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iOS 7 Fights Mobile Spam With Option To Block Calls And Texts From Specific Numbers | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Telemarketing spammers bothering you? Clingy exes calling in the middle of the night? iOS 7 will let you block calls from specific numbers to save your sanity. Rather than allow third-party developers to modify the native Phone app like on Android, Apple has chosen to offer this feature itself. Apple mentioned the new privacy option in its rundown of , and detailed in a that this fall the update to its mobile operating system includes, “Phone, FaceTime and Messages blocking to prevent specific people from being able to contact you.” Yesterday I wondered if Apple might finally open up some more flexibility to iOS developers and allow them to provide this kind of functionality. Android lets apps like and many others let you block specific numbers or entire area codes, instantly hang up on them, or automatically send them to voicemail. Call and text blocking builds on the iOS Do Not Disturb feature you can schedule to block calls and messages from all numbers except certain favorites or groups. As a gauge of just how popular this capability could be in iOS, Mr Number had racked up over seven million downloads before being a week ago. Perhaps it suspected that call blocking would go native in iOS, denying its potential there, and feared the same would happen on Android.
It’s hard to assess how valuable call and text blocking is unless you’ve ever had a stalker or bully. To those who have, the feature can make or break their mobile experience. Getting woken up or interrupted by unwanted communication can feel like a deep invasion of privacy, and make people scared or angry every time their phone buzzes. It lets people fight back against drunk dials from old boyfriends or girlfriends, creepy strangers, and disrespectful marketers breaking their workflow. With any luck, Apple will evolve the feature with more granularity over time. Putting communication devices in our pockets that anyone can reach with the right string of digits forced us to surrender control of our attention. Call and text blocking for iOS will put that control back in the hands of millions of people. |
Design, And Insecurity, Is Back At Apple | Ryan Block | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | The phrase uttered by Phil Schiller during today’s keynote got a few laughs from the predictably enthusiastic WWDC audience. To me it dropped like a ton of bricked iPhones. Let’s catch up. The last time we heard from Apple was at its absurdly aggressive , where it introduced the iPad mini and refreshed an astounding number of its products in one fell swoop. The company’s stock was soaring at around $700 per share. Apple goes quiet for about nine months — the longest in recent memory. Its stock slides steadily, losing nearly 40% of its value. Samsung is said to have in the smartphone space. There are supply chain worries. And then . We’ve heard it. Even people who don’t follow tech seem to have heard it: Apple just isn’t innovative anymore (the subtext referring to Steve Jobs’s death in 2011). Well, it’s clearly gotten under Apple’s skin, and they’re doing something about it: launching about the design and user experience of their products. Wait, what? Let’s put aside for a moment that iOS 7 looks to be the most stunning, thoughtfully designed new software product Apple’s shipped since, well, iOS. Go ahead and table the company’s fresh, cylindrical new Mac Pro that looks more like a minuscule jet engine than any desktop computer I’ve ever seen. Apple really seems to think we now believe they’ve lost their touch. Is perception reality? Do products no longer speak for themselves? As Cook said at D11 last month, “Many people now define innovation as new [product] categories.” Perhaps Steve’s final act was the impossibly high bar he set at a very particular moment, where in the span of just a few years Apple was able to single-handedly define the modern smartphone, create the entire tablet industry seemingly out of thin air, and reinvent the laptop in the MacBook Air. So yeah, you might say expectations are a little high. But the reality is not every idea deserves to exist. Steve was fond of saying that he was as proud of the things Apple didn’t do as those it did, and that view continues to define Apple today. Trends change — today we finally toss out skeuomorphism in favor of so-called flat design — but as iOS 7 proves, the pursuit of beautiful, humane design remains. In the end, Apple abides by the same laws of physics and market dynamics as every other company. Not every concept has the potential to be a life-changing hit, and not every idea that makes oh so much sense on paper to fans and pundits can be willed into a game-changing product, even by Apple. That’s how it ought to be. Categories don’t equal innovation. Just ask Sony. In a world of companies willing to say yes to just about anything in the name of being innovative Apple still says no. If genius is, as Edison said, 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, then perhaps innovation is 1% invention and 99% iteration. The best way to know that Apple has truly taken a turn worthy of the insecurity on display today? Look for signs of experimentation. Half-baked ideas that just don’t stick the landing, products that elicit hand-wringing and that require lengthy explanation. If Apple releases its own Google Glass, get worried. But until such a day comes, there’s only one thing Tim proved at this year’s WWDC: There’s still no substitute for good taste, and there’s no need for any insecurity. Design is back at Apple.
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Sony’s PlayStation 4 Will Launch “This Holiday Season” For $399, $100 Less Than Xbox One | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Following up on their oddly detail-light press conference , Sony used their E3 press conference this evening to finally disclose a bunch of important details: the price, a launch window, and, at long last, what the PlayStation 4 will look like. The PlayStation 4 will launch in the US for $399 “this holiday season”. Alas, that’s as specific as they got regarding the timing. Microsoft’s Xbox One, meanwhile, will in November for $499. This brings the PS4 in at a full cheaper than the One, with the One already facing its fair share of criticism. Sony specifically targeted many of the things that the Xbox One has been lampooned for, from its seeming , to its publisher-set restrictions on the selling and trading of used games, to its requirement that gamers periodically connect their consoles to the Internet to authenticate their games. Sony says that the PS4 will have “no restrictions” on used games, and that no PS4 game will require online authentication. Sony just won a of fans. The biggest surprise of the night? Just how similar the PS4 and the Xbox One look, at least from afar. If you don’t follow gaming closely — or if you do, but you’re squinting — it’d be easy to get the two mixed up. Both are jet black, with incredibly sharp angles from edge to edge; the PS4 is just a bit more laid back, with a slight lean to its corners when compared to the Xbox One’s VCR-esque boxiness. If the Xbox One is a rectangular cuboid, the PS4 is a .
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Take A Good Look At Apple’s New iOS 7 With These Early Screenshots | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | iOS 7 was announced today officially at WWDC 2013, and it brings a lot of visual changes to Apple’s mobile OS, plus a host of new features and functionality as well. The official release is still a few months off, but one enterprising developer, from the new beta out today. The screens really just show a close-up view of what Apple demoed on stage, but they’re definitely worth a look if you want a better idea of the coming changes.
As you can see, simplified style and indeed, “flat” design are the hallmarks of the new OS, even if there are still some remnants of so-called skeumorphic design, like the paper texture in the notes app. The new multitasking tray looks to be a massive improvement over what we’ve seen in the past, and the Command Center is infinitely more useful looking than the limited access to some settings you get now with the bottom tray accessible via double-click. Overall, the OS looks like a much more modern and clean experience that the current version of iOS based on these screens, especially when it comes to some of the core apps like Calendar, Email and Safari, which have all been reduced down to their basic essences and feature far fewer distracting design flourishes. I’m curious to see how some areas where they’ve added more information, like with the new Notification panel, with its “today,” “all,” and “missed” panes will change the experience for what’s essentially supposed to be at-a-glance triage material, however. We’re still quite a ways off from the general consumer release of iOS 7 this fall, and a lot can change over a few months, but expect the overall look and feel of what arrives then to be very much the same as is depicted in these early shots. It’s a dramatic change, to be sure, but it’ll be interesting to see how general users react to the shift. |
Apple’s Flashlight Is Why We Can’t Fund Nice Dumb Things | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Flashlight apps are a testament to the power and simplicity of modern technology. Power outage because of a hurricane? There’s . Need to stealthily kill a mosquito without waking up your partner? There’s an app for that, too. Actually, there are more than 1,000 in the App Store alone, many with 5-star ratings, because flashlight apps, which turn the flash of your iPhone camera into a literal flashlight, are awesome. Flashlight apps make you feel like your phone is more Swiss Army knife than Twitter receptacle. With that innocuous seeming icon on the left there, Apple essentially in the App Store. It will be adding its own Flashlight to iOS 7 Control Center, the feature accessible with a swipe and a tap. Versus apps that take so many clicks to open you might as well wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Apple routinely turns to the developer ecosystem for for its own products, thus killing said inspiration. Hence the cliche question, “What will happen if Apple (or Google) does this?” . But in most cases, like Filters taking on Instagram and iTunes Radio taking on Pandora, the stakes are higher. Of the that exist in CrunchBase, only one, made by is . None are VC-backed. “We are certainly concerned about this announcement by Apple, as it could affect our core revenue stream. However, we believe that, just like Instagram will survive the addition of filters to the Camera app, our Flashlight app will flourish,” said the very hopeful i4software co-founder Michael Zaletel. “Flashlight will lack brightness control and will require two steps to access. Our app features INSTANT-ON just by tapping the icon on your home screen.” Okay. Flashlight apps, being utility apps, weren’t that big an opportunity to begin with — the only business model being paid ads or downloads. They are also easy to build, which explains the slew of them in the App Store. “This is the curse with utility apps,” said one investor who wished to remain anonymous. “You don’t pay tons for utility stuff, as its value can’t increase a lot over time. You pay at cost plus a bit more. Like the bills you pay every month.” Still, Apple Flashlight’s gotta sting hard for i4software, iHandy, Jason Ting Utilities and friends just like Apple’s Weather app hurt who made a similar Weather app, which Apple as it quietly built its own. “According to Apple, no one wanted a flashy weather app. They were so certain of this, they built one themselves.” |
The TechCrunch TV WWDC Wrap-Up: OS X Mavericks, iOS 7, Apple Steps On Pandora’s Turf, And More | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Check out the video above to see Greg and Darrell give us the rundown on , , Apple with , that that will be both designed assembled in the , and more. |
Watch Sony’s 2013 E3 Press Conference Right Here | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 6 | 10 |
E3 2013 is in full swing. Microsoft with plenty of news followed by several big developers showing off their upcoming flagship titles. But now it’s Sony’s turn and, thanks to gaming startup , you can watch the live stream right here. The player above will work for all of Twitch’s content. The company’s full streaming schedule is . This marks Twitch’s second year at E3. Since launching in late 2011, the startup continues to to their customers and 35 million users. Twitch in September 2012. Starting at 6:00pm PT/9:00pm ET Sony will take over the massive Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena to show off their latest. Expect plenty of game demos, PS Vita news, PlayStation 4 details and not-so-subtle digs at the Xbox One’s many shortcomings. Sony is widely expected to finish revealing its PlayStation 4 console. The company back in February, showing off a lot of demos and the new Dual Shock controller. But the console itself was curiously absent. Sony briefly talked about its X86 CPU and 8GB of memory, but stopped short of anything truly interesting. All should be revealed today, officially kicking off the next round of console wars: Xbox One vs the PS4. And just because it’s funny, here’s John Biggs at Sony’s 2011 E3 press conference. He likes cupcakes. |
Apple Publishes iOS 7 Transition Guide To Help Developers Adopt Flat Design | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | As expected, Apple is a completely new design language for . For developers, this means they will have to adapt their apps to match the rest of the operating system if they don’t want them to look antiquated. Thankfully, Apple today also published a pretty to designing for iOS 7 and transitioning apps to the new version that helps developers understand how they should use new UI elements like borderless buttons, translucent bars and full-screen layouts for their apps. As Apple notes, iOS 7 provides “a rare opportunity to revisit the way apps communicate their core purpose and functionality to users.” Here are Apple’s three main themes for developing for iOS 7: The UI helps users understand and interact with the content, but never competes with it. Text is legible at every size, icons are precise and lucid, adornments are subtle and appropriate, and a sharpened focus on functionality motivates the design. Visual layers and realistic motion heighten users’ delight and understanding. One new feature Apple especially stresses in its documentation is Dynamic Type, which now automates many of the text layout functions in iOS. Apple also notes that iOS 7 apps should get their apps ready to support the new transparent status bar, navigation bars, tab bars, toolbars, search bars, and scope bars, as well as other new UI features like the date picker. Most importantly, though, Apple is giving developers a couple of tips for building “crisp, beautiful UI and fluid motion” for iOS 7 so that third-party apps match Apple’s own style. This means apps should, whenever possible, take advantage of the whole screen, and developers should reconsider the use of insets and visual frames and instead let the content “extend to the edges of the screen.” They should also “reconsider visual indicators of physicality and realism” and avoid bezels, gradients and drop shadows, because that “sometimes lead to heavier UI elements that can overpower the content.” The UI, Apple says, should just “play a supporting role.” This also means apps should “provide clarity” (that is plenty of white space) and use color to simplify their UI. Another design feature Apple wants developers to embrace is the use of depth to communicate hierarchy and position through translucent backgrounds and enhanced transitions. Despite the focus on iOS 7 and the new design, Apple also acknowledges that some developers will have to (or want to) support iOS 6 for the time being. For them, Xcode 5 to manage multiple versions of an app to compare what they will look like using Apple’s Auto Layout. Here is Apple’s full list of the things it believes an app developer should do to get ready for the next version of iOS 7: You can find the full transition guide and iOS 7 design guide . |
With $1.2M In Funding, TapCommerce Aims To Bring Ad Retargeting To Smartphones | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Retargeting, everyone’s favorite web advertising technology, is coming to smartphones thanks to a startup called . The company isn’t exactly launching today, but it has been relatively quiet, and now it’s announcing some initial advertisers, as well as disclosing a $1.2 million round that it raised last year. Retargeting allows businesses to target their ads based on a user’s past activity. At its best, that means the ads are smarter, with a better sense of what you’re looking for and where you are in the purchase process. (At its worst, it can be creepy and annoying.) It has become a staple of web advertising, particularly for e-commerce companies, but it doesn’t work on Apple’s mobile devices because they don’t support third-party cookies. To solve that problem, CEO and co-founder Brian Long (previously vice president of mobile at ad company ) told me via email that he recruited a smart team including a Ph.D. from Caltech and an algorithmic options trader. He added, “There is a bit of secret sauce, but we use very large amounts of data coupled with sophisticated statistical analysis to produce extremely accurate results for retargeting.” Long said there has been another big challenge to mobile retargeting — “mobile inventory was siloed into a few major mobile ad networks.” Now, however, TapCommerce can work through the real-time mobile exchanges “to reach a very large audience and retarget efficiently.” In addition to its retargeting technology, the company says it has developed dynamic ad units and audience segmentation tools. As with desktop retargeting, the obvious advertisers are e-commerce retailers, since they can use the technology to convince visitors to buy a product that they were already considering. The startup’s advertisers include JackThreads, BustedTees, and 1-800-FLOWERS.com. As for the funding, it comes from , , , and . Each of the firms invested a similar amount of money, but Long said he considers ENIAC to be the lead since it invested first. |
iOS 7 Leaves Older iPhones And iPads Out Of The Fun | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | hits iPhones this fall, but only the iPhone 5 and iPod touch will get all the features announced at . The iPhone 4 and 4S will only get the new iOS 7 look and a splattering of features. And forget about the iPhone 3GS and older iPhones. They will be stuck in the skeuomorphic world of iOS 6 forever. As shown in our chart below, AirDrop is limited to just the latest devices, including the iPad 4 and iPad mini. The iPhone 4S is missing out on the filters in Camera but it, along with the iPhone 4, does support filters in Photos. iTunes Radio, the only feature announced today that makes Apple money, will be available on all iOS 7-compatible devices. Some of these features are also coming to the iPad – except for the original iPad. It too will be stuck with iOS 6. The iPad 2 will only receive the Siri updates and iTunes Radio. Filters in Photos and new capture mode are coming to the iPad 3 and new devices. But even the iPad 4 and iPad mini will not get the panorama or filters in the Camera update. This is of course an unfortunate side effect of progress: some devices naturally get left behind. Apple and Google have done a commendable job supporting older hardware with their latest operating systems. Most of the time, including with iOS 7, the limitations are tied to hardware. Either the hardware flat-out doesn’t support the function or only in a fashion that wouldn’t provide a quality user experience. Apple more so than most companies will only implement features if the user experience does not diminish. When Siri debuted alongside the iPhone 4, Apple didn’t roll the voice command function onto the one-year-old device, which happened to run a slower SoC than the iPhone 4S. Microsoft took a big hit when it announced that Windows Phone 8 then-current generation devices. Instead, those users would get some of Windows Phone 8’s user elements, but not its new underpinnings that powered the improved performance. But the new operating system required hardware not found in the devices of the time. Progress hurts sometimes. When iOS 7 rolls out , hackers and coders will no doubt do their best porting the missing features to older phones. Besides, even if that doesn’t happen, there’s more than likely an app for whatever feature is missing from your phone… because anyway. |
Chinese Microblog Site Tencent Weibo Will Be Baked Into iOS 7, Just Like Facebook And Twitter | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | It’s been a big news day for all things , and a lot of the buzz has been around the company’s . But one feature announced today in shows that Apple’s — and specifically, the market of Chinese iPhone users which is growing at a — is only getting stronger. Apple said today that a host of new features will be included in iOS 7 that should make the mobile operating system even more useful for the Chinese market, including a Chinese/English bilingual dictionary and handwriting recognition for multiple Chinese characters. But possibly the most significant bit of news in terms of iOS 7 and China is that , the microblogging site that essentially functions as a Twitter focused on the Chinese market, will be “supported” in iOS 7. The integration received just a short mention in Apple’s official , so the extent of the support is not yet clear. But the fact that the service has been accounted for at all puts it in an elite group of third party players given priority on Apple’s mobile operating system — most notably Twitter, which was (and subsequently saw a huge bump in new user registrations), and Facebook, which was last year. Tencent Weibo’s competitor, Chinese social networking giant Sina Weibo, . Both platforms are massive, with user bases that . It will be interesting to see what effect this has Tencent Weibo’s growth going forward. |
Are You Ready For The Seattle Meetup And Pitch-Off On July 18? | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | You may associate TechCrunch with the sunny climes of Northern California, but we’re ready to make it rain. We’re bringing our TC Meetups + Pitch-Off to the great, tech-centric city of Seattle. You can expect beer, great conversation, and a battle to the death to see which entrepreneurs can dazzle and excite in under sixty seconds. I mentioned there would be beer, right? You can We are charging a nominal TC editors will be on hand to talk about your pitches and we’ll have a great program of on-stage events. The event will be at on July 18 from 6pm to 10pm. Participants interested in competing in the pitch-off will have 60 seconds to explain why their startup is awesome. These products must currently be in stealth or private beta. . We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-Off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. We’re really looking forward to Seattle – it’s been far too long since we’ve been back to the home of Microsoft and Amazon and it looks like it’s going to be an amazing event. For more information on sponsorship packages and to discuss becoming a sponsor, please contact . Sponsors help make these events happen. |
Lamoda, The Samwer Brothers’ Russian Online Fashion Store, Snags $130M Led By Access Industries | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | , the Russian online fashion site incubated by the Samwer Brothers’ , is upgrading its wardrobe. On Tuesday, the company is announcing a new injection of $130 million — understood to be a record round of funding for a Russian ecommerce site, passing the $100 million that Ozon, Russia’s Amazon, picked up . This latest round was led by Access Industries, the VC and holding company controlled by Len Blavatnik, with participation also from Rocket Internet regulars, and . Like these two, Access Industries is also a repeat Rocket Internet investor, with stakes in Pinterest clone and home furnishings site . Last May, Blavatnik and Access Industries also put $200 million as a direct investment into Rocket Internet itself. The company has told us that today’s investment is separate and new. “Lamoda is a dynamic e-commerce company with strong growth and an experienced management team,” noted Blavatnik in a statement on the investment. The company is not revealing the valuation of Lamoda after its cash-for-equity deal. Niels Tonsen, one of the German co-founders and the CEO of Lamoda (along with Dominik Picker-Huchzermeyer, Burkhard Binder and Florian Jansen), tells TechCrunch that the funding will be used to continue expanding the company into more of Russia and adjacent markets like Ukraine. Riding the double trends of a growing middle class and a rising population of internet users — Russia is currently ranked as the largest internet market in Europe by comScore with — Lamoda competes against the likes of Ozon, as well as KupiVIP and a number of smaller sites. The addressable market in the whole of the Russian-speaking world counting other CIS states, Tonsen notes, is 200 million. It also fits with the Samwers’ wider focus on fast-growing emerging markets where large U.S. players like Amazon or eBay have yet to make significant inroads — although eBay has , and in the country. Like its rivals, Lamoda aggregates and resells clothes and accessories from some 800 brands — 1 million products in all — and also runs a logistics operation to deliver them, called Lamoda Express. Russia, , has a notoriously inefficient postal service, and so the bigger ecommerce companies tend to take matters into their own hands and run both logistics and delivery themselves, along with a cash-on-delivery payment scheme because credit card penetration is also low. Lamoda’s aim, says Tonsen, is to offer its courier service in over 25 cities by the end of this year, from its current number of 10. “Our company had very good traction in recent months,” he tells TechCrunch. “Things are going well on delivery platform and in our warehouse, so now is the right time to continue building the service.” The company is not releasing any revenue figures, nor will it say whether it has become profitable yet. But Tonsen points out that its 1 million customers make 20 million visits per month to its two sites (there is a second in ), and that it has a “multiple three-digit million run rate, and growing by a couple of hundred percentage points per year.” Some 15% of its traffic comes via mobile devices and is rising, he adds. Today’s round comes on the heels of a funding round announced just in September 2012, which was and led by JP Morgan, another big Samwer backer. Before that, there was an investment of an undisclosed amount made by Rocket Internet and the Samwers themselves. Other Russian backers of the Samwers include Yuri Milner’s DST, which also invests in Rocket Internet, but not publicly in any individual company. One area that Tonsen says today’s investment will not be used is in acquisitions. “We are a believer of building things ourselves, such as what we’ve done with fulfilment and sales,” he says. “We have a private label, and we will continue to push into that part.” Other investments — and a common focus for online fashion sites — may get made in technologies that will help Lamoda offer better visualizations for internet shoppers to pick fits and looks they’re more likely to keep than return. And like other companies in the Samwer portfolio, Lamoda may work with other Rocket Internet startups. “We’re considering eerything that could make sense,” he says. “But some like Payleven, which relies on mobile payments with cards, wouldn’t make that relevant at the moment here.” Lamoda is a good news story today for Rocket Internet, but it wasn’t always this way. Today’s funding and growth are turnaround tales for the company, which once was something of an embarrassment for Rocket Internet. In 2011, an from Oliver Samwer admitting early mistakes when first launching the company, and calling for a more aggressive strategy as a result — a “blitzkrieg,” in his words. That may bristle with some critics of the Samwers, but ironically, it looks like, for now at least, it has paid off for Lamoda and the Samwers’ Russian ambitions. |
Survey: Majority Of Americans Think NSA Spying Is More Important Than Privacy | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Despite the conniption fit over the National Security Agency’s Internet snooping, most Americans are perfectly okay with Big Brother spying on them. “A majority of Americans – 56 percent – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism,” a new Pew Report. An overwhelming majority of Americans also feel, generally, that it’s more important to “Investigating Terrorist threats” than “Not intrude on privacy.” (62 percent vs. 34 percent). Indeed, the Hawkish margin has been steady for 6 years. If I were President Obama, I’d start wearing a Pew t-shirt to all my press conferences, because anyway you slice this data, it’s an inescapable endorsement for his controversial policies (for the record: ). Americans, however, get a bit more constitutionally queasy when it comes to email snooping: a slight majority (47 percent vs. 52 percent) do not believe the government should be able to monitor everyone’s email. While especially young citizens are more snooping-averse, the majority of all age groups support monitoring everyone’s online activity if authorities think it will prevent a terrorist attack. As expected, people who follow the news “very closely” are more concerned about civil liberties than national security (31 percent vs. 21 percent). Interestingly enough, there’s a been a noticeable partisan shift between the Obama and Bush administrations. In 2006, 53 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats supported email monitoring, yet seven years later, it’s the complete reverse (45 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of Democrats support email monitoring). I conclude this post knowing that I might be hammered by my colleagues: The press isn’t always representative of the people. Our job is to be critical. As we criticize President Obama for his civil liberties record, we should be mindful that he may be following his mandate as an elected official to represent the people. Again, I’m not a fan of the NSA secrecy. However, any intellectually honest writer has to admit that public opinion complicates widespread criticism of President Obama’s national security strategy. |
iTunes Radio? Pandora And Slacker Are Not Impressed | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Apple its iRadio, er, iTunes Radio service this morning at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Now that we know the basics of the streaming music service (which is supposed to launch this fall), one of the obvious questions is: What does this mean for existing Internet radio/online music services like Pandora and Spotify? Well, I emailed Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, and Spotify to see what they thought. Spotify declined to comment, and Rdio says it’s still working on something (I’ll update this post when I get it), but the other services all sent me brief statements. There are no huge surprises, and yes, the dreaded “validate” word gets trotted out once. Even so, there’s some entertaining talk about why they’re not feeling too threatened by the news. Here’s Pandora’s statement: Apple’s new feature is an evolution of their iTunes offering to bring it on par with other streaming music services that have added radio into their feature sets. We have spent the last 13 years singularly focused on redefining radio and benefit from unrivalled intellectual property, deep experience in delivering personalized playlists, and ubiquitous product availability across every platform. We make it effortless for our more than 200 million registered users to connect with the music they love anytime, anywhere.
Here’s Slacker CEO Jim Cady: Maybe people do want to rent music, after all. Apple finally jumping into the streaming music space validates the work we’ve been doing at Slacker since 2010, offering anytime, anywhere access to the world’s music library on any device. Apple creates great products, but unless you’re in the Apple ecosystem you’re out of luck. Walled gardens don’t benefit listeners and Slacker believes in the importance of giving users true freedom to access their content, whether they’re on iOS, Android, Windows, a smart TV, Xbox or in-car infotainment system. Slacker also takes a uniquely human approach to content programming, mixing in news from ABC, ESPN sports, and updates from The Weather Channel for uniquely personalized entertainment that goes well beyond music. |
Walmart Labs Buys Data Analytics And Predictive Intelligence Startup Inkiru | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Walmart, via its Silicon Valley innovation lab @WalmartLabs, has made another acquisition today, continuing its shopping spree. The company is announcing that predictive intelligence startup will be joining Walmart Labs to accelerate the retail giant’s analytics capabilities. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Inkiru’s platform is an active learning system that combines predictive intelligence, data abalytics and a decision engine to influence and determine customer interactions. Benefits to using Inkiru include being able to reduce fraud, improve customer segmentation and targeting, and more. announcing the acquisition, Walmart Labs writes that Inkiru’s predictive analytics platform will add data analysis capabilities, including site personalization, search, fraud prevention and marketing. From the post: “Walmart’s data scientists will now be able to work with big data directly and create impact faster than ever before.” Walmart Labs is known for being acquisitive when it comes to snapping up early-stage startups to test new ideas in e-commerce. Some of these startups eventually get folded into the company’s e-commerce site and other online operations. In May, Walmart Labs cloud computing newcomer OneOps and the software development shop Tasty Labs, which was founded by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. In the past, it has acquired startups like Kosmix, OneRiot, Grabble, Small Society and others. It looks like we can expect Walmart.com to improve personalization, which isn’t too surprising. Data analytics and personalization are certainly two areas where retailers are doubling down as a way to both add to the customer experience and draw more conversions online. |
The Best Features Of iOS 7 | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 6 | 10 | Users of Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices got their first look at the company’s newest operating system, iOS 7, earlier today. Not only has Apple given iOS an entirely new look and feel, courtesy of head designer Jonathan Ive, but it has also revealed a revamped suite of core apps like Photos, Camera, Calendar, Weather and others, added new services like iTunes Radio and features like AirDrop, while also making it less lucrative for would-be thieves to steal your iPhone, and much more. During this morning keynote’s, , which launches in beta for iPhone developers today, with a larger public release expected this fall. Here are some of the best new features and updates you can expect when iOS 7 ships later this year. Let’s get this out of the way first: love it or hate it, . The new operating system has been redesigned from head to toe in a flatter — but not a flat — design as some had feared. Instead, there’s a transparency effect in place in many screens, and when you move the device in your hand, iOS now tracks the motion, allowing you to see behind the icons. This is great for background wallpapers, for example, as you’ll get to see more of your favorite homescreen photo previously hidden behind the apps. Overall, the look is cleaner and simpler in many ways — the ugly green felt is gone from Game Center, for example. It is one of the most-hated apps in terms of being representative of the older, “skeuomorphic” design, which attempted to make apps familiar to users by coating them with elements from the real-world (like leather stitching, felt or yellow-lined notepad paper). The company took several digs at the old style in the process of introducing the new, as well. To be sure, there was no “evolution” at play here — this was murder. With an idea borrowed from several third-party iOS apps and (if you can believe it), the new version of the operating system now has a “back button” of sorts. Except it’s not a button really, it’s a gesture. Unlike on Android, where devices offer a dedicated software or hardware button for the function that means “go back to the previous screen,” the iOS back function is there when you need it but doesn’t clutter up the screen when you don’t. Instead of a button, you swipe in from the left side of the screen (bezel to screen) to invoke the feature. It works in places you would expect, such as the Safari web browser, as well as in apps like Mail, and elsewhere. Apple has responded to the growing number of apps meant to serve as an alternative to Apple’s default set (think Calendar, Weather, Mail, Messages, etc.) with an overhaul of all its apps that ship with iOS devices out of the box. , too, if not directly built by third parties, as the new Yahoo-powered Weather app is. Though not identical to (which is arguably one of the highest-rated weather apps of all time), the new native Weather app shares a lot of the design elements, but replaces Flickr photo backgrounds for those of weather animations like rain or snow — also much like Android’s live weather widgets allow for today. The native calendar app, now clean and white ( ), lets you swipe between days, turn to landscape to see a week in advance and zoom out to see your month or year. Mail, meanwhile, offers big, edge-to-edge photos when used for photo-sharing and lets you take action on inbox messages with a swipe, which is a feature that earlier earned third-party app Mailbox . Safari got a big revamp too, with fancy 3D-esque tab-switching behavior, improved bookmarking, one-tap access to favorites, and even Twitter integration which lets you see which links your Twitter friends are reading and sharing. The camera, meanwhile, has been updated with built-in Instagram-like filters, and the ability to swap between the different camera modes like “panoramic” or the new “square” camera view. Though technically another default app update, the revamped Photos app deserves a deeper look because photo-taking is one of the iPhone’s (and all smartphones, really) most-used features. The Camera Roll itself has now been improved, organizing photos into “Moments” based on location and time – again, a feature inspired by the work of a number of third-party apps including Cluster, Moment.me, Flock, Tracks, flayvr, and others. These collections will be auto-labeled with locations you visit. In the demo, that included venues like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of Fine Arts, as well as your home and your kid’s elementary school, for example. But as you zoom out to take a broader view, the locations merge together by date, letting you zoom all the way out to the year view where you can scroll and scrub through the photos, then tap to go into any one. Built-in to this new experience is something called Air Drop, which is a new way to share photos with other iPhone users. (The poke at Android users: “there’s no need to wander around the room bumping your phone.”) Instead, photos and videos can be shared peer-to-peer over Wi-Fi connections with nearby users on newer iOS devices; they can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter, email, and into iCloud photo streams. The photo stream was one of iOS’s lesser understood features among mainstream users, but the update makes it more accessible, allowing multiple users to contribute both photos and video, as well as comments to a shared stream. Everyone had been calling it “iRadio” ahead of today’s announcement, but is worth noting even if the surprise was spoiled. As expected, iTunes Radio is very much a Pandora-like experience built on top of the iTunes music catalog and forged through new deals with the major record labels. Like most streaming music apps on the market, you can play pre-loaded stations by genre or create your own “artist radio” station, skipping and favoriting songs to teach the service your own likes and interests. What Apple’s iTunes Radio does differently is that it also ties you back to the iTunes store, allowing you to “wishlist” your favorites, and purchase those tracks you want to hear on demand. The app is free and ad-supported, but ads are removed for iTunes Match subscribers. There wasn’t as big a focus on Siri as is needed ( ), but the feature has gotten new male and female voices, which can now speak French and German with more languages coming “in time.” Notably, the service can now control more of your device, including playing back your voicemails, turning on or off things like Bluetooth, increasing or decreasing screen brightness and more. It has also now integrated Twitter, Wikipedia and search results from Bing, so it can do things like read you Wikipedia entries or pull up web results. The iPhone’s popularity and high resell value has led to it being one of the most stolen devices, too, but Apple’s new security upgrade is meant to make at least petty crime involving stolen iOS devices not worth criminals’ time and effort. Apple said that hundreds of millions use “Find my iPhone,” but as we know, thieves simply turn off devices and wipe them before re-selling them. With a new “Activation Lock” setting, a thief won’t be able to reactivate an iPhone without hacking your iCloud user name and password, too. Although no security mechanism is bullet-proof, this makes it just hard enough to deter casual criminals or crimes of opportunity — like the phone that gets left behind at a bar, maybe? The notification center drop-down has also gotten a makeover, but considering how often users check this screen it’s surprising it didn’t get more show time this morning, when its new feature set was revealed. That being said, the center now splits your notifications more intelligently between top-level categories like “All,” “Missed,” and “Today,” the latter giving you a day-at-a-glance view into your To-Do’s, plus Stocks, Calendars, Weather and a small preview of Tomorrow at the bottom. A new gesture — a swipe up from the bottom of the screen — will now launch a “Control Center” interface which is like an easier-to-access Settings area. The ability to quickly dive into your Settings is a feature that Android phones have had forever, and iOS users have been clamoring for. Here, you can quickly tap things like “Airplane Mode” or access your Wi-Fi controls, for example, as well as a built-in flashlight (hooray!) and media player controls. Before, the multi-tasking interface accessed by a double tap of the home button brought up a small rack of app icons running in the background. Today, it displays large windows showing the app’s interface in action instead. More importantly, multi-tasking has gotten smarter without damaging battery life, Apple claims. Now apps are able to run in the background, and iOS 7 learns from your patterns of app usage which ones deserve a more regular update. For example, an app you check often like Facebook will be updated more regularly than one you check once or twice per day. In addition, the apps update this information based on other factors, too, like whether you’re in an area with good cell coverage or whether or not you tend to respond to that app’s push notifications. All these things tie in to train iOS 7 to learn which apps are most important to you. There are a number of new features which Apple didn’t have time to go through today, including FaceTime and iMessage blocking, per-app VPN capabilities for the enterprise, and more, but these are “icing on the cake” type of features on top of those given special attention today. In the weeks ahead, we’ll know more about some of these minor upgrades, as developers begin their beta tests of the new operating system and other details emerge. |
LinkedIn Outage Due To Possible DNS Hijacking [Update: Fidelity.com Also Affected] | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | LinkedIn that its site suffered an outage due to “a DNS issue.” Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, and we’re continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience. — LinkedIn Help (@LinkedInHelp) According to , LinkedIn’s service outage began around 6PM PST yesterday and is still continuing, though service has gradually resumed for some users. Shortly after the outage began, that the site’s DNS may have been hijacked–in other words, its domain name was redirected to a different IP address. In this case, LinkedIn’s traffic was re-routed to a network hosted by http://www.confluence-networks.com, which has phone numbers listed for both India and the U.S (UPDATE: the phone numbers for India have been removed, but they ). A spokesman reached at confluence-networks.com’s India number said that they are investigating why LinkedIn and Fidelity.com’s (see update below) nameservers have been redirected to their Web site. This is potentially worrisome for LinkedIn users because, Berg writes, the site does not require SSL (secure sockets layer), which means that if you visited it over the last few hours, “your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext” and a third-party may now have access to your account information. LinkedIn users may remember that when they were dumped onto a Russian hacker forum. That incident occurred around the same time that calendar entries made on LinkedIn’s iOS apps, including sensitive information like meeting locations and passwords, were transmitted back to LinkedIn’s servers without users’ knowledge. A spokesman for LinkedIn said: “LinkedIn is experiencing some intermittent issues due to a DNS issue. Our team is working on it right now and we hope to have the issues resolved as soon as possible.” EDIT: A reader directed us to noting that Fidelity.com also suffered an outage earlier today. According to , several of Fidelity.com’s nameservers appear to be routed to 204.11.56.22, which is also . This may mean that Fidelity and LinkedIn both pay the same company for DNS services, but it’s impossible to tell from the information available. We’ve also emailed Fidelity.com for more information. |
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Rocket Internet’s Lazada Lands $100M As It Seeks To Become The “Amazon Of Southeast Asia” | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | , the e-commerce site founded by in a bid to build the “Amazon of Southeast Asia,” announced today that it has landed another $100 million from returning investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik Investment AB, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Group, as well as new investor, Belgian-based family-owned investment holding company Verlinvest. This is the largest single round that Lazada has raised to date, and brings its total amount of funding raised since its launch in March 2012 to more than $236 million. News of Lazada’s latest and biggest funding round comes just one month after Zalora, Rocket Internet’s Southeast Asia-facing fashion retail site, , including Rocket Internet, Summit Partners, Kinnevik Investment AB, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The two rounds are among the largest ever for e-commerce startups in the region. Lazada operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The site has a lot of room for growth in the region, but also a lot of catching up to do because, according to its own estimates, 99% of Southeast Asian consumers still prefer to do their shopping offline. CEO Maximilian Bittner that Lazada’s latest funding will be used to improve logistics and the company’s supply chain, a key factor in the the site’s growth across the region, especially since key rival Amazon that it would ship some items from the U.S. to Singapore and India for free. Like Amazon, Lazada offers a mix of books, household goods, consumer electronics, toys and sports equipment. The company is also readying the launch of its iOS app, an important move because many Southeast Asian consumers bypass PCs and rely solely on their mobile devices for Internet access (Lazada already has an Android app). Rocket Internet’s continued investment in Lazada, Zalora and its other e-commerce sites in emerging markets represent a departure from its previous strategy operating as a –often to the very businesses cloned (for example, ). Instead, Rocket Internet is now focused on positioning itself as an e-commerce leader in emerging economies with rapidly-growing middle class consumers. Other retail sites Rocket Internet has launched in emerging markets include fashion site Lamoda in Russia (which ), , home furnishings site and African retail site . Despite its continued investment in these properties, it’s difficult to gauge how well the sites are doing because Rocket Internet does not divulge details about their performance. For example, Bittner declined to give specific details to Reuters, but told them Lazada hit the “three digit millions” of euros in gross merchandise value last month. Zalora this spring when its and moved to Singapore, as well as the resignation of at least two managing directors ( and Mato Peric both left the company in 2012) since its launch in March 2012. It remains to be seen whether Rocket Internet’s aggressive and expensive approach to building a global e-commerce footprint will pay off. |
30 Days In, Bitcoin Angel Group BitAngels Doubles Network To 120, Puts First $100K Into Seasteading Venture, Blueseed | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | As has been written ad nauseam, we’ve seen a lot of activity in the wild and wacky world of cryptocurrency of late, thanks primarily to the tech industry’s new obsession with Bitcoin. , digital currency like Bitcoin will either be worth nothing in 10 years, or its value will make Warren Buffet weep. It’s a polarizing topic at its very essence, but one thing is for sure: So far, , and startups are beginning to follow suit. In late May, we introduced you to the Bitcoin market’s latest growth milestone: The launch of , the first multi-city angel network and incubator dedicated exclusively to digital currency startups. Appropriately given its focus, BitAngels is a distributed network of angel investors and entrepreneurs that came together over the course of a few days in the wake of the . At launch, some 60 angels had joined the network and had pooled together just under $7 million in Bitcoin, which the founders planned to invest in $20K chunks, or increments thereof. While BitAngels isn’t a formal fund per se (so the Bitcoins are soft-circled, not in escrow), all involved are accredited, experienced investors, many of whom have made themselves available as advisors. Like Bitcoin itself ( ), the angel network and incubator is growing like crazy. One month removed from launch, BitAngels has doubled its number of investors to 120 and has added nearly $10 million in capital to its reserves, bringing its total to just under $18 million. Behind this steady growth, the network announced that it is has officially completed its first investment. Its first $100K investment went to , the “seasteading venture” that incubates startups in international waters not far off the coast of Silicon Valley. Naturally, its offshore incubator has drawn a handful of Bitcoin companies, as they aren’t subject to any regulation from Uncle Sam during their seafaring incubation. The angel network and incubator for cryptocurrency startups is the brainchild of Engine.co founder David A. Johnston and SocialRadius CEO/Marketwire founder Michael Terpin, along with four additional founding board members Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham, Memory Dealers CEO and “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver, Tradehill CEO Jered Kenna and angel investor Sam Onat Yilmaz. BitAngels also tells us that it is in the final stages of due diligence with three other Bitcoin startups and, although it can’t yet reveal their identities, the founders expect to fund one or more of them in the next 30 days. For more, find . |
EMC Acquires Israeli Storage Startup ScaleIO For $200M-$300M To Compete Better With The Cloud Kings | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Palo Alto-based is one of a new generation of startup storage providers that’s using intelligent software to help big companies streamline and converge their data storage operations at scale across thousands of servers. On a mission to re-imagine the very operations of enterprise data centers, the startup’s tech takes aim at the core business of storage giants like EMC and IBM. In fact, ScaleIO claims that its block storage technology offers 80 to 90 percent savings compared to the bigs. Well, it appears that at least one of the bigs has been listening and wants the startup’s tech for its own. TechCrunch has learned today that EMC, one of the largest data storage providers in the world, has agreed to buy ScaleIO for $200 million to $300 million. The news was , and as the deal is reportedly still in the final stages, according to our sources, neither EMC nor ScaleIO would offer official comment on the news when reached by TechCrunch. While the terms of the reported deal are still unclear, if this range holds true, it’s a big win for both sides — and, , it’s another big exit for Israeli tech startups. In EMC’s case, the storage giant has been taking a turn toward a more AWS-style infrastructure, and the ScaleIO acquisition gives the company access to the startup’s “block storage,” an adaptable, multi-use data-storage technology that makes it easy to scale across thousands of servers. In other words, ScaleIO’s software uses the hard disk on application servers to create high-performance, shared virtual storage array networks (SAN), which offer the easy scalability and elasticity of “block storage.” With the cost of hosting coming down and the quality, speed and elasticity of cloud computing on the way up, small and medium-sized businesses have been moving to cloud hosting infrastructures (like, say AWS) at a breakneck pace. In turn, larger companies are increasingly consolidating their own clouds into massive data centers. These clusters continue to increase, resulting in all sorts of cost- and management-related headaches for the companies that manage these data centers. That’s why EMC has been moving to a more AWS-style system and the reason why ScaleIO’s technology holds appeal for the storage provider. What’s more, with the consumerization of IT, and employees now using a wide range of consumer-friendly applications and tools at the office — not to mention bringing their own personal devices — along with the rise of the Internet of Things, infrastructure providers like EMC are going to have to be able create a bridge between connected devices and consumer and enterprise clouds, among others. This means not only more big data and more servers, but a sort of industrial web. As data centers consolidate and startups turn to cloud hosting services, the bigs will have to adapt, offering the things clients have come to expect, such as database management, capacity planning and scalability, while maintaining uptime. Doing so in a smooth manner is becoming critical to the millions of applications, tools and businesses housed in these data centers. For EMC, the ScaleIO acquisition follows its for $2.5 billion in 2010, and marks its second acquisition of an Israeli storage startup in the last 12 months. The company scooped up Flash storage pioneer ExtremeIO in May of 2012 for $430 million. The move also represents a fairly early exit for ScaleIO, which just raised $12 million from Greylock and Norwest Venture Partners in December as part of its first round of financing. However, the startup was built by a veteran team that has designed and developed storage software apps for companies like IBM, NetApp and Xtremio, which, of course, was just acquired by EMC. The challenge for ScaleIO, , has been in scaling its business — one that’s largely controlled by resellers that have long-standing relationships with the big players. While ScaleIO CEO Boaz Palgi said at the time that he has had “no problem selling direct to customers,” scaling the business and selling direct will no longer be as much of a concern. , EMC announced that 50 percent of its storage revenue “now comes through indirect sales,” and at a $52 billion market cap and doing $22 billion in revenue, ScaleIO now has plenty of scale at which to test its mettle. Overall, the ScaleIO acquisition represents the impact that cloud services are having on EMC. The company has faced its own challenges competing with AWS. Adding a software storage capability gives EMC a better capability to offer a service that can help it compete better with the cloud kings. |
Why MakerBot Is Like Apple | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | When we first was looking to partner with Stratasys, I was a bit non-plussed. MakerBot, as I’ve noted before, has a certain indie cred that makes this move a bit unpalatable. But, at the same time, it’s immensely important. Stratasys makes expensive, industrial-quality 3D printers. They are the “big iron” of the 3D printing world. Items printed on Stratasys hardware are as solid as anything produced by, say, injection molding, and the resolution make them indispensable for engineers and designers. In short, Stratasys is making mainframes and MakerBot is making the Apple I. While I’m loath to claim that Bre Pettis is Woz (let alone Steve Jobs), he is a charismatic leader who makes 3D printing fun, something the folks at Stratasys probably could never do. And, like Apple, MakerBot had to ramp up. By signing with Stratasys, MakerBot will be able to maintain its breakneck speed and growth. The company where it is assembling machines and it has office space in downtown Brooklyn overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. They have made it big with very little investment — they recently closed a $10 million round and were nosing around for more before this news — and they suffered from some severe growing pains along the way, especially in . This purchase gives the company some breathing room, at the very least. Could MakerBot have made it without selling? Possibly, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. Home 3D printing is taking off. It’s not ubiquitous, to be sure, but it’s a method to turn bits into atoms that will become increasingly important in a post manufacturing world. Sadly, VCs are still suspicious of hardware startups (but that’s changing) and MakerBot could have gotten a few infusions of cash to help them glide to cruising altitude. Now they’re already there. Many will say that MakerBot sold out. Many will complain that the company lost open-source roots. Many will claim that there are better printers out there. None of these claims are absolutely false, to be clear, but things are not as cut and dried as we like to think. MakerBot took something simple and made it amazing. They sold when they had to, especially considering issues with quality control and support, and I trust Pettis will bring the open-source ethos to Stratasys headquarters and tell them it’s off limits. 3D printing isn’t new, just as computing wasn’t new when Apple hit the scene. MakerBot, like Apple, made it accessible. |
Well Done, Microsoft | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | The of the Xbox One . Gamers loved the system, but hated the absurd restrictions placed on the games. But Microsoft listened and reversed its stance on some of the more ridiculous policies. Good for them. Good for us. I mean, . The memes, the tweets, the visceral anger was everywhere. Even the talking heads on nationwide morning talk shows were debating the curious DRM restrictions. Gone is the daily Internet check. Gone is the very limited region locking. Games can now be rented and traded and passed among friends just like always. Things are essentially back to normal, for better . This move was clearly to save face and eliminate potential digs Sony and Nintendo could (and would and ) take at the Xbox One. The last thing Microsoft needs is Sony pointing out that the PS4 doesn’t require an always-on Internet connection like the Xbox One. Microsoft didn’t have to reverse its stance. It could have taken the potshots and rolled out, touting the Xbox One’s features alongside the forward-thinking requirements. After all, the company has historically been pretty good about not responding to consumer feedback in a timely manner. Just look at Windows 8. Or Windows Vista. Or Xbox Live. The company has a long history of doing whatever the hell it wants. Even with the crazy restrictions, the average consumer would have probably purchased the Xbox One anyway. Gaming forums and Twitter represent just a small (if noisy) portion of the One’s target market. And with the One launching months from now, in the midst of the holiday season, the talk would have quieted down before it hit Walmart’s shelves. The Xbox One still requires a Kinect to always be connected, and removes some of the more novel features like game sharing from the system. But at least Microsoft is listening and responding quickly. That’s new. Gamers wanted to love the Xbox One but Microsoft made it impossible. Now things have gotten slightly better. [Image via Flickr/ ] |
Microsoft Heeds Gamer Feedback, Dumps Xbox One DRM Restrictions | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Attention gamers: you win. The folks at Redmond infuriated many when it revealed that the Xbox One would come with a long list of potential caveats — there was the automated 24 hour check-in to keep the console in playable condition, and the restrictions on who you could share disc-based games with, not to mention the fact that it would shipped region-locked. Unsurprisingly, the gaming community lashed out in a big way, and Microsoft is finally doing something about it. According to a from Microsoft Interactive Entertainment President Don Mattrick, the company has suddenly decided to drop all that nonsense due to an outpouring of (largely negative) feedback. It’s generally welcome news considering just how off-base Microsoft seemed to be with its apparently overzealous approach to DRM, but the move doesn’t come without its drawbacks. The ability to store your entire game collection (even copies of games you physically bought) in the cloud? Gone. also reports that this late-stage change means that the Xbox One will have to be patched by players as soon as they received them. Still, considering just how viscerally gamers reacted toward Microsoft’s policies (the image macro above is pretty mild compared what others have said), it’s frankly hard to see how the company could’ve played this any other way. Rather than standing on its own numerous merits, the Xbox One was almost immediately bogged down in important questions about how it would handle seemingly mundane actions like passing game discs among friends. What was Microsoft going to do, push the Xbox One onto store shelves knowing that a non-insignificant chunk of the gaming populace hated the thing on principle? Some would argue that’s what Microsoft should’ve done, but it’s likely Microsoft felt its hand was being forced. Of course, it didn’t help that rival Sony . All Sony had to do to endear itself to legions of eager gamers at E3 was to point out just how un-Microsoft it was by sticking to a more traditional (read: hands-off) approach to managing how people play games. Between dealing with gamer rage and the looming threat of a competitor that was eager to capitalize on the Xbox One’s shortcomings, Microsoft finally wound up doing what it should’ve done far earlier in the One development process — listening to the players. |
Microsoft Was Close To A Nokia Acquisition Before Talks Broke Down Recently, WSJ Reports | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Microsoft and Nokia have gotten pretty cosy over the past few years, and at the time of the announcement of the Finnish company’s decision to use Windows Phone OS to power its smartphones, many speculated it was the first overture for a coming acquisition. And that is apparently where things were headed, according to the , but the proposed deal has since fallen apart. The WSJ says talks were taking place as soon as this month, but that they’ve collapsed to the point where they aren’t likely to get revived again, meaning a Microkia or Nokrosoft isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Talks up until that point had been very advanced, the report says, but eventually broke down because of financial difficulties faced by both MS and Nokia. Microsoft ended the courtship, per the report. Nokia has been struggling, and the Windows Phone plan hasn’t done much to shore up its continued losses. Nokia , and posted an operating loss, though a much lower one than it reported during the year ago period. Its device sales were down both sequentially and year over year, however. Essentially, Microsoft and Nokia were able to have an extended dating period, and Microsoft had plenty of time to see that opting for marriage wasn’t likely to turn around the fortunes of either party. In fact, neither the fact that a merger was being considered, nor the fact that it fell through, should come as any big surprise to anyone who has been watching the progress of Nokia over the past few years, and of Windows Phone as a mobile platform. What’s left now is to see where Microsoft goes next with smartphones, and whether it opts to try to jump start things with its own project, Surface-style, or seeks out someone else like Nokia who might be able to do a better job of lighting a fire under its mobile OS. |
Twitter Acquires Local Discovery Startup Spindle, Will End Spindle Service | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Twitter today acquired Spindle, an app that uses mobile devices and social networks to make a smarter localized search engine. The Spindle team will move to San Francisco and shutter the Spindle app. Using social networks, the time of day, and your location, Spindle would show you places you may want to visit, like restaurants or stores or other points of interest. “We’ve spent the past two-and-a-half years building a product that helps you answer the question: “What’s happening nearby right now?” Every time we’ve experimented and looked beyond local discovery, we’ve been amazed by the breadth and quality of content shared on Twitter,” the company . “By joining forces with Twitter, we can do so much more to help you find interesting, timely and useful information about what’s happening around you.” Spindle comes from ex-Microsoft engineers and before being acquired by Twitter. The company introduced version 2.0 in March, which based on user preferences. The Spindle team also said they will be relocating from Boston to San Francisco to join the Twitter team, and will be “sunsetting the Spindle service today to focus on these new and exciting opportunities.” It’s not immediately clear what the Spindle team will be working on, but we obviously expect them to keep answering the question, “What’s happening nearby right now?” Combined with Twitter’s resources and social graph, the team could produce a product to rival Foursquare or Facebook’s local search. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. I reached out to Twitter for comment, who mostly pointed to Spindle’s blog post but also offered this tweet: Welcome! “ : Exciting news: Spindle has been acquired by and joins the flock! ” — Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) |
Stratasys Acquiring MakerBot In $403M Deal, Combined Company Will Likely Dominate 3D Printing Industry | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Today Stratasys , as , in a stock deal worth $403 million based on the current share value of Stratasys. The combination of the companies brings together a leader in 3D industrial printing and manufacturing, with the emerging leader in desktop 3D printing, which the companies said in a press release should help drive “faster adoption of 3D printing” across all categories. MakerBot will continue to operate as a separate company from Stratasys as part of the deal, which is r . It’ll be a subsidiary of Stratasys, but will serve the consumer and desktop market segment while Stratasys continues to focus on its existing industry placement. MakerBot was founded in 2009, and has since sold over 22,000 3D printers, with its most recent model making up 11,000 of those sales coming from the Replicator 2, which it . That means traction is on the upswing in a big way, something which no doubt helped pave the way for the deal. As for , its name might be less familiar for regular TechCrunch readers, though it may ring a bell from when we accurately reported that . But in terms of the history of 3D printing it’s operating in much more established space. It facilitates the printing of prototypes, concepts, components, parts and more on an industrial scale and for commercial applications. The publicly traded company merged with Object Ltd in 2012 to form one large entity, and is headquartered in both Minneapolis and Rehovot, Israel. Stratasys has demonstrated it’s going to be aggressive about owning the 3D printing space, and the MakerBot buy is the consumer-focused piece in that puzzle. For MakerBot, it gives the startup access to Stratasys’ wealth of industry experience, as well as probably better access to new tech coming down the pipeline, a greater pool of engineering talent and more resources to put behind marketing and distribution. MakerBot has been pretty consistent in terms of updating its hardware and software since the startup got off the ground four years ago, and to improve the quality of its printed products. The company has some competition from other, newer startups like Form Labs, whose , but MakerBot already had a head start on the younger company, and Stratasys should be able to juice its growth even further. |
Google’s Dart SDK and Editor Hit Beta With Improved Performance, Smarter Code Completion And More | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Google today the first of its Dart SDK and Editor. With this update, Google says, the SDK can now produce significantly smaller and faster JavaScript code and make it easier for Dart developers to deploy their code. The now features an analysis engine that’s 20 percent faster at parsing and analyzing code as you type it, making it a bit less likely that your code won’t run because of a typo. , which developers can compile to JavaScript or run in a that features a built-in Dart VM, hasn’t quite caught on with developers yet, but that doesn’t mean that Google isn’t putting quite a few resources behind the project. The Dart Editor now also features smarter code completion that is, for example, camel case aware, deletes unused optional parameters automatically after template editing is done and includes a number of . The Dart VM, Google says, is now up to 40 percent faster at executing and even the code that’s compiled to JavaScript is up to 20 percent faster. The Dart team also says that it has greatly improved WebGL performance in , Google’s special build of Chrome with the built-in Dart VM. It also looks like Google is working to bring its web components-based to Dart, though the team currently lists this as a “work in progress.” You can find the full release notes . Other browser manufacturers haven’t shown much interest in working with Google to integrate Dart into their own browsers (Mozilla, for example, is betting on Rust, JavaScript and asm.js for performance improvements). Even Google hasn’t integrated Dart into Chrome yet, but as the language matures, it’s probably just a matter of time before the first Chrome builds with the Dart VM arrive. |
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Zynga Acquires Spooky Cool Labs To Boost Its Social Casino Push | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | , Zynga is still picking up talent in strategic areas like social casino gaming. The company bought a roughly 40-person team called Spooky Cool Labs full of real-money gaming talent. Based in Chicago, the team is made up of social and real money gaming veterans from companies such as Aristocrat, and slot machine makers like IGT (International Game Technology) and . The company’s founder, Joe Kaminkow, was ranked as one of the 10 most influential people in the history of slots by Strictly Slots Magazine. But from Spooky Cool’s website, the company looks like it had been working on non-casino titles like a Wizard of Oz city-building social game. Zynga says that access to this Wizard of Oz brand is part of the deal. The team will stay in Chicago and work with Zynga’s San Francisco-based social casino gaming team. In another interesting twist to this deal, Kaminkow will apparently also still lead game design at Aristocrat Leisure Limited, an Australian company that’s one of the biggest slots makers in the world. He told VentureBeat back in March Spooky Cool also , but they didn’t disclose the amount of funding. As Zynga grapples with how to approach mobile platforms, it has relied on one of its old standbys: Zynga Poker. At the same time, the company has made steps toward exploring how to incorporate real money into its betting games. The company made its first But it has yet to bring these real-money efforts to the Facebook platform or mobile in that market. In December, the company also applied for a “preliminary finding of suitability” from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, starting a process that could take more than a year. |
Cortica Raises $6.4M To Improve Visual Search And In-Image Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | , a startup developing technology for analyzing in-image content, is announcing that it has raised $6.4 million in Series B funding. The round was led by previous investors Horizons Ventures (the firm which manages investments for Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing), with participation from Russian firm Mail.ru Group and other angel investors. Cortica has now raised a total of $18 million. Founded by neuroscientists Yehoshua (Josh) Zeevi and Karina Odinaev, as well as engineer Igal Raichelgauz (the company’s CEO), Cortica says its Image2Text technology processes images based on patterns and identifies the images’ core concepts. It also says that it delivers zero false positives — in other words, it might not identify every concept associated with an image, but it will never incorrectly identify one of them. When last year, it was focused on using the technology for in-image advertising — if you have an accurate sense of the content of an image, you can place ads that are a good match. Advertising is still one of the use cases, Raichelgauz said, as is e-commerce, but the biggest use among the company’s initial commercial partners is visual search. The technology is now deployed across hundreds of millions of images, he added. “The goal now is to distribute Cortica technology across multiple partners, whether those are leading publishers, leading manufacturers of devices, and so on,” Raichelgauz said. |
Twitter Adds Easier Column Navigation To Tweetdeck For Power Users | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Twitter today that makes it easier to arrange and consume various feeds. Column headers now have “grab handles” in the top-left corner so they can quickly and easily be rearranged. If you are looking at fewer than four feeds, the selected column will now snap its left edge to the sidebar; if four or more columns are visible, the selected column will still be in the center of the screen, like before. Finally, when you click a column icon twice, it will scroll to the top and reveal any Tweets you may have missed, a similar function to Twitter for Mac. Tweetdeck, which Twitter acquired for $40 million in 2011, is a web, mobile, and desktop client for sorting and reading many customized Twitter feeds in a short amount of time. Twitter seems to be working hard to keep their core “power users” loyal to digesting most of their media through the service; the company and added some “often requested features.” Today’s updates are available now for web and Chrome, and the company says updates for Mac and Windows will “follow soon.” |
Wired Editor Michael Copeland Joins Andreessen Horowitz To Lead New ‘Content Strategy’ | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Wired Senior Editor Michael Copeland is venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. We’ve confirmed with the VC firm that Copeland will be leading Andreessen’s new ‘content strategy.’ Prior to joining Wired, Copeland was a Senior Writer at Fortune and was previously also a Senior Writer at Business 2.0 covering the VC world. Additionally, he held editorial positions at Red Herring, the Venture Capital Journal, the Washington Post and was a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, Orange County Register, and Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s unclear what A16Z’s content strategy is yet, and we’re told that details are still being ironed out. Additionally, Copeland will be part of the marketing team. Clearly this is part of A16Z’s strategy of being full-service VC agency that provides more than just a check. The firm has staffed up in recruiting, marketing, financial services, business development and more. Last year, A16Z as a partner on the Market Development team, as well as Wildfire-exec to help lead the deal and research team on enterprise deals. The firm is staffing up with the best talent from every area of the startup and technology world. There are a lot of directions A16Z could go with a content strategy, including creating more its own content (all of the investment partners currently blog), and also helping create content for portfolio startups. Also worth noting, fellow VC firm Sequoia recently brought on WSJ alum Ben Worthen to lead its content efforts. |
Backed By First Round’s Dorm Room Fund, Pagevamp Turns Facebook Pages Into Websites | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | It feels like startups are taking more and more steps to make the website creation process as easy as possible. There are companies like , which . There’s Barley, which . And now there’s , which allows you to turn a Facebook Page into a website. The company was founded by Atulya Pandey, Fred Wang and Vincent Sanchez-Gomez, three University of Pennsylvania students (now graduates) who ran a small WordPress design agency while they were in college. What they discovered, Sanchez-Gomez said, is that the process is still too complicated for many people. Facebook Pages, on the other hand, are easy to create, but they’re not particularly customizable. “I think there are people, like my mom or my grandma, where if you said, ‘Hey, just make a WordPress site,’ they wouldn’t know what to do,” he said. “For them to make a Facebook Page is much more in the realm of possibility. And with Pagevamp, if they can do that, then they can make a website.” I tried it out myself this morning, where I pointed Pagevamp at the and within a few seconds I had a not-terrible-looking website. (You can see a screenshot of the website, along with Pagevamp’s admin controls, below.) I could do some basic editing like choosing from different designs, but really, typing in the Facebook URL was all the effort required. Pagevamp launched its public beta at the end of March, and Sanchez-Gomez said users from more than 80 countries have created more than 7,000 sites. You can see sample Pagevamp-created websites for , , and a . Sanchez-Gomez said it can be used by both individuals and businesses, though it needs to start from a Facebook Page, not a personal account. Today the company is announcing that it has backing from , which means that it has access to the fund’s mentorship and network, as well as $20,000 in funding. Like I said, the initial websites created by Pagevamp are pretty simple, but the company plans to expand its functionality through add-ons. Right now, there are two — an add-on for managing website menus and another for adding custom pages. There are more in the pipeline, Sanchez-Gomez said, and ultimately he wants to turn Pagevamp into a platform for add-ons from third-party developers. (In fact, there’s .) Creating a Pagevamp site is free, but you have to pay a subscription fee if you want to publish on a non-Pagevamp domain and if you want access to the add-ons. |
Lytro Enables Its Camera’s Hidden WiFi Chip, Launches A Companion iOS App (With Animated GIFs!) | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | It sure doesn’t seem like many people have bought Lytro’s crazy light-field camera (the one that lets you focus your photos you take them) — but if you’re one of those who did: go plug that thing in. Lytro has just released a firmware update that enables the camera’s dormant Wi-Fi chip, along with an iOS app that lets you wirelessly access and share your photos. Oh, and it makes super trippy animated GIFs!
(I’ll go ahead and forgive Eric for pronouncing “GIF” with a hard G there at the end. We all know it’s pronounced like “jiff,” .) Even if you own a Lytro, there’s a pretty good chance you didn’t know there was a Wi-Fi chip inside. Surprise! The company hadn’t really mentioned it much until now, as it previously served no purpose. When the FCC’s teardown of the Lytro revealed the chip shortly before the device’s release a year-and-a-half ago, the company responded to inquiries about it with “Connectivity is important to us, and we’re working on it.” The Lytro Mobile app’s main purpose is to serve as an on-the-go interface for uploading, tweaking, and sharing photos from a Lytro camera without having to hook it up to a computer. All of your photos are pulled into the application over the air, where they can be geotagged, refocused and perspective-shifted on a screen that’s a good bit more finger-friendly than the relatively tiny one found on the Lytro itself. New photos will show up in the app as you shoot them, with a transfer time of around 5 or 6 seconds. You can also peruse photos shared among the Lytro community. The company also confirmed to us that an Android app is on the way, though they declined to pin down a date for it. A Wi-Fi-enabled syncing app for the Mac or PC, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be on their roadmap. Plus, as mentioned, you can make totally crazy looking GIFs. Check out these total dreamboat (*cough*) examples of my big dumb head recording the above video. On the left is the parallax shifting effect; on the right is the foreground/background refocusing effect ( ): Once you’re on the new firmware, connecting your Lytro to your iPhone is pretty dang simple: you swipe up on the Lytro’s screen to bring up the taskbar, and hit the little Wi-Fi icon to turn your Lytro into a hotspot. You connect your iPhone to the Lytro’s Wi-Fi signal, launch the app, and you’re set. You can find the free .
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Microsoft Launches Security Bounty Program, Will Pay Up To $100K For Exploits | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Microsoft has long resisted this move, but starting June 26 — the date the Windows 8.1 preview will ship — it will finally its own . The company will offer bounties for “truly novel exploitation techniques” that expose security issues in Windows 8.1 Preview. It will also pay up to $11,000 for Internet Explorer 11 vulnerabilities and up to $50,000 for “defensive ideas that accompany a qualifying Mitigation Bypass submission.” Microsoft says it made this shift to bounty programs “in order to learn about these issues earlier and to increase the win-win between Microsoft’s customers and the security researcher community.” It’s worth noting that the IE 11 Preview program will only be open for 30 days after the launch of Windows 8.1 Preview. This makes sense, though. The IE 11 bounty, Microsoft says, is mostly meant to “fill a gap in the vulnerability marketplace to the benefit of researchers, Microsoft engineers and our customers.” Most existing bounty programs and white market vulnerability brokers like HP’s Tipping Point and iDEFENSE’s also don’t offer bounties for beta software. The company acknowledges that it isn’t exactly the first vendor to offer this kind of program, though Katie Moussouris, the senior security strategist lead, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, argues that the company has long sponsored hacker conferences and awarded cash and prizes through other programs in the past. She also that Microsoft will likely announce a number of other ways to work with users and industry partners to discover security issues. Here is a full description of the three programs: |
The Case For And Against Candy Crush-Maker King’s Possible IPO | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | Zynga cast a long shadow when its stock tanked by about 75 percent in the first year after going public. But that apparently isn’t scaring off other contenders in the gaming industry from an IPO. Over the past two weeks, I had heard from several sources in the industry that King — the maker of mega-hit Candy Crush Saga — had changed its internal thinking around an IPO. The blew through all of the company’s 2013 financial targets in a single month, the company’s CEO Riccardo Zacconi told me back in March at the Game Developers Conference back in San Francisco. Candy Crush that they’ve even stopped doing advertising. Then this week that the company had hired J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG, and Bank of America Corp. to handle an IPO. It definitely isn’t the first time they’ve thought seriously about this. In early 2012, the company had restructured for a possible IPO, hunted for a Silicon Valley-based board member, and put its financial reporting more in line with generally accepted accounting principles. But they pulled back. Publicly, the company hasn’t changed its tune about keeping its options open. King’s chief marketing officer Alex Dale told me a few days ago before the Journal story ran: “There are no current plans for that. What we did do is organize the company in such a way that were we to decide to do that, we were set up to do it. We would keep the option open, if you like.” The company says it has nothing extra to add today. Still, honestly I’m a bit surprised. As I wrote last week, I’m skeptical that . And I’m even more skeptical that public investors, ruled by “animal spirits,” are equipped to value gaming companies. They’ll bid up a stock when there’s a hit: just look at Gung-Ho’s to a $14.6 billion market cap because of Puzzle & Dragons. Then they’ll oversell on misses. (See Zynga.) Companies that have hits on generally don’t need the cash. The success of comparable companies like Finland’s Supercell on iOS would suggest that King is probably pulling in around $2 to 3 million per day from its Match-3 game. That would exclude revenue from other platforms like Facebook and King’s destination site. The founders also don’t need a financial exit. The from Index Ventures and Apax Partners was also at least partially secondary, meaning they took cash off the table. Zacconi told me back in March that that decision gave him the flexibility and comfort to run the company for the long-run, even Yahoo! made decisions that cut their traffic by almost half. From that, , grabbing second-place on the Facebook platform behind Zynga in terms of active users and a regular spot at the top of the grossing lists on iOS and Android. Zacconi said in a March interview, “When we started the company, we put in our own money because it was difficult to find capital. I gave up everything. I gave up my flat. I lived in a place with a friend of mine, and put everything in storage.” He then added, jokingly, “I wouldn’t buy a Ferrari, because it would get stolen and it would be a pain in the ass.” So a King IPO would probably be to have capital for acquisitions, to reward employees who joined later, provide a return to investors and to have a feather in the cap as a public company after a decade-long journey. From an investor perspective, there are a couple ways in which King is very different from Zynga:
An advisor to another very promising gaming IPO candidate told me yesterday that you have to have a history of revenue peaks and troughs in a hits-driven business like gaming to be a public company. You need to have a compelling story so that investors continue to believe in you through the inevitable misses as well as the hits. Zynga went to market on its first peak, but King has a decade-long track record of both hits and tough times. Plus, it’s been profitable since 2005. King also isn’t a company that happened to show up at an opportune time on an emerging platform and blitzkrieg their way to success. In fact, they showed up late to the party pretty much every time. They didn’t make a serious move onto Facebook until 2011, and they didn’t make a serious push onto iOS until late last year. They came to platforms that seemed saturated and still managed to do well in a calculated way by bringing IP that was already proven on their destination site. On the Facebook platform, Zynga would identify an existing, successful game genre, fast-follow and iterate on it, and then use the might of its distribution power to crowd out competitors. (Less euphemistically, some rivals called this copying.) But for several years, it worked. However, on iOS and Android where Zynga doesn’t have the same market share it did on Facebook, it means that the company is all over the place. They’ve had games for the “running” category, for the “zombie” category and for the “card battle” category, and so on. King, on the other hand, has pretty much only ever done arcade games. They don’t have any desire to do other genres. Even King probably earns most of its revenue from mobile platforms, the other pieces of the business — especially the destination site at King.com — are very strategically important. Before King transitioned to Facebook , the company amassed a small, but dedicated audience of “hardcore casual” gamers, or people who play arcade games for five to six hours a day, on a destination site at King.com. Even though this site has much less traffic, it’s like the perfect focus group. The company has launched hundreds of titles here over the years, and only the ones the perform and retain the best with this dedicated audience get a shot at moving to Facebook or iOS. So King has a place outside of iOS and Android where they can literally throw spaghetti on a wall and see what sticks. Unlike other CEOs in the industry, who are sometimes more eccentric or aggressive, Zacconi comes off like a reserved consultant or a banker-type. He easily admits he’s not the creative genius inside the business, but he has hired well around him. King has talent that has come over from Playfish or Digital Chocolate through the years. “We are humble, resilient and we’ve been developing casual games for 10 years,” he told me back in March when I asked him about King’s company culture. They are second to Zynga on Facebook in active users and currently maintain the two highest grossing titles on iOS and Android in the U.S. They are at 70 million players per day, of this year when it pulled in $263.6 million in revenue. So they are literally at the top of the charts on three different platforms, although I also hear this has to do with aggressive spending to boost top-line revenue. Only a handful of purely digital gaming companies currently match this reach right now. While Zynga does have some strong historical titles on mobile like Zynga Poker, its business is still overwhelmingly on Facebook and the company’s management is trying to course-correct. All of the same structural issues with the gaming industry still exist. It feels like King should wait longer until they have a multi-year record on Android and iOS and a full portfolio of games there before aiming for an IPO. As we’ve seen with Zynga, even reach with hundreds of millions of users can erode quickly if a company doesn’t have the hits to keep it up. As Benchmark Capital general partner Mitch Lasky , “The biggest self-deception in game investing today is ascribing strategic value to hit games based on potential cross-marketing leverage.” Given Candy Crush’s success, King will have a leg up as it cross-promotes its next big title . But King is testing the waters with public markets on only about , which seems a bit early. Perhaps the company thinks after 10 years, they’ve waited long enough and this window is as good as any other they’ll get. |
EFF Sues FBI, Wants Access To Records Of The FBI’s Facial Recognition Program | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Companies like Facebook have been over the use of facial recognition technology. Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is putting a mirror up to the government to demand the same scrutiny back. The the over access to its facial recongition records, based on three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that the EFF originally made a year ago. We’re embedding the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, below. To be clear, the EFF is not asking for actual facial recognition records — although that may be to come. For now, the complaint is restricted to demanding records relating to the FBI’s plans for its facial recognition program, which is still being put in place and expected to launch in 2014. The EFF is asking records of agreements and discussions between the FBI and state agencies; records related to the FBI’s assessment of the reliability of face-recognition technology; and records of the FBI’s plans to merge civilian and criminal records in a single repository. The EFF says it also wants to know how many records containing facial-recognition data the FBI may already have. For those who believe that programs like this should be made more public, the EFF’s requests are essential building blocks for those subsequent demands of the records themselves. As background to the FBI’s bigger plan: The FBI has been putting together a facial recognition plan for at least a couple of years, as part of a larger biometrics database that it plans to share with other agencies across the local, state, federal and international levels. The EFF has been trying to get it to disclose information about how it will work since 2011. Other parts of the Next Generation Identification database, as it is called, include iris scans, palm prints, face-recognition-ready photos, and voice data. “NGI will result in a massive expansion of government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes,” writes EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “Biometrics programs present critical threats to civil liberties and privacy. Face-recognition technology is among the most alarming new developments, because Americans cannot easily take precautions against the covert, remote, and mass capture of their images.” The EFF believes that the FBI is working under an out-of-date set of privacy guidelines, last written in 2008 before biometrics capabilities were as advanced as they are today. The EFF is no stranger to suing the FBI over information access — and no stranger to getting its way, either. It’s also taken the FBI to court over ; for private citizens’ data (it , with some help from the ACLU); and a over disclosures at the Department of Justice. The EFF has also recently revealed data about the . [scribd id=150299797 key=key-fcgdzoh3i0qll2m8pt9 mode=scroll] |
Aiming At Small Business And Headed By Ex-Yahoo Head, NumberFour De-Cloaks In Berlin With A $38M Series A, Europe’s Biggest In Two Years | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | , founded in 2009 by former senior Yahoo executive in Berlin to re-engineer small business processes, has secured an enormous $38 million in Series A financing led by , specifically . Volpi Participating in the round is , /Deutsche Telekom, Andreas von Bechtolsheim, former Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Klaus Hommels and Lars Hinrichs among others. Unusually, the company has remained almost completely quiet . It will obviously compete against a number of players, not least Salesforce among them. Also participating in the round was German entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Microsystems and , a former partner of Accel Partners, and executive at Excite@Home and Yahoo!. Perhaps oddly, its business platform and apps are not yet publicly available. The company said “an announcement will follow at an appropriate time.” The startup is producing apps on smartphones, tablets and PCs. It has offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Germany and Palo Alto, California. The round is Europe’s biggest in the last two years since Rovio raised $42m in 2011. Out of the largest Series A rounds in the last few years, Spotify raised $21.6m in 2008 and iZettle raised $11.2m in 2011 (also led by Index Ventures). NumberFour’s long-in-the-tooth history is in marked contrast to many other businesses that raise similar rounds, such as the ill-fated Color which, , rushed out a widely-derided product.
Colour’s Peter Pham that he was pushed to get a product out along with the funding announcement and that it simply wasn’t ready. A salutary tale. NumberFour says it has a platform that provides productivity, communication, sales, production, procurement, delivery, reservation and financial tools for offline and online businesses. Boerries’ vision is that in the future, most small businesses should have the efficiencies and scale effects that large enterprises enjoy. Why NumberFour? It’s his fourth company, as I explain below. In statements, Boerries said: “I deeply care about enabling small businesses to become more competitive and successful. Having started four businesses myself, I know how hard and rewarding it can be at the same time. Small is beautiful!” Mike Volpi, Partner, Index Ventures said: “From a technology perspective, small businesses are the most underserved market in the world. NumberFour is the first comprehensive business platform that offers amazing technology, wrapped in apps with a stunningly simple user interface.” Klaus Hommels an investor in NumberFour said: “NumberFour combines huge market potential, scale effects and passion – paired with the powerful and meticulous leadership of one of the best and most experienced entrepreneurs. It is a truly special opportunity.” Klaus Hommels is one of Europe’s leading business angels and has invested in Skype, Facebook, Xing and Spotify, among others. Lars Hinrichs, Founder of XING and investor stated, “NumberFour has the potential to become the leader for small business software, a multi-billion opportunity. Marco is a successful serial entrepreneur and has proven multiple times that he can make big ideas work.” Hinrichs founded LinkedIn competitor Xing and is now best known for founding the startup accelerator HackFwd. Inspired by a high school visit to Silicon Valley as an exchange student Borries founded Star Division out of his family garage Lüneburg . There here developed the software StarWriter which became StarOffice and later developed into OpenOffice, as an alternative to the office suites from Microsoft. In 1999 he sold eventually StarDivision to Sun Microsystems, where he stayed briefly. His Hamburg-based Star Financial created StarMoney and developed into a major supplier of home banking software. In early 2001, he sold his shares and founded founded Borries VerdiSoft. This developed software for the Yahoo! Go mobile product and was picked up by Yahoo in 2005, where Borries became executive vice president in the Connected Life division, until he left in to 2009. It was after this that he returned first to Hamburg and then moved to Berlin to start NumberFour (fourth after StarOffice, StarMoney and VerdiSoft). The full . |
With New Initiative ‘Galactic,’ PayPal Wants To Own Payments And Commerce In Space | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | In a slightly bizarre announcement today, PayPal is debuting PayPal Galactic, an initiative to own universal payments and commerce in space. Yes, outer space. PayPal Galactic brings together leaders in the scientific community, including the SETI Institute and Space Tourism Society, to prepare and support the future of space commerce, and develop the galaxy’s first money transfer platform. PayPal is looking to address and solve the problems of what the standard currency looks like in a cash-free interplanetary society, and how banking, risk and fraud management systems will adapt to this. The payments giant is also exploring regulatory issues (ie what regulations, at this point). The company says that there is already the need for a galactic payment system. Astronauts inhabiting space stations still need to pay for life’s necessities—from their bills back on Earth to their entertainment, like music and e-books, while in space. In an interview with TechCrunch, PayPal president David Marcus explained that the creation of the space economy through flights, hotels and more will require a currency. “This initiative is designed to raise awareness and bring everyone around the table, ” he says. “We’re excited about this because there are no boundaries from old school payments.” This move is a little outlandish for PayPal, but this isn’t the first time the talk of a space currency has come up. Back in 2007, scientists came up with the to be the de facto physical currency. It’s clear that Marcus sees potential for space travel to be commercialized and wants to make sure that PayPal is the potential go-to currency if this happens. Separate from the space venture, there’s also the question of if and how PayPal is going to integrate Bitcoin. We know Marcus is definitely on the P2P currency, but we haven’t seen any movement from PayPal yet. Photo Credit/Flick/ |
21-Year-Old Thiel Fellow Raises Three-Point-Eight Million Dollars For Figma | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Children are our future, and VCs are giving them the cash to make it happen. Dylan Field, one of Peter Thiel’s fellows, just raised for his startup Figma according to an SEC filing. Field declined to talk with me about Figma, but the Thiel Fellowship site says “Dylan is building a browser based photo editing tool.” The raise comes as Snapchat, whose founders average out to age 23, just picked up a and cashed out $20 million in stock themselves. It’s looking like Silicon Valley has a new love affair with kids. Wait, no, that sounds terrible. But after Josh Miller’s essay on ” went viral, there seems to be more confidence than ever in the youth’s ability to predict changes in the technology landscape. may be young, but he’s already got a . The California native has worked at Flipboard, O’Reilly Media, Indinero, Microsoft Research, and LinkedIn. He’s currently stopped out of Brown where he was studying computer science and math. The opportunity Dylan sees is in making creativity tools more accessible. Media-capturing devices like camera phones have proliferated, giving way to apps like Instagram for quickly turning mediocre shots into art. But more advance photo editing tools are typically reserved for professionals or at least serious hobbyists, and many operate as clunky desktop software. Beware, Figma could be doing something else as Dylan declined an interview, saying he’s not publicly discussing the company yet. But here’s what he said he was working on when he appeared on the last August: “So the idea is to basically let people express themselves creatively online. So I think everyone has this inner artist, and we suppress that artist because our taste is so high but our skill level is a little lower. But I think the delta between that can be changed, fixed with technology. What we’re doing immediately is an in-browser photo editor.” If that’s still the plan for Figma, Field would be competing with independent apps like and juggernauts like . Whatever he does, he’ll have $3.8 million in equity financing to show the adults what’s up. |
Xiaomi Launches Its Own Text Message Service | Victoria Ho | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Users on devices will now be able to send international text messages faster and more reliably, it said. The Chinese smartphone maker just announced its enterprise international SMS platform at the Mobile Asia Expo event in Shanghai. The new service looks like it’ll rival Apple’s iMessage service in function, but is based entirely on SMS technology. That means that while iMessage requires a data or Wi-Fi connection, Xiaomi messages will go through SAP’s global gateway of over 990 operators globally, an SAP representative said. It will also likely be more reliable, because fewer packets are required to transmit SMS compared with data-based messages such as those exchanged over WhatsApp or iMessage. That means it’s more likely to send successfully if you have patchy connectivity, and will work if you’re traveling with data roaming switched off. SAP also said that the service won’t be an extra subscription for users since it’s based on SMS. Messages sent will just come out of your regular SMS quota or be charges as ordinary text messages. Xiaomi’s service is built on SAP’s SMS 365 platform (which SAP acquired by purchasing enterprise messaging company for $5.8 billion). Prior to its acquisition, Sybase was one of the world’s largest SMS and MMS exchanges in the world. In 2010, it delivered messages at a rate of 32,000 per second all year round. Xiaomi also has a consumer messaging app called is a closer rival to and . It has a relatively small base compared with the latter two, however. Mi Talk reportedly has about 23 million registered users, while WeChat has 300 million—and 50 million of those active monthly. WhatsApp has active monthly users. The launch of the messaging service follows Xiaomi’s recent launch outside of its home country to neighboring . The smartphone maker is known for its powerful but relatively low-priced smartphones. The company’s newly launched flagship, the Mi-2S, is priced at just $373 (RMB 2299). Xiaomi reportedly makes on its handsets, which exceeds the margins of other domestic players like Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo. |
Drew Houston And Bryan Schreier On Dropbox’s Early Days and Stealth Code Name | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | As we mentioned 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 this video, Houston talks about his journey from being an MIT hacker to the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company, and how he has changed as an entrepreneur and individual. Schreier, who serves on the board of Dropbox, recalls the first time he met Houston in Sequoia’s offices when the then-fledgling startup took its first institutional investment from the firm. Houston and Schreier also revealed Dropbox’s code name (hint: it’s the name of a famous Pearl Jam song) when the company was still in stealth back in 2007. Tune in above for more! |
John Zimmer Says Lyft Will Work With Sidecar, Uber To Fight Regulators In Wake Of LA Cease & Desist | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Lyft co-founder John Zimmer says the company is trying to work with other ride sharing companies to fight regulators after Los Angeles served Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar yesterday. “Do you envision partnering with competitors like Sidecar or Uber to promote and defend ride sharing as a legal alternative to the taxi monopoly? As a driver for Sidecar, I’m continually disheartened by the lack of cooperation which could be such a huge boon for both the ride sharing organizations and consumers,” a commenter asked Zimmer in his “We’d love to work together with Sidecar and Uber on this front and have initiated multiple meetings to do just that,” Zimmer wrote. “Since Sidecar’s model is most similar to ours, we have found common ground and are beginning to do more work together here. In full agreement that on this issue its in all our best interest to work together!” All three companies said yesterday that they will continue to operate in Los Angeles while they sort things out with regulators. “We’ve seen this before and historically it has made our community stronger as they come together to demonstrate to local officials why platforms like Lyft matter,” Zimmer wrote in a response to a question about the cease and desist letters. “We will continue to operate as we work with local officials to understand their concerns. We currently have a state-wide operating agreement with the California Public Utilities Commission who has reviewed our insurance and background check process.” In classic Reddit fashion, Zimmer also answered more lighthearted questions, choosing waffles over pancakes and explaining a bit about Lyft’s pink mustaches. “The main difference to me with Lyft is the sense of community and social experience. The pink mustache, fist bump and strict screening have fostered a strong sense of community with many stories of new friends, discovered jobs and even some Lyft hugs after a tough break up,” he said.
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Zuck’s Adorable Sheepdog Beast Is Now A Facebook Messages Sticker Pack | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Now you and Facebook’s CEO can unwind in the same way: playing with . The billionaire’s Puli dog just got his own Facebook Stickers pack, which lets you forgo typing and instead send friends animated images of Beast playing, begging, or wearing the cone of shame. Before you ask “why does this matter?”, consider that this is part of Facebook’s quest to help you communicate complex emotions efficiently. If Facebook has the most expressive, efficient messaging system, people will use it rather than SMS, iMessage, Google Hangouts, Path, Line, WhatsApp, Snapchat, or any other app. because people spend a ton of time messaging, which creates advertising and ecommerce opportunities. Messaging engagement also provides critical data on who you’re closest to, which Facebook can use to better target ads and show your more relevant content in the feed. That’s why stickers are becoming all the rage in messaging. They’ve been part of Asian apps like Line for years, but this year Path got into the action, and you can access from a little smiley emoticon button in Facebook and Messenger for iOS and Android. At first glance, they might seem pointless or juvenile, but when you think about it, they bring a human touch (or in this case, a canine touch) to texting. Without facial expressions, body language, or tone of voice, it can be difficult to express things like excitement, sarcasm, or being serious over text. That means you can take a joke too literally, or not realize someone was being sincere. But now if you mean something in a playful way, you can just send an image of Beast gnawing on a toy along with your message. Or add one of him looking angry if you’re not kidding around. While there have been emoticons for a while, they’ve been tiny and generic. Stickers are much larger, more unique, and can show off animations and vivid emotions. Facebook’s free approach to stickers is especially empowering as you can download as many of the 15 sticker packs as you want. The Beast pack was designed by of Impending and IconFactory, it rolled out yesterday, and was spotted this morning by . Newer sticker sets include First Mate, which is full of pirates and mermaids, Skullington, which has a bit of a goth feel, or Wide Eyes, which is a little more hipster. The diversity lets people find stickers that match their style, and convey things like “LOL” or “I love you” in delightfully graphical ways instead of with the same old text. I’ve sent people a few Beast stickers and they stopped to say how adorable they are. It seems Facebook’s work with compassion researchers is paying off and that could give its messaging product an advantage. The may be won with cuteness. Personally, I’m going to throw around Beast chasing his tail when a friend is being indecisive, and the puppy dog eyes when I need a favor. Please please pleeeease can I be your +1 to the sold-out concert? |
3D Systems Invests In Asteroid Miners Planetary Resources, Opens Up New Seed-Stage Venture Arm | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | ‘ plan to scour the heavens and find asteroids to mine may seem a little out there as far as startup ideas go, but that hasn’t stopped some big names from backing the company. Today, that list just got a little bigger — 3D printing giant announced that it , and that it will aid in the development of the startup’s ARKYD series space telescopes by fabricating components for them. In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on Planetary Resources, the company was founded in 2009 with the goal of creating a fleet of autonomous drones capable of mining raw materials and minerals (think water and platinum, to name a few) from asteroids as they swing through our corner of the solar system. More recently, they’ve attempted to win over the masses (well, the masses familiar with crowdfunding) by starting a for its ARKYD orbiting telescopes. People could pledge money in exchange for the opportunity to give the ARKYD a target to photograph, or purchase chunks of access time that could be distributed to schools and research institutions when the telescope goes live. The team is aiming to get it running in orbit in 2015, but they should get their money well before that. The campaign has already blown past its $1 million funding goal and there’s still four days left on the clock. While I’m sure the folks at Planetary Resources are glad to have another big name join their (which already includes Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and former prominent Microsoftie Charles Simonyi), this investment marks an interesting new direction for 3D Systems. For years the company has been churning out industrial-grade 3D printers and has recently branched out into consumer models and software, but now it’s opening up a separate venture arm called (what else?) 3D Systems Ventures. PR is the first such company that 3D Systems Ventures has backed, and while the company wouldn’t confirm the size of the investment it made in Planetary Resources CMO Cathy Lewis shed a little light on what 3D Systems hopes to accomplish by funding early-stage startups. Apparently, 3D Systems’ MO is to keep an eye out for startups that would not only benefit from using their 3D printing prowess, but startups whose goals “have something to do with improving the environment, ecology, or life as we know it.” In short, don’t expect 3D Systems Ventures to get name-checked the next time a flash-in-the-pan social app announces a new funding round. Lofty as those goals may be, this is all very tentative stuff. Hugh Evans, the newly named VP tasked with running the venture wing, hasn’t even started full-time yet. Only time will tell if 3D Systems Ventures works out the way the company’s board and CEO think it will, but here’s hoping the companies it winds up backing are just as wild-eyed as Planetary Resources. |
Microsoft Confirms IE11 Will Support Google’s SPDY Protocol | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | In a press briefing this afternoon, Microsoft announced that will support , the Google-backed protocol for speeding up download speeds for web sites. Microsoft only briefly talked about this in its briefing and didn’t even mention it in , but this is actually a major step for SPDY, which is now supported in all of the mainstream browsers. This move will surely also get more web developers to look into supporting SPDY on their servers now that almost 100 percent of the user base will be able to make use of this protocol in the near future (except, of course, those who are still using IE7). Earlier today, Microsoft announced that it would . Indeed, the company is clearly stressing the fact that is built directly into IE11, while other vendors haven’t yet focused on this so far. Microsoft argues that by just focusing on one platform, it’s able to deliver better performance, because it doesn’t have to compromise. With WebGL and SPDY, Microsoft is clearly getting behind a number of open standards. The one that’s still missing, though, is WebRTC. Microsoft has decided to back its own proprietary version of this standard, even though Chrome and Firefox in their stable releases. |
Windows 8.1’s Start Button Isn’t A Start Button | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | The are loud and clear today. Microsoft brings back the Start Button in Windows 8! Huzzah! ZONG! But don’t believe the hype. We’ve been duped. isn’t the Start Button of old. The classic multi-step application launcher is still missing. Windows 8.1’s Start Button is more of a shortcut to the Start Menu — you know, the screen with the little colorful icons. A right-click on the so-called Start Button pulls up a quick launch menu of shorts. The menu displays a list of administrative tools like Power Options, Event View, Disk Management and Windows Shells. It’s not customizable. Microsoft essentially installed a shortcut to the Start Menu and called it a button. This does nothing to fix the core issue of Windows 8. With Windows 8, Microsoft dramatically changed how the user interacts with the computer. The Start Menu replaced the Start Button — a full screen menu replaced the task of a tiny application launcher. It is a step backwards for productivity. To open a new application, the user has to completely leave the workspace. It’s horrible on a laptop. It’s clear that Microsoft switched the paradigm to address multitasking on a tablet, and it works well on a tablet, especially so when all the applications are Metro based. But for those of us that greatly prefer the classic Desktop — mostly because of the lack of mainstream applications — having to switch back to the Start Menu to load a new app is a waste of time. A shortcut to this screen doesn’t change that fact. I’ve been looking forward to the return to the good ol’ days ever since the news broke that in Windows 8.1. Windows 8 runs like a champ — noticeable better than Windows 7. But even after 6 months of using it, I still try my hardest to stay within Desktop, mostly the browser, and shake my head ever time I have to see the Start Screen. Also, startup idea: Customize people’s Windows 8’s start screen for them. Or better yet, develop a little plug in that does it automagically. , but quickly discovered it’s a horrible chore. |
Ranku Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Legit Online Universities | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Scummy for-profit schools like University of Phoenix spend big bucks to rope students into mediocre educations. So launches today to help students find a reputable online university. Its site lets you browse different programs, and compare their price, online interface, and performance of graduates. The TechStars-backed Ranku wants to bring transparency to the sketchy business of choosing a digital education. Here’s the problem. Lots of people want to go to school online so they can get a more affordable education from home, even if they’re on a tight schedule. Sixteen million students were enrolled this year. That has spawned a rapidly growing ecosystem of online schools. There are traditional, legitimate, nonprofit private, public, and state schools like Stanford, Georgetown, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There are only 100 nonprofit schools operating at scale online now, and they account for just 1 million of the 16 million students. That’s because there are for-profit schools, such as the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, Everest, and Art Institutes that, studies have shown, produce graduates who earn less, are more likely to be unemployed, and have higher debt. But since for-profit schools can make so much money from each student, they’ve developed aggressive online marketing tactics to sucker people in. They’ll pay sky-high prices for ads on education-related content, and even split tuition with any site that delivers them an enrollee. There are whole networks of sites devoted to funneling people into for-profit schools. That makes it tough to find an online university without getting scammed. Everyone’s trying to sell you to the highest bidder. solves this by barring all for-profit schools from its online education comparison-shopping site. It only features nonprofit schools. Through curation and Facebook login-based personalization, its goal is to show you the best and most relevant universities. There’s no massive open online classes (MOOCs) or places to dabble in learning. Just schools where you can get a full-fledged online degree that’s an equivalent of what you could get on a campus. You can search for a specific school or type of program, or browse top universities. Each school’s Ranku page includes info on descriptions of available degrees, price, minimum GPA, application due date, if you get to walk at a physical graduation ceremony, faculty profiles, student testimonials, and links to apply. To let you “know-before-you-go,” Ranku breaks down the features of each school’s online education interface, such as mobile apps, 24/7 access to course materials, face-to-face interaction with faculty via video, and real-time chat. Ranku’s plan is to become the destination for people researching where to go to school online, and expose which schools actually produce graduates who succeed. Ranku was founded by CEO Kim Taylor and COO Cecilia Retelle. Taylor knows how sketchy the space can be from her time working in user acquisition with major for-profit schools including University Of Phoenix. She was also a director at adtech startup Ampush Media, and was in the cast of the Start-Ups: Silicon Valley reality TV show. Retelle was the senior director of education policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They’ve from the New York arm of Ranku’s accelerator TechStars. They think Ranku can turn traffic from potential students into a serious business. Currently Ranku operates as a software-as-a-service, where client schools pay it to build them richer profiles so they stand out from other universities. Eventually, expect Ranku to look to take a cut of tuition for students it signs up for a school. Considering people already pay a total of $24 billion a year for non-profit online universities, and big schools spend up to $50 million a year on marketing, even small revenue shares could add up fast. Taylor tells me that 500 more non-profit schools are expected to start operating at scale online over the next two years as long-standing offline schools adapt. Ranku’s next step should be building out its product to more vividly preview each university’s online education interface with images, as right now it just outlines features in text. Search is a bit janky right now too, and a tool for directly comparing specific schools would be helpful. Once the product is sorted out, its goal must be to become the first place people go when picking an online school. Not everyone chooses the digital education route, and those that do probably only shop for a school once. That makes it tough to achieve viral growth. The whole for-profit vs. nonprofit school situation is complicated, so it’s harder for the startup to communicate its value. The startup is battling some very well-funded for-profits that don’t want it to exist. And since most of Ranku’s target users won’t have attended an online school before, they might not realize that the quality of the tech platforms that universities use differ widely, and a comparison site like is a big help. What’s undeniable, though, is that education will increasingly happen online, and people will need a way to find the school that’s right for them. With any luck, the world is on an inevitable slide towards transparency, which favors quality. People shouldn’t pick a school because of a flashy ad, but because its graduates get great jobs. Taylor explains, “Until now, whoever paid the most got shown to most students, but I think we’ll eventually all shop for schools based on outcomes.” |
Google Removes All The Clouds From Google Maps And Earth | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Ready for your regular reminder that technology is magic? Google has just rid the earth of clouds. Well, Earth, at least*. They’ve just pushed an update to the satellite imagery found in Google Earth and Google Maps, offering a higher-res (and now cloud free) view of the earth than ever before. By tapping the tools they built for the project they showed last month, Google was able to process and combine all of the photos they had for each region of earth — that’s hundreds of terabytes of data — until they had an almost completely clear shot of the entire globe. Go, now, Brave Adventurer! Explore the world from the comforts of your five-wheeled vessel, the SS Herman Miller! As part of the update, they’ve also updated the satellite imagery in places that haven’t been refreshed in a while, focusing mostly on Russia, Central Africa, and Indonesia. You can check out the new, mostly-cloudless view of the planet Just flip on satellite view. [* ] Check out these before and after shots, compliments of : |
No Mailbox? No Problem. Boomerang For Android Brings Gesture-Based Email Management To Gmail Users | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | , the startup behind a suite of productivity add-ons for Gmail, Outlook, and Google Calendar, is today bringing its inbox management solution Boomerang for Gmail to the mobile platform. With a new app called , the company is iterating on its previously web-only application in order to offer non-iPhone users their own gesture-based, email scheduling and snoozing application, similar in some ways to the iOS app Mailbox. Prior to , the hype around the Mailbox app was incessant. Naysayers will argue that the app was perhaps overly fawned upon by tech press (yes, including ourselves), but that opinion ignores the fact that users are checking their email on the go, and especially on mobile devices like their iPhone, more than ever before. While Baydin’s add-ons may have been around longer, offering browser plugins for web apps is no longer seen as the most innovative solution to the information/email overload problem, no matter how clever they are. That’s why Baydin’s launch of a mobile application is notable. It’s now stepping up to compete in the area where there’s still a major need for better management tools. Baydin CEO Alex Moore agrees, saying mobile has been the number one request from customers, and the company is thrilled it finally had the resources to deliver. Google, of course, has not been ignoring the email management problem. The company , which helps to automatically categorize incoming messages as “updates,” “promotions,” and “social,” and then moves those into designed sections of the inbox. But Baydin’s Boomerang app isn’t about pre-sorting email, it’s more about managing your responses and other actions. By swiping to the right, you have the standard option to archive a message, while swiping to the left lets you choose from more actions including also delete, snooze (aka “boomerang” – where the app gets its name), label, mark as read and star. Scheduled messages can be configured with a tap to go out in 2 hours, 4 hours, tomorrow, 2 or 4 days, a week, or you can type in a date and time to be even more specific. In addition, the app can bring back messages to the inbox if there’s no response, allowing for further follow up. Unlike Mailbox, which only works on mobile (iPhone and more recently iPad), Boomerang’s advantage is that it will work on both web and mobile, but for now, “mobile” means “Android.” The company says that support for iOS is planned for the future, however. Though Boomerang and Mailbox share several similarities, the Android app lacks the same design polish and simplicity which made Mailbox really stand out. Boomerang is plainer and more utilitarian in nature, with a largely black-and-white look versus Mailbox’s brighter, color-coded actions. If Mailbox made you feel like you were pruning the roses in your inbox, then Boomerang feels like weed whacking. But that may be a better fit for the Android platform where users often appreciate customizations and control over simplicity. Boomerang, for example, even lets you configure the gestures. The company is now working on support for non-Gmail services, including Exchange and IMAP, plus offline support, push notifications, and a tablet-optimized version. Moore also notes that mobile support for calendar management is also in the works, adding that he feels scheduling is even tougher on mobile than on the desktop. In the meantime, Boomerang for Android is available for . (While in beta, the app is free. Pricing is still TBD.) |
Nvidia’s Project Shield Release Gets Pushed Back To July Due To “Mechanical Issue” | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | The Nvidia Project Shield, a handheld gaming device from the graphics card-maker that was , will be delayed until July, the company revealed today. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Nvidia explained that it had to delay the release after discovering a mechanical issue tied to a piece supplied by a third-party company. The full statement is below. During our final QA process, we discovered a mechanical issue that relates to a 3rd party component. We want every SHIELD to be perfect, so we have elected to shift the launch date to July. We’ll update you as soon as we have an exact date. Perhaps most disappointing is that there isn’t a set timeframe for when the Shield will make it out to early buyers. Nvidia says in a that it’s working “around the clock” with the supplier to correct the issue, but that doesn’t indicate whether we’ll see it arrive early or late in July. If it’s an issue that shut down production lines and affected all units, the likelihood is that Nvidia will need at least a few weeks to put everything right. We’ve already , and while the hardware wasn’t the production version, the software seemed ready for market and the control layout was pleasing. Hopefully that means this is just a minor hiccup, and the July launch will go off without a hitch. |
Maker Studios Co-Founder Danny Zappin Sues The Company Over His Ouster | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | It was only about six weeks ago that co-founder Danny Zappin , replaced by Endemol exec Ynon Kreiz. Well it turns out that he didn’t “step down,” so much as he was “pushed out.” And now he’s taking the company to court over his ouster. Zappin just filed a lawsuit against Maker’s partners and investors, claiming concealment of secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, and constructive fraud. According to the lawsuit, Maker’s board diluted the company’s common stock in favor of preferred stock in order to remove him as the company’s CEO. Maker Studios was founded in 2009 by a collection of top YouTubers, including Zappin, Lisa Donovan, Scott Katz, Kassem Gharaibeh, Shay Butler, and Ben Donovan. The idea was to create a creator-friendly multichannel network on YouTube that would help individual producers to create better videos, collaborate with each other, and boost the number of subscribers and views that they all had. It also hoped to help them all monetize those videos a little bit better. Since then, Maker has grown to become one of the top five networks on the YouTube platform, , with more than . It’s also attracted a fair amount of outside investment, including . The lawsuit names Maker co-founders Ben Donovan, Lisa Donovan, and Ynon Kreiz, as well as investors such as Time Warner Investments’ Rachel Lam, Greycroft’s Dana Settle, Mark Suster, and his fund, GRP Partners. It claims that the board: “…fraudulently, and in a breach of all their fiduciary duties… entered into a series of agreements, including employee agreements, whereby they either caused stock to be issued to one or more of the Interested Parties; allowed one or more of the Interested Parties to exercise, sell, or vest certain stock rights early; agreed to sell stock to the other Interested Parties or those aligned with the Interested Parties to create a favorable voting block; and/or awarded employment and money, among other things, to one or more of the Interested Parties in exchange for their director seats with the purpose and intent of diluting the Common Stock; decreasing the rights of the Common Stock, including to relegate the Common Stock to minority status, increasing the right of the Preferred Stock, including obtaining majority status for purpose of electing director seats; voted on each other’s contracts while being an interested party to the transaction at issue, and to deny the Common Stock shareholders of their rights.” In other words, it claims that the senior management at Maker conspired to create a favorable voting block with which they could hire Kreiz as CEO and push Zappin out. According to the lawsuit, Lisa Donovan and Ben Donovan voted in favor of the current board structure, and in exchange got cushy salaries, bonuses, the ability to exercise up to 50 percent of their common stock, and the ability to sell that stock. Through a series of stock sales by Lisa Donovan, Ben Donovan, as well as Zappin, majority control of the company’s common stock shifted enough that the board could remove Zappin. Even before the management change, Zappin was a controversial figure within Maker and the broader YouTube community. Last year, he got into a after Johnson announced that he was leaving the studio. In that exchange, it was also revealed that Zappin , long before founding maker. The lawsuit is a major reversal from the memo that Zappin sent to employees at the time that he left the CEO role, at a time when he was expected to remain an advisor to new CEO Kreiz. In that memo, he wrote: “After much thought and discussion with Ynon, my co-founders and the board, I am happy to announce that I will be stepping down as the Maker Studios CEO. Ynon, our Executive Chairman will now be taking over my responsibilities and operational oversight of Maker. While I won’t be responsible for day to day operations, I will remain on the board of directors and will serve in an advisor role to Ynon and the company. I will work very closely with Ynon during this transition phase to make sure everything goes smoothly.” Representatives from Time Warner Investments and GRP Partners could also not be reached for comment. Maker Studios issued the following statement: “The lawsuit is without merit and the allegations are baseless. We regret that Danny is taking this step and involving the Company he co-founded in litigation.” |
CrunchGov Essential: How The Internet Helped Gay America Come Out Of The Closet | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | The U.S. has always included a sizable population of gay citizens. Without a way to coordinate their latent collective powers, discrimination and isolation forced them into the shadows. As the U.S.
slowly inched its way toward tolerance, the Internet, as a soapbox for young liberals, became a
powerful platform to expose otherwise oblivious Americans to their gay neighbors, backed by the full force of unrelenting digital activism. As social media explodes in celebration over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, it’s important to look back at how the Internet built the momentum for this historic occasion: The Internet has always been a , especially it’s early ivory-tower adopters. Compared to the rest of the U.S., Twitter and Facebook are environments that welcome recently outed gay citizens and promote equality. To the extent that the Internet is becoming the epicenter of national dialogue, the overwhelming liberal bias tips public policy in favor of equality. To get an idea of just how liberal the Internet is, Pew found that the average sentiment of Twitter updates was 25 percent more positive about Obama’s re-election than a national representative public opinion poll. On marriage equality, Twitter was decidedly more favorable (33 percent vs. 46 percent) and there was virtually zero negative sentiment (44 percent vs. 8 percent). Twitter isn’t the only social-media friend of gay rights. A comparison of the Facebook fan counts between gay rights-related pages reveals a struggling religious right. A top Facebook page in favor of marriage equality, Gay Marriage USA, has more than three times the fans as The Family Research Council (300,000 vs. 100,000). A fan page to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) has 30 times more fans than ones dedicated to keeping DOMA intact. Engagement for Gay Marriage USA is overwhelming. A picture of a rainbow-painted house sitting conspicuously across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church has 100 times more shares than a top update from the Family Research Council, a prayer for the Supreme Court. The religious right has struggled to spin its issues that users feel comfortable sharing. “Defense of marriage,” and “pro-life” are still stuck with hateful undertones. Straight marriage defenders don’t want to speak up, liberal voices take their place in the conversation vacuum and, as a result, the opposition to gay marriage is being erased from online discussions. No one was more shocked by the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay scouts in the late 90s than their own regional leaders. “It never dawned on me that we weren’t supportive of gay scouts,” says Mike Harrison, a former chairman of California’s Orange County Boy Scout Council. “We’re just busy serving kids and running a program.” Discrimination abruptly entered their world when the Scouts expelled decorated Eagle James Dale. According to a few voting members of the Scout leadership that I spoke to, the initial ban on gay students was more a product of ignorance than discrimination. The obsessively representative executive board conducted a series of surveys to understand whether their intuitions were correct and, up until 2012, internal surveys . So without much deliberation, the executive council maintained the position. Then, the backlash started: veteran leaders quit, , and an army of activists continued to erode the once morally pristine student organization. A flood of Change.org petitions continued to get headlines, as heartwrenching stories of banned gay Scouts amassed millions of supporters. One petition alone, to , swelled to over 300,000 signatures. “The reason online petitions made such a big impact — Change.org in this instance — was that it gave petition starters a platform to tell very effective stories,” said gay rights activist Zach Wahls. Instead of faceless rumors of expelled Scouts, petitions highlighted real people in their own voices. Indeed, Wahls himself became a civil rights icon after testimony he gave about his lesbian mothers in front of the Iowa legislature went viral on YouTube (currently over 17 million views on the main video). [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMLZO-sObzQ] Despite the internal surveys, the overwhelming online pressure forced the scout leaders to hold a more deliberative conversation before the eventual vote that overturned the ban in May. Behind the closed-door discussions, the Internet played a hand, as well. Northeast executive board member Jay Lenrow recalls one voting member quoting a study from the anti-gay , which ominously predicted that allowing “gays in would lead to boy-on-boy sex and bullying by older gay scouts, of young scouts trying to force them into a gay lifestyle”. Immediately, Harris’s friend, a board certified orthopedic surgeon, “stood up with his iPhone,” and began to school the crowd about the difference between a faux group and a recognized medical institution, the American Academy of Pediatrics. He proceeded to dispel the gay agenda rumors, reading . Dispelling myths blunted the spread of doubt. Ultimately, however, academic research doesn’t change minds — but having a gay family member or friend does. National support for marriage equality has steadily climbed from 33 percent to a slight plurality (49 percent) a decade later. Of those who changed their minds, one-third (32) “say it is because they know someone – a friend, family member or other acquaintance – who is homosexual,” . “What the power of the Internet does is allows people to connect with each other,” says Wahls. “For many young gay kids, growing up 20 or 30 years ago, they thought they were the only ones. But today, in 2013, you can discover very, very quickly that that isn’t the case.” Online support has fueled a cycle of coming out and acceptance, exposing more and more Americans to their gay neighbors, friends and family members. Fascinating enough, the demographic that has made the greatest percentage gains in support of marriage equality is the “silent generation,” those born before WWII ended (1925-1945). True to course, the deluge of Scouts coming out of the closet made its way to one of the organizations oldest and respected members, Jack Coughlin. A Scout of 77 years, Coughlin had one of his four sons come out to him shortly after the James Dale decision. After educating himself about homosexuality, he came to understand it as biological fact of life — a perspective he shared with his skeptical colleagues during crucial regional meetings leading up to the May vote. Coughlin argues that widespread associations with gay friends and family members were “a major factor” in the decision to eventually overturn the ban. After Coughlin’s regional meeting, his colleagues approached him saying, “I’m going to vote for change, because I have a gay daughter.” Three months later, the Boy Scouts would accept gay Scouts and one month after that, the Supreme Court would make equality the law of the land. [tweet https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/349703625616011264] The Internet is going crazy over the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down DOMA and uphold a lower court ruling to overturn California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. Here are the funniest and most inspiring and thoughtful updates: [tweet https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/349909232725917696] [tweet https://twitter.com/jessetyler/status/349901581665320960] [tweet https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/349923070208794624] [tweet https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/349894675253051393] [tweet https://twitter.com/HuffPostComedy/status/349903749076090881] [tweet https://twitter.com/szorowitz/status/349904477832232963] [tweet https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/349904334764523520] |
Microsoft Opens Up Bing As A Platform For Developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | At its developer conference today, Microsoft that it is opening up quite a bit of ‘s advanced functionality to developers. As Microsoft corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall noted, developers are already using Bing APIs, of course, but apps can now use Bing’s entities and knowledge, natural user interfaces, and new , including Microsoft’s just-announced 3-D imagery for maps. As Singh Pall noted, Microsoft has been using all of these capabilities privately already, of course, but he thinks that “if we can do something with an API that is good, third parties can do something that is dynamite.” Bing, he said, “is not just a great search engine, but the team has built some great capabilities.” Bing, after all, is pretty good at understanding user intent, unstructured content on the web and other queries and data types that are not trivial for a developer to implement. The team, he said, always believed that Bing could do a lot of things that can “actually be very valuable outside of the search box. For a long time, we’ve now thought that you could use these capabilities to create some great experiences.” Developers will get access to much of Bing’s data, including its web index and relevance engine, as well as its knowledge base and understanding of entities. The Bing team has also worked on lots of natural user interface technologies, including voice recognition, which will also be available for developers to add to their apps. Here is a full list of the new capabilities for developers: |
Facebook Updates Its Ad Manager Reports With More Customizable, Real-Time Data | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 26 | Facebook’s effort to continues: Today it’s announcing an update to Ad Manager Reports, a product whose name pretty much explains what it does — helps advertisers track and manage their campaigns on Facebook. The goal of the changes, according to Product Manager David Baser, is to give advertisers tools that are “simpler, easier-to-use, and more flexible.” A lot of that seems to involve giving those advertisers more control over the data that they receive. Specifically, Baser said Facebook is now making it easier for advertisers to see reach data for an ad, a campaign, or an entire account, for any date range. Previously, you could only look at reach for an ad or a campaign, and only on fixed schedules designated by Facebook, like a week or a day. Reach is particularly important, Bazer said, because that tends to drive most of the other results, such as in-store purchases, that advertisers are hoping for. And controlling the scheduling is important because it allows those advertisers to immediately understand the success of specific efforts (say a four-day campaign to drive purchases over the weekend). In addition, Baser said Facebook is “introducing cost-per-action metrics everywhere throughout our reports,” so that advertisers no longer have to look at different reports (or combine those reports in Excel) to understand what they’re paying to achieve their desired goals. It’s also allowing advertisers to see the performance of an ad, campaign or account based on age, gender, country or placement within Facebook. And it’s updating those results in real-time. When I pointed out that adding more data to the reports might not meet everyone’s definition of “simpler,” Baser acknowledged that there can be tension between the goals of flexibility and simplicity. But in this case, he said Facebook managed to do both. “Even though there are more metrics now, accessing them is simpler and the presentation is simpler,” he said. “This is a case where simplicity overrides the number of things [presented to advertisers].” Altogether, Facebook says these changes should give advertisers an easier experience, as outlined in : Marketers no longer have to export multiple reports to get the data they want. With these new reports, they can choose the Facebook ad metrics they want to include in a report; break out the data how they want it; drag and drop to organize columns; and save, export, and schedule their reports for delivery. Facebook also quotes Priceline.com, which has been testing the new interface. Priceline’s Kristen Jones said that the changes mean the company has to pull 50 percent fewer reports and spend less time looking at spreadsheets. Last week , so I was also curious about the extent to which these different efforts are being coordinated. Baser said there’s actually a product manager and a team working to ensure “we have an overall vision for simplification” — though he added that the updates will be staggered across different products: “They won’t come as one big change.” |
null | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 6 | 19 | null |
CloudUp Is A Fast, Dead-Simple Way To Share And View Files On Any Platform (Without The Folders) | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | In today’s world of email, social networks, SMS, chat applications and cloud services, there are plenty of ways to share share a file, folder, photo or video. And as intelligent devices and cloud computing infrastructure proliferate, and processing power and capacity improve, we expect file transfer and sharing to be speedy — and simple. Everything is about “realtime” and accessibility these days (not that we’re complaining, but thanks Twitter). Yet, file-sharing still isn’t quite there. Even with all the options — whether it be the Skypes, Facebooks, Google Drives, and of the world or the , etc. — we’ve still got one eye out for a better way. (Here’s xkcd .) The file sharing service to end all file sharing services. Dropbox has gotten the closest, gobbling up a ton of mindshare as a result, but its layout and presentation are more storage service than simple sharing tool. In other words, you may store your photos there, but it’s probably not where you’ll go if you want to show them off. This week, became the latest to join a younger group of services that are pushing the conversation forward when it comes to speed and simplicity — and nibbling at the heels of the incumbents. Sharing the mantle (most closely) with services like , , and perhaps biz collaboration and sharing services like , CloudUp aims to a new spin on file-sharing by creating a tool to make sharing images, links, documents and videos as simple as humanly possible for both the sharer and the viewer. In practice, that means that has a clean, minimalistic look that makes it feel like it’s made for designers, yet is easy enough to use that your mom could get excited about it. CloudUp enables users to share files by dragging them and dropping them into their browser, automatically generating a link which they can then share on email, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Like Dropbox, the link-centric service is available for free on the Web or as a native OSX app, the latter of which puts CloudUp in your menu bar for easier drag-and-drop sharing. However, CloudUp wants the similarities to end there. Although the service is offering up to 1,000 uploads for free — that’s the equivalent of about 200GB of storage — CloudUp doesn’t want to just be a storage locker or a quick way to share URLs with your homedawgs. What’s cool about CloudUp (and distinguishes it from most apps out there) is that it focuses on converting the design of file transfer from one that makes it clear that “THIS PRODUCT IS JUST A UTILITY” to one that’s elegant and minimalist, Jony Ive-style. But the minimalism isn’t there for the sake of itself (sorry hipsters), it’s meant to bring more of the focus to consumption — to make the content the focus, not the app itself. For more than one file, many services use folders, which look and act like the same folder icons you’ve been seeing on desktops since the Apple IIGS. Instead, when you drag-and-drop multiple files into CloudUp in succession, it automatically collects them in a “Stream.” It functions similarly to folders one would find anywhere else, with a more Pinterest-style layout. Nothing is opaque, the app puts it all right there, making things easier to find. (Personally, I can never find files in Dropbox, but that could be because I was dropped on my head as a child.) CloudUp also does a lot of cool stuff around conversion. The app creates thumbnails for “nearly every kind of file you can imagine, camera RAWS, office documents, code snippets, images, videos and many others,” Cloudup Engineer TJ Holowaychuk last week. It’s kind of a small thing, so if you don’t share docs or images that much, it probably won’t matter to you, but if you do, this small stuff matters. So, beyond just thumbnail rendering, CloudUp has applied some nifty conversion and rendering voodoo on the back-end so that everyone can see them, even if they’re still running IE6, like video transcoding, office doc PDF conversion and image compression so that images appear actually appear on your device. User streams are also updated in realtime, synchronously, so that even if an image you’re downloading from a friend hasn’t fully transferred yet, you’ll still see it — on mobile, too. And not only that, but you can share a link to a Stream even if it hasn’t finished downloading. Of course, how instantaneous and “realtime” all this is tends to depend on the speed of your browser, but when it works, it’s another big point of differentiation — even if it’s not the one reason you’d download CloudUp. The team also designed the app not just to be useful when sharing among friends and family, but to facilitate collaboration and productivity among teams as well, CEO Thianh Lu tell us. That, in particular, is something Lu and the rest of the team had been wrestling with for a long time — in other words, this ain’t their first trip around the block. All the EdTech homies in the house know them as the same team behind LearnBoost, a suite of free classroom administration apps for teachers. While LearnBoost raised $2.87 million from Charles River Ventures, Atlas Ventures and others for its beautifully designed product and its mission to rethink the gradebook, Lu says that teachers were more interested in its Lesson Plan-sharing feature than grading. Teachers were still looking for new ways to share their content, and the more the team fought against the slow sales cycles in K-12 education, they kept coming back to the fragmented sharing problem. Each member of their team had their own workflow, setup and preferred method of communication and sharing. There wasn’t a single solution out there that let them share and consume files quickly and easily that didn’t offend the eyeballs, so they built CloudUp. And that’s the same reason that CloudUp’s OSX app attempts to remove the extra steps from the team collaboration process by letting users share files by dropping them on the CloudUp status icon in the menu bar, which automatically copies the Stream’s link to your clipboard so you don’t have to take any other steps. The app also supports automatic uploading of screenshots, which you may or may not think is awesome depending on how frequently you do the ole “shift+command+4” dance. All in all, CloudUp has a lot going for it and, at launch, it’s already competitive in a crowded space, which is saying a lot. That being said, it still has a long way to go. CloudUp doesn’t yet do simultaneous photo uploading, it doesn’t have native apps, premium tiers or actual team/business collaboration features — it’s more of an idea than a reality. However, all these are on the near-term roadmap, Lu says, and should becoming to CloudUp experiences near you in the months ahead. Going forward, the company thinks that its take on file sharing can act as a complement to the Big Storage Kahunas in the space. That’s a smart and completely understandable position to take, but not sure anyone is really buying that. CloudUp is an alternative. Some might think of it as a sexier, frictionless-sharing-focused Dropbox skin and some may get enough use out of their familiar apps that needing an alternative file service sounds superfluous. But it doesn’t take long to see that CloudUp has nailed the design and user experience. There’s no doubt that this looks better the majority of apps out there. It’s easy to use, and the stream function, instant viewing and link-sharing and the work its doing on the back-end (and front, for that matter) to make conversion and rendering easy pretty much blow Dropbox out of the water. CloudUp isn’t for the enterprise, and it’s not a place you’re going solely for file storage — in that sense, the “complementary” analogy does make sense. Yes, CloudUp will add premium tiers, but it remains to be seen whether the more casual, file-sharing crowd it’s going after is going to be regularly uploading more than 1,000 files. That means, like LearnBoost, monetizing may be a long, bumpy road for CloudUp, at the same time, as Dropbox moves to scoop up other awesome, sexy mobile and , a service like CloudUp could become very attractive. But, in the end, you’ll just have to check it out for yourself to decide. |
Meet Cody, The Casual Fitness Coach And Social Discovery Tool For Everyone Else | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Today, there’s a long list of apps and services that sit at the intersection of fitness and mobile technology and leverage everything from social dynamics and behavioral economics to Quanitifed Self-inspired tracking to motivate us to be more active and drop a few pounds. There’s Lift, Nike+, Basis, RunKeeper, Runtastic, Fitocracy, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal — the list goes on and on. Rather than simply adding another me-too product to an already-crowded space, two former Microsoft product managers launched earlier this year to offer an experience they think has been missing from the world of mobile fitness. Co-founders Pejman Pour-Moezzi and Paul Javid tell us that the majority of fitness apps today tend to cater to hardcore fitness enthusiasts, who get a lot of mileage out of wearable gadgets and obsessive data-tracking. By nature, many of these products revolve around activities where GPS and accelerometer-based tracking and metrics really come in handy, like running and cycling. Of course, not everyone wants to track every second of their day or exercise routine, is wearing a Fuel Band (or some alternative thereof) or is an avid runner. Rather than targeting hardcore Quantified Selfers or focusing on running, Cody is going after casual fitness enthusiasts by emphasizing sharing rather than tracking and by building an experience that’s more reminiscent of Instagram and Vine than RunKeeper and Nike+. On Cody, users can add photos, videos, tag their location and leave status updates — actions aimed at making it easy to share the story of their daily fitness routines, rather than the metrics. Users can log and share workouts across a range of categories, like Crossfit, Yoga, Barre, weightlifting, walking, running and cycling, and 70 percent of the workouts logged fall outside of running and cycling, the co-founders tell us. “One of the things we want to tap into is the group-fitness movement,” Javid says, “which happens to be one of the fastest growing segment in fitness.” The goal instead is to create a mobile experience that people don’t just open when they have something to track. Since launch, Cody has seen a lot of activity around group-fitness categories, like CrossFit, Yoga and Barre, but 85 percent of user sessions on Cody don’t even include a workout, he explains. By allowing users to describe their workout, follow their friends and top users — along with commenting on their status updates — and by recommending articles and offering tips, Cody is building a social fitness experience that centers around consumption. The app also incorporates some familiar tracking features, allowing users to review past performance and view personal highlights in graphical layouts and swipe through a calendar of each of your activities, while filling out their personal profile that is shown to others in the network. While there’s value in being able to browse through a shared workout feed to check in on what your friends are doing, a key part of creating a social fitness experience and a “fitness graph” like this is discovery. And up until now, that’s largely been missing from Cody. But today, Cody is adding a new feature called “Explore,” which makes it easier to discover people and workouts, and browse through other Crossfitters, yogis and weightlifters with one tap. Explore intends to make it easier to find and follow people by grouping them into categories, so that you can search and discover workout pals by activity, Featured Users or Featured hashtags, like “#5K,” for example. Like Edomondo and other apps, Cody has also set out to add value to its fitness network by acting as a virtual coach.
After users download the app, they’re asked to identify their goals, whether that be running 10 miles or reducing a little bit of stress, which Cody uses to surface content and tips relevant to those goals. Now, with its Explore feature, Cody is adding another piece of the puzzle in pursuit of being able to more accurately recommend friends, workouts, information and venues based on their activity and interests. It’s a similar path to the one followed by Twitter and Foursquare — the more data it has on you, your friends, your favorite workouts and workout spots, the better it can help you find people you’ll enjoy meeting, following or working out with, and content that better helps you meet your goals. By providing a familiar Instagram-like feed and Twitter-inspired Hashtags in a clean, simple design, Cody is reducing some of the friction less hardcore fitness enthusiasts might experience at the thought of downloading another fitness app. If Cody can successfully strike content deals with top fitness publications to offer quality fitness content and offer support for various fitness-tracking health gadgets, there are plenty of ways for Cody to incentivize potential customers. Furthermore, Cody hasn’t yet settled on a business model, but by, say, offering top yoga instructors the ability to post five-minute instructional videos in an activity feed that users can access for a fee or by allowing local gyms to create profiles and target in-stream ads (a la Twitter) at local exercisers, it has some potentially cool opportunities to begin monetizing, while adding value for local businesses and instructors. However, with Fitocracy already offering a popular, fitness-dedicated social network and with the bevy of fitness apps out there that have a running head-start, Cody has its work cut out. Apps like Runkeeper already have sizable user bases and data pools to work with, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine them putting that to use to enhance the discovery experience at some point down the road. Cody is off to a great start, and while the road ahead is a steep one, by targeting more casual exercisers, focusing on adding value to the social, mobile fitness experience and catering to a wider range of activities, it may be able to find its niche in a crowded market. |
Microsoft And Oracle Will Announce Major Cloud Computing Partnership Next Monday | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, its Azure chief Satya Nadella and Oracle’s president Mark Hurd are holding a joint press conference next week, just two days before Microsoft’s Build developer conference is scheduled to kick off in San Francisco. The press event follows Oracle’s earnings call that featured remarks by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about a series of major partnership announcements next week, including one with Salesforce.com. : “Next week we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies (software-as-a-service) and infrastructure companies in the cloud,” Ellison . With this press conference slated for Monday, questions are bubbling about what these companies have planned. Adding to the speculation: Oracle is starting to promote its 12c database technology, which the company announced last October and which Larry Ellison said today that companies will use for . 12c is a pluggable in-memory database, which sounds strikingly similar to . Industry observers I talk to say that it’s possible the two companies are planning their own big data initiative to compete with Pivotal and its mega-partnership . Would that emerge as a separate company? That’s the path that EMC followed when it spun out several of its product groups and those from VMware. Cloud Foundry was part of that spin-out. But the SAP angle has interesting possibilities. SAP has aligned closely with Amazon Web Services. Oracle could be looking to Microsoft to be its partner for big data, in-memory computing. For Pivotal, its effort is as much about big data as it is about application development. They also face SP as a competitor in the space. In any case, it’s going to be an interesting week. |
France’s Dailymotion Finds Stateside Tech Partner In Video Editing Service Givit | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | In other video news this week, the video editing app Givit has announced its integration with the social video site Dailymotion. It is the first U.S. app to be built into the France-based Dailymotion’s API. This comes after news in late April that in order to prevent a U.S. company from taking a controlling stake in one of France’s leading technology companies. Carrier France Telecom / Orange has put between 50 and 60 million Euro into Dailymotion as it waits for someone else to bite. The Yahoo shutdown sent a bad message to the French marketplace and to foreign investors. This Givit integration is a way for Dailymotion to reach out to U.S. partners from a different angle, tech, while growing their American user base. When I spoke with Dailymotion’s US Managing Director Roland Hamilton and Givit CEO Greg Kostello today, the two emphasized the commonality of their platforms with respect to fostering creative communities. Givit allows users to stitch together videos of any length, add music and special effects, and “give it” away on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Hamilton called Dailymotion a “young, hip community” that supports independent filmmakers. This is really a push by Dailymotion to scale up stateside and is especially strategic given recent . “Dailymotion is becoming a true alternative to YouTube,” said Hamilton. “From articles over the last few weeks, people are looking for another platform, and we want to be there.” Dailymotion has a public API, and it’s looking for more U.S. mobile and social developers to tap into it. The site, which is the second largest social video site globally after YouTube, is currently reporting 20 million unique monthly visitors for the U.S. versus 112 million globally although a spokesman would not give numbers on Givit’s traction. Even though the Yahoo deal fell through, it seems Dailymotion is still fighting for a bigger toe-hold in the U.S. video scene. |
Thanks To A Six-Figure Purchase By Reputation Changer, Brand.com Is A Thing Now | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | My boss Alexia Tsotsis . With a name like , you can imagine that an online reputation management company would be stuck in the shadow of (which itself was formerly known as Reputation Defender). The solution? It’s changing its name, and purchasing a memorable URL of its own — . The URL supposedly cost six figures, and you can see that the company has already taken it over to promote a product called “Brand.com by Reputation Changer.” President Michael Zammuto said the plan, ultimately, is to completely switch over to the Brand.com name. It will become the highest trafficked website in the reputation industry, he said, based on : “Brand.com and the term ‘brand’ have much greater recognition with potential clients and with the general public than the term ‘Reputation’ or ‘Reputation.com’.” And as much as people like Alexia might complain that the word “brand” doesn’t mean anything, the company says the URL captures the idea that “online reputation is a critical component” of the brands of Fortune 500 companies, governments, and celebrities. And hey, there’s already another startup in the industry that . Reputation Changer/Brand.com says that even prior to the name change, revenue has grown 1,500 percent in the past two years. Now it has revenue growth and a sweet, sweet URL. |
Edward Snowden Charged With Espionage | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | [tweet https://twitter.com/AriMelber/status/348202090415390720] , the U.S. government has brought the hammer down on NSA leaker Edward Snowden, charging him with one of the most serious offenses: espionage. Snowden, who is holed up in Hong Kong, is currently searching for asylum with the help of fellow leak-enthusiast, Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Ironically, and report that charging Snowden with a heavy political crime could make it harder to extradite him. “The treaty, however, has an exception for political offenses, and espionage has traditionally been treated as a political offense. Snowden’s defense team in Hong Kong is likely to invoke part of the extradition treaty with the United States, which states that suspects will not be turned over to face criminal trial for offenses of a “political character,” explains . The extradition process could drag on for months. “Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably also under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States… Any court battle is likely to reach Hong Kong’s highest court, and could last many months”. The harsh indictment should worry those who fear Snowden will face the as Wikileaks source Bradley Manning who was reportedly driven to suicidal thoughts from “extreme” 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement. In an interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama to comment on how Snowden would be punished. For good measure, we’ve included a screenshot of live Google search results that show the world still has its priorities straight with regard to the most important “bradley.” |
Ask A VC: Mayfield Fund’s Navin Chaddha On The Consumerization Of Digital Health Care | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Mayfield Fund Managing Director sat down in the hot seat to answer reader questions. In particular, Chaddha addresses a trend he calls the “consumerization of health care,” in which technology is empowering patients to become consumers of their medical and health care. Mayfield has invested in a number of startups in the space, including dental services marketplace Brighter, wearable health tracking device developer Basis, and health network HealthTap. Chaddha also talks about the next innovations in mobile marketplaces, and more. Tune in above! |
Facebook Security Bug Exposed Personal Account Information, Emails And Phone Numbers, Six Million Accounts Affected | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | A Facebook security bug exposed users’ personal contact information (email or phone number) to other users who were connected to them; the bug has affected 6 million accounts. “When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations,” the security team . “Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook,” the post continued. “As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection.” A Facebook spokesperson tells me the bug has been live since last year, and was discovered last week. Facebook says the security team fixed the bug less than 24 hours after it was brought to their attention. The social giant says six million users had email addresses or phone numbers that were included in the downloads. Additionally, there were non-Facebook users’ email addresses and phone numbers included in the downloads from tools to invite contacts to join Facebook; a Facebook spokesperson tells me that this information wasn’t tied to any Facebook accounts and “wasn’t structured and wasn’t identifiable.” Facebook says the bug has not been exploited maliciously, and the company is reaching out to the affected users. “For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice,” the post said. “This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.” |
Google Makes Google News In Germany Opt-In Only To Avoid Paying Fees Under New Copyright Law | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | will soon change. Starting August 1, it will index sources that have decided to explicitly opt-in to being shown on the search giant’s news-aggregation service. Google News remains an opt-out service in the other 60 countries and languages it currently operates in, but since Germany passed earlier this year that takes effect on August 1, the company is in danger of newspapers, blogs and other publishers for the right to show even short snippets of news. Publishers will have to go into Google’s page to agree to be indexed by Google News. Publishers who don’t do this will simply be removed from the index come August 1. Many of Germany’s publishers had hoped to force Google to pay a licensing fee for their content, but today’s announcement does not even mention this. Instead, Google notes that it is saddened by the fact that it has to make this change. On its German blog, Google argues that Google News currently gets 6 billion visits per month and that, if anything, it’s providing a free service for publishers that brings them more traffic. One of the main issues with the “Leistungsschutzrecht” (how’s that for a good German word?) — the ancillary copyright law that the German government passed after large protests earlier this year — is that it’s not clear when a “snippet” becomes a snippet. The law doesn’t feature a clear definition of how long a snippet actually is (140 characters? 160? 250?). Google always argued that the new law was neither necessary nor useful and that it wouldn’t pay for links and snippets. A number of major German publishers have already that they will opt-in to being featured in Google News, but there is a good chance that quite a few will decide that they don’t need the traffic. |
Gillmor Gang Live 06.21.13. (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. |
Tobii And Synaptics Partner On Ultrabook Prototype With Eye Tracking Tech | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir4YTzu3F0E?feature=player_embedded]
You will gaze at your computer, and your computer will gaze back. That’s the inevitable path of progress in interface design, as evidenced by ongoing projects from companies like , , and more. Now, Sweden’s is taking a step forward with its own approach, via a prototype ultrabook design created in partnership with touchpad company Synaptics. The notebook will incorporate Tobii’s eye-tracking tech with Synpatics’ touch sensitive input methods to preview how the two can be used together to further the cause of new input methods. The purpose of the project is to showcase to OEMs how they might be able to use the same tech in their own products. Tobii and Synaptics will be touring with a roadshow of the prototype devices throughout July and August, showing off exactly how the two technologies work in tandem. For Tobii, which has been showing off its Tobii Gaze technology since its introduction last year (and which was in development for in some form or another), this is a chance to finally start getting eye-tracking built-in to more mainstream devices. There’s been a lot of attention paid to how gaze tracking is a part of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 device, and other startups like Umoove are trying to market their own products to other consumer electronics makers, so the time is right for a major sales push. Partnering with Synaptics is a good way to hitch Tobii’s wagon to a player with strong existing relationships with virtually every Windows PC manufacturer, as well as makers of mobile devices. The touchpad company has been in business for a long time, and survived the transition from cruder, simpler pressure-based input mechanisms to the more sensitive capacitive and hybrid systems now in place in most modern devices. Synaptics will be using the prototype to shop around its own ForcePad solution, a new product offering that incorporates per-finger pressure detection into the mix for even greater sensitivity. [vimeo 47329679 w=640 h=360] The jury’s still out on whether any one company will dominate gaze detection and eye tracking the same way that Synaptics has done for touch-based input on PCs, but clearly Tobii (which last year) is making a play for the crown. “We expect consumers will start seeing product options like this one in stores as early as sometime next year,” Tobii VP of Business Development told us via email. This push likely means we’ll see a lot of familiarly named PC makers trot out this kind of tech (or some kind of motion detection) in their prototype products and concepts at CES next year, so keep an eye out for that, and for the Tobii name. |
Aiming To Disrupt Payday Lending, a16z-Backed LendUp Now Offers Instant Online And Mobile Loans | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Y Combinator-incubated launched in October Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Kapor Capital and others, to bring a fresh solution to an old problem: You have to pay your bills now, but you don’t have the money to pay them. Rather than turn to predatory lenders and banks, with their high interest rates, borrow money from friends or cover your eyes and hope they go away, what do you do? It may seem like a situation that only befalls the chronically irresponsible, but in fact, 15 million Americans turned to payday lenders to borrow money last year. Instead of ending up saddled with long-term debt from hidden fees or wrestling with Draconian terms and costly rollovers, LendUp wants to give those looking for a speedy fix to a short-term financial conundrum a way to borrow money without hidden fees, costly rollovers and high-interest rates. The lending space at large has begun to brim with startups — like BillFloat, Zest, Think Finance, Kabbage, On Deck and Lending Club — each of which is trying to make it easier for consumers and small businesses to get access to capital without having to jump through a million hoops. LendUp, in contrast, is positioning itself as a direct lender, using technology and Big Data to allow consumers with poor or no credit to get access to small-dollar, short-term loans (of up to $250 for 30 days) and build their credit while doing so. Unfortunately, most credit agencies turn their backs on payday loans, so even if people are able to pay them on time, it doesn’t help their credit scores and the cycle of bad credit keeps on spinning. Most banks won’t touch these kind of loans because they’re high-risk, but (which is attempting to streamline the lending process for small businesses), LendUp uses Big Data to do instant risk analysis and evaluate creditworthiness, weeding out those who have bad credit for a reason from those who may have become victims of the system. Along with eschewing hidden fees, rollovers and high interest rates, LendUp streamlines the application process for loans — which traditionally takes forever — by customizing the process. In other words, rather than make everyone submit bank statements, credit reports and so on right from the beginning, it crunches available data and approves those with good credit instantly. It only requests more information from you if questions arise, approving or rejecting as soon as it has enough information to make an informed decision. Co-founders Jacob Rosenberg and Sasha Orloff tell us that they’re able to build a dynamic application that changes in realtime based on customer risk profiles and segment with a higher level of accuracy by utilizing data sources that most banks or credit bureaus don’t consider. That could be data from social media or other lesser-used credit institutions. With its foundations in place, today the startup is taking its formula one stop further, offering instant online loans. This means that LendUp now has the ability to deposit money in your account in as little as 15 minutes, so that consumers not only can apply for and get approved quicker than than they normally would, but they now have near-instant access to that loan. LendUp loans are also available on mobile, so unlike its aforementioned lending competitors, LendUp deposits that money into your bank account, which you can then access from your laptop or while you’re on-the-go. Orloff, who has nearly 15 years of experience working in credit analysis at the World Bank, Citigroup and others, says that the biggest problem inherent to the current lending process is that it can take up to four days for people with good credit to be approved for loans. When you need money right away because of impending deadlines, when it’s an emergency, that’s too long to wait. By depositing loans directly into your bank account and making that capital available while you’re on the go, the founders believe that they’re removing one of the last advantages of going to a payday loan store rather than borrowing online. Participating banks offer instant direct deposits and loan decisions through LendUp, while users with non-participating bank accounts will receive loans the next business day. It also hopes to incentive users by offering financial education through its “LendUp Ladder,” which aims to help borrowers with poor credit improve their credit scores by using LendUp to pay their loans on time. With its new announcement today, LendUp is removing one of the last barriers that stands in the way of short-term, payday lending that actually offers fair terms to the consumer. So, while the word “disruption” is overused in Startup Land, LendUp has begun to create a service that seems like it could have real disruptive potential in the predatory world of payday lending. Find |
Snapchat Has A Patent That Could Help It Become The Defacto Camera App | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | While larger competitors struggle to , Snapchat could use a different weapon to be the first camera app opened: speed. And unlike filters, this one will be more difficult to copy. Snapchat has a patent, on its technology that allows the user to take a picture by tapping the camera button and a video by holding down the same camera button. Photos are simply taken by the tap, and videos end when you release the camera button, or after 10 seconds. The app always opens directly to the camera screen, and this single camera, single button for both photo and video makes capturing moments simple and very fast. Vine’s recording interface is most similar, and is also quite quick, but it only does video. By comparison, to move from photo to video in Instagram, you have to hit the video button, wait for the camera to shutter for a few seconds, move to a new screen, then press and hold to record. In Poke, Facebook’s Snapchat clone, you have to select camera or video camera before you see the capture screen; and, again, there’s loading time for the camera to open before you can capture something. Even in the standard iPhone camera app, you have to slide the dial from camera to video, wait for the camera to shutter for a couple seconds, then shoot. Figure 2 of the patent shows the processing operations behind Snapchat’s photo and video taking apparatus. This might seem like a trivial difference, but waste a couple seconds to switch to video or to wait for your camera app to load and the moment you were hoping to capture could be over. The patent could also help Snapchat settle a pesky lawsuit. Frank Reginald “Reggie” Brown is currently suing Snapchat and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy; Brown claims he was a co-founder of the company and was forced out by Spiegel and Murphy. In a , Brown alleges: “In addition, at this time [summer of 2011], Brown undertook the responsibility of drafting and filing a patent application for the technology used in the Application, which named Brown and the Individual Defendants as co-investors. Brown prepared the patent application and filed it with the United States Patent Office on behalf of the joint venture/partnership.” As , this original patent led to a major argument: “There was a big argument over patent filing,” the first source tells me. “Then there was a huge fight where each person said terrible things about the other and then Spiegel changed the passwords and Reggie just sat and waited to file…it was something to do with who’s name was listed first. Literally a pointless argument. The bigger thing was what happened after. I really don’t think the patent ended up being a problem. It’s pretty much just a fight between friends and people calling each other out. Not much basis for why they actually had a big split up.” Nearly a year later, in August 2012, Spiegel and Murphy filed this patent. Until recently, patent searches for Brown, Spiegel, Murphy, Snapchat, and even the company’s early names like Picaboo and Toyopa Group, came up with nothing. A representative from the United States Patent Office tells me an “inventor can ask for an application not to be published at all until the patent is actually issued.” The patent eventually gets abandoned if it is never issued. The representative noted that if an application has multiple inventors, any of them can file a non-publication request. A lawyer from the firm Lee, Tran & Liang, Brown’s representatives, confirmed the statement in the February 2013 complaint, but could not comment further due to the nature of the ongoing case. |
Instagram Hit 5 Million Video Uploads Within 24 Hours | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Judging by the massive spike in (and ) and in our Instagram feeds following the debut of their new video functionality, it certainly seemed like a successful launch. Now, thanks to some stats that the team just shared with us, we know exactly how well it did right out of the gate. In the first 24 hours after the switch was flipped, Instagram saw uploaded. That’s a jaw-droppingly huge number for any day one feature, but remember: Instagram have 130 million users. Even if we assume that each of the 5 million videos came from a unique user (an absolutely wild assumption, of course), that works out to around 3.8% of Instagram’s userbase giving the new feature a spin. In the first 8 hours alone, Instagram saw roughly a year’s worth of content uploaded. Curiously, their biggest spike in traffic didn’t come right after launch — instead, it was a few hours later, when the Miami Heat won Game 7 of the NBA Finals. At that point, they were seeing almost 40 hours of videos uploaded For comparison’s sake, Vine’s 13 million users upload a collective 1 million videos per day. |
Scrooser Is A Motorized Scooter From The Future | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | The unfortunately-named Scrooser (the creators are from Dresden so maybe it sounds better in German) is actually surprisingly cool. It looks like a standard, two-wheel kick scooter but actually has a motor built in and it can go about 15 miles per hour on a good day. The has been running for 19 days and is already at $43,000. The Scrooser itself can be yours for $3,950. It’s obviously quite pricey but it looks like it could be a fun way to get around town. It has a range of 20 miles. The design of the Scrooser is quite unique and compact. The batteries are under the footboard and the motor is in the rear wheel. Quoth the creators: While seeing grown men on scooters is always comical, this powerful hybrid could make scooting cool again… maybe.
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YouTube To Live Stream Wimbledon Matches For The First Time | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | YouTube has been getting deeper into lately and today, Google’s online video site that it will live-stream the Wimbledon tennis tournament, too. The company says YouTube will stream “the key moments of the tennis, interviews, behind the scenes and press conferences” throughout the two-week tournament. The coverage, which will be sponsored by Rolex, will be available on the , starting Monday, June 24. The Wimbledon channel debuted in 2006, and this year marks the tournament’s first foray into live-streaming the matches. The coverage will be available “anywhere YouTube Live is available.” There are some geographic restrictions, though. The live video and full broadcast will be restricted to the U.S., Canada, South America (except Brazil), the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus and New Zealand. Highlights will be available globally except for the U.K., the U.S., South America, Germany, Austria and Italy. All other content will be available on a global basis. As Google tells me, tennis is about as popular as baseball on YouTube , but both are still well behind soccer. Currently some of the most popular sports channels on YouTube that stream live video include the UFC’s and WWE’s channels, but YouTube has also recently streamed major soccer tournaments, cricket matches and similar sporting events with a worldwide audience. Given that YouTube offers live streaming in its mobile apps, as well as through Google TV and its web-based “ ” experience, this actually puts YouTube in direct competition with the traditional TV broadcasters that generally had a lock on major sporting events coverage. |
Adobe Photoshop CC Proves That The Cloud Isn’t A Cure-All Refuge From Software Piracy | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Adobe released Photoshop CC this week, as part of its Creative Cloud-only revamp of the entire Creative Suite of software products it offers. The new version of Photoshop offers some exclusive new features, which I’ve covered previously, but the cloud-based and subscription nature of the program were seen by many as a way of counteracting the rampant piracy that greets each new edition of Adobe’s software. Fast-forward a couple of days, and Photoshop is encountering the same old problems it has always had, thanks to a . The pirated version has some trade-offs like a lack of cloud-based functionality tied to creative portfolio network and , as well as other CC services, but it’s functional enough for most. So is Adobe’s grand cloud experiment a failure, at least in terms of deterring pirates? Yes and no. On the one hand, Adobe is shifting more of its services and feature to the cloud, which is accessible only with a legit subscription. and add to that the fact that it’s actually much easier now to just sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription than to go through the often complex process of installing a pirated copy of software. Adobe’s David Wadhwani recently and said that that’s more where their energy is focused in terms of discouraging product theft, in fact. Adobe has never played up or even talked much about the benefits of going with a subscription-based model for its creative suite products in terms of piracy prevention, so it’s hard to say specifically that that’s what they were trying and that those efforts have been thwarted with the rapid breaking of Photoshop CC’s DRM. But it’s worth an Ian Malcolm-esque “Piracy, uh, finds a way” to observe just how fruitless the subscription shift has been in terms of changing at least how easy it was to make Photoshop available to those who’d secure it by nefarious means. The cloud might not be a cure-all, but Adobe’s right that it can build in additional, cloud-based functionality that will forever remain off-limits to pirates, and convenience is a huge factor for those who do have the money to pay for products like Photoshop but simply opt not to. The other big promise of CC is that it will be subject to frequent updates to address just do its (JDIs) to improve features and address nagging issues, and that kind of stuff might not make it through to pirated versions, so it’s early yet to say definitively what kind of impact going all-subscription will have on long-term piracy rates. |
Thankful Registry Is A Wedding Gift Registry For Thoughtful Couples | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Registries present an etiquette quandary for engaged couples. Open one at a major retailer, fill it with and you end up looking greedy (how many newlywed couples really need a gravy boat?). Skip the registry, and you risk receiving multiple toasters. tackles that problem by re-imagining registries as a way for couples to sign up for a thoughtful selection of items while connecting with their guests. Bootstrapped by founder Kathy Cheng, Thankful Registry launched three months ago. Cheng worked with Web design studio to set the tone of the site. Each wedding registry features a full-bleed photo of the affianced pair and a personal message. Instead of the sterile lists seen in most wedding registries, photos of potential gifts are arranged like a catalog into categories such as “delicious,” “play” and “nest.” Items can be chosen from different vendors, separating the registry from big-box retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond that derive a large portion of their sales . Once shoppers select an item, they are taken to the vendor’s order form pre-filled with the couple’s shipping information. Though there are other sites, like and , catering to couples who want to avoid retailer registries, Cheng says she drew on her design background to set Thankful Registry apart from its competitors by honing its elegant and simple user interface. “I focused less on adding a bunch of features just for the sake of having features and more on the tone of the brand because I feel that in the wedding space, people are looking for something that draws them in emotionally,” says Cheng, a senior copywriter for consulting firm . “Everyone else is about creating a wishlist and convenience.” Cheng, who started brainstorming Thankful Registry three years ago, says she likes to take her time finding the perfect present and found shopping her friends’ wedding registries frustratingly impersonal. “I consider myself a pretty okay gift-giver and it wasn’t cutting it. I was disappointed. I also felt that couples felt obligated to add things to their registries,” says Cheng. “Our site looks modern, it doesn’t look greedy. I thought, gifts are as much about the giver as they are the couple.” “Couples put so much time into their weddings, but the true touchpoint that guests see outside of the actual wedding day are invitations and wedding registries,” she adds. “We don’t say things like ‘register for whatever you want’ because you don’t want guests to spend their time and heart picking out a gift that ends up just being returned for cash.” With their gift registries independent from major retailers, Thankful Registry’s couples can add items from any site, allowing them to support smaller vendors. One couple, for example, registered for handcrafted Japanese cutlery. “I am surprised at the retailers they pick sometimes. They are usually not retailers who are heavily represented in the wedding registry sector,” says Cheng. Though Cheng expected almost all of the site’s users to come from the U.S., couples from different countries, including the U.K., Norway and Australia, have signed up, and she plans to make the site friendlier for international couples by making the content less U.S.-centric. Thankful Registry is free for a one week trial, after which couples pay a $30 fee, and Cheng says it currently has a 24% conversion rate. The site also makes revenue by participating in Amazon’s affiliate program. Cheng’s next step is to create a baby gift registry with the same low-key approach as Thankful Registry, as well as versions of the site for other life milestones, including birthdays and graduations. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Instagram Video, Samsung Stuff, And MakerBot | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | Instagram It be better than Vines. Samsung a bunch of computers and cameras and phones with strange names. That was fun. And of course, 3D printing sweetheart to Stratasys. It’s been a long, crazy, eventful week, and we’re here to discuss it with you on the , featuring John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, Chris Velazco, and a touch of Matt Burns. Enjoy, folks!
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Malaysia Is Poorly Marketed To Entrepreneurs, Says 500 Durians’ Khailee Ng | Victoria Ho | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Malaysia is an easy place to get cheap, good, English-speaking talent, with overheads that are often far lower than in more advanced markets in Southeast Asia. But it continues to suffer the effects of brain drain. Simply put, Malaysia isn’t cool to be in for some of the nation’s brightest, and this has hurt its startup scene, according to Khailee Ng. Ng, who is from Malaysia, was recently as venture partner for Southeast Asia. The Silicon Valley VC also set Ng up with a shiny new $10 million microfund for the region. (The SEC-filing was called .) Ng was speaking to a roomful of Malaysian startups and the 500 Startups’ delegation that is currently traveling . When I spoke to him on the sidelines of the conference, he said Malaysia has all the makings of a ripe scene to be picked, but he has been watching in dismay as startups flocked to larger, far less Internet-penetrated countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. And Malaysia often gets outshone by its smaller neighbor to the South, Singapore, where plenty of large corporations have set up shop, and seed funding is readily available, backed by . Malaysia’s situation is the result of an under-marketed set of funding from the government, plus a syndrome where none of its successful entrepreneurs are keen to let others know about them, said Ng. Some government funds that have been around for a decade already. “Nobody knows they exist, or there are misconceptions that it’s hard to get, or there are bureaucratic hoops to jump through,” he said. For example, the Cradle fund offers up to $160,000 (RM500,000) in seed funding to projects that are younger than three-years-old. Other non-government-linked funds that have just been set up within this year include $10 million from , Group, and $5 million from the Asia Venture Group. Ng also said that people are often surprised to find that some of the largest tech companies to IPO in the region are from Malaysia. According to a ranking of publicly-listed companies taken about a year ago, Jobstreet had a market cap of $268.2 million, iProperty Group had $178.2, My EG Services had $151.7 and iCar Asia had $56 million. The fifth in the list was the only one not from Malaysia, and was Singapore-based Asiatravel.com, at $40.4 million, he said. He said the local scene also needs more experienced professionals coming in. “There’s nothing wrong with fresh grads, but sometimes you get one or two guys who have either had a failed startup, or one of those McKinsey, Accenture guys, and you can really feel things getting serious (in the startup),” he said. Copycats are also the reason why startups in the region need to think outside their home bases from day one, said Ng. While many often think they should conquer one market and slowly expand outwards, it’s often too late by the time the expansion happens. “Be in as many markets as you can afford to be from the beginning,” he said. The reason why many copycat models fail is not because transplanting models doesn’t work, but because execution is the main difference, he added. Operational excellence and being “super tight” can make or break a startup. “That’s why you get group-buying being crazy profitable in some markets, but bleeding in just the next country. Same model, right? It’s operational issues,” he said. Check out Ng’s . |
Samsung And Nokia Could Be Gearing Up For A Smartphone Camera War | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | So Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Mini and Galaxy S4 Active have officially made the leap from unimaginative rumors to unimaginative reality, which leaves only one oft-rumored version of the popular smartphone left unaccounted for — the curious S4 Zoom. As the name sort of implies, this Galaxy variant is said to blur the line between smartphone and camera, and we may now be getting our first look at the thing. A set of images from both and purportedly show off the photo-centric S4 Zoom ahead of a big Samsung press event in London later this month. It’s hard to judge from the unflattering angles, but these images depict a device seems to be more camera than phone. The thickish frame, protruding lens obscuring a 16-megapixel sensor, and rounded butt are all design choices that are more reminiscent of point-and-shoots than they are of any standard smartphone. Too bad then that the supposed spec sheet that’s been attached to the S4 Zoom seems wimpy in comparison — that hefty sensor will supposedly be accompanied by a 4.3-inch qHD AMOLED display and a 1.6GHz dual-core processor. If the S4 Zoom is indeed the real deal — and at this point it just about seems like a lock — Samsung may find that it’s not alone in using smartphones as a platform to show off their camera prowess. Persistent rumors of a Nokia Windows Phone sporting one of the company’s mind-boggling PureView sensors have been floating around for now, and a handful of spurious “leaked” images of one such device (codenamed “EOS “)have been circulating these past days. Hell, just earlier this morning we were treated to what may be the smoking gun — a purported recording of the EOS’ gigantic rear camera pod blinking at us. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBaOuHMugb8&w=640&h=360] In case you missed the PureView hullabaloo from last year, Nokia’s EOS isn’t expected to feature the comparatively puny sensors seen in the company’s recent Windows Phones. No no, rumor has it that it will instead sport the same 41-megapixel camera sensor that first graced the chubby back in 2012. But I think there’s a bigger question here that hasn’t been adequately answered yet — who do these companies think we’ll buy these things? I suspect I may be in the minority on this one, but I’ve always though that the camera-first approach that some OEMs fiddle around with is just sort of silly. Yes, there’s definite value in being able to capture compelling shots on the run, but really: do people really care how good their photos look once quality inches past a certain threshold? After all, the way we visually memorialize things has changed since the dawn of smartphone epoch — most images don’t wind up printed and tucked away in photo albums any more. They get hastily MMSed to friends. They get marred by fugly filters and splayed up on Instagram. And in some cases (I’m looking at you Snapchat), the real value of these photos is knowing that they’ll quickly be lost to the ages, a pointed rejection of the archaic permanence of images chemically etched on dead tree material. Camera quality ranks pretty low on my list of criteria when it comes time to buy a new phone, and leaning too heavily on one aspect of a device could be… problematic to say the least. The closest thing Samsung has had to the S4 Zoom to date is the Galaxy Camera, and the company has never broken out Galaxy Camera sales for we hardware business dorks to dig into. Still, the device was hamstrung by carriers requiring customers to buy a data plan along with the thing (a Wi-Fi version was announced just two months ago). And while Nokia has kept its PureView numbers a closely guarded secret, enthusiasts have estimated that the Finnish phone company managed to sell as of Fall 2012. That’s a very solid number considering all the 808’s potential sticking points, and Nokia’s moving these days so Nokia must be hoping that PureView and Lumia are two great tastes that really do taste great together. Thankfully, we probably won’t have to wait much longer to see these two duke it out — while the S4 Zoom is expected to be outed this month, the EOS could see the light of day . |
NYT Claims Tech Giants Gave NSA Access To Private Data, Just Not “Direct Access” | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | The fog of confusion is slowly lifting and the facts surrounding the are becoming a little bit clearer. According to a , the tech companies that allegedly helped the government to spy on their people did indeed not provide a direct access back door to their servers. Instead, the New York Times report claims, they made it easier for the government and the companies, including Microsoft, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and Paltalk, “to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests.” In some instances, the report says, the companies did change their computer systems to do so. Google and Facebook, for example, apparently discussed plans to build “secure portals” that would allow a government agency to request data, which the companies would then upload to these servers for the government to retrieve. That sounds a little bit like a from an espionage novel, but some variation of these rooms has in telco switching centers in the physical world. The report also details one instance where an agent installed software on one of the company’s servers (which one isn’t clear) and used it to download data to a laptop for “several weeks.” Just like the original report claims, real-time access is apparently also an option. All of this, of course, doesn’t immediately with the company’s that they had any knowledge of this. The New York Times argues that the employees who were handling this information were likely not allowed to discuss their work – though it’s unclear how all of this would go unnoticed inside a company like Google or Facebook. |
Doublespeak Denials Of PRISM Hid The Truth About Participation | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | “Direct Access” didn’t mean no access. “Back door” didn’t mean no door. “Only in accordance with the law” didn’t mean PRISM is illegal. And you didn’t need to have heard of a codename to have participated. Larry, Zuck, you didn’t spell out your denials of the NSA’s data spying program in plain English, and now we know why. You were obligated to help the government in its spying, but were muzzled. [ : This article and its headline have been edited, see explanation below.] you knowingly participated in the NSA’s data monitoring program. In some cases, “a locked mailbox and give the government the key”, to allow it to peer into private communications and web activity. Even if the exact words of your denials were accurate, they seemed to obscure the scope of your involvement with PRISM. Outlining as clearly as possible exactly what kind of data the government could attain would have gone a long way. But you were probably cornered by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act restrictions about what you could say about PRISM. And in fact, you might have beeen subtly trying to fight back by asking the government for more transparency. When you decode Mark’s statement “We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe”, I hear “Our hands are cuffed. Only the government can reveal that we participated. We wish they would.” Sadly, you really were working with the NSA to give it access to our private data, so your supposedly candid statements full of technicalities just broke our hearts, as the truth has come to light. The . Direct access means unrestricted access with no intermediary, but the government didn’t need to be standing in the server rooms to get what it wanted. A back door means access to data without its host’s knowledge or consent, but you were well aware of the NSA’s snooping. The NSA’s actions are likely protected by law, so saying you’re only honoring prying that’s legal didn’t mean no prying. And why would the government tell you the juicy codename or details of its data spying program? All it had to say is it needed your data. Now these excuses ring hollow. The average citizen doesn’t know the difference. They heard “we didn’t help the NSA”, and you did, so their trust in you has disintegrated. That’s a threat to your business, and our way of life. I like that all my friends use Google Docs. I like that I can invite any of my friends to a Facebook Event. Seeing them ditch the building blocks of the web you’ve developed because they don’t believe anything you say anymore will be a great inconvenience. And that inconvenience pales in importance to the actual liberty PRISM strips away from us. Then again, your silence would have been taken as an admission of guilt. What an awful position our government put you in. [Update 12:45am PST 6/8/13: This article and its headline have been edited as I think the title “Doublespeak Denials Of Prism Participation Were Careful Lies” went a bit far. The execs weren’t lying, but by denying specifics rather than discussing their participation in PRISM on a high level, I think they obscured their involvement. However, their companies are legally required to provide private information requested by the government, and were legally restricted in how they could explain the process, so I feel the blame rests more on the NSA than the tech giants. For more information, read my follow-up “ “] |
The Deep Space Tourbillon Is A One-Off, Handmade Watch That Will Take You To Infinity And Beyond | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | As you may well know, the is one of the hardest (and most expensive) complications to build and only the very rich and very obsessed can afford them. This watch, however, may be just the ticket if you’re a hardcore Trekkie and you just hit a liquidity event. The Deep Space Tourbillon is made by and is supposed to look like the Deep Space Nine station from Star Trek. The tourbillon – essentially a rotating balance wheel – is suspended between two gears in the movement and the whole thing has a very steampunk meets Spockpunk vibe. It has a large domed crystal and 46mm case. It is a triple axis toubillon, which makes it extra hard to make and quite unique. Before you place your order, you should be aware that Halter’s work is often amazing in theory but difficult to build in practice. You should also note that this thing will cost $200,000 when complete and it appears that it has . As we know too well, fools and their money are soon parted and sci-fi fans with money are the most . Regardless, it’s a cool piece with a surprising pedigree and enough geek cred to convince me that Khan shot first. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nWh4y2gxMGM] |
Following Google’s Lead, Zuckerberg Says Facebook Isn’t Giving Govt “Direct Access” Either | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Mark Zuckerberg has just taken to Facebook to to the accusations that Facebook is involved in PRISM, an alleged secret government program that gives the government access to user information, denying that Facebook has ever given any government “direct access” to its servers. This comes just hours after to the unfolding events regarding , which reportedly allows the NSA and FBI access to the servers and user information of multiple major US tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. Zuck’s response isn’t that different from Larry Page’s: I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM: Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday. When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law. We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure. We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It’s the only way to protect everyone’s civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term. The post has over 56,000 likes at the time of writing. It’s worth noting that the wording in Page’s statement and Zuckerberg’s statement is very similar. Just check out the Doc in this tweet from Alex Madrigal: Here's a Google doc with the Page and Zuckerberg denials: Similar passages are bolded. — Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) their participation, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Dropbox, PalTalk, and Aol. Five out of eight of those companies denied giving “direct access” to servers to any government agencies. At least half of them have said “they never heard of PRISM”. Page and Zuckerberg both said verbatim that they hadn’t heard of PRISM “until yesterday”. The here is just one floating and possible theory. The other is that the domino effect was necessary. Once one company denies participation (regardless of the truth, which we clearly are right now), the rest must follow suit. |
Who’s Telling The Truth About PRISM? Computer Security Expert Gene Spafford Weighs In [TCTV] | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | So we were pleased today to have the chance to speak with , aka “ ,” a computer science professor and a noted expert in computer security and ethics whose C.V. includes time serving , to help elucidate what’s going on here — and perhaps point us in the direction of the truth here. It was a wide-ranging conversation, and Spaf is a very thoughtful and knowledgeable source on this, so I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing. But I wanted to pull out one bit of what Dr. Spafford said regarding the timing of this whole situation, starting at about minute 10:18: “I think there are several things here that are interesting about this. The first is, in the last three days we’ve seen three highly classified bits of information that were at the center of stories broken by the in England, all involving highly classified U.S. documents. That indicates that there is potentially some very significant leak of someone who is violating their oath, who is disclosing information that is protected by law, and is undoubtedly going to be raising the ire of law enforcement, intelligence, government agents throughout the U.S. because they don’t now what else may be leaked. This is a major problem, it is likely to provoke a significant backlash. It raises some questions about the veracity of the information. I find the timing interesting that all of this is being released on the days that the president is and the major topic of discussion was supposed to be the us complaining about surveillance and cyber attacks by the Chinese. One of the things in security is that there are no coincidences. So one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some political motive, and who’s really behind this, if in fact there is a real story.” There’s so much more where that came from, and you can see it all in the video embedded above. |
After Picking Up ExactTarget, Salesforce Buys Enterprise Business Intelligence And Analytics Startup EdgeSpring | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Salesforce is on a bit of an acquisition spree this week. After purchasing marketing software company ExactTarget for , the sales SaaS giant has announced the purchase of an enterprise business intelligence and analytics startup. Though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, this is likely a smaller acquisition for Salesforce. EdgeSpring last month, raising $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. The EdgeSpring platform accelerates the building of analytics applications that parse business intelligence data like sales, financials and more. The company wants to allow businesses to derive insights from data of any size or structure. EdgeSpring says it enables applications to answer first and second order questions across structured and semi-structured data. CEO and co-founder Vijay Chakravarthy, who previously worked at Salesforce, explained in May that part of EdgeSpring’s secret sauce is in its patent-pending technology. The core of the platform is built around EdgeMart, a powerful data store, and the Lens Framework, a dynamic visualization engine. He writes on the company’s site, announcing the acquisition: “Over the past two and a half years, we at EdgeSpring have built up a strong team and executed on bringing a next-generation decision-making platform to market. Business Intelligence and Analytics in the enterprise is a massively painful and IMHO still largely unsolved problem today. Being a part of Salesforce.com will give us a tremendous opportunity to take our technology to the next level and deliver truly amazing innovation to solve this high value problem. Having worked at salesforce.com once before, I am also excited to be (re)joining a company that shares the values that we hold true here at EdgeSpring: being strongly customer centric and focused on bringing consumer-like ease of use to the enterprise.” Despite being in stealth, EdgeSpring was able to accumulate a number of high-profile customers, including AppSense, Demandbase, Docusign, EllieMae, Equinix, Hara, HighWire, Intacct, Lithium, Neustar, Pandora, SpruceMedia, and Xactly. It’s not surprising that Salesforce would be doubling down on business analytics and intelligence talent and software — no word yet on whether Salesforce will shut EdgeSpring down or continue to sell the technology. |
Ask A VC: Redpoint’s Chris Moore On What He Looks For In An Ad Tech Startup And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | In this week’s Ask A VC show, Redpoint partner joined us in the studio to discuss how he sources and spots promising startups, and more. Moore focuses on making investments for Redpoint in consumer internet, online marketing and SaaS companies, and has led Redpoint’s investment in Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), Right Media (acquired by Yahoo), Auditude (acquired by Adobe), and IntoNow (acquired by Yahoo). Considering the many successful exits Moore has helped startups navigate through (especially in the ad tech space), we asked him how he knows when a company has the potential to go public vs. stay private, and accept an acquisition offer. We also tackled a number of reader questions including whether he would rather invest in an entrepreneur who has previous experience working for a technology company in Silicon Valley. Tune in above for more! |
CAPTCHA Ad Startup Solve Media Says 2013 Revenue’s On-Track For $13M-$16M, Should Reach 4B Engagements | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | , a startup that , says that it’s growing quickly. There were more than 1 billion engagements with Solve’s Type-In ads last year, the company says. It will exceed that number in the second quarter of 2013 alone, and it should hit 4 billion for all of 2013. Solve also says that it’s on-track to bring in $13 million to $16 million in revenue for 2013. The technology takes advantage of all those CAPTCHAs we have to fill out to we’re verify that we’re not robots while using different online services. When a site is running a Type-In ad, instead of just forcing you to enter a random collection of letters and numbers, you’ll see an ad (it can be a display ad or a video) and be asked to type in a brand name or message instead. The publisher gets extra revenue and the advertiser gets the attention of consumers in way that’s supposed to deliver 6.7 times higher brand recall than standard ads. The company also runs a similar ad as a preroll before videos. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/15041038 w=400&h=300] “Soon we will release a mobile product that performs as well, from an effectiveness standpoint, as our desktop products,” CEO Ari Jacoby told me via email. “Our main goal this year is to remain number 1 on every campaign that we serve for performance. So far, so good.” Solve is also announcing that it’s opening an office in London, which it says is the first step in its plans for international expansion. |
Your Arduino Is In My Android Device! UDOO Mixes It Up With An All-In-One Solution | John Biggs | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | For most beginning hardware hackers, is hard and Linux/Android is easy. The folks at , a Kickstarter project that ends tonight, aim to solve that by mixing the best of both worlds. The UDOO device contains an ARM processor (dual or quad core) as well as an Arduino microprocessor. This allows you to program the Arduino using the tools you’re familiar with including a standard embedded Linux install and the associated command-line software. The UDOO contains both and ARM cortex-A9 CPU and the hardware on a . This includes 54 digital I/O pins, an optional SATA connection, and a number of other pin-outs and connectors. This part of the board allows users to add all of the shields and accessories associated with the highly evolved Arduino environment to the equally evolved Linux and Android environments. Think of it as a Raspberry Pi you can upgrade. The UDOO also includes a Wi-Fi module, USB ports, and 1GB RAM. The dual core model costs $109 while the quad core costs $129. They’ve already surpassed their funding goal with 25 hours to go. It looks like a great way to harness the power of Arduino using tools that geeks know and love. It is, as they say, two great tastes that taste great together thanks to complex interoperability and a rabid fan base for both platforms.
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Twilio Raises A $70M Series D As They Consider An IPO | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Twilio, the company whose APIs help developers easily add SMS, voice, and VoIP functionality to their applications, has closed a Series D round of $70M dollars. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, and backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. As part of the deal, Redpoint’s Scott Raney will be joining the company’s board of directors. not quite sure what Twilio does? Let’s say you’re building a service that sends its users a daily text with . Between dealing with carriers and SMS gateways, sending texts programatically is… actually pretty challenging. Twilio turns it into a single line of code, in exchange for about 1¢ per text sent or received. For most things a developer could want to do over a phone line — be it SMS, voice calling, or VoIP — Twilio can handle the vast majority of the grunt work with just a few simple API calls. Think this news sounds familiar? We actually broke the news that Twilio was in talks to raise a big Series D . I’d reported then that the company was aiming to raise $50M, which Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson confirmed to me yesterday was in fact their original goal. “We thought we’d raise somewhere between $35M and $50M,” he said, “but in the end, interest proved to be a bit higher than we expected.” Prior to this round, Twilio had raised $33.5M dollars, making this round alone over twice the size of the company had raised before. Twilio is currently made up of just over 160 employees, with the company having just moved into a bigger office — an old paper/textile factory they retrofitted when they couldn’t find a big enough space in the city — last month. So what’s next? In my previous post on this round, I bet that Twilio was heading towards an IPO. While he wouldn’t positively confirm it, Lawson did say that the company “doesn’t expect to need to raise another round”, and that an IPO would be “the next logical step”. |
Google: There Is No PRISM Back Door To Our Servers, No Open-Ended Access To User Data | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | All of the companies that are allegedly involved in the have now issued short statements saying that they are not in this program and that they are not allowing the government “direct access” to their servers. Among these, of course, is Google. The company, however, also just issued a penned by its CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond. In it, Page and Drummond argue, just like in the company’s shorter statement, that Google does not give the U.S. government “direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers.” Indeed, just like Apple, Google claims that it “had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.” Google also argues that it had never heard of a broad type of order like the one Verizon apparently received and which led to the release of millions of call records. “Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received — an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist,” Page and Drummond write. Most importantly, though, Google continues to argue that it is not providing the government with “open-ended access to [its] users’ data.” “Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period,” they claim. The two also use this opportunity to stress that the company frequently pushes back when it does receive legal requests for data and that, in their view, “this episode confirms what we have long believed—there needs to be a more transparent approach.” What exactly this approach would look like, Page and Drummond don’t go into here, but they do note that “the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.” |
iOS 7, OS X 10.9, MacBooks And iRadio: What To Expect At WWDC 2013 | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Apple is set to deliver its WWDC keynote address on Monday June 10, and there are bound to be a lot of new things revealed on that day. The exact details remain shrouded in mystery, but as with every major Apple event, there have been lots of leaks and rumors leading up to this one, so we can at least sketch in broad terms what we’re likely in for next week. I’m leading with Apple’s streaming music service, which is probably freshest in most people’s minds if you’ve been following the news today. That’s because the service (which may or may not actually be called “iRadio”) is now likely a done deal with all the major record labels, which should make it possible for Apple to preview it next week, though we’ll likely have to wait a few months for a general consumer release. Apple’s iRadio service is supposedly a lot like Pandora, but with some added tricks, like the ability to pull from a user’s existing music library in order to offer up better, more personalized streaming content. The service is similar to Genius, according to , but uses tracks from the entire iTunes catalog, not just those in a user’s library, and offers an easy method for iOS users to simply purchase tracks they hear with a tap directly through iTunes. Typically, DMCA streaming radio does not permit track skipping, but this may be a feature of iRadio, depending on how Apple’s negotiations with labels went. iRadio will be free, if reports prove true, and instead make revenue for Apple and its music partners via advertising. That will likely take the form of audio ads that come up in the radio stream after a certain amount of tracks are played, according to . Apple’s iOS 7 has been the talk of the town for a while now, ever since reports back in early April suggested that Apple was planning a significant overhaul of the user interface, and that has been echoed in numerous reports ever since, including more recent information brought to light by 9to5Mac. Apple’s design guru Jony Ive is said to be taking the helm of the redesign, which is interesting because he’s an industrial designer, not a graphic designer, but the result is said to be a scaled back, simplified UI that embraces flat design principles in favor of textures that mimic real-world materials like canvas and aluminum. A that surfaced today suggests we’ll see something clean and simple. For the system itself, Apple is said to be including additional hooks for social network sign-in, including Flickr for photos and Vimeo for video, each of which will be accessible via the Settings app in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are currently available. Another new feature could be AirDrop, Apple’s easy file-sharing service introduced recently to OS X. That could be an amazing way to move files easily between desktops and mobile devices, especially for users who otherwise might have to resort to email or something. Apple CEO Tim Cook also suggested that we’d see Apple begin to open up more APIs for developers to take more advantage of additional system and device features, but the extent of just how far things will go isn’t known, though . We’ve also heard from a source that Apple might introduce blocking features for some of its own on-device services including iMessage and the phone app. This is something , too. It’s not something we’ve been able to reliably confirm, but it’s a possibility for either this version of iOS or one in the future, and it’s something that would definitely go further in terms of making iMessage feel like a proper competitor to third-party products in the same vein. We’ll see this released as a beta for developers at WWDC, with a full launch likely to follow in fall alongside new iPhone (and potentially iPad) hardware. This will be named after a big cat, but we don’t know which one yet. The changes we’ve seen rumored so far include mostly minor tweaks, like a new fullscreen mode that doesn’t render other displays completely useless, and tabs and tags added to Finder to make it more complete. For a preview of what this new Finder might look like, check out advanced . These are minor changes that might only be appreciated by a small subset of OS X users, but those who do appreciate them will find them very welcome. Other changes to OS X include stuff under the hood for developers that will allow them to exploit some of these new power user features, and some reports indicate that Apple wants to bring more iOS into OS X, including via app multi-tasking and switching features that concentrate more on allowing apps to move into the background and take up fewer system resources. We’ll likely see OS X 10.9 arrive later in the year, but developers stand a good chance of getting access at the WWDC event, possibly immediately following the keynote. Apple isn’t supposed to be doing much in the way of hardware, but we’ve seen lots of reports that suggest at least some Macs will get updates at the event. The MacBook Pro with Retina display and the MacBook Air are two specific example, and there’s a chance (albeit a more remote one) that says we’ll see a new Mac Pro unveiled at WWDC, too. New Mac notebooks are almost a sure thing, with retail sources reporting stock shortages, and 9to5Mac saying there are new SKUs showing up indicating at least . The new Macs will likely all boast Haswell chips from Intel, as that company announced the new processors just this week, and other hardware upgrades could include full-HD FaceTime webcams, dual-mics on the MacBook Air to match those introduced in the Retina MacBook Pro, and possibly faster Wi-Fi chips that support new breakneck 802.11ac networking speeds. If we do see those speeds added, it’s likely we’ll see Apple’s routers also updated to support that, too. The new Mac Pro is a more remote possibility, but Apple has been doing a lot to talk up recently, alongside reports that we’ll see it made in the U.S. as well. Apple has confirmed it will be making a Mac in the U.S. this year, but it hasn’t said it’ll definitely be the Mac Pro. Still, the machine has languished for a long time now, receiving no significant update since July 2010 (it got a processor bump in 2012, but mostly because the part it was using before was probably being discontinued). As for availability, expect new Macs to go on sale later in June if they are announced at WWDC, as Apple usually spreads out the ship date a little from the event itself when it debuts new Macs at these events. Apple could announce all of the above, or just some of it at WWDC next week, but it probably still has at least one or two surprises up its sleeve. Will we see a new iPhone? Indications are pretty strong that we won’t. But still be sure to stay tuned as we bring you live coverage of everything they do announce, and hands-on impressions of new software and hardware they make available. |
null | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 6 | 21 | null |
Airport Car Rental Startup Silvercar Ramps Up Expansion, With Plans For 7 Cities By Year-End | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Airport car rental startup has increased the number of markets it hopes to launch in by the end of the year, as it seeks to more aggressively make its services available to more potential customers. Now available at three airports, it hopes to add a fourth by the end of the month, and expects to be in seven different markets by the end of 2013. I’ve been covering Silvercar almost since its launch, and even got a chance to try it out for myself several months ago.* The idea behind the service is that it provides a online or via mobile phone. The app works by offering users a mobile app for booking, unlocking, and powering services while renting the car. Silvercar offers one make and model of automobile — the Audi A4 — which simplifies the process of stocking inventory and renting out cars. Since it doesn’t have to handle multiple different classes of vehicle, customers don’t have to worry about different prices of rentals or trying to find just the right car. Having one type of vehicle also makes opening up at new airports extremely easy for the startup. Well, . It still needs to deal with finding space near whichever airport it hopes to launch in, you know, a place to stage inventory and have customers pick up their cars. In its launch market at Dallas/Fort Worth, Silvercar is part of the airport’s ConRAC (consolidated rental car facility). At launch, the idea was that it would gradually introduce services in other ConRACs over time. But there was a problem with that model — openings in those facilities only pop up every now and then, which means that Silvercar’s ability to expand was limited by external forces. Starting in Austin, Silvercar began testing a way to get around that problem. To make its cars available there, it found space a few minutes near the airport to house its cars. From a user experience perspective, in airports that don’t have ConRACs, customers are able to hit a button once their planes have landed to indicate that they’ve arrived. They then get picked up by a Silvercar employee in a courtesy car, who drives the customer to the nearby lot. Once there, they pick the car they want, scan it with the mobile app, and are on their way. The service was sold out during SXSW and led the company to keep a presence there. After that success, the company decided to make cars available at Dallas Love Field as well. But it’s looking to move outside of Texas and expects its service to launch in another (unnamed) market by the end of this month. When we first talked to Silvercar about its expansion plans, the company was targeting one new airport each quarter. Now it’s looking to expand into two per quarter. With three airports now and half a year ahead of it, that means it’ll probably be in seven by the end of the year. Silvercar raised $11.5 million in series A funding led by Austin Ventures, with participation from CrunchFund, SV Angel, Chris Dixon, and Dave Morin. ==
* Disclosures galore: Silvercar is a CrunchFund portfolio company. That’s important because CrunchFund was started by Michael Arrington, also founder of this website. That test drive of my Silvercar rental at Dallas-Fort Worth back in January was partially paid for by the company. Silvercar also sponsored our recent Austin meetup, offering us a few cars for use during the meetup in exchange for a table and branding at the event. |
After Quietly Launching Down South, NoChains Wants To Help You To Find The Best Cuisine In NYC | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | Picture this: you’re traveling somewhere new and when it comes time to eat you want to get a feel for some local flavors. You’re not going to want to chow down at the nearby Applebee’s in that sort of situation, which is why South Carolina native Rich Winley and Philadelphian Dan Mall whipped up an iOS app called — creatively enough — . NoChains has already soft launched in Austin, Texas and Winley’s native Greenville, SC, but the two-person team has just set their sights on a much more prominent target for their next public beta: New York. “We originally thought about going to the Bay Area, but it’s very noisy.” That, plus the sheer volume of restaurants in New York City and across the bridge in Brooklyn convinced the small team to set their sights on the East Coast instead. Winley admits there’s nothing wrong with chain restaurants, but when you’re out in a new place, chances are you don’t want to dine exclusively on familiar fare. And that’s the issue with services like Yelp, or so he says. They’ll show you exactly what eateries are within spitting distance, but hang out in certain parts of the city and you’re likely to see your list of results cluttered with repetitive names. Not so with NoChains — right now, the app plays home to menu data for hundreds of restaurants across the city, which works out to between 400,000 and 500,000 menu items that the service keeps track of. The team’s approach was a simple one: the founding team leaned heavily on Elance and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to feed those menu items and prices into the NoChains backend.
All that would mean very little if the app itself wasn’t terribly easy to mess around with (not to mention rather handsome). Once you’ve selected one of the four launch markets, you’re immediately taken to a landing screen that cycles through different recommendations for notable nearby eats. Hankering for something specific? A small slider with common food choices (think pizza, burgers, barbecue, fish, dessert) sit just below those rotating recommendations, as does a search bar to help accommodate your more esoteric desires. One touch brings up a map of local eateries too, in case you’re hungry enough to settle for whatever happens to be close by. The only real issue at this point is that the app is so new, there are very few user recommendations to be found for New York restaurants. It’s precisely that sort of social proof from native city-dwellers that will ultimately help NoChains become a trusted source for food recommendations, but the team still has a ways to go before it gets to that point. That said, there’s a strong case for using NoChains purely as a menu app for a large swath of the city’s restaurants (that’s how I’ve been using it these past few days), and as more people see that sort of value in it, the more likely they’ll stick around and drop hints about what’s good and what’s garbage. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Form 1 3D Printer, WWDC, And WWDC | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | If you’ve got that , look no further than this week’s . In it, we discuss the new which is meant to compete with the likes of MakerBot, as well as all the from Apple, including a revamped iOS 7, the , and even some new MacBooks? Maybe? John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington and Greg Kumparak discuss this and more below. Enjoy!
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If PRISM Is Real, Why Are All These Tech Companies Denying Participation? | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | . Even the U.S. government now acknowledges its existence. The question that remains unanswered, though, is how involved Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Paltalk and Facebook were. These companies are all named as “providers” on the original slides, including the dates the NSA started collecting data from them. The reporter with the most direct access to these documents, , has also now stated that the NSA had “direct access” to these company’s servers or seized this data from them. According to Greenwald, NSA agents even have real-time access to conversations and chats on Skype, Gmail and other platforms that are being targeted. We contacted every single one of the companies implicated on these slides, though, and all of them either denied having ever heard of the program and virtually all of them claim that they would never give any government “direct access” to their servers. The one line virtually all of them use is some variation of “we do not provide the government with direct access to our servers.” They all, however, say that they comply with court orders after scrutinizing the request. So we’re at an impasse here. The government acknowledges that PRISM exists, but the companies that are supposedly involved all say they’ve never heard of it. Greenwald says they are either giving the government direct access or the government simply seized the data from them. If these companies aren’t giving the government direct access, could they give it “indirect access?” That way, the statements remain technically valid. Assuming these companies knew about the program, they obviously wouldn’t be . One suggestion I’ve seen floating around is that all Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Co. would have to do is give the government access to their networks and let the NSA copy all of this data. Or they could send their users’ data to the NSA, too, but given that the leak seems to imply real-time access, that seems unlikely. The way things stand right now, it seems the NSA has deals in place with these companies — deals they can’t talk about — that allow the government to tap into their traffic (maybe at a large ) and route it through one of the NSA’s for storage and analysis. If everybody but the U.S. government is denying knowledge of this program, something is clearly wrong. There are still 37 pages of this 41 page presentation that haven’t leaked. Hopefully we get to see those in the near future, and maybe that’ll shed some light on these tech companies’ exact roles in this program. : It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers. |
Despite Naming Coincidence, Palantir Says It’s Not Part Of PRISM Program | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 6 | 7 | It’s unwise to postulate that, because big data and security startup , that it’s somehow culpable. And, in an to the Financial Times’ Tim Bradshaw, Palantir has now refuted that exact claim. “Palantir’s is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name. Prism is Palantir’s name for a data integration technology used in the Palantir Metropolis platform (formerly branded as Palantir Finance). This software has been licensed to banks and hedge funds for quantitative analysis and research.” The startup explains that the Prism software in question is for banks, not for government — though it does count the NSA as a client for other products. YCombinator partnet Garry Tan has backed up this statement, that he helped build the team and code Palantir Prism Palantir Finance in 2006. Here is Palantir’s : “Prism is a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases into Palantir. Specifically, it lets you build high-performance based providers without writing any code. Instead, you define simple configuration files and then Palantir automatically constructs the data provider and database code for you. This ensures that all data access goes through well tested, high-performance code paths. Also, you can iterate more quickly because you can modify and reload Prism-based data providers without restarting the server.” The Gawker story , because it is apparently already causing the startup on Hacker News; as mysterious as Palantir likes to play it, sometimes transparency assuages people’s greatest fear. Even if the startup were misleading us in its denial, and/or somehow involved in the government’s controversial program, it’s sort of a paradox: Let’s say someone was using Facebook to send nasty messages to random girls … Facebook’s fault or that person’s? You’re using the Internet to download kiddie porn, the Internet’s fault or yours? Software products are tools — Bludgeoned someone with a hammer, should ACE Hardware stop selling them? It’s the startup equivalent of the “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” argument. It’s a hard one. Check out Palantir co-founder explanation of what the company actually does, at , below: |
The Battle To Be First App Opened | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 6 | 9 | Competition is heating up in the on-demand transportation industry, but unlike other segments of the market, there’s no lock-in that keeps customers loyal to one service or another. Users looking for a way to get from one place to another seemingly only care about the cost, convenience and reliability of the service. With that in mind, services like Uber and Lyft aren’t fighting to be the only app people use necessarily, but they definitely want to be the first app passengers turn to when requesting a ride. With convenience and reliability becoming commoditized, the next battle will be waged based on price. Once upon a time, Uber was pretty much the if you needed a fast, reliable alternative to hailing a cab on the street or calling one of the local taxi dispatchers. It’s not surprising, then, that it charged a premium for that convenience and reliability. If you needed to be somewhere, it was worth it to pay a little bit more to know that a car was on its way and, well, how far away that car would be. Over the last few years, however, competitors have popped up with on-demand ride apps of their own. On the one hand there are apps like Hailo, which allow customers to use their phones to hail a taxi, rather than having to find one on the street or rely on a local dispatcher. And on the other hand, there were apps like Lyft, which rely on community, non-commercially licensed drivers to get passengers from point A to point B. In both cases, Uber’s competitors undercut its traditional black car prices by a significant margin. With convenience and reliability becoming commoditized, they’re competing on price instead. Of course, Uber hasn’t been sitting still since its lower-cost competitors have arrived. It, too, has been working on . In cities like New York, that means its own e-hail taxi service. And in San Francisco and some other cities, it’s moving forward with its own peer-to-peer ride-share offering as part of its UBERx service. But while UBERx’s prices are lower, they’re still above the typical cost of a Lyft or SideCar ride. That’s led some in the San Francisco Bay Area to switch. Anecdotally, I know a number of people who are active users of both services in San Francisco, but tend to open the Lyft app first when they need a ride. Price is a big reason for choosing one over the other. But the community aspect is another reason. Say what you will about the big pink mustaches on Lyft rides, or the obligatory fist bump when you enter the car of one of its drivers, but those things let users to know what kind of experience they can expect when they get into a Lyft. (Then again, it’s not for everyone — I know plenty of people who would prefer not to get into a conversation with their driver when requesting a ride.) For a while, even if those users opened the Lyft app first, there was no guarantee that there would be rides available. The startup went through some growing pains in San Francisco at the beginning of the year, as demand outstripped its supply. It seems like Lyft has gotten those problems mostly under control over the last few months, as it it has serving the city. Even still, there are times when an Uber will be available and a Lyft will not. In those cases, Uber wins the ride, but those cases are becoming rarer as Lyft removes its supply constraints and better positions its drivers. What happens if UBERx becomes cheaper than Lyft, though? That’s a scenario we will see play out soon, as Uber is poised to , according to a memo it sent its drivers last week. While lower fares will reduce the amount drivers will make per ride, Uber is betting that the increase in volume will more than make up for it. That’s a bet Uber likely feels comfortable making, in part because it has years of data to back it up. And it’s a bet that Uber can make in part because it has a diversified set of higher-priced services in UberBLACK and UberSUV that will be able to provide healthier margins even as it reduces fares on UBERx. Will that make it first app opened? Or maybe only app opened? You can be the guys at Uber sure hope so. |
What Android Has That iOS Has Not (Yet) | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 6 | 9 | Android is open and customizable. iOS is closed, designed for ease. But iPhone users are maturing, demanding more personalization, and Apple might give it to them at WWDC. At , Tim Cook said “I think you will see us open up more in the future, but not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience.” Here we’ll look at some Android options Apple could unlock for iOS. I agree with when he speaks of how the average smartphone user has matured. “The design of the iPhone software was entirely informed by the fact that this was a new experience. It needed training wheels. Look around you. We all get it now. iOS-style computing is no longer novel. The training wheels can now come off.” 2007 is very different from 2013 in terms of our mobile literacy, and it’s time iOS reflected that. Apple’s concern is likely that novice users might download and install an interface-changing app and not know how to remove it — “a bad experience.” Apple would need to determine how to reconfirm configuration changes with users such that veterans don’t get annoyed but newbies don’t get stuck. If it can strike the right balance, some new capabilities iOS users might gain include: The most commonly requested customization we hear from iOS users is the option to replace the default keyboard. Simply shrinking a typewriter keyboard down for a tiny touch screen may not be the most efficient way to type, especially one-handed. Android lets you replace the default tap-to-type version with third-parties keyboards like which learns how you type to predict your words, and the popular gesture typing keyboard. Advanced prediction and the ability to drag your finger between letters can drastically speed up communication. The iOS lock screen and home screen have begun to look quite static. With so many real-time feeds of information out there, from weather to finance to social, staring at wallpaper or a set of dead icons and folders buries information. Android lets you pull that data out from apps and splay it across your lock and home screens for value at a glance. While Apple has sought to make the iOS interface consistent, more experienced users would appreciate the ability to deviate to their own tastes. One under-appreciated advantage of Android is the ability to change the most basic part of a phone — the phone part. Apps can allow you to block certain numbers or entire area codes from calling you or send their calls straight to voicemail — handy for dealing with insistent telemarketers or ex-girl/boyfriends. You can set up custom Do Not Disturb modes that repond to calls or SMS with a pre-written text message. There’s even crowd sourced caller ID apps that pull in what other people have named numbers so you always know who’s calling. was a particularly powerful phone app mod who was rewarded for its innovation by being acquired by WhitePages. Mr. Number doesn’t even offer an iOS version because none of this functionality was allowed on iOS 6 or older. Update: Apple announced at WWDC that of specific numbers. Rather than opening up the ability to modify the Phone app for developers, Apple chose to build in limited blocking functionality itself. Launchers have long been a favorite of Android users, but brought the open / closed issue to the mainstream, demonstrating how your entire phone experience can be reskinned. Home lets you read the news feed from your lock screen, while others like , , and let you navigate through gestures, offer quick access to certain settings, and provide pre-made themes amongst other options. Android doesn’t erect boundaries between apps like iOS. Thanks to , apps can easily share information and content with each other so you can send a photo from one editing app to another. They can even run over the top of one another, like Facebook’s Chat Heads which overlays chat conversations on whatever app you’re currently using. On iOS, Chat Heads is trapped within the Facebook app. Android also lets you pick which app you’d like to default to for opening certain media types, or doing certain actions. My fellow writer Frederic calls for s and choose if we want to use Chrome as our default browser or Google Maps for default navigation. Sharing one device between many people is a huge pain on iOS. You all have to use the same instance of the operating system. That means frequent log-ins and outs of different apps, overlapping phone books, a shared camera roll, and big issues for parents who don’t want to let their kids meddle with their whole phone or tablet when they hand it over to let them play a game. Android lets each user customize their account to their liking. There are plenty of other personalization options on Android, including automation for scheduling tasks; quick controls for brightness, wifi, and airplane mode; the ability to track and manage your battery and data usage by restricting what certain apps can do; and SD cards for slotting in new data. Of course, Apple isn’t fond of just following so we’ll hopefully get some true innovation in iOS 7 at . But adding some of these features could unlock new opportunities for the developer community, attract more hardcore tech users, and let people feel like the Apple devices they carry everywhere are truly their own. |
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