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UPDATED: Facebook Hit By Extended Outage In Several Countries | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Facebook is back online for everyone, according to and the company. A spokesperson said: Earlier today we experienced a DNS issue that briefly prevented people who typed ‘facebook.com’ into their browsers from reaching the site. People who accessed the site using a mobile app, typed ‘www.facebook.com<http://www.facebook.com/>’ into their browsers, or used a bookmark or a search engine to navigate to the site were not affected. We resolved the issue quickly, and the fix should be fully propagated now. We apologize for any inconvenience. If your Facebook seems like it’s a bit quiet just now, don’t worry that you have been subjected to a mass defriending. Real-time updates about baby poop and your friends’ feelings about their favorite TED videos will return just as soon as the social media platform deals with an outage that’s been , including the U.S. (New York City, Florida, Tennessee and Seattle), the U.K. and Argentina. confirms the outage, stating that Facebook is experiencing a “likely service disruption” that started at around 7AM Pacific Standard Time. ( attempting to access Facebook with the “www” prefix resolves the problem, while the “facebook.com” root domain continues to experience issues. In addition, it appears that Chrome users are disproportionately affected by the outage.) Facebook is usually reliable–at least relative to other social media sites like Tumblr or Twitter–but it has been hit by several outages in the last few months. In December, Facebook . An issue in Facebook’s service routing layer , and in October and May, (which Facebook denied). The social media network’s ubiquity means that it’s not just users who are inconvenienced–past outages have in traffic for media and e-commerce Web sites. |
VMware To Cut 900 Jobs As Outlook Disappoints, But Will Still Pursue M&A | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | VMware plans to , as part of a restructuring. The company also issued cautious 2013 forecast, due to a decline in U.S. federal government bookings and continuing concerns about the sluggish economy in Europe. The company reported on-target fourth-quarter earnings and said it expects revenue of $1.17 billion to $1.19 billion for the first quarter, an increase of 11 percent to 13 percent, but still short of the $1.25 billion estimated by analysts on average. For the full year it forecast revenue of $5.23 billion to $5.35 billion, lower than estimates of $5.42 billion. The downturn hit other companies in the sector: smaller rival BMC Software also with its 2013 outlook due to lower license bookings at its enterprise services management and mainframe service management business. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told analysts during the company’s earnings call that it will streamline and eliminate jobs from low-priority areas, like VMware’s SlideRocket presentation software, in order to focus on more popular products, with an emphasis on geographies, product groups and operations. VMware estimates that the job cuts will cost the company between $70 million and $80 million, while consolidation of some business lines will result in a charge of between $20 million and $30 million. COO Carl Eschenbach added that VMware intends to go on a hiring kick as it adds new people to priority divisions, saying that by the end of 2013 VMware’s total employee headcount will actually be up by about 1,000 people. The company will also continue to actively pursue M&A opportunities. Last week, it , a data center automation company, as the two firms formed a strategic partnership for delivering IT management solutions that will allow customers to take advantage of virtualization and cloud in heterogeneous, multi-vendor IT environments. And last year for $1.2 billion. VMware is a publicly traded division of data storage maker EMC Corp, and the two companies say they plan to give more details about their “Pivotal Initiative,” or plan to merge the two company’s data analystics and coule application assets. VMware’s 2013 outlook did not include any guidance about the intitiative, but Chadwick said more details will be revealed on March 13 at the EMC VMware Strategic Forum. |
Sand Hill Road’s True Belieber | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | , a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow, decided to completely overhaul his investment strategy today after returning from a trip to New York. Hartley, who is originally from Palo Alto, spent a few days in New York for meetings and When he unlocked his Sand Hill Road office today, he found that his colleague had cheerfully Bieberized his new desk on the other side of Mohr Davidow’s office. While at first he was shocked, with a little reflection, it sunk in that the mobile-social wave is over, and that while enterprise is cool, the next wave of disruption is Bieber. “I have a belief that ‘ ‘ that disrupts traditional verticals,” he said. “First, we saw this with the Internet in the 90s, then with mobile as a dominant form factor, and social as a proxy toward authenticity. We believe that the next wave will include Bieber, and we are well positioned in this space.” His colleagues and the firm’s LPs, while stunned by this sudden pivot, were understanding and said they felt confident in Hartley’s abilities to identify the very best early-stage teams in this new Bieberification wave. “The question is how will Bieber disrupt traditional verticals,” he said. “We’re investors in RockHealth, pioneers in the digital health category, and we’re actively seeking opportunities in the vertical disruption Bieber is applying on Sand Hill Road.” He’s working on partnering with Y-Bieber-cubator to source deal flow on companies that have evidence of Bieber-gagement, Bieber-tention, boyishly good looks and mesmerizing hair. He added: If I was your VC, I’d never let you go
I can scale you places you ain’t never been before
Baby take a chance or you’ll never ever know
I got money in my hands that I’d really like to blow
Swag swag swag, on you |
Ad Exchange adBrite To Shut Down On Feb. 1 | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Ad exchange told partners today that it will be shutting down on Feb. 1. A couple of TechCrunch readers sent us copies of the emails that went out to adBrite publishers and advertisers. Here’s the advertiser version: Dear adBrite Advertiser, Over the last few weeks, adBrite and its management have been evaluating the go-forward plan for the business. Given market conditions and certain financial liabilities, in working with our lenders, we have decided to cease operations on Feb 1, 2013. This is a difficult decision for all of us at adBrite. However, after much deliberation this seems to be the best course of action despite the impact it will have on all the employees, clients and partners who helped build this business. There will be a team in place as needed to assist with winding down your campaign, and final reporting and invoicing. Thank you for being part of the adBrite community. The adBrite Team In , CEO Hardeep Bindra said he joined last year with the goal of selling the company, and was making progress on talks before they fell through “a couple weeks ago.” AdBrite currently has 26 employees. The company was founded in 2002 as an ad network, and became an ad exchange in 2008. It raised more than $40 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and others. ( ) Co-founder Philip Kaplan has been involved in several startups since then — currently he’s working on . |
Marissa Mayer’s 3 Goals for Yahoo: A Better UI, Bigger International Reach And Broader Demographics | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Considering the long-standing struggles of Yahoo as a business, its board of directors battles, and Scott Thompson’s , Yahoo (and its investors) have been in sore need of some good news. When beloved Google exec Marissa Mayer took the helm as CEO back in July, finally Yahoo had a cause for optimism. Today, , which marked the end of Mayer’s second full quarter at the helm and showed that new CEO’s efforts to implement a turnaround are truly underway. For starters, the company showed the first signs of progress in that regard, with revenues coming in at $1.22 billion with non-GAAP EPS at 32 cents — a 4 percent year-over-year increase. But the real question is, now that the Honeymoon period is coming to a close, whether Mayer will be able to provide the infusion of energy and leadership that Yahoo needs to regain its former position as an innovative, Web giant and not a has-been. At the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Mayer gave us a glimpse into her plans for getting Yahoo back on its feet, which the CEO elaborated on in today’s fourth quarter earnings call. The company’s financial results were better-than-expected today, and Yahoo’s stock saw a 4 percent rise in after-hours trading, with a 26 percent gain overall over the last six months — certainly cause for optimism. During the investor call today, Mayer showed that Yahoo is renewing its focus on its people — on talent acquisition — something that’s largely been missing in recent times. Yahoo has become well-known for its bureaucracy and employees identified around 385 “annoyances or barriers” in the fourth quarter, Mayer said today. To change that, the company is trying to lower its attrition rate by hiring better people and the CEO said that Yahoo is starting to make progress in this regard, seeing a marked “increase in the volume and quality of the people joining Yahoo” in the last six months. Much of this is owed to the appeal of being able to work with Mayer herself, who made note of Max Levchin’s joining the company’s board of directors (Levchin is a co-founder of PayPal and Slide, among others) as well as the hiring of recruiting guru Sandy Gould (formerly of Disney) and the promotion of Adam Cahan to lead mobile. Yahoo has also stepped up M&A of late, through its acquisitions of last week, video chat and . These acquisitions offer a glimpse into the areas of its business where Yahoo sees big opportunity going forward. To help catalyze its turnaround and generate new growth, the team identified a dozen or so products that it will begin focusing on more aggressively, “each a digital daily habit,” the CEO said during the company’s investor call this afternoon. The new releases of Flickr mobile and Yahoo Mail in December acting as the first steps in this regard. Mayer said that the biggest opportunities for Yahoo lie in “search, display, mobile and video,” and, in search, especially, Mayer still sees “a lot of headroom.” On top of that, Yahoo’s focus going forward will be to improve engagement, with the key being personalization. While mobile growth hasn’t begun to show true results as of yet, the company remains focused on growing its mobile footprint, specifically in mobile, where Mayer says that the company has already begun to sell ad space six months in advance, which is “just getting started.” As to the challenges Yahoo will face in the future? The new CEO said that the company has identified three key challenges: “Increasing usage, growing our international presence and appealing to a broader demographic of users — roughly in that order of priority.” As for mobile, Mayer thinks that Yahoo is in a good position, as its strengths correlate directly with behaviors that users are already using mobile for, like checking the weather, getting the news, financial quotes, checking email, sports scores, and so on. Yahoo already has the content that people want on their phones, it has these daily habits, but the challenge is providing more value around those habits. The real question, of course, is how Yahoo will monetize its mobile properties, which, luckily, is something that the CEO spent quite a bit of time at Google thinking about — on a daily basis. Yahoo saw mobile adoption rise to more than 200 million monthly unique users, which “from a monetization perspective is still nascent for Yahoo,” she said. The other troubling statistic for Mayer was that about 75 percent of the company’s revenue was derived from the Americas region, something that needs to change as Yahoo moves forward. But, largely, the conversation with analysts focused on mobile and Yahoo’s push to monetize on that front. Mayer wasn’t eager to share too much in the way of traction, but commenters pushed on that regard, asking if there was any risk to the company focusing too aggressively on mobile — with the possibility of cannibalizing desktop search. “There may come a point where cannibalization happens,” Mayer says, “and we’re positioning ourselves to better understand mobile. But we’re still pushing to getting 50 percent of our engineering staff on mobile — I think this is something that’ll happen. We’ve already started to shift some of our engineering teams to focus more on mobile, and we need to get to critical mass on that.” Mayer also noted that Yahoo hired 120 new employees with computer science degrees in the fourth quarter, most of which are being allocated to new areas, Mayer said, presumably mobile and video. While no one seems to have figured out the panacea for mobile monetization pains, Mayer said that it’s just a matter of getting the right format, pricing and dynamics to encourage quality ads that match with what users are doing on mobile. When users are moving en masse to mobile, it’s not rocket science to figure out that this is an area where companies need to be investing, it’s just a matter of how. For years, the CEO said, search wasn’t a money maker, but that’s ridiculous today. For now, she said, it’s all about experimentation and being on the cutting edge of that experimentation so that when a best-case scenario is identified, Yahoo will be better positioned to capitalize on that solution. Analysts also pointed out that Yahoo will be hard-pressed to compete in terms of investment in R&D compared to its competitors, which could make the road towards innovation a little bumpier. Mayer said that Yahoo has taken to investing in fast, nimble, small teams — and already has small teams in place for iPad, iPhone and Android. “Everything starts with a small team,” she continued, “and we think they’ll end up changing our products and our user base and hopefully even change the world for the better.” Of course, let’s not forget about search. In the future, search will continue to be a “key area of investment for Yahoo,” Mayer said, and its “search alliance” partnership with Microsoft has led to some “nice increases in our key metrics.” That being said, the CEO remains convinced that the company needs to continue to increase its investments in search interface, because “all of the innovations in search from here are going to happen at the user interface level,” both for desktop and mobile. Mayer also pointed out that Siri on the iPhone actually uses Yahoo’s data and includes links to its services and that Yahoo will continue to investigate ways to make investments in this area as it moves forward. The future of search, at least in the Yahoo CEO’s conception of it, will be one that’s far more personalized than what the company offers today. To provide this new era of personalization, the engines will have to know where you are, what context you’re searching for something, who you’re talking to and more — all of which will come to the fore in the next three to five years, Mayer recently said at Davos. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see Yahoo delving more deeply into developing its users’ interest graphs to help it better inform its future personalization technology. In this regard, Yahoo will be able to build on the data collected from its homepage and media properties. But, it’s clear that Mayer and Yahoo have begun thinking about the best ways to capture and leverage the opportunity that is beginning to manifest around interests and the interest graph. Of course, while Yahoo leadership is not a loss for ideas (which may already represent huge progress from Yahoo Past), implementing those ideas, experimenting and monetizing, while trying to stave off competition from its rivals is a tall order. But, be that as it may, there’s a lot more confidence in Yahoo’s chances with Mayer at the helm than there have been in a long, long time. For more, check out Sarah’s recent post on , and you can find more on Yahoo’s fourth quarter earnings, . |
With The Help Of Citizen Cartographers, Google Launches More Detailed Map Of North Korea | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Google Maps is not only a strong product, it’s a strong platform. With its Map Maker tool, people from around the world can participate in making Google’s maps more detailed, accurate and up-to-date. This is exactly what happened for North Korea’s maps, . Google’s Senior Product Manager of Map Maker, Jayanth Mysore, discussed what went into these new detailed views: To build this map, a community of citizen cartographers came together in Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names and points of interest. This effort has been active in Map Maker for a few years and today the new map of North Korea is ready and now available on Google Maps. As a result, the world can access maps of North Korea that offer much more information and detail than before. We know this map is not perfect — one of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place. We encourage people from around the world to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps for everyone with Google Map Maker. From this point forward, any further approved updates to the North Korean maps in Google Map Maker will also appear on Google Maps. Here’s a before and after look at North Korea, with more details popping up thanks to the Map Maker community: We recently reported exactly how , giving them badges for accomplishments and adding more detail to make Google Maps better. While this community isn’t fully relied upon for Google Maps, it is definitely an important part of the entire system. With , companies like Apple who are trying to do the work on their own definitely have some catching up to do. Right now, Google allows people from 200 different regions to participate in the editing of the Maps product. Without sounding like a huge downer, this is also probably way safer than a Google Street View truck driving around in North Korea . |
Rdio Needs More Users, Hopes Going Free On Web & Desktop Will Help | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | The battle for international users continues to heat up for streaming music services. Just this morning, in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Brazil, and now Rdio follows with news of its own – it’s going free. The company says it’s rolling out free web access internationally to all territories where it operates, except for Germany and Brazil. The list of includes the U.S., U.K., Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. (Germany and Brazil are still in copyright and label discussions with Rdio, the company says). It’s a good-sized lineup, but one that’s a bit smaller than the seventeen regions where Spotify works, and quite a bit smaller than the now 182 countries where Deezer is supported. But unlike Deezer, which followed by paid tiers for web, or web plus mobile, access, Rdio will now use free web streaming as a lure to attract new users. The streaming music it offers as a part of this new initiative will also be ad-free, which it hopes will help hook users on the experience. This new deal is essentially . As before, the company isn’t really providing streaming, but instead offers limited free streaming for up to six months, slowly pushing its users into premium tiers based on their activity, and how many songs they stream during the month. In the past, Rdio placed a green bar at the top of its site, showing its free users how much music they had access to for the given month. It will now do the same with this international promotion launching today. Going forward, only paying subscribers ($4.99 USD/month) have unlimited access to streaming music, while others will be guided by the green bar. And as always, those who want to use Rdio on mobile (including offline) will have to . That’s a competitively priced $9.99 USD/month. The free access is available on both Rdio’s web app and its desktop applications for Mac and PC. Currently, the site offers over 18 million songs to choose from – also a bit smaller than the 20 million tracks offered by Spotify and Deezer, for comparison’s sake. The company declined to provide actual user numbers, which should now be seen as a red flag. Users/subscribers is a critical metric for determining growth, and both Spotify and Deezer are more forthcoming here with 20+ million and 26 million, respectively, according to their most recent public disclosures. Based on AppData’s monthly active figures, Rdio still has far to go, with only , compared with Deezer’s + and Spotify’s +, to give you an idea of where these services stand. Unless Rdio has a large number of non-Facebook users/sharers, it’s losing the battle in terms of on-demand music right now. Or, in other words, it’s not just offering a free tier to boost its international audience in a land grab – it actually needs to ramp up its overall user base significantly, and fast, in order to stay competitive. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 16 | null |
Goatse.cx Is Reborn… As An Email Address Provider | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q82RNlCRoFs#!] It was nigh on half a decade ago that I first met the fell demon they call Goatse.cx. It haunted my dreams – the ring, the red, the evident pleasure – and even today I am loath to type in those five consonants and three vowels without a shudder. Brave men and women, we need fear no more. A group of powerful conjurers have banished the Dark Bane of Goatse to the Nether Regions and are changing the domain into an email provider. A safe, calm, and beautiful email provider. for their project and have all already surpassed their funding goal of $10,000. For $50, you can get a 10-year Goatse.cx email account and for $140 you can be part of the Goatse Hall of Fame, a graphical representation of your bravery in facing that foul demon once again. Incidentally, the conjurers note that the email address could exist for life if all goes according to plan. I wanted to offer accounts “$50 For Life” but for legal reasons I am unable to offer services “For Life”. Instead, it is $50 with a 10 year service and I will then attempt to keep the service going without further charges. Moore’s Law will have hopefully reduced the running costs significantly by 2023, and the email forwarding will likely be cheap enough for me to keep the service running in perpetuity. In summary – I have every intention of maintaining this indefinitely but for legal reasons I can only commit to 10 years. You will never have to visit the website (which is now SFW). You’re essentially getting the right to use your Goatse.cx email address with almost any email provider using “send as” functionality. Why anyone in their right mind would want to associate their name with the Gaping Goat Man Of Hades is beyond me, but it’s available and I’m sure there are a lot of good names still available. N.B.: If you don’t know why this domain is unique or unusual, for heaven’s sake please do not look up goatse.cx on Google. I’m absolutely serious. To those not so lucky perhaps this piece of Goatse will help assuage that first, deep grief felt when you realized just what was going on in that picture. |
MediaCorp Taps Tvinci To Launch Toggle, Its Virtual Cable Service In Singapore | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | It used to be that building a new TV service was incredibly expensive, as operators had to build out all sorts of new infrastructure to do so. But now with the Internet, operators can launch streaming video services that can reach millions without major new investments in equipment. One example of an operator doing this is Singapore-based , which is launching a new streaming video service called Toggle that will provide live and on-demand access to streaming video content. To make Toggle work, MediaCorp has hired Israeli video startup to get the service on multiple devices. As a platform for video distribution, Tvinci helps companies to release streaming video services online and on other devices. Through a single content management system, operators can quickly and easily build and deploy apps for mobile phones, tablets, connected TVs, and streaming set-top boxes. It’s providing those services to MediaCorp, which is building Toggle as a sort of “Netflix for Singapore.” That said, Toggle goes beyond the kind of on-demand streaming video provided by companies like Netflix or Hulu. At launch, Toggle will have VOD content, but will also have about a dozen channels of live TV available for streaming. In that way, it’s more like a virtual cable service being streamed to users’ connected devices instead of their TVs. Toggle will be available as a subscription service, as well as on a pay-per-view basis, allowing users to choose whether they want to pay for monthly access to live and on-demand videos, or whether they just want to pay for individual movie or TV titles. At launch, it will have more than 1,000 hours of programming available on demand. It will give the ability for users to rate and share the shows and movies that they watch, and will be integrated with Twitter and Facebook to do so. While the service launches on PCs, iPads, and iPhones in the coming weeks, MediaCorp and Tvinci hope to make Toggle available on more devices as time goes on. That includes Android phones and tablets, as well as a wide range of connected TVs and streaming set-top boxes, according to Ido Wiesenberg, co-founder and VP of business development. After a launch in Singapore, MediaCorp also hopes to potentially make the service available in other markets. For Tvinci, the launch of Toggle represents its first deployment in the Asia-Pacific market, and could pave the way for more projects with operators in that area. The company currently has offices in London and Tel Aviv, but could soon open a regional sales office to support Asian operators who wish to deploy new streaming video services, or augment their existing pay TV operations with a streaming component. Last fall, in funding from existing investors Kaedan Capital and Zohar Gilon, as well as new investor Trellas Enterprises. The company has about 60 employees split between London and Tel Aviv, but will be adding more to support its new Asian win and enter new markets. |
Get Ready For Even More Google Glasshole Sightings | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | In major metropolitan areas and in Silicon Valley, there have been a rash of sightings of people wearing . They look like inhabitants of the future, come back to and and report back to their leaders about what the world used to be like, well before everyone had the Internet on his or her face. Maybe you’ve seen these people around San Francisco or Mountain View, inevitably staring off into space while swiping the sides of their glasses during conversation, ignoring those around them while surfing the web or scrolling through images they’ve captured with the device. I like to call them “ .” Glasshole – That know-it-all guy you've always hated, only now he's got 4G and Google+ connected to his face. Thanks Google. — Startup L. Jackson (@StartupLJackson) Glassholes aren’t just annoying because they’re wearing portable electronics that no one else can get their hands on. They’re annoying because they represent a coming time where our worst insecurities will finally come true. Today, you can usually tell when someone is being rude and looking at a cell phone. But with Google Glass it’s going to be a lot harder to tell if they’re paying attention to your conversation or just, like, watching cat videos on YouTube.* So far, we’ve been relatively lucky in this regard. Yes, Google Glass has been out in the wild, even in places as far off as New Zealand. (I was there for that one.) But so far the hardware has been restricted for use only by Google employees. And those Google employees, at least all those I’ve seen or heard about, have been quite protective of their eyewear, refusing to let anyone touch it. That could soon change, as a whole new group of Google Glass developers are expected to be getting their hands on the devices this week, coinciding with two meetups that Google is throwing for developers in San Francisco and New York City. Some developers we’ve talked to expect to be able to take some hardware home after the Glass Foundry events, taking place January 28 and 29 in SF and February 1 and 2 in NYC. That will mean more Glassholes, and probably more Glasshole sightings. What’s not clear is how protective these new Google Glass owners will be about letting other people play with the hardware. After all, it’s one thing if you’re a Google employee and you’re toting around a device that costs dozens of thousands of dollars and you don’t want it to get into the wrong hands or be broken or whatever. It’s a whole other thing if you’re a third-party developer who’s paid $1,500 to play with Google’s newest toy. Then again, Glass Foundry participants have agreed to a , so who knows? Maybe we won’t see as many of these things as one might expect. Anyway, if you are one of the lucky devs who gets a pair and you want to bring it by one of the TechCrunch offices for us to test out, we promise not to call you a Glasshole to your face. ==
* There’s also that whole thing about Google knowing everywhere you’ve been and everything you’ve looked at, but that’s a whole other discussion. [Photo taken by A.R. blogger who spotted Google co-founder .] |
Pinterest, One Of The Web’s Most Iconic Designs, Tries A New Look | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | Don’t worry, isn’t ditching the grid-style “Masonry” design it’s known and cloned for. But today Pinterest of a new navigation system, bigger images, and more related content on pins to keep you clicking. The redesign is being tried with a small group of users that can sign up to join, but everyone could get the new way to nest online if it’s popular. Here’s a quick look at what could change about Pinterest. Right now, the top of the site has a few navigation options but still requires users to click a drop-down arrow to see a full list of feed categories. Pinterest’s new design condenses the navigation into a button in the top right. Click it to pull up options like “Following Feed,” “Popular Pins” and “Every Pin,” as well as dozens of categories like “Outdoors” and “Men’s Fashion” (yes there is men’s stuff on Pinterest). The new style gives Pinterest a cleaner look, and forcing users to view the categories whenever they move around the site could encourage more exploration. When you click to open a pin in the standard version of Pinterest, you see an image stuffed between big white sidebars. Pinterest figured there’s a lot more that could be done with that space. In the redesign, the pinned image is larger and surrounded with helpful content. You’ll see bigger thumbnails of other things pinned to the same board, and now they’re on the right instead of at the bottom. This is especially helpful for tall images that would bury additional content several folds down. What I’m most excited about, though, is that the pin view will now show “a whole slew of related Pins.” This is where Pinterest will be able to flex its data chops to help you discover more things you’ll probably like. Rather than trapping you on one board, Pinterest could now lead you on Wikipedia-style click quests where you surf the related links all across the site. Or, your Pinterest could provide Amazon-esque recommendations of what fellow users viewed later. For example, a sweet photo of a speed boat racing down the Hawaiian coast could show related pins of more outdoor photographs from Hawaii, instead of just more boats. If YouTube is any indication, providing people with related links to what they should view next is critical to keeping them from getting bored and bouncing. As if Pinterest didn’t have people addicted enough already, related pins could make sure you never leave. Overall, Pinterest writes that “we’ve tried to take your feedback into account.” Beyond the look, it notes “we also made some improvements behind the scenes that we hope will make things faster.” If you want to get early access to the design, you can . Expect a flurry of meta-pins of the new Pinterest design as more people gain access. Then I’ll probably pin those people pinning Pinterest until we get Pinception or a rift in the time-space continuum — whichever comes first. |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Foundation Capital’s Anamitra Banerji And Kleiner Perkins’ Chi-Hua Chien | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 28 | We have two guests joining us in the TechCrunch TV studio this week for our Ask A VC series, where you put VCs in the hot seat. First up we have Foundation Capital’s newest partner and former Twitter product lead . Later in the week, we’ll be joined by Kleiner Perkins’ partner As, you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Banerji was a manager at search marketing firm Overture in 2004, which was acquired by Yahoo. Then, as the first product manager and thirtieth employee at Twitter, he hired many of its engineering and product employees, and developed its ad platform from scratch. He left Twitter in early 2012, and joined VC firm Foundation Capital as an EIR. He was recently named a partner at the firm, where he will focus on identifying and investing in startups in the communications, commerce, mobile and marketing technology sectors. It should be interesting to hear Banerji’s thoughts on Twitter’s and the life of a VC vs. a product leader. Later in the week, Chien will be stopping by to discuss his thoughts on mobile, commerce and more. At Kleiner, Chien works with the teams at Klout, Path, Spotify, Twitter and Chegg, among others. Prior to KPCB, Chi-Hua worked with Accel Partners as a Venture Advisor and Associate and helped lead Accel’s investments in AdECN (acquired by Microsoft) and Facebook, while also working on the firm’s investments in BitTorrent, fbFund, Glam, Trulia, and YuMe Networks. He also held positions at Google and Coremetrics. We’ll be asking Chien’s view on what’s next to disrupt commerce and more. Please send us your or put them in comments below! |
Sony Corp Sells Its U.S. Headquarters Building for $1.1B | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Sony’s U.S. unit is selling its NYC headquarters to a group of investors led by Chetrit Group for $1.1 billion, the cash-strapped company today. Sony said it will use the proceeds to “undertake a range of initiatives to strengthen its financial foundation and business competitiveness and for future growth.” The electronics manufacturer has endured four straight years of losses, due in large part to falling demand for its television sets and a weak Japanese economy. After repaying debt related to the building and other transaction costs, Sony expects to retain net cash proceeds of about $770 million, and is currently reevaluating its financial forecast, which it announced last November, for the current year ending March 31, 2013 to take the sale into account. As Businessweek notes, Sony’s takes advantage of rising real estate values in New York. The transaction is expected to close in March. Sony agreed to a lease that will allow its businesses (including Sony Music Entertainment, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Sony Pictures Entertainment) to remain in the building at 550 Madison Avenue for three years. |
VCs Invested $26.5B In 3,698 Companies In 2012, Total Dollars And Deal Volume Both Down | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | A new Moneytree report is being released this evening, showing that annual VC investment dollars have declined for the first time in three years. The study, which was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), and based on data from Thomson Reuters, reports that there were $26.5 billion put into 3,698 VC deals in 2012, a decrease of 10 percent in dollars and a 6 percent decline in deals over the prior year. For the fourth quarter, venture investment of $6.4 billion into 968 companies fell 3 percent in dollars, but rose 5 percent in deal volume over Q3 2012. While the numbers differ slightly, this data is in line with a similar from CB Insights. Most industries saw double-digit decreases in investment dollars, especially the Clean Technology and Life Sciences sectors. However, the software sector actually saw an increase this year in dollars invested. Additionally, stage of investment shifted from Seed to Early Stage in 2012 as venture capitalists overall began engaging with companies later in their life cycle than in previous years. “General economic uncertainty continues to hinder capital investments, and venture capitalists are no different,” noted Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PwC U.S., in the report. “As some expected, 2012 investment levels are less than what we saw in 2011. And, we’ve seen nearly a third fewer dollars going into even less Seed Stage companies during that same time. As the number of new funds being raised continues to shrink, venture capitalists are being more discriminating with where they’re willing to place new bets. At the same time, they’re holding on to reserves to continue to support the companies already in their portfolio. Both of these factors are taking a toll on the amount of capital available for young start-ups, which is reflected in the 38 percent drop in the number of Seed Stage companies receiving VC dollars in 2012.” As we mentioned, the Software industry maintained its status as the largest investment sector for the year, with dollars rising 10 percent over 2011 to $8.3 billion, which was invested into 1,266 deals, an 8 percent rise in volume over the prior year. This represented the highest level of investment in the Software sector since 2001. Investment in the fourth quarter of 2012 remained flat in dollars but increased 17 percent in deals from Q3 with $2.1 billion going into 368 companies. Software was also the No. 1 sector in Q4 for dollars invested and number of deals. Internet-specific companies experienced a 5 percent decline in both dollars and deals for the full year 2012, with $6.7 billion going into 976 rounds compared to 2011 when $7.1 billion went into 1,033 deals. Interestingly, this year marked the second highest level of Internet investment since 2001. For the fourth quarter, Internet-specific investment declined 13 percent in dollars and 5 percent in deals, with $1.5 billion going into 242 deals, compared to $1.7 billion going into 255 deals in the third quarter of 2012. Internet companies accounted for 25 percent of all venture capital dollars in 2012, up from 24 percent in 2011. Biotechnology investment dollars declined 15 percent with volume flat in 2012 to $4.1 billion going into 466 deals, placing it as the second largest investment sector for the year in terms of dollars and deals. The Medical Device industry fell 13 percent in dollars and 15 percent in deals in 2012, finishing the year with $2.4 billion going into 313 deals. The Clean Technology sector experienced a 28 percent decrease in dollars and a 23 percent decline in deal volume in 2012, bringing the year’s total to $3.3 billion going into 267 deals, compared to $4.6 billion going into 348 deals in 2011. In terms of stage, investments into Seed Stage companies decreased 31 percent in terms of dollars and 38 percent in deals with $725 million going into 274 companies in 2012, the lowest annual seed dollars since 2003. This is interesting considering the CB insights report said that Seed deals experienced a high in terms of deals and dollars. The difference in data may be attributed to the Moneytree report only calculating VC firms, and not integrating seed deals from individual investors. For the fourth quarter, VCs invested $156 million into 67 seed stage companies, the lowest quarterly dollar investment since 2005. Seed Stage companies attracted 3 percent of dollars and 7 percent of deals in 2012, compared to 4 percent of dollars and 11 percent of deals in 2011. The average seed-stage round in 2012 was $2.6 million up from $2.4 million in 2011. Early Stage investments experienced an 11 percent decline in dollars but a 5 percent increase in deal volume in 2012 with $7.8 billion going into 1,638 deals. For the fourth quarter, Early Stage investments increased 5 percent in dollars and 9 percent in deals over Q3 2012 with $1.9 billion going into 448 companies. Early Stage companies attracted 30 percent of dollars and 44 percent of deals in 2012 compared to 30 percent of dollars and 39 percent of deals in 2011. The average Early Stage deal in 2012 was $4.8 billion down from $5.6 billion in 2011. Expansion Stage investments decreased in 2012 by 5 percent in dollars and dropped 6 percent in deals, with $9.4 billion going into 956 deals. Expansion funding also dropped in the fourth quarter, dipping 14 percent from the prior quarter to $2.2 billion. The number of deals also decreased during the quarter, falling 2 percent to 240. Expansion Stage companies attracted 35 percent of dollars and 26 percent of deals in 2012 compared to 33 percent of dollars and 26 percent of deals in 2011. The average Expansion Stage deal size in 2012 was $9.8 billion compared to $9.6 billion in 2011. In 2012, $8.6 billion was invested into 830 Later Stage deals, a 12 percent decrease in dollars and a 9-percent decrease in deals for the year. For the fourth quarter, $2.1 billion went into 213 deals, which represents a 5 percent increase in dollars and a 10 percent rise in deals from the third quarter of 2012. Later Stage companies attracted 32 percent of dollars and 22 percent of deals in 2012 compared to 33 percent of dollars and 23 percent of deals in 2011. The average size of a Later Stage deal fell slightly from $10.7 billion in 2011 to $10.4 billion in 2012. First-time financings fell both in terms of dollars and deals from the prior year, declining to $4.1 billion going into 1,163 companies, a 24 percent decrease in dollars and an 11 percent decrease in deals. However, the dollar level and number of companies receiving venture capital for the first time remained relatively flat in Q4 compared to the third quarter, with $1.1 billion going into 306 companies. First-time financings accounted for 16 percent of dollars and 31 percent of deals in 2012 compared to 18 percent of dollars and 33 percent of deals in 2011. Industries receiving the most dollars in first-time financings in 2012 were Software, Media/Entertainment and Biotechnology. Industries with the most first-time deals in 2012 were Software, Media/Entertainment, and IT Services. Sixty-five percent of first-time deals in 2012 were in the Early Stage of development followed by the Seed Stage of development at 17 percent, Expansion Stage companies at 12 percent and Later Stage companies at 7 percent. |
‘Search, Plus Your World’ Just Got Bigger As Google+ iOS Apps Launch In 48 New Countries And Territories | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | The Google+ iPhone and iPad apps are now available in 48 countries and territories, announced Google engineer (h/t ). Users with iOS devices can now download Google+ in: Albania, Anguilla, Barbados, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Chad, Republic of Congo, Dominica, Fiji, Gambia, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Liberia, Macau, Malawi, Mauritania, Federated States of Micronesia, Mongolia, Montserrat, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Suriname, Swaziland, São Tomé and Príncipe, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos, Ukraine, British Virgin Islands, Zimbabwe.
Both the iPhone and iPad Google+ iOS apps were released in the middle of 2012, making their debuts after that Apple had intentionally delayed approval. This international rollout comes just days after Facebook announced Graph Search. At the launch event, Mark Zuckerberg said he instead of Google because Bing is more flexible on privacy. Facebook Graph Search may potentially by grabbing away users’ attention and cutting into the search behemoth’s ads business. Though it has , Google has continually worked on improving its social network, which received a and with new features in December. |
With Customers Like LinkedIn On Board, Bugsnag Launches To Bring Realtime Bug Tracking To Your Web & Mobile Apps | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Last year, James Smith and Simon Maynard left mobile gaming startup Heyzap, where Smith was the CTO, to build and launch a new venture that aimed to tackle one of the biggest problems they encountered in working with mobile developers: The need for better crash detection. In an attempt to bring some continuity to the fragmented set of point solutions developers use to monitor and capture errors in their applications, Smith and Maynard set out to create an affordable, full-stack monitoring service to allow businesses to easily track errors in both mobile and web apps, via a single dashboard. The result is , which, after three months in closed beta, has already begun to find traction. Now tracking an average of 800K crashes per day thanks to adoption from the likes of LinkedIn, Storenvy, Codecademy, Treehouse, Svtle, Customer.io and DNS Simple, the co-founders are ready to open the doors to the masses. Launching officially today, Bugsnag’s crash detection platform allows businesses to collect diagnostic information on their web and mobile applications and quickly notify development teams over email, SMS or chat when there’s a problem. Through its intelligent dashboard, Bugsnag aims to give developers increased visibility into app errors in realtime, allowing developers to find the precise location of errors, see what was happening at the time it occurred, how many users were affected and which versions of their apps experienced the problem. To differentiate from the competition, Bugsnag has designed its platform to monitor the entire stack, allowing developers to see crashes on both their web and mobile apps. There are plenty of options already out there for this kind of service, but they tend to cater to one or the other. helping developers pinpoint and solve performance issues in iOS, Android and HTML5 apps, while companies like and cater to the Web side. But, as Smith points out, “when the shit hits the fan, businesses want to see errors on all of their platforms,” he says. Being able to understand how backend errors are affecting mobile apps, for example, is critical to solving performance issues and maintaining a seamless user experience. Bugsnag also attempts to help developers answer the “how bad is this?” question, allowing them to see how many users are affected by each crash, which platform or version is experiencing errors, and automatically notify the right people via chat or by creating a ticket in your existing issue-tracking system. To that point, the co-founder says that early adopters have cited Bugsnag’s integrations with major issue tracking services like Pivotal Tracker and JIRA as one of the big reasons they decided to switch over, enabling them to prioritize engineering resources and complement existing workflows by automatically creating tickets in their tracking service. Combined with the ability to drill down to the exact line of code that led to a bug and see details on affected users, Smith says that Bugsnag is already working with a “couple thousand” customers, “a good chunk of which” are paying customers. The platform’s base plan starts at $29/month, which includes unlimited users and projects, error notification, ticket creation, encryption, 6 months of storage and code deployment tracking to name a few, and offers EC2-style, pay-as-you-go pricing for high volume customers. With the ability to give developers multiple views on incoming exceptions — in realtime or in groups based on type — along with context-aware plugins that help eliminate noise and notification plug-ins for email, SMS (Twilio), Campfire and Hipchat (plus the create your own using the platform’s ), Bugsnag appears to be off to a pretty good start. The co-founders tell us that they’re already generating revenue and will continue to bootstrap, though they may look to raise later this year. Bugsnag is currently offering a free 14-day trial for all, but has also made its “Full Plan” available (for free) to those looking to give it a test drive. The first 25 . |
Facebookers Feed Graph Search And Set A Record By Uploading 1.1B Photos On New Year’s Day/Eve | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | No one knew it yet, but people all over the world gave a hearty meal when they uploaded a record 1.1 billion photos during the 48 hours over News Year’s Day and Eve. That’s nearly double the 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook on an average day. Content upload stats from Facebook take on new meaning now that Graph Search makes everything shared more discoverable. The 1.1 billion photos stat was confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson. The number tops the record-setting 844 million photos shared over last year’s New Year’s. The billion extra photos adds to Facebook’s collection of 240 billion photos that Mark Zuckerberg announced at the on Tuesday. All of those photos are now indexed in Facebook’s new internal search engine. The New Year’s photos could help friends or strangers, depending on each of their privacy settings, , or just give them something pretty to browse. Unfortunately, as Graph Search is still in beta, you can’t search by keyword or exact date. The best you could do to surface New Year’s photos right now would be to search “Photos taken in Times Square NYC in December” or “…in January.” While Instagram is growing fast, its parent company, Facebook, still sees way more photo uploads thanks to its higher user count and bulk upload options. According to today and first spotted by , Instagram averages 40 million photo uploads per day, about one-seventh as many as a normal day on Facebook and one-thirteenth as many as Facebook on New Year’s Eve or Day. Instagram did see on Turkey Day 2012, though. Pulling in tons of photos doesn’t just give Facebook something to show its users. There’s valuable meta-data to be mined. Photo tags tell Facebook who people spend their offline time with, while Likes and comments teach the news feed whose content to show to whom. Graph Search also makes location tags of photos even more important to the social network. It can use your photo taken at a local business to . While your Likes of businesses might have , geo-tagged photos are a cleaner data set. You probably don’t take a lot of photos at places you hate. After all, I don’t see many people posting pics from the DMV. |
Telcentris Raises $5.3M For Calling, Chatting, Faxing (And More) App VoxOx | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | , the maker of “unified communications” app , says it has raised $5.3 million in its first institutional funding. The VoxOx desktop and iPhone apps combine features like VoIP calling, texting, chatting, and faxing; aggregate contact info from Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere; and offer Google Voice-style support for calling multiple phones with one number. Back in 2008, as “not a Skype killer, but close.” We haven’t heard much from VoxOx recently, but a spokesperson said that’s because 2012 was a “stealth” year on the consumer side, while the company focused on . (Telcentris declined to reveal customer or user numbers for either the consumer or enterprise side of its business.) The new funding comes from and will be used to support international growth among other initiatives. It’s part of an open round of up to $40 million that’s being facilitated by investment banking advisory firm . Until now, Telcentris has been funded entirely by angel investors, plus friends and family funding. Nonetheless, it’s actually raised a total of $33 million (including the new round). “In the few years that VoxOx has been on the market, we’ve gained notable traction around the world, and now it’s time for us to address our global audience in a much bigger way,” said CEO Bryan Hertz in a press release. |
Mobile Video App Montaj Makes Editing As Easy As Shaking Your Phone | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | The latest entrant into the mobile video segment is , a new app launching next week that seeks to be a kind of “Instagram for Video.” Montaj was founded by Demir Gjokaj and Dan Long, a couple of New York-based entrepreneurs who had originally been focused on making a more engaging travel site. Key to that experience would be video, but they had to tackle the video problem first. The idea behind Montaj is to make videos actually watchable and shareable. Not a new idea, and one that’s seen startups like Socialcam and Viddy already try to tackle. The problem is that video can’t be made good just by throwing a filter on it, like Instagram. Instead, there’s gotta be a bit of editing involved. More importantly, shots have to be bite-sized. “What would it look like if we made movies like Hollywood?” Gjokaj told an audience in San Francisco this afternoon. He explained that over the past several decades, the shot duration for Hollywood movies has fallen from 11 seconds down to below five seconds over the last several years. Montaj seeks to emulate that. “Your audience wants you to shoot less and pick up the pace.” Unlike startups that have come before it, Montaj forces you to break videos down into five-second clips, which can then be stitched together. Once you’ve either shot a bunch of short clips, or you’ve assembled short clips from videos already in your camera roll, the app lets you storyboard, select a song, and add a new filter. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can just say, “Screw it,” and shake your phone. With each shake of a phone, Montaj brings up a new song, a new edit, and a new filter, according to Gjokaj. But what happens if you don’t like a clip order or a song or the clips the app has chosen for you? The app lets you change all that on the fly. You can trim clips, rearrange them, import new clips, change the song, or change the filter. Ta-da! The app does the work you don’t want to, and then you can refine videos as much as you want to. Once a video is created, users can share it out on YouTube, and those videos are by default created as an unlisted video. Those videos can then be made public in the future. Those video links can then be shared through Facebook or Twitter, and they can also be downloaded to the user’s camera roll. There is a little bit of a community aspect, with users able to view videos that their friends or other users create. But you’re not trapped in the Montaj community, as you can be in Socialcam or some of the other so-called video sharing apps. That’s because Montaj doesn’t host its own videos, but relies on YouTube for hosting. What about monetization? Montaj isn’t monetizing any of the videos that users create now, but it plans to work with brands in the future. By licensing its technology, Montaj hopes to enable brands to work with customers who would presumably make awesome videos on the brand’s behalf. Montaj will be launching on January 22 for devices that run iOS 6 — that includes the iPhone 3GS and above, as well as the iPad. The startup is working on an Android version, which it expects to launch in the second quarter. For an example of what can be done with Montaj, check out the video below: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaDv8F7-PgU&w=560&h=315] |
NewHive Lets You Hack Together Any Media Into A Website Collage. 10M Views Let It Raise Funding | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Instagram for websites? Not exactly. is more like a cross between MS Paint, Photoshop, and Tumblr. But NewHive’s not just a collage site-making tool. It has a community that’s logged 10 million views of NewHive creations, and that attracted investors. SV Angel, CrunchFund, and some angels just backed its seed so NewHive can build a social media consumption network around self-expression. Over the last few years, Facebook, Twitter, and other places to share things have rapidly proliferated. Unfortunately, they’ve outpaced the tools for creating things to share. That means we see too many hastily taken photos, shaky videos, and shallow memes that can be made and posted in a few seconds. NewHive wants to pioneer what co-founder Zach Verdin calls “slow social media”. He describes it as “Creating something meaningful that takes more time and thought than just sharing an image. It has more emotional impact on the people creating it and the people consuming it.” , though its simple but powerful self-expressions tools can be used quickly. NewHive lets you pull in text, links, photos, videos, drawings, music, GIFs, and more to compose one-off website collages. You can also embed things from YouTube, Spotify, Google Maps, and PayPal. When you’re done you get a unique URL to share your masterpieces around the web. What people create on NewHive ranges from to serious, amateur doodles to serious art. Verdin says NewHive wants to make tools accessible to the average Joe, but that professional designers can rely on. For an example, , a GIF, text, and Spotify ode to Willy Wonka. It’s not enough to be the tool, though. Instagram proved there’s enduring value that’s tough to disrupt in fostering a community around the output of your tool. That’s why the homepage of NewHive isn’t an expression builder, it’s a grid feed of recent expressions from people you follow. Don’t follow anyone? No problem. The official NewHive account will show you the best creations from the community. Or you can browse tabs for humor, art, music, technology, poetry, and more. The community is still small, as NewHive remains in invite-only beta (we’ve got invites below), but it’s bustling. Together its users have racked up 10 million views of expressions. If you create something of quality NewHive can find you an audience. 13% of NewHive expressions have over 1000 views. Verdin tells me “We all express ourselves because we want to know that were not alone. To have a powerful tool for content creation, you have to have a vibrant community of people who support self-expression.” The site’s potential to become the home for people who want to consume has captured the attention of some big names in Silicon Valley. joined its new seed round first, and NewHive brought it on to gain access to Ron Conway’s extensive network. Verdin tells me won a spot thanks to “MG Siegler’s deep product expertise and insight” (disclosure: MG and fellow CrunchFund partner Michael Arrington write for TechCrunch). Howard Lindzon (along with his partner Tom Peterson) was added to the round because Verdin calls him “a hustler, and an amazing CEO I turn to for insights into building the company.” The round is joined by David King, Jonathan Teo, Todd Perry, GenY capital partners, Seth Berman, Steve Katz, Michael Kinsbergen, plus Rothenberg Ventures — the new $5 million fund led by . NewHive will be taking on others that help you build art and websites like and Though the sum was undisclosed, NewHive will be spending it on expanding its three-person team and product development. Specifically its looking to launch a mobile app with an “auto-upload” feature that pulls photos taken on your device into your NewHive profile for instant use in your collages. While raising, some investors referred to NewHive as “Instagram for websites”. But Verdin stresses that his service is much more flexible, “NewHive is not a templated tool for creation. It’s not a series of boxes and rigid structures.” Maybe one of its users put it best when she wrote ” it’s so much more than just a blog or social network…it can be ANYTHING you imagine.” |
Apple’s iOS Newsstand Now Offers Hearst Magazines Days Before Print And Other Digital Stores | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Apple today quietly launched a , whereby publications by partner Hearst (covering their entire catalog) will now be available to subscribers days before they come to print, or other digital editions. Hearst’s library includes a number of top titles, including Car and Driver, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Seventeen and Harper’s Bazaar among many others. The exclusive arrangement varies by individual publication in terms of how far in advance you’ll be able to get the various Hearst titles compared to in print and from other online storefronts like Amazon’s Kindle marketplace, but each will be available at least a few days in advance, I’m told. Existing subscribers will get early access, as well as those signing up for the first time. Hearst has previously indicated that its titles were seeing signs of significant success on Apple’s Newsstand store for digital periodicals. It said earlier this year that it has , and while it’s unclear exactly how many of those came on board via its iOS-based publications, the company did share in December, 2011 that despite early fears they might lose out on a direct subscriber relationship through Apple’s store, actually opt in to info sharing through Newsstand, and “efficient” delivery method Newsstand provides led to a in digital subscriptions. Late last year, analytics firm App Annie found that . For Apple, the arrangement with Hearst means that it can provide a considerable competitive advantage to users via its platform. Now that Amazon has followed its lead and expanded , early access for subscribers is a good way to help it maintain the early edge Newsstand’s initial launch provided in this arena. Apple and company are remaining mum on the details of the deal here, but you have to wonder if it isn’t something they’ll try to pursue with some of the other publishers out there, and whether those other publishers will bite. |
Foursquare’s New Interactive Map Plots Its Evolution From Local Check-In Site To Global Utility | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Any mature Internet product always has difficulty proving its success or illustrating its evolution. Foursquare is definitely one of the companies with a product that fit into many buckets, depending on who you talk to. Today, the company has , plotting out 500 million check-ins from the past three months. There are quite a few things you can , perhaps the most interesting being that Foursquare isn’t a product that’s simply popular in San Francisco or New York City. Since launching at SXSW in 2009 in 10 major cities, the app has grown to 35 million registered members who are visiting places all over the globe. The company has raised $71.4 million to date, from every big player in venture capital, but some pundits and users aren’t sure where Foursquare is headed in the near or long-term. Foursquare’s strength, as most big platforms can attest to, is the data that it collects from its engaged users. As we noted last October, the company is . And from your mobile device primarily, to boot. This is not an easy problem. allows you to zoom in on different areas of interest, going down to a street level: I spoke with Foursquare’s data scientist, Blake Shaw, about what all of this data means and what Foursquare’s goals are for 2013: We’re starting to realize that people want tools to find the best places, no matter where they are, a familiar city or not. We’re building more tools to achieve just that. We’re also starting to fully leverage our data and aggregate signals to make a more quality signal and experience for users. We’re looking at things like: How often do people come back to a place? What type of people like to come to a place? It all comes back to data, and Foursquare has quite a bit of it. I asked Shaw how Foursquare users have evolved, as far as what types of features they’re asking for and expect: As we’ve grown, users expect a lot more, people really want mobile tools that really fit into their lives. People aren’t sitting at their desk trying to access information, they’re on their mobile device in the real world. In the situation that Shaw explains, Foursquare is trying to become a utility for mobile users. This is a pretty big goal, but it makes sense now that Foursquare has a mature set of data to pull from. Think about it: When you’re on the move, do you want to tap a bunch of buttons, choose filters and get asked a series of questions? No, you just want suggestions for places you can try out, based on where you’ve been before. That’s what Foursquare has become. The tool that Foursquare launched today could turn into an actual product, Shaw told me. Based on trends, you could see on a map which spots are hot on, say, Sunday. If you’re looking for a bar that has a lot of people, you’d want to gravitate to an area that’s “lit up.” If you’re someone who likes things to be low-key, you can do the opposite. If you take a look at this map of Philadelphia, you can see that all of the historic landmarks get checked into quite a bit: It gets pretty busy in those areas, especially on the weekends and holidays. I only know that because I used to live there. But with where Foursquare is going, everyone can have that intelligence, even if they’ve only been there for a few minutes. Shaw went into more detail when it came to the future of Foursquare, and how far it’s come since 2009: ———–
Foursquare started out as a way for people to share the bar they were at with nearby friends, and it’s turned into something much bigger. People are now using their phones out in the real world to connect to immense amounts of local knowledge, to discover new places, or to get recommendations from their friends. While these maps are a beautiful visualization of check-ins from cities around the world, they also represent a huge dataset we can use to better understand places and build new tools for navigating the real world. The high level of detail in these maps is very interesting. This is a new perspective on what cities look like in terms of the underlying social behavior of their citizens. Plotting check-ins allows us to perfectly see roads, runways, and ferry lines, while also quickly pointing out the most popular areas of a city. Atlanta Airport We are measuring this incredible signal — what people are doing in the real world at every moment. With each check-in Foursquare gets a little bit smarter, we learn a little bit more about where places are, when they are busy, and who likes to go there. We are providing contextual relevance around the data we collect – something no one else can do. And that data goes into building a personalized recommendation engine for people looking to discover new places. It’s like when the web went from directories to search – relevance was added to make recommendations matter more. We started Foursquare with this somewhat quirky tagline – make the world easier to use. But the underlying message there is technology can make your real-world experience – when you’re not in front of your computer – so much better. More than 30 million people have checked in more than 3 billion times and left tens of millions of tips at nearly 50 million points of interest across the globe. They turn to us every day for ideas on what to do and how to best spend their time. This massive amount of data enables Foursquare to do things others can’t, like provide contextually relevant answers for people looking to discover new things to do around them. On the business front, we launched a pilot program over the summer aimed at helping business owners more actively engage the Foursquare users who are also their customers. More than 1 million businesses have claimed their venue, allowing them to get a better sense of who is coming in their doors, and how they can better engage their customers. We are also working with six of the 10 biggest merchants in the country, including Best Buy, Gap, Walgreens, and Starbucks to provide special offers or promoted placements in our app. Foursquare has roughly 150 employees across offices in New York, San Francisco and London. We are continuing to build out the engineering team that is helping to create our new features and products, as well as staffing up our new sales team led by our chief revenue officer. Foursquare is going through a natural evolution. Check-ins were the first way most people interacted with us. It took billions of those check-ins before we could build and launch Foursquare Explore – and people are now using it to meet up with friends and discover new places. What we’re seeing is similar to what Twitter experienced around 2008. Initially, they were a place people went to share something. Over time, they evolved into a venue for people to consume information. We’re going through something similar. A few years ago, we were the place for you to share where you were. But now, we’re the place millions of people go to for ideas on what to do next – be it a particular item to order off a restaurant menu, or a fun place to go, or a new bar to try in your neighborhood. We see that evolution – towards being an app that people use to discover new places – continuing in 2013. We’re building something that makes people’s experiences better in the real world. People carry these amazing devices in their pockets, connecting them with others and the world around them. What excites us the most is using all of this data being generated by these devices in new ways. For example, Explore is now more aware of a person’s context when they are using the app. When a person is traveling in unfamiliar areas, we detect this important bit of context and use it to make our recommendations more relevant. We can surface places other travelers like you went to when they were in that same location. We are entering a new age of cartography, where maps will change to better suit who is using them, and will be created collaboratively by you, your friends, and millions of other people.
——— Whether you use Foursquare to check-in or not, you can still find value from all of the data that it has collected over the years. The company hopes that by using this data, you’ll be inclined to participate as well. Think of this as the great re-onboarding of Foursquare. It’s not just for geeks, and it’s not just used in major cities like San Francisco and New York. In the same way that , Foursquare has tools for everyone on the go, even if they don’t want to share how often they hit up Starbucks for coffee. That is the purest definition of a powerful utility. It’s global and it’s growing. [Photo credits: and ] |
Study: Learning Spanish With Duolingo Can Be More Effective Than College Classes Or Rosetta Stone | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Education is quickly moving online, but we haven’t seen all that many studies that actually look into the effectiveness of these new forms of online learning. To see how its program performed, the language learning service , founded by CAPTCHA Luis von Ahn, commissioned a study ( ) into the effectiveness of its program. The result, which even surprised von Ahn: it only takes a Duolingo user 34 hours to learn the equivalent of a first college semester’s worth of Spanish. A similar study by the same researchers who conducted Duolingo’s study, by the way, found that it took Rosetta Stone users between 55 and 60 hours to learn the same amount of material. These studies were conducted by Roumen Vesselinov, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and John Grego, Professor and Chair of the Statistics Department and the University of South Carolina. While the study was obviously funded by Duolingo, the data collection and analysis was done independently by the researchers. Using the for Spanish, a placement test many universities also use for their students, the study found that the average student gained around 91 points over the course of eight weeks and the average participant gained about 8 points per hour of study with Duolingo, though its worth noting that the researchers also found that Duolingo was a little bit more effective for students who started with a very basic knowledge of Spanish than for those who were already more advanced. The study also found that those learners who said they wanted to brush up on their Spanish for travel registered the largest average gains (17.6 points per hour) and while the majority of participants said they studied for personal interests and school, that group only registered an average gain of 5.7 points per hour. Being self-motivated enough to learn a language by yourself is obviously hard and it’s no surprise that many participants dropped out or only studied for two hours over the course of the study. A student in a college class, by contrast, may not learn as effectively as the Duolingo users who made it through the program, but chances are most students will make it through the semester with more than 2 hours of instruction and without dropping out. Still, almost 94% of the participants in the study said they would continue to use the product after the end of the eight weeks. Duolingo is clearly doing something right. Overall, von Ahn tells us, Duolingo now has over 1 million active users and 100,000 daily users. The team’s , which last December, has been in the top 15 education apps in the App Store since its launch. |
Intel’s Q4 A Mixed Bag: Misses Estimates With $0.48 EPS, But Nails The Street’s Revenue Consensus | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Intel has just reported both its , and they’re a mixed bag to say the least. The company itself expected to rake in $13.6 billion in revenues as per its Q3 release, but only managed to hit $13.5 billion this time around — a slight disappointment to be sure, but right in line with analysts’ consensus. That said, the legendary chipmaker only reported earnings per share of $0.48, just missing of $0.49. Net income this quarter was $2.5 billion, down from $3 billion in Q3 and $3.4 billion from the year-ago quarter. Pulling back a bit to look at the whole fiscal year, we find that Intel has raked in $53.3 billion, and reported net income of $11.0 billion. Intel’s Data Center business unit was the clear standout in fiscal 2012 (which may not come as a surprise to some of you), as both its PC group and its other architecture groups dipped considerably from their positions last year. “The fourth quarter played out largely as expected as we continued to execute through a challenging environment,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. He went on to highlight the progress Intel had made in breaking into the mobile space with chipsets for smartphones and tablets (likely to be a key driver of performance, if Intel’s presence at CES is any indication), and noted that Intel worked with its partners to “reinvent the PC” — something that seems to be a crucial for Intel since has notably dipped. Intel’s Q4 PC Client Group performance stands as a testament to that shift in computing demand; it only generated revenues of $8.5 billion, down a full 6% year-over-year. (Oh, and in case you were curious, there’s still no word on who is set to succeed CEO Paul Otellini when he retires later this year.) Q4 may not have been the staggering success that Intel was secretly hoping for, and investors sure seem miffed (for now) — Intel’s stock has dipped nearly 3% in after hours trading. As always, there’s an earnings conference call slated to take place any minute now, and I’ll update this post if something new or interesting pops up. |
Now In Brown And Ruby Wine, The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Gets New Color Options | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The , arguably the next big thing, will be available in Brown and Red along with its usual blue and white options. The only bad news is that the new color flavors are only available in Korea at the moment, but it’s entirely possible they’ll make their way stateside eventually. This is big news for fans of warmer color schemes and earth tones. All joking aside, it’s clear that Samsung has big plans for its Note line. The original Galaxy Note phablet, which was received with curiosity and awe, sold over it was available. The Galaxy Note II achieved the same sales . And let’s not forget today’s hottest leak: the tablet, which we expect to see at Mobile World Congress in February. But just in case you’ve missed the last year of Galaxy Note glory, here’s the run-down on the device. The Galaxy Note line of smartphones are exceptionally larger than most phones with sporting a 5.5-inch 720p display. The other distinguishing feature in the line is a Wacom-style S-Pen, that features pressure sensitivity, screen grab functionality and more. [via ] |
Instagram Reports 90M Monthly Active Users, 40M Photos Per Day And 8500 Likes Per Second | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Instagram , marking the first time it has talked about numbers on its own site since the following the Facebook buy-out. The internal stats show strong engagement, and user growth, rather than a , as . Part of the discrepancy between the these numbers and third-party doom and gloom reports may have to do with the fact that Instagram is tracking monthly active users, of which it has 90 million, versus the less stable daily active users stat often cited by others. Other stats listed by the mobile photo sharing app tackle the specific ways users engage with Instagram. 40 million photos are posted daily to the service, for instance, and its users manage to rack up 8,500 likes and 1,000 comments per second. That’s a strong indicator that whatever the reaction to Instagram’s proposed TOS changes, plenty of them are still interacting with the service at a breakneck pace. Mike Isaac at AllThingsD also points out that while the 90 million figure being reported today may look weak compared to the 100 million users it reported last September, these are specifically active accounts, where previously the company only shared data on straightforward registrations, which means total registered users is probably much higher at this point. For perspective, Facebook itself has 37,037 combined Likes and comments per second, according to stats released by the company in August when you break down the daily average they reported at the time. Instagram’s 9,500 similar actions per second definitely trail, but are nonetheless impressive given that Instagram is mobile-only and a much younger service. Facebook also reported in October that it had crossed the 1 billion monthly active user mark (based on users who log into the service at least once a month), which means that its MAUs on average engage more with the service in terms of likes and comments than Instagram’s, but that’s also not very surprising given Instagram’s emphasis on passive enjoyment of a stream of images. Instagram is reporting these just two days before its revised privacy and user policies go into effect, which are the result of the feedback it received after changing its terms the first time around. |
LG Remains Committed To Nexus 4 Production, Even As New Nexus Rumors Swirl | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | If you’ve been trying to get your hands on a Nexus 4 (without signing a contract, anyway) then these past few weeks have probably been some pretty iffy ones. Even now they’re unavailable from the , but LG France Communications Director Cathy Robin wants to straighten things out a bit — according to an interview with her in , LG remains devoted to the Nexus 4 and pegs some of the supply woes on Google’s questionable foresight. The full (and mildly kooky) Google translation can be found here for you non-francophone types, but the gist of Cathy’s argument is that it’s all a case of misallocated resources. Google apparently overestimated demand for Nexus 4s in some countries, underestimated demand in others (she claims that strong forecasts for UK and German demand led to a shortage in France), and generally made some curious calls when it came to where the lion’s share of Nexus 4s should wind up. Curiously, Google UK’s Managing Director said in an apology on Google+ in December that “supplies from the manufacturer are scarce, and our communication has been flawed,” so it seems that Google is unwilling to shoulder the blame by themselves. Gotta wonder how/if Google will respond now that another LG representative has called them out (even if she says that she’s not outright blaming Google). In any case, she also quickly downplayed the (pretty damned silly) notion that LG would be winding down production of the Nexus 4 just a few months after the device was officially released to the world. If anything, production momentum is expected to pick up as we head into February, though there’s no telling what sort of effect Mobile World Congress (and its multitude of phone announcements) could mean for LG’s production priorities going forward. But is it all too late? It’s no secret that the Nexus 4 was designed using LG’s one-time flagship the Optimus G as a base, but the Korean company is reportedly working on a successor to the device that (surprise surprise) should outclass the original in a number of ways. Rumors of with a 5-inch 1080p display have picked up plenty of steam thanks to reports from Korea’s MK Business News, and a May 2013 launch window has been bandied about to go with them. Meanwhile, those rumors dovetail rather nicely with murmurs of new LG Nexus hardware — specifically a Nexus 5 smartphone and a Nexus 7.7 tablet — that continue to make the rounds thanks to a post from Korean forum . The purported spec sheets are nothing to sneeze at (both are said to sport the newly-announced Tegra 4 chipsets from NVIDIA, among other things), and the rumor says that they’ll see the light of day at Google I/O in ( ) May 2013. Is it possible that Google and LG are planning to push out even more hardware together on such short notice? Sure — LG USA CMO James Fisher said at CES that the Nexus 4 was the first in the company’s with Google after all, but that by itself shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Still, if the timing for both of these events pan out the way the rumors suggest, we could be looking at some fresh new Nexus gadgets much sooner than expected, and the Nexus 4 may wind up an unintended casualty of change. |
“In The Studio,” XG Ventures’ Pietro Dova Prefers To Fly Under The Radar | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | TechCrunch “In the Studio” welcomes a quiet, unassuming early-stage company veteran who has been through the ups and downs of Valley startups before landing at a certain search engine around the year 2000, after which he spent nearly seven years in various finance leadership roles and helped steer the company to its blockbuster public offering. , now a Managing Partner at , is not a name that comes up much in the noise of today’s funding stories, but that’s probably just fine for him. Along with his business partner, (also a former Google executive), Dova has helped steer XG (stands for X-Google) into the ever-changing world of angel investing, focusing the fund on areas such as mobile, e-commerce, analytics, gaming, and business intelligence. Like the folks from , Dova and his colleagues are focusing on staying small and lean, closing about 12 deals per year, and trying to their model before making any decions to when and how grow. I had to ask Dova a few times to come in, and he finally relented. He was, in fact, one of the first people I met in the Valley, as we were randomly seated together at a random startup dinner event back in June 2010. Somehow, we managed to stay in touch and I was able to convince him to sit down in the studio with me. Today, four years into XG, it will be fascinating to see what Dova and Zurek do for their next move, as they’re both young, strongly positioned in the Valley and particularly within Google’s deep network (which is especially important given the increasing strength of Google Ventures), and could take their fund in many new directions. In this discussion, Dova talks about his time at Google, the formation of XG, how XG engages with founders, and how he and Zurek approach the opportunities that lay ahead. |
Accel-Backed Entertainment News Outlet Global Grind Finally Starts Taking Mobile Seriously With New iPhone App | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Global Grind, the NY-based digital media company funded by Accel Partners and hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, is finally taking mobile seriously with today’s relaunch – and really, it’s a start-from-scratch job – of . With today’s debut of Global Grind for iOS (Android to follow), the company is bringing custom mix of Music, Celebrity, Gossip, Entertainment, and Style news to mobile with a whole new look and feel. It’s been a long road for Global Grind, which received its Series A from Jim Breyer at Accel back in August 2007. That was a time when , if you’ll recall. The company has since been through several pivots (and ), moving from what was once something of a Digg competitor to the media company it is today, which is now pulling in just shy of $4 million in revenue, and, after accounting for its operating budget, has had “multiple months of being cash-flow positive,” according to Global Grind Head of Product, Robert Boyle. On the web, however, as one click through will tell you, the company relies heavily on advertisers and sponsors. Today, , for example, and I struggled to find the “X” button. (It’s the word “collapse.” Ugh.) The website content is wrapped in Toyota, too, and other ads are all over the place, to the extent that it’s almost difficult to read the articles. Toyota’s ad even returns when you click through to read anything. I’m telling you, it’s painful. In comparison, the revamped mobile app is a breath of fresh air. There is only a minimal iAd banner running, but Boyle says that they decided to go light on ads to start, in order to focus on delivering a better user experience. And thankfully so, because the website is a mess. The new app is actually really attractive. It has been designed using the now-familiar left hand navigation which lets you browse through its featured news categories, which include Music, Style, Entertainment, and the more general “News.” This latter category is a mix of everything from politics to tech, to yes, even that crazy Te’o story that people can’t get enough of right now. There’s also a unique navigational pop-up at the bottom of the screen, where you can filter content by photos and video, customize a “favorites” section by picking your favorite celebs, and even a City Guide which offers editorial recommendations for restaurants, drinks, and parties in Global Grind’s target markets of NY, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami and DC. Offline support is available as well. Boyle tells us that the new app, which replaces a stagnant 16-month old version with “minimal” usage, is meant to be a facelift for the Global Grind brand itself. “Our mobile app is where we want to go as a direction as the company, which is focusing very heavily on the user experience,” he says. “It’s about creating something that’s personalized and smart.” It was important for Global Grind to figure out mobile, given that mobile traffic now accounts for 55 percent of the website’s traffic altogether. Overall, Global Grind reports 188 percent growth in visitors (95M), 137 percent growth in uniques (43M) and 159 percent growth in pageviews (282M) from 2011 to 2012. Mobile traffic, meanwhile, grew by 408 percent (visitors), 294 percent (uniques) and 554 percent (pageviews) during the same period. If you occasionally dabble in non-tech news, you can grab the new app from . The Android version will arrive in Q2. |
Nielsen: Smartphone Battle Ready To Rage In Brazil, Russia, India | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | In a research note today, Nielsen examines the potential for smartphone growth in the BRIC region (Brazil, Russia, India, China), where, in many cases, feature phones still dominate. According to the firm’s findings, only in China are smartphones predominant, where they’re now owned by two-thirds of mobile subscribers, as of the first half of 2012. However, in India, Russia and Brazil, users are only beginning to transition away from feature phones to newer, app-capable devices. In India, feature phones account for 80 percent of the mobile market, Nielsen says, followed by Russa at 51 percent, and Brazil at 44 percent. In Brazil, there’s more of an even split between feature phones, smartphones (36 percent) and a third category Nielsen dubs “multimedia” phones (21 percent). These multimedia phones have a touchscreen and/or a QWERTY keypad, but no smartphone operating system installed. They’re basically a better feature phone, if you had to classify them one way or the other. The data provided by Nielsen was a bit old (first half 2012), and perhaps also somewhat obvious to those who are tracking the industry closely. For example, , mobile measurement firm Flurry listed India, China, Russia, India (and others) as some of the largest addressable markets for 2012. And around a year later, it also listed Russia and China among , and , was on track to top the U.S. iOS/Android install base by Q1 of 2013. China is an especially interesting one to watch at present, because even though smartphones are now topping feature phones among mobile users, smartphone platform will become the dominate player there is a battle that’s still underway. Apple CEO Tim Cook has been busy on this front , in fact, visiting China personally to meet with China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua, likely discussing how to gain access to the carriers’ some 700 million subscribers. According to news reports of the visit, Cook remarked that the country would become Apple’s most important market in the “not too distant future.” : Flurry also just published new slides, with updated data for 2013: [slideshare id=16045629&w=427&h=356&sc=no] |
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Dropify Is Part Of A New Wave Of File-Sharing Using Facebook-Authentication | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Promoting your stuff on Facebook is all very well, but what if you want to offer downloads (such as for music) from within the platform? Oddly, German startups are all over this problem. Out of Berlin has recently come . Yet to launch, this is an app which promises to send files up to 1GB to Facebook friends in real-time and without leaving a trace. Although it’s only available to Facebook users, there are a billion of those of course. It’s an eagerly awaited startup. And now has appeared – founded in Cologne in May, 2011 by Alex Heilmann, Mike Lieser and Chris Striepecke. Again, this integrates with Facebook and lets you publish and discover files, making them more social, allowing files to be shared in quite a viral way across Facebook. After connecting your Facebook account with the Dropify Web app you upload a file (PDF, Doc, audio/video file etc, add some meta data information. You can then publish the file and also embed it in Facebook. The file can then be downloaded from Facebook by anyone who it’s shared with. Now, there is potential for this to go viral because Dropify creates an activity feed post when files are downloaded, making links to files spread fast on Facebook. Musicians and perhaps even developers are going to like this, a lot. Furthermore, downloads from Dropify are compatible with mobile devices. Dropify is free but you can also subscribe for more features from between $9 to $99 per month, allowing you access to more uploads, larger file sizes and the ability to get analytics about how the files are performing. The potential for these apps to create a new wave of Facebook-based file-sharing is clear, just keep it clean kids, m’kay…? |
Glooko Receives FDA Clearance For Its Mobile Diabetes Tracker, Hires Intuit Health Exec As Its First CEO | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 17 | Back in September, announced the release of a new version of its iOS app, a digital logbook which helps people with diabetes track their blood glucose levels from their smartphone. , meaning that Glooko is now compatible with more than 17 different devices — a sign of the headway the startup has made in its march toward meter agnosticism. Diabetes, as with any condition that requires constant monitoring and tracking (often via multiple devices), has been in sore need of better data and device interoperability, and Glooko is on a mission to do just that. While there are a ton of digital logbooks in the app store for those who regularly check blood sugar levels, most require users to enter data manually. Since launching in late 2011, Glooko has set itself apart by allowing them to download readings from multiple devices automatically. However, up until now, — an app that gives users robust analysis and visualizations of glucose data — has only been available in Europe, but that changed today, as Glooko announced that has received from the FDA, allowing it to expand distribution and bring products like Logbook Charts to the U.S. This is a significant achievement for Glooko, especially considering that FDA approval isn’t something that comes easily or that happens overnight and can require months or years of effort to meet the government’s stringent regulations. But now that it has regulatory approval as a Class 2 device, Glooko is clear to sell its products over the counter as well as directly to consumers. It also allows the startup to begin courting healthcare providers, which gives them access to a huge market of potential institutional customers. With the nod of approval from the FDA, the startup is also announcing today that it has new leadership at the helm, as Rick Altinger joins Glooko as CEO and Dean Lucas as its new VP of product development. Altinger is the company’s first CEO and brings over 15 years of industry experience in healthcare services, serving most recently as an executive at Intuit Health, where he led the company’s acquisition of Medfusion. Lucas, too, is a veteran of the healthcare industry with 17 years of experience under his belt, having led interface and product design for both Doximity and Epocrates — the latter of which for $293 million. He will also reportedly has plans to help bring Glooko to Android, which is welcome news to Glooko users who have endured a long wait for an iOS alternative. The Center for Disease Control 25.8 million Americans — 8.3 percent of the population — have diabetes and an estimated 79 million have prediabetes, making it one of the most pervasive diseases in the U.S. As a result, there’s a huge opportunity for digital health startups in leveraging technology to help those who suffer from the disease to better manage its symptoms. Startups like Glooko and Omada Health represent the next generation of care and prevention, finally helping the country address a critical disease that costs it $200 billion each year. “Lack of support across multiple meter types and differing data transfer methods have long withheld a truly unified diabetes management solution,” says the company’s new CEO. “By creating a universal diabetes management platform, Glooko is beginning to crack the code, and I look forward to continued innovation and implementation of Glooko across healthcare as a unifying force in a disjointed ecosystem.” To date, Glooko has raised $3.5 million in funding from The Social+Capital Partnership, Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Judy Estrin, Andy Hertzfeld, Venky Harinarayan, Russell Hirsch and Xtreme Labs. |
Bad Dog Tools Demos Drill Bits That Cut Through Basically Everything There Is [Video] | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | The CES show floor was packed with tons of companies that you’ve probably heard plenty about this week, such as Panasonic, Sony, LG, etc. But the hidden gems and oddballs among the consumer electronic giants were the real treat for world-weary attendees who felt it was hard not to stifle a yawn at yet another 4K TV. Bad Dog Tools, a company demonstrating its super-hard drill bits, is one of those gems. While I had trouble understanding exactly why there was a tool-making company on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show, I had to admit that what they had to show off was impressive. We got to see their drill bits undergo all kinds of stress and strain, and come out working perfectly fine on the other side. I’m not exactly a handy guy, but I’ve used a drill enough to realize that bits that can endure the kind of punishment these were facing are something special. I liked when they got so hot they gave off smoke. Not enough things at CES gave off smoke. |
Hands-On With The Lockitron, The Easiest Way To Control Your House’s Locks With A Smartphone | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Lockitron’s Cameron Robertson stopped by our CES booth for a little demo. It doesn’t take much to demo the . It’s a little wireless device that slips onto a deadbolt and can be controlled by a smartphone. Put it on your house. Put it on a rental property. Put it on your cat. To be honest, is much more interesting than the Lockitron itself. The Lockitron is the company’s second project, and they intended to turn to Kickstarter to fund it. But as Robertson explains in the video, that wasn’t going to stop the YC alums. They made their own crowdfunding platform and surpassed their required goal within 24 hours. It’s clear that people love the Lockitron. |
Sphero And Augmented Reality Are Made For Each Other | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | had a big 2012, but it’s clear that 2013 will be even bigger for the company. This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the makers of a phone-friendly robotic ball launched a handful of augmented reality games, expanding the breadth of the little sphere’s functionality. The first game is inspired by possibly the best meme of 2011, Nyan Cat. lets you navigate through outer space, collect lollipops and fire off bacon to defend against enemies. You can either play it on your Android or iOS device, or use the Sphero as a controller. The other new game, , takes AR to an entirely new level. We sat down with the founders who explained that Sphero is perfect for AR — the easiest queues to pick up are spheres and the color white. On top of that, the actual picture is much more accurate than most AR games, because the Sphero is on the ground and can send depth information back to the device. This allows for cupcake tossing in Sharky The Beaver. It’s so accurate, you can actually see the cupcakes bounce up off of the floor. Both are available now in the Apple App Store and on Google Play. |
Refinery29 Raises $3.5 Million Through A Private Offering, According To SEC Filing | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | According to a recent , fashion news and e-commerce site has raised $3.5 million through a private offering from a total of seven undisclosed investors. The Web site, which focuses on trends and independent designers, has grown rapidly since it launched in 2005 in New York City. It now focuses on six cities (NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Chicago and Washington, D.C.) and boasts 30 million unique visitors per year, according to . In 2012 the company , with a from advertising. Refinery29 last year that it was in the midst of changing the focus of its revenue model away from advertising to its new online boutiques. It’s one of several fashion sites, including and , that mix fashion coverage with e-commerce. Refinery29’s included angel investors Ramesh Haridas, Mark Mitchell and Jim Yang. Refinery29 has been emailed for comment. |
With 15K Businesses On Board, BetterCloud Lands $5M To Help Accelerate The Adoption Of Google Apps In The Enterprise | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | For years, Microsoft has been the king of the world’s offices, as its own Office productivity suite dominating the market. If you’ve worked in an office in the last 20 years — preferably at one with computers — chances are good that you’ve used (or at least familiar with) Word, PowerPoint, Excel or Outlook. But, in taking off, Google has been slowly eating away at Microsoft’s lead. Today, Google’s productivity suite, Google Apps, is used by over five million businesses and, while small businesses has long been its core customers, adoption is increasing up the chain — in the world of the enterprise. Today, as the Google Apps ecosystem matures and becomes critical to the day-to-day operations of businesses at both ends of the spectrum, it continues to expand, incorporating new services and products around Drive, Chromebooks, Vault and Android. But, inevitably, this has led to some growing pains. As the ecosystem expands, it can be difficult for businesses to figure out how to manage and make the most of the array of tools available, not to mention maintaing security. launched last year to make it easier for businesses to move to, work within and get the most out of Google Apps. The New York City-based startup wants to be the end-to-end service that helps businesses manage everything associated with Google’s enterprise suite, whether it be domains, reporting, education, security or compliance. The company has quietly become the leading provider of cloud management tools for Google Apps, having acquired more than 15,000 customers with 5.5 million end-users worldwide. To support its current growth, the startup announced today that it has raised $5 million in series A financing, led by David Aronoff at Flybridge Capital Partners. The round also included contributions from New York-based firms, Greycroft Partners and TriBeCa Venture Partners, which joined the round as new investors alongside existing investors like Bear Creek Capital and BLH Venture Partners. The new round brings the startup’s total funding to $7.2 million. What is it about BetterCloud that attracted investor attention? BetterCloud founder and CEO David Politis attributes it, in part, to the growing adoption of its flagship management and security application, , which launched six months ago. The app is basically a toolkit for Google Apps administrators, providing them with the ability to more easily add controls, manage users and automate tasks. FlashPanel allows IT admins to manage domains from a single dashboard, increasing visibility into user activity, groups, organizational units, Google Docs quotas, along with CRM functionality that helps them onboard new employees, de-provision those who leave the company, back up inboxes and sync with mobile devices. By delivering tools like Google Drive sharing policies, email signature standardization, domain wide reporting and bulk management of users and groups, BetterCloud aims to add more value to businesses using Google Apps. Going forward, Politis says, FlashPanel will extend to cover more of the Google Enterprise Cloud, including mobile device management and enhanced data loss prevention functionality. BetterCloud also plans to increase its flagship app’s management capabilities across the Google Apps suite, including Calendars, Sites and go deeper in the areas that have been most popular with users, namely, Google Drive. With its new infusion of capital, the startup will also build out its repository of premium training videos available through , the startup’s information resource, which offers video tutorials on Google Apps products, along with a Chrome extension that enables users to ask how-to questions directly from their inbox. Over the long-term, the founder’s big-picture goal is for BetterCloud to help accelerate the adoption of cloud technology — and, of course, cloud platforms like Google Apps — by giving businesses the types of tools they need to manage the transition to the cloud. In so doing, Politis says, companies feel more confident about making that move, as they’re now able to add the extra layers of security and management functionality that aren’t available natively the Google Apps ecosystem. |
Google+ Hangouts On Air Now Have A Full-Screen Option For Your Broadcast | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | When you’re using Google+ Hangouts to broadcast, say, a live concert, there hasn’t been a way to make it full-screen for your wonderful viewers. Basically, it would show a big window with you in it, along with a smaller window under it. A full-screen option has been a long-requested feature, and the Hangouts team announced today that this has been added due to popular demand, much like the recent . take your live streaming Hangout and push it to an embeddable YouTube player, which records for later viewing as well. If you’re a band, a teacher or , you’ll be happy to know that your one-camera show will now have a gorgeous viewing option. Here’s the before and after, as shared by : This feature is now the default. It’s a pretty important one to have for professional musicians or news organizations, as the original display was kind of, well, amateur. Attracting these types of users helps Google build out a social platform that integrates with all of its products, as Hangouts On Air demonstrates by working quite nicely with YouTube. When you think about it, the service takes a lot of the hard work out of shooting live video, recording it and then sharing it to places like YouTube. It’s done seamlessly. Hangouts have been the breakout feature of Google’s social suite, Google+, since its launch. As we noted before, to stitch participants together into one chat, with seamless camera switching. It’s still easy to use, though, which is the magic. If you have more than one participant, you can still go full screen by using to put the main speaker in the background. Incremental changes, small tweaks, and improvements: This is the Google way. [Photo Credit: ] |
UPDATED: Apple Not Focused On Developing Cheaper iPhone, Says Marketing SVP Phil Schiller | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | UPDATE: Reuters has its original report about Phil Schiller’s interview with the Shanghai Evening News based on “ ” to original story, though its not clear what those changes are. The Shanghai Evening News report remains . Earlier this week, reports that a caused plenty of buzz as observers speculated about how such a device could help Apple target emerging markets, including China. But Apple Marketing SVP Phil Schiller gave to the (link via Google Translate) appeared to refute the rumors. (TNW with Apple that this was an official interview). Schiller told the newspaper that Apple is not focused on issuing a less expensive version of the iPhone to grab market share: “We are not like other companies, launching multiple products at once, then hoping one will get the attention of consumers,” Schiller said. He added that Apple only uses top technology and high-quality components when developing new products. Reports have circulated that Apple is working on a less pricey iPhone. Such a device would cost roughly half as much as current iPhones and be made with less expensive parts, like a shell made of polycarbonate plastic, or recycled components. A more affordable iPhone would help Apple compete with Android handsets in developing economies including China and India. Schiller’s interview with Shanghai Evening News comes at the same time as , where he has been focused on opening the way for Apple to gain greater market share in that country. |
Samsung Fined By Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission For Misleading Advertising | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Samsung has disclosed that Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) fined it NT$300,000 (or about US$10,389) for an advertisement that featured “misleading” information about the Samsung Galaxy Y Duos GT-S6102, reported Taiwanese news agency (link via Google Translate). According to the FTC, the South Korean company said in online and catalog advertisements that the phone has automatic focus and flash functions, which it doesn’t. Samsung has deleted mention of those features from its ads. This is not the first time that Samsung has run afoul of the FTC. In September, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology (a joint venture of the two companies) , along with several other companies, for fixing the prices of optical disc drives (one of the companies was exempted from the fine for playing the role of whistleblower, but its identity was kept confidential). |
ScottEVest Shows Off Their Latest Pocket-Ful Travel Jacket | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | As geeks, it’s hard for us to carry all of our geek accoutrements to our various geek events. That’s why I, for one, love : they’re durable, fun, and pocket-ful pieces of clothing for the nerd on the go. We sat down with Scott Jordan, the Scott of the EVest, and talked about their latest creation, the TEC Jacket 2.0 with a full iPad pocket, easy-to-access phone pocket, and an internal wiring system. Scott started his business 10 years ago and is popping up all over these days. We had a few minutes to talk with him about his latest creations and what has changed over the decade he’s been in business. |
Talking To Your TV, Your Car, Maybe Your Fridge? Maluuba Is Connecting Users To Their Favorite Devices By Voice | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | You might remember from TechCrunch Disrupt, where the company for Android last year, combining voice recognition and natural language processing with search to create a really smart way to easily find the things you want quickly. If you’ve already forgotten: It’s kind of like Siri, except it works. Anyway, the company has been busy over the last few months — it’s been making updates to its Android application, including the addition of a shopping category, which allows users to ask about the prices of various products and where to find them. And later this month, it plans to launch a Windows Phone app using the same technology, the founders told me in a video interview at CES today. Speaking of which, they’re at the show exploring the next group of devices that might benefit from a fast, smart search technology powered by voice recognition and natural language processing. That could include TVs — where a number of OEMs are already experimenting with voice control and navigation — as well as cars. But what about other devices — like, say, smart refrigerators or smart toasters? Maluuba head of UX Tareq Ismail says that you’re not likely to speak directly to your fridge in the near future. However, there are some applications where talking to your phone to find out about stuff in your fridge might make sense, according to Ismail. To find out more about Maluuba’s plans for new apps, or its view of voice search and recognition technology, check out the video above. |
Samsung Says It Will Not Release Its Windows RT Tablet In The U.S. | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Samsung’s Windows RT tablet, the Ativ Tab, will not be sold in the U.S. Mike Abary, head of Samsung’s PC and tablet business in the U.S., told at CES that his company shelved the release because its retail partners do not see enough demand. (Abary did not specify if the Ativ Tab will be launched in non-U.S. markets). The Ativ Tab is powered by Qualcomm chips, and the announcement comes, rather unfortunately, just days after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with an Ativ Tab on hand, joined Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs during his to extol their partnership. Abary also said that the amount of investment it would take to educate consumers about the benefits of Windows RT was another factor. As he told CNET: There wasn’t really a very clear positioning of what Windows RT meant in the marketplace, what it stood for relative to Windows 8, that was being done in an effective manner to the consumer. When we did some tests and studies on how we could go to market with a Windows RT device, we determined there was a lot of heavy lifting we still needed to do to educate the customer on what Windows RT was. And that heavy lifting was going to require pretty heavy investment. When we added those two things up, the investments necessary to educate the consumer on the difference between RT and Windows 8, plus the modest feedback that we got regarding how successful could this be at retail from our retail partners, we decided maybe we ought to wait. This is another step back for Windows RT, which is floundering in the face of competition from Windows 8 and Android tablets, and once Intel Atom Bay Trail tablets are released later this year. Abary said, however, that Samsung may reconsider Windows RT devices if a strong enough market develops. |
Withings Shows Off Its New Smart Scale And Smart Activity Tracker At CES [Video] | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Withings was one of a pretty busy section of the CES 2013 show floor demoing health, fitness and lifestyle monitoring apps, and it had a couple of new things to add to its line of Wi-Fi scales and monitoring devices. One was the new Withings Smart Body Analyzer, which is a version of its Wi-Fi scale that, for the first time, measures heart rate. The other was the Smart Activity Tracker, a FitBit-style device for keeping track of your activity. The Withings Smart Body Analyzer will be hitting stores in Q1 2013 and retails for $149.95. It does weight and body fat readings like the existing versions and beams all that info either over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to its companion app for iOS or Android. The scale can also detect air quality and is intended to be used in a bedroom so that you can check its readings to figure out when you need to open a window to increase air flow. The Withings Smart Activity Tracker is like the Jawbone Up, FitBit One, etc. It’s tiny, and it’s hard to convey just how small in words, but you can check it out in the video for a better idea. Besides being incredibly small, which is a big advantage for a device you have to wear constantly, it also connects to your iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth, has an on-device display, and can send you alerts. |
The YotaPhone Has An E-Ink Display On The Back And That’s Simply Awesome | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Okay, hear me out. The duel-sided is not a gimmick. It makes sense. On the back of the YotaPhone is an e-ink display that can mirror anything displayed on the main screen. And because e-ink screens do not require battery life, these images are available even if the phone battery dies. Get it? Probably not yet. As shown in the video below, this allows for tons of novel use cases. Load your boarding pass on the back screen so it’s always handy. Put a to-do list on always-on screen. Store a map or directions on the screen. Or, best of all, the YotaPhone can load RSS feeds or notifications onto the e-ink screen, effectively turning the phone into a dual-sided productivity machine. The YotaPhone is currently just a prototype. In fact, as explained in the video, the unit shown in the demo was fresh off the production line three weeks ago. At 9mm thin, it’s not that much thicker than an iPhone 4S. The company expects the final production unit to be even thinner. Sure, I agree that it’s not a phone for everyone, but having two screens, especially one as special as an e-ink screen which doesn’t consume battery life. |
Want: LG’s Pocket Photo, A Tiny, NFC-Friendly Photo Printer | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | LG and CES are made for each other. The company may not make the best smartphones (with the exception of Google’s Nexus 4), or get the most attention all year round, but when they whip out the big screen TVs at their massive CES booth, it’s easy to get on the “Life’s Good” bandwagon. Unfortunately, TechCrunch is one of the few attendees at the show that isn’t all that interested in television, which is why we were so pleased to stumble upon this cute little NFC printer, the LG Pocket Photo. It’s incredibly small — you can probably fit the little guy in your back pocket — and it uses a new Z-ink (or Zero ink) technology to print 2×3-inch photos. Through the magical power of NFC, users can simply tap their LG phone against the printer and in 30 seconds the picture goes from a file on a smartphone to a photo in your wallet. Users can also transfer photos through Bluetooth and USB. Simply download the app, and from there you can add skins, text, etc. The good news is that it’ll only cost around $169, which is pretty good for it’s size, capabilities, and speed. The bad news is that it’s only expected to ship in Korea. |
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Tim Cook Meets With China Mobile, Says China Will Soon Become Apple’s Most Important Market | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Tim Cook would like to get Apple on a faster boat to China. On his current visit to the country, it looks like the Apple CEO has focused on smoothing the rollout and distribution of Apple products there. In an interview with Chinese news site (link via Google Translate), Cook said that he believes China will become Apple’s most important market in the “not too distant future.” He also sounded an optimistic note over his latest talk with China Mobile, but would not divulge further details about whether or not he has managed to ink a deal with the world’s largest carrier, which the Cupertino company has been stuck in negotiations with for years. Earlier this week, Cook also met with Miao Wei, minister of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the agency responsible for approving Apple products before their launch in that country. The China launch of Apple products lags significantly behind their U.S. debut, which is due in large part to the wait for approval from government authorities. For example, the iPhone 5 was not available in China until nearly three months after its U.S. debut. Not only that, but Apple has wrestled with China Mobile for four years over network and revenue sharing issues. Apple’s lack of a distribution deal with the world’s largest carrier by subscriber means that its market share in China has been chipped away by less expensive, more easily attainable devices by competitors like Samsung and Lenovo. It is crucial for Apple to cement a deal with China Mobile if it wants to increase its market penetration. Cook met with China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua on Thursday, as confirmed by the carrier to (link via Google Translate) and . Though both Apple and China Mobile have refused to disclose what issues were on the table, it’s almost certain that Cook’s aim was to finally gain access to the carrier’s 700 million subscribers. While China has constantly been one of the latter countries to receive new Apple products, Cook told Sina that it is a “top priority” of his for China to become one of the first regions in each rollout, and that he has been working diligently to cooperate with the government approval process for each new device in order to shrink the time between it’s U.S. and China debuts. At present, Apple has 11 stores in China and Hong Kong, as well as a wide network of Apple resellers. Cook hopes to increase the number of official Apple stores in the region to 25. Cook, who said in the interview that he has visited China at least 20 times since 1996 and has a Chinese sister-in-law, also emphasized that Apple focuses on the needs of Chinese consumers when developing new products. For example, Apple made sure that both OSX and iOS had capabilities and functions tailored for the Chinese market. (The cheaper iPhone would also help rope in new consumers in China). |
An Interview With Eric Migicovsky, A Product Designer Who Had To Ramp Up From $0 To $10 Million In Funding In A Month | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | The Pebble Smart watch is one of the best-known projects. A compact e-ink device designed to work with almost any smartphone, the Pebble grabbed attention when it hit $10 million and sold 85,000 watches after expecting to sell 5,000 unitKickstarter”>;=”https://techcrunch.com/tag/s. Eric had to go from a tiny, one- or two-man operation to a company with 11 employees all dedicated to building the watch. While they expected originally to build the watches in California, they suddenly had to move to China to begin ramping up production. Eric explained why the company missed its initial ship date – essentially because they suddenly had to make thousands more watches – and told us how it felt to move from a business with 0 orders to a powerhouse with 85,000 orders in a month. |
Lemmy From Motorhead Answers Questions About New Motorheadphones | Jay Donovan | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | I can tell you that the very, very last place I expected to see , from the band Motorhead, was at CES 2013. However, the metal pioneer emerged from the chaos with his new line of headphones — , that is — to sell to the masses. Lemmy is definitely a man of few words. The press conference was a reminder of this. However, he did answer every question regarding the look and feel of the Motorheadphones and let his technology partners, Ulf Sandberg and Anders Nicklasson, field more of the technical aspects of the hardware. So how are Lemmy’s headphones different from other headphones out there? For starters, they are less focused on deep bass, like hip hop headphones are, and more focused on the mid-range sound of rock and roll. This is not surprising considering Lemmy’s trademark mid-ranged Rickenbacker bass sound. It’s a trend we are seeing a lot — rock and hip hop stars partnering to create new hardware with mobile appeal. , Dre has his own headphones… it’s a smart play for pro musicians in the mature part of their career to diversify their personal and professional brands with technology offerings. Indeed, there is money to be made. I waited with several other writers for quite a while after the press conference to ask a few more questions. It was taking a long time until finally our own Eve Binder from sister publication Engadget, took one for the team and volunteered to let Lemmy “sign” her with a Sharpie marker. Amazingly, this sprung Lemmy into action and he re-emerged from the Motorheadphones tent once again and I was able to capture this video of him fielding questions. Thanks Eve! |
Oculus Shows Off Its Virtual Reality Goggles For Genuinely Immersive Gaming | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | As someone who devours way too much science fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that I’ll be wearing giant VR goggles at some point in the future. (I’m patiently waiting for my jetpack, too.) Now it looks like I might not be crazy after all — Palmer Luckey, founder of , is hoping to take VR goggles out of the lab and put them into the hands of gamers at an affordable price. The company held a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for its Oculus Rift headset last year, . The company plans to ship its first developer kits in a couple of months, and Luckey dropped by the TechCrunch booth at the Consumer Electronics Show with an early version of the goggles. He compared the experience to “having an enormous screen suspended in front of you,” which is true enough, but doesn’t quite do justice to what it’s like to put the headset on, watch the game respond to your movements, and feel like you’re moving through a real space. I’m eager to try it out in a real game, but it sounds like I might still have a while to wait on that front. “It wouldn’t be really responsible for us to go out and say, ‘This is when we think it’s going to be done,’ when we haven’t gotten any developer feedback on what they think should be in the consumer version,” Luckey said. The developer kits are still available for pre-order for a price of $300 . When the consumer version is released, Luckey said he’s aiming to deliver it at the same price or lower. |
The Sky Is The Limit For Aereo, Assuming The Sky Remains Filled With Free TV Signals | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Aereo is quite possibly the most disruptive company to come out of New York since Kickstarter. The startup, founded by serial founder , brings live and recorded TV content direct to your Internet-connected devices for as low as $8 per month. In a world where retrieving free over-the-air signals with rabbit ears is an extinct idea, Aereo has shrunken the rabbit ears down to the size of a fingertip, hosted them remotely, and enabled New Yorkers of all walks of life to get their TV fix for cheaper. We spoke to Kinojia onstage at CES, and he explained why about the launch and success of his company. As technology advanced from rabbit ears to cable to satellite and so on, the price of these services steadily rose. But there are over 30 channels that are available for free, and Aereo is set on bringing those to the masses (on their Internet-connected devices no less) for an affordable price. The company recently received in funding and will use those funds to start marketing the service and expanding to 22 new cities. With the extra cash, the forthcoming marketing efforts, and the downright cheap TV service, there’s no end in sight for Aereo. No matter how much it upsets the big guys. |
Performance Marketing Brands (a.k.a. Ebates) Buys Grocery Shopping App Pushpins | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | , the operator of online shopping and rewards programs, has , the mobile app for saving on groceries. We’re hearing that the acquisition price was likely in the range of $10 to $15 million. Pushpins and rewards when they scan UPC barcodes at the grocery store. The company’s app also allows you to access digital shopping lists, coupons, nutritional information and access to your shopping history. Pushpins’ app will suggest coupons for the items on your list based on previous additions and purchases. And you can sort products by aisle, view nutritional info and access a history of your past purchases and savings via the shopping history feature which can be printed out as a digital receipt. The app also features integration with the store savings cards from many brand-name grocery store chains like Foodtown, Giant Eagle, Harps, Lowes Foods, MainStreet Market, Marsh, Shop ‘n Save and ShopRite. When you clip the digital coupons using the app, those savings are instantly loaded onto your grocery store loyalty card for use at checkout. Performance Marketing Brands was a year and a half ago. The company has been on a bit of an acquisition spree, and most recently |
Facebook + Kayak: Flights With Friends Launches To Take The Pain Out Of Group Travel Planning | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | Over the last few years, the travel industry has begun to undergo significant change, as startups and incumbents have fought to bring the disparate parts of a highly regulated industry online. Much of the attention from consumer web businesses has focused on making travel more “social,” improving discovery and helping travelers figure out what to do at their destination of choice. Today, there’s a laundry list of options when it comes to finding information about travel destinations, and sites like and (now part of Priceline) have changed the way we search for and book travel. However, while the travel space (especially the social side) begins its inevitable consolidation after a flood of activity and launches, , there’s still plenty of opportunity “closer to the top of the decision funnel” — the moments after we decide where it is we want to go. , a San Francisco-based startup that launches out of beta today, is willing to bet there’s a big opportunity at the top of the funnel in one of the least-explored (but growing) areas of social travel: Group planning. Flights With Friends wants to make it easy for families and friends to find and book flights and hotels together, allowing everyone in your travel posse to see the same results, pin their favorites and chat about different options — in realtime. The startup is on a mission to solve the kind of problems that are familiar to anyone who has attempted to arrange travel for a group of friends, like those inevitable, lengthy back-and-forths via group text, reply-all-heavy email chains and spreadsheets. Generally speaking, to get the travel planning process moving along, one or two people will take the initiative, who ultimately organizing the whole shebang. The planners then end up resenting their lazier travel buddies, while their buddies end up being unhappy they weren’t more involved in the decisions and, when someone ends up on the wrong flight or at the wrong hotel, friendships are tested. Not to mention the fact that collecting money from a large group of friends is a horrible thing to endure. So, Flights with Friends lets groups traveling together find the best flights, places to stay, and activities to do while discussing the options in realtime. In turn, this realtime communication tends to motivate groups to actually get the planning done, thanks to the fact that Flights With Friends offers the same sense of urgency for travelers, regardless of whether half of the group is offline. As to how it works: Let’s use bachelor party in Vegas as an example. The best man might navigate his way to Flights With Friends to begin the search for transportation and accommodation, inviting his friends in the process. The user would be able to use private Facebook messages or send emails and once others start joining, they could add flights if they’re traveling from different cities, pin flights and hotels they like, set shared search filters and book, while everyone else in the party gets notified. Now, the best man doesn’t have to be the hero (or the bad guy), pestering each member of the trip about different options or spamming them with email. Co-founder Kyle Killion tells us that he sees the service’s most attractive use case as being those like the one mentioned above, along with planning associated with weddings, family gatherings and graduations. What’s more, while these use cases may seem niche when considering the travel space as a whole, the co-founder tells us that small group travel (groups between two and nine) is a $31 billion annual market, according to estimates made by Groupize. However, there is a flip side. Although startups (and some incumbents) are working hard to bring the whole travel decision funnel online, most group travel still happens through travel agents — much of it offline. found that nearly 80 percent of travel agents booked 10 or fewer groups in 2010. So, all in all, groups account for a relatively small portion of bookings. What’s more, there’s still plenty of competition. TripIt options, , which is similar to Flights With Friends has been in this space for awhile, Groupize offers group hotel bookings and in New York, is gearing up to become a player in group travel. That’s just naming a few. Nonetheless, Killion is still optimistic about the opportunity in group travel. Although it’s been around since 2004, Triporama has been fairly quiet of late, Travelocity offered co-browsing options and Jetaport has still yet to launch. The other prevailing trend in social travel, he says, is that, while startups may purport to offer group travel options, they’ve mostly focused on travel inspiration functionality, a la Gogobot. And, while Gogobot keeps growing, inspiration doesn’t really need another player. Killion says that their research has found that most groups know where they want to go, but they just need help planning. What’s more, , while the total number of group bookings remains low for travel agents, proportionately, groups already represent over one-third of all sales — a surprisingly large portion of their total business. On top of that, nearly 50 percent of agents said that they expect group travel to show strong growth going forward. Right now, the problem for those tackling group travel is that people use a lot of different sites when searching for travel options, so startups have to offer something better if they want to become the go-to destination for search and booking. The co-founder says that Flights With Friends wants to link directly to airlines’ “buy” buttons from results and now combs 150 sites, along with funneling in hotel information from Expedia, which offers the largest selection of hotels. Long-term, Flights With Friends wants to combine Kayak and Facebook for group travel, offering Kayak’s metasearch, along with a collaborative, group communication component as well. As of yet, there hasn’t been a clear winner in the group travel space — or really even a clear front-runner, so the key to success starts with offering a better user interface. Most players out there stink in this regard, and simultaneous or co-browsing is still a relatively new concept, so the challenge is to give users a co-browsing experience that’s simple and easy to use. On top of that, Flights With Friends is focusing on viral growth and marketing to its audience at the moment they need this type of service. On the viral end, the co-founders are working on changing the way the site integrates with Facebook so that people who want their friends to know they’re planning a trip can help promote the service. Killion says they’ve erred on the side of privacy in the first version of the site and are now looking to add more sharing options. Flights With Friends bootstrapped its way through its four-month beta run — which attracted over 10,000 users — supplementing that with some revenue earned from lead-gen for flight, hotel and activity bookings. Now that it’s emerged from beta, the co-founders say they’re going to begin raising some angel funding to beef up staff and pursue further partnerships. And, , it’s critical for companies to offer a mobile experience. Flights With Friends is working on an iPad app, which the co-founders hope to launch in February, before developing for apps for the iPhone and for Android. It also helps that this isn’t the first time around the merry-go-round for the co-founders. Killion founded Flights With Friends after serving as VP of Product for . The serial entrepreneur got his start as the eighth employee at The Geek Squad in the late nineties (which now has nearly 25K employees and was bought by Best Buy), before founding maccontrol (which sold to Pegasus) among others, while doing stints at Coupa, Yelp and Apple. Killion is joined by Arthur Klepchukov, an early engineer at Votizen and founder of Outspokes and Slipstream. Find Flights With Friends , and let us know what you think. |
What Games Are: Playing In Interesting Times | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | It’s no great revelation that financial reports can be arcane and hard to interpret. Everything is balance, trends, pointers and a series of evolving narratives that subtly dance with one another across a crowded floor. There are always new angles to consider, players in the mix and potential directions to be taken. Yet despite all that, meta-trends do emerge, larger tides that lift all ships or founder them. A few years ago social gaming was that meta-trend, and it produced a flurry of activity in investment and acquisition as the potential of getting games in front of hundreds of millions of users for low cost struck a chord with investors and VCs alike. At other times everything seems in flux, and that seems to be the prevailing mood at the start of 2013. Last year may have seen a considerable degree of mergers and acquisitions (although the number of transactions were down 27 percent, their average size was up 60 percent), but it’s not clear what any of them are supposed to mean. This is a theme also being reflected in reports, such as the executive summary of Digi-Capital’s latest . This year the company seems to think that games are all a bit up in the air and is strongly advising caution. With a billion dollars less invested in social games (a 94 percent drop!) and Kickstarter only representing around 6 percent of all investment activity, the overriding theme is transition, changing dynamics and, well, chaos. Anecdotally, this is also being reflected on the development side. Studios are very hedgy about their prospects for 2013 and adopting a wait-and-see stance for every new platform announcement. Everyone wants to know where to spend their development money most effectively, and nobody seems able to tell them. Given how social has stalled, mobile seems packed to the gills, tablet is increasing and cloud gaming went bust it’s hard to be confident about where games will go in the next 12 months. As the proverb goes, we seem to be living in interesting times. Yet I think there are still some beacons to navigate and sharp rocks to avoid. Here are five examples: The more I read about , the more I’m convinced it’s a ticking time bomb. Not only does it open the door for all manner of creepy PR disaster stories, it will make users (i.e. those who don’t pay attention to the tech press) very uncertain about just how safe they are online. It might look great in demo, but nobody actually needs to search their social graph that often for information. Recruiters, stalkers and daters, on the other hand, will. Not only is it a boondoggle, it’s a potential user killer, and it reflects a deep lack of focus in the company. The general problem seems to be that while a scrappy startup attitude propelled Facebook to massive success, Zuckerberg and his team seem to be struggling to define what a mature Facebook looks like. He has his billion users but isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do with them. For Facebook games none of this augurs well. Likewise the recent platform change behind a cloud of ranks and inferred positions is a deeply suspect move. Not only does it allow for vanity metrics to go unchallenged, it means developers will be considerably less able to conduct market research. And discovery remains a big issue. The App Center has largely failed to shift the needle quantitatively or qualitatively, and so Facebook as a platform languishes and continues to be a game of who can afford to pay the most in customer acquisition. While I certainly don’t expect Facebook to stop serving games, over the last 24 months it has become the new Yahoo Games or Real.com. It’s a dead zone and really only of interest to those who want to burn a lot of money to acquire users. With all due respect to Zynga, something is very wrong with a platform when the top games on its charts are still the same old poker, a middling sequel to FarmVille and a bunch of very tired-looking content underneath that. It means it’s over. “Mid-core” is a term that has gained some currency in industry circles in the last 12 months as a kind of halfway house between “hardcore” (Call of Duty/World of Warcraft types) and “casual” (everybody else, but usually with an inferred slant – meaning women). To be mid-core implies that the previously casual player is on the road toward becoming a PC or console gamer, or is developing instincts in that direction, or that a previously hardcore gamer is disengaging. In theory the mid-core is a space that companies like Kabam and KixEye occupy, and Zynga has made moves in the space as well, and it’s supposed to be the social market that explodes next. I think not. While I have no doubt that many ex-console gamers now play games like 10000000 or on their iPads because of greater convenience, there is no mass audience of casual players slowly levelling up to become proper gamers. As far as we know, KixEye’s War Commander is a well-performing game in terms of ARPPU but – up until Facebook killed transparency on its reporting this week – has only ever had maybe half a million daily active users. That’s a good number for a respectable niche of a market, but nowhere near “explosive.” While I do think that there is a , mid-core games are not it. Generation-two games need to be much bolder in their vision, frankly, and focus on delivering genuine value through social connection. More than we are currently seeing across the whole spectrum of social gameplay. At some point the basic roleplaying and simplified strategy-raiding games just wear out, and mid-core really is really just an elaboration of those basic principles. I’ve been . Although many analysts expect Zynga to partially become a gambling company in the hope of returning to explosive success, I don’t think it’s going to work out. Not only is the farming game audience different to the roulette and slots audience, there are already hundreds of providers in that space. It’s simply not the kind of virgin market as that which Zynga was able to so successfully inhabit in 2008-2009 by being smarter with the platform levers than everyone else. It’s crowded, and in many cases the core idea is already out there and being flogged to death. Some of the players in this space, from Jackpot Joy to King.com, are intimately familiar with how to deliver socialised gambling products. It varies from country to country, but in the UK television has been awash with companies advertising Slots, Bingo, Poker, Blackjack, live betting and so on for years, and those providers have likely saturated most of the customers that would have been prime targets already. There are also many providers on Facebook offering social slots and the like, and many more who’ve found that that has become an overly stuffed market. Other than the fact that it has large user numbers in its network, I don’t really see what Zynga brings to social gambling that isn’t already there. Zynga’s been stuck in a pattern of sequel-ing and trying to hold onto the users that it has for a while, with many pundits predicting that they may even decide to go back to private in the not-too-distant future. How that is supposed to be rescued by yet-another-Bingo title is beyond me, and as Zynga is the bellwether in this market the same question applies to other providers, too. It is universally expected that Sony and Microsoft will launch new PlayStation and Xbox hardware this year, and has it that both will make very large announcements at the Game Developers Conference at the end of March. Nintendo has already launched its next-generation machine too, the Wii U, but it seems as though it’s unlikely to be the smash hit that the Wii was (although with Nintendo you never know). The troubling aspect for all three is how they increasingly seem out of step with the much more fluid app-style market that mobile devices have driven, both in terms of hardware iterations and how they sell software. In the seven years since it launched, for example, the Xbox 360 has remained largely the same beast. And yet Apple has managed to launch six iterations of the iPhone and five iterations of the iPad (including the mini). Furthermore, the number of companies who are able to provide software for these premium machines continues to drop. With , eyes are looking to the other second-tier publishers like Capcom, Ubisoft, Square Enix and Take Two and asking how long they can expect to play at this level. The question of whether there will be enough games to satisfy all three platforms is becoming very real, as is the question of whether it will effectively become a two-horse race soon. Finally there are the questions of cost, inflated expectations and whether ultimately the console business is on a path to becoming entirely vertical. There’s a sentiment among developers who work outside the walled gardens of the console that these platforms just do not understand what the app and service mentalities have done to games in the last few years, and instead keep trying to deliver premium retail propositions in a world that doesn’t care about that so much. Certainly the precipitous drop in retail sales of console games combined with public market valuation of the console sector (again according to Digi-Capital) seems to reflect that sentiment. And yet the only messages coming out of Console Towers are about grand visions, huge technologies, massive Blu-ray discs, roll-up media services and $60 price tags for games. This is why I think 2013 may actually be the year of the microconsole. Small devices like the Ouya and the are threatening to do to the console market what the netbook did to the laptop market. They’re focused, open, mostly Android-powered and fundamentally being driven by app thinking rather than hulking retail propositions. They promise to be cheap, nimble, open to develop for and to have free-to-play games. Nobody’s close to saying that there’s an obvious winner in this space yet, and it feels as though it probably needs a large backer to step in and legitimise it. Samsung perhaps. Or perhaps fulfilling the eternal threat of something to do with the Apple TV will really kick microconsoles into high gear. However the prospect that a game console might return to its roots as a dumb machine that displays games on your TV, which small studios can write and run games on much as they have on PC, social, mobile and now tablet is incredibly exciting. Whereas Gormenghast-sized beast machines that don’t know whether they want to be game, TV, Internet, social, music or movies boxes? The question not being asked is whether anyone really wants that machine at all. Why else do you think Ouya raised $8.9 million out of thin air on Kickstarter? Speaking of Kickstarter, PC games had 73 percent of the volume of videogame crowdfunding in 2012 and 63 percent of the value. This far outstrips any other platform or type of game (with the possible exception of tabletop games). At the same time much of the enthusiast gaming press and communities are of the opinion that the PC is still the prime game platform going into 2013. Many have concluded that tablets are neat, but not yet ready for serious play. PC gaming action also continues to aggregate around Steam, and whatever Valve may be doing with hardware. And while I maintain that the Windows 8 Store will prove to be disruptive to the PC gaming space given time ( despite its many woes), what’s clear is that the gamer is still in love with the mouse and keyboard. So if they are supposed to all be going post-PC, it doesn’t look as though anyone has convinced them as to why yet. Nor does it look like anyone in the near future is going to do so, perhaps not even (for the first time in living memory) console makers. They still love their high-end gaming rigs and their sense that PC is where indie games thrive. They love that quirky sense of openness, and the notion that their machines are where “proper” games live. All of this means that, despite the tech blog narrative saying otherwise, most of the marketing story successes in games are coming out of PC land. MMO playing is still largely happening in PC land. Weird hardware like the and the Razer laptops are still appealing most directly to PC land. And here’s the kicker: If the PC does shrink as a market to the point that it really only becomes about Alienware and similar machines specifically tailored for power use, the PC gamer and game developer is perfectly fine with that. They do not care in the least whether there’s a PC in every home: For them a gaming PC is still considered a pride purchase, a thing of love rather than a word processor with Internet. And I think they’ll still be around next year, and the year after that. And so on. In Digi-Capital’s executive summary, the advice is about acquisition opportunities, exits or investment opportunities. However, the tone across all sectors is very tentative. Be selective, avoid big moves, think limited or organic. The phrase “ ” pops up again and again. All of which essentially means “hold onto your hat.” For outer markets (by which I mean those involved in casual, light, social and so on) this is a sentiment that I find myself agreeing with. For inner markets, not so much. As a lot of the more peripheral plays rise and fall quickly, the more focused companies at the centre who offer games to those who already have an interest continues to rise. It may be a very complicated time for those who have built businesses largely with eyeballs and revenue in mind first, but it’s also a time when . The difference is increasingly not between one sector over another, but between passion and novelty, dedicated audience versus idle distraction. Increasingly the latter is looking troubled. |
Senator John Cornyn Wants Answers: Did U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Aim To ‘Make An Example’ Of Aaron Swartz? | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | It’s been one week since , the prominent programmer and digital activist who took his own life as he was for computer fraud after he allegedly used the network at MIT to illegally download a large cache of scientific journals from . Since then, a number of people — including Swartz’s family, friends, and longtime colleagues — Massachusetts’ U.S. Attorney was overzealous in her prosecution of Swartz’s case, and how this may have impacted Swartz’s state of mind leading up to his death. And now those questions have escalated to the legislative level. On Friday , the Republican Senator from Texas, to United States Attorney General demanding answers on the “prosecutorial conduct” surrounding Aaron Swartz’s case — specifically, whether Ortiz’s office handled things appropriately. One of the key questions Cornyn asks is whether the punishment that was threatened in the Swartz case — as many as 35 years in prison — was proportional to his alleged crime. He also asks Holder whether the U.S. Attorney’s intention was to “make an example” of Swartz. It bears mention that Cornyn, who was once an early sponsor of SOPA, does not take a soft line on digital crime: He has that “stealing content is theft, plain and simple.” Nevertheless, he has serious questions about how aggressive the government should be in cases such as Swartz’s. It goes without saying that this is an incredibly unfortunate and tragic situation all around. But one potentially positive aspect is that it seems to be sparking a very important discussion about what should be considered a crime in the digital age, and how infractions that do occur should be punished. Here is the of Cornyn’s letter: January 18, 2013 The Honorable Eric Holder
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20530 Dear Attorney General Holder: Like many Americans, I was saddened to learn last week of the death of Aaron Swartz. Mr. Swartz was, among other things, a brilliant technologist and a committed activist for the causes in which he believed – including, notably, the freedom of information. His death, at the young age of twenty-six, was tragic. As you are doubtless aware, Mr. Swartz was facing an aggressive prosecution by the Department of Justice when he took his own life. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts accused him of breaking into the computer networks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading without authorization thousands of academic articles from a subscription service. While the subscription service did not support a prosecution, in July 2011 the U.S. Attorney’s office indicted him on four counts of fraud and computer crimes, charges that reportedly could have resulted in up to 35 years imprisonment and a $1 million dollar fine. This past September, the U.S. Attorney’s office filed a superseding indictment charging Mr. Swartz with thirteen felony counts and the prospect of even longer imprisonment and greater fines. Mr. Swartz’s case raises important questions about prosecutorial conduct: First, on what basis did the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts conclude that her office’s conduct was “appropriate?” Did that office, or any office within the Department, conduct a review? If so, please identify that review and supply its contents. Second, was the prosecution of Mr. Swartz in any way retaliation for his exercise of his rights as a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act? If so, I recommend that you refer the matter immediately to the Inspector General. Third, what role, if any, did the Department’s prior investigations of Mr. Swartz play in the decision of with which crimes to charge him? Please explain the basis for your answer. Fourth, why did the U.S. Attorney’s office file the superseding indictment? Fifth, when the U.S. Attorney’s office drafted the indictment and the superseding indictment, what consideration was given to whether the counts charged and the associated penalties were proportional to Mr. Swartz’s alleged conduct and its impact upon victims? Sixth, was it the intention of the U.S. Attorney and/or her subordinates to “make an example” of Mr. Swartz? Please explain. Finally, the U.S. Attorney has blamed the “severe punishments authorized by Congress” for the apparent harshness of the charges Mr. Swartz faced. Does the Department of Justice give U.S. Attorneys discretion to charge defendants (or not charge them) with crimes consistent with their view of the gravity of the wrongdoing in a specific case? I appreciate your prompt and thorough answers to these questions. Sincerely, JOHN CORNYN United States Senator A public memorial service for Aaron Swartz is being held in New York City today from 4pm-6pm ET. You can watch a . |
Every Company Is Up For Disruption, So Keep Your Products Simple | Victor Belfor | 2,013 | 1 | 19 |
A friend of mine told me recently that he closed a $240,000 account. A competitor (let’s call it BigCo) was bidding for the business. I doubt that BigCo even considered my friend’s company (let’s call it SmallCo) a direct competitor. BigCo is a major player in their space and it raised a lot of money from good VCs and has a strong customer base. SmallCo’s product doesn’t have a tenth of BigCo’s features. And yet in spite of that, SmallCo won the account. Actually, it was because of that. As products mature, companies continue to compete in heated battles with their competitors by adding more features and more functionality. Investors and shareholders want to see steady revenue growth, so prices creep up. Yet, the truth of the matter is that a lot of customers need only a fraction of a product’s capabilities. In fact, many of them would prefer fewer features because extra features tend to make products clunky and difficult to use. Still, companies become feature-producing machines. As a result, what often happens is some small company comes out with a product that’s just good enough and just for the lowest tier of customers and BigCos start losing business. BigCos console themselves by saying the customers weren’t all that profitable and that it’s too expensive to serve them. And they walk away and focus upstream. SmallCos gets a foothold and releases a new set of features. And the process repeats. There are hundreds of examples. PCs disrupted mainframes exactly this way. Japanese cars and electronics disrupted American ones, only to be disrupted later by Korean companies and now Chinese companies. Merrill Lynch was disrupted by Schwab and then E-Trade. Phone companies by Skype. Visa and Mastercard by Square. Cisco was disrupted by WebEx, , then screwed it up, then got disrupted by Citrix and LogMeIn. Smartphone cameras disrupted Nikon and Kodak. The process of Low End Disruption is beautifully described in Clayton Christensen’s series of books: , and . If you haven’t read them, you should. What’s amazing about these books is not only how important their conclusions are but how well researched they are. These are academic works of the highest quality (I should know. I studied under Jeff Dyer, who co-authored “The Innovator’s DNA”). So why is this relevant to the deal that I mentioned above? Because I believe the process starts much sooner now. Companies that are barely out of the gate are getting disrupted. The rapid pace of innovation we are experiencing, plus the low costs of starting a company and the reasonable availability of venture capital, add up to a large number of startups fighting for survival in very close quarters. I found the following perceptual map of photo sharing services a couple of years ago. There are a lot of companies. But just think how many more aren’t on the map: iPhoto, 500px, Tumblecloud, Skitch and ACD. And never mind Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All of them are differentiated – all of them have something unique – and yet I doubt that too many customers use more than one or two. And that’s when the trade-off happens. In each segment, customers tend to pick the one service that addresses their most salient need the best and other needs just well enough. Those who want to manage albums get Picasa. Share with friends? Facebook. Mobile? Instagram etc., etc., etc. And now we have come full circle. In my view, companies of all sizes need to think about “good enough” competitors. So what can be done about this? There’s one other thing you should do as part of your go-to-market strategy. You need to very clearly identify an underserved (or over-served) market segment and make it your own. If you can’t find one that fits, INVENT one! At Influitive for example, we define our focus as “advocate mobilization.” And if that sounds strange, just remember that only a handful of years ago when Eloqua was founded, “marketing automation” sounded strange. Yet today, it is a whole industry with such great companies as Eloqua, Marketo, and ActOn leading the charge. Perhaps there’s an industry segment with your company name on it. |
Facebook’s New Employee Swag: A Low-Key Hoodie With A Lofty Hidden Message | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | Most clothing items companies give out to their employees make it outwardly clear where the person works ( .) It makes sense and all, but sometimes you don’t want to be a walking advertisement for your employer, especially if you’re in Silicon Valley and work at one of the most buzzed-about companies in the tech world. So Facebook’s new employee swag, pictured above on an engineer at the company, looks pretty awesome. It’s a hoodie, , but it’s completely unbranded on the outside. On the inside, there’s a screen print of a Facebook’s : “Making the world more open and connected.” I admit, that lofty-sounding can be a little groan-inducing. But even so, the juxtaposition of wearing a hoodie (even if it’s an expensive one) while ostensibly doing world-changing work is a fun mix of high and low. It’s also a big part of the charm of today’s tech culture overall. |
Gillmor Gang: It’s Only Love | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — have some fun with Facebook’s new GraphSearch and advances in medical techniques. We all agree that when Facebook says it’s not about search, well, it’s all about search. Should Google be quaking in its boots as @scobleizer shows the Jets and Giants parking lot in the post season that is Google+, or does Foursquare get its oxygen cut off by the Facebook hoards looking for a good restaurant? GraphSearch is notable for being the first Facebook Beta launch, unless you count every one of the privacy relaunches. We have some fun at Google’s expense, but the reality is that the winners — Google, Apple, Facebook — are crowding out the losers in the battle for screentime. Finally, the Gang calls on @kevinmarks to honor the memory of , an old soul gone all too young. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dannysullivan, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
EyeEm Photo App Snaps At Instagram’s Heels In iTunes Free App Charts | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | , the Berlin based social photo and filters app, has been snapping at the heels of photo giant Instagram in the U.S. iOS app charts this week. A week ago they were No. 242 in the photo and video charts, but at one point this week they were No. 2 behind YouTube. Yesterday they held the No. 20 spot in the free app chart overall, ahead of Instagram at No. 22. The movement was picked up by social photography blogger after he checked . It will take a lot to challenge Instagram, but such hyper growth indicates that users are hunting around for alternatives to the photo app. EyeEm appears to have achieved this through pure word of mouth, and no doubt the Instagram ToS backlash has had an affect as well. Competing app also recently claimed to have had a lift from the Instagram ToS debacle. EyeEm took the No. 6 spot in the photo/video category in the U.S. app charts on Dec. 20. The furore around Instagram’s change in Terms of Service happened three days before. However, as German tech news site Netzwertig , the app sunk to 232 on Jan 12. But on 13 Jan EyeEm leapt to No. 9, eventually getting to No. 2 behind YouTube. Co-founder Florian Meissner told me they’d seen a burst of interest springing organically from “some high school in Texas” and spreading across the U.S. He said he’d even seen new users starting to post screen shots of the EyeEm app actually on Instagram and Twitter. “We’re currently seeing sign ups a day in six figures” he said. EyeEm released a recently saying they were committed to users owning their own photos forever. The startup also doubled their Twitter followers over the past week from . “Our game plan has not changed: building the best and most beautiful photo community in the world that becomes profitable,” said Meissner. Meanwhile some of EyeEm’s very dedicated core users – many of whom are photography aficionados – have become perturbed at the influx of teenagers posting ‘selfies’. I guess that’s what happens when you go mainstream. |
Mega Launches Its Cloud Storage And File Sharing Service As ‘The Privacy Company’, ‘Thousands Of Registrations Per Minute’ | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | Kim Dotcom’s new secure file-storage and file-sharing venture has now officially launched on a surge of interest. The timing of the launch, 6:48 a.m. New Zealand time on January 20, coincides with the one-year anniversary of the after the closure of Megaupload, another file-sharing and file-storage site that was seized by U.S. authorities for copyright violations. [tweet https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292689727474266112 align=’center’] Meanwhile, some 10 minutes after the launch, it looks like the site is generating a surge of initial interest. [tweet https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292692300562321408 align=’center’] Later, Dotcom that sign-ups were coming at a rate of thousands per minute. The site opened up for , and now everyone can go to Mega to sign up and use the service, with a basic, free offering of 50GB of storage, plus three pricing tiers with additional storage and bandwidth capacity. This is being resold by partners of Mega, which include Instra, as well as EuroDNS and Digiweb. In the hours leading up to launch — as Kim Dotcom this kooky pop video by Jayme Guitierrez called “Death to the Dinosaur”, featuring Kim Dotcom — there was some speculation about whether the site would make it, with the holding page timing out unless you typed in the address using the “https” secure prefix. All seems to be working fine so far, however. Mega Ltd, the company that runs Mega, plans to expand its offering in a few months with the for streaming music. Think of this as laying the groundwork for that effort. There is an event taking place to celebrate the launch in about 13 hours. We’re aiming to run a stream of that event here on TC so watch this space. |
Circa Raises $750K From Group Including Lerer Ventures To Revolutionize Mobile News Delivery | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | We’ve learned today that has raised another $750K on top of the $900K raised previously. The company launched its app of the same name, which allows you to follow an often-changing story in bite-sized chunks, only three months ago. A few more big names have joined in this up-round, including: Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Menlo Talent Fund, Alex Bard and Eamon Leonard. Those investors join individual contributors from its previous 900K raised, including Dave Morin, David Karp and Josh Spear, as well as firms such as Quotidian Ventures and SK Ventures. When I spoke to Circa’s co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan today, he told me that he’s extremely happy about the growth of its userbase as well as how the app itself is coming along. The team , which included some design and usability tweaks that Galligan is specifically proud of. Circa currently employs seven non-editorial staffers and 12 others who manage the current news categories within the app. Regarding the funding, Partner and former CEO of Huffington Post, Eric Hippeau, had this to say: We think Circa has developed the right technology and persona to capture a large audience looking for their mobile devices as their main source of news. Growth is on the horizon, as far as what types of content you’ll be able to find within Circa. Galligan tells us “Right now, we’re exploring what categories that we want to go into next,” mentioning such verticals as Business and Sports. When thinking about what makes Circa different, Galligan says if you think of CNN as something that has nailed TV coverage of news and Huffington Post as a publication that does well on the web, Circa can be that application for mobile news delivery. Circa allows you to follow an ongoing story, like Lance Armstrong admitting that he doped during his cycling career. It updates as individual bits of information come in, rather than making you read an entirely new story each and every time. Galligan also says that Circa has been approached by large news outlets that are interested in working with his company to adopt its format. With the money, it seems like Circa will continue to hire and work on perfecting what it believes will be a format that publications will want to pay closer attention to as time goes on. People who read the news on their mobile devices don’t have a lot of time, and can only read things in short chunks; that’s why services like Twitter and Facebook are so popular. Circa allows you to jump in and out of a larger news story without feeling completely overwhelmed. Galligan didn’t give me any specific numbers to share, as is still young, but says that downloads are in the “few hundred thousands” since launch. |
Backed Or Whacked: Smartphones That Light Up Your Life | Ross Rubin | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | Last week’s Backed or Whacked on devices that can remotely provide input to smartphones; this week, we venture beyond the bounds of simple information retrieval and toward illuminated products that can actually be controlled by one’s pocket companion, particularly in the home. (Note: Starting with this column, Indiegogo Flexible Funding campaigns that do not or are not on track to meet their funding goals will be considered “whacked.”) A seven-pound framed, open-source 32-LED grid-equipped display that presents Android-slung images over a mirror finish, PIXEL is the kind of MakerShed fare tech art project that brings us back to Kickstarter’s roots. PIXEL transfers images from an Android phone by Bluetooth and includes a proximity feature for delivering a map detailing the whereabouts of Snow White to those who approach it. With about 40 days left to go in the campaign, Kickstarter backers have seen the founders’ big picture, smashing through tiers of early-adopter rewards to contribute more than $30,000, nearly four times the initial $8,000 funding goal. Those who seek Lite Brite-quality art for their walls can still get in on the first production run for $229, a modest discount from the final retail price. Those who have seen the future know that it is illuminated by light bulbs capable of emitting lots of trippy lighting schemes. Frankly, iLumi didn’t have to be a very good product and probably would have made its meager $1,000 funding goal. Indeed, at $15,303 raised with two weeks left to go, the campaign was a far cry from the more than a million dollars that last year’s Kickstarter phenom bagged in those dark days before Backed or Whacked. And even so, iLumi admitted this was its second time back at the till trying to get its multi-colored lighting source off the ground. Unlike LIFX, which is based on a hybrid of Wi-Fi and the Zigbee-friendly 802.15.4 mesh network, iLumi uses Bluetooth 4.0 to issue its spectrum-altering commands from your smartphone. Like the LIFX, it can sync your pulsing bulbs to a music track so you can be “Blinded by the Light” as you hear it. Alas, iLumi’s time to shine stood in contrast to another Indiegogo project that closed in late January, the RoboSmart, which raised only $4,107 of its $65,000 goal. Part of that Bluetooth bulb’s challenge may have been a lower wattage equivalent (40 watt) versus iLumi’s brighter alternative (100 watt). On the other hand, RoboSmart includes a proximity sensor, a more practical capability in a smart light bulb than music sync. The RoboSmart team has taken its campaign video private but should hold its head high. After all, it will collect more funds from its Flexible Funding campaign than iLumi would have had it only met its (second) funding goal. Billed as “one device to rule them all,” Mauz seeks “Tolkiens” of your affection to interact with a range of more sophisticated light-emitting devices, namely your PC and television. Affixing the little Mauz dongle to your iPhone turns it into a mouse that can be used with your Mac; rotate it 90 degrees and the surface becomes a multi-touch trackpad. But the real magic occurs when the iPhone leaves the surface where it can act as a gesture-driven motion controller. You can even leave it on your couch armrest and flip through content options by hovering and gesturing your hand over the phone. It’s all slick stuff, but the team hasn’t shared much about what exactly is in Mauz that enables the functionality since many smartphones already contain the gyroscopes and Bluetooth to control other peripherals. Indeed, the over-device hand navigation gestures are powered by user interface company , which demos those features working with a Mauz-free iPad. This Mauz, which backers would receive for $45, is having trouble collecting its cheese, though. With about 40 days to go, the campaign has cleared only about 10 percent of its $150,000 funding goal. |
Your Database Is Probably Terrible | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 1 | 19 | Databases aren’t sexy, but they’re the absolute foundation of the tech world, the ground on which all of its edifices are constructed. You probably use a hundred every day. At . They’re like the Spice in : “S/he who controls the database, controls the universe!” Well, don’t look now, but that universe is beginning to quake. In the beginning was the flat file, and lo, it was pretty awful, so help us . Then came SQL and Larry Ellison, who inexplicably became the world’s sixth-wealthiest man on the back of the thoroughly mediocre . (I once spent several months as an Oracle developer. It was the longest several months of .) For a long while the relational-database triumvirate of Oracle, IBM’s DB2, and Microsoft’s SQL Server ruled unchallenged, with Oracle first among equals. Then came the open-source revolution, and and . (As well as SQLite, which runs on mobile devices. But everyone knew 10 years ago that that was just a niche market. ?) Then Web 2.0 hit, and it turned out that relational databases did not scale well. Oh, they were fine up to a point. But when the whole world starts hitting your server? Your server falls over. Facebook still runs on MySQL, but they have to jump through many (expensive) to do so. Same with . Reddit . Google tackled this problem before anyone else, as usual, with its database, which scaled brilliantly…at the cost of several quirks, including forbidding more than one inequality operator per query. (For instance, if you have a database of “boxes,” you can search for boxes with “length greater than 5” or “width greater than 3″…but not both at the same time. I’m actually very fond of BigTable, which I’ve used fairly extensively, but I have on multiple occasions found this infuriating.) This ushered in the age of . , , arguably , etc: They scaled like crazy! And they were really easy to use! Unfortunately, they had to sacrifice a few things that relational databases were good at. Like transactional integrity. You could have a database that scaled really well, or you could have (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability. Trust me, these are all important things.) But you couldn’t have both. Everyone knew that. Engineering is a question of optimizing compromises, that’s all. You always have to compromise. Everyone knows that. Well. everyone. It turned out that within Google, there were a whole lot of people who didn’t think too much of BigTable and its limitations. So they went and built , a relational database that doesn’t just scale, but scales across the . Meanwhile, was attacking the problem from one end, creating a datastore that is , while was making a relational database that can happily and seamlessly scale horizontally as you add more servers. (As of this week they launched on , too.) Database admins are famously conservative. Which makes sense. You don’t want to mess with your data. Again, it’s the ground on which everything else is built. And once you’ve gone and built an entire system upon a database, the last thing you want to do is migrate to another one. But at the same time, DB technology has been advancing by leaps and bounds, especially of late. So the database(s) you’re using at your workplace? They’re probably not the best available; in fact, they’re probably pretty bad, relatively speaking; and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon. It’s food for thought the next time you expect some new technology to thoroughly revolutionize the world just because it’s better than all its competition. Most of the world doesn’t want to be revolutionized. Most of the world likes its databases just fine. You can’t convince them to change; you have to them to it. |
null | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 10 | null |
Unlocking Your Phone Is Now Illegal, But What Does That Mean For You? | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | All the salacious headlines are (mostly) true — as of today, you can’t unlock a carrier-subsidized smartphone on your own before the contract associated with it runs out without technically running afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Granted, I’d wager that the number of people who faithfully stick to their multi-year wireless contracts far exceeds the number of people who would unlock their phones and bail, but this is still a damned lousy turn of events for all you proponents of phone freedom out there (myself included). But how did this actually happen? To more clearly understand the change that went into effect today, we have to flash back to the heady days of 2010. In late July of that year, the that it had won three big exemptions to the DMCA. One of them dealt with the legality of using copyrighted footage from DVDs for noncommercial works of “criticism or comment,” but yet another exemption made it legal to jailbreak a phone, and the final was actually the renewal of an existing exemption for (you guessed it) unlocking phones for use on other networks. Everything was copacetic until this past October, when the U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress spent time reviewing some of those exceptions made to the DMCA. Geekier endeavors like jailbreaking or rooting your devices are still totally kosher, but after extensive review the original exemption for unlocking phones was overturned, noting the ability for users to unlock their own phones for use on other networks just wasn’t necessary anymore given the perceived ease of obtaining either a pre-unlocked phone or a carrier-sanctioned way to unlock one: The [Register of Copyrights] concluded after a review of the statutory factors that an exemption to the prohibition on circumvention of mobile phone computer programs to permit users to unlock “legacy” phones is both warranted and unlikely to harm the market for such programs. At the same time, in light of carriers’ current unlocking policies and the ready availability of new unlocked phones in the marketplace, the record did not support an exemption for newly purchased phones. The decision goes on to say that, considering “precedents in copyright law,” a 90 day transitional period would be allowed so people would have time to unlock their phones before the exemption kicked in. That period has just run out. The full text of the Librarian’s report (the section on unlocking starts on page 16), and after taking a few moments to glance through it, the amount of lobbying and discussion that went into the process of drawing a conclusion is pretty amazing. As you might expect, one of the most vocal proponents of axing the exemption was the CTIA, a wireless trade group that counts every major U.S. wireless carrier (not to mention a whole host of others) among its members. It’s no shock to see the CTIA — and, by extension, the carriers — get a little worked up over this. You see, shelling out a mere $99 and signing a piece of paper may seem like a trivial action for the person actually doing it, but the carriers view the situation a little differently. They sell those phones with hefty subsidies in hopes that they’ll make up the difference (and then some) over the two years a customer is contractually bound. In this case, the CTIA’s argument basically boils down one of money: “the practice of locking cell phones is an essential part of the wireless industry’s predominant business model.” Put another way, unlocking a phone can be considered one of the first steps in jamming up a carrier’s revenue stream, and they certainly don’t want that happening too often. In this case, carriers get some additional protection without inconveniencing their customers en masse — not a bad deal for them. So yes, unlocking your phone without your carrier’s explicit approval is technically . But let’s not forget what this particular change doesn’t mean — the police most likely aren’t going to knock down your door because you felt the compulsion to free your phone from your carrier’s shackles. It also doesn’t mean that the stash of old phones nestled in your drawer can’t be unlocked — so-called “legacy” devices are exempt from silly change, so feel free to take your old phones and show them a little bit of freedom. You can still buy unlocked phones from eBay and Amazon like you always could, and hey, some phones sold by carriers are unlocked right out of the box anyway. But all those caveats raise an even weightier question: what will actually happen if you unlock your phone? For now, it’s the sort of question that comes without any clear answers — if anyone, it’s the carriers who have the ability to detect and crack down on unsanctioned unlocked phones, but so far none of them seem very keen on addressing the matter. I’ve reached out to representatives from AT&T and T-Mobile, the two most prominent GSM carriers in the country (and therefore the two carriers that are mostly likely to deal with the issue of unlocked phones) and asked what would happen if either carrier had determined that one of their customers had illicitly unlocked their phone. Surprise, surprise — I was met with canned responses and unsatisfying non-answers at every turn. It seems they’re angling to keep that particular card close to their chests for now. What’s also unclear is whether or not intrepid unlockers (and the folks that make unlocking tools and services) will soon face any legal ramifications. Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Mitch Stoltz told earlier today that the U.S. Copyright Office is “taking away a shield that unlockers could use in court if they get sued.” The key word in that sentence is “if” — while I doubt we’ll be hearing about many unlocking-related lawsuits in the weeks and months to come, there’s little denying that this turn of events has left more than a few people wondering about what it really means to purchase and own something. Some have already made their discontent known; a imploring the Librarian of Congress to rescind the decision has already made the rounds on Reddit and Hacker News, and racked up nearly 15,000 signatures in two days. To its credit, the CTIA has painted a clearer picture of the potential legal penalties of unlocking a phone on its . Sadly, those penalties aren’t inconsequential: Civil penalties are based on the carrier’s actual damages and any additional profits of the violator, or a court can award statutory damages of not less than $200 or more than $2,500 per individual act. Criminal penalties are even more severe: any person convicted of violating section 1201 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain (1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and (2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense. |
Truth, Money, Right, Wrong | Michael Arrington | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | I wrote about the ongoing CNET editorial independence issue. I said that the editors and journalists at CNET were part of the problem, and suggested that they either publish their (assumed) dissent, or resign, or both. A conversation began in the comments of that post, with some people saying that it isn’t reasonable to expect people to resign. From Danny Sullivan: I think a lot of CNET staffers probably aren’t resigning, Mike, because they have families to support, as well as themselves. It’s not exactly a great economy out there. I think what Greg did was very brave, but not everyone is that brave nor even able to make that type of move. Rof Hof: I don’t blame people in today’s publishing business for wanting to line up work first. Not everybody can be sure of being able to support their families, and when they’ve been screwed by their employer, they shouldn’t be expected to *immediately* screw themselves too. But don’t be surprised to see more leaving. There were similar comments on Twitter. These comments were often combined with statements my position wasn’t valid because I have made some money selling my business. As just one example, David Carnoy, Executive Editor at CNET, : @arrington In your post about @CNET you neglected to disclose $$$ you made from selling out to AOL. Easy to walk when you had your BIG EXIT. And finally, some people have said that it’s only reasonable for people to resign if they have another job lined up. Hunter Walk, in a comment to the original post, says: Let’s see other journalists stand with their brethren and start a “free the CNET staffers” fund that can be tapped by any CNET journalist who wants to walk away but needs the money to do so. Mike, I’ll match up to the first $500 of your contribution :) I think some of these are valid points and worth exploring. sure it’s easy for me to say they should just quit their jobs when I’m not the one doing it and I may have more financial security than most or all of them. If I worked at CNET, had a family to take care of and had little financial breathing room I cannot say for certain that I’d resign. My family would certainly come first (and second, and third). It’s a fair point. I agree that it would certainly be easier for CNET people to resign if they knew that they had another job waiting for them. Still, I think there are some profound issues to think through that drive to the core of what it means to be a journalist, and these issues are worth exploring. What does it mean to be a journalist? If I have bias here, it isn’t in net worth. It’s that I don’t respect what I’ve called the Priesthood of Journalism. Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality. Among those rules – It doesn’t say or No, journalists hold themselves to a higher standard. Situations like CNET are exactly what journalists are supposed to fight. That’s why we entrust them as the fourth estate. Is the pushback here because we’re just talking about press and not press? What if someone at the New York Times was under express orders not to write about a political or financial scandal? Would we say it’s ok if they were at risk of losing their job and maybe not being able to pay their mortgage? Hell no, we’d consider that reporter as part of the overall conspiracy. “Just following orders” doesn’t cut it there, and the tech press should hold themselves to those same standards. Journalists are supposed to put the people first, even before themselves. Around the world and throughout history journalists to get the truth out. We’re not talking about losing a job and having trouble paying the bills. We’re talking about things like having your . Of course covering the latest tech gadgets isn’t quite the same thing as covering a bloody civil war. It’s not as important, or dangerous. But there is still quite clearly a principle at stake here. If a tech journalist needs financial security before doing what their conscience dictates, I’m not sure they should be calling themselves journalists at all. Would it be ok for a CNET reporter to take a bribe to cover or not cover a certain product? Or what if CBS said “in appreciation of you not leaving after this debacle we want to give you all a 10% spot bonus.” Would that be ok? But what if they really need that bribe or spot bonus? What if they have a sick kid and can’t pay the hospital bills? Is it ok then? To me, every paycheck a CNET reporter receives from here on out is just a bribe. A bribe that they are accepting in exchange for putting up with CBS telling them what they can and cannot say. By staying they are making it easier for companies to do evil in the future. – So to end this I’ll say this. I don’t think CNET reporters are bad people for not quitting, and I quite understand that some of them may not be in any kind of financial position to even consider it. But as this crisis passes, perhaps those that couldn’t make that hard decision should consider if, over the long run, they should continue to call themselves Perhaps a new line of work, one where the public isn’t relying on them, is a better choice. |
The Roger Dubuis Quatuor Watch Attempts To Outfox Gravity With Four Separate Balance Wheels | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf_kkDMZC58&feature=player_embedded] Today’s watch porn comes courtesy of Roger Dubuis, a manufacturer of odd timepieces. Their latest, the Quatour (which kind of sounds like a character from Total Recall), is a watch with four separate escapements that average each other out as the watch is worn. It’s very weird. The watch is absolutely massive – about 48mm from stem to stern – and the weird escapement system is designed to ostensibly improve accuracy. The theory is that when a watch is worn gravity tends to pull down different parts differently. The escapement is the part of the watch that flips back and forth to drive the watch hands forward one tick at a time ( ). To account for gravity, watches spin the escapement 360 degrees. This watch, on the other hand, just has four escapements and a differential gear to “average” their movements. It basically “ticks” four times, making an . You can read a full or just marvel that this thing costs about $400,000 and is limited to 88 pieces. An all-silicon version costs a cool $2 million. |
What Games Are: Games Need Their Nielsens | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | In the age of better metrics for games, some developers take it too far and . This generally leads to trouble. However one of the better aspects of metrics is the idea that you can assess the overall performance of your game against someone else’s. You can know how well you’re really doing, or at least you should be able to. In the screen trade they have done this for a long time through Nielsen ratings and , to the point that audience numbers are a regular part of the critical conversation. Such information is valuable because it shows what seems to work in any given market. Every company in the television market knows where they stand relative to everyone else, and they can segment their efforts accordingly. In the games industry such objectivity has long been absent, and this is because games is a multi-platform business. It’s not just about game developers or publishers fighting it out, but of whole systems striving to be the dominant host of all games. The games business is what the television business would look like if Disney, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox all sold their own TV sets in addition to their own programming. As a result of platforms trying to outdo one another, performance data is often hidden. Sony does not necessarily want to lift the lid on just how poorly (or well) PSHome is doing on a day-to-day basis, for example, because that gives ammunition to Microsoft and Nintendo. Apple does not necessarily want the daily active user count of Rage of Bahamut to be query-able, preferring instead to use relative chart positioning. They don’t want Google to then turn around and show that the game is played more on Android. And vice versa. Rumour may have it that Halo 4 is attracting a lot less concurrent play than previous Halo games but nobody external knows that for sure, and Microsoft isn’t keen to tell us. In the retail space there are some companies like and GFK Chart-track that conduct market research and publish charts. This information often varies per country and sampling method, but it’s seen as trustworthy enough to act as a rough guide to the state of the industry. In the online space, however, there’s almost nothing to compare. There are plenty of companies who provide metric solutions, but these tend to be for internal use only. Just like hardware platforms do (and sometimes for legal reasons as part of the terms-of-service of those platforms), the tendency of publishers is to keep their true numbers secret and only expose their . It’s all too easy to claim you have a million users if you stretch the definition to a million registered email addresses, for example, or how many Facebook likes your page got. Such numbers are generally useless for any kind of analysis because they cannot be validated, and do not conform to any standardised methods for collection. Their only value tends to be as sales points for VC types who might read Techcrunch, or for fuelling Reddit threads. But overall we may as well be using divination sticks for all the good they actually do. This means that our efforts to understand how well the industry is doing only come from incomplete sources like the iOS charts. The Top Grossing chart is particularly popular among game makers, especially those who are fans of free-to-play games. It helps make the argument for certain kinds of games over others, but the data is all relative. Clash of Clans may sit atop the chart, but we don’t know to what extent. Supercell may kindly tell us that the game coins half a million dollars a day, but we don’t know if that performance has sustained. We don’t know on what size of user base. We can’t really verify it. Ideally what is wanted is objective measures of daily active users. Up until very recently there was one platform that provided that information: Facebook. Through services like it was possible to track the MAU and DAU of games as well as their chart positions, and this was very valuable information. In the early days these metrics were key to wowing potential investors as to the size of the market and helped formulate many a business model. They also provided a positive story. You could see where CityVille got over 100 million users, and that information was reasonably objective, which was powerful. Now Facebook has instituted a change that only provides banded information about games (whether they are in a 500K+ MAU game or a 10 million+ game, etc.) and charts. The reasons Facebook cites for doing this are to bring its reporting into line with other platforms like Google Play or Amazon, but it is a deeply disappointing change. Rather than knowing, we are back to guessing and supposing based on our historical understanding of the platform, and over time that will become inaccurate. This means that soon vanity metrics will follow, with studios announcing unverifiable numbers to grab headlines. It feels like a gigantic step backward. Everybody in the industry knows that this sort of thing goes on, and how difficult it makes market research, but nobody wants to fix it for fear of losing face. If one publisher were to start to reveal its numbers then it would be vulnerable to attack from others who had no compunction to do likewise. Nobody wants to be the one who leads with their chin, even if they know that that’s near-sighted thinking. This is why the industry needs someone to solve the problem for it. It needs its own version of Nielsen or BARB, across all platforms. The question is how to do it: Behind closed doors at every major publisher there are accountants and forecasters constantly analysing their own performance and that of their competitors to derive a picture of what’s going on. What will it take to bring them together? Nielsen did it by polling. Samples of customers were asked to record their viewing activity, and this data was then projected and weighted to determine the market size for radio, and then television. Later this technique evolved into distributing meters to a sample size of homes across the United States. For tracking games a similar approach may be needed. Perhaps a company like would be well-placed to create an app that regularly asks players to submit what they are playing. It already has the back-end for this in place, but instead of trying to create a social network of gamers (which has never really taken off), it could be used as a Nielsen equivalent. Or perhaps one of the metric companies could do it. Ideally the place to be would be to convince the industry as a whole to embed some black box code in games to report usage stats directly, but I suspect that’s more of a pipe dream. It’s crazy that in an age where we have the tools to know more about our audience, the industry actively supports deception and hoodwinking. As an industry we should be able to compare the performances of games on tablets versus those in browser, or console, or Steam to further open an honest debate. Otherwise we are just kidding ourselves and making up stories about our games that we want to hear. Better playing through data yo. |
The Silicon Valley Housing Market Is Only Going To Get Crazier | Glenn Kelman | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | Silicon Valley home buyers, I wish we had better news. Prices keep rising, with no end in sight. Across the 20 markets Redfin serves, only Phoenix saw more rapid price increases than the Bay Area. Over the last 12 months, . When the market moves this fast, the appraisals required by a lender reflect last year’s prices, and sellers just take all-cash deals instead — even when another bidder with a mortgage offers more money. Across California, we are starting to see conventional sales handled more like the sale of foreclosures once were, with the home sold as-is. What’s going on? Well by December of 2012, the number of homes for sale across the Bay Area had declined 68 percent from the previous year. Once foreclosures stopped flooding the market, there weren’t enough conventional sellers to take their place. Goaded by very low interest rates, buyers turned out in force. High demand and low supply were why we were so bullish in our . This swing to a seller’s market happened first in California and Arizona, then spread to other parts of the country. Now, the inventory crunch is self-perpetuating, as some homeowners we talk to hesitate to sell for fear they won’t be able to find a place to buy, and even more consider renting out their place instead. So that’s the recent history of Bay Area real estate. But what’s happening in the market right now, and how is it changing? We’ve noticed four trends: 2013 was the first year in the past six to begin with a broad consensus that home prices were again rising, so we expected the year to start with plenty of new listings. But in the first two weeks of January, the inventory problem somehow got worse rather than better, with new listings in the Bay Area falling more than ; much of the drop is due to a whopping 72 percent decline in short sales, where the owner sells for less than she owes on the mortgage. When foreclosures first became scarce in 2012, short sales became the preferred way for banks to clear out troubled loans, but with rising prices and more loan modifications, even short sales are now rapidly disappearing. What this means is that Bay Area real estate is again becoming a free market, where the only people selling are the ones who want to sell. As any East German will tell you, this transition is hard. It’s almost as if homeowners have forgotten how to sell. We expect the supply of homes for sale to increase by the Super Bowl, but if it doesn’t increase a lot, we’re going to have a silent spring, with meager sales gains. 88 percent of the December offers written by Redfin agents for our Bay Area clients faced competition. Inventory is now so scarce that sellers sometimes enjoy a virtual monopoly, as was the case just last week with . Every Redfin agent in the San Francisco office represented a different home-buyer on that property. As likes to say, there’s an enormous difference between competition of kind and competition whatsoever; it’s like the difference when raising venture capital between having one term sheet or two. Mobile real estate applications are increasing the pace at which the market moves. After getting listing alerts instantly delivered to their mobile devices, several Redfin clients have been able to get those hours later. With so many home-buyers across the Bay Area now getting alerts instantly rather than nightly, the whole home-buying cycle here is becoming more like a flash sale, with properties lasting a day rather than a week. As frustration builds among would-be home-buyers, we increasingly see wild-card offers, higher than any competing offer by hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to , the leader of Redfin’s Silicon Valley business, “People just get tired of losing, and say, ‘Screw it.’” In just the past few days, a $1.8-million listing in Silicon Valley attracted six offers clustered around a price of $1.95 million, which was at the high end of what recent comparable sales could justify. This kind of competition was familiar to us. But the seventh offer came in half a million dollars higher, at $2.45 million, with no contingencies for an inspection or an appraisal. The seller’s agent was flabbergasted. These are the kinds of shots that send a shiver down the market’s spine. As the U.S. government approached a fiscal cliff, plenty of folks in Silicon Valley with stock in their own companies became worried that capital gains would be taxed at a higher rate, and so rushed to sell their shares by December 31. Redfin saw a spike in the number of high-end customers making an offer on a home in December, and still Redfin agents are representing a handful of clients who cashed out their equity positions with an eye toward using that money to pay for a home. Even as investors become more cautious in the face of increased competition, more cash buyers than ever are entering the market, loaded for bear. Where will it all end? The truth is, alone among the 20 markets Redfin serves, the Bay Area market is the one I dread getting asked about. Everywhere else follows rational economic laws. But here it just gets crazier and crazier. [Image via Redfin] |
Fly Or Die: Vine | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | Twitter launched Vine, the mobile iOS app that lets users create six-second looping video and share it to various social networks, and it’s been of many a media conversation since. Yesterday, Vine in the App Store after being featured, and many have even called the app the Instagram of video. But does Twitter’s new video-sharing venture have what it takes to maintain momentum? In what may be a first for a video sharing app, we both think this little Twitter birdy’s going to fly. I mean these . The number of social networks that launch into our laps is limitless, and there are a very rare few that truly get us excited. But the ability to string multiple clips together makes Vine a different form of mobile media creation, something we’ve never seen before. The user can press their thumb to the screen to record, and then release to switch to a new angle, perspective, or shot. The maximum length of a video is six seconds, but that could comprise seven or eight very short clips. The real-time nature of it with the Twitter brand, as Vines let you look through a window into someone’s real life, complete with motion and sound. We see big things in Vine’s future, especially if Twitter can integrate the service directly into Twitter’s mobile app. |
Netflix’s House Of Cards Could Be The Best Show You Won’t See On TV | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | Early on in the Netflix original series House of Cards, you see Kevin Spacey get his hands dirty. As Representative Francis Underwood, he doesn’t suffer fools and he doesn’t tolerate weakness. The opening scene shows Spacey performing a mercy killing of sorts, removing the pain of a beast not fit to continue living. It’s an apt metaphor for Underwood’s upcoming crusade against a presidential administration that has turned its back on him. But the scene could also be read as a metaphor for the show itself: Just as Underwood seeks to show up the incumbent powers that be, so too is Netflix attempting to shake up the TV distribution model. And in both cases, you’re rooting for the underdog. Spacey’s Underwood is the House Majority Whip and already has a tremendous amount of power. But when spurned for the position of Secretary of State, he puts a plan in motion to not only unseat the person chosen instead of him, but to cause further headaches for the administration that passed him over. The first two episodes are an unraveling series of events that have Underwood stealthily undermining the new president during his first several days in office. He’s helped in this pursuit by aide Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), as well as young Washington Herald reporter Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara). Meanwhile, Corey Stoll plays Representative Peter Russo, a hard-partying Congressman who ends up owing his loyalty to Underwood, and Robin Wright plays Underwood’s wife, an equally ruthless businesswoman undergoing her own professional upheaval. Altogether, the ensemble and script makes for really good TV, even if you’ll never watch the show on any broadcast or cable network. That’s because Netflix cut a reported $100 million check to production house Media Rights Capital for exclusive rights to stream the program to its subscribers. Like HBO, which has spent the last two decades winning over subscribers with really high-quality original content that can only be seen on its network (or, if you’re willing to wait, packaged for DVD and Blu-ray sale), Netflix is hoping that it too will soon be defined by shows that users can only see by paying $8 a month for its streaming service. House of Cards wasn’t the first exclusive series Netflix put on its streaming service, and it won’t be the last: There are at least three others in development, including the reboot of Arrested Development, Eli Roth’s horror series Hemlock Grove, and Weeds creator Jenji Kohan’s prison comedy Orange Is The New Black. But House of Cards is probably the most significant original release that Netflix will see over the next year. Unlike Lillyhammer, the goofy fish-out-of-water comedy that planted a New York mobster in Norway, this series was created exclusively for Netflix and features serious star power in Spacey and Fincher. And while viewers are no doubt waiting for the coming Arrested Development revival, most have some idea of what to expect from that project. House of Cards, though, bears the burden of being the first real serious piece of original programming that the online streaming company has licensed exclusively. It is, one might say, a defining moment for the company. Ever since it was announced, critics have questioned whether Netflix would be able to pull off an original show with HBO-like quality. While everything looked good on paper, including the involvement producer/director David Fincher and actor Kevin Spacey, there are no shortage of announced series that had viewers salivating, only to be let down once they were actually able to see the end result. Even HBO has had a few blunders of this sort — just check out the network’s horse racing extravaganza Luck, which combined the talents of David Milch and Michael Mann, and starred Dustin Hoffman. It was cancelled after just one season. At the same time, Netflix famously stepped back during the production of House of Cards, something that few traditional networks are willing to do. The common belief among those in the TV business was that Netflix was making a big, risky bet by paying upfront for two seasons of a show that didn’t even have a pilot, and then letting the production studio do its job with little interference. But if the first two episodes are any indication, Netflix’s bet on House of Cards should pay off handsomely. The show not only lives up to the production quality that we’ve come to expect from cable TV — in writing, acting, and directing — but it will probably surpass the expectations of many. That’s not to say that the show is perfect: Kevin Spacey as a Southerner is a tough sell, and his affected drawl can be grating. The fictional Washington Herald isn’t a great representation of the modern news room, and the balance between the print reporters and the online ambitions of newcomer Barnes seems a little off. In the initial few episodes, the motivations driving certain characters are a little over-simplified. But overlooking those issues — which, frankly, are present in most TV pilots seeking to get a viewer up to speed in the fictional world they weave — House of Cards is very good. At least, the first two episodes were. All 13 episodes of the show will be made available soon enough, as the series premieres February 1. And when it does, viewers will be able to make up their own minds about whether or not House of Cards lives up to the hype. |
Gillmor Gang: The 10 Percent Solution | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement as Apple’s stock price tanked due to their blowout quarter and two-thirds ownership of the U.S. smartphone revenue. @scobleizer gave it a 70% chance that he would bolt the Apple Fanboy ranks by the end of February, but only a 10% chance that an unexpected breakthrough from an unexpected source would change the world by the end of 2013. That, of course, leaves Google to account for Robert’s waning enthusiasm for Tim Cook’s lack of leadership and lack of SteveJobsness. But what Jobs triggered was a continuous wave of innovation driven by the engaged forces of the Google/Apple contest. And as @jtaschek points out, fostered in the competitive playground of the carriers where innovation in bandwidth fuels the social players. You don’t have to wait for the end of February to place your own bet on the percentage likelihood of disruption in this year of dreams coming true. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
CNET Now Forbidden To Review Aereo, The TV Service In Active Litigation With CBS | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | John P. Falcone over at CBS-owned CNET posted a quick piece on Aereo, the TV-over-Internet startup that is giving broadcasters fits. , which would have been a short piece on Aereo on a Roku device, is now awash with ridiculous disclaimers and discussions of lawsuits filed against Aereo by broadcasters. In short, CBS no longer allows CNET to write about (or, more precisely, review) things that are in pending litigation. Because CBS can’t control its own business model, it wants to control CNETs. When the Dish stuff broke I really didn’t think much of it. Now that this is happening, I have no respect for CBS and am losing hope for meaningful change at CNET. I wish we didn’t have to write about CNET this way. Whatever is going on inside CBS/CNET ( ), it’s making the tech reviewing juggernaut look like an absolute joke. It gives sites like Amazon amazing respectability and essentially makes the entire business of tech writing suspect and reduces the amount of valuable information available to readers. It hurts us all. As Mike , we’re supposed to be truth-tellers. To be clear, CNET staffers are not writing dispatches from the Eastern Front when they review an all-in-one printer, but as anyone who has ever looked for a camera or tablet online can tell you, a secure, trusted source for product information is Internet gold. These people get paid to look at cool stuff all day and pass judgement based on certain criteria and past experience. For CBS to figuratively fuck them like this is an absolute travesty. |
America Has Hit “Peak Jobs” | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | “The middle class is being hollowed out,” James Altucher. “Economists are shifting their attention toward a […] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality,” the . Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: “Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market,” according to on how technology is killing middle-class jobs. When I was growing up in Canada, I was taught that income distribution should and did look like a bell curve, with the middle class being the bulge in the middle. Oh, how naïve my teachers were. This is how income distribution looks in America today: That big bulge up above? It’s moving up and to the left. America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs; a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between. But it won’t be 19th century capitalism redux, there’ll be no place for neo-Marxism. That underclass won’t control the means of production. They’ll simply be irrelevant. Why? Technology. Especially . is already over “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots.” These days robots are in everywhere–but soon enough they’ll be doing plenty of service jobs too. Meanwhile, . Well, at least the newly unemployed can still go flip burgers…oh, wait, . (And other machines can . No, really.) No wonder people with jobs increasingly feel . Of course the robot manufacturers dispute this characterization. “While automation may transform the workforce and eliminate certain jobs, it also creates new kinds of jobs that are generally better paying and that require higher-skilled workers,” the . That’s true, and the usual retort to this kind of . But what if, as I’ve been saying for more than a year, ? What if America has hit peak jobs? Here’s your answer: that’s a thing…in the long run. Job loss isn’t actually a problem in and of itself. Instead it’s a symptom of something much larger. Step back a minute. Way back. What precisely is the purpose of technological innovation? Why do we want to make things faster, smarter, better, healthier, ? To get rich? OK: to generate wealth, and ultimately, eliminate scarcity. The endgame, where we’re going as a species if we don’t screw up badly and destroy ourselves or burn out all our resources before we get there, is some kind of . Will people have jobs in a post-scarcity society? No. That’s what post-scarcity . They’ll have things to do, authorities, responsibilities, ambitions, callings, etc., but not jobs as we understand them. So if the endgame is a world without jobs, how will we get there? All at once? No: by a slow and inexorable decline of the total number of jobs. Today’s America is just at the edge, the very beginning, of that decline. Trouble is, America, , is around the notion that all able-bodied adults should have jobs. That’s going to be a big problem. Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a about what I call , i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt. If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come. It’s hard to see how that turns into a post-scarcity society. Something big will need to change. Tom Brandt, . |
Anonymous Threatens Massive WikiLeaks-Style Exposure, Announced On Hacked Gov Site | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 1 | 26 | Hacktivist organization, Anonymous, is play ever: a massive WikiLeaks-style exposure of sensitive U.S. government secrets. As proof of their power, they announced details of the plan on hacked government website, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC.gov). Citing the of free information activist Aaron Swartz, they explain, “With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration.” Swartz was facing up to 50+ years in prison and a $4 million fine after releasing pay-walled academic articles from the popular JSTOR database. Some legal scholars have argued that releasing copyrighted material, or breaking the “terms of service” of a website, should not carry such harsh penalties. Anonymous is demanding that legislation be passed to no longer consider such violations a felony–a law that Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren ( : A) has . If legal reforms are not enacted, Anonymous has threatened to activate files containing embarrassing or incriminating secrets. “The contents are various and we won’t ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.” It appears that the secrets will come a cost: Anonymous claims that there will be “collateral damage” if they are reluctantly forced to expose the information, presumably related to individuals who they think are associated with, but responsible for, the offensive laws. For added effect, Anonymous made USSC.gov editable. “Feel free to upload snapshots of your improvements with the hashtag #USSC. Failing that, we find that highlighting large sections and pressing the backspace key has a great therapeutic effect…” As of this writing at 3am PT, the encrypted files on the page are no longer downloadable, but the hacked site remains intact. We’ve seen Anonymous angry before, but the death of Swartz and the recent of some of their members seems to have pushed them over the edge. Big news may be coming very soon. Listen to the full message below: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaPni5O2YyI] |
Yahoo Sending “Welcome (Back)” Packages To Former Employees, Trying To Get Them To Come Back | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | This is the official Yahoo “employee welcome” kit. Except the employee in question, doesn’t work at Yahoo. He . Over the past couple of months, Yahoo recruiters have reached out to ex-VPs, low-level engineers and PMs who used to work for Yahoo with these packets, with the word “Back!” scrawled on them in black Sharpee. On the packet inside is a bunch of copy about how much has changed since the new regime, and how Yahoo wants to talk about “big opportunities.” “I’ve heard they literally cannot buy people,” said one recipient of the packet, who passed on whatever the big opportunities are. While I have no idea how many packets were sent, I’m hearing that apparently quite a few former Yahoos have been on the receiving end, with at least one person moving back to the company because of it. This is definitely a pretty aggressive way to initiate contact with talent, but it makes sense. Many of the Valley’s most talented workers will likely not return email or calls from Yahoo. And we’ve actually been hearing that Yahoo’s M&A efforts have been stalling for months (more in a later post) because of mismanagement, the latest victim of offer-rejection being the Yahoo! Answers product for Mobile. “They are incapable of doing deals right now and it’s an open secret,” said one source familiar with the matter. So any way to get offers in front of people is a way to get offers in front of people. But, if Yahoo recruiters were really smart, they would enlist a high-ranking executive (ideally Mayer) to reach out in a meaningful way to former employees. We’ve heard that the because of the direct involvement of the charismatic CEO with the former Googler co-founders. Mayer also recruited her former colleague Henrique De Castro to be COO, though the probably helped — $56+ million is indeed . |
Pew Study Suggests Libraries (And Print) Still Have A Future In An E-Book World | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | A new study from looks at the future of libraries. The study, titled “Library services in the digital age,” doesn’t include anything particularly shocking or revelatory, but it suggests that many people still value the role of libraries, and that librarians are thinking about how their services can evolve. Pew found that in the past 12 months, 53 percent of Americans who are 16 or older visited a library or bookmobile, 25 percent visited a library website, and 13 percent visited a library website using a smartphone or tablet. Of those “recent library users,” 26 percent said their usage has gone up in the past five years; the most commonly given reasons were the enjoyment of taking children and grandchildren; the need to do research and use reference materials; and plain old borrowing books more. Meanwhile, 22 percent said their usage had gone down, and the biggest reason by far was the Internet. The study also mentions a bunch of additional tech-related services that libraries could provide, including an online research service for asking questions of librarians (37 percent of respondents said they’re “very likely” to use this); app-based access to library materials and programs (28 percent); GPS-style apps for navigating libraries (34 percent); Redbox-style lending machines (33 percent); and Amazon-style recommendations for books/audios/videos (29 percent). At the same time, there was a lot of support for traditional library services. For example, of the people who have visited libraries in the past 12 months, 73 percent said they did so to borrow print books. And when asked if libraries should move some of their printed books and stacks away from public locations to make room for tech centers, reading rooms, and cultural events, 20 percent said definitely, 39 percent said maybe, and 36 percent said definitely not. The study also includes a number of ideas from librarians about what else they could offer. It sounds like there’s plenty of interest around mobile apps, “makerspaces”/workshops, and RFID-tracking of books, though there’s some resistance too, as well as concern about funding. Here’s one of the more interesting responses: We recently began circulating Rokus with HuluPlus, Netflix and Amazon Prime loaded onto them. As far as I know we are the first library in the world to do this. This type of out-of-the-box technologies are making a huge difference to the demographics we are reaching. I would like to further those types of technological innovations and push the envelope on the public’s perception of what libraries offer. These types of initiatives do cost money and staff time to develop the program—but if it is important enough, the money can be found. The survey was conducted from October 15 through November 10, through landline and cellphone interviews conducted with 2,252 people. You can . [ ] |
RIM Extends Built For BlackBerry Deadline After Receiving More Than 19,000 Applications | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | RIM that it is extending the deadline for Built for BlackBerry after receiving more than 19,000 applications. One of several incentive programs launched by RIM to attract developers for BlackBerry 10, Built for BlackBerry is meant to highlight apps that have “passed an added level of evaluation” and will receive extra marketing from RIM through several channels. The Ontario-based company, which recently its store from BlackBerry App World to BlackBerry World, also held a series of “Port-A-Thons” to help developers port apps built for other platforms over to BB10. Last weekend’s event brought in , according to the company. There may be as many as 104,000 apps by the time BB10 launches on January 30. Alec Saunders, RIM’s vice president of developer relations and ecosystem development, said back in September that BB10 will have more apps at launch than any other mobile operating system. But, as CNET UK’s Crave blog , that might not be enough to help BB10 catch up as it vies with Windows Phone for third place after Android and iOS. The company’s market share has plummeted over the past year, falling to 5.3 percent of the global smartphone market, down from 11 percent in the year-ago period, according to . Its report was slightly better than the analysts’ lackluster forecasts, but revealed a drop in its subscriber base from 80 million to 79 million during the quarter. RIM CEO Thorsten Heins that he has not ruled out licensing BB10 to other manufacturers, and that his company is also open to the possibility of selling its hardware production business. |
Modern Guild Gets $500K From Jawbone Founder & Others To Bring Better Online Career Coaching To College Students | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | With unemployment and “under-employment” rampant among grads, many college students are facing the unpleasant reality of a less-than-appealing job market. As a result, students have begun turning to alternative resources to help them prep for life after college, whether that be through skill-focused online platforms like Skillshare or online educational resources like . Founder Adrien Fraise decided to launch Modern Guild to address the fact that college students tend to be less-focused on academic paths that can lead to post-college employment than they should be – and employers struggle to find appealing candidates, when many are in fact eager to hire. In an attempt to help bridge this perceived gulf, Modern Guild offers college and college-bound students online career prep courses that are taught by real professionals and trained career coaches in live, one-on-one learning sessions. After a pilot program last year in which 100 students at 10 campuses participated, attracting over 200 mentors, the startup is ready to launch its first “semester” and has just closed its application period, in which 4,000 students applied. Based on this early interest, Modern Guild announced today that it has raised $500K in seed funding from a handful of angel investors, including Jawbone Co-founder Alex Asseily. The new funding will allow Modern Guild to build out its platform and prepare for its first round of classes, which are set to get underway this spring. While companies are trying to help veteran technical folks get hired at startups, and networking experiences and opportunities to connect with employers, Fraise thinks that there’s room for a more intensive, online educational experience that can help give students a “stamp of approval” heading into the job market. Students are looking for anything that will give them an edge in a crowded post-collegiate market, so Modern Guild offers the opportunity for students to participate in a new kind of digital apprenticeship, with the platform matching participants with a personal mentor in their career field of choice. The courses run for eight to ten weeks and require students to meet with their mentors for at least one eight-hour-long class, interacting directly in a one-on-one setting with these mentors, who are either professors or professional recruiters, or who might lead their college’s career centers. Through Modern Guild’s platform, students can videoconference with their mentors, connect with other guidance counselors or career coaches, learn about available opportunities, talk to other students who are looking for jobs in similar fields, and take preparatory interviews, to name a few. Along with completing the assignments from their mentors, of course. However, , the one potential drawback for Modern Guild is its high price point. Courses cost about $1,500. Although part of this cost goes toward paying the mentors for participating, it could price out a significant demographic, i.e. anyone not already suffering from loads of student debt. Certainly, many students, regardless of where they fall on the debt spectrum, are willing to fork over tons of money for tutoring, counseling or coaching if they feel it will help them stand out in the job market. Modern Guild certainly hopes to appeal to those with a little more disposable income, or parents who are looking to help their students take their career paths by the reins, justifying a higher price point by providing more value — particularly in its live, hands-on, one-on-one approach to mentoring. As sites like Udacity, Treehouse, Instructure, Coursera and dozens of others ramp up career service offerings around free course and learning platforms (and MOOCs), it will be more difficult for those in the old world of educational content pricing (like Princeton Review and Modern Guild) to stay above the rush of the more modestly priced. Especially when services like SoFi allow would-be mentors to actually invest in students to help them alleviate their debt and connect with post-collegiate employment opportunities. That being said, Modern Guild has already shown that there’s a willing audience, as it’s already able to host up to 2,000 students. As to the value proposition, Fraise says, “by offering an intensive curriculum and staying selective, we think that our ‘stamp of approval’ can help give students a valuable edge for even those positions that are in high demand.” With the role of accreditation changing, its employers agree that Modern Guild is up to snuff as a new alternative to traditional apprenticeships or internships, then there’s a lot of room left to grow. |
Huawei Again Mulling IPO As It Hits Back Against Accusations Of Espionage | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | Huawei is considering an IPO after disclosing sales figures that in the race to become the world’s biggest telecom equipment maker by revenue. Huawei CFO Cathy Meng said yesterday to a listing (link via Google Translate) after disclosing details of . Huawei’s sales last year rose 8 percent year-on-year to 220 billion yuan ($35.4 billion), boosting net income 33 percent to 15.4 billion yuan, said Meng. In comparison, Ericsson, which will report earnings at the end of this month, is to post 2012 sales of 226.9 billion Swedish kroner ($34.8 billion), about the same as its 2011 results. Huawei first beat Ericsson in July 2012, when the Chinese company reported that its first-half revenue was $16.1 billion, or $850 million more than Ericsson’s first-half sales. Meng said that she disclosed the figures as part of ongoing efforts to “honor our commitment to transparency.” She also expressed frustrations with U.S. investigations into Huawei’s alleged connections to Chinese espionage: “These measures using trade protectionism to interfere with free competition will ultimately harm the benefits of end users and consumers.” The Chinese company has been considering an IPO for years, but progress by the company’s complicated share structure, as well as concerns that a listing would not allay U.S. lawmakers’ suspicions that the Huawei is involved in espionage. As an alternative, that Huawei might look at an IPO in Hong Kong or London instead. Last October, reports that Huawei had asked investment banks for advice on an IPO came at the end of a 18-month-long investigation by U.S. lawmakers into whether or not Huawei had engaged in espionage for the Chinese government. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Huawei saw the IPO as a way to win contracts in the U.S. and other lucrative markets by becoming more transparent. In the meantime, Huawei has focused on boosting its presence in emerging economies and raising sales in Europe. Meng said that R&D spending last year rose 26 percent to 29.9 billion yuan ($4.7 billion), and that Europe, the Middle East and Africa made up 35 percent of its sales, while 17 percent were in other Asia-Pacific markets and 15 percent from the Americas. The company has been repeatedly , as well founder Ren Zheng-fei’s alleged ties with the Chinese army. Ren once worked as a military technology, a fact that has been cited by U.S. lawmakers when raising concerns that Huawei might be involved in cyber espionage. Back in October, however, a reportedly found no evidence of spying by Huawei, though it did note vulnerabilities in equipment that could potentially be exploited by hackers (though it was unclear whether or not they had been placed there deliberately). Around the same time, the U.S. House intelligence committee that Huawei and ZTE both pose security risks to the U.S. government because their equipment could be used for espionage, in part because both Chinese companies would be required to comply with requests for access to their systems by the Chinese government. |
Logitech Gaming Software Beta-Testing Program Confirms Future Support For Mac OS X | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | According to a on OnlineBeta.com, Logitech is finally preparing to support OS X gamers. At long last, the company is working to release its “Gaming Software” for Mac OS X that lets users configure their Logitech gaming mice and keyboards to optimize performance and play. It’s unclear what this type of software will do specifically, as the listing is kept very vague, but the most obvious conclusion is that the OS X software will configure the lights and controls of various gaming mice and keyboards sold by Logitech. Here’s the official wording from the : We all know that in computer gaming you must have the right tools to claim victory. The more flexible and configurable your keyboard and mouse are, the more likely you can come out on top in your favorite game. We are now starting a public software beta test that is open to anyone who meets the requirements below! To participate in this test you need to regularly use one of the following Logitech gaming products: G300, G400, G600 gaming mice and/or G103, G105, G110, G510, G11, G13, G15, G19, G710 gaming keyboards. Also, this test is for Mac users only who spend lots of time playing games each week. If you are a gaming jockey and want to enhance your experience, you will want to try out this new software. So log in, download this exciting update and share your feedback! Logitech is listening and they want to know what you think about the new enhancements! To confirm that the beta test is in fact underway, a tipster also sent us a screengrab of an email he/she got as part of Logitech’s beta program. Some of Logitech’s hardware already plays nice with Mac OS X thanks to the company’s . But for the most part, Logitech focuses its software products on Windows users, and rightfully so. PC games are made for Windows machines. Still, it’s nice to see that Mac gamers will be able to enjoy their gaming tools to the same extent their Microsoft-friendly counterparts do. |
Facebookers Get Into Philanthropy: A3 Foundation Launches At Sundance To Support Asian-American Artists | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | With Facebook’s incredibly hyped IPO now over, longtimers at the company are naturally exploring the question: what does life after Facebook hold? Some are years into new startups of their very own, while others are funemployed. But a small group is getting into philanthropy and giving back. The latest of these projects is , which is launching at the Sundance film festival today and supports Asian-American artists in film and other creative industries. It’s the project of , a seven-year Facebook veteran who is now an engineering manager on the Facebook for Android team, , who co-founded an unlaunched startup called Optimistic Labs after leaving Facebook and , who co-founded LearnSprout also after leaving Facebook. “When Phil was growing up, he didn’t see a lot of role models on television. He wanted to help fix that,” said Lam, who was part of an Asian American theater group while an undergraduate at UCLA. “Our feeling is that there is a lot talent out there. They just need a longer runway to help develop their skills. It’s something that we felt like we could help with.” At the same time, social networking and sites like YouTube have allowed Asian American artists to flourish and reach audiences in ways that the traditional film and television industry have not. The top four independent YouTube creators, like , , , , have seen more than 3.5 billion views and attracted 20 million subscribers. A3 is running two programs at the moment. One gives artists $10,000 to $20,000 in grants along with mentors and other connections. . You can see some of their work here: [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/56611247 w=500&h=281] from on . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIFD_DwCgJI?list=PLPKUY1074ddob4FGjGCe2oocA9x6YMcw-&w=560&h=315] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl4wKdQo2dI?list=PLPKUY1074ddrhoMaqkSTJTXeGxZpw2rBC&w=560&h=315] A second program is a partnership with the Sundance Institute to sponsor a fellow in their Director or Screenwriting Lab in 2013 or 2014. The normal Sundance fellowship is very competitive with about 2,000 applications for about 25 slots. Grantees don’t actually have to be Asian-American. They just have to be passionate about telling stories about the Asian-American experience in the media. They also don’t necessarily have to be filmmakers. Lam said they would be open to artists in dance, and other creative fields. They’ll be self-funded the first year, and hope to see about five to 10 fellows in the next year. Lam, Fung and Chien follow a slew of other Facebookers who have gone into philanthropy or social good-related startups and projects. While , and Chris Hughes launched Jumo and bought a stake in the New Republic, plenty of mid-level Facebookers and rank-and-file have pursued their own charitable work too. , who was a photos and videos engineering manager, later started Pave, which connects young, talented people with financial backers who support them in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings. Yun-Fang Juan, who was one of the founding engineers behind Facebook ads, went to Khan Academy before joining a Facebook commerce startup called Soldsie. Luke Shepard, who was an engineering manager for Facebook’s mobile platform, became chief technology officer of eSpark Learning, which is trying to personalize education for elementary and middle school children. Then |
Mozilla Devs Are Working To Optimize Firefox For The OUYA Android Game Console | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | To say that the Android-powered OUYA game console has garnered some serious attention is a hell of an understatement, and that’s sure to be the case as developer units keep trickling out into the wild. As it turns out, it’s not just game devs that are getting some hands-on time here — some of the folks at Mozilla may be working on getting a version of its Firefox mobile browser up and running on the game-centric cube in short order. The news comes courtesy of Ed Krassenstein, an administrator for . According to him, a Mozilla developer earlier today to talk briefly about the process of bringing the browser to the OUYA platform: We’re investigating what we need to do to make Firefox usable on Ouya. It already works and we have some preliminary patches for gamepad support, but there’s still quite a bit of work to be done to make it really usable. Part of this work will be making sure that WebGL and Canvas support performs well on the device, and making sure that the relevant APIs (such as Gamepad API) are also supported The platform certainly presents some… interesting challenges, thanks mostly to its non-standard control scheme. After all, plenty of people have scrolled down a webpage on a smartphone screen, but I’d wager the number of folks who have done so with the assistance of a full-size game controller is considerably smaller. Still, the fact that some Mozillians have already worked to surmount that particular stumbling block is heartening news for fans of third-party Android browsers. Krassenstein’s initial post didn’t offer a name for the anonymous Mozillian he had spoken with, but he eventually confirmed that it was , a Mozilla mobile platform engineer who happened to of a Firefox build running on an OUYA earlier today (see above). Granted, it doesn’t actually work very well — Lords notes that it’s “kinda unusable” for the time being — but it’s a step in the right direction at least. Lords also revealed on Twitter that a gentleman named Kats (aka Mozilla software dev Kartikaya Gupta) is mucking around with Firefox for the OUYA as well, though there’s no word on how many others (if at all) are spending time on this. Naturally, this project is in its very early stages, and there’s no guaranteeing that a final, fully-compatible version of the browser will ever actually become available to OUYA owners, but it looks like things are off to a promising start. And hey — they’ve still got a few months before OUYA’s official release, so there’s a chance an OUYA-optimized version of the browser could debut right in that launch window. |
LG’s Optimus G Will Hit LTE Markets In 50 New Countries Starting In Late January | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | LG’s might not have gotten the same attention as the Nexus 4, but it’s the cream of LG’s 2012 crop. And to that end, the company has just that it will roll out the Optimus G smartphone globally to ove 50 new countries in the coming months. Back in , the Optimus G landed in the states, along with Canada, Korea and Japan. Since then LG has sold . That doesn’t quite hold a candle to the Galaxy Note 2s sold or the seen in 24 hours, but it’s still a phone worthy of a global stage. Singapore will get the Optimus G by the end of January, and then the 4.7-inch beast will makes its way to other LTE-ready markets across the world. The has a pretty impressive spec sheet, including a 1080p HD IPS display, a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM and a 13-megapixel camera. Of course, the G also comes with 4G LTE support and will be upgraded with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean right out of the box. Don’t forget, though, that the , the original G’s 5-inch 1080p successor, is just around the corner. There’s no word yet on country-by-country pricing or availability for the Optimus G. [via ] |
Photovine Grows Again As A New Photo App, Under A New Owner, Less Than A Year After Google Killed It | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | Remember Photovine? This was the rolled out by Google via its acqui-hired Slide developer team in 2011, then relegated to the not one week later, and then finally shut down in . Now, much like a persistent vine itself, “Photovine” is getting a new lease of life, once again as a photo sharing app — this time launched by a different company. The new Photovine is the first app to come out of developer house , a seed-stage startup co-founded by Mithun Baphana and Kevin Geehr, based in Southern California and backed by . Silo Labs says it’s working on three different products right now, one of which is Photovine. Silo secured for “Photovine” earlier this month (Google dropped it in July 2012), and now it is preparing for a mid-February launch. The idea for Photovine, Baphana says, was “absolutely not” connected to Google or its past efforts with its own Photovine app. “The name ‘Photovine’ came randomly to my mind and from [an] App Store search, I found no such app existed,” he told me. “That is the only reason I decided to go forward with it.” Although both the new and old Photovines focus on photo sharing, that’s where the similarities end. Whereas Google’s Photovine was focused on user-generated “themes” for friends to create and share pictures with each other, the new Photovine focuses on aggregating photos from different networks, initially from Facebook and Instagram, and eventually, Baphana says, G+ and other social networks. “I love seeing seeing photos from Facebook and other social networks more than the text feeds, and I personally did not like the way photos are displayed on these native apps,” says Baphana. “I thought we can do a much better job at displaying those social network photos and give it a nice feel, look and make it more fun experience.” In (the new) Photovine’s case, it offers users a “photo wheel” as well as an option to shake their devices so that they can spin to animate their pictures and rearrange them in montage format, or as a slideshow. Given the popularity of different photo apps, it seems like a natural progression for users to look to apps to help manage those disparate photo collections, along with the larger digital photo collections that we’ve amassed on other services like Flickr, Picasa and our own computers. But if Facebook and Flickr are recognizable names in the cloud-based photo storage world, I’m not sure if there is a similarly high-profile leader in aggregation right now. Indeed, Photovine is not alone in its field: ( , and now no longer accepting new users), part of ), and all offer similar spins on aggregating disparate photo albums and presenting them in more engaging ways. In the gradual assumption of the Photovine brand, Silo has also requested Apple to issue a notice to Google to release the name “Photovine” — the company’s Slide division had reserved the app name when the first Photovine launched. That is still in progress. The last remaining brand asset in Google’s hands is the URL . There is no operational site at that address right now, so Baphana says the next step is a friendly request try to get Google to relinquish the domain. In the meantime, you can sign up for the new app at . |
Read-Me-The-News App Umano Launches On Android | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | , an app that provides commuters (and others) a curated selection of articles read by voice actors, . Now it’s available to Android users, too. It seems pretty inevitable for a mobile app to go cross-platform, especially since it was created by former Googlers. But Ian Mendiola, co-founder and CEO at Umano-maker , said he realized that Android should be a priority after a marketing stunt where team members boarded Caltrain (that’s the commuter rail running between San Jose, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco) with fliers promoting the app, and they saw that many of the interested users owned Android phones. The content is the same in both versions of the app, with about 20 articles selected each day by the Umano team and read by voice actors (so it sounds like a real news broadcast, not a robotic text-to-speech translator). It’s divided into six categories: Entertaining, Must Know, Geeky, Entrepreneurial, Inspirational, and Scientific. Mendiola said he was particularly impressed by the popularity of self-help content. The company doesn’t have a relationship with any of the publishers, he added, but it hasn’t received any complaints, and “if content owners would like their content taken down we’re happy to work with them.” The Android app includes some platform-specific features, including Google+ integration and rich notifications, allowing users to access playback controls directly within their app notifications. There are, however, some features that haven’t made the transition to Android yet, including the ability to create playlists (so you can create a list at the beginning of your commute, then just let it run as you drive) and download content for offline listening — adding those features to Android is the company’s next goal, Mendiola said. The team has bigger goals, too. Mendiola said he wants to add more personalization to the app, so that it can create an automatic playlist based on your interests and the length of your commute. He also wants to “open up more of a voice actor marketplace,” so actors could visit the site and upload their own recordings, rather than waiting for an assignment from Umano. You can , and . And . |
PennApps 2013 Hackathon Runner-Up SparkTab Could Be Your New Browser Start Page | John Biggs | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | I attended this weekend and got to judge the winners out of 20 excellent finalists. The 48-hour event brought out some amazing talent from many colleges across the nation but one product, really stuck out as a unique and interesting solution to a thorny problem. SparkTab is kind of like for your browser. Instead of setting your new tab page to, say, Google, you would add SparkTab. From the text entry bar, you can perform searches, send texts, and even post to Facebook and Twitter. Think of it as a quicker way to do lots of stuff online without having to enter a URL or click on search results. It connects to a number of services using URL calls or API connections. There is a full set of commands that is available just by typing in the text bar. You can even send arguments to various services including a built-in SSH service accessible just by typing SSH: in the box.
The project is obviously quite unpolished and I suspect that website, where the program is hosted, will be hosed once we all give this thing a try. The team, Greyson, Ben Chen, Michael Toth, and Zachary Daniels, are all students at Lehigh University and this is not their first hackathon, as evidenced by the utility and beauty of the interface. The product isn’t for everyone but as a sort of quick and dirty method to get a few things done from a brand new browser tab it seems to be quite useful. I could definitely see them adding more features (and advertisements) and making at least some sort of small service business out of the project. It also just goes to show you what a few bright lads and a little CSS can do without sleep and hyped on on soda, beer, and pizza. |
Twitter Is Having Connectivity Issues Again, But Why? (UPDATED) | Drew Olanoff | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | With a lot of people in the United States off for the national holiday, Twitter appears to be buckling under the pressure. Right now, the service is experiencing issues, including the inability to connect to any of its official apps. As is usually the case, the problems are intermittent and don’t affect all users. Sadly, when the service goes down like this, there isn’t an explanation like there used to be. Remember the ? We haven’t seen that guy in quite some time. Now when the site is down, we end up getting a white screen in our browsers. The company added this message to its : Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue. Currently, the site is up and down, and you also get error messages when clicking a tweet button on a website: This is the that Twitter has had in the past four days, and the company doesn’t go into any detail on what the problem was or is. As a communication platform, it’s key for Twitter to be up as much as possible. While it’s understandable that every service has downtime issues, it seems to be a dirty little issue that has followed Twitter since it launched in 2006. Why can’t the service stay up and what are the problems that they’re experiencing? These are questions that are hard to answer, even when we ask. What I do know is that when a site goes down and there is little or no communication to its users about it, hours are spent asking one another “ ” In a word, it’s annoying for everyone involved. Complex issues face every company at this type of scale, including Facebook and Google. The issue with Twitter is that it’s the leader in real-time communication, therefore its users experience all of these problems in real-time as well. This is similar to something happening with AT&T and you not being able to fire off a text message and not knowing why. While Twitter is free, it does have an obligation to communicate with its users, since its intent is to be the “ .” It’s kind of hard to be that when you tend to flatline at random moments. If we’re supposed to trust Twitter when we’re trying to follow things like the President’s inauguration, there needs to be more of an explanation when things go wrong. The company has raised $1.16B to date, has major marketing, partnership and advertising initiatives happening, while also trying to make a real run at going public we hear, so these questions do need to be answered. So are you going down, Twitter? Stop posting if you can’t handle the load. Twitter is still down but have no more details to share. Well, because their status site hasn’t been available at times, either. We’re still hearing from readers that Twitter’s apps aren’t working and their site is hit or miss. This “site issue” have been going on for 4 hours now. Twitter has issued the following statement on its status blog: Update: This incident has been resolved. Not very informative for seven hours of service disruption, I’d say. [Photo credit: ] |
Tagged Embraces Mobile To Help You Meet People Offline Too With New City-Exploring App Sidewalk | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | Tagged isn’t doing too shabby, introducing you to people to flirt and make friends with online. It’s got 300 million registrations and 3 million daily users. Now it’s stepping into offline meetups by launching standalone app that feeds you fun happenings in your city, as well as who you might run into where you’re hanging out. Snap a geo-tagged photo of what you’re up to and a fellow Sidewalker might come say “Hi!” Sidewalk is now available for and , but is only operating in San Francisco for now. When Tagged debuted its site in 2004, it thought it was going to be Facebook. In a stunningly candid interview, CEO and founder Greg Tseng tells me “For three years we competed to become the world’s social network. We realized by the end of 2007 that there was going to be one winner and it wasn’t going to be us. So we made the difficult decision to pivot into social discovery, which is a fancy way of saying ‘meeting new people.'” That worked. Fifteen million users a month flock to Tagged to browse profiles of potential dates or friends and play games. It just finished its fifth consecutive profitable year thanks to ads, virtual currency sales, and subscriptions to premium features. But there’s no rest for Tseng. He admits: “Tagged is a web company. We’re reorienting to become a mobile company because we’re convinced the future of social discovery is in mobile.” It’s got its main Tagged app, and has tried and failed with some other roughshod apps that it’s since killed off, but it’s putting its weight behind Sidewalk. Tagged used a startup-within-a-startup strategy Tseng calls “intrepreneurship” to develop Sidewalk. Working independently inside of Tagged, the 15-person Sidewalk team is led by Jared Kim, founder of WeGame, which Tagged acquired in 2011. Tseng says the game plan lets Sidewalk “operate like a startup with all the advantages of being small and nimble, but not the problems of having to raise money and hit arbitrary venture-capitalist targets.” They can use as much or as little of Tagged’s infrastructure as they like. Building Sidewalk as a standalone app rather than as a feature of Tagged also protects the company. Kim tells me “With Sidewalk we have nothing to lose, but Tagged has a lot to lose. We can be like, ‘Hey, turn that button orange.’ On Tagged that could mean ‘oh we just dropped 5 percent in revenue.'” It also prevents Tagged from getting bloated. Tseng explains the need that Sidewalk addresses and why it’s a critical complement to Tagged: “We’re all social animals. We’re all constantly refreshing our 150 connections – Dunbar’s number. How? We don’t normally wake up and say ‘let’s meet people!’ You go through your life and new people slow in. It happens very naturally, organically — it’s serendipitous.” The idea is that you’ll open Sidewalk, discover something fun going on nearby, get off your butt and go there, and meet people, including this post’s author, as you share an experience together. There are no gimmicks, forced ice breakers, or private messaging. Sidewalk also has less anonymity, and more barriers to bad acting than online social discovery where Tagged made its name. The app is simply a portal to connection around real-life moments. Tseng believes this sets Sidewalk apart from Highlight, At The Pool, and other apps that he believes don’t work. He thinks those competitors assume you can meet people “based on interests or being friends, but it’s just not happening.” I haven’t found those apps too compelling, either, but I see potential in Sidewalk. Sidewalk greets users with the message “Let’s discover San Francisco together.” The design language employs a swirled watercolor motif, symbolizing the app’s desire to help people express the unique way they bounce around their city. Sidewalk is immediately refreshing because there are no privacy controls to think about or social graph to recreate. Everything you share can be seen by everyone in your city, and you don’t follow people. Instead you browse a two-column feed of relevancy-sorted photos with descriptions and optional (but encouraged) location tags. Click through to see photos full-screen, check out a map of the specific spot or neighborhood where they were taken, and leave a comment. The absence of private messaging keeps things casual and keeps users from being hit on too aggressively. Instead, you could comment on someone’s post that you’re going to join them there, arrange a meetup, or just thank them for showing you something exciting. If you’re somewhere interesting, tap the ‘+’ button to share. A camera launches or you can choose an existing photo of yours, then add a description and location. There are no filters or photo editing. Sidewalk isn’t trying to be Instagram. It’s not about taking art for art’s sake. It’s about showing what you’re doing to guide others. Tagged hopes Sidewalk will become a “for locals, by locals” app where people share stuff that will excite their neighbors rather than posting about tourist traps. As for being SF-only, Tseng tells me “It makes sense to start in San Francisco because that’s what we know. If and when we can dominate SF and we see the product really works, then there must be some secret sauce, and we’ll try to replicate that formula in other cities.” For now Tagged is aggressively buying Facebook mobile app install ads to jumpstart growth. Tseng says he’ll know Sidewalk has succeeded based on seven-day retention metrics, and “if people are getting enough value out of this they’re continuously going back.” Breaking people’s habits of sharing photos for the sake of sharing will be Sidewalk’s big challenge. I see plenty of selfies taken at home and artful pics of candles and coffee. Instead Sidewalk needs to get people creating posts that serve as mini travel guides. I’ve already discovered some cool happenings and places like street markets, vista points, and beer gardens. “Sidewalk is your real-time eyes and ears to the whole city,” Tseng beams. We’ll have to wait and see if enough people open up. |
Listia Partners With Best Buy To Let You Trade Old Stuff For New Electronics | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | It’s getting more tempting to give away used goods on , the marketplace startup backed by Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz ( ), thanks to a new partnership with Best Buy. When you give away “old stuff” on Listia, you earn points, which can be redeemed for items that other users are giving away, as well as new goods offered through . Those rewards already covered a pretty broad spectrum (when , the goods were anywhere from $20 to $16,000 in value), but adding iPads, TVs, video game consoles, and other products from Best Buy can’t hurt. The mix will change from day-to-day, according to co-founder Gee Chuang. Today, for example, the first items listed in the store include and — both products fulfilled by Best Buy. The store takes advantage of Best Buy’s API, but Chuang told me via email that it’s “a close partnership,” so users can have their items shipped from Best Buy or even pick them up in-store. “Currently, other companies that work with them at this level are credit card rewards companies like Citi and Chase… but our partnership is unique in that people can trade actual goods and get Best Buy items in return (and not just use credit card points etc.),” he said. The company more than 2 million users have traded 7 million goods on the site, and that mobile usage has grown 500 percent, year-over-year. |
With The Xperia Z And Xperia Tablet Z, Sony Has Finally Found Its Mobile Soul | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | There was a time when Sony defined mobile. Its products, along with wares from partner Ericsson, were the very best looking and performing mobile devices. But that was a decade ago. Sony hasn’t been part of the mobile conversation since before Apple crashed the party and it never picked itself up in the aftermath. But it seems Sony might be back. Its latest mobile products are stunning and have clear design message. Sony isn’t taking 2013 lying down. The Sony Ericsson T68i (my fave), the P800, and later the P900/P910 were amazing phones in their time. The Sony CLIÉ line outclassed everything in the PDA space for years. The foldable PEG-NZ/NX/UX lines? Radically inspiring. The Palm-killing SJ/TJ lines? Functional and affordable. The mobile landscape would look dramatically differently if Sony had the foresight to include a GSM mobile radio within some of these PDAs — or better yet, shared some of its DNA with the designers at Sony Ericsson. The best Sony PDAs were very expensive but Sony products are supposed to be expensive. And they’re supposed to feel expensive. Sony lost that mentality over the years. Its mobile products were always contenders with competitive specs but they didn’t feel like anything special. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is all plastic. The Xperia Arc is simply bland. Quality improved when Sony split ways with Ericsson. The Xperia S/P/U from 2012 feel great and have clear branding but they’re still uninspiring. Plus it will take time for Sony to improve the damage down to its image from years of boring SE phones. Sony Ericsson was late to the smartphone game. It was too closely focused on the feature phone/camera phone market. SE’s first Android smartphones hit the market with older hardware and often received updates late. Android fanboys quickly figured out to stay away from SE phones. SE, unable to compete head-to-head, turned to gimmicks in a desperate attempt to move some units. The Xperia X10 mini was a small, but an ultimately wonky take on Android phones. The Sony Xperia Play, with its slide-down gaming pad, is perhaps the most unconventional Android phone to date to gain any traction, but again, SE gave it little support once it hit. In November 2011 Sony announced that all its 2011 phones (including the Play) would eventually receive an update to Android 4.0. That didn’t happen. Sony eventually pulled the post and the support. (Here’s and of the original content) It wasn’t just Sony Ericsson products that failed. Sony’s own tablets were a joke, too. It was early 2011, the iPad wasn’t even a year old and the market was just coming off the high of netbooks. Sony just introduced its first tablets but was still betting big on the underpowered ultraportables. At the time Sony had several lines of expensive Asus EEE competitors. But the Sony VAIO P ultimately floundered — you remember, the netbook for the JNCO crowd. Tablets were set to be the next big thing but Sony wasn’t ready to commit. Its first tablets were marketed not as standalone units, but as a second screen to Sony’s BRAVIA HDTVs. They flopped. Then something happened. Sony had a changing of the guard. The Sony of 2013 is dramatically different from the Sony of 2011. There is now just “One Sony”. In 2012 Kazuo Hirai replaced Sir Howard Stringer as Sony’s president and CEO. As the former head of the PlayStation division, Hirai knows the consumer market. He quickly moved to reposition the massive Sony machine through a plan called “One Sony”. Stringer built an empire during his tenure, but it was clear even during Hirai’s early days that he was aiming to refocus Sony into a more focused company. Hirai’s plan calls for Sony to reduce losses from its struggling TV business while focusing on imaging, gaming and mobile products. Just one year later, it seems to be working. A few weeks ago, Sony introduced the Xperia Z and ZL at CES 2013. These device not only look great, but they signal a huge change in strategy: . In a bid to better compete with Apple and Samsung, Sony is only going to make high-end smartphones. This seems to be the message with tablets, too. The company just unveiled the aptly named and it’s just as stunning as its smartphone counterparts with high-end specs and a case thinner than the iPad mini. In short Sony is attempting to be the Sony of old. The Xperia Z and Xperia Tablet Z have the same lines and striking designs. They’re both impossibly thin and in classic Sony style, nearly void of any branding. Their designs are not loud or over the top. The designs are not gimmicky, yet, strangely, that’s their gimmick. These mobile devices are purely Sony. I want them in my life. Sony still has a lot of work to do. Simply building a great product does not guarantee success in the marketplace. Along with smarter marketing, Sony needs to drop the silly Xperia branding. Just like it’s doing with its product lines, the branding needs to be simplified, basically reduced to a minimum viable name. This is true across Sony’s vast product library. This Sony speaker dock is one of the best I’ve tried, but I can never remember the name (RDP-XA700IP). Under its new CEO and President, Sony has a chance to return to glory. It has a chance to be a must-have brand again. There was a time not long ago that Sony had legions of fanboys and released products that inspired. People simply *had* to own Sony products. But Sony sold out by throwing multiple products against the wall, just hoping something would stick. The Xperia Z and Xperia Tablet Z might not outsell the Galaxy S III or iPad, but for the first time in years, Sony has a mobile product family with a soul. |
Branch Adds Personalized Recommendations To Help You Find Good Conversations | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 21 | launched out of closed beta only last week, but the engineering team is hard at work pushing out new feature updates. Today, the company announced that logged-in users will now when they visit the homepage, from people you know. Your conversations will likewise be displayed to your contacts. The new recommendations will show up in your stream, and feature someone you follow on Twitter, the title of the Branch they’re in, and a brief selection of what they’re actually saying on the subject. As it stands, it’s a fairly basic tool, and looks to just be grabbing content from anyone you’re following on Twitter, regardless of the nature of the discussion compared to what you yourself are talking about on Branch. But it’s a step in the right direction to better content discovery, which is something that could make Branch a much more broadly engaging tool. Branch says that its recommendations “won’t be perfect,” which means that it is likely planning to improve the recommendation engine to deliver better suggestions. It makes sense to cast as wide a net as possible now while the community is still growing, but it would be great to see a more refined approach in future iterations. That could help Branch expand from being a specialized tool to a more free-ranging content dialog discovery tool. |
500 Startups-Backed Silver Living Wants To Be The Consumer Reports For Senior Care Communities | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 1 | 7 | When his grandmother was no longer able to live safely at home, Tal Ziv and his relatives set out to help her find the best senior care facility — better known as assisted living communities. It’s an experience many families face at some point, and it’s not always an easy one. What’s more, the stakes are high; we want loved ones to be at home in a great environment, but there’s also the fact that the average cost of senior living communities is $80K. Assisted living facilities are expensive, and, while they’re all very different, it can be tough to distinguish without visiting each and every one. So, wanting to find the best community for his grandmother, he began researching the best options in his area, only to find that the majority of them lacked a substantial presence online. So Ziv and former Microsoftie and veteran engineer Mike Cirello founded to digitize the process and become what the co-founders hope will be a “consumer reports for senior living communities.” Launched in December, and currently covering New York, New Jersey and Connecticut (with plans to expand in 2013), the startup offers extensive research coupled with high quality, honest photography on assisted living communities. The research is 100 percent free to use. For Ziv, an “honest” portrayal is the key to his business’ value proposition. “We share the good, the bad and the ugly,” he says, and we “dig deep into living experience.” The team sends mystery shoppers to the facilities for multiple tours, who report back on their findings, along with paying photographers to offer a realistic portrayal of what accommodations and facilities look like. Communities aren’t given editorial control over any of Silver Living’s content — either text or images — but they try to get after the essence of what that facility is best for. So, the community don’t shy away from giving low scores to a particular facility, but the idea is to find their strong points. Maybe the facility doesn’t have the best accommodations, but it’s passable and it’s affordable. Silver Living offers its own scoring system — the traditional “our of five stars” approach — which are compiled based a variety of factors, including inspection reports and complaint reports.
For each facility, the startup applies, the startup sends the state a Freedom of Information request, to get inspection and complaint reports. It often takes six months, but once they get the reams of files, Silver Living analyzes how inspection deficiencies they have relative to their peers, for example, along with relative cost for each amenity, the cost for different levels of medications, levels of care, on top of the conclusions of their mystery shoppers. On top of that, Silver Living actually interviews residents in each community, asking them what do they think, what they like or don’t like, which is then factored into the score. That’s the difference between Silver Living being a Yelp for assisted living and the Consumer Reports — it’s not just someone off the street, the reviews come from people who have actually lived there. Of course, while transparency, insight and visibility are becoming more valuable commodities in the digital age — and Silver Lining is trying to bring this collective to assisted and independent living communities, it can be a delicate balance. While working to reveal the good, bad the ugly, the startup also relies on these facilities as its primary source of revenue. What’s more, currently you won’t find any reviews on Silver Living with less than 2.5 stars. Why? Ziv says that Silver Lining has, thus far, selected which facilities it chooses to work with and that they must be run by reputable operators and have at least one hundred beds in its facility. It’s partly an editorial decision, the co-founder says, in that it’s the way they’re choosing to operate at present — it’s not just a Yelp for every mom and pop shop out there. Up to this point, the quality of facilities have been good enough that none of them have warranted “one star” yet. However, he expects that, as the company expands and reviews more communities, volume will inevitably bring lower ratings. For now, regardless of whether or not some are in Each of them regardless of how shoddy they are, they’re still good for someone. For some, location or geographic proximity might matter more, or price, and while one facility may be rated lower because it doesn’t include care for memory issues, some families might have a loved one that doesn’t require that particular kind of care. Silver Living is currently working with three of the four largest assisted living chains in the industry and has agreements with these chains — as well as with other facilities — such that it’s paid when someone actually moves into the community. The startup receives a fee once someone commits, and because these are annual fees in the thousands of dollars, the amount received is higher than other lead-gen businesses, like say, Kayak. The startup has also raised a round of seed funding (under $500K) from Dave McClure and 500 Startups, Facebook’s Bubba Murarka, Oakview Group (Henry Parry-Okeden) and Slo Seed Ventures’ James Glinn. Going forward, Ziv says that the startup will begin looking to raise its series A in the coming months and will be looking to expand to the West Coast, beginning with LA. It might not seem like it, but Silver Living is going after a big market. All told, long-term care is a $200B industry, Ziv tells us, and assisted living is a $48B segment of that total. Turnover is high at assisted living facilities because, unfortunately, residents pass away or move on to other facilities, to nursing homes and so on. To stay in business, these facilities need to fill their rooms, and Silver Living wants to help them do that, while giving families and those in need of care an easy (and transparent) way to find the community that makes sense for them. And when it comes to photos, the startup isn’t messing around — it’s almost as if Silver Living is trying to be Airbnb in this regard. Some reviews include 300 to 400 photos. The team is going after breadth, hoping to allow people to easily sort the wheat from the chafe without having to go on a tour to do that. It’s a great idea, now it just has to find its legs. |
Hands On With Verizon’s Elusive Samsung ATIV Odyssey Windows Phone | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 1 | 7 | Samsung’s ATIV Odyssey has been a real noodle-scratcher of a device ever since its existence was first hinted at during Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 launch event. Well, consider that particular veil lifted — Samsung had a near-final version of the Odyssey to play with here at Digital Experience in Las Vegas, and I took the secretive little guy for a spin. But first, the particulars. Under the Odyssey’s glossy plastic hood is a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor as well as 1GB of RAM. To be quite honest, the screen was nothing to write home about (though that’s really nothing for a device of this caliber) — it’s a 4-inch WVGA Super AMOLED panel, the likes of which you’ve seen many times before. Couple that with 8GB of internal flash storage, a removable 2,100mAh battery, and a microSD card slot and you’ve got all the makings of a half-decent mid-range Windows Phone. Despite touting the device in a release earlier today, Verizon is still keeping mum on pricing and availability, but I wouldn’t expect that to be the case for much longer. Since Microsoft has very stringent requirements, most of these lower and mid-range Windows Phones run very similarly. That’s hardly a bad thing — it gives Windows Phone a sense of consistency that’s often lacking from other platforms — but it means that there really isn’t much to expound on here. Swiping between through a homescreen full of ever-blinking live tiles was seamless, and it kept up nicely as I darted in and out of apps. [gallery ids="731972,731973,731974,731975,731976,731977"] When it comes to design, the Odyssey won’t come as a shock to anyone who’s manhandled any other mid-range Samsung phone in recent years (oh, and that leak from late last year was dead on). It strikes a fine balance between the round, rather bulky body of Nokia’s Lumia 920, but isn’t quite as slim or as nicely tapered as HTC’s Windows Phone 8X. In many ways it’s a typical Samsung device — lightweight and plasticky, but with a surprisingly sturdy feel. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Odyssey’s physical design is just how small it feels in your hand; it’s only been a year or two since 4-inch smartphones were the pinnacles of product design. All things considered, the ATIV Odyssey seems like a neat (if somewhat underwhelming) Windows Phone. Verizon have a winner on its proverbial hands if they price the thing aggressively enough, but it’s not hard to see how a device like this could easily be overshadowed by more able hardware. |
Hands-On With Polaroid’s Three New Android-Based Interchangeable Lens Cameras | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 7 | Polaroid saw the curtain raise early on its Android-based interchangeable lens cameras thanks to early leaks, but today was the first day we got to go hands on with the new cameras at CES 2013. The cameras, based on Android 4.1 (but fully upgradeable to 4.2, Polaroid tells me), feature a 10-30mm F2.8 lens (which maintains that aperture through the zoom range) and a pop-up flash, and they come in three flavors, including two with built-in Wi-Fi. The cameras are advertised as lightweight, and they felt surprisingly so; the bodies appear to be made mostly of plastic, and don’t have the rigid metal lens mounts you may be used to if you’re coming from a DSLR. The price reflects the feel of the build, however, at an entry-level pricing of $349, which puts it well under the average range for interchangeable lens cameras. Android on the camera works pretty much as you’d expect Android to, offering all the conveniences of direct integration with Instagram and Facebook apps, but with some of the quirks inherent in using a smartphone OS on a camera, too. The OS stuttered and froze a couple of times, but this device is planned for a Q2 launch after all; there are bound to be bugs at this stage. Polaroid’s interchangeable lens system will include a zoom lens and a pancake to be released following the camera’s introduction, a company representative told me, so there will be more than the general-purpose walkaround lens for photographers to experiment with. All told, it’s still very early days for this camera, and the price point and vision of the product are ambitious, to say the least. If the shipping hardware can offer the style of these prototypes, but at $350, and if Polaroid can nail the experience for a broad audience, we could see a significant change in the accessibility and appeal of the interchangeable lens market from a company that some would likely peg as an unlikely contender.[gallery ids="731952,731953,731954,731955,731956,731957,731958,731959"] |
Hands-On With Canon’s PowerShot N: A Compact Camera That Does Instagram One Better | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 1 | 7 | Canon had a number of new cameras on display at CES 2013 this year, but the most noteworthy of all was the PowerShot N, a new ultracompact shooter that’s only about 3 inches by 2 and half, and only 1.2 inches deep. It’s almost square, which makes it resemble the camera depicted in the Instagram icon on the iOS and Android app, and once you use it, you realize the connection probably isn’t entirely accidental. The PowerShot N is designed entirely around one-handed use, a Canon rep explained, with a touchscreen based interface that generally takes care of most things for you, including even selecting a filter, should you choose. Whereas with Instagram you still have to do some kind of creative input, the Canon rep explained, the Canon PowerShot N on full auto will choose the best filter for your situation. It’ll give you a different one for a sunset landscape vs. an indoor portrait, for example. The camera can also create five different filtered versions of each shot in a new creative mode to let you pick the best. The PowerShot N still offers a lot of creative control, with shutter and zoom manual ring controls on the lens, which borrows a trick from the PowerShot S100 series of more pro-oriented compacts. It has a 12-megapixel sensor, and improved Wi-Fi connectivity with a new button that allows you to get it connected to the CameraWindow app for iOS and Android with a single click. The camera has a battery good for around 280 shots, with Canon’s new eco-drive, which should add 30 percent more battery by managing power. In practice, the PowerShot N is an attractive device, and one that you can’t help but enjoy playing with. AF is pretty quick, and the on-screen controls give you just the right amount of access to features without cluttering your interface. Plus, you can upload pics directly to Facebook using onboard Wi-Fi, and even comment on those photos, too. This is definitely one of the more unique cameras that Canon has released recently. But with the variable angle screen, pocketable form factor, and unique control ring mechanism, it’s a winner based on my early initial tests, especially for those looking for something with better IQ than their smartphone, but with a lot of the same features and similar portability, too. The PowerShot N goes on sale in April and will retail for $299.99. [gallery ids=",731913,,,731915,731917,731918,731919,731916,731914,731911"] |
We’re Live From Pepcom’s Digital Experience At CES 2013 #CEScrunch | Felicia Shivakumar | 2,013 | 1 | 7 | Tonight is the last night of teasers and private previews before the main event. Starting at 8pm PST TechCrunch TV will be streaming live from at the MGM Grand hotel. Join us as we tour the exhibit hall looking for the most newsworthy gadgets, smartphones, and tablets, and stay sober enough to report on them. Got to love ! Then tune in again at 10 am tomorrow, as we buck up for our of live coverage from the CES show floor. We’ll be featuring demos and interviews from popular startups and consumer brands, including Samsung, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Ford, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Nokia. Is there a newly announced gadget that you are dying to see? Send us questions and comments with the hashtag #CEScrunch. |
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