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Strike Social Analyzes The Performance Of Your YouTube Videos For Free | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | A new startup called says its tools give YouTube publishers a way to track how their content is performing on the video site and on social networks, and at a pretty compelling price — free. The first big piece of the Strike Social product is a number, called the Strike Score, that reflects the overall performance of your YouTube content. CEO Patrick McKenna said the company looks at “more than 100 datasets” from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to calculate the score, and tracking that number over time should give you a sense of whether your performance is improving. You can dig in to get more detailed data, too, looking at the total number of views, engagements, and subscribers for your channel, and at the performance of individual videos. Publishers can also look at what people are saying about the video, sort those comments based on the size of each commenter’s social media following, and respond to specific remarks from within Strike Social — in particular, McKenna says that the tools are “more actionable on the Facebook side” than the competition. So why offer these tools for free? Well, McKenna wants to charge eventually for premium services, but he said everything that he showed me will remain free, and that the company will also be selling advertising tools. (When the addresses the free question, it says, “Strike Social is chock-full of YouTube marketing experts and we hope to earn your online video promotion business.”) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBtSvPTqGs&w=560&h=315] He acknowledged that paid products offer some features beyond what Strike Social can offer for free, but he argued that the product is competitive, with advantages like the Facebook engagement features mentioned above, and for that reason “it’s going to be tough” for competitors to justify their prices to clients. (In that discussion, he didn’t mention a specific company, but came up at a couple of other points in our discussion. When I asked about his pricing, co-founder and CEO Robert Sandie pointed out that vidIQ also offers a free version, while he said pricing for the premium plan starts at $2,000 a month.) McKenna also described the current product as version “0.1”, and he said he wants to add features that give more insight into the distribution channels, geographies, and social networks where content performs best, and to provide more recommendations around publishing and advertising videos. |
Lockbox Raises $2.5 Million Seed Round To Help Encrypt Your Stuff | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | It’s hard to trust the cloud. With the NSA coming in one end and hackers coming in through the other, complete encryption is key. That’s what is for. The company, founded in 2008, has accepted $2.5 million in seed funding to further roll out their . Lockbox offers end-to-end encryption. The system encrypts and compresses files before accepting them into the cloud. These files can then only be opened by users who have the right key. At no point in the transfer can anyone read the file until it is decrypted. “The Client Portal compresses, encrypts, and digitally signs each file before it is uploaded into the Cloud. Files can only be decrypted and read by the invited recipients,” said Lockbox CEO Peter Long. “This makes the information inaccessible to everyone else – including the cloud storage provider and even Lockbox.” The company has 6,000 paying users and has thus far sold to legal and financial clients. However, given the Internet’s predilection towards insecurity, it could be a good investment for the average Joe or Josephine. The team also framework that is used to secure Android devices. The company is using the cash infusion to complete which allows for encrypted file sharing from iOS as well. The system works by first encrypting files on your desktop and sending them to the Lockbox cloud. There they can only be read, on the desktop, by users with the right key. Long sees this as a solution for those forced by regulatory concerns to maintain a tight ship. “The Client Portal targets financial planners, accountants and insurance brokers who have a desire to use cloud, but have regulatory or business requirements for secure and private (encrypted) document exchange. Prior to the availability of Client Portal, alternatives were insecure, inefficient and expensive.” Their Client product is the only one popularly available right now and may be an interesting tool if you’re looking to send sensitive – or not so sensitive – files to clients, friends, family, or the NSA. |
Augment Makes Augmented Reality Useful For Salespeople With Its New ‘Business Catalog’ | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | While augmented reality has been around for a while, is trying to monetize it with its platform. The company just released its feature, targeted toward salespeople. For $30 per month and per user, you can carry around all your catalog on your iPad and show how it would look like to your client. It makes sense for furniture, merchandising displays or even art prints. “Our biggest competitor is choosing not to use augmented reality,” co-founder and CEO Jean-François Chianetta told me in a phone interview. “Thanks to our platform, you can upload and visualize your 3D models as augmented reality objects in minutes,” he continued. With the business catalog, everybody on the sales team has the same 3D portfolio on their tablets and phones. Everything is downloaded to the devices so that they don’t have to worry about connectivity. Comparatively, the free account is much more limited as you can only see a few test models and upload your own models to your own account for testing purposes — you cannot deliver your models to your team and you need to be always connected. The premium offering was already available in beta for a few months. More than 3,000 users tried it out. But, starting this week, they now have to pay the subscription fee. When asked who Augment’s potential clients were, the answer was very straightforward. “We work with companies who already use 3D models,” co-founder and CMO Mickaël Jordan said. “We support 3ds Max, Maya or even SketchUp files,” he continued. So far, 8,000 users have uploaded 3D models to the platform. Companies like use Augment for its digital art marketplace. Before buying an art print, you can figure out what print size you should order for your living room, and how it would look like over the fireplace. There’s another part to Augment’s business. The company also creates advertising campaigns using augmented reality. For example, clients can create a booth to promote DVD sales in a supermarket and let anyone take a picture of his or her friend with a famous movie character. The character will be in 3D thanks to the Augment app. In many cases, companies need to hire an agency to create a special app — when you work with Augment it’s easier as you can build your campaign on top of its existing platform. Back in April, the French startup raised (€220,000) from multiple angels. It plans to raise more funding in the coming months. Now that the company generates revenue, it will be a compelling argument to convince VCs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmb00l5SEtQ |
As Uber Drives Into India, It’s Shifting Its Emerging Market Strategy Up A Gear | Mahesh Sharma | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Transportation tech startup is continuing its aggressive expansion across Asia. As of this week, it is now live in India, starting first with a luxury car service in its tech capital, Bangalore. The subcontinent may boast a potential market of over a billion, a rising middle class and , but these are silver linings to some possibly darker storm clouds: low credit card and smartphone penetration, inadequate infrastructure, and low levels of disposable income. Uber will try to impose its premium and efficient model on the market, but entrenched indigenous operators, whose lo-fi solutions have thrived, won’t give up their turf without a fight. So far this year, the private transportation startup has and it that Bangalore would be the latest cab off the rank. The strategy is being fuelled in part by a , which values the company at $3.5 billion. In India, the initial strategy appears to be an extension of what occurred in Singapore, Seoul and Taipei, where the service was positioned as a luxury option better than the status quo. The Bangalore launch comes amid a , with Dubai and Cape Town preceding the India debut. Uber hasn’t spelled out what its bigger plans are for India — whether it will be about trying to replicate the same roll-out in this emerging market as it has done in places like the U.S. by starting with luxury car services and then expanding from there. Luxury car services could be Uber’s canary in the mine in India, laying the groundwork before sending in subsequent waves of logistics services as well as targeting the mid-level segment via its Uber X brand. What seems more apparent as that, after proving the model at home and enjoying the proceeds of its long-tail revenue model, the firm is now looking to emerging markets for the next wave of growth. In India, companies have generally failed, or only enjoyed modest success, when they try the model of making consumers pay for the privilege of excellent customer service. However, some believe that bucking the trend might work in its favor. “In the US. they started with the black limo, the premium service, and people raved about Uber’s fabulous experience. It wasn’t just another taxi experience. From booking to ride to wait-time to payment, it was seamless and I think that over time they have broadened their offering in the U.S. Here, it’s interesting they’re not selling out and saying ‘let’s go into mass part of market’,” said Somaia. “What I see more often in India is just get a focus on getting big, whether that’s scaling through inefficient marketing spend, coupons or discounts. Here cars arrive late, they’re not clean, drivers aren’t particularly knowledgable: it’s fairly poor, broken customer experience,” said Lightspeed Ventures partner Bejul Somaia. “Even if they are saying ‘fine, we’re going to have slightly more premium offering, and the trade-off is scale,’ the point is they’re focused on superior consumer experience.” In India’s taxi service today, it’s fair to say that you get what you pay for. Taxis are often smelly, dirty and uncomfortable but they get you from a to b. Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of one of the country’s biggest taxi booking platforms , estimates that in Bangalore there are only around 100 drivers licensed to drive luxury cars, compared with about 50,000 drivers authorised to carry passengers in medium to low-end vehicles. The huge differential highlights the low interest in luxury services, he said. He believes that Uber has about eight luxury cars on its books and will find it difficult to sustain its cheap introductory prices and establish a solid foothold. We reached out to Uber India’s spokesperson, who declined to comment for this article. Even if Uber can grab some market share in the small luxury segment, it will need to navigate its way around some pretty big cultural hurdles before it can reach the untransported masses. Here, the majority of Indian consumers don’t have a credit card or smartphone, nor the financial incentive to catch a taxi (autorickshaws are still the cheapest, quickest way to move around the city, more below). A few but a mass market solution is still a few years off. For now, locals prefer to book over the phone and pay via cash. Unlike Uber’s build-it-and-they-will-come strategy, local players have typically used available, accepted methods to gain the trust of consumers and later introduced innovative technologies to improve the experience. India’s most successful startups, such as , , and , are the ones that bent to the will of the people, and not the other way around. Almost 95% of Ola Cabs’ passengers pay cash. And 80% of their bookings are taken via the call centre — over 10,000 customer calls a day. India’s largest radio taxi network said that 60% of its 20,000 daily bookings are done over the phone, with the rest coming from mobile internet and the web. Aggarwal’s three-year old firm has signed up about 6,000 drivers servicing customers in four cities, and expects to hit $100 million by the end of the current financial year, ending in April 2014. He believes that you need to customise solutions for the local market. “My feeling is that launching a luxury brand is good for the luxury people that can afford it but for India you need to build an Indian solution,” he said. “You can’t just copy a Western solution for India. You need to solve the local problems.” Yet Indians appear to be itching for a change. Ola has offered a slick smartphone app for about a year, which shows the distance from the nearest taxi on the launch screen. , which feature an emergency distress button, in order to boost the number of bookings made from the smartphone app. The number of bookings Ola has processed through its mobile app has increased by 100% quarter-on-quarter since it was launched in August 2012. And over two million people have visited the Android and iOS apps, while five million visited the website in the last year. In of 150 rupees ($2.50), and a minimum of 250 rupees (~$4). It has secured an undisclosed number of Mercedes, Toyota Corolla Altis and Honda Civics for the task, but being conveyed in the lap of luxury will cost Indians 20 rupees per kilometre, and a waiting time of two rupees per minute — this usually ends up being quite lucrative considering the lengthy waiting times on Bangalore’s heavily congested, poorly constructed roads. There’s also a 100 rupee cancellation fee if you give the Uber driver a bum steer. It might sound cheap by western standards but it doesn’t compare with the competition. The country’s biggest radio taxi service, Meru Cabs, with a fleet of 5,500 air-conditioned small sedans, . It charges 80 rupees for the first four kilometres and 19.50 rupees for every additional kilometre. Waiting time is 10 rupees for 15 minutes. Meru recently to boost its bookings. So that means that a Uber cab will cost twice as much as the competition, who also don’t charge you a cancellation fee. A fare of 150 rupees in other taxis would get you from the centre of Bangalore “CBD” to the city’s outskirts, which are around 15 kilometres to 20 kilometres away. Uber’s flat rate of 2000 rupees to travel to the airport from the main city area, is nearly double what you would pay the other operators. If you are comfortable venturing in an open, small-moving, lawnmower-engine powered three wheeler, known as ‘autorickshaws’, you can travel for about half or two-thirds of the expense of a regular taxi — or about the quarter of the price of an Uber cab. All other operators accept cash, while Uber requires a valid credit card to sign up which is a huge barrier to entry in a country where most of the population still transact using paper money. Already there have been a few teething problems with first customers hoping to participate in the pilot, but the firm has been and appears to have waived the mobile verification process. Customer can also . Uber’s Indian soft-launch involved ferrying two of Bangalore’s rich celebrities, but that leaves question marks over a strategy to target the city’s minority elite. Here, most of the wealthy locals and well-resourced foreigners have access to a car, either their own or via their employer, which comes with a full-time driver — who cost about 10,000 rupees per month ($160) or just over 300 rupees a day — to chauffeur them at a moment’s notice. |
Nokia Promises Its Amber Update Will Come To All Windows Phone 8 Lumia Devices By The End Of September | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Today Nokia owners of its Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices that its “Amber” will reach all phones by the end of September. The Amber upgrade is a mix of feature improvements that will improve Nokia’s handsets, further setting them apart from devices built by other smartphone OEMs. Amber contains a photo-editing tool, improved image processing, the ability to snag motion in sequence with “Action Shot,” the acceptance of double-tap input to wake the phone, and improved internal storage reporting. However, the most important new piece delivered by Amber is “Glance Screen,” a tool that makes your phone’s inactive state more interesting. When your handset is inactive, it will display a clock and battery information. So, you can more quickly interact with your phone without having to do anything at all. You can turn off Glance, of course, or have it switch off after a set amount of time. In past years, we would now discuss how Amber puts Nokia ahead of Samsung, HTC, and other Windows Phone OEMs (remember Dell?). We don’t have to do that anymore, as Nokia controls . Thus, the changes are not as much changes to Nokia’s Windows Phone handsets as they are adaptations to the Windows Phone platform itself. Given that Nokia sells nearly 90 percent of Windows Phone devices, any changes that it makes become de facto official changes. This is a problem for Microsoft, as it initially ceded flexibility to make changes to Nokia in partial exchange for it adopting the platform. This saved Microsoft’s mobile life, but in the process cost it control: If Nokia can essentially skin Windows Phone to its own contentment, Microsoft is in a material way not in charge of the Windows Phone user experience and design. I doubt that sits well in Redmond. Thus, Microsoft either builds a phone itself (there have been rumors), or it bolsters HTC (the only remaining OEM partner with more than a scrape of market share that isn’t Nokia) to get a better grip on its platform. Whatever the case, if you are a Nokia handset owner, the Amber update will be rolling out depending on your handset and country and likely carrier over the next month. Get ready. |
MoPub’s Optimizer Lets Mobile Publishers Automatically Prioritize Their Most Lucrative Ad Networks | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | is releasing a new tool called the Optimizer that should allow mobile publishers to take an entirely automated, hands-off approach to managing their ad networks — and increase revenue, too. The team gave me a demo of the new feature, saying the technology uses a “waterfall” approach, moving down a list of possible networks from which to serve an ad, starting with the one that had the highest estimated CPM (price paid per thousand impressions). Normally, MoPub prioritizes those networks based on CPM estimates provided by the publisher. The problem: Those estimates are often wrong. (MoPub has been trying to address the lack of transparency and data about the performance of individual ad networks .) Now, when publishers hit the Optimizer button, MoPub will automate that prioritization process based on its own data and the data it has acquired from various networks, so that it can predict the likely CPM, clickthrough rate, latency, and more on a given ad. Ideally, for each impression MoPub should be serving an ad from the network that’s likely to make the most money for the publisher. “It seems like a really simple concept, but our publishers haven’t seen anything like it before and they’re basically blown away,” said Marketing Director Elain Szu. The data used for prioritization is supposed to be as specific as possible. In other words, when possible, MoPub will calculate CPMs and so forth using data specific to that publisher and that geography, but when necessary it will use more general data, and in some cases, when there’s really no data available, it may just fall back on the estimates provided by the publishers. Not every publisher is going to embrace this for all of their campaigns, Szu added. Instead, she suggested it could be particularly useful for small publishers who don’t have the resources to manage their ad networks in a very hands-on way, as well as for larger publishers who may have a number of geographic segments to monitor. Those larger publishers may want to pay close attention in more mature markets like the United States while taking a more automated approach in small-but-growing markets. The MoPub team also showed me the results of some early campaigns, particularly how the share of ads from different networks shifted when the Optimizer was turned on, and continued shifting over time. (In some cases the Optimizer would even shift money away from the MoPub Marketplace to other ad networks.) In each case, the CPMs went up compared to past performance and compared to apps that weren’t using the Optimizer — you can see one example in the (anonymized) chart above. |
Deeplink.me Launches A Retargeting Network For Mobile That Sends Users Back To The Apps They’ve Already Installed | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | , the new service from making it possible for users to the way you navigate the web, is today exiting from its beta period and launching an accompanying . The network takes advantage of Deeplink.me’s knowledge of deep linking into apps to identify users who have a particular app installed on their phone, in order to show them personalized ad units which redirect them to a specific page within an app. For background, the Deeplink.me service as something of an offshoot of Cellogic’s development of , a content discovery network for mobile applications. App developers can build mobile app deeplinks (Deeplink.me links) which can automatically detect where end users are coming from (web or mobile) and then point them to the correct resource, whether that’s a website, mobile web page, or specific page within an installed mobile application. At the time, the company described this service as a “bit.ly for deep linking,” as these shortened Deeplink.me links could be promoted on social media or elsewhere on the web. Since the initial launch, the service has been tweaked a bit to better fit into developers’ workflows. Before, developers would have to figure out their app’s URI was, what the corresponding web page was, then create an individual link to point there. Now, things are more rule-based. For instance, a social network’s URL may be , and the URI is A rule can be set up that explains how those two things are related, so each URL can be automatically translated. According to Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod, several thousand “medium to premium” app developers have signed up to use Deeplink.me so far, and a small handful are currently testing the retargeting capabilities. The Deeplink.me service and basic analytics are free – similar to other efforts like – but the retargeting service is how Deeplink.me plans to generate revenue. With this, developers can choose to retarget to any users they want, but Deeplink.me will also help by providing suggestions based on what apps people are using, when they’re using them, and how they’re using them, based on the data it gleans from its network. “Because it’s retargeting, we can take very user-specific data and say, ‘come back in because of reason X,'” explains Weisbrod. For example, a regular app user could be targeted to launch an e-commerce app in order to participate in a flash sale that was taking place or return to their recently abandoned shopping cart, while another less regular user might just be encouraged to open the app again via a coupon or offer of some sort. Though the system itself is still new and the beta testing group is small, the company says that they’ve already had repeat customers for the retargeting network, and those marketers are seeing high conversions. Specifically, they’ve found some traction with e-commerce, travel and freemium utility-like apps, as well as in the payment and wallet space. The retargeting is a per-click, bidded system, and the minimum to really get going is around a couple thousand dollars. “Longer term,” says Noah Klausman, Cellogic’s VP of Business Development, “we see an environment where instead of seeing ads for ‘click here to download’ all the time sending you to some app you may or may not have interest in, we see a system that’s seamlessly flowing you through the apps that are already on your phone.” That could prove beneficial to mobile app developers who often have a hard time getting users to open their app after the first install. Unlike on the web, the only way to see most applications is to download the app and then launch it. But while download numbers are easier to come by, especially since they can be bought and paid for, getting repeat users is much tougher. The idea with Deeplink.me’s network is to personalize the ads shown to users in order to get them to return to the apps they have on their smartphone or iPad, and getting them re-engaged with the service. App marketers can get started with Deeplink.me’s retargeting networking by using a provided 300×50 template or uploading their own creative, and can then keep track of their ads performance using the provided analytics which shows numbers of ads shown, clicks, geography, and more. (This can also be integrated with other third-party analytics providers, too). The ad units themselves will be improved over time as well, allow for more interactivity, and more customization possibilities with regards to their look-and-feel. Those interested in participating in the new retargeting network can learn more or sign up . |
Microsoft Vows To Fight Government For Right To Disclose More Information About User Data Requests | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Microsoft today post stating that it feels that recent government changes to how it reports surveillance activities are insufficient. Calling the decision by the federal government to publish more information on the quantity of consumer data requests relating to national security each year “a good start,” Microsoft claims the Constitution demands more progress. Microsoft cites the founding document several times in its post, also declaring that it believes that it has “a clear right under the U.S. Constitution to share more information with the public.” In a rare moment of solidarity, Microsoft name-checked Google, saying that the two companies agree that more must be made legally allowable to disclose. Both companies are in litigation with the government for the right to share more about what they are forced to hand to the government. Specifically, Microsoft wants to disclose how often user content such as the content of an email is demanded. Revelations from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to journalist Glenn Greenwald showed that through a program called PRISM, the United States government requested hefty amounts of user data from large Internet companies. There are gag rules around what can be said regarding government data requests. This stifles discussion, debate, and functional oversight of the government by its ultimate leaders, the citizenry. Microsoft and Google are also likely not particularly excited about sharing their private user data with intelligence agencies. Microsoft, citing a “failure of [its] recent negotiations” promises to press forward with its lawsuit “in the hope that the courts will uphold [its] right to speak more freely.” The company claims to have met with the government on six different occasions. Microsoft indicated that its suit was filed in June. You don’t often see a company worth hundreds of billions go full philosophy, but Microsoft went there (this appears to be a trend at the company – I’m ): The United States has long been admired around the world for its leadership in promoting free speech and open discussion. We benefit from living in a country with a Constitution that guarantees the fundamental freedom to engage in free expression unless silence is required by a narrowly tailored, compelling Government interest. We believe there remains a path forward that will share more information with the public while protecting national security. Our hope is that the courts and Congress will ensure that our Constitutional safeguards prevail. Microsoft is not always on the right side of privacy issues. However, in this case it is, and that is worth noting. Also, the combined Google and Microsoft legal budget is formidable. Perhaps progress will be made. |
Twitter To Appoint Vijaya Gadde as General Counsel as Alex Macgillivray Moves On | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | Twitter is appointing as its new General Counsel after current appointee has announced his plans to move on. The news came as a post on and was shortly thereafter reported on by . Techcrunch has confirmed both the departure of Macgillivray and the hire of Gadde with Twitter. Macgillivray says that he is planning on dialing back his involvement with Twitter over the next few months as the team transitions to new leadership. “I’ll continue to support the company and its great people by staying on as an advisor for the legal, trust & safety, corporate development and public policy teams,” says Macgillivray. “I continue to care deeply about Twitter, the folks who work at Twitter and our tremendous users, so I’ll remain close to all three.” Macgillivray was hired by Twitter in 2009 and previously served as DGC of Product at IP at Google. Gadde has been a director in Twitter’s legal department since July of 2011 and will now take on the GC role. Macgillivray’s former post at Google had him going to bat for the company over its efforts to scan books. His move there was seen as a key ‘first amendment’ hire as Twitter began to be considered a platform for expression and came under attack from government agencies of various countries looking to quash or investigate statements made by users. Gadde was formerly an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where Macgillivray was also formerly an attorney. Though Gadde doesn’t have the same bonafides as Macgillivray when it comes to first amendment stuff, she is apparently regarded well in the company and at her former firm. In addition, from what we’ve heard, Twitter will be doing some shuffling of the legal structure as well. Its director of public policy Colin Crowell will no longer report to the General Counsel, but will report directly to CEO Dick Costolo on matters affecting Twitter and Washington. All signs at the moment are pointing towards this being a voluntary exit for Macgillivray, who was well liked and respected. No one at Twitter is happy to see him go, as they might be with someone who wasn’t getting the job done. Macgillivray states in his post that he’s “looking forward to engaging my various internet passions from new and different perspectives, seeing friends and family without distraction, and just goofing off a bit.” According to what we’re hearing, that’s essentially the core of why he’s leaving. Being the bastion of free speech at a hot target like Twitter can’t have been too relaxing or left a ton of free time to enjoy family. There’s also the fact that Macgillivray’s shares have vested after four years with the company. As a bit of a going away present, Twitter officially in the Federal Circuit court today which attempted to claim invention of Twitter’s messaging structure. Image Credit: / Flickr CC |
Flutter Is A Wireless Platform For Arduino-Based Projects To Network Over Wi-Fi-Busting Distances | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 30 |
Getting Arduino-powered devices to talk to each other over long distances is going to get cheaper and easier if this project flies. Flutter is a wireless development platform for Arduino with over half a mile of usage range — making it suitable for outdoor projects covering greater distances than Wi-Fi can comfortably manage. Possible use-cases could include home automation systems, flying bots like quadcopters, environmental monitoring systems and radio-controlled cars. In short any Arduino-powered project that needs to ferry data from one relatively distant point to another. Flutter’s range will be 1,000m+ (3,200ft) but its creators also intend to include a mesh networking component, so multiple devices can be positioned to cover even greater distances than the standard half mile+ range. The plan — assuming Flutter hits its crowdfunding target of $80,000 to turn its current Kickstarter prototypes into shipping product — is to offer two main Flutter board options to network up your devices: a basic board costing $20 and a pro board with a built in antenna for $30. The boards will be powered by an Atmel SAM3s ARM CPU. The Flutter Basic board will have an integrated (rather than external) antenna and is smaller in size thanks to having components on both sides. It also has a micro USB for power and programming, an LED, and a button, plus digital and analog I/O. The Pro board will include battery charging, a professional screw mount antenna, an additional button, and more memory for more code. Flutter’s makers also plan to offer a few other bits of kit to flesh out their wireless system, including a variety of shields for easier plug and play (and minimal soldering); a home base station which can connect to a router via Ethernet or Wi-Fi; and a Bluetooth shield for talking to a smartphone and interfacing with a planned Flutter mobile app. The more devices you want to talk to each other, the more boards/bits of kit you’ll obviously need but at $20/$30 a pop for the main boards the cost should scale to support sizeable projects without breaking the bank. Kickstarter backers are being offered a veritable pick ‘n’ mix of options, starting at $25 for one basic board — rising to $475 for this “autonomous swarm” supporting haul: 5x Flutter Basic, 5x Flutter Pro, 4x RC Shield, 2x Shield shield, 1x Flutter Network Shield, 1x Bluetooth Shield, 1x Starter Kit, 10x USB and 12x (two extra) Breakouts. Security is an obvious focus for Flutter’s creators — being as you’re transmitting potentially sensitive data over relatively large distances where it could be intercepted. Data transfers will be encrypted and the Flutter devices themselves will include a cryptographic chip to store and protect encryption keys. The project is also open source. “Every aspect of our system will be made available, from schematics, board designs, the bill of materials, right down to the firmware and mobile app. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to build or improve upon our foundation,” they note. Plus they intend to offer a set of tutorials to open up wireless development to a broader base of makers. It’s an ambitious project for sure, and still has a fair bit of work to do — including redesigning the prototype, gaining FCC certification for the wireless hardware, developing their supporting software and mobile apps (iOS and Android are planned) — but they are already approaching the half-way mark of their funding target with 27 days left to run on their campaign so have clearly struck a chord with the maker community. With that kind of support this is one Kickstarter project that looks all but certain to take off. |
Startups From New Zealand Accelerator Lightning Lab’s First Intake Close $2M Total In Angel Funding | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Wellington-based accelerator program , which launched in February, announced today that four of the nine startups in have raised a total of $2 million in angel funding. The startup teams from New Zealand and Australia pitched 150 investors during Lightning Lab’s first Demo Day on May 15. The four companies that have closed investment since then are: , an on-demand language tutoring platform that matches students with native English speakers. Co-founder David Cameron is currently focused on developing the startup’s sales pipe and finding opportunities in China, where LearnKo has a full-time staff. , a Wellington-based video-sharing platform that allows filmmakers to collaborate and solicit feedback on works-in-progress. The startup is currently adding features that allow users to upload reference images, videos and sound bites, further simplifying the editing process. , which helps ensure product authenticity with verification technology that protects against counterfeiting. The startup’s tech also allows consumers to track items to their source, an especially valuable tool for food companies that want to reassure buyers in export markets of their products’ safety. , a platform for open-access, crowdsourced peer reviews of academic papers. Co-founder Andrew Preston says the startup’s current goal is to build its platform so it can continue to assist peer reviewers, with a focus on helping editors at traditional academic journals. “Traditionally many people keep hands off this early stage due to too much risk. Lightning Lab has really pulled together investors, mentors, and entrepreneurs to get involved up front,” said program director Dan Khan. “We have had over 1000 mentor sessions from over 100 local, national, and international mentors this program, and the interest for 2014 is already strong.” Lightning Lab launched earlier this year with the goal of supporting entrepreneurs within New Zealand’s startup ecosystem. The program, which funds about 10 companies each year, is a member of the , which was founded by . |
Bitmonet Monetizes Your Blog Through The Power Of Bitcoin | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 30 | – think “Bitcoin Monetization” rather than “Bitcoin Impressionist Painter” – is a platform for creation microtransaction-based paywalls on your blog or content portal. While most people don’t like paywalls, most people are also going to have to start expecting them and this open source service definitely makes a lot of sense. Founded by Bo Li, Ankur Nandwani, and designer Valerie Chao, the site adds very basic functions to your average blog. When you click on a link, a window pops up asking for a few cents to read a post and a little more to buy an hour’s worth of access or a day pass. This obviously requires access to and a willingness to use Bitcoin although you could pay in another currency. The team launched the app using the API, a service that allows for nearly seamless BTC integration. They have a . You can . It is an open source project and the team is releasing the code today. Bitmonet’s origin story began at a hackathon. “I spend 2-3 hours every day reading news from all over the world,” said Nandwani. “Over the last few years I have noticed that more and more newspapers are setting up paywalls. Now if I want to just read an article, it doesn’t make sense to pay $20 for a monthly subscription. So I was trying to solve this problem. At the same time I was researching investment opportunities in Bitcoins by talking to people in the Bitcoin community, when this idea clicked to me and I ended up developing the prototype at the Bitcoin Hackathon.” “Our goal behind BitMonet is to increase Bitcoin adoption. Hence we have made BitMonet free and easy to install. Also, it is completely customizable, giving the publisher complete control of how they want to monetize their content,” said Nandwani. “They can monetize a single [piece of] content, or they can offer time-metered subscription services.” The team is focusing on publishers right now and will soon move on to game makers and other content creators. There are other services, like and even Apple’s own payment system that creators can use but this looks to be one of the first with BTC support. While this is obviously still a niche tool, it’s interesting to see how seamless Bitcoin payments can be using open source and a little API magic. |
Silent Circle Preemptively Shuts Down Encrypted Email Service To Prevent NSA Spying | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | “We knew USG would come after us”. That’s why Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch his company . It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy. The Silent Circle blog posts explains “We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.” It’s especially damning considering Silent Circle’s co-founder and president is Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of widely-used email encryption program Pretty Good Privacy. Silent Circle reportedly had revenue increase 400% month-over-month in July after corporate enterprise customers switched to its services in hopes of avoiding surveillance. The company giddily it planned to nearly double staff and significantly increase revenue this year in part thanks to the NSA’s practices coming to light. In light of those comments, today’s news about shutting down Silent Mail seems a bit sobering. Silent Circle’s other secure services including Silent Phone and Silent Text will continue to operate as they do all the encryption on the client side within users’ devices. But it explained that “Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has.” With too many opportunities for information and metadata leaks in the SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email protocols, the company believes there was no way to live up to its promise of total privacy. In a statement to TechCrunch about whether the shut down was only because Silent Circle felt email was insecure, CEO Michael Janke tells us “It goes deeper than that. There are some very high profile people on Silent Circle- and I mean very targeted people- as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let alone the “highly targeted high profile people”. They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer to peer products- we made the decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now- they are completely shut down- nothing they can get from us or try and force from us- we literally have nothing anywhere.” Silent Circle says it had been considering a more conservative slow shut-down of Silent Mail or ceasing to take on new customers, but was inspired to shut down by Lavabit. That company was reportedly PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden’s email provider, likely because of its claims of high security. But Lavabit was told by the government to turn over user data, and received a gag order preventing it from publicizing details of the situation. Today Lavabit owner Ladar Levison posted saying “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He chose the latter. The move has bolstered critics who are becoming increasingly vocal about how the U.S. government’s surveillance efforts are jeopardizing American technology businesses. They fear international customers may take their cloud business elsewhere in an attempt to avoid the NSA. Jennifer Granick, the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, “the U.S. government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive industry. Lavabit may just be the canary in the coal mine.” Now it seems that the negative impact won’t just be in the form of lost customers or businesses shut down upon receiving data demands. The destruction could reach as far as companies unwilling to even risk compromising their values. At this point, the nation’s best hope for reform of spying practices might be making a case that it hurts the economy. |
Social Ad Startup Shift Hires Former Facebook VP Paul Ollinger As President | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | , a company that offers tools for running social advertising campaigns and , has hired Paul Ollinger as president. Ollinger was previously vice president of sales for Facebook’s west region, joining in 2007 and leaving two years ago. Since then, he has served as an advisor to several startups — including Shift. And now he’s joining Shift full-time. “I was very excited about getting back into the industry,” Ollinger told me. “I was tired of sitting on the sidelines.” As for why he’s joining this particular company, he said he knew and liked the team and its investors. Plus, he said he stays in touch with his old colleagues at Facebook, and they’ve had high praise for Shift. Ollinger is Shift’s first “standalone” president, according to CEO James Borow (someone served as a combined COO and president in the early days of the company, which was previously known as GraphEffect). His role will involve helping Shift scale and to expand into new markets. The company will have nine figures of ad spend going through its system this year, Borow added. There are currently around 70 people on the team, with plans to grow quickly. |
Microsoft’s Lightweight Windows Phone App Builder Saw 30,000 Projects Started In First 48 Hours | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Today on the , on which , Microsoft’s announced that the new had seen usage higher than the company anticipated, with 30,000 applications started in the first 48 hours of the tool’s life. Given the stronger-than-expected demand, Microsoft is currently “throttling” usage to the service. However, your lag time to entry should not be too long. Perhaps a day. Why does the 30,000-projects-started figure matter? Simply because it shows that developers and non-developers showed up to test the darn thing out. However, what we must discuss today is context. On Tuesday, when the tool was released, Microsoft described it online, through an example, as for the “savvy developers” of the world. That didn’t sit well with me. TechCrunch, among other publications, noted that that specific positioning of the Windows Phone App Studio felt somewhat odd. Is the tool strong enough that folks such as myself can build something that is worthy of publishing? Here’s : Windows Phone has the advantage of having a relatively simple visual style that looks good across a variety of apps, so there’s a chance it could result in a net good. But there’s probably a greater chance that we’ll just end up with more crud blocking up the charts, search and overall library. Yes. Only, today on the show, Tomlinson noted that the app would be great for individuals who want to load their lightweight apps directly onto the phones of their friends, to help folks get their first taste of development, and for other similar reasons. And this is what the App Studio is perfect for. It was all but the correct marketing pitch for the product. But two days earlier, the company stated in its own copy that the App Studio was great for savvy developers. That’s the opposite of what it said today. Mixed messaging can often lead to muddle, and a confused press and general public. The gist of this is that Microsoft does in fact know what its neat new service is for. Or for whom, depending. This is welcome news. If you want to get in line for a turn at App Studio, . |
Beddit: A Proper Sleep Tracker That Uses An Ultra-Thin Film Sensor In Your Bed | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | , a Finnish company that has long made sleep trackers for medical professionals, is looking to tap into the broad consumer market with a $149 sleep tracker that uses a thin-film sensor on your mattress. The sensor can send data back to a person’s smartphone, that tells them when they’ve been snoring or when they’ve fallen into deep sleep. Beddit says it can measure data as detailed as a person’s heartrate during the night. The startup is launching the new sleep sensor with . Backers get a discount with a $99 price point instead of a $149 one, and Beddit is looking to bring its product to market by November. While the company has been around since 2006, they’ve been considering bringing a cheaper consumer-facing product to market for years, said CEO Lasse Leppäkorpi. But up until recently, the cost of manufacturing and then selling a sleep sensor for a mattress was prohibitive at a 500 euro ($669) end price point. “We had been focused on basic monitoring in hospitals with tracking heartrate and breathing without touching the patient,” Leppäkorpi said. “Now the next piece is to bring this technology in the form of a consumer mobile app to market. We’ve been developing this for a long time.” Beddit is competing against a host of activity tracking devices using accelerometers like the Fitbit or the Jawbone. But Beddit, of course, is just focused on sleep. Beddit says it uses ballistocardiography, with a sensor sensitive enough to measure the mechanical forces from a person’s heartbeat, their breathing patterns and their movement in bed. The sensor is a thin strip of film with adhesive on one side that acts like a sticker on a mattress. There aren’t any batteries required because it needs a low-voltage USB power supply. It connects to a smartphone using Bluetooth, not unlike other activity trackers like the newly-launched Shine from Misfit Wearables. The app shows a timeline of a person’s sleep activity during the night and awards them a quality score. It also can track light and noise during the night from the smartphone to tell if those factors might be affecting a person’s sleep. There’s also a smart alarm clock built into the app that can wake a person up inside a certain time window when they’re sleeping lightly. The app also gives personalized coaching and tips for how to improve a person’s sleep. Leppäkorpi said most of Beddit’s customers are usually surprised when they’re faced with actual data about how they sleep. “You spend one-third of your life in bed but people know very little about how they actually sleep,” he said. “Most of us think that we know how we sleep — that we sleep well or that we sleep poorly. But it’s often a surprise.” The company has taken about $2.5 million in angel and government investment so far, and has yet to go for a full venture round. |
Fail Week: When Mark Suster Believed His Own Startup’s Hype, And Everything Came Crashing Down | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | So we at TechCrunch created , five day long video series that shines some light on the dark days that even the most lucky of entrepreneurs go through. Today we’re featuring , who famously had success on “ ” as a repeat entrepreneur turned investor over nearly two decades in the industry. But not all of his efforts have been winners. Watch the video embedded above to hear about how he got caught up in believing his own hype and proceeded to make “every single mistake you can make” in building a startup — he bit off much more than he could chew in terms of funding, press coverage, product development, investor expectations, hiring, you name it, and eventually it all came crashing down. You can find all our Fail Week stories . |
Lyft Hits A Million Completed Rides And Launches Service In Washington, DC | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Ride sharing startup hit a big milestone yesterday,* reaching its one millionth completed ride about a year after . The company also continues to expand into new markets, launching most recently in Washington, D.C. The comes as Lyft has been expanding quickly into new markets. In fact, the number of rides has doubled in just the last three months, as the company has added new cities and grown its existing markets. With that in mind, Lyft keeps adding new cities. The latest is Washington, D.C., as the ride sharing service became available to friends and family in the nation’s capital last weekend. (It’ll be launching to the public this week.) D.C. is the seventh market for Lyft in the U.S., following launches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and San Diego. The new market was launched a week after Lyft, SideCar, and Uber received a big victory in California, where the local regulator issued a proposed set of regulations that would legitimize certain new transportation services provided by unlicensed drivers. The new regulations came out after a year of negotiations between the California Public Utilities Commission and the new transportation startups. But how local regulators will react to Lyft’s launch in D.C. isn’t clear. It took a long time for Uber to get on the right side of the D.C. city council, and the local taxi commission seems to be to keep that company out of town. Still, Uber was able to and create regulations that enable its service to continue operating in the capital. While those rules did make e-hailing a taxi or black car legal in D.C., there are no provisions for the kind of ride sharing service that Lyft operates. In fact, the D.C. city council regulations , which, of course, Lyft drivers aren’t. Lyft president John Zimmer said that the company has been talking to local officials in D.C., and that “conversations are ongoing.” The hope is that D.C. — and for that matter, any city that Lyft seeks to launch in — will look at the proposed regulations put forth in California and consider adopting them, or at least, build a similar framework. That’ll be important, as Lyft plans to keep adding new cities. Next stop is Minneapolis, where the local press noticed that Lyft was hiring drivers and believes it . And the company plans to launch in another two markets in the two or three weeks after that, according to Zimmer, putting it in 10 cities by September. With that in mind, the company is growing fast. It just reached 100 employees, and is adding about five to 10 new full-timers each week. That growth comes after it raised and also pocketed some cash from the . With capital in hand, the company plans to accelerate its growth with lots of new hires and new cities over the coming months. ==
I just happened to be in the Lyft office when the company hit its millionth ride. We had scheduled a time to catch up and I was planning on just chatting about the D.C. launch, but the company had a ticker counting down the number of rides in the front of the office and it was at 999,900 when I walked in. Kind of a coincidence, but it was a . |
Snowden’s Alleged Email Provider Shuts Down, Warns Against Trusting U.S. Companies | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | The alleged email provider of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden , leaving just an ominous message in its absence. “I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision,” writes Lavabit owner Ladar Levison on the company’s front page. “I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.” The note, which we’ve pasted in full below, alludes to Levison being silenced under a gag order, forced to choose between being “complicit against the American people” or continuing to operate Lavabit. Tanya Lokishina, Snowden was corresponding with a lavabit.com email address. Levison is asking readers to contribute to his legal defense fund and support laws in Congress that permit greater transparency. Unfortunately for Levison, none of the current proposed laws would likely help him. The closest proposal, from Representative Zoe Lofgren ( ), would allow tech companies to reveal the number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court data requests to their users. in the Surveillance Order Reporting Act that would permit people under gag orders to reveal their cases publicly. Major US Internet firms active participation in an alleged dragnet program, but this latest development doesn’t bode well for their reputation. Letter below: I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company. This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States. Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC : its encrypted email service Silent Mail, following Lavabit’s lead. Silent Circle said it hadn’t received any government demands for data yet, but due to the high-profile nature of its users, the CEO told TechCrunch “We knew the USG would come after us”. |
Record Your Every Waking Moment With Narrato | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Not everyone can be as obsessive about journaling as, say, a lovesick 14-year-old or Samuel Pepys, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. That’s why is so interesting. Created by a London-based team of , Narrato allows you to enter notes, take photos and describe your feelings and mood in an app that is reminiscent of a version of that you’d actually use. Because the system is ostensibly private you can tell Narrato your deepest secrets and share some of your most candid photos. You can later export the data to your desktop or just go through and recall the days of your lives.
Apparently the app has gotten very popular in Japan where mobile-only journal-makers have been creating digital diaries for months. It’s and will soon be available for iPad and Android.
The system uses two ways to view your online life. There is your private journal — a system that auto-populates with the date, time, location, and weather — as well as a Life Stream page that shows the photos you’ve taken as well as tweets and other social media updates you’ve made during the day. You can bring these images and notes into the main journal and comment upon them. The app costs $3.99 and costs $4.99 a year to maintain your journal. When you’re ready to export the journal it outputs all of your data in a JSON-compatible format along with the images and media you’ve selected. You can also create multiple journals or delete your account entirely to protect the innocent. Will I use it? Probably not (but I’d never tell you, would I?) However, I could definitely see the draw. Because it’s not inherently social you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s simply a journal, like so many others out there, but it’s beautifully designed and quite usable. |
France’s $16M Anti-Piracy Agency Has Sent Two Million Warnings, But Only Fined Two People | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Anti-piracy agency Hadopi just broke a record. In less than three years, it more than 2 million warning emails for copyright infringement. Warning emails are just the first strike in the “three strike” scheme. After that, it sends you registered snail mail, and finally it takes you to court. Yet, only four people were convicted. The most surprising aspect is that the agency is still going strong despite the change of government in 2012. As a reminder, the Hadopi pays a private company to spy on BitTorrent activity regarding popular music, TV shows or French movies. Then, ISPs are supposed to comply with the Hadopi to give the real identity of the person behind an IP address. Offenders don’t receive a warning because they downloaded a movie, but because they failed to put proper security on their Internet connection. It’s a lot more pernicious. While the Hadopi originally wanted to automate the third step and fine everyone who was caught three times, this part of the bill didn’t pass. A court has to decide whether an offender is guilty or not. Only 10 percent of the offenders received registered mail (200,000 people). 710 people are supposed to be tried but there aren’t enough resources to bring all of them to court. So far, only four had to defend themselves in front of a court — less than 0.000002 percent of those who received the first warning. The result isn’t a glorious victory for the government, the results of the cases including a discharge, an “exempt from penalty”, a $200 fine (€150) and an $800 fine (€600) with 15 days of Internet blackout. In other words, it’s a failure. With a budget of $16 million (€12 million) for 2012 alone, the agency managed to fine two people for a grand total of $1,000. Some detractors claimed that France created the most expensive newsletter in the world. Back in 2012, then presidential candidate François Hollande was reluctant to say that the Hadopi would end with his presidency. That was one of the reasons why Aurélie Filipetti was named as the Minister of Culture, because she seemed to get along well with right holders. The government doesn’t want to simply kill the Hadopi and leave a void. It would send out the wrong signals to music and movie companies. Instead, the government put Pierre Lescure in charge to find an alternative. While his conclusions are now , the 719-page report has yet to become a law or a new authority. |
Google Adds 79 Cloud And Big-Data Patents To Its Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Earlier this year, Google not to sue open-source developers over 10 patents related to MapReduce. Today, the company is this pledge by to its . These patents, Google says, cover software that is “used to efficiently operate data centers, including middleware, distributed storage management, distributed database management, and alarm monitoring.” Google acquired these 79 patents from IBM and CA Technologies and include patents that were filed in the U.S., Europe and Asia. They include patents on things like a “ ,” a “ ” and for a “ .” The company says that even though the pledge currently mostly covers back-end technologies, it’s also looking to add others that would be related to consumer-facing technologies because “open-source software is also transforming the development of consumer products that people use every day.” As Google noted when it its pledge, it hopes that this move will “serve as a model for the industry, and we’re encouraging other patent holders to adopt the pledge or a similar initiative.” Given the size of Google’s patent portfolio, having 89 patents that are covered by this pledge is obviously just a small gesture on Google’s part. However, it is part of an overall movement against patent trolls and other abuses of the patent system by large tech companies — though even they obviously continue to sue each other and patent trivial inventions. |
AOL To ‘Impact’ Hundreds Of Patch Employees Friday In A Bid For Hyper Local Profits | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Patch, AOL’s hyper-local news effort, will lose up to 550 employees this Friday, according to a local editor at the group. Hundreds of sites in the network are expected to close in the process. In recent calls with Patch employees, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong avoided the word “layoffs,” and instead stated that hundreds of Patch employees would become what he called “impacts.” (AOL owns TechCrunch.) There will be between 200 and 550 “impacts,” according to sources at AOL, a surprisingly broad range of potential layoffs. It isn’t clear how the company can be so unsure of its plans, but I would interpret the range as indicative of AOL’s hope that it can salvage some of its Patch sites that currently lose money. In its , Armstrong noted that certain Patch sites may be able to find local partners. Perhaps if some do, layoffs will be toward the lower end of the stated range. According to TechCrunch’s source, and separate , up to 300 individual Patch sites will be axed in the process. The local editor that spoke to TechCrunch indicated that the layoffs will impact the editorial, sales and management of Patch. In short, Patch is about to get quite smaller. The news is set to drop on a call scheduled for Friday at 9 a.m. The local editor at Patch was blunt about the situation: “If people at Patch didn’t see this coming for years, they are total idiots.” In the editor’s view, Patch has gone from being free-wheeling to overly controlling with its local editors and then back and forth between the two. Patch’s history can be described in two parts: over-expansion, and a long painful decline. Why the layoffs now? AOL has made a promise: Patch will make money by the end of the year. Revenue isn’t likely to ramp quickly enough to meet that goal. So cuts are needed. Also, a separate source informed TechCrunch earlier that job offers are being yanked, indicating that hiring at Patch is slowing, if not halting, altogether. Patch must hit the black by the end of the year. This is more than a promise to investors that a long-term bet will stop financially harming AOL; instead, Patch is making the rest of AOL’s media properties look bad. The company’s makes this point explicitly: “While significantly improved, Brand Group Adjusted OIBDA remains negative reflecting our investment in Patch.” The company lists other costs as adding drag to the adjusted operating income of the Brand Group — of which TechCrunch is a part — but Patch is the first listed, and I think for a reason. Only one segment of AOL’s larger business has positive adjusted operating income, the Membership Group, which is a brilliant holdover from the days of dial-up. That’s the entire profit source for AOL. The company’s other segments, the Brand Group and AOL Networks, both lost money in the most recent quarter. However, the Brand Group saw its adjusted second quarter operating loss fall from $15.2 million, to $1.4 million over the past year. If Patch were to fire up to 500 people, it’s hard to see how the Brand segment could not find aggregate profitability. I’ll simply say that the slashing of Patch budgets in an attempt to find short-term profits appears to have led to a hollowed out, understaffed and unimpressive product. Ask yourself: When was the last time that Patch was relevant to your local life? Exactly. More in the morning. |
Google’s New Maps App Now Showing Local Ads Related To Users’ Searches | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Google AdWords customers can now better target mobile device owners via an updated ad experience within the Google Maps app on Android, iPhone, and iPad, Google today. This news follows app, which previously saw a number of changes and additions, including an updated user interface, integrated traffic reporting, Zagat reviews, changes to how business ratings display, and more. In the updated Google Maps application, advertisers can now target Maps users after they’ve performed a search. Here’s how it works: after a user performs a keyword search in the native app, a box appears at the bottom of the screen which includes a title, text and link to get directions for a relevant business. Users can also tap or swipe up on this box to see more information. In the example Google provided today, a user searches for “gardening shop” and an ad appears below for a gardening supplies store nearby their location. When clicking (err, tapping) on that ad, Maps users will also be able to view the business address, phone, photos, reviews and more – just like a regular business listing would show. However, the listing is preceded by a small purplish icon reading “ad” to indicate that this is, in fact, a paid placement. The icon on the map is also purple, as opposed to the standard red. Some actions a user takes are free, including saving business information for later, sharing a business listing with a friend, or starting navigation, for example. Meanwhile, others are paid. Advertisers who want to enable the initial “get location details” click, the “get directions” option, click-to-call’s, and clicks on the ad headline, have to pay, says Google. Reporting is available for both types of actions, and can be filtered by choosing the “click type” in the reporting screen. To get started, Google advises advertisers to add to their search campaigns or create an ad with . Ads also have to be configured for mobile devices and on Google search partners in the AdWords settings. Prior to today’s change, Google’s Map apps on and had been updated with a new interface where business listings appear at a box a the bottom of the screen. Users can swipe up on these in order to flip through them one-by-one, or they could just tap on the “list” icon next the search box at the top of the screen to see a full list of nearby results. Now Google is making it so advertisers can pay to be that “first click,” so to speak, which could boost a business’s exposure in terms of attracting foot traffic to their store, or reaching those in search of something in particular (e.g. , and not just Google its updated version of Google Maps at this year’s I/O developer conference, when it announced new plans for AdWords , which would enable and on the map on the web, too. Maps has by Google advertisers, but this year’s user interface overhaul changed the way ads will display, and what sort of options advertisers can now pay for and track. Google offers more details about the setup process . |
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Android And Chrome OS Could Reap Big Windfalls From Slowing Worldwide PC Economy | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | The global PC market is shrinking, and continues to which means there are a lot of concerned device-makers looking around for what to do next. Acer is one of those companies, and the firm is looking to pin the blame on Windows and find a better option, . That might be a very popular tune in the next few years from other OEMs like Acer, and that’s great news for Google. Acer is looking to mitigate its PC market losses by growing its non-Windows business, and by doing that fast. Android is the logical choice for smartphone and tablet plans, and Acer President Jim Wang told investors during his company’s quarterly results conference call last night that he “sees a new market there for Chromebooks.” Already, Acer makes the C7 Chromebook, a $199 device that has a lot in common with netbooks of the past but that runs Chrome OS, Google’s desktop operating system that pretty much takes the Chrome browser and extends its capabilities somewhat. Chrome OS and Android devices are expected to make up around 10 to 12 percent of Acer’s revenue by year’s end, per Wang, and that could climb as high as 30 percent by the end of 2014. Chromebooks made up around 3 percent of Acer’s total PC shipments in Q2 2013, which doesn’t sound like much but shows impressive growth for a largely experimental OS that’s launching into an extremely entrenched market. The situation is similar to what other PC makers are seeing. with its slowing PC sales, and the company is clearly seeing enough interest in its Nexus 7 devices to partner up with Google for another round with the new version launched just this past month. In the past, Apple has been the beneficiary of a slumping PC market; iPad sales have progressively increased as PC sales have slowed, making it seem like there’s a direct correlation there that would see Apple’s tablets satisfy customers to the point where they’d eventually mostly op for iPads instead of Windows-based notebooks. But iPad sales were actually down last quarter, for the first time ever. That might just be attributable to a new release cycle that saw no new iPad hardware released in early 2013, but it could also be a sign that there are others who stand to gain from the PC sales slump. Tablets based on Google’s mobile OS have been slow to find their audience, but they’re , in a way that Windows hasn’t been able to match in that market. Chrome OS devices might still be a tiny fraction of the notebook market, but they at least represent a different approach with seemingly growing appeal – something that can’t necessarily be said for Windows 8 just yet. If consumers are souring on traditional PCs, it makes sense that OEMs would put more stock in something like Chrome OS that has a chance to accomplish something different, than in the more or less business-as-usual approach of Microsoft, which is actually peeling back some of the more innovative aspects of its Windows 8 platform with the upcoming 8.1 update. Google has a number of things going for it in terms of being able to capitalize on PC industry slowdown: Its licensing model means it can harness the need of existing OEMs to put their existing infrastructure to good use; it already powers the most successful mobile operating system on the planet, in terms of broad adoption; and it’s a name and brand that has recognition and trust worldwide. Once upon a time, there was no reason to take a risk on experiments like Android for tablets or Chrome OS for notebooks for OEMs like Acer, as Windows was a comfortable and secure platform investment from which to milk revenue. That’s no longer the case, and that could be a very good thing in terms of shaking up a mostly tired consumer PC device market. |
The TC Meetup + Pitch-Off Is Invading San Diego On August 22 | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Baseball season is in full swing and football is around the corner, but there’s one other competitive sport that’s heating up. The on Tuesday, August 22. That’s right, folks. It’s game time! The event will start at 6pm and last until 10pm at . We’re looking for all the best and brightest entrepreneurs of Southern California to hop on our stage, pitch their product in sixty seconds, and ultimately be judged by their peers and a panel of expert judges. These startups get no presentation materials or demoes — words only in a minute flat. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, to be a part of our Pitch-Off (form embedded below), and if accepted, you’ll get a one-on-one Office Hours Session with Greg Kumparak, Matt Burns, or myself. We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VC’s, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second Place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Companies chosen to participate will be notified one week before the event. But if you’re not down to compete, that’s just fine. We’re meeting up to talk tech, build the community, and throw back a few cold ones. That said, the comes with a drink ticket and the requirement that you are 21+. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LRp1ivMe70&w=640&h=480] |
Evergage, The Disrupt Finalist Formerly Known As Apptegic, Launches A Freemium B2B Service For Improving Website Click-Throughs | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | , the start-up that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in 2012 under the name , has been quietly building its business for a year and is now launching a freemium model to help companies improve the click-through rates on their websites without the need for hiring a developer. Though the name has changed, in part because people associated it too closely with mobile apps, Evergage co-founder and CEO Karl Wirth said that the product is fundamentally the same. Evergage looks at behavioral click-through data to identify which website features a customer is focusing on, and which aren’t getting many hits. Using that data, marketing teams can then use a visual editor to build floating messages on top of the site to draw users’ attention to a particular feature. And depending on who the visitor is, they might be shown different pop-ups. “We’re rolling out predictive analytics,” Wirth said. “We make suggestions to the market about what they could be doing. We’re able to say, we’ve seen people who have done these actions, you’ve shown them this message, and they’re converting to the goal at a higher rate. We suggest that you target people like them.” If, for instance, a company wants their users to click through a particular promotion, they might have a call-out message open on top of it when the user is about to close the website tab. Another common and effective message is a membership sign-up box that pops up when the user enters the site. The freemium product, called Evergage Lite, allows users to create up to three message boxes, which Wirth said is all some companies need. Letting businesses prove Evergage for themselves with the free basics seems like it will be a good way for Evergage to drive its own conversions to upgrades. For those who want to up the ante to 40 or 50 boxes, pricing is based on the site’s traffic. Especially on websites that use log-ins, it’s crucial to not show a user the same information twice, Wirth said. If you have a banner asking visitors to sign up for a webinar, that banner should go away after they’ve signed up. And yet some sites keep it up, wasting the opportunity to push further conversions in a return visit from the user. Adobe offers similar products with Adobe Digital Marketing Suite and Adobe Target, but Wirth said that their level of complexity often requires a developer to be involved, which racks up expenses for the company. Evergage aims to be a more cost effective alternative, so that marketing departments can manage the site themselves. As Apptegic, Evergage raised a $3.1 million seed round in the fall of 2011 from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, and a number of Boston angel investors. Wirth said the company is running on revenue from its paying customers for the time being, but that they are planning to raise a Series A in the near future. |
Rdio Hops On The Radio Bandwagon With Pandora-Style Stations Based On Your Friends | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Mainstream music fans don’t want to constantly choose what to listen to, so streaming services are embracing radio. The latest is , whose new Friend FM turns your friends’ listening activity and social connections i While Pandora popularized adaptive online radio, it’s becoming an essential feature for all music services. at the end of 2011, and Apple is gearing up to launch alongside iOS 7 this fall. The fact is that people listen to music in different ways. Sometimes you want to hear that one particular song or album, sometimes you want to dabble and discover something new, and sometimes you want to just fire-and-forget a radio station while you work. The more use cases a music service can cover, the more likely people will stick with it, endure ads, or pay for a subscription. Usually, adaptive radio stations build themselves off of your listening habits. That includes what you played, thumbs up or downed, and saved. This is how Rdio’s new You FM works, though it also factors in your Facebook Likes and Twitter Follows. Rdio’s overhaul of Stations also lets your tune into any of yours friends’ You FM stations. Friend FM could get you out of your comfort zone and stumbling upon new artists you can then cue up on-demand. Maria FM could score me some new yoga music, while Alex FM would rock my bones with the latest new metal. Rdio says “It’s like flipping on the car radio and knowing every DJ.” The cross-platform streaming service has also built a more immersive player for Stations, a better navigation system, Stations for genres, and an Auto-Play radio based on the last song or artist you were last listening to. Rdio has some catching up to do. It doesn’t reveal its user counts but some peg it as much, much tinier than direct competitor Spotify which has 24 million active users, over 6 million paying subscribers, and brought in $533 million in revenue in 2012. While many say Rdio’s design is better, its marketing hasn’t been as aggressive and it fractured its attention to launch the . Rdio needs to lock in more casual listeners before iTunes Radio comes out or Spotify gets any bigger, otherwise it could be stuck with its stylish but small user base. You can’t make a business just selling to hipsters unless you’re Pabst Blue Ribbon. |
The NSA Searches US Citizens’ Cross-Border Email That Mentions Foreign Targets | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | It’s difficult to keep track of what the NSA does and doesn’t do, and today, the New York Times piled on. Citing “senior intelligence officials,” the paper is that, under a broad interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA intercepts communications of U.S. citizens whose communications cross borders and mention foreign targets. You don’t have to communicate with someone being targeted directly to potentially have the NSA collect and search your email. So, if in an email to a friend in, say, France, I were to mention someone who the NSA is keeping tabs on, I could be the subject of extensive NSA surveillance of my email and text communications — legally, to boot, in the eyes of the government. The NSA has lied, , concerning its collection of records, content, metadata, and the like of American citizens. And, frankly, it’s become a complex enough situation that it is slightly hard to parse truth from half-truth from downright lie. However, James Clapper, current Director of National Intelligence, lied to Congress — and you — about the NSA not collecting information on American citizens. All that has happened since that moment is that the depth of his lie has increased; previously, it was phone metadata that became known as a collection target. The Times’ report goes deeper in damning Clapper as mendacious. And who can forget the commentary of Rep. Mike Rogers, who said that Snowden was lying when he described the , which was later leaked and confirmed by the former NSA director? We could go on. The new dodge is somewhat simple. Break down the NSA’s activities into two parts: collection and the search of that information. This allows the government to occlude their activities. The Times’ piece has a perfect encapsulation of the sort of idiotic verbiage that we are currently being spoon-fed: “In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, N.S.A. collects only what it is explicitly authorized to collect.” That’s from Judith Emmel, an NSA spokesperson. She continues to tell the Times that “the agency’s activities are deployed only in response to requirements for information to protect the country and its interests.” For more on the collection and search false dichotomy, . The crux of the search-collection split is that the NSA can hide behind search oversight rules as a canard to collect, en masse, the communications of any or all American citizens. They should not be granted this wiggle room. The two practices are inherently linked, and should be treated as part and parcel of the same dream. Today the Times did us a favor by outlining a precise mechanism with which the NSA helps itself, as it deems fit, to the private communications of U.S. citizens, with an increasingly low level of legal requirement. Mention something in an email to, hell, Canada, that raises an NSA flag and you may have lost the right to privacy. I can almost understand the logic that led the agency to this point, but I must protest. The revelation isn’t shocking in the face of former intelligence operatives claiming that the NSA goal is to “ .” It does, however, grant us a view into the thinking of the NSA and the larger government intelligence operation. And that matters. The Snowden effect continues apace. |
Dragon Innovation Raises $2.3 Million To Help Build Hardware Startups | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | Prepare yourself for an onslaught of small, clever, software driven hardware projects because former members of the iRobot team have just started , a manufacturing services and crowdfunding firm that will help small makers go from garage to factory. Co-founded by Scott N. Miller and Herman Pang, the group has decades of experience in hardware design and manufacturing. Miller worked on the functional prototype of the Roomba and then led the team to ramp up production and sales. He supervised the building of 3 million Roomba units. Pang worked on Hasbro’s FurReal friends and then helped build the Far East office of iRobot with Miller. The company isn’t just another incubator. The plan is to run a crowdfunding platform that allows users to get funded and then work with DI to produce their hardware to scale. “Dragon Innovation’s crowdfunding platform is exclusively focused on hardware and allows a broader category within Hardware than some other sites including Pet Tech, Home Security, and Home Health,” said Miller. The company raised its round from Flybridge Capital Partners and Foundry Group as well as the Box Group. DI will use its experienced team to make sure products actually get delivered, a breath of fresh air for anyone who has waited for months for a gizmo. “Dragon takes on detailed vetting of each team and project, so that if the funding threshold is met, the team will deliver on the promise to its backers. This step ensures real people with real products are behind each project,” said Miller. “Furthermore, Dragon’s network of service providers, investors and experts in relevant fields is another differentiator.” “In the old days, firms would spend millions of dollars over the course of multiple years in stealth mode, then have a big product launch backed by a significant market spend to drive demand,” he said. “In some cases, this went well, and the product sold. In others, it did not.” The company is launching its crowdfunding system later this year. DI’s goal is to capitalize on this trend of small, agile hardware manufacturers that can create cool products and, at the same time, raise awareness of the issues with hardware manufacturing. But bringing their expertise to bear on the big problems, maybe they can prevent another ? |
Mozilla’s Persona Login System Now Supports All Gmail Addresses Out Of The Box | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | One of Mozilla’s lesser-known projects is , a login system that aims to eliminate site-specific passwords so you can log in with your existing email accounts without having to type in a password. Its aim is somewhat similar to what Google, Facebook and others are doing with their login systems, though Mozilla’s is obviously quite different. Persona uses email addresses to authenticate users and , all Gmail users will be able to use Persona to log in to the sites (and to be honest, there aren’t all that many yet) right out of the box without having to sign up for it in the first place. As a Mozilla spokesperson told me, the company did not work with Google on this project. Instead, it is using Google’s publicly available to “bootstrap a Persona transaction.” It’s worth noting that for now, Persona only supports regular Gmail addresses. While the team is interested in adding support for Google Apps accounts, it’s not clear when it will start supporting these. Today’s announcement comes almost exactly four months after the company announced the same feature . Today’s addition of Gmail, Mozilla says, means Persona now supports “more than 700,000,000 active email users” – or “about 60-80% of people on most North American websites.” In most cases, signing in to sites that support Persona just takes a click or two. The authentication is based on public-key cryptography. Unless you are using a Yahoo or Gmail address, you will still have to sign up for Persona to get started and run through the usual email verification process. For these two services, however, Mozilla now uses what it calls an , which essentially uses the email provider’s existing OAuth gateway or OpenID endpoint to verify your identity. As long as you stay logged into your Yahoo or Gmail accounts, signing in to third-party sites that support Persona will just take a single click. Mozilla will use Persona in its own Firefox OS, but outside of the company’s own services, Persona hasn’t gotten much traction yet. Indeed, you’ll probably be hard-pressed to find a site that uses it, so if you want to give it a try, head over to Mozilla’s or its demo. Given how easy Persona is to use from a user’s perspective, it’s a shame that there aren’t more services that support it. But maybe now that millions of new email addresses will just work with it out of the box, it will give developers more confidence in the system and get them to support it. |
Culture Amp’s Analytics Platform Uses Data To Help Companies Boost Employee Morale | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Human resource departments often use the term “culture change” to describe positive adjustments to a company’s working environment. Unfortunately for frustrated employees, that concept is often poorly defined. Created by Melbourne, Australia startup , is an innovative data-driven analytics platform that enables companies to track and improve worker morale. Murmur fills the gap between traditional management consulting firms such as and that provide in-depth but costly research and much simpler platforms like that allow companies to quickly create surveys but don’t provide context or analysis. “The last decade has been torrent of innovation in marketing analytics, how we ask questions, how we visualize the results and how we use those results to change the culture,” says Culture Amp co-founder Didier Elzinga. “We know an incredible amount about someone who buys a single hamburger from us, but there are people who we have worked with for 10 years who we don’t know a single thing about.” Launched less than two years ago, Culture Amp already has an impressive client roster that skews toward tech startups, including , , , , , and . A typical Culture Amp client has about 400 employees but plans to increase that number by 50% in the next eight to 10 months. “[Tech startups] are companies that believe in the power of data and because they are growing so fast, recognize the culture and the people they hire as the biggest leaders they have for succeeding,” says Elzinga. Culture Amp’s clients also come from sectors such as retail, manufacturing, media and financial services. Murmur’s data is gathered from engagement surveys, which gauge employees’ emotional commitment to their companies. The analytics platform then visualizes results in order to help managerial staff hone in on areas that may be causing dissatisfaction, such as lack of promotion opportunities. In addition to measuring how engaged (or not) staffers are, Murmur also gives suggestions on how to improve scores. Of course, companies have to first convince employees to fill out surveys in order to get good data. The development of Culture Amp’s survey questions, which are designed to be completed quickly, was led by its Chief Scientist and psychologist Jason McPherson. “Traditionally people designing surveys have been more interested in the statistical validity of models are normed across thousands of people, as opposed to the experience of the person doing the survey. But once you give up hope, you just start entering random data,” says Elzinga. “You should be able to to complete one on the fly in under 10 minutes.” Culture Amp’s clients receive survey templates which they can change to suit their needs. The default form includes questions that measure employee satisfaction by asking if they are proud to work for their company, whether or not they would encourage a friend to join their organization or if they are motivated to work harder there than at other places. Elzinga says employees are more likely to answer questions when they can see how answers can be used to improve an organization’s working culture. Anonymity is also key–Culture Amp ensures confidentiality by aggregating feedback in groups of five respondents or more. One of Murmur’s advantages is being able to pinpoint issues that are eroding employee morale before they snowball into expensive crises. For example, one of Culture Amp’s clients, healthy school lunch provider even though workers were still performing well. “After running the survey they were able to see that a pocket of the company was not engaged as they expected them to be,” says Elzinga. “The CEO, Justin Gagnon, said to me that without having the results and seeing that it didn’t line up with expectations, that would have gone on for years and those people would have left.” Though Elzinga says the bootstrapped company intends to remain in Melbourne, its roster of Silicon Valley clients recently prompted Culture Amp to hire its first permanent U.S. employee, a San Francisco-based head of marketing. Culture Amp plans to expand into European and Asian markets including Indonesia, where the rapidly increasing number of white collar jobs means there is a strong growth opportunity. “Our tool doesn’t fix culture. It doesn’t improve anything. It’s a diagnostic, but it’s critical because it starts the conversation,” says Elzinga. “There’s that immediacy that’s so important.” |
Burpple Serves Up A Fresh Version Of Its Social App For Foodies | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | , the memorably-named mobile app for food lovers that we , has launched an updated version that makes it easier for gourmands to share pictures and recommendations. The and app’s brand new design has a revamped feed that allows users to see photos, restaurant names, comments, likes and other activity at a glance. Once you spot a tempting dish, Burpple’s Social Food Guide allows you to take a closer look at restaurants with interior photos, venue info and a “social menu” that ranks items by popularity. Want to find other lovers of Ethiopian cuisine or uni? The Community feature brings together users with similar interests in food. Since its launch in December 2011, Burpple’s users have shared over 700,000 photos of food from over 100,000 merchants in 4,000 cities. The app’s team is based in Singapore and received seed funding from and . |
Watch NSA Chief Gen. Alexander’s Speech To Black Hat Defending His Surveillance Work | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | General Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, recently took the stage at the Black Hat security conference to reiterate that what the NSA is up to is legal, efficacious and, frankly, hardly controversial. Given Glenn Greenwald’s deep and broad leaks concerning the general’s activities, the NSA had a skeptical audience to convert to its side. For a dive into TechCrunch’s first take on his speech, . For notes by those critical of his remarks, . It’s worth noting that on the same day as this speech, Greenwald and Edward Snowden , which gives NSA analysts the ability to pull up the full content of email and other messages without a warrant. Here are , and here’s his take on the current privacy scandal: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvVIZ4OyGnQ&w=660&h=495] |
Facebook News Feed Event Aug 6 Will Give Much-Needed Rankings Explanation And Reveal What’s Next | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Facebook plans to clear up confusion about what appears in the News Feed, announce a ranking algorithm change, and preview the future of the feed at a press event on August 6. The Menlo Park HQ session will be live-streamed to Facebook’s London offices to keep European reporters in the loop. Hopefully users will gain better understanding of how to banish boring and distant acquaintances. In an invite to American reporters for the event at 10 a.m. PST Tuesday, Facebook said that it will “be talking about News Feed, and taking a deeper look at the ranking algorithms that determine which stories appear at the top of your feed. We’ll be discussing a specific update to organic ranking that’s coming up.” And the European invite notes “We’ll also be talking about what’s coming next for News Feed.” Though not as hyped or secretive as some other Facebook press events, the fact that it’s being live-streamed to Europe denotes greater importance than Facebook’s other “whiteboard” press meetings. Now 9.5 years old, Facebook has run into a problem. As we accumulate more “friends” and the definition of the word expands to include family, co-workers, and people we’ve met once, our feeds are getting cluttered. We’re fascinated by the daily lives and photos of people we know and love. But pics of the kids spawned by that guy from accounting and the relationship drama of a high school classmate make Facebook’s News Feed feel like a waste of time. Most people don’t understand the way Facebook chooses what to show you. TheNews Feed ranking algorithm, unofficially known as “EdgeRank,” uses how close you are to someone, how popular a post is with others, how recently it was published, and many other signals to decide which of the huge numbers of posts and actions that your friends generate appear and how prominently. Articles by The New York Times’ and BuzzFeed’s have brought up how and sometimes unpredictable EdgeRank can be. Without EdgeRank understanding, most people don’t get the importance of using the tools to refine and customize their feed — that is if they can find them. There’s the readily available feedback buttons, such as Like, comment, and share, that tell EdgeRank you’re interested in someone. But the options to “hide post”, “do not show in news feed”, “show only important posts”, and hide specific story types are hidden within drop-downs, hover cards, and the “Friend” button on people’s profiles. They require multiple clicks to use, making it a huge chore to modify the feed presence of multiple people. Yet these options are critical to quieting or muting annoying people without having to defriend them or never accept their request in the first place. Meanwhile Facebook has struggled for years to get users to build Friend Lists of their closest chums and people with traits in common, which are now easily viewed as custom News Feeds thanks to the feed selector launched at a . Lists could help people keep track of their favorite friends despite the noise if only people would use them. And then there are businesses. Many still don’t understand which of their fans see their News Feed posts, and why they’re being asked to buy “Promoted Posts” to reach fans they already earned or paid for. Facebook has a ton to gain from this event. Proper education could finally get everyone to explicitly help the social network to refine their News Feeds. It could boost confidence of Page admins and advertisers, as well. Facebook did out the ability to say why you were hiding someone’s News Feed post, which could give it insight into whether to hide that post from other people too, or review it for terms of service violations. I’ve got no idea exactly what will be revealed at the event, but hopefully this and more efficient feed presence options will appear eventually. At the very least it should look to make the desktop feed tools more accessible on mobile where users are increasingly accessing the service. The News Feed is Facebook’s lifeblood. Its ambient intimacy keeps us coming back day after day, and it’s where Facebook shows its most lucrative ads. The social network is now competing for our attention, as a parade of other mobile apps try to entertain us. To stay center stage, Facebook will need to lift the curtain on EdgeRank, give us an acting class, and let us play a role in choosing what we see. |
Codementor Is An Open Marketplace That Provides Developers With One-On-One Programming Help | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | It’s a scenario all programmers are familiar with: you are coding alone, only to have something go awry and no one to ask for help. wants to prevent developers from going insane by providing an open marketplace where they can ask experts for one-on-one programming and design help. Founder Weiting Liu says the goal of Codementor’s platform, which recently launched in beta and features code/screen sharing, video and text chat, is to replicate the reassuring feeling of having an experienced programmer beside you. “We are working hard to bridge the gap between the experience of asking public questions on an Internet forum and having a real mentor sit right beside you,” says Liu. The site currently has 300 mentors based in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Liu says that urgent questions can be answered within two hours, while other queries will get a response within 24 hours. Codementor’s goal is to eventually have mentors available immediately for all types of requests. Y Combinator alum Liu is a veteran founder of startups including stock investing community , which was acquired by Financial Content Services in 2009. He says Codementor is the tool he wished he had as an individual developer and business manager. “Oftentimes, if developers are relatively inexperienced, they’d run into technical issues that none of us could solve,” says Liu. “As a business manager, you’re willing to pay thousands of dollars just to make those urgent show stoppers go away. If Codementor had existed before, we wouldn’t have had to pay thousands of dollars for certain issues.” Codementor isn’t just meant for urgent issues. The platform also wants to help coders train with developers who are experts in certain programming languages, giving them in-depth mentoring and live help that’s missing from Web resources like or , and serving as a cheaper, more accessible alternative to offline developer bootcamps. There are two ways to ask questions on Codementor. The first is to post your question directly on the site, which will match you with mentors. For example, if you need help with Ruby, Codementor will show you which Ruby experts are currently online. The second method, still in beta testing, will allow programmers to embed widgets on their blogs so followers can ask them questions directly from posts. Developers are accepted into Codementor after a vetting process. The startup’s team looks at each potential mentor’s codebase on GitHub and also takes participation in Web communities such as Stack Overflow into consideration. Mentors set their own rates and are scored after each session by their mentees on a five-point system. Liu says Codementor, which offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee, will drop mentors with consistently low ratings in order to ensure quality. Codementor currently monetizes by taking about 15% to 20% of each session’s overall fee. It has received initial funding from and will be a member of ‘s next class. |
Social Bill Payments Service PayDivvy Sold To Higher One To Expand Its Education Payments Platform | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Back in February of this year, , a social payment platform that lets people split bills for utilities and other services and each pay their share, that it had been acquired and that it was no longer accepting payments on its platform. We reached out at the time and Mike Melby, the co-founder and CEO, said that he would be able to tell us more when the time was right. Today, nearly six months later and now that the deal has finally closed, the company has finally come out with buyer’s name: it’s , the publicly-traded universities and students payments and financial services company. Higher One is not planning to reopen PayDivvy’s service as such, but it will be integrating PayDivvy’s technology into its platform and offering it to its target student customers. “We’re excited about the foundation that PayDivvy has created to allow consumers to easily split and track their bills and share expenses,” said Whitney Stewart, the VP of product for Higher One. “We plan to incorporate these new features into our student account offering so that students can focus on the important stuff, like study and graduating while we help them get their shared expenses paid more easily.” There is also a possibility that Higher One may eventually extend its services for users beyond those at university. “They are focused on universities but when people graduate they don’t have lose them as customers,” Melby noted today. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but what Melby has done is give us some insight into how this deal came about. He says that in fact PayDivvy had been involved in a year-long sale process, with more than one offer falling through before finally connecting with Higher One. The reason for a sale was simple: after first launching in 2011 at Finovate, PayDivvy raised around $2m of angel funding but started to get offers for a sale at the same time that it was starting to explore raising a Series A. That would have been a route to pursue, but as Melby told me, “payments are really hard.” Not only were there already other players out there trying to do something similar — specifically WePay and Venmo — but then , and WePay has raised significantly more ( ) than PayDivvy had. “Location was a disadvantage, too,” Melby says. “I was told by investors if we were had moved from Newport Beach to Silicon Valley, we would have raised twice as much and sold for lots more.” More importantly, there were yet more companies jumping into the social payments space. And yet “no one has done anything extraordinary,” he says. “No one has the magic to overhaul the existing payment system,” which is still reliant on Visa and MasterCard networks. Dwolla is one that Melby thinks could possibly have a shot. So because of all of that, PayDivvy pressed on with a sale, finally getting success on that front. “Higher One has proven to be a great partner,” Melby notes. “Aside from the fact that their strategy and customer base is a perfect fit for our technology, the team is super intelligent and picky about the assets they look to acquire.” Higher One is still run by its original founders. While Melby and his co-founder Ray Tamblyn have both moved on to other places — Melby is back in private equity, as VP for New Evolution Ventures; Tamblyn working on something new — PayDivvy’s engineering team will continue to work with Higher One. But the experience of starting a company, raising money, then deciding to exit the venture through a sale, and then having a sale fall through more than once, and then eventually, after months, get completed, is one that Melby will not forget soon. It’s the other side of the exit myth, in which a company like Yahoo quickly swoops down and scoops up small startups to beef up its talent and IP. For any startups out there who may be thinking of a similar route and wants to talk to someone who has been there, Melby says to . |
The New Motorola Is Focusing On “Very Few” Devices, And A Low-Cost Phone May Be Next | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Motorola has never been the most prolific smartphone maker, but there’s no question that they’ve churned out over the years, but now that Motorola is flying under Google’s banner, you can expect to see some shifts in the company’s hardware strategy, and it looks like that scattershot approach to making phones is getting the ax. According to Motorola Corporate VP of product management Lior Ron, the company is going to be trimming down the number of phones it releases so it can better focus on the ones that are really worth it. “We’ve done a lot of devices before,” Ron told TechCrunch in an interview earlier today. “Now we’re going to do a few — very few. Everyone of those devices is going to really matter for consumers.” Those are some pretty bold words from the man who headed up the Moto X project, but it isn’t the first time that we’ve seen the company try to embrace a more streamlined product strategy. Sanjay Jha, CEO of a then-unified Motorola, basically said the same thing a year-and-a-half ago, citing the woes “incremental innovation” as the big drivers behind his decision. At the time, it seemed as though Jha’s words struck a chord with at least one other beleaguered Android device manufacturer, as HTC publicly committed itself to producing a smaller number of “hero” devices just a few days after Jha did. According to CNET, the next of those “very few” devices that Motorola is reportedly working on is meant to expand Motorola’s position in cost-conscious global markets. Ron declined to explain just how dramatic this change in focus is going to be for the company, but that’s not to say that Motorola will be without its share of repeat customers. Motorola confirmed to CNET earlier this month that the company is slated to become the sole manufacturer of Verizon’s popular Droid line of Android devices. Previously, companies like HTC and Samsung were allowed to pitch in as well, but it now appears that Motorola will run that show entirely. Then again, the “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach presents some potential issues, too, and HTC serves as proof. Despite the fact that the HTC One received near-universal critical praise, the company that made it recently reported quarterly profits down a whopping 83 percent from the year before. On the other hand, many have argued that Google’s interest in Motorola was based purely on the value of the company’s patent treasure trove — it’s not hard to look at any revenue that Motorola brings in from hardware sales as icing on that cake. And Google (naturally) seems all for the strategy, despite the potential pitfalls it entails. “Our mandate from Google, from Larry, is really to innovate and take long-term bets,” Ron said. “When you have that sort of mentality, it’s about quality and not quantity.” |
Andreessen-Backed Tutor Matching Service Is Working With Colleges To Upend The Tutoring Industry, Starting With Cost | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Of the many ways that technology is disrupting education, one area that’s changing a lot, is rife with potential, but doesn’t get as much play as it should is tutoring. Mostly, this involves the attempt to make high-quality, local tutors accessible to a wider range of students online, without having to turn to traditional channels, like Craigslist or those pesky, expensive SAT-focused private networks. There are a million marketplaces for tutors, and many startups that have joined in the struggle to make connecting with quality tutors possible, , and the increasing number of and Chegg. But a new startup is launching out of beta today with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and others that wants to help push the space forward by creating a tutoring marketplace that is not only affordable for students but is a sort of official “Tutor List” for universities. What does that mean? In other words, Blake Miller, Ethan Fieldman and Chad Corbitt founded Tutor Matching Service to both increase student access to quality tutors and one-on-one education, which, unsurprisingly, is something schools are increasingly turning to as they look to increase graduation rates and learning outcomes. Both schools and teachers have begun to realize that they are going to be judged more on how students perform (and hopefully, how they perform on more nuanced assessments that prove mastery and not just the ability to take a standardized test). Schools want to improve student graduation and success rates, and one-on-one tutoring is a great (and effective) way to do that, however, at most colleges and universities, there are few tutoring options for upper level chemistry, physics, math, languages and so on. College learning centers are asked for help in this regard by parents and students all the time, so Tutor Matching Service began by piloting (and sponsorships) from the career centers, learning centers and student governments of schools like CalTech, Purdue, NYU Poly and Kent State University. The startup is attempting to establish a real tutoring marketplace, through which tutors can connect to students who need help in each subject, whether they want to volunteer or offer paid services. The founders initially started with a proof-of-concept Facebook app, but at launch, Tutor Matching Service is a web app that no longer requires you to use Facebook to log in. The startup is now working with over 30 schools to offer tutoring services both online and on campus — and that’s what founder Blake Miller says is their real differentiator. The company has thus far grown organically by word of mouth, but is now on a mission to begin spreading the word. To incentivize schools, the service offers the ability to tap into data collection and analysis tools to map student progress and learning paths, giving those types of tools away for free. So that means the service, when all is said and done, is a free service for schools, including that data on what students are booking, searching for, paying for and so on. To survive themselves, the company will withhold 10 percent of the fees that students pay to tutors — if a tutor charges $10/hour, the startup will take $1 and the tutor receives $9. For those who volunteer, no fee is applied. Cost-wise, this could be comparable to digital solutions, or not, it really depends, since Tutor Matching Service is going to let tutors set the going rate of their services. But the company is putting emphasis on being truly affordable — not just another company that says it’ll be affordable and three months later is right up there with everyone else. Today, having spread to 30 schools, the average price is $12/hour. Compared to “brick-and-mortar” tutoring services, that puts Tutor Matching Service in the “extremely affordable” category. Around the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, there’s Tutorpedia, which costs $105/hour (while tutors make $20-$40/hr), and Stutors, a tutoring company in downtown Palo Alto, is $96/hour. Then there’s Cardinal Tutors and many, many more. Their overhead requires them to take a huge cut and the stigma around tutoring — in other words, the fact that everyone and their mother expects tutoring to be expensive and a pain in the ass. The other keys to Tutor Matching Service, which it hopes will make it appealing to high school and college students, if not differentiate it from others in its camp starts with offering both in-person and online tutoring. The other is that most tutoring companies which take the Kayak or lead-gen approach are really referral sites, potentially getting paid to send customers to particular companies. Tutor Matching Service wants to be a marketplace, allowing people to contact tutors before booking, view mutual friends on Facebook and the network, and other features like this that can help add some transparency to the process. Lastly, for the campuses it’s working with, the startup is becoming an official “Tutor List,” that is to say the schools put links on their school websites, have flyers on campus, sending them traffic direct and acting as their advertising and marketing funnels, if you will. Oh, that and the fact that it offers a 100 percent guarantee on the quality of its tutors, and more than 100 of its tutors are certified by their universities (which includes faculty recommendations, training and taking courses at the school). There’s a long way left to go before Tutor Matching Service becomes the official tutoring network for higher ed in the U.S., but it’s certainly moving in that direction. There’s tons of competition and plenty of private tutoring companies will be up in arms if/when they begin infringing on their territory. But, really, it’s the Uber model at work, as local tutors can join the service, get certified and begin building reputation scores and seeing more students (and revenue) as a result. That could be hard to resist. |
YC Partners Taggar, Tan And Reddit Co-Founder Ohanian Raise $39M For Initialized Capital | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | YC Partners Garry Tan and Harj Taggar along with the early-stage firm’s “Ambassador to the East” and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian for a separate fund called , . All three of them have been investing on their own for a couple years and Initialized Capital isn’t formally tied to Y Combinator in any way. It is their own fund. Taggar, who at Y Combinator, was not involved in raising this fund. Initialized looks for high-quality founders first and then try to see if they can help or understand the market a company is attacking in any way. The fund is open to all companies, regardless of whether they have been part of the Y Combinator program or not. It’s their second fund, following that has backed companies like Zach Verdin’s . Y Combinator has stake in its companies in exchange for $11,000 plus $3,000 per founder, which is ideally enough to get a startup to a decent first prototype. The firm sometimes invests more than that. But it historically hasn’t done serious follow-on funding, and has instead left that to the broader community of angels and venture capital firms. |
Employer Tipped Off Police To Pressure Cooker And Backpack Searches, Not Google | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | In what might be ‘s first widespread , music writer Michele Catalano to blog details of an unexpected visit to her home yesterday, from six men she identifies as members of the “joint terrorism task force.” Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers” and her son reading the news. Or something. Turns out the visit prompted by the searches, but not in the way — by a law enforcement-initiated, dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company,” called the police on their former employee. The Suffolk County Police Department has just the following information related to the case: Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.” After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature. Any further inquiries regarding this matter should be directed to the Suffolk County Police Department From what we can , the computer company referenced above may be Speco Technologies ( Speco says it wasn’t them), where Catalano’s Todd Pinnell worked as a product manager until last April (we’ve called Speco to confirm). This should be a teachable moment to anyone who thinks that their work computers are somehow not being tracked. Speco Technologies has confirmed to us that they are not the company who reported the searches. While Google’s, or ‘s, tracking of Internet activity wasn’t behind this incident, the fact is that Google to hand over user data in general. Can the FBI or local police provide a search warrant to Google, and would Google possibly comply with such a request? Yes, and the company in a report every six months. This is nothing new. And , like for the months of search history that would be needed to figure out the pressure cooker and backpack coincidence, may result in a push to narrow the scope of the investigation from Google’s end. But, an industry source confirms, it doesn’t work the other way around: i.e. Google isn’t flagging searches for “pressure cooker” + “backpacks” for the cops. It’d be crazy if it did though. Catalano this interpretation of the story. For those of you wondering where we got the press release: I called the Suffolk County Police Department for a statement, and they emailed it to me. |
Wall Street Darling LinkedIn Beats Estimates Again, Revenue Booms 59% To $363M, Now At 238M Members | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | LinkedIn continues to be on of the few companies that can do no wrong on Wall Street, continuing to beat estimates and display growth curves that consistently move up and to the right. Amazon would perhaps be one of the few other exceptions, as Jeff Bezos’ short-term-loss-for-long-term-gain continues to confound the status quo. The professional network on Thursday, and it was another good one, as the company grew to 238 million members and saw revenue increase to 59 percent to $363.7 million from $228.2 million in Q2 2012. Meanwhile, net income also jumped to $3.7 million from $2.8 million in Q2 last year, while non-GAAP net income was $44.5 million, compared to $18.1 million in 2012. “Accelerated member growth and strong engagement drove record operating and financial results in the second quarter,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in today’s statement. “We are continuing to invest in driving scale across the LinkedIn platform in order to fully realize our long-term potential.” To build that scale and to follow through with its ongoing plans to build out the go-to professional content network, LinkedIn’s investments have included those like and startups to dig deeper into mobile. LinkedIn’s adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $88.6 million (24 percent of revenue) compared to $50.4 million for Q2 2012, and GAAP diluted EPS for the second quarter was $0.03, while non-GAAP diluted EPS for Q2 was $0.38. Meanwhile, as most of LinkedIn’s class of tech IPOs continue to struggle (namely Zynga and Groupon), the company has put together a string of victories. While some questioned its ability to diversify its revenue streams, Linked has been seeing continuing growth in each of its three revenue buckets. This quarter, as per usual, talent solutions took the cake, representing the biggest slice of LinkedIn’s business, as revenue from its talent solutions products hit $205.1 million, up 69 percent compared to Q2 2012. Talent solutions’ share of revenue grew slightly to 56 percent of total revenue, up from 53 percent last year. Marketing solutions, on the other hand, came in at $85.6 million, an increase of 36 percent when compared to last year and premium subscriptions hit $73 million, representing an increase of 68 percent over Q2 2012, and 20 percent of total revenue. Other highlights from the quarter included the addition of some big names to its growing “Influencer Program” or roster of Super Awesome Motivational Bloggers, as I like to call them, including Bill Gates, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, the Burberry CEO, Japan’s Prime Minister. These new influencers helped LinkedIn “more than double” its homepage traffic over the last year. The company also “revamped its mobile phone experience” with new iOS and Android apps, saying in its report that “mobile activity has increased, with mobile homepage engagement rising over 40%, and increasing levels of social actions, article views, and mobile profile edits when compared to the past version.” The company also released a new version of its flagship Recruiter platform for Talent Solutions customers and also launched CheckIn, which “enables student members to engage with recruiters at on-campus hiring events.” |
The American Nightmare | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Inside a casino whose theme is an empire that collapsed into venal decadence, middle-aged computer-security professionals clutching cups half-full of free Veuve Clicquot line up to collect VIP nightclub passes. Outside, teenagers who beg on the pedestrian overpasses. Earlier, the man turning today’s empire into a surveillance state was met with warm applause. He was to only talk about specific programs. To bureaucrats, only specific programs matter, not the cumulative effects of all those specific programs combined. And as long as you frame the subject as a discussion of specific programs, you don’t have to talk about the entirety of the surveillance the government performs. To bureaucrats there is a huge difference between one arm of the government collecting metadata for all American phone calls overseen by a ; and another that ; and another that to investigate households who, , post photos of firecrackers to Facebook; and yet another . They’re different programs, after all. But to the people under surveillance, there really seems to be no difference at all. On the other side of the world, the whistleblower whose revelations led directly to is a fugitive in Russia’s uneasy embrace. On this side, was acquitted of an absurd charge of “aiding the enemy” but was found guilty of espionage and other charges that could land him in jail for 136 years. But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic of life in this country–but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that. Pretty much everyone at is hiring. The business of fear is booming. As I walk past the Pure nightclub I see the words “CYBERCRIMINALS LEVERAGE BIG DATA” projected on its outer wall above the Las Vegas Strip. Earlier, , who eight years ago to UBM for some $14 million, remarked onstage: “Anyone here remember the late 90s? The Clipper chip? How the government might want to listen in our phone calls? …How times have changed.” It got a big laugh. Later, the of two near-naked women gyrate above a crowd attending the party thrown by Blue Coat Software. A few Blue Men halfheartedly wander through the party waving tubes. Blue Coat has a history of that totalitarian regimes; the EFF has condemned their “ .” And that, I think, was the handle–that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting–on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. — Hunter S. Thompson, [Image from the film ] |
LinkedIn Wants To Ramp Up Ads With An Advertising API Like Twitter’s And Facebook’s; A ‘High Priority’ Says CEO Weiner | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | , now with 238 million registered users on its social network for the working world, wants to follow in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter and turbo-charge its advertising effort. Speaking during the company’s , LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner, in answer to a question from an analyst, said that the social network will be introducing an advertising API, so that brands and agencies can more easily make bigger media buys on the social platform. An exact date was not named, but Weiner said an ads API was a “high priority.” “Introducing a robust set of APIs for social marketing agencies to best leverage the platform is a high priority,” he said. “We’re not pre-announcing a date but it’s high on our list.” To be clear, LinkedIn already offers an , but it’s in a limited, private release at the moment; its partners are Adobe, AdStage, Bizo and Unified. Launching a wider, public advertising API, therefore, would be a sign of how LinkedIn is looking to get more serious about how it makes revenue from ads on its platform. An advertising API will also allow companies to more easily make media buys, and will specifically mean that third party social media marketing and advertising agencies will be able to link up with LinkedIn, which can then get incorporated into larger media buys made through those agencies. And, following from Facebook’s introduction of an , and Twitter’s in , LinkedIn introducing an advertising API will also be a sure sign that we will start to see more ad units as a result. Right now, LinkedIn does not break out how much money it makes from advertising. The company tells me that it roughly categorizes those revenues in its “Marketing Solutions” division (one ad unit, where companies can advertise to “Work with us”, goes into Talent Solutions). In LinkedIn’s Q2 earnings reported earlier today, Marketing Solutions made up 24%, or $87.36 million, of the company’s $364 million in total revenues. With LinkedIn’s user numbers and features growing — including enhanced home pages for users with more news and other information, as well as a revamped search — there is room for ads to grow, too. And that’s before considering mobile. The company has only recently started to introduce advertising on mobile, which now makes up about a third of all of LinkedIn’s traffic. |
CityMaps Announces $1.5M In Additional Series A Funding From A-Grade Investments, Endeca’s Founder & Others | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | , a company for a new version of its mobile mapping application for iOS, has raised an additional round of $1.5 million in outside funding – an extension of its earlier Series A, this time bringing in new investors, including and s , (founder of Endeca, which ), and other angels. This additional round brings CityMaps’ total raised to date to $5 million. We recently took to the time to talk to CityMaps about what it’s preparing to launch in the weeks ahead, and how the company will use the funding to further its goal of building a unique mapping product in the shadow of mapping giants like Google and others. CityMaps has several upcoming features on the horizon, including a developer API, as well as features that could better connect local businesses to mobile consumers by alerting them to deals, promotions, nearby events, daily specials and more. But more broadly, the company wants to establish CityMaps as defining a new niche in the mapping ecosystem, where maps are no longer read-only creations accessed by users in need of information, but are rather personalized to individual users’ interests and preferences. Over two and a half years ago, CityMaps co-founders Aaron Rudenstine and Elliot Cohen had an idea for a new kind of mapping interface — one whose focus, they explain, was not just on navigating your way around unfamiliar territory, but where maps became social, collaborative, and better highlighted the places where people spent their time and money, like stores, bars, restaurants, and other local businesses. “Google Maps is the hallmark of maps. It’s a terrific product,” says Rudenstine. “But our whole vision for maps from day one — when Elliot approached me and said he had this loony idea to create a new map — is that maps should be more than just utilities that help you get from point A to point B.” He likens the idea for a collaborative map to the rest of the social web, where users find and follow others, and where maps become live and dynamic. To be clear, CityMaps are not collaborative in the sense that is, meaning user-built maps of the streets and landmarks around you. OpenStreetMap, however, serves as one the product’s data sources, among others like , , , as well as some data from strategic relationships CityMaps has made with Fortune 100 companies, which it’s not allowed to disclose. So rather, CityMaps’ collaborative functions are not about building the map itself, but live as a layer on top of the basic mapping data. The idea is that users can build their own maps of what matters to them, such as lists of favorite restaurants or stores, perhaps. In addition, it means that friends can suggest places they should add to their lists, too. After raising $3.5 million over a couple of rounds of funding, the company launched what it now refers to as its “proof of concept” application in early 2012 — the fastest it could put on the market to test whether or not the consumers would be interested in such an idea. This early version of CityMaps worked in just five cities — New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Austin — where it gained “many hundreds of thousands” of users, though less than a million. But the engagement levels were high enough for the company to push forward – over half (55 percent) of users were opening the app multiple times per week, the company found. The app also received good feedback, even winning the recommendation of the City of NY Dept. of Tourism, and gaining a deal which saw it replacing Microsoft’s mapping software in 7,000 NYC taxis this January. With the redesigned, revamped iOS app ( ), CityMaps now includes over 15 million business locations across the U.S., allowing it to work anywhere, not only in its originally supported, nearly half a dozen cities. The company’s local data set includes the business name and location, as well as other information a user would want to know, such as the menu at a local restaurant, what kinds of clothes a clothing stores sells, when happy hour is, and more. In the near future, CityMaps will be rolling out a system to help users see more about what’s currently happening at all these venues, too. Explains Rudenstine, this system, due out in just a few weeks, will leverage the company’s partnership with business listings service . This will enable local business owners to post real-time messages about whatever it is they have to promote to CityMaps, along with all the other services Yext currently supports. Launch partners for the new in-map communication and recommendations feature set include Bliss Spa, Aeropostale, Gansevoort Hotel Group and Morgans Hotels (hotel chains), The Vitamin Shoppe, Bond New York, StyleCaster Media Group, and Time Out. Other businesses will also be able to claim their own venues and manage their events and communications in the near future, as well. Also coming soon is CityMaps’ bigger plans for map personalizations. After users sign in via Facebook, or later connect their social accounts like Facebook or Foursquare, CityMaps will be able to access their profile and/or check-in data to begin making some simple judgment calls about the kinds of things a user likes. As the user continues to engage with the product, CityMaps’ ability to refine those earlier judgment calls then improves. “Our whole vision is that no two maps should be the same,” Rudenstine says. “When you pull up CityMaps, you should see a collection of logos that represent…businesses that CityMaps deems are relevant to you,” he explains. “At the most basic level, the personalization engine matches what we know about the businesses to what we know about you.” Finally, in addition to the forthcoming launch of the personalization engine and recommendations, CityMaps is building out its API for developers, which would allow them to use CityMaps data in their own products. For instance, if Airbnb homeowners wanted to make a map for their guests of nearby restaurants and stores, they could use CityMaps to do so instead of Google. (Airbnb is a partner on this, it’s just an example – but it is an A-Grade investment, so who knows). The company is also in discussions with OEMs, and will have announcements surrounding their adoption of the API soon, too. There’s been a renewed interest in companies building mapping startups, following Apple’s booting of Google from its list of pre-installed apps for a map app of its own, not to mention the by Google, which not only helped its own interests in mapping, but also kept that data out of Apple’s hands. CityMaps seems to think it’s now onto the next big thing in mapping with its personalization efforts, but it’s difficult to ignore the giant in the room, Google. With Google’s ever-expanding Google+ initiative, it could choose to light up maps with more collaborative and personalized features as well, by tapping into all the data it already knows about businesses and users alike. But Rudenstine is hopeful, saying that the recent events have changed the way people think about maps. “People are now beginning to realize the importance of having a map,” he says. “The story of maps hasn’t yet been written.” |
Reebee Launches To Provide A Bridge For Bargain Hunters Moving From Paper To Digital Flyers | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Waterloo-founded startup , a current Y Combinator Summer 2013 cohort member, wants to take digital flyers and make them actually useable, something which a lot of companies have tried but none have gotten quite right. Reebee is mobile first, which is a great start, but it’s got a lot of plans besides that in store for revolutionizing one of retail’s oldest and most trusted marketing channels. Currently, Reebee is available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry and collects over 300 weekly flyers in Canada. Flyers account for a huge amount of the marketing budget of any brick-and-mortar retailer, even now that a lot of commerce has fled online. The growing number of people shopping online means that flyers need to adapt, but focusing too much on digital means leaving behind older customers and other shoppers who are still very comfortable with the paper flyer format. Reebee solves the problem by keeping things simple; what you’ll get with flyers that appear in its library is a browsing experience that works seamlessly with touch controls, so that you can swipe between pages and pinch to zoom, but otherwise it’s just like reading a print flyer. This is an MVP, according to Reebee co-founders Tobiasz Dankiewicz and Michal Martyniak, and there are more features planned, but the experience as-is is winning them a lot of fans. “Even with the MVP model of just the browsing, people are loving the experience and it’s receiving higher ratings than certain branded apps,” Dankiewicz said. “We’ve even heard feedback from people asking us not to change or add any sort of features, so we have to be really careful when we introduce things not to ruin the extreme simplicity of it.” Feature updates are planned, however, as Reebee wants to make it possible to search through flyers to find the one you’re looking for, as well as create unified shopping lists from various stores. The company also wants to link product pages from retailer’s e-shopping sites in cases where that makes sense, though it’s less useful in cases like grocery stores. For now, Reebee is adding a lot of flyers on its own, but it’s also partnered with some retailers who are paying for its services. In return, these retailers get access to detailed analytics about their customers, as well as priority placement within the app. Soon, Reebee will also be launching a list where users can sign up to let companies know they’d rather receive flyers via Reebee than through paper mail, and they’ll be sent a sticker or some other way of notifying mail carriers in response. Reebee hopes this will act as a sales tool, showing its target customers that they can reach their existing audience via new, less expensive and more ecologically sound ways. Reebee hopes to tackle the U.S. market sometime in the next year, but notes that there’s a lot involved with working out what adds to serve for what geographies, a less daunting task in Canada. It’s had a big hand from YC involvement, however, and plans to tackle the challenge of coupons (another huge market) too. |
Facebook Brings Home’s Lockscreen Replacement To Their Main Android App — A Bad Sign For Home? | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | Four months after the launch of Facebook Home, which aimed to turn Android phone into the long-rumored Facebook Phone, the company is starting to bring certain Home features into their primary app with an update today. In other words, bits and pieces of Home are coming to the main app… without requiring anyone to actually download Home. The first feature to make the jump to the main app is Home’s Cover Feed, which lets you replace Android’s default lockscreen with one that brings in photos and posts from your Facebook news feed. While it’s always been possible to use Cover Feed while disabling other aspects of Home, you still had to at least download Home to do it. Not anymore. Not crossing over to the main app just yet is the namesake Home launcher (a Facebook-centric overhaul to Android’s core interface, its homescreen) and their platform-wide floaty-head messenger notifications system, Chat Heads. With that said, you get Chat Heads without downloading Home — it’s built into the Android port of Facebook’s Messenger app. So the only thing that’s really left to Home as a standalone app is the launcher, which has never really seemed to prove all that popular. For those who dig the Home launcher, though, three new devices are getting supported as of today: the HTC One, the Nexus 4, and the Samsung Galaxy S4. Facebook has as test beds for features, letting the early-adopter audience deal with all the kinks before throwing it at the millions of users who’d never care to go beyond the main Facebook app. In the test case of Home, it would seem that the only thing not making the cut so far is… well, Home. The update will start rolling out to Android users today. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 8 | null |
Soylent Closes In On Finalizing Its Formula, Reaches $1M In Pre-Orders | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | , the of 24-year-old engineer Rob Rhinehart, is maturing into a full-fledged business. Rhinehart and his team, who were running a Y Combinator-backed startup called Level RF last year, did what Paul Graham has called the “pivot of the century.” Fascinated by inefficiencies in the industrial food system, Rhinehart designed and then started living off a meal replacement he cheekily named Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans. This Soylent, thankfully, is not made of humans. It contains , that are deemed medically necessary to for a person to live by the Institute of Medicine, plus other modifications Rhinehart made through the testing process. “I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.” Now Rhinehart says the company will be closing in on a finalized formula by the end of next month — a version 1.0, if you will. They’ll have a party in late August where they’ll invite press and members of the public. Then the company will gear up to do 140,000 shipments in September with $1 million in pre-orders. It costs roughly $65 a week, including shipping. Most of the customers are young men, but there have also been a few Doomsday predictors and people preparing for a societal apocalypse that have tried to order lifetime supplies of Soylent, Rhinehart said. The company has been posting updates of modifications to the Soylent formula, including changing the derived from a rice or pea protein isolate. “In terms of a new food product, this is much, much larger initial manufacturing run than has happened in the past,” Rhinehart said. A chance introduction got him in touch with the makers of MuscleMilk, Cytosport, who helped him find a factory in Modesto certified by the NSF. He also started working directly with suppliers; in early versions of Soylent, he would buy components off Amazon or Alibaba. The taste is pretty bland, kind of malty even. “Soylent is not supposed to be this luxurious thing,” Rhinehart explained. To be clear, Rhinehart is not necessarily arguing that people should consume soylent. He’s more of a believer that we don’t really think about or even consciously care about the vast majority of our meals. So instead, his goal is to create a wholly nutritious and inexpensive source of food that he uses for most of his meals. He tries to savor the few non-soylent meals he eats, and says he even appreciates them more as a result. So is it safe? Well, there are only 50 beta testers at the moment plus Rhinehart’s running journal of his Soylent-based lifestyle. But all of the components of Soylent are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Soylent wouldn’t need any kind of additional approval unless there was a new additive of some sort. “The typical Western diet is pretty easy to beat in terms of nutritional value,” Rhinehart said. “You have to accept the pre-ponderable amount of testing the EFSA (European Food Safety Administration) and the FDA has done on these ingredients. These organizations are very conservative on the quantities of foods that they approve under six-sigma sorts of control.” At the same time, there are already longstanding meal replacement products out there like Jevity from Abbott Nutrition and from Nestle, which are targeted at medical patients that can’t consume whole foods or need tube feeding. So conceptually, medical foods have existed for a long time and they’ve kept patients alive for years. Rhinehart lived solely off Soylent for a month at the beginning of the year, and now he’s probably relying on it for about 80 percent of his intake. But if you decide to consume it or live primarily off of it, you’re essentially trusting that because the 50 beta testers and Rhinehart haven’t had serious health problems as a result of living off Soylent, you probably won’t either. Because Soylent is also so new, no one has lived off it for years and years either. So nobody fully understands what the consequences of consuming Soylent for years will be. “No one really worried about me when I had an awful diet of Doritos and fast food. But now that I’ve invented something that’s good for you, everyone is worried about me killing myself,” Rhinehart said. In his month of living entirely off his creation, his physique improved, his skin cleared, his hair got thicker and his dandruff disappeared. Rhinehart has five dietitians and medical professionals who work with the company on an advisory basis. He also tests his blood every day for his sugar level and regularly posts to show things like his platelet counts and sodium levels. He tracks everything from how far he can run comfortably to how many hours he sleeps on a regular basis. He’ll also offer a discount to any customers who want to regularly run medical tests on themselves too. He’s tried to design Soylent from the most elementary level possible with raw minerals and vitamins. He believes that other previous meal replacement products have fallen short because they mixed together traditional foods, instead of breaking down a person’s daily nutrition needs to their most basic level. Through constant iteration, he’s realized deficiencies in the formula over time. Some led him to add a sulfur source to the mixture. There is also a on the company’s site where enthusiasts share their own DIY recipes and modifications to the mixture. “Soylent has taken on a life of its own,” Rhinehart said. “You may have an initial knee-jerk reaction to the name. But when you step back, it allows you to analyze or engage in a reasonable discussion about the nature of food and sustainability.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSkOVkgd8hY&w=560&h=315] |
Hello Moto X | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | After Google acquired Motorola Mobility last year, I wondered what was next for the smartphone company. It spent ages clearing out its pipeline of smartphones that were already in development before rumors of an X Phone made in America started making the rounds. In those early X Phone days, Rick Osterloh, Motorola’s SVP of Product Management said the team that worked on the device was plopped in front of a whiteboard and asked to describe the product they wanted to make. That brainstorming, plus loads and loads of user testing, came together in the form of the Moto X. Motorola isn’t the same company today as it was when Google snapped it up last year — it’s smaller, leaner, and if recent reports are indication, gutsier than ever. The Moto X is that new Motorola’s coming out party, and I think they’ve finally got something worth celebrating. Before I launch into a lengthy harangue about how this phone makes me feel, let’s dig into the X’s vital statistics. Just about those rumors were true, folks: running at 720p? Yep. with 1080p video recording? You bet. ? Check. ? Sadly, no. That would all make for a decent, if unremarkable little smartphone, were it not for what the Moto X packs inside its plasticky frame. The real star of the show Motorola’s X8 chipset, which actually consists of a 1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, Adreno 320 GPUs, 2GB of RAM and specialized processors meant to handle natural language processing and information from the X’s myriad sensors. If that thing sounds familiar, well, it should. Verizon and Motorola’s recent Droid launch took some of the shine off the X’s more intimate event this morning. Why? A lot of the X8-centric features that seemed to make the Moto X so smart — those always on voice commands, the motion-sensitive Active Display, and the twisty camera activation gesture — will in all likelihood wind up on most of Motorola’s new phones going forward, the Droid Ultra line included. Oh, and the device is expected to launch very soon. Think the — it all depends on when Motorola’s carrier and distribution partners make their announcements. Speaking of carriers, AT&T and Verizon will both sell the 16GB black and white versions of the X for $199 (on contract, of course) when it launches later this month, but only AT&T customers will able to customize them using the MotoMaker website. Additional caveat: it seems like the 32GB storage upgrade can only be purchased from MotoMaker for the time being, which is frankly pretty lame. Not a particular fan of either carrier? That’s fine too: the Moto X will also be available for purchase as an unlocked device, and as a developer edition with an unlocked bootloader (for easily hackability), though Motorola doesn’t seem to have locked down pricing for either version just yet. Easily the most impressive part of the Moto X package though is how users can customize it using Motorola’s MotoMaker web app. When it goes live later this month, users can pick from some 16 colored resin back plates, as well as a black or white front facade, and seven accent colors for your volume and sleep buttons. And in case you were wondering, yes, there is a wood case in the works. It’s apparently undergoing some late-stage testing, but should hit proverbial shelves in Q4 of this year. Throw in the ability to engrave your name (or whatever, really) onto that backplate and you’ve got yourself a pretty tremendous level of choice here. While we’re talking about how the X is put together, it’s worth pointing out that Motorola isn’t giving up on its global supply chain here. U.S. customers who order customized Moto X’s will get units assembled in Texas (and to boot), but the rest of the world will get their X fix from the usual slew of foreign manufacturers. Motorola is gearing up to make itself a purveyor of a smarter kind of smartphone, but it does mean that there were few surprises to get worked up over this morning. Even so, the X is exciting for what it represents. It’s hard not to think of the X as Motorola’s take on Google’s Nexus concept — the phone itself is a template for Motorola’s vision of mobile computing. But what’s it like to use? [gallery ids="855346,855347,855348,855349,855350,855351,855353,855354,855355,855149,855242"] Motorola’s clearly all about making the phone your own thanks to its MotoMaker customization options, which is a good thing because the untouched black and white Xs look pretty damned dull. That’s not to say they’re ugly — the composite weave pattern on the back is handsome and distinctive, and the whole thing exudes a sort of minimalist charm, but it feels like Motorola’s main concern with these default builds was to keep design from getting in the way of functionality. The X feels surprisingly small for a device with a 4.7-inch screen since there’s very little physical cruft — there’s only a hint of a bezel running around the display’s left and right edges, and there isn’t a whole of space surrounding the speaker, 2MP front-facing camera, and microphone along the face’s top and bottom. It’s awfully comfortable too, owing largely to considerable curvature of the X’s rear end. Osterloh said that the device’s 2,200mAh battery was specifically engineered to fill up that shapely rump, and he expects the device to last up to 24 hours on a single charges thanks to the X8 chipset’s power-sipping tendencies — we’ll see about that. And then there’s the software. On one level, it’s all very familiar — the X runs a very lean build of Android 4.2.2, and you could easily mistake it for stock if you didn’t know what you were looking for. And I don’t doubt that a decent chunk of people will use it that way, but there’s plenty to like when it comes to Motorola’s additions. So far, the touchless controls work like a charm (even those this is technically non-final software). Once a brief setup process was completed, I successfully asked the X to give our video producer Steve a ring and do a Google search for “TechCrunch”. Meanwhile, a few vigorous shakes coaxed the X into firing up its camera, and flipping the thing over and over caused the active display to show off the time and how many messages I had waiting for me. And since Android is largely unencumbered here, whipping through pages of apps and scrolling through webpages was generally very smooth — though it could be smoother. I’m reserving final judgment on this thing until I’ve had the chance to play with it for more than three hours, but I actually rather like the X. Do I wish Motorola could have pushed the technical envelope further? Sure. I also think the customization angle, neat as it is, is essentially a ploy to make an unassuming phone stand out in a crowd. And frankly, it’s a little frustrating to see that a solid chunk of what the Moto X can do will soon be replicated by — you guessed it — just about every other new Motorola phone in the works. It’s far, far too early to tell if Motorola has a hit on its hands — especially because the X will ultimately compete with Motorola phones with similar feature sets. If nothing else though, Motorola’s X represents a dedication to creating a smarter breed of smartphones, and I doubt that’s something the rest of the industry is going to ignore. |
A Majority Of The Public Still Approves Of NSA Dragnet, 4 Graphs | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | I’m , but I’m honest enough to admit that I hold a minority view. Recently, have that the public has become more privacy-happy in response to the scandal surrounding the leak of the NSA’s telephone and Internet metadata surveillance program. So, to test whether public opinion had actually changed over the last month, we ran our own national opinion surveys and found that, like last fall, about 56 percent of Americans approve of the government collecting their data to investigate terrorism. Perhaps more importantly, Americans think the government is collecting the actual of email and phone calls, and approval of the program slightly in the last month. In future surveys, I’m hopeful that public opinion will, at the very least, support more transparency in mass surveillance programs, but, in the meantime, let’s explore the facts as they are. Since January 2006, about twice as many Americans have consistently thought it more important to “Investigate terrorist threats” than to “Not intrude on privacy”. The last column in the graph is our own Google Survey CrunchGov Poll. You can view the methodology and wording . Our results show about a 4 percent dip from Pew from last month, but it’s almost within the margin of error (2 percent) and it’s slightly different wording, so it’s doubtful there’s much of a change, if any, in public opinion. Fortunately, Google Survey also gives us an idea of why people answer the way they do. A few responses:
About the NSA specifically, a slight majority (54 percent) favored the current dragnet program. Some of the justifications:
Privacy-advocates may not like the way Pew framed the questions, but I think they’re fair. It explicit asked if it’s ok to track millions of Americans’ phone records. In fact, I thought Pews wording was against the NSA. A more balanced framing would have qualified that the data are unlikely to be read (which is true. most data is swept but no human ever sees it). Oddly enough, Pew found that not only does the public think the government is collecting more information that they disclose, but the public’s approval of the practice has slightly increased in the last month (48 percent to 50 percent, probably within the margin of error). In this next graph, we see that the public thinks the government is lying about how much data they actually collect, since 63 percent apparently believe the government is recording phone calls and collecting the content of emails (the NSA denies this). Now, some critics have pointed to a graph showing that for the first time on record, more Americans think the government has gone too far in restricting civil liberties. However, this shift occurred sometime over the last two years, and isn’t specific to the NSA: So we can exhibit all the outrage we want, but critics are in the minority. I suspect Americans would want more transparency in the process, and that will be the subject of future CrunchGov polls. Until then, we need to be honest about what the American public actually believes. –Staunch NSA defense, Senator Diane Feinstein, writes an OpEd calling for more transparency for surveillance programs
–Targeting should be made public, number of warrants made public, more Democrats on the secret FISA court (and more!) –“President Barack Obama on Thursday told lawmakers he is open to changing controversial surveillance programs in order to restore public confidence and provide assurance the government is not violating citizens’ privacy, participants at the meeting said.”
— “The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.” [tweet https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/362626509648834560]
[tweet https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/362667698016104448] |
Design Competition Model Is Working For 99designs, Especially In Asia | Victoria Ho | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Love them or hate them, 99designs’ design contest model is working pretty well, going by its latest figures. The Melbourne, Australian company now pays out about $2 million per month to designers on its site, according to its CEO, Patrick Llewellyn. Comparing that to the $20 million it paid out in the three years between 2009 and 2011, that’s an almost four-fold growth. But for every designer that gets paid, hundreds of others don’t. 99designs currently makes 90 percent of its revenue through design competitions. That is, a paying client puts up a request for a design—say a logo for example—and designers submit their work, in hopes of winning the job and getting paid. Typically, contests can draw hundreds to thousand of entries, with only the final winner getting picked. Llewellyn didn’t comment on how many designers respond to competitions, but to give you an idea of the stream of responses, the company in June that one design is uploaded every four seconds to the site, and that 99designs has amassed about 23 million submissions in its five years. 99designs takes, at its lowest end, a 5 percent commission on jobs, and this can go up to 40 percent for clients on “gold level” tiers. This involves having a 99designs member of staff handhold you, from writing a design brief to selecting top designers and inviting them to your contest. He wouldn’t break down the proportion of clients on the different tiers, but at the lowest cut of 5 percent, 99designs makes revenues of at least $105,000 a month. Naturally, the company has copped some flak for its business model, which some say turns the design marketplace into a bazaar and thins out the profits for good designers. Critics also say that it is unfair to the many designers which put in work that eventually doesn’t get picked, resulting in designers working for no payment. Llewellyn insisted, however, that the contest model has worked for its designers who willingly participate, because it’s become a “fantastic way to meet” clients. And they are asking for more ways to interact with the site. “For a long time, we were just the facilitator for that meeting, but people are asking for more tools,” he said. In response, the company is ploughing money back into building a payment gateway and a project management tool. It started building a basic version about 18 months ago, and now it’s rolling out the service to more of its users, he said.
Llewellyn said that the company paid $3 million in the past quarter to designers in Asia, a 10 percent increase over the previous quarter. This means that half of the design work is coming from the region. But almost 70 percent of its sales still come from North American customers. The past year has seen 99designs expand into Europe, with sites in German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. “We’ve put people on the ground in London, and doubled the Berlin team to 10,” he added. Last year, it scooped up European rival, , for an undisclosed amount, too. These moves haven’t shifted much of the proportion over to Europe yet, however. North America’s contribution has hovered at the 70 percent mark for the past few years, and Europe stands at 15 percent. Over in Asia, in spite of the massive participation from designers there, just 5 percent of client work comes from the region. Llewellyn said the company is hoping this will change, with its recent foray into the region. “We haven’t had an Asian presence till about two months ago,” he said. The company launched its Singapore site, , in June, about a month after it created for Hong Kong. While it has targeted the two Southeast Asian economic hubs for business development, designers in Indonesia and the Philippines have contributed the most work in the region. The two countries have taken $10 million of the total $54 million that 99designs has paid out over the past five years. The company competes with a fellow Aussie company, DesignCrowd. The latter, also founded in 2008, just told that it has hit $10 million in project revenue. It’s on track to hit $1 million a month in client fees, it said. 99designs was founded by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz. It raised in 2011. Llewellyn said the company isn’t profitable yet. “We were (before the funding), when we were bootstrapped and cashflow-funded. But we’re investing heavily into the business, and into marketing in all our countries,” he said. |
YC-Backed Glio Aims To Be The “Yelp of Brazil” And Beyond in Latin America | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Even though Yelp is almost a decade old, the business model it pioneered with crowd-sourced local listings has yet to permeate the rest of the emerging world. A Y Combinator-backed startup called is betting that it has a chance to dominate Brazil’s fractured local listings market. Co-founded by , a former professional poker player who entered college at 16, the site is just open to a few major cities in the country like Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo. But eventually, the company plans to expand beyond into Brazil’s mid-size cities and then into other Latin American markets like Argentina and Chile. Glio’s team got into Y Combinator on the third try, about two years after they originally launched the service. They now have about 10,000 reviews for restaurants and venues in Rio De Janeiro. They just launched . Riccio has some experience in building consumer web products for the local market, after creating one of the country’s more popular poker sites called . Riccio said there is no existing dominant market incumbent, although there are competitors like Foursquare, and . “We think there’s a very big opportunity for local advertising. Brazil has gone through a lot of growth in the last 10 years and there’s been a massive change. You suddenly have tens of millions of people with new access to the Internet,” Riccio said. “We think the timing is right.” At the same time, Riccio said his competitors are focused on restaurants. But there are broader categories of local data that user-generated reviews could tap into like with drug stores or local retail outlets. He said the startup is focused not only on getting reviews (since only a small percentage of users take the time and effort to do them). They also broadcast a wider band of a person’s activity on the site, with “likes” and “follows” helping to surface interesting venues or places. Glio has taken funding from Y Combinator and its associated fund, YC VC. |
Yahoo Will Update Its Logo! | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Yahoo with a sans-serif font similar to the ones , but keeps its purple color and oft-maligned exclamation point. Don’t like it? That logo is just the first of 30 variations Yahoo will show off over the next month on its homepage and other sites before the final version is revealed on September 5 (so you’ll have plenty of other redesigns to make fun of). The redesign isn’t a complete surprise. Last October, a that he’d been invited to take an online survey with a potential redesign that also featured a sans-serif font. Unlike the logo Yahoo showed off today, however, the updated logo shown in the survey had its purple color toned down to a quieter hue. The user survey came just after Yahoo announced its , the first of CEO Marissa Mayer’s acquisition spree. In a post on the company’s Tumblr, Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt said that Yahoo’s new logo “will be a modern redesign that’s more reflective of our reimagined design and new experiences.” Under Mayer, Yahoo has been busy reinventing itself with a series of more than two dozen acqui-hires, the most recent of which was . As Alex Wilhelm , the company’s aggressive attempts to overhaul its operation has increased its workforce morale, but it’s uncertain if it will actually reverse the company’s declining revenue. Furthermore, Yahoo still has to win over consumers. For example, many Tumblr users threatened to quit after of the site in May and it’s still unclear how the company will handle adult content as it seeks to turn Tumblr into [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agRxG-X_TEQ&w=560&h=315] Playing around with its logo is part of Yahoo’s efforts to reflect “a renewed sense of purpose and progress,” but it remains to be seen if consumers are equally inspired. |
I Built A Windows Phone App And It Freaking Sucks | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | INTRO TALK ABOUT LOOK ! LET’S SEE WHAT THE OPTIONS ARE AN OPTION FROM ABOVE: I DO NOT OWN A RESTAURANT SO I WILL SELECT ‘CREATE AN EMPTY APP’ THE LOGO UPLOAD FAILED. SORRY TECHCRUNCH NO FREE LOVE FOR YOU. LET’S SEE WHAT IS NEXT: TRYING TO ADD STUFF TO THE SOMETHING, I’M KINDA CONFUSED. OH IT WORKED, LOOK EVERYONE: MY APP NOW HAS A BUTTON THING. OK, HIT ME WITH THE NEW SHIT, MICROSOFT: WE’VE GONE FULL PINK. THERE IS A JOKE THERE SOMEHOW. BUT LET’S MOVE ON: OK ERIC, WE’RE ALMOST DONE. THE LONG AWAITED, TECHRUNCH APP FOR WINDOWS PHONE! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU WIN THE GAME: — Alex, you are certainly thinking, that’s unfair. Mostly, but not entirely. Microsoft has created a tool that makes it possible for anyone to create a simple Windows Phone application. You can download the source code as well, if you want to take things to the next level. It’s a somewhat appealing opportunity: Instead of making a trying to , skip that and work with objects and relationships to get your first app off the ground. Apple and Google don’t offer similar tools, despite the fact that their platforms – iOS and Android respectively – are older than Windows Phone. What Windows Phone lacks is not a quantity of applications – it has 160,000. Instead what it lacks is a strong cadre of applications. Any serious developer, the sort that could build one of the aforementioned amazing applications, will not be impressed with the above tool. For students, and others that might want to dabble in development, what Microsoft has put together is cool. In fact, if this was marketed to middle and high schools, it could go a long way to getting folks into development for the first time. The app creator tool lacks sufficient firepower to create applications whole-cloth that are ready for the Windows Phone Store. Is the builder tilted at students, or talented developers? The latter. Here’s Microsoft: We know you – the savvy developer filled with great ideas but not enough time. If only you had a way to quickly build and test your latest innovations. With the Windows Phone App Studio, you do! The Windows Phone App Sudio lets you swiftly build apps for immediate publishing, testing, and sharing with clients, co-workers, and focus groups. Need to make changes or try variations? With the App Studio it’s a snap! I take them at their word. I remain bullish on Windows Phone – – and its developer outreach work. Hell, I’ve met with that team and run through their entire strategy. Smart folks. But the above is at best a rough canvas for app idea generation. What irks me about this is that Microsoft, in its positioning of the Windows Phone App Studio as something more serious than it is, self-dinged their media cycle. The press is taking it as a sign of desperation at the company, looking to juice developer activity. That was avoidable. Still, as soon as Lyft picks up Windows Phone, I’m probably going back. |
Airport Car Rental Startup Silvercar Quietly Launches Service At SFO | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Airport car rentals seem like they’re ready for disruption, right? The same incumbents have been serving a more than $10 billion market for decades, and a few startups are stepping up to try to steal a little share from companies like Avis and Enterprise. That includes FlightCar, RelayRides, and Silvercar — which just began serving the lucrative San Francisco Bay Area by quietly launching at SFO. In case you forgot, Silvercar seeks to by simplifying all the options that consumers are faced with and offering them a single, high-quality ride at a decent price. It has a fleet of Audi A4s that are programmed to be rented and picked up ad unlocked, all through a mobile app. The app also works to make creating a reservation ultra-simple, even enabling mobile payment once the rental period is over. At SFO, Silvercar will mark its first entrance into the California market. So far, the company has only been operating at various airports in Texas, , before expanding to , , and . The company initiated service at SFO over the weekend, but it’s still in what CEO Luke Schneider would call a beta test. That means having a limited inventory of A4s available as it seeks to determine how much demand it will have at the airport. Still, the company is bullish on the prospect of operating in the Bay Area, a place which has huge demand for airport rentals. For his part, Schneider estimates SFO is probably the fourth-largest airport for car rentals in terms of demand. Perhaps more importantly, the SFO clientele fits the profile of Silvercar’s target customer: highly edumacated with a propensity to use mobile phones for everyday things, and an interest in paying a little bit more for a premium experience. (Does that sound like any entrepreneurs/investors you might know?) While the company isn’t talking too much about its expansion plans — outside of its desire to be in — it’s probably a safe assumption that SFO could be the anchor airport for a bigger expansion across other Bay Area airports, like Oakland International Airport and Mineta San Jose International Airport. To finance its expansion, Silvercar has raised $16.5 million in financing, including a . Investors include Austin Ventures, SV Angel, Chris Dixon, Dave Morin, and CrunchFund.* ==
* Disclosure: CrunchFund was founded by Michael Arrington, who also founded TechCrunch. |
Fail Week: When Kevin Ryan Held 7 Ugly Layoff Rounds — And Lost ‘Total Credibility’ As CEO | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Today’s Fail Week story features , who has one of the most star-studded track records in the tech industry, having been the president and CEO of DoubleClick from 1996 up through the time of its to Hellman and Friedman in 2005 (a couple years before its ) and the founder of luxury flash sale pioneer , among other things. In the video above, Ryan talks about the lowest time in his career, when he held a total of seven painful rounds of layoffs while shepherding DoubleClick . Having to show so many hard-working employees the door meant “losing total credibility” as a leader. “It was ugly,” he said. Hear about how that time felt, what kept him going through the dark days, and what lessons he’s learned. |
Meet Appidemia, A Beautiful Application Guide For iOS In Case You Need More Distractions | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Today released , an application guide for iOS that helps you find new software to play with, and keep track of what your friends are using. It has the added quality of being one of the prettiest applications I’ve used on any phone. Once a platform expands past a certain size, the sheer scale of its app catalog can become ponderous. How the heck do you find what you need? iOS, Android and Windows Phone, and so forth all struggle with this issue. I’d say that anything more than 10,000 applications becomes messy. Messy in the best possible sense, of course, given that more choice is not a bad thing in this case. You do, however, need a way to cut through the chaff. Appidemia is an attempt at solving that problem. It’s designed for someone who takes their phone experience seriously, so if you merely dabble, you won’t have a use for it. But, if you want to dig past Instagram, Facebook, and Lyft, you might find something worth using. When you first join the service, it suggests that you follow a few people who work at the company. This gives you a feed of activity to dig through when you get started. Given how new Appidemia is, I doubt you will have a friend who also uses the service if you give it a spin. However, as I’m not looking for another social network to tinker with — my love affair with Twitter persists — I found Appidemia’s search function to be the most compelling part of it service. Its search feature is far superior to what Apple offers inside of the App Store on-phone tool. Here’s a shot of how it works: Appidemia caught my eye precisely because it’s not something that I would have thought of using. When it comes to mobile applications, I am the opposite of a connoisseur. So, I wanted to better understand the application marketplace, and the way to do that is to dig through it. Appidemia’s search technology and its user interface are its strong points. I would argue that the social component of the service could be de-emphasized, at least until it has more market penetration. And, frankly, I don’t care what apps you use. I just want to filter through the most popular book apps to make sure that I’ve heard of them all. Turns out there are more comic-book-related apps than I knew. Now you know, too. Give if you want to get your hands dirty and find some new apps to use. But if you don’t want to see another damn app on your phone, close your laptop screen and slowly walk away. |
YouTube Network Fullscreen Sued By Music Publishers Over Unlicensed Cover Songs | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | The National Music Publishers’ Association, or NMPA, is for copyright infringement, bringing the company to court primarily over the distribution of unlicensed cover song videos. At the same time, the publisher association has announced a deal in principle with Fullscreen competitor Maker Studios. Fullscreen is what you’d call a “multichannel network” (MCN) on YouTube, aggregating a large number of independent creators and giving them tools to grow their audiences and better monetize their videos. Today, it’s one of the largest MCNs, with more than 15,000 channels and 2.5 billion views per month, according to the Fullscreen website. That puts it No. 2 behind VEVO in terms of the number of unique viewers, according to . But some of the content that Fullscreen helps creators distribute and monetize comes in the form of unlicensed covers of popular songs, according to the NMPA. In fact, that’s a problem that NMPA president and CEO David Israelite called “endemic” in the . That release claims that MCN channels represent a significant number of total views on YouTube and are “comprised largely of cover song videos.” Music, of course, is a big part of why people tune in to YouTube. You can see that in the popularity of top channel VEVO, which carries the bulk of licensed music videos from the top recording agencies, as well as Warner Music’s channel, which is also in the top five of all YouTube networks. The NMPA, for its part, wants to ensure that it’s getting paid when one of its artists’ songs is performed to the public — which in this case, means on YouTube. At the same time that the NMPA announced the lawsuit, it also said that it had reached an agreement in principle with Maker Studios, another one of the big MCNs. The deal, once finalized, will let music publishers get paid for past infringement by Maker partners, and ensure licensing going forward. The lawsuit comes not long after Fullscreen announced the to better manage and monetize their channels. One of the features of that platform is the ability to add licensed songs and to enable creators to make their own music available to others on the platform. |
TechCrunch China Is Our Latest International Expansion, And It’s Live Now | Eric Eldon | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | We’ve been busy expanding our coverage around the world and today our latest project is ready for you — if you’d prefer TechCrunch written in Chinese that is. You can now find translated TechCrunch articles available on , via a partnership with Gang Lu and his Shanghai-based tech publication, . We’ll gradually introduce original content in Chinese later on. Here’s his official statement on the matter: Over on our other non-English sister site, , we also have a new editor. is a long-time tech writer (and software developer) in the country, and he’ll occasionally contribute to our main English site, too. We’re also increasing our focus on India by bringing on , formerly of ZDNet. He started last week, and you’ll be hearing more about our India plans soon. These writers join in Taiwan and in Singapore, helping us cover the latest in tech and startups across Asia. And on the events side, there are a string of new city conferences coming later this year that we’re putting on together with local partners: , September 25 to 26
, November 11 to 12
, November 14 to 15
, December 8 to 9 And last but not least, we’re doing our first Disrupt in Europe this fall — this October 28 and 29. |
Facebook Toys With Twitter-Style Feed Order For Posts About Real-Time Events | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Facebook could soon look a little more like Twitter. It’s internally testing “Chronological By Actor,” a new way to display updates about live events so they appear in order from most recent to oldest, surrounded by feed posts ranked by its traditional relevance-sorting. It’s not ready yet, but the algorithm test denotes Facebook’s keen interest in stealing Twitter’s real-time social media crown. Chronological By Actor sorting was at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. The goal of the “Whiteboard Session” was to help reporters and the world understand how it sorts the News Feed. It revealed it would start publicizing News Feed algorithm changes in blog posts, as well as two changes that have already been rolled out: “Story Bumping,” which bumps stories you haven’t seen yet to the top of the feed, and “Last Actor,” which shows you more feed stories about the people you’ve recently interacted with or viewed the profile of. But what was most surprising was Chronological By Actor. Facebook’s strategy with displaying content has been to show you a feed of only the most relevant stories out of everything published by your friends, as opposed to showing a river or firehose of everything your friends post, as on Twitter. The relevancy-sorted feed lets it adapt as each year — . But its deficiency is in real-time events. If you want up-to-the-second information about what’s transpiring in a sports event or breaking news story, Twitter wins. You look at the top of Twitter and you see what just occurred. Tweets don’t get hidden because they didn’t receive enough favorites or @ replies. You can watch things happen as they unfold. Twitter works best when you’re glued to it in the moment, whereas Facebook excels at giving you the most interesting retrospective of what happened while you were gone. But Facebook is realizing that real-time events create a huge, emotional response that resonates across the whole world. They inspire a ton of social media activity, and advertisers are eager to join in. So over the last few months, Facebook has been exploring how it can better host these moments. , which Twitter pioneered, so that people could tag their posts to make them more discoverable by other people looking for information about a specific topic that their friends and the world were talking about. But hashtags require users to change their behavior. So does Facebook’s Most Recent tab for the News Feed. For years the feature has let users switch from the default Top Stories relevancy-sorted feed to a Most Recent feed with the latest updates at the top. But most users never bother to switch to it, and its not the best format for most content. That’s Facebook came up with the idea for Chronological By Actor — a way to create a hybrid feed that integrates both relevance and real-time sorting. Here’s how it works: Let’s say your friend Paul posts a bunch of times about the World Cup finals. Normally these updates would be scattered across your News Feed regardless of the chronological order, with the posts that received the most Likes and comments closer to the top, and the ones that didn’t farther below the fold. Facebook realized this made it tough to follow the action. You might see Paul’s heavily Liked post “Neymar on a breakaway, dodges the last defender, and scores on in the first minute!” from the beginning of the game at the top. After three posts from other friends you’d see Paul say “BRAZIL WINS 2-1!!! WOOO!!!!” from the end of the game. Then four posts down you’d see Paul’s less-Liked post, “Jefferson with an incredible save to shut out Italy in the first half.” All these posts are out of order, so it’s difficult to keep the timeline straight. Facebook suspected there could be a better way to order these posts, which led to internal testing of Chronological By Actor. It determines which posts by a specific person are about a certain real-time event, and then sequences them in chronological order with the most recent at the top like Twitter, but leaves the rest of the feed as is. In the version currently being tested, you’d see “BRAZIL WINS 2-1!!! WOOO!!!!” “Neymar scores on a breakaway in the first minute!” at the top of your feed, “Jefferson with an incredible save to shut out Italy in the first half,” as the fourth post in your feed, and “BRAZIL WINS 2-1!!! WOOO!!!!” after another four stories by other friends. Paul still fills up the same numbered slots in the feed, but his content is swapped around to flow as if you were reading them in real time. The only problem is that Facebook said its tests of Chronological By Actor actually reduced Likes, comments, and other signals it uses to gauge News Feed success. That’s why the algorithm change hasn’t been rolled out like Story Bumping and Last Actor. It still needs some tweaks. When asked by AllThingsD’s if this test showed Facebook was becoming more like Twitter, Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox explained that this was more of an isolated tweak than a broad shift in strategy. “Philosophically, Twitter and Facebook are still quite different in their product assumption and product promise. We’ve always been committed to ranking, just given the core demand of ‘I don’t want to miss stuff.’ Twitter has built a whole ecosystem around not ranking and showing things in real time. I wouldn’t over-pivot on this feature. We’re not changing the core philosophy.” That makes sense for Facebook. It’s not just tweet-like status updates and photos. Facebook’s feed can show off-site Open Graph app activity, new friendships, Event RSVPs, Likes of Pages and much more. Most of that stuff is only interesting if it’s about your closest friends, so if Facebook were a firehose, you’d probably find very little of it interesting. Real time is great for events and breaking news, but not day-to-day life. Still, at the end of the day, Facebook is about connecting people, and real-time events make the whole world feel like they’re experiencing something together. Facebook can’t just adapt the feed to handle more content. It needs to learn to treat different types of content as special and unique snowflakes. |
Zillow Posts Record Q2 Revenue Of $46.9M, But EPS Drops To $0.30 Loss, Traffic Up 66% YOY | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Online real-estate database has its earnings for its second financial quarter of 2013. The company, which saw its stock over the last few months, reported record revenue of $46.9 million, but a massive loss per share of $0.30 compared to the $0.05 loss it posted in the last quarter. The Wall Street was that Zillow would post revenue of around $44.42 million and a GAAP EPS of -$0.40. : Last quarter, Zillow revenue of $39 million and an EPS of $0.06. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $27.8 million. The main reason for Zillow’s loss per share is due to its large increase in spending on marketing and sales (up from $12.153 million three months ago to $32.924 million this), as our own Alex Wilhelm points out. The company also almost doubled its expenses on technology and development. The company’s audience — an important metric for Zillow — grew to 61 million unique users on mobile and web in July 2013. That’s an increase of 66 percent year-over-year. On mobile devices, monthly uniques doubled over the last 12 months. “The second quarter was a tremendous one for Zillow as our focus and investments delivered record revenue, traffic and Premier Agent growth,” said Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow, in a statement today. “We’re executing to the long game and making great progress against our strategic priorities to grow audience and gain market share, grow our Premier Agent business, and grow our emerging marketplaces. We’ve seen substantial audience growth with another record traffic month in July with more than 61 million unique users on mobile and Web, and we added a record number of Premier Agent subscribers during the quarter. Also, our emerging marketplaces are taking flight as Mortgages Revenue more than doubled in the quarter compared to last year, and we’re beginning to test monetization in our growing Rentals Marketplace.” Last week, Zillow’s closest publicly traded competitor posted for its last financial quarter, so a lot of analysts will be looking at Zillow’s numbers today as an indicator of how the online real estate market is doing. After Trulia posted its earnings, quite a few analysts believed that Zillow would surprise them, too. Here are the highlights from today’s report: |
Microsoft Goes WYSIWYG To Broaden The Appeal Of Windows Phone 8 App Development | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Microsoft has just revealed an interesting effort to get more apps to the Windows Phone Store, via its new , a visual, web-based editor for Windows Phone 8 apps, which launches in beta today. With it, anyone can build apps without code, using customizable themes and custom text, graphics and design. This is unique in a couple of ways from most approaches to mobile development: It’s a much lower barrier to entry for mobile app coding than you’ll typically find, and it’s from Microsoft direct, not a third-party provider selling a “no coding required!” solution. The app can be published on the Windows Phone Store, too, so long as you have an active developer’s account – which is temporarily discounted to $19 through August 26, another ploy to help drum up interest. Even free developer users can unlock and register a single phone and load up to two apps on their own device, so there’s now no barrier at all to at least kicking the tires on Windows Phone 8 app development. Microsoft’s Todd Brix also took the opportunity today to unveil a new easier “Click to Chat” system for WP8 dev center support, and new payment systems in place for six new markets, as well as new carrier billing markets. Overall, the message is clear: BUILD US SOME APPS. Windows Phone 8 isn’t lighting a fire under a lot of developers, according to a , so that may go some way to explaining why Microsoft is casting a wider net with the Windows Phone App Studio. BlackBerry World reported passing 100,000 apps earlier this year, around the same time the Windows Phone Marketplace topped 145,000 apps, which is not good in terms of the pace of its catalog growth. Is opening the floodgates to everyone who wants to mash together a Windows Phone app the best way to boost those numbers? There’s no doubt it’s going to invite a lot of chaff, but there almost might be some wheat mixed in there. Windows Phone has the advantage of having a relatively simple visual style that looks good across a variety of apps, so there’s a chance it could result in a net good. But there’s probably a greater chance that we’ll just end up with more crud blocking up the charts, search and overall library. But by all means, prove me wrong, amateur developers. Prove me wrong. |
Causora Promotes Philanthropy By Matching Donations With Spa Gift Cards | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | What if you could donate to charity, and get your money back in full? It seems like there would be a catch, but that’s exactly what is doing. The startup, which launched its platform a month ago, allows users to donate to nonprofit organizations and receive matching rewards in gift cards. Here’s how it works: After registering on Causora, users can donate to more than 150 nonprofit organizations on the website. If you can’t find the charity you’re looking for, you can add it yourself, and it will appear on the site after it goes through Causora’s verification process. When you donate, your account receives the same amount as your donation in Causora credits, which can be redeemed for vouchers in $20 increments to any of Causora’s 150 partner merchants. The credit-card company takes a little less than 3 percent of your donation, and Causora takes 7 percent to generate revenue and keep up operations. So in total, about 90 percent of your contribution goes to the charity chosen on the site, and you still get your money back in choice of services. Partnering merchants receive business through gift cards and publicity, so it’s a win for everybody. If you just want to donate to an organization without any rewards, 97 percent of your donation goes straight to the nonprofit. By bringing incentives to a larger audience, founder Kai Buehler hopes to increase donations to nonprofit organizations that are struggling to grow their donations year over year. However, a study by The Chronicle of Philanthropy shows that charitable donations through online processors such as PayPal. Regardless, if Causora is looking to increase philanthropic awareness on a wide scale, rewards and online donations are the way to go. “If you talk to any director of development, they’re focusing on the big donors, on the big checks,” Buehler tells me. “However, they have limited resources to go after people who give them $20, $50, $100, $200.” There are downsides to Causora, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Right now, all choices are local and related to health and wellness. That means the merchant page is populated mostly with spas in California. Another downside to this is you can only use one $20 voucher at a time. So if I wanted to donate $100, I would basically have five different certificates, each of which would have to be used at a separate time or location. That’s five more trips to the spa or salon that I would normally make, plus I have to fill in the difference. The good news, Buehler tells me, is Causora is adding food and restaurants as the next options for rewards. Causora also plans to expand to different states toward the end of the year. Even though you’re basically getting your money right back, the process of looking through the donation and reward options, donating and redeeming could be too much of a hassle for those who just want to give to a cause. To lower the barrier of donating even further, Causora is working on embedding a widget onto the websites of nonprofits, as well as their pages on Facebook. That way, users can make a donation directly from the cause’s site. and sold three other businesses. Watchpoints, his most recent startup, sold in 2011 for $3 million. In January, Causora raised $100,000 from angel investors including executives from Google and Univision. Causora, which launched its today to raise $2,500 in 60 days, is still working on building out its merchant base and accessibility. But if you were planning on going to a spa in Los Angeles, Orange County or the Bay Area, now you can take a couple of seconds and donate to charity in the process. |
Yelp Will Add The Ability To Book Home Services Online With ReachLocal | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | If you’re looking to find home services ranging from movers to interior designers, you’ll be able to do it all on by the end of the year. The popular review site will be adding a new option to book services online through a partnership with online marketing company . ReachLocal announced yesterday, and is using the platform to integrate its services with consumers on Yelp. ReachCommerce is an SaaS management platform that tracks marketing efforts, customer interactions, purchases and appointments for small to medium-sized businesses. Any ReachCommerce user can now add a booking option right onto its Yelp business page. The company has been pushing services to connect with local customers, which will provide a valuable asset to its users. Last month, ReachLocal also introduced a to book home services straight from your phone. “We view this partnership with Yelp as tremendous acceleration of our local commerce strategy we announced earlier this year,” ReachLocal co-founder and CEO Zorik Gordon said in a press release. “Leveraging the power of Yelp Platform is one of many ways ReachCommerce can help local service providers ensure they prosper in an era of digital transformation.” With a monthly average of in Q2 2013, Yelp is a huge step for ReachLocal trying to increase business for its users. While the booking service ClubLocal is restricted to the Bay Area, now any Yelp user can easily book a ReachLocal business while browsing the site. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 1 | null |
Keen On… The Mobile Future: Why IT Might Not Happen | Andrew Keen | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”, William Gibson said. But, with 20 billion connected devices and 6.5 billion network users by 2020, Gibson’s optimism might be misplaced. Indeed, according to Ericsson CTO, , the future – at least, our connected, mobile future – might not happen at all. And as the chief technology officer of the most global of networking infrastructure providers, Ewaldsson is as well placed as anyone to peer into our collective digital crystal ball. The problem, Ewaldsson says, there will be a thousand fold increase in mobile traffic over the next five years and today’s 4G networks aren’t sufficiently muscular to handle this explosion in bandwidth demand. Spectrum, he predicts, will be “more scarce than oil in the 21st century”. And so it’s “very, very important,” Ewaldsson insists, to undertake what he calls a “global alignment” on spectrum policy to ensure that the new demands on the network – from self driving cars to wearable intelligent devices – can be guaranteed as we eventually shift from a 4G to a 5G world. That’s the bad news. The good news, Ewaldsson says, is that a lot of people – including Ericsson themselves – are working on making sure that our connected future actually happens. Indeed, the Swedish networking company $5 billion a year in R&D and is particularly interested in startups in the energy, healthcare, education and transportation sectors. |
Inside Foursquare’s Growing Revenue, Which Could Reach $20M In 2013 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Aside from what Path is worth, the way in which Foursquare will monetize its user base and dataset is perhaps the most popular conversation over the second cocktail in Silicon Valley. At least if I’m there. Today, in , new figures were disclosed concerning Foursquare’s revenue: It’s growing. , a Foursquare investor, told Fast Company’s that Foursquare had brought in more than four times its total 2012 revenue by around the middle of the year. As both Carr and have noted, that puts Foursquare’s 2013 top line on a run rate between $15 million and $20 million. Compared to 2012’s painfully paltry $2 million in revenue, the new figures are — and we’re leaning on data released by an investor with a firm financial interest in Foursquare’s success — almost rosy. However, at its 2013 revenue pace, can Foursquare break even? Can it drive meaningful profit? Foursquare’s CEO and founder told Carr that his company has 160 employees. The old rule of thumb was that you could mentally budget $100,000 per employee in yearly costs, after taking into account rent, insurance costs, and the like. However, given Foursquare’s split profile between San Francisco and New York, I think that the old rule is outdated and far too conservative. Let’s be polite and assume that the figure is $150,000 per worker, giving Foursquare costs in 2013, for personnel alone, of $24 million. So before servers, advertising, expansion and SXSW parties are taken into account, Foursquare is still set to lose money in 2013. And I’d wager that its cash burn isn’t small. It has cash now, raised via convertible debt, but those accounts will depress in time. Foursquare will then have to raise money from private investors, the public markets, or seek an exit. Its ability to do any of the three will depend on its ability to accelerate its revenue growth in dollar terms, and, if it wants to go public, demonstrate profitability, at least briefly. Can it? Inside of Carr’s profile is a telling paragraph, delineating how Foursquare might generate new revenue. I quote at length to preserve voice: The biggest near-term revenue will likely come from the 1.4 million local merchants on the platform. The company plans to start charging them for its ad products on a cost-per-action basis later this year, which could prove a boon to its bottom line. “Maybe you’re slow during the day, so when people search for a lunch spot, you run an ad in the neighborhood for your rotisserie chicken salad. Say we showed the ad a hundred times and six people showed up within the next three hours–that’s a pretty good conversation rate,” Crowley says. “So maybe we pick up $200 per month from that venue. Take that from 10% to 20% of our million venues, and that’s $20 million to $40 million a year.” That would be, given Crowley’s estimates, a doubling or trebling of Foursquare’s current — and potentially overly kind — revenue forecasts. But in fact it isn’t a particularly harmonious product fit to the current trends that Foursquare is encountering. The company is working to allow for more passive usage of its service. Presumably to both bolster active engagement, and perhaps bring lapsed users such as myself back into the fold. The above example demands that a business owner be at once monitoring their business, and then turning to Foursquare on a continuing basis, a relationship that I think is unlikely to occur. Attention of the owner of a restaurant is always short, and to expect that person to use Foursquare on a chronic basis is perhaps optimistic. Yes, there is a potential of financial remuneration for the small-business person, but would it be consistent enough to warrant consistent use? Crowley’s example of $200 in monthly revenue would likely require such usage. The crass point at this juncture would be to state that if Foursquare can grow its user base it likely could be a consistent driver of such sales. However, the company has struggled to continue user acquisition on par with rates that it previously enjoyed. I would estimate that at its current revenue growth rate, Foursquare will be able to raise more capital, which it will need. $2 million to $20 million in a year is a wonderful multiple, and Foursquare’s dedicated fans are not about to abandon the service. However, I’d argue that the second $20 million in revenue for Foursquare will be a more interesting tranche of top line; Foursquare is currently monetizing its service as a green field. Put more simply, the next set of apples may be further up the tree. Foursquare wanted to raise capital at a $700 million or $800 million valuation, but instead took on cash without putting a new sticker price on itself. For comparison, the market currently values Yelp at north of $3 billion. However, Yelp’s in the most recent quarter. Using crude math, assuming say $200 million in Yelp revenue in 2013 and $20 million for Foursquare, the latter would be worth about $330 million using Yelp’s current multiples. That’s about half of Foursquare’s 2011 valuation of $600 million. Assuming that Horowitz’s numbers are accurate, Foursquare is at last demonstrating that it can generate eight-figure revenue from its social location service. But that answers only the first in a brace of questions. Still, there were those who didn’t expect the company to make it this far. They were wrong. |
We Should… Be Better Friends | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | We should go get drinks sometime soon. We should go on a trip to Atlantic City! You know what we should do? We should get everyone together for a parrrtyyyy! Yeah! It’s easy to make plans, but keeping them is a different story. A new app launching out of New York aims to change all that. However, the aptly named WeShould app doesn’t work like any of the social planning apps that have come before it. Rather than , , and on a network, WeShould is one-sided, with no real networking function at all. Instead, WeShould users are asked to choose ten friends they plan on hanging out with soon. These can be imported from Facebook or input manually. Then, you can add more detail to each friendship, including how often you hang out with this or that person, what activities you enjoy together, etc. From there, you have a dashboard outlining each of your major friendships, letting you make a plan, jot down a gift idea, or set a reminder. If you make a plan, you have four easy options of movies, food, deals, and tickets. WeShould partners with Fandango, Yelp, LivingSocial and SeatGeek to offer an app-within-an-app experience, so you can buy tickets and book trips right then and there. But if none of those options tickle your fancy, WeShould offers up curated experiences based on your friendship feedback, in challenge form. They sound something like: “Pick a bar trivia night and go for a top three finish,” or “go for a one-hour walk and discover some new things.” [gallery ids="857289,857290,857291,857292,857293,857294"] By using the app-within-an-app model, WeShould pays nothing to the services sending in data but rather receives a small percentage of each sale made within the WeShould app. Meanwhile, the company plans on transitioning the challenge section of the app into a sponsored challenge revenue stream. Imagine, Heineken sponsoring a beer pong challenge, or Eataly sponsoring a lasagna-making challenge. But beyond business models and cash flow, WeShould does something interesting to the idea of social planning. There are already more than enough tools out there to facilitate setting a plan, or making a date. Instead of trying to funnel that communication through a brand new platform, WeShould is more of a personal planner and assistant, dedicated to making us better friends. Sure, it could use some navigational tweaks, but the core of the idea is a smart one. If you’re interested in more, check out on the Apple App Store. |
Sensor Tower Raises $1M To Help Mobile Developers Improve Their App Store Presence | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | As Google Play and Apple’s iOS stores have become crowded with north of 1 million apps, it’s no longer practical to try and climb the overall top rankings for most developers. That’s why a series of startups focusing on . They try and help apps that might practically not have a chance or the capital to break into the top of the charts gain visibility through search. San Francisco-based is one of those. They’ve just closed a $1 million round of funding to deploy an app analytics service that tells developers how they might improve keywords in their apps’ descriptions. Rembrandt Ventures led the round, which also included Merus Capital, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Pejman Nozad, Mar Hershenson, Ariel Poler and Maneesh Arora. They were part of the AngelPad’s 2013 class. They’ll use the round to improve the Android version of the service and hire employees. Both co-founders, and , are app developers. They found that the cost to acquire new users — often at $1 or more (or even several dollars per user) — was too expensive. They started building Sensor Tower as their own personal tool and then opened it up to third-party developers. You can test drive how Sensor Tower works by typing the name of your application into the search bar on their homepage . It shows which keywords pop up for a given app, and can tell a developer how well they rank for each keyword. The company naturally has a freemium model where they charge anywhere from $39 to $399 per month based on the number of keywords and apps a developer wants to track. The startup is profitable with about 10,000 developers using the service, including clients like Skype, GREE and Flipboard. These plans give developers data on how well their apps rank in given categories and for given keywords over a historical period of time. Sensor Tower also automatically generates a list of relevant competitors based on keywords. The startup is competing against a number of other app store optimization (or ASO) companies like , and . |
With Tynker’s New Service, Kids Can Learn To Code At Home | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | Mountain View-based , a startup focused on teaching children of all ages the basics of learning how to code, is now expanding its service beyond schools with today’s debut of . This new system is similar to the platform targeting teacher and classrooms which . Tynker for Schools, as that previous suite is called, provides web-based software and a curriculum aimed at elementary and middle school students. The new home edition is designed for the same crowd. Also like the school edition, Tynker for Home takes advantage of kids’ interest in computers, but more specifically, games, videos and other more visual content. Instead of trying to teach the actual syntax of a programming language right away, Tynker lures students into the developer mindset by first reducing the complexity of the experience and starting with something fun – building an animated character like a princess or zombie, which kids can then teach to walk, move, and perform other tasks through the use of a visual programming “language” of sorts. This same program involving the creation of animated stories and self-paced learning, is now available to parents who want to introduce their children to programming basics at home. The expansion comes at a key time in today’s job market, where unemployment looms, , even as other industries – including information technology – . As a parent living outside of Tynker for Schools’ earlier test market -the San Francisco Bay area, of course* – I’ve been cautioned that school choice matters some, but education at home is what really drives a child to succeed. I hope that’s true. (This, as I scour school websites for any hint of technology-driven initiatives.) With , parents can bring self-guided lessons, puzzles, tutorials, quizzes, missions, videos and more to personal computers, regardless of whether or not their kids have any I.T. education at school. The company has also partnered with Dave McFarland, an author of several O’Reilly programming books (including some in the well-known “The Missing Manual” series) to create Tynker’s “Introduction to Programming” course materials. Tynker may not be perfect – the further along the course gets, the more complex and “geekier” it becomes, which may lose kids who don’t have a natural inclination toward math and logic. And despite your lofty goals as a parent, you might still have to force (or bribe – that’s cool, right?) your kids to do the work. Tynker is not free. But its $50 per student plan is affordable enough, if held up to the cost of a private school education, camps, or specialized tutors, which far outside the Valley, is often the only way real parents have access to formal programming courses for kids. (Another point against those claims that the tech industry is somehow a , where anyone can just work hard and succeed. Some kids – and parents – have to work a little harder to even the playing field. ) That being said, Tynker is also up against a handful of free products, notably MIT’s (which Tynker is similar to and supports import from), as well as free and paid tools, services, sites, products, and more like those from , , Pluralsight, Code.org, , , and even that thing, to name a few. But we may as well err on the side of having too plentiful a selection of educational tools, than not having enough. Tynker for Schools has been adopted by over 2,700 elementary and middle schools, reaching 23,000 students. Tynker for Home is . |
Weekend Watch Review: Grappling The Girard-Perregaux Chrono Hawk | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | Girard-Perregaux, to those not familiar with watch lore, is a watchmaker founded in 1791 and that now produces handmade, manufacture pieces in the mid- to high-level range. I’ve been a longtime fan of the brand – they usually come up with designs that are timeless and more classic than, say, Concord, and less fuddy-duddy than IWC and other traditional makers. The watch we’re looking at today, the Chrono Hawk, is G-P’s lower-end addition to their catalog (if “lower end” and G-P can ever appear in the same sentence.) First, let’s be clear: the Girard-Perregaux Chrono Hawk is expensive. It’s $13,800 expensive. Which makes it one of the pricier watches I’ve reviewed during my semi-regular Weekend Watch reviews, and it is, to be clear, a luxury item. Why is it so expensive? Well, it is completely made in a single factory in Switzerland to exacting standards and the time, effort, and research that go into a piece like this are akin to the efforts put into a nicer luxury car. You’re paying for a few things here. You’re paying for solid materials and a nice band, to be sure, but you’re also paying the salary of men and women who are manufacturing watches by hand at a clip of a few dozen per day. At that rate you won’t be getting any bargains. So what is the Chrono Hawk? It is an automatic chronograph (basically a stopwatch) with two registers – a running seconds at 3 o’clock and a 30 minute counter at 9 o’clock (called the bi-compax layout) and a central seconds hand. It has a 48 hour power reserve and 44mm in diameter – quite bold for a simpler chronograph. It is very evocative of older, 1970s era chronographs where two registers and a date window were in vogue. Watch blog notes that the case shape comes from the , a long-time staple in the G-P line. The tooling and design are a delight. The soft leather bands melds into the case seamlessly and the clasp is easily resized by pulling out a pair of pins under the buckle. It curves over the wrist for comfort and has a rear see-through back so you can see the handmade movement. The buttons and crown have small rubber highlights that make them easier to push and the buttons protect – and are protected by – the crown. The piece is a harmonious whole, which is an important distinction in this type of chrono. I especially like the face. The Guilloché dial features a futuristic-looking hexagonal pattern (that is actually shaped like part of the movement) that is not too messy to render the hands illegible. It is an interesting nod to modernity, to be sure, as G-P has usually used a square engraving on its sportier watches, a change that I think is welcome. To me a manufactured – meaning “manufactured by a single company” – chronograph like this one is tough to hate. It has just enough features – called complications – to be worth at least some of the purchase price, but at $14,000 you’d better be in love with this piece before you plunk down the credit card. I love watches that are eminently usable and the Chrono-Hawk fits the bill. It’s readable at almost any angle, is dripping with lume for night-time reading, and it kept prefect time for the weeks I wore it. I don’t like the lack of a third elapsed hours register and the chronograph is a bit short since it records only thirty minutes total – enough to time baking some cookies, but probably not a cake. Thus the appreciation of this watch is a matter of personal taste. It also comes in black but the tan strap and champagne face look excellent together and the case is large without being overbearing. It is one of the nicer watches I’ve seen in a while and it’s a nice addition to the G-P line. Sadly, given the price, I can probably never convince myself to pick one up but, as Ferris Bueller said, “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”
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As Wix Heads Toward IPO, Weebly Looks To Expand With Big New SF Headquarters, Plans To Add 500+ Employees | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | , the service that lets you, your grandma and anyone else build a website for free, is growing fast. The startup launched out of Y Combinator in 2007 and today hosts over 15 million sites, which together see more than 100 million unique visitors each month. But they also expect this growth to continue, as Weebly co-founder David Rusenko tells us that his company has signed a lease on 36,000-square feet of a historic warehouse in SOMA in downtown San Francisco, which will become its new headquarters. Not only that, but as the anchor tenant of this new space, the company has the option to expand to 50,000-square-feet, which Rusenko says the company plans to do. As a comparison, Weebly’s new office will be nearly five-times the size of its current space in Pac Heights, which is a puny 11,000-square-feet. Besides the fact that the warehouse that will play home to their new headquarters is apparently the “last brick-and-timber warehouse in SOMA to be converted to a more modern setup” — and is where many of the grapes would be shipped from Napa to make wine in San Francisco, Rusenko says — the reason for the move is that Weebly plans to hire hundreds of new employees and it’s going to need somewhere to put them. Weebly plans to move into the new space sometime in early 2014 and over the next couple of years plans to grow to up to 600 employees globally — most of whom will be located in San Francisco, the co-founder tells us. When Weebly moved into their current offices in 2011, the company was just 19 employees, a team which today has grown to 80. Yes, that means beginning soon Weebly is going to begin a long-term push that will add over 500 people to its staff, many of whom will be engineers and designers. When asked how Weebly is making this possible, the co-founder says that the company has been profitable from “very early on” and is backed by VCs like Sequoia, so that help build confidence among potential recruits that the company is actually going to be around in a year. It sounds a lot like Dropbox’s , doesn’t it? But how does it plan to pay for all that? Although the company won’t share specifics on its financial performance or how much it raised from Sequoia (and only lists $650K), Rusenko says that it’s been profitable from day one and will be profitable even with its 50,000-square-foot lease. Weebly may have to raise more money to do so, but without giving too much away, the founder points to “stored value” as part of the explanation. Although Weebly starts off free and while less than 50 percent of the revenue from a cohort of users will be collected in the first year (from users upgrading to premium services), over time, these users consistently upgrade enough that it has been able to make up for the churn. As it continues to grow, it’s been able to keep customer attrition low, while retaining (and growing) its conversion rate through quality premium products (like eCommerce functionality). And, as Rusenko looks at the future, he thinks that there’s opportunity for Weebly to maintain its growht rate based on the growth of its market. As more and more people come online and have serious computing power in their pockets, having your own real estate on the Web (or in an app store) is imperative, especially for businesses. However, a huge number of small businesses still don’t have much of an online presence — less than 40 percent of restaurants have their menus online, for example. Thus, the addressable market for startups and software that allow you, your grandma and anyone else to build a website quickly and easily is still huge. But Weebly isn’t the only startup in this space to benefit. Wix, like its competitor, has been expanding quickly. Today, the company says, it’s at 37 million users and is seeing more than 1.3 million new users building sites every month. It now employs nearly 400 people in Tel Aviv, San Francisco an New York and has raised about $60 million from its investors. Its users have created over 23 million websites (as of December) and since Wix began ramping up its push on mobile, co-founder Avishai Abrahami said that it has become “largest mobile site builder in existence,” with users creating mobile sites at a rate of 50K sites/month. Again, while the company declines to share specifics, the company believes its growth rate is steady enough that it seems ready to take the next step in its development. Wix , which now has it headed squarely in the direction of the public markets. And you’ll notice that Wix appears to be hiring in all four of its locations, so the growth appears to be continuing even as it prepares for its quiet period. While the big CMS players, like Joomla and Drupal, are still growing themselves and work with a litany of the biggest companies in the world, website builders like Weebly and Wix have been gobbling up market share. The speed at which they’ve grown is a testament to the fact that people now value speed and simplicity of website builders just as much (if not more) than the power of CMSes. (And likely, in the future, whoever can synthesize them best shall wear the Site Creator Crown.) As the tools and standards people use to build sites and apps on the Web and mobile change, these players have to change with them. This week Wix took a step toward that goal, with the release of a sort of app market for business add-ons, which offer small businesses a suite of tools they can add to their sites to help grow their business. Just as the company offers a marketplace for widgets that developers can build and sell to customers who are looking for specific tools or functionality for the front-end, this release intends to help businesses beef up the back-end. |
Gillmor Gang: Watching the River Flow | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Doc Searls, and Steve Gillmor — digest the resignation of Steve Ballmer and its potential impact on the direction of the Post-PC Era. Whether he was pushed by Bill Gates or what, it’s clear something changed in the last few days. Just how or who can do better will soon be apparent, as Ballmer’s lame duck term has been accelerated by a cheering Wall Street. Below the fold but no less an aftereffect of the Microsoft decline is the continuing story of the Social App Revolution, as Al Jazeera struggles with the transition to mobile, @dsearls laments the threat to the 4th Amendment, and as Moe Glitz puts it in the chat: Apple is The Beatles. Google is The Stones and Microsoft are The Monkees. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @dsearls, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
CrunchWeek: Ballmer’s Classy Exit, Our Picks From YC’s Demo Day, And The Gold iPhone | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | Are you feeling like you’re ready to kick off the weekend, but could just use three more opinions on the biggest tech news stories of the week before you really get the party started? Well you came to the right place, because it’s time for a new episode of the show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past week. This week, and I mused over Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s , our top picks from Y Combinator’s and the rumors during the upcoming iPhone, including a the and more. |
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running Your Business | James Altucher | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | This is going be a bullet FAQ on starting a business. No joke. If you’re a lawyer, feel free to disagree with me, so you can charge someone your BS fees to give the same advice. If you can think of anything to add, please do so. I might be missing things. If you want to argue with me, feel free. I might be wrong on any of the items below. There are many types of business. Depending on your business, some of these won’t apply. All of these questions come from questions I’ve been asked. The rules are: I’m going to give no explanations. Just listen to me.
C-Corp if you ever want to take on investors or sell to another company.
Delaware.
Yes, over a period of four years. On any change of control the vesting speeds up.
First build a product, then get a customer, then get friends-and-family money (or money from revenues which is cheapest of all) and then think about raising money. But only then. Don’t be an amateur.
Get customers first. Patent later. Don’t talk to lawyers until the last possible moment.
No. Nobody is going to steal your idea.
Divide things up into these categories: manage the company; raise the money; had the idea; brings in the revenues; built the product (or performs the services). Divide up in equal portions.
No. If you don’t already have a technical co-founder you can always outsource technology and not give up equity.
No. You get what you pay for.
Friends and then word of mouth.
Maybe. But first see if, manually, your product works. Then think about providing it as a service. Then productize the commonly used services. Too many people do this in reverse and then fail.
If someone wants to give you money, then take it. The old saying, 100 percent of nothing is worth less than 1 percent of something.
Yes, of course. They gave you money. But then don’t do anything they ask you to do.
Then change to a service and do whatever anyone is willing to pay for using the skills you developed while making your product. “You’re gonna rattle the stars, you are.”
Always do the ethical thing: Hire the friend and get the client’s business.
Stay in touch once a month. Never be angry.
Release fast. Add new features every week.
The best new clients are old clients. Always offer new services. Think every day of new services to offer old clients.
Over-deliver for the first 100 days. Then you will never lose them.
Do it, or find someone who can do it, even if it’s a competitor.
No.
No.
Never gossip. Always be straight with the culprit.
Do as many ideas as possible. The right idea will pick you.
— Trying to raise VC money before product or customers.
— Having fights with partners in the first year. Fire them or split before anything gets out of control.
— Worrying about dilution.
— Trying to get Mark Cuban to invest because “this would be great for the Dallas Mavericks.”
— Asking people you barely know to introduce you to Mark Cuban.
— Asking people for five minutes of their time. It’s never five minutes, so you are establishing yourself as a liar.
— Having a PowerPoint that doesn’t show me arbitrage. I need to know that there is a small chance there is a 100x return on money.
— Catch 22: showing people there’s a small chance there’s 100x return on their money. The secret of salesmanship is getting through the Catch 22.
— Rejecting a cash offer for your company when you have almost no revenues. Hello Friendster and Foursquare.
— Going from bullshit product to services to product to SaaS product. (Corollary: the reverse is amateur hour).
— Cutting costs every day.
— Selling every day, every minute.
— When you have a billion in revenues, staying focused. When you have zero revenues, staying unfocused and coming up with new ideas every day.
— Saying “no” to people who are obvious losers.
— Saying “yes” to any meeting at all with someone who is an obvious winner.
— Knowing how to distinguish between winners and losers (subject of an entire other post but in your gut you know — trust me).
When you have revenues
In a GREAT business, six months. In a mediocre business, infinity.
No, not unless you have revenues.
Yes, find one customer who DEFINITELY, without a doubt, will buy a service from you. Note that I don’t say buy your product, because your initial product is always not what the customer wanted.
No. You should always reinvest your money and operate at a loss.
See above.
No more than 2x your lowest employee if you are not profitable. This even assumes you are funded. If you are not funded your salary should be zero until your revenues can pay your salary last. Important RULE: the CEO salary is the last expense paid in every business.
When you have fewer than six months’ burn in the bank and you aren’t getting revenues growing fast enough.
When you love her and the feeling is mutual.
— When they gossip.
— When they don’t over-deliver constantly.
— When they ask for a raise because they think they are making below industry standard.
— When they talk badly about a client.
— When they have an attitude.
Rarely.
15 to 20 percent.
One-fourth of 1 percent. Advisers are useless. Don’t even have an advisory board.
Nothing. They should all be investors. If they aren’t an investor, then one-half of 1 percent.
Treat them very nicely. Don’t forget the Christmas gift basket.
Show arbitrage: If they pay X now they are buying something worth X * Y. That is the ONLY way to sell.
Part II: fear and agitation. Get them afraid (the world is falling apart). Get them agitated (this is the only way to stop it).
Use “choice ambiguity” (Google it). Say, “all of my competition is great. I wouldn’t even know how to choose among them.”
Ask yourself (no BS): How much would it cost to recreate the technology, services, brand and customers you have already built. Then quadruple it and see what people would pay.
Absolutely not. The best businesses are started in horrible economies.
You don’t have anymore friends.
Itemize as finely as possible and charge for each item.
First per project, then per-month maintenance.
Know everything about the clients: competition, employees, industry. Over-read everything. Read everything.
Highly targeted email marketing written by professional copywriters, and the email list is made up of people who have bought similar services in the past six months.
Maybe. But don’t expect free customers to turn into paying customers. Your free customers actually hate you and want everything from you for nothing, so you better have a different business model.
No.
No.
No.
Yes. You must. Blog about everything going wrong in your industry. Blog personal stories that you think will scare away customers. They won’t. Customers will be attracted to honesty.
No. Care about revenues.
No. Make one business . Throw everything in it. Do DBAs to identify different ideas.
Don’t be an idiot. If anything, hire people the opposite of you. Or else who will you delegate to?
When they approach you.
Every other conversation you ever have with them after that initial “no.”
Stop asking that.
No. Pick the VC you like. Times are going to get tough at some point, and you need to be able to have a heart-to-heart with them.
No. Make money. Build shit. Then start a business.
No. Give them gifts but not bonuses.
Send everyone you know a gift basket.
“I can introduce you to lots of women/men.”
When you can’t generate revenues, customers, interest, for .
They hate you.
“Yesterday” was like a split second ago for them and a lifetime for you. There’s the law of entrepreneurial relativity. Figure out what that means and live by it.
No. Never.
No. The founder is the head of sales until at least 10 million in sales.
No. You no longer have any boundaries.
Yes. Tell him everything that happened. You’re his partner. Not the guy that hides things and then lies about them.
Should I listen to them? No. Diversify in every way you can.
Only if the business can survive for another six months no matter what.
No. Not for at least two years.
No. Only if you have salary that can pay you for six months at your startup. Aim to quit your job but don’t quit your job.
Ask your customers if your doubts are trustworthy.
Competition is good. It shows you have a decent business model. Now simply outperform them.
Divorce them or close your business.
Get rid of your relationship.
No. Get all the business you can in your local area. Travel is too expensive time-wise.
Document every meeting line-by-line, and send your document to the client right after the meeting.
Nothing. Charge the next client more.
Draw every screen and function. Then outsource someone to make the drawings look like they come from a real app. Then outsource the development of the app. Get a specific schedule. Micromanage the schedule.
Only buy a franchise if it’s underperforming and you can see how to improve it. Don’t buy on future hopes; only buy on past mistakes.
Rely on the three Ds: Death, Debt, Divorce. When someone dies, the heirs will sell a business cheap. When someone is in debt, they will sell a business cheap. When someone divorces, the couple usually has to sell a business cheap. IMPORTANT: even if the trends in the industry are in your favor, you CANNOT predict the future. But you can use the past to help you get a deal. Always get a deal.
Sell your business. There’s only one Google. (Well, there are two or three Googles: Facebook, Twitter … )
Shut down your business.
No. Do guerilla marketing. Read “Newsjacking” and “Trust me I’m Lying.” PR firms screw up from beginning to end. The first time I hired a PR firm, instead of sending me my contract they accidentally sent me their contract for “Terry Bradshaw.” He was paying $12,000 a month. Was it worth it for him?
Don’t be afraid to instantly shut down your business and start over if you can’t sell it. Time is a horrible thing to waste.
Come up with 10 ideas a day about new services your business can offer. Try to get a customer for each new service. I know one business in this situation that refuses to do this because their VCs are telling them to focus more. You’re going to go out of business otherwise.
I don’t know. Did God tell you that in a dream?
It means you’re fired.
No, you should shut up.
You should know the answer to that by now.
That you feel it would be easier for you to grow in the context of a bigger company that has experienced the growing pains you are just starting to go through. That 1+1 = 45.
Sell it as fast as possible (applies in 99 percent of situations). Sell for cash.
No you can’t.
Because I sold my businesses early, lost everything, started new businesses, sold them, and got lucky every now and then.
You create your luck by being healthy and not regretting the past or being anxious about the future. |
Livewith.us Makes The Roommate Search More Social, Less Painful | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | Looking for someone to share your apartment on Craigslist can be a huge pain — so much so, in fact, that when my roommate moved out last year, I considered leaving the room empty. Thanks to some friend-of-friend connections, it all worked out in the end, but if it hadn’t, I probably I could’ve used a service like . Perhaps the first thing to say about Livewith.us is that it’s not actually trying to compete with Craigslist. Instead, its creators expect users to continue posting and finding roommate listings on Craigslist. However, when the someone finds a listing that seems like a good fit, they can apply via Livewith.us. It’s there, in the latter part of the process — the part that’s largely conducted over email — that the site should be useful. Both tenants (the people with an apartment who are looking for a room) and applicants have profiles on the site. They can use data imported from Facebook or they can be built from scratch. Basically, these profiles take the place of the copy-paste-bio-intro-email process and the awkward Facebook search that people might perform to learn more about future roommates. Livewith.us gives you the basic social context (including a list of mutual friends) that you’re looking for without showing you their drunk photos or whatever. Plus, there’s no process of sending messages like, “Hey, we don’t know each other but can you friend me so I can see your profile?” There are other workflow tools for both parties. For the applicants, there’s a dashboard where you can see the status of all your applications, and you can send follow-up messages if you want. For the tenants, a group of roommates can leave notes for each other on each application (the applicant can’t see those notes), and they can also sort applications into virtual piles of Yes, No, and Maybe. Once the applicants are sorted, tenants can send messages to every member of a group — for example, when someone has accepted a room, you can send a generic rejection to everyone else. There are some nice touches in the Craigslist integration, too. Tenants can actually create the listing on Livewith.us, then publish it on Craigslist with a big “apply” button that will lead applicants back to Livewith.us. Applicants can also install the Livewith.us browser plug-in, which will allow them to apply for any listing on Craigslist with a link to their Livewith.us profile. Zach Berke, CEO of (the company that created Livewith.us), said he’s hoping to create a “virtuous cycle” where tenants start using the service, which means applicants will start using it, too. Then they might convince other tenants to use it when they start their next apartment search. Livewith.us is tackling a part of the housing process that’s been relatively neglected by startups. Berke said most other companies have a more pressing need to make money, so they’re going to try to get involved in the owner-tenant or broker-tenant relationship. Exygy, on the other hand, is an online services company, and it created Livewith.us as a side project. So if the project is useful and draws some attention to the company, then it’s a win. That doesn’t mean Berke is totally opposed to making money. He described Livewith.us as the first of what will hopefully be a number of “self-incubated” projects that could eventually spin out if they do really well. There are areas where Livewith.us could charge a fee down the line, such as rental payments. And Berke also suggested that this approach could be brought to other categories, like applying for a job.. “We’re looking at building a With.us universe — we’ll start with Workwith.us and go from there,” he said. |
Doximity, A LinkedIn For Medical Professionals, Now Reaches About 30% Of Doctors In The U.S. | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | , which is like a LinkedIn for physicians that lets them share patient data in a HIPAA-compliant way, said that it’s now reaching about 30 percent of doctors in the country. They’ve got about 200,000 licensed physicians on-board across the U.S. in every major city and sub-specialty. Two hundred thousand users isn’t a grand number in the scheme of most apps. But in the case of a highly-specialized vertical like medicine, it is. “It took LinkedIn many times longer to reach that level of penetration in the white-collar workforce and Doximity has accomplished this ,” said Kevin Spain, a general partner at Emergence Capital Partners who backed the company. The CEO Jeff Tangney is a second-time founder whose previous medical software company Epocrates went for an IPO in 2011. He founded Doximity a few years ago as a way to attack how doctors share medical data on their patients. Hand-offs between doctors are an eternal source of mistakes that can cost patients their lives. “The current system is positively Medieval in terms of how we ask doctors to communicate,” he said. “I saw how much time was wasted with fax machines. There are 15 billion faxes a year sent in the U.S. healthcare system and it’s because there is no other legal way to send your lab report from one office to the other. It’s not HIPAA compliant.” So they built Doximity as a social network for doctors where physicians could look up other colleagues or physicians. Tangney says the platform is speeding up the process with which doctors can find relevant specialists for patients. In one case this week, he said a doctor treating a patient with a tear in their retina was able to find an eye surgeon in the same day. That speed potentially saved the patient’s eyesight. Doximity has a freemium model with two revenue streams at the moment. One is charging for sending patient files above a certain limit, and the other is for honoraria or consultations. For example, an analyst on Wall Street might want to reach out and ask a physician about a potential healthcare investment. They would pay the doctor and Doximity would earn a cut. The company is not yet cash-flow positive, however. The service grew slowly at first, but they’ve started to pick up momentum with doctor-to-doctor referrals generating 80 percent of new users. It helps that there are only a few hundred medical schools in the entire country, so the industry is very tightly-networked to begin with. Each doctor on the network has about 25 different colleagues and the company has mapped about 10 million unique connections in the network. “We’re winning based on network effects at this point,” Tangney said. Doximity has to verify physicians to allow them into the network by checking their DEA number (which is a number assigned to medical professionals by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration), social security number or examining their medical license. The company has raised about $27.8 million in total, with two rounds including investors like Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Capital, and Morgenthaler Ventures. The at about $80 million. |
Forget Your Phone | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8] This video made the rounds yesterday, tugging at heartstrings and giving us all in the Era Of Communication a bit of a kick in the buttocks. It shows a woman who forgot her phone. The premise is hokey at best, but it still tells us something about ourselves these past few years. Our world is endlessly mediated through lenses and screens. They used to tell us we’d get cancer if we sat too close to the TV. Now we have TVs in our hands at all times. Where is that nagging voice now to tell us when enough is enough? There’s a reason it’s called : it puts a pane of the clear stuff between us and the world. Digital detox isn’t enough. We need this new technology to do our jobs and to live our lives. What is necessary is the understanding that looking something up on Google at a cozy little cafe is not as satisfying as figuring out on your own that Tia, from the short-lived TV series Uncle Buck, was in the first episode of the Wonder Years. We don’t need to detox. We need to see the world as a glorious puzzle again. We can sigh into our beers all day long, complaining things have changed. That rarely, if ever, helps. What we have to do is just sit still for a minute and not click anything, not peck at a screen, and not think about how amazing this would be on Vine. We’re figuring out a brave new world right now. Let’s not make the same mistakes we made in the old one. |
How Fast Should You Be Growing? | Contributor | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | wrote a great in which he defines a startup as a “company designed to grow fast” and encouraged founders to constantly measure their growth rates. For companies, he notes that a good growth rate is 5 to 7 percent per week, while an exceptional growth rate is 10 percent per week. But 10 percent growth can’t last forever. If it did, the results would be astonishing. A company making $100 each week growing 10 percent weekly would generate $15 billion in annual revenue after just three years. Even Google and Facebook didn’t do that. The law of large numbers catches up to everyone. So if the success of your startup is measured by your growth rate, how do you know if you’re growing fast enough? At IVP, we researched this very question. We pulled data on Internet and software IPOs since 2010 and tracked the historical growth rates for each company for the four years before they went public and the year of the IPO. Some of the 70 companies on the list (like Groupon) grew incredibly quickly at first, but, as they scaled, they slowed down like a rocket ship getting pulled back down to Earth. Other companies (like HomeAway*) initially grew at a more measured pace but maintained this growth rate through their IPOs and beyond. While every company and market is different, we aggregated the data to arrive at median growth rates at different revenue ranges (as shown in the graph below): As the chart above shows, if you’re hoping to be a public company, you should be growing significantly faster (by percentage) the smaller you are. The median company with revenues between $0 and $25 million grew at a whopping 133 percent. As these companies scaled to the $150 million to $500 million revenue range, they grew at a more modest rate of 38 percent per year. Additionally, the companies with the most successful IPOs ( , Workday, , ServiceNow, *, LinkedIn, etc.) achieved growth rates at or above the median benchmarks in each of the years we examined before the IPO. As expected, the median revenue multiple at IPO for these companies was significantly higher at 7.3x. Conversely, the median revenue multiple for companies with growth rates below the median benchmarks in each of the years was only 3.8x. We also learned a few other lessons: Companies are only able to go public if they are growing quickly. Out of the 70 IPOs that we tracked in our analysis, 69 of them were growing faster than 20 percent in the year of their IPO, and 54 of them were growing faster than 30 percent. The quality of the revenue matters just as much as the quantity and growth rate. The companies in our dataset that were valued most favorably at IPO have predictable revenue streams, high-gross margins and low customer churn. These companies generally avoid services and other one-time revenue. While we focused exclusively on pre-IPO data, these benchmarks hold true for public companies, as well. At the time of its IPO in May 2011, LinkedIn was valued at $4 billion. Since then, it has grown revenues above $1 billion at an 86 percent annual CAGR, which greatly exceeds our benchmarks. As a result, the company is valued at over $26 billion today. |
Gillmor Gang Live 08.24.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | – Doc Searls, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
Justdelete.me Wants To Help You Pull The Plug On All Those Pesky Online Accounts | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | It’s tiring, isn’t it? Doing everything online, I mean. Everyday you log into services tailor-made for shopping, searching, sharing, watching, chatting, curating, reading, bragging — that’s a lot of places to keep your personal information, and no one could blame you if you wanted to try to pare down on those extraneous connections. Hell, I’d like nothing better myself sometimes. A U.K.-based duo consisting of developer and designer seem to understand that desire awfully well, and they teamed up to create what may be a truly indispensable resource. It’s called , and as the name sort of implies, it’s a directory of links to pages where you can lay waste to your myriad online accounts. It’s a deceptively simple resource. You’re greeted with a sizable grid that points you to a slew of popular web services that you probably use. More specifically, those links point you straight at the pages where you can deactivate all those pesky accounts… or at least where you can try. Thankfully, Lewis has done the due diligence to figure out which services can be disconnected from painlessly and which ones require you to (ugh) actually communicate with someone to get the job done. A disconcerting number of sites and services fall into that latter category. Of the ones that Lewis has added, 10 won’t let you kill your account without first talking to a customer service rep, and 4 (Netflix, Steam, Starbucks, and WordPress) don’t seem to let you delete your accounts at all. Of course, it’s in these companies’ best interests to keep the account deletion process as obtuse (one might say ) as possible. The less progress you make on that front, the more likely you are to say “screw it” and remain in their clutches. As useful as the site can be for people looking to disconnect sans headaches, it’s far from being a complete compendium. Lewis notes that Justdelete.me is very much a work-in-progress — he’ll gladly accept suggestions for services that people think should be on the list, and here’s hoping this thing continues to pick up steam. |
Jobs, Robots, Capitalism, Inequality, And You | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 24 | . Maybe everything will be fine. Maybe the “ between ” is temporary. Maybe the steady growth in the proportion of jobs that are and/or will soon reverse. Or maybe the idea that is not unlike the claim that new technologies automatically create new jobs for everyone. Maybe, unless something drastic changes, most people are totally screwed. This has not been a great decade for the average American. The recession ended in 2009, but median household income remains what it was in December 2007…while the income of the top 10% . Meanwhile, productivity growth has been exceedingly sluggish on both sides of the Atlantic. , and : In the early 2000s, in both Britain and America growth and wages peeled apart. The economy kept growing, but median earners did not feel the benefit… in Britain a net 360,000 self-employed jobs have been created in the first four years of recovery… The self-employed work longer but their median hourly earnings are less than half those of employees. Another theory is far more disconcerting: it’s the suggestion that “the economic progress of the past 250 years may have been a unique period in human history.” As : At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off … The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed. Which neatly echoes Peter Thiel’s “The End of the Future”: Technological progress has fallen short in many domains… While innovation in medicine and biotechnology has not stalled completely, here too signs of abound… By default, computers have become the single great hope for the technological future. The economic decoupling of computers from everything else leads to more questions than answers, and barely hints at the strange future where today’s trends simply continue. The strange present, we may conclude, is one in which the middle class is slowly being squeezed out of an economy that is gradually dividing into two camps, the few rich and the many poor. Furthermore, “rich” increasingly means “those working in technology.” Of course there are other wealthy sectors — oil, finance — but tech is the high-growth startup amid those stodgy, stagnating elephants. This is happening first and most in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which are “increasingly divided between young, wealthy tech workers and those who say they are being pushed out of a city they can no longer afford,” the LA Times, leading to: "…a new phase of Silicon Valleyites Acting Massively Arrogant, Entitled, and Generally Just Obnoxious." — Jon Evans (@rezendi) …but the tech/non-tech divide will metastasize and spread everywhere else soon enough. That’s an inexorable consequence of “ .” Henry Blodget : “Hate To Say It, But If Companies Don’t Start Paying People Better, We May Need Unions.” But unions only matter if labor is valuable, and with every passing year, technology renders labor more irrelevant. When the 5.7 million licensed truck drivers in America are , they can go ahead and strike all they like. Nobody will care. Hardly anybody who matters — which is to say, the rich, the powerful, the technical — will even . And it’s not just truck drivers and factory workers. Better software and better robots are already beginning to replace , , , even , and countless other workers, including those poor souls in technology who . The new law of the economic jungle is this: either write the software that eats the world, or be eaten. Maybe that’s why app stores are filled with “the next ” instead of , and why most app developers still target iOS first, instead of the Android masses. That’s where the (perceived) money is. As the and the poor get poorer, faster and faster, the rich become an ever more tempting target…and the poor are more quickly forgotten. So. The global economy seems to be bifurcating into a rich/tech track and a poor/non-tech track, not least because new technology will increasingly destroy/replace old non-tech jobs. (Yes, . Foxconn is already replacing Chinese employees with .) So far so fairly non-controversial. The big thorny question is this: is technology destroying jobs faster than it creates them? A whole lot of people say For instance, Scott Winship’s “ .” Similarly, last time I wrote about this I received angry Twitter commentary claiming that sociologists had proved this as fact long ago, complete with links to studies from, er, 1988. These “nothing to worry about here” claims tend to advance two theses at the same time. The first is “this didn’t happen in the past, so it won’t happen now,” which — apologies to those people who will inevitably make that very claim in the comments below — is so foolish it makes me weep. We live in an era of in technological capabilities. (Which , true, but that’s an issue for decades hence.) If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if it has to today’s situation, then you do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is qualitative, not just quantitative. It’s like comparing a leisurely walk to relativistic speeds. However. The second thesis is one which I am less ready to dismiss. As Winship puts it: If technology reduces demand for labor by a quarter, that might translate into everyone working 25 percent less rather than unemployment rising by one-fourth. I fully agree. Indeed, in my view, the ultimate purpose of technology is to destroy jobs and bring on a . Let’s face it, a whole lot of today’s jobs are already ; but they persist because we live within an economic system built by, for, and around people with full-time jobs. The trouble is, we can’t get there from here, not without wholesale changes. Machines will reduce labor, yes, great: but equally, across all of society? You must be joking. If technology cuts the demand for labor by 25%, then laborers will earn 25% less, or 25% of them will become unemployed, while all the benefits go to those who own and/or built/wrote that technology. That’s capitalism. “Just turn the newly unemployed into entrepeneurs!” the cargo-cult believers chant. Yeah, right. Let me quote again: “The self-employed work longer, but their median hourly earnings are less than half those of employees.” Entrepeneurialism is not magic pixie dust. Most entrepeneurs fail. Everyone I know was (rightly) contemptuous of, and disgusted by, the that the homeless can be raised out of poverty with a few JavaScript textbooks. But the notion that America’s six million licensed truck and taxi drivers will all find new-new-economy jobs once start putting them out of business? I fail to see how that’s much different. And again, it’s not just truckers; almost every job, probably including yours, runs the risk of being obsoleted when software eats the world…or when the next version eats it again, even faster. Meanwhile, retraining is slow, 50% of the population is below average, and even if technology does eventually create as many jobs as it destroys, there’s no guarantee that those jobs will be available to the entire population, or appear in a timely manner. The result, in a world built around the precepts that most people must have jobs and unemployment is a disaster: economic devastation for those affected. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything will be fine and the next generation will quickly find themselves overwhelmed with offers for jobs that don’t exist today. But there’s no conclusive evidence either way, and by the time there is, it’ll probably be too late to make meaningful changes. So we need to at least seriously consider the possibility that our current economic system is fundamentally incapable of dealing with this rising technological whirlwind, and that most people live in houses with much thinner walls than they want to believe. If I’m right, then the under- and unemployed masses will grow ever more frustrated, angry, and resentful of the distant and decadent elite who reap all the wealth and benefits of this Great Devouring. (I think we can all agree that San Francisco’s already getting pretty decadent.) The rich will in turn will presumably accuse the masses of trying to freeload on the immense wealth generated by their disruptive innovations. And instead of taking the first few faltering steps towards a post-scarcity society, i.e. a better world with fewer jobs, we’ll charge headlong into class warfare. I’m a huge fan of capitalism. But I can’t shake the thought that in a decade or two we may need to move to what I call -capitalism. Whether that means a (endorsed by Milton Friedman!) or something else — and whether it has to happen the hard way, via some kind of social uprising by the have-nots — I don’t know. But I fear that if our basic economic foundation doesn’t evolve, then we’ll squander most of the enormous cornucopia of benefits that new technologies offer us. That’s not (yet) inevitable; but right now, alas, it seems to me all too likely. , by Steve Jurvetson, (CC license) |
FitTrip Will Take You On Tours Of The World From The Safety Of Your Gym | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | I’m a mediocre runner at best, and I’ve taken to blaming that on the dearth of idyllic running spots in my particular corner of New Jersey. For schlubs like me, the key to true fitness may lay in something like , a Kickstarter project that vows to liven up the experience of working out indoors. The concept is a simple one: FitTrip is an app for your iPad that attempts to simulate the experience of running down a trail in Utah or zipping along on a bike in the Rocky Mountains from the safety of a treadmill or stationary bike. Once you lash your tablet to the workout contraption of your choice and fire up the app, you’re given the option to choose from a slew of locales to immerse yourself in. From there, you’re treated to a video of your chosen course to take your mind off the intense physical discomfort you’re feeling — throw in a few electric fans to simulate the wind whipping your hair around and it’s almost like you’re enjoying the great outdoors indoors. Sadly, FitTrip can’t actually control your workout equipment, so there’s no way to automatically ramp up the resistance to match the intensity of the setting you’ve chosen. The team has cooked up a pretty savvy solution though — the app is capable of connecting with a handful of popular heart rate monitors, so the harder you work out, the faster your heart beats, and the quicker the video plays. The end result (they hope) is an experience that manages to approximate the sensation of exercising in a gorgeous foreign locale, or at least distracts you from the drudgery of your surroundings. The FitTrip app is still in beta so it’s hard to get a feel for just how immersive these videos can actually be, but at the very least they’ll be better than watching Judge Judy reruns on a 6-inch television screen mounted on an elliptical at your local gym. Access to all these trips comes at a price, though: after the Kickstarter campaign wraps up, curious consumers will have to pay $5.99/month to access FitTrip’s library of scenic videos. Naturally, early backers can lock up longer-term subscriptions at lower rates — $25 will nab you a six-month package, with deals getting sweeter the higher you climb up the backer spectrum. Fortunately, the FitTrip campaign has already blown past its $7,500 funding goal in under a week, which means backers should receive their doses of digital escapism in a few short months.
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Motorola’s New Keyboard-Packing Droid 5 Reportedly Caught On Film | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Motorola just showed off last month (or, if you prefer, one new Droid and two spinoffs), but it’s apparently not done cranking out Verizon hardware just yet. Another new Motorola device clad in Verizon livery was spotted in a batch of newly leaked images from Chinese social network Weibo, and it seems to hearken back to the Droid line’s roots. Unlike the trim, all-touch smartphones that Motorola has been enamored with lately, the most eye-catching feature of the alleged Droid 5 is the same sort of slide-out QWERTY keyboard its forebears also had. According to , the D5 also has a display between 4.3 and 4.5 inches and a body that’s resistant to dust and water. I know, I know, it seems a little yawn-worthy at first glance (even for sliding keyboard suckers like me). Curiously enough, that big five-row keyboard isn’t the only difference between whatever this is and the other Droids that have just started hitting store shelves. One of the images depicts a camera interface complete with a discrete shutter button on the touchscreen, a UI flourish that doesn’t exist on either the Moto X or the Droid Ultra. That super-simple, touch-anywhere approach to snapping photos on the go is a feature Motorola brass have been talking up for a while now, so it’s quite surprising to see that the company may be mulling a reversion toward the mean. If we’re lucky, that just means Motorola is still trying to lock down some of its UI experiences… though arguably a solution the company already worked out was the better way to go. The grimmer scenario is that the Droid 5 outright lacks some of the niceties its cousins have, which is certainly one way to compartmentalize a product portfolio. At this point there are still more questions than answers, but judging by the fit and finish of the phone in those images, it shouldn’t be too long before Motorola officially springs this thing on us and all our questions are answered.
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Drivewyze Raises $7.5M From Emergence, iNovia To Streamline Commercial Trucking | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | , which helps commercial trucking companies save time by bypassing weigh stations through a mobile app, just raised $7.5 million in a round led by Emergence Capital Partners and iNovia Capital. They’ll use the capital for a sales and marketing expansion of their bypass service that should bring their offering nationwide by next year. It works through a mobile app that alerts a subscribing trucker when they are about two miles away from an inspection site. It’s currently available in 16 states, but the company is hoping to get to full national coverage in 2014. The company is a spinout from , a Canadian road technology company that has been around for a decade. They launched Drivewyze as a standalone division last year and starting signing up truck fleets with good historical safety scores. They built a commercial mobile radio service that allows their platform to communicate with inspection sites. When truckers are about one mile from a Drivewyze-enabled inspection site, the app will let the driver know whether to bypass it or report in for an inspection depending on what the local law enforcement agency says they should do. Their business model is to charge $7.99 per month for a single state and $12.99 for a multi-state plan. Emergence Capital, which is an enterprise-focused fund that has backed Salesforce, Yammer and Box, has been looking for software-as-a-service bets that cater to very specific verticals including transportation and health. They have about $575 million under management. |
Yahoo Acquires Image-Recognition Startup IQ Engines To Improve Flickr Photo Organization & Search | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Oh, so you thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree was over? Not even close. A Yahoo spokesperson has confirmed that the revitalized web giant has snapped up yet another company — this time it’s an image-recognition startup called . Yahoo has declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but the IQ Engines team confirmed in a statement on its website that they have been tapped to join the Flickr team where they will work on “improving photo organization and search for the community.” IQ Engines first made a splash back in 2010 when it snapped up $1 million in funding for crafting an API that would allow its customers (think online retailers and app developers) to provide a visual search engine of sorts that could automatically categorize images on the fly. It later appeared at that year’s , where our own Alexia Tsotsis picked it as one of the show’s . Eventually, the startup would come to maintain two APIs. The first was called , and it was geared mostly toward retailers who wanted users to interact with products and brand logos by scanning them with their smartphone cameras. The other API, , allows for photo analysis and facial recognition for online photo albums and mobile apps — if I were a betting man, I’d wager this is the bit Yahoo is really after. Those APIs were adopted by a host of high-profile customers including retailers Best Buy, Old Navy, and Tesco, though the APIs they had access to will be shut down in 30 days. More recently, though, IQ Engines locked up a $3.8 million Series B from Third Point Ventures and Motorola Solutions’ venture arm (not to be confused with the totally separate mobile division that Google now owns). So what’s the IQ Engines team going to do now? While IQ Engines’ main bread and butter was offering image-recognition APIs, it was also working on a mobile photo album application called Glow that organizes the images on your smartphone into categories based on automatically generated tags. As seen in a demo video (below) released back in July, the app is not only smart enough to tag photos based on location, but also their contents. A quick bit of tapping meant users would be able to view all their sunset photos, or all the photos that prominently feature faces in them. Given the team’s statement, it wouldn’t be a shock to see them try to bring some of this contextual intelligence to Flickr as a whole, though the Flickr mobile app seems like a more logical starting point. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkUXRx3jFlU&w=853&h=480] |
Google Glass Isn’t Coming To Best Buy Next Year, And It Won’t Cost $299 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Even though Google Glass is out in the wild and on the heads of around 10,000 people, there are still plenty of questions about it. For a long time now, we’ve heard that Glass would retail for $299. And earlier this week, unofficial Glass evangelist put a bit more oil on the fire when he that Best Buy would rent out 6,000 square feet inside each one of its stores to Google to showcase Glass. All of that sounds great — even though 6,000 square feet sounds like quite a lot — but Google’s Chris Dale, who runs comms for Google Glass, today put those rumors to an end. In a tweet, he noted that Glass isn’t coming to Best Buy in 2014, and that it won’t cost $299. We have verified with Dale that this is, indeed, his tweet and account. It wasn’t hacked. Google Glass not coming to Best Buy in 2014… oh, and it won't be $299 either. — Chris Dale (@cadale) So there you have it. Obviously, this could mean that Glass will cost $298 or $599, but it’s definitely not coming to Best Buy anytime soon. For now, it’s pretty clear that Google wants to control the Glass sales experience from top to bottom. The company has rented out space in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles for people to pick up their Glass. It’s not clear if it will continue to rent these spaces once it starts selling Glass, but there is no reason to believe that it won’t. Best Buy already features dedicated store-within-a-store areas for selling Apple products and recently , too. Google’s Chromebooks also get some shelf space in most stores. : As for the price, there is really no way of knowing how much Google will charge. I’d actually be surprised if Google knew. The $299 price tag always felt a bit low, given that the developer version is going for $1,499 now. But if Google kept the same hardware, it could even go for as little as $199 next year, or the company could decide to go much higher. It’s very unlikely we’ll find out before the end of the year, but that won’t keep us from trying to find out. For now, the $299 rumor can be put to rest, though. |
Growth Product Manager Erin Teague Leaves Path For Quora | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | , a growth product manager at Path, is leaving for the same position at Quora, . At Quora, Teague replaces , whose Twitter handle is amusingly @ibringtraffic. Johns to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock Partners. No word yet on who will replace Teague at Path, but they will face interesting challenges. We’ve heard mixed reports on Path’s growth, although the company proudly announced last week that the app is now opened over a billion times a month. I’ve reached out to Path for comment, but haven’t heard back yet. It’s official – I’m joining !! Incredible team. Meaningful mission. I couldn’t be more excited to get started!! — Erin Teague (@ErinTeague) An earlier version of this story noted that Teague’s role was a growth project manager, while it is actually a growth product manager. Apologies for the error. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 6 | null |
Inside Ballmer’s Exit And Who Definitely Won’t Be Microsoft’s Next CEO | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that in the next 12 months. His successor is not known, but the move marks the end of an era in technology, as Ballmer himself has become a controversial stalwart in the sector. The stock market with a 7.29 percent bump in its share price following the news. However, Ballmer’s final years at the company have been . Windows 8, Windows Phone, Azure, and other new products have reformed Microsoft’s software lineup. Executive exits, a re-org, and a shift in business model have remade the company, at least in theory. During his stretch as CEO, Ballmer has overseen a company that has weathered internal gridlock and market woes. That said, the last few years of Microsoft history have been turbulent. And perhaps turbulent in a way that is good for the firm. My good friend and colleague Frederic Lardinois and I sat down to talk over the news. Have a view: |
Locket, Which Puts Ads On Your Lock Screen, Asks Users To Vote For The Ads They Want To See | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | , the startup that pays Android users to engage with ads, is now asking those users to weigh in on the type of ads that they want to see. When users install Locket, they’ll start to see ads on their lock screens, and they can swipe left to claim a deal, watch a movie trailer, or whatever the desired engagement is. (Or they can swipe right and go back to using their phone.) Users are paid 1 cent for each new ad they see. That may not sound like much, but co-founder and CEO Yunha Kim said it can add up over the weeks and months, and users can then donate the money to charity, put it on a gift card or just cash out. Since , Kim said the team has received “thousands of emails” from users requesting ads from specific brands. It might seem a little strange to be actively asking for ads, but Kim attributed this to the fact that Locket only allows high-quality ads into the system — she described the lock screen as a “sacred, personal space.” (Another possible explanation: If you’ve got an incentive to look at ads, you might as well try to get ads that you find interesting and relevant.) So earlier this week, the Locket team launched where users can submit the names of brands whose ads they’d like to see, and they can vote on the brands submitted by others. The company then promoted the page with a Locket ad, and the top brands, which are currently — in descending order — Sony, Samsung and Google, now have more than 1,000 votes. Not that an early lead means users will start seeing Sony, Samsung and Google ads in the next week. “We have to do a good job with that,” Kim said. “If someone says, “Hey, I want to see Samsung ads,’ I can’t just call them and have them advertise. There’s a sales cycle.” She added that her goal is to bring ads from the most popular brands into Locket by this holiday season. Locket has been downloaded nearly 90,000 times since launch, Kim said, and there are about 80,000 active users. |
Instagram’s First Acquisition Is Video Sharing App Luma | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Instagram has just made its first acquisition, buying both the team and technology of Y Combinator company (formerly known as Midnox). Luma created a video-capture, stabilization and sharing app, which will be shut down soon. In fact, one source tells us Luma’s stabilization technology is already live in Instagram. Luma’s iOS app has been pulled from the App Store but existing users will continue to be supported until December 31, 2013. Users can . We were tipped off to the acquisition, and Facebook has since confirmed that it is Instagram’s first, and the deal is for both talent and technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Luma team writes: “Eighteen months ago, we embarked on a mission to make capturing and sharing beautiful videos easy without expensive software or heavy equipment. By joining the exceptionally talented team at Instagram, we’re taking another big step towards realizing that mission.” Along with being in Y Combinator, Luma was formerly part of . Unlike the rash of acqui-hires in Silicon Valley, this deal comes with Luma’s technology. This includes video stabilization, which Instagram is apparently now using to improve its own stabilization tech that launched alongside its new video sharing feature in June. Instagram might also make use of Luma’s “non-disruptive” video filtering technology, which allows videos to be shot with filters turned on, but switched or removed after a video has been recorded. Luma also had a suite of video-editing tools that could aid Instagram’s 130 million+ users. These include sliders for changing the brightness, contrast, saturation and exposure of videos. You can see its “Infinite Filter” technology in action in . This impressive technology led TechCrunch to name Midnox/Luma one of the . The acquisition highlights the increasing differentiation in product and strategy of Vine and Instagram. Vine is trading on simplicity and spontaneity. Its app features a quicker publishing process for its six-second videos with no need to choose a cover frame. You also have to shoot videos entirely within Vine, making it more of an art form in and of itself. That contrasts with Instagram, which is trading on power and flexibility. You can add filters to its 15-second videos and enable stabilization, but also have to sacrifice speed to pick a cover frame so your video look good beside photos in the Instagram feed. You can also upload previously shot (and edited) videos, allowing for more professional clips that could be a hit with advertisers one day. This all makes Instagram more of a sharing medium than its own art form. If that’s the route Instagram chooses to take, it needs the best video editing technology it can buy, hence the Luma deal. The challenge will be making these tools available at a moment’s notice without bloating Instagram into a mobile Final Cut Pro. |
Why I Hate Conferences But Love TechCrunch Disrupt | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Conferences can be dull, soul-sucking enterprises. Too often, the stage is filled with the same speakers saying the same things and providing too little value to the people who’ve paid to attend. Those sessions are sometimes complemented with sponsored messages from universally bad companies touting their latest new thing that probably sucks. They’re a necessary evil, I know. Conferences are how businesses like TechCrunch actually make money, because display ads ain’t gonna pay the bills just on their own. At best though, most conferences are just an opportunity to see people you haven’t seen since the last conference you went to, and to discuss all the things that haven’t changed while you’re chatting over lunch. Which is a horrible way to network, because most conference food sucks. There’s something different about , however. Last year, I joined TechCrunch about a week before Disrupt NY. They flew me out to attend, and it was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. We had Fred Wilson and David Karp and John Borthwick on stage. The U.S. Government . Josh asked Tim Armstrong how he felt about . I drank Adrian Grenier’s beer.* Anyway, it all kind of blew me away. Then a funny thing happened. Last year’s Disrupt SF was even better. I mean, Zuck. I could probably just drop the mic right there, but what about Ben Horowitz, Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose, Matt Cohler, Reid Hoffman, Ev and Biz? , on our stage to talk about the iPhone 5? This year’s promises to top both of those, and I’m not just saying that because I work here and Alexia assigned this story to me. I mean, and see for yourself. I’ve been told this might be a good place to put in a . Anyway, here are the things I love about Disrupt: Unlike so many other conferences I’ve been to, Disrupt doesn’t invite big name speakers to get on stage and say nothing interesting for 20 minutes. Or, worse, to trot out all the same talking points that we’ve heard from all the same people over and over again. “The reason I find [Disrupt] worth attending is that I want the people on stage to be on stage more than they do,” my colleague Alex said the other day. And this is coming from a guy who was our competitor . The other thing about the speaker lineup is that we have people coming out for Disrupt who don’t normally do these things. I mean, we’ve somehow gotten folks like and to come out of hiding for this one. (Maybe this time I’ll ?) Last year at Disrupt SF, I saw something pretty amazing. At some point during Arrington’s interview with Reid Hoffman, I look over and there’s Marc Benioff sitting in the front row, taking the whole thing in. I mean, how often do you see the CEO of a company with a $20 billion market cap just hanging out in the audience at a conference? It’s not just Benioff, though. Folks like Mike McCue and Vinod Khosla don’t just come and sit on stage, they also can be seen walking through Startup Alley, meeting with entrepreneurs and seeing what’s new. Which is pretty damn cool. There’s nothing quite like watching today’s technology leaders for half a day and then seeing a group of fresh new startups coming up to the stage and presenting for the first time the thing they’ve been working on. As Ingrid said the other day, the juxtaposition of the two “creates a spark.” And then there’s the quality of the startups competing, which is just so, so good. I mean, where else are you going to find a ** competing against a ? Love him or hate him, the man is a pro. He’ll do five or six interviews at one of these events and he’ll always be the best-prepared person taking the stage. Oh, and that no bullshit thing I was talking about? A lot of it comes from Arrington, because he’s not going to let you sit there and say nothing interesting for 20 minutes. Everyone loved the last year, and it was pretty great. But for my money, the highlight of Disrupt SF 2012 was watching Arrington grill David Sacks about how there’s supposedly no more innovation happening in Silicon Valley. To do so, Arrington reads off a long list of famous quotes that ended up being disproven, much like that “Silicon Valley as we know it may be coming to an end.” Spoiler alert: It’s not. ==
* It was not delicious
** Lit Motors was robbed |
Ask A VC: Menlo Ventures’ Mark Siegel On The Opportunity For Building Startups In ‘The Right Now Economy’ | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Menlo Ventures’ managing director Mark Siegel in the TCTV studio. Siegel, who focuses on investments in enterprise and advertising, has recently penned a presentation on the opportunities in mobile, social, cloud computing and data, titled the While many companies like Uber, Netflix and others are taking advantage of some of the current opportunities, explains Siegel in the interview, the next wave of startups taking advantage of this trend will likely be in health care, education and financial services. Siegel also talked about what metrics he looks at when evaluating a company for investment at the seed or Series A level and more. |
Facebook Ditches Physical Gifts To Double-Down On Digital Codes And Its Own Brick-&-Mortar Gift Card | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | is getting a major redesign that will end sales of physical gifts. It will now focus on suggesting you buy friends digital gift codes or Facebook’s omni-Gift Card credit to spend at brands and local businesses they Like, which now get their own Gifts landing page. These two types of Gifts made up 80% of sales, cost less to ship and support, so it makes sense to invest in them in the rollout coming the next few weeks. in September 2012 to fanfare that it might challenge ecommerce kingpin Amazon. Gifts fell short of those lofty expectations, though. The product let you buy physical gifts like chocolate and stuff animals or digital gift cards to Starbucks or Uber for friends on special occasions like their birthday. Facebook later added sales and , plus began surfacing opportunities to buy Gifts in mobile. Still, sales were suspected to be slow and Facebook reported $5 million in earnings between Gifts and User Promoted Posts in Q4 2012, giving the product a on the company’s bottom line compared to ads and game payments. So Facebook tried something new. It launched its own . It’s a credit-card style plastic slice you could buy for friends that Facebook would mail to them. It would come loaded with the Gift credit you bought them, and could be remotely topped-up with money to spend at different specific brick-&-mortar stores if other friends bought them Gift credits. With time, Facebook saw that only 20% of total Gift sales were for physical products, while gift credits to Starbucks and iTunes were the biggest sellers. It turned out it was difficult to recommend specific products to buy for friends. However, Facebook’s data on people’s interests, location, and social graph made it easy to recommend whole brands or businesses to buy friends digital gift codes and Facebook Gift Card credit. So starting today, 10% of the U.S. user base will receive the redesigned version of Gifts that eliminates physical gifts. The rest of the U.S. will get it over the next few weeks. Facebook Gifts manager (and former CEO of gifting app to power Gifts) Lee Linden tells me it was worth it for Facebook to invest in the product and not kill it off entirely because revenue from Gifts is “definitely going up. It’s been steadily going up since the beginning of the year and I think it will keep going up with this.” Beyond the disappearance of physical gifts, there’s a bunch of changes to the product and buying experience that you’ll see in the Facebook website birthday’s section, on friends’ walls, and in the mobile feed. Previously, the Gifts buying interface opened in a little overlaid window on Facebook’s website. Now it will have its own Gifts marketplace landing page, and each brand will get their own URL for their gift shop. That means businesses can finally share a direct link to where you can buy Facebook Gifts from them. That makes it much easier for brands like Williams-Sonoma, Whole Foods, and Express to promote their store front. Before, they had to tell people to sniff them out inside the cluttered Gifts window. Businesses could even buy Facebook Promoted Post ads to boost traffic to their store, or Facebook might consider a special ad unit for Gift shops. This means Facebook could double-dip, earning money to drive traffic to Gifts as well as a revenue share when people buy them. Depending on the business, you’ll be able to buy gifts codes that can be instantly redeemed on ecommerce websites or in apps like Uber, or load up a friend’s Facebook Gift card with credit they can take to the mall and spend in person. Because it doesn’t have to recommend you specific products but just whole businesses, Facebook is going to be leaning more heavily on your friends’ personal information to suggest where to buy them Gifts from. To go with the greater emphasis on brick-&-mortar shopping through the Facebook Gift Cards, Facebook will now be factoring people’s check-ins (correction: but not photo locations) into recommendations. So if you check-in at Olive Garden, Facebook might suggest your friend buy you Facebook Gift Card credit to the italian restaurant chain. You’ll also be able to buy gift credit in any denomination, so you could gift me $29 to Target for my 29th birthday. Linden tells me “The whole point of Gifts is to learn about commerce on Facebook and build a product that users wants. We’re going to improve commerce overall on Facebook in a number of ways. Gifts is a natural extension but not the end.” He explains the other components include commerce discovery from seeing apps your friends use as well as mobile app install ads, and to help you automatically input your billing details when you buy other ecommerce apps. Together, Gifts, ads, and payment info input could combine to help Facebook prove it delivers return on investment to advertisers. If Facebook is selling the gift or involved in an off-app payment that began with a click from one of Facebook’s ads, it can tell businesses the exact ROI of their ad spend. That’s key to getting them to spend more. Facebook is finally realizing its synergies in commerce. Hawking a random scattershot of kitschy physical gifts didn’t play to its strengths over other ecommerce providers. But what Facebook does has is personal data. It knows what your friends are interested in and where they go. By harnessing that information to recommend what you should buy them, Facebook is taking the guess-work out of gifting. If you’re going to get someone a gift card, it may as well be to someplace they Like. |
Uber Confirms That It Raised $258M From Google Ventures And TPG | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Well, it’s official — Uber has confirmed that it raised $258 million in new funding and added a couple of new members to its board of directors to help move it forward. In a blog post that but was quickly taken down, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick confirmed that the new money came from Google Ventures and TPG. The company plans to use the funding to move into new markets and begin marketing efforts, as well as to fight off protectionist, anti-competitive efforts, Kalanick wrote. And while the money will surely help, the backing from the new investors and board members should be equally as important. Along with the funding, Google SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will be joining the board. On Google backing, Kalanick said the company will be looking to connect strategically around product initiatives. Also, the startup will likely lean on Google for help with local governments and regulatory bodies as it expands. TPG founding partner David Bonderman will also be joining the board. On the TPG side, Kalanick wrote that it will look to the private equity firm for some of its operations and their regulatory know-how. Since the blog post has been taken down, here’s the text of the announcement as it first appeared: As many of you have seen in the press today, Uber recently closed a financing round. We wanted to put out the official word to make sure the facts were clear and confirmed. This round is $258 million with proceeds to be used to expand into new markets, begin marketing efforts, and fight off protectionist, anti-competitive efforts. The financing was led by Google Ventures with TPG Growth participating. David Drummond, Google’s SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer will be joining the Uber board. David Bonderman, founding partner of TPG, will also be joining the board. The numbers on this financing are fairly substantial. It is a reflection of our growth to date and continuing success. But with this new investment, expectations naturally increase and there is a new standard of excellence and accomplishment that we seek to live up to. Our vision is to build a technology company that changes transportation and logistics in urban centers around the world and this financing gives us the fuel to make that a reality. We couldn’t be more excited to embark on the next phase of our journey with our new partners, both truly great in their respective industries. I like to talk about this combination of investors as “Bits and Atoms.” Bits On one end we have Google, a technology powerhouse, with billions of users on an incredibly complementary product suite ranging from Google Maps to Android to self-driving vehicles. We look to Google for the strategic connectivity to their product initiatives alongside the expertise that comes with evangelizing new technology with governments and regulatory bodies around the world. David Drummond is our partner at Google who will help us navigate the company and provide strategic advice as our regulatory efforts follow our launches across Europe and Asia. Atoms With TPG, we have partnered up with one of the most prolific private equity firms in the world. Why does that matter? How are they different than any of the traditional venture capital firms? It’s really simple: TPG owns and operates companies. The Uber deal is obviously very different, but their deep rolodex of operations executives and their regulatory know-how in highly regulated, “atoms”-based industries in the farthest corners of the globe is where TPG shines. David Bonderman’s vision and relationships will be invaluable to Uber as we become a global brand. So that’s the news. I hope this clarifies what Uber is looking to do with this new funding, and sheds some light on the groundbreaking investment partnership we’ve put together for Uber’s next phase of growth. Uber On, Travis |
Fly Or Die: The Nvidia Shield | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | In this decidedly dorky edition of Fly Or Die, yours truly and TC’s resident Canadian Darrell Etherington duke it out over Nvidia’s curious Shield game console and what it means for the future of Android gaming. In a surprising twist (well, surprising if you haven’t already ), Darrell is absolutely smitten with the thing. Honestly, it’s a little hard not to be — we both agree that the Shield is a top-notch piece of kit, with hearty spec sheet, one of the best screens we’ve seen on a mobile device, and a level of fit and finish that puts most standalone Bluetooth controllers for smartphones to shame. Throw in the ability to stream full-blown PC games from computers with the prerequisite graphics cards, you’ve got yourself an awfully compelling little package. Meanwhile, I’m a little more skeptical of the Shield’s chances. My main beef is that the Android ecosystem doesn’t yet play home to the sorts of games that make a $299 portable console like this worth owning. That’s not to say it isn’t going to get there — Android recently vaulted over more traditional rivals like Sony and Nintendo when it came to game revenue so there’s clearly a consumption shift in effect here, but I’d argue there isn’t much in the way of AAA Android games just yet. In the end, we just had to agree to disagree: Darrell gives it a fly, I give it a die, and all’s right with the world. |
Steve Ballmer’s Classy Exit | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 23 | Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met his critics head-on that he will relinquish his title within the next 12 months. Microsoft’s stock ticked higher on the announcement, to the company’s market capitalization. The market responded to the impending leadership change not with exultation, but with grim relief. Microsoft is a company struggling to be reborn, but its new trajectory is something Ballmer steered. Were mistakes made under his tenure? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean Ballmer isn’t leaving on a high note. In fact, his exit is classy: He stuck around longer than few others would have, and the concluding years of his tenure as CEO have been his best. You can view Microsoft from a pre-Windows 8 and post-Windows 8 perspective. And by pre-Windows 8 I mean before the company embarked on its new creation. That was before Apple released the iPad, as you certainly recall. Since then, Microsoft has enacted a number of changes that bear remembering. From the re-org to a new business model to cloud-based businesses and back to app stores, it has been a big few years for the company, and Ballmer stayed until a new path was forged. Let’s take a look at the Microsoft Ballmer is leaving behind. Microsoft recently made two massive internal changes to its management and goals: A to better align its efforts and a away from selling software to instead vending both services and devices. In practice this means that Microsoft broke its famously bickering business units into new groups in hopes of better synergy. Hardware was aligned, and the like. And some rose during the changes, such as Terry Myerson who is now the head of the Operating Systems Engineering group, and some fell, such as my personal favorite Tami Reller, who slipped from co-running the Windows group to head of marketing for the company. However, the change dovetailed nicely into the company’s new business model: No more software in a box. Instead, have a service on a subscription payment and a device. The new Microsoft is potentially more nimble, precisely as the company moves to a faster software cycle (think Windows 8.1 in a single year). You can’t have one without the other, as the old fabric of Microsoft would have rent under the stress. Bringing this back to Ballmer, the man stuck it out until all this was set and underway. He could have shrugged it off and shipped out, but instead he ensured that the company he was leaving was as prepped for the future as possible. We don’t know yet if the reorg will succeed, or if the device side of Microsoft’s new business model will find market acceptance. However, we can say that the old Microsoft was becoming quickly obsolete. Big bets and big changes were needed. I can’t predict the future, but the Microsoft of five years ago would have been fucked by it. In the past few years, Microsoft has , products that generate 10-figure revenue each year. Azure, Office 365 and Lync are driving Microsoft’s top line forward even as Windows slips with the contraction of the PC market. These efforts are, respectively, out of character, gutsy and proof that some old formulas can still work. Azure, , is Microsoft’s cloud computing service that plays nicely with open source and any competitor. Office 365 is a reformation of the Office product, an essential profit cannon for the company; it is a realization that an old model is failing, even as it prints cash. And Lync is old-school Microsoft, selling a service to enterprise customers in the way that it always has: Through its massive partner network. But Lync is also baked into Office 365 SKUs, making it a SaaS product like the rest. Forget per-seat one-time fees. The future is recurring revenue and Microsoft knows it. The company is busting a hump to reform its products to fit that new norm. Done? Not even 10 percent. But some of the products that will solve the Windows revenue slump are now mature enough to walk alone. Microsoft, until quite recently, was platform. Then Apple came along and blew that up, followed by Google’s Android, which further exploded Microsoft’s hegemony as the platform company . Well, those days are over, and it can be argued that Android is now a larger platform than Windows. But rather than retreat from Windows, Microsoft’s response to this, under the gaze of Ballmer, has been to greatly expand the damn thing — from your desktop to every screen you can imagine. Phones? Yep. TVs? Yep. Tablets? Yep. Trick bit on that last one, as Microsoft’s core Windows experience is built for tablets, unlike Apple’s OS X. The kicker here is that Microsoft is bringing a shared operating experience to every possible slice of pixel. And it is uniting it with a shared code base that will allow developers in the future to build once and run everywhere. You want a bold gambit? That’s one. Microsoft is not there yet. But as we have seen before, Ballmer stuck at Microsoft until the vision was firmly under way. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and the Xbox One are the bones of this transformation, and all were released under Ballmer’s time in the driver’s seat. (This assumes Ballmer doesn’t race out the door before the Xbox One goes on sale. I don’t think that will happen). A short coda on Windows Phone and Surface. Talk about the peanut gallery. Ballmer has been hit, dinged and shellacked for both products. Windows Phone 7 Series — as it was once called — was a joke, people said, that would never work. The market would only bear two platforms, so the thinking went, and Android and iOS were the best. So forget it, Microsoft. Billions of dollars and years later, Ballmer has carved out a growing seat at the mobile table. Few thought this was possible. Ballmer spent and pushed. The same will come true, eventually and in one form or another, with the Surface product. Microsoft views the project as core to its future as a device company. Therefore it is playing a five- or 10-year game, and not one in which short-term revenue is god. The company is richer than Croesus, and generating staggering profits each quarter. Not Apple money, mind you, but big sums all the same, and so it can afford the journey. — If Ballmer had exited, say, during the Windows 7 period, I think that his time at Microsoft would have deserved a different badge. However, missteps included, the recent few years have been a fundamental shift for Microsoft, leading it to functional preparation for the future, which is to his credit. If the company had failed, we would have blamed the leader. So as the company finds new success, we should laud the boss. Let’s be consistent, at least. Presuming that Ballmer’s successor is competent, he or she will be inheriting a firm in transition, but one with a future that is quite interesting. And it hasn’t been too long that we’ve been able to say that about Microsoft. So, all right Ballmer, you never would have dinner with me, but points for the classy exit. |
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