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Vine For Android Gets Updated With Front-Facing Camera Support | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | When Vine for Android, there was one, big, near-universal complaint amongst its users: It didn’t support front-facing cameras. While the existing iOS port had been supporting front cameras for months, Android users looking to take Vine-selfies (Velfies?) were stuck contorting their wrists like some sort of chump. Users were hopeful it’d come baked into the update that shipped last weekend — no such luck. In an update pushed to the Google Play store just a few minutes ago, Vine for Android finally learned how to play friendly with that front lens. Meanwhile, this update also brings a few other new tricks: there’s a new upload manager for the Vines you’ve yet to finalize, a few tweaks to the settings screen, and an overall speed improvement — most importantly, the camera is said to load notably faster, now. • Front-facing camera
• New upload manager for unsubmitted posts
• Improvements to settings
• Improvements to camera loading time and support for more devices
• Speed improvements overall
• Bug fixes and UI improvements This update comes just five days after the last — a remarkably quick turnaround, from build to build. Say what you will about Instagram pickin’ up video support, but a little competition really does help kick things into gear. You can find the latest version of Vine . |
Unity Game Engine Announces Xbox One Support, Goes Free For Windows Phone 8 Developers | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | Unity, the cross-platform 3D engine and game development tool that’s been on something of a roll lately, has a few more bits of good news today. At Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference this morning, Unity announced two new tricks: Xbox One (and Kinect!) support, and completely free support for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 games. It’s been a few good months for Unity. Back in March, they . Then, after dropping support for , they announced that iOS and Android game developers could now build their wares on Unity free of charge — ditching their requirement that mobile developers pay a few hundred bucks for an add-on package for each platform. They’d continue to offer pro versions of both Unity ($1,500 for the Pro build) and the iOS/Android add-ons (another $1,500 per platform) for those who needed advanced functionality, but the free versions would cover the use cases for anyone just getting their feet wet. With today’s news, Windows developers are getting a similar deal — in fact, the one they’re getting is a bit better. As with iOS and Android, developers using Unity’s basic/free product will be able to build their Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 games for free. But that Pro add-on? The one that iOS/Android developers need to plunk down an additional $1,500 for? Unity and Microsoft have worked out a deal to eat the cost of that. If you buy (or already own) Unity Pro, the Windows Store Pro add-on and all the advanced functionality that comes with it comes free. For Windows gamers, that’s pretty good news. It means that pretty much any game built on top of Unity can be ported to Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 with minimal effort, without that developer having to drop a dime on engine licensing to do it. Meanwhile, the company also announced that Unity would be deeply supported by the Xbox One, including gesture/skeletal recognition through the Kinect. While tying into the 360’s Kinect from Unity has been possible for a while now, it’s always been a bit of a hack; once Xbox One support makes its way into Unity 4, it’ll be official. Alas, it’s not clear if the One-specific tools will be made available to everyone — while Unity says that they’ll be free to anyone published by Microsoft Studios, there’s no word on how much they’ll cost (or if they’ll even be available) to anyone just looking to tinker. We’ve sent an email to Unity asking for more details here. [ A Unity rep tells us “Unity can still be used by [Xbox] developers being published by someone other than Microsoft Games Studios, they’ll just need to pay for it. We ask developers interested in using Unity to publish to consoles to contact us directly to discuss pricing.”] With today’s news, Unity can now claim cross-platform support for every next-gen console, as well as every popular mobile operating system. |
Case Study Shows Google+ Sign-Ins Are Working, Increased Snapette Sign-Ups By 16% | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | One developer feature Google is really stressing these days is , the company’s recently launched authentication tool for third-party sites and mobile apps. While the company will continue to support its standard Google Sign-in tool as well, it’s pushing hard to get users to switch to its new system. The Google+ version has the advantage (or not, depending on your perspective) of being linked directly to Google’s social network and profiles and can therefore provide sites with easier registration system and more information about their users. A number of large companies have now integrated Google+ Sign-ins, and we are starting to get about how things are going. Mind you, these are somewhat , but the results are still pretty interesting. Most companies don’t want to go on the record with their numbers, but Google just published a case study with Snapette that’s pretty much in line what we’ve been hearing, too. The latest come from mobile shopping app , which , and this marks the first time we’re seeing some of these stats for a service that uses Google+ Sign-in. Just over 44 percent of the service’s users now use Google+ to sign in to their accounts. That’s a bit higher than the 40 percent acceptance rate Google itself cited . Snapette also says it’s been seeing an uptick in user registrations since integrating this feature. The company says it saw “an increase in registered users of 16% above average growth” since it started using this tool. |
Incubator AngelPad Plans To Launch A New York Office, Says Its Startups Have Raised $100M Total | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | Startup incubator is looking beyond its current base in San Francisco — founder Thomas Korte just announced that he plans to hold one of his two annual sessions in New York City. That doesn’t mean AngelPad is going to be working with more companies or hiring more staff. Instead, the New York class is taking the place of one of the two San Francisco sessions, and Korte said that he and partner Carine Magescas will be running both of them. As for why he’s making the move, Korte noted the growth of NYC’s startup scene, and he said it has an advantage over the San Francisco Bay Area because there’s less competition for engineers. Plus, AngelPad has an extensive network in the city, with Korte estimating that 10 percent of the incubator’s companies are already in New York. So despite the switch, Korte said he isn’t worried about missing out on great San Francisco companies — if founders want to participate in an incubator, they’re going to be ready to travel to make it happen. “Between New York and San Francisco, the differences are really shrinking,” he said. “There’s going to be great companies built in the Valley there’s going to be great companies built in New York.” The exact location of the AngelPad’s New York office hasn’t been determined yet, but Korte plans to start accepting applications in late August or early September. He also said that he’s calculated all the money raised by startups after they left AngelPad, and the total is $100 million. The biggest rounds include and . Korte noted that on its own, a lot of funding doesn’t make for a successful company, but he said it’s one of the two quantitative measures that AngelPad uses to track whether its companies are thriving (the other is number of engineers hired). This seemed like a good time to ask Korte about whether he plans to raise a fund, but he was as coy about it today . “So far, AngelPad has been funded by the partners, and that may or may not change in the future,” he said. |
Immigration Reform Passes Senate, House Leadership Calls Bill A “Pipe Dream” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | Immigration reform is half-way to its goal: The Senate passed a comprehensive bill this afternoon 68 to 32. , including more foreign visas, a special visa for startup entrepreneurs, and unlimited space for brainiac inventors and scientists. However, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have unspecified issues with the bill and say the Senate version is a “pipe dream.” “Apparently some haven’t gotten the message: The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes. We’re going to do our own bill — through regular order — and move the legislation that reflects the will of our majority and the will of the American people,” said speaker of the House, John Boehner at a press conference on Capitol Hill. The House is intent on moving things through an orderly process of debate, revisions, and committee hearings. Currently, the House has broken up immigration reform into several bills, including a high-skill worker bill that CrunchGov is helping to crowdsource ( ). So, it’s one big step, but not the goal line yet. |
Google Looking For Groups To Provide The Next Hikers To Don Trekker Street View Backpack | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuiEmxDklKw?feature=player_embedded] Google is trying hard to build out its Street View-style imagery of locales off the beaten path with its Trekker program. The Trekker, a roughly 40-pound backpack that has a camera-ridden sphere poking out over its wearer’s head, captures 360-degree fields of view which are then used to build interactive, first-person views of remote places like the Grand Canyon. Google is now to help it continue to expand its Trekker efforts. The application is open to non-profits, tourism boards, government agencies, academic or research organizations or other groups interested in helping the search giant document the world. The applications will be reviewed over the next few months, and agencies selected will become part of Google’s pilot program, which is open to organizations around the world. I got the chance to wear one of the Trekker packs at Google I/O this year, and to discuss the program with the tech’s co-creator, Steve Silverman. At the time, Silverman said that Google would be building out its Trekker program in the coming months, and it’s looking at outside partners to help with that, including the inaugural partner for this expansion, the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau. It makes sense that Google would turn to the people who know the terrain best to help them chart and capture Trekker Street View scenery, rather than trying to do it all themselves. If they’re looking for anyone to help negotiate the wilds of Toronto’s dense urban jungle, sign me up, but this is more likely a job for those occupying greener spaces. |
Adobe Acquires Conversational Marketing Platform Neolane For $600M In Cash To Bolster Its Marketing Cloud | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | today announced that it has acquired , a conversational marketing company with an annual revenue of just under $60 million, in a transaction that’s worth $600 million in cash. Neolane was founded in 2001 and is currently headquartered in Paris, France, with offices around Europe, North America and Asia. The company’s customers include the likes of Accor Hotels, Alcatel-Lucent, IKEA, Samsung, Sony and Dior. For Adobe, which is putting quite a few resources into its , this acquisition adds a new piece to its feature lineup. Adobe does offer , which provides a number of social media-tracking and analysis tools. Neolane’s , however, is far larger and includes tools like handling leads, marketing resource management, and a for personalized, one-to-one messages. Neolane, Adobe says, will become the sixth solution in the Marketing Cloud, joining its existing Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager and Media Optimizer offerings. Last year, Neolane raised a round led by with participation by and . “The acquisition of Neolane brings critical cross-channel campaign managementcapabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice presidentand general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing business in a canned statement today. “Adobe has long been the trusted partner to creative professionals and we are now extending our lead in the digital marketing space with the addition of Neolane. From campaign creation through planning, execution and optimization, Adobe technology is driving the entire marketing process.” |
Rolocule’s Motion Tennis App Turns The Apple TV And iPhone Into A Legitimate Gaming System | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | Just in time for Wimbledon, is releasing a new tennis game today. It’s , but it is the first that turns your iPhone into the controller and Apple TV into a gaming console. The app, which costs $7.99, uses the iPhone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer to track the phone’s motion, so players can slice and slam shots across the court. All you need is an Apple TV and an iPhone: hook the two up, open the app, and you’re playing tennis. Rolocule is selling rolomotion — its name for the technology that powers Motion Tennis — on a few points, one being that it eliminates the necessity for a console system and lets people play on any Apple TV, anywhere. Rolocule will eventually be releasing Motion Badminton and Squash as well, and they’re working on a shooting game unofficially called “Die Zombies Die!” While Rolocule has only stepped into immediate competition with games like Wii Tennis today, it’s easy to see the implications of developing good console-free gaming. It’s a huge market to cut into, and rolomotion games are light, portable, and relatively cheap, excluding the $99 Apple TV. Rolocule raised an angel round in India last year with Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures, though Gupta would not disclose how much they raised. He said that they might be looking to raise again, especially if they want to become leaders in this technology. I wouldn’t put it past them.
It’s also a look into iPhone games that don’t involve tilting or swiping across the screen, which founder Rohit Gupta said has limited the creative breadth of games. That may be true, but it would seem that the first move for rolomotion would be to replicate every console game possible. Creativity can come after total game domination. Oh, and you might want to invest in one of those iPhone cases with an elastic strap on the back. You know, your phone. [Image from Rolocule] |
AdTech Star Nanigans Scoops Up Facebook’s Retargeted Ads Director Antonio Garcia-Martinez | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | Facebook’s just lost some critical business talent. Today, ads product director , and now Facebook Exchange director , has signed on with one of Facebook’s top ad partners, Nanigans. Garcia-Martinez could help Nanigans keep adapting to Facebook’s ever-changing ad platform. Founded in 2010, Nanigans has become a powerhouse in the social advertising world. with a focus on helping game developers determine the ROI of their marketing spend by showing how far users brought in through ads got into a game. With time it expanded into more traditional brand advertising on Facebook. What’s really differentiated Nanigans, though, is its ability to keep up with the breakneck pace of the evolution of Facebook’s ads products. It quickly integrated system, which lets advertisers reach a set of people they already have the email addresses or phone numbers for. It also built out real-time bidding demand side platform retargeting technology so it could serve Facebook Exchange ( ) ads, which are showing where else someone has browsed on the web. That’s how it ended up working with . Years ago he sold his Y Combinator adtech startup, but jumped ship to join Facebook. There he built FBX and directed the product from its inception. From his privileged vantage point, Garcia-Martinez could assess all of Facebook’s , and , he knew he had a hunch about who he wanted to work with. “Nanigans is the real deal. They were on top of all the innovative products Facebook was building. It’s the one company that does both sides well — traditional Facebook ads and retargeting. Basically, I thought they were the best PMD partner that Facebook has.” Those two sides combine to give Nanigans some advantages, Antonio explains. “From a purely sales perspective, an advertiser like Fab.com has a pretty big social budget and they do FB ads, but want to do retargeting, as well. They can have their entire Facebook buy through one company. “There’s also interesting things you could imagine in social and real-time bidding,” Antonio tells me, referring to the fact that right now Facebook advertisers can’t combine its traditional biographical targeting with cookie-based retargeting. I expect to make that combination available eventually if it can figure out the privacy implications. “If Facebook goes in that direction, straddling that divide could be interesting,” Antonio says with a hint that he hopes Facebook relaxes the restrictions on what advertisers can do. Don’t expect him to give Nanigans any unfair help, though. “I’m still completely held to my confidentiality restrictions, of course. Frankly, Facebook’s product roadmap changes so quickly that anything I know would date so quickly I don’t think there are beans I could spill.” |
DigitalOcean Wants To Challenge Amazon, Linode And Co. With Better Prices, Marketing And Focus On Simplicity | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | is quickly becoming a household name in the web-hosting world. For , the company lets you rent a basic virtual private server (or “droplets,” as the company calls them) with 512MB of RAM and 20GB of SSD-powered hard disk space in one of its three locations (two in the U.S. and one in Amsterdam). The company, as its co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky told me, believes that its focus on simplicity, speed and keeping prices low will allow it to effectively challenge the incumbents in this space. Things are clearly working out well so far. Over the last few months, DigitalOcean has become one of the fastest-growing cloud providers in the U.S. and has now launched more than 225,000 servers for its customers (and because it uses and SSDs, it typically launches these in under 55 seconds). , DigitalOcean had grown from being home to just under 140 web-facing servers in December 2012 to 7,134 this June. Uretsky told me that getting to this point was a bit of a struggle, though. The company eventually made it into the summer 2012 program in Denver, thanks to recommendations from Slicehost founder Jason Seats and other mentors. But at the beginning, there was “very little love” for a startup that wanted to disrupt the hosting space. Uretsky and his previously worked in the dedicated server space for 15 years and already had plenty of experience in managing servers and building hosting-related companies. Uretsky, however, says he still wanted to subject himself and the team to the pressure of joining an accelerator program and to build a large network of mentors — something he didn’t do with his first company. The team was very strategic about jumping into this space and did lots of competitive analysis before it launched. Uretsky believes that every company, at heart, is a marketing company, so the team is clearly focused on honing its message. One thing DigitalOcean realized is that getting started with platforms like Amazon Web Services or Azure is very complicated, even for experienced developers. Because of this, the team decided to focus strongly on keeping things simple, and a quick look at the DigitalOcean dashboard already tells you that they are taking this approach very seriously. Everything is laid out with lots of whitespace, and spinning up a new server — or taking is offline — is a matter of two clicks. The developers that DigitalOcean is targeting (right now that’s mostly individual developers’ startup teams) want flexibility and on-demand resources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vHZLCahai4Q Today, DigitalOcean is already profitable, Uretsky says. Quite a few pundits have wondered whether the company’s low-cost model is sustainable, but Uretsky notes that its scale is now allowing the company to negotiate bulk deals on hardware and bandwidth that keeps its costs down. It’s also operating at a pretty healthy margin that scales across its pricing plans. Looking ahead, DigitalOcean is planning to launch a data center in Brazil, followed by a location in Asia (either Singapore or Hong Kong) and then India. The company also just hired 28 new employees to allow it to move from just sustaining its quick growth to launching new features. The first of these new features (which is already in beta), is support for quickly launching pre-configured servers with basic LAMP setups and similar use cases. |
null | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 18 | null |
Boombot Rex Makes Good On Kickstarter Promises With Durable, Siri-Friendly Bluetooth Speaker | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | Sometimes I refer to Kickstarter as the “land of broken dreams,” especially when I’m looking through my backer history and noting how few projects actually delivered, and how disappointing were most of the ones that did. The does not fall into either of those categories, thanks to an experienced team that sent me a review unit of the shipping product a couple of weeks ago. The Boombot Rex has a design that isn’t quite like any other Bluetooth speaker out there, with a pretty much hexagonal shape that can be easily palmed, only a little bit larger than a hockey puck. It’s extremely portable, and that’s sort of the point: The Rex has a clip built into the back, and it’s meant to be the speaker you reach for when you set out on an adventure, thanks to weather resistance and a general hardiness that comes in handy while hiking, camping, biking, fighting pirates or whatever else. [gallery columns="4" ids="839678,839677,839675,839674"] The surface of the Rex is coated in a matte, rubberized ABS plastic housing, which is both durable and pleasant to touch, and there are a number of colorways to choose from. We got the “Savage Green” edition, given TC’s penchant for green things, and while the vibrant colors make it look a little like a child’s toy, the feel of the speaker suggests tremendous durability, as it’s completely solid and there’s no errant rattling or anything else going on. The clip is perfect for securing it to some board shorts, and there are flaps to keep mud, dirt and water out of the speaker’s three ports. The Rex has a built-in speakerphone, and the noise cancelling tech used make it good for that purpose. It can also call up Siri with a long-press of the center button (between volume up and down) on the top of the speaker, and in my testing the iOS virtual assistant was as effective as when used from the phone itself. It’s perfect for a device meant to help you enjoy music and also stay connected while you’re doing activities where earbuds or headphones would hamper you. It works really well. I can’t believe the sound that comes out of this diminutive speaker. It’s not on par with something like the Big Jambox, but it’s very capable with its dual drivers, especially considering its other advantages, even when biking through a forest on a fairly fast wooded path. And its durability works, too. I used it in light rain, and fell off my bike a few times with it on, and the Rex didn’t skip a beat, which is more than I can say for my shins. Battery life is about what Boombot advertises for the Rex. It isn’t anywhere near the longest in the category, but it does the job, especially for active outings. As a set-and-forget option for camping trips, I’d have appreciated a lot more reach, maybe say double the time the Rex puts out. Speakerphone functions work great on this unit as mentioned, though, and the Siri integration is actually really handy for quickly checking stuff like the weather forecast or for making calls without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket, which can really come in handy if you’re caught in the rain or, I dunno, sliding down the side of a mountain. An active lifestyle is an oft-used marketing strategy, for electronics in particular. But the Rex actually is a good device for people who regularly expose themselves to the elements, it isn’t just posturing as one. And even if your desire to live a little more extreme is more aspirational than anything else, the Rex is a solid option in a portable Bluetooth speaker in any circumstances, that at least offers you the option of getting out of the office once in a while. |
Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s Album Of Motivational Music Is Coming Out Next Week | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 27 | We already told you that , the founder who was ousted from the , was dead serious when he said last month that he was planning to release a (Mason is known pretty well for his , so many people thought he had to be joking about his foray into music.) Well, for those of us to hear Mason dropping workplace knowledge in musical format, the wait is almost over. In a post on his , Mason (who recently ) said that ‘ will be released next week through the usual channels (“iTunes, Spotify, etc.”) on — “just in time for American audiences to incorporate into Fourth of July festivities.” He also revealed the album’s cover art, which is embedded in this post, as well as the seven-song track listing: 1. Look No Further 2. The Way to Work 3. My Door is Always Open 4. Risin’ Above the Pack 5. K.I.S.S. 6. Stretch 7. It’s Up to Us As a recap, Mason has characterized the idea behind as follows: “I managed over 12,000 people at Groupon, most under the age of 25. One thing that surprised me was that many would arrive at orientation with minimal understanding of basic business wisdom. …I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. These songs will help young people understand some of the ideas that I’ve found to be a key part of becoming a productive and effective employee.” The whole situation is so unique that a lot of people probably won’t quite believe it till they see (and hear) it. But I’ve heard on good authority that the album is indeed real, and the songs are pretty good — “really interesting” is one characterization I’ve heard. The rest of us will find out for ourselves in just a few days. |
Electric Kool-Aid iOS 7 Test | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Flat, man. Flat is free. It doesn’t tell us what to think. We don’t need those metaphors. Skeuomorphism was a trap. A mental prison, holding us back. Let the people decide for themselves what a calendar or a notepad looks like, and their eyes will open wide When their icons cease to be facsimiles, we stop trying to replicate analog behaviors. Then our tools can ascend, and we can finally imagine how they might ideally serve us. Steve, dude. Steve got it. He SAW it. The future can’t depend on the past. You can’t ask people what they want. They don’t know they what they want. Because magic is invisible until we breathe it into existence. Steve opened his third eye to where technology could take us. He discovered we weren’t meant to be ashamed of it. Technology could let us express ourselves, beautifully. Steve *helped* me see too. this Safari icon. It just is. Your imagination can roam its vast flat gradients. You can find yourself IN that Safari. I stared into the heart of a sunflower. The stem, the leaves, the sky, they all disappeared. I just saw color. The color saw me. It asked me what I felt. It let me interpret it on my own terms. That’s what I want for the people of this world. To see our software’s beauty in their own way. I think they’re ready for it. Like the technicolor hues I’ve washed over our interface, the future will be bright. So bright it blinds some. But when their third eyes adjust, they’ll see it too. The magic in what we took away. The freedom they’ll find when they feel what flat means to them. |
Roam And Wander’s TuTu Turns iPhones And iPod Touches Into Cuddly Children’s Toys | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Children’s entertainment studio wants spark children’s imaginations by bridging the gap between touchscreens and real-life toys. The Hong Kong and Taipei-based startup’s top-selling iOS app, Sticker Games, allows kids to earn real stickers sent through postal mail. Now its first stuffed animal, a pink bunny named TuTu that comes with a set of touch-enabled accessories for iPhones and iPod Touches, is seeking funding on . Roam & Wander, which has received Series A funding from venture firms and , is not the first company to design stuffed animals as child-friendly cases for mobile devices. But TuTu is not just a gadget holder. The TuTu app and toy set was designed by Roam & Wander founder Jason Warren to give children growing up in the digital age a more engaging and tactile way of interacting with mobile devices. “I love video games, everyone in my family is a hardcore gamer–my wife, my sister, all the females in my family,” says Warren. As his daughter grew older, Warren was delighted to see her start taking up the family pastime. But then he began to worry about the stretches of time she and her friends spent engrossed in tablets and smartphones, silently tapping away at the screen. “They didn’t have a strong connection to physical games. They were literally living in a digital world,” says Warren, who was a general manager at HTC before founding his startup. “I didn’t feel that was super healthy, so I thought there has to be a way to use the creative canvas provided by smartphones and embed them in toys to make them more fun and engaging.” TuTu’s expressive face is powered by an iPhone or iPod Touch screen and kids can play with her using a set of plastic toys with touch-enabled sensors, including a milk box, carrot and toothbrush. After TuTu has been fed and groomed, she can be rocked to sleep with the device’s motion sensor. In TuTu’s dream state, kids play a series of games that allow them to learn new skills while getting a glimpse into the bunny’s backstory. Roam & Wander hopes to by July 11, which will fund the production tooling of TuTu’s plastic accessories and the completion of safety testing and certification to U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission standards. Roam & Wander plan to follow TuTu with the release of their second character DiDi, a teddy bear powered by the iPad mini. |
Netflix Will Launch Multiple User Profiles This Summer To Keep Your Recommendations Pristine | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | It’s a nuisance many users are familiar with–you log-on to watch something from the Criterion Collection, only to find that your recommendations are now littered with “Dora The Explorer” or “Say Yes To The Dress” because someone in your household with less erudite tastes in streaming entertainment used your account. Fortunately, Netflix Vice President of Product Innovation Todd Yellin at E3 that Netflix will launch separate profiles for people sharing one account this summer, giving each person customized recommendations. In addition to making Netflix recommendations more useful for individual viewers, multiple profiles will also allow the company to take a closer look at user data. Without multiple user profiles, the mish-mash of information generated by accounts with several users amounted to “junk data,” but multiple profiles will enable Netflix to hone its recommendations and make better use of its social-sharing features, which in turn will help increase viewing hours and lure in new subscribers. The company, which first unveiled its plans for personalized Netflix user profiles at CES in January, . Multiple user profiles allows the company to not only offer more refined suggestions to individual viewers, but also lets users to broadcast better recommendations to their friends on Facebook, a feature Netflix . |
Reddit Adds Benefits For Gold Members To Further Monetize The Site Without More Ads | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Social-sharing site Reddit has announced the addition of new benefits for Gold members as part of its efforts to further monetize the site without relying on more banner ads. Reddit Gold members from the site’s retail partners, ranging from urban gardening accessories seller to Goldbely, whose products include . Reddit is also using its partnership with clothing retailer to launch its “Golden Tikkit” incentive program this week. Once a week, a randomly selected Reddit Gold member will get a private message with 24 hours to claim a prize. Gold Benefits, which has its own public , adds more perks to Reddit’s existing Gold Partners program and gives “some real-life benefits” to , which allows members to use premium features on the site (for example, Reddit Gold members are currently able to ). Reddit Gold, which costs $4 per month or $30 per year, is often gifted by users to other users who have made especially noteworthy comments. Reddit Gold Benefits may make the program more attractive for Redditors to purchase on their own and help fund Reddit’s massive growth. In a , Reddit CEO Yishan Wong said that the Reddit Gold program was started as an alternative to running more ads in order to fund the server costs needed to handle the influx of traffic, which at that time was up to 3.8 billion pageviews and more than 46 million unique visitors. The Gold program , but for the first two years of its existence had a relatively low profile, with Reddit making few promotional efforts. The addition of Gold Benefits, however, is one more step Reddit has taken in the past half-year to monetize the site and fuel its growth while keeping it relatively free of traditional banner ads, therefore helping it preserve its counter-mainstream reputation. |
WTF Is Waze And Why Did Google Just Pay A Billion+ For It? | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | The tech industry has seen its fair share of acquisition whoppers lately, with Salesforce acquiring this month, and Yahoo putting the icing on its by snatching up . But the news (reportedly for around $1.1 to $1.3 billion) is a little different. While the prices are similar and Tumblr may well have seen interest before Yahoo swooped in, rumors have been swirling around for months. First , then it was , before Google swooped in, upped the ante and closed the deal. In fact, Israeli publication, The Globes, execs were committed enough that they flew to Israel and were in the middle of serious (albeit stalling) negotiations when Google showed up. Founded in 2007, is an Israeli and Palo Alto-based developer of free mapping and turn-by-turn navigation apps for iOS and Android. Since its launch a year later, Waze has raised $67 million in outside funding from a number of prominent Silicon Valley firms (including Kleiner Perkins), as well as Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong, and has grown to 110 employees — with the majority of its staff in Israel and around 10 or so in Palo Alto, including CEO Noam Bardin. Amidst a flood of third-party mobile mapping apps that have emerged since, Waze is today pushing 50 million users (up from 30 million in October) and has managed to find a steady growth curve thanks to its unique crowdsourcing formula. Rather than assiduously map out every single road, lane and byway, Waze relies on its millions of users to act as traffic cops, field ops and cartographers, flagging and recording updates on accidents, bottlenecks and traffic as they drive. It sucks in and aggregates this realtime user data (on speed, location, routes and so on), using it to build out and refine its own maps and to calculate the best possible routes (and re-routes) for its drivers, among other things. This crowdsourced data, driver-sourced mapping, community curation and citizen traffic reporting adds an interactive element to the user experience, which not only quickly becomes addicting, but tends to be more accurate thanks to its obsessive (and often geeky) army of reporters relaying traffic data and updates in realtime. The crowdsourcing model also (in theory) helps make it easier for Waze to offer more accurate re-routing info when you inevitably miss that left turn at Albuquerque — something the majority of apps struggle with (even Google) thanks to the amount of stress these realtime calculations and calibrations (and processing) put on the app and its infrastructure. In other words, it’s a tough problem to solve, and the more realtime feedback and data you have on routes, etc., the better the experience is for drivers. So, this, along with enabling drivers to tap into social layers, view realtime fuel prices, nearby gas stations, points of interest and use hands-free navigation (all of which adjust to your location as you drive), have enabled Waze to become an attractive alternative to native navigation apps. Which is impressive, considering its native competitors came with your phone when you bought it, so they’re already there, a finger tap away. As it is with apps no matter the category, to compete, there has to be a significantly higher value proposition, otherwise you’ll just stick with what’s on your phone. As , the so-called “Map Wars” have become increasingly intense among the big mobile tech companies. For the Average Joe, while a navigation and mapping app probably won’t be the reason you buy one phone over another, a reliable, easy-to-use map app is key to a good mobile experience. After all, we use our maps and navigation apps so frequently — rely on them, really. For that reason, it’s no wonder Facebook, Apple and Google are all scrambling to one-up each other. For Apple in particular, when the company was rumored to be checking out Waze, it was still stinging from the embarrassing premature release of its own native mapping and navigation app, which was so bad it drew a fairly unprecedented public apology from . With Apple Maps hitting the App Store half-baked, acquiring a popular and arguably far-more-accurate navigation app would have made sense. Hopefully Apple’s decision to pass on Waze isn’t a product of the company believing it can just build a better app internally. Sure, maybe it can, but that would also just smack of the same hubris/lack of perspective that led them to think Apple Maps was good enough to be released in the first place. (You think Steve Jobs was satisfied with “good enough”? Hell no.) As to Waze and Facebook: The Social Network has been loudly stepping up its mobile game, including the recent launch of its much-ballyhooed half-operating system for Android (or “apperating system,” ), which comes amidst a laundry list of other mobile updates, shifts and product releases it’s made of late. After all, mobile is becoming an increasingly important . For Facebook, being able to offer a reliable, popular mapping app as a “native” part of its Android experience might have given potential customers a reason to take a second look and put a jolt into the . Google’s situation is a bit different, as it already has a world class map product. For all intents and purposes, Google Maps set the standard and Google might as well have invented consumer-facing digital navigation (All apologies to MapQuest, of course.) I mean, what other company can you name that has sent out a fleet of hilarious-looking, seeing-eye cars to map each and every street? We now take it for granted that we can pop over to Google Earth and instantaneously “fly anywhere” on the planet to “view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean.” Which is ridiculous. , Waze CEO Noam Bardin gave a little insight into the mutual motivations for Waze (and for Google CEO Larry Page and Google GEO VP Brian McClendon, specifically.): “We are excited about the prospect of working with the Google Maps team to enhance our search capabilities and to join them in their ongoing efforts to build the best map of the world,” he said, before revealing that “nothing practical will change” after the acquisition, and that Waze “will maintain [its] community, brand, service and organization.” But that doesn’t really say much, so while both companies aren’t laying out all the gory details yet, below are a few of the reasons why Google was willing to shell out the big bucks and why it should be giving Apple, Facebook and everyone else map-shaped fits. Israel has a long, celebrated history when it comes to technology and R&D, and its startup economy, which is already one of the strongest in the region, continues to evolve and produce great companies. But with the exception of , Waze represents one of the largest exits for an Israeli-born company in recent memory. Especially consumer. But more importantly, Google, as with every tech company, is now well aware of Israel’s talent pool. In the past, it’s scooped up native startups like Labpixies and Quicksee, and it already has a presence in Israel, . With most of Waze’s staff based in Israel, Google wants to maintain the current set up, as it makes Israel’s strong R&D and emergent talent pool that much more accessible. It’s not unusual for companies to make acquisitions for their users, especially if that traction and user base is significant (and its users are on the younger side). Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr is a perfect example. But, with Google already owning arguably the most popular navigation app in the U.S., it’s not exactly dying for more users. Though certainly 50 million users doesn’t hurt. But likely there’s a stronger pull in the overlap of what the companies see as their perceived value. Waze doesn’t consider itself a “Mapping Company,” but a “Big Data Company.” And considering Google is out to organize the planet’s information, Google is practically the definition of Big Data (and helped invent MapReduce), even if it hates that label, as MIT Tech’s . What’s more, Google loves to experiment with different , and its new, updated Maps product And, really, the mapping game is won on Big Data, isn’t it? Because of its giant data set, and maturing mapping infrastructure, Google itself has begun to leverage that data to offer custom, personalized maps for its users — something that’s fundamental to the social, customizable experience Waze has sought to create. But, generally speaking, when it comes to realtime navigation, adjusting to the driver’s route as it goes, Google still feels more pre-programmed. Yes, it has improved in the newest version of Google Maps, but while it has colored traffic layers to show users degrees of traffic, it doesn’t seem on par with Waze’s in-route, constantly-updated traffic info. And it often doesn’t offer the same number of potential routes as Waze when a driver is, say, looking to avoid traffic. These differences in user experience may seem small by themselves, but compounded, they could represent a big value-add to Google Maps down the road. Plus, Google’s design has become uniform in an effort to maintain a single user experience across its various properties. Waze’s design and user experience is more fun, liter and more interactive. Wazers can be religious about reporting traffic jams or speed traps, and Google knows that it can use that. Waze gives Google the perfect opportunity to leverage Google+ and make Google Maps more social. The company has moving quickly to integrate its new social graph (Google+) across its products, but it’s not there yet. adding social functionality in October that allows drivers to see which of their friends are on their way to a mutual destination, gave them the ability to share drives, pickups, meetup spots and more easily communicate status from the road. , which one can easily see Google replacing with Google+ authentication to drive more users to Google+. And Google+ could use some friends, lets be honest. With its Facebook integration, Waze gave users the ability to collect friends around a shared destination point, distribute directions to that group and use short cuts — all cool features that Google can continue to expand via Google+ (as it already added social search function in its new version of Google Maps). While it’s always working to be seen as , Google is first and foremost an advertising company. Really, many of its services’ main function is to help their customers get their ads in front of their users. Google advertising can be a key asset to Waze going forward as it looks to expand its own revenue potential and advertising platform. Up until recently, Waze had put monetization on the backburner, focusing on growth and product. But, late last year, While Waze previously allowed users to quickly tap and swipe through its categories to locate nearby gas stations, for example, its new ad product aims to take that to the next level. Rather than simply plastering display ads all over your phone’s already-limited surface area, Waze wanted to create a system where local businesses (and chains) can claim their spot on its maps, while sending out targeted messages and “native” ads to people who are already driving nearby and already happen to be looking for a local place to eat, for example. Waze’s advertising product gives brands like Dunkin’ Donuts access to a self-serve advertising platform, where they can “set, change and measure their mobile advertising campaigns,” along with features like “local search advertising and advanced targeting.” Who does that remind you of? Many of the big tech companies have been looking to make a splash in local, whether it’s Foursquare, Yelp or Facebook, and many more are trying to get there. These three companies in particular can tap into geo-location data via check-ins and local search, but none of them can hold a candle to Google’s scale. Yes, Google+’s local business pages may not quite have the same adoption as Facebook Pages, but the company is working hard to shore up the gap and make G+ a destination, digital real estate that’s actually valuable to local businesses. Though it doesn’t have the traffic yet, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore Google+. The company has an enormous dataset on local businesses, listings, contact information, hours and so on and they’ve capitalized on that to cater to local advertisers looking to reach customers as they search for related keywords, etc. skyrocket over the next few years, making Google’s vast index of local businesses and search extremely valuable to Waze, and to an extent, vice versa. Although adding this search and its accompanying massive dataset and processing on the backend may lead to a more cluttered user experience (and its hard to imagine Google will never touch Waze’s UI), Google can also give Waze the kind of search functionality and integration that it’s still missing. The more one starts to drill down into the motivations for the acquisition, it gets easier and easier to justify the one-billion-dollar price tag. And, although it’s rarely said of big-ticket acquisitions like this, it almost seems as if it’s a steal. Rather than having an excellent map and navigation product fall into the hands of one of the other big players that (desperately) needs it, Google has taken its already stellar Maps product and added a younger but potentially equally valuable one. And while Wazers may worry about its new owner tinkering (and screwing) with the app’s current experience and interface, it’s more than likely that any significant changes or integrations are still a long ways out. Plus, as my homeskillet and colleague Greg Kumparak points out, Google can immediately start getting value out of Waze’s realtime traffic data and its on-the-go re-routing prowess — both of which Google needs and both of which can potentially be integrated into Google Maps without spoiling Waze’s user experience. Ultimately, however, if the “Map Wars” are more than just hype drummed up by the media and if its outcome has any significant bearing on their mobile strategies, than this seems like a fairly big loss for Facebook and Apple. It almost seems as if it would’ve been worth it just to keep Waze out of Google’s hands, but again, there’s a big mobile landscape beyond Maps. Regardless, after the Waze-oogle deal, Apple, Facebook and everyone else are now swimming upstream against a stronger current. |
PRISM Would Have Come Off Better With Better PowerPoint Design | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 6 | 11 |
First of all, how does an NSA contractor have to wiretap anyone, ANYONE, from an infrastructure level to a legal level? Is the legal part that “terrorism” is important enough to bypass a court? Is the infrastructure part that the data is available on the NSA’s servers somewhere, and this guy who worked at Booz Allen for three months was given clearance for it? How did this happen? This part isn’t clear for me, though Michael Arrington has some . Still, I and the rest of the world, after the first story broke, have little idea whether this AIM, Facebook Messenger, Paltalk conversation you and I are having is directly accessible to the U.S. government, which, at anytime — and whether or not anyone has clearance — can look at it (Hi guys?!). What we do know for a fact though is that the NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden you can wiretap Obama if need be, but the NSA has done a poor job of expressing that impact through its . Exactly how much access the government has to company data is completely belied by its shitty graphic design skills. “The top banner with the logos, it’s horrible, you cannot avoid it,” French PowerPoint designer , who turned the government’s laughable deck into something more design-friendly (above), tells me. “You cannot say it’s bad — for someone who is not a designer to not know design at all. But you can say you didn’t think very much about what you wanted to say. It’s sad. Because people did not think about those slides.” And their eventual audience of, I dunno, 2 billion or so people. De Cubber is, yes, a PowerPoint slide designer who believes the U.S. government could have conveyed its message more effectively through visual design: “Half of the people don’t care about design, but the other half do care about it. It’s like a PowerPoint cliché, and not as threatening as it actually is.” And his opinion on the guy who leaked the terrible slides in the first place? “He’s in a good place to be TIME Man Of The Year.” |
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Gmail’s People Widget Now Lets Brands Highlight Their Google+ Profiles And Posts | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Google today a small but nifty new feature for its Gmail that allows brands and businesses to highlight their Google+ profiles and recent Google+ posts right in their customers’ inboxes. Once they have , Gmail users will be able to easily follow these brands’ page right from within Gmail and without the need to go to Google+, just like they can already do with all of their regular email contacts. The people widget will also highlight the brands’ latest Google+ posts. This, Google says, will make it easier for customers follow a brands’ or business’ Google+ page help them find and engage with the company’s content. It’s worth noting that this also means a brands Google+ logo will prominently appear in the Gmail sidebar, which will definitely draw a few more eyeballs to the follow button. Getting started with this isn’t hard, but it’s not trivial either. A business must have a website verified Google+ page and all emails must then come from this domain. The emails also have to be signed with or – two ways to prevent spam and phishing attempts – and the organization must send at least 1,000 emails a week from its domain (it’s not clear how Google tracks this, by the way). Google also notes that the follow button will only appear for brands that have recent Google+ posts. It’s worth noting that Google has also recently added a few more features to Gmail that make the inbox a bit more interactive. At I/O, for example, the company that email senders can now include small to their emails to add extra functionality like one-click RSVPs to their messages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=C3wIrSExI_s |
Is PRISM Precipitating A Bitcoin Sell-Off? | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Bitcoin has experienced a fairly massive drop in value over the weekend and into this week, moving from a peak of $118 on June 7 to a low of $89 on June 9. While precipitous drops and dizzying highs aren’t unusual for the cryptocurrency, BTC watchers are pointing to the PRISM and NSA leaks as a cause for this weekend’s massive dip. The note that Sundays are usually slow for the market in general. On the ninth, however, the volume spiked past recent highs and the price dropped precipitously. The correlation between price and the PRISM news making the rounds this weekend – while not airtight – is at least plausible. Bitcoin is controlled primarily by market sentiment. While a few big players can move the market a few notches, it’s clear that the currency does get hit with periodic storms related to attacks and, more important, news relating to privacy and finance. Users, then, are in the unenviable position of dealing with online mobs whose impetus and trading inspiration are far more opaque than, say, a retail equity trader’s. But why the drop? Most BTC owners are of the mind that the transactions between wallets are completely anonymous and, in theory, they are. However, as more and more cash changes hands, it’s obvious that someone somewhere wants to watch where these BTCs are going. While it’s hard to see exactly who is getting what using any sort of transaction log, the associated metadata collected by various outfits, the NSA included, point to transfers into and out of BTC. In short, Bitcoin users are stuck: They revel in the anonymity but are unsure of the degree. That’s a problem that will become more and more disconcerting as the currency grows in popularity and strength. |
Take A Peek At The Inner Workings Of MakerBot’s New Brooklyn Factory | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Brooklyn-based MakerBot is a darling of the 3D printing community, and it in Sunset Park, so the crew can more efficiently build and ship their shiny new Replicator 2 and 2X printers. Call it a classic case of growing pains — once demand for 3D printers started picking up, the MakerBot team soon found themselves aching for even more space to work in, and we got the chance to tour the new 50,000-square-foot facility when it opened last week. All things considered, it’s a nifty operation, and the move should help MakerBot cope with growing prominence as the 3D printing movement slowly moves into the mainstream… especially as it attempts to make the printing process easier with its forthcoming desktop scanner. Of course, MakerBot’s position as a high-profile purveyor of 3D printing wares has reportedly made it an attractive target for a potential acquisition, with Minnesota/Israel-based and even (which just recently opened a ) being pegged as potential purchasers. MakerBot’s ebullient founder Bre Pettis was keen to downplay that acquisition chatter, as he cut the ceremonial ribbon at the factory’s grand opening (using a partially 3D printed pair of scissors, naturally), but he did later note that they But while those conversations continue behind closed doors, the roughly 100 employees at MakerBot’s new Brooklyn outpost will continue assembling those printers by hand for a while to come — why not take a look and see what they’re up to? |
Event Ticketing And Crowdfunding Platform Picatic Now Lets Event Organizers Pay What They Want | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Online event ticketing startup is taking a novel new approach to signing up event organizers and getting them to use its services. The company’s new FairPay initiative will allow users to pay what they want after their events are successful. Picatic launched as an event ticketing startup — sort of an alternative to the Ticketmasters and Eventbrites of the world. Later, it unveiled a platform to enable organizers to . That was designed in part to boost the number of events that would run on its platform by increasing the chance of running a successful event. Now Picatic is removing another barrier to using its platform for events or ticketing by getting rid of fees that it charges event organizers and allowing them to pay what they want. The company’s new FairPay payment model gets rid of application fees, setup fees, transaction fees and service fees. The platform will continue to charge a small fee for payment processing, but otherwise it’s up to the event organizer to decide how much he or she should pay. Event organizers will be able to go through the entire process of setting up an event, whether it’s crowdfunded or not. Once it’s been successfully executed, they’ll be prompted to pay what they think is fair, based on the service that has been provided. The hope is that they’ll find Picatic so valuable that they’d pay as much, if not more, than Picatic might have charged them. The problem with the ticketing industry is that, while consumers generally don’t care where they purchase their tickets from, event organizers and venues generally get locked into long-term contracts with the agencies that provide those services. Picatic is hoping to get event organizers in at the ground floor, before they’re locked in, by enabling crowdfunding and partnering to ensure their success. Will it work? Who knows! But good luck to ’em. |
This Mechanical, 3D-Printed Entabulator Is An Amazing Tribute To The Power Of Clockwork | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | As a lover of all things mechanical, I’m in awe of . Using an old book about mechanical loom-making, a 3D printer and some serious patience, he engineered a computer that can read a program off of punch cards and, in this case, calculate the Fibonacci sequence. The machine runs using a hand crank (Fenton notes you can overclock it by cranking faster), and it is quite finicky but also quite beautiful in its own way. Obviously the world doesn’t need this Entabulator. It is so wildly impractical that it’s almost ludicrous, and the usability is limited (at least in this iteration). But isn’t it great that it exists? I’ve been messing around with 3D printers for most of this year and I’ve found a great deal of joy in wresting the means of production from Big Plastic by mass producing little parts and trinkets ( ) but I’ve also come to understand the real value of 3D printing. In short, these things allow us to create what we can imagine. Whereas a few years ago, building something like this out of wood and metal required a different set of skills and tools, now you can build most of it online and “build” it in a few hours. It allows for hacking in a very real sense — the consequences of failure are almost nil when you use these tools as compared to situations where a builder has to work in less forgiving materials. The Entabulator, while beautiful, is more important as an artifact of a post digital age when machines can beget machines. It’s actually quite thrilling. You can and build one yourself. Because it’s programmable, you can entabulate all sorts of stuff — a dubious but exciting prospect, to be sure.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1lMTgYoIGvo] |
Why Google’s Request To Release More Spying Data Would Be *Uninformative [Updated] | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Google for a letter to the federal government requesting the right to release more information on compliance with spy orders. The letter claims that if the public knew how many requests for data the National Security Agency demanded, they would dispel rumors that it’s giving away sweeping access to federal spies. “We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide,” Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond. In understanding FISA orders, it’s important to realize that it’s possible for one court order to gather troves of data. “FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said,” . As a case in point, the leaked court order to allow the government to collect phone records of all U.S. Verizon calls could have been a single, solitary FISA request. “It’s not necessarily the case that disclosing raw numbers will be helpful, but it depends on the type of order they receive,” explains Mark Rumold of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “In the business records context (the Verizon order), the government disclosed raw numbers, but that didn’t provide meaningful information because they were using a single order to obtain records on millions.” The good folks at the EFF are right in that any step towards more transparency is helpful. As the EFF reminds me, Google in disclosing censorship requests, and helping to bring public attention to America’s growing spying apparatus. . . Google responded to us, saying that they would like to include the number of users affected, . “We know that sometimes a single government request can cover more than one user or account. That’s why the Transparency Report today includes, for criminal requests and National Security letters, the number of requests and the number of users/accounts affected. We would certainly like to extend that approach to any additional kinds of legal requests we add to the Transparency Report in the future,” a Google representative wrote to us in an email. The problem is, if the article is to be believed, the NSA can request data on search logs, which means it could scan millions of users. Even under the best scenario, the NSA couldn’t have let Google do this, because it would be tantamount to disclosing how many services it’s sweeping. In other words, Google’s letter is asking for permission to essentially reveal the PRISM program itself. The letter, then, is a more roundabout way of telling the American people that Google is gagged and, therefore, can’t control wild speculation. I’m sympathetic to Google’s situation, even if the letter itself seems an odd way of expressing their frustration. More importantly, it doesn’t get us any closer to meaningful public oversight. We don’t know what data is being requested, if it’s being abused, or if it’s effective. In other words, we still lack solutions. |
Apple Stays Closed As iOS Shuts The Door On Developers | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Apple demonstrated that it will keep its iron grip on iOS 7, despite it’s time for Apple to start opening up. Rather than debut new opportunities for developers, Apple squelched them at WWDC by building its own substitutes for widgets, phone modifications, and whole categories of existing apps. Long ago, Apple declared war on inconsistency. When critics say ‘closed’, Apple hears dependable. Buy an iPhone or MacBook Pro and Apple wants your experience to be reliably great. It will do what it takes to protect that reputation. That means keeping its software largely unaltered by third-party developers. Apple’s homemade apps and operating system infrastructure might not be the best, especially compared to Google’s, but they’re easy and simple and usually get the job done. Hardcore users and third-party developers are the casualties of this war. And WWDC was a battle lost for them. Considering it’s supposed to be a developers conference, Monday’s event was all about Apple. So much so it may have left a sinking feeling in the stomachs of those hopeful to build helpful experiences for users…as well as those who already had. At WWDC, , calling it the biggest change to its mobile operating system since its launch in 2007. But what stayed the same was Apple’s disregard for customizability. In iOS 7, you still won’t be able to modify your lock or home screen with widgets, shortcuts, or launchers. Those tools allow Android holders to make their devices uniquely their own. Real-time feeds of information surface data from within apps so you don’t have to open them. Shortcuts let users jump straight to important parts of the OS or quickly toggle settings. Launchers let you choose from custom themes and employ different gesture controls for navigation. None of those things are coming to iOS. It’s still a one-size-fits-all operating system. Developers hoping to port their customization apps to iOS are likely out of luck for at least another year. Instead, Apple built several of the most important shortcuts into a single panel called Control Center. A swipe up reveals a number of crucial switches and sliders you used to have to dig out of different tabs of the Settings menu. There’s airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, rotation lock, Airdrop, and Airplay. Maybe most beneficial will be the brightness slider, which is critical to adjust as you move between direct sunlight and dark night so you don’t drain your battery. There’s also instant access to the music controls, which could combine nicely with the new iTunes Radio. But there was one little icon in Control Center that surely struck fear in the hearts of quite a few developers. . In a pinch, your mobile phone can help you find things in the dark by turning and leaving the camera’s flash on. Until now, Apple left it up to scrappy developers to offer apps that do this. There are over 1,000 flashlight apps in the App Store, 50 in our own CrunchBase, and even one that’s venture funded. They’re all in trouble now. Why download or waste home screen space on an app when you can use Apple’s native version with just a swipe up and a tap? Sure, these apps probably didn’t take long to develop, and maybe their makers should have predicted Apple might launch its own flashlight, but still, they deserve a little sympathy. Finally, the most direct example of Apple’s quest to stay closed is what it did with . Everyone uses the phone and SMS apps in their iPhone, but you can’t do much to customize them. Compare that with Android, which lets downloaded apps like Mr Number drastically modify the phone to allow for blocking of whole area codes of numbers, options to send specific numbers to voicemail, and even crowdsourced address books so nearly every incoming call comes with a name attached. Apple could have opened up developer hooks so iOS apps could have similar abilities to modify the phone app. But Apple isn’t built on “open.” So instead, it announced at WWDC that iOS 7 will support basic blocking for calls, texts and FaceTime from specific numbers. That takes the wind out of any Android phone modification app hoping to port to iOS. And with the expectation that Apple will keep improving these phone privacy features, it will be hard for any new developers to eke out enough value in the space to gain traction. iOS is falling behind. While many say the iPhone/iPad software is less advanced than the newest builds of Android, it’s how it that isn’t aging well. We’ve become more tech literate, and especially more mobile literate in the six years since iOS launched. Yet the operating system still acts like we have no idea what we want. That hand-holding is starting to drag us down. Apple saw that in its mobile design scheme. iOS 7 shed its predecessor’s skeuomorphism, dropping antiquated metaphors that made its calendar app resemble a physical paper planner many young users would hardly recognize. Now it’s time to let the functionality of iOS grow up, too. There must be a way for Apple to offer the same reliability that’s made it a household name, but still offer flexibility to developers and power users. For example, a series of stern prompts could warn people that they are going to change their operating system by installing and activating certain apps. Apple could even prompt people at regular intervals to confirm their modifications, allowing them a quick way to uninstall these customization apps to make sure no one gets stuck with an unwanted foreign experience. iOS was a marvelous introduction to smartphones for millions of people, and it will continue to be. But if Apple wants to satisfy us all and compete with the ever-evolving Android, it needs to let iOS mature. We certainly have. |
Zuckerberg Is (Still) Disappointed By Facebook Stock, Says He’s ‘Well-Versed’ In Its Ad Business | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Before Mark Zuckerberg started the question-and-answer session at today’s Facebook shareholder meeting, he noted that many of the pre-submitted questions focused on the performance of Facebook’s stock since IPO. It’s a familiar question, and he offered comments similar to ones that he’s made before — . Zuckerberg acknowledged that many shareholders aren’t happy with the stock’s performance, and he said Facebook needs to do more than achieve its general mission of making the world more open and connected — it also needs “to be a great financial return for all of our shareholders.” “We’re disappointed with the performance of the stock over the past year,” he said. “The real question is: What are we going to do about it?” Zuckerberg didn’t get too specific in his response, but he said that the company has always taken “a long-term view.” He noted that it took Facebook nine years to get to the point that it’s at today, and he said the company will “stay focused” on things like improving the product, growing revenue, and adding more apps to the platform, rather than the stock price per se. As it does so, he said he expects there “to be fluctuations in how the public thinks that we’re doing.” Judging from the questions that followed, shareholders weren’t entirely happy with that response. And while it’s easy to at the or of many of the comments and questions, it was a reminder of the (perhaps obvious) point that there are many regular people and lost money as a result. Zuckerberg’s answers to their complaints were mainly a variation on his initial comments, but he did give an interesting answer at the end, when someone asked how much time he spends paying attention to the business. “I spend most of my time reviewing the product and on the things that our users touch,” he said. However, he noted that “users” include a number of groups, including consumers, developers, and advertisers. So he added that it’s safe to assume that he has spent a meaningful amount of time reviewing Facebook’s ad products: “I’m very well-versed with our ad business.” |
The Best Of iOS 7’s Minor Upgrades | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Apple revealed with the of iOS 7 yesterday, but there are many smaller features that are now leaking out as developers have had a chance to play around with the new operating system. Though most of these didn’t get a shout-out during Apple’s keynote and accompanying demo at WWDC, they are the “little touches,” which help to make iOS 7 something bigger than an incremental update in terms of the new functionality it introduces. There are hundreds of new features, tweaks and changes in any operating system update, but below are some of best “little” features in the new release, many of which have been flying under the radar. Apple’s pseudo mobile wallet Passbook, which previously offered a way for users to store their tickets, store cards, and coupons now has another new feature that makes it more utilitarian: a QR code scanner. Spotted in press shots on Apple.com by , the apparent intention here would be to offer another way for users to onto their iPhones, as opposed to scanning just any QR code found in the wild. The compass app, like all the other Apple default applications, received a minimalist makeover with a new design. But the compass also got a level feature, too. It now uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to detect how many degrees off of zero a surface is. The feature is accessed by swiping left from the Compass’s main screen. Nifty, but I’m also thankful that Apple did not launch “Level” as a standalone application. (source: ) With a nod to Windows Phone (!!!)’s concept of live tiles and Android’s widgets, Apple has taken its first baby step towards offering a more real-time interface to its homescreen with the smallest of changes: for the iOS 7 clock app. Before, this app’s icon was static, but now the app shows the correct time and even includes a second hand that moves. (You can see this in the and the unofficial one below). [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_eUDWtHizY?feature=player_detailpage] OK, this one get a brief shout-out during the keynote, but it’s worth a mention. Though most will see this as a minor enhancement, this will actually be huge for parents. In the revamped iOS App Store, apps for children finally gets its own top-level category. (Before, the majority of kids’ apps were found in the “Education” section if remotely instructional, or tucked under the “Games” category if mainly entertaining.) With the introduction of the Kids section (above screenshot from ), there’s an opportunity for parents – and their offspring – to better drill down to find those that are appropriate based on the child’s age. And, , this also sets up a structure where Apple could begin to enforce specific rules about apps based on those more granular age designations (e.g. no in-app purchases on ages X to Y, guidance on analytics and how in-app ads are used, etc.). Because iOS 7 now uses transparent overlays for things like the Control Center (easy-access Settings you get to by swiping up from the bottom of the screen), the OS will use either black or white for app labels and the icons on the overlay, as appropriate. As notes, the default wallpaper that ships with iOS 7 will serve up the black version, but the white version was demoed during the keynote. Previously, iPhone users could access FaceTime from either the Phone app or Contacts app, but now Apple’s voice calling service has its own dedicated app – just like it does on the iPod touch. More importantly, however, in addition to audio plus video. No wonder didn’t want to support FaceTime, right? A concept popularized by Android is the idea of a “live” wallpaper – that is, instead of a static, unmoving image for your background, the wallpaper is animated, often subtly so. Apple’s iOS 7 with at least two live wallpapers, and hopefully this will open up the OS to run third-party live wallpapers, as well. (See around 0:30 in the YouTube video below for a demo). However, even for those who choose to use a static wallpaper as their background, as you tilt your phone the wallpaper stays with you. In addition, panoramic photos for wallpaper. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urTdhRmMrQY?feature=player_detailpage] Great for city dwellers, or anyone else who would rather be steered by audio instead of having to peer down at their phone while trying to find their way around, Apple’s Maps app has been updated to offer , in addition to driving. It also includes inclinometer support so it knows when you’re heading up or down hills, too, and will kick in when the sun sets. A minor but ongoing frustration with iOS’s earlier implementation of the Notification Center is that it required you to first slide to unlock your device. That made no sense of course, as often the purpose of notifications is a quick check of what you may have missed – and Apple had required you take an extra step to accomplish this before. Now, you can the revamped Notification Center from the Lock Screen. And with the redesign, it appears it will be easier to tap that “Clear” button when you’ve completed your review and want to dismiss the items. Safari’s revamp puts it more on par with something like Google’s Chrome app, with its new interface, improved bookmarks and sync, and more, but one of the biggest pain points has also now been addressed, too: on the number of tabs you have open. For heavy readers and web surfers, this was one of those minor but annoying issues that eventually forced us to other browsers, so it’s good to see it addressed. A way to see which apps are eating into your cellular bandwidth is now found in the iOS 7 Settings, . This is the kind of feature that third-party applications like have provided in the past to data-conscious users. iOS 7 only offers the bare details, though, while Onavo offers tools to keep data usage down, as well. The search function is no longer available to the left of the homescreen, but is rather accessed by swiping down from the center of the screen. MacRumors that you can now configure which search results categories display including things like iCloud documents, iTunes, Passbook updates, Reading List and more. Twitter’s good relationship with Apple now sees the app’s new Twitter Music service integrated right into iTunes Radio. on Apple.com, Twitter Music’s “Trending” section is available as its own station within Apple’s streaming music service. The app everyone loves to complain about, Newsstand, had been stuck on Apple’s homescreen forever, refusing to bend to your own ideas about app categorization. Fear no more says , you can finally shove that thing in a folder. (Which is good, too, because I’m not so sure about that icon!) A significant new feature that speaks to Apple’s focus on gaining traction in China is , a microblogging site that’s like China’s version of Twitter. Tencent Weibo’s competitor, Sina Weibo, was integrated into iOS 6 last year. As , the new version of the iOS operating system now offers “Phone, FaceTime and Messages blocking,” allowing users to prevent specific people from being able to contact you. |
At Facebook Shareholder Meeting, Zuckerberg Stands Behind His Initial PRISM Denial | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | The has since last week, when Mark Zuckerberg to the reports that it is among a group of tech companies that have been secretly cooperating with the United States government to provide user data. But at Facebook’s held today in Millbrae, California, Zuckerberg said the company continues to stand behind that initial statement. “I wrote this statement last week that I published on Facebook that I think is basically the fullness of what we believe,” Zuckerberg said in response to a shareholder’s question about the general national security reports in the press. He went on to add more detail:
“We don’t work directly with the NSA, or with any other program. Nor do we proactively give user information to anyone, nor has anyone approached us to do that.” He also reiterated his statement that no agency has “ ” to Facebook’s servers, and acknowledged that that phrase has as to whether that means that the company is providing some kind of indirect access to its data. “The reality is anyone can go to Facebook.com and get indirect access to our service,” he said. “No agencies have direct access and can plug into our servers and get information… the process that government agencies go through if they want to get a warrant is similar to what police do in any court case, and we basically give the minimum amount of information” necessary to comply with any request, he said. Of course, these statements don’t come close to addressing the about what PRISM could actually be. And Google, for one, has stepped forward and issued an today about the situation. After Zuckerberg and team return from the shareholder meeting (which included a Q&A session with of investors), perhaps they will take a more serious second look at updating their stance. |
Who Won E3? | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | By now we’ve heard most of what the big three have had to say. Nintendo is holding the line with the Wii U, Microsoft has announced an always-on box for $499, and Sony has made nice with gamers by offering a $399 device that allows users to share and sell games. All of the consoles are HD, all of them support multi-player, and the console wars are essentially over. Each console is a permutation of a high-end PC and each console should have a life-cycle of about seven years, give or take, until 4K becomes interesting then the new console generation will pop onto the scene. It is, as the Lion King says, the circle of life. Sadly, however, I think older gamers are finally seeing through the console ruse. To be clear, every console from each manufacturer will sell in the millions. There will be lines around the block at Best Buys across the nation come November as holiday buyers rush for the Xbox One and further lines when the PS4 launches. Nintendo’s top-flight franchises will sell out and the Wii U, while seemingly disappointing, will still sell kids just coming up in the gaming world and to nostalgic adults. In that way, no one can “win” E3 – no matter . So what’s next for gaming? It’s clearly not “casual consoles” like the Ouya nor is it Zynga’s brand of crack gaming that fails when the addicts lose interest. What, then, constitutes the future? The phone has to, at some point, replace the handheld console and give the home console a run for its money. Mobile games are addictive but non of them offer the depth and complexity of a game that requires concentration and a stronger control system. There is a reason RPGs and other “deep” games work well using keyboards and, to a degree, controllers: the medium is separated from the message of the game. Games like Kingdom Rush and Angry Birds rely on the device and are, in a way, wedded to it. More complex games are wedded to a passive screen that we control using hand motions that are completely divorced from the actual game play. This is not to say that mobile gaming can’t create rich worlds. It’s just far harder. It’s not difficult to grab a mobile gamer’s attention for a long time – games like Civilization Revolution are a testament to that – but the interface doesn’t lend itself to long, complex adventures like Oblivion or Bioshock. Once the hardware and software reach parity, however, I could definitely see something in that vein. While console makers aren’t quite ignoring this, Nintendo (and others) could be leaving money on the table by not developing for mobile platforms. Products like the Oculus Rift are examples of true innovation in gaming. I’ve tried the developer kit and while it is far from complete or even particularly compelling, it does bode well for an immersive future. It is obviously a gimmick, just as the Kinect was before it, but it adds a great deal to the gameplay experience and I could see a day when a headset could augment the gaming experience considerably. But the future cannot be all headsets and multi-dimensional treadmills. The future has to be filled with compelling content created for a wide audience, something that blockbuster games makers are increasingly afraid to attempt. and are both recent examples of some of the best – and worst – habits of game makers. The LEGO title has all of the fun of a Pixar kids’ movie mixed in with a compelling (if cute) story. Bioshock Infinite has all of the twists and turns of a good movie and the majesty of a Hudson River School painting. Both of the games are flawed in their own way but, in another sense, both are perfect examples of the genre. Most important, however, is that they could be improved like a gimmick like the Oculus Rift but they do not require it to shine. While I intimated above that none of the “big guys” won E3, , captured hearts and minds across the globe. In short, they understand the primary value of the console as a physical media player. Allow me to explain. Game services like Steam (and, to a degree, OnLive) got one part of the equation right. They understood that gaming is usually a solitary endeavor that takes place on a one-to-one basis between a player and his or her monitor. Microsoft is hoping that this relationship can easily cross over to the console experience, which is untrue. On the console, physical media is important for a few reasons and, while the urgency of these are rapidly diminishing, they still exist in most of the world. First, physical media is popular because it allows folks without stable Internet (arguably an increasingly small cohort) to play any game, it allows for easy trading and aftermarket sales, and it allows, to a degree, for piracy. These are, whether we like it or not, all important things to consider when creating a living-room-based games console. You can, obviously, attempt to crack a console to play downloaded games but, thus far, the physical media has been the primary vector for piracy and will remain so. Not every gamer lives in the U.S. where games aren’t amazingly expensive and so there is far more of an impetus to pirate than any of the big three let on. When you have both parts of the equation correct – the DLC for solitary, more mature gaming and the physical media for a more price-sensitive market – you win. When you fail to address both sides you fail. Microsoft will probably rejigger its strategy shortly to concede to the mass of gamers who are outraged or it can ignore the complaints and just go for a more mature, less-price-sensitive gamer who doesn’t take his or her disks to a friend’s house to play. Why does this matter to a non-gamer? First, consoles and the attendant applications drive the direction of in-home media. The PS2 drove DVD adoption just as the PS3 drove Blu-ray (for a while). Consoles are streaming video, allowing for interactive chat sessions, and encouraging us to upgrade our televisions. Gaming is an industry, not a business, and millions of people world-wide are shaped by its tribulations and triumphs. Gaming is great. For all their complaints, the game-playing masses are still investing time and energy into some amazing titles and games are becoming increasingly more immersive, exciting, and artistic. To say any one console “won” E3 is to ignore the up-and-coming technologies that will make our twitch-fests more interactive and the older players who, by now, are the interactive equivalents of the movie studios of old. Gamers love to whine, but when the pre-order button lights up or its time to queue around the GameStop there is little that can hold them back. The giants at E3 know this implicitly and while no business is guaranteed, there is more than enough precedent to point to a bright and fascinating future. |
Gillmor Gang: Cider House Rules | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — absorb the WWDC keynote. iOS7, OS/10 Mavericks, Macbook Air refresh, and iTunes Radio were the big bullets, but underlying the event was the resurgence of Apple as the leader in setting the agenda. Not everyone buys this perspective, of course. @scobleizer sees this as the assignment of RIM and Microsoft to the dustbin of history. But wait, there’s XBox. @dbfarber provides the context, @kevinmarks the technopop view, and I watch from the comfort of my living room as Apple TV looms, the elephant in the room. 1080P HD straight into the living room, iOS7’s control panel makes AirPlay one scroll and click away. Apple no longer feels haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs; they’re having fun again in Cupertino. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Keen On… Internet Access: Does American Broadband Suck? | Andrew Keen | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | For years, it’s been taken for granted that the U.S. ranks low in the broadband performance table. But a piece by explodes the myth of poor U.S. broadband. Not everyone, however, agrees with Bennett. So, to debate the ITIF Senior Research Fellow, I invited SVP , who has a much less positive take on America’s broadband reality. While acknowledging that American broadband performance has improved, Feld still believes that in certain respects, particularly rural access, American broadband is still pretty pathetic. “We suck less,” Feld insists, is hardly proof of America’s world beating broadband. So why should Silicon Valley entrepreneurs care about this debate, I asked both Feld and Bennett. Their answers were identical. Low quality broadband, they both believe, kills digital innovation. Which is why, in spite of its occasional wonkishness, this debate about the quality of American broadband is critical to the success of the American 21st century digital economy. |
As IPO Nears, Twitter CEO Says “We Think Of Revenue Like Oxygen” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | As Twitter nears its IPO — at least according to — CEO Dick Costolo seemingly refuses to focus on the money. “We think of revenue like oxygen. Essential to life but not the first thing you think about in the morning,” he told Katie Couric at The Atlantic’s Aspen Ideas Festival. “I don’t try to get caught up in short-term thinking about the company.” Given the impending IPO, this is likely Costolo’s last interview, so these quotes will haunt them frenzy ramps up. Couric asked him if he had learned anything from Facebook’s blunder. Costolo, in a transparent dodge that got laughs from the audience, said, “I don’t like to think about reacting to what other people are doing in the market. It’s like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.” The goal, Costolo said in true buzzword-happy fashion, is to become a “global town square.” Costolo completely bypassed questions about the National Security Agency’s Internet snooping program. “We have to obey the rule of law,” he said, noting that Twitter was not one of the nine . It should be noted that Twitter isn’t the only company that claimed to fight the NSA. Yahoo reportedly tried to block the NSA’s spying . So while it’s laudable that Twitter isn’t part of PRISM, it may be because Twitter doesn’t collect the kinds of user identification data most valuable to spy agencies (you can sign up for Twitter with a pseudonym). Ultimately, Costolo said he wants Twitter to be an interesting place to work. All money and no play makes Twitter a boring business. “That’s not a fun place to go to work in the morning. It’s not particularly innovative.” [pic via ] |
Google Asks U.S. Government For Permission To Publish Aggregate Number Of National Security Requests It Receives | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | Google is one of the companies implicated in the leak last week, but the company continues to that it provided the NSA with special access to its servers. It is, however, now to be allowed to publish at least a little bit more information about the national security requests, including FISA disclosures, it receives. Google isn’t currently allowed to publish even this aggregate data in its . Google is under nondisclosure obligations here, so the details of these requests will likely always be under wraps, but according to a letter by its Chief Legal Officer David Drummond sent to the FBI and the Attorney General, the company would like to make public at least the number of requests it receives. : This is meant to push back against the assertion that Google provides the government with direct access to its servers – something the leaked and statements from the reporters who have seen the whole presentation seem to indicate. The company argues that “government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.” “Google appreciates that you authorized the recent disclosure of general numbers for national security letters. There have been no adverse consequences arising from their publication, and in fact more companies are receiving your approval to do so as a result of Google’s initiative. Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest without harming national security,” Drummond writes. Drummond also uses this opportunity to note that the assertion that Google gives the U.S. government “unfettered access” to its server are “simply untrue.” |
CrunchWeek: Sean Parker’s TechCrunch Post, VCs Get Into PR And Journalism, SnapChat Snaps Up $80 Million | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | , and I piled ourselves into the TechCrunch TV studio to discuss some of the most interesting tech news stories from the past seven days: Sean Parker’s in which he tackled the criticism of his wedding and the larger state of modern journalism, venture capital firms such as First Round Capital , and SnapChat’s ($20 million of which went straight to the app’s two young cofounders.) This will be our last CrunchWeek for a little while, as we’re taking a two week summer hiatus — next week, we’ll be off at our July 4th barbecues grooving to Andrew Mason’s , and the week after that a bunch of us will be in Los Angeles covering the startup scene there. So enjoy this episode, and until we meet again, enjoy the next couple weeks of summer! |
IE11 Gives Microsoft A Shot At Browser Redemption | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | is a hard product to love. It was and Microsoft its position of having the dominant browser for so many years that even today, with a few solid releases under its belt, IE still feels like the browser you should hate. But with IE11, which just with the Windows 8.1 Preview, Microsoft is finally stepping up its game to the point where there’s a reason to take IE seriously again. And it deserves another look from both developers and users. Microsoft didn’t go into all that much depth when it discussed IE11 during its Build keynotes, but during an IE-focused press briefing, the company opened up a bit more about the state of its browser. The main takeaway from that session, at least for me, was that Microsoft believes that the fact that it only has to focus on one platform allows it to build a superior browser. Other browsers, the message was, have to work on so many platforms and that means the developers have to make too many compromises. With being fully focused on Windows and Windows RT, Microsoft argues, it can include fast hardware-accelerated features like WebGL and even significantly faster font rendering. It’s not just 3D content where IE is now competitive (and often ahead of the competition). While Microsoft often shied away from putting standard JavaScript benchmarks on it screen and argued that “real world” performance was more important, it now proudly put the usual , and numbers on the screen. The results are indeed impressive. I repeated some of these benchmarks myself and IE11 always easily beat Chrome and Firefox in all of these (arguably unscientific) tests. If you want to see an impressive example of IE11 in action, try out Microsoft’s new and demos. There are other features that make IE11 interesting, too. The new in the Start Menu, for example, allows any site to create an app-like experience on the Windows 8.1 desktop. Bookmarks are now synced over SkyDrive and the browser is integrated with the new Reading List feature in Windows 8.1 (though sadly, there is no Instapaper-like, distraction-free reading mode). Microsoft is really focusing on touch in the browser, and with , it’s working to make this a W3C standard for all browsers. All of this doesn’t mean IE11 is perfect, though. Far from it. While it now finally supports standards like WebGL and has support for SPDY (something Microsoft did not exactly highlight), WebRTC is still missing in action. The Metro/Windows 8-style version of IE is also still decoupled from the desktop version. It’s also still not clear whether IE11 will ever come to Windows 7, though Microsoft pretty clearly hinted at this during its Build press briefing. Overall, IE11 gives Microsoft a shot at being taken seriously again in the browser game. Even though it’s not a dominant player anymore, it still owns a lot of market share around the world. And no matter how you feel about Microsoft, a better IE makes for a better web ecosystem for both developers and users. |
You Can’t Quit, Google Reader, Because I Already Fired You | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | Google Reader is dying come Monday, and the whole Internet is sad. I’m not sad. I won’t miss it at all. I used to use Google Reader a lot, as in every day, and it was once a key component of my arsenal of work tools, too. Reader was the pulse of the Internet, my way of staying up to date with everything that happened while I was waking or sleeping. In tech news, having a resource like Google reader is important. Or wait no: was. Was important. At one time, news happened at a pace that allowed it to be digested relatively slowly, in batches resembling what we were used to from the one or two-times a day print newspaper schedules. Google and RSS were fine for that; it’s like a digest that builds in near real-time, putting everything in one convenient place for you to come back to whenever you need to. Which is what some people still need it for, and that’s great. But for me, and I’m sure for others like me who work in the online news space, at some point Google Reader just stopped feeling current enough, fast enough, and comprehensive enough. If Reader was the Model T, tools like Twitter and more timely and true real-time reporting tools that tell you when pages are updated the instant they’re updated became Edsel’s Model A. Reader is still arguably a nice way to keep up with more evergreen and long-form content, from blogs that post irregularly and that you’d like to collect in one place. But for that, I again trust recommendations from my Twitter peeps, and add content to Instapaper or Pocket for later reading instead of looking to individual sources. This adds an additional filter layer for longer content, meaning I’m less likely to end up wasting my time reading something I’m not all that interested in. And recently, endeavours like The Magazine and Medium have made tracking that evergreen content even easier. At first, I stopped using Reader for work around two years ago. I’d actually open it as an escape, tracking things that I was personally interested in but that weren’t really relevant to my specific coverage areas, per se, including gaming news. Tapping it open via Reeder on the iPad was a pre-bedtime activity, designed to provide some relaxing light reading before hitting the sack. Then, eventually, I’d tap that icon less and less, finding fewer and fewer articles that I hadn’t already seen, or grasped the content of from Twitter posts and interactions. Finally, I moved it from my iOS dock to the standard homescreen, and by around a year ago it was relegated to a page towards the end of my series of iOS homescreens. I haven’t used it in months. Reader was good stuff, and plenty of people still use it. But there are , and by and large, the Internet has moved on. If people haven’t, it might be because Reader provided a comfortable standard that was easy, giving them little reason to look around. Reader’s death isn’t a bad thing; it’s just a chance to put your head up and look around to see what’s changed in aggregation over the course of the past few years. |
A Year After Launch (And With 300K Sites Created), ‘Social Front Page’ RebelMouse Mulls Ad Strategy | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | It’s been since former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry first launched , a service allowing users to pull their content together from across social networks. To mark the occasion, Berry stopped by the TechCrunch office to look back at the past year and hint at his plans for the future. Overall, Berry said that the service’s growth has backed up his initial vision. “We haven’t done any pivots — we’ve just been following the core path,” he said. “A year ago, I had all these hypotheticals of how people could use the product. Now there’s an insane amount of anecdotal evidence.” , RebelMouse is now reaching 5 million unique monthly visitors, and its users have created 300,000 sites. Publishers like , , and have used the technology, as have brands like , , and . One thing you might notice about all of those links is that they don’t go to RebelMouse site itself, but instead to the websites of the publishers in question. Berry said that’s as it should be: “We want to be very clear to everyone that it’s not as important to us to be the destination as it is to help the open web.” That goes back to the original vision, where Berry realized that it’s “too hard” for many people to build and update a website using a traditional content management systems. With RebelMouse, you can take advantage of all the content that you’re already posting on other sites to create a unified, up-to-date presence, whether the “you” in question is a person or a company. And if you want to pay RebelMouse for the privilege, even better. The company is already making money through a subscription program where users to host their RebelMouse site at their own domain. The next step in Berry’s monetization plan is advertising, specifically the term that everyone is embracing nowadays, native ads. Berry acknowledged that native “is a highly abused term” (in his view, native advertising means that the ad has to match the look and the content of the site), but he argued that RebelMouse can deliver sponsored content in a real-time way that’s sensitive to the user’s context: “We can give publishers native advertising at scale.” Other future plans include the launch of smartphone apps (although Berry noted that mobile already accounts for a significant part of RebelMouse’s traffic.) And of course, as RebelMouse evolves, so does the social media context in which it’s operating. The past year has seen the new social apps explode in popularity, and Berry predicted that the process will continue. “It’s surprising, but social graphs, instead of gaining value over time, well, there’s an aspect that’s true, but there’s the opposite, where they lose value over time — people enjoy new networks,” he said. “That’s why RebelMouse’s goal is to remain the Switzerland of all of this.” |
DFJ Restructures Firm Partner Network | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | Back in 1990, then relatively young venture firm started thinking about how to expand the firm’s presence outside of Silicon Valley and share ideas and diligence with other VCs in the industry. DFJ created a partner network of independent VC firms across the globe that adopted DFJ branding. It was the closest thing to VC franchising at the time. The first firm who joined was DFJ Polaris, who was based in Alaska. This network was an early version of the agency model that many VCs have adopted in the past few years as the affiliate VCs and DFJ combined created an extended network of resources (both in the U.S. and globally) for portfolio startups. Now DFJ is announcing that the firm is restructuring the network to clarify branding and create a governing board around the body. To date, there have been 16 outside funds who have joined the network, 11 of which are outside the U.S. These include DFJ Mercury, DFJ Athena Korea, DFJ Frontier, DFJ Esprit, among others. As mentioned above, these firms are independent when it came to fundraising, LPs, and decision-making on when to fund startups. In turn for the branding and access, DFJ would have some carry in the funds that joined DFJ’s network (and there was also income paid to DFJ in the form of dues). As part of the restructuring, DFJ will be creating a governing board, who will oversee the entire network, which includes DFJ’s own funds, DFJ, and DFJ Growth. The board is composed of a DFJ partner and includes representation from other network partners. Along with the board, the partner networks will be dropping the DFJ-branding from their names. For example, DFJ Mercury is now Mercury Fund. So why the change? As the firm explains, the partner funds have matured, and are self-sustaining, meaning the DFJ branding is no longer necessary for these funds to create deal flow and more. DFJ Partner Don Wood, who also holds a seat on the governing board of the DFJ network, says the “restructuring wasn’t necessary per say, but instead it was an evolution and improvement of network.” He adds, “The benefits of the network remains the same, it’s just that the governance of the network has changed and actually gives a strong and equal voice to all the members of the DFJ family.” In terms of the branding decision, Wood explains that the DFJ name attached to these independent funds caused confusion, especially amongst LPs and entrepreneurs. As for the board, the benefit is two-fold, he says. First, it clarifies any confusion on how the network works. And second, it makes the network more of a democracy. For example, if a new firm wanted to join the network, the board will make the decision. This was previously made by DFJ in the past. The board itself will help coordinate benefits, such as discounts to office services, to all startups in the network’s portfolio. Another interesting change–DFJ itself will no longer have any direct economic benefit to firms joining the network. Member firms still pay their dues (though now to the board), and DFJ will not get any carry in network firms. Dues from the partner networks will go towards creating services and making hires that can manage the relationships and networks between firms. The question many may ask how the network firms have responded to this change. According to DFJ, they have embraced these changes and also found the existing structure to be confusing to both LPs and startups. DFJ JAIC, which is going to be known as Draper Nexus, launches a cross border VC firm with around $50 million to invest in Japanese and US startups. The firm joined the network in 2011, and saw DFJ as an opportunity to give startups a global network of access points. “Our four person fund has limited brainpower and we wanted to tap into a larger knowledge base, and take a more global view to managing and helping our startups,” says Quaaed Motiwala, Managing Director of the firm. Wood says that since the decision was made (which was unilateral across the network), no firm has dropped out of the DFJ partner program. In fact, many of the partners from DFJ network firms decided on the new infrastructure themselves. DFJ, who last closed its tenth, $327 million fund back in 2010, says that this was the natural evolution of the partner program. You also have to wonder if the firm is raising a new fund, and decided to take some of this feedback from LPs into account. It should also be interesting to see whether any other VC firms follow suit in creating a similar structure. |
Nokia Launches Nimbuzz Chat App To Tell Indian Users To Trade Up To A Smartphone | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | After biding it’s time in emerging markets, free messaging app Nimbuzz has ben ratcheting up the news and partnerships lately. It’s hit 150m users globally, in Asia, India and Saudi Arabia, has been for platforms like Windows 8, and . Of course, Viber, WhatsApp and GroupMe are doing well, but these startups concentrate on smartphone apps. Nimbuzz emerged on feature phones and still has a story feature phone user base. But Nimbuzz is unique in that is has opened up its platform for third party messaging services which behave like little chat bot apps. These bots are called Chat Buddies. There are Weather bot apps, or you can chat with a horoscope app that behaves rather like a text-based Siri. Independent developers have added ‘chat games’ like Hangman or an app called “Stranger Buddy” which is like Chat Roulette in text form. Brands are gradually realising this is a very clever way to interact with users, especially in emerging markets. These chat apps are hugely popular in regions where text messaging works and where data is expensive. Now Nokia has developed its own Chat Buddy called Nokia Lucky Sunday. From tomorrow this will appear as a contact on the roster of all Nimbuzz users in India and start to quiz users and reward them with prizes. That’s over 25 million users, or a quarter of the entire mobile Internet population of the country. With every correct answer, the user moves a leaderboard and the top users stand a chance to win Nokia smartphones at the end of every Sunday. Vikas Saxena, CEO, Nimbuzz, says the move “is a translation of the belief that brands have in our platform.” This is obviously going to remind feature phone users who may still be on Nokia to opt for a Nokia smartphone when they change handsets. But because Nimbuzz works across all smartphones, it means Nokia can try and entice them back via the Chat Buddy. Nimbuzz is available on all major platforms such as BlackBerry 10, Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone, and J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac computers. It’s pre-loaded onto all local OEM handsets in India apart from Nokia, Samsung, LG. |
Gillmor Gang: Interdependence Day | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — marvel at the mutually assured creation of a partnership between Larry Ellison’s Oracle and Marc Benioff’s Salesforce.com. Few would have predicted such a stunning partnership just a few years ago, but the crescendoing intersection of cloud, social, and mobile has borne sudden fruit. The only constant is change. Google Reader’s demise gives way to @borthwick’s Digg Reader, seeds @scobleizer’s Flipboard magazines, and tracks the proliferation of a shiny new red Glass to replace Robert’s original accessory. Managing the tweet notifications can quickly overrun the Twitter for Glass app, but we’re living in a material world where the innovation surge of the last few years is now ripe for absorbing. Gentle men and women, start your engines. @stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Why Oracle And Salesforce, Once Bitter Rivals, Are Now On Cloud Nine | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 29 |
Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison, the CEOs of two of the more powerful enterprise companies in the world — Salesforce.com and Oracle — are not known to be the chummiest of pals. Before this week’s sudden peaceful truce, which will see the two companies , the only clouds that connected the two were dark and frowny ones. For years, the two have pitted themselves and their companies against each other in brinkmanship-style competition, while and just to stay within sight of each other. It was popcorn-munching fodder, as their sparring often took on a decidedly personal, catfight-style spin. To wit: , Oracle cancelled Benioff’s high-priced keynote talk at its OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco at the last minute, precipitating a back and forth between the two CEOs. Benioff wasn’t invited back in 2012. While the personality-led public spats often seemed more like desperate grabs for publicity and attention than anything else, the Oracle-Salesforce feud can be boiled down to a much more interesting (and fundamental) conflict: Which company or model (if either) represents the “true cloud” — present and future. In reality, that comes down to not only who has been able to win over enterprises with their respective service suites in the sky in the past — but who’s got the best shot at doing that tomorrow … or in 2025? Leading up to this denouement, Benioff rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Oracle’s philosophy, focusing on its Exadata system, which the Salesforce CEO called “the false cloud” (a term he used consistently over the years). His opinion: Oracle’s direction failed to show a critical understanding of what enterprise customers really want (and need) in the modern world of cloud computing. Benioff has long been outspoken about the fact that IT companies must embrace consumerization and the “social revolution” if they hope to survive. That manifested, in part, in Salesforce’s integration with Facebook and acquisitions of a number of social-marketing and social-productivity services, like Buddy Media, Radian6 and Rypple, among others. In turn, Ellison has said that Salesforce.com, in fact, “isn’t a real cloud company,” because it was “applications-only, rather than apps backed by that all-important cloud infrastructure,” . Of course, Oracle has worked hard to become much more than a partial cloud, with the virtualization tech and an end-to-end stack that one traditionally associates with a “true” cloud-computing company. Salesforce, in reality, Ellison had said, was actually just an running on Oracle’s infrastructure. Sure, Ellison and Benioff sparring over “whose cloud is bigger” doesn’t quite have the same pugilistic feel of a real war, but, for good reason, the two companies have long been referred to as enemies. That’s why the news this week that Oracle and Salesforce are putting aside their differences to embrace in a nine-year partnership, covering applications, platform and infrastructure over the next nine years, came as somewhat of a shock. The truth is that Benioff and Ellison have known each other for a long time. Larry Ellison was Marc Benioff’s mentor when he was an eager executive at Oracle — for 13 years, mind you, in which he became Oracle’s youngest VP — before he took off to found Salesforce. Back in the day, Benioff’s presence onstage at an Oracle conference a decade ago as Ellison-esque. In fact, the Oracle CEO went on to help get Salesforce.com off the ground as an early investor, and Salesforce has been a big customer of Oracle’s over the years. When did it go wrong? Some have said that the feud that broke out officially in 2011 could be attributed to Benioff’s drive to be taken seriously by his former boss, mentor and investor — in short, he had something to prove. While sensitive, city-sized egos have no doubt been partly to blame; on the other hand, as , again, the real issue at hand has been the very definition of cloud computing. On this issue, the two CEOs routinely went their separate ways. For Benioff, the cloud has been something that can’t be owned or packaged, because it is a fundamental part of the web itself, which consumers never really interact with or touch on a daily basis. Salesforce.com was designed to bring massive data centers and cloud computing to users through the familiar window of their browsers — they just need an Internet connection or a web-connected device to use it. Benioff’s “cloud” is defined by services like Facebook, or AWS, or Google Apps, where customers have a wide range of tools at their fingertips without having to worry about what’s going on behind the scenes. They don’t have to install anything, manage a ton of moving parts, worry about upgrades (and so on), and they pay for what they use. But for the Oracle CEO, the cloud has been more of a hybrid, one that caters in part to enterprise organizations that don’t want third parties handling their data or operations or physical assets. Really, it’s the old world of enterprise software, with a mess of modern tech — a world where Oracle, traditionally, has hardly been alone. Of course, Benioff has been a broken record on this point, believing that this kind of cloud is going the way of the dinosaur, that Oracle-style hardware will be replaced by the distributed, omniscient Internet-powered cloud. So why the change of heart? It seems that at least part of it has to do with growing up: The two companies share a long list of mutual customers. “Salesforce is a big company now,” Ellison said proudly in front of his former pupil and new bestie. “Companies expect us to work together professionally toward their mutual benefit.” And Ellison noted on a around the news, “We don’t want each and every one of those customers having to hire a third party or having to spend a lot of money to wire up the Salesforce applications to the Oracle applications.” Benioff added that it was “an easy commitment” for both companies to make and that there was “no company” he’d rather “partner with to be the heart of Salesforce’s database infrastructure.” Not only that, but he gushed that the potential opportunities that could result from the partnership were “endless,” and that they would be hosting more joint conference calls in the future. The reality of it, however, is that on some level the two companies need each other. While Salesforce has nailed the idea of cloud services, its bread and butter remain as its name says — focused on sales teams and mobilizing them. On top of that, Salesforce’s cloud mantra, even if it is the way everything seems to be moving, is still far from ubiquitous, particularly for large enterprises. By contrast, Oracle, has the larger remit with the verticals it targets, and it also has the credibility for premise-based software solutions, but perhaps has not managed to pin down that cloud element in quite as strong a way as Salesforce has. That speaks to a sort of symbiosis: Salesforce will become an official internal user of Oracle’s financial and HR apps; Oracle will begin integrating Salesforce into its infrastructure, using its newly acquired companies using Salesforce to help it find the best ways to integrate. Down the road, the idea is to allow customers to just flip a switch to enable usage of either company’s apps. , this alliance will also help Oracle crack further into big data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL, which may compete, but more likely complement the relational databases upon which Oracle’s business is built. This also points to another way that a partnership between these two giants makes sense: if it’s the new wave of enterprise startups that are creating the most disruptive effects in the industry, with large enterprises increasingly opting for hybrid solutions from a selection of these emerging companies, Ellison and Benioff coming together to present an even more formidable OracleForce will make it difficult for would-be rivals to compete. To that end, it will be interesting to see if this does indeed usher in a “third wave of computing” as Benioff terms it, in which big companies and rivals like Oracle and Salesforce (and Microsoft, who had Oracle news of its own this week) are forced to come together if they hope to produce the kind of value and flexibility of choice that customers have begun to demand from their infrastructure — the kind of value that smaller competitors may be more agile and able to achieve. This argument is made most persuasively by Aaron Levie, co-founder of Box (yes, one of those nipping at the big guys’ toes), who writes about . [tweet 350077536685924352 align=’center’] Herein also lies the challenge for the two: whether they can really get their big arses in sync to work together to meet those new enterprise demands. Some are very cynical that this latest move demonstrates that they can. Carter Lusher, chief IT analyst at Ovum, believes that “nothing in the announcement amounted to a significant change in either company’s strategy.” “This is a very minor announcement, just above ‘press releaseware’ because of the lack of detail provided,” he writes in a research note, citing the lack of detail on how and when platform migrations will take place, or what companies will get displaced in the process, or when they will hit the market with these new solutions. “It is Ovum’s opinion that this announcement neither shifts the dynamics of the IT industry nor should it change any IT organization’s IT strategy or procurement plans,” he concludes. Still, there’s time to see how the practicalities play out. In the interim, let’s see whether regulators have anything to say on this deal. |
If You Must Wear Your Tech, Try Not To Look Like An Idiot | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | Like Dance Moms or protein-only diets, wearable tech is one of those things that simultaneously incites excitement, bandwagonning, distrust and disgust. Gut instinct tells us we’re turning into cyborgs, which is either terrifying or great, depending on how you see it. Maybe we will become more efficient, fit versions of ourselves, or maybe we are simply setting ourselves up for the government to steal a new wealth of personal information. As Sarah wrote, even for those most involved in its development. These are big concerns. But I have another one: that your wearable tech is making you look like a tool. An unofficial poll of five TechCrunch writers and editors revealed little faith in finding decent-looking wearables. The most popular suggestion was followed by . But the thing is, sometimes you love what you love, and it’s awesome, so you’re just going to wear it anyway, goddammit! Even those TC eds admitted that they have an affection for dumb-looking wearables. Like USB belts. Wristbands. And so we embark on the search for wearable tech pieces that are both functionally great and aesthetically not the worst. Note that a lot of these guys are only available for pre-order at the moment, so you have some time to consider your fate. Fitness bands are the easiest entry point into wearables, because everyone knows that if you want to be cool, go where the jocks go. All of my athlete friends in college wore plastic stopwatches around to clock their pace on runs, and they worked out smarter and harder than the rest of us who tooled around on the elliptical for half an hour. Fitness bands are a useful extension of that, tracking diet and sleep in addition to exercise. There are a number of fitness trackers out there now, but the Fitbit Flex . Jawbone UP , while Nike Fuelband . Minimalist and sporty, the Fitbit Flex also nails the aesthetics of fitness tracking. It’s respectable while still telling the world, “Yeah, I work out.” Kicking things up a notch, Nike’s Hyperdunk basketball shoes are embedded with sensors synced to the Nike+Basketball app that measure your air, speed and intensity. I would like to know (1) what Lebron, who , actually thinks of these, and (2) how well they work. Depending on their functionality, these shoes could be an awesome piece of undercover sports tech, especially in an industry that values and capitalizes on over-the-top, attention-grabbing design. These bands look like cute oversize watches, but they appeal to every parent’s darkest fear of losing a child. Let’s suspend debate of the various pitfalls of our helicopter parenting culture, and focus on the good here: Filip has GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular capability, so you can locate your child, see if they’ve moved out of designated safe zones, and call and send them short messages, among other things. It’s targeted at 5- to 12-year-olds, an age group that maker Filip Technologies recognizes probably shouldn’t have cell phones because of cyber-bullying and that horrible sexting business. (This is, of course, hoping kids don’t get bullied for wearing an umbilical cord/watch.) As a device it’s quite good looking, so it’s not a bad option if you don’t mind being implicated as a helicopter parent for those who know what it is. But you know what? We all have priorities. According to a PR rep, Filip goes on pre-order this summer and will ship in the fall, with pricing as of yet undetermined.
Last TechCrunch reported, for its $149 MYO armband, so if popularity is your benchmark for acceptability, it’s not a bad bet. Worn around the forearm, MYO translates electrical impulses and muscle motion into gesture control for Bluetooth-connected devices. The potential applications of this are pretty exciting, the most mundane being that PowerPoint
presentations just got a whole lot sexier. It’s okay aesthetically, if a little awkward because of how the band’s links space out as they’re slid onto the arm (Counter point: you could look like .) Hazy silver and the size of a quarter, Misfit’s wearable activity tracker makes the best show of the lot in striving for elegance. Their website suggests that it’s meant to “complement any fashion statement,” a welcome change from tech that strives to your fashion statement, or at least sit awkwardly next to it. Plus, it can be easily hidden on a sock or bra strap. Shine can be worn in the pool, but it really wins in business or formal occasions. Although Livestrong made it okay to wear a rubber wristband with a suit, it’s nice to not have to be that guy. So what, are we trying to tell you to not wear something at the risk of not fitting in? To not be disruptive? What is this, high school? Of course not. We need brave souls like the Google Glass lady models to pioneer wearable technology in the mainstream — if, that is, we even want it in the mainstream. And that’s a question worth asking. It’s more a matter of asking tech companies to really consider product from a style standpoint. If they want us to serve as their ambassador 24/7, they have to return the favor in good taste. At the moment, the most wearable pieces are those that emulate common clothing and jewelry items, because they have the most established benchmarks for design success and because we identify them most readily as something that is, in fact, meant to be worn on the body. The products I listed are good, but they can do more. If wearable tech companies are going to proliferate and incorporate themselves into our daily lives, they should start hiring fashion directors. Heckled as it is, Google Glass has reportedly made the smart move of about infusing its kickass design aesthetic (and name) into future glasses. What I want to see is wearable tech that accommodates my taste, rather than making me redefine what I would be willing to wear. Unless I’m going for a swim, I don’t want plastic around my wrist. Mainstream wearable tech is in its early stages. If it’s going to catch on, it needs to step up its design game now. |
Pirate3D Printer Exceeds Kickstarter Goal By 14X | Victoria Ho | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | The Buccaneer printer has been successfully funded , reaching $1,438,765 in funds—more than 14 times its original $100,000 goal. The Singaporean startup burst onto the scene with news of its relatively . The Buccaneer cost $347 on Kickstarter, far cheaper than the at $2,199. For reference, the , which has just started to ship, set its Kickstarter pledge at $2,299. The printer is pitched as a consumer device, and Pirate3D makes a library of objects available through a drag-and-drop Web-based GUI (graphical user interface), for people unfamiliar with CAD (computer aided design) software to customize objects. You can download its to test out the interface. Pirate3D is placing so much emphasis on this interface that it is resting its future survival on its software hopes, said co-founder Roger Chang. “I’m certain you’ll see a fake Buccaneer within the next six months,” he said. Hardware copying is inevitable in this business, and to stem the possibility of being edged out by a fake, the company is planning to outsource the brains of its device, he said. This will allow other hardware makers to produce similar machines, but still plug into Pirate3D’s software library. This will allow it to stay relevant in the industry, and ahead of the copies. The company is working on releasing an SDK (software development kit) for its Smart Objects library as well, to encourage the community to populate the pool of items in it. Over 3,000 machines have been ordered through Kickstarter, and Pirate3D is working with manufacturers in Singapore to get mass production going. The third-party manufacturers are headquartered here, but mass work will be done in China, where their factories are. With any luck, the first prototypes will come out in December, and proper models will start shipping in February next year, said Chang. |
Samsung Galaxy Owners Will Get Jay-Z’s New Album For Free 72 Hours Before Its Official Release | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | If you own a Samsung Galaxy and are a Jay-Z fan, then you will probably be happy to hear that Samsung is giving away one million copies of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” to owners of its flagship smartphone 72 hours before the album’s official debut on July 4. Jay-Z hinted at the endorsement deal on Sunday when he appeared in a TV commercial during Game 5 of the NBA finals, along with Pharrell Williams and producer Rick Rubin. The tagline was “The Next Big Thing”–a teaser for the early release of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” on Galaxy devices. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B–ZARCwSIE] Samsung bought 1 million copies of the album, which is scheduled for release on July 4, to give to Samsung Galaxy owners. The Wall Street Journal –reaping Jay-Z $5 million for “Magna Carta Holy Grail” before it even goes on sale. The deal is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it could help Samsung further polish its image in the U.S. as it continues its heated rivalry with Apple. Though , with a 28.8% percent share of the global market according to IDC, iPhones in the U.S. Samsung’s Galaxy series has performed very well in the U.S., but the Korean company still suffers from thanks to the drawn-out Apple-Samsung legal battles over patents. An endorsement deal with one of the U.S.’s top rap artists may help Samsung gain more cred with consumers, especially younger ones. The deal may also help Samsung’s , a streaming music service available on Galaxy devices, compete with , which will be included with iOS devices and offer preview of tracks before they are available elsewhere. If Samsung is successful in building an attractive ecosystem for its mobile devices, that will help it retain consumers even if . |
Tomorrow’s Surveillance: Everyone, Everywhere, All The Time | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 6 | 29 | Everyone is worried about the wrong things. Since Edward Snowden exposed the incipient NSA , the civil libertarians are worried that their Internet conversations and phone metadata are being tracked; the national-security conservatives claim to be worried that terrorists will start hiding their tracks; but both sides should really be worried about different things entirely. Online surveillance is the one kind that can actually be stopped. One interesting thing we learned from Snowden: “ .” Right now almost all Internet traffic is completely unencrypted, or , or , or your host encrypts with the . But these are all, in theory, solvable problems. If we don’t want governments (or anyone else) spying on our Internet traffic and our phone conversations, then we can stop them from doing so. Tools that seem to successfully ward off the full might of the NSA already exist: for email, for instant messaging, for voice calls. Now, these tools are all, to varying degrees, a huge pain to use. This is partly because security is hard and partly because the world could really use an anti-surveillance Jony Ive. But as time goes on, they and their ilk will become more user-friendly, and it’s only a matter of time before tools which can withstand (most of) the full might of the NSA become simple enough that their use is fairly widespread. CyanogenMod is Adding Secure End-to-End Encryption to Messaging Apps — TechNorms (@TechNorms) As long as a critical mass of techies and civil libertarians make a point of using end-to-end encryption, its mere presence won’t be enough to trigger extreme suspicion. One day will crack today’s codes, but the smart money is still on beating it into widespread use. As for metadata — well, you can already hide your Internet metadata by using Tor. I expect similar “metadata muddying” networks to spring up for voice calls; maybe they’ll onion-route calls a la Tor, maybe they’ll just be apps that cause your phone to make encrypted calls with no actual content to other phones in the network at sporadic intervals, so that large quantities of fake metadata gets mixed in with the real stuff. Either way, the data gathered by governments can be corrupted. To an extent, this may help explain the disproportionate and vindictive persecution of hackers like , , and . (Disclosure/disclaimer: I haven’t seen Jake for years, but I count him as a friend.) These are exactly the kind of people who are capable of throwing monkey wrenches into the gears of the online surveillance machine. What civil libertarians be worried about isn’t online snooping and wiretapping. It’s the surveillance that’s already becoming pervasive, if not ubiquitous, throughout the real, physical world. : “A Silicon Valley startup is launching a fleet of imaging satellites that are cheap, small, and ultra-efficient,” giving us “up-to-the-minute snapshots of the planet.” DARPA already “a 1.8-gigapixel camera that will be attached to unmanned drones to spot targets as small as six inches at an altitude of 20,000 feet.” The Supreme Court just made it easier for the police to collect DNA samples . The FBI is a biometric database which includes facial and voice recognition, and drones for surveillance on U.S. soil; the Border Guard, which effectively claims jurisdiction over , is rapidly its own drone fleet; and cameras on police cars are already busily en masse for local law enforcement. Meanwhile, even if you’re wearing an anti-facial-recognition to protect yourself against software that can identify you in real time, that won’t help; is amazingly effective these days. Oh, and by the way, you’re carrying a uniquely identifiable, always-on, remotely controllable with a microphone and a camera wherever you go; it’s called . I realize that phrasing sounds a bit tinfoil-hat…but at the same time, it is an inarguable technical fact. That’s why Snowden had his Hong Kong visitors . So. Connect the dots. Put all the above together, add in the the government is building to analyze and cross-reference all that Big Data, and then imagine the generation of all these technologies — and what do you get? Something a lot a . Sure, the NSA isn’t allowed to spy on Americans ( , , , , , ) but other government agencies can. Since most Americans , and phone metadata (from which your location can often be deduced) … we can conclude that in relatively short order the U.S. government will be maintaining near-real-time tabs on the location–and to some extent the activity–of almost every single person in the country. Other countries will soon follow. And there’s no way to encrypt our way around . what the civil libertarians should be worried about: A government that knows where you are at all times, and has an indelible record of everywhere you’ve ever been, and everything you’ve ever done in any public space. It’s claimed that most Americans commit “ ” thanks to overbroad statutes. Even if that’s not true, there’s little doubt that with so much on record, there will always be a way to persecute if not prosecute anyone who isn’t a saint. Everyone will be guilty of , so the powers that be can simply selectively enforce the laws against the people they don’t like. The national-security conservatives who claim to be worried about terrorism should really be worried that their attempts to protect their nation are in fact damaging it; that their quest for security, and their , have begun to slowly corrupt their democracies into police states. I know, I know, tinfoil hat. : “unfortunately in the past decade the United States has moved toward police-stateness in small but key ways.” It’s crucially important to realize that today’s technologies make it much easier to build the of a police state, and tomorrow’s will make it easier yet — and once those tools are in place, whatever their original intent may have been, someone will seize them and abuse them. (Of course, many people who claim they’re worried about crime and terrorism are being disingenuous and actually do want much less in the way of freedoms and liberties, and much more in the way of . Not surprisingly the police often fail to see what the problem with a police state is exactly. What, don’t we trust them?) The problem isn’t that our governments have surveillance programs. The problem is that they about and keep them so secret that it’s all but impossible to determine whether they have gone beyond any reasonable remit, or, indeed, whether they are in fact . "They filed suit, and the government quickly said that they wanted out. They didn’t need this information after all." — Jon Evans (@rezendi) Their defense of this secrecy consists entirely of: “There are some benefits somewhere! Of course, we cannot tell you exactly what they are.” There appears to be no consideration whatsoever of whether these alleged benefits exceed the . It’s essentially an engineering problem: government initiatives need feedback mechanisms to check their excesses and keep them on course, but the NSA’s current so-called feedback mechanism, the , is so ridiculously inadequate that it would be laughable if the ramifications weren’t so serious. Only one side gets to bring cases, show evidence, argue before the court, and then interpret its decisions, which are zealously protected from any public scrutiny. And what’s more: All 11 FISA judges were appointed by Chief Justice Roberts. 10 nominated to be Fed judges by Republican presidents. 6 are ex-prosecutors. — Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) Sneaky. DOJ writes secret interpretation of surveillance law. When asked how Americans' data is protected, we are told to read the statute. — Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) The national-security conservatives claim that this secrecy is required to , but first of all, that doesn’t even pass the laugh test: Terrorists are so smart, we must upend the Constitution to stop them. But they're so dumb, they just learned we read their emails last week. — Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) And second, even if it were true, it , because this kind of secrecy damages the feedback mechanism that ultimately makes it possible for democracies to work. Tomorrow’s vastly more powerful surveillance technologies, combined with today’s level of secrecy, may well put the very existence of that feedback mechanism at . That’s something we all need to be worried about. |
Social Web Privacy Wonk Andrew Keen Weighs In On PRISM — With More Than Just ‘I Told Ya So’ [TCTV] | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Keen talks about a lot of these ideas in his TechCrunch TV interview series “ ,” but I thought it’d be good to bring him to the other side of the table to hear a bit more about his thoughts on the NSA and PRISM and how people should view privacy in light of the news that’s just surfaced. Talking with Keen is always interesting, so I’d recommend you check it all out above. |
As Hardware Startups Take Off, Materials And Technology Marketplace Inventables Raises $3M | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Chicago-based , a marketplace for technology and materials for developers and designers, has raised $3 million in new funding led by Tim Draper (via Draper Associates) with Dundee Venture Capital, Richard Yoo (founder of Rackspace), Georges Harik, and True Ventures participating. This brings Inventables’ total funding to $5 million. Inventables as a marketplace for software, hardware and materials for makers, designers and manufacturers to create prototypes and low-volume production runs. Essentially, Inventables sells the parts, machines and materials that many hardware developers or manufacturers need to build their products. The marketplace itself is similar to any other shopping site, where you can purchase supplies online that are shipped to you within a few days. But Inventables has added a few features which make it friendly for makers. For example, on a product’s page, you’ll see what other designers have made with the material or how they used it to develop a product. You’ll also see questions (and answers) posted about the product. Additionally, Inventables develops and sells its own products, including a CNC milling machine, called Shapeoko, which is used by a watchmaker to design and manufacture its leather and wood watches. The machine allows customers to create products digitally on the computer and then download them into a digital manufacturing machine where they are actually produced and made. Inventables also has one of the largest selections of acrylic sheets. And as 3D printing has taken off, Inventables sells 3D printers (including Makerbot), and has a selection of filament for these printers in 24 colors. As founder and CEO Zach Kaplan explains, Inventables is helping to make it possible for a new generation of individuals and companies to manufacture and sell their own products without needing to outsource production. As we are seeing more hardware startups enter the market, Inventables has become a destination to buy the components needed to build these products. Of course, Kaplan acknowledges that its a competitive market, with Inventables going head to head with But he thinks Inventables can differentiate itself via its community of designer, makers and entrepreneurs. Already there is a passionate community around some of the products and functions supplied by Inventables, and the company has even open-sourced the software and hardware behind the milling machine. Inventables will use part of the new investment to expand to a new 25,000-square-foot facility in Chicago where product development, engineering and distribution will be colocated. And Kaplan is hiring a larger engineering team to develop additional proprietary software and hardware. |
Unofficial Vine App 6Sec Finally Lets Windows Phone Users Upload Their Own Micro Movies | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | A few people have taken up the challenge of bringing some kind of Vine support to Windows Phone, but so far all the ersatz Vine apps in the Windows Marketplace do is let people view those six-second clips. According to , developer Rudy Huyn’s is different — the third-party Vine app crossed a major milestone with a recent update so Windows Phone 8 users (well, ones that are part of the private beta anyway) can now upload their micro-films in addition to just watching them. 6Sec isn’t expected to shed its beta trappings for at least a few weeks, but it’s big news for folks looking to jump on the next big social bandwagon (as I write this, Vine is No. 4 on Apple’s Top Free app list, and No. 5 on Google’s). The app is a remarkably pretty one considering the fact that it was cobbled together by a single person, but that probably won’t come as a shock to Windows Phone app junkies. After all, Huyn’s Windows Phone development chops are well-established by now: He’s perhaps best known for whipping up an equally handsome Wikipedia app that won Microsoft’s curious Next Big App contest a few months back. Of course, 6Sec may find itself pushed to the sidelines if the folks at Vine Labs actually decide to craft their own Vine app for Windows Phone. It’s become increasingly clear that Microsoft has no problem throwing its financial resources around if it means getting developers onboard. A recent report about iOS 7 from points out that Microsoft has been shelling out plenty of dough (apparently over $100,000 in certain cases) to developers in a bid to get them creating for the Windows Phone platform. That’s not exactly a new story, considering that the folks at Redmond have been trying to for years now, but it speaks to the level of importance Microsoft has placed on getting companies to create quality Windows Phone apps. Hell, it seems to be working, too — I still see some of those pushing their way into the Windows Marketplace, but Microsoft has managed to land surprisingly good WP-specific versions of Zinio, Hulu Plus, and Pandora over the past few months. It wouldn’t be a shock to hear that Microsoft is attempting to tempt Team Vine into building a WP app, especially considering just how quickly . Until then though, talented developers like Huyn are working to fill that gap, and I’m looking forward to taking 6Sec for a final spin once it finally graduates from beta.
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Agent Smartwatch Banks On Design, Developers, Distribution To Survive Battle | Ross Rubin | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A guy walks into a watch store and a smartwatch business partnership is formed. OK, it’s not a funny joke; in fact, it’s not a joke at all. Secret Labs’ founder and CTO Chris Walker walked into the store on Prince Street owned by neighbor Lawrence Layderman. A discussion about the future of watches led Walker to show Layderman a prototype of a state-of-the-art smartwatch he had already been working on for a year and a half. Walker’s company had previously created the , an Arduino alternative that allows developers to use Microsoft’s developer tools. But as anyone who has ever seen most of those projects knows, they’re usually not known for their aesthetics. Walker knew he had to partner with a company that understood fashion, but he still wanted to maintain control over the project. The partners launched a for its Agent smartwatch, which blew through its funding goal in the first nine hours. Now, with less than a week before it closes, it has attracted nearly $900,000 from nearly 5,000 backers, many of whom will be picking up the American-made device for about $150 even though the watch is expected to retail for $100 more than that. The Agent is a bit thinner than House of Horology’s beefy color-accented Bedlam line, key to attracting more upscale shoppers who will encounter the device at its store and other retailers. Despite this, it brims with state-of-the-art components. These include a charging coil to support the . One of its two processors is a new chip from ARM — the — that won’t be shipping until the summer. “We’ve effectively done for watches what Haswell has done for processors,” Walker says. The processors team with a next-generation for some of the best battery life in the category. Agent even supports a licensed version of the Monotype font library to display foreign language characters. The team has also thought about how to protect against things not going so well. It can be restored via a button-press combination in the event a firmware update goes awry. In addition, it searched globally for a rechargeable lithium ion watch battery that wouldn’t explode if punctured, a concern for something kept so close to the body. But some things will remain out of reach. For example, the team couldn’t yet find a color display that presented anything richer than pastel colors. And as for using the phone as a headset, Walker says the project looked into integrating a speaker or microphone to activate features, such as Siri, as the does. But the team decided against it, with Walker characterizing taking a call through a watch as “the worst speakerphone experience you’ve ever had.” The Agent may be loaded with the latest components. Technology, though, becomes available to many in successive generations and it’s easy to imagine a second-generation watch from one of the Smartwatch Class of 2012 upgrading beyond what the Agent has locked down. That said, not all watches are open platforms and, as many Kickstarter projects go, some only create development kits optionally after reaching a stretch goal or shipping. Not so for the Agent, which was created with third-party developers in mind. Here, too, it is not the first. WIMM Labs worked on whittling down Android before being entering into an exclusive, confidential relationship with an unnamed company. , another Kickstarter alum, served as “a lot of the inspiration for what we did,” according to Walker. The Agent, though, relies on Microsoft .NET, which allows developers to use a wide array of tools to create apps for it, as well as take care of lots of things under the hood. That might not matter much for a watch face, but it could become more of an advantage as capabilities grow. Despite this, don’t expect too much to differentiate Agent apps at launch. The Agent will be hosting the kinds of apps, including weather, golf swing analyzers and sleep and exercise trackers. Walker expresses faith that developers will create the kind of unforeseen titles that came to flood the Apple app store. While the House of Horology support has helped with the design up front, it will be at least as helpful when it comes to distribution, a challenge that confronts many tech products after a successful Kickstarter campaign. As the steward of a young luxury brand, Layderman says that his consumers are now looking for a more well-rounded timepiece. While the first Agent is being designed as a unisex watch, interest from women is driving exploration into even smaller casings. The partners think that they can expand far beyond the current watch market to target retailers in the fashion space, phone accessory and electronic enthusiast markets. Still, despite attracting dalliances from the likes of and , as well as less ambitious efforts from and Citizen, many of the smartphone-tethered smartwatch market entrants have attracted mostly crowdfunded startups, and the big ecosystem providers have all been rumored to be developing wristwear; Walker provides the classically optimistic take that their entrance will validate the category. But the particular areas on where the Agent watch partnership has focused — Secret Labs’ development and House of Horology’s distribution — seem particularly vulnerable to the . “Hopefully, we can all move this forward together. They’re welcome to call us,” says Walker. Still, for any new smartwatch, the clock may be ticking. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 11 | null |
Thanks, Dads | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | My father put together a Heathkit shortwave radio in his youth. The radio is still there in my childhood home. He’s still alive so this isn’t saccharine reminisces of a man who passed. Dad still sits in that room with the radio, the radio still works, his hands pound away at the Internet all day now, the radio forgotten but still as vital as the day he built it. My Dad is a little less vital, but he’s hanging in there. My hands are like his. The knuckles tend to callus for some reason and, although he has his Hungarian father’s miner’s hands, meaty and thick (he earned those hands, I like to think), and mine are weak, you can still see the potential for density in mine. If hadn’t ended up behind a keyboard I’d probably really have his hands. Instead I can play a guitar and put transistors into a breadboard with my own kids and marvel at a world that he and my mother made entire when they were married and had my sister and I and how my sister and I had kids and how we all, in turn, are worlds entire. That’s what Dads are good for, sometimes: for reminding you that you came from some place that was rougher and meaner or far different than your own place and that Dad escaped that rough, mean place to try to make a nicer place with a nice woman he met somewhere. And my Dad passed along all sorts of habits that helped me on the way. He told me about his Heathkit radio, for example, and told me that with the right schematics you can fix anything. He had me hold open a Chilton repair manual as we tore the brakes out of our old Ford Fairmont so I could learn to follow directions. He let us trample his spring onions while he dug up the garden with a roto-tiller and he explained the oil and gas mixtures needed for his old Toro so I could know the pleasure of simple machines. He told me to always use anti-seize compound and, to my chagrin, I still do whenever I have to fix something big. He taught me to plan ahead. He also taught me a love of words and bought hundreds of books at a used book sale at the Columbus Public Library. If I needed to know something – Soviet history, the botany of poison ivy – the book I needed was right there. If it wasn’t he’d take us back to the library. He taught me to read with care and caution and to write with wit and intelligence. He worked every day of his life pushing papers at a military depot so we could have a big house with enough room for all the books he amassed. He taught me to look back and to create. Your Dad, if you had one who was close and didn’t die early, was hopefully like mine. I like to think a lot of them are, even given the horrors some Dads have inflicted on their kids, horrors I’ve witnessed firsthand and heard about from friends. I like to think that when that woman your Dad met that delivered that first child, your Dad teared up a little and swore on whatever strange star put them in this place that the baby would have a good home full of schematics, books, and food. I hope your Dad taught you how to be smart and self-sufficient and gave you a model for your behavior. I hope your Dad is the kind of Dad you wanted to make laugh and when you made him laugh it was the greatest thing in the world. And I hope your Dad is still alive and pounding away at a computer somewhere or is puttering in the garage or is pulling up early tomatoes. And if wasn’t that great, so what? You have a chance to make up for it. About fifty percent of us get a chance to be a Dad and we can take it or we can leave it and nothing and everything changes when we make the decision to go through with what our fathers and our fathers before them went through, namely the decision that these hands are too important to let wither and should instead be used to lift babies out of cribs and tune shortwave radios for a young daughter fascinated by geography and to pull weeds and make things that were small and unimportant grow and become important. That’s our choice. Sometimes it makes more sense not to revisit the bad, mean places and sometimes it makes sense not to have kids, but sometimes it does. So here’s to Dads who, literally, built our world up around us. They built the Internet for us. They built our laptops and phones and their ideas helped form our world. They drew the schematics and with the right schematics we can fix anything. We may not always see eye to eye, but Dads are always ready to point into the distance and say “That’s where you’re going. I can give you help, but it’s your job to get there in one piece. There is a cloud over there, but every step you take will reveal just a bit more of the road ahead. You will build the world just as I did. Good luck.” Here’s to Dads. Thanks. |
The YouTube Paradox And The Off-YouTube Solution | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | When it comes to video distribution on the Internet, there are few solutions better than YouTube. The company is the No. 1 place to search for and find the video content that viewers want to watch, and for creators it provides a size and scale of audience it can offer videos to. That said, a growing number of YouTube creators and multichannel networks are beginning to grumble about the revenue share that the site has with its partners and their inability to monetize their huge audience of viewers on the site. And, increasingly, they’re looking for off-YouTube solutions to better distribute and monetize their videos. The problem is that distributing video yourself is costly, whereas distribution on YouTube is free. That’s one reason that so many creators got started on the platform in the first place. With the shrinking cost of cameras and editing equipment, as well as the ability to upload and distribute their content for free, YouTube had an incredibly low barrier of entry for its creators. As a result, the platform attracted a huge number of talented creators who have, in turn, attracted millions of fans. For those who weren’t part of the traditional TV or movie ecosystem, that created an unprecedented opportunity to get paid to do what they love — make videos and talk to fans. For many first-time YouTube partners, the additional income was likely a nice bonus for a hobby that they never expected to get paid for. But things have changed over the years. Those same creators now have big audiences and have become their own big brands. The problem is that they aren’t getting compensated very well for all that. At least not as well as they’d like. As the YouTube ecosystem has grown up, it’s gotten a lot more professional. With more professional video equipment, more professional editing equipment, more highly skilled creators. Huge networks have popped up — like Machinima, Maker, and Fullscreen — to help creators improve their content and reach. Some provide tools to boost views and reach new audiences, some help with production, some help improve monetization. But it’s become increasingly clear that these businesses will have to find other ways of making money — YouTube can’t be their only solution. That’s in part because YouTube takes nearly half of all ad revenues from partners. Not just that, but the typical YouTube ads have relatively low CPMs — all of which means that revenues aren’t as high as they would like and margins end up being constrained. The problem is that there’s no other solution for easily reaching the size and scale of audience that YouTube offers. For all the talk of some networks creating a YouTube alternative, it will be difficult for them to move the audience over. Not just that, but they won’t benefit from all the network effects and video search advantages that they get from being on YouTube. With that in mind, a growing number of YouTube partners are looking for other monetization options. Some are building apps for mobile phones, tablets, and connected TV devices. The idea is that they’ll be able to better these apps through ads, when compared to the revenue share that comes from YouTube’s website and mobile applications. They can also own the user experience and have a more engaged connection to their biggest fans. That is, they’re not looking for a replacement for YouTube, but a way to augment their YouTube audience and monetization through other channels. Partners like VEVO, for instance, have been putting a lot of effort behind owned and operated apps for various devices. And more will likely follow. It might be pricey to build out their own apps, but at the end of the day, these networks will benefit from additional distribution outlets. It’s not to become independent of YouTube, but to become less dependent on it. Photo Credit: via |
Apple Is Building A Beautiful New Store To Overshadow Microsoft In Palo Alto [Images] | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Apple is building a big, visually stunning store in the Stanford shopping center. A few hundred yards from the construction site sits a small, modest Apple location. Last spring, Microsoft with a free Maroon 5 concert. Whether for pure dollars and cents or for appearances (maybe both), Apple has been very aggressive in Palo Alto in the past couple of years. The company had a very nice store on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto; in October 2012, they moved down the street to an even bigger, more prominent location. Now, this new store in the Stanford shopping center is supposed to become one of the company’s flagship stores. We’re told that the company tests its retail products at the Stanford Shopping Center and University Avenue locations; when the company began offering self checkout, the engineers who worked on the project were in those stores testing the new systems. This new flagship location offers enormous space for testing new retail products, and makes the nearby Microsoft store an afterthought at best. that the “store design was completed in 2011 by Apple’s long-time architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. It was approved by Steve Jobs about six months before Tim Cook assumed the position of CEO in August of that year.” The that construction is happening seven days a week, usually beginning at 7 a.m. on the 12,000 square feet store. The Palo Alto Online also reported that while initial estimates had the store opening in November 2012, delays may be due to “the sensitive glass design of the building.” Employees at the University Avenue Apple store told TechCrunch that they don’t know when the Stanford shopping center store will open; employees said that some of them were only given two weeks notice in October before they moved down the street to the new University Ave. location. I checked out the construction myself, and the store is impressive. While it looks months away from an opening, it’s a massive space and the glass facade will be a striking architectural accomplishment that makes the store stand out even with impressive neighbors. Less than two minutes after I started taking pictures of the construction, a security guard told me to stop, as taking pictures of any buildings or logos is “against their policy.” Never change, Palo Alto. Check out more photos of the construction below: While most of the construction is hidden behind a large fence, you can see the massive glass panels and early work on the roof in these photos. Update (08/30/13): The store is looking much further along now. We’re told the store will open on September 7 and that it is being treated as an unofficial West Coast flagship store. |
What Games Are: E3 Was Wild, But AAA Games Are Still A Mess | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Between all the press conferences at E3 and the follow-up interviews, there’s been a lot of gaming news to chew on this week. Announcements of consoles and games all came at a terrific pace, along with a lot of he-said/she-said. There was an amusing gaffe made by one platform chief, essentially saying “ ” to those who didn’t jive with his next-gen vision. There was a very in a press conference. There was a dreadful reaction on Twitter to a question posed by Anita Sarkeesian about in upcoming titles. And a stunt gone slightly wrong when one microconsole maker tried to set up an un-conference . For me, however, the signature moment was a cheer that happened . Sony, once kings turned to laughing stocks. Sony, the penitent platform holder who spent half a decade mending fences and yet still got very little respect. Now Sony, champion of used games, lending games and region-free games. Sony, hero of indies and diversity. Sony, the console maker who didn’t make . Sony, a full $100 cheaper than its rival. And the crowd roared. While the cheer was certainly a delicious moment, its broader context is significant. It wasn’t an Apple-esque cheer for some new invention, device or bold new product line. It was a cheer for the status quo, for a of innovation or disruption. Gamers whooped and hollered because Sony said that it was going to try to keep their world exactly as they already know it, discs and all. Gamers are an expectant group on the whole. They are highly tribal in their loyalties, and consistently respond to both visual aplomb and brands. They buy into franchises rather than single titles, which means once their loyalty is earned it usually stays earned for long periods of time. With the right trailers and tone, the publisher that seizes the moment can ride it all the way to 100m unit sales over a decade if it gets it right. Many gamers don’t like some kinds of change. The console war saga is one that they’ve known for a long time, and they are comfortable with. It feels as though the back-and-forth of gaming generations is eternal, and how things should be. It seems evolutionary, right, and disruptions that threaten its core dynamic are viewed very dimly. It’s always been consoles and the PC, that’s where “real games” are. “Real gamers” don’t like iPads. “Real gamers” don’t like Facebook. “Real gamers” consider figures like Sarkeesian as pushing agendas that will ruin games. “Real gamers” consider games as more than a medium: they are a culture. And that would mostly be fine (not the sexism part) if it weren’t for two issues: (1) The escalating cost of making games driven by gamer expectations, and (2) the size of the gamer population. There are simply not enough “real gamers” to make the console market function well, and there haven’t been for a long time, but “real gamers” don’t really get that. They think that “real games” are bigger than movies, and always growing, but the reality is that the market for console games has only grown incrementally over the last decade. All the explosive growth and the most interesting stories have come from “not-real” markets like mobile, social and casual games. For a long time now it’s been smartphones and Wiis that really pushed the medium forward. Core consoles, on the other hand, seem stuck. While the Wii managed to sell to lots of people outside the gamer fold, the core consoles managed about 75 million to 80 million sales each over a seven-year period. Accounting for dual ownership (people who bought both systems) and replacements, the overall core market’s size is probably about 140 million gamers, much the same as it was in the PlayStation 2 era. Of those, maybe half are active enough to buy three to five games per year, and of that half, maybe a third are active enough to buy one or more games per month. That means the real market for console games is maybe 70 million (split across two systems). Remembering what I said about gamers buying into franchises, less active gamers tend to make a lot of repeat purchases. They buy into the super-AAA games over multiple years (Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Mario, Zelda, The Sims, Diablo, Pokemon, The Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, The Need for Speed, Halo, etc.) and not touch newer would-be franchises unless more active gamers keep telling them to. This means the market for mere AAA games is smaller, closer to 20 million to 25 million players. And below AAA used to what we’d call mid-tier games, but they’re mostly dead now. Why? Mid-tier games just stopped making sense. At a $1 million typical cost level of original PlayStation games, publishers could field lots of games and rely on a few hits paying for all the others. This meant that many games were mid-tier, a few became AAA and the idea of a super-AAA category didn’t really exist. However with the sixth generation (PlayStation 2, the original Xbox) development costs multiplied by a factor of four, and with the seventh generation (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) they did so again. Publishers could no longer afford to play the field and had to be very choosy in what they funded, and yet many of their games didn’t pan out. The market did not grow along with the costs, and so the mid-tier game died. So did many publishers. With the next generation, the same is already starting to happen for AAA games, only the stakes look even higher. Costs will rise once more, but the market is still much the same as it was. We live in an age when a console game can and still fail to make a financial impact for its publisher. That’s a team of 700-1,000 developers slaving away on a 15 hour experience that people pay $50 to own. And still, at best, it’s breaking even. As costs continue to rise does that mean that the sales target for all big-budget console games become 5 or 6 million copies? Yep. Sony may feel reborn, and along with its rebirth comes a sense of rejuvenation in the games industry. It may seem as though the forces threatening “real games” have been pushed back, and that these are happy times. Publishers will commission new games, developers smart enough to have gotten an early start gain enormous buzz from the press and inflated sales, and everybody hopes to build a marketing story. Yet this exuberance is irrational, a temporary respite from the longer problems that the console industry faces. For all the excitement surrounding the eighth generation, not enough has changed about how it operates, and its core market’s unwillingness to be disrupted means that it continues to battle its own stasis. It means that successful publishers are likely to see a big shakeout in the next couple of years. Companies like Ubisoft, Take Two and even mighty Electronic Arts are going to feel extreme pressure to succeed at every instance of going to market. Soon the only viable market for console games will only be super-AAA, and they know it. E3 may have proved a very exciting week, but the quiet news about is probably more significant. While the “real gamer” can comfort himself in feeling that games have not been ruined by outside forces, and that because games are bigger than movies that means everything will be fine, the reality is that change is coming to games whether he likes it or not. The only question that remains for the companies involved is which side of that change they want to be on. |
Mayor Bloomberg Tells Stanford Graduates To Go To NYC For Tech | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | “No other university in the world has so profoundly shaped our modern age,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today in his commencement speech at Stanford University. Bloomberg’s speech was relevant to both the tech and Stanford communities, and often self-serving, as he touched on entrepreneurship, immigration reform, and marriage equality. Bloomberg said Stanford has helped everyone in the country move forward, and likened Leland Stanford’s pioneering spirit to present-day entrepreneurs moving to Silicon Valley and New York City. “Stanford is known for its bold entrepreneurial spirit,” a characteristic shared by Bloomberg, said Stanford President John Hennessy. As Hennessy introduced Bloomberg, the crowd lightheartedly booed Bloomberg’s Harvard MBA. Hennessy praised many of Bloomberg’s accomplishments as mayor, but declined to mention . “We had hoped that Stanford itself might help lead our tech boom in New York City. That didn’t work out — no hard feelings — but I think in the end, it will,” Bloomberg said. Bloomberg talked up the NYC tech scene and urged grads to work there. “I believe that more and more Stanford graduates will find themselves moving to Silicon Alley, not only because we’re the hottest new tech scene in the country, but also because there’s more to do on a Friday night than go to the Pizza Hut in Sunnyvale,” he said. “And you may even be able to find a date with a girl whose name is not Siri. Stanford graduates thrive in New York City–because both places thrive on innovation and entrepreneurialism.” The Mayor moved on to discussing entrepreneurship, both from a broad perspective and from his personal experiences. “Technological disruption drives innovation. And the more disruption there is, the better markets perform and the harder it is for monopolies to survive,” Bloomberg said. His comments are interesting in the wake of many high-profile battles between and . “No one called us a startup or a tech company. They just called me crazy,” Bloomberg said about the founding of Bloomberg LLP. “Work hard, take risks, follow your passion, embrace innovation,” he urged graduates. “The secret of success isn’t really a secret. It’s just that many people look for a shortcut…the American dream has no shortcuts and no endpoint. It is the freedom you have to chart your own journey.” The mayor then discussed his work with the Partnership for a New American Economy, FWD.us, and the tech community in pushing for immigration reform. “If those in Washington had any sense at all, they would be begging you to stay here in the U.S. But instead, our immigration laws may force some of you to leave in the months and years ahead,” he said. “It is the most backward economic policy you could possibly come up with,” he said to his loudest round of applause. “Every STEM student graduating today should have a green card stapled to their diploma. “I hope you will make your voices heard,” he added, telling the crowd to call their elected representatives about immigration reform. Bloomberg’s speech was at times highly political, but overall had a solid message for the class of 2013. I wonder how effective his efforts to talk up the New York tech scene will be; in my experience, most Stanford students and recent graduates already know that they could have more fun in New York than Sunnyvale, but still keep taking jobs in the area. In my opinion, Newark Mayor Cory Booker gave a better speech in his 2012 address; Booker, a Stanford alumnus, spoke more to the entire graduating class, rather than focusing mostly on tech, and his references to his own Stanford experiences felt more genuine than Bloomberg’s heavily-researched, buzzwordy references. And of course, I imagine it will be a while before another speaker comes close to Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 address, which a reader has linked to in the comments. Bloomberg also spoke about marriage equality and the civil rights movement. He has already been in town meeting with , and the starts tomorrow in Half Moon Bay. You can read Bloomberg’s , and you can watch the full commencement ceremony below. Hennessy introduces Bloomberg right before the one-hour mark if you want to skip ahead. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLyXsbIlg1E] |
Google Pledges $5M To Fight Online Child Exploitation | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | The Internet has plenty of dark corners, but one of the darkest is surely the growing number of sites that traffic in child pornography. Google, which has no interest in surfacing any of these sites and images, has worked with numerous nonprofit organizations and law enforcement agencies to help protect children online and keep these sites out of its index. The company has, however, recently been by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and others for not doing enough to fight child pornography online. Today, Google $5 million to the fight. It will distribute this money to a number of organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America. Among the organizations that will receive these funds are groups like the (NCMEC) and the U.K.’s . Google has also set up a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to “encourage the development of ever more effective tools.” Since 2008, Google has been tagging the child abuse images it detected in its index and those that were reported to organisations like the NCMEC to ensure that it could also identify any copy of these files. In today’s announcement, Google revealed that it has recently started to add this information to a cross-industry database that it shares with law enforcement agencies and charities. This, Google believes, will allow these organizations to “better collaborate on detecting and removing these images.” Later this week, representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and a number of telecom firms will also meet with the U.K. Culture Secretary to discuss this issue. It’s worth noting that Google is obviously not the only search company that is working to combat child pornography online. Microsoft has a , and the company also tags images of child abuse it finds using its technology. Facebook started licensing PhotoDNA from Microsoft in 2011. The company has also been with a number of law enforcement agencies to develop the . |
U.S. Government Denies Reports That NSA Listens To Domestic Calls Without Legal Authorization | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Yesterday, a that alleged that the NSA disclosed during a secret Capitol Hill briefing that its analysts can listen to domestic phone calls “simply based on an analyst deciding that,” got a lot of play in the tech and blogosphere. Today, however, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) a statement that denounces this story as “incorrect.” The CNET story was based on a comment by Rep. Jerrold Nadler who, according to the reporter, was told by the NSA that ” the contents of a phone call could be accessed ‘simply based on an analyst deciding that.'” If true, the idea that an analyst’s hunch was sufficient to listen to domestic phone conversations would have been quite a bombshell. According to ODNI, “the statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.” ODNI states that members of Congress were only briefed about the implementations of of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which ” targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose.” As ODNI stated , this regulation can’t be used to target Americans. As many pundits have noted, however, the scope of these programs makes it likely that domestic calls and other communications will get caught up in the dragnet, too. The government also just needs a 51% confidence that the target of the surveillance is not American or a legal citizen. Previously, the U.S.’s Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, also argued that the recent revelations around the NSA’s PRISM program contained “ ” and that PRISM to mine data and ““intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person.” Since publishing the original story, CNET changed the headline of its post from “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants” to “NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls” and attributed Rep. Nadler as the source of the main quote. The main gist of the story has remained the same. |
Iterations: Man Vs. (The Government) Machine | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | TechCrunch In 2013, we have seen a reincarnation of “man vs. machine,” except this time, the machines aren’t algorithms — the machine is government. Within a few months, various levels of government across the United States have made headlines with respect to new technologies, products, and services. Unmanned aerial drones, which have a relationship with citizens worldwide already, present complicated scenarios. The Texas state government, for instance, recently drones for most private use; the state of North Carolina is a ban on direct sales of Tesla vehicles; Airbnb was illegal in New York state by a judge; startups like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar face threats and hurdles as they expand outside of the Bay Area; and of course, there’s Bitcoin, where Mt. Gox suffered a recent Fed as the most active exchange for the popular crypto-currency. The ways things are going, 3-D printers will be because some fanatic will hack software that lets him print a 3-D gun. The common thread weaving through this trend is that the pace of technology is empowering individuals to actively participate in fundamentally new markets and economies. Even just a few years ago, it wasn’t as easy to buy a fully-electric luxury car and not send part of your income to the local gas station; it wasn’t as easy to earn over twice one’s salary by grocery bagging in favor of providing livery services; it wasn’t as easy to cash into liquid digital currencies; it wasn’t as easy to rent out your apartment, or your spare bedroom, or your couch to earn a little extra scratch; and it wasn’t easy to physically print out items at home or send items to others via unmanned aircraft. This shift comes at a critical time for America. In a sluggish economy slowly recovering from the largest wound since the Great Depression and adjusting to a fundamental, structural change (aka, those jobs aren’t coming back), the country is in desperate need of innovation. I say “desperate” because even with successful innovation, our economy isn’t on an enviable pace for growth. Mega-forces like widening income inequality, crushing debt burdens, and the politically-toxic mismatch between our immigration policy and inability to properly educate children for the jobs needed today combine to form a potent mix of stagnation. In lay terms, if someone is laid off from their job bagging groceries because of online grocery delivery or automated checkout machines, will government also prohibit them from using their car to give a “Lyft” to others for money, or renting out the spare room in their apartment on Airbnb to offset their fixed mortgage rate, or storing some of their savings in Bitcoin after losing most of their 401k savings in the 2008 economic collapse? It remains to be seen how far governments will go. Laws are made to protect people from harm, but they’re also made by taking into account the interests of special interests who spend billions to lobby the halls of Congress. Innovation like the types cited here directly threaten a range of powerful, incumbent, cash-rich industries who view lobbying costs as a minor line-item expense, the cost of doing business in America. The other side of this coin is that, right now, government regulation that overreaches to the point of suppressing an individual’s ability to earn a living wage is the political equivalent of playing with fire. It’s early, but consumer demand is pointing in a direction where the democratization of access to technologies like electric vehicles, 3-D printers, alternative currencies, and peer-to-peer lending puts more power into peoples’ hands than government can realistically control. Aggregate consumer demand is distrustful of large institutions, is willing to pay for goods crafted specifically for them, is open to turning their assets into wealth-generating vehicles, and so much more. It’s hard to see how government will try to control this. Alas, it will. There is too much to lose. Perhaps this is why many of the startups listed above (and their ) have begun to form relationships with local and national politicians, have actively participated in panels nationwide with public officials and commissioners, have hired former politicians and policy analysts to help them anticipate these collisions and actively participate in the lawmaking itself to keep the interests of these startups in mind. The interests of startups like these are the new “special interests” — in fact, they’re “our special interests” — and they protect much more than the companies doing the legwork — they can protect the future income, livelihood, and social security of the former grocery bagger, and in a country founded on principles of humility and hard work, it would be a shame — perhaps even evil, given the criminally economic circumstances of the last two decades — to not empower consumers and leave consumers unprotected. I’m optimistic startups will be part of the conversation that stitches these new laws and regulations together, and I fundamentally believe it is startups like these and all of us consumers, individually and collectively, that will spark the next waves of innovation, with government enabling it, not restricting it. Let’s hope so. / |
Sciencescape Wants To Solve Academic Research Discoverability, Deal With The Noise Problem | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | Toronto-based startup came about because of a problem that was significant enough to lure co-founder Sam Molyneux away from a bourgeoning career as a cancer researcher, and into a new venture that wants to tackle the bigger picture issue of fixing the entire system of academic, medical and scientific research. It’s a system that’s incredibly outdated, the Sciencescape team believes, and one that’s ripe for change. Sciencescape is trying to tackle the massive uptick in scientific research, which has exploded since the advent of the computer, in order to make it once again manageable for researchers, students and academics working on furthering their disciplines and making real breakthroughs. The startup wants to become the “plumbing” for academic and medical research, by making sense of the massive influx of data from new studies being published every day by the huge number of peer-reviewed journals out there. The total volume of papers published each year has reached a staggering 22 billion according to a recent count, Sciencescape says, and the dollar value of the business of academic research is in the $45 billion annual range. There are tools designed to help researchers sift through all that volume already, including Pubnet.org, but these are pretty universally regarded as insufficient by the people who use them. There are still so many chances to miss crucial bits of information, or entire tracks of research that re-cover ground. Academics place an emphasis on breaking new ground, Molyneux says, and students and researchers are constantly running the risk of reinventing the wheel or missing landmark papers because of sheer volume. To get around that, Sciencescape wants to apply intelligent sorting algorithms to incoming new publications, in order to build intelligent feeds that researchers can subscribe to, around subject matter areas, specific researchers, genes, disorders and more. The Sciencescape engine uses natural language processing exclusively to funnel content in real-time, and is starting out with biomedical fields of study. But Molyneux says that they’re going to work quickly to expand to other fields, with specifics like law on the roadmap for upcoming additions. The system would make it easy to not only collect key research, but also visual it via graphs and charts that can show you exactly when key breakthroughs in the field have occurred, and also provides sharing options for broadcasting to other like-minded researchers via standard social network channels. Sciencescape is emerging at a very good time in terms of drawing interest from investors and a community beyond just the academic silo; others with similar aims like or achieving . Sciencescape has already secured initial funding of $1.1 million, and hopes to move quickly to expand its business. |
A Handy Guide For Comparing Spying Vs. Terrorism Disaster Scenarios | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 16 | The week’s news has been a fear-mongering marathon between civil libertarians who are convinced we’re on the road to becoming North Korea, and security hawks who are building bunkers for the inevitable post-cyberattack hell scape. Unfortunately, because the most important facts about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are top secret, the entire debate has consisted of fear-driven hypotheticals. We can’t change that fact. But! by detailing the relative harms of privacy invasion vs. terrorist threats in a handy guide on their probability and scope. In ascending order of paranoia, I compare privacy vs. security trade-offs, and conclude with a section that makes sense of why some people fear surveillance more than terrorists.
We know for sure that both defense and fear of terrorists is burning a hole in America’s pocketbook. Terrorist-driven aversion to flying and tourism has resulted in an , according to Eli Berman, an associate professor of economics at University of California, San Diego. In a bit of delightful parity, of the U.S. intelligence apparatus is $75 billion, including $1.7 billion for the NSA’s massive new 1-million-square-foot Utah campus, which houses all the servers it needs to retain America’s vast collection of porn, Justin Bieber tweets and cat videos. “Surveillance inclines us to the mainstream and the boring,” Washington University law professor Neil Richards, who argues that the watch-tower effect of omnipresent government spying throttles open dialogue. Personally, I do find myself avoiding the word “terrorist” in emails because I have a vague sense I’ll get flagged by some government agency. On the security side, some are reasonably worried about theft of company secrets. We know that Chinese hackers ; in one instance, stolen data from Coca-Cola preceded their failed $2.4 billion acquisition of the China Huiyuan Juice Group. According to security firm Mandiant, the Chinese top-level hacking unit, was “busy rummaging through their computers in an apparent effort to learn more about Coca-Cola’s negotiation strategy.” It’s just as possible that the Russian and Middle Eastern terror cells being tracked by the NSA are also stealing corporate secrets, which could cause more widespread piracy and throttling of innovation.
For the most part, the NSA only targets terrorist suspects — the rest of the data collects cobwebs on a faceless server. But civil liberty critics worry that nefarious middle managers at the NSA could blackmail whistleblowers or policymakers that threaten their agenda. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly : “Did you hear about the IRS scandal? Did you hear about the IRS taking personal information and feeding it out to left-wing websites?… You’re telling me that can’t happen here? It absolutely can happen! So, for example, some conservative senator calls Trixie at the Hot Licks Massage Parlor, guess who knows it? And guess who can put it out any time they want?” To get a handle on how bad this kind of blackmail could be, the greatest email scandal ever uncovered outed Army General David Patreaus after the FBI found saucy messages between him and a mistress. Arguably the largest whistleblower was leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Both Patreaus and Ellsberg had major impacts on two foreign wars — Petraeus executed the successful Iraqi Surge and Ellsberg accelerated public pressure to pull out from Vietnam. Taken together, it’s reasonable to assume that without their contributions, hundreds of more soldiers might have been killed and hundreds of millions of dollars more would have been wasted. On the other hand, NSA hawks claim that Internet and phone snooping foiled “dozens” of terrorist attacks, Najibullah Zazi’s failed plot to bomb the New York subway. All told, that’s probably hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in infrustructure repair saved.
If you hold survivalist training in your end-of-days bunker, chances are this next category feels like home. The libertarian op-eds are rife with insinuations that America is on the fast track to a perpetual -style tyranny — or what they call Tuesday in North Korea. “This isn’t an argument about how tyranny is inevitable. It is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck,” the very sharp and otherwise level-headed resident libertarian at , Conor Friedersdorf, in a (popular) post titled, “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama.” If you think government monitoring Instagrams of quinoa waffles at Manhattan brunches is a one-way ticket to Orwellian dystopia, then the cost of the NSA’s spying program is the end of self-government as we know it. On the other hand, if you’d like to see the TSA conduct more cavity searches, you probably think a police state is the only way to stop a real-life Jack Bauer plotline from happening. 4th-Amendment fanclub president Dick Cheney a “high probability” of a nuclear or biological attack that kills “hundreds of thousands of Americans” unless programs like the NSA keep constant watch over Americans. But we think Cheney’s being modest: if we did suffer a nuclear attack, we’d have to retaliate against , and that could spark an armed conflict between the entire Middle East and their Asian supporters. So as long as we’re wearing a tinfoil hat, let’s just go ahead and admit that we’re talking about all-out thermonuclear war. Ultimately, skepticism is a visceral reaction: there’s no purely fact-based way of thinking about the future. Without sufficient information, we reasonably fall back on our assumptions about the way the world operates. For instance, we know that than climate change. While there isn’t any good evidence about why some people fear the NSA more than others, Yale’s lab has my favorite political typology for predicting what kinds of programs we support. They divide political worldviews into four categories: If you have tendencies, chances are . This helps explain why the traditional rivals, Glenn Beck (Individualist) and Michael Moore (Equalitarian), in opposition to government surveillance. If you tend to be more , either because you have a compulsive need for stability (Authoritarian), or you think everyone has an obligation to contribute to the public good (Communitarian), chances are that (Disclosure: I have very strong Communitarian tendencies). To be sure, . The debate over the NSA is entirely hypothetical; the public has no evidence on how surveillance has been abused or leveraged to stop terrorists. So what’s the lesson? Be respectful and open-minded. Without evidence, we’re all equally irrational. |
After Three Months Of Work, Digg Reader Officially Opens To The Public | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth Google Reader is finally set to go dark next week, and more than a few companies (including ) are shooting to fill the gap it’s going to leave behind. Digg Reader is probably the most prominent of those reader replacements, and just a few minutes ago the team officially announced on that the long-running project is now open to the public. What perfect timing! After all, what better way is there to spend a Friday night than carefully setting up all your RSS feeds? In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the Digg Reader odyssey, the betaworks team has been slaving on this thing essentially since Google announced that its own reader would get the axe . The Reader project has largely been kept under lock and key since then, though betaworks has been showing it off to journalist types (see our own Sarah Perez’s impressions ) and recently opened up access to the earlier this week to those who expressed interest early on. Even though the news-hungry masses now have access to Digg Reader, it’s not ready for primetime yet — the team concedes this week spent conferring with early access users had made it clear that Reader is still missing a few things. Among the features they hope to implement shortly are accurate counts for unread items in users’ feeds, the ability to mark individual items as unread, and a way to view just those unread. The post doesn’t offer up a timetable on those features, but Digg GM Jake Levine confirmed on Twitter that they’ll some time next week. All that said, Reader is now crawling some 4.5 million feeds and (at least in my experience) has been running like a charm so far — here’s hoping that it doesn’t get crushed by Google’s reader refugees over the next few days. |
Drew Houston And Bryan Schreier On Dropbox’s Future As An Enterprise And Consumer Company | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Dropbox founder and CEO and partner joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Houston and Schreier work together on recruiting, growing as a CEO, and building the company. The first part of this series was , and in the second part of the series, Houston of a multi-billion-dollar company and how he has changed as an entrepreneur and individual. In this third, and final segment, Houston and Schreier talk about Dropbox’s evolution from a startup to file-hosting giant that is used by 95 percent of the Fortune 500. Tune in above for more! |
Ask A VC: General Atlantic’s Brett Rochkind On Spotting Startups That Have IPO Potential | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | In this week’s Ask A VC episode, General Atlantic Managing Director joined us in the studio to talk about international investing and more. Rochkind, who makes growth-stage investments on behalf of the firm, talked about how he evaluates whether a company has the potential to be public. For background, he has helped lead General Atlantic’s investments in Alibaba, Renren, Box, Appirio and MercadoLibre. Rochkind refers to the “three M’s” as his basis of criteria (a hint — one of the M’s is market opportunity). Tune in above for more. |
Yahoo To Sunset AltaVista, Axis, RSS Alerts, and Nine Other Products, Some As Soon As Today | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Yahoo under Marissa Mayer is taking a page from her old employer, Google, and , with some starting as soon as today. Included are AltaVista and other search products like its experimental Axis search extension, as part of “an ongoing effort to sharpen our focus and deliver experiences that enhance your daily lives,” in the words of Jay Rossiter, EVP of platforms. That’s right. Now, we can finally write, “Hasta la vista, AltaVista.” :( To be fair, I’m not sure who has been using AltaVista all that much, or many of these other services. In any case, it’s a sign of the company getting more focused and cutting down fat, as it makes way for what I hope are a new set of cool products based on all the many talented acqui-hires and straight-out product acquisitions that it’s made over the last several months. Here is the full list, with the shutdown dates: . Yahoo says the browser plug-in will no longer work; the app will, but will no longer be maintained and updated. “We encourage you to use the Yahoo! Search app for iOS and Android.” . No explanations here but a suggestion to visit of other Yahoo-based browser extensions for developers. . Looks like Yahoo will be merging some of that content into its wider Yahoo! Sports portal, where it also posts Fantasy Football games. . The player will no longer load after the end of this month on sites where this is embedded. “Your users will continue to be able to play media files using native browser support,” Rossiter notes. If you were among the people trying to use the , you’ll know that this is no great loss. At all. . Again, as with sports, this service is shutting down for consolidation of into another yahoo property, in this case, Yahoo! Music. . Yahoo gets its own RSS shut-down, too, on the same day as Google Reader. “To continue to get the latest content that you care about, you can subscribe to Keyword News alerts at our Yahoo! Alerts and receive them via email,” the company notes. . So much for hyperlocal expansion. “You can visit Yahoo! Local Search to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood,” Yahoo writes. . This is a later closure date, although as noted before, usage is not particularly high these days. It wasn’t always this way, of course: AltaVista is one of earliest search engines, first opening for business in 1995 and taking an early lead in the portal space. It was well overtaken by Google a few years after that. In 2003, it was bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo in the same year. Over the last few years, pieces of AltaVista have been migrating to Yahoo technology, including the core search algorithms themselves, which direct to Yahoo searches once you go beyond altavista.com, so swapping the branding over is, in a sense, just the last formality. “Please visit Yahoo! Search for all of your searching needs,” Rossiter writes today. . Yahoo now points users to Yahoo! India OMG!. . Yahoo! Downloads will no longer support 3rd party downloads. It will continue to offer downloads of Yahoo! products like Yahoo! Toolbar or Yahoo! Messenger. . Another move away from local and mapping — or at least away from legacy products trying to serve that need. Yahoo says local API documentation is also getting removed from the developer portal. . This is not getting turned off, but Yahoo will be stopping direct access to it. This service lets developers input a very large amount of text, and the algorithm can be tweaked to parse that text for specific terms or phrases. Sounds a little like Summly, and we don’t yet know how Yahoo plans to use what it’s picked up in that deal; maybe this could provide a clue. My colleague Greg Kumparak suggests that the longer timeframe for the Term Extraction API could have to do with needing to have more time to try to contact developers using the product, especially if it hasn’t been updated in a while and those developers are not actively in contact with Yahoo. Yahoo writes that if developers, as of September 28, are already using the Term Extraction API via YQL, they will not need to do anything; those who are not are being encouraged to migrate to YQL. |
Co-Founder “Who Made Numbers God” At Zynga Joins Bee Cave Games As Advisor/Investor | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Zynga co-founder and godfather of metrics-based game development Eric Schiermeyer quietly slipped out of the company, is working on a new startup, and today announced he’s become an investor and advisor to , makers of play-money gambling Facebook game Blackjack Casino. Bee Cave Games CEO Erik Bethke tells me Schiermeyer’s advisor role is a weekly commitment and his investment is part of a forthcoming funding round in the low millions. Previously, Schiermeyer was a CTO of Myspace, and at Zynga he was VP of Product. Bee Cave Games won’t be his full-time gig as he tells me he’s advising some other companies, and is in the early stages of building a new company. A former Zynga employee gave me this candid look into working with Schiermeyer: “He was known as the most aggressive man at Zynga. He ran the product management organization. They were the numbers guys, the one behind metrics. He’s the one who made numbers God in the product management cultures. That’s where he was the most aggressive, always trying to push the numbers, push the numbers.” That strategy of tweaking every bit of a game’s design to increase growth, retention, engagement, and monetization is arguably what made Zynga so financially succesful in its early years. It may have also eventually contributed to low morale, fleeing talent, and the inability of Zynga to produce any hit games recently. Our source says, “His reputation was for being a bit abrasive and hard to work with, but he was absolutely successful. He got results. He was the driving force behind Zynga’s growth.” Schiermeyer will bring serious business experience to his board advising and investment spot with the young company, which was was founded in 2012 and has only raised . Why did he pick the startup? He tells me “I think BCG is posed to take all the lessons they learned from pioneering the social games space into the casino world. I’ve looked at all the top grossing casino apps on IOS and they remind me of the old school online gambling downloadables. Certainly while I was still at Zynga we were eating traditional gaming companies lunch in the online side of the business. I think BCG could do something similar.” Schiermeyer left Zynga in July 2011. Since the public offering at the end of that year, the gaming giant’s share price has rallied from its year’s low of $2.10 in November up to $2.78 now, but has been on a jagged decline since March. Zynga recently fired hundreds of employees, closed several offices, and earlier this month it bought for $200 million just a year prior. The plan has been for Zynga to reemerge as a leaner, mobile-focused gaming company. But it’s not that simple. The big gaming business is based on home runs that pay for development of a slew of titles, and Zynga hasn’t been able to find one. Many hopes now rely on its plans for real-money gambling games. Bee Cave CEO Bethke, who formerly worked with Schiermeyer at Zynga on Mafia Wars, told me factors that have led to Zynga’s fall include “tremendous amount of talent turnover. I think they’re struggling. It needs direction, it needs a strategy. If you look over at King they’re making hits. If you look at the Facebook ecosystem everyone else is making 60% more this year than last year. Despite Zynga’s decline, Facebook’s [gaming] ecosystem is still up.” That bodes well for Bee Cave, whose only game right now is on the Facebook platform. The company claims that Blackjack Casino is “now the #2 fastest growing casino game on Facebook trending charts”, though puts it below 50,000 daily users. Bethke tells me that later this summer it plans to port the game to iOS, Android, and 14 other languages, and it’s building some new titles. While Bee Cave games let users bet fake money, Schiermeyer’s ruthless efficiency could help the studio churn out real dollars. |
YouWeb Founder Peter Relan Sunsets His Gaming Incubator, Will Open A New Company Building Studio Soon | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Peter Relan is best known for his gaming and mobile incubator which spawned Crowdstar, Agawi, Spaceport, OpenFeint and others. Today, the serial entrepreneur is announcing that YouWeb will no longer be incubating any additional companies, and Relan will be moving on to a new venture. With this move, Relan will be sunsetting the operational roles he took across a number of companies he co-founded. For example, he stepped in as the CEO of Crowdstar in 2011, and stepped down from the role last fall. He will remain in a chairman role of his companies, he tells us. YouWeb had differed from other accelerators in that it was extremely early-stage, almost pre-Y Combinator incubator. YouWeb chose individuals based on talent, and entrepreneurs came in with no team, business model or idea. The individual was given $100,000, and developed a business or app in-house, with Relan advising the startup along the way. YouWeb usually incubated about two entrepreneurs per year. OpenFeint was acquired by GREE a few years ago for over , and Facebook Mobile gaming company CrowdStar is still alive, having raised another in new funding last year. In total, Relan says that YouWeb companies raised $60 million in capital, and saw $120 million in three exits. He adds that YouWeb generated three times the cash multiple for investors (YouWeb raised around in outside funding). YouWeb won’t be shut down entirely, as the entity will still have ownership in the incubator’s startups. But the entire YouWeb team will be moving to Relan’s new company. With all of the YouWeb companies now matured to full-fledged companies, Relan is setting his sights on something larger. He plans to expand the concept of YouWeb at a larger scale, and will be launching a studio-like organization that goes beyond mobile gaming. He adds that the new company will give greater focus on mentorship, not on co-founding or operational roles. “I was an operational co-founder and now I will become a mentor,” he explains. We’re seeing more and more serial entrepreneurs are forgoing traditional VC roles in favor of As Relan tells us, his new venture will have a slightly different take on this model by focusing on mentorship. Stay tuned. |
Google+ Tries To Gain Photo Sharing Ground By Making It Easier To Move, Download, And Upload Your Pics | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Photo sharing just got a little better on Google+, as the social network has made it easier for users to move, download and upload their pictures. Google+ engineering manager Jon Emerson that the new features came from user feedback. Users can more easily move batches of photos between albums, use a new download option to quickly save photos and upload large sets of photos faster. “We hope this latest set of changes makes managing your photos with Google+ easier than ever,” Emerson wrote. “We’ll keep improving Google+ Photos based on your feedback, so please keep it coming.” A little over a month ago at Google I/O, Google+ launched a revamped and . Google+ has impressive functionality and a nice user experience for photos, but is still fighting an uphill battle against Instagram, Flickr, Facebook and others, many of whom have more users interacting with more photos. |
Google+ Turns 2, Rolls Out Redesigned Follow Buttons And Badges, Introduces Badges For Communities | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Google+ turned two today. To celebrate, Google’s social network didn’t just dress up , but it also a redesign of its Google+ plugins for websites, including its , +1 and share buttons, as well as its for pages and profiles. All of these are getting a refreshed look, and most of them are also getting a few new features and customization options. In addition, the company is, for the first time, launching . Google will automatically update existing +1 and Share buttons over the next few weeks. Existing badges will be updated in 90 days, which should give website owners enough time to configure the new version for their sites, Google says. The new visual style, Google argues, is more consistent with its recent redesign of Google+ as a whole. The new look adopts Google+’s cleaner, more minimalist look. The Follow button, Google argues, is now “nice and compact” and should integrate more easily with the social buttons of its competitors. Here is what they look like: Page and profile badges are also getting a redesign and can now be used in a light or dark theme and in portrait and landscape mode. It’s not clear how popular Google+ communities are, but Google is now giving community managers a way to attract new members by introducing a new badge they can use to get their website visitors to sign up for their groups. Google says the badges are highly configurable. One nice feature of these badges is a preview link that opens the community page in a new tab so potential members can see what’s going on in these groups (assuming the privacy settings for the community allow this). |
UK’s BSkyB Wins Case Against Microsoft Over Use Of “SkyDrive” Name In Europe; May Have To Drop Name Or Pay Fines | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | went this week at its Build conference, but today it was dealt a blow for how it might get to market them in Europe. , the pay-TV broadcaster partly owned by News Corp., won a against the U.S. software giant for infringing the “Sky” trademark. The next step is another hearing in which the presiding judge, Justice Sarah Asplin, will hear arguments for an appeal from Microsoft, as well as decide on what remedies may be applied. Those remedies in past trademark cases have typically included financial compensation, an order to abandon usage of a name, and sometimes both. . The case between Sky and Microsoft started back in June 2011 and specifically concerns “an action for passing off and for infringement of two registered Community trade marks (CTMs) and two UK registered trade marks (UKTMs) for the mark ‘SKY’ by which the Claimants [BSkyB] seek to prevent the Defendants [Microsoft] from using ‘SkyDrive’ as the name for their cloud storage service throughout the European Union.” The judgement published today comes after an eight-day trial in April of this year. BSkyB is one of the largest pay-TV service providers in Europe, and like many TV broadcasters it has leveraged this to grow its digital audience. Within that, Sky also provides mobile apps and an online streaming service that are — yes — cloud-based. It also provided its own online storage service between 2008 and 2011, Sky Store & Share. Microsoft, on its side, has put in a counterclaim trying to invalidate four Sky trademarks “on the grounds of descriptiveness for cloud storage services.” In other words, Microsoft believes that it’s not easy to confuse its cloud-based SkyDrive services with BSkyB’s pay-TV, mobile and online services. You can read the full judgement, written by Justice Sarah Asplin, or embedded below. In it, she compares Sky’s and Microsoft’s arguments to a number of other precedents in areas as diverse as the beer and the educational publishing industries, and weighs it up alongside evidence from surveys of existing users. Particularly detrimental to Microsoft’s case is that the two services often sit quite close to each other, as demonstrated in this piece of evidence for how the apps appear on the XBox: Reading through the case (warning: it’s long) you can see that there are a lot of nuances, and so there may still be some options for Microsoft to appeal or get other leeway. But regardless of that, Mrs Justice Asplin concluded today that the scope of BSkyB’s “SKY” registered trademarks, as well as its goodwill in the SKY brand, was such that Microsoft’s use of the “SkyDrive” mark was likely to cause confusion among consumers. She also decided that use by Microsoft of the “SkyDrive” brand was detrimental to the SKY mark which, in itself, amounted to trademark infringement. A Microsoft spokesman has provided TechCrunch with a response to today’s ruling. “This case is only about the SkyDrive name and has nothing to do with service availability or future innovation,” he said. “The decision is one step in the legal process and Microsoft intends to appeal.” In a way, the folks at BSkyB probably feel like some kind of justice has been served. In 2010, (coincidentally just around the time that Microsoft announced it would buy it) for that name infringing on the Sky mark. It doesn’t appear that the case went anywhere, though. We have reached out to BSkyB for its response and will update as we learn more. : A Sky representative tells us, “Sky is pleased with the judgment handed down today by Mrs Justice Asplin. We regard any unauthorised use of the Sky name as a clear infringement of our well-established Sky brand. We remain vigilant in protecting the Sky brand and will continue to take appropriate action against those companies that seek to use our trademarks without consent.” [scribd id=150567685 key=key-14735wzn06tmx3iueywk mode=scroll] |
This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Bye Bye BlackBerry And Vanilla Android On The HTC One/GS4 | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | BlackBerry is “ ,” as Chris Velazco puts it so eloquently. Meanwhile, Google is now offering of the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. We’re also mildly interested in Hyundai’s new infotainment system, Blue Link, (especially given Apple’s foray into the car with iOS 7). Just as you’d expect on this lovely summer Friday, we discuss all this and more during this week’s . This week’s conversation features John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Natasha Lomas, and a dash of Darrell Etherington. Enjoy!
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Facebook Announces New Review Policy To Prevent Ads From Running On Controversial Pages And Groups | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Facebook just a new review policy for Pages and Groups that’s aimed at reducing cases where ads run alongside content that the advertiser or their customers might find objectionable. Earlier today, stated that Marks and Spencer and BSkyB had pulled “all or part of their spending” on Facebook after a BSkyB ad (which was “promoting an M&S voucher”) was shown alongside a Facebook Page that was titled “cute and gay boys” and included photos of teenage boys. The story said Facebook was going to make an announcement to address these types of concerns later today. The Facebook post doesn’t mention any specific advertisers, and regardless of whether the decision was prompted by this incident, it seems to address a larger issue — leaving room on the site for potentially controversial content without making advertisers uncomfortable. Facebook already had restrictions on both content and on the types of Pages and Groups where ads could be shown, but it says the new policy “will expand the scope of Pages and Groups that should be ad-restricted”: For example, we will now seek to restrict ads from appearing next to Pages and Groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content (as determined by our guidelines). Prior to this change, a Page selling adult products was eligible to have ads appear on its right-hand side; now there will not be ads displayed next to this type of content. The company says that the reviews will be conducted manually at first, but it plans to develop “a more scalable, automated” process in the next few weeks. Ads should be removed from existing Pages and Groups that fall onto the “new, more expansive restricted list” by the end of next week. In a statement provided via email, Sprint Vice President of Digital Scott Zalaznik said, “We appreciate our continued corporate partnership with Facebook and are pleased with their rapid response to addressing brand-protection issues.” |
Labster Gamifies Bio-Tech Teaching So Students Can Use Their iPads To Blow Stuff Up | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | Educational games to make learning more engaging for students are nothing new, but , a bio-tech education startup founded back in 2011 and just now coming out of stealth, has gone further than most by creating an entire virtualised laboratory for teaching bio-tech students without the need to purchase expensive lab equipment or conduct potentially hazardous experiments for real. Labster launched its lab simulation software (or “eLearning video game” as it dubs it) last week. It’s offering free user accounts for people in the first three months. After which it will be charging for use — with a fee for each new virtual cases (going the downloadable content route), selling via the iPad App Store. Labster is also already selling licenses for its software to universities and schools, and also to corporates for training. Current customers include Stanford, Hong Kong and Copenhagen Universities. The software has been tested by more than 10,000 students over the past year. So what is Labster? “Basically a science video game,” says co-founder and CTO Michael Bodekaer. “A video game that actually teaches you how to do anything like Sequencing DNA and become a Bio-Engineer or even a CSI agent. Not just theoretically, but hands on. You for instance actually get to solve a CSI murder case as a real forensics analyst.” Which sounds pretty neat — but it is that disruptive? Yes, argues Labster, because access to the highly expensive lab instruments and equipment its software is simulating is necessarily limited. “Where students and bio-curious folk could never get access to the hundred-thousand dollar NGS machines, Electron-Microscopes or even HPLCs, they now have 24/7 access to a virtual 3D laboratory full of all these awesome machines, with real-life mathematical simulations of anything from basic PH base/acidity simulations to DNA manipulations and enzyme simulations (all made in Unity3D for web and iPad). And you get a knowledgeable virtual assistant to show you how to use all their the cool new toys,” Bodekaer adds.
Labster also argues that another advantage of using a software simulation of lab experiments vs the real deal is it allows more of the molecular processes to be made visible via interactive molecular 3D animations — instead of the real thing being obscured behind the walls of the machinery. Which is clearly better for learning. Labster has also added quiz questions and interactive feedback to its software to further enhance the education experience. It says its aim is to break down the traditional lab teaching method of requiring students to follow “a pre-ordained cookbook recipe of the experiment” — and rather allow them to follow an “inquiry based approach” where they can choose their actions and make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. It claims these methods have been shown to be than traditional teaching methods. Asked about competitors in the space, Bodekaer cites LateNiteLabs and McGrawHill LearnSmart Labs as the main ones — but argues that Labster stands apart because it’s also reworking the education “flow”, as well as virtualising high tech equipment to widen access. “Our competitors have simply virtualized the traditional science teaching method that have been documented to be very ineffective in numerous scientific studies. In collaboration with learning researchers and professors we have innovated the entire learning flow by re-inventing science education covering everything from engaging and fun real-world scenarios, to interactive 3D animations explaining what happens even on a nano-level, to applying modern teaching methods that optimizes learning effectiveness and retention,” he argues. “We furthermore focus on offering students the latest advanced research equipment, such as a $700.000 Next Generation DNA Sequencing machine by leveraging our advanced mathematical simulation engine, where our competitors simply rely on the older and simpler equipment used only in traditional school teaching.” There’s also the platform angle. Bodekaer says Labster’s competitors are focusing on older technology — namely Flash — while it’s targeting the iPad market to allow learning to be mobilised. “All our competitors rely on the dying Flash technology, preventing them from entering e.g. the iPad market,” he adds. “We leverage the state-of-the-art 3D gaming engine called Unity3D, which is cross platform and compiles natively to iPads, Androids, Mac, PC, all web browsers and even iPods.” Labster’s other co-founder and CEO is Mads Bonde, who brings the bio-tech education background to the mix. The startup’s current funding is $1 million in grants and non-equity support, but Bodekaer says it’s “in early dialogues with several investors for a potential Series-A funding”.
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CE Week’s Startup Pavilion Serves Up Bikes, Hydroponics, And Rotary Phone Photo-Sharing | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | In the , there’s just as much diversity as there is similarity among the new flock of products and services hitting New York. We saw a number of bikecessories, bike services, and reached the other end of the spectrum by visiting a cloud-based hydroponics monitoring solution and a nice twist between new-school photo-sharing and old-school phones. Join us, won’t you, as we journey through Startup Pavilion? is a company looking to disrupt the bike-sharing services sweeping the globe, namely in Europe and most recently in New York city. But rather than keeping all of the technology within the proprietary racks and kiosks, SocialBikes have a little tech package on the back that stores a locking system, GSM cellular chip, and a GPS chip. This lets each bike act as its own autonomous system. Just find a bike on the map, reserve it with your phone, and pick it up. Right now, SocialBicycles is focusing on selling to universities, municipalities, and corporate campuses. What do you know? Another bike startup. is a small digital bell for your bike that can be customized the same way that you can customize the ringtones on your phone. Simply move any .mp3 file over to the MyBell via a microUSB connection, and that noise (whether it be the Jaws theme or a line from a Nicki Minaj song) will thereafter be emitted from your MyBell each time a driver cuts you off. Eventually, the MyBell will include LEDs, but it’s still in the development stage with plans for a crowdfunding campaign starting at the end of the summer. The founders expect the device to retail at $50. To grow a hydroponic garden, there are a number of factors that require constant monitoring. lets you monitor these things remotely, thanks to a $499 device that uses a suite of sensors to monitor things like PH, temperature, humidity, light levels, and more. That device sends real-time information to the cloud, which is displayed in a web dashboard. Not only can you monitor and control your garden remotely, but the service offers up tips on how to keep your plants happy. And if that weren’t enough, you can connect with other growers to share and receive tips. The web service is built on a freemium model, with a standard tier at $9/month and an enterprise tier of $49/month. is a product meant for events and parties that combines the old with the new. It’s a rotary phone booth, at its core, with souped up technology and LED bling. It’s fairly straightforward. Dial your number into the phone dial, and you’ll be prompted to take four different pictures. Those pictures are then displayed on the wall of the party, and also sent to your SMS inbox with a link. The link lets you see all four photos separately, or as an animated gif. Pricing for the Rotobooth comes on a quote-by-quote basis. |
Mozilla Opens Its Firefox Social API To Developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | With the release of the , Mozilla didn’t just introduce and , it also its for developers. This feature allows them to create new ways for users to interact with their favorite web apps through a persistent sidebar, notifications or toolbar buttons in the browser. With this release, Mozilla also adds a to the mix. Mozilla first launched this feature in cooperation last year. Since then, it added a number of new partners, including , Mixi (for users in Japan) and . All of these services add a small persistent sidebar to the browser windows. As Mozilla has , the organization believes that social networks, web-based productivity apps and other sophisticated desktop-like web experiences have changed the way we use the browser. It’s worth noting that Mozilla still hasn’t quite found a solution for using multiple services that rely on the Social API simultaneously. You can enable multiple Social API-based apps, but only one of them will show in the sidebar at any given time. That’s something the designers still have to solve, especially now that more developers will surely start to use these features. The other new feature that most developers will surely appreciate is the addition of the new in the beta. Chrome users, of course, are already familiar with this tool, which displays a graph for all the individual server requests it takes to load a given page. Mozilla says this is just an “initial” release, but also notes that it’s already “very functional.” |
Google Trekker Gets You Off-Limits Access To Exotic Locations Like The Island From Bond’s Skyfall | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kmKO_gGsc?feature=player_embedded] Google Trekker just announced the , and today it’s : Getting virtual tourists behind velvet ropes at completely unique, remote destinations. On the Google Maps blog today, the team showed off a virtual tour of the island of Hashima, in Japan’s Nagasaki Prefecture, which providing the setting for Bond villain Raoul Silva’s hideout in Skyfall. Hashima, otherwise known as “Battleship” island in Japanese, is a former coal mining facility and living area for its workers. It was abandoned completely in the 1970s, and then finally opened its doors to tourists again in 2009. But tourists aren’t allowed everywhere in Hashima, since it’s basically a toppling wreck of concrete and steel – pieces of buildings regularly fall off and might not mix well with the soft skulls of gaggle-eyed visitors. The Trekker team managed to gain special access to off-limits areas, however, and even got in-building imagery to provide a near-complete virtual view of the strange, industrial-era island. You can see how they did it in the video above. This expansion of the Trekker program will likely encourage tourism to the area, but it’s also a great example of how Google’s ambitious digital archiving project can preserve a digital record of sites unlike any other. Especially in a case like Hashima, where in 10 years time what remains there won’t resemble what’s there today in the least, thanks to the continued effect of ocean winds on the crumbling city infrastructure, that’s a valuable and previously unavailable resource, for researchers, students and the just plain curious alike. |
Music App Songza Goes Ad-Free With A New Paid Service, “Club Songza” For $0.99 Per Week | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | , the music-streaming and recommendation service that has picked up some 4.8 million monthly active users with its free, ad-based service, is turning on a feature now that it hopes will convert some of its most loyal listeners into more monetizable ones. It is launching “Club Songza,” a subscription-based service that is priced at $0.99 per week for users to get an ad-free experience. Songza has started out by sending emails to its 500,000 most loyal users in the U.S. and Canada — the only two markets where Songza is currently available — encouraging them to sign up. “You can now to go ad-free and get double the skips on Songza’s apps for iPhone, Android, Sonos, and the web,” the email says. “Only $0.99 per week. (Cheaper than a soda!)” Maybe not cheaper than Spotify, though, which starts at $4.99/month for desktop/laptop ad-free subscriptions and $9.99/month to include mobile and other devices. “We’ll be sending out more invites, and over the next few days we will have sent it out to everyone,” Elias Roman, the CEO and co-founder of Songza, told us after we contacted him to ask about the service. Songza, which was co-founded by Roman after , Amie Street, also counts the e-commerce giant as an “active” minority shareholder. So why the move to paid subscriptions? You may think that it’s because it’s hard to monetize ads on a user base of 4.8 million listeners, or because Songza is not able to make enough from the labels on those numbers. But Roman says otherwise. “The primary reason is user request,” he says. A lot of users have been requesting an ad-free service, he adds, and they are throwing in a couple of other sweeteners: more ability to skip tracks (to 12 from 6 in the free version) and special access to more premium content. He points out that Songza’s playlists are curated by 50 very top music experts that source rare content, such as “a track on vinyl from a swap meet in Brazil.” At other times, it may be a playlist created by a famous DJ. On the ad front, Roman says that Songza makes the pitch to brands that what they may not be getting in listener numbers they are making up for in loyalty. “We generate millions of minutes of engagement,” he says. “It’s not quantity but quality.” In May, when Songza , it noted it was seeing 65 million minutes of use on its platform per day. Other music streaming platforms have been grappling with questions of margins on digital music and debates over royalty payments across the music ecosystem. Most recently, Pandora founder Tim Westergren that it was squeezing artists. , we wrote about how Spotify’s profitability structure is partly based on it achieving a particular level of scale. While I had Roman’s ear, I also asked him the ever-present, slightly selfish question I like to ask of all U.S. startups: when are we going to see this service go abroad? “There are other territories on the roadmap,” he noted. The UK is not among them, however. “We look for relatively less crowded markets, and the UK doesn’t score super high in that category.” |
Maker Nabs A 3D Model Of Marcus Aurelius With Google Glass | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | In what looks to be a first for the technology, designer and engineer took 30 pictures of a bust of Marcus Aurelius with Google Glass and created a downloadable 3D model that you can Blatt writes: Obviously Blatt had some prior experience with the gear and the tools required to build a 3D model but it’s fascinating that, in a few minutes, he was able to render a physical object digitally and then reprint it. These methods aren’t foolproof, but they’re very nearly so. What does this mean for the future? Well, almost anything can be copied now, from a car to a tourist’s trinket. It also means that nothing is “safe” anymore – all it takes for IP theft of object designs to happen is a few winks with a good enough camera. Look for this to also affect the uptake of glass in the corporate world. If I were a designer I definitely wouldn’t want some weirdo coming in and snapping my objects with Glass. You can also , which should give museums pause if they’re worried about losing gift shop business. |
Accel Launches $100M Big Data Fund 2 To Invest In The ‘Second Wave’ Of Big Data Startups | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | The tech industry has been buzzing about “big data” for years now. And according to venture capital firm , the excitement around the big data space is not set to die down any time soon — it’s just about to enter into a new phase. Accel is announcing tonight that it has dedicated $100 million for a new investment fund called Big Data Fund 2. The fund is the same size as Accel’s first big data focused fund, which . As part of the new fund, Accel is also adding CTO and CEO to its Big Data Fund Advisory Council, which Accel has said is meant to serve as a “guiding light” to help think through investments and track entrepreneurs doing interesting things in the space. Despite the nearly identical name, Accel’s Big Data Fund 2 will mark a definite shift in focus from the firm’s first big data fund, partner said in a phone call today. “Over the past few years, we’ve focused a tremendous amount of attention on what people like to call the ‘three Vs’ of big data: variety, volume and velocity,” he said. “We now believe there is a fourth V, which is end user value, and that hasn’t been addressed to the same extent,” and that is where Big Data Fund 2 will be focusing the bulk of its investment and attention. Specifically, Accel believes that “last mile” for big data will be served largely by startups focused on data-driven software, or “DDS.” These startups have largely been made possible through the hardware and infrastructure technology innovations that defined big data’s first wave, Flomenberg says. In a prepared statement from Accel, Facebook engineering VP , who also serves on Accel’s Big Data Advisory Council, explained it like this: “The last mile of big data will be built by a new class of software applications that enable everyday users to get real value out of all the data being created. Today’s entrepreneurs are now able to innovate on top of a technology stack that has grown increasingly powerful in the last few years – enabling product and analytical experiences that are more personalized and more valuable than ever.” One example Flombenberg pointed to as an example of a “fourth V” DDS startup is , the “next generation relationship manager” software startup which from Accel and others. Accel’s existing portfolio of big data investments also includes Cloudera, Couchbase, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Opower, Prismatic, QlikView, Sumo Logic, and Trifacta. |
Yahoo! Discloses Number Of Data Requests From U.S. Law Agencies, Says It Will Issue “Transparency Report” Soon | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | Yahoo! has disclosed the number of government requests for data it has received over the past 18 months, becoming the latest tech company to do so after the fallout from the NSA spying scandal. In , the company said that Yahoo! received 12,000 to 13,000 requests from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and U.S. law enforcement agencies during the period between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Like other tech companies that have recently disclosed the number of U.S. law enforcement requests for data they have received, Yahoo! used its press release to reiterate that its commitment to user privacy, despite being implicated in PRISM. “We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it,” Mayer and Bell said in the statement. on June 15 that for the six months ending December 31, 2012, it had received between 9,000 to 10,000 requests for data from U.S. law enforcement agencies. During that same period . Google, on the other hand, to be allowed to publish more information about national security requests it has been given. for disclosing the number of data requests they received because their numbers do not break down the types of request made by type or government agency. Yahoo!’s statement noted that “like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue.” The company said that most of the requests it received concerned fraud, kidnappings and other criminal investigations. Yahoo! also stated that it will issue its first “global law enforcement transparency report” later this summer, which it will refresh with current statistics twice a year. |
Yahoo! Reportedly Offers $30M to $40M For Social Email Startup Xobni | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | Yahoo! is offering to purchase social email startup for $30 million to $40 million, . If the deal goes through, Xobni would be the latest acquisition by Yahoo! as CEO Marissa Meyer seeks to boost the company’s talent roster and product offerings. Xobni’s social email plugin automatically creates a profile for each contact with correspondence history and data pulled from social networks including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Hoovers. The San Francisco-based startup began with a Microsoft Outlook plugin and now supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Apple’s iCloud, in addition to its Smartr Contacts apps for Android and iOS. The deal makes sense for Yahoo! because it would enable the Internet giant to add a competitive edge to its email products. Furthermore, the startup already has strong ties with Yahoo!: Yahoo! co-founder David Filo previously worked with Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte, who in turn was once vice president of social search and real-time communications at Yahoo!. In addition to the , the company has also made a series of mobile acquisitions. These include . The Summly deal , which was staffed by former Yahoo! employees. As Drew Olanoff noted at the time of Jybe’s acquisition, the deal proves that Yahoo! is focused on “acquiring teams that do heavy research in machine and natural learning, which goes to show you that Mayer is giving the company an intelligence facelift of sorts.” (Speaking of additions to the Yahoo! team, ). The acquisition’s closure, however, is still uncertain. Longtime Xobni followers might remember that . While the $30 million to $40 million offered from Yahoo! represents an increase from Microsoft’s offer, it is important to note that it is still less than the $40 million that the startup has raised from investors including First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator. AllThingsD reports that some Xobni common shareholders might not get any of their investment back over preferred shareholders, which might prevent the deal from going through, especially since Yahoo! seems unlikely to offer more money. |
Yahoo! Becomes Exclusive Partner Of 49ers Online Content | Greg Barto | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | I get as excited as anyone thinking about the upcoming 49ers season. Quite a bit has happened since we were five yards from winning the Super Bowl. The stadium was branded with the , we got Anquan Boldin from the Ravens for pretty much , and Michael Crabtree . Yahoo!, while on a purchasing spree of startups, decided to align themselves with SF’s most beloved football team (sorry Raider fans) by inking a 10 year deal that makes them the 49ers exclusive partner for online digital content. Levi’s stadium has been called the “ ” stadium ever built. With a focus on mobile, the 49ers took into account that nearly everyone who attends a game will be bringing their own smartphone. The stadium will be able to provide Wi-Fi to nearly 70,000 people on any given Sunday. Fans are said to be able to interact with other people in the stadium, watch replays from different camera angles, and possibly order food directly to their seats so they don’t have to miss a down of football. One of the most attractive highlights is being able to upload a photo to Flikr, and possibly be shown on the stadium’s jumbotron. That’s assuming, like me, you’ve always wanted to be on a jumbotron. As part of the partnership, Yahoo! will be the exclusive digital content, social network, and online photo/video partner for the San Francisco 49ers. Expect to see lots of Yahoo! branding around the new stadium as they’ve been given rights to the Fantasy Football Lounge, along with logo placement inside and outside the stadium. Partnerships like this are becoming more commonplace in the sports world. Big brands have been buying naming rights to stadiums for decades now. Tech companies have been no stranger to those deals. Oracle Arena and Overstock.com Coliseum are two such names bought by their respective companies for naming rights in Oakland. Financial terms for the Yahoo! agreement weren’t revealed, but one can assume that such a high-profile stadium set to host the Super Bowl in three years can charge quite a premium. It’s also good to know Marissa Mayer wears red and gold on the weekends. Go Niners. |
Big Brands Are Growing More Quickly On Twitter Than Facebook (According To Optimal) | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | Here’s a fun comparison from , a social advertising and analytics startup: If you look at big brands on social networks, their following seems to be growing more quickly on Twitter than on Facebook. Optimal says it looked at the data from 4,330 brands, representing a total of 3.49 billion Facebook Likes and 595 million Twitter followers. Last week, those brands added 18.5 million new Likes and 4.5 million new followers — so on a percentage basis, their following grew 55 percent more quickly on Twitter than it did on Facebook. Now, you might quibble about whether pitting Facebook Likes against Twitter followers is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison, but those are, ultimately, the main ways that businesses can count their following on each service. You could also point out the Twitter audience is still smaller than it is on Facebook — so even though Optimal said Twitter grew more quickly, the brands in question actually got more Facebook Likes than new Twitter followers. There are cases, however, where brands have a larger following on Twitter, full stop. , for example, added the most Twitter followers of all the brands tracked — 279,500 new followers compared to 214,300 Likes. It has 21.3 million followers total and 4.6 million Facebook Likes. ( came in at No. 3 on Twitter growth, adding 167,400 new followers and 217,200 Likes.) Not that Optimal CEO Rob Leathern is really trying to pitch this as Twitter overtaking Facebook. “I think it does show that Twitter is growing and becoming more relevant for brands, too – in a sense ‘catching up’, but also it is different as well,” he told me via email. “A smaller but often more active audience.” Optimal also broke down the data by industry. Department and general merchandise stores had the highest growth rate on Twitter (2.01 percent, versus 0.59 percent on Facebook), while books and magazines had the lowest (0.46 percent, compared to 0.61 percent on Facebook). Leathern said this isn’t necessarily the first time Twitter has outpaced Facebook (in this very specific measurement) — it’s just “the first time we are looking at the data this way.” |
If You Watch One Daft Punk Remix Performed By Robots (And Jack Conte) Today, Make It This One | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TAJBc7gW-Vc#!] , musician and founder of , has been on a tear lately with a set of unique music remixes performed by him and a group of pneumatic robots that fire off audio sequences to create some amazing music. In this video Conte used a , a wooden surface, and a projector to create a stage for his music. He then used an -controlled solenoid hand made by Rich Humphrey to trigger various sections of the music and played and sang the rest of it. The resulting mix of DIY robotics, live performance, and general chaos is pretty infectious. Conte even did a behind-the-scenes video to share how he built the project using , Final Cut, and a lot of patience. It’s a great look at an artist at work. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsvh7OtrhfI&feature=youtu.be] |
Why Was Apple Late To The PRISM Party? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | If there’s one striking thing about those slides, other than their hideous aesthetics, it’s that Apple’s allocated yellow oval, instead of a date, has the words “(added Oct 2012)” underneath it. That difference is most striking when you consider the fact that Apple competitor Microsoft cooperated with the government a full five years earlier. The company, which ever having heard of PRISM, released its FISA request numbers today, starting on December 1st, 2012, through this May 2013. Though it’s plausible that the government would not have disclosed the name of the program, the Apple’s participation in a government surveillance network designed to make data collection more efficient for the NSA — whatever that entails, like “a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms.” From Claire Cain Miller’s : While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so. The October 2012 date is notable as coming a year after the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Perhaps, because it is an interesting coincidence, it’s led to speculation that Steve Jobs resisted systematic data collection from the NSA until his death. That statement was echoed on the record by NeXt developer Andrew Stone, who Cult of Mac, “Steve Jobs would’ve rather died than give into that, even though he had a lot of friends at the NSA. Microsoft caved in first, then everyone else. Steve would’ve just never done it.” The speculation, which I’ve heard from a couple of sources, has grounds. NeXT was publicly a vendor for the NSA and many other security agencies, and Jobs had many contacts at the agency who perhaps had offered him immunity. It could be that his connections, Apple’s brand popularity or straight-up his legend allowed him to escape Microsoft’s, which had cases up until then, or fates. All of these explanations make sense, though it could be something like the Twitter that caused Apple’s tardiness. In Twitter’s case most of its data is public, so it’s not that big of a loss to the NSA until it becomes more of a communication node. Perhaps only recently did Apple collect the kinds of data the government would want, like the metadata around iMessage, which, though encrypted, doesn’t pass the test. We will likely never know what Jobs did in those last few years as PRISM loomed ever larger, but whatever he did it looks like he held out as long as he could. The image of Steve Jobs playing chicken with Uncle Sam fits right into his myth. Even if it is just a myth. |
PalTalk: It Was “Flattering” To Be Included In The PRISM Slidedeck | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | The eyesore of a PowerPoint deck that contractor Edward Snowden had leaked had globally recognized names: Microsoft. Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Apple. AOL. Skype. YouTube. The NSA had allegedly collaborated with all of these Internet giants to request and access data on foreign users. But then there was also PalTalk. WTF? Even Stephen Colbert ribbed them last week. “You heard right. They’re monitoring PalTalk. Folks. You know what that means. We are close to learning what PalTalk is….” PalTalk, a profitable group video chat site that’s been around for more than a decade and has about 5.5 million monthly uniques, officially says it had no idea what PRISM was until the slidedeck was published — . And then added — — that it doesn’t let any government agency have direct access to its servers, but that it legally complies with court orders. “First of all, it was flattering to be included in that list of the top eight tech companies in the world,” said PalTalk president Wilson Kriegel, who recently came over from Zynga and OMGPOP. “But we weren’t aware of Prism. We’re not giving backdoor access to the NSA and we comply with the law as the law states we should.” and Facebook, about the volume of requests they receive from law enforcement agencies, Kriegel said PalTalk wasn’t disclosing the number of types of requests it had received. The company’s CEO Jason Katz is a lawyer by training, however, and PalTalk works with New York-based law firm Fross Zelnick to evaluate in-bound requests. “Zuckerberg and Sergey [Brin] have to make public statements because they have at least a billion users. Trust is a component that can erode quickly. But for us, I’m not sure if there’s anything to gain at the end of the day from sharing data like that,” said Kriegel, who added that none of PalTalk’s metrics, engagement figures and daily actives have seen any major impact from the Prism news. Kriegel said that he hadn’t been at the company long enough to know whether PalTalk had ever disputed a government request based on its constitutionality or whether it overreached. Other companies like Twitter . But Kriegel did share some insights into how or why the company might have held such interest for federal law enforcement. PalTalk is a video chat community that offers free group video calls and chats, with more than 20 million streams viewed per day. Their base is split with about one-third in the Middle East, one-third in Asia and one-third in the U.S. While the majority of the company’s revenues — which come in the form of subscriptions, advertising and virtual currency purchases — flow in from the U.S. and English-speaking countries, the Middle East delivers “significantly great revenues,” Kriegel said. Apparently, they have strong numbers of paying users from countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. “The majority of our paying user base is in the U.S. and the Middle East,” he said. “If you think about these countries, not many countries in the region have wide access to credit, so we do well in very rich, oil-based economies like Saudi Arabia.” A UN counter-terrorism report back from 2009 “The majority of all our interactions are about music, karaoke, languages, sports, politics, religion and dating,” Kriegel said. But he did say that video chat lets people get around restrictive social norms in other cultures. “If you want to interact with people in ways that aren’t always socially acceptable like with swearing, video chat might work for that.”
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Oculus VR Raises $16M To Build Their Crazy Virtual Reality Gaming Goggles | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | Following up on their massively successful $2.4M Kickstarter campagin, Oculus VR a gigantic $16M Series A to help them build the truly amazing Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles. In case you’ve somehow missed all the hubbub about the Rift, here’s what you need to know: it’s quite possibly the most exciting thing going on in gaming right now. Packed tight with 3D stereoscopic displays and a fistful of motion sensors, it’s the virtual reality headset that science fiction has promised us for decades. Strap the Rift on your face, fire up a compatible game, and it’s like entering a whole new world. Still lost? Check out this clip of our own Anthony Ha demoing the Rift at CES: As someone who’s lucky enough to have had a Rift strapped to my head at one point: I. can’t. wait. While Microsoft is off shooting itself in the foot with a semi-automatic that has seemingly infinite ammo and Sony is mostly just following a natural evolutionary path with the PS4, in swoops these (now not so) little guys to try and revolutionize gaming. [By the way, Microsoft: if you want to turn that tide you’re drowning in, if only just a little… embrace Oculus. Fast. Or, you know, let leading up to this next generation.] So why raise? Isn’t the $2.4M they got from Kickstarter enough? Hardly. While that’s a good start (and the Kickstarter certainly did a damned good job of spreading the word), that initial injection went toward the creation and distribution of the Oculus Rift dev kits — the rough, prototype hardware meant for developers to test the waters and start implementing Rift-compatibility into their games. They’ve still got to build their production/retail hardware, continue to build out their SDK, evangelize the heck out of all of it to get enough developers onboard to make the product worthwhile, and then figure out how to sell it beyond the notable but still relatively small geek crowd that has embraced it so far. They’ve done a great job of convincing much of the tech world (myself included) that the Oculus Rift could very well change the face of gaming — but if that’s to be the case, they’ve still got a much harder job in front of them: convincing . Oculus VR isn’t the first to raise a big ol’ round shortly after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Pebble pulled in $10M on Kickstarter, then a year later. Ouya pulled $8M on Kickstarter, then raised $15M from Kleiner Perkins. It’s starting to seem like a trend in big, flashy hardware startups: have a gigantic Kickstarter, get your prototypes out there, then raise around $15M from the more traditional funding sources within a few months. The round was led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners. As part of the deal, Spark Capital founder Santo Politi and Matrix Partner’s Antonio Rodriguez will be joining OculusVR’s board of directors. |
With $1.9M From Venrock And Others, Trumaker Wants To Bring Made-To-Measure To The Masses | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | To help in achieving its mission, Trumaker has raised $1.9 million from a group of seed backers that include , RRE, and angels including , , Bonobos CEO , , , and others. From top to bottom, Trumaker’s business model is quite unique. Made-to-measure has been done on a more mainstream level , but Trumaker is focusing on the casual space, with the kinds of button-down shirts that men wear with jeans. In terms of its sales force, the company has no brick and mortar stores: Instead, it employs contractors called “ ” who come to clients wherever they are — at home, work, wherever — and take their measurements to ensure a proper fit. The Outfitter then programs those measurements into Trumaker’s mobile app along with the customer’s custom order, which allows him to choose the fabric, fit, collar shape, and other details (Trumaker’s shirts are made at a factory in Malaysia that also manufactures high-end shirts for the likes of Brooks Brothers.) Trumaker shirts start at around $100, which is in line with nicer off the rack men’s shirts from stores like J. Crew. Since Trumaker’s Outfitters collect a commission on each purchase made by their clients during that first fitting and going forward into the future, working for Trumaker can be a lucrative job either in a full or part-time capacity — just like people working for startups such as Lyft and Sidecar. And sales seem to be going quite well: Since Trumaker’s soft launch in San Francisco this past December, the company has sold more than 2,000 shirts simply through word of mouth. It’s all pretty exciting stuff, so we stopped by Trumaker’s San Francisco headquarters to meet with founder and CEO Mark Lovas and get a look at what the company is doing and what exactly the process of ordering a Trumaker shirt is like. Check all that out in the video embedded above. |
Online Coupon Giant RetailMeNot (Formerly WhaleShark Media) Files For $230M IPO | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | Online coupon giant RetailMeNot has just filed for $230 million IPO, according to an released today. RetailMeNot, which was by the $300 million-funded WhaleShark Media, operates one of the largest digital coupon marketplaces (WhaleShark was subsequently rebranded as RetailMeNot this year). In 2012, the marketplace featured digital coupons from over 60,000 retailers and brands, and the site saw more than 450 million total visits to desktop and mobile websites last year. As of December 31, 2012, the company said it has contracts with more than 10,000 retailers, or paid retailers. RetailMeNot sites account for the majority of the company’s traffic. In terms of financials, RetailMeNot reports that revenues increased from $16.9 million in 2010 to $144.7 million in 2012. In the same period, net income increased from $2.3 million to $26 million, so the company appears to be profitable, and growing. The Austin-based company has raised $300 million in funding from Google Ventures, IVP, Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Adam Street Partners. Whaleshark had previously acquired a number of other coupon sites, including , deals2buy, coupon7, couponshare, cheapstingybargains.com, and deals.com. It’s good to see a non-enterprise, consumer-focused company bet on the public markets in this climate. We’ve definitely seen a number of strong enterprise IPOs, so it will be interesting to see how the markets react to the more consumer-facing, and ecommerce-related RetailMeNot. |
In First NSA Interview, Obama Can’t Confirm If Courts Ever Rejected Spying Requests | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | President Obama finally took a sit-down interview on the and we’ve pasted a partial transcript below. Disappointingly, most of it is (very) generic and defensive. But, there is one important takeaway: President Obama couldn’t answer whether oversight courts (FISA) have ever rejected a single NSA spying request. PBS’s Charlie Rose asked, pointedly, “has FISA court turned down any request?” The president appears to bumble through the answer, “The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.” This is problematic, since leaker Edward Snowden that the FISA courts are essentially a “rubber stamp” for any NSA investigations. As a result, they routinely exploit legal and technical loopholes to spy on Americans with direct and indirect ties to foreign suspects. The rest of the partial transcript shows Obama defending the program, claiming that it doesn’t permit broad spying on U.S. citizens, and touting his civil liberties record. Transcript below (via BuzzFeed): : Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe, is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice. That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn’t the case…. And so that’s a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, “Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.” To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports. : But there is a balance here. : But there is a balance, so I’m going to get to your — get to your question. The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life, which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I’ve said is “Let’s examine and make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs.” Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the intelligence gathering business for a very long time — Bigger and better than everybody else. : Bigger and better than everybody else, and we should take pride in that because they’re extraordinary professionals; they are dedicated to keeping the American people safe. What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they — and usually it wouldn’t be “they,” it’d be the FBI — go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause…. So point number one, if you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails unless it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule. There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden, allegedly, since there’s a criminal investigation taking place, and they caused all the ruckus. Program number one, called the 2015 Program, what that does is it gets data from the service providers like a Verizon in bulk, and basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there. Now, if the NSA through some other sources, maybe through the FBI, maybe through a tip that went to the CIA, maybe through the NYPD. Get a number that where there’s a reasonable, articulable suspicion that this might involve foreign terrorist activity related to Al-Qaeda and some other international terrorist actors. Then, what the NSA can do is it can query that database to see did any of the — did this number pop up? Did they make any other calls? And if they did, those calls will be spit out. A report will be produced. It will be turned over to the FBI. At no point is any content revealed because there’s no content that — : So I hear you saying, I have no problem with what NSA has been doing. : Well, let me — let me finish, because I don’t. So, what happens is that the FBI — if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone — it’s got to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant. But has FISA court turned down any request? : The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion. : Should this be transparent in some way? : It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court…. The whole point of my concern, before I was president — because some people say, “Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.” Dick Cheney sometimes says, “Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel.” My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances? So, on this telephone program, you’ve got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program. And you’ve got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee — but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works. Now, one last point I want to make, because what you’ll hear is people say, “Okay, we have no evidence that it has been abused so far.” And they say, “Let’s even grant that Obama’s not abusing it, that all these processes — DOJ is examining it. It’s being renewed periodically, et cetera — the very fact that there is all this data in bulk, it has the enormous potential for abuse,” because they’ll say, you know, “You can — when you start looking at metadata, even if you don’t know the names, you can match it up, if there’s a call to an oncologist, and there’s a call to a lawyer, and — you can pair that up and figure out maybe this person’s dying, and they’re writing their will, and you can yield all this information.” All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that, it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that. : So, what are you going to change? Are you going to issue any kind of instructions to the Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Clapper, and say, “I want you to change it at least in this way”? : Here’s what we need to do. But before I say that — and I know that we’re running out of time, but I want to make sure I get very clear on this. Because there has been a lot of mis-information out there. There is a second program called the 702 program. And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity. It can only be narrowly related to counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber hacking or attacks, and a select number of identifiers — phone numbers, emails, et cetera. Those — and the process has all been approved by the courts — you can send to providers — the Yahoos or the Googles, what have you. And in the same way that you present essentially a warrant. And what will happen then is that you there can obtain content. But again, that does not apply to U.S. persons. And it’s only in these very narrow bands. So, you asked, what should we do? …What I’ve said is — is that what is a legitimate concern — a legitimate critique — is that because these are classified programs — even though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it — despite all that, the public may not fully know. And that can make the public kind of nervous, right? Because they say, “Well, Obama says it’s okay — or Congress says it’s okay. I don’t know who this judge is. I’m nervous about it.” What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program, number one. And they are in that process of doing so now so that everything that I’m describing to you today, people, the public, newspapers, etc., can look at because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story. Number two. I’ve stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board, made up of independent citizens including some fierce civil libertarians. I’ll be meeting with them. And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities. : Let me just ask you this. If someone leaks all this information about NSA surveillance, as Mr. Snowden did…. Did it cause national security damage to the United States, and therefore, should he be prosecuted? : I’m not going to comment on prosecution…. The case has been referred to the DOJ for criminal investigation… and possible extradition. I will leave it up to them to answer those questions. |
Living In The Future With The Formlabs Form 1 | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed,” wrote William Gibson. He’s right. Luckily, the future is mostly in my attic workshop. I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a for the past week and have come away with a better sense of the platform, the way forward of 3D printing in general and Form 1 in particular. In short, the Form 1 is one of the simplest and most usable printers I’ve ever used and, barring a few minor peccadilloes, it is well worth the hype — and price tag.
First, a bit of explanation. The Form 1 is a stereolithography machine and this is an important distinction to make. We are probably all familiar with machines like the Makerbot. These machines use fused deposition modeling to extrude a small bead of metal or plastic to “draw” one slice of the shape you’re building over and over again until the object is built. The Form 1 shines a laser onto a metal surface through a layer of resin. Using a process of photopolymerization, the slices are laid down one after the other creating a solid object that of the resin as it is built. Think of the Makerbot as a stalagmite maker — the material is laid down on a platform — while the Form 1 is a stalactite maker where the object hangs from the platform that slowly moves up. The objects that come out of the Form 1 look as if they had been injection molded. The layer height of 25 microns ensures that there are no “jaggies” along the object edge and that items that come out of the machine look as solid as, say, a child’s toy. In fact you can see objects made of the same material in stores around the world — it’s a solid, usable, slightly malleable plastic that holds up to abuse. But the Form 1 itself isn’t a child’s toy. It is a stable, solid, and very attractive lab-quality machine for prototyping and, while usable as an experimentation platform, it is a bit wonky when it comes to printing, curing, and maintenance. In short I wouldn’t recommend this printer for students under the age of, say, 16 but I would recommend it to almost everyone else over similarly outfitted machines. To make an object you upload an STL file to the Form 1 using a program called PreForm. The program is Windows-only right now, although the team is hard at work on a very usable OS X port. The PreForm software allows you to position multiple items on the build platform and orient them in a position that allows for ideal quality. You then add automatic supports — essentially struts made of plastic — that will form around the object as it builds. Think of the struts as a self-generating scaffolding for difficult parts. The Form 1 has a plastic cowling that keeps out UV light and hides the laser at the bottom of the machine. The cowling lifts up to reveal a build plate that hangs over a lucite tank. This tank holds enough resin for a few dozen smaller prints, but prints over a certain size require you to pause the print and refill the tank. Running out of resin results in a truncated print but it won’t harm the printer. Print times are slow for high-resolution prints. The two-inch-high rook — shown below — took about six hours to complete, and less complex prints like an clocked in at 4 hours and 20 minutes. Luckily the printer is nearly silent. Its only sound is a regular, slow clicking as the laser hits the resin, the tank tilts to peel off a layer, and the platform moves up infinitesimally. It is a slow, soothing trance track when compared to Makerbot’s jagged industrial backbeat. When printing at “lower” resolution the print times can fall drastically. I want to stress that the photos I took of the finish objects are literally just pulled from the curing vat. I did not cut down the small support suture points so as to show a product that has not been modified in any way. The tiny jagged points can be easily cut off and become invisible when you do so. Resin costs $149 per liter and is available in only clear right now. I’ve seen grey resin and it works beautifully, creating a solid, highly detailed print out of pure plastic. The company is working on a “burn away” resin that will allow makers to print objects and then create molds by melting away the plastic, but that is still in the works. At $3,299 the Form 1 isn’t cheap – but it’s not obnoxiously expensive, either. The Makerbot Replicator 2 is about $2,200 and the intrinsic difference in the technology and the difficulty and quality of manufacture add a premium to the Form 1. First, a few notes regarding the product. The build space is “tall” but it isn’t wide. It has a 4.9 x 4.9 x 6.5 inch build envelope compared with the Makerbot’s 11.2 x 6.0 x 6.1 inch platform. This means you can make smaller objects with ease or, if needed, chop them up into pieces for later assembly. Obviously the level of detail and smoothness is what you’re paying for here and so we can excuse the device for producing smaller-than-average prints. Second, you usually print objects with scaffold-like supports poking off of nearly every surface. As you see below, these prints of required quite a few supports which left little lumps on the print that can be easily cut off. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means — I’d prefer the object to be structurally solid and deal with a bit of clean up — but it is a little bit unnerving at first. Luckily all of the supports usually snap right off. Finally, the curing process takes about 10 minutes after finishing a print. This is obviously not onerous and it’s an important part of the system, but having a vat of isopropyl alcohol hanging out near potential heat sources, especially when printing in schools or a home, is a bit unnerving. Again, this is not a deal-breaker but an important consideration when looking at this device over any other. 3D printing, in many ways, is in its absolute infancy. What Formlabs has done is leapfrog over traditional home and open source printers with a unique system for high-quality stereolithography that is priced for the average consumer. While the Form 1 won’t replace a factory-grade machine, it’s definitely as close as you can get without sending something off to . In the end, however, you’ll want to know whether to buy this over a less expensive model or whether or not to build yourself a RepRap or other “free” printer. As a fairly experienced printer, I’d say that the Form 1 is absolutely stellar and well worth the investment if you are working in a design lab or engineering environment. The prints, resin cost, and machine cost add up to a perfect storm of printing perfection. If you are at an educational institution, especially teaching young children, I think the multi-step curing process could be a stumbling block. It is important, however, to understand that the curing process is as safe as, say, running a dark room, so with proper supervision I see no reason why this couldn’t be injected into an educational curriculum. The guys from Formlabs, who, only a few months ago came hat in hand to collect pre-orders for their project, have made an amazing product. It is compact, well-built, and exciting. The prints that come off it are mesmerizingly beautiful and the quality is top-notch. I did have some issues with prints falling off the plate and incomplete jobs but most of those were caused by user error. As printers and the attendant software improve, you begin to get the print you want more and more readily. However, the Form 1 is still in its infancy and so it can be excused a few hiccups. If you’re looking for something that produces more than acceptable prints using a machine that is a bit less expensive but offers a bit less resolution, by all means look at a fused deposition modeling printer like the Makerbot. The ease of use and inexpensive materials makes them an excellent choice for less mission-critical prints. However, if you’re looking for something that can mimic injection molding and other high-quality manufacturing processes, look no further than this printer. The Form 1 is sent here from the future to show us a new way forward in 3D manufacturing and I’m pleased that I could see it take its first few steps. |
null | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 28 | null |
Win Admission To creativeLIVE’s “Secrets From Silicon Valley” Workshop | Elin Blesener | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | The world’s largest video education platform is hosting a “Secrets from Silicon Valley” workshop later this week, where some of the Valley’s best minds will be sharing their wisdom with a handful of attendees. Only 30 tickets to this event were released, and they can’t be purchased anyway… but we have five of them to give away. Here’s just a sampling of some of the folks who will be leading classes at the event: If you don’t win, don’t panic hard — you’ll still be able to catch the classes, but from afar. creativeLIVE will be streaming the event, live and for free, Want to come? You should! Follow the steps below. 1) 2) Leave us a comment below telling us why you want to come. The contest starts and ends soon. At 5pm PT tonight. So, enter soon. We’ll choose our winners and contact them tonight. Please note this giveaway only includes 1 ticket per person. |
Google Will Soon Start Selling Chromebooks At Walmart And Staples, Other Retailers Coming Soon | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | Google sure isn’t giving up on its , even though it’s not clear that the company’s Chrome OS-based laptops are selling all that well. Today, Google announced that it’s expanding its brick-and-mortar retail efforts for Chromebooks through partnerships with Walmart and Staples. Over 1,500 will feature them starting this weekend and about 2,800 stores will carry Chromebooks later this summer. In total, Google says, this will triple the number of stores that carry its Chromebooks and bring the total number to 6,600 stores around the world. Walmart, it seems, will only make the cheapest Chromebook — the — available on its shelves, though. Staples will feature “a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung” and will also make them available . The more expensive Pixel, Google’s high-end Chromebook, won’t be available at any of these retailers, it seems. The company also announced that select Office Depot, Office Max, Fry’s and Tiger Direct locations will begin selling Chromebooks in the “coming months.” Previously, only Amazon and Best Buy carried Google’s laptops. Google is also expanding the availability of Chromebooks internationally. In the U.K., for example, 116 Tesco stores are now selling Chromebooks; in the Netherlands, Mediamarkt and Saturn will carry them and France’s FNAC stores will also get Chromebook displays. Google is also adding partners in Australia (JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman) and Sweden (Elgiganten). |
Indonesian Instagram-Clone PicMix Gets Monetization Right From The Start | Victoria Ho | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | At first glance, the similarities between and are obvious. Both apps are photo sharing platforms with simple, square Polaroid-esque aesthetics, and display photos from friends in streaming feed. But while Instagram is figuring out , Indonesian startup, PicMix seems to have nailed it from the get-go. PicMix makes it part of the core photo posting process for users to add frame and text embellishments. Many of the frames included in the app are branded from labels (who have paid for the privilege) that users actually want to use on their photos. It’s not hard to imagine getting a user in Asia to willingly use a Hello Kitty or Louis Vuitton frame around their picture. The company offers these frames to users as part of branding campaigns that are run by labels. They also put up photo competitions, and the criterion to enter is to use one of the branded frames around their photos. The visual impact of a frame or brand’s “sticker” on a photo is far more significant than hashtagging a brand. Stickers and frames are catching the wave of users warming up to adding extra bells and whistles on their photos, beyond photo filters. While Instagram hasn’t departed from its genesis as a vintage, Polaroid-style filter app, a crop of photo editing apps have blossomed around it to fill that gap. These third parties allow you to add captions and combine several photos into a single collage, ready to be loaded into Instagram. Two popular examples are for Android and for iPhone. Right now, PicMix charges an absurdly low $5,000 per brand campaign, but as its user base grows, it’s likely to increase that. , a marketing and brand development consultant and co-founder of Hawaii-based accelerator, , said he was impressed by PicMix’s execution of brand marketing. “Getting brand insertion without ill will is key. It’s amazing that it’s got users to want to insert brands, in a process that is not negative,” he said. Since the company launched less than a year ago, it’s already attracted 11 million users to the platform. 35 percent of those are in Indonesia, with the rest in South Africa and Venezuela. The reason for that spread is that unlike most photo sharing apps which tend to prioritize the iPhone upon launch, PicMix is available on feature phone platforms like the Nokia Asha, as well as , and . Calvin Kizana, founder and CEO of PicMix’s maker, Inovidea Magna Global, spoke to me at his booth at the Jakarta conference, which I visited as part of the trip last week. He said the company chose these platforms over the iPhone because he wanted to grab share in his home market—a notoriously loyal BlackBerry base. And an iOS version is coming. PicMix will enter the US market with it within the next two months, said Kizana. The company’s users seem to be pretty active. Each day on average, a user shares between five and 10 photos, to add up to a total of 450,000 photos uploaded to the service daily. The company was hosting this on Indonesian servers, but switched over to Amazon Web Services after its first month of business, when it hit 200,000 users and its servers were starting to feel the strain. PicMix received a round of funding from Indonesian mobile equipment distributor, . Kizana declined to share how much the funding was, and when exactly the deal was struck, but said that the investor came in when PicMix hit the five-million user mark. Besides sponsored marketing campaigns, PicMix also makes money through in-app purchases of premium frames, stickers and filters. Focusing on its emerging market base, it’s also established carrier billing arrangements in 75 countries worldwide, and has just launched a gift card service with Indonesian payment provider, . Carrier billings and prepaid gift cards have helped the company appeal to its domestic base, within which a significant proportion of users don’t have credit cards, said Kizana. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1bCiJxN80] |
Apple’s 2013 13-Inch MacBook Air Sweetens The Deal For One Of The Best Available Computers | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | The MacBook Air was the only new Apple hardware to be (besides the new AirPort Extreme), and while it isn’t a big change from the previous version, it packs some crucial improvements that really cater to the Air’s existing strengths. The 2013 Air is really Apple pushing the envelope with its ultraportable, and that has helped make one of the best computers in the world even better. Apple hasn’t changed the MacBook Air’s physical design since its last major update a few years ago, but the sleek, aluminum chassis isn’t showing its age. Sure, (though the Air is still thinner at its tapered end) but the fact that PC form factors are really only just now catching up speaks volumes to the quality of the Air’s industrial design.
Apart from overall good looks, the Air has a tremendous leg up on most computers in terms of size, weight and portability. If you haven’t yet used one for any sustained period of time, you’ll be absolutely blown away. Going from the 13-inch MacBook Pro to the 13-inch Air is like leaving the past behind and joining the future; big leaps in computing design are seldom so observable, and so noticeable in terms of your daily usage. A concern with many who aren’t familiar with the Air is that the thin and light chassis won’t be durable, but having used both the 11- and 13-inch as my daily working computer for months at a time, while jumping from desks to various remote working locations, I can attest to those fears being unsubstantiated. The Air may not feel quite as rock solid as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, for instance, but it isn’t fragile by any means. Apple has improved the Air in key areas with this redesign, and that’s where it makes sense to focus, based on the understanding that the previous version was already one of our favourite computers. Apple has focused on changes that should have the biggest impact, like the new Intel Haswell processors, the much speedier flash storage, a near doubling of battery life, and networking speeds that embrace 802.11ac, a tech on the verge of becoming conspicuous in consumer goods. Of these changes, the one with the greatest impact for the average user will be the new, all-day battery life afforded by the 12-hour capacity built-in pack (on the 13-inch Air; the 11-inch also gets a boost, but should afford you 9 hours, not 12). Apple is also testing battery life under more demanding conditions now, which suggests that if people go to extreme measures to conserve juice they might be able to get past that 12 hour mark. And indeed, I was able to eke out around 13 hours at least once, with screen brightness dialed down and other battery drains like Bluetooth disabled. The battery is truly remarkable. In standby mode, I haven’t yet even begun to scratch the surface of how long it can last after a week of usage. It really sips power when managing background tasks, and that should improve even further under OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which adds even more battery-conserving features to Apple’s desktop OS. The Air still ships with Mountain Lion, but you can bet Apple’s engineers were working on the upcoming OS X release when they were developing the new Air hardware. Even without the extreme measures, this is a computer that you can forget is unplugged without fear of running into dire problems. If you’ve got a charge in the morning, and provided you aren’t doing anything too demanding that’s burning CPU cycles, you should have enough to get you through a reasonable mobile workday. Which is to say, we’re nearly at the point most people really badly want to be in terms of their MacBook’s battery life (short of limitless, endlessly clean and cool energy). And the other upgrades help as well; the MacBook Air I reviewed was the 13-inch base model version, which retails for $1,099, but it come with double the internal storage standard vs. the 2012 model (128GB vs. 64GB), and Apple says that its new type of flash is a better performer, beating the previous generation’s storage performance speed by up to 45 percent. Certainly in testing the Air near-instantly recovered from sleep, and side-by-side with my top-end 2011 model, was snappier with nearly every task – likely also helped by the next-generation Intel Haswell processor. Some nice new features on the MacBook Air that add to the computer in small ways are the addition of dual mics, which greatly improves call quality for things like FaceTime when you aren’t using headphones, and the new Intel HD Graphics 5000, which gives you around a 25 percent bump in performance over the Intel HD 4000 graphics chipset used in previous generations. The other big new step-up in terms of features is the 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking card, which is complemented by the new AirPort Extreme router that offers the same. It’s a technology that’s becoming more and more commonly available on other routers, too, so it’s a very nice-to-have feature on the new Air, even if you can’t take advantage of it just yet. Still, in my brief tests with LAN performance over 802.11ac, I found that transfer times for files between computer and network-attached storage on the new router were just about halved vs. 802.11n speeds, though still lagged far behind wired Ethernet transfer times of course. The new MacBook Air isn’t a dramatic change, but it is a very good one. I’ve fallen in love with Apple’s Retina displays, so if I have one complaint about the computer it’s that there’s no ultra-high resolution display, but incorporating that kind of screen in this generation would’ve likely meant trading a big chunk of that new battery life away, and also increasing the price tag by around $400-500. For those who value the portability, flexibility and economy of the Air above all, the 2013 edition definitely hits all the right notes. |
Squrl Updates iOS Apps To Simplify Video Discovery With Better Recommendations And Social Features | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 6 | 17 | There is no shortage of apps on the market to help users find new, interesting videos to watch and enjoy. But video discovery startup still thinks there’s work to be done. The company just released a new version of its iPhone and iPad app that provides new ways to share with friends and find content that is more personally relevant to them. The new version of Squrl comes with a big redesign that breaks down the design and puts the content or categories that are most important on the front page of the app. There are now nine options available on the home screen, highlighting Featured videos and What’s Hot, as well as Channels, Recommendations and what users have liked, watched or added to their queues. The typography has gotten bigger and there are simpler icons to click on. And once users have clicked on a certain icon, that icon changes dynamically to highlight content that viewers will see in that section. That gives a little bit of a preview into what’s available to users. Those cosmetic changes are designed to simplify navigation throughout the app, but Squrl has done a lot more under the hood to improve recommendations and provide more relevant videos. The app combines the search and customize options so that users can customize the channels from within that screen. There’s also been a big upgrade to its recommendations engine, which uses collaborative filtering and interest-based matching to serve up videos based on what its users have already watched. The app needs users to watch about four or five videos to get started, but once that’s happened, it creates a stream of videos that should interest viewers. With the update, Squrl has also made its app more social. While it has always been easy for users to share with their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter, they can now share content and communicate with others within the app, as well. It’s improved the Find Friends feature inside the app, and enabled private messages so that users can share videos and chat privately with each other. Squrl provides access to videos from a whole bunch of on-demand and live aggregators, including YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, TED, Vimeo, Aol, and Blip.tv. Users who want to download the newest version of the app can . |
Looking To Beef Up Margins, Exec Hikes Hourly Rate For Errands From $25 To $30 And Triples Its Surcharge | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | , the San Francisco startup that lets you easily hire people online by the hour to run your errands and do your cleaning, will be increasing the flat rate for its flagship errand-running service by 20 percent and more than tripling its surcharge in an apparent bid to beef up its margins. In an email sent to Exec users today, founder said that the price for errands will now be $30 per hour, up from the $25 hourly rate that it touted when it launched as . Exec Errands is also upping its surcharge from three percent to 10 percent. The changes go into effect later this week, on June 14th. The official explanation for the price and surcharge hike is straightforward: “We’re making these changes to ensure that we are able to continue to provide the highest level of on-demand personal assistant services to our customers,” Kan wrote in his email to users. We’ve reached out for more details on Exec’s margins and how this will impact them, and will update this with any word we receive. Notably, the price increases do not effect , the standalone house cleaning app that and has since expanded to Seattle, , . Cleaning had already accounted for of Exec’s business before it was spun out as a standalone service, and it’s now the first thing featured on the company’s landing page. Indeed, Exec is one of several startups that launched with a focus on helping people outsource their errands but has since expanded its purview — or changed it entirely. , which launched in 2011 for outsourcing odd jobs to neighbors, has since ditched that business entirely to ; , which for years focused solely on errand-running for consumers, now also caters to businesses looking for . Of course, these kinds of changes are natural as startups develop, especially in a brand-new business category (after all, just a few years ago, getting someone else to pick up your dry cleaning was something that could only be afforded by, well, execs.) We can almost certainly expect to see more shifts as the market evolves. Our own interviewed Justin Kan a just after Exec Cleaning launched in New York City, and it was an in-depth discussion about the company’s growth thus far, future plans, the larger competitive landscape, and more. It’s embedded below: |
Pinterest Pushes Global Growth With A Localized Version For France, Its First Non-English Site | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | , the image-based social network, is picking up more global momentum: today, it the launch of a new site in French, with users in France getting pushed more localized content and more French site links in both their search and category feeds. The French version is being launched simultaneously on web, iOS and Android, and follows news in of Pinterest in the UK, the site’s first move into international waters. With much of 2012 seeing a number of sites following in the footsteps of Pinterest and undergoing “ ” redesigns — that is, highly-visual, grid-based layouts and instant links for social sharing — the big challenge for Pinterest now is to use its position not only to stay ahead of the pack, but to take things to the next level. With of how the company plans to monetize the platform, scaling up will be essential, and that is where international growth is key. It will also be interesting to see what Pinterest does about copycats that have sprung up in Europe in its absence. ( , from Rocket Internet, comes to mind here.) Also a challenge: currently, Pinterest doesn’t appear to own . Important to note that while this is Pinterest’s next step in localized content, the company has already been offering users the ability to change language settings on the site. In addition to English and French, Pinterest can be viewed in Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese — possible clues to which markets will get local versions next. There is already another country launch in the works, a spokesperson says, but Pinterest is still waiting to finalize details before announcing it. “This is among our first international efforts, and we are hoping to learn a lot that will inform how we reach out to communities in more countries moving forward,” she added. “We’re just getting started.” A spokesperson for Pinterest would not break out how many of its users are currently outside the U.S. In February, when Pinterest pinned down at a $2.5 billion valuation, it had 48.7 million users, according to comScore. (France and all things French and romantic, of course, were already for pinners prior to today.) Pinterest tells us that it has a team on the ground in Paris this week, and, as it did with its UK launch, will be using the next month spotlight some of the more prominent French pinners already on the site. (You can read about the first two French pinners .) : has a breakdown of where traffic is coming from on Pinterest’s site, and France is pretty small, with just over 1% of all traffic: in fact, the U.S. has by far the highest number at 70%. France’s traffic over the last six months grew by about 20%, while U.S. traffic declined by about 8%.
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