Australian mining magnate. The pitch was simple: Flowtab would be a better way to order and pay for drinks. It would speed up service, as bartenders would no longer deal with payments, something that the software handled for the bar. No more bar tabs, no more lost or forgotten credit cards and IDs, or soggy receipts and dry pens. All that was replaced by an iPad behind the bar that displayed drink orders as they were logged by folks pecking on their smartphones. Customers then picked up their drinks when they were ready. Simple. The idea was akin to a real-time GrubHub for the bar that you were currently sitting in. Flowtab would sport menus, and allow for tipping directly inside the app. Founders Townsend and wanted to help you get your tipsy on. Townsend took his iPad mockup and a short demo to 12 bars in the Santa Monica area, pitching a product that was utterly unbuilt. Response, Hill and Townsend recount, was good enough to keep moving on the project. Following the offline testing period, in mid-May of 2011, Flowtab put together a landing page. As Internet companies go, Flowtab had planted its flag. Two months later, the first version of Flowtab, coded in HTML5, was complete. However, Flowtab was severely understaffed, and needed far more development firepower than it currently had in-house. Money was scarce, and Flowtab wanted someone truly top-notch. This created something of a problem. A friend of Hill’s had worked with a developer by the name of on an application in the past. Hill flew to see him in San Francisco. Kouznetsov, who has a Ph.D. in computer science and worked in Oakland at the time, started to contribute at nights and on weekends as the company’s CTO. The first version of Flowtab was extremely limited. You could select the bar that you were in, pick a drink, set a tip amount, and hit order. But nothing more. Eventually, Kouznetsov helped the Flowtab crew wrap their HTML5 up into a native shell (using Appcelerator), and get it into both the Android and iOS app stores. That launch, in February of 2012, proved premature, as Flowtab had zero bars using its technology for users to actually visit. Users of the application were therefore greeted with an empty app. Well, there were a few fake bars listed. Ironically, Apple featured Flowtab for a week, sending it users that couldn’t actually use the app. At this stage, however, Flowtab remained focused more on talking to bar owners than acquiring users. The idea behind the focus was that, in the words of Townsend, “geographic density is absolutely key for any mobile payments application.” That fact that Apple had noticed the app at all was good augur. The Flowtab boys were now ready to land some bars. Flowtab held its coming out party at the Copa d’Oro bar in Santa Monica, processing around $1,200 in transactions throughout the evening. The mayor even showed up, and ordered a Coke using the app. Getting the mayor wasn’t easy for Townsend and Hill, who admitted to emailing him around 20 times, begging him to show up. It worked. Throughout the evening, customers placed 150 orders. It was a real, if moderate, success. To get people in the door, Flowtab was picking up the bill for the evening’s revelry. But that was secondary to the event proving that, when its technology flowed properly, Flowtab had built something that worked and people seemed to enjoy. After the launch party, Flowtab was invited to present in the LA Startup Competition, an annual event. They won, besting 14 other startups, but turned down the offered investment from VoiVoida Ventures. The location of VoiVoida was far from Flowtab’s Santa Monica digs, and the company didn’t want to move. Still, the win felt good. Townsend called it a “confidence boost.” Still in the learning stage of their venture, Team Flowtab went to the Nightclub and Bar Convention in Las Vegas. The company didn’t acquire new bar customers for its technology, but the trip did convince them that a business model idea that they were kicking around wouldn’t work: Flowtab could not be distributed through partnership with companies that sell Point of Sale (POS) systems. Flowtab would therefore have to build its own sales team, it realized. That meant more overhead, more staff, and more work for the little company that remained dramatically under-capitalized. By now, Flowtab had worked its way into three bars in L.A., but was seeing nothing like critical mass or organic growth. At its tender age and size, Flowtab had now decided that it needed intellectual property protection. You want to protect your IP, right? Well, maybe not. Flowtab filed a patent concerning the “ability for merchant sellers and servers in hospitality establishments to use point-of-sale applications to send one-click/one-touch order-status notifications to mobile devices of their customers.” It wasn’t a good move. Looking back, founders Hill and Townsend describe the effort as a waste of time, and a drain on their finances. It burned “lots of energy” and yielded nothing more than an “investor talking point,” they told me. Hill explained that the largest “value that [Flowtab] got out of the patent was convincing investors that it actually meant something.” At this early stage in its corporate life, with only a few bars on its platform, and a user base in the hundreds, Flowtab spent and invested scarce resources into something that would eventually yield it nothing. Landing July 1, 2012, the second version of Flowtab was done. Still coded in HTML5 that was wrapped into native code, the second iteration was a dramatic improvement on its predecessor. The bar-facing iPad app could now load drink orders asynchronously, limiting meaningless refreshes. The new version of Flowtab, like the two before it, was aimed more at responding to bartender requests than answering users’ needs. With the new app in place, Flowtab wanted to bump up its usership figures, which meant that it planned another party. Flowtab wasn’t attracting many users on its own in the bars it was installed in, so it wanted to bring more to its locations, and do it in a very public fashion. The resulting event was a comical cockup.
Flowtab teamed up with Uber and Thrillist for the three-bar crawl. Each of the bars that Flowtab was installed in would be in play. Thrillist sold tickets, Uber ferried folks, and Flowtab was in charge of making sure that the drinks kept pouring. “At this point,” said Hill, “we thought we were hot shit.” Three-hundred people were invited. The event was a catastrophe. The app failed, the bars were understaffed, and drink orders piled up, leaving 35 in the queue at once in the second pub the group visited. That bar had a single bartender. It was stuffed with 150 patrons who were told that Flowtab could get them a drink, fast. Finally, Flowtab’s server went down, scuttling the entire operation. Hill started handing out margaritas by the fistful to keep everyone happy. The Flowtab team buckled under the stress. After the abortive bar bashes wound down, Hill went to the beach, wearing his Flowtab shirt, and sat down for an hour by himself. The app picked up a number of 1-star reviews following the debacle. Looking back, Hill and Townsend have a slightly positive take on the experience: It’s great to go out and get your ass kicked, they told me. Not that they would ever want to go through the agony of being in charge of hundreds of people wanting a drink as their server failed again, but it was like middle school: good to have done once. Hill claims that the situation provided “fuel” to keep going. The event did lead to product improvements, including limiting the number of drinks that could be placed into the iPad app queue at a time. This cut bartender confusion, and helped staunch lines where people picked up their drinks. If the queue was full, you had to wait. Another lesson: Sometimes you need to wade into new territory slowly, instead of cannonballing in, guns blazing, servers crashing. Flowtab now needed two things: money and guidance. After applying to a number of incubators in the L.A. area, Flowtab couldn’t find an open door. Local groups found it odd that their CTO was in the Bay Area and part time. Concerns were also raised about the size and approachability of the market that Flowtab had selected. However, Mike Jones, the CEO of L.A.-based incubator and studio , helped the small company out by introducing it to DexOne, which sells advertising in the Yellow Pages. It’s a public firm, with a market capitalization of over $100 million. So, Flowtab linked up with the guys who print and leave massive phone books outside your apartment each year. DexOne has an experimental arm, which would prove important for Flowtab as it was a potential answer to its distribution question. Around this time, Hill and Townsend went on Shark Tank, the reality TV investment program. In Hills’ words, it was a “long and drawn out process” that was “very involved.” The show wanted drama, and in the end not only did Flowtab not land a deal, but their pitch session didn’t make it onto TV, depriving the group of any free advertising they might have hoped for. After the accelerators didn’t bite, and Shark Tank had done little more than nibble, Flowtab decided to move north to San Francisco, where they hoped they would have more access to capital. What about the bars in L.A.? Well, following the riotous bar crawl, they weren’t exactly enthused with the Flowtab product. The company cut loose, and following an endless wave of others, landed in the Bay Area. The company raised $50,000 within the first month in the city. DexOne, the Yellow Pages company that sold nearly $2 billion of that product in 2012, was Flowtab’s shot at distribution. DexOne has a team of 12 that it partners with small tech companies to try out new things. Somewhat progressive, and perhaps interesting for a company so traditional, DexOne had what Flowtab did not: capital and manpower. DexOne developed a pilot program to sell Flowtab in Colorado. It put six full-time sales people on the ground to push the new product. The partnership landed the largest strip club in Denver, Shotgun Willies, where the model worked moderately well. Culture, however, appeared to work against them. Folks in the strip club didn’t seem too excited about using their phones to order a drink. The DexOne deal landed a few other bars, as well, but as in L.A., the growth was slow, and only garnered by firm grind. Back in San Francisco, the Flowtab team was experimenting with new ways to grab bars, and hopefully, paying customers. Crowdsourcing might be a dead buzzword, but hiring out grunt work is as popular as ever. Flowtab, in a bid to reach more bars, hired a call center in the Philippines to call potential bars in San Francisco. The idea was to massively scale their initial outreach, and then send in the founders to lock down deals that the call center would set up for them. The lesson according to Flowtab: Technologists aren’t always salesman, but founders should be.
After the call center didn’t perform, Flowtab hired Trevor Bisset, who promptly cut the call center on his first day on the job. Weeks later, he had landed the group’s first bar in the city, McTeague’s. A short note on McTeague’s. The bar is located on Polk Street here in San Francisco. It’s a fine place to be Monday through Thursday, a low-key sports bar that won’t be too crowded unless the Giants are on a streak. But Fridays and weekends at McTeague’s are a complete zoo. Amateurs from four counties descend on the place, turning it into a part club, part bar, and complete goat rodeo. You can’t get to the bar, let alone get a drink. So, if there were ever a bar that Flowtab should work at, it was McTeague’s. Anything to break the logjam would be welcome. McTeague’s remains the only bar in San Francisco to my knowledge that has a sign in the bathroom stating that drug use is not allowed, and that bar staff will be checking to ensure that things remain clean. People still do coke, presumably, but the place would prefer it if they didn’t. McTeague’s was a get for Flowtab, but they had eyes on a bigger prize: the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. With 1,500 rooms, it’s massive. It has three bars. Landing the hotel would have been a coup. The team designed and pitched a . But in the end, Flowtab’s lack of feature capability to integrate with the Marquis’s point of sale system (Micros) scuttled the idea. Startups are human endeavors, and around this time, a friend of the company, Brandon Zacharie, started contributing for beer and pizza. The team credits Zacharie with getting them off FTP and onto Git where they belonged. According to Hill, Zacharie specifically helped the team “integrate web socket connection between the user app and the [bar’s] iPad” application. Three bars locked down but not doing much in San Francisco, the DexOne work in Colorado was ramping up. Little Flowtab found itself a bit more stretched than it could manage. The team would later liken the moment to tossing logs onto a small fire, choking it. Flowtab wasn’t performing well in the bars close to its core team. How could DexOne flog the product successfully? Despite the fact that people were not organically flocking to the app in bars, DexOne wanted to press ahead and get Flowtab into even more locations. A doubling-down in Denver? Yes. Orlando? DexOne wanted to go there. Portland? Yeah. But Flowtab, far away from the Rockies, didn’t have enough money to support that many cities, and had concerns about its business model, which at that point charged users $1 to file an order. The handful of bars that were signed up in Denver through the DexOne deal paid $1,200 to get started with Flowtab. It wasn’t a small sum, but the cash went to providing them with the hardware that they needed to run the service (an iPad, etc.). Worried about money and consumer reaction to the product in its current form, Flowtab declined the expansion that DexOne wanted. Ironically, one of the most successful efforts that Flowtab found to accumulate new users was killed by the ridesharing service Lyft. Don’t fret, Lyft had every right to do so. Flowtab recruited Lyft drivers to hand out free drink coupons to riders heading to bars that it was installed in. Drivers got $5 every time a rider signed up and ordered, and that drink was free for the new user. Around 30 drivers took part, and more than 1,000 drinks were given away. Ask forgiveness, not permission was the idea here. It worked until it didn’t, and it didn’t when Lyft asked them politely to knock it off. Still, for three months Flowtab was picking up new users at a decent pace, a rare moment of encouraging growth for the company. With a fresh $25,000 note from a technology investor at a venture capital group in Palo Alto, Flowtab had 12 active bars in three cities by January 2013 but little in the way of active users. The company set a small goal: By March 1, they wanted to have at least 50 active users, who were using Flowtab several times per month. As a company, Flowtab was beleaguered by inconsistent usage; most folks just didn’t go back to the same bar every week, so a new user might enjoy Flowtab, but not use the service again for months until they were back in the bar they signed up in. Order volume was low, and as a company Flowtab was starting to doubt its model. Were they only able to pick up new users through gimmicks? Would they always have to show up to a bar to get people to sign up? Order volume could spike over 60 orders in a day if Flowtab had a presence at a bar. But when they weren’t it would fall, sometimes to single digits. It was time to prove that Flowtab could scale. With 12 bars, the company had enough market presence to test its service. It would get users to the bars, and then see if it could keep them around. Hill and Townsend came up with 12 new ways to get users, including Facebook ads. Each effort, according to Hill, “fell flat on its face.” Nothing spurred organic growth, and Flowtab didn’t have the funds to keep buying users that were at best infrequent revenue sources. As a final effort to see what could be done, Flowtab decided to have a much smaller party. McTeague’s and the nearby Mayes were pressed into service for the Super Bowl-themed event. About 100 attendees floated between the two bars. Unlike the L.A. pub crawl meltdown, the event cost Flowtab a modest $500. They acquired 92 new users, which worked out to around $5.50 per. That was cheaper than the Lyft effort, which cost $5 for the drivers plus a drink for the new user. The economics were difficult to make work. Flowtab’s $1-per-order fee meant that even at $5.50 per new account, the average user would have to make six orders in the history of their usership to allow Flowtab to break even. People were not drinking enough to make that feasible. The DexOne partnership had proven that some bars were willing to pay for Flowtab, but a few checks of $1,200 apiece were not going to float the company. Flowtab wanted to raise $300,000, but in the face of its challenges, the sum was daunting. And with its current business model floundering, Flowtab decided it was time to pivot. So, instead of charging users to pay an extra fee to use its service, Flowtab flipped around and decided to sell advertising to alcohol companies inside of its application. About to order whiskey? Why not a Jim Beam? It made some sense: Bars and users were not rich, but the corporate interests behind Bacardi and Johnnie Walker certainly were. And they are banned from advertising inside of a bar. Flowtab felt that since it was a mobile application, the law did not apply to them. However, after meeting with six small and large liquor and beer companies, it became clear that Flowtab simply did not have the scale needed to land a deal large enough to matter. February 2013 was a brutal month for the other small companies looking to execute something similar to Flowtab. BarTab, which had raised more than $1.5 million, essentially went offline. , a local competitor, in the words of Flowtab, “began losing bars.” The shakeup of its better-funded rivals unnerved Flowtab: If folks with more money and distribution than themselves couldn’t make the model work, what shot did they have? It was stock-taking time. Flowtab had, in its own estimation, zero organic growth and few if any regular users, and it couldn’t find a conduit to new users that would scale. New efforts would cause a minor rise that would anti-soufflé the moment the monetary influx halted. Six weeks into the process, and given its doubts about its model, Flowtab put fundraising on ice. They had $20,000 left in the bank, and its hopes to pull off its bar model were tanking. It was time for another pivot. It’s now March 2013. Flowtab had burned through a total of $110,000. It had fewer than 2,000 users, and the team had come to the conclusion that they did not have product-market fit. I suspect the team could have come to this conclusion far sooner if they knew a year prior what they knew in March. In the end, the team decided that their problem was distance. GrubHub, which is comically successful, brings something to you that is far from you. Flowtab wasn’t saving you enough time or energy to make it a compelling experience. However, the team had built a technology stack and had a few dollars left in the bank. They began looking for a new application for their software. After poking around golf courses, hotels, and other potential venues, Flowtab decided that stadiums were the best bet for its tech. Beer as a Service? Something like that. In startup style, Hill and Townsend called every stadium in California — there are 114 if you were wondering — and met face to face with a few, including the Giants, Warriors, and A’s. However, even as they were starting to sour on the prospect of stadiums (too much regulation and other issues), a different company called Bypass raised $3.5 million, partially from AEG, which manages 50 stadiums. eBay-owned StubHub also took part in the raise. If there had been a slightly open door to apply Flowtab to the stadium business, it had closed. Flowtab was “just like……… fuck” at that point, according to its founders. Mike Jones of Science, who had helped Flowtab land the DexOne deal, met with the company again. The team needed counsel. After explaining their stadium exploits, Jones agreed that it didn’t make sense as an avenue for the firm. The company was also all but flat broke. Seven days after Bypass’s raise was announced, on April 17, Flowtab was shuttered. Trevor the sales guy went to a startup in Portland. Friend of the company Zacharie went full time at a different startup, and the erstwhile CTO kept to his day job. Jones offered to hire Hill and Townsend into Science — it was a non-monetary acquisition of sorts — where they worked on and recently , a marketplace for home care of seniors. As part of the Science deal, both Hill and Townsend are back in Los Angeles, full circle from where they started. It was a long, eventful, often ridiculous, and always stressful experience. But to hear the founders tell it, it was a rollercoaster, but one that had them grinning through nearly all of its twists and turns. The oddest piece of Flowtab history started with a random email that was almost deleted. A dude in Australia loved the product and the idea and wanted to chat. This was in February 2013. The Aussie, who had made his money in mining, liked Flowtab enough to fly out to meet the fledgling firm. Three months later, a month after the company had been shuttered and the team scattered, an acquisition offer was made. But with new roles at Science, and no team to speak of, they turned it down. Flowtab was no more. “In the end, Flowtab failed in the sense that we never IPO’d or sold the company,” Hill concluded. “But the last two years have been a huge learning experience, and we believe the real failure would be not sharing our story with the world.” Read, examine their documents, and do not repeat their mistakes. |
Google Confirms It Has Acquired Android Smartwatch Maker WIMM Labs | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 31 | Google has confirmed it acquired last year, a company that previously made before shuttering operations in 2012. At the time a message on its website said it had entered into an exclusive partnership without releasing further details, but it’s now clear that partner was Google, rather than Apple as some had initially speculated. Google’s WIMM Labs acquisition was reported earlier by . , with patents turning up earlier this year (filed in 2011), and a report by the that claimed Google’s Android team was in the process of developing such a device. Google has also hinted at Android powering a range of wearable devices in the past, when CEO Larry Page let slip during a quarterly earnings call this year that Glass runs on its smartphone and tablet OS, and that Android is “pretty transportable across devices”. Google has also long had bigger ambitions for Android than just pushing it onto phones and tablets, with TV set-top boxes, in-car tech, home automation and wearables all areas where it’s actively encouraging Android to spread. WIMM Labs started out building Android-based platforms for wearable displays, akin to Google Glass, and then created the WIMM One in 2011: a smartwatch powered by Android 2.1 that was aimed at developers as a sort of concept flagship ahead of a broader consumer launch. The WIMM One used Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g for connectivity, had 256 MB of RAM plus a 667MHz processor, and used a screen design that refreshed once per minute to conserve battery life. It also supported apps via a “Micro App Store” — installed and managed by users via a web-based dashboard. Android developers were offered custom APIs for adapting their software to the WIMM One’s tiny, 16-bit colour screen. Google is not commenting further on the acquisition at this point, beyond providing confirmation that it picked up WIMM Labs in 2012. If Mountain View is building its own smartwatch it’s unlikely to beat its Android OEM partner Samsung to a launch, as the Korean company’s in Berlin at a September 4 event. Plenty of other Android-powered smartwatches are also entering the frame via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, and also cropping up on the roadmaps of . Meanwhile remains elusive. If Google isn’t building its own smartwatch hardware, acquiring WIMM Labs could be a way to help it develop a custom version of Android designed for wrist-mounted wearables, which it could then provide to OEMs the same way it currently does with Android proper. Given the amount of interest in smartwatches from OEMs big and small, that could be the better strategy for long-term platform growth. |
Following Mobile Test, Facebook Tries Out A ‘Trending’ Section On Its Desktop News Feed | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Back in June, Facebook said it would be rolling out a number of features for following public conversations, and it looks like the company’s holding true to that promise. Specifically, the company is testing a section highlighting “Trending” topics that appears alongside its desktop newsfeed. The Wall Street Journal , and it included a screenshot (which you can see to the left) that looks pretty much as you’d expect — a box with a list of linked topics. A Facebook spokesperson sent me the following statement: We are running a small test of a unit on News Feed that displays topics currently trending on Facebook. Right now it’s only available to a small percentage of US users and it is still in the early stages of development. We will share more details down the line if we decide to roll it out more widely. Facebook has been moving towards something like this for the past couple of months. It in June, and those are all about making it easy for people to see related conversations around a single topic. At the time, the company said it would be “rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics.” Then, earlier this month, it to some mobile web users. Trend-based navigation is a pretty natural outgrowth of adding hashtags, so it might seem strange that Facebook is taking a while to go from one to another. However, public-private dynamics can work pretty differently on Facebook than on Twitter (where the hashtag/Trending Topics ideas were popularized), so I imagine Facebook is using tests to make sure this approach makes sense with its more private model. |
Microsoft’s Next CEO Will Not Spin Off Xbox, Unless They Abdicate The Company’s Larger Strategic Direction | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | A story floats the idea that Microsoft might spin off its Xbox business, which it calls “more likely [following current CEO Steve Ballmer’s] exit.” The publication values Xbox at around $17 billion, a figure based on a comparative revenue multiple with Nintendo. This is precisely the sort of bilge that cavorts and pretends to be serious analysis. The Bloomberg piece leans on the words of a fund manager, Todd Lowenstein, who claims that Xbox “looks like an attractive standalone business that could hold up on its own.” He continues that it “seems like it would be the most mature candidate with the best growth potential and the most established to stand on its own.” You could argue that Xbox is currently undervalued inside of Microsoft. However, that potential is not exactly material. Presuming for the moment that the $17 billion figure is reasonable, Xbox as a group would represent 6.1 percent of Microsoft’s current market capitalization, a slim segment. Presuming a 50 percent lower market valuation while under the aegis of the larger Microsoft corporation (the tax of being part of Microsoft, the value that could be unlocked), Xbox could represent $8.5 billion in lost value to investors. That’s about 3 percent of Microsoft’s worth. So, the potential upside isn’t too great. The potential downside, however, is hilariously large. Microsoft could spin off Xbox, reap a short-term financial gain from the transaction, and return that money to shareholders via stock buybacks or a special dividend. The former would have a small, but real long-term impact on Microsoft’s earnings per share, perhaps leading to a higher per-share value in the future. The latter would be a waste, as a demonstrated. So, Microsoft would gain little from the deal as a company, even though institutional investors might enjoy a special dividend boosting their quarterly numbers. That’s nice, but not what Microsoft lives to do. In fact, Microsoft’s job is not to worry about the spreadsheets of external financial entities, but instead to build great products, grow new platforms, make oodles of money, and take care of its employees as it does so. Therefore, the short-term financial gain is not core to what Microsoft needs to worry itself with. Does the idea of spinning off Xbox make product sense? No it does not. At all. Microsoft is working around the clock to expand the Windows platform to every screen that you view, from the desktop, to your laptop, tablet, phone and, you guessed it, your television. Windows on my TV, you might think, I don’t want that! Chill fam, it’s fine. What Microsoft is up to is simple: A common set of APIs and foundational code called the Shared Windows Core will underpin all Microsoft platforms. It’s in Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8, and is also present in the forthcoming Xbox One. As the traditional PC market declines, Microsoft is endeavoring to extend its Windows software to work everywhere. And Xbox is core piece to this gambit, which is a bet that developers matter, and that as a company Microsoft needs to cater to them. Essentially, Microsoft wants to create a single mega platform, one in which any developer with a shared code base can reach consumers and companies on screens of every size: Tablet, phone, laptop, desktop, and TV. No company offers that, and HTML5 is far from reaching the point in which it can deliver anything similar. Now, why does Xbox matter for Microsoft? It matters as it has high levels of developer support at the Triple A tier – think ‘Gears of War’ and that sort of game. Xbox has a subscription revenue system that is a key part, and has been a critical antecedent to its new services strategy. And, finally, Xbox allows Microsoft to offer music and video to a family across quite literally all their devices. If Microsoft were to sell off or spin off or otherwise cut ties with Xbox, which, by the way, makes utterly no sense under the current reorganized structure — it would cede the living room to third parties. The company is not willing to do that. Just as it was not willing to fail in search, or mobile. — So the financial upside of the deal isn’t large enough for Microsoft to particularly care, especially given its ample — if mostly foreign — cash reserves. And the exit of Xbox would tear at the fabric of its company-wide plan to unite all screens under the Windows flag. Sacrifice the end-game of Windows for the potential of a few billion in shareholder equity? No. |
Former Waywire CEO Nate Richardson Joins AOL As President Of AOL Live | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | A few weeks ago we reported that Nate Richardson, the CEO and co-founder of Waywire, would be as it makes a strategic shift from content creation to content curation. Well now we know where he’s landed: Richardson has joined our parent company AOL* as the President of , TechCrunch has learned. Richardson was one of the co-founders of Waywire, along with Newark mayor and Senate candidate Cory Booker and . The company originally set out to focus on creating its , but recently shifted direction to become more of a personalized hub for curated content. Richardson exited the company while the curation site was still in beta, and we’ve heard Waywire is looking to announce a new CEO soon. We heard rumors that Richardson was being courted by AOL around the time of his departure from Waywire, but apparently he hadn’t joined the company at that time. That said, the decision to become part of AOL isn’t totally surprising, as Richardson has a long history of working in media. In addition to serving as the CEO of Waywire, years ago he had also been the CEO of ContentNext Media, former home of tech blogs such as paidContent and MocoNews. Joining the AOL team also means that Richardson will be reunited with my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss, AOL Brand Group CEO Susan Lyne. Those two worked together while Lyne was CEO of Gilt Groupe and Richardson held various roles at the company, including Gilt City president and GM of Gilt Groupe’s Men’s section. At AOL Live, Richardson will oversee the new live streaming video channel that the company is putting together. That channel has yet to officially launch, but the idea seems to be to offer up a continuous lineup of news and interviews that will match the type of content you’d expect to see on the . So lots of celebrity and entertainment news, sprinkled with light doses of sports, finance, and quirky lifestyle stories. There will be lots of opportunity for AOL to experiment with that channel, as the company did when it held an . Over the course of two days in June, AOL had anchor hopefuls come in and read the news of the moment, with a hilarious hodgepodge of characters swinging by the studio to try out. The live auditions weren’t the only experiment that AOL Live will be testing out — apparently the company sees an opportunity to have live brand messages interspersed in the content, in addition to the usual pre-roll ads that will appear when someone starts up the stream. The hope is that viewers will watch AOL Live in the same way they might leave daytime TV on while going about their day. Lyne a few months ago that viewers could eventually get into the habit of leaving a live AOL player on minimized all day at work. Anyway, it all sounds like an interesting new endeavor for Richardson. ==
* While we’ve been told that TechCrunch is an integral part of the AOL franchise, neither AOL PR nor Richardson responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. But hey, it’s the Friday before a holiday weekend. I get it. |
Target Ticket, Target’s Video Download & Rental Service, Nears Launch | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Target’s answer to Walmart’s Vudu, Netflix, and iTunes, is preparing to launch. Employees at the Minneapolis-headquartered retailer were told this week that , as the service is called, will soon be offered to consumers, allowing them to rent and purchase digital copies of movies and television shows like they do on Apple’s iTunes, then play them back across all the devices they own, including smartphones, tablets, TVs, Blu-ray players, and game consoles. Details surrounding Target Ticket were first revealed , when word got out that the concept was in testing with employees. At the time, appeared, saying that Target Ticket would offer users instant access to 15,000 titles, including new releases, classics, and TV shows. The company then would only say that the service was in a trial period that would help it gather data to help inform its future plans. Most movies on the soon-to-launch service will cost around $14.99 (though some were less at $12.99), and movie rental prices will be on par with iTunes at $3.99/$4.99. Individual TV show episodes tend to be around $2.99, depending on the show, and TV seasons will be around $34.99, again depending on the show. However, Target Ticket doesn’t offer a comparable alternative to iTunes’ “Season Pass,” as you can’t purchase a TV season until after it has aired. Networks including ABC, AMC, CBS, CW, Fox, FX, HBO, The WB, NBC, Showtime, Starz, and USA have content on Target’s service. The TV shows and movies can run nearly anywhere, including on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, as well as on streaming players, TVs and gaming consoles like the Xbox 360. However, support for the service on TVs is currently limited by manufacturers. Employees were told that only Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players will work with Target Ticket during training, but now the site lists Samsung, Panasonic, LG, Philips and Funai brands as “coming soon” under compatible devices. Unfortunately, Apple device owners will not have quite as smooth of an experience as those on other platforms, as it seems that they’ll have to first download the movie to their computer, then sync it to their devices manually. The iOS app itself only displays the movies you own, but doesn’t offer a purchasing option. Beta applications for (iPhone and iPad) and were published to the app stores earlier this year, but received a significant update this month. Currently, the app description says that Target Ticket is only for “team members and REDcard holders,” the latter presumably being beta testers. (It’s worth noting also that on iOS, the app says it can play back content already purchased on TargetTicket.com while the Android version says users can “stream or download movies and shows in your library.”) After renting a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it, but after starting, you have 48 hours to finish viewing it. You can also watch it as many times as you want during that period. The 30-day window is similar to iTunes, but have 24 hours to watch their movie, while outside the U.S., it’s 48 hours. The company is offering some movies available for purchase ahead of DVD releases, including Paramount’s “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” and more will be available in the future. Movies have also been organized into collections for end users’ ease of access, like “End of World Movies” or “Marvel Movies,” for example. Target has partnered with , the digital movie locker service backed by studios like Sony Pictures, NBCUniversal, Fox, and Paramount, Warner Bros. and others on Target Ticket. Designed to allow DVD movie buyers to keep digital copies of movies in the cloud, UltraViolet also powers things like , , and . Internally, Target is positioning Target Ticket to employees as an alternative to Netflix and Hulu, as well as iTunes, but that’s not entirely accurate. Although some of the content may be the same, you don’t pay a monthly subscription fee for all-you-can-eat access on Target Ticket, but rather pay for individual rentals and purchases. While the pricing is competitive with iTunes, Target will be incentivizing its customers to choose its service by tying it to the company’s REDcard discount program. Target REDcard holders will see their same 5 percent in-store discount applied to rentals and purchases made in Target Ticket just like they would on Target.com, and employees can also use their 10 percent discount here. Another aspect to Target Ticket which Target is asking employees to tout are the parental controls. Parents can create profiles, and then limit access not only by MPAA and TV Parental Guidelines, but also optionally by Common Sense Media more fine-grained controls. That’s a step up from the profiles and controls , as Common Sense Media include both an age-appropriateness score and overall quality rating that help parents choose not just “safe” content but also “worthy” content. The retailer has been busying itself with digital initiatives this year, having recently launched a Facebook-enabled digital savings program and mobile app called Cartwheel, which has over a million members, for example. But in terms of competing on the digital movie landscape, Target is late to the party. Walmart, as noted above, already offers , while its own family-friendly movie service last fall with some 4,000 titles. Walmart encourages users to sign up to Vudu , and Target Ticket, , will do the same. Target declined to comment on these specific details, saying again that it’s just testing the service with team members. Of course, the Target Ticket app store description already indicates that the service is opening to REDcard holders. On the main website, non-employee testers will be able to enter a promo code to sign up ahead of the broader public launch. Employees have now been trained on the service and how to pitch it to customers, but have not yet been given the go live date. : Launch date is “fall 2013” (see below); next-day TV is included |
Ask A VC: Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil On The Evolution Of Developer Platforms And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Bessemer Venture Partners’ joined us in the studio. Kurzweil, who leads Bessemer’s roadmap on developer platforms and has led investments in Twilio and SendGrid, talked about the biggest changes he’s seen in developer platforms. One observation he made was that companies are tapping to separate developer platform for different functions. So startups are looking to Stripe for payments, Twilio for communications, SendGrid for email and so on. Check out what area Kurzweil predicts will be the next big service for developers and more. |
TechCrunch Giveaway: Win Disrupt SF Tickets And Fitbits From New Relic | Elin Blesener | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | You know what’s cooler than reading TechCrunch every day? Diving into startup culture head first by attending . We’re excited to announce that New Relic is giving away eight coveted Disrupt SF tickets. To try your luck, simply tweet a link to this article with the hashtag #NerdLife. Besides loving us, the New Relic team also tells me they love monitoring everything. That means they are also graciously giving away 10 . If you want one, all you have to do is sign up and deploy New Relic . Once you do that, you will automatically be entered to win a Fitbit. And as a bonus, everyone who deploys New Relic will get a free Nerd Life t-shirt. Now to review: 1) If you want a chance at winning one of the eight tickets to Disrupt SF, tweet this article using the #NerdLife hashtag. 2) If you want a chance to win one of the 10 Fitbit Flexes and get a free nerdy t-shirt (which I love by the way) then . 3) Cross your fingers. They will be choosing the winners next Tuesday, so be on the lookout for a congratulatory message. Good luck, everyone, and we hope to see you at Disrupt SF! |
null | gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 9 | null |
Gillmor Gang Live 08.30.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. |
As Ballmer Exits, Microsoft Inks Deal With ValueAct That May Lead To Board Seat | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Today that it has reached a “cooperation agreement” with ValueAct Capital, an investment company that had been a thorn in its side. It was said that ValueAct wanted a seat on Microsoft’s board. Instead, Microsoft and ValueAct have come to a different agreement, in which the president of ValueAct – Mason Morfit – and Microsoft directors will meet to talk over issues relating to the company. Morfit will also be given a chance at joining the board, after the company’s annual shareholder meeting. ValueAct owns 0.8% of Microsoft’s outstanding shares. It’s a hefty investment, one that is large enough for the investor to command the attention of the company’s board. It was said following Microsoft CEO’s Steve Ballmer’s within the next 12 months that ValueAct and its pressure on the company was key to his removal. It is not clear if that is the case, or pressure resulting from a massive $900 million Surface writedown, or the ensuing market shellacking of Microsoft’s stock were larger catalysts. That said, to have the news of the agreement come precisely one week following the Ballmer announcement, is more than slightly suspicious. ValueAct is a large firm, with assets under management of $12 billion. That’s enough money to cause havoc. Departing CEO Steve Ballmer had nice things to say about his tormentors: “Our board and management team are committed to enhancing growth and value for Microsoft shareholders, and we look forward to ValueAct Capital’s input.” Only, I don’t think that that is true. Nice boilerplate, but I can’t imagine that Ballmer is too enthused about ceding some of his authority in his final days atop the Microsoft org chart to money folks from San Francisco. Whatever the case, Microsoft appears to have cleaned the decks of its little investor problem. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Nintendo 2DS, Pebble, And Unikey | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | The is just like a 3DS, except for the fact that it’s cheaper and has no 3D. Deal breaker or deal maker? Meanwhile, Matt still seems to fancy the , while the rest of us are sick of hearing about it. And finally, the (currently available for pre-order) will make its way into homes in about a month with plenty of competition from Lockitron and others. But which is the better product? We discuss all this and more on the latest episode of the , featuring , , , and . Enjoy!
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