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Curious Brings Its “Learn Anything” Marketplace And Video Lesson Library To The iPad | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | Thanks to the steady march of technology into the world of education, it’s a great time to be a lifelong learner. Today, there are a growing number of platforms that allow us to search and discover (quality) learning content, across a wide variety of topics. Plus, thanks to the advance of technology that enables the speedy production and distribution of video at scale, the traditional barriers to learning are being torn down — learning is visual and it can happen anywhere. Sites like TED, Khan Academy, Skillshare, CreativeLive, Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy, Lynda.com are all great examples — and the list goes on. But something is still missing. Perusing the Web, one quickly finds that the learning platforms lean toward more academic subjects and mastery — online and — but what about more practical learning content and instruction? Sure, YouTube is rife with “how-to” videos, but separating the signal from the noise can take a lot of time. It’s this problem (or opportunity) that led Justin Kitch . Having built and sold early website creation platform Homestead to Intuit, Kitch saw an opportunity to capitalize on the rise of video-based education and offer curious minds, hobbyists and lifelong learners a place to peruse and find how-to content on any subject. Like a combination of Skillshare and Udemy, Curious essentially aims to be a marketplace of how-to videos, allowing those experts and those who want to teach with those eager to learn from them. However, the key, Kitch tells us, is to do so in a way that’s more targeted, navigable and interactive than YouTube. And, what’s more, to differentiate from the Skillshares and Courseras of the world by serving those practical, how-to lessons in a short, bite-sized format that makes it easier to engage with and consume — or so the thinking goes. The content on Curious covers a wide swath of topics, from how to grow organic asparagus and brew beer to the best way to flirt in a foreign language and perfect one’s salsa dancing technique, ranging from five to fifteen minutes in duration. Since launching in May, Kitch says that Curious has posted over 2,000 lessons on 100 different topics, which have together collected over 400K views. Going forward, the goal, he says, is to continue to expand the scope of the platform horizontally and vertically — to both increase the range of subjects covered, while increasing the depth of popular subject areas by adding content that cover sub-topics and offers alternative methodologies. Last week, however, with its foundation on the Web established, Curious took its first step into mobile with the launch of an iPad, allowing users to access its video library and learning platform while on the go. The app allows users to sync the lessons they watch on the Web with the app, pausing a video started at work to pick up and watch on the train home, for example. The key, really, is the very mobility that access to its video library on the iPad app allows — in other words, if users are watching a how-to cooking video, now they can bring the lesson into the kitchen. Furthermore, rather than rely on YouTube to beef up its catalog of lessons, Curious has built its own proprietary video platform that gives the startup a little defensibility in the ever-increasing world of video-based education. In practice, this sets the foundation for the other ways the platform wants to differentiate itself from YouTube and other educational sites, meaning that users can not only watch videos and leave comments, but film videos of themselves performing whatever task or lesson it may be and upload them to the site so that the teacher can give feedback on their technique. Users can also ask teachers targeted questions — like what kind of barley to use in their beer or what kind of soil to use in growing their organic tomatoes — and tag their videos at the point in the lesson where they have questions. On the flip side, instructors will eventually be able to offer lessons for free or for a price, with Curious providing the tools that will allow them set the price and collect micropayments. The platform puts a low ceiling on how much teachers can charge, keeping prices in the single-digits. On the one hand, this may mean less incentive for teachers, but it also keeps the barrier to entry low for the average learner. Much lower, in fact, than YouTube, which is currently experimenting with paid subscriptions to channels and the like. For now, all of the content on Curious is free, but Kitch says paid lesson functionality is coming soon, along with apps for other platforms and devices — though those are a bit further off. While the platform has taken big strides in just a few months — and it’s still early in the game — Curious could run into problems as its model forces it to make certain concessions. The key for Curious is to scale quickly, adding as much content as it can, across a wide variety of subjects as quickly as possible. Of course, this tends to happen at the detriment of quality and quality control. Though of course, as it scales it will also be able to attract better teachers, giving it a leg up over YouTube and other video platforms. As of now, Curious has a team that works individual instructors to help them optimize their videos (and how they teach) for the platform and only accepts teachers who meet a certain quality standard. But such a high-touch process could be difficult at scale, however, Kitch did tell us that the startup has built and will eventually release tools for teachers that will automate the video creation and uploading process — a la Udemy. As of now, the overall quality of content across the site is fairly high, but it is true that some of its lessons could easily be found on YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing, however, as simply having a dedicated destination for how-to videos is enough of a reward over having to tackle the colossus that is YouTube. The Web is sorely in need of a platform that’s dedicated to easily-consumable how-to content and lessons, which immediately differentiates it from sites like Lynda.com. If you want to learn how to code, you’ll probably go to Lynda.com, Treehouse or another platform that offers dedicated instruction, video-based or not. Kitch also sees other video-based learning sites as potential collaborators rather than all-out competitors — a perspective that could benefit the company as incumbents continue to grow and new sites continue to emerge. Going forward, feeling the need to be everything to everyone could become a handicap for the site — though it doesn’t have to be. Over time, Curious can collect data on what types of content people really want to consume, offering a little bit on everything, but really focusing on the most popular (and monetizable) subjects. It can also acquire customers more inexpensively in areas that are popular but more difficult to monetize, and then sell them lessons in more profitable areas. In the short term, Curious is helping itself stand out by building out features that allow collaboration and interaction around its content. For example, as of now, the platform enables learners to download attached files, view a list of (and purchase) related materials, reach out to and collaborate with other students and send teachers “Curious Cards” that contain those videos and photos of what they’ve learned. It’s not quite disrupting higher education, but there’s a huge opportunity in continuing education, especially if it can convince people that it’s the go-to destination for life-long learning. from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch himself. To check out Curious for iPad, . |
When Apple Did Color Because It Was Delicious, Exciting, And Human | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | You know what they say about trends: wait five years and they’ll swing back around again. With confirmation that a will indeed break onto the scene in September to throw a crimp into Apple’s monochromatic streak (madness! Gold rush jokes!), let’s take a look back at all those times that the company did color and did it well. While Apple is known for a clean, pared-down aesthetic that hits the human brain’s zen center in a way that just feels intrinsically , the company’s design history is actually quite colorful. These designs weren’t always pretty, but they were whackadoo and fun in a way that befit the exploration of that brave new world called The Internet. Between 1976 and 1998, the Apple logo itself before it was discarded a year after Steve Jobs’ return in favor of today’s modern look. In 2008, Gizmodo that Apple was perceived as the top gay-friendly tech company in a survey of 757 gay and lesbian participants, so make of that what you will. The multi-color logo was an update from the original logo, a decidedly antique-looking ink illustration of Isaac Newton with an apple dangling above his head. The Newton logo was a throwback — a nod to history and to hand craft — which was an interesting choice for a tech company. Although less handmade, the bitten apple logo’s rainbow gave it humanity. Because rainbows just make you . Speaking of human, let’s talk about the first generation iMac released in 1998. Utterly huggable and Jolly Rancher-hued, the computer was a solution to computers that were slow, had no networking capability, and were, , “uuuuug-ly.” iMacs were about getting people on the Internet. That was exciting, and the translucent teal body was cool and futuristic to match. “It looks like it’s from another planet, and a good planet,” Jobs said in his introduction. “A planet with better designers.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcBpXYI1r3Q&w=640&h=480] With flavors like “lime,” “tangerine,” “grape,” and “strawberry,” the iMac was meant to make you salivate just like a pack of Gushers would. Evoking every delicious snack ever was pretty genius, to be honest. That’s not to say that things didn’t get weird with the blurry color trips that were the “Blue Dalmatian” and “Flower Power” iMacs. But weird can still be awesome. Or it can just be awkward. See 1992’s , 500 of which were released in honor of Japan’s JLPGA golf tournament. Maybe the thought of the curvy Bondi Blue iMac is clouding my vision, but the PowerBook’s primary colors and boxy shape just look… basic. Good thing they were limited edition. Back on the pretty side of the spectrum are the colorful chrome iPod nanos and shuffles and touches and minis. The gold iPhone 5s seems to be an evolution of this design, which gave the colors a particular luminosity. It’s probably worth noting that the ,” so there’s hope yet. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrRHPf0_B3M&w=640&h=360]
Monochrome is professional. It’s cool. But as the iPod proved, balls-to-the-wall color combined with clean product design is a match made in heaven. It’s like the rainbow Apple logo: simple in outline, punchy in spirit. You can’t ignore it. |
Vogue And The Tech Hard Sell | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | It isn’t often that one learns about cool apps from Vogue. In case you don’t read fashion magazines, is basically like a seasonal shopping catalogue for women who find themselves, or aspire to find themselves, in the 1%. With an per item displayed, there are very few people who can afford what Vogue is peddling. But those who can, buy. This September, the 902-page fashion tome is peddling tech — hard sell. Forget if you will the few data points pointing Judging by the number of times Instagram and Twitter are mentioned in the September Vogue, it’s no longer okay to be a beautiful Luddite. Now you have to be gorgeous AND have built an app. Like Peek founder who is featured wearing techie favorite Oscar de la Renta. Or model Topaz Page-Green (what a Vogue-friendly name!) whose yet-to-be released Feedie app turns your food selfies into charitable donations. Of course. If you’re trying to profit off of consumer tech, consider your market expanded this September: Nike’s FuelBand now pairs nicely with a Cartier LOVE bracelet. Make up artist s 800,000 Instagram fans, 400,000 Twitter followers and 1.3 million Facebook Likes are considered just as valid a status symbol as multi-colored, , de la Renta (of course) cardigans. What better proof of this tech hard sell than Mayer herself? Her in the magazine, any tech reporter’s wet dream, reveals insights into Yahoo’s stealth “Project Grand Slam” and a breakdown of how the went down last Spring, in addition to : “That’s when we said, ‘My gosh, if we’re going to do all this, it makes sense to merge.’ I loved David’s perspective on the products, and I think he respected mine. We had a tremendous meeting of the minds in terms of what we wanted to build and what we wanted to do.” Hell, the profile even Oh and of course Google Glass makes an appearance, continuing its vigorous efforts to expand beyond face onto 12 pages of model and, maybe someday, if everyone keeps their fingers crossed long enough, yours. This most recent Glass press cycle leverages Vogue, , model Coco Rocha and a bunch of non-tech influencers in an attempt to make Google’s wearable form of Google+ something that normal people aspire to. At least it Even before the Marissa Mayer star turn, the issue is littered with QR codes, so readers can call up all kinds of supplemental behind-the-scenes content. An apparition of Editrix Anna Wintour herself appears after you scan in a pretty randomly placed code. On the ads side, a CoverGirl Hunger Games campaign directs you to , an app that literally brings the advertisement to life, i.e. acting out a full CoverGirl Hunger Games makeover in front of the reader on iOS, like something out of Vogue knows where its bread (advertisement) is increasingly buttered (through, or by, tech). Tech is a double target more than ever before — both as an advertising category and as a medium through which print can claw back some of the revenues it is losing in the overall decline of traditional ads. The fact that the industry is now fashionable enough for editorial fodder is a byproduct of this dynamic, the two go hand in Cartier-encrusted hand. In fact, the two major non-tech profiles of stars in the issue make points of grounding themselves in a tech context, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s mocking of Jonathan Van Meter’s “Radio Shack-era” recorder and pop star Grimes’ giving up on the medium entirely: “I don’t keep up with the Internet,” she says, a statement telling because of the fact that it would have been nonsense five years ago. Back then, Vogue didn’t even keep up with the Internet. And now? Well now it courts the online world, and its money. Between begs at the end of articles to download the Vogue digital edition and pleads for QR code scans of the Wintour explainer, Vogue, and thus its , wants a piece of our brave new world, signaling that they’re aware of and willing to play by our rules. And, for now, for novelty’s sake, we’re more than willing to |
Microsoft’s Next Era | Contributor | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | Moments like this happen only once a generation in the technology industry. The announcement of Steve Ballmer’s retirement from his post as CEO of Microsoft puts an end to one of the most powerful and interesting “regimes” in technology history. Symbolically, this is likely the closing chapter of an era that was led by Bill Gates, then collectively by Gates and Ballmer, and then more recently just Ballmer. We think of these as distinct periods, but while Ballmer may not have had the technology visionary chops that famously defined Bill, much of what we saw from Microsoft in the 2000’s was a continuation of the strategy that defined the company in the 90’s. The story of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer can be told in two very different ways. The one that took center stage in the public eye narrated Microsoft’s slow response to emerging, low-end software disruptors like Google Apps and Amazon Web Services; a missed mobile-device wave led by Apple and Google, which dramatically weakened the Microsoft monopoly; and a series of failed service launches like the Zune, Windows Vista, and more. The other version of the story is the lesser told of the two. Microsoft more than tripled its annual revenue under Ballmer, from $22 billion annually when he took over to $78 billion when he announced his departure. , launching successful online services and platforms like Office 365 and Azure, and purchasing compelling technologies and companies like Skype and Yammer. Microsoft’s negligible market share in search grew to 30 percent through clever maneuvers like securing all of Yahoo and Facebook’s search traffic. Microsoft also secured the only corporate investment ever made in Facebook. Under Ballmer, Microsoft even began to embrace open source and other competing platforms. However, in this binary world where you’re either up or you’re down, we must have losers to bolster our winners. Even during the peak of its recent successes, the stock market voted that Microsoft was not the victor. What explains this? The answer lies in a stale strategy that often refused to acknowledge the new realities of a changed marketplace. Today, the Department of Justice is about as worried about a Redmond monopoly as the State Department is about Canada. Microsoft doesn’t wield the same kind of control it once did over the developer ecosystem, and overall that’s a good thing, both for the marketplace and ultimately for the company’s own posterity. Choice drives competition, and competition drives innovation. Apple producing better devices gets Google producing better operating systems, and so on. Microsoft needs to recognize that the world has become far more heterogeneous and choice-driven than ever. And Microsoft needs to adapt its strategy accordingly. While the latest re-org was ostensibly about realigning the company to be better integrated the organization -– an important move for better execution and less friction – it’s equally critical to get alignment with what’s happening the company. The world of software and technology is no longer a zero-sum game. Ballmer’s successor will need to recognize this new reality, and embrace it. Here are just a few areas where he or she should start: Microsoft grew up in a world where its operating-system dominance drove unparalleled success in a number of key application categories. It’s almost as if its OS efforts were only there to serve its application efforts, and not the other way around. Competitors were stamped out one by one (see Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape, Real Networks) along Microsoft’s journey to capture eyeballs and entire software budgets. Today things are different, and the tail is now wagging the dog, with applications being used to prop up Microsoft’s operating-system efforts. But in today’s changing world, where the vast majority of Internet-connected devices are not based on Windows, these services need to be unbundled from the Windows mothership. Services like Microsoft Office remain either unavailable or limited on Apple and Android devices. With tablet sales set to surpass new PC sales in the next couple of years, it’s more important than ever that Microsoft realize that its apps need to compete on their own. One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is that disparate applications can finally work seamlessly with one another. Customers no longer need to buy all of their services from the same two or three vendors to get this level of integration. APIs and integrations between apps allow for mixing and matching best-of-breed tools: your ERP from Netsuite or Workday can talk to your customer support app from Zendesk, which in turn talks to your social stream on Jive. This new “Cloud Stack” is driving much more openness between applications, and ultimately much more value for customers. But today, Microsoft is nowhere to be seen in this colorful array of new applications. For instance, if you wanted to integrate the latest web versions of Office into a third-party application (say Box), this would take an act of Congress, not a simple API call. The closed nature of their applications was suitable for an era when it needed to control the operating system, but not for a period of IT abundance. The new leadership in Redmond will need to make sure that products are far more open and extensible with other software from companies that they once considered enemies. Much of the Microsoft product lineup is still coasting on past glories. Unlike other technology giants who are known for their innovations in the past decade — Android, Chrome, and the iPad, or more fanciful and futuristic innovations like self-driving cars and Google Glass — the vast majority of Microsoft’s successful products over the past decade are iterations of products that were initiated in the thick of the PC era, and very little that would be described as “Post-PC.” Ultimately, Microsoft needs to become a platform company (again). Google has taken the role of benevolent monopolist by providing traffic via Search, standards via Chrome, and distribution via Android. Apple, similarly, has ignited billion-dollar startups without encroaching on their territories (Uber, Instagram, Angry Birds, Super Cell, Spotify, and more). Microsoft needs to figure out how to become the place where the next great apps are built – by companies other than Microsoft. And this time around, it needs to avoid obliterating every successful startup that emerges from its ecosystem. The latest strategy that has been publicly communicated amounts to “Microsoft is a devices and services company.” That’s tantamount to Disney saying it’s a “theme park and film company.” The vision of Microsoft putting a PC on every desk and in every home got them to where they are, and a put-a-man-on-the-moon-scale mission is required at this stage, as well. It’s not sufficient to have a strategy that shareholders and analysts understand; it’s essential to have one that consumers care about. Microsoft needs to stand for something unique. The world was once defined by Microsoft products and now Microsoft is letting itself be defined by everyone else. Of course it’s easy to offer feedback from the outside. Microsoft is one of the 50 largest companies in the world, and pointing to their competitors’ successes and saying “they should have done that” certainly over-simplifies how hard it is to make the right calls in a rapidly changing landscape. And you can already see early signs of momentum in the right direction: With leaders like Satya Nadella, Qi Lu, and Tony Bates, Microsoft is becoming a markedly different, and more open, company. Case in point: at this year’s developer conference, Build, they demoed new products using a Mac. A decade ago this would have been sacrilege; today, it’s Microsoft publicly acknowledging a new reality. Microsoft is also accelerating its pace of innovation with its web and platform products seeing updates many times a quarter, a huge departure from their traditional three-year product cycles. The technology ecosystem is best served by companies pushing the bar higher and higher, raising it for one another and customers alike. Hopefully whoever is chosen to steer the Redmond oil tanker can usher in this all-new era of Microsoft. |
Dispatch From The Future: Uber To Purchase 2,500 Driverless Cars From Google | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | — As part of its second-quarter earnings announcement today, local transportation and delivery giant Uber announced its biggest bet on autonomous vehicles yet, saying it would purchase 2,500 driverless cars from Google. In addition, the two companies have agreed to a deal in which Uber will share data from its local transportation services with Google, which will use it to further improve its own autonomous car-routing algorithms. Uber has committed to invest up to $375 million for a fleet of Google’s GX3200 vehicles, which are the company’s third generation of autonomous driving cars, but the first to be approved for commercial use in the U.S. The deal marks the largest single capital investment that Uber has made to date, and is also the first enterprise deal that Google has struck for its new line of driverless vehicles. It’s been just five years since Google announced it would begin manufacturing its own driverless cars, and just two-and-a-half years since those vehicles have hit the streets. But the company is already on its third car model, following the first-generation GX1000 two-seat “commuter” model and its followup GX2100 five-seat family sedan. The GX3200, which was shown off earlier this year at the Detroit Auto Show, is Google’s latest effort to produce a fully electric, fully autonomous vehicle. The car seats four comfortably and has room for up to three suitcases in its rear storage compartment. Like previous Google models, each car acts as its own wireless base station, so that passengers can connect to the Internet through Google’s WirelessGig service. Due to its low weight and the latest in fuel cell technology, the GX3200 can get up to 750 miles of travel on a single charge, or about 48 hours on standby mode. Like Google’s other autonomous vehicles, the GX3200 is designed to find and dock in the nearest Google PowerUP station whenever it’s not in use. But unlike the first-generation GX1000 or the follow-up GX2100, this latest car from Google is meant strictly for non-personal use. With it, Google is targeting the enterprise market of local transportation providers like Uber, as well as various municipalities like New York and Chicago. The idea is that those cities could finally do away with their outdated taxi systems and move to a more fully automated fleet of on-demand vehicles. For Uber, meanwhile, the purchase could represent a more driverless future for its local transportation service. While the company has experimented with the use of autonomous cars as part of its fleet, those cars still needed an Uber “driver” present in case of an emergency. However, since the GX3200 has been licensed for commercial use in several states — such as California, New York, Illinois, and Washington — Uber will be able to deploy the cars without drivers in several of its largest markets. The company hopes to have its first set of driverless cars on the road by the end of the year, introducing a new service called uberAUTO using those vehicles in one or two of its markets at first. Based on the reception there, Uber says it could have the service available in up to 10 markets by the end of next year. As part of the deal, the companies will work together to install the latest Uber logistics software directly into the vehicle, and Uber will share some of its traffic and routing data back to Google. With that data, Google says it will be able to provide more accurate real-time information to all cars that are part of its autonomous driving network. In general, the move to so-called driverless cars and on-demand transportation services has resulted in faster commute times and less congestion in many major cities over the last five years. Uber claims that its service has reduced traffic by up to 35 percent already in many of its biggest markets, and putting more efficient driverless cars on the road should only help improve that. Meanwhile, the move to autonomous cars, though just a few years old, is already starting to benefit drivers and passengers alike. In California, where the state is testing so-called “autopilot lanes” on the freeways, driverless vehicles can speed up to 120 miles an hour, drastically reducing commute times. And while it’s still early, Google has yet to have an autonomous vehicle be found “at fault” for a major accident, even at those high speeds. That said, not everyone is happy about the idea of on-demand, driverless cars. When the news was first reported several months ago that Uber and Google were in talks, some of Uber’s drivers expressed displeasure at the idea of being replaced by autonomous vehicles, waging protests outside of its international headquarters in San Francisco. When asked how the deal would affect its worldwide workforce on the company’s earnings call today, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said driver concerns are a bit overblown. Uber has more than 50,000 contractors as part of its driver network globally, but he said the Google fleet purchase won’t drastically reduce that number. “This will affect a very small portion of our worldwide driver base,” Kalanick said, noting that the Google cars will only be deployed in the small number of markets where they are legal for commercial use. He also pointed out that drivers who were affected as part of the company’s uberRIDE transportation division could also transition to its uberDELIVER local delivery service, which continues to grow around the world. The move to more on-demand transportation has also been a shock to the traditional auto manufacturers. Drastically reduced demand for cars in urban and even some suburban areas where Uber operates has sent shares in companies like Ford and General Motors to five-year lows. With auto sales lagging, those companies have introduced their own on-demand rental and transportation services, but consumer interest has been lackluster so far. Shares in Uber, meanwhile, continue to soar. Its stock was up a whopping 10 percent in after-hours trading on news of the deal, bringing shares to an all-time high. |
The Board Of The Borg | MG Siegler | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | On April 17 of this year, I wrote a post that I never published. The following day, Microsoft was set to release their Q3 numbers and I wanted to see what they looked like before I ran my piece. I wanted to see if the implosion of the PC industry would start to show up in that quarter, or if it would take before we saw how dire things really were. Then . I never ran the post. But given this week’s news of Steve Ballmer vacating his CEO position sometime in the next 12 months, I figured it was just as timely, if not more so. The , released on April 18, ended up being pretty decent. But there was one sign that perhaps all was not as well as it seemed in Redmond: CFO Peter Klein would be leaving the company. As I at the time, “Who is best positioned to know that winter is coming? The CFO.” A few months later, we got of the senior leadership of Microsoft, led by Ballmer. And a week later, the company released their . As expected, these were not great — accentuated by the fact that the company had to take a $900 million write-down related to their Surface RT debacle. And now the final shoe has dropped. Ballmer. But I’m still not certain it should be the end of the changes if Microsoft really hopes to return to greatness. While the buck ultimately stopped with Ballmer, there was another group of people who enabled him to make one catastrophic miss after the next. The Board. —————————————————— I’ve been thinking about Microsoft a lot lately. Maybe it’s . Maybe it’s . Maybe it’s the complete and utter lack of interest in Windows Phone. Bing. Maybe it’s the collapsing state of the PC industry. We’re watching a once giant balloon deflate before our very eyes. And while it can be hard to perceive such deflation at first, we’re getting to that point now. Right now, Microsoft feels a lot like Nokia a few years ago. Or RIM shortly thereafter. On paper, the numbers still look good. The company is still on top and financially healthy. And yet, it sure feels like they’re nearing the cliff that Nokia and RIM eventually hit. It’s like the Ernest Hemingway quote about how you go bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” I know I’ll be called crazy by many for taking this stance. . Yet many others will agree, saying all of this is obvious. But if it’s , why can’t Microsoft do anything about it? Is it just the innovator’s dilemma in action? It sure seems like Microsoft is trying to take some gambles. But in each case, it seems like they’re either taking the wrong ones — or worse, the right ones . This seems like a leadership problem pure and simple. And while there are few CEOs more divisive than Steve Ballmer these days, it seems like you have to look higher — to the people for whom he serves: the Board. When I started thinking about this a few weeks back, I realized I had absolutely no idea who was on Microsoft’s Board beyond Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates. I had to Google it. I was even more surprised by . I have no idea who any of these people are. Of course, me not knowing any of the members of Microsoft’s Board doesn’t necessarily mean anything by itself. Maybe I’m just ignorant. But the more I thought about it, the more I was amazed that I really didn’t recognize a single name. That’s not true of the Boards of any other of the major tech companies that I can think of. I’ve covered the technology industry as closely as anyone for the past six or seven years. I just don’t know these people. Either I’m out of touch or Microsoft is. Time will tell, but I like my odds here. And I’m not alone. A couple weeks ago, Joachim Kempin wrote a guest post for ReadWrite entitled: . In it, he argues that Microsoft’s Board has let the company down in failing to get ahead of the major trends in computing over the past decade. And Kempin isn’t just some 30-something blogger who loves Apple products, he’s a former SVP at Microsoft. He ran the company’s division selling operating software to PC manufacturers for 15 years. So who is on ? Beyond Ballmer and Gates, we have: Dina Dublon, Former Chief Financial Officer, JP Morgan Chase
Maria M. Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
Stephen J. Luczo, Chairman, President and CEO, Seagate Technology PLC
David F. Marquardt, General Partner, August Capital
Charles H. Noski, Former Vice Chairman, Bank of America Corporation
Dr. Helmut Panke, Former Chairman of the Board of Management, BMW AG
John W. Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, Virtual Instruments Of the seven directors, three of them are best known for roles they held, at least in Microsoft’s eyes. Looking over their bios, there are some impressive resumes, no doubt. But I’d argue they were all more impressive a decade ago — or two decades ago. I have a hard time believing any of these people remain well tapped into the technology ecosystem where Microsoft has been failing to compete. So count me in with Kempin, I’m not convinced this Board has been doing its job for some time now. The trouble is that solid revenue and profit numbers mask much of this. It’s like the quarterback who throws two touchdown passes when his team is down 30 points late in the fourth quarter. The numbers can deceive. And I’d argue that’s exactly why Microsoft is eventually going to find themselves at the cliff quite suddenly, not realizing how they got there. The good news for Microsoft is that unlike Nokia or RIM, the company has multiple businesses, three of which are quite large (and another that does little ). This will undoubtedly help the company avoid the complete dives that Nokia and RIM have taken. Instead, I believe that first the consumer business will hit the cliff, at which point, Microsoft will evolve into . But then the enterprise cliff will come too. Some believe that Microsoft has all the time in the world to weather such declines — plenty of time to adapt and see the company re-born as a company for the 21st century. But just look at those PC numbers. Not good. And not going to get better. Microsoft may think they are safe. . I understand that this post will be taken as yet another anti-Microsoft diatribe. And Microsoft has withstood thousands of those throughout the years, and they remain a strong company, the critics will argue. I’m just anti-Microsoft, they’ll say. But why? Why am I anti-Microsoft? Because I like Apple products? That’s silly. My only agenda is to point out what I see. And ultimately, to be right. And I simply believe I’m going to be right here. But at least I’m giving a potential fix this time! Or rather, I’m endorsing Kempin’s fix. It’s time for a major Board shakeup at Microsoft. They need some fresh blood in there. People who are tapped into the current technology and startup ecosystem. People who will stand up to Steve Ballmer or even replace him, if need be. People I have heard of. —————————————————— It’s worth noting that Microsoft have one very relevant and tapped-in Board member in recent years: Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings. But Hastings stepped down from Microsoft’s Board in November 2012, after serving for five years. He said at the time it was to allow him to focus more of his time on Netflix (which seems to have worked, at least from ) as well as put more energy into helping California’s school systems. Interestingly, he opted to maintain his role on Facebook’s Board. Hastings seems like exactly the type of Board member Microsoft should have — though it appears that he too was wrong about . Not surprisingly, some people are as a potential replacement for Ballmer in the CEO role. That seems highly unlikely — if the CFO is first to see that winter is coming, and , Hastings, as a Board member, would have been in the top 15 to see this as well. Would he really want the role? : And here’s a little nugget from this evening: Gates — who has always been and remains the key decision-maker on Microsoft’s board — had always been Ballmer’s major backer, despite increasing pressure both externally and from other directors for him to step down. Gates had rejected such suggestions for years. That included former director and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who many sources said had been one of the first to urge that the company replace Ballmer as CEO, as well as from a spate of Wall Street investors complaining about the company’s declining value in the Ballmer years. Hastings was also the lead independent director on Microsoft’s Board at the time of his departure. Now that role is filled by John Thompson, the man tasked with chairing the committee looking for Ballmer’s replacement. So it’s probably safe to assume that it would have been Hastings who would have been leading this committee if Ballmer’s announcement had happened just a year earlier. Alas… Both and Seagate CEO Stephen Luczo joined Microsoft’s Board only last year. So perhaps it’s fair to say that Microsoft has already shaken up the Board quite a bit recently. Thompson, in particular, had an interesting — — history with Microsoft before joining the Board. But Microsoft’s board has long had a tumultuous history. Only two of the independent directors remain on the board today. Perhaps that was a part of the problem as well — no one stuck around long enough to properly help shake things up. Or perhaps they weren’t allowed to stay around long enough… Perhaps Thompson and Luczo did in fact (again, Thompson is the lead independent director, and now Luczo is also on his committee to find a replacement). Though it seems just as likely that Ballmer is making the smart move here: by stepping down now, one could easily see a scenario where in a few years, as Microsoft really shows signs of struggle, everyone will look back at Ballmer’s tenure as “the good old days”. Pure speculation, of course. But it would be a pretty savvy move from a legacy perspective. Undoubtedly, we are now in the single most important period for the future of Microsoft. Will the Board select an internal candidate to take over the show? Or will they and select an outsider? Does this Board, which let Microsoft reach this troubling time in their history, have the right people to find and convince the right person to take the top job? The removal of Steve Ballmer was really just step one. |
Mozilla’s Firefox OS Gives The Open Web Top Billing On Mobile | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | Mozilla was late to mobile and now it’s trying to catch up. For a while now, the nonprofit has been releasing mobile versions of its Firefox browser for Android, but its most ambitious project to date is its mobile operating system for smartphones. Earlier this month, the Chinese handset manufacturer ZTE made the first set of its entry-level unlocked $80 Firefox OS phones available in the and the and quickly sold out the first batch of about 1,000 devices in each country. In Europe, the devices were already on sale through Deutsche Telekom in Poland and Telefonica in Colombia, Spain and Venezuela. Earlier this month, I got a chance to talk to Mozilla’s Principal Developer Evangelist Christian Heilmann to talk about what this project means for developers. The company also sent me a review unit of the ZTE Open. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Iu8q-oISbas As Heilmann stressed when I talked to him, the phone is meant to fill what Mozilla believes is a “massive gap in the mobile space.” Right now, the organization rightly argues, mobile connectivity to the web is only for “the rich people in the modern world.” Android and iOS devices aren’t even available in many parts of the world, and the fact that you often need a credit card to fully use them puts them out of reach for a large number of potential users, especially in developing countries. The ZTE Open (and Firefox OS itself) then, Heilmann noted, is targeted at a market that is not covered by other phones. Eager to set my expectations right for when I received the phone, Heilmann likened it to a family sedan that we shouldn’t compare to an F1 car. After using the ZTE Open for a while, that’s definitely true in this case. It’s clearly an $80 phone, but as a device that is meant to bring web connectivity to people who don’t currently have it — or can’t afford it — it succeeds. Given the price, it’s no surprise that it’s still a bit sluggish at times. Firefox OS itself also still needs some polish around many edges. The sluggishness especially shows when you use the virtual keyboard. It’s often not clear when you press a link in the browser, for example. Still, thanks to its focus on web apps, it’s pretty straightforward to use Facebook and Twitter, manage your email and text messages or to listen to music or the radio (and, of course, make phone calls). Most mobile platforms don’t treat the web as a first-class citizen and they definitely don’t make it easy for developers to distribute their apps over the web. On Firefox OS, developers get two options for distributing their apps: they can do so from their own website or — as so-called “privileged apps” — through Mozilla’s marketplace. For security reasons, apps that are distributed outside of Mozilla’s store, however, don’t get full access to all of the device’s hardware features (geolocation, gyros, etc.). App discovery, by the way, is one of the cooler features of Firefox OS. Just swipe all the way to the left-most screen and you get a search bar. Type in something like “photography” and the screen will show you apps you already have installed on your device and a list of related service. For photography, this list includes the likes of Flickr, Picasa, Pinterest and Tumblr, for example. Type in “music” and you get links to SoundCloud, YouTube, Metro Lyrics, MTV, Last.fm and many others. Click on any of these, and you’re taken right to these service’s web apps. If you like them, just swipe up from the bottom of the screen to pin them to your home screen. If you are a developer who wants to port existing mobile web apps to Firefox OS, the whole procedure is extremely easy and doesn’t involve much more than writing a manifesto to package it for Firefox OS. It’s so easy that when Heilmann reached out to those who had already done so, most weren’t really able to tell him much because it only took them a few minutes to do. Apps that want to use the platform to its full potential, of course, take a bit more work, but even there, the focus on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript opens the platform up to a wide range of developers who wouldn’t previously have considered writing apps for smartphones (similar to what Microsoft is doing with HTML5 on its Windows platform). For many users, Mozilla hopes, Firefox OS will mark the first time they’ll use the open web on a phone. This is something developers should keep in mind as they design apps for the platform, Heilmann noted, as you can’t always expect that users are already familiar with all of the usage paradigms most of us have grown accustomed to over years of using touchscreen phones. Overall then, the ZTE Open with Firefox is an interesting first look at the potential of Firefox OS. It’s not the world’s most amazing phone by a long shot, but I would never bet against the open web and with that at the core of Firefox OS, the operating system definitely has a chance to be successful in the long run. |
Naughty NSA Agents Spied On Lovers | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | [tweet https://twitter.com/PRISM_NSA/status/371434894141841408] Note to self: do not cheat on employees of the National Security Agency. The NSA is in more hot water after it was revealed that a few heart-broken agents . The violation is apparently common enough to earn its own bureaucratic code, “LOVEINT” “When we make mistakes, we detect, we correct and we report,” said NSA Chief Compliance Officer Justin DeLong in a conference call addressing the recent revelation that the NSA has violated its own thousands of times. Though, they claim that major infractions like targeted, unlawful spying are rare (most are typo errors that cause the wrong people to be queried). While disturbing, the revelation isn’t exactly a surprise. I would happily take a bet that unrequited love has caused egregious abuses of power in every intelligence agency — in the past and into the foreseeable future (it was even the plot line for James Cameron’s 1994 spy rom-com, ). True to form, Twitter had its own fun with the #NSAPickUpLines hashtag: [tweet https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/371617859958759424] [tweet https://twitter.com/Vidyut/status/371430682871861249] [tweet https://twitter.com/ColorMeRed/statuses/371554958123880448] Personally, I turned to Saturday Night Live; I imagine the spying went a little something like this:
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AWS Server Issues Take Down Instagram, Vine, Airbnb And IFTTT | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | Those of you looking to spend the rest of today watching people do other things on Instagram or Vine probably just had a rough time trying to do it. Both services went offline for over an hour, most likely because of issues with . Instagram was the first of the two to its issues on Twitter, and Vine followed suit . The deluge of tweets that accompanied the services’ initial hiccups first started at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and only increased in intensity as users found they couldn’t share pictures of their food or their meticulously crafted video snippets. Some further poking around on Twitter and beyond revealed that some other services known to rely on AWS — , , and to name a few — have been experiencing similar issues today. At this point Instagram and Vine are slowly coming back online for most, and the trickle of tweets bemoaning a Netflix outage has slowly dried up, but IFTTT’s website is still out of commission. A quick look at reveals that the company’s north Virginia data center is having some issues that are likely at the heart of all this (a situation that Airbnb confirmed ). The company has been dutifully reporting issues with its EC2, relational database, and load-balancing services for the past two hours, though recent updates indicate that they’ve managed to lock down the root issue and are currently cleaning up the remaining mess. Amazon figured out what happened with EC2 first: 2:21 PM PDT We have identified and fixed the root cause of the performance issue. EBS backed instance launches are now operating normally. Most previously impacted volumes are now operating normally and we will continue to work on instances and volumes that are still experiencing degraded performance. And then moved onto load balancing issues: 2:45 PM PDT We have identified and fixed the root cause of the connectivity issue affecting load balancers in a single availability zone. The connectivity impact has been mitigated for load balancers with back-end instances in multiple availability zones. We continue to work on load balancers that are still seeing connectivity issues. In any case, it appears that the worst is over, but we’ll continue to keep an eye on the situation for the time being. I hope your time spent away from those services was spent wisely (i.e. not just moaning about it on Twitter). |
What Games Are: The March Of The Muggles | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | The most (aside from Ballmer-chirping I suppose) interesting article I read this week was about how kids . Its author (Marc Scott) says that — contrary to the popular myth — kids today are every bit as incompetent with computers as their parents. They know how to use technology for specific functions (like Facebook or Skype) but don’t really understand what’s going on under the hood. Rather than taking the time to learn and master, they rely on some geek to fix their problems for them. Like most people, they essentially tolerate using computers rather than engaging with them. At first glance this article may make some of us despair. As (presumably) people who make, write or read about technology, most of us assume a passing familiarity with computers. Some of us can code. Some of us are power users. Some of us have built our own PCs from parts. Some of us have braved the wilds of Linux. Most of us have at the very least learned how to fake it, and nearly all of us at least get excited by new shiny toys. We’ve all suffered the perennial computer-fixing day that constitutes a key time of any trip home, but we have hope that one day our descendants won’t have that particular chore. Not so. Yet at second glance this article shows why Steve Jobs was basically right. iPads and other tablets and (as I talked about ) the PC is seriously on the slide. The reason is that tablets are powerful yet simple. The end user can do a lot with them and feels more in control because she uses her fingers to directly manipulate the screen. Yet at the same time the experience is siloed. There are no opportunities for viruses, bad software, browser toolbars or any of the thousand other headaches of computers. She can do her Facebooking and Skyping without feeling as though one misstep will invite some digital punishment. Few outside the geekternity care about how much power that means sacrificing because it wasn’t a power they ever really had to begin with. Cory Doctorow’s piece about the was right, but has another angle. It’s being driven by end users who just want to make their tech work without the . Their gap of understanding has little to do with smarts and everything to do with attention. While we may roll our eyes at the next generation’s skills, we should ask ourselves how many of us really understand the workings of our cars? We’re all, in other words, muggles about something. Few are the people with a polymath-level capacity to be interested in everything. Most of us triage the parts of life we don’t care about. In this case that happens to be computers. If you want you can get right into the heart of figuring out how to convert a PC into a kind of console via Big Picture, but many people are neither interested nor paying attention. That’s how it is. That’s how it will always be. As a game designer this doesn’t surprise me in the least. Players have been buying game consoles for 30 years, and all they are are glorified special-purpose computers with intentionally dumb controllers. They remove much of the pain of games in the eyes of Joe Customer, and for his part Joe is often content to pay more for his games as a result. Why faff around with complicated terror-inducing machines. Just pop a disc in a tray and play a game, you know? For a long time that led to a simple arrangement, a divide between console gamers and computer gamers. Yet, then the world changed and became far more complicated. So-called casual and social gaming appeared and changed the basic templates for the kinds of machines where gaming happened. You had people doing things on Facebook, on their phones and elsewhere, and the universe felt upended by an influx of muggles. In some respect this is a valid concern. While a movie can be shown at a multiplex or the art house and is much the same, a game for iPad is often a fundamentally different business proposition to one for Steam. Games don’t translate well, even with the advent of tools like Unity, and every platform is in effect its own wee universe. Games are tied to technological and platform constraints in a way that most other media doesn’t have to deal with, so the audience composition of a platform seriously affects what works on that platform. This presents a set of problems for many game makers. One is access to market. Another is the ability to talk to the market, even some part of it. It’s one thing to be an indie and make a game like (whose creator has made a couple of about indie life). It’s quite another, however, to get that message out in platforms whose audience doesn’t pay attention. Those markets tend to respond to top-down content direction, and often take a hand in shaping that content. This lead to a kind of television-esque market where the customer only ever looks at the top 50 chart choices and advertising muscle (or “user acquisition” as we call it these days) is king. That in turn leads to mainstreaming, average game ideas for average people. For example many years ago when the match-three game dominated Flash gaming space, folks used to wonder how long it would be before it tapped out. Surely, we’d think, it’ll run its course. Not so. ? ? Match-three games. They thrive partly because of but mainly because they’re just easier to grasp in a five-second attention span. A game like , on the other hand, needs editorial exposure. The App Store provides that kind of exposure, but the tragedy is how few games can realistically hope to be featured in that way. What I’m saying is that because the technology has become simpler and more immediate, its appeal to muggles has grown. However, in certain platforms that’s affected the kind of game (and probably other media, too) thats likely to succeed. It’s just hard to convey a nuanced idea to an audience that’s not really paying attention. This, then, is why Steam grows even though the PC is declining. Art-house-style games find a more willing reception on Steam because the community is already full of the people who choose to be there. They don’t have a technical barrier problem and are interested in the conversation. They want to know about the weird and the wild, the games like and the . They feel able to indulge in quirky games and community, support favored developers through services like Greenlight and otherwise be part of a more engaged culture. That sense of audience self-selection is also why many game makers still prefer the idea of working on consoles like Sony’s, Nintendo’s or Microsoft’s than on phones or tablets. If you get onto a sanctioned platform then getting coverage by the gaming press is easier, as is getting reviewed. Players on those platforms pay attention to media outlets and make informed purchasing decisions. By comparison, iOS, or worse Android, is perceived as one big stinky . Yet for all that, the problem for non-muggles is this: Operating on sanctioned platforms may feel safer, but there are not enough art-house customers to sustain an art-house platform all by themselves. Steam does not just sell indie games, it also sells . Sony does not just sell on its systems, it mostly sells . If the PC is on the decline and the console is squeezing itself out of existence, they do so in favor of those more muggle-like devices. Tablets, phones, microconsoles and more become the places where people go, and in time that affects everyone else. Those muggle platforms, the tablets and whatnot, are slowly becoming the future one sale at a time, and as game makers, we’re going to eventually have to stop treating them as where the lamestreamers live. We have to find a way to talk to a new generation that doesn’t want to learn about computers, because one day soon their choices will affect us all. |
“You Should Probably” Reminds You To Stop Wasting Your Life On The Internet | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | We all have our e-vices. Those sites that you catch yourself browsing with a half-focused gaze. The ones that nibble away at your time and leave you wondering what the hell you did all day, and how you ended up with page after page of purple links but not one thing scratched off your to-do list. For some, it’s Hacker News. For others, it’s metafilter or Facebook. Hell, for some, it’s probably TechCrunch. For me, it’s Reddit. “ ” is a Firefox extension that tries to wean you off those sites by nagging at you with better uses for your time. Unlike extensions like (Firefox) or (Chrome), “You Should Probably” doesn’t sites. Instead, it just throws a big, bright, closeable banner on top of each of your pre-selected time-sucks, reminding you that you could be doing… well, anything else right now. “You should probably go read a book,” it might suggest, or “You should probably go outside and take a walk.” You can customize and add to your list of alternative suggestions, and apply the banner to any site you choose. Want to ignore the banner and keep doing what you’re doing? Go right ahead — just be conscious of your decision. It’s not a strict parent, but a helpful (whiny) friend. The banner is placed right at the top of the page in a way that blocks the core navigation elements on many sites, so you’ll have to look at it on the regular. That distinction — nagging, over blocking — is why I this idea. I’ve tried plenty of those blocking extensions before; in every case, I’ve uninstalled them after a few days. For every minute of productivity they helped me find, they introduced two minutes of frustration whenever I to visit a site for whatever legitimate reason. The problem with time-gobbling sites isn’t when you deliberately to go there, it’s when you zone out in a productivity slump only to de-glaze your eyes and find yourself there. Like when you realize you’ve looked in your fridge eight times in the past hour, despite not being all that hungry in the first place. I just wish it could pull items straight from my own to-do list. “Oh, you’re reading yet another Today-I-Learned factoid that you’ll probably forget by tomorrow? You should probably write that email that’s been on your to-do list for 6 days.” As far as I can tell, the at the moment. If you know of something like this for Chrome, drop it in the comments and I’ll add it to the post. |
Say Something Is An App For Singles To Get Better At Dating Small Talk. But First It Needs To Attract Women | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPGciGrGApc&w=640&h=480] Say Something is that wants to inject some fun into online dating by letting you practice your small talk on other users of the app before you actually go on any first dates — thereby giving you the chance to make all those awful first impressions somewhere where they won’t count against you. Or rather where, if they do, it doesn’t matter because you’re not actually on a date yet. Where, in fact, it’s helpful feedback if your cloying online overtures are met with a barrage of ROFLs and LMAOs because you’ll know to avoid trying that particular line IRL. I’m half convinced this app is actually a cunning ruse designed to defuse the self-consciousness of dating by making it into a bit of a game — thus allowing people who want to go on dates to meet other like-minded single folk and get chatting without having to have those awkward first conversations framed by the awkward ‘first date’ context. Except they are arguably even more awkwardly framed as ‘this is me pretending to be on a first date’. But then that awkwardness is probably actually going to make things pretty funny — thereby oiling the wheels of a fun first (faux) date. Maybe. Not so, says Say Something’s London-based founder and CEO Marian Gazdik. The plan is to dating apps not fight them. “Our objective is to help people improve using our app and THEN go and meet people, using Match, eHarmony, Zoosk or whatever,” he stresses. He spells out the two “key premises” of the app as: 1. People will NOT meet in real life: we don’t encourage it and it is normal that the app’s algorithm will match a man from London with a girl from NY. (Yes, they can end up having fun, but it’s not going to be the main use case).
2. Because they will never meet, they will be much more likely to share honest feedback with each other. So what does Say Something do? It presents players of its dating game with scenarios where they might be able to strike up a conversation with a handsome stranger IRL, such as in a coffee shop queue or being smiled at in a bar, and then lets them try out an opening line on a player of the opposite sex so they can get feedback on whether it was a killer or a clanger. In short, it’s crowdsourced dating advice. Isn’t practicing dating conversation in bite-sized text snippets just going to encourage people to come up with more cheesy one-liners? “People play with other people. If they use cheesy pick-up lines, the game is over at level one. We have 15 levels,” is Gazdik’s rebuttal. This is not his first app in this area. , is another of his dating game efforts, which he says has amassed around 22,000 users with “no marketing budget.” That app started out as a “serious dating advisor for men” and gained only a small user-base (of around 500 users). But after gamifying it to shift the emphasis to fun he realised he was onto something as the number of users swelled. “People like the relaxed way of learning a topic that stresses them out a lot — dating is very stressful for many,” he adds. Say Something takes another bite at the dating gamification cherry, but this time, Gazdik says he’s trying to offer something that also appeals to female users. However there’s one pretty big caveat here: the app makers reckon it’s men who mostly want and need dating conversation practice. Female users of the app are apparently mostly there to provide feedback on how awful (or otherwise) the male players’ chat-up lines have been. “The app allows men to their conversational and with ” notes the description on Say Something’s page [emphasis theirs]. (Yes, its makers are seeking crowdfunding to fund this crowdsourced advice app, to the tune of £20,000 no less). Female users can get feedback on the responses they give the male players, and can also initiate conversations themselves, but the rules of this dating advice game — as its creators publicly explain them — cast women as the secondary sex, predominantly in a feedback giving role, rather than as people who might want to initiate conversations with sexy strangers themselves. Which does rather put a male-centric spin on the app from the start. So I asked why it doesn’t see demand for women initiating dating conversations. “Say Something is for men and for women. That is why the starting screen says ‘Say or Do something to start a conversation.’ Both can start a conversation, but we expect, just like in online dating, that men will be the ones who will start most conversations. On the other hand, she can just smile at him, or ask him something in an innocent way, right?” says Gazdik via email, wading deeper into gender stereotyping. All of which does rather give the impression that the app is wrestling with a contradiction: it needs to attract women to function properly, but may not actually be saying all the right things to get enough women interested in spending quality time with it. More practice required, clearly. Say Something is presumably angling its conversation at men because it’s hoping to tap into the kind of male appetite for dating advice evinced by the popularity of ‘pick up’ manuals aimed at men, like Neil Strauss’ The question is whether it’s also doing enough to convince women to take part. A male-centric gamification process could easily give the impression that it’s commodifying or stereotyping the dating experience — to the point where it feels off-putting to women, leaving the app with a paucity of female users to provide the feedback male users crave. If it can avoid the impression of being unattractively one-sided, and raise the £20,000 needed to finish development and start shouting about its assets, the app makers intend to offer freemium, premium and subscription versions of Say Something. The premium version will include a “contextualised advisor” — offering a player additional guidance so they can “transition” from text snippet into “a normal conversation”. The subscription service will include access to the “latest dating research findings, best tips, polls, dating guides, etc” — for those who want to turn dating from a game into a full-time job. |
null | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 8 | 22 | null |
The NSA Reportedly Bugged The UN’s New York Headquarters | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | As tensions mount between the United States and over the NSA’s once-secret spying programs, German news magazine reported earlier today that the NSA has been spying on the goings-on at the United Nations’ New York headquarters for nearly a year. Der Spiegel cites a multitude of documents that “stemmed” from security-consultant-turned-leaker Edward Snowden which purport (among other things) that the NSA first managed to crack the UN’s video conferencing system during the summer of 2012. Some of the documents obtained by Der Spiegel speak nicely to the sort of banality those involved ascribed to their actions — “The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” one of them reads. In the weeks that followed the number of decrypted communications surged from 12 to 458 (and almost assuredly grew from there) and it appears that the NSA has only expanded its surveillance of extra-national bodies. As it turns out, the UN wasn’t the only organization targeted by the NSA in this manner — still more documents obtained by Der Spiegel speak to the existence of a program called the Special Collection Service that allows the agency to monitor goings-on in 80 embassies and consulates across the globe. Also on that list of targets is the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union, though at this point it’s unclear what exactly the NSA has managed to dig up on either of those bodies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Der Spiegel notes that SCS’s operation is a well-organized one that “has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists.” As disconcerting as the revelation may be, this is hardly the first time the United Nations has been the stage for a bit of international espionage. British Parliament member Clare Short on a UK intelligence effort that saw British agents spying on then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and published a leaked memo from a senior NSA official just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 asking staffers to increase surveillance on security counsel members and other UN officials. |
The Maginot Line | Devin Coldewey | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | that I have succumbed to something like schadenfreude. It’s not that I really enjoy what is happening these days, what with institutions of the web shutting down, basic civil rights being ignored, and all the rest. It’s just that it’s all a little poetic. The technocracy, hoisted by its own petard – out-technocracied! We’ve been lionizing the Internet full-time for two decades (with good reason, of course) while clucking at the government’s failure to understand or adopt it. We’ve circumvented laws both just and unjust with it, hidden ourselves in its obscurity, reveled in its ubiquity, and laughed at the poor, benighted functionaries we presumed were still toiling over carbon copies and rooms full of file folders. Yet somehow with their ostensibly outdated tools and notions they were in fact subverting our little utopia at its most foundational levels. Did you know the Greeks had a god specifically for this type of situation? Nemesis, in charge of punishing hubris, often in especially apropos ways (Narcissus, for instance). The FISA court probably set up a temple in her honor. Please fill out form 617-B, allocation for a fatted thigh, the scent of which riseth to heaven and pleaseth the gods. But let’s cast our eye instead on more recent and confirmed history: the 1930s, on the eastern border of France. An impenetrable series of bunkers, tunnels, and garrisons built with the object of preventing a German assault. It worked wonderfully, of course — so wonderfully that the Germans decided they should go around it. The Maginot Line is what I think of when I hear about efforts to secure electronic communications, generally via increasingly complex encryption schemes. The battle is over, everyone. Believe it or not, we lost! In fact, we were completely routed, so to speak. And yet it seems like all anyone can think of doing is shoring up defenses which hardly came into play in the first place! PGP? People can barely manage the privacy settings on Facebook, much less a stable of random numbers and the means to deploy them. Zero-knowledge storage? Great until a court orders you to decrypt your own data (in violation of the 5th amendment, likely, but how long until a friendly precedent on that account?). Self-destructing messages? Print screen says hello, at least until someone finds a nice exploit. End to end encryption? Lovely, so you get flagged as suspicious by the NSA all your data is stored for five years — plenty of time for them to squeeze the keys out of you or a friend (identified by metadata), at which point they breach a whole network of trust. Tor? The feds are watching exit nodes like prohibition gangbusters outside a speakeasy. 256-bit WPA2 keys? If the password isn’t “password,” “admin,” or “123456,” it’s probably written on a post-it note stuck to the goddamn router! Come on! It’s not that these methods are technically insufficient for the their own purposes — it’s that they’re simply not practical given the actual threat: ubiquitous, flexible, and resourceful. Each one is arrayed against an idealized attack vector, and even if someone were to adopt each and every one of these worthy measures, they’re still going to get flanked. Of course, perfect security is just a dream. But when a burglar comes through the window, do you put more locks on the door? Better to just acknowledge that we chose to live in a dangerous neighborhood. The existing infrastructure of the Internet, from the routers and switches to the browsers and apps we use, was simply not designed with privacy or anonymity in mind. That wasn’t a problem until the volume and importance of our electronic communications hit some crucial tipping point, at which they ceased being yet another way to get data from here to there, and became an indispensable and historically unparalleled tool for free expression. Gradually, the dissonance of these two ideas — a tool built for shouting that must be used to whisper — has become clear. This whole surveillance debacle is only the latest revelation to disturb our cozy ignorance. We will have to live with the fact that our data is not secure for a while. Considering the towering privilege that is the Internet in the first place, it’s not too much to ask that we cope with a few cracks in the foundation. People for whom anonymity is critical, such as whistleblowers and activists, will be at risk, as they always were. Don’t forget that while the Internet is a powerful tool, it’s also a new one, and while we should value its contributions and the people whom it enabled, it is by no means an essential tool for confidential communication, or, for that matter, . But we may also have to face the idea that the savior Perfect Security may appear to rapture us into a world of true anonymity, fountains of bitcoins, and desiccated surveillance apparati, lovingly tended by weeping spooks. I was told yesterday (by Bruce Schneier, so I trust it) that the noise pattern from a device’s antenna can be used to fingerprint it, a side effect of high-precision wireless transceivers. Metadata is leaking at the seams because our communications must be quick and precise. Our faces are registered on cameras dozens of times a day because the demand for imaging devices has made the cost of capturing and recording less than the cost of not doing so. Every defense we raise is a Maginot Line, and every sword we forge cuts both ways. We’ve opened box after box from Pandora’s collection, and generally speaking the shrieking demons which emerged have quickly sunk their unholy teeth into industries and institutions whose devourment was long overdue. But sometimes we look down and notice bite marks on ourselves, as when we found that the Internet enables a , , or . Clearly, this is one of those times. It does no good for us to pretend that the way we have crafted our world is without consequences unfavorable to ourselves, perhaps permanent ones. The rule of history is two steps forward and one step back. We have just taken a step back. Hubris, meet Nemesis. |
Teen Brags On Facebook About Drunk Driving, Gets Arrested | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Police out of a teenager from Oregon who boasted about driving drunk on Facebook. “Drivin drunk… classic ;) but whoever’s vehicle i hit i am sorry. :P,” wrote the clueless 18-year-old. to local news channel KGW, two people tipped the officers via Facebook about the post. After inspecting the most-likely-profusely-sweating/hungover teen’s car, the damage on his vehicle matched that of two other vehicles hit earlier that New Year’s morning. And, with their powers of deduction…bam! Handcuffs. The suspect was charged with two counts of “failing to perform the duties of a driver,” but not drunk driving, because a Facebook post is apparently not sufficient evidence of intoxication, according to KGW’s report from Deputy Chief Brad Johnston. , the police wrote, “Astoria Police have an active social media presence. It was a private Facebook message to one of our officers that got this case moving, though. When you post…on Facebook, you have to figure that it is not going to stay private long.” Note: unlike many other media reports, I have decided not to reveal the teenager’s name. We all did stupid things when we were young. He’s getting his legal comeuppance and hopefully the story will deter his peers from reckless activity. But, one stupid mistake shouldn’t be a life-long sentence of public shame. |
A Story About Threading The Needle On Mobile | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 8 | 25 | TechCrunch . As some of you may know, I’ve been lucky to be a small of the team behind , a new kind of radio experience built initially for iPhone. After spending many months in stealth mode leading up to our public at the end of June 2013, I finally gained some perspective with which to reflect on all the little product and strategic decisions the team made to deliver what is, in my (biased) view, a great version one product in a consumer app marketplace. About two months into the wild, we are fortunate to have received some nice feedback and organic mentions on Twitter, where much of our core audience resides. Undoubtedly, completing version one only means that we have a long way to go, things to add and mistakes to learn from, but with that said, there could be some useful lessons hidden in the tiny decisions Swell made that may help the next mobile developer down the road. This post is an attempt to collect those decisions and analyze them with the benefit of hindsight, as well as to share them with you all. The list may start with obvious elements, but please bear with me as the decisions get more precise. The team wanted to leverage its expertise in bringing complex technologies to mobile. Given their experience with , that meant focusing on the latest iPhones and iOS. It may be en vogue to comment now that it’s time for , but from a technology development perspective, going that route is either for an early-stage startup that has limited resources and time. (The web is a great place to test ideas and build an audience, as well as being a tool to help mobile distribution, but the team didn’t feel a web player for Swell radio would deliver a “wow” experience.) One lesson the SnapTell team learned is that using a mobile image app for shopping wasn’t something people did every day. On mobile, the trick is to find a daily use case. The team began to focus on commuters, specifically those commuting by car and train. The idea is that if we could provide value to them during this activity, it could be a daily habit, though any solution would still compete with music, audiobooks, phone calls, terrestrial and satellite radio, and other talk-radio apps for consumers’ time. The battle for consumer attention is fierce, and no place more fierce than the iPhone. Everyone is building apps that require our eyesight and attention. Some of us are stuck in Twitter, and others are stuck in Facebook, and it’s hard to use these apps when we are not focused and working inside them (outside of push notifications, which can be distracting). Therefore, building on the trend of more “ ” in applications, the team decided to focus on a consumer solution that could provide value in the background while the consumer focuses their attention in the foreground on apps like Twitter or Waze, for instance. We didn’t want to compete with these big attention-grabbing apps — we wanted to complement them. The “News” category in the Apple App Store is densely populated. News is, indeed, a competitive category. But, people want news every day. So, instead of trying to build another news reader, the team investigated the audio news category, which still has competition but is not as crowded, relative to the readers. In this process, the team discovered that a treasure trove of quality audio content was either freely accessible through public APIs and/or buried in the world of online podcasts. This presented an opportunity to find the best content, to classify it in a new database according to a new ontology, to rank it based on a human expert’s understanding of audio content, and to remix that content to deliver to consumers a new, radio experience. The timing of this company coincided with some important opportunities presented by the advancements in cellular network technologies and mobile hardware. In order to deliver a streaming audio experience, mobile consumers would need to dip into their cellular data plans to enjoy the product. Luckily, the streaming costs for audio are quite low relative to video, and they are decreasing. The company went steps further to optimize this for users by building a to pull content to the client when the device is on a Wi-Fi network. A step more, the team built functionality inside the app for the consumer to allocate more client-side storage for content to listen to the audio in an offline mode style of consumption. Finally, these improvements also minimize drain on the handset battery. The company started out with a desire to build an application that would have the chance to become a mainstream consumer hit. To fulfill that promise, the team recruited an experienced audio producer from the world of radio and media to organize, classify, rate, and license the best content. The result is a valuable repository and ranking system that contains a library of audio content. On the personalization side, the team built an based on (i.e. listening and learning from the amount of people who actually listened to a piece of content) to continuously learn about the consumer’s preferences and tastes and, theoretically, become smarter over time. by what Pandora has unlocked for our musical tastes, the goal was to build a similar system for audio news and information. It’s cliche to point out how important interaction and visual design are for consumer-level apps, but it bears repeating here, because, as more and more people transition to apps over the web, the experience becomes more like a game and, conversely, raises the stakes for providing a simple experience that doesn’t turn off or frustrate a user. The team recruited a founding designer from the gaming world to design an interface that would both be simple, novel, and fit the needs of people who are driving. That means it involves thinking about everything from Bluetooth integration to locked home-screen controls for iPhones. One of my favorite interactions is the ability to “Skip” through content by . In regular terrestrial radio and satellite radio — and even most mobile radio apps — the user has to either turn a dial to tune their experience or search for what they may like. In our app, the “skip” is the dial. Many apps get thrown into the market with a ton of features slapped on and “social” awkwardly baked in. We made a conscious decision not to do this. Instead, the company designed the application to be of high use to just one person, to offer a high-quality “single-player mode.” Furthermore, the company elected to focus on delivering content to consumers in a “lean-back” mode, like Pandora, where the user has some basic controls but essentially doesn’t have to do any work to enjoy the experience. In addition to being complex on many dimensions, many apps these days ask the user to do more work than many people have an for. As a result, the radio app was designed for a user to simply hit “play” and then have relevant content delivered to them. I’d like to underline again that all of this, in no way, implies or assumes success. And mistakes were made, indeed. It is a continual learning process, and there is a long, long way to go to keep threading the needle. Additionally, there are many decisions that couldn’t be included in this post but are no less important to the company. Here, I wanted to focus on the steps we took to conceptualize and build a mobile-first product. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, these decisions may look good, but as things were unfolding and in the moment, it just happened to be a series of seemingly small decisions that, over time, thankfully combined to form the foundation for what the Swell product experience is today. |
Tencent Hires Peter Cheng, Former COO Of AdChina, As It Seeks To Bolster Advertising Revenue | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | , China’s largest Internet company by revenue, announced today that it has hired Peter Cheng, the former chief operating officer of , as the general manager of Tencent’s online media group advertising platform. Cheng will take charge of Tencent’s advertising platform-related business and report to SY Lau, the senior executive vice president of Tencent and president of the online media group. The move comes after Tencent warned of slowing advertising spending in the Chinese market. Cheng became AdChina’s COO in February 2008, where he was responsible for the daily operations of the company’s integrated marketing and advertising platform. Before joining AdChina, Cheng was vice president of product management at online advertising company Adify and prior to that held senior marketing and product management positions at eBay, Oracle, and FedEx. Back in November, that advertising spending in the Chinese market continues to be slow due to a weak economy and industrywide sluggishness. Even though Tencent’s ad-revenue growth in the third quarter reached 69 percent, the company warned that its winning streak was coming to an end “because decelerating economic growth in China may slow revenue growth rates for the online-advertising industry as a whole, including [Tencent’s] own online-advertising business.” Other Chinese Internet companies hit by declining advertising spending include Baidu and Renren. At that time, however, Tencent chief strategy officer James Mitchell also said that the company still has room to add advertisements, in particular targeted ads, to its platforms. In May 2012, Tencent , including the Online Media Group Cheng just joined. The move was meant to help it ward off competition from Alibaba/Taobao and Sina Weibo. Cheng will “continue to work on maximizing advertisers’ marketing value through the integration of Tencent’s marketing platforms,” said the company in a press release. “More and more advertisers are focusing on new media and mobile marketing. Soon, new technologies such as RTB, audience targeting and social CRM (customer relationship management) will inject new power into online marketing,” said Cheng in the statement. “We are already seeing major developments in online video advertising, and all of these innovations will revolutionize traditional marketing approaches.” |
Tinder: Finding Traction On Campuses, IAC’s New Dating App Makes It Easy To Break The Ice | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Regardless of what you think about digital dating sites, they encourage us to close our computers and get out there and meet new people. In short, they bring people together. The problem is, of course, that there are infinite variations on social and mobile dating, from compatibility engines and social, Facebook-based platforms to and . Then there are the quasi-dating, people-meeting sites . Some work, most don’t. A new LA-based startup backed by IAC — the Barry Diller-led digital media giant that also happens to own dating veteran Match.com — thinks it has a shot to catch your attention amidst the noise by throwing out the bells and whistles and keeping it simple. Launched in October, is an iOS app that focuses on the social and mobile aspects of dating, while attempting to get rid of the creepy factor. Co-founders Sean Rad, Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen, and Christopher Gulczynski tell us that, based on their experience, most dating sites offer too much rejection. They focus heavily on profiles (and photos), many of which are fake, don’t tell you much about your prospective match and set the table for tons of message spam. Guys tend to be over-eager, sending messages broadly to 200 ladies, and generally speaking only a couple will respond. It’s a waiting game with plenty of rejection, which makes for a bad user experience. And for women, it can be pretty darn creepy, if not overwhelming. As a result, few dating sites/apps have really taken off, while the largest players in the dating world — incumbents like Match.com and OkCupid — continue to hold the most mindshare among daters. These incumbents can provide better matches and more structure, but they often require you to fill out a bunch of forms and tend to cater to a slightly older crowd. Having learned from Match.com (also part of IAC), the Tinder founders decided to build a dating experience for a younger demographic — the mobile generation. Initially, Tinder piloted its dating experience on a few college campuses, where it’s been taking off, serving over one million matches, with users having made 35 million profile ratings in less than two months. The co-founders say that they’re continuing to listen to users, tweaking the experience based on feedback and, with traction building, they’ll be looking to build off their seed funding from IAC and raise a series A in the coming months. CEO Sean Rad says that he thinks Tinder is resonating with college students because the app has taken a more subtle approach to dating, as it doesn’t require users to “put themselves out there” to the same degree other apps require. In terms of how it works: Tinder is location-enabled, in that it shows you other people who nearby it thinks you might like to know, connecting you if you’re interested. The experience is anonymous until someone you like returns your interest, as you can anonymously “like” the person or skip to the next suggestion. Unlike some other apps, Tinder doesn’t track location in the background, meaning that it doesn’t eat up battery life. When a user opens the app, Tinder captures their last known location, presenting it to other users with limited details — in the “worst-case” scenario, Rad says, it might say “Rip is <5 miles away." Fairly standard among mobile dating apps. Tinder casts a 50 miles net around its users, taking users within that radius and giving them a rating based on their relevance to you. It displays people in order based on this score, so the person with the highest potential match is at the top. The score is based on shared friends (via Facebook), interests and networks. In turn, the more one uses Tinder, the more data it has on your tastes and preferences, tweaking its score based on those implicit signals it captures from user behavior. There are a host of dating platforms built on top of Facebook data (and in some cases other others), like TheDatable, TheComplete.Me, Circl.es, and Yoke to name a few. While Tinder makes Facebook log-in mandatory and uses the social network's profiles to establish a baseline of trust and identity, the CEO says that the app doesn't share anything back to Facebook and doesn't post to Walls or Timelines. The initial experience is somewhat reminiscent of the old Hot or Not model in that users check out some basic profile data and photos based on the list of Tinder's nearby matches. If what you see is appealing, you "like" them, if not, you pass. And to that point, another upside for Tinder is that users can't message each other unless they've both explicitly stated interest in one another. The idea is that, once users have stated interest in each other, they can message the other person via chat, add each other on Facebook, leading to a meeting in person. At least that’s the idea. Based on location and shared interests, Tinder attempts to prequalify the relationship, Rad says, and Facebook authentication reduces a bit of the creepiness. The founders are trying to put more emphasis on one’s social circle than on interests, likely why the app is finding adopters on college campuses and among the recently graduated. Going forward, the CEO says, the team wants to make it easier for users to meet by allowing them to throw a party in an area where you (and your friends) have more matches, for example, to create a more comfortable, “safer” and larger environment where they can mingle. One thing working against Tinder is that, even as its user base grows, it doesn’t yet have a business model — though it’s still early in the game. The co-founders did say that they are confident monetization won’t come in the form of ads, instead, they’ll likely turn to in-app purchases. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you might be able to shell out a couple bucks to be able to send your matches a virtual flower or a dozen roses, for example. While virtual gifts may not represent a goldmine, it’s an appealing idea and one that’s proven fairly successful on Facebook. Next, the co-founders plan to continue improving the app’s algorithms and, judging by some early user reviews, Tinder might want to consider establishing some sort of age range so that 30-year-old users aren’t seeing a bunch of 16-year-old matches, as well as build up infrastructure to prevent crashing. The latest version of the app takes care of some of the glitches and improves the visual experience, allowing users to see up to four Facebook photos during the initial Hot or Not and flirting stage. But it would be good to let users archive old messages and go back through people they’ve already rated. Tinder may not blow you away with its innovation or shock with first-mover appeal, but by keeping things simple and social, improving algorithms, reducing creepiness and targeting young daters, the app very well could be hitting the right note and an attractive niche. Considering how fast SnapChat has taken off among younger generations, there’s a huge audience of excitable, mobile and social flirters out there. Two months from launch, Tinder has been able to maintain 65 percent daily active users (and 80 percent when a user is matched) and the 35 million profile ratings show it’s been able to capitalize (at least initially) on that viral hook. There’s a lot of competition, but Tinder is creating an addicting experience that could stand to find big adoption on college campuses. Check . |
Sina Weibo Accounts Of Prominent Bloggers, Journalists & Activists Shuttered As China Clamps Down On Internet Users | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | The last week has been a troubling one for observers of Internet censorship in China, and things just got worse, as several bloggers and activists had their Sina Weibo accounts shut down over the past few days, t . The account closures come one week after the requiring people to use their real names when signing up for Internet and phone services, a sign that the Communist Party intends to tighten its grip even further on China’s netizens (who currently make up the world’s largest group of Web users), and just three days after Chris Buckley, a New York Times reporter, and his family were forced to leave China after they weren’t issued a new visa by the end of 2012. Though the , many observers view the delay as retaliation by the Chinese government for . The people who had their Weibo accounts disabled recently include journalists Shi Feike, an investigative reporter whose coverage of the abuse of power in Chongqing led to the arrest of disgraced former official Bo Xilai, and Cheng Yizhong, founder and former chief editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily. Also blocked were the accounts of Sichuan blogger and activist Ran Yunfei and Xiao Han, an associate professor at the China University of Political Science and Law. Ran told the Washington Post that he had received no advance notice from Sina Weibo or any explanation of why his account was shuttered, though he had recently “posted some messages satirizing the so-called new governance” of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party and prime minister-designate Li Keqiang. The Sina Weibo account of cartoonist Kuang Biao, whose pieces satirized Communist Party policy and the “well-documented misbehavior of some Communist Party officials,” was closed by 7pm Friday, according to the Washington Post. The Xi administration has plenty of reason to be wary of the Internet, as “Chinese citizens were treated this year to an unaccustomed number of hard-hitting exposés and investigations detailing the private lives and corrupt financial dealings of the most senior Communist Party officials and their family members,” the . Notable examples include the surrounding deposed former Politburo member Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai, who of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. Though Sina Weibo, which has more than 400 million members, was slow in after being instructed to by the Chinese government a year ago and stands to lose plenty from the new law if traffic is reduced, Tech In Asia’s Steven Millward notes that the microblogging platform by blocking certain searches, not indexing other searches to push down their visibility, asking Weibo users to report other posters for spreading “rumors,” and delaying mentions of “sensitive” words by a week. We have emailed Sina Weibo for comment and will update this post if they respond. |
Amazon’s R&D Group Lab126 Embarks On Hiring Spree As Kindle Business Expands | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Amazon’s , the secretive R&D group behind the Kindle, is apparently , as noted by the , which speculates that the organization may be planning to spin out the lab as a stand-alone company. There are currently about available, with most based in Silicon Valley, but several in Hyderabad, India, one in Shenzhen, China and another in Tokyo. This is yet another sign that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is gearing up its mobile device business to lead its global expansion strategy, after years of giving its Kindle products a rather sluggish international rollout. Japan , and the device looks set to arrive soon in . Amazon’s Kindle bookstore also recently , though Kindle devices . The number of Lab126 employees has jumped over the past 15 months. In September 2011, Lab126 had just over 500 employees listed on LinkedIn, , but that number has grown to 1,015 as of a search of current Lab126 employees today. Back in September, Lab126 leased 500,000 square feet of office space in Sunnyvale, California, with enough room to hold more than 2,500 workers. Amazon has also launched a that focuses on developing services and APIs for TVs, game consoles, smartphones and PCs for the global market. As , there are more than a dozen management openings, including several requiring 10 years of experience or more. International positions include a camera test engineer based in Shenzhen, China, who “will be a key member of the development team and will be the main interface among the internal engineering and operations teams as well as our OEM partners.” Lab126 is also looking for a data center engineer who will be based in Meguro City, Tokyo. The job description for that particular position says: “Amazon is expanding the Data Center management team in Asia and specifically in Japan. This position requires broad Data Center knowledge with Subject Matter Expertise (SME) in as many specific fields as possible.” Another open position is a Silicon Valley-based principal software development engineer for APIs who will be expected to “engage with an experienced cross-disciplinary staff to conceive and design innovative consumer application solutions,” a possible sign that Amazon will continue to more attractive to both developers and consumers. Other positions listed include accessories engineers for “in-box and out-box accessories,” especially for candidates with experience in “IP creation,” which, as the EETimes notes, is interesting because Amazon produces few Kindle accessories even though that is a high profit margin area. Job openings in this area include an accessory electrical engineer and senior accessory electrical engineer, both based in Cupertino, and required to be “someone who is a “hands-on” electrical accessory engineer with a hardware design background in consumer electronics to develop in-box and out-box accessories.” In another strong sign that it plans to expand rapidly, Lab126 is even hiring a team of recruiters, including five for its Silicon Valley office (a senior recruiter, two recruiters for digital products, a sourcing recruiter, and a recruiting coordinator), as well as a software development manager in Hyderabad who is also expected to be a “recruiter and people manager.” A request for comment has been sent to Amazon’s press office and this post will be updated if they respond. |
TC Cribs: A Trip To Airbnb’s Headquarters, Where The Coolest Rental Properties Are Re-Created | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Welcome back to , the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the offices of the industry’s hot companies to see what it’s really like inside the belly of the tech innovation beast (and check out the free food and fun perks that often help power it.) In this episode, we visited the downtown San Francisco headquarters of , where we received a tour from co-founder and CTO . Now, I have to admit that our expectations were pretty high — after all, by running possibly the most well-known online , I figured that the folks at Airbnb have seen their fair share of interestingly designed interiors. I’m happy to report that the Airbnb office did not disappoint. The company has actually re-created rooms from some of the coolest properties available for rent on the site, and uses them as conference rooms. This means that there are replicas of spaces in Hong Kong, Berlin, New York City, and elsewhere that are accurate down to the smallest details, which was pretty neat to see. Watch the video embedded above to see those re-created Airbnb spaces for yourself, along with a particularly historic Skee-Ball machine, surprisingly tasty looking gourmet raw food, some unique bathrooms, and more. |
Google Isn’t A Monopoly If Consumers Choose Speed Over Options | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | While the Federal Trade Commission earlier today for prioritizing its own products in search results, it’s questionable whether the search giant can ever be considered a monopoly, if consumers continue to rely on Google to offer up solutions without the inconvenience of comparison shopping other services. There’s countless review websites to help me choose the best restaurants, a handful of map applications to give me the quickest driving directions, and a litany of coupon search engines to find me the cheapest price. In the interest of efficiency, more and more users may want a company like Google to recommend a restaurent, present driving directions in Google Maps, and offer a great coupon–all in one search. In an era of information overload, choice (i.e competition) can be a burden and consumers may very well prefer the efficiency of a single option. Microsoft and a coalition of niche search engines accused Google of unfair search practices for prominently displaying some results at the top of some inquiries. For instance, when I search for my dream vacation back to Brazil, Google displays a list of flights it thinks I’m most interested in. Google controls a whopping two-thirds of U.S. searches, enough to threaten the existence of niche search sites that thrived in the crevices of where the search giant did not previously attempt to dominate. “Google clearly skews search results to favor its own products and services while portraying the results as unbiased. That undermines competition and hurts consumers,” said John M. Simpson, of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, in an extended rant against the FTC’s refusal to charge Google with anti-competitive practices. While Google may have a foreboding market share, dominance must be paired with consumer harms to constitute a legal monopoly. “Mere possession of monopoly power is not an antitrust offense,” explained legal scholars Joshua D. Wright and Geoffrey A. Manne in a deliciously informative piece about the . Courts recognize that sound monopoly law has an “understanding of the tradeoffs between innovation and dynamic efficiency gains and the static welfare losses associated with monopoly power.” I enjoy the fact that Google’s search results save me the trouble of comparison shopping every imaginable niche competitor (i.e. it provides consumers with beneficial efficiency gains). Right now, my browser has 53 open tabs; every second matters to me. Indeed, Google’s has found that users are extraordinarily sensitive to speed: consumer satisfaction takes a noticeable dip if web pages take longer than 500 milliseconds to load. Consumers (including myself) will continue to offload more and more decisions to computers, from flights to restaurants to television shows, and we will want answers as quickly as possible so we can make even more decisions in our increasingly information-hungry lives. The need for speed necessarily squeezes out competitors, because it’s worth increasing the volume of information we can absorb in exchange for the time it takes to find higher quality information for each search. Monopoly law may make sense when something like a government-supported telecommunications industry excludes other Internet service providers from offering me cheaper, faster Internet. But consumers are choosing Google; more importantly, they’re also asking Google to make choices (quickly) for them. Unless readers believe that users are hurting themselves, Google’s dominance isn’t paired with a harm that could trip the second legal requirements for a “monopoly.” Indeed, it seems that the more decisions we ask Google to make, the more impossible it becomes for Google to be a monopoly at all — no matter how much of the market it dominates. |
Imagining The Future: Ray Kurzweil Has “Unlimited Resources” For AI, Language Research At Google | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Last month, famed inventor, entrepreneur and futurist, Ray Kurwzeil, joining Google as a director of engineering. , Kurzweil said at the time that he would be assuming a full-time position in Mountain View, focusing on “new technology development,” as well as machine learning and language processing. Joining other giants of technology at Google, like VP, Chief Internet Evangelist and “father of the Internet” , the move was not necessarily an unexpected one, especially as Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long been fascinated by “the singularity” — the theoretical moment in time in which artificial intelligence surpasses the human brain. Beyond being credited as the inventor of the CCD flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine, and various other speech recognition technologies and text-to-speech synthesizers, Kurzweil is one of the better known proponents of technological singularity and helped to popularize the concept. Nonetheless, many have wondered what Kurzweil’s new position would mean for Google and the billions of people its global reach directly or indirectly touches. Would they be uploading Kurzweil’s brain into their datacenters? Become the next ? Fulfill technological prophecies? Speaking at an event at Singularity University today, X Prize Chairman Peter Diamandis and Kurzweil shared in a dialogue that sheds a bit more light on just what Kurz-Google will mean. by my friend Kelly Faircloth at BetaBeat and , we learned that the futurist will be “working on advanced implementations of AI” at Google, where he will apparently have “unlimited resources.” [tweet https://twitter.com/wadhwa/status/286893821944557568 align=’center’] While it might seem odd that an independent thinker like Kurzweil would join a large corporation, given Google’s reach, enormous computing resources and talent pool (along with the presumed freedom to investigate whether or not Androids dream of electric sheep), there’s plenty of incentive to take this kind of work to Mountain View. Participating directly in innovation — arguably at one of the forefronts — likely has a bit more appeal than writing books and speaking. After all, who needs to know how to read when the robots can do that for us?! It’s likely the same impetus that drew Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig to Google, for example. In conversation with Diamandis, Kurzweil his role at Google to be one in which he helps to create technology that truly understands human language and its real meaning. (At this point, Siri loudly got up and left the room.) Thanks to its many, far-reaching tentacles, Google already has an enormous amount of information about human speech, thought, and beyond; knows where we are, what we’re interested in, who are friends are; and what we’re saying in our emails. “What if Google were actually able to understand us — the user?” to paraphrase a question posed by the futurist. In part, that’s a frightening concept. (And not really even “in part.”) It’s easy for companies to become wrapped up in defending their market positions, increasing stock price, which often seems to work against them — or at least against their presumed better, innovation-centric selves. So, while Kurzweil’s mission may be an appealing one for us armchair thinkers, the question is whether Google will be able to maintain its “don’t be evil” mantra in the face of innovation, exponential technological growth, knowing anything that happens anywhere — in minutes — and the singularity. While it may just be food for science fiction fans, Kurzweil said that tech isn’t moving in a linear manner but toward the exponential, and it will “create abundance” as a result. At which point Diamandis chimed in to say that, in fact, “the world’s biggest problems are its biggest market opportunities,” like energy, food and water — or the scarcity thereof. Wishful thinking or not, we need more that believe this. “We can use technology for creativity or destruction, it’s up to us,” Kurzweil said (via Wadhwa). While it may be hard for people to understand the multivariate implications of technology’s exponential growth curve, things are indeed changing quickly. Asking questions of our phones and getting answers seemed crazy just a few years ago, he said, and today we complain that it isn’t perfect. And therein lies another rub: We expect a lot, and technology has taught us to do so, yet we often give little ourselves. Moore’s Law will run out of steam this century and will be replaced by new paradigms, Kurzweil told the crowd, as exponential technologies grow at the speed of light in fields like AI, nanotech, robotics and computational neuroscience. Soon, we will see high school kids contributing to innovation in a meaningful way, he said. While that is an exciting (if not terrifying) notion, “soon” may be a relative term, considering that computer science classes are currently absent in about 95 percent of high schools in the U.S. . Albeit slowly. [tweet https://twitter.com/wadhwa/status/286914949249392641 align=’center’] The most salient point, at least from my perspective, is that we can all benefit from remembering to “think big” — rather than the alternative. Minutiae be damned! To Google’s credit, it has the reputation of supporting and fostering this kind of thinking, and it’s exciting to think of the possibilities that Kurzweil has with access to the levers of Google resources. And, yes, that’s also somewhat terrifying. As are some of the implications of this speculation from the singularity believer: [tweet https://twitter.com/wadhwa/status/286891717536391169 align=’center’] Check out Kurzweil’s conversation with . |
Unitus Seed Fund Raises $8M From Khosla, 500 Startups To Back Ventures That Fight Poverty In India | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Poverty is a huge problem in India. But just because there’s social good to be done doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made. So a year after its launch, to invest in for-profit startups that help people in India at the bottom of the economic pyramid. 500 Startups, Vinod Khosla, and other angels contributed to the fund that is already having an impact. Based out of Seattle and Bangalore, India, in February 2012. It’s part of the that includes an equity fund and a financial advisory firm. Unitus Seed Fund aims to make small equity investments in 30 to 40 early-stage startups that aid India in the next four years. It’s shooting to back 10 in 2013. Unitus Seed Fund looks for scalable startups that “provide economic self-reliance, education, and basic necessities to millions of low-income people” who live on less than $4 a day. Its first investments are making progress. They are: Now, some of the world’s leading impact investors have put money into the Unitus Seed Fund. They include “Mike Murray (co-founder of microfinance pioneer, ), Jeff Clark, Vinod Khosla (Founder, and ), , and Bob Gay (Formerly Huntsman-Gay and Bain Capital). Co-investors in India include T.V. Mohandas Pai (Chairman of ), and Dr. Ranjan Pai (CEO of ).” Along with its crew of advisors, these investors will help guide Unitus investments in building out their teams, bringing solutions to market, scaling, and monetizing. The seed fund’s raise continues growing interest in India as a place to invest. 500 Startups recently filed with the SEC to set up a . With a population of well over 1.2 billion, and mobile technology gaining traction outside of major cities, there’s a huge opportunity to create the brands and essential services of the future. Engineering talent is plentiful. What India needs now is venture capital, and Unitus Seed Fund is ready to jumpstart companies as long they help people, not just themselves. |
The Bonsai Is A Shaving Accessory That Hopes To Be One Designer’s Contribution To Water Conservation | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezo0VbcSJ-I?feature=player_embedded]The Bonsai is gadget with a soul, one that hopes to make a global difference by changing the way we go about an activity many do on a daily basis. It’s a shaving accessory, and it’s being right now, with creator Craig Battin and his team looking for $125,000 to turn their final prototype into a production shipping device. The Bonsai is a razor rinsing device, one that can save up to 99 percent of the water the average person uses rinsing out their blade under a running tap. It’s essentially a cup, one that you fill with a set amount of water at the beginning of your shave, which then creates a spray via high-pressure circulation of water. It also filters out hair and other debris, which you can then dump when you’re done. Battin explained via email that growing up in Las Vegas, the need to conserve water was ever-present, hence his fascination with this problem in particular. “I can remember driving over Hoover Dam with my family on the way to Arizona and seeing the “bathtub ring” of Lake Mead grow and grow, and it was very alarming to me,” he explained. ” At the most severe point in the ongoing drought, I believe the lake level had dropped by 120 feet. When I joined the workforce after college, I was forced to shave frequently, and I was always bothered by how much water I wasted each day. That was the genesis.” While the water conservation aspect drove the Bonsai’s initial development, Battin and his team quickly turned their attention to other areas of concern. These prompted the design of the filter to get rid of gunk that can clog drains, especially with daily shaving, and also the way the Bonsai actually blends your shaving cream with the rinse water as you go to create a solution that’s easier on your face since it’s oiling your razor as you go. The project will also offer an oil that you can use in combination with the Bonzai to enhance that effect. Battin explained that too much attention has been focused on razors, hence the lack of forward movement in terms of changes to the way we actually shave. “It seems like we’ve been riding this trajectory where the only feasible innovations involve the physical razor or the blades, so you end up with things like vibrating handles and lethal 6-blade cartridges,” he said. “I think the lack of disruption has everything to do with where the focus has been, and the fact that consumers really don’t have many alternatives.” Of course, the Bonzai also saves money by saving water, and Battin claims, by extending the life of your razor blades. It’s powered by a rechargeable battery and works both in and out of the shower. The gadget is available during the Indiegogo campaign for a pledge starting at $79, and the team estimates they’ll begin shipping devices by July 2013. If you’re a slave to the shave, as most of us likely are, you could do worse than to back this project and its aspirational goal of cutting down on the environmental toll it takes for us to clean up our ape-like faces and bodies. |
comScore: U.S. Holiday Shoppers Spent $42.3B Online, Up 14% From Last Year | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | After announcing some , comScore just released its final analysis of U.S. online holiday spending for 2012: shoppers bought a total of $42.3 billion worth of goods online from November 1 to December 31. That’s up 14 percent from the $37.2 billion comScore reported last year, but a bit lower than expected as shoppers slowed down around mid-December. While the numbers were up across the board, comScore registered especially strong increases in online shopping on Thanksgiving Day (up 32 percent to $622 million) and “ ” on December 17 (up 76 percent to just over $1 billion). While Christmas Day itself was rather slow with $288 million spent on online shopping, even that number was up 36 percent, though it couldn’t make up for a generally soft end of December. Overall, these increases around 15 percent have been over the last years. ComScore originally predicted a growth rate around 16 percent for this year, but as the company’s chairman Gian Fulgoni pointed out in today’s release: “November started out at a very healthy 16-percent growth rate through the promotional period of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but consumers almost immediately pulled back on spending, apparently due to concerns over the looming fiscal cliff and what that might mean for their household budgets in 2013.” The last week of December clearly shows this softening with a minuscule year-over-year increase from $2.499 billion to $2.530 billion. |
Art.sy Now Showing Permanent Redirect To Artsy.net As Conflict In Syria Escalates | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | , the New York City-based startup that has created a Pandora Radio-like discovery engine for artwork, has attracted over the years because of its domain name — .sy is the official domain suffix for the Syrian Arab Republic, a currently which is the subject of . Now, as violent conflict in Syria , it looks like Art.sy may be feeling some side effects — and making changes of its own. Yesterday, Art.sy’s , and the company was redirecting traffic to a backup site at . At the time, a spokesperson confirmed the issues via email but could not provide details on whether the outage was related to the Syrian conflict. The spokesperson did say, however, that things would be back to normal soon: “The only information we have now is that our domain, which was registered and paid for through the end of 2013, is incorrectly appearing as expired, but we should be back tomorrow.” Now today, it does appear as if the domain has been re-registered — but , until January 6th, 2013. More importantly, Art.sy is serving an HTTP 301 response redirecting to Artsy.net. The key here is that a , not a temporary one — that is typically done with an . Here is an image of that 301 redirect:
It bears mention that obtaining the Art.sy domain did not come easily. The company’s founder originally got into purchasing Syrian domain names at least three years ago a Syrian law firm power of attorney to represent him in the country. He also had to go through lots of little bureaucratic hurdles and legal red tape as regulations in the country changed: He had to get his signature authorized by the Syrian embassy, for example. Since then, though, the country has descended into over the past year and a half, following the throughout the Middle East early last year. The United Nations said yesterday that Syria’s conflict, which has decimated , has now seen (which is 15,000 more than human rights agencies had previously expected). Internet access has also been unreliable in Syria. In more than one instance, the government has in the country for several days. Renesys also reported that access in the first few days of the new year. We’ve reached out to Art.sy today for more details on the situation, but have yet to hear back; we will update this with any information we do receive. But at the moment, it looks as if Art.sy, which has been steadily growing in stature with from some of the industry’s most serious investors, has decided that having a more dependable web presence is more important than a snappy domain name. |
Source: Shutterfly To Acquire Slick Photo Sharing And Storage Startup ThisLife | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | We’ve heard a rumor that , the photo and personal publishing company founded in 1999, is set to acquire online photo sharing and storage startup . We’re hearing the acquisition price is around $25 million. The service was founded in 2010 by . While there is no shortage of cloud-based photo storage apps (including Shutterfly), ThisLife’s interface is pretty slick compared to some of the dinosaurs in the space. The startup had previously raised $2.75 million in funding led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Morado Ventures, Rogers Venture Partners, Animoto co-founder Brad Jefferson, Isilon co-founder Sujal Patel, and YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse. ThisLife lets you import your photos from most of the popular online photo-sharing sites (Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, Shutterfly, Flickr, Twitter and SmugMug), but it also comes with a desktop uploader (Mac and Windows) for transferring your iPhoto galleries and uploading folders or individual files. If you decide to connect your account to other online photo services, ThisLife will also regularly import your images from there to make sure they are stored in a safe spot. Once uploaded, the service displays your images, which are shareable, on a timeline that scrolls horizontally. Other compelling features of the service are an algorithm that always gives preference to the file with the highest resolution, as well as a facial-recognition tool that makes it easier to tag people in your photos (and that can get names and other data from your Facebook account if you connect the two). And the company’s pricing is relatively inexpensive. Shutterfly may be interested in the the company’s algorithm, and engineering and product talent. The company has been making acquisitions left and right, most recently . Shutterfly ; bought Nexco, which became Shutterfly share sites (private photo-sharing networks); and acquired Photoccino, which had developed 29 algorithms for sorting through photos. Earlier this year, the company announced of bankrupt-ridden Kodak’s online photo-sharing platform for $23.8 million. Shutterfly declined to comment on this report. |
Indiegogo’s 2012 In Crowdfunding: Campaigns Raised 20% More Than In 2011, With Shorter Funding Periods | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Crowdfunding site shared some exclusive details regarding their past year with TechCrunch, and the stats essentially back up what Matt Burns said about 2012: In many ways, this was the year of crowdfunding. Campaigns raised more money in shorter periods, with fewer people involved in their creation, and more than half met their funding goal. All told, campaigns launched in 2012 raised 20 percent more than they did on average in 2011, and ran for only 49 days. In 2011, the average campaign not only brought in less cash, but also ran for 60 days, or 22 percent longer. Among successful campaigns in 2012, the funding periods were even shorter: on average, projects that met their goal lasted for only 39 days. This decrease in the time required for a project to meet its goals, coupled with higher funding amounts, pretty clearly points to an increase in the overall comfort level and popularity of crowdfunding with the general population: more funders more eager to donate would definitely lead to this kind of result. Crowdfunding also appears to have taken a more altruistic turn this past year, as Indiegogo found that 33 percent of the dollars contributed via its platform were given with no strings attached – meaning they either didn’t have a perk attached, or exceeded the amount required to obtain a perk from project creators. In 2011, only 23 percent of dollars gathered by Indiegogo fell into that category. Campaigns were more viral, with 14 percent seeing more referrals from just a single contributor than from the project creator (or creators) themselves, and those seeking funding were more likely to strike out on their own, since the average founding team was made up of just 1.7 people, vs. 2.2 in 2011. Crowdfunding also got more social, with each project getting an average of 42 more shares or Likes on Facebook than they received in the previous year. Crowdfunding will definitely continue to be a space to watch in 2013, after posting significant gains in 2012. Equity-based crowdfunding in the U.S. may miss the 2013 mark and arrive instead in early 2014, but , to $6 billion worldwide. |
“In The Studio,” Timehop’s Jonathan Wegener Talks Mobile Growth | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | TechCrunch “In The Studio” kicks off its second season and 2013 by welcoming an with an eclectic past, ranging from time as a lab assistant, media strategist, business development manager, and consultant to many NYC startups until he and a college friend stumbled upon what could be a big idea during a short hackathon. Ever since, they have been slowly growing their addictive and highly personal product to an ever increasing audience. , CEO and co-founder of Timehop, may have accidentally upon a big idea. During a time when social media products, especially those revolving around digital pictures, seem to be a dime a dozen and eye-rolling among many observers, Wegener, the CEO and co-founder of Timehop, and his small team in New York City are slowly hacking away at building a social network around our pasts. They begin with resurfacing images, tweets, and other media based on yearly anniversaries of when the original content was created. The result so far has been organic growth and inherently viral interest in the product, which taps into our human desire to reflect, experience , and share the past with others. In this discussion, Wegener and I explore the initial conception of Timehop, how the early product was built, how and why the company grew its base audience through email, how they built for iOS and are thinking about mobile growth, and how they look at platforms other than the web. Additionally, what’s most to me from this conversation is just how much of a product person Wegener is. You can tell that he and his team have long, detailed debates about how to present media to users that are usually private while also paying attention to growth and retention, especially with the recent iPhone application. This video would be useful to anyone building a social product on the web and/or mobile, as Wegener goes into great detail about all the growth tactics they employ. |
Facebook Adds Voice Messaging To Messenger For iOS and Android, Tests Open Source VoIP In Canada | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | Facebook’s next messaging move is all about voice. Today it released an update for its standalone Messenger for and that lets users send up to one-minute voice messages. It’s also testing open source VoIP calling between Canadian iOS Messenger users that runs over a user’s existing data plan. Both power hands-free communication between friends, which helps drivers and reduces mobile typing. The updates to the apps should be available in the app stores later today. Most people hate voicemail so it may seem curious that Facebook is adding voice messaging to Messenger. Even with visual voice mail, many say they simply never listen to their cell phone’s answering machine. But most voicemail is just a longwinded way of saying “call me back.” Facebook sees a new opportunity in making voice messaging a seamless part of a conversation, not a replacement or a bridge to it. With voice messaging in Messenger, you open a conversation (new or existing) and are shown a red “record” button. Similar to Facebook Poke’s video recording interface, you press and hold the button, talk or record a sound up to one minute in length, and then release the button to stop recording. You can then send the audio message, which appears in the conversation stream as a little wave form that can be listened to. Voice messages will also be available for listening from the web interface. There are several use cases for audio messaging that text and photos in Messenger can’t cover. For example, if you’re driving, you could record a voice message hands-free to comply with the law but still communicate asynchronously. Sometimes you have to send someone a long message like a complicated set of instructions or driving directions that would be a pain to type. Now you can ramble them off into Messenger.
[ : After a little hands on, I think the voice messaging works well. The interface is responsive, audio quality is decent, voice recordings are delivered quickly, and they’re instantly available to listen on the web.] Voice messaging could also be popular for things other than voice. You might record the sound of the lapping waves at the beach, or a clip of a concert. Kids without cellular or data plans might enjoy voice messaging within Facebook instead of having to use third-party apps, such as WhatsApp or . Voice messaging probably won’t get used too frequently, but it’s a nice addition that makes Facebook Messenger an even more complete app. Soon I’d expect video messaging to be added. Facebook tells me it has no plans to add voice messaging to its website, as its focus right now is entirely on mobile. Facebook is beginning to test VoIP audio calling in Canada to see if it should bring the feature to the U.S. and perhaps the rest of the world. Canada closely resembles the United States in demographics and usage trends, but is one-tenth the size, making it a smart testing ground. If it gains traction, Facebook will work on how to scale it for a bigger audience and would probably roll it out in the U.S. next, and possibly the web interface. For now, though, only Canadian users of the latest version of Facebook Messenger for iOS can try VoIP. People can’t VoIP call Android users or people outside of Canada. The feature is a bit buried. Users have to click the “i” icon in the top right of a conversation to reveal a “Free Call” button. It’s not entirely free, though. It will burn data on a user’s existing carrier plan. The new VoIP test is not built on Facebook’s existing Skype partnership which powered a briefly available in January 2011. This indicates somewhat icier relations between Facebook and Skype’s owner Microsoft, which also powers a Bing search integration and display ads on Facebook. If the trend continues, Facebook might also look elsewhere for help with search. Voice Messaging and VoIP could also be seen as Facebook taking on the default calling app on smartphones. Facebook wants to own social, and that means a lot more than the news feed and profile. Knowing who you’re close enough with to send voice recordings and calls helps it refine its relevancy-sorted content streams, too. If Facebook has its way, eventually you’d only use it for friend-to-friend communication. And with it now showing ads around the web inbox, starting to charge users to contact strangers, and more potential monetization around messages, it makes sense that Facebook wants to kill the phone part of the smartphone |
iPad Self-Publishing Tool Tactilize Launches In-App Editor | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | , a self-publishing tool and content network , last September. At the time, the only way to get content into the app was through a browser-based tool, which always felt like a little bit of a disconnect. Now, with the app’s latest update, users can also create content right on the iPad, too. The Tactilize app now features an easy-to-use editor that lets you add photos, videos, text, and links to external content to your pages. To create their pages (or ‘cards,’ as Tactilize likes to call them), users can import images from Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Box, Picasa, Flickr and a number of other services (including FTP and WebDAV for advanced users). The in-app editor itself allows you to easily move, resize and rotate images, videos and text fields on the page and with a bit of patience and practice, the resulting pages can be very attractive and look just as good as some of the best iPad magazines. Once your page is done, you can use the app’s Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest integration to spread the word about it (including links to the web versions of your pages). The Tactilize team expects that users will use the app to “publish a full interactive eBook, create an impressive press kit, or use Tactilize to bring your blog to the next level.” One area it still has to work on before this, though, is to ensure that others can find content in the app. This new version makes it easier to add titles, categories and tags to every card, but users still have to use the app to easily find them. On its website, Tactilize features a somewhat where the team features interesting cards, but I can’t help but feel that it needs to highlight the web side of its service. For the time being, these cards on the web also still miss the interactivity that makes the iPad versions so good ( : Tactilize tells us that interactive web views are coming “very, very soon”). Over the holidays, Tactilize tells me, the service went from about 8,000 active users to 16,500 as people used the app to create holiday cards and greetings. Tactilize raised a in November. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/44789769 w=640&h=360] |
Room 77 Closes $30.3 Million Series C From Expedia And Others To Take Its Hotel Search Engine Global | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | , a Mountain View, California-based company that operates a search engine for finding the lowest prices on hotel rooms, has closed on $30.3 million in new funding. This round, which counts as Room 77’s Series C, brings the total invested in the company to . Travel search giant Expedia Inc. participated in the round as a new investor; existing investors in the company including , , , Expedia’s founder , former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford, and Hotwire co-founder and current Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff all chipped in as well. The new money will be used to scale its product globally, the company says. The hefty funding round shows a quick ascent for Room 77, as the company . But it’s apparently a good time for hotel metasearch, and Expedia in particular is taking a keen interest in the space: Just last month Expedia to acquire a majority stake in European hotel metasearch company Trivago. From the start, Room 77 has adopted the strategy of doing one thing — hotel room search and booking — and doing it well. The company has built some pretty : It provides specific details about each hotel room at a property such as square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 technology from Google Earth to generate a virtual “Room View,” which shows what you’ll see when you look out the window. And while it may be a narrow focus, but it may be a very lucrative one. In a press release announcing the funding, Room 77 cites data that says the hotel vertical represents “the largest and most profitable category in online travel,” making more than $165 billion in gross bookings annually. The company says its own growth has been swift, and that its engine has facilitated the booking of “hundreds of thousands” of hotel rooms over the past nine months alone. |
Publishing Startup Graphicly Raising $1M More As It Aims For Profitability | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | is about to close a $1 million bridge round of funding, as first revealed in . The company started out as a marketplace for digital comics, but last year it aimed at helping publishers distribute their content onto a wide range of platforms, including iOS, Android, and Kindle. CEO Micah Baldwin told me today that things have been taking off, with millions of dollars in annual revenue and 1,500 percent growth year-over-year. (And even though it’s no longer focused exclusively on comics, it to distribute more than 60 Peanuts titles.) Baldwin added that the funding is supposed to get Graphicly to profitability, which the company should reach by the middle of 2013. At that point, the startup may raise a larger Series B. And he has other plans for 2013. Right now, he said that building a native app based on a book is an expensive process, so as an alternative, he wants to add more and more interactivity and app-like capabilities to e-books created in the Graphicly platform. “Publishers seem to want it and desire it,” he said. “They’re stuck in this world of doing apps, which are just really expensive.” That strategy won’t just add capabilities for existing Graphicly customers — it will also allow the company to expand into new areas. As an example, he said that quick and easy publishing of interactive e-books could dramatically change education, with students turning in their assignments in e-book format. Baldwin said the funding comes mostly from existing investors. The company has now raised about $6 million from backers, including Mercury Fund, 500 Startups, Dundee Venture Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and Venture51. You can . |
Zynga’s One Standout From Its String Of Sequels Has Been Farmville 2 | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Sequels can be risky business for embattled social game developer Zynga. They can extend the lifespan of a popular franchise like Farmville. But they also siphon away players from the original game. So if a sequel doesn’t retain players well, it can cannibalize the player base But Farmville 2, with its 3D graphics, . The game is really the one standout sequel in Zynga’s recent line of follow-ups including Cityville 2, . Zynga just released some engagement stats today about the performance of Farmville 2. To underscore how big a risk Farmville 2 is for the company, the original game has been one of the top money makers for the company since it was launched in 2009. Even three years later, . That’s $57 million in one quarter alone or more than a half-million dollars a day. The company . All eyes will be on Zynga’s next earnings call, when the company will reveal how well this sequel has performed financially. , 7.4 million daily active users and a healthy stickiness ratio of daily-to-monthly active users at 17.5 percent, . It appears to have peaked though, and has lost about 700,000 daily active users in the last seven days, according to the service. That’s not necessarily something to be alarmed about though, because most social games peak early on and then decline while retaining the most lucrative players or “whales.” Even if active usage declines overall, revenues can still increase from a good title for months or years to come. The original Farmville was around for about eight months before it peaked in monthly active usage, but that was before Zynga had amassed its network of players on the Facebook platform. |
Mobile Gaming Platform Heyzap Confirms $4.3M Round From Union Square And Qualcomm | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | , which built a social platform for mobile games, has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding. The round was revealed in (first spotted ). Co-founder Jude Gomila confirmed the news over email and said the funding comes from existing investor and Qualcomm. Heyzap was incubated by Y Combinator and started out as a platform for Flash games before refocusing on mobile. It has been rolling out a number of new features over the past few months, including and , and it now has 9 million registered users. Gomila said the new funding will be used to hire engineers and salespeople: “Our leaderboards, achievements and ads SDKs are taking off and we want to fuel the growth there.” Heyzap has now raised more than $8 million total. |
Facebook Mobile User Counts Revealed: 192M Android, 147M iPhone, 48M iPad, 56M Messenger | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Facebook keeps user counts for its mobile apps hidden, but analyst Benedict Evans found and they provide critical insight into the direction and performance of Facebook’s mobile efforts. Most interestingly, Facebook’s Android user count is growing much faster than its iPhone user base, but is found on a lower percentage of Android devices. Let’s take a closer look at the data. A year ago, Facebook stopped reporting user counts for its own mobile apps via the Graph API. But if you searched for one that none of your friends used and hovered over the search result, you could see its monthly active user count (MAU). Evans of meticulously recorded until “some time in November [2012], those disappeared and were replaced” with hover cards lacking the usage data, he tells me. He incorrectly calculated Facebook’s mobile web site stats due to overlap between native app and HTML5 site users. Facebook declined to comment but solid analytics sources and old official numbers say the rest of his stats are accurate. Evans gave me the raw data dump from his research, which is more current than his blog post, and here’s what it shows. As of September 2011, Facebook for Android has 66 million MAU and Facebook for iPhone had 91 million MAU. In December 2011, right before Facebook stopped openly publishing stats, . By just 11 months later in November 2012, Android had grown to 192.8 million MAU while iPhone only had 147.2 million MAU. This shows Android is a core source of growth that helped Facebook reach 604 million mobile users by the end of Q3 2012. This underscores the need for Facebook to speed up Android development. Many new features and sometimes entirely new apps like Pages Manager launch first on iPhone. This could be because for a long time, and still more team members carry them than Androids. While Facebook for Android may have more absolute users than its iPhone counterpart, the iPhone has a much better penetration rate. Facebook’s native app is actively used by 73.6 percent of the estimated 200 million iPhone install base. Only 35 percent of the estimated 550 million Android install base see monthly usage of Facebook’s native app. This may be in part due to the popularity of Android in China where Facebook is blocked. However, it may also show Facebook’s lagging penetration in emerging markets like India where Androids are common. This all leaves out the iPad, though. Facebook for iPad rapidly grew from just a few million users in September 2011 to 48 million MAU in September 2012. If you estimate iPad’s install base at 100 million, 48 percent use the Facebook app monthly. That’s a lower penetration than on iPhone but worthy of regular updates. Meanwhile, out of the 195.2 million iOS devices regularly accessing Facebook’s native apps, only 53.8 million or 27.5 percent of devices have turned on . That means there’s lot of people who aren’t using contact sync, easy sharing, and single sign-on for third-party apps. Facebook may need to come up with a way to convince more users to turn on the integration, both for its own benefit, and to convince Apple that Facebook is a powerful partner. The big takeaway from the iOS / Android platform battle is that Facebook needs to focus more on Android. If Facebook’s iOS and Android apps have continued on the same growth trajectories, by now Android likely has more MAU than the iPhone and iPad apps combined. Even if Android is not the preferred mobile OS of employees, building for it is critical to keeping its overall mobile usage growing. From September 2011 to November 2012, the Facebook’s feature phone app called Facebook For Every Phone that’s built on the Java Platform, Micro Edition, more than doubled in MAU to 82 million. The feature phone app’s growth shows emerging markets around the world are getting on mobile, and a decent number are using Facebook. We don’t hear much about this app from Facebook. That might be because most of its employees carry smartphones, and so it may be harder to see how important it is, brainstorm improvements, and test updates. But until low-cost smartphones start displacing feature phones in the developing world, Facebook needs to innovate here. What it doesn’t need to worry as much about are the second-tier smartphone platforms. RIM’s BlackBerry still has a somewhat significant Facebook user base of 60.2 million as of December 2012. Unfortunately that was only up from 48.9 million in November 2011, and its failed PlayBook tablet’s Facebook app had just 690,000 MAU by December 2012. Meanwhile Nokia had 15.7 million MAU by November 2012, and Windows Phone had only a couple million Facebook users. Fracturing engineering resources across these platforms is likely inefficient for Facebook. Facebook does a lot. Having a ton of features on the web makes sense, but cramming them all in a single mobile app can make it feel bloated. That’s why Facebook began releasing standalone apps in August 2011. They give users quick access and a dedicated interface to a popular feature, and helps Facebook it might add to its primary smartphone apps. After in March 2011, Facebook re-skinned it, and hooked it into its unified web/mobile messaging system. The result was for iOS and Android in August 2011. A month later it had almost 3 million MAU. Growth picked up in the fall and it had 10 million users on each platform by November. It continued steadily gaining users, and Android pulled in front of iOS in Fall 2012. By late November 2012, Messenger had 22.8 million iOS MAU, 32.3 million Android MAU, and 1.6 million BlackBerry MAU for a combined 56.7 million MAU. That sounds impressive but Messenger still . WhatsApp is believed to have several hundred million users and China’s TenCent says its WeChat app had 200 million users as of September 2012. That’s why we’ve heard Facebook has made inquiries about as well as Snapchat, which it instead ended up . Owning the platform you private message on is critical to Facebook because knowing who you message with helps it refine its content-sorting relevancy algorithms. There’s also potential monetization options within messaging. Facebook knew it had do something unique with photos on mobile. So, long before it began negotiations to buy Instagram, it started building Facebook Camera. The , and Camera was almost done so it a month later in May 2012. Though Camera offered its own filters, a powerful bulk upload option, and more cropping flexibility, Instagram had too much momentum and a loyal user base. Instagram passed 100 million users in September 2012. Thanks to Evans, we’re now getting our first look at Camera’s progress, and its lackluster performance. A month after its launch it hit 1.4 million users, dipped for a while, and now six months later it only has 1.5 million MAU. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to Facebook. It showed a slick photo selection flow, filters, and bulk uploads were popular, so Facebook added them to its primary apps. But in the end, Facebook may be better off dedicating development resources to Instagram. To put it simply — going hard at Android, making its feature phone app more viral, and figuring out whether to concentrate on one omni-app or several standalone apps. Obviously there’s monetization, but that’s for another article. Android’s growth momentum means Facebook for Android needs to become its premier app. Facebook’s competition with Google might make that painful, but it needs to stick to its social layer strategy. It should view building an incredible Android app as a way to take advantage of Google’s mobile install base, not the other way around. There’s a ton of of feature phone users, and not enough are on Facebook. The social network should look to how it can convince its feature phone users to get their friends on-board too. That might mean some kind of incentive program for feature phone recruiters or recruits, such as mobile data discounts. Finally, with Messenger, Camera, Poke, and Pages Manager, its standalone app portfolio is starting to bulge. Users might not want a home screen full of Facebook, and that might lead them to . Then again, Google has done well with a suite of standalone mobile apps. Either way, 2012 was about Facebook getting serious about mobile in general. 2013 will be about trading the shotgun for the scalpel. |
Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, CTO Rich Tom To Depart The Company In Q1 2013 | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Hulu just posted an internal , indicating that he and CTO Rich Tom will be leaving the company during the first quarter of 2013. The timing is new, but word that Kilar was on his way out was , when an internal memo included a passage about transitioning to a new CEO. In the email announcing his and Tom’s departure, Kilar said he’ll be working with the board to ensure a smooth transition. Kilar said that the decision was difficult, but didn’t share much about the reasoning behind his or Rich’s departure, or what they’ll be doing next. “I’ve been so fortunate to play a role in this amazing, ongoing journey,” he wrote in the email. “My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I’ve ever made. Though the words will fall short of the intended mark, please know how much this team means to me and how very thankful I am to be able to innovate and build alongside you each day.” Kilar says in the blog post that he’ll be providing a more specific date to the Hulu team at a later date, but also plans to be involved in steering- the company “for much of Q1.” The exiting CEO took the reins at Hulu in June 2007, shortly after it was formally announced. He helped grow the company to its current state, with 3 million paying subscribers for Hulu Plus, the premium version of the service launched in late 2010. In December 2012, , a 65 percent increase from its 2011 haul. The content library also grew 40 percent over the year, and in total, the company managed to generate more than $1 billion in revenue for content partners who offer video through the service. Recently, however, Hulu has been seen as facing a number of complex issues, thanks in part to the exit of private equity firm . Providence was seen by some as the last disinterested party on a board full of media companies, all of which have a more direct stake in the content that appears on Hulu as streaming video. When Providence made its exit, our own Ryan Lawler explained why the time might soon be ripe for Kilar to exit, perhaps to explore more entrepreneurial pursuits. At the time of Providence’s equity sell-off, Lawler said not to expect an immediate departure by Kilar, but he did say to watch for developments along those lines to start taking shape within the 12 months that followed that move. It might be early yet to call Kilar and Tom’s exit the beginning of an “unraveling,” as Lawler put it, but watchers will definitely be paying a lot more attention to what Hulu does next now that one of its primary architects is taking his leave. |
Vobi Raises $1.5 Million For Online Collaboration That’s Kicked Off By Phone Calls | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Austin-based , a cloud-based collaboration startup which will sell its services through mobile operators, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Dallas VC firm . The firm specializes in communications companies that have unique IP, explains Vobi CEO Mark Castleman, making it a good fit as Vobi’s lead investor. Castleman himself has extensive experience in both telecommunications and collaboration, most recently with , a PBX-as-a-service company he founded, where he now sits on the board. He brings that experience to Vobi, which has been in stealth mode for around two years. Vobi will offer subscribers a platform for online collaboration, allowing them to work on projects, share files, media, and more. It’s not an online file storage site, though – it only works to connect users with those types of services. And access to Vobi’s dashboard is based on your phone number. In practice, the way this may work is that instead of phoning a co-worker or client and then instructing them on how to view or edit a given file – maybe through a WebEx meeting, a URL they type in, an email attachment, etc. – they can simply enter in their phone number at Vobi.com and a workspace for collaboration is presented immediately, no effort required. While that sounds simple enough in concept, the technology that makes such a thing appear seamless is non-trivial. To be clear, with Vobi, you’re not typing in a username and password to access this portal – just your cell phone number. “We’re big believers in mobile phone numbers being the key identity element,” explains Castleman. “It’s globally unique. My phone number in France is accessible, but my social security number in France means nothing.” He also notes that email addresses aren’t completely portable either – when someone leaves their company, for example, they lose access to that email. After using the phone number to connect its users, Vobi will then connect a user’s mobile number to their other identities like email, and accounts on various cloud services or social networks, making it something like a smarter caller ID. On this front, the service may compete with other startups, , for instance, but Castleman explains that it’s not just about delivering additional info to enhance a phone call, it’s actually about collaborating while on the call. “Our enterprise use case is that you have a workspace – your tablet, desktop or laptop – and your voice interface is your phone, ” he says. “Meanwhile, you’ve shared content with [your call recipients] like your Box, or Dropbox, or Salesforce, and emails. When you make that call, on your Vobi screen on your laptop or computer, you get an activity stream that shows you all the content that you’ve shared, and you have a collaboration panel.” “We reconstitute the workspace in that environment to show you what your last interaction looked like, as well as any asynchronous shares you’ve done through Box, etc.,” he adds. More simply put – it’s a smarter collaboration service that picks up where you left off, after having first authenticated users via their phone numbers. To make this work, Vobi needs carrier relationships as well as partnerships with online cloud services. Castleman – who happens to be on his way to an AT&T developer conference today – says he can’t provide details at this time as to who those carriers and partners will be, but he would say that the service will launch when it gets at least one of the top U.S. carriers on board. That’s expected to take place this year. Vobi is designed to be a good fit for carriers, he tells us, as the base feature can be sold like other monthly, subscription-based features such as Call Waiting or Call Forwarding, for example. “Through the carriers, like a switch, it’s turned on. And once it’s turned on, it’s like electricity. Now the applications are like the various things you plug into it,” he says referring the forthcoming Vobi-connected apps that would connect a user to Salesforce, Box, and others. “That’s a great model for the service providers, too, because they’re used to it and because they know how to sell features,” he adds. The apps will be sold both in the operators’ app stores and in the consumer-facing markets provided by platforms makers like Apple and Google. (Vobi is first launching on mobile as an iOS and Android app.) However, in a move that could also prove disruptive to web conference providers like GoToMeeting and WebEx, users won’t need to install a smartphone app to use Vobi. They could simply type in their cell phone number to start a collaboration session on their notebook or desktop. Because the Vobi is tied into carriers’ database of subscribers, it will immediately know who’s logged in and who they’re currently talking to, and present the screen accordingly. Vobi’s technology is fully functional, and all of its pre-launch efforts now are being directed at commercialization of the service at scale. The company, co-founded by Cameron Cooper, , and has been very quietly and deliberately moving forward ever since. “The carrier world is a slow-moving world, but once things get baked into that world, they have the ability to have an enormous impact,” says Castleman. “When you embrace them, you can really do some cool stuff because – let’s face it – everyone is their customer.” |
The Weekly Good: A Star Is (Re)Born, The Lester Chambers Story | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Your song hits the Billboard Hot 100 Charts at number 11, you and your brothers have played with the likes of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, things are great, you’re on fire. You’ve got it made, right? Wrong. is living proof that just because you become “popular,” doesn’t mean that you will be rewarded properly for it. Lester’s tale is multifaceted, starting with the release of the hit single “Time Has Come Today” in 1966 with “The Chambers Brothers.” It’s a song that you’ve probably heard on the radio, in commercials and in many Vietnam-themed movies. Mr. Chambers has received a pathetic $1,300 from the record labels for his talent and work having to do with the song. Zip to 2012, when Lester published a photo of himself on Reddit, one that you’ve probably seen already: He’s . I got to spend the better part of yesterday with Lester, his family, band (The Mud Stompers) and , co-founder of Reddit. What I saw was a group of people wanting to right a wrong that was dropped on an unsuspecting Lester Chambers so many years ago. You see, Lester didn’t read his contract fully and didn’t ask a lawyer to do so, either. Sadly, he was taken advantage of time and time again, even though the labels promised to “fix it.” They never fixed it, so with Ohanian and Reddit’s help, the Internet has its chance to shine once again. [spotify id=”spotify:track:5qA1ZrjjVLh1cL9GZOFdNm” width=”300″ height=”380″ /] Since Lester was brave enough to post that photo on the Internet, the folks on Reddit figured out who he was and bubbled it up to Ohanian. He reached out to Lester, and was surprised when Lester responded. The rest, as they say, is history. The power of community, in any size, shape or form, is a marvel to watch. Something that Reddit has always been known for is fostering a mob mentality that can work for the common good. This was pretty obvious when Ohanian decided to take it upon himself to fight the SOPA and PIPA acts. In the end, the Internet won. When it comes to Lester and his career, what you have is a wonderful and talented man, someone who never squandered riches, took drugs, hurt anyone or did anything “wrong.” What he did incorrectly was care too much about what he loves the most, his music. When people come up to me and say that they have my music, I don’t ask them where they got it, I just say thank you for listening. – Lester Chambers The stories that Lester shared with Alexis and I yesterday blew us away. The Chambers Brothers toured with the Beatles, played with Jimi Hendrix, and had a fan in Bob Dylan – all of the things that you hope and pray for as a budding artist. Lester’s story was supposed to have a happy ending, much like this music does, but it wasn’t in the cards. This can change now; Lester has a second chance. When we were first shown our album cover for “Time Has Come Today,” it had four white dudes on it, not me and my brothers. – Lester Chambers Not only did Lester and his brothers get screwed out of royalties, as African Americans, they were treated less-than-human. When they went on tour, they were forced to sit in the back with the kitchen staff, hoping to get a “ham sandwich” or other “scraps.” There was no VIP treatment for the Chambers’. According to Lester, they were once told “We simply cannot allow four black dudes and a white drummer to play on our stage in front of white patrons.” That’s wrong, and we know this now, but Lester had to live through it. His son, Dylan, looks at Lester like any son does, with a twinkle in his eye. He’s always been proud of his father and his heritage, no matter how bad things got. At one time, Lester was homeless, along with Dylan, and family friend Yoko Ono helped them out. Yes, these folks are a national and global treasure, but the record labels didn’t care about them. The Internet does, though. With Ohanian’s help, there is a that ends in just five days. Naturally, it will be used to fund his next album with his band .
If you play it, I’ll sing it. – Lester Chambers If you sing it, I’ll play it. – Baron Chase, The Mud Stompers To date, over $56,000 has been raised by over 2,000 people, and I imagine that this album might be Lester’s best ever, if only because of his renewed trust and vigor for the music that he loves so dearly. He never lost his love for the music, but his world was shattered by how others treated him. Maybe this time, things will be different; in fact, I know they will be. Last night, Lester and The Mud Stompers performed at San Francisco coworking space, . I’m not sure how many people were there, but I was told that more than a hundred signed up for the free Q&A and concert. Listen to Lester explain his relationship with The Beatles: Lester is appreciative for all that he has, doesn’t crave what he doesn’t have, no matter how many horrible things that he’s been through. The best part about all of this is that you can see and feel how excited he is to continue on his path of creating and sharing music, which is and will always be what he’s known for. His time has come today, and tomorrow. And the next. The Lester Chambers story is one that will never end, and he hopes that young musicians will learn from his plight, suggesting that you “make sure that all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed in the right place” when it comes to contracts. Hop on the train, ya don’t need no ticket or baggage, . |
Gillmor Gang Live 01.04.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. |
Amazon Improves Its Web Services Console, Launches Tablet Support And Android App | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | As Amazon’s continues to add more tools to its (AWS), the that provides a graphical user interface to services like S3, EC2 and CloudFront started to look a bit unwieldy. Today, Amazon is making to make the Management Console a bit easier to use for developers. In addition, Amazon is also launching a tablet-optimized view of the AWS Console and an for managing EC2 cloud computing instances. The new design, says Amazon, will offer more customization options and improve “information display on your screen of choice.” The new design now allows users to customize the Console navigation with shortcuts to the services they use most often (you can just drag and drop them into the menu bar), for example, and allows developers to easily select and compare the settings of different AWS resources. The Console now also features a new “Monitoring View” that allows users to see statistics for their resources like CPU utilization, database connections, read latency etc. Other improvements include endless scrolling and larger buttons (especially useful for tablet users), as well as the ability to collapse sidebar menus. As for the EC2 Android app, Amazon notes that it will allow you to see your EC2 metrics, stop and reboot EC2 instances, receive and view CloudWatch Graphs. While the app currently just supports EC2, Amazon says that it plans to support additional services “very quickly.” Support for other mobile operating systems is also in the works. |
TechCrunch Giveaway: Two Tickets To The Crunchies Awards #Crunchies | Elin Blesener | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | will soon be upon us and (if you hadn’t noticed) we just announced our new host. The Daily Show’s John Oliver will take the stage at this year’s Crunchies Awards and we couldn’t be more excited. Not only is he hilarious, but he has been nominated for multiple prestigious awards and won the Emmy Award for Best Comedy Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series in 2009 2011. We told you this award show, coined the Oscars of tech, will not disappoint, and we meant it. We’re incredibly lucky to have John Oliver host, but we also have plenty of surprises up our sleeves — expect to hear more about them in the weeks leading up to the show on January 31st at the in San Francisco. Tickets are and we are filling up fast. Since we have just released the nominated, . However, since we know not all of you will be able to purchase tickets, we wanted to give our loyal readers a chance to win some. Today, we are giving away two free tickets (valued at $120 each) to the Crunchies Awards — only one reader will win, but they’ll be able to bring a friend, colleague, date, or whomever they choose. The night will be filled with surprises, influential tech gurus, drinks, hors d’oeuvres, giveaways and much more. Want a chance to come join us? All you have to do is follow the steps below! 1) 2) – Retweet this post (making sure to include the #Crunchies hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite comedy show is Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner January 6th at 7:30pm PT. Anyone is the world is eligible. Please note: this giveaway is for two tickets only and does not include airfare or hotel. |
OS X Mountain Lion Now Accounts For A Majority Share Of Mac Web Traffic, Growing Nearly Twice As Fast As Lion | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | OS X Mountain Lion, or version 10.8 as it’s known according to Apple’s numbering system, accounted for 32 percent of all , a firm that charts OS share and other web metrics. This marks the first time Mountain Lion has accounted for a majority share of web traffic from Apple computers, with Lion dropping down to 28 percent. In November, Mountain Lion only just trailed Lion, with 29 percent of web traffic, vs. 30 percent for Lion. Snow Leopard use actually remained relatively steady between November and December, losing less than a percentage point and suggesting that most of the Mountain Lion upgraders are coming from Lion, and not jumping up two versions. Mountain Lion requires that Lion be installed in order to upgrade (unless you have a USB stick version of 10.8), so it makes sense that the pool of upgraders is coming from Lion, where there are relatively few barriers to upgrading (it’s handled directly through the Mac App Store). Snow Leopard continues to be very tenacious, with a 29 percent share of Mac web traffic, which makes it the second-most frequently used version of OS X over even Lion. But Mountain Lion’s growth is still impressive, and it seems to be attracting users faster than Lion was ever able to. Lion took until in terms of share of web traffic as measured by Net Applications, meaning it required nearly 10 months to unseat Snow Leopard as the dominant Mac OS. By contrast, Mountain Lion took around five months to reach the top spot, or about half the time. Speedy adoption of new OS X versions is key to keeping a solid software ecosystem in place, and lessening headaches for developers both internal and external. That makes this particular development promising news for Apple, especially now that they’re on an annual update cycle for OS X, which makes getting people on the newest version as quickly as possible even more crucial. |
Mobile Accessories Maker TYLT Partners With YC-Backed Tagstand On Trio Of NFC-Enabled Products | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | , the Y Combinator-backed startup intent on taking NFC mainstream, is announcing a partnership with mobile accessories maker TYLT in advance of this year’s CES in Las Vegas. The deal involves three new products, manufactured by TYLT, which use Tagstand’s NFC technology: TUNZ, a portable Bluetooth speaker; CAPIO, a universal smartphone mount for the car; and TAGZ, which are the NFC stickers you can program and place anywhere. The products are designed to work with Tagstand’s Android application, , which previously was made to work with NFC tags, like those Tagstand offers . Users configure their NFC tags to perform particular tasks when tapped – like automatically activating Bluetooth, launching their navigation app or music app on their phone, connect to Wi-Fi networks, change ringer volumes, check-in on social networks, and more. The Task Launcher app has now been downloaded over 250,000 times, according to Tagstand co-founder Kulveer Taggar. With the new products from TYLT, however, some of those are now available built into the hardware devices themselves. For example, the CAPIO phone dock can now be configured to turn on your Bluetooth connection to sync with your car, launch your favorite mapping app or start playing music just by placing the phone in the mount. The TUNZ speaker can be tapped to start playing music, and perform other tasks, like connecting to Wi-Fi, for example. So hopefully, a better alternative to the ? (At least it looks like a speaker, not a ball.) The speaker includes a built-in noise canceling microphone that lets you switch from music to hands-free calling, and offers up to 20 hours of battery life. You can get 30 hours if you play the volume at half status, the company claims. Although NFC doesn’t have widespread adoption in the U.S. at this point in terms of mobile payments – the technology it is often most associated with – Tagstand has been betting big that its integration into new Android phones will pave the way for startups that take advantage of the technology in other ways. TYLT is also investing in NFC, with plans to ship at least 100,000 NFC chips in six products in 2013. (In addition to the speaker and smartphone dock, they have four others on the roadmap. Some of the products were , but Tagstand’s partnership was not.) Taggar adds that Tagstand’s NFC Task Launcher app has now seen over 10 million actions executed, which is up from the . At the time, the company had just transitioned the app from a $2 paid version to a free offering, so the drop in price (to zero), has likely helped increase adoption. As have Samsung’s and of its own NFC implementation, , I might add. The new NFC-enabled products will debut at CES, and TUNZ will be available for purchase immediately. CAPIO and TAGZ will launch next month. |
U.S. Department Of Defense Signs New Deal With Microsoft To Bring Windows 8 To 75% of Employees | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | For the most part, the news about Windows 8 hasn’t been very positive for Microsoft, but the company today a major win. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) just a new three-year licensing agreement with Microsoft reseller Insight Public Sector to bring Windows 8, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013 Enterprise to 75 percent of all DoD personnel. The DoD, Microsoft says, will “use Windows 8 to empower productivity from any location, and any supported device, while taking advantage of enhanced security.” It’s worth noting, of course, that the DoD was already a Microsoft customer. Today’s announcement, says Microsoft, means the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) will now have access to “the latest Microsoft technologies in support of top IT priorities around datacenter consolidation, collaboration, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud computing and big data.” Microsoft also says that this is “the most comprehensive” agreement it has ever established with the DoD. The total worth of the deal is about $617 million, and the Army expects to save more than $70 million per year because of it. “There’s a move afoot throughout the department to bring about efficiencies in the [information technology] world,” David L. DeVries, DOD deputy chief information officer, told . “We took a long, hard look at it … realizing that the Department of Defense relies upon the network and upon information technology to do its business.” Microsoft will work closely with the U.S. Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command and the Air Force Program Executive Office for Business and Enterprise Systems to achieve “Army Golden Master and Air Force Standard Desktop Configuration compliance for Windows 8.” |
The Daily Show’s John Oliver To Host The Crunchies | Greg Barto | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | It’s often said that the Crunchies are the Oscars of tech. It’s with great anticipation that we bring you the best of innovation in technology from the past year in an environment that’s fun and elegant. In an effort to continue to raise the bar each year, we are excited to announce John Oliver as our host for the 2012 Crunchies Awards. John Oliver has been a writer and correspondent on Comedy Central’s with Jon Stewart since 2006, and he’s also had his own Comedy Central series, , since 2009. He’s also had multiple Writers Guild and Emmy Nomination for his writing on The Daily Show and won the Emmy Award for Best Comedy Writing In A Comedy or Variety Series in both 2009 and 2011. We invite all of you to come out on Jan 31st to participate in what’s one of the most exciting nights for all of us here at TechCrunch and for the tech community. You can get your tickets below! The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards Thursday, January 31, 2013
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA 7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire. . Be sure to act fast! .
Voting closes: Thursday, January 24th at 11:59 p.m. PST Finalists were . (2011 winner: )
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Google Now And Google Translate Praise The iPad | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Google’s text-to-speech engine loves the iPad so much, it often ends sentences with the phrase “ ” for no obvious reason. The bug appears in Google Now, assuming you ask it the , as well as in , which makes it easy to replicate and . To replicate this yourself, just head over to Google Translate and end a sentence with something like “end with,” “ ” or “filled with.” Judging from on Google’s Android bug tracker, the issue has actually been around since at least early October 2012. The issue only started to go viral yesterday, however, after the good folks over at picked it up. Of course, it would be great if this was an Easter egg that a mischievous developer added to Google’s text-to-speech systems after a few too many drinks, but the reality is probably a bit more prosaic. As the sleuths over on Hacker News found out, chances are this is just a badly trained algorithm. Google’s systems likely looked at this story on . Here is the sentence that likely caused the bug: “Describing the negotiations last spring as being filled with “so much drama,” he now praises the iPad.” It’s not clear if this is an issue with Google’s algorithm or human error, but for some reason the system now thinks that it needs to complete sentences that end with the right sounds with “he now praises the iPad.” Chances are Google will fix this bug soon, so if you want to have some fun with it, just head and try it yourself. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIBeMfeViBw] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbHzcWMMpec] |
Join The TechCrunch Greece Meetup With This Live Video Feed | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | [ustream id=68339 live=1 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=640 height=392]
So you couldn’t make it to . No worries. Here’s a live video feed sponsored by Open Coffee and Microsoft Innovation Centre so you can catch all the action from Benaki Museum in Athens. Events are all in local Athens time. • 5.00pm – 5.15pm: Opening Remarks by Alexia Tsotsis, co-editor at TechCrunch and Niko Bonatsos, co-founder of SV Greeks & Greekamericans and VC at General Catalyst Partners. • 5.15pm – 6.00pm: Greek Founders’ Panel: Panos Papadopoulos (BugSense), Alexis Pantazis & Emilios Markou (Hellas Direct), Nick Drandakis (Taxibeat), TBD (People Per Hour). Moderator: Alexia Tsotsis. • 6.00pm – 6.15pm: Break • 6.15pm – 7.00pm: Ecosystem Builders’ Panel : Stavros Messinis (CoLab), Yorgos Koutsoyannopoulos (HSIA & Helic), Dio Synodinos (Greece JS & InfoQ), Bill Vatikiotis (Ruby Euruko) and Fotis Draganidis (Microsoft Innovation Center). Moderator: Mike Butcher. • 7:00pm – 7.15pm: Fireside Chat with Marco Veremis (Upstream). • 7:15pm – 8.00pm: Greek Investors’ Panel : George Tziralis (OpenFund), Vassilis Theoharakis (PJ Tech Catalyst), Spyros Trachanis (Odyssey Venture Partners), Dimitris Kalavros-Gousiou (HackFwd). Moderator: Niko Bonatsos. • 8:00pm – 10:00pm: Networking Session. |
Euclid, The “Google Analytics For The Real World,” Partners With Aruba, Aerohive, Xirrus & Others To Make Customer Tracking Sensor-Free | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | , the new startup from the creators of Urchin, a company Google acquired which then of Google Analytics, first introduced its offline customer tracking solution – or “Google Analytics for the real world,” as the team calls it – . Today, Euclid is rolling out a new version of its solution called “Euclid Zero,” which is the first time businesses can use its cloud-based software without having to install a hardware sensor device in their stores. Traditionally, retailers have used everything from basic door clickers to optical solutions like beams above a door or video cameras to track their customers’ comings and goings. But Euclid had a different idea – it could passively detect customers’ smartphones with Wi-Fi enabled and collect their phones’ MAC addresses. Because MAC addresses are unique to each device (although not personally identifiable info), Euclid hashes the MAC address before storing the number on its servers. It also contractually requires that its customers place signage in their stores . The company’s flagship solution, , uses preconfigured sensors which are connected to the switch in the network closet. This allows the business to track how many people walk by a store, enter, how long they stay, and more. “We’ve been very focused on providing Google Analytics for the real world, where instead of the clickstream, you get the footstream,” says Euclid CEO Will Smith, whose background in retail complements that of COO , co-founder. (Brett Crosby, also an Urchin co-founder, sits on Euclid’s board.) Today, the company is debuting Euclid Zero, which is being offered in partnership with several wireless access point providers including Aerohive Networks, Aruba Networks, Fortinet, Xirrus, and soon others. Since many retailers already have those devices in their stores, they can now forgo the sensor installation and configuration, and simply switch on the new Euclid feature in their Wi-Fi management console. The Xirrus partnership, in particular, will allow Euclid to go after a new market as well: . Smith says the solution has a big appeal in an era when Amazon is crushing brick-and-mortar retailers left and right. “The big advantage that Amazon has now is data,” he explains. “Data is what allows Amazon to acquire customers cheaply, and make sure they’re engaged and getting through the site seamlessly. We’ve been making the same pitch to offline retailers – ‘we’re going to give you the same tools that Amazon uses to compete with you.'” When the Palo Alto-based company opened its doors to U.S. testers a little over a year ago, it had primarily been working with retailers in the San Francisco Bay Area, like Philz Coffee, but today it has dozens of national retailers using its software. While it does have some non-obvious locations – like a Western wear retailer with stores in Montana – most of its customers are in San Francisco, L.A., and New York. That customer list will continue to grow, says Smith, as Euclid brought on , a founding team member at competitor , to help it onboard new businesses. The majority of its customer base includes retailers in the top 100, and it will make additional announcements about customer base in the future, Smith says. To give a picture of its traction, Smith noted that Euclid has grown from 1 million “events” per day (meaning the Wi-Fi pings it collects) to 3 billion. One smartphone could register multiple pings, however, so that’s not an indication of how many customers have been tracked using Euclid’s solution. Euclid recently updated its customers’ dashboard, which now allows new views into the data, including bounce rates and ways to see how behaviorally similar groups act. It’s currently working to improve the export process to support integration with retailers’ own business-intelligence solutions as an alternative to having them download a CSV file. There are other startups, (which recently raised $7.5 million in Series A funding), working to innovate in the retail analytics sector, but Smith argues that his startup offers more relevant data for retailers. “These heatmap companies, these video companies are interesting, but as far as the metrics that drive a retail business, they’re not touching that many of them,” he says. |
JBL’s CES Speaker Lineup Includes Portable Bluetooth, Beat-Pounding Boombox And Compact Lightning Varieties | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | JBL will be at CES this year, which is no surprise, and it’ll be showing off at least a trio of new speakers, which also isn’t that surprising. The speakers themselves have some interesting features and quirks, however, and look like solid options for mobile device owners of all stripes. Also coming to the show are two new Harman Kardon receivers, each of which boast compatibility with Apple’s AirPlay audio streaming. First, there’s a new addition to JBL’s line of Lightning-enabled speaker docks called the OnBeat Mini, which will work with the iPhone 5, iPad mini, new iPods and iPad 4th generation devices, providing charging for those Apple gadgets when plugged into the wall via AC connector. The OnBeat Mini follows the , both of which were introduced late last year and also sport Lightning connections. This one is designed to strike a balance between portability and support for larger devices, and boasts 5 hours of battery life, the ability to charge Lightning devices when plugged into the wall and a USB audio port for connecting non-Apple devices. Another new portable speaker from JBL on display at CES this year will be the JBL Charge, which is a cylindrical design that follows the examples of the Jawbone Jambox and Philips Shoqbox, with a 12-hour battery life, Bluetooth connectivity and a ruggedized exterior design. As its name implies, it also acts as a backup battery for portable devices, allowing them to sip juice via USB from its 6000mAh onboard battery. The JBL Charge will also run for $149, and begins shipping sometime in the first quarter of 2013. The battery backup is a nice feature, and the price undercuts many of its competitors, but we’ll have to wait to go ears-on to see how it stacks up. The final new speaker is the JBL Rumble, another Lighting speaker dock, but one that also offers Bluetooth capabilities, 50 watts of output power and a 4.5 inch downfiring subwoofer for ample bass. It’s clearly designed to rock the party, and JBL says it’s compatible with DJ apps on iOS devices when connected with Bluetooth (as are pretty much all Bluetooth speakers, of course, but this one is aimed at the demographic which might be most interested in actually using those apps). It will be available sometime in the spring with a price tag of $399. Finally, JBL also has two new Harman Kardon home theatre receivers at the show, the AVR 2700 and AVR 3700. These are 7.1 and 7.2 surround sound receivers, priced at $799 and $999 respectively, and both feature AirPlay streaming built-in. The more expensive AVR 3700 also offers 4K pass-through, which most likely won’t be able to take advantage of for a little while yet, and both also provide iOS direct play through USB connections, eschewing the need for a standalone dock, as well as vTuner Internet and terrestrial radio. They’ll be available to consumers sometime during the first quarter of 2013. All of these will be on display at JBL’s HARMAN booth during CES next week, so we’ll try to get up close and personal with the devices above to see how they pan out in the real world. |
null | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 3 | null |
An Old Eric Schmidt Interview Reveals Google’s End-Game For Search And Competition | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | Google was cleared of anti-competitive accusations , but a long-forgotten interview with Chairman Eric Schmidt reveals that the search giant may be on an inevitable road to monopoly anyways. Microsoft and critics allege that when Google prominently displays its own predicted best answers above all search results, it unfairly favors its own services above other niche search engines, like travel and shopping websites. But, as Schmidt told Charlie Rose in 2005, Google searches do yield one perfect result: When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong. That’s our challenge. In other words, Google’s hyper-perfectionist ambitions are unlikely to leave much room for competitors. Today, the perfect search isn’t possible and highlighting good results doesn’t exclude competitors. Indeed, the FTC agreed, saying that favoring its own search results “could be plausibly justified as innovations that improved Google’s product and the experience of its users. It therefore has chosen to close the investigation.” The rapid pace of computing genius is forcing us to test long-debated notions of the truth, choice, and the value of diversity. As consumers offload more decisions to computers, or as computers come to know more about us than we know about ourselves, the value of competition is diminished. This is not unique to Google, though it may be the lucky winner of a new form of monopoly by virtue of being first. Read more in my Washington Post piece and see a clip of the interview below: |
Google Pledges To Restore In-Browser Maps Access To Deprived Windows Phone Users | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 5 | Rejoice, Windows Phone users: your daylong Google Maps crisis will soon be over. After causing quite a kerfuffle the other day by effectively blocking some Windows Phone users from , Google has released a statement (obtained by ) clarifying its rationale and promising that it would soon fix the issue. “IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality,” the statement reads. “As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users.” Here’s a quick primer on the situation in case you’re not familiar with it: late yesterday, Windows Phone users discovered that they could no longer access Google Maps from within the preloaded Internet Explorer browser – they’d be redirected to the Google homepage instead. When the expletive hit the fan shortly afterward, Google issued an official statement that, no, it never officially supported in-browser Google Maps on the Windows Phone platform, blaming the “fact” that IE doesn’t lean on the WebKit layout engine. It wasn’t long at all before people figured out that wasn’t the whole story. Google was only redirecting users whose betrayed them as Windows Phone owners. So long story short, the experience for Windows Phone users really sucked, and they didn’t want people using it. Fair enough, I suppose. I get not wanting people to draw inaccurate conclusions about Google Maps because it doesn’t yet play nice with a particular platform. But to say that Google handled this whole situation poorly is a bit of an understatement. Walling off a service like Maps to an entire class of device owners was bad form, even if it wasn’t the vindictive, anti-competitive move some people first thought it was. Really Google, could you not have just told Windows Phone users that when they tried to access Google Maps? Was a blind redirect really the best you guys could come up with? Granted, Microsoft’s mobile OS hasn’t exactly picked up the sort of traction that makes every developer swoon yet, but surely there must have been another way. It really seems like Google just took the path of least resistance here. After all, there’s a decent enough Maps app baked into every Windows Phone, and Google clearly didn’t expect the likely small subset of users who leaned on Google Maps to get too ticked when access to a sub-standard experience was revoked. I can’t help but think that it was foolish of Google to underestimate the ire of spurned geeks, but with any luck, Google will think long and hard before it does something as short-sighted as this again. |
What Games Are: Here Come “Local” Mobile Games | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 1 | 5 | When we talk about “social” in the context of gaming, we mean one of two ideas. The first is using social networks to distribute games, connect players and provide server-hosted fun over the long term. These kinds of game are often better described as “ ,” as they are essentially single-player roleplaying games that sometimes connect to other players out of necessity. The other kind of social is when you gather with people in a physical play area, enjoying each others’ company as much as the play of the game itself. Sports, board games, card games and tabletop roleplaying games are social games in this sense. A similar experience can be had by playing a console game like Halo with four joypads, Wii party games, or local-area-network (LAN) games. To distinguish that experience from the Zynga-esque social game, I label these kinds of activity “ ” games. Unlike social games, local games are usually multiplayer. Your local Bridge club, pub quiz, football team or Dungeons and Dragons group gathers together to play together, and their games have a high degree of interplay. In addition to social benefits (i.e. having a reason to meet people), the fun of local games is all about coordination, team psychology, and the dynamic that plays out there. This can lead to some of the most delightful or emotional game experiences that are possible to have. Local multiplayer is also different to online multiplayer gaming. In a local game of Halo, for example, players yell for help, shout out the most-feared player’s location and haze each other. However in the online game you’ll get called all manner of names, insulted for your perceived race, gender, or sexuality. You’ll also encounter zero sense of spirit, shameless cheating, and more goading. Absent the stares of others and the social moderation that that brings about, people can be amazingly childish. This is why many gamers prefer to play on a LAN or with friends on a couple of consoles rather than online. However local games have been slow to adapt to a more mobile computing landscape. Traditionally this is because they have often been constrained by equipment as well as geography. In order to play a LAN game you need a bunch of PCs, a router, and so on. These are not impossible to attain, but are more of an impediment than a game that you might play with a smartphone. So local games have often been seen as a more dedicated form of gaming than others, more of a niche for the passionate. For a while some of us thought that location games (i.e. ) might solve that problem, but that hasn’t worked out. Location turned out to be a different kind of problem, one which so far has proved a damp squib from a gaming perspective (they will probably find their place once augmented reality matures a little further). Similarly, turn-based games seemed to be the way forward, but while you can play a turn-based game of on your iPad with a friend in the pub, it’s a bit forced. It’s better to play the actual board game version, much like playing a board game version of Scrabble is always going to be a better experience than a digital one. There’s something about the tangible quality of cards and pieces that adds to those games in a way that digital versions never match. The native experience that video games provide is more fluid than most board games, more active like sports, more dynamic. The gap for local mobile games is about providing that active engagement, much like playing Mario Kart but in the pub or cafe rather than on your couch, and at a cost of almost nothing to players. With smartphone and tablet technology getting better all the time, delivering powerful computing to users’ pockets for less, I 18 months ago that we would eventually see real local games start to emerge. Last week I encountered the first game that I think really fits that bill: . Spaceteam is an iOS game for 2-4 players. The setup is that each player is a member of a spaceship crew and – in cod-Star-Trek fashion – has a bunch of ship controls in front of them. The objective is to survive a continuous series of increasingly difficult rounds by responding to instructions issued by the game to set controls correctly before time runs out. But (and this is the clever bit) the instructions you see on your screen are generally . So you have to rapidly communicate with one another, much like a Trek crew yelling orders during a tense space combat. The game elaborates on that theme further by making the names of the actions intentionally humorous (“Enable Holobib! Set Moontwig to 4!”), which players have to say to one another. It also uses the gyroscopic features of the devices for asteroid attacks or wormholes, so players have to shake them back and forth or flip them in unison. The overall experience is frantic and hilarious (and also free). Spaceteam is an example of what I call a “ .” Founderworks define new territory in the games industry, proving that there is a new avenue to explore or a new way of looking at play. Sure, the game is geeky, and likely only appeals to a certain subset of players. It is also a little thin. Like Draw Something or Wii Sports, Spaceteam is very delightful for a short period of time, but then you’re kind of done with it. However the same was true of early browser RPGs, and they went on to form the basis of the social game revolution. Ditto the original Bejeweled and the casual game revolution. The seeds of the next big thing are often located in the barely-noticed game that turns a few heads with a neat idea, and then other developers expand upon it and fix its problems. I think Spaceteam may turn out to be one of those games, but local-mobile is not quite there yet. The biggest problem that remains is coordinating people. As an old-school Dungeons and Dragons game-master, I know how hard it is to get people together to play a game – especially as they grow older. Where sports and big game clubs (as in for Bridge or Poker) solve this probem with dedicated venues, digital gamers often want their games to be available on their schedule. Spaceteam works great if you get your friends to install it on their devices, but you have to actually tell them about it first. This makes adoption a problem. What would be game-changing is if a platform holder like Apple got involved. iOS 6 devices all have Game Center and Find My Friends functionality built in, so how hard would it be to close the loop for local games in iOS 7? Perhaps a “Find A Game” function that scans your local area and finds players of the local games you like. A service that matches players of the same game together by location as well as scores, maybe even offering a way to meet up. The ability for players of a game like Spaceteam to self-organise in the gaming equivalent of flash mobs. Maybe not exactly as I’ve described, but there’s to an entire field of players discovering other players and finding it easy to meet and play which feels not too far away. Like a gaming version of dating apps, helping people come together in social settings to play digitally… That could be a real revolution. |
The Fifth Horseman: Samsung | MG Siegler | 2,013 | 1 | 5 | We all know the “ ” of tech: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These are the companies that pretty much everyone agrees will shape the foreseeable future of the tech sector. In some circles, that list makes waves for who is not included: . But any rational thinker (meaning those outside of Redmond or anyone who hasn’t made a career as a .Net developer) knows that Microsoft simply no longer belongs on that list. But that doesn’t mean the list is perfect. In fact, I do think there’s an omission that’s becoming a glaring one: Samsung. Sure, Samsung is not an American company (it’s South Korean). Nor did it start as a scrappy technology startup that set out to change the world (it started in 1938 as a local produce trading company). Nor does it operate like an American technology company (the entire company is and has been run largely by one family, even through ). Hell, Samsung isn’t even just a technology company (but , which I’m clearly going to focus on here, is by far the largest subsidiary of the Samsung Group). But trying to suggest that Samsung is not one of the most important companies in technology is increasingly folly. In fact, there’s a decent chance that it will end up being most important tech company of 2013. This week, that Samsung would start selling Tizen-based phones in 2013. According to Jungah Lee’s sources, this is at least in part due to Google’s purchase of Motorola last year. This is important because Samsung is by far the most important Android partner. Not only does it dominate from a market share perspective, it’s really the only Android OEM that is actually making any money. (Motorola, by comparison, is a total dog that is actually money.) And it’s making a ton of it. The company (again, just the Samsung Electronics group) posted about $155 billion in revenue in 2011. That’s almost exactly the amount of revenue that Apple posted in 2012. Samsung should come in closer to $190 billion when its fiscal 2012 comes to a close. Not only is it bigger than Apple from a revenue standpoint, it’s almost twice as large as the three other “horsemen” ($190 billion versus what should be about $100 billion for Amazon, Facebook, and Google in 2012). And unlike Amazon and Facebook which make little or no profit, Samsung is hugely profitable. $12 billion in profit for 2011 should move closer to $20 billion in 2012. That’s not a ton compared to Apple ($55 billion in profit in 2012), but it should be roughly twice as much profit as Google pulls in for the year. But let’s forget the money and go back to Android. Samsung is so important and deserves a place with the other horsemen because it is the most important piece of the Android ecosystem beyond Google. And it seems that the company is at least exploring the possibility of taking a step back from that ecosystem, or hedging its bet. That could be story of 2013. Imagine Samsung, with 40 to 50 percent of the Android market, breaking away to focus on Tizen. Or perhaps more realistically, imagine Samsung forking Android for its own purposes while exploring the Tizen possibilities. Not only can the company afford to do it, there may be several incentives to do so. Amazon is closing in on its own phone running a forked version of Android in a similar manner to its Kindle Fire tablets. The first iterations of that tablet weren’t great, but they’re getting better. And because it now has its own forked Android app store, Amazon is going to be in control of the entire ecosystem. Samsung has no such control if it remains a loyal Android partner. Maybe it’s okay with that, but Samsung must be looking at how profitable Apple is as a result of its total control. Shitty mobile skins only give the illusion of control, Samsung needs to control the full stack. And given its position of power, the company has the leverage to do that if it chooses to. And it’s not just an offensive imperative, it’s a defensive one too. Google continues to say the right things publicly about maintaining distance from its Motorola unit with regard to Android. Of course, it says this with the well underway. A true Google phone. Perhaps it’s a project meant less to scare Samsung and more to fight back against Google’s true bane: its carrier partners. Or maybe it’s Google hedging against Samsung’s position of power. It doesn’t matter. The Google/Samsung relationship is starting to show signs of strain, and they’re only going to get more pronounced — . Beyond mobile devices, the hot topic for 2013 is the future of television. Most of this is focused around Apple with a little bit reserved for Google’s TV projects. But it’s once again Samsung that is already the leader in the space. Sure, it’s the old school (shitty margin) television space, but why doesn’t anyone think that Samsung can translate its success in smartphones here as well? It simply hasn’t really tried yet. Perhaps that’s another part of the Tizen equation. Or maybe a forked Android will find its way here as well. But Samsung has a huge head start on Apple, Google and everyone else. And Samsung isn’t stopping with phones and televisions (or memory chips and flat-panel displays where it is also the global leader). Chairman Lee Kun Hee recently to employees underscoring the need to venture into new businesses. The son of the man who started the produce trading company knows that the future of his company will be products that don’t even exist today. Samsung is in this for the long haul. It feels as if the recent Apple/Samsung legal battles have branded the South Korean company as little more than a copycat in this country. But that’s a dangerous underestimation of a company that is quickly becoming one of the most important ones in tech right now by pretty much every metric. A fifth horsemen. |
Gillmor Gang: Two Clouds And A Screen | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 1 | 5 | The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — made it past the Fiscal Cliff in good order and got back to the day job: buying stuff. With CES on the horizon, the talk quickly got down to screens big and small. Passive TV vs. transactional mobile devices, the differences between the platforms are being absorbed by the big players as they rush to consolidate each other’s positions. Microsoft continues to struggle in this two-horse or maybe three climate, with Amazon straddling both Google’s context engine and Apple’s credit card superiority. The Gang seems well-positioned to navigate, with Android fans favoring the big lead Google maintains in knowing our data from Gmail and search outward, and Apple enjoying the AirPlay loyalty and its potential in the TV Everywhere battle. A good start to an exciting year we all believe is in the cards. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Why We Need To Kill “Big Data” | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 5 | It’s the New Year and along with resolutions about eating healthier, being kinder and exercising more frequently, I’d like to add one more to the list. Let’s banish the term “big data” with pivot, cloud and all the other meaningless buzzwords we have grown to hate. To be completely honest–I have been one of the bigger abusers of the term in posts, as you can see and It seems like every enterprise startup nowadays is in “big data.” There are even devoted to investing in “big data” startups. Why have I grown to hate the words “big data”? Because I think the term itself is outdated, and consists of an overly general set of words that don’t reflect what is actually happening now with data. It’s no longer about big data, it’s about what you can do with the data. It’s about the apps that layer on top of data stored, and insights these apps can provide. And I’m of the buzzword. I’ve talked to a number of investors, data experts and entrepreneurs who feel the same way. According to , “Big Data” originates from Francis Diebold of the University of Pennsylvania, who in July 2000 wrote about the term in relation to financial modeling. That was over 10 years ago. In the meantime, so much has happened since then with respect to how and what people can do with these enormous data sets. And big data is not just about the enterprise. The fact is that every company, from and Twitter to the fast-growing enterprise companies like Cloudera, Box, Okta and Good Data are all big data companies by definition of the word. Every technology company with a set of engaged regular users is collecting large amounts of data, a.k.a. “big data.” In a world where data is the key to most product innovation, being a “big data” startup isn’t that unique, and honestly doesn’t say much about the company at all. According to IBM, four dimensions: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity. Nowadays, in the worlds of social networking, e-commerce, and even enterprise data storage, these factors apply across so many sectors. Large data sets are the norm. Big data doesn’t really mean much when there are so many different ways that we are sifting through and using these massive amounts of data. That’s not to under-estimate the importance of innovation in cleaning, analyzing and sorting through massive amounts of data. In fact, the future of many industries, including e-commerce and advertising, rests on being able to make sense of the data. Startups like , Infochimps, Cloudera, , and many others are tackling compelling ways to actually make use of data. Another fact worth pointing out is that enterprise companies like IBM, large retailers, financial services giants and many others have been parsing through massive amounts of data for some time now, before this word was even coined. It’s just that the types of data we are now parsing through is different, and we don’t need to be using these data analytics systems through on-site data centers. So let’s figure out a different way to describe startups that are dealing with large quantities of data. Perhaps it’s about the actual functionality of apps vs. the data. It’s the New Year and a great time to brainstorm over ways we can avoid “the term that must not be named.” |
Leading Indonesian E-Commerce Platform Berrybenka.com Raises Stage A Funding From GREE Ventures | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | , the venture capital arm of social gaming company GREE, has made an undisclosed series A investment in leading Indonesian e-commerce fashion platform . The funds will be used to grow Berrybenka.com’s business in Indonesia by expanding its product selection, scaling marketing, and expanding logistics. Berrybenka.com also announced that Jason Lamuda, co-founder of Groupon Disdus, will join the company as president director. In a press release, Lamuda said: “I truly believe that fashion is one of the biggest market opportunities in the Indonesian e-Commerce landscape. When you look at more developed regions such as Europe, China, Japan and India, there always existed leading local fashion e-Commerce players. Similarly, we aspire to become the leading fashion e-Commerce player in Indonesia, built locally. We are proud to be able to promote and nurture local brands and designers who are looking to market their products throughout Indonesia.” Founded in August, 2011, Berrybenka.com is an online platform that carries items from both Indonesian and international fashion brands. It previously raised its seed funding from East Ventures, an early-stage investment fund based in Jakarta, Singapore, and Tokyo. |
Enter The Dronenet | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 1 | 5 | Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via , who’s always worth : The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.” He fleshes it out in , but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the fly. Sound like a pipe dream? Not at all: is a startup working on implementing just that for delivery of high-value goods (pharmaceuticals, electronics) to developing countries and/or rugged locations where the roads are so few and/or terrible that UAVs become the superior option. Their idea is for drone transportation to – literally – leapfrog trucks in those areas in the same way the cell phones leapfrogged land lines. Robb’s, typically, is bigger. Essentially, he envisions the Dronenet delivering to individual buildings and even houses, eventually replacing UPS, FedEx, DHL, and the postal system. What’s more, it would dovetail awfully nicely with the 3D-printing revolution: I’ve argued before that , but the Dronenet could ultimately provide not just same-day but often same- delivery of newly printed items. Feel free to be skeptical about the economics or the logistics, obviously – we’re talking about, by definition, a of moving parts – but hey, at least you can’t complain that this idea is . Best of all, though, it lets me quote one of my favorite lines in all of science fiction: The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just
human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap
technical fix: smart boxes. –Neal Stephenson, Just as (and ) revolutionized shipping, the Dronenet will need standard-sized, interchangeable, reusable smart Droneboxes. (Which in turn every self-respecting 3D printer will be able to crank out pretty much from scratch.) They will be to the Dronenet what packets are to the Internet. If I may step back into a slightly philosophical stance, this would actually be quite a striking development. People have been talking and speculating about the “ ” for so long that it has actually threatened to become a little boring before it even begins to exist. Until now my assumption has always been that the Internet-Of-Things mostly just meant ubiquitous Internet connectivity coming to things that already exist in the physical world. But the Dronenet would be different: The Dronenet, if it happens, would instead be an instance of . Will it actually happen? Who knows? It may become yet another beautiful notion slain by that tragic assassin named economics. Or niche Dronenets may arise in a handful of places around the world where they make economic sense, but fail to ever quite mesh into, well, a world-wide web. My greatest concern, though, is not economic but political: it’s that someone will start packing drones full of and sending them after political targets. I’ve been thinking about drone disasters for some time: a whole four years ago, before drones were big, I wrote (and ) about their misuse by terrorists. That seems inevitable, and it seems likely that when it happens it will lead to a ham-handed, TSA-style clampdown on all drone activity everywhere, and a government monopoly on the use of drones (perhaps for ), throwing the Dronenet baby out with the terrorist bathwater. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But I fear I have a lot of trouble coming up with reasons why it won’t. |
Stick Them With The Pointy End: Apple Files ‘Active Stylus’ Patent | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | Apple for an active stylus. According to the filing, “the stylus includes an electrode at a tip of the stylus; and powered circuitry coupled to the electrode and configured for capacitively coupling the electrode with a capacitive touch sensor panel. The powered circuitry can further include drive circuitry configured to output a drive voltage at the electrode and/or sense circuitry configured to sense a voltage received at the electrode.” In other words, the design can improve stylus sensing on conductive displays without being more costly to manufacture. As , the patent wasn’t filed in Apple’s name, but by two employees of Apple, engineering manager Jonah Harley and hardware engineering manager David Simon, and the Cupertino-based company can take assignment for the patent before it is granted. As everyone who follows Apple may remember, Steve Jobs famously dismissed the stylus when the first iPhone was revealed in 2007 ( ) and Samsung received plenty of ridicule when its Galaxy Note/stylus bundle was first revealed, as detractors mockingly compared it to a Palm Pilot. But this latest patent filing the that have surfaced for styluses. And, of course, just because Apple files a patent doesn’t mean it actually plans to bring the design to fruition. But it’s another sign (along with the iPad mini and the iPhone 5) that Apple is keeping a keen eye on Samsung and other competitors as it continues to work on new products. |
Developer Training Platform Pluralsight Raises $27.5 Million From Insight Venture Partners To Expand Its Online Catalog | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | , an online training resource targeting professional developers, is today announcing its first outside funding, courtesy of a $27.5 million investment from . The additional capital will help Pluralsight fund the expansion of its course library and will be used for hiring. Salt Lake City-based Pluralsight was founded back in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard (CEO), Fritz Onion (Editor in Chief), Keith Brown (CTO), and Bill Williams (who’s no longer there). The company got its start as a classroom training outfit that once involved sending out an instructor to a business or having employees attend a training event. Three years in, it shifted the business model from in-person training to online learning. Today, Pluralsight offers over 400 web-based courses, beginning at $29 per month for individuals, who account for half of the company’s revenue stream. That monthly fee provides access to Pluralsight’s entire online library, and for a bit more – $49 per month – mobile access with offline viewing is provided. Business and enterprise plans are also available, with discounts for companies buying more than 25 licenses. Pluralsight has an extensive partnership with Microsoft, its biggest corporate customer, involving several different groups across Microsoft, including MSDN, DreamSpark, BizSpark, WebsiteSpark, asp.net, and Engineering Excellence. The system is also frequently used by engineers at Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Bank of America, Dell, EMC, Walt Disney, and KPMG. According to Skonnard, the new funding will be used to expand the catalog of course materials, with a specific focus on building up its Salesforce offerings, where it expects to offer 50 courses by year-end 2013, up from the few it has now. “Salesforce is a great example of a developer community that’s under-developed in our library today,” says Skonnard. He notes that Pluralsight is currently strong in Microsoft technologies, Java, Android and iOS, but Salesforce’s developer community will probably reach a million developers sometime in the next few months. “We started to take notice of them earlier [in 2012] as an emerging, high-revenue part of the market that we could invest in heavily,” he explains. Pluralsight will also invest in developing courses for social platform technologies like Twitter and Facebook, as well as in Java, Android, Ruby, PHP, and Python, as well as cloud platforms like Amazon’s AWS, Google App Engine, Windows Azure and others. On the surface, it looks like Pluralsight has a lot of competition in the heating-up online education market. This sector saw a number of notable investments in 2012, including , , , , , and (also an Insight-led deal), to name a few. In addition, the “ ” niche itself offers a variety of , like , , , , and more, all aimed at those who are looking to develop programming skills. But Pluralsight is a bit different than many of its code-training competitors. Instead of providing DIY courses for newbies, its focus is on the serious developer. The site even warns those unprepared for that level of training to “click the back button.” Skonnard tells us that he thinks the company’s real competitors are not the startups trying to bring university courses online, but rather those with similar catalogs who are targeting developers looking to expand their skills. He sees Treehouse and the Adobe-focused Lynda.com as being the top competitors on that front. He also wasn’t concerned with Insight’s new investment in Udemy, saying its model is very different from Pluralsight. “Anyone can go in there and write a course on anything, without having any credentials,” Skonnard explains. “Our business is 100 percent focused on content curation – that’s our value-add.” Meanwhile, Codeacademy is only worrisome from the “PR perspective,” he adds, explaining that the site got a lot of attention, but it was still unclear if the model would work. “They’re doing a lot of good for the online education world, but they’re not producing paychecks for people,” Skonnard says. Pluralsight’s 100 authors, however, average $9,000-$10,000 in royalties per quarter, he notes. The average royalty payment is 20 percent, which the author receives in addition to the one-time, course-delivery fee. “This is where we win over [our competitors]. This is the reason we’re able to get the best people,” claims Skonnard. “Our authors make a lot of money. Our top author is going to make over $500,000 to $600,000 this year,” he adds. “Our top 10 authors are averaging $40-50K per quarter – so anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 per year. ” The site has now attracted over 200,000 users from 100 countries worldwide, and sees significant traction in the U.S., UK, Scandinavian countries, India, Canada, and Australia. The company just hired a director of sales for India, and will open its first office there in a week. Pluralsight has to now only had contract sales reps in the country, as well as reps in London and elsewhere in Europe. Its sales team is currently five field reps and five inside sales reps, but the latter will triple in early 2013. In total, Pluralsight expects to double its 22-person team over the next six months. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avn7Fxcjoxg?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 4 | null |
A Little Sleuthing Leads Nexus 4 Enthusiasts To Estimate About 400K In Sales Of The Device | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | Google and LG’s Nexus 4 has been such a coveted item this past holiday season, that . Because Google doesn’t publicly comment on device sales, it’s been hard to understand exactly how much OEM partner LG produced for the device’s initial launch. However, suggests that LG produced about 400,000 devices going into the end of last year. How did they do it? They’ve taken the IMEI numbers of their phones and backtracked the production number of their devices using an LG mobile link that’s usually used for finding new firmware. An IMEI number, or International Mobile Station Equipment Identity number, is usually printed on the battery compartment of the inside of the phone. It can be used to prevent stolen phones from accessing a network. If you take this and put your IMEI number at the very end, this LG site will spit back out the IMEI followed by a long string of characters that looks something like this: “LGE960 ACAGBK 212KPHG188745 20121206 GLOBAL/GLOBAL N N” If you break this string apart, you get:
LGE960 = phone model
A = ?
CA = Country where the device was sold. (Others include ‘US’ for the U.S., ‘HK’ for Hong Kong, ‘AU’ for Australia and so on.)
G = Storage (G = 16GB, 8 = 8GB)
BK = Color
2 = ?
12 = Production Month (November)
K = Production Country (Korea)
PHG = ?
188745 = The line or production number, showing that phone was the 188,745th device made.
2012121206 = The production date in YYYYMMDD format A number of Nexus 4 owners have been sharing and compiling the production numbers day by day (see below). It suggests that LG made about 70,000 devices in October, 90,000 in November and 210,000 in December. Google declined to comment on these numbers. Still, they’re interesting for a couple reasons. It appears that Google and LG have been conservative with the Nexus 4 launch. LG has previously said Google’s U.K. and Ireland managing director Dan Cobley Keeping supplies tight have made the Nexus 4 debut a world apart from the launch of the original HTC-manufactured Nexus One back in 2010. DEC
165000
264000
265133 14-th ADEUBK GERMANY
266133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
267133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
268133 15-th ADEUBK GERMANY
269133 15-th ADEUBK GERMANY
270133 15-th ASWSBK SWS Switzerland (looks like around 500 units)
271133 16-th AISRBK Israel
272133 15-th ADEUBK Germany
273133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
274133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
275133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
277133 17-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
278133 17-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
279133 16-th AMYSBK
280123 17-th AMYSBK
289000 18-th UK
300123 19-th ADEGBK
305112 19-th ACA8BK
306000 28-Oct (?) AUSGBK, 211KPPB306000 “csn” is also very different from the “surroundings”
306001 8-Oct AUSGBK 211KPHG306001 esnoutgodate=null >>Never shipped?
306009 4-th Dec AUSGBK 212KPHG306009 esnoutgodate=null
306010 19-th AUS8BK 212KPYR306010 esnoutgodate=null
306020 19-th AUS8BK esnoutgodate=null
314001 19-th AFRGBK
314002 19-th ADEGBK
314050 19-th ADEGBK
314123 19-th ADEGBK
315112 19-th ADE8BK
319123 20-th ADEGBK
320123 20-th ADEGBK
321123 20-th AAUGBK
325112 20-th AUSGBK
330123 20-th AUSGBK
340123 21-th ACAGBK
350123 22-th AUS8BK
360123 26-th AUSGBK
365123 27-th AUS8BK
370123 27-th AUSGBK
374110 28-th AUSGBK |
Andrew Sullivan’s Ad-Free Publishing Experiment Sees Six-Figure Revenue In First Six Hours | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | When political blogger Andrew Sullivan that he’s leaving The Daily Beast and launching an independent company called Dish Publishing, the most provocative bit of news was his intended business model. He doesn’t plan to run any ads, and instead to support the company entirely through subscription revenue. “It’s been a pretty amazing day,” Sullivan told me. Six hours after he first made his announcement and put out his call for sign ups, he said. “We’re well into the six figures.” He described the system as a “leaky meter,” where readers can hit the “read on” button a limited number of times per month before they have to pay; it’s leaky in that readers can follow links from other sites without adding to the meter. A subscription costs at least $19.99 per year, but readers can pay as much as they want, and Sullivan estimated that about a third of the initial subscribers are paying more than the minimum. As for why he’s taking such a dramatic stand against ads, Sullivan said that he’s watched the media industry over the past decade and found that the pursuit of ad revenue has led not just to blatant “whoring” for pageviews (for example “slideshows of topless celebrities”), but also exerted a more “subtly corrupting” influence by leading to the creation of special issues and the like, which he said are basically “gussied-up vehicles for advertising.” “Both those avenues seem kind of desperate,” Sullivan said. “You find yourself trying to create pageviews that don’t really have any editorial basis.” With this approach, on the other hand, Sullivan said he’s solely responsible to readers, and if he succeeds, it will be because he offered content that readers believed was worth supporting: “It really does leave it in the hands of the reader. We’re not going to get bailed out by [IAC/Daily Beast owner] Barry Diller or Credit Suisse or some ad network. They know that the readers are all we’ve got.” Asked whether this approach can be replicated by other, less well-known bloggers, he said, “Well, we don’t know if it’s even going to work for us yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” After all, low six-figure revenue isn’t enough to sustain even a year of the Dish. At the same time, he said that smaller blogs that are “just one person blogging out of a room” will have lower costs. “If you get rid of all the overhead … I think it is scalable with a smaller blog,” he said. “I don’t see why not.” Sullivan plans to re-launch the blog and introduce the meter on February 1, using technology from a startup called . Last fall, he said he talked to a number of different metering companies, but he found Tinypass most compatible with his vision. Tinypass COO David Restrepo suggested that one reason Sullivan chose his company was its flexibility. Sullivan is one of the most high-profile bloggers to use the Tinypass service, Restrepo said ( ), but the company didn’t have to build any custom products to support his needs — it’s designed to support a broad spectrum of paywall/meter/donation models. Restrepo said that Sullivan is one of Tinypass’ first big customers in the U.S. Most of its business (the company that it’s working with more than 250 publishers) has been international thus far. “It’s a big world, and in many countries the online advertising model even lags the advertising model for independent content in the United States,” he said. Restrepo also predicted we’ll see more and more blogs asking for reader payments in the coming year (which, to be clear, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll take the no-advertising approach that Sullivan is espousing). “We’re at the end of people saying, ‘Will people pay for content online?'” Restrepo said. “That’s history. We’ve reached the beginning of asking, ‘What exact model works for the sector or the business that I’m in?” You can . , “Basically, we’ve gotten a third of a million dollars in 24 hours, with close to 12,000 paid subscribers (at last count). On average, readers paid almost $8 more than we asked for.” |
Cue User Data Shows Email Problem Worsening | Michael Arrington | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | In 2008 about 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Which is nothing. Today it’s up around 7,000, and I declared an email bankruptcy just a few months ago and started fresh. , a handy mobile app for organizing and searching your online data across a variety of services, some fascinating anonymized user data this afternoon that confirms what we all know already. We’re getting a lot more emails and reading fewer and fewer of them. The service lets users auth in to things like email, cloud storage, calendaring, etc., to deal with them all in one place. It gives them an unprecedented amount of data about users’ online activities. Here’s what the aggregate data from a random selection of Cue users tells us about email habits: – Average number of email words written per person in 2012: 41,368 (about the size of the Lord of the Flies novel)
– Average messages received in 2012: 5,579
– Average messages sent in 2012: 869 CEO Daniel Gross also tells me (not included on the chart) that users are becoming much slower in responding to emails. The average response time in 2012 was 2.5 days. In 2011 it was 2.2 days, nearly a 14% increase in response time. And if you don’t get a response within 24 hours you may have to wait a while. If a message gets a response there’s a 56% chance it’ll come within an hour, and a whopping 89% likelihood it will come within 24 hours. To get the average out to 2.5 days, the remaining responses come much, much later. Tuesday is the busiest email day, although Wednesday is the most popular day for calendaring meetings. 11 am is the busiest email time of day. There’s fun data included as well. :) accounts for over 50% of emoticon usage. :( only gets 4.89%. My personal favorite :-P rings in at just 0.21%. If a presidential nominee was mentioned last year in an email, it was “Obama” 68% of the time. Romney got just 32% of mentions. Dogs were the most popular animal at 38%, cats got just 32%. And if you click on the most common swearwords, you’ll see which one is most popular. . |
Al Jazeera Has Bought Its Way Into Viewers’ Homes With A Deal For Al Gore’s Current TV (CONFIRMED) | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | Over the past few years, Al Jazeera has gained prominence and new audiences in the U.S. and around the world. Thanks to its coverage of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera became a powerful new outlet for news from the Middle East and other parts of the world. Even so, it had yet to reach cable audiences due to a reluctance on the part of big cable distributors to carry the network. That could change soon, thanks to a deal through which it would — and more importantly, Current’s distribution network. The New York Times reports that Qatar-financed news organization Al Jazeera is close to a deal for Current, which would make it available to a majority of cable viewers around the country. Current might not have gotten high ratings, but it had distribution, thanks to deals it had struck with several of the major cable companies. The network is available in 60 million out of about 100 million U.S. homes with cable, satellite, or IPTV service. Al Jazeera, meanwhile, has had a difficult time getting distributors to add its new network to their lineups. Despite years of discussions with cable companies around the country, the international news agency is virtually non-existent in U.S. homes. While Al Jazeera has aggressively rolled out an online presence and video apps across multiple mobile phones, tablets, and connected streaming boxes, until now it has been unable to get traditional pay TV distribution. Outside of markets like New York and Washington, D.C., it simply hasn’t been available to cable viewers. The solution? Acquire Current and use its existing distribution network instead. According to the New York Times, after the purchase, Al Jazeera would likely rebrand the network and bring a new lineup of its own content in Current’s place. “Current’s schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring,” it reported, and would be replaced with programming produced both in the U.S. and internationally. While that means Al Jazeera will finally have an outlet with regular TV viewers, it also likely means the end of the line for Current, which launched in 2005 as an alternative new documentary and news network. While it gained headlines after hiring Keith Olbermann and other left-leaning pundits for news talk programs, it wasn’t able to get the ratings required to keep it a viable alternative to CNN, MSNBC, or the other 24-hour news networks. The deal has been confirmed. Statement from Al Gore and Joel Hyatt: “Current Media was built based on a few key goals: To give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling,” Gore and Hyatt said. “Al-Jazeera has the same goals and, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us.” Also, Al Jazeera won’t be distributed to all 60 million of those cable households that Current had deals for. Already, Time Warner Cable has said that it won’t no longer carry Current in the wake of the deal being done. Reports are coming in that Time Warner Cable has already removed Current TV: [tweet https://twitter.com/stevekrak/status/286645927706521600] |
Possible Replacements For Speaker Boehner Are Mostly Tech-Friendly | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | One of the most powerful positions in the U.S. goverment may be up for grabs if Republicans follow through on a growing opposition to House Speaker John Boehner ( : B). Opposition for his re-election tomorrow from began pouring in after an epic press conference where Republican Governor Chris Christie for choosing not to ratify aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy. It’s anyone’s guess whether the handful of critics can muster a last-minute coup, but, fortunately for tech companies, most of his likely replacements are quite friendly to the industry. [tweet https://twitter.com/mboyle1/status/286601050025238528 align=’center’] The first and most obvious pick is House Majority Eric Cantor ( : A). Cantor has been a of high-skilled immigration reform and was the nail in the coffin for the widely contested when he decided it would not come to a vote. He has also overseen the greatest expansion in transparency in Congressional history, including an agreement to place legislation online three days before a vote, as well as YouCut, which allows citizens to select federal programs to cut via SMS voting. Finally, the majority leader appears to have a good relationship with the president, so it could usher in a much-needed era of (relative) cooperation. The Wisconsin congressman and former vice presidential candidate was an early favorite to replace Boehner in December, to Fox News’ Laura Ingram. Ryan ( : B), like many of his libertarian colleagues, is a friend of tech through his opposition to regulation. He supported opening up crowdfunding for startups ( ), opposed SOPA, and supported high-skilled immigrants. However, he has some worrisome opposition to federal funding of science and an ambiguous relationship with net neutrality. If Ryan were to get the position, it would signal a tectonic shift toward libertarianism. If you think the government moves slowly, even ideologically, then this pick isn’t as likely as Cantor. The House Majority Whip has generally toed the line on big tech issues, including high-skilled immigration, SOPA, and crowdfunding. While rarely a figurehead for these issues, McCarthy ( : B) has shown a willingness to get more involved. I ran into the congressman and his geeky staff at Google’s swanky Republican National Convention . He’s pictured second to right in the Prom-esque photo with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Since I have an opinion on the subject, I feel compelled to disclose: Cantor is my favorite of the pack. He’s the only candidate who scored one of CrunchGov’s few A’s for being both tech-policy friendly and admirably experimental with open government. If I’ve left other more likely candidates out, please let me know in the comments. This is all last-minute and so everything is up in the air. The implications for tech policy and the future of open government could be substantial. |
iPhone 5, Galaxy S III, Kindle Fire And Galaxy Tablets The Big Winners in Mobile Traffic Share Growth This Holiday | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | Mobile ad network via impressions on both the period leading up to Christmas and the period immediately following, and found a few devices grew their share significantly, while others didn’t fare so well. The iPhone 5 was the top gainer in smartphones, growing 1.11 percent overall following Christmas day; the Samsung Galaxy S III also grew 1 percent. But there was greater variance among tablets, where the Kindle Fire grew considerably, and iPad share actually dropped off. Chitika found that on its network, the Kindle Fire gained 3.03 percent of the overall market share, nearly doubling its total share of tablet traffic to 7.51 percent. The Galaxy Tablet, both 7- and 10-inch versions, also gained a fair amount with 1.38 percent growth, and the Google Nexus grew by nearly 1 percent. Not surprisingly, traffic from the BlackBerry Playbook dropped, but only by a very meagre 0.02 percent. What is perhaps surprising is that traffic share from all iPad models actually shrank, and was down 7.14 percent overall according to Chitika’s numbers. Remember that despite share growth slipping, Apple likely sold a large number of devices over the holiday; the number just reflects usage share spread out across all devices in the category as they pertain to one another. The iPad still dominates overall tablet traffic, with 78.86 percent of all traffic from slates, but it dropped from 86 percent pre-Christmas. Chitika still expects it to climb back above 80 percent, but it does suggest that a lot of gift-givers opted for (likely less expensive) alternatives from Android-based competitors this year. This gives a little more device-specific context to the numbers put out by Flurry and in the days following. It’s still likely not an exact representation of how the chips fell in terms of overall holiday sales, but at least it provides a look at which devices where being turned on and actively used in the days following the gift-giving season. |
Unpakt Is A Comparison Engine For Moving Companies, And Now It’s Launching In 15 Cities | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | With , moving out of your house or apartment doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Unpakt lets you compare reputable moving companies, compare prices, and book online. Now it’s launching in 15 cities and listing 100 movers after starting in New York. It’s like Kayak plus Yelp for movers. Unpakt could earn juicy referral fees, bring transparency to an industry laden with hidden rates, and make moving as easy as booking a flight. Traditionally, finding a good price for getting all your possessions moved from one dwelling to next was annoying and time consuming. You would look up companies, and call them one at a time. You’d have to repeat your addresses, preferred dates, how much stuff you have, and then get a quote that wasn’t even guaranteed to be what you’d pay. With this frustration and the inherent stress of moving, most people would end up just picking one of the first companies they called and overpaying. Screw that. Most everyone moves a few times in their life, and prices can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. It’s a big market desperately in need of a marketplace. That’s where Unpakt comes in. Unpakt’s website lets you choose the size of your place, and select what furniture you have or instantly go with the typical trappings. You can save your progress at any time so you never have to punch in your data twice. Then you’re shown prices for your move from a bunch of local companies, and you can compare reviews so you know they’re not gonna break everything. Pick the best company with the lowest price and you pay right there on Unpakt. I just tried out the booking process and it took all of two minutes to plan a move. Without professional packing and unpacking, hauling all the stuff in a well furnished one-bedroom apartment across San Francisco cost around $550. Thanks to Unpakt, though, I could find a great mover for $100 less than that and avoid companies trying to rip me off for over $800. Unpakt opened up its beta in New York City in July but now it’s launching in 15 more markets coast to coast: Los Angeles, San Francisco, DC, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Miami, Tampa, Atlanta, San Diego, Denver, Raleigh, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It’s got nearly 100 movers listing their rates in the marketplace now, meaning you can do serious price shopping. That’s a big deal for anyone who has to move because most companies don’t publish their rate cards and there didn’t used to be any way to efficiently compare them. That meant moving was like booking airfare before the Internet existed — having to call each company individually and never being sure you were getting the best price. That lack of transparency and friction in the comparison process made it easy for movers to jack up their rates if they thought they were talking to a sucker. Thanks to Unpakt, not only are all the prices laid out, but movers are incentivized to have the lowest. Unpakt’s director of marketing Jenna Weinerman tells me “the movers using Unpakt competitively are getting the most jobs.” She says “our goal is to shine up the industry.” The but I bet VCs are going be clamoring to get in on Unpakt considering . The startup’s biggest challenge will be making sure the prices movers list on Unpakt are actually the lowest they offer. Otherwise people may worry they have to call in too to double check their rate. That’s why Unpakt is improving and teaching movers to use its price input tool, and regularly monitors and audits prices to make sure those it lists aren’t higher than if you call in. In exchange for the small referral fee percentage, Unpakt is doing marketing, sales, SEO, PR, and reducing staffing costs for movers. Weinerman says “Over time as movers grow with Unpakt, there’s a chance they can pass the savings on to the customers.” And even if they don’t, just saving you time on the phone and steering you away from needlessly expensive movers could be enough to get you recommending to your friends. Otherwise, you might end up spending next Saturday breaking your back dragging their stupid couch down the stairs. |
Microsoft Says Google Is Preventing It From Building A YouTube App For Windows Phone | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | There’s no love lost between Microsoft and Google: The two have been feuding for more than a decade, with Microsoft regularly calling Google out for anti-competitive behavior in search. As earlier today, one issue that’s cropped up again is the lack of a Windows Phone app for YouTube. On Microsoft’s today, Microsoft VP & Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner has an extensive post complaining about YouTube’s lack of support for its mobile platform, and how that affects its users. The gist is that Microsoft has been trying for years to get a proper YouTube app working, and has developed its own app to bring a high-quality experience to Windows Phone devices. But YouTube has prevented Microsoft from making the same features available to iOS and Android users available on its platform. Microsoft has never been shy about building apps for its devices when developers don’t have the resources to do so, or its platforms are low on their priority list. It’s worked hand-in-hand with a number of developers to get their apps on Xbox Live (including YouTube), and has even built apps for companies like Twitter and Facebook to get them on Windows Phone. But according to the blog post, Google isn’t even allowing Microsoft to do that. That’s likely because YouTube wants to control the entire app experience, something it won’t necessarily be able to do on the Windows Phone platform, especially if it’s an app built by Microsoft. It wants to be able to serve up ads and provide the same richness of experience that’s available on the other platforms it’s built apps for. That was part of the reason that it pulled support for Apple’s internally built YouTube app, and created its own version. But for whatever reason, though, Microsoft believes the higher-ups at Google are dictating that a similar app shouldn’t be available on Windows Phone. Heiner writes: “Microsoft has continued to engage with YouTube personnel over the past two years to remedy this problem for consumers. As you might expect, it appears that YouTube itself would like all customers – on Windows Phone as on any other device – to have a great YouTube experience. But just last month we learned from YouTube that senior executives at Google told them not to enable a first-class YouTube experience on Windows Phones.” In the meantime, Google says that Windows Phone users will be able to access YouTube through the mobile web. The company has worked hard on building a robust mobile web presence for platforms where it doesn’t have an app or that aren’t app friendly. In a statement sent to AllThingsD, a spokesperson wrote: “Contrary to Microsoft’s claims, it’s easy for consumers to view YouTube videos on Windows phones. Windows phone users can access all the features of YouTube through our HTML5-based mobile website, including viewing high-quality video streams, finding favorite videos, seeing video ratings, and searching for video categories. In fact, we’ve worked with Microsoft for several years to help build a great YouTube experience on Windows phones.” YouTube recently for tablets that don’t run iOS or Android in a way that makes it more like the company’s web presence. |
NY County Defies Law, Refuses To Release Gun Permit Info For Controversial Google Map | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | After a , officials in Putnam County say to give up public gun permit ownership information for its residents. “In Putnam County I have over 11,000 pistol permit holders, and I refuse to put their lives and their families’ lives in danger,” County Clerk Dennis Sant , regarding the ‘ request for the public information. “New York residents have the right to own guns with a permit and they also have a right to access public information,” said Publisher Janet Hasson. In a revenge post against the Google Map of permit owners in selected New York cities, a Connecticut lawyer, Christopher Fountain, published the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the newspaper’s staff, including a Google satellite image of Hasson’s home. Some are applauding Putnam County’s ironic civil disobedience. “I thank God that Putnam County has a clerk with the guts to stand up and draw the line here in Putnam County,” said State Senator Greg Ball, who referred to the editors as “elitist eggheads” who made an “asinine” decision to publish the map. “My hope is that officials in Putnam county will actually take a look at the law and reverse their response,” said Robert Freeman of the state Committee on Open Government. “In a civilized society, we do our best to comply with the law. If we object to a law, we don’t simply ignore it.” |
Ask A VC: Shasta Ventures’ Rob Coneybeer On The Challenges Of Founding A VC Firm And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | We put Shasta Ventures’ co-founder in the hot seat this week for Ask A VC. After spending a number of years at NEA as a VC, Coneybeer decided to found his own firm. He explains in the video above why he felt there was a need for another fund, as well as the challenges of creating an investment vehicle. We also chatted about whether VCs have short attention spans, what’s next for mobile innovation, and more. Check out the video above! |
After Teasing Its Touch-Friendly Future, Canonical Officially Reveals The Ubuntu Phone OS | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | [youtube http://youtu.be/cpWHJDLsqTU?feature=player_embedded] Ubuntu isn’t exactly a stranger to the mobile space — it started showing off its project in early 2012, but it wasn’t about to stop there. Not long after teasing the prospect of a touch-friendly future for its peculiarly-named OS, Canonical has officially pulled back the curtains on its Ubuntu phone OS and it looks, well, . That beauty comes from the fact that it doesn’t really look like any other mobile UI out there right now — it eschews the traditional app grid concept that pervades iOS and stock Android and instead relies on horizontal swipes to view oft-used applications and switch between currently running ones. In a way, it’s approach is more reminiscent of Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT than either of the two leading mobile OSes, though whether those UI decisions catch on is another story entirely. Still, the end result is an interface that feels more spacious and expansive than its potential rivals, a tricky proposition when hardware designers struggle to balance device screen size and portability. Plenty of sweat has been poured into the crafting of Ubuntu’s search functionality as well, and it’s mildly reminiscent of Palm/HP’s webOS. A single search query will yield results from multiple sources, and Ubuntu is apparently clever enough to determine which of the results are most likely be what you’re looking for. Throw in support for robust voice commands and the ability to play nice with HTML5 apps as well as native ones and you’ve got yourself one intriguing little product. Now, a new mobile OS is swell and all, but it’s nigh useless without some proper hardware to go with it. Unfortunately, that’s where the situation gets a little stickier — Ubuntu Mobile is designed to play nice with hardware of all stripes (it supports x86 processors in addition to more common ARM chips, and doesn’t lean on a Java Virtual Machine), but there hasn’t been any word yet on device partnerships. Instead, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has pointed out that first Ubuntu-powered phones could see the light of day towards the end of this year or in early 2014. Of course, Ubuntu’s latest mobile foray raises some weighty questions, not least of which is “who would buy an Ubuntu phone?” If Canonical CEO Jane Silber is to be believed, Ubuntu’s appeal isn’t just limited to Linux enthusiasts and enterprises. Instead, We also see an opportunity in basic smartphones that are used for the phone, SMS, web and email, where Ubuntu outperforms thanks to its native core apps and stylish presentation.” The ability for OEMs and carriers to easily modify and rebrand Ubuntu on mobile devices certainly doesn’t hurt — Firefox OS has taken a similar route with carrier partners like Telefonica. What’s really got me scratching my head is how Ubuntu will stack up against its rivals (and there are plenty of them). I don’t need to tell you that Apple and Google are running the smartphone show with their respective mobile operating systems and the list of players extends much further than you may expect. Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 have probably raised the most eyebrows lately, but the teams behind , , and are gunning to make their mark on the mobile space all the same. When we asked Shuttleworth about the motivation for doing this, rather than throwing their weight behind existing efforts like Android or Tizen. “Our vision is deeper and broader than I’ve seen from other ecosystems,” he said. “We believe that one platform can stretch across multiple environments”: the developer desktop to the cloud server to the end user’s so-called “superphone.” Shuttleworth was honest that the smartphone OS market is already a crowded space, but feels confident that the Ubuntu story will present a winning proposition. Canonical can’t compete with the millions of dollars spent by Microsoft and RIM, but can compete, according to Shuttleworth, on a classy interface across all segments of phones. Here’s hoping it works out — I can’t help but feel that the Ubuntu approach is too interesting for people to ignore completely. |
Good News For Entrepreneurs On Fiscal Cliff: R&D Tax Credit Extended | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | The government gave the nation’s suit-and-tie mad scientists a tax break again this year, agreeing to the much-loved R&D tax credit. “We can’t keep cutting things like basic research and new technology and still expect to succeed in a 21st-century economy,” said President Obama, Congress’s passage of a budget related to the so-called “fiscal cliff.” The popular 1981 law to incentivize research-oriented hiring has generally been extended annually for its 30-year existence, and there’s good evidence that the tax credit really does spur innovation. In 2005, the Congress Budget Office concluded [ ]: A consensus has formed around the view that R&D spending has a significantly positive effect on productivity growth, with a rate of return that is about the same size as (or perhaps slightly larger than) the rate of return on conventional investments. Sean Haggard, Tax Manager of Florida accounting firm, Kaufman Rossin, Businessweek that the lion’s share of R&D tax credits, 80 percent, goes to the big dogs with $250 million or more in gross receipts. Smaller companies, often thought an important engine of economic innovation, use a modified version of the tax code to calculate the credit, the “Alternative Simplified Credit” formula. Entrepreneur Magazine gave a helpful dollar-by-dollar hypothetical of how this might play out for a small business owner: Let’s say you averaged $50,000 in qualified R&D expenses over the past three years. That makes your credit base $25,000. You spend $60,000 this year, or $35,000 more than your base, and 14 percent of that amount yields a tax credit of $4,900. Typically, you can claim the credit in its entirety or amortize it over a period of 60 months. If your company is a startup and doesn’t have three years of history, the credit is a flat 6 percent of qualified research expenses. In 2012, Senators Coon, Enzi, and Schumer an attempt for a startup-specific tax credit, the , but it was referred to a committee (i.e. killed) back in July. How will you use your tax credit this year? Build the next iPhone? Launder the money and head to Disney World? Build a basement meth lab? Oh, the possibilities! |
ABI: 43.6B App Downloads In Year To Sept 2012, Apple Leads Google + Microsoft Overall, But Microsoft Tops For Innovation | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | The mobile app economy continued to power ahead last year, with 43.6 billion downloads worldwide in the 12 months ending September 2012. And while first-mover Apple may have today had a in its attempts to fight off competitors with trademark complaints over the very use of the phrase “app store”, it continues to lead the market in the category, according to figures out today from . But while some might argue that the most obvious marks of app store success are download numbers and sales figures, ABI has chosen two other parameters to measure how well app stores are performing at the moment: implementation and innovation, which it scores on an overall scale of 100. The idea here is that while, at the moment, a store like Apple’s might be leading on download numbers because of its sheer size compared to, say, Microsoft’s Windows Phone store, there is an argument to be made that even if a store is smaller, it’s got a shot at longer-term success for developers who choose to place apps there. As it turns out, Apple leads the pack with 80.8 out of 100, with Android in a close second position at 72.2. Microsoft is at a more distant 63.9 out of 100, but ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen notes that it actually beat Apple where innovation is concerned, with a total point score of 77 points compared to 76 for Apple in innovation. In some regards, this is not a big surprise: it’s the latest entrant into the app store world, and it has fewer apps — 200,000 compared to 700,000 for iOS or over 600,000 for the Google Play store. Markkanen says this has propelled Microsoft, in an underdog position, to being more innovative in terms of how it markets apps and helps users discover them. He highlights “Microsoft’s approach to app charting” — the listings of Top Free, Top Paid, and so on — as one of the main ways that the company has taken the lead, with algorithm factors being more nuanced with Windows Phone. “An app with a modest-but-loyal and highly-engaged user base gets a boost over an app that may see boatloads of downloads but fails to retain its users,” he tells me. “It’s important because this favors quality apps with modest post-launch budgets over mediocre apps that throw a lot of money at ad networks and other forms of marketing.” In other words, the underdog app store is better at promoting underdog-but-possibly-great apps. If more developers started to buy into this concept, it could potentially also start to shift the paradigm for how people chart app success away from download numbers. “I also like the way Microsoft has been transparent about what its chart algorithm has eaten, if compared to Apple and Google which officially never comment anything and leave everything for speculation,” he says. That’s for a reason: “If your algorithm is less holistic, i.e. focused heavily on downloads, it’s also more susceptible for manipulation.” Storefront charts can be real kingmakers in app discovery, he notes, so that makes transparent policies all the more important. Microsoft has also done a “fairly good job” at app personalization, although this has mainly been just to keep up with what Apple and Google already do; and the ease of use of the Windows Phone Store navigation. Ultimately, what this says is that while Apple and Google are still leading overall above Microsoft’s app storefront, there is room for improvement for the leaders. Getting complacent however is one way to eventually level the playing field for competition. |
Phunware Acquires Mobile Advertising Company TapIt Media Group For $23M | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | , a company that specializes in enterprise branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences, just announced that it has acquired mobile ad company (not to be confused with the Australian ). The total purchase price was $23 million and the acquisition closed just before the end of the year on December 28. All of TapIt’s employees, who work in the company’s offices in Irvine, California and Rockville, Maryland, will join Phunware and the company will continue to run TapIt’s ad products under the “TapIt by Phunware” label. When I talked to TapIt earlier this year, the company, which was bootstrapped with a $350,000 seed investment by its CEO in 2010, had just launched a number of new mobile ad products and was already profitable and handling about 6 billion ad impressions per month. TapIt specializes in offering self-service media buying, real-time bidding, cross-platform ad creation, publisher mediation and yield optimization to its network of about 30,000 active publishers. “We are honored to become part of the Phunware family, as our combined mobile platform offerings will add operational value, insight and control to both advertisers and publishers alike,” said Giancarlo Maniaci, Co-Founder and CEO of TapIt Media Group. “With the velocity of adoption and maturation of mobile increasing daily, we strongly believe that fully integrated, easy to use, simple to deploy and all-inclusive mobile platforms like Phunware’s MaaS will soon define both ‘best of breed’ and the new global mobile standard.” For Phunware, which already like the NFL, NASCAR, ESPN, Discovery and other major brands, this acquisition also gives it access to TapIt’s large customers like Disney, Toyota, EA Sports, MSNBC and Rovio. In addition, Phunware’s CEO and co-founder Alan S. Knitowski argues, the acquisition will allow his company to “add further breadth and depth to the existing global scale of our core MaaS [mobile-as-a-service] platform product offerings.” As Phunware’s Knitowski also told me in an email earlier today, he considers his company to be akin to a “a big jar of Advil for the mobile cloud.” Phunware, he says, helps businesses “solve both operational and monetization headaches on mobile for global deployments at scale for the world’s most demanding brands. TapIt by Phunware will represent the core of our MaaS Advertising offering globally and will facilitate the monetization associated with free and freemium mobile applications.” For Phunware, this acquisition will allow it to combine its expertise in building apps on its mobile-as-a-service platform with TapIt’s monetization expertise. As Phunware also notes, this move also shows Phunware’s “aggressive push for ‘mobile cloud’ leadership globally” and the acquisition will help it solve “the underlying operational and monetization headaches of those required to reach, engage and delight them.” For the upcoming year, Knitowski told me, he expects to “scale our US geographic reach and we also expect to enter foreign markets with physical offices in Europe and Asia. This will be done via a combination of organic growth and acquisitions both domestically and abroad. Our core focus is to provide the world’s only fully integrated mobile services platform and to become the defacto engine for the global mobile cloud.” |
Google, HelloFax, Expensify And Others Want You To Go Paperless In 2013 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | The “paperless office” has been a fantasy of office managers since the . While you are probably printing less today than you did 10 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average office worker still uses about 10,000 sheets of paper per year (the numbers for the UK are , too). To make a new push for a really paperless office, the “ ,” which includes , , , , , and , today announced the launch of a new campaign to get businesses to go paperless to save “time, money and trees.” The group is led by HelloFax. “The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water,” said Joseph Walla, HelloFax founder and CEO in a canned statement yesterday. “For the first time, it’s easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It’s finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.” Paperless 2013, the coalition says, is a “campaign to remove the need for paper from ‘paperwork.'” Besides saving time, money and trees, all of these companies are also obviously interested in getting new users. In its current incarnation, this group is clearly meant to be complementary and doesn’t include any obvious competitors. While is not a bad choice for storing your data online, for example, competitors like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Box or SugarSync offer many of the same features. If you want to go paperless in 2013, you can take a pledge on , which will also sign you up for the group’s monthly email newsletter. According to its website, the coalition is also planning “other activities,” but it’s not clear what these will look like. |
Payleven, The Samwer Brothers’ Answer To Square, Takes A ‘High Single-Digit Million Dollar’ Round Led By A Mystery Investor | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | , the -incubated mobile-payment service that uses a dongle attached to a mobile device to make and process card transactions — yes, like — is today announcing that it has picked up another round of funding, as well as a new investor. As has been the case with many past investments in Samwer-incubated startups, neither the exact funding figure, nor the investor, have been disclosed — except to note that the value is in the “high single-digit millions” of dollars, and that it is “largely” from the new backer. Payleven would not comment on whether this is a strategic investment (eg, from a payments company) or a VC. But, in the process of announcing this news, it did confirm — specifically New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net and the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet, which together invested “double-digit millions” in a round last year. As a point of comparison, European competitors and SumUp have respectively raised and . Still nowhere near the scooped up by Square since 2009. Payleven has not released usage numbers for its service, which is now live in Germany, Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom, Poland and Brazil, but a spokesperson tells TechCrunch that it will be using the funding to build out its service in markets where it already operates, as well as continue its international push. The funding comes at a time when competition heats up among services that use dongles on mobile devices to enable credit card payments. But with Square or PayPal’s yet to make any large movements outside North America, the playing field remains wide open. Startups in addition to Payleven offering dongle-based payments include iZettle, mPowa and SumUp. Like many of its competitors, Payleven takes a 2.75% commission on all transactions, with a minimum spend of €1. And like these others, Payleven is going after the same type of client — small businesses that, up to now, may not have been able to accept card payments before because of their size. But Payleven also has a unique selling point. As of , it became the only one that has integrated a chip-and-pin reader into its offering. The chip-and-pin reader is one of the few ways that major credit card company Visa has said is acceptable for verifying a user’s identity. This has been a snag for competitors like and . At one point last year, iZettle had to through its service because Visa decided that its signature-based authentication was not secure enough. (Unlike Square and other payment companies in the U.S. that read the magnetic stripe on the back of the card, in Europe the majority of cards have a chip embedded in them, with a user further authenticating their identity by entering a four-digit code, rather than a signature.) iZettle and others have so far managed to get around this issue by sending buyers to a mobile website for SMS-based authentication, but this of course is less efficient than punching in a short code on a keypad. These other companies are undoubtedly going to arrive at a more frictionless solution — including maybe their own chip-and-pin readers. For now, Payleven is making it more convenient for people to use its service compared to its competitors, with its device linking up with the merchant’s smartphone or tablet via a Bluetooth connection to complete the transaction and sync it up to the merchant’s account. Because it’s using a European-specific approach to mobile payments, and solving a Europe-specific problem, Payleven believes that this is enough to keep it from being labelled a mere clone. That’s an adjective often applied to Samwer ventures that replicate the features and business models of startups in the U.S. that have yet to hit Europe and other markets where Rocket has launched. “We are Payleven. We are more than a clone. We are not replicating but we are creating something differently,” co-founder and COO Alston Zecha told me in October when the company first launched the PIN reader. Full release below. Berlin/London 21th Jan, 2013 – At the end of 2012, payleven, Europe’s mobile payment pioneer, secured additional funding to continue its strong growth in Europe and South America. The high single digit USD million amount comes largely from a new investor who joins the existing group consisting of New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net and Rocket Internet. The name of the investor remains undisclosed. The additional funding comes after an initial double digit investment last summer. payleven turns a smartphone or tablet into a card terminal, enabling small businesses and mobile service providers to accept card payments everywhere – without any fixed costs or a complicated signup process. Co-Founder and CMO Konstantin Wolff: “We are thrilled to see our investor base grow, which reflects the excitement for the first Chip & PIN mobile point of sale (mPOS) in Continental Europe. We want to remain innovative, develop our product and accelerate the growth of our merchant base. The close partnership we have with our investors is key to achieve this.” In Europe, Visa only allows mPOS payments with Chip & PIN authorization. With the introduction of its Chip & PIN solution, payleven is the first company in Continental Europe to fulfill the high security standards required for a fully functional mPOS acceptance device. payleven has been working closely with Visa to ensure the right standards for its mPOS solution. payleven’s Chip & PIN solution works through a compact, secure device that links to a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. The PIN is entered on a keypad on the device. With Chip & PIN, transactions are as secure as with a traditional card terminal and therefore merchants are protected to the highest standards. payleven is tailored to the needs of small and independent businesses with fair and transparent terms and conditions. Billing is solely transaction based – there is no minimum turnover or fixed fee. Transaction costs are as low as 2.75% of the transaction value. All card payments can be accepted starting from EUR 1. payleven, Europe’s mobile payments pioneer, is a start-up with its headquarters in Berlin and London and was founded in March 2012. payleven is founded by a group of young entrepreneurs who want to do things differently from the way big businesses operate. Our team members come from the payments and financial services industry (including large corporations like American Express, MasterCard, Travelex and Visa as well as small payment startups) and also from the software and technology sectors. The company is under the leadership of Co- Founders Rafael Otero, Alston Zecha, Dr. Alexander Zumdieck as well as Konstantin Wolff and currently employs around 70 employees. payleven is already available in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, Poland and Brazil. Further press material and information can be downloaded at www.payleven.com |
Sony (Finally) Moves Past Kooky Tablet Designs, Introduces The Svelte New Xperia Tablet Z | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | This latest Xperia tablet has been the stuff of rumors for a few days now — a release from Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo first hinted that the so-called Tablet Z was in fact a real thing — but the time for rumors has passed. Now Sony Mobile Japan has , and (to my utter surprise) the Tablet Z is both real and rather striking. The first thing you’ll probably notice about the Android 4.1-powered Tablet Z is its 10-inch display. It runs at 1920×1200, and is bolstered by Sony’s occasionally eyeball-nuking Mobile Bravia image-enhancement engine. The internals in question are no slouch either, though chances are they won’t knock your socks off. Nestled snugly inside the Tablet Z’s dust-and-water resistant chassis is an unspecified 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm chipset, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and an 8-megapixel rear camera complete with backlit sensor. Throw in a (slightly anemic) 6,000mAh battery, a microSD card slot, as well as requisite radios for Wi-Fi, LTE, and NFC, and you’ve got yourself a potential contender. Really, though, perhaps the biggest draw here is just how slim the Tablet Z is. With its 6.9mm waistline, Sony’s latest tab is just a hair thinner than the iPad mini, and makes both the Nexus 7 and its larger cousin the Nexus 10 look downright chubby by comparison. The spec sheet may not be the strongest you’ll find on the market, but there’s little question that the Tablet Z is one of the sleekest, prettiest mobile computing packages to trickle out of Sony’s Japanese headquarters in a long time — if only the company would come clean with pricing and availability. Sony’s brief (and ) release leaves a fair bit to the imagination, but to call the Tablet Z a breath of fresh air for a company that never really managed to crack the tablet formula in a meaningful way is an understatement. What’s really got me excited here, though, is what devices like the Tab Z mean for Sony going forward. It was only a week or two ago that Xperia product manager Stephen Sneeden noted that the company was considering bailing out of the , and a similar shift in the company’s overarching strategy for tablets would only be par for the course. Whether or not Sony can really claw its way into a position alongside superstar players like Samsung and Apple remains to be seen, but with hardware like this hitting the market, it seems clear that Sony is giving it the ol’ college try. |
Cincinnati Startup ChoreMonster Makes Chores Fun And They Even Made A Beastie For Us | Jay Donovan | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | launched an update to their app a few days ago that includes a parents section, a redesign of the kids section, a new Monster Carnival and yes… . We never asked for this, but I have to say… “Damn it feels good to be a Monster.” The website/mobile app ecosystem designed to get kids to do their chores officially launched at the turn of the year, is , and . Indeed, “after eight months in private beta and with over 300,000 chores completed” ChoreMonster is available to the masses for $4.99 a month and believe me, this spells HAPPY NEW YEAR to a bunch of parents out there. In short, the website/app is a calculator that lets kids collect points for completing their chores. These points can be exchanged for real-world rewards designed and granted by their parents (basically for doing the kind of tasks my parents just sorta made me do). But this is a much more civil age, and any kind of motivational force to get kids to clean up after themselves should be lauded. I found an interview with one of the founders I shot recently. Chris Bergman, does a much better job explaining the concept than I could. In the video, he even shows me a concept for the above-mentioned character called TeeCee that they were actually serious about adding to ChoreMonster. Rad! But I also reached back out to Chris to get a few more details about how things are going at the ChoreMonster HQ, since we last spoke. “First, what exactly are the details about TeeCee. What’s his M.O.?” “He’s a cleaning monster. He cleans all the crumbs and food particles out of your gadgets and devices.” “Have you conducted any primary research into how kids are reacting to ChoreMonster? Is it working?” “Yeah, it is working. Kids, in general, are more interested in collecting the monster characters than getting rewards. Actually, 63% care more about collecting monsters than they do about getting rewards from their parents for their chores.” “Why Monsters?” “Well, Paul Armstrong (co-founder) had been drawing monsters with his son quite a bit. His son really liked them. I had this idea for a chore app, and the two ideas just sort of came together.” “You guys have raised a decent amount of money. Are you going to stay in Cincinnati? What’s your opinion of the Midwest as an economy for tech startups?” “Yes, we are definitely staying in Cincinnati. We love it here. I’m glad you asked about the Midwest startup scene, because we are big fans of it. Unique things are happening in the Midwest; people are more available, office space is cheap…there’s just a general honesty and authenticity here which is nice. We have to raise less money and give away less of our company to operate here, and that feels good.” “What’s next for ChoreMonster?” “We have some really big plans ahead, that we can’t discuss just yet, but will keep you posted.” |
Leading Asian Cloud-Based Music Service KKBOX Expands Into Southeast Asia, Starting With Singapore And Malaysia | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | , a leading cloud-based music service provider in Asia with 10M registered users, just launched in Malaysia and Singapore. The company’s decision to enter the Southeast Asian marketplace is a sign of . By 2014, KKBOX plans to offer its services in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Founded in Taiwan in 2004, KKBOX is currently available in that country, Hong Kong and Japan with Web sites in traditional and simplified Chinese, English, and Japanese. With more than 10M songs, KKBOX describes its online music library as “the largest and most complete” in the Chinese-speaking marketplace. KKBOX is a popular marketing tool for artists and boasts Facebook integration and features such as “listen along,” which allows users to listen to a song together and is meant to replicate the experience of sharing a set of headphones with a friend. KKBOX’s majority shareholder is Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI, which holds a 70 percent stake. Smartphone maker HTC also owns 10 percent of the company. |
Mandopop Idol Wang Leehom’s DRM-Free Experiment Seeks To Foster Innovation In The Asian Music Industry | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | When Asia’s music industry is covered in the Western media, it is often within the framework of . Another thing that gets attention is the perception that Asian pop stars are pre-fabricated . But now someone who has the influence to tackle these issues is doing so. Mandopop idol Wang Leehom released his latest single “12 Zodiacs” last month through a on his Web site for $1 US, a price that includes the audio track, digital booklet and cover art. The , which co-stars Jackie Chan, was released on Youtube and Youku. The release of “12 Zodiacs” is similar to DRM-free download experiments by and , but with a difference: Wang is much more influential. He may not be a celebrity in the West, but to get an idea of the Taiwanese-American Wang’s reach, take a look at his , the third most popular one on the Chinese microblogging platform, with more than 28.9 million fans. Only three people–Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry–have more followers on Twitter. Wang’s team rebuilt his official Web site so they can sell music directly from it. This year, Wang plans to team up with other musicians to create a new site that will allow them to “share their creative works in an economically viable way.” “The Asian music industry is sustainable in many ways, and I am tremendously fortunate to continue to benefit from that and be able to do what I love for a living. But I think, like any industry, we need to continue to look forward and evolve, and a significant aspect of that is finding new, mutually beneficial ways for artists to share content with fans. What we’ve done with the release of ’12 Zodiacs’ is just one experiment in that vein,” Wang said in an email. It is important to note that piracy has not been as disruptive to the music industry in China as it has been in the West. Harold Li, who directs the digital sales initiative on , says that album sales have never been a significant source of revenue for Wang, who, like other major artists in Asia, earns most of his revenue from concert ticket sales and brand endorsements. Confronting music piracy is a secondary issue. Instead, the DRM-free online release of “12 Zodiacs” explores what different directions the Asian music industry can take in order to cultivate new talent. Wang’s success and celebrity has given him the freedom to tackle social issues that are usually missing from Mandopop, which has a reputation for catchy tunes but fluffy lyrics. For example, with past releases Wang has looked at and . But younger artists who don’t have the leverage to draw crowds or ink advertising deals often struggle to break into the music industry, let alone find a wide audience for anything truly original. For example, and ‘s popular music industries are (in)famous for training, grooming and assembling groups with clinical precision. Even in Taiwan, known for being the center of the vast Mandopop industry as well as a host of , emerging artists often feel enormous pressure to fit into a very specific mold. Last year, Taiwanese-American singer Joanna Wang went on Reddit to , which she referred to as a “a shitastic record with the cheesiest and cliche 80’s-esque music videos to very lame music that my label [Sony Music Taiwan] coerced me into singing.” The release of “12 Zodiacs” looks how whether or not it will be possible for an artist to operate independently from record labels by launching and promoting tracks on their own Web platforms–in effect, making each artist the founder of his or her own startup. If the idea takes off, it can mean more diversity in this region’s music industry. “The Chinese music industry is very innovative, and it’s a personal mission of mine to make sure we do a better job showing that to the world,” said Wang. “I think artists old and new will find, as I have, that the best way of building an audience is to directly engage fans, particularly through digital platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Youku, or YouTube.” Though Wang’s company doesn’t release sales figures, Li says “12 Zodiacs” got 2 million views in the first week and a half after it went live on last month. Many of Wang’s fans throughout China don’t use credit cards, so his company made a deal with Alibaba’s to support online payments. One goal of Wang’s experiment is to find artists capable of creating content with international appeal and then spread their work. Wang also hopes to expose more listeners to Chinese-language pop music across the world, even those who aren’t native speakers. One of his goals to break into the U.S., where there are significant barriers for Asian artists in the U.S. music industry despite the growing global appetite for . “There’s a lot of difference, but the obvious comparison is ‘Gangnam Style,’ and how that changed the conversation very quickly,” says Li. “In terms of accessibility, there are a lot of the same factors involved in how that became very widely known. We are creating an industry where everyone feels like they can enter it and build a career out of it.” |
Apple Reportedly Reduces iPhone 5 LCD Panel Orders From Sharp | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | Japanese newspaper is reporting that Apple has halved LCD panel orders from Sharp due to lower-than-expected sales of the iPhone 5. This is the latest indication apparently pointing to the device’s sluggish performance since its launch in September, and comes just three days after that Sharp has slowed production of the 9.7 inch panels used for full-sized iPads. Earlier this month, the that Apple cut component orders for the iPhone 5 due to weaker-than-expected demand, with orders for iPhone 5 screens for the January-to-March quarter dropping to about half of what the company had previously planned to order. Orders of other components were also reduced. It is important to note, however, that there might be other reasons for a reduction in component orders. Many analysts believe that reduced component orders are not due to weak demand, but rather to after . Consumers may be waiting for , which has been rumored to be slated for a June or July release. Apple is due to report its Q1 2013 fiscal results on January 23. Sharp said it does not comment on business transactions with clients. Apple has been emailed for comment. |
Social Network Fandalism Adds A Cheap Way For Musicians To Upload Songs To iTunes And More | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | , a social network for musicians, is adding a new feature that should undercut the market for “aggregators” like and (which allow independent artists to sell their music on iTunes and other digital stores). To do that, founder Philip Kaplan (who also founded the FuckedCompany blog and ad network AdBrite, as well as co-founding social shopping startup Blippy) is offering a free song upload to iTunes, and unlimited uploads to iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play for $19.99 per year. That’s significantly cheaper than most other services, he said — for example, Tunecore charges $29.99 per album per year, while CD Baby charges $49 per album and takes a cut of earnings. Those fees don’t seem like an enormous amount of money, but Kaplan said it’s still a risk for the musician, and one that they shouldn’t be taking. Fundamentally, he argued that the aggregation business is “a commodity.” He doesn’t see it as a serious moneymaker for Fandalism, but instead as a way to attract new members for social network (you need to be a member to participate in the music distribution program), which he described as “my true business.” Plus, he said he likes the idea of “causing trouble” for an existing industry. In fact, the main reason he’s charging anything at all is just to convince musicians that it isn’t a scam. So how is the business side of Fandalism going? Well, aside from the distribution feature, Kaplan isn’t actually making money yet. Instead, he’s focused on building “a database of every musician on the planet.” When , he was already off to a good start, with 330,000 members around the world. Now he said that number is up to 550,000, and those members are pretty active, uploading 1,000 videos per day, providing 20,000 “props” (the Fandalism version of a “like”) and 3,500 comments. It’s becoming a real-world community too — a few months ago, Kaplan organized a meet-up in New York’s Washington Square Park and 400 people showed up, as you can see in the video below. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZWDugECM2Y&w=560&h=315] At some point, Fandalism will probably become a large enough that it will be valuable to advertisers like instrument manufacturers: “I’m not sure what that point is, but we’re not there yet,” Kaplan said. He plans to start allowing uploads in the next day or so. In the meantime, . |
E-Medical Records Get A Mobile, Open-Sourced Overhaul By White House Health Design Challenge Winners | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | The standard electronic medical record is a confusing, text-heavy computer read-out. But the winners of Designer Fund and the White House’s have created beautiful, comprehensible, mobile versions. Soon, a combination of the best of the submissions will be open-sourced and implemented as the record format for the Veterans Affair Administration and its 6 million patients. The challenge was launched in November by the White House and a new called . Directed by five-year Facebook designer Ben Blumenfeld and 500 Startups founding team member Enrique Allen, Designer Fund aims to advise and back designer-led startups with a positive social impact. The to redesign the electronic medical record (EMR) was a huge success, pulling in 230 submissions compared to 80 submissions in a previous White House health challenge. Blumenfeld tells me that “from a quantity standpoint it was amazing, but from a quality standpoint too. People thought through all sorts of ways for the electronic medical record to expand and live on mobile, and have preventative care in there too.” The overall winner called from consultancy solved many of the biggest problems with the existing EMR. Those include medication plans that are tough to understand, unintuitive formatting, impersonal statistics, and the general feel of a decades-old print-out. It will be the basis of the open-sourced final version of the downloadable medical record that other healthcare providers could adopt. Nightingale creates an obvious hierarchy for all your health info, and uses styling to make it easy to read. Patients are shown their statistics on a scale from “concerning” to “doing well” instead of as raw numbers. Rather than only showing your latest lab results, Nightingale puts them in context of your past tests to show how you’re trending. That’s critical, because if your latest results says your cholesterol is too high but the trend shows it’s coming down quickly, you’re actually taking the right steps and shouldn’t make drastic changes. Graphical timetables in Nightingale make it obvious when to take which medications. Nightingale is accessible from mobile so you can always check your dosage schedule, which will help people make sure they take the meds on schedule. You can even set email and phone alerts to remind you it’s pill-popping time. Mobile was a big theme among the top submissions. , which took second place, laid out ailments on a body map that could be viewed on your phone. won best medication design by creating a browsable deck of mobile medicine cards. The challenge’s winners will split $50,000 in cash. Beyond that, Blumenfeld tells me healthcare companies he’s talked to are calling the winner’s showcase “the perfect place to recruit from.” But hopefully the winners see the real prize is helping 6 million VA patients and more truly understand their health. |
Wheelz CEO: Avis’ Zipcar Buy Signals A Shift Toward More Car Sharing, Less Car Ownership | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | Car-sharing service Wheelz is kind of like Zipcar, but instead of owning a fleet of vehicles itself, it’s making cars that are owned by regular folks available for rent. Founder and CEO Jeff Miller says Wheelz is “building a community marketplace that connects people who own a car with people who need access to a car.” According to him, there are about 250 million cars in the U.S., most of which are parked all the time. Wheelz aims to make those parked cars available to those who might not own one, when they need a vehicle. To do so, it installs a hardware device into all cars, which allows renters to unlock and access those cars via its mobile app. Not only is Zipcar kind of a competitor, in the sense that it also provides on-demand access to vehicles via the web and mobile apps, but it was also . So what does the Avis purchase of Zipcar mean for Wheelz, and the on-demand car-sharing market in general? “What we’re seeing is a greater shift towards mobility services, away from just a single one-car-to-one-person ownership model,” Miller said. “Avis… making an investment and acquiring a car-sharing company is making a pretty big statement around the direction in how the overall car-sharing industry is growing.” Avis isn’t alone: automotive companies like Mercedes-Benz and BMW are launching their own services for on-demand car services and fractional ownership of vehicles. Check out the video above to hear more about how car-sharing is changing. |
With $4.1M In New Funding, MasteryConnect Wants To Give Teachers A Better Way To Track Student Progress | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | One of the most important roles that technology can play in transforming education revolves around data. Whether that’s by implementing APIs to make student data more transportable (à la Clever and LearnSprout) or creating integrated, cloud-based analytics platforms that give educators more insight into student performance through real-time metrics, finding better ways to make data more accessible can solve some of the biggest problems that are crippling our educational system. Today, many educators agree that the educational process relies too much on end-of-the-year or end-of-term assessments and standardized testing, and, instead, needs a better way to assess their students’ mastery of the material during the term so they can make adjustments on the fly rather than at the end of the term when it’s too late. launched in July 2011 to help solve this problem by offering a cloud-based platform that allows educators to track student progress through their mastery of Common Core standards. The Salt Lake City-based startup focuses, particularly, on — a type of assessment that involves qualitative feedback (instead of relying on scores) and takes place during the learning process, with the goal of helping educators tweak their activities and approach to teaching with the goal of helping students learn more effectively. MasteryConnect, then, makes it easier for teachers to create these types of assessments and share them with colleagues, parents and students. MasteryConnect co-founder and CEO Mick Hewitt tells us that another important part of the startup’s mission is to help teachers, parents and schools understand the Common Core Standards, while allowing teachers to help drive the shift away from a situation in which students tend to be over-tested yet under-assessed. Hewitt, whose wife and father are both teachers, says that he hears time and again that teachers go into teacher-parent conferences wanting to explain why their son or daughter got a “C” grade in Math, and, while they can point to poor grades on homework or tests as a result, they still find it nearly impossible to explain which concepts or lessons they struggled with, which in turn led to the poor grades. That’s why MasteryConnect created a widget that allows schools to embed Common Core standards into any website so that they can easily look up those standards and better understand the connection between them and the lessons they’re teaching (or learning) and the meaning behind them. In turn, the platform makes it easy for teachers to upload their assessments and answer keys, analyzing feedback from students through the browser or MasteryConnect’s app, which are then graded automatically. Allowing teachers to drive the assessment process, doing so in the ways that they see fit while getting access to real-time results on those assessments, has led to some promising traction. Hewitt tells us that the startup’s iOS and Android apps have seen 500K downloads to date, and standards in these Common Core reference apps have seen 40 million pageviews. In turn, its patent-pending technology is now used by teachers in 7,700 districts across the U.S. — over half of the country’s 15,000-odd districts — and some 23,000 schools. To support this growth — most of which has occurred over the last 12 months — the startup is today announcing that it has raised $4.1 million in series A financing, a round that will remain open for the next month or so, Hewitt says. Catamount Ventures led the investment, while the second-largest chunk came from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, with contributions from Deborah Quazzo of GSV Advisors and existing investor, LearnCapital. The new round adds to the $1.1 million in seed financing MasteryConnect raised from Imagine K12, NewSchools and Learn Capital, bringing its total to $5.2 million. It tends to be unusual to see venture firms investing alongside non-profit foundations, but for Hewitt, it’s an important sign of validation. While the Dell Family Foundation has made a handful of investments in both non-profit and for-profit ventures over the last six years, this represents “the first equity investment for the foundation in a U.S.-based edtech startup,” Hewitt said today, . As a result of the investment, the Dell Family Foundation required that part of MasteryConnect’s schools be low-income institutions. And while that could be seen as a handicap for an education software startup amidst a space that is traditionally rife with slow sales cycles, the chief executive welcomes the requirement, helping it maintain its focus on its core user base: the public school market, both low-income and otherwise. Not only that, but MasteryConnect wants to help transform education in such a way that learning is driven by teachers and educators, allowing them to decide how assessment data is used in the classroom. Teachers are becoming disillusioned with the types of tests they’re required to administer by the state, with many of them believing that they are far from being the most effective way to measure progress. Instead, MasteryConnect offers teachers an opportunity to do away with the old letter grade standard, using its platform to track student mastery against Common Core or state standards as they go. For both teachers and students, that’s an exciting proposition. In terms of its business model, MasteryConnect has opted for the freemium approach, offering free accounts to teachers, which allows them to access its Learning Community to find, share and collaborate on assessments, along with including basic grading functionality. Premium accounts, which cost $159/year for teachers or $6/year per student for an entire school or district, allow for more grading capabilities and integration with Student Information Systems, more robust collaboration and reporting. Hewitt attributes part of the success of the platform thus far to this social component, which allow teachers to collaborate on the most effective ways to create formative assessments and discover which teachers, classes and students perform best under different teaching styles and methods of assessment. Traditionally, assessment in K-12 education has been driven by top-down models, with higher-ups in the district or state determining how testing will be structured, and on what content students will be tested, with pre-determined content from publishers driving the whole process. MasteryConnect allows teachers to play a greater role in determining what content should be used and how it should be used, as well as test the efficacy of content and different styles in their own classrooms. While the startup is pushing a greater understanding of the Common Core within education’s ranks, it doesn’t play favorites or put any requirements on how teachers use these assessments. This, in turn, has led to the sharing of 25,000 different types of assessments by teachers via MasteryConnect, and, with its new funding under its belt and the ability to scale its own infrastructure, Hewitt sees a lot more growth in the future. For more on MasteryConnect, . |
Facebook Graph Search Is Humorless, Creepy And Doomed To Disappoint | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | Facebook’s newest feature (so new it’s still in beta) can apparently tell you lots of stuff. Which of your friends are into surfing, hiking or drinking cups of tea. Or, delving into darker territory, which of your friends are sexist or racist — as this article points out. (Ewww.) But Graph Search also shines a massive illuminating spotlight on something else: why has captured people’s imagination. And the answer is simple: because it does something Facebook does not. It lets data disappear, rather than stockpiling it until it starts to stink. Snapchat is a photo-messaging app that lets you send a missive that automatically deletes itself after a set amount of time (from one to 10 seconds). Which means your Snapchat buddies’ proclivities and peccadilloes linger mostly in your memory (and any screengrabs/photos you’ve been able to take – but ). Snapchat’s existence — and apparent popularity — is fascinating in an age of indelible digital footprints. YOU may not remember that in 2007 you (jokily) liked ‘Barbara Cartland novels’ on Facebook but Facebook sure as hell does. And now that we have Graph Search lots of other folks can know something about you that isn’t true. Facebook’s algorithm isn’t actually that clever, so it can’t figure out that you were being ironic when you clicked the like button. Leave your humor at the door, all who enter here. (As an aside, there is a huge festering issue for Facebook and its advertisers in the form of so-called ‘dirty data’ – the site is awash with people playing deliberately fast and loose with the truth. Teenage girls who are ‘married’ to their BFFs. People who work at ‘Rydell High’ or ‘Charlie’s Chocolate Factory’. Or who look an awful lot like Brat Pitt. And that’s before you even get to the whole fake likes issue – explored in some detail . In short: just because it’s called a ‘like’ doesn’t mean someone actually likes it.) The — Google Play lists its Android app as having clocked up between one to five million installations in the past 30 days which, while no Angry Birds, isn’t trivial either — runs counter to claims that young people don’t give a damn about their personal data being perpetually published online. We don’t yet have detailed demographic data on Snapchat users but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence its use is being driven by teens and young people (13 to 25 year olds). In other words exactly the group who were supposed to have been born post-privacy. Don’t R.I.P. privacy – we’re coming with a shovel to dig you back up. The surprise success of an app that deletes rather than retains data suggests there is potential for other startups to get themselves noticed by letting data decay. By building more transient, human technology that seeks to mimic the privacy of memories – which remain, for now at least, locked safely in our skulls. Evidently there is an appetite for digital footprints that – like a real footprint – gently fade and crumble away, leaving little or no trace of your passing. After all, even Facebook decided it needed to clone Snapchat – with . So let me say that again: startups, there’s an opportunity here. Think about ways to humanise technology. To make it a little bit more forgetful, a little less 1984. Seize the day. And you too might have Zuck and Co. running scared. Technology that’s a little more human, a little less stalkerish could have a very bright future, indeed. Especially as more and more companies start to join the dots of people’s personal data – illuminating the implications of continuing to contribute to a single catch-all data bank. What is actually in it for the user? Not necessarily much of value when that data is dubious or paranoid or both. I explained Graph Search to a twentysomething U.K. Facebook user who grew up using the service as a teenager. Her response was a question: “How does this Graph Search benefit the people who use Facebook?” How indeed. If you aren’t already aware that your surf board-owning friend likes surfing, or your travel-mad friend went to New York City for New Year’s Eve, are you sure you’re actually friends with them? After Facebook unveiled Graph Search, my colleague Josh Constine argued that not sharing your likes on Facebook is because you’re depriving humanity of your own humble contribution, insights, knowledge, tastes and so on. In my view the exact opposite is true: by sharing anything on Facebook you risk over-sharing more than ever – which means that Facebook risks making more of its users think long and hard about every little thing they contribute to its data banks. The visibility of Graph Search contributions can apparently be controlled in the , but as is always the case with Facebook and privacy, it’s not immediately obvious who will be able to see what — meaning you have to put the leg work in figuring this stuff out on Facebook’s behalf. And that’s just annoying. This uber joined-up social network is hacking your life back together without asking – and probably making a hash of it (i.e. you) in the process. Tools such as Graph Search – and more broadly, whole social networks designed to make it easy to browse through large chunks of personal data, chronologically and/or by slicing and dicing it in various ways, while simultaneously making it insanely complex to opt out of putting personal stuff in the public domain (networks which take individual bits of data and sew them together to make a Franken-YOU) – are playing with fire. And promising far more than they can realistically deliver. By contrast, one of the best things about Twitter is that it knows the importance of limits: 140 characters per post, and a site structure designed to take time and effort to go delving back into a user’s catalogue of tweets adds up to a service that feels more respectful of its users. Cumulative, joined-up data is simply not the same beast as data that’s distributed and at least partially disconnected. And by pretending that joining up all those disconnected dots is no big deal, Facebook is being dishonest and dumb. Plenty of people won’t care what quasi-identity Facebook gives them, but there will be others who decide there’s no benefit to them of being on Facebook’s public record. Indeed, that removing their contribution is the most sensible response to its behaviour. In real life only stalkers and psychos keep databases on their friends. Share out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle between your friends, family, lovers and strangers and it would need a freak accident to gather the whole odd-ball collection in one place to put the picture together. But even that metaphor is way too simplistic. The point is: there is no you. And any algorithm that tries to create one by joining your disparate dots is pitifully reductive – and doomed to fail by overpromising, under delivering and being really really creepy while it flounders around trying to impress you. |
The World’s First 3D-Printed Building Will Arrive In 2014 (And It Looks Awesome) | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | Sure, 3D printing is fun and cute. And products like the and will most certainly disrupt manufacturing, even if it’s only on a small scale. But the possibilities of 3D printing stretch far beyond DIY at-home projects. In fact, it could entirely replace the construction industry. We’ve already seen folks at MIT’s Research Labs working on ways to 3D print the frame of a home in a day, as opposed to the month it would take a construction crew to do the same. But it isn’t just geeks taking an interest; a Dutch architect is interested in 3D printing a home, with the hopes that it’ll be ready by 2014. The architect’s name is Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture, and his project is a part of the competition, which lets architects in over 15 different countries build projects over the course of two years. Ruijssenaars will work with Italian inventor Enrico Dini, founder of the 3D printer. The plan is to print out 6×9 chunks of frame, comprised of sand and inorganic binder. From there, they’ll fill the frame with fiber-reinforced concrete. The final product will be a single flowing design, a two-story building. [gallery columns="4" ids="740227,740228,740229,740230"] Here’s the project in Ruijssenaars’ words: One surface folded in an endless möbius band. Floors transform into ceilings, inside into outside. Production with innovative 3D printing techniques. Architecture of continuity with an endless array of applicability. As I said, he doesn’t plan on realizing the dream until 2014. So just because he has plans to build the world’s first 3D-printed building, it would appear that others have time to nab the title first. [via ] |
Organic Transit’s Solar-Pedal Hybrid Vehicle Is Ready To Ship In March | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | We’ve seen the go from in founder Rob Cotter’s eye to the real deal in a matter of a few short months. The solar-powered pedal hybrid vehicle first showed its face in prototype phase back at our , and shortly thereafter found its way to . After asking for $100,000 in funding, Organic Transit actually received $225,000 and about 51 pre-orders for the $4,000 hybrid vehicle. And that doesn’t include the original 400 pre-orders Organic Transit racked up before hitting Kickstarter. But the revolution has begun, my friends. The Elf has gone from hand-made manufacturing to vacuum forming the body, which produces a new frame every 11 minutes. A few other tweaks have been made like the addition of standard 60 watt panels, a lithium battery, and an app that tells you how much you’re working out your legs or decreasing your carbon footprint. Plus, the app makes sure you don’t get lost on an epic biking adventure. This only means that shipping is in the works. Kickstarter pledgers should get their Elf starting in March through May, and the original 400 pre-orders plus new ones will fall in line after that. The company is aiming its vehicle, which retails for about $4,000, at small businesses who might need something a bit more efficient and protective than a bike to make their deliveries. It’s only a matter of time for the Elf to garner a following, which is just the right time for a to start marketing its TruckIt vehicle, similar to the Elf but with more payload capacity. |
CrunchWeek: Will We Use Facebook’s Graph Search, Netflix Vs. Time Warner And The CBS/CNET Debacle | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | In this edition, my esteemed colleagues , and I discuss Facebook’s and its ; Netflix’s over Open Connect, and the over not the ‘best of CES’ prize. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 2 | null |
Ben Horowitz: “We Like To Invest In College Dropouts With Insane Ideas Going After Tiny Markets With No Way To Monetize” | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | At the in Munich today, venture capitalist took the stage to discuss why he and his firm invest in a company and its founders. Last year, he said, Andreessen Horowitz found 2,355 companies that were potentially worth investing in that passed the company’s initial screen. In the end, Andreesen Horowitz only closed 24 deals (excluding seed deals). The companies that made it, he cheekily argued, are those started by “college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no way to monetize.” Talking about crazy ideas, Horowitz noted that in 1975, software wasn’t something people would invest in because it always came with the computer. The market was too small, you couldn’t sell it yourself and most people thought something like Altair Basic wasn’t a viable product. Still, that’s what Microsoft essentially did. In 1998, web search was considered to be a bad idea and investment because most of the search companies that had already launched weren’t able to make any money, yet Google figured it out. Other examples of companies that started with a bad idea that then turned into a major company noted by Horowitz were the podcasting service that turned into Twitter and , which turned into Instagram. An idea that gets funded, he noted, has to be a breakthrough idea. It has to be an order of magnitude better than what is currently available. The problem, however, is that those breakthrough ideas – by definition – look like they are insane. Even the smartest people will pass on great companies because they know too much about the old paradigm that they can’t comprehend the breakthrough. Airbnb, for example, sounds like a crazy idea – even the name, he noted, sounds like it’s a bad idea. Now, more people rent Airbnb hotel rooms in New York than Hilton hotel rooms. The key characteristic to look for, says Horowitz, is an incredibly brilliant entrepreneur with a seemingly berserk idea. Who are these great entrepreneurs? Using the college droputs Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates as his examples, Horowitz said that what he looks for are brilliance, courage and a breakthrough idea. Unless you have the brilliance to pursue it, you don’t get into college and unless you have courage and a breakthrough idea, you don’t drop out (though I think Horowitz was really talking about elite colleges here). Horowitz also noted that even though Silicon Valley is often accused of having great ideas but problems with coming up with good business models, Horowitz argued that companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and others were often underestimated in the beginning and that many analysts believed they could never turn into profitable businesses. All of these ideas initially looked crazy and impossible to monetize, yet all of these companies eventually figured it out. |
Codecademy’s Zach Sims Talks Education 2.0 And Learning To Code At DLD | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | At the invite-only (Digital – Life – Design) conference in Munich today, Codecademy’s co-founder and CEO Zach Sims talked about the history of the service, the way people are using it today and how he sees the company’s role to be in the quickly growing online education space. Sims recounted the story of Martha, a Codecademy user in Kenya who barely had any experience with the Internet until she started her medical internship. During this internship, she finally got access to a computer and started using social media and began to learn from sources like Wikipedia that were previously unknown and unavailable to her. What really attracted her, though, was the fact that the Internet allowed people to create, so she started to learn how to code with Codecademy. Two weeks after she started, she quit her internship and focused on learning to program, which eventually landed her a job as a Ruby developer in Kenya. As Sims stressed throughout his talk, wants to enable its users to create. Too many Internet users, he argues, just consume content and don’t know how to create it. “We all have the ability to create more and not just consume on the web.” Codecademy, he said, wants to “build the educational experience the Internet deserves.” Asked whether what Codecademy built could apply to other disciplines as well, Sims argued that what made Codecademy work is the fact that it puts a focus on learning by doing and teaching skills that can be applied immediately. He also noted that one thing that makes Codecademy work so well is that it created a community of learners who can encourage and help each other by building their own lessons, for example.”You should learn anything interactively and in the company of your peers.” In addition, he also cited Codecademy’s as examples for this emphasis on teaching users skill they can immediately apply. Sims also talked a bit about the experience of building Codecademy with his co-founder. Sims said that he always found learning to code hard, especially because he often didn’t find the right answers to his questions and a community of other learners. So when he met his co-founder Ryan Bubinski, the two essentially built the service for Sims himself. They developed the prototype in three weeks and Sims learned JavaScript to develop it. Shortly after they launched the project, thousands suddenly signed up and it quickly went global. Indeed, Sims believes that Codecademy has the opportunity to “build a global community of people who build things.” As for other platforms like and , Sims argues that they are cracking the distribution problem, but Codecademy wants to do something different. It wants to empower people to not just learn but to become teachers themselves (through, for example, Codecademy’s user-created courses). Sims also had to face the dreaded question about how he plans to create revenue from the service, which is currently completely free. While he admitted that the service could at some point charge users upfront, he really sees it as his mission to lower the barrier for learning how to code and making a profit doesn’t really seem to be on the top of Sims’ mind right now. |
Study: Many Skin Cancer-Detecting Apps Are Not Accurate | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | Dermatologists can rest assured that they will not be replaced by computers anytime soon. that smartphone applications designed to automatically detect cancer lesions misdiagnose more than half of all malignant growths. “There’s no substitute, at this point, for a complete skin exam performed by an expert dermatologist for picking up melanoma as well as other skin cancers,” said University of Missouri dermatologist, Dr. Karen Edison (who was not involved in the study). Since cancer-detecting apps aren’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration, most apps, such as , have butt-covering legal language like, “Always defer to a medical professional if you feel that a mole looks suspicious. Mole Detective’s intent is not to diagnose but to help you better track the symptoms of melanoma at home.” Making cancer detection habitual could be a good thing, but it also might lull users into falsely believing that an actual tumor is benign. This isn’t to say that all of the apps were failures. One of the unnamed apps in the study sends a picture of the user’s skin to a certified dermatologist (for $5 an evaluation). The consultation app misdiagnosed just 1 of 53 cancerous lesions. This is good news for telemedicine startups, such as hospital-in-a-box, , that aim to bring low-cost health care to under resourced or overcrowded areas of the world. The study (for now) is free to read on the Journal of The American Medical Association website . [ : iTunes] |
Iterations: Graph Search, In Theory And In Practice | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 1 | 20 | TechCrunch The biggest news in consumer technology this week was created by Facebook. The social network’s new product – “Graph Search” – was the subject of an international press event where analysts initially speculated on all new things, from a Facebook partnership on the scale of Spotify or even their own phone. There were a lot of posts about Graph Search. Facebook is an important, powerful company, and that level of coverage is warranted. I’ve finally read through most of the analysis that made its way through my Twitter feed, and found myself surprised by the range of opinions shared on the matter. Graph Search is probably not a “Google Killer,” as it indexes, restructures, and surfaces data within its own walled gardens (which includes data pumped into Open Graph). Facebook’s search product opens up a new window to search what many refer to as the “ ,” a web that is not accessible to Google’s crawlers and algorithms. Smart writers weighed in with great insights. John Battelle, who has covered Google and search for years, Graph Search gives Facebook a new layer of interaction to increase engagement; Steve Cheney argued Facebook’s mining of “Likes” created distorted signals to begin with and puts Graph Search at risk of irrelevance; Pando’s Hamish McKenzie Facebook as a network of connections over a network of people, which presumes Facebook must continue to acquire user data, either directly through native activity on the site or indirectly through Open Graph permissions or acquisitions like Instagram; and Xconomy’s Wade Roush Graph Search as Step One of Many in Facebook’s attempt to produce more relevant results for everything, based on the belief social filters and recommendations are going to best what algorithms can deliver. I haven’t paid as close attention to Facebook as others, but my initial reaction to the unveiling of Graph Search was that it was less about what individual consumers could do (though that’s cool), and how companies, brands, and other institutions could further segment the Facebook audience in order to hyper-target their messages, advertisements, and attention. This is where Open Graph, in theory, could continue to funnel data into Facebook’s data centers and, over time, build all sorts of audiences with a few keyword search terms. Where this logic breaks down for me, however, is that I rarely send data to Facebook. I use the service daily, and I like it a lot. But, I don’t connect many other services to it that send data back to Facebook. I also don’t go to Facebook to search, so it’s not an underlying behavior for me on their properties. This creates two issues: (1) I’m not trained to search on Facebook; and (2) I’m not giving Facebook more details about me or my graph in order to produce more relevant results against a search. I know it’s dangerous to extrapolate from just my own behavior, but I also sense people are growing more and more reluctant to sign into new services with their Facebook permissions, or to embed their Facebook account into Apple’s iOS operating system. All this said, I wouldn’t bet against Facebook. I don’t know exactly how, but I feel they’ll figure it out and continue to extract key data, whether directly or through other means, perhaps even acquisitions as its revenue streams mature. Yet, reading all these great analyses and reflecting on this week’s news, I find myself thinking about other great sources for information where the underlying behaviors for search are already being served in more natural ways. On Pinterest, users discover new things through streams of images, but users also can search directly for things they’re interested in, bypassing Google entirely. On Quora, most visitors to the site lurk (e.g. “browse” and “search”) and do not actively participate, many of them ironically ending up on the site after entering a Google search. It remains to be seen whether Facebook is able to reinvent search altogether, or whether Facebook successfully opens an entirely new search channel which could monetize as well as Google’s, or whether other sites like Pinterest and Quora, for instance, already have a head start on capturing the underlying behaviors embedded into their properties and flipping them into a search business model. What I’ve learned from this week, then, is that Facebook and newer companies have a great opportunity to allow their users to search within their walled-gardens and Wall Street, already primed on Google’s model, loves how online search monetizes. There will likely be many different types of search, especially as the “dark web” continues to grow outside the sight of Google. Graph Search is an important step in this direction, but given the competition and the pace of growth of particular startups in the market right now, it remains to be seen if Facebook will actually create the next killer search product. In theory, Graph Search makes a ton of sense; in practice, however, Graph Search most likely has a very, very, very long way to go. |
The Weekly Good: The Problems Of Today Will Be Solved By The Minds Of Tomorrow | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | If you’re looking for a great story to end your week, here’s one. Below is a mission statement that’s brief, to the point and something that is easy to get behind: For younger folks who really love technology and the idea of hacking things with others, there is a place for them. Just a few years ago, you probably wouldn’t be able to say that. These days, a Seattle-based company called has a program that gives high school kids a place to be as creative as they want to be, with others that want the same thing. It’s like space camp, but it’s not a one-time thing by any stretch of the imagination. When you foster an environment of innovation for younger minds, you’re setting up everyone’s future for really amazing things. While we’re stuck in the world of social networking via Twitter and Facebook, the developers that will end up making their mark on the world over the next ten years are thinking way bigger, and deeper, about the problems that affect all of us. Someone who is fifteen years old right now could end up building the next huge evolution in transportation, cure a serious illness or just bring a smile to people’s faces in a new way. This is a great thing, and StudentRND is helping it happen. I spoke with its CEO and Founder, , about StudentRND’s mission and what’s next for them. ——— I believe that students have incredible amounts of potential. However, not many realize that they can do amazing things. Some high school students start to tinker around with technology in their spare time — learn how to code, mess around with electronics, but never do anything substantial because they never really get around to it. There’s always a homework assignment due tomorrow, and a test next week to distract them from doing something they want to do. Others want to learn how to do things with technology, but don’t even know where to start. None of their friends, teachers, or parents are involved with technology, so they assume that it’s some sort of rocket science that isn’t easily accessible. I believe that the best way to learn about technology is to do things with technology. When I was in high school, I learned a lot about technology because I started building a flash games website so that my friends & I could play games in the computer lab. Friends requested more and more features in the site, and I went out to learn how to do it. As time went on, I got pretty adept at solving problems with technology! Later on in my high school career, I stopped working on websites, and started competing in tech competitions. I loved the communities surround the competitions, but didn’t like how most competitions encouraged students to win awards for their resume, instead of doing something meaningful. So — right as I was about to graduate, I recruited several of my friends, and asked them to hang out at my house and focus on building cool tech projects over the summer, instead of getting a job! And that was the start of StudentRND. Right now, StudentRND has a really cool ecosystem in Seattle consisting of StudentRND Labs (formerly known as the StudentRND Incubator), and . We have too many interesting stories to tell! However, here are a few: Most Exciting: We actually raised our initial $25,000 seed funding from Chase Community Giving, in a Facebook competition. Right after we got our 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in 2009, Chase had a competition on Facebook, asking people to vote for their favorite small, local (under $1M in annual revenues) nonprofit organization (the top 200 would get $25k each)! Many of the smaller nonprofits in 2009 were either not very adept at social media, didn’t know about, or chose not to participate in the competition. We ended up with ~3,000 votes from our friends, and won Chase’s grant! Proudest: (Tyler’s company) actually first met at StudentRND. More info here: Coolest: Issaquah High School student Marshall Meng builds a Plasma Speaker, a taser-like device that uses the electricity to actually play music. They put it on Kickstarter and raised $18,500 — over 9x their original goal! Most Caffeinated: For several CodeDays, this one group of students would come to the event and have a soda drinking competition. Each one of them would drink 20+ sodas within the course of 24 hours! At one event, I was making cup noodles to serve as a midnight snack, and realized that a carton of cup noodles had less carbohydrates than a can of soda! I told the group, and they immediately stopped drinking quite so much soda =D Most Caffeinated 2: Clearing out an entire Safeway’s worth of Safeway soda: Silliest: There’s a bunch of high school students involved in StudentRND — we goof around a lot! After this one event, we ended up with some extra styrafoam, so Vu made the most rediculous paper airplane: Via curriculum? There are already science/tech magnets schools out there for students interested in technology. They’re just not focused on the Silicon Valley ideal of developer/entrepreneurs. That’s fine, because education doesn’t have to be about the flavor of the week. There are many constraints around national standardized tests, college application processes and requirements, etc, that make it almost impossible for you to have a substantially different curriculum. Via culture? This might be a bit harder. Attendance at magnet schools seems to be determined by parents lately (especially the competitive ones that want their kids to get into a good public school). You can have subcultures focused on technology/entrepreneurship in schools though. I think that having a balanced culture and meeting more than a specific group of people is a good thing though. There’s a lot of hubris in the tech entrepreneurship world. (Software is eating the world, etc. Yes, software is eating the world, but not everything just yet!) These things I’d like to change about HS though — * Treat students with respect, like adults.
* Computer Science courses in every school.
* Fewer classes per quarter, but more in-depth (we had 7 classes per day at my high school)!
* Let the higher performing students do more, instead of slowing them down via busy work! (Related: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/09/24/the-scary-smart-have-become-the-scary-rich-examining-techs-richest-on-the-forbes-400/) For the most part, it’s very difficult to be running a high school. I don’t envy the administrators. StudentRND’s strategy is to get a group of passionate, motivated students, and spread the community from there — inspiring and energizing more and more students. Schools have to deal with every single student, no matter how slow / fast they are. Many organizers and sponsors tell me that StudentRND is something they wish they had when they were younger — relating directly to some of the problems I outlined above — and they’re involved because they want to provide this opportunity to others. Several things: * They get to do things that they wouldn’t have in a regular summer internship, or in their own house.
* They have lots of fun! Truly.
* They’re doing something they find meaningful
* They make lots of new friends and love the passionate community!
* They learn We’re currently scaling our CodeDay events across the country — in a similar fashion to Startup Weekend and TEDx — where volunteers across the country organize CodeDay events according to our model. We’re also aiming to double the number of students participating in StudentRND Labs each summer for the next three years — last summer was 30, this summer we plan to have 60. Within 3 years, we’ll be taking more passionate, motivated students through StudentRND Labs than University of Washington (Seattle)’s Computer Science Department (they graduate 160 per year). As we start to reach capacity in the Seattle area, we will start looking at building out StudentRND Labs in other cities across the country. As we do this, we’re developing relationships and funding partnerships to make this happen. Two ways: 1. Help us organize a ! We’re looking for passionate, motivated students in different schools across the US to help us organize CodeDay in their city. If you or a student you know is interested — let us know! 2. Whether that be $25/mo, a larger donation (feel free to contact us), or getting your company/foundation involved, we could really use the financial support to fund our growth! ——— Would you have attended meetups and participated in groups like this when you were younger? You can help make a difference by spreading the good word about StudentRND and its CodeDay initiative. You could even start your own program or help out with something that’s already happening in your area. Technology is a global thing, and its accessible for all ages and skill-sets. Pretty awesome, huh? |
Top Hat Monocle Adds $1.1M Follow-On From Felicis To Reimagine The Lecture Hall Experience In Higher Ed | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 18 | If you attended a university, you likely took at least one class where you sat in a lecture hall with at least 50 other bedraggled, hungover students. In that case, you may be familiar with those handheld clickers distributed by professors to allow students to “click” their responses to questions they ask during class. Well, in the event you’re unfamiliar, Toronto-based startup is taking ye olde clicker model and attempting to reinvent it for the mobile era – with some help from the cloud. Essentially, the startup has built a classroom response solution that, by being both mobile and cloud-based, allows students to respond to questions regardless of the device they’re using, even if it’s a feature phone. In turn, by offering professors a range of tools to visualize student response data and create quizzes and interactive demos, the idea is to create a more engaging classroom experience. Classroom response systems and modern clickers may not sound particularly exciting (and they’re not) but higher education is looking for its teacher and students OS (operating system) and there’s big potential in owning a share of the student/teacher interface. Top Hat has grown quickly since from Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital, SoftTech and a few others. In the last year, it’s gone from 20 to 70 employees, particularly beefing up its sales staff, using a direct sales force to “sell” to educators — that is, spinning the traditional SaaS education sales model, offering the product for free to professors, while charging students per semester. To help them do that, they’ve been successful in stealing a bunch of former Groupon-ers (as ), with the total now at about 15, including two executives. Today, the company announced that it has added an additional $1.1 million to its coffers with a new follow-on investment courtesy of Felicis Ventures. Now in 285 schools, the company, says COO Andrew D’Souza, has been generating solid revenue and doesn’t need the money, but has wanted to work with the Palo Alto-based investment firm, which has made some great investments and has begun to turn to education, having added companies like MindSnacks, Piazza and Inkling to its portfolio. Felicis Founder Aydin Senkut explains: “We discovered Top Hat around the time they closed their Series A. They liked our expertise and passion but didn’t need the money and we didn’t want to wait until the next round, especially when they were growing so quickly so we figured out a way to make it work.” Another way of saying that the terms were favorable for the startup, methinks. The company also recently opened a sales office in Sydney and partnered with cloud-based learning software maker, Desire2Learn, as it looks to accelerate growth through integrations and by following the lead of other edtech startups and elbowing into international markets. But content is king. The real key for the company is interactive content. Control the relationship between the teacher and student and you can have real influence (and can be a billion-dollar company), but to do that, the startup will have to be able to supplement the user experience (on both ends of the funnel) with kick-ass content from textbook publishers and digital media and other content providers. The more meaningful and interactive the presentation of the material becomes, the higher the engagement and the better the outcomes. And that’s money in the bank. |
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