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Facebook Eyeing Up A $10-$15M Acquisition Of India’s Little Eye Labs | Pankaj Mishra | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | We now have more details on Facebook’s , an Indian startup whose primary product is a software tool for analyzing Android apps’ performance. Multiple sources have told us that the two companies exchanged the term sheets few weeks ago, and that a final announcement could be made by mid-January. The deal size is expected to be in the range of $10-15 million. Overall, the Little Eye Labs acquisition fits right into in Facebook’s mobile ambitions, an area where it has lagged rivals like Twitter, despite having some 874 million of its 1.19 billion-strong (September figures) user base logged on via mobile devices. And Facebook has been on the lookout for startups that could potentially help it gain a greater foothold on mobile devices. As part of its aggressive mobile strategy, , a mobile-backend-as-a-service startup in April of this year. A Facebook acquisition of Little Eye Labs would mean a lot for an Indian startup that’s less than one-and-a-half years old, and it would mean much more for the , where acquisitions of this profile have been tough to come by. While exploring potential acquirers, Little Eye Labs also pitched to Twitter, but Facebook seemed to offer a better deal, another source added. One of the sources who shared some details about this proposed acquisition said that if the deal closes, most of the Little Eye Labs’ founding team will move to Facebook’s U.S. headquarters, and work there as part of the mobile engineering team. Little Eye Labs caught the attention of potential acquirer(s) in , where the startup was refining its product along with 20 other companies. Gaurav Lochan, who joined Little Eye labs from India’s largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, earlier this year, to say about using the startup’s tool for fixing a bug in Google’s official I/Q app at the event. Flipkart, was also the first customer for Little Eye Labs. Kumar Rangarajan, co-founder of Little Eye labs, had even earlier this month, after reports of the acquisition first surfaced. However, Rangarajan could not be reached at the time of publication. A Facebook spokesperson, who had earlier declined to offer any comments, has also not responded. The Little Eye founders — Kumar Rangarajan, Satyam Kandula, Lakshman Kakkirala and Giridhar Murthy, all worked together previously at IBM. They started Little Eye Labs in August 2012 and were part of the GSF Accelerator’s batch from October to December of the same year. In March of this year, the startup raised seed funding of around $300,000 from GSF and . A Little Eye Labs acquisition would not be the hugest deal for Facebook, especially when compared with its $85 million acquisition of Parse. But it would be an important enough piece in the social network’s overall mobile strategy. I know of several Indian startups working in the mobile space who hope acquisitions like these will raise the profile of the ecosystem. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Our Favorites For 2013 | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | It’s the most reflective and introspective time of the year, so this week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we take a look back at the year that was and offer up our favorite gadgets. John likes a lot of stuff, including the treadmill desk that has become a permanent fixture on the Gadgets cast, and some more broadly transformative gadgets, too. Predictably, I like Apple stuff, and also predictably, Matt Burns likes some kind of reciprocating saw or tool or whatever. Some of the devices that come to mind can be found in our , or on one of the other various all season long. So have a listen to this week’s episode of the TechCrunch John Biggs Treadmill Deskcast, featuring in the title role, , and .
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
ChallengePost Will Soon Support Software Innovation On An Ongoing Basis Outside Of Contests | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | Hackathon and online technology challenge contest provider (disclosure: ChallengePost is the current service provider for TC Disrupt hackathon events) is pretty proud of its 2013 – the company awarded $7.5 million in prizes to developers and software creators this past year, topped 400,000 registered users on its platform, and hosted 130 hackathons and online competitions. That represents 100 percent growth in business compared to 2012, but already the company is turning its attention to something new: supporting the kind of innovation that happens within a confined time frame at hackathons, but on a continuing basis. “The future of every industry is a battle to create an ecosystem that has a platform for developers, and the developers and designers themselves,” ChallengePost founder and CEO Brandon Kessler explained in an interview. “That to me is a hugely important aspect of the future and it’s already coming true, and ChallengePost sees ourself as the only platform that excels at developer marketing.” Currently, ChallengePost powers both the kind of 24-hour in-person hackathon that we host at our Disrupt Events, as well as longer format online events they call “challenges” that could span weeks, and that generally produce much more polished and usable software. Embark, the transit app acquired by Apple earlier this year, was first built at a ChallengePost online challenge event, for example, as was Movil, the video startup acquired by Samsung to boost its smart TV platform. “The thing I am most focused on is allowing software makers to submit their software outside of a challenge, as well as inside of a challenge, so developers can showcase their work any time,” Kessler said. “In order to best inspire developers to build and showcase software, we want to do it beyond just challenges and hackathons and allow them to do it any time. The time-constrained nature of challenges has limited our ability to respond to the intense demand to showcase software.” “No customer has ever said ‘we only want to engage developers between the months of March and April,’ and no software maker has said ‘We only want to show our software to the world between the months of January and April,'” Kessler added. “They want to do it all year round, and that’s where we as a company are at right now.” Of course, ChallengePost will continue to offer its platform for contests, hackathons and challenges, but the sense I get from Kessler is that they see a lot of opportunity for revenue and platform engagement left on the table dealing only with time-constrained competitions. The need to build a platform with a rich developer ecosystem doesn’t ever go away, and while a high-stakes, high profile hackathon draws a brief spike in attention from software builders, having that fizzle away after the fact because there’s no easy support system in place once the contest closes makes little sense. Kessler is keeping mum on the specifics around how a ChallengePost product that isn’t time-constrained will work exactly, and when it’ll go live for users, but he says they’ll be back with more information soon. For now, with the company at the peak of its popularity, all that’s certain is that this is a good time for ChallengePost to capitalize on is customer interest and user engagement to take its platform to the next level. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 2 | null |
Backed By Steve Blank & More, Startup Genome Founders Launch Next-Gen Benchmarking Tool For Startups | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | of researchers, entrepreneurs and data geeks set out on an ambitious mission: To put the world’s technology startups under the microscope in an effort to better understand why some succeed and why 90 percent eventually go the way of the dinosaur. Fast forward to today, and (as it’s now called) has analyzed data from over 100,000 startups around the globe and has conducted hundreds of in-depth, qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs and investors. The results provide an exciting look into not only what characteristics and qualities make for a successful formula, but how different startup ecosystems stack up with each other. The team behind the project has also begun to leverage its unique data sets to create a benchmarking tool to enable entrepreneurs to evaluate their progress compared to their peers and help them make more informed product and business decisions. This month, after more than a year of testing and tweaking, the team finally released into the wild. Compared to prior iterations, Compass founder and CEO Bjoern Herrmann (who is also one of the co-founders of The Startup Genome Project) tells us, the now fully-baked startup benchmarking tool offers automated data collection from a host of tools and services popular among SMBs, including services like Salesforce.com, MailChimp, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, PayPal, Quickbooks and Stripe. Using data derived from the sources, Compass then funnels your startup’s business metrics into its revamped dashboard, allowing them to view company benchmarks across a range of categories, configure an alert system to stay up to date on company revenue, churn rate, user growth rate, acquisition costs and so on, while offering visualizations of that data in correlation charts, graphs and via tailored, supplemental analysis. But the real key to the new Compass product, Herrmann says, its the new dynamic system its team developed to generate benchmarks based on large data sets. Up until today, most benchmarking solutions have relied on 50-year-old methodologies to collect and analyze data, so, the team has instead developed a methodology designed specifically for Big Data analysis. For example, prior iterations of Compass only grouped companies in to two categories — B2B or B2C — which, of course, is a fairly limited taxonomy given the diversity of startups out there. The new product, however, places companies along a continuous spectrum based on the “complexity of customer interaction,” Herrmann explains. On one end of the spectrum, for example, will be Google Search and businesses that rely on less complex customer interactions, while, on the others side would be, say, Oracle. The spectrum for “complexity of customer interaction,” the founder explains, is defined by looking at the interplay between a business’ transaction and traffic history. The founder compares the methodology to Google’s first dynamic ranking system for indexing and search results, except, in this case, it’s the methodology used to determine the best benchmarks to use for your company. It’s also the technology that allows Compass to provide a similar level of benchmarking accuracy to a wide range of businesses — from restaurants to retail. As of now, Compass is free to use and the CEO says that this will remain true for the forseeable future. However, Herrmann did says that the team has begun to test premium features, which will likely include full customization, additional filters, data segmentation and so on. Up until now, the Compass team has made most of its money via R&D for governments and consulting firms and by offering sponsored versions of its “Startup Genome Reports.” Moving forward, Compass will also begin piloting a handful of potential revenue channels, including matching companies to value-add products and services, providing automated audits of startups for investors or bye working specifically B2B transactions, or companies within large organizations. The other option, Herrmann said, is to allow financial customers, for example, to manage their relationships with their tech customers. Going forward, in support of its launch and the continuing experimentation with new revenue channels, Compass’ team has raised a total of $700K from, you guess it, a flock of Angels. Those angels include Amir Banifatemi, Anil Sethi, Ben Congleton, Christopher Grey, Clemente Germanetti
Daniel Recanati, Erik Jansen and more. With its new money in tow, and 1,400 new businesses joining its platform over the last 10 days, Herrmann said that the team plans to put its capital to work hiring data scientists for its research project and engineers for Compass. For more, find Compass and . |
InVision Raises $11.6M From FirstMark Capital And Tiger Global | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | , a prototyping tool for thousands of web developers and designers, has recently closed an $11.6 million Series A round from FirstMark Capital and Tiger Global. The company out of New York with a mission to make it easy for designers to share, interact with, and get feedback on their prototypes. Users can easily upload Photoshop files to the web and add interactions to form a simulation, all within a normal web browser under a single link (which can be password protected). In February 2012, InVision with FirstMark. The startup has since focused on facilitating the conversation around these prototypes, which can now happen with a much wider range of people. Founder Clark Valberg explained that traditionally, the communication between designers and coders about the final look and feel of a project was limited to an inner circle of people. With InVision, a wide range of people across the company can consult on the design and give their feedback asynchronously. That might sound like data overflow, but one might also consider it a less risky alternative to launching a real product before the design department is ready. That is, after all, the argument. Some startups believe that design, in multiple drafts, should come before coding out the product, while others believe that you should push a real product out as quickly as possible to get users (and ultimately receive their feedback). Valberg has that he isn’t opposed to iterating based on user feedback, but believes that it’s better to get much of that initial iteration process out of the way before you “lose a lot of control” by making your product publicly available. The new funding will allow InVision to continue picking up new customers, which currently range from small startups to huge corporations. The company is also working on “some interesting partnerships”, as well as some enhanced marketing and new features.
from on . |
Warby Parker Raises $60 Million From Existing Investors, Fortune Reports | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | Online eyeglasses company just raised a $60 million Series C round from its existing investors, with Tiger Global Management leading. General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital, Thrive Capital and First Round Capital also reinvested. reported the news first. It is likely that the company wasn’t short on cash before raising this round. But the momentum was right for the company as receiving new cash from existing investors is a great vote of confidence. Warby Parker plans to increase its customer support team. As Zappos showed everyone, having a great support team is an important asset when it comes to large-scale specialized e-commerce companies. The startup first started as a way to get cheaper glasses. Instead of selling traditional brands, Warby Parker chose to go directly to the manufacturers in China and work with them. By removing the middleman and selling exclusively on its website, the startup became very competitive while maintaining healthy margins. Recently, the company put a toe in the water by opening a bricks-and-mortar store in New York. But the website remains the main retail location. As a reminder, the company raised $41.5 million in . Warby Parker now has enough cash to do small acquisitions. But it’s still unclear whether an IPO is in the works. |
Yahoo/Siri App Is Actually A Real Prototype Built By Robin Labs But Not Commissioned By Yahoo | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | A little earlier we about a video that showed what appeared to be a Yahoo Siri competitor. “Sources familiar with Yahoo’s internal projects tell us that the video is fake,” we wrote. Well, it turns out that this isn’t the whole story. It’s true that Yahoo didn’t make the video itself, and it didn’t make the app, but that doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t involved. The app was made by a natural language/speech recognition/navigation startup , in discussion with Yahoo. Here’s the backstory as told to me by Ilya Eckstein, the co-founder and CEO of Robin Labs: Robin Labs has been building a white-label platform for custom voice assistants. It’s the second stage of the startup’s development, the first of which was to develop its own eponymous personal assistant and navigation app. (That app .) As for stage two, think of it as Siri for everyone and everything, not just Apple. “The idea is that brands could offer their content to their audiences, wrapped in voice-interactive UI,” Eckstein says. It turns out that Yahoo is one such brand, and appears to have been behind the development of the white-label platform in the first place. “We’ve been in conversations with them,” he says. “But our white-label platform was not commissioned by Yahoo.” The Yahoo-branded prototype in the video, powered by the Robin platform, was created as part of those discussions. “Somehow, the video has leaked out after we’d sent it to Yahoo,” he says. In fact, although published a link to the video on Dailymotion today, it’s been on at least one other video network since December 4, if you knew where to look. We had already seen it and were trying to get to the bottom of the story before Android Police published its post today. To be honest, I had thought originally that Yahoo might be trying to buy Robin Labs. Eckstein would not comment on that. “We are having an ongoing conversation with Yahoo,” he told me, and he says that has been with senior people both in engineering and corporate. “That’s as much as I can say about it.” It’s not too left-field to wonder if Robin Labs could be another acquisition target for CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo: Yahoo’s been on a long-term buying spree of startups to pick up technology, talent (and sometimes users). Robin Labs fits thematically with other acquisitions Yahoo has made in natural language processing ( ) and mobile assistant apps (a href=”https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/yahoo-acquires-to-do-app-astrid/”>Astrid). Robin the app today has seen some 1 million downloads. Today that service focuses on navigation and a few other services but has ambitions to extend out to other areas as a platform for personal assistants across different verticals such as “a news concierge, a communication / scheduling assistant, and assistant in the kitchen,” according to Eckstein. Asked if Robin Labs had approached Yahoo for this prototype, or if it was the other way around, Eckstein responded with a saying: “Great minds think alike.” He’s not very happy about how the videos leaked out in the first place, it seems, but is now just trying to accept it as a bit of “unexpected market research.” If you look at some of the readers’ comments, the idea does strike a chord with people, and we are pleased to see that. That actually may be one good thing to come out of that debacle.” We’ve reached out to Yahoo and will update this post as we learn more… |
Viki Launches On China’s Baidu To Expand Further In The World’s Biggest Online Video Market | Pankaj Mishra | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Video streaming site , which allows users to write subtitles in over 160 languages, is expanding in China’s online video market by launching on Baidu, the country’s biggest search engine, with around 237 million monthly active users of its video service. Over the past 18 months, . Some of the recent alliances signed by Viki include content distribution partnerships with Renren (the Facebook of China), Sohu and LeTV to offer Chinese content in the rest of the world. As part of this alliance, from the U.S., UK, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and ten other countries to Baidu video viewers in China. Razmig Hovaghimian, CEO and co-founder of Viki, said he was encouraged to launch on Baidu after seeing the success of streaming popular sci-fi series “Falling Skies” across Renren, LeTV and Xunlei Kankan (video-on-demand sites). For its part, Baidu has been pushing to sell more premium advertising, especially after it as defined by number of mobile users and video viewing time. “We knew we were onto something when we released the TNT sci-fi show ‘Falling Skies’ over the summer and it began receiving four times the ratings than it did in the US,” said Hovaghimian. The show was the most searched U.S. series on Baidu Video, outranking “The Big Bang Theory,” “Vampire Diaries,” “Under the Dome” and “The Walking Dead.” In addition, “Falling Skies” generated more than 5.7 million posts on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform. “The show ranked number one on Baidu search results for US shows. We’re looking to replicate this success and build a pipeline of the best of global content for Chinese fans.” Viki on Baidu will launch with Falling Skies and hundreds of other titles on Thursday. With over 25 million viewers a month, Viki is also looking to enter the Indian market. As for the competition from YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, Hovaghimian said there’s no direct rivalry. “On many occasions, Viki has partnered with YouTube to stream its content and Viki shows can be found on our YouTube channels. We also have distribution deals with Netflix and Hulu – where we power their Korean dramas and other unique shows,” he said. Viki crowdsources subtitling of movies and other shows in over 160 languages, and earns revenue by selling premium ads on its streaming video service. Three months ago, by Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten. |
Yahoo Introduces New Style Of Flickr Embeds To Seed Content Outside Of The Site | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Yahoo has today. Just about everyone has used content from Flickr in various ways at some point, especially from its great store of Creative Commons licensed images. Now, Flickr can capitalize on the network effect of people seeing all of those images off of its site with a new cleaner style. The realization that embeds help spread influence and drive traffic back to a site or service has struck every major service over the past few years. Twitter announced embeds, so did Instagram and Facebook. Vine introduced embeds a couple of months after launch and most new mobile apps and services ship with them nowadays. Embedding bits of a site’s stream in places other than the site itself is just smart. The Flickr embeds only work on publicly shared photos, not private ones, which is how it should work. Each photo is also displayed with a full title and Flickr user name, which is a great nod to attribution for photographers. Many photogs post images online without any hope or expectation of compensation, but I have yet to find a single one that loves their images to be used without proper attribution. Sometimes saying ‘hey, this is the person that took this cool photo I used’ is the only way to ‘pay’ a creator who isn’t charging. So good work there. I’m of mixed feelings about the big ‘Flickr’ logo in the corner of the image. I get what Flickr chose to do here: it made the ‘frame’ around an embed part of the image itself, rather than placing it ‘outside’ as with many other services that offer embeds. It’s cleaner and focuses more on the image. But perhaps a logo with more transparency would be nice, or one that faded away with navigation controls, appearing on interaction or mouse-over. It’s a fairly minor complaint for me, though some photogs might have an issue with it. : Flickr has now changed the behavior of embeds, causing the logo to fade with navigation controls. If you embed a photo from a set, you’ll be able to navigate through that whole collection, and they can always be displayed full-screen in uncompressed fashion. Here is a picture of a bunny:
Top image credit: |
Bionym’s Vision For A Future Where Secure Account Holders Are Their Own Credentials | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Toronto-based turned heads with its concept for wearable hardware that authenticates a user , which could turn the whole world of digital security on its head. It’s a key tied to your person in a very intimate sense, meaning it can’t really be stolen or lost like even a current standalone unique passkey generator can. We met with Bionym CEO and co-founder Karl Martin at their headquarters in Toronto, where the engineering team shares relatively limited space with the rest of the folks. The team is growing at a rapid clip, however, and the plan is to move into a more accommodating space in the near future. As it stands, however, it’s kind of nice to see people soldering and testing brand new circuit boards right next to those arranging future partnerships and doing developer outreach. Martin filled us in on the progress his startup has made since launchings its pre-order campaign back in September, and it sounds as if things are on track. Final design is still mostly up in the air, but as you can see, things have come a long way from the original prototype that Martin and his co-founder Foteini Agrafioti developed first only roughly a year ago. It’s also very interesting to hear Martin articulate exactly where he sees Nymi’s tech headed – including a long-term goal where it becomes a wearable you won’t even notice you’re wearing. |
That Yahoo Siri/Google Now Competitor Video Is Not A Yahoo Product | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Earlier today a video began circulating that showed what appeared to be a Yahoo project that would be aimed at the virtual assistant market currently dominated by Siri and Google Now. The video, which was posted , shows a man driving around speaking to an app which recognizes his voice. : TechCrunch tracked down the app — it’s real and was built by Robin Labs — but is still definitely not a Yahoo product. Check . We did some digging and sources familiar with Yahoo’s internal projects tell us that the video is fake. Whoever made it has some interesting ideas, and video making chops, but that’s about it. Currently, Yahoo’s acquisitions are being integrated into its product teams very quickly, on an average time scale of weeks rather than months. The company has begun integrating people and technology at a fairly rapid clip, pointing to purpose-built acquisitions. That’s why it didn’t seem too outlandish when the Android Police story mentioned Yahoo’s as something that could be behind this kind of product. We’re not sure exactly what SkyPhrase is doing at Yahoo, but this project is not it — because it’s not a Yahoo project at all.
The video displays an app that hovers over the top of the Android home screen in a manner similar to Facebook Messenger’s Chat Heads. We became suspicious of the video due to its seemingly amatuer-ish nature (we understand that most Yahoo project videos, even internal ones, are far more polished than this). The Yahoo logo is also incorrect, which led us to believe that someone had comped something together out of unofficial resources. So, is Yahoo working on a virtual assistant project internally? Maybe. Is this video it? Nope. I’d personally welcome a large — somewhat agnostic — third party version of Google Now and Siri that worked everywhere without a platform agenda behind it. The more options the better. |
I Guess It Was My Turn To Get A Creepy Pitch Video | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 18 |
[12/18/13, 5:12:24 PM] : so this creepy santa video
[12/18/13, 5:12:28 PM] Bob Patterson: was that sent to you?
[12/18/13, 5:13:16 PM] Anthony Ha:
[12/18/13, 5:13:41 PM] Bob Patterson: I feel like you get an unusually large percentage of this crazy pitch email
[12/18/13, 5:13:54 PM] Anthony Ha: nope! that’s just what a
[12/18/13, 5:14:05 PM] Bob Patterson: also you may be sexually assaulted by a creepy santa is what i got out of that video
[12/18/13, 5:15:57 PM] Bob Patterson: you should write a post about how awesome xtranormal is
[12/18/13, 5:16:15 PM] Bob Patterson: if that even still exists
( .)
[12/18/13, 5:16:19 PM] Anthony Ha: well xtranormal was used by
[12/18/13, 5:16:27 PM] Anthony Ha: to create
[12/18/13, 5:18:41 PM] Bob Patterson: if I was that PR dude I would definitely go the next step and send you some coal if you didn’t write
[12/18/13, 5:19:02 PM] Bob Patterson: start leaving threatening heavy breathing voicemails, the whole 9 yards
[12/18/13, 5:19:15 PM] Bob Patterson: That’s just how business is done (Transcript edited for brevity; video created by .) |
California’s Experiment With Massive Online Courses Restricted To University Students | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | in massively open online courses (MOOCs) is not so radical anymore. San Jose State University will scale back the number of purely online courses and restrict them to enrolled students. “The goal right now is to focus on providing access to all CSU [California State University] students, including SJSU students,” San Jose State University spokesperson Patricia Harris said to me in an email. In other words, outsiders are no longer welcome. Over the last year, partnership with MOOC provider, Udacity. Students in the on-campus equivalent courses did significantly better than their online counterparts in the Spring 2013 pilot, but were roughly equivalent during the following Summer semester (graph below). Comparisons were difficult, since the Spring semester was brand new and admitted non-SJSU students, but Summer’s class was generally older and more educated. The highly controversial low-cost program seems to tearing apart the fragile relationship between SJSU and Udacity. Now, SJSU will maintain control over the courses and offer through their own provider, . Udacity won’t make any profit on the courses. Moreover, costs will increase, from $150 to tuition price at the schools. Harris would not comment whether there are future plans. It’s widely acknowledged that MOOCs have difficulty serving underprivileged and under-motivated students. “It’s a group for which this medium is not a good fit,” Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Of course, colleges do a pretty poor job of retaining students generally, with . MOOCs continue to expand, race to try out new online models. But, at least in california, the experiment goes on without a crucial demographic necessary to see how to open up the college gates. [ ] |
null | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 20 | null |
Low Surface Inventory Could Hamper Microsoft’s Q4 Hardware Results | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Demand for Microsoft’s new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 computers is outstripping supply, with shortages being noted online and off. Over the past few days, reports have cropped up that stock of the new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 tablet hybrids has become quite tight. A quick search around the Internet confirms this. Mashable wrote about the lack of stock a , with one Best Buy employee telling the publication that the devices were “extremely popular”. That article noted low Amazon supply, and tweets from annoyed customers asking when the devices would be back in stock. Not a single Best Buy near me has Surface 2 inventory in stock, according to the company’s website. Today, the online Microsoft Store ran out of devices as well, with that “all of the second generation Surface tablets are ‘out of stock’, one week before Christmas.” What’s going on? Two things, I think: Demand for Microsoft’s hardware is up, and supply is down. After taking a massive, and deathly embarrassing $900 million charge for building too many first generation Surface devices, Microsoft seems to have built fewer this time around. However, whatever its projected number was, it was too low. Not having enough of a product is a fine problem to have, but it’s a real issue for Microsoft given how high the stakes are for its new line of devices. With the company now reporting Surface revenue each quarter, we have a public measuring stick for its performance as an OEM. After its prior mistakes with Surface, Microsoft wants the first revenue figure for its new devices to be as large possible. By underbuilding Surface devices, Microsoft is hampering its ability to dial up Surface revenue, something that investors may chide it for. After all, mis-estimating demand for a second year running could be taken as indicative of a certain immaturity in the company’s work as an OEM. Put another way: Surface revenue is a key metric for Microsoft’s progress as a device company, half of its new business model. And it’s a cutthroat business without shooting yourself in the foot. Taken all together, Microsoft’s efforts to be a ‘devices’ company appear to be coming together. Windows Phone has , the Xbox One , and now Surfaces are hard to come by. That’s good. But watching Microsoft get in its own way with the Surface line (again) is somewhat painful. Consumers can buy other Windows 8.1-based devices of course, perhaps boosting Microsoft’s OEM partners, but what the company wants is a Surface on every desk, and not to run out a week before Christmas. In its most recent quarter, Microsoft had $400 million in Surface revenue. So, in the quarter before new devices and the holiday season, Microsoft’s Surface top line sat 20% under a half billion dollars. How much revenue can Surface drive in the current quarter? Your guess is as good as mine, but we know one thing: Whatever number Microsoft reports will be smaller than it could have been if it built more of the darn tablets. What a difference a year can make. |
Obama’s NSA Task Force Recommends Major Reforms | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Today, the much-anticipated findings of President Obama’s National Security Agency task force have hit the wire [ ]. The non-binding 200 page report of 40-plus recommendations calls for the end of many of the most controversial programs. Here are the big takeaways: . Instead, phone companies might warehouse the data for individual requests from the government. The recommendations say that the government should only access such data with a specific purpose, so it’s unknown how the NSA would continue to mine networks for patterns — or if it would be allowed to at all. Here’s the important quote, “We recommend that legislation should be enacted that terminates the storage of bulk telephony meta-data by the government.” . undiscovered hacking tools (“ “) and force loopholes in Internet security standards. The work it’s doing to crack basic encryption falls along those lines as well. It helps them monitor more traffic, but makes the web overall a less safe place. Google and other major tech companies have vigorously denied that they for NSA spying, but the report recommends they cease this supposedly non-existent practice anyway. It is unclear whether such backdoors were currently being built out or already in existence. The director of the NSA should be confirmed by the Senate and open to civilians, there should be a new privacy board to review strategies, and the secret court should have a special public advocate. This differs from previous leaks to the , which implied that the panel recommend a civilian director. The government should disclose the number of users who the NSA has requested to examine. The panel follows a torrent of new developments, any of which may significantly alter the way U.S. intelligence agencies gather private data . This week, a federal judge declared bulk collection of phone records to be unconstitutional, . Members of congress aren’t sitting idly by for the courts; several groups have proposed on U.S. spying, , to end all bulk collection and disclose the number of users being spied on. The Internet hive mind is collectively combing through the 200 page report. We’ll have more soon. [ ] |
Google’s Location History Browser Is A Minute-By-Minute Map Of Your Life | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Quick! Where were you last Tuesday at 6:35 PM? If you’re anything like me, your answer is probably along the lines of “I… have absolutely no idea.” Most people’s brains just don’t work that way. But odds are, Google knows. They probably know where you’ve been most days, too. And they’ll happily show you, letting you relive your life one step at a time. If you carry any Google-filled gear (like, say, an Android phone or tablet), there was a prompt during the initial setup that asked if Google could transmit your location data back to the mothership. . You know how Google Now can auto-magically figure out where you work and warn you about traffic? This is the data that makes that possible (or at least a good chunk of it.) Now, something to note: if you’ve been paying close attention, you might have seen this before. It’s not new. In fact, it’s been around for . And yet, I had a helluva time finding many people who knew about it, even when I asked amongst my geekier circles. So consider this a public service announcement of awesomeness. A PSAoA, if you will. I use “awesome”, here, instead of “terrifying and creepy”, because this is all opt-in. It’s a bit spooky in its scale, of course; it’s mindblowing to think about just data they’re gathering. But any data that’s there is there because you gave them the thumbs up at some point, even if it was while mindlessly clicking through the setup of a new device. If you’re suddenly realizing that there’s a location or two that you’d rather weren’t sitting in your history (hey, I’m not judging), you can wipe it on a day-by-day basis or clean your entire location slate in one fell swoop. Google launched the first version of this tool around the same time that they launched Latitude. After they killed Latitude off, they kept their location browser around, polishing it up and adding new little tricks as time went on. One particularly cool bit: scrub your mouse cursor over the graph at the bottom. The map above will play back your day, movement-by-movement. I spent well over an hour yesterday reliving the last month of my life, trying to remember what each stop was for. Oh, and that graph? It’s charting your distance over time relative to where you began your day (so, in most cases, your home), along with a readout of your furthest distance traveled for each day. Fun(/kind of depressing) fact: for 3 days after Grand Theft Auto IV came out, the furthest distance I went was the Jack In The Box across the street. If you missed the link above, here’s the link to the . |
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: What To Get The Android Lover Who Has Everything | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | After a whirlwind trip in Toronto, my co-host Darrell Etherington and I are back in our respective countries and ready to talk about what’s new with Android. But first, a heartrending disclaimer — we were not wearing festive sweaters while recording the show like the image would indicate, but we did get a little festive talking about Google’s new Play Edition devices, what’s new in the world of Google Glass, and our picks for last minute Android-centric gifts. That’s got to count for something right? And as for next week? Christmas does indeed land on Droidcast day, and the two of us may just sneak away from our families to spend a few moments discussing what (if any) Android goodies were left under the tree for us. Why would we do that? Because we love you much.
Intro music by Direct . |
Video: A Window Into BTCChina And The Rise Of Bitcoin In Asia | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | If you’re looking for a little background on bitcoin in China – and speak Chinese – this video from our TechCrunch event in Shanghai last month may be of interest. Featuring BTCChina CEO Bobby Lee as well as bitcoin luminaries Xu Mingxing, Celso Pitta, Wang How, and Mark Mai. During the time I was there I saw a lot of excitement in regards to bitcoin but many Chinese saw it as just another fad. Not surprisingly the panel was quite bullish on the currency and many of them recommended the viewers buy bitcoin, touting like infomercial pitch men. It’s fun viewing but, without the benefit of the live translation it will probably be useless to those who haven’t brushed up on their Chinese. |
Revamped PrivacyStar App Uses Color Coding To Help You Avoid Telemarketers | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | released a version of its Android app today aimed at making it easier for users to avoid calls from aggressive telemarketers and debt collectors. The previous PrivacyStar app already provided real-time caller ID, as well as call and text blocking. (You can .) It also allows users to report abusive calls and texts. Now, according to Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Sasse, it’s using that data to create a color-coded “alert system” for calls. In other words, when you get a call from a number that would normally be unknown to you, PrivacyStar won’t just try to tell you who it is, but also identify the caller with a color that indicates how likely they are to be an annoying telemarketer. Here’s how the company described the system: The “offenders” mentioned above are those who have allegedly violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act or the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. In fact, the updated PrivacyStar even includes an option to report offenses directly to the Federal Trade Commission from directly within the app. I wasn’t able to test the app out, since the new features are available on Android only (Sasse said that’s because developers don’t have access to many call blocking features on the iPhone), plus I actually get very few telemarketing-type calls. PrivacyStar is available in both free and paid versions, but the new features are available in both. . |
Keen On… 2013: Robert Scoble’s Person And Company Of The Year | Andrew Keen | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | 2013 has been kind to one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic characters – the blogger, tech evangelist and writer . He published a new book, , with , that not only has already sold 10,000 copies but has also received corporate sponsorship from ten technology companies including Rackspace and Microsoft. So how, I asked Scoble, will we look back at the year? What’s been the biggest deal about 2013? “The maturation of mobile,” Scoble says. We’ll remember 2013 as the year in which “smartphone dominance” and the emergence of portable products like Google Glass and Fitbit reshaped the industry. Which is why Scoble made , the e-commerce app, the most interesting new company of 2013. But his Person of 2013 has less to do with mobile. It’s “Elon is the man”, Scoble says, not only because he is revolutionizing the car industry, but because he is pioneering space travel too. According to Scoble, however, not everything has been rosy in Silicon Valley in 2013. He’s worried about the new inequality – “Two Californias” he calls it – dividing a small rich tech class from everyone else. And this is “going to get worse”, Scoble warns, as scale enables startups like Snapchat to establish massive user bases with a tiny number of employees. 2014 is just around the corner. So stay tuned in a couple of weeks for Scoble’s preview of 2014 and his take on the technologies, companies and individuals which are going to make it big next year. |
Photos+: A Better, Gif Friendly, Camera Roll For iPhone | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | I get a lot of crap every time I say that my . The sensor snobs and glass hogs come out of the woodwork to tell my why I’m an idiot for using it as my primary shooter. But the truth is I don’t give a crap — I’ve used the best lenses and cameras in the business and I know good from great from amazing. The iPhone’s camera is best for me, personally, and I’ve worked within its limitations to create a lot of pretty fun and memorable photos over the past few years. My SLRs and compacts (dozens at last count) are still there and I head to the Canon if I need the power for some reason or I’m doing a family portrait session. But most of my shooting is done on the iPhone. (I’d do it on Android but most of the cameras suck, and the Lumia 1020 has a great camera but it’s slow and I think Windows Phone needs a refresh). Which is where comes in. It’s a camera roll replacement app for iPhone, it runs $3 bucks and it’s pretty great. It displays photos larger and in a more pleasant configuration than Apple’s camera roll and offers me, as a reformed pro photographer, quick access to my EXIF data to see what the camera is doing when I’m shooting from the hip. The tiled layout means that it’s able to present photos in their original ratios and orientations without a ton of white space. Vertical images alongside horizontal and square images in one continuous flow that utilizes every pixel of screen real-estate while still showing you your entire image. This is a camera roll that’s been re-imagined with a ‘device first’ view, rather than being beholden to an arbitrary crop, like Apple’s app. There’s not much more irritating than having to pop in and out of a cropped image just to check to see if it’s the exact one you want to share. Tapping on icons in the image view will toggle on or off a location map and a pane with EXIF data like aperture, shutter speed and ISO. This also means that you’re able to easily ID images you’ve imported from other cameras if you’re into that sort of thing. And, to top it off, the app supports gifs right in stream. I save and share a lot of gifs and love that iMessage now handles them natively, but I’m always miffed that I can’t see them play back in the camera roll. Photos+ fixes that, which is fun. Developer Justin Williams, who also makes my favorite text editor for iPad, , says that he’s trying out a different kind of pricing model for the app. There’s a fixed price, but there is already one pack of upgrades that allow you to share to more networks than the standard Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, iMessage and email options. “I’m doing a model more akin to buying a car,” Williams told TechCrunch. “$2.99 up front to get the base model but in subsequent releases I’ve got some IAPs planned to “trick out” the app for more pro users. ” Other features planned for the future include IPTC search, with custom fields, more sharing services and importing from Dropbox, Loom, Instagram or other services. “The idea being to do mini ‘spikes’ so that the app can sustain itself longer without having to do a new ‘for pay’ version yearly because that sucks for everyone,” says Williams. Williams likens the take to an auto enthusiast who likes his car, but wants to add items on to trick it out over time. My one dream feature for Photos+ is the ability to delete images on the fly. Because it offers a complete view of the image in the stream view, you’re able to make easier editing choices and deleting would be much easier. Unfortunately, Williams says, Apple’s current APIs do not allow for that behavior. One can hope for the future. Photos+ is on the . |
Boxbee Launches A Sharing Library To Spark Peer-To-Peer Lending Of Unused Goods | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | San Francisco-based storage startup was founded on the idea of using technology to change the way people thought about urban storage. By providing its users with an inventory system and an ultra-easy way to get boxes for storage picked up and delivered, the company made it so that stored stuff didn’t just disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again. Now, the company is using those same tools to allow its users to share stuff they’ve stored with their friends who might want to use it. Boxbee, which is , provides standard sized boxes to users who fill them with stuff that they don’t need at any given moment. Since launching in March, Boxbee has had more than 4,100 items added to storage. For $6 per box per month in SF and $9 per month per box in NYC, Boxbee will take stuff off your hands and put it in secure storage until you needed it again. When the time came to reclaim your things, the company would deliver goods back to users for $15 plus $2 per box. But how would you know which box you’d want back? The genius in Boxbee’s system is that it allows users to keep an inventory of the items that are available in their boxes. That lets them request a certain box at any time, instead of having to take all boxes out of storage and rifle through them looking for just a few items. But this system also lends itself — pun intended — to making those goods available to others who might want to use them. With the new Boxbee “sharing library,” users can do just that. Imagine, for instance, putting ski equipment you’re not going to use this season into Boxbee storage and then having the option to let a friend borrow it instead. That type of model is the true essence of the “sharing economy,” in which stuff I might not need at a certain time can be used by my peers. Boxbee’s sharing library isn’t just for sharing with friends, though. To get its customers used to the idea of short-term borrowing and lending, the company is making its own library of goods available to users. That is, anyone with a Boxbee account can borrow shared items from the company itself — stuff like camping goods, for instance — rather than renting them from traditional sporting goods stores or other lenders. The stuff is free to borrow to users, who need only pay the $15 delivery fee for the goods dropped off to their homes. |
Crowdfunding: Figure Out What Success Looks Like And Plan Backwards From There | Contributor | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | This is what happened during my first crowdfunding project, which is currently sitting at 97% of its goal with two days left on the clock. Our campaign’s goal was to cover the launch cost of our first product, a supercapacitor-powered portable speaker which would cost about $8,000 in compliance & overhead costs. The next time I do something like this, I’m going to make a giant poster of that baseline number – $8,000 or whatever it is – and hang it right in front of my face. The biggest mistake I made during this campaign was forgetting that number. Here’s how I messed up. About 90% of my planning was very realistic. I built a simple, conservative model, and set the variables so that if things went according to plan, we would make a bit of money on top of covering those costs. And then, I started imagining what it would be like to make two times the goal, or ten times. We almost failed because while there was a definite goal, I was thinking about a different number. That is my biggest takeaway from the whole project. There is only one goal; your objective is to meet it. Everything else is gravy. So that’s the first half of success in crowdfunding: know what success looks like. So this is how to plan once you know what you’re planning for. The first thing is to see what your market looks like. has built an awesome set of open source tools to see the shape of your potential market – a very pretty Unity 3D visualization of the data from Kickstarter. They also scraped all the data from every Kickstarter project to make it work. Each dot is a project – the bright diagonal is the fact that projects that get close tend to meet their goal. The visualization is cool, but having the data from every project is awesome. For our working data set, we took the whole list and filtered it down to only Product Design and Technology projects that had raised over $2000, of which there were 2085. We were pretty sure we’d get over $2000 in pledges from friends and family on day one – if you can’t hit 5% of your goal within your private network, you are probably in a bad spot. Now, with this list of similar projects, we used simple statistics to think about our funding goal. 45% of these projects with goals $25-$35k were successful vs. only 35% of projects with goals $36k-50k. Getting even more specific, within audio projects, only 21% of projects aiming for over $30k have been successful. We settled on $30k as a goal, believing that our idea was in the top quartile of audio projects in terms of how much interest, media coverage, and organic traffic it would generate. With an idea of the goal in mind, it was time to set prices. We started out our price planning with a simple survey, run through Facebook & SurveyMonkey. It cost about $20 – but if I were going to do it again, I’d probably use SurveyMonkey’s paid audience feature instead of Facebook ads to (hopefully) get a better sample. Our survey used the Van Westendorp method: show potential customers the product, explain it, and then ask for four prices from each respondent, in order: Take the set of answers for each question, graph them in rank order, and you end up with a set of four curves that show how much people are or are not willing to pay. This helped to validate our initial guess that $300 was a pretty good price that many people would be willing to pay. It also showed how much demand would drop off as the price increased – in the neighborhood of 30% less demand for each $50 price increase. This survey gave us a slope for our demand curve, but no reference point. So we put together this chart: reward prices vs. number of backers from 12 related Kickstarter audio projects. It was enough to make an educated guess about how many units we might sell. This still left a continuous range of possible price and goal coordinates – the final decision was based on where I thought the product should be priced in the long term. Now we had informed guesses on a plausible funding goal, a plausible unit retail price, and how many units might sell at a given price. We knew our overhead costs and our per unit costs, including US shipping and 8% fees (3% credit card + 5% for the site). So we built a simple model and tweaked the pricing and goal until we would break even at the funding goal. This is where I made the big mistake. My idea on pricing was to have prices increase through the campaign. I remain convinced this is a good idea, but I messed up the implementation. The prices need to convince people they are getting a good deal, but they also need to present a sense of urgency. Initially the campaign was set up with 25 pledges at the first level (best price / earliest delivery). These sold out in six days, which was pretty good, about what I had hoped for. Then the price went up to the second tier (+$50), and the campaign came to a dead stop. The problem was that my carrot-stick pricing model was off. A $50 discount (carrot) was indeed a strong incentive to buy early, but conversely a strong disincentive to buy later. If demand had been high enough that the second tier (100 units) started selling out quickly, maybe it would have worked – but instead, it just sat there, telling people there was no need to buy today because there were 97 left. This probably would have killed the campaign completely, but we got a large cash donation on day 16, which allowed us to subsidize/add more pledges at the carrot level. Moral: if you’re going to do tiered pricing, make sure the tiers are small enough that they start filling in quickly! I thought that having a nominal ‘regular price’ as a stick would help to push the middle tier along, but the tier had too many slots for the stick to be credible. The last part, and probably the hardest part, is planning for traffic. I initially thought we needed to get 10,000 hits on the site to make the goal – turns out it was really more like 20,000. Our conversion rate at present is about 0.5%. Most of those conversions ultimately come from Facebook and direct traffic, but very few originated from Blueshift’s Facebook posts. It was serious a challenge to get enough media coverage. Doing this again, I would find a way to build demo units to send to the press – otherwise, you’re basically asking people to write about your press release (no matter how many times you reword the email). The only times that the campaign is “news” are the first day, the day you make your goal, and the last few days. Use those days wisely and reach out early. When you are not a news item, you need to find alternative means of generating traffic. We got a fair amount press, about 30 postings – but each bit of coverage brings only a small number of visits, and a smaller number of sales. I was surprised to see how few clicks some coverage generated: for example this article on got 650 likes on Facebook, but only 350 clicks to our CrowdSupply page. We were really lucky to get a big donation – if that had not happened, the project would have been effectively dead a few weeks ago. If I were going to do this again, I would have left out the international option, which would have saved us some money – we could have set a lower goal, and we have very few international pledges. Beyond that, making this work took me being a full-time marketer/internet fiend for about two months. Honestly, I just want to get the product built – but I don’t know of another way I could have gotten the money together, so we’ll call it a victory. . |
A Look Back At How The Content Industry Almost Killed Blockbuster And Netflix (And The VCR) | Contributor | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | . The once iconic video rental giant Blockbuster is shutting down its remaining stores across the country. Netflix, meanwhile, is emerging as the leader in video rental, now primarily through online streaming. But Blockbuster, Netflix and home media consumption (VCR/DVD/Blu-ray) may never have existed at all in their current form if the content industry had been successful in banning or regulating them. In 1983, nearly 30 years before thousands of websites blacked out in protest of SOPA/PIPA, video stores across the country closed in protest against legislation that would bar their market model. In 1977, the first video-rental store opened. It was 600 square feet and located on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. George Atkinson, the entrepreneur who decided to launch this idea, charged $50 for an “annual membership” and $100 for a “lifetime membership” but the memberships only allowed people to rent videos for $10 a day. Despite an unusual business model, Atkinson’s store was an enormous success, growing to 42 affiliated stores in fewer than 20 months and resulting in numerous competitors. In retrospect, Atkinson’s success represented the emergence of an entirely new market: home consumption of paid content. It would become an $18 billion dollar domestic market, and, rather than cannibalize from the existing movie theater market, it would eclipse it and thereby become a massive revenue source for the industry. Atkinson’s success in 1977 is particularly remarkable as the Sony Betamax (the first VCR) had only gone on sale domestically in 1975 at a cost of $1,400 (which in 2013 U.S. dollars is $6,093). As a comparison, the first DVD player in in 2013 dollars and the first Blu-ray player in $1,161 in 2013 dollars. And unlike the DVD and Blu-ray player, it would take eight years, until 1983, for the VCR to reach 10 percent of U.S. television households. Atkinson’s success, and that of his early competitors, was in catering to a market of well under 10 percent of U.S. households. While many content companies realized this as a massive new revenue stream — e.g. 20th Century Fox buying one video rental company for $7.5 million in 1979 — the content industry lawyers and lobbyists tried to stop the home content market through litigation and regulation. The content industry sued to ban the sale of the Betamax, the first VCR. This legal strategy was coupled by leveraging the overwhelming firepower of the content industry in Washington. If they lost in court to ban the technology and rental business model, then they would ban the technology and rental business model in Congress. In 1976, the content industry filed suit against Sony, seeking an injunction to prevent the company from “manufacturing, distributing, selling or offering for sale Betamax or Betamax tapes.” Essentially granting this remedy would have banned the VCR for all Americans. The content industry’s motivation behind this suit was largely to deal with individuals recording live television, but the emergence of the rental industry was likely a contributing factor. While Sony won at the district court level in 1979, in 1981 it lost at the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit where the court found that Sony was liable for copyright infringement by their users — recording broadcast television. The Appellate court ordered the lower court to impose an appropriate remedy, advising in favor of an injunction to block the sale of the Betamax. And in 1981, under normal circumstances, the VCR would have been banned then and there. Sony faced liability well beyond its net worth, so it may well have been the end of Sony, or at least its U.S. subsidiary, and the end of the VCR. Millions of private citizens could have been liable for damages for copyright infringement for recording television shows for personal use. But Sony appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is able to take very few cases. For example in 2009, of petitions for certiorari were granted, and of these approximately are cases where there is a conflict among different courts (here there was no conflict). But in 1982, the Supreme Court granted certiorari and agreed to hear the case. After an oral hearing, the justices took a vote internally, and originally of them was persuaded to keep the VCR as legal (but after discussion, the number of justices in favor of the VCR would eventually increase to four). With five votes in favor of affirming the previous ruling the Betamax (VCR) was to be illegal in the United States (see ). But then, something even more unusual happened – which is why we have the VCR and subsequent technologies: The Supreme Court decided for both sides to re-argue a portion of the case. Under the Burger Court (when he was Chief Justice), this only happened in of the cases that received oral argument. In the re-argument of the case, a crucial vote switched sides, which resulted in a 5-4 decision in favor of Sony. The VCR was legal. There would be no injunction barring its sale. The majority opinion characterized the lawsuit as an “unprecedented attempt to impose copyright liability upon the distributors of copying equipment and rejected “[s]uch an expansion of the copyright privilege” as “beyond the limits” given by Congress. The Court even cited Mr. Rogers who during the trial: I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the ‘Neighborhood’ off-the-air . . . Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. On the absolute narrowest of legal grounds, through a highly unusual legal process (and significant luck), the VCR was saved by one vote at the Supreme Court in 1984. In 1982 legislation was introduced in Congress to give copyright holders the exclusive right to authorize the rental of prerecorded videos. Legislation was reintroduced in 1983, the Consumer Video Sales Rental Act of 1983. This legislation would have allowed the content industry to shut down the rental market, or charge exorbitant fees, by making it a crime to rent out movies purchased commercially. In effect, this legislation would have ended the existing market model of rental stores. With , major lobbyists and significant campaign contributions to support it, this legislation had substantial support at the time. Video stores saw the Consumer Video Sales Rental Act as an existential threat, and on October 21, 1983, about 30 years before the SOPA/PIPA protests, video stores across the country for several hours in protest. While the 1983 legislation died in committee, the legislation would be reintroduced in 1984. In 1984, similar legislation was enacted, The Record Rental Amendment of 1984, which banned the renting and leasing of music. In 1990, Congress banned the renting of computer software. But in the face of public backlash from video retailers and customers, Congress did not pass the Consumer Video Sales Rental Act. At the same time, the movie studios tried to ban the Betamax VCR through legislation. Eventually the content industry decided to support legislation that would require compulsory licensing rather than an outright ban. But such a compulsory licensing scheme would have drastically driven up the costs of video tape players and may have effectively banned the technology (similar regulations did ban other technologies). For the content industry, banning the technology was a feature, not a bug. As Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), explained before Congress in 1982: We are going to bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects [our industry against the VCR]. . .we cannot live in a marketplace. . . where there is one unleashed animal [the VCR] in that marketplace, unlicensed. It would no longer be a marketplace; it would be a kind of a jungle, where this one unlicensed instrument is capable of devouring all that people had invested in… Valenti’s comments were stark and designed to scare Congress to act: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Jack Valenti even threatened that if Congress didn’t regulate the VCR then movie producers may cut their movie production in half. But Congress decided to wait until the case was decided by the Supreme Court. And with the 5-4 decision of the Court upholding the VCR under fair use grounds, the VCR was declared legal in 1984. The ruling created a groundswell; it received overwhelming support from the media and the American people. And the Sony Betamax player was exploding in popularity with manufactured worldwide. As more Americans bought this technology, the content industry’s ability to regulate it slipped away. Given the groundswell of support for the VCR, the content industry was not able to scare Congress to regulate this nascent industry out of existence (or perhaps, they started to realize that they would actually make more money from the VCR). The content industry learned an important lesson, one that they apply today: they want to ban technologies, they must do so before the technology has wide adoption from the American people. Congress is quick to ban technologies it doesn’t understand and that the American people don’t have yet, but reluctant to ban widely used technologies with clear economic consequences. History has demonstrated numerous times that when the legal terrain is more solid, innovation and competition flourishes. One year after the case, with the legal issues on less precarious grounds, David Cook the first Blockbuster store in in Dallas, Texas, in 1985. Within two years it became one of the top 10 video-rental chains with 67 stores. Blockbuster expanded outside the U.S. with over 1,000 stores in 1989. And by , Blockbuster was the with over stores worldwide. In 1994 Viacom bought Blockbuster for , and in 1999 . At its peak in the early 2000’s, Blockbuster 10,000 stores. But as a demonstration of robust competition, this success was soon disrupted by new market models. Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997 with a completely different market model. As explains in the Harvard Business Review: The scrappy start-up built a distribution model that relied exclusively on mailing DVDs to customers through the low-cost U.S. postal service. It was almost as convenient as a neighborhood retail store but at a fraction of the price—and without the late fees that annoyed Blockbuster customers. Reed Hastings has explained that the idea of Netflix to him when he was forced to pay $40 in overdue fines after returning Apollo 13 past its due date. In 2002 Netflix went public. Early on the bandwagon of streaming video, by 2010, Netflix went from “ ” to being the “biggest source of streaming Web traffic” during peak evening hours. The old brick-and-mortar-style rental market was being disrupted at an incredible pace, and Blockbuster was ultimately unable or unwilling to adapt. By the time Blockbuster realized these market trends and disruption, it was too late. In 2010, Blockbuster and recently to close its U.S. stores. The ups and downs of winners and losers in the market is evidence of dynamic competition – exactly what the free market empowers. The failure of a leading market power and the rise of a new market power with a different market model, that consumers seem to prefer, is evidence of the market working. Consumers win when companies rise and fall and new market models compete with old market models. This story should be a lesson for both policy-makers and for the content industry: legal and regulatory certainty leads to dynamic competition. The market forces incumbent industries to adapt and compete with emerging technologies and better market models. Innovation comes from this dynamic competition, pushing down costs for consumers and providing better services and products. The threat of having banned video rentals was quite real; while the content industry failed in banning video rentals, it succeeded in banning the renting of music and software. The industry also instituted regulations that banned new technologies, such as the digital audio-tape player, a successor to the analog audio tape player. In 1992, the industry succeeded in levying a “private” tax on empty cassettes, blank CDs and CD-recorders. They litigated to ban the first iPod (the Rio) and the first DVR (ReplayTV) – bankrupting each through litigation costs but ultimately failing to stop these technologies. But the content industry failed to ban or regulate video rentals, and they failed to ban or regulate the VCR and subsequent technologies. This led to the emergence of the VCR, DVDs, Blu-Ray, Blockbuster, Netflix and modern home media consumption. But Netflix, and Blockbuster before them, are not the only winners, or even the most profitable winners, of keeping their market models and underlying technologies legal; ironically, the biggest winner might be the content industry. Contrary to the fear expressed by Jack Valenti before Congress, “[w]hen there are 20, 30, 40 million of these VCRs in the land, we will be invaded by millions of ‘tapeworms,’ eating away at the very heart and essence of [copyright].” Within two years of the Supreme Court case, in 1986, revenues from video tape sales and rentals were $4.38 billion, box office revenues of $3.78 billion. By 2012, consumer spending on home entertainment, including VHS/DVD/streaming media, rose to , eclipsing the revenue of and Blockbuster. |
Hey Uber, Lyft Is Growing Faster Than You | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | Uber’s revenue numbers, just a few weeks ago, look bold at roughly $20 million per week. But there isn’t necessarily a definitive market winner yet in the peer-to-peer space, as the entire field is on a rising tide. Lyft, which started peer-to-peer ride-sharing after Uber’s black cars on demand, is seeing its revenues grow at a rate of about 6 percent every single week, according to raw data and revenue dashboards that Lyft co-founder John Zimmer shared exclusively with TechCrunch. That growth rate is more than double Uber’s growth pace, which averaged about 2.8 percent in the five weeks of data leaked to Gawker. Compounded over a year, Lyft is seeing 20X growth. “I think there will be a black car winner at the high end and a peer-to-peer winner at the affordable price point for the mass market,” Zimmer said. “Lyft is already the leader in peer-to-peer, which is the fastest growing on-demand transportation segment.” You could argue that because Lyft is growing from a smaller revenue base, its growth rate would naturally be higher. But Lyft says it is already doing one-third of the weekly ride volume Uber was doing across all of its product lines when they (if you back out Uber’s leaked numbers to June 2013). Zimmer’s data and revenue dashboards last week revealed a more than $100 million gross run rate. Uber, for its part, says that growth rates vary drastically in different seasons, with the summers being slower than the holiday season. November, in particular, is a weaker month so they argue you can’t extrapolate growth rates back. (That said, Lyft shared revenue dashboards for the same time period.) “I’d love to tell you how much bigger we are than them, but I can’t do that,” said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. “We’re the leader right now, but we take competition seriously. We don’t dismiss it.” We estimated Uber’s from the leaked Gawker dashboard. That is 10X Lyft’s size and Uber said many of the cities it serves on its own have already passed the $100 million gross revenue mark. Kalanick adds that the company has also seen 20 percent month-over-month growth in the last two months, despite growing from a larger revenue base. But they don’t just do peer-to-peer ride sharing. They have multiple product lines covering black cars, taxis, peer-to-peer ride-sharing and SUVs. Uber is also international, covering 66 cities in 24 countries, compared to Lyft’s U.S.-based 20 markets. (Lyft also doesn’t do 7X surge pricing.) Then there is a slew host of other companies competing to offer on-demand transportation from your phone like Sidecar, Hailo, Gett, and China’s Didi Dache. But these competitors are generally much smaller than Lyft and Uber, which are fighting for peer-to-peer in the U.S. market. It’s not clear from Uber’s leaked numbers how big their peer-to-peer business is compared to the original black car or taxi business lines. Kalanick declined to break this out, but he said black car fares are generally only 1.8 times higher than the peer-to-peer fares. The competition between the two companies has become increasingly cutthroat, with Uber resorting to aggressive campaigns to undercut Lyft’s supply of drivers. They’ve offered $50 gas vouchers to recruit Lyft drivers and have run advertising campaigns urging drivers to “Shave The Stache.” Kalanick defended these tactics, “It’s important for us to have as much supply as possible. When you’re small, you don’t need that many drivers to make it work. But when you’re big, you’re talking about taking in thousands, if not tens of thousands of drivers. It’s important that if there are good drivers out there, they know they have options.” Amid Uber’s more competitive tactics, Lyft has stayed focused on growing its core community of drivers and users without poaching from rivals. “By focusing on community, we’re able to attract the highest quality drivers. It makes sense that our competitors would try to recruit them as they try to catch up in peer-to-peer, but we’re not seeing an impact on our loyal driver base or our ride growth numbers.” said Zimmer, who added that the “Shave the Stache” campaign actually ended up educating more prospective passengers and drivers about Lyft. |
Snapchat Downplays Phone Number Matching Hack, Says It’s Added New Counter-Measures | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | Following security researchers publishing a way to match Snapchat usernames to phone numbers, Snapchat has a skimpy statement making the hack sound impractical and noting “We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.” Earlier this week of how white-hat Gibson Security researchers had tried to notify Snapchat of a way hackers could connect usernames to phone numbers for use in stalking, but were ignored. The GibSec team then publicly on Christmas Eve. Read ZDNet’s post for full details on how the hack works. Snapchat hadn’t provided a public statement until now, and what it’s offered isn’t very satisfying. “Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do.” It goes on to note it’s added more barriers to the use of this hack. There are no details on how these countermeasures work, such as rate limiting, bad IP blocking, or automated systems that scan suspicious activity that may be someone trying to match names and numbers. The vagueness could keep the new barriers from being evaded, but doesn’t offer much comfort to users. Snapchat correctly stresses there’s no easy way to discover someone’s phone number based on their username or vice-versa. And it explains that the ability to match names and phone numbers on a limited basis is very helpful for users trying to find their friends on the service through their phone’s address book. Still, the company’s statement doesn’t seem very sympathetic to people concerned about their privacy. Snapchat isn’t the only one who’s had security issues around names and phone numbers. In June, a hacker named Brandon Copley from Facebook using a Graph Search exploit that preyed on people who had their phone numbers set as a way to find them through search. Facebook sent Copley a cease-and-desist notice over the situation. Several tech startups have recently felt the bite of bad PR and worried users after ignoring claims from white-hat security researchers. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg had his when a white hat tried to prove his exploit worked after being dismissed by Facebook’s security team. But Facebook at least in its communication with the researcher and vowed to improve its bug submission and review process. Snapchat did neither of these in its statement today. The whole situation could have been handled with more tact. Snapchat is a very young startup that’s been thrust into the spotlight recently, though, so some growing pains are to be expected. |
Ask A VC: Accel’s Ping Li On The Impact Of Data-Driven Software and More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Accel Partners’ Partner Ping Li joined me in the studio to talk about big data companies, enterprise IPOs and more. Li, who focuses on early-stage growth software and data-center investments for Accel and is also responsible for the firm’s Big Data Fund, talked about the impact that data driven software has had on how entrepreneurs. He also explained where he sees new areas of innovation in the large-scale data analysis space. Check out the video above for more! |
NY Judge Rules NSA Phone Record Collection Is Legal | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | A U.S. District Judge that the National Security Agency’s phone-record-collection program is constitutional [ ]. “The right to be free from searches and seizures is fundamental, but not absolute,” New York’s Judge William Pauley wrote. This stands in direct contrast to a decision earlier this month the very same program is likely unconstitutional. “We are pleased with the decision,” Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr. In essence, Pauley was convinced that countermeasures to investigate terror plots justified mass collection of data. The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data. He went a bit further, arguing that collection from private firms was likely more invasive, yet few consumers care. The government, moreover, has only had isolated instances of abuse. Every day, people voluntarily surrender personal and seemingly-private information to trans-national corporations, which exploit that data for profit. Few think twice about it, even though it is far more intrusive than bulk telephony metadata collection. There is no evidence that the government has used any of bulk telephony metadata it collected for any purpose other than investigating and disrupting terrorist attacks. While there have been unintentional violations of guidelines, those appear to stem from human error and the incredibly complex computer programs that support this vital tool. And once detected, those violations were self-reported and stopped. As I’ve noted before, ultimately, will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court. Or Congress could decide to end bulk collection sooner. The short of it is that, practically speaking, this decision won’t mean much, but could provide compelling arguments for the Supreme Court, should it decide on the controversial practice. Until then, please have a wonderful holiday weekend and feel free to enjoy this . [ ] |
Rdio Shuts Down Video-Streaming Site Vdio, Offers Amazon Credits As Reimbursement For Purchases | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | It’s only been six months since Rdio to the world, but it appears that the company has already decided to give up on that experiment. In an email sent to customers today, the streaming media startup announced that it has decided to discontinue the service. While Vdio was only just introduced over the summer, it followed nearly that Rdio would compete against Netflix and Amazon with a streaming video product. When it finally launched, Vdio was less of a Netflix clone, and more of a competitor to traditional on-demand video rental services like iTunes or Google Play. The shutdown of the service follows a . At the time, Rdio didn’t comment on how the layoff would affect the video service. In an , the Vdio team said it was not able to “deliver a differentiated customer experience,” and is offering users Amazon gift cards as reimbursement for purchases made on the platform. According to several reports on Twitter, Vdio sent the following statement: Hi [NAME], We are writing to inform you that we have decided to discontinue the Vdio beta service. Despite our efforts, we were not able to deliver the differentiated customer experience we had hoped for, and so Vdio is now closed. For more information, please read the . As reimbursement for any content you purchased and any rental content that has yet to expire, we’d like to give you an Amazon gift card. To redeem your gift card, please visit and enter the following gift card claim code: We want to thank you for trying Vdio, and we wish you a very happy New Year. The Vdio Team We’ve reached out to Rdio for comment and will follow up once we learn more. |
Asia’s Richest Man Invests In BitPay | Pankaj Mishra | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | After some in two of the world’s largest countries during past few weeks, the Bitcoin ecosystem may have found its biggest individual backer yet in Li Ka-shing, . Li is now an investor in Atlanta-based BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal for the virtual currency world. He has made this investment through his venture capital company, , an early investor in companies such as Facebook, Waze, Skype and Summly. A BitPay spokeswoman told me that Horizons Ventures and the Founders Fund are among a group of investors including Shakil Khan, Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland, Roger Ver and Ben Davenport, who have put around $2.7 million in the startup so far. Founders Fund is the VC group run by people who founded and were early employees at PayPal. In May this year, . The Li has invested in BitPay through Horizons Ventures, but didn’t give any specific details on the amount invested. Li’s investment in BitPay comes at a time, when regulators in India and the People’s Bank of China, have issued advisories against the virtual currency, and even questioned the legitimacy of Bitcoin. Overall, the environment for Bitcoin seems more conducive the in U.S. where Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently said that despite risks, there are . Indeed, in transactions this year, and has increased its merchant base to over 15,500. It’s been a very busy month for Bitcoin, mostly filled with bad news in two of the world’s biggest countries. While China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, in Chinese Yuan earlier this month, after , RBI. The 85-years old Hong Kong-based billionaire, who is also the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa, is buying into Bitcoin growth in the U.S. amid uncertainties in Asia. John Greenwood, the chief economist of London-based Invesco, that Li’s strategy of investing in a startup that provides enabling infrastructure for the virtual currency, offers lessons for investors looking to make money from Bitcoin. This is what Greenwood told the newspaper: “Just like investors in days gone by made more money out of selling shovels and picks to gold-diggers than anyone ever made out of the gold mine, he is investing in the peripheral activity that bitcoin has generated.” Clearly, Li seems to have made a smart move by avoiding any direct investments in Bitcoin. |
Gillmor Gang Live 12.27.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
2013 Mac Pro Review: Apple’s New Desktop Boasts Dramatic Redesign, Dramatic Performance | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | Pro is a sight to behold: In black aluminum with an eye-catching cylindrical design, there’s little chance you’ll ever mistake it for any other computer. The previous Mac Pro was iconic too, of course, but this one is also just slightly larger than a football and dimpled on the top with a recess like a jet engine. But the true power lies under the hood, and what’s contained therein will satisfy even the most pressing need for speed. Few would argue that Apple’s design for the Mac Pro isn’t unique. It’s been compared to Darth Vader’s iconic look from the original Star Wars movies, and in a less flattering light, called the “trash can” Mac. But when you actually have one sitting on your desk, it’s a very different story. The aluminum surface is cool to the touch, reflective without being shiny, and – somehow – astoundingly reassuring. [gallery ids="934401,934402,934403,934404,934405,934406,934407,934408,934409,934410"] It’s the modern monolith of desktop computing, and indeed it does harken forward to a future age where the amazing engineering contained within is required for your everyday computing needs. As it stands, of course, the computer housed within that sleek black shell will obliterate any task thrown at it by all but the most extreme and demanding of professionals. Apple might not be as fond of the so-called ‘moonshot’ as competitors like Google, but it gives great immediate futurism with the Mac Pro in terms of both design and performance. The modularity of the new Mac Pro is not the same as it was with the older versions. You won’t be swapping 3.5mm HDDs out of bays, for instance. But the outer shell slides off easily once you’ve unlocked it, and you get full access to the RAM bays (upgradeable to a maximum of 64GB via four 16GB modules), as well as to the SSD units (which, while Apple-specific, are upgradeable too) and the GPUs (also theoretically replaceable with future Apple-specific hardware). But the real modularity comes via the external I/O: Thunderbolt 2 can theoretically display 4K video while simultaneously transferring it thanks to a unified 20 Gbit/s throughput rate, and there are six ports on the back, combined with four for USB 3.0. This, combined with the unique thermal core Apple has created, makes for an incredibly small, quiet professional workstation machine. In testing, I couldn’t hear it unless I put my ear up close, and even then it’s a relatively quiet hum, not even close to the fracas my Retina MacBook Pro makes when it’s doing heavy lifting. It breathes a light exhaust of air through the top, too, which is actually a nice refresher if you’ve been slaving away in Final Cut Pro all day. For the layperson or everyday computer user, the new Mac Pro will seem like a thought-based computer, where virtually every input action you can think of results in immediate response. Whether it’s the Xeon processor or the super-fast PCIe-based SSD or those dual workstation GPUs, everything seems slightly but impossibly faster than on any other Mac, even the most recent iMac and Retina MacBook Pros. To be honest, it’ll be hard to go back even for everyday tasks like browsing the web and importing pics to iPhoto. But that’s not what the Mac Pro is for: It’s a professional machine designed to help filmmakers create elaborate graphics, 3D animations and feature-length films. It’s aimed at the most demanding photographers, working in extreme resolutions and doing batch processing on huge files. It’s for audio producers, creating the next hit album using Logic Pro X and low latency, high bandwidth I/O external devices. For me, Final Cut Pro was bound to be the wrench that would otherwise throw my existing Mac setup some trouble. On the Mac Pro, FCP X ran like a dream, rendering and publishing in the blink of an eye. I had to pinch myself to prove that I wasn’t dreaming after it took fewer than 10 seconds to render and publish the final edit of a 1080p video a little over two minutes long. And again, nary a peep from the Mac Pro itself. For the super nerdy, you can check out the of the new Mac Pro we tested and . Remember, this is the baseline, entry-level version without any customization options, so it’s the bottom of what you can expect in terms of performance. The Mac Pro has some unique abilities that you won’t find in any other Mac, including the ability to power up to six Thunderbolt displays at once. I ran two Thunderbolt Displays plus a 21-inch iMac, as well as a Wacom 13HD through the HDMI port, and Apple’s premium machine didn’t even break a sweat. This is definitely the computer for the video producer who wants to be able to monitor output in real time while working on some raw video at the same time, or the information addict who feels they just aren’t getting enough with the two or three displays that represent the maximum possible output with a MacBook Pro or iMac. Another great feature is the upgradeability, which ensures that, as futuristic and ahead-of-the-curve as this Mac already is, it’ll be even more future-proof thanks to the ability to swap out components down the road. Apple hasn’t revealed any details about later upgrade kits, but it’s reasonable to expect that RAM, SSDs and even GPUs will be available for those who feel they need even more out of their maxi Mac. One final subtle but very nice feature is the auto-illumination of the ports that happens when you move the Mac tower itself. It’s extremely useful for helping you plug the right device into the right port when you’re looking to add new devices, and likewise when you’re looking to unplug something. This kind of attention to detail only reinforces that if you have $3K to spend on a Mac, your money’s in good hands with Apple. The Mac Pro is almost absurd in terms of its abilities. It’ll blow away any ordinary computer user, including one with even slightly advanced demands like myself (occasional video editing, plenty of Photoshop, some digital graphics and podcast production). But in reality, my Retina MacBook Pro wasn’t straining under the demand of my needs, either – the Mac Pro merely makes it all seem effortless. That said, it’s rare that a computer is an investment; mostly these days, you buy one with the expectation that you’ll probably need another in two years’ time. The Mac Pro, somewhat like the iPhone 5s, is designed with the future in mind, so that video producers who aren’t working on 4K but will be expected to in a few years don’t have to reinvest. For anyone who’s been looking forward to a replacement for their aging gray tower Mac Pro, and for anyone who has the money and is willing to spend it, the Mac Pro is a no-brainer, but for the rest of us, we needn’t reach quite so high to touch the sky when it comes to Apple’s line of OS X hardware. |
As Marketplaces Evolve, Greylock Places Its Bets | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | The idea of marketplaces as a business model for technology startups isn’t new. We saw some marketplaces go belly up in the bubble, and saw a few, like eBay, grow into massive businesses. However, the marketplace model has experienced a renaissance of sorts lately, with companies like Airbnb, Uber and others gaining serious traction and becoming billion-dollar-plus businesses. Greylock Partners held a conference in mid-November devoted to talking about design, product development, the economics and more around marketplaces, spearheaded in part by the firm’s newest partner and former eBay Motors creator, Simon Rothman. As part of its new to investing in marketplaces, Greylock assembled , Airbnb co-founder and CEO , eBay CEO , Nobel Prize Laureate and marketplace expert Alvin Roth, and many others to discuss the rise of marketplaces and much more. I was able to sit down with some of the speakers to talk about their thoughts on why marketplaces are hot right now. Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, sees many parallels between networks and marketplaces. On the similarities in both models, he says: “There’s a question of how do you identify people? What reputational systems underlie it? What kinds of information and signaling? What kind of transactions go public? There’s some differences, too, but it’s essentially a similar brain activity.” As for why marketplaces are getting more attention now, Hoffman believes that it’s in part due to mobile and the progression in human behavior. “Now everyone is comfortable with the notion of, ‘Oh, I could actually find someone I don’t know and transact with them, either as travelers, hosts, sellers, buyer.’ Those that can actually work mean that I have some trust in these mechanisms,” he explains further. Rothman agrees with Hoffman, and told me that trust is a huge element of why marketplaces have evolved, as well as the biggest challenge for these marketplaces. “They’re really selling trust. And until the web adds social identity, I think creating trust at scale is really hard. As we’ve heard, marketplace is about influence, and if you can’t control the experience, if you can’t control the product, you can’t control the fulfillment. All you can control is trust and you need to have that. And then mobile is an accelerant to that. If you are a local market, or a local business, you have to have mobile. There’s just no way Uber works without mobile,” he says. Reid Hoffman So how do marketplaces add trust? Hoffman advises to look at mechanisms by which you can essentially borrow some trust and add it to the product, such as using social networks or identities. He recalled a product development from his PayPal days, where an engineer developed a better way to authenticate bank accounts. For years, in order to authenticate a bank account you had to send in a voided check, and a copy of your drivers license. PayPal realized that if they wanted to get to scale, the company would have to make it easier to create accounts. “If we can’t solve this problem, we basically don’t have an interesting business model,” he said. One of the early engineers developed a way to send two sub-dollar transactions to the account, to create a PIN of sorts for instant verification. While friction is something most marketplaces want to remove, Rothman argues that some should consider “the concept of strategic friction” when it comes to trust and safety. He thinks it’s one of the only places where friction is not only tolerable but kind of desirable. Of course, one of the marketplaces where trust and safety have been of the utmost importance is Airbnb. Hoffman recalled when he heard Airbnb’s pitch, he was in immediately. But Hoffman recognized that there have been bumps in the road when it came to trust and safety–but he said that what made the difference was Chesky and his team’s hard work is setting things right. “Brian motivated the entire company within six weeks, and said We are revamping trust and safety, in the same kind of pattern he was talking about in terms of developing for mobile,” Hoffman recalls. Separately at the conference, Chesky talked a bit about design, and how he approaches designs at the company. Airbnb launched a complete redesign of its mobile app in November, and Chesky was involved in every part of the three months it took to implement and create the new design, even forgoing hiring efforts. While it took three months end to end to launch a new version of the app, the actual design took place in a matter of three weeks. Brian Chesky When doing the design, the company put up a huge wall where they printed every single screen in the app and placed it on the wall. It amounted to around three hundred separate pages. Chesky learned at art school that you need to draw the whole canvas before rendering because you lose perspective. People tend to get stuck on one page in a design or redesign, and I didn’t want that to happen. And because the design has to cater to two groups, the host and the guest, one team would design the pages from the guest point of view and another from the host point of view. Chesky also met with the designers every couple of days or even every day and that was really, really critical to the speed of design and overall success of the project, in his opinion. One speed bump that many of these marketplaces hit is regulatory pushback. Every large marketplace of late, including Uber and Airbnb, have had challenges dealing with local regulatory agencies. In fact, Rothman says that “any interesting marketplace will hit regulatory issues…largely, if you’re not hitting a regulation issue, the likelihood that the marketplace is interesting is very low. Not zero, but very low.” Hoffman is familiar with this, as even networks hit regulatory challenges. He explains: “I think the simplest way to understand regulation is, there’s a bomb, there’s a fuse, you’ve lit the fuse. And you have to figure out how long the fuse is and how fast it’s burning. And you have to pay attention to that. And then depending on what you think the dynamics are, and there’s certain things you think that can accelerate this fuse or not.” He advises that in the early stages of any marketplace that may hit regulatory snags, founders should figure out what their engagement strategy is. “You don’t want to pre-sell [regulators] on the benefits. You want to get to where they just look around at host sipping coffee and say, “Oh, how was it being a host? How was it being a traveler. Oh, great.” He says you shouldn’t stick your head in the sand, and ignore regulators but also going to them early may be futile as most regulators don’t want change. “So you want to keep that in play to the point where you can build it out and make them go, “Oh, I get this.” And by the way, then, at that point you have a large constituency, if you’re being successful, that also is arguing in your favor and then that allows for regulation change. The regulators, legislators, other people need to figure out what the thing should be.” Now that Greylock is allocating some of its new toward the marketplace model, we’ll be looking to see where the firm will be placing its bets. Rothman thinks that in the next five years there will be more $1 billion dollar marketplaces than there were in the past 20 years, and we already have quite a few that are rising fast. Stay tuned. |
Managing Director Jonathan Teo Leaves General Catalyst, Might Set Sights On Asian Startups | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | Jonathan Teo, a General Catalyst managing director whose most notable investments included Snapchat, has left the venture capital firm. The news is confirmed on Teo’s and his , where Teo is now listed as a venture advisor instead of a managing director. It might seem surprising that Teo would leave General Catalyst when it’s just . During his two years there, Teo was a personal investor and led GC’s Series A and B participation in Snapchat, and his investments also included , and . When I contacted him, Teo said he isn’t ready to comment on his future plans, but I was told by a source close to him that he’s been planning to leave General Catalyst for a while and focus on Asia. I also learned he’s been approached by other Silicon Valley firms but hasn’t shown an interest. Though Teo is still based in San Francisco, Asia makes sense for him because he has strong personal and professional ties to the continent. Teo was born and raised in Singapore and, while working at Google, he set up its research and development center in Shanghai. After leaving Google, Teo joined , where he originated its investments in and . His track record in consumer mobile means he’d be able to provide valuable guidance to startups in Asia’s emerging markets. In many of the continent’s fledging startup hubs, including Seoul, Taipei and Hong Kong, there is plenty of talent but a lack of mentors who know how to help companies navigate the challenges of securing early funding and gaining traction. If Teo heads East he will probably be busy fielding calls from founders who hope to replicate the success of Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. If he does focus on Asian startups, Teo will likely work with his friend Robin Chan, an early Xiaomi investor who , Google’s former head of Android, to join the fast-growing Chinese smartphone maker. Chan told me that he’s excited about the potential of partnering up with Teo. “Jonathan is one of the most talented early stage investors that I know,” Chan said. “He has great intuition about consumer mobile.” |
Nine Music Labels Plan To Sue Vkontakte, The Facebook Of Russia, Over 6,000 Illegal Tracks | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | , a social networking site known as the “Facebook of Russia”, is facing legal action from nine music labels including EMI, Sony and Warner over what they claim is the unlawful distribution of some 6,000 tracks of licensed music on the site from artists like Madonna, Linkin Park, Metallica and Beyonce. The lawsuits are being prepared for filing after the holidays, according to the Russian newspaper . Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Vkontakte, says the site is prepared to negotiate with them, as it has with video rightsholders. “If some music companies wish their content to be deleted from VK, we, as always, are willing to comply with their wish,” he told TechCrunch. “On the other hand, we are also ready to seek mutually beneficial ways to monetize their content. This year we managed to find such a solution for video content and we are optimistic about the audio section of VK as well. “Of course, if no agreement with large record companies is reached, their content will be deleted and VK music service will rely mostly on independent artists.” If the suits go ahead, they look like they may be some of the first big moves from music rightsholders to go after a major site in the wake of a new anti-piracy law in the country designed to protect copyright better. That law originally was aimed to focus more on but there are some who hope to . The law enforces improved communication by requiring site owners to provide easy-to-find contact details, including real-world addresses, and forms for rightsholders to file complaints faster. If a site fails to comply with an infringement complaint, it faces a block at the ISP level. Leonid Agronov, the head of Russia’s National Federation of the Music Industry (Russia’s RIAA), told Izvestia that his organization has long been trying to negotiate with Vkontakte over music distributed through its site. The NFMI claims that Vkontakte does not pay for streamed plays, neither by charging users directly nor by paying the licensing fee directly. But that does not mean that the social network is not profiting. “[Vkontakte] shows ads while people listen to music. So they make money on it,” he said. In the case of removing these tracks, it puts Vkontakte in a double bind, where it’s damned if it doesn’t and damned if it does: on the one hand, it risks legal action from larger companies and potential ISP blockage; on the other, it faces backlash from its users, who look to it as a content portal. This is not Vkontakte’s first brush with copyright holders. Izvestia notes that in June of this year, the site — which has become a go-to place for users in Russia for music and other digital content sharing (including a lot of legal content) — took down some 7,000 music tracks. Then in August, Vkontakte signed a to track and remove illegal music from the site. Muso’s CTO and co-founder James Mason tells me that it continues to work with Vkontakte to take down free music that infringes the copyright rightsholders that Muso represents. “Over the years VK has become the principal tool for music discovery among Russian-speaking population,” Durvo says. “As a result, there are plenty of artists and music companies that use VK as the main way to promote their work. We hope that more and more talented artists will get exposure with the use of our music service.” In January 2012, Vkontakte , which said the site was allowing users to upload and share tracks by Russian artists in breach of copyright law. It was fined $7,000. It has , such as a case against Russian label Soyuz this past October, again over copyright. It is also not Vkontakte’s first brush with Russian legal forces. In May this year, the Russian regulator Roskomnadzor . Although it claimed to have done this by mistake, the move was a bit close to the bone, considering that the site has been a strong advocate of free speech, including content critical of the government. One of the social network’s investors, United Capital Partners, has ties to the Kremlin. It picked up its stake in Vkontakte in a secondary sale. Russia is Europe’s biggest internet market with . But it also has the more dubious distinction of being one of the globally when it comes to digital content copyright infringement. That has been one of the big gating factors for legit services to enter the market — not least because those businesses may actually find it hard to find paying users, when free (but illegal) content is so easy to get. But with companies like Apple finally launching , the tides are slowly shifting — something regulators have been hoping to encourage with anti-piracy legislation. According to analysts at TNS, Vkontakte is one of the most visited sites in Russia, overall coming in third after portals like Mail.ru and Yandex (which each account for some 30 aggregated URLs). Looking specifically at Moscow, Russia’s biggest and pace-setting market, Vkontakte is the leader among under-24s and third in the 25-34 age bracket: In this particular case, which will be filed in court in St Petersburg (where Vkontakte is based), the plaintiff group includes a mix of international and Russian labels: Sony, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI, Gala, Navigator, Studio Soyuz and Nikitin Media. The case could last between a couple of months and two years, Izvestia writes. |
Bitcoin Exchanges In India Shut Down After Regulator Warning | Pankaj Mishra | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | Bitcoin exchanges in India are shutting down days after the country’s banking regulator warned users of virtual currency against security and financial risks associated with them. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had remained silent on Bitcoin over the past few weeks, even as China started clamping down on the exchanges, earlier this month. A week after India’s small but growing Bitcoin community , and made an appeal to the country’s banking regulators for recognizing the virtual currency, , which poses several risks to anybody associated with them. This is what the RBI said: There have been several media reports of the usage of VCs, including Bitcoins, for illicit and illegal activities in several jurisdictions. The absence of information of counterparties in such peer-to-peer anonymous/ pseudonymous systems could subject the users to unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) laws However, the wording of the announcement from RBI leaves a question mark over the legality of not just the exchanges but also of the people who trade on them. As we had , India was just beginning to see a rise in Bitcoin exchanges, and the country’s 1,000-member strong Bitcoin community was hoping to get more merchant endorsements. , an Indian website offering Bitcoin exchange in the local currency, has already suspended its operations. The founder of BuysellBitco.in, Mahim Gupta, who had previously mentioned that his , could also not be reached for comments. Other Bitcoin traders, perhaps cautious that the RBI’s statements threw their own legal situation into question, were also unavailable. |
With Angel Funding From Top Media Veterans, The News Lens Wants To Reshape Journalism In Taiwan | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | Earlier this month, , an independent media startup in Taiwan, from Marcus Brauchli, whose resume includes top editing positions at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and Sasa Vucinic, who helped launch the non-profit (MDIF). In addition to their investment, Brauchli and Vucinic are also working closely with The News Lens as advisors. The involvement of these two journalism veterans is a sign of how quickly The News Lens, which launched just five months ago, has gained traction as a trusted source for information in Taiwan’s crowded media landscape. The site’s growth strategy, which balances idealism with a solid business plan, offers a look at how independent news organizations can leverage multiple channels and organic marketing to build readership without sacrificing the quality of their content. Though the amount of funding was undisclosed, Joey Chung, the founder and chief executive of The News Lens, says it will enable the startup to hire more staff, access photo wires and databases to create in-house content and launch video content. The site currently aggregates content from different media outlets in addition to publishing original columns and analysis. “Sasa and I are hugely impressed with the vision and energy that Joey Chung, [co-founder and editor-in-chief] Mario Yang and their team bring to The News Lens. Both of us have spent time with them in Taipei,” Brauchli told me in an email. “Their use of social media, aggregation and user-centric design, their awareness of the importance of fresh voices in the mix of content, their political and commercial independence, and their commitment to smart, relevant content for a younger audience made the company an especially attractive project for us.” Since launching in July, The News Lens has grown to 1.5 million unique visitors a month, a sign that Taiwanese readers are hungry for a politically independent news site. For English-speaking readers, the most obvious site to compare The News Lens to is the (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by AOL). But Chung says there are several key differences in strategy between the two publications. For example, The News Lens is already aiming for expansion into international Chinese-speaking markets, including Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia. The site is available in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters and has translation widgets for English-speaking readers. The startup also launched with a multi-platform strategy that includes a mobile-optimized site, a content partnership with HTC and videos with news summaries that will play on TV screens in public places like airport terminals and shopping centers. The News Lens wants to be a platform where a wide range of readers can engage in informed debates about important social and political issues, but it balances its lofty philosophy with Chung’s business savvy. Chung wrote six Chinese-language books and was a reporter at the , an English-language daily (disclosure: I also worked there, though not at the same time as Chung) before going to Harvard Business School. After graduating, he oversaw Sanrio’s China operations. At the end of 2012, Chung began discussing the possibility of launching an independent news site with Yang, who was then working for , a Taiwanese magazine. Taiwan’s media industry has grown rapidly: when martial law was lifted in 1988, there were only 31 newspapers, but . But a highly-competitive media industry comes with problems like endless articles about C-list celebrity sex scandals and silly food fads. To be sure, these articles are the kind of mindless fluff that draws readers looking for a quick diversion, but more serious problems include defamation laws that have sparked concerns about censorship and highly polarized political coverage. The and the are seen by many readers as mouthpieces respectively for the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s currently ruling party, and the opposing Democratic Progressive Party. The has managed to establish a reputation for independence, but that is arguably because the tabloid’s voyeuristic celebrity- and crime-obsessed coverage is equally offensive (and titillating) to readers across the political spectrum. Chung is careful to point out that The News Lens isn’t out to topple Taiwan’s leading newspapers. In fact, the site often aggregates content from those publications. Instead, he says The News Lens’ role is to identify important stories and then offer readers analysis to put it into a wider context. “For my generation, people don’t read newspapers because they don’t want to be affected by bias, or they read three newspapers, the Liberty Times, United Daily and Apple,” says Chung. “We want to be the one-stop shop so we can give you that service already. We screen out the junk. We tell you this is what blue is saying and this is what green is saying, and this is what you should know about the issues behind it,” he adds, referring to the party colors of the KMT and DPP. “We try not to judge and we try not to lean toward any perspective.” Recent headline topics on the site have ranged from gay rights in Taiwan to U.S. foreign policy. Though The News Lens target audience is between the ages of 25 and 35, the site hopes to reach people across a broad range of demographic niches. Columns penned by The News Lens’ own contributors currently focus on tech, startups and education. The News Lens now has seven full-time employees, most of whom have previous journalism experience, and 11 part-time staffers. Chung says the site is open to having employees who are “extreme blue or green,” but while they are allowed to express their opinions, they have to keep a “calm, rational and respectful” tone. Another way that The News Lens hopes to build trust is by being honest and pragmatic about its coverage. “I would say we are independent and we’re fair, but since our inherent ideal is to promote as many viewpoints as possible, it’s easy to imagine that we might be a little bit more liberal-leaning,” says Chung. “As long as an idea is not harmful, we’ll put it up there.” The News Lens has focused on word-of-mouth marketing since its launch instead of paying for ad campaigns, partly to prevent overexposure and partly to establish credibility as readers share links with friends on their social media accounts. To reach a wide readership, the News Lens cross-platform strategy includes a mobile-responsive main site, a Flipboard account and a partnership with a digital marketing group that will place videos produced by The News Lens onto public screens. It also landed a deal with HTC which means that The News Lens is one of the sources Taiwanese smartphone users can select for push notifications about breaking news. “From early on, we didn’t want to be another Web site with an afterthought app. We wanted to be on social media, on TV screens in public places, on Flipboard, as fast as possible,” says Chung. This strategy has worked well for The News Lens. Chung says that startup originally hoped to reach a target of one million unique visitors around Q2 2014. Instead, The News Lens hit 1.5 million visitors last month. Within five months of its launch, it had already racked up 50,000 Facebook followers. To put those numbers into context, Taiwan’s population is 23.3 million. Before venturing into other markets, Chung says the startup wants to be profitable in Taiwan. Ideally, that means the site will be considered “one of the top sources of where you get your news,” he says. “We’ll be happy and comfortable once we’ve spent six months as one of the top Web sites that our generation goes to for news, columns and perspectives in different industries.” The News Lens currently earns money with banner and video ads and direct sponsorships. It also hopes to start organizing events and perhaps sign licensing partnerships. Chung says Brauchli and Vucinic have worked closely with The News Lens’ team, providing guidance in weekly Skype chats. For the two news veterans, The News Lens is the first of several investments they hope to make in independent media organizations around the world. “We’re building out a portfolio of investments in journalism-related media and technology companies in Asia and other key emerging markets in the world,” Brauchli tells me. “We’ll bring our experience running or building successful media companies to bear and draw on the expertise of other people we know who are leaders in their areas to bolster our partners.” “We believe fundamentally that good content and a good user experience are pathways to success,” he adds. “This is an exciting time to be involved in media. In many markets, there is an extraordinary opportunity to re-imagine and reshape media, and we want to be part of that.” Chung says that the company’s future projects, including its marketing campaigns, will add value for busy people while getting The News Lens’ brand in front of more eyeballs. He is especially excited about short video summaries of each day’s top news that will play on advertising screens in shopping centers and other high-traffic venues. “It goes back to the idea of why we have media and why we have news, the idea of being better informed. You don’t have to agree with the opinions you see, but it’s our job to put different perspectives out there,” says Chung. “The better informed you will be, the more curious, open-minded you will be, the more tolerant, the more curious about the outside world.” |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 18 | null |
How A Fabricated Story About Iron Maiden’s Love Of Music Pirates Became Internet Truth | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 27 | Wouldn’t it be awesome if heavy metal icons Iron Maiden leveraged data about which regions of the world pirated their music to plan a multi-million dollar global concert tour? Yeah, it’d be awesome, if it were true. So awesome to my anarchistic ears that I was halfway through reblogging the reblog of a Rolling Stone before I learned that I couldn’t actually verify any of the facts. , tech and music outlets have heaped praise on the supposed the tech savviness of the 80s metal band, who allegedly analyzed Bittorrent data to plan a concert tour in South America. Bittorrent, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing client, can often reveal hidden fan bases around the world, since the traffic and contents can be analyzed in aggregate. Musicmetric, an entertainment forecasting startup that analyzes bittorrent and social media data, was quoted in a on November 29, arguing that bands could potentially leverage the wealth of online information to plan their concerts. Then, on December 20, a tech blog, citeworld, “How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates — then went and played for them.” The piece implied that MusicMetric directly advised Iron Maiden to plan an otherwise unscheduled concert tour in South America. “[The] CiteWorld story is sadly not substantiated,” a spokesman for MusicMetric wrote to me in an email. “We never stated or implied that Iron Maiden had used our analytics to plan its tours.” “Once someone writes it and someone tweets, there’s not a lot that anyone can do,” said the MusicMetric spokesman, who preferred to remain anonymous. Despite the glowing press coverage, MusicMetric worries about taking credit for something they clearly didn’t do. In fairness to my fellow writers, I was part of the hype machine. I the story before I had the chance to fully read it. In the course of writing this post, Citeworld has issued an apology and correction, but that the Internet rumor machine from cranking out more stories today. After all, it seems like a plausible story. Indeed, beloved science fiction writer Neil Gaiman has become a full-fledged piracy supporter, after finding out that regions that pirated his books also bought more of them. “Places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia, where people were translating my stuff into russian and spreading it out into the world, I was selling more and more books,” he gushed. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI] I suppose it’s possible that Iron Maiden has, in fact, used Bittorrent data to plan their South American tour. I reached out but haven’t heard immediately back. But, I wouldn’t bet any Bitcoin that they do. This isn’t the first time that the Internet rumor machine has come to the wrong conclusions. During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, amateur sleuthing wrongly suggested that missing student, Sunil Tripathi, might be the culprit. The rumor eventually out of control into front-page headlines implying that Tripathi was enemy #1. I really wish MusicMetric had advised Iron Maiden on how to make millions of dollars from music pirates. It’s such a good story. Too good, evidently, to be true. [ ] |
Shopify Raises $100M To Drop The ‘E’ And Become The Commerce Company That Spans On- And Offline | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Ottawa-based has already raised a considerable amount of money, especially for a Canadian company, and its Series C round continues that theme: The e-commerce company has raised $100 million from existing investors, as well as new ones, including OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners; the goal is to help Shopify drop the ‘e’ and embrace all kinds of commerce, for all kinds of merchants, in all kinds of settings. This $100 million round adds to the $22 million Series A and B rounds raised by the company in 2010 and 2011, both of which came considerably late compared to the startup’s original founding back in 2006. Shopify has had a revenue model since day one, however, and anticipates exceeding $1.5 billion in products sold via its platform this year. That’s more than double its $750 million in revenue last year, which makes sense because it has jumped from around 40,000 shops operating on its platform last year to over 80,000 at present. The new round also values the company at $1 billion, which is unheard of for a recent Canadian startup and an elite club regardless of where you’re based. “In terms of why we’re raising, we’ve talked about what we see as the future of retail,” explained Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief product officer. “There’s kind of this concept that the future of retail is online vs. offline, or just online. We don’t actually believe that; what we believe is that the future of retail is all about consumer choice.” Consumers want to be able to buy in-store after shopping online, go see products at retail locations and buy online afterwards, or do some other combination of the two. They want their retailers to be able to provide them with that kind of experience, according to Finkelstein. So to help their clients accomplish that, the next goal of Shopify is to “transition from an e-commerce company to a commerce company,” he says. Moving from online to more involvement in in-store sales efforts isn’t going to be cheap, even if you take a relatively hardware-light approach. Shopify’s goal is to serve a merchant’s needs wherever they need to sell – online, from a storefront, at a festival or show, or just when they happen upon a chance customer. To serve those ends, the company has already created a point-of-sale system and Square-style mobile card reader, both of which were released earlier this year. Finkelstein suggested we’ve only seen the beginning of the product rollout to support its new mission, and said to watch out for further developments coming out of this funding to be revealed next year. I asked Finkelstein about how Shopify feels about launching initiatives that put it head to head with strong players in the space, including Square. The answer lies in Shopify’s roots, which are firmly planted in online shopping. Square’s DNA is in offline, so Finkelstein says there’s an opportunity for a company to step up and recognize that there’s little to no line left between those two things for a lot of small- to medium-sized merchants. “There are these players, for example Square which is firmly focused on the offline market, and you have guys like Etsy who are focused on the online market, and you have others that are just focused on mobile,” he explained. “But you have no one out there who’s really putting this all together. Our view is that Shopify is sort of that hub right in the middle, and one spoke might be your online store, one spoke may be your offline store, and one spoke may be your mobile device, and one spoke may be cross-selling on Amazon marketplace, but it all ties into Shopify.” To that end, Shopify has been experimenting with real world retail to glean lessons about how best to operate at that nexus. , an event held recently with a pop-up shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market district, is a perfect example. “We know the online world pretty well, but we want to learn as much as we can about the offline world, so this year you saw a couple things from us around that,” Finkelstein said, referring to Popify as well as the launch of Shopify mobile. Shopify’s run rate and growth are putting it on track to be one of Canada’s top tech companies, especially in light of a waning BlackBerry. It’s currently at 320 employees, up from 120 last year, and anticipates growing to over 500 next year spread across its Toronto and Ottawa offices. This huge raise is just the most recent evidence that it is quite possible the Canadian tech company to watch. |
Spire Raises $8M In Series A To Help Customers Manage Talent, Prevent Employee Fraud | Pankaj Mishra | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | , a big data startup based in Bangalore that helps customers manage current and future talent requirements using a contextual search engine, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from an unnamed institutional investor. Saurabh Jain, the founder of Spire, said that this investor has requested two-months embargo before his name can be made public. The financing will be used to hire more data scientists, engineers and also bolster sales, marketing efforts. Started in 2008, Spire has raised $1 million to date in seed funding from several angel investors. This Series A funding valued Spire at $23 million based on an annual revenue of about $400,000. Jain said that one of the key differentiators for Spire is that its solution can be used to recruit fresh talent, and to detect and prevent employee fraud. Spire’s list of customers include IT services companies Atos, Cognizant Technology Solutions, and JDA Software. To date, Spire has processed nearly 700,000 candidates for these customers. SAP’s SuccessFactors and Oracle’s Taleo seem to be decent rivals for Spire, when it comes to the recruitment and talent management market. With nearly three million engineers in the Indian IT industry, employers such as Cognizant and JDA are always looking for ways to reduce time taken in hiring candidates because they are under pressure to deliver software projects faster. Spire helps these companies identify talent with required skills, and matches them with the projects they can execute, all in real time. “Our contextual engine is also able to map potential candidates, both from outside and within a company, against projects in the pipeline. This helps them reduce the number of staff sitting on the bench and improve profitability,” said Jain. With fresh money, Spire plans to tap into U.S. and other Asian markets. However, unlike the Indian market, where its customers need help in sifting through thousands of candidate profiles and matching them with relevant projects, companies in U.S. are not always looking to hire in thousands. But Spire is betting on its big data, contextual search engine to offer solutions beyond just smart recruitment for customers in U.S. and elsewhere. Employee fraud detection and prevention, is one of them. Spire wants to become ‘ ‘ for its customers, and use the big data engine in tackling challenges beyond recruitment and talent management. But that would require testing Spire’s current engine in situations it has not dealt with before. |
NSA Reportedly Uses Google Cookies To Target Suspects | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | According to information once again leaked by , the National Security Agency using the same tool that allows advertisers to target consumers — small files known as “cookies.” In fact, the Washington Post has released more classified slides, revealing that the NSA has found a way to use Google’s own cookies (“GooglePREF”) to pinpoint users. According to The Post, Google’s cookies don’t track personal information, such as name or email address. However, they can identify a user’s browser activity, which is why some users may see an ad for a product they’ve searched for previously on the web. In response to privacy concerns, Google allows users to opt-out of some cookie-tracking ( ). “On a macro level, ‘we need to track everyone everywhere for advertising’ translates into ‘the government being able to track everyone everywhere,” UC Berkeley Law Lecturer Chris Hoofnagle told The Post. “It’s hard to avoid.” As with many of the revelations about NSA spying, the impacts to individual users are uncertain. While the NSA does collect user information in bulk, it often requires a judge’s approval to query the database and analyze it. However, there have been several instances of privacy violations, including agents and targeting suspects that judges . Cookies would potentially allow the NSA to track individuals’ surfing habits and, perhaps, use of Google products, such as Maps. The slides show that the NSA shares this targeted information with a handful of internal divisions and with its British counterpart, GCHQ. By combining information from cellphone location data logs, call logs, and email habits, the agency might be able to better target suspects from the volumes of information it collects every day. It is unclear whether would impact this particular tactic. A suite of laws propose to end bulk information collection, create more oversight, and release gag orders. However, leveraging Google cookies appears more targeted than previous leaks about indiscriminate collection of user data. In any case, Congress goes on holiday break soon, so any reforms will have to compete for attention in the busy new year. Good luck with that. |
Uber Offering Lyft Drivers Free $50 In Gas, Signing Perks To Switch Teams | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Uber is offering Lyft drivers several perks to entice them away from the ride sharing service. The perks include a $50 gas card just to stop by Uber HQ in San Francisco, and signing bonuses if they choose to actually take them up on the offer. We’ve been hearing reports of a signing bonus for a while now, but a flyer — discovered in a Lyft by , details exactly what Uber is offering switching Lyft-ers. Chellam says someone from Uber hopped into the driver’s car for a 3-block ride and handed them the sheet. On one side is a large notice for a $50 gas voucher, which gets Lyft drivers in the door. On the other side is the details of the program which offers new signups 100% of fares through the end of 2013, with no Uber commissions taken out. There’s also a $500 bonus if drivers pick up 20 riders before January 1st, 2014: Our own Josh Constine also heard a few days ago from a Lyft driver that Uber was offering new drivers a $500 bonus for picking up a set amount of rides. Lyft Director of Growth Adam Fishman , noting that the company was aware of the promotion. “We’re aware and flattered by the interest in our awesome community of drivers,” read Fishman’s reply. If this strategy is effective, it could affect Lyft on a couple of levels as it reduces their supply of drivers while increasing Uber customers’ available pool of drivers. Heading into the holiday season that raises the possibility of people not being able to find a Lyft in San Francisco — and turning to Uber to find it much easier to get a car. Uber is on a mission to find more drivers, recently to allow drivers approved for its platform to purchase affordable cars. Founder Travis Kalanick told TechCrunch that they wanted to get ‘hundreds of thousands’ of cars on the road. We reached out to Fishman for more information on how Lyft is handling this strategy. We’ve reached out to Uber to confirm the campaign as well. |
Web Video Startup Ooyala Raises $43 Million From Telstra | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Video distribution startup Ooyala raised another $43 million today, in a round of funding led by Australian telecom service provider Telstra. The funding brings the total amount raised to more than $120 million, and buys the company some time before it might have to go public. Ooyala customers include ESPN, Fox Sports, Pac-12 Network, and, uh, Telstra. |
A Merger In Gaming Services: Playhaven, Kontagent Combine In An All-Stock Deal Worth “Hundreds of Millions” | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Consolidation ahoy! Playhaven and Kontagent, two of the bigger gaming services companies that help developers run analytics and retain their players, have decided to merge into a combined company worth “hundreds of millions” of dollars in an all-stock deal. Neither company could give more specifics on how the deal was structured. “The valuation in the hundreds of millions, but I won’t tell you where,” said Andy Yang, who was Playhaven’s CEO and will lead the combined company. They have yet to choose a new name. Playtagent? Konplaygent, anyone? Playhaven is a company that the biggest game developers use to retain their players with personalized promotions. They help studios segment out players, by whether they tend to play for free or are bigger spenders (known as “whales”). With the top gaming studios reaching tens of millions of players, retention has evolved into a big data problem. Kontagent, on the other hand, is an analytics company that started off by catering to social game developers on the Facebook platform. They are . It’s a natural marriage of sorts. One company provides very deep analytics on game play, while the other offers a monetization solution. “With this combination, we’ll be the 800 pound gorilla and the clear market leader,” Yang said. “Our clients were asking us about how they could take all the valuable data they’ve collected in Kontagent and act on it. We ended up having a shared vision.” Yang said negotiations took somewhere between two and three months, and the boards of both companies were supportive. The two companies will end up reaching 22,000 apps and 400 million monthly active users together. The new company will employ 160 people and Yang and Kontagent’s CEO Josh Williams said there were no layoffs or redundancies with the deal. Williams will become the chief technology officer of the new company, while Yang will take the helm as CEO. They expect to merge their two products by the end of 2014. “At the moment, we’ll have to take one step at a time and have a simple integration at first,” Yang said. “It’s day one of our marriage, and we just moved in together.” The merger comes at a time where we could be seeing more consolidation. As mobile and social gaming have matured, literally dozens of service providers offering competing analytics and monetization solutions have cropped up. Not all of them will survive. “The market is very fragmented right now and you’ll see consolidation in the space,” Yang said. As for why they decided to call it a merger and not an acquisition? “This is a merger of equals. We are two leaders in our respective categories and there’s no money changing hands. This is not a traditional acquisition,” Yang said. The two companies have raised at least $26 million from investors including ALTOS Ventures, Battery Ventures, e.ventures, GGV Capital, Maverick Capital, Morgan Creek and Tandem. |
Facebook Puts Its Web Feed In Motion With Auto-Playing Videos | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | The News Feed is about to get a lot more lively. Just days after pushing its auto-play feature for videos , today we spotted auto-playing videos on Facebook.com, and the company confirms to me “we’re continuing a wider rollout of in-line video on web”. Once this rollout is complete, the stage will be set for the introduction of more flashy video ads. Until now, Facebook’s News Feed has always been still. Everything stays put as you scroll past. All videos were locked in place behind a play button, and no animated GIFs were allowed. But Facebook is putting the feed in motion for the first time with the auto-play videos. For details on exactly how it works and feels, check out and Facebook’s aspirations to become more video-centric. On the web, auto-play makes it so videos uploaded directly to Facebook and videos shared from Instagram begin to play as soon as you scroll over them. They’ll keep playing even as you scroll around, though they stay silent unless you click/tap them, in which case the audio plays. The videos don’t loop, and YouTube or other external videos that appear in the feed as previews of links don’t auto-play at all, giving Facebook-hosted videos an advantage. The feature was previously being tested on the web with a very small group of users after Facebook revealed it was starting in September. It’s currently and Android, and Facebook is now finalizing a design for the web as it pushes it out wider there. You can see what an auto-play video looks like in action in the screenshot below, courtesy of Auto-play could give Facebook-owned Instagram’s video feature a boost. People are more likely to share videos if they get seen, and auto-play basically assures that. Perhaps once auto-play video is available to everyone, Facebook might start allowing animated GIFs, as they wouldn’t stick out so bad. reports that Facebook has had GIF support built for a while but has hesitated to roll it out. Facebook may have been worried that GIFs of “low-quality memes”, a content type it’s , would overrun the feed. It could potentially mitigate that by only rendering the animations in-line if the GIFs were uploaded natively like with videos that auto-play, and not if they’re hosted elsewhere and linked to. With viewing of individual videos improved, I bet we’ll see Facebook relatively soon. It might also look to provide a better way to discover and watch multiple videos, maybe with a lean-back sort of channel for watching back-to-back videos from friends. But what the world is waiting for, or worried about depending on your perspective, is more aggressive video ads on Facebook. Once auto-play video is available to everyone across devices, Facebook may have all its ducks in a row to introduce auto-play video ads. Marketers may love it if the price is right, because it will let them communicate with customers in a much richer way than photos and text. Advertisers might be able to repurpose the ads they shoot for television to fit Facebook, and could shift spend from TV commercials to Facebook. Users may hate it because many simply hate ads all together. Personally, seeing movie trailers or Super Bowl-quality commercials in my News Feed doesn’t seem so bad as long as they don’t immediately auto-play with sound and I can scroll past or x out of them. If they act as roadblocks forcibly delaying me from viewing updates from friends, though, I might be pissed too. No matter the format, Facebook will have to do a careful job balancing the frequency with which video ads are shown, so I’d expect a slow, cautious rollout with lots of testing. If Facebook can make auto-play video feel like a natural part of the feed, it could unlock a new level of proficiency in consuming the world. Auto-play could give us quick windows into our friends lives that are almost as easy to skim as photos but much more evocative. News outlets could serve up footage from major events happening around the world or recent sports highlights. Imagine watching an epic interception returned for a touchdown silently filling you feed with a remarkable athletic achievement that you might not have clicked and waited to load, but you’re happy to see. And if you want to hear the hits and announcer’s commentary, one click and it’s like you’re watching television. And that might be the goal of Facebook video. To combine the vividness of TV with the efficiency of reading. [ |
Glow, The Fertility App Founded By Max Levchin, Crosses 1,000 User Pregnancies | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | When launched its iPhone app for tracking female fertility earlier this year, it garnered attention for its slick design, , and of course well-known founder . But its real success — how many women conceived with the help of using the app — couldn’t be judged right away. These things take some time. Now that it’s been a little over four months since its , Glow is finally talking numbers, and they are pretty impressive. More than 1,000 women have become pregnant with the help of the fertility-tracking app, Glow announced today. The company also rolled out a new section of its website called , dedicated to the success stories of people who have conceived while on Glow (the feature image is one of the photos shared to the site.) The entries are pretty touching, and they show a personal impact not often seen in consumer tech. Also today, Glow issued an update to its iOS app and a new feature called Glow Community, which is a social space to allow couples who are trying to conceive and parents-to-be to share their experiences. The updated app also has some revamped calendar features that purport to help users track their fertility with more precision. Max Levchin has said that his goals for Glow go much farther than what we see on the surface. Levchin’s larger vision with HVF, the umbrella company that Glow is operating under, is to use machine learning and big data to solve the world’s big problems, particularly those concerning healthcare. Pregnancy is just the first piece of the puzzle. Levchin talked to TechCrunch TV about what inspired him to launch Glow at the app’s launch in August. You can watch that in the video embedded below: |
Kleiner Perkins Names Bing Gordon As Chief Product Officer; Debuts Founder Education Program ProductWorks | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | It’s no secret that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has been its partnership, with some partners and others transitioning to new roles within the firm. Today, the firm that General Partner Bing Gordon, who was the former Chief Creative Officer at EA, will become the firm’s chief product officer, leading a program that provides entrepreneurs the intensive mentoring, recruiting and technical assistance needed to create consumer, enterprise and digital health products and services. At a discussion with reporters today, Gordon told us he will continue to make investments and take board seats on behalf of Kleiner Perkins, but since the much of his time will be spent with ProductWorks, he will be scaling back his board involvement compared to traditional VCs. This follows KPCB’s announcement last week that the firm as Design Partner. Maeda will play an important role in ProductWorks by helping entrepreneurs build design DNA into their company cultures. Maeda, along with KPCB General Partner Mike Abbott, former VP of Engineering at Twitter; and Partner Megan Quinn, former head of product at Square, will all be working on ProductWorks with Gordon. “Great products are at the core of great companies,” said KPCB General Partner Ted Schlein in a release. “Even the most brilliant founders need help refining, prioritizing and executing on their product vision. With ProductWorks, our goal is to deepen and extend our support to entrepreneurs who are building stellar products.” So what is ProductWorks? As Gordon, Abbott, Quinn and Maeda explained today, it is sort of like a university for Kleiner founders. The program includes mentorship from the above partners, but also one-on-one product review sessions with a KPCB partner during ProductWorks’ monthly Office Hours at the KPCB San Francisco office. The firm says it will also hold a series of product workshops led by key industry product managers. ProductWorks will focus on giving founders access to top product, design and engineering leaders through events with KPCB’s product, Engineering and Design Councils, and through various meetups and events. As Gordon commented, it is institutionalizing much of what Kleiner already did with founders into a central place. And Abbott and Quinn explain that ProductWorks is also about how to scale knowledge, mentorship, and education to a wide group of people. Part of that will involve more writing by Kleiner partners and Maeda, and disseminating this information on their site. Another aspect of ProductWorks will be recruiting. Because of the talent challenges every founder faces, KPCB will be giving entrepreneurs access to a pool of young designers, engineers and product managers via the KPCB Design, Engineering and Product Fellows programs. For the past two years, Kleiner Perkins a summer fellowship program to place top engineering, product and design talent from colleges at the firm’s portfolio companies. ProductWorks sounds similar in theory to the design team at Google Ventures, but with additional product and engineering focus as well. Adding these valued-added services, especially with the advice of someone like Maeda or Gordon, can be meaningful for entrepreneurs. As for operationalizing ProductWorks, Gordon says they may hire a few people to support the initiative but it certainly wouldn’t be an army of talent. It’s an interesting move for Kleiner that sheds some light on some of the questions we all had following the restructuring news. Many weren’t sure about Gordon’s fate, in particular, with the partner not being named as a managing director of the firm’s early-stage fund. But it seems that with this announcement, Gordon is staying at Kleiner and will be making investments, just not as many. “In a time of change, we wanted to go back to our first principles,” said Gordon. Part of that is helping entrepreneurs. Another part, he explains, is productizing VC, and Kleiner was among the first to hire outside talent to help with recruiting and marketing. Can VCs productize product and design? Perhaps. Google Ventures has seen success with its and in this VC climate, most firms are across the portfolio. Despite any internal shakeups the firm has a deep bench of product and design talent within its partnership, and within many of the company in the firm’s portfolio. |
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: So Many Google Play Editions, So Little Time | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | After a brief hiatus, we’re back with a very special episode of the TechCrunch Droidcast. Recorded with both myself and Chris Velazco in the flesh in our studio offices in sunny, warm (actually freezing, dark) Toronto, Canada this week is a pleasantly brief sojourn into the world of Android. We deal mostly with the new , which include a stripped down, virtually stock OS running on Sony’s Experia Ultra Z (though it loses the ‘Xperia’ for some reason) and the LG G Pad 8.3-inch Android tablet. Google’s going a little wild with those ‘blessed’ devices, which have the benefit of having all manufacturer bloatware stripped out, to show just how dumb OEM skins actually are.
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Gift Card Marketplace Raise.com Gives Itself A Raise With $18.1 Million In New Funding | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Chicago-based , a marketplace where consumers can buy and sell gift cards for cash, has raised $18.1 million in funding, according to . The company declined to comment on who invested in the latest round, but has raised $4.5 million in earlier seed and angel rounds, we’re told. The filing doesn’t reveal the investor lineup, listing only Raise.com founder George Bousis and board members (Yapmo founder) and (Listen.co founder and CEO). shows a few of Raise.com’s seed rounds, and reveals that Lon Chow of Apex Venture Partners is a prior investor. “It became a challenge from a consumer standpoint, to understand how gift cards, coupons and deals went together,” says Bousis. “We pretty much decided that because our motto was ‘Give Yourself a Raise,’ that the best natural name for the new gift card-only focused company would be ‘Raise,’ itself,” he says. The company started in Bousis’ living room, tethering off his iPhone for the first six months, around two and half years ago. Today, it has grown to over 50 full-time employees, and is now aggressively hiring. In its sights is the massive ($115 billion) gift card industry in the U.S., where roughly 20% of gift cards’ value sits unused every year. In addition, there’s some $200 billion in merchandise credit from store returns, which is another currency Raise.com can buy and sell. “People can expect to save anywhere from 5% to 40% or more on everyday purchases across a variety of brands,” says Bousis. “We want people to think of shopping on Raise before they spend money at any store. Emotionally, we want them to always feel like they got a raise when they use our website,” he adds. To begin, verified sellers simply create an account, enter the required info like retailer, serial number, and PIN. For each sale, Raise.com takes a flat 15% commission, and they charge an extra $1 per physical gift card sale. Physical gift cards account for around 10% of the company’s sales. The site will cover shipping and handling fees, and provides prepaid shipping labels as needed. Sellers are then paid by check or PayPal, as specified. Buyers and sellers are protected by a 100% money back guarantee. The company encourages sellers to discount their cards by at least 5%, but the actual price is up to the seller, as long as it’s not more than the gift card’s value. In the works is a gift card pricing tool which will calculate the best price, as well as a way to access your purchased gift cards through a scannable barcode you could show the cashier via your smartphone. Since there’s no sales tax, shipping costs, or processing fees associated with buying these gift cards, for savvy shoppers, buying a card on Raise.com is like getting free money. This has made the site popular with a number of coupon bloggers, like the well-known and , for example, which have touted the site in recent months. The company will use the additional funding for growth, marketing and advertising, and hiring – it’s adding around three people per week right now. But Raise.com is not yet ready to go international, as it wants to secure the U.S. market first. |
Will Instagram’s Messaging ‘Moments’ Be Ephemeral? | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Instagram is preparing to launch a new on its platform this year — as soon as its event this Thursday — TechCrunch has heard from a variety of sources. This isn’t too shocking, as Om Malik that the service would be coming very soon. What we’ve also heard, however, from a few sources, is a very interesting rumor: Instagram’s messaging feature will feature messages that will disappear over time. We haven’t been able to get a solid confirmation of this one so let’s call a spade a spade — this is conjecture. Hence the headline with a question mark up there. But, since we’re here, let’s talk it out. From what we understand of the messaging feature, it will be a part of the main app but may not be dedicated to a separate section on the tab bar. This leads us to believe that it will be an offshoot of the profile section of the app, similar to how Twitter’s previous app handled DMs, though yesterday’s update places messages right in the tab bar. It’s also possible that Facebook has sent over some of its ‘Poke’ messaging vibes along with Facebook Chat Groups and Messenger director Peter Deng back in August. Deng moved to Instagram in August, when Instagram founder Kevin Systrom said that “his experience building out Facebook News Feed and Messenger make him the perfect fit for our company.” Deng that “Mark [Zuckerberg] wanted to make the world more open and connected. We want to capture and share the world’s moments. It’s a beautiful mission.” The messages are text-based, with a fairly straightforward interface reminiscent of any other chat app. We don’t know if images or video will be an option but it would be hard to imagine why they wouldn’t be. TC’s Josh Constine has talked before about might be good for Instagram. And the service as a whole has been people’s use of it as a messaging platform — this would be a natural continuation of that path. Obviously an Instagram ephemeral messaging system, if what we hear is accurate, would be an effort to play into the arena that is currently being dominated by Snapchat. And everywhere you go, people really want to know what other people think about Snapchat (especially teenz!). Going along with this is Instagram’s use of the sent out to press. Sharing a moment has been a guiding statement for the company for a while now, but was emphasized yet again at its recent launch of video features on the service. Sending a message that will be available to view for a limited time is absolutely a way to communicate that concept. You’re sharing a ‘moment’ with someone, and that moment will then be gone. Humans often forget the exact contents of a conversation in a short period of time. We’re left with an impression of what was said, but not the exact letter-by-letter or photographic transcription thereof. Having messages last for a brief period and then flutter off into nothingness might actually be a better way to go, more representative of real life, than having that all on permanent record for eternity. Though a lot of the discussion surrounding ‘limited time’ messaging has focused on Teens , there is a possibility that messaging on the whole could benefit from considering this outlook. Is permanence important in text messages and casual conversations? Or is it something that just “happened” to us as our conversations moved from voice chats on the phone to text messages and IM? Moving to text-based, computer-facilitated messaging allowed us to easily keep those messages for easy reference. This can be handy in business communications, for reference and more. But is it really necessary for us to index the angry argument we had with our spouse a week ago? One we’ve already reconciled over? Instagram’s messaging section, which we’ll see shown off Thursday, could be a plain Jane non-disappearing-act affair. But if it, too, taps into this ephemeral messaging trend, we could be seeing the continuation of a much-needed re-thinking process about how we use the Internet to talk to each other. |
AmazonFresh Launches In San Francisco | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | As we , Amazon has launched its grocery-delivery service in San Francisco today. The service was previously available in Seattle and Los Angeles, but has now extended to the San Francisco Bay Area. costs $299/year and promises fresh produce, meats, dairy and more delivered on the same or next day. Prime membership is automatically included. Grocery delivery seems to be a hobby for Amazon, which is looking to be your one-stop shop for online shopping. Today, Amazon is the digital incarnation of what Target was for brick-and-mortar. By offering groceries, Amazon can loop customers into a subscription for something they need regularly. The hope is that each visit results in a wandering eye and extra purchases from Amazon’s never-ending catalog of products. Right now, AmazonFresh competes with Instacart, which today in Boston, and Walmart in the grocery deliver vertical. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to try out AmazonFresh, head over . |
On Strength Of Chicago’s Growth, Instacart Launches Grocery-Delivery Service In Boston | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Grocery-delivery service today launched in Boston, its third market after and . The company said it will serve the entire Boston metropolitan area within the next few months. That rate of expansion is normal for the firm, which took its time spreading out over the greater Bay Area, and is currently continuing to cover more of Chicagoland. Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta told TechCrunch that Boston’s high population density, large economic base, often inclement weather, and stats as the 10th largest metro area in the United States were deciding factors in the city’s selection. At launch, Instacart will only support Shaw’s. Instacart’s usual mix of Whole Foods and Costco and so forth will be added shortly. Geographic expansion has thus far treated Instacart well. Its operations in Chicago are growing 100 percent monthly. In Boston, according to Mehta, day one orders are strong given that the service launched with a note to people in the area who had asked to be informed when it went live in their city. Instacart’s business in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to grow at around 10 percent weekly. The company intends to land in more cities by the end of next year, so if you are jealous of Boston, hold fast. As I : The company plans to be in 10 markets by the end of 2014. All of Chicagoland, or the Bay Area count as single markets in the firm’s thinking, so by the end of next year, a sizable chunk of the United States population should have access to Instacart’s service. I’m guessing the Seattle area, LA, the New York City sprawl, and so forth. Maybe Boston, and some place in Texas. The company declined to be specific, unsurprisingly. The company has assembled an internal launch team to support its goal of reaching new markets. While Instacart is growing quickly, a giant looms. This morning, Amazon , its own grocery-delivery service in San Francisco, the home market for Instacart. Amazon has scale and buying power that Instacart can only imagine. However, Amazon’s dive into the San Francisco market is at once modest, and pricey. According to : Amazon said Wednesday that AmazonFresh will be offered as a free 30-day trial in select parts of San Francisco. After that, customers have to sign up for Prime Fresh, which costs $299 a year. And Instacart continues to run the risk of peeving its retail partners. The company had to remove Trader Joe’s from its platform after the grocery chain began barring its shoppers from entry. TechCrunch will check in with Instacart to see how it’s performing as a market in a few weeks. If Boston follows Chicago and sees rapid order growth, Instacart’s model is probably attractive enough to land in as many cities as the company hopes to in the next year. |
Twitter Broadens Its Keyword Targeting For Ads With Synonyms And “Twitter Lingo” | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Twitter just that it calls “broad match for keyword targeting.” Supposedly, this will allow advertisers running keyword-targeted campaigns to reach users who are using synonyms, alternate spellings, or “Twitter lingo.” When Twitter in April, Senior Director of Revenue Products Kevin Weil told me that the goal of the program was to make tweets (as opposed to the “interest graph” of who you follow) a “first-class citizen” in Twitter’s ad targeting, and to allow advertisers to reach users at the right moment, i.e., when they’re actually discussing a relevant topic. By adding these broad match capabilities, Twitter can presumably do all of that while also exposing a given campaign to a broader audience. As you can see in the graphic to the left, a coffee shop that wanted to target “love coffee” could also reach users who were tweeting about how much they “luv coffee” or “love lattes”. At the same time, Twitter says advertisers can structure their campaigns so that they’re not broad: Just like on other keyword advertising platforms, if the coffee shop sells lattes but not espressos, they can use the “+” modifier on the broad matched terms to prevent broadening. Targeting “love + latte” will match to users who Tweet “luv latte,” but it won’t match to users who Tweet “luv espresso”. |
Snapchat Raises $50 Million In Series C From Coatue Management | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Amid rumors of a and a potential $200 million funding round, turns out that ephemeral messaging sensation Snapchat has actually raised $50 million in Series C funding. Co-founder Evan Spiegel has confirmed with TechCrunch that the $50 million was from a single investor, with no secondary offering. However, there is no word on who that investor might be, or whether or not it was a previous investor. [ : that the investor is private equity firm Coatue Management, and Snapchat .] Spiegel did say that the money will go toward growing the business. The reveals nothing. recently that Snapchat was looking to raise $200 million, potentially from Tencent, at a valuation north of $3 or $4 billion. Spiegel has mentioned Tencent, and its chat subsidiary WeChat in particular, as an interesting company to learn from. However, it’s now confirmed through court documents and TechCrunch’s inside sources that , likely during the Series B round. According to , this $50 million puts Snapchat’s total investment at no less than $123 million, and without a revenue stream in sight. And honestly, it doesn’t seem to matter right now. Snapchat announced recently that it sees over , which is more than Facebook’s daily photo uploads. Though the company doesn’t publicly disclose numbers, it is to have around 30 million monthly active users. However, TechCrunch has confirmed that Snapchat actually has more than that. Previous investors include Light Speed Ventures, who led a small seed round, Benchmark and SV Angel, who joined Lightspeed and invested $12.5 million in Series A, as well as IVP and General Catalyst, who contributed to a massive $60 million Series B round in . Word on the street is that the last round was actually closer to $80 million, with $20 million going toward founder liquidity. |
Petsy.mx Raises $1M To Bring U.S.-Style E-Commerce To Mexico’s Pet Lovers | Steve O'Hear | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | If, like me, you’re old enough to remember the original Pets.com, then this funding story will make you smile. The iconic pet supplies online retailer, not to be confused with new owner PetSmart, sits alongside Boo.com and Webvan in Dot Com history. Folklore has it that Pets.com, which went from IPO to liquidation in 268 days, was selling its wares for one-third the price it paid for them, and that’s before taking into account the huge advertising spend. Oh, how things have changed… Enter , Mexico’s “premier petcare e-commerce retailer”. Hoping to make a land grab in the burgeoning Mexican e-commerce market, the young startup has announced a modest seed round. It’s raised $1 million, led by Venture Partners, with participation from Capital Invest, and Dila Capital, as well as unnamed angel investors. Money, Petsy says, that will be used to fund its growth and product development. Launched in June 2013 with the aim of bringing “US-style” customer service to the Mexican e-commerce market, Petsy.mx sells a wide variety of pet care products, including premium dog and cat food brands such as Royal Canin, and Eukanuba. Like a lot of e-commerce activity in Mexico and the wider LatAm region, it looks to be gunning for something close to first-mover advantage. “Mexican pet owners suffer from a lack of retail options, both brick and mortar and online, when seeking the best products for their pets,” says Toby Clarence-Smith, Petsy.mx’s co-founder, in a statement. “We want to solve this problem while offering fantastic customer service at all times. Our goal for Petsy.mx is to play a central role in the Mexican pet community, as both a partner and an advocate.” E-commerce in Mexico seems to be quite a hot space right now, probably because its burgeoning nature means that, for the time being, competition is limited compared to maturer markets. In traditional e-commerce, timing is everything. Move too early, and the market is too small. Move too late, and incumbents make the barriers to entry that bit higher. To that end, Petsy is talking up in Mexico, and the government’s active role in supporting the Internet sector. Of course, in emerging markets like Mexico, Rocket Internet, the hugely well-funded German e-commerce incubator, is the elephant in the room. As an example, Rocket’s ‘Amazon of Latin America’, Linio, from the likes of JP Morgan Asset Management, Investment AB Kinnevik, the Tengelmann Group, Summit Partners, and Rocket Internet itself. Perhaps counteracting (or complementing) the Rocket effect, however, local startup activity more broadly is also on the increase. Initiatives like 500startups’ presence in the region, with its , are proof that the local startup scene is maturing. Meanwhile, VCs, such as Spain’s Seaya Ventures, are about the LatAm market, not least Mexico. |
Google Brings Chrome Apps For Mac Out Of Beta, Offers Web Software That Works Offline | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Google has brought its , letting users install apps to their desktop for use just like native software. There’s a Chrome App Launcher for Mac, too, which resides in your dock and provides centralized access to all those Chrome apps in the same place. The apps available work offline, and can sync their state across computers where a Chrome user is logged in with their Google account. They update automatically when a new version comes out, and “behave and feel just like native software,” according to Google. To find Chrome apps that work with the Mac Desktop, you can visit the “ section of the Chrome Web Store, which essentially collects any Chrome software that functions offline, and includes things like 500px, Any.Do, Autodesk Pixlr Touch Up and more. Google bringing Chrome apps to the Mac desktop isn’t strictly new: The search giant revealed its plans to do this back in May when it launched Chrome Apps in beta, but now it’s taking the beta label off and making it available to all. If you’ve ever used a site-specific browser like Fluid to turn web pages into desktop apps on your own, you’ll know the value of having this stuff live outside of Chrome itself. That said, don’t expect apps from the Chrome web store to replace Photoshop or anything like that just yet. Still, it’s a good way for Google to get people using their software on their current platforms, so that they can get an advance look at how Chrome OS works, essentially. The fact that these sync settings with Google accounts also means that users who embrace them on Mac will be primed to start right where they left off should they ever pick up a Chromebook, which helps with Google’s long-term strategy for its browser-based desktop OS. |
Google Releases Its Find My iPhone-Style Android Device Manager App In The Play Store | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Google launched , but it curiously made the tool web-only, eschewing a native Android app and causing a lot of confusion in doing so. The Android Device Manager is , and does most of the things that Apple’s Find My iPhone service does, but for Android gadgets instead of iOS-powered devices. The new app, like the web interface, lets you locate your Android device on a map, see when it was last located and when it was last used, as well as ring, lock and wipe the device. Plenty of people I spoke to about the service early on were excited it was finally bringing some device security features to Google’s mobile OS, but also confused when they searched the Play Store only to find that no actual app for the service existed. Of course, in theory having it operate on the web makes more sense: if you’ve lost your phone, an Android app running on it won’t do much good in terms of helping you track it down. It makes more sense to have an Android Device Manager on the web, where it was born, but people were bound to look for it on the Android mobile app store, especially given the example provided by Apple’s competing service. Having an app also means that people who have multiple Android devices, including tablets, will have faster access to the security features contained therein. |
“Feels” For iPhone Updates The Pro/Con List For The Emoticon Generation | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | Torn up by a complex decision you need to make, and that pro/con list just isn’t helping? A new app called can help. Feels is a recently launched app designed by three students at the Savannah College of Art and Design that offers a clever, quick way to work through your decision-making process via a simple and colorful iPhone app interface. Think of it as the pro/con list for the smartphone, emoticon-favoring generation, perhaps. To use the app, you enter the name of a decision you’re struggling with (e.g. where to move, taking a new job, etc.) and then the various factors influencing that decision. For each option, you can attach a photo, then swipe over the text label next to every influence to add your “feels” (that is, your feeling) about the matter. A new apartment that’s close to work might get the smiling emoticon, for example, while the fact that it’s expensive might get the frown. And there are several emotions to choose from in between, of course. It’s almost silly, but there’s something to having all these decisions before you, not just in black and white as with pros and cons lists, but weighted by a variety of factors and your emotions associated with those items. For instance, the app told me — pretty accurately, I think — that my pipe dream of a decision to move to a downtown condo is probably not the best one with regard to the other factors that are important to me and my family. (I’ll admit I’ve been blindly devoted to this idea for some time, but Feels is right in telling me that it should not be my top consideration.) To be clear, the app doesn’t just spit back one decision, but rather displays your list of options and your overall feeling about each, based on all the influences you previously provided. The idea, co-founder Joseph Albanese explains, is to offer an emotional scale designed to give users a more in-depth approach to gauging how they really feel. For decisions with a larger number of factors, Feels will also offer a “Details and Trends” section about the data you’ve submitted. The app was a joint effort between Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) students Albanese, Wyatt Gallagher (recent grad), and Ameer Carter. They put the app together in nine weeks, says Albanese, as part of a class project. “This is the first iOS app any of us have ever shipped,” says Albanese. “We came together because we wanted to build something even though we had no idea what it would be. We worked relentlessly for weeks to get this from initial concept to shippable product,” he explains. The class required that, by week nine (of a 10-week quarter), the students had something submitted to Apple for review. For a student project, Feels is surprisingly well done and fun to use. The team will now work on UI enhancements, and making the process even simpler and more collaborative, they say. You can snark if you like about the need to use an app to help you think through things, but some people need to work through their thoughts by putting them down on paper. This is the modern-day update to that. I feel I might actually use this one. The app is a paid download, $2.99 in the iTunes App Store . |
New Report Shows That Most Of China’s Gamers Are Still Playing On PCs, Not Mobile | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | A (link via Google Translate), an industry group for game publishers, shows that China’s video game industry is now worth 83.17 billion RMB (or $13 billion), a 40% increase over the past 12 months (h/t ). While the growth is not surprising, the fact that most of that revenue came from PC-based games may be, especially considering the amount of attention that has been focused on the rise of mobile in China. Most of this year’s revenue, 64.5% or about $8.7 billion, was generated through client-based PC games. Browser games took in a comparatively low $2 billion, while mobile games earned just $1.8 billion. Social games–which many developers depend on to spread the word about their products–earned less than $1 billion. As Games In Asia notes, most browser games can’t be played easily on mobile devices, so these figures mean that PC games made up more than 80% of revenue earned by China’s gaming industry in 2013. A lot of focus has been placed on the rise of China’s mobile gamers. For example, Tencent gave mobile developers a potentially lucrative outlet when it . Several China-focused mobile game companies have also recently picked up significant funding. These include , bringing its total funding to date to an impressive $83 million (its existing investors include GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital’s China fund, Disney’s Steamboat Ventures and Northern light). Another mobile game developer in China that earlier this month. Developers are busy in order to take advantage of China’s rapidly increasing smartphone penetration, and they have good reason to. There are more than 500 million Android and iOS devices in China, according to , and that number is expected to grow to 800 million next year, and top-grossing Android games can make $5 million to $10 million per month. Smartphone penetration is growing rapidly in Asia and, as in other markets, most of the time players spend in-app are on games. As a result, many developers have focused on HTML5 to help them develop casual games that can be played on different mobile OSes, as well as figuring out a distribution strategy for China’s highly fragmented app marketplace. Developers shouldn’t ignore PC gamers. But the report from GDC shows that game developers who want to be profitable should consider developing a multi-channel strategy, too. |
Mophie’s Powerstation XL Packs In The Power For Extended Time Away From Outlets | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | Our devices have a never-ending hunger for power – it’s their single greatest failing, in a time when they can do incredible things but still only last around a day of solid use in the best-case scenario. But Mophie has made a name for itself providing extra juice for your devices, and now they’ve got a new that packs a crazy 12,000 mAh, which can charge some smartphones up to eight times over. Mophie’s Powerstation XL isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s just making the wheel a lot bigger. Even design-wise, it resembles previous Mophie power pack devices, with a rubberized black top and bottom ‘sandwiching’ a silver wraparound rim. A button on the side will light up an LED indicator to tell you how much juice is remaining (to the nearest quarter), and two USB 2.0 ports on the top can charge up to two devices simultaneously, while a micro USB input is used to fill it back up once it’s empty. The sandwich look is simple, good and a nice fit with Apple products, with which I’m generally using the Mophie Powerstation XL. Plus, the whole thing feels terrifically well-built, and you can imagine that if you pop the lid, it’ll be tightly packed edge to edge with battery cell units. Mophie’s backup batteries feel like they can survive a fall, which is more than you can say for a lot of the lower-priced models it competes with. And the Mophie Powerstation XL also works as advertised. I used the partial charge it came with to fully reenergize a Nexus 5, HTC One and Nvidia Shield before it exhausted itself, and subsequent charges have managed to serve up multiple charges to my iPhone 5 while also topping up an iPad Air on the run. Plus, in terms of charge retention, you can easily have the XL in a bag for days without it losing a single dot of its energy meter to dissipation. Mophie does good retention, and good overall life of the bank itself, which is why they can get away with asking for $130 for a backup battery and someone like IOgear charges a lot less. The XL is brand new, so I haven’t had the opportunity to test its longevity yet, but the Powerstation Pro I’ve had now for a couple of years still seems not to be noticeably diminished vs. when I first bought it. The bottom line is that if you need serious backup juice in a relatively small package that’s bound to be reliable, Mophie’s latest delivers. It’d be great if someone made a smartphone that eliminated the need for such a thing, but until then, at least there’s the Powerstation XL. |
New Leaks Detail How The NSA’s ‘TAO’ And ‘ANT’ Units Spy On Devices, Global Networks | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | New leaks in Germany’s newspaper about the scope of electronic surveillance conducted by the United States’ National Security Agency. In short, it looks like the agency has even more access to personal data than we already thought. says it has obtained documents detailing the depth and breadth of access that the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, an elite group within the NSA gaining access to foreign computer systems in the name of protecting national security, now has when obtaining data. The paper wrote:
“According to internal NSA documents viewed by Spiegel, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies… The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.” Also according to Spiegel, the NSA has called ‘ANT’ which has compiled information about specific hacking methods for everything from high-end networking devices to consumer-grade electronics: “A document viewed by Spiegel resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell. These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them. This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets’ data. The catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000.” You can read the entire coverage at Spiegel and . |
Fly Or Die: Microsoft Xbox One | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | Microsoft’s is off to a great start, launching with cable TV control, bumped up graphics, and an all-new Kinect. But is upgrading worth it? Our own that it’s a tough upgrade from the Xbox 360, after customers have grown accustomed to taking such huge technological leaps during earlier generational transitions. And John Biggs isn’t thrilled with the early titles available at launch. Still, it’s hard not to be excited about the live TV control, and the speed with which you can switch between gameplay and television. If only the voice-control feature were a bit more reliable. In the end, we recommend waiting a year or so for the $499 price to come down a bit, but eventually most gamers will want to make the transition. |
Reason #152 Virtual Reality Is Awesome: Personal Movie Theaters Without The Awful Other People | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | I love going to the movie theater. Seriously, I . I just hate all the other people that go. Quite early on, my parents taught me that there was but one rule for going to the theater: silence is golden. If the theater was a moviegoer’s church, talking or otherwise ruining the experience for others was sin. If I talked, we’d leave. Simple as that. Sometime in the past few years, though, it’s like people have forgotten how to the movie theater. I’ve tried going at different times. I’ve tried going to different theaters. No matter what I do, no matter where I go, the shitty moviegoers follow. They talk. They crack jokes that only their friends laugh at. They muck with their phones, blinding everyone in the rows behind them so they can blast out a Facebook update about being at the movies that literally no one will care about. I went to 10 movies this year; 9 out of 10 had at least one person who happily paid their $12 just to go in and crap on the movie for everyone else. I’ve given up. But this… this gives me hope. Hope for a next-best-thing. And does it make me want like . VR Cinema 3D is a movie theater… simulator. Built with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in mind, it’s a simulated movie theater without the lines, the massively inflated concession prices, or the crappy people. It’s a full-sized movie theater in the comfort of your own home, beamed straight to your eyeballs. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nha5VVslG_o&w=640&h=360] You strap on the Rift, load up your favorite movie (by naming it “movie.avi”, regardless of what sort of video file it actually is. Hurray, beta software!), pick any seat in the house, and kick back. The “in-theater” lights dim, and the projector starts rolling — complete with a bit of ambient light reflecting off the screen and back into the room. Don’t like your seat? Walk to another, or bring up the UI to instantly warp across the room. It may seem silly, at first glance. Why simulate the environment? Why not just play the video directly onto the Rift’s display? Once you try it, though, it all makes sense. The familiar environment helps it all feel very, real, allowing you to quickly lose yourself in the movie. Meanwhile, simulating the screen at a realistic distance gives it all a massive sense of scale. Just imagine this with a bit of networking magic added in. You and your friends could catch the latest flicks while sitting side-by-side, even when you’re thousands of miles apart. And if one of them starts talking a bit too much? Boop! Muted. Of all the Oculus Rift demos I’ve tried, this one might actually be my favorite. They hooked me initially with the promise of immersive games, but they sold me forever with the promise of private theaters. If you have a Rift, you can find the early (and occasionally buggy) build of . Sorry, Mac users – it’s Windows only, for now. Still not getting it? Here’s a slightly longer video of the app in use by Youtuber/Rifter emart: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_JkrU2kxag&w=640&h=360] |
SD Cards Aren’t As Secure As We Think | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | The hardware hacker gave a talk at the where he offered some good news and some bad news. The good news? SD cards contain powerful, handy micro controllers that are useful to hackers and hobbyists. The bad news? SD cards are woefully insecure. In a detailed and , Huang describes the exact problems with Flash memory. In order to reduce the price and increase the storage space, engineers have to fight a never-ending form of internal entropy that slowly but surely scrambles the data on every Flash drive. Huang writes: To take up arms against these errors, SD cards are essentially over-engineered to ensure an acceptable level of data retention. They also contain firmware that can, for example, change the visible available space on the card without changing the actual available space. This means you could sell a 2GB card as a 4GB card – your computer wouldn’t notice a difference until it started filling up that fake space. You can, incidentally, . Here’s the worse news: because these cards contain firmware, this firmware can be updated. Huang reports that most manufacturers leave this update feature unsecured. In other words, don’t ever assume a Flash device is empty after you wipe its contents. For example, the card could make a copy of the contents in a hidden memory area or it could run malicious software while idle. And the good news: Huang also notes that these cards could be reprogrammed to become Arduino-esque open source microcontroller and memory systems. “An Arduino, with its 8-bit 16 MHz microcontroller, will set you back around $20. A microSD card with several gigabytes of memory and a microcontroller with several times the performance could be purchased for a fraction of the price,” he writes. So, in short, destroy your SD cards if you have any dirty info on them and keep your eyes peeled for ultra-small, ultra-fast Arduino hacks. |
Marco Polo Is A Simple App For Sharing Your Location With Selected Friends | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | A smartphone app called aims to make it easier for users to find and meet up with their friends. The basic mechanic of the app is pretty straightforward, and is indeed reminiscent of . Instead of text messaging back-and-forth with your friends to find out where they are, you hit the “Marco” button to share a pin showing your location. Then the app shows you a list of your friends, and you choose who to share it with. (You can also add an image or a message to the pin.) Once other users get notified about your location, they have the option to share their location with you. And if someone hadn’t downloaded the app, you can still send them a link to your location. There are, of course, many other location-sharing apps, and a broader category of similar apps under . However, I haven’t seen anything that works exactly the way Marco Polo does. Co-founder Aneel Ranadive said via email that the app “is more low key and less formal than texting, and less invasive than, say, turning on Apple’s Find My Friends or broadcasting to your entire network on Foursquare or Facebook.” Unlike Find My Friends, you’re not sharing your location on a persistent basis, and unlike Foursquare, you choose who you share with each time. (I’ve certainly had moments where I realized that I didn’t really want to share a given location with someone — but I didn’t have the guts to unfriend them on Foursquare, so I just didn’t bother sharing at all.) He also pitched the app as part of a trend of people wanting to share more privately, for example with Snapchat. (Update: A couple of people , which may have a similar aim but achieves it in a different away; as I understand it, you continually share your location for a set period of time.) The app actually represents a shift for the startup, which was previously known as Pinchit, and which started out as a daily deals site with from investor (and ) Tim Draper, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and others. Marco Polo has actually been available for iOS and Android for a little while now, but Ranadive said it’s only with the most recent update that the team is trying to go beyond a small group of testers. I tried the app out myself. None of my close friends are on it, so it didn’t have much utility in terms of actually meeting up, but it was still fun to see where Ranadive was at a given moment. And it’s as simple and “low friction” as he said, with only a couple of taps needed to share your location. If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, you can . |
What Makes Girls Fall In Love With Computers And Code? | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | By Zach Weiner, via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic The discussion about women in technology is in , this time after remarks made by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham about the relative dearth of female tech founders and the perks of starting to code at a young age in with The Information were picked up by . Discussions about career, gender and age with a dash of the that often accompany them are always dicey topics, so it makes sense that this interview hit a nerve. For his part, Graham (who, it should be mentioned, in interviews with TechCrunch a very strong interest in funding more and voiced pride in in Y Combinator’s founder classes) says he’s been and misunderstood, and there are some being made that at least some of the pile-on seems to be unwarranted. That said, people on all sides of the debate are making good points, and will probably continue to do so for a while. The real upshot of all this may be that more people are talking about solutions to the inequalities in tech. Because putting the controversy aside, there is one thing that isn’t really up for debate: There are still far fewer females in the technology industry than there are men. As Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson wrote in a this morning, “The brouhaha that [Paul Graham’s comments] unleashed about women founders, women coders, and women hackers is a good thing because we ought to be having a broader conversation about these issues. Paul asks ‘God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?’ and that is a damn good question”. Wilson offers up some examples of initiatives tackling the problem full time, including and . He also referenced TechCrunch’s from this past October’s with Dr. Maria Klawe, who has nearly closed the gender gap at the elite Harvey Mudd computer science department since she joined the college as president in 2006. In fact, the Hopper conference was teeming with women who had fallen in love with computers and engineering, and anyone interested in learning how to welcome more women into tech should make it a priority to attend. While there this past fall, I asked a number of Hopper attendees to talk about what they love about the act of building things through code, and we’ve edited a number of those responses together for the video embedded at the bottom of this post. It’s interesting to watch today in relation to the current discussion about girls in tech, because many of the Hopper attendees I talked to had discovered their interest in computer science around the age of 13 or younger. The thing that’s most striking about all of these responses is that there’s really nothing overtly gendered about them. They could have just as easily come from a group of males. So perhaps the best way to get a girl interested in computers is simply to put them in front of her as often and as early in life as we do — and even more importantly, encourage her to approach computers as a producer, rather than as a consumer. As Maria Klawe put it in the video, “One of the things I hate about the current state of things is people think of technology as something you use, but not something you create.” Indeed, that’s a mindset people of all ages and genders would do well to change. |
Facebook’s Cutesy Annual Report To Partners Reveals First Country-By-Country Mobile Stats | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | TechCrunch has obtained never before published metrics showing Facebook’s international growth. Facebook sent some partners a playfully illustrated eMagazine called The Annual, but I’ve acquired a copy from a source and the stats inside are serious business. The report divulges user counts for some key international markets like Germany, which now has 25 million users, and 18 million mobile users. Previously, Facebook had only shared combined web and mobile user counts by multi-country region, and its mobile user counts as global totals. The problem is that hides what parts of the world are driving its mobile growth, which has brought it to a total of 874 million monthly mobile users and 507 million daily mobile users as of September 2013, out of a total 1.19 billion month user across all devices. So for several quarters I called for Facebook to release more detailed international mobile stats. The company partly acquiesced in August, , seen in the graph below. Though it vowed to be more transparent about international mobile growth and publicly release more of these country by country stats, it hasn’t done so yet. But buried inside its stylized “The Annual” report to European and Middle Eastern marketing partners are figures for Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Turkey, and Israel. The Annual includes some interesting quotes from Facebook executives including VP of Product Chris Cox, who said “We’re not ever going to be a media company. There’s not a great history of mediums becoming good at creating content.” There’s also plenty of Facebook-themed illustrations (seen in this post) case studies, interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, and stats on shopping and travel spending influenced by Facebook. It’s the previously unpublished international growth stats that are most fascinating, though, and here they are: [Update: Facebook previously trickled out a few of these stats to press in their respective countries, but many of these figures have not appeared elsewhere, and never together in a way that allows for cross-region analysis.] The numbers show that Facebook is successfully making the shift to mobile in Europe and parts of the Middle East, with all the listed countries seeing well over 50% of total users accessing from mobile. Facebook’s small-screen interface is especially popular in Sweden where over 81% of users are on mobile. The stats on Germany show that local social network StudiVZ and the populace’s strong focus on privacy may have slowed Facebook’s growth in the country. Only 43% of German Internet users and 27% of German mobile phone users are on Facebook — lower percentages than the other countries noted. Still, Facebook has built a 25 million-strong user base in Germany. While Facebook made a big mistake relying on HTML5 and was slow to start displaying ads on mobile, it’s now demonstrating it can earn serious money outside of the desktop. Developers have proven willing to pay for mobile app install ads that help them score downloads and get discovered despite the crowded app stores. That’s why mobile user growth around the world could excite Wall Street. It could also insulate Facebook from the fickleness of teens at home in the United States where there are worries that the social network may be losing its “cool” with the youth. Surveys say on Facebook. However, survey results may be skewed against the company by the , which may encourage kids to say they use the decade-old Facebook less than they actually do to sound cool. It’s unclear whether Facebook actually needs to be loved by teens or if it can . As kids flock from one social app to the next, adults might follow them, or they might simply dismiss the teens as chasing the next fad. Either way, the more Facebook can establish itself as a mobile-first service around the globe, the better chance it has at escaping churn and instead becoming an enduring, institutionalized piece of the Internet. [slideshare id=29557037&doc=facebook-theannualtechcrunch-131229150318-phpapp02&type=d] |
“Steve Jobs” Biographer Puts Draft Of New Book Online To Crowdsource Ideas | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | One of the most successful authors in the world, , is seeking the wisdom of the crowds for his new book about the technology industry’s major inventors. Crowdsourcing books , but it is, as far I as can tell, the first time a writer of Isaacson’s caliber has opened up the writing process in such a way. In an email interview, Isaacson gave me some more detail on how it’s working. “It has been surprisingly helpful. I have made dozens of factual changes, plus I have sketched out a few more substantive additions I plan to make in the final version,” he said. Though only two chapters , it’s already gotten attention from an impressive group. Stanford Professor of Political Theory thought the role of government in funding the early Internet got short shrift, and Isaacson give it some attention. Isaacson responded in kind, “Yes, I will add a section on govt research at MIT, Stanford, Lincoln Lab, BBN, SRI, etc. Very important. I’m a fan of Leslie Berlin and her Noyce bio is superb.” In a spicier example, , an early pioneer of online forums, Isaacson’s retelling of his own history. The two had a lively exchange, with both agreeing to moderate their understanding of the events. As the former CEO of CNN and Managing editor of Time, Isaacson is no stranger to soliciting feedback. “In the past, I have sent parts of my drafts around to people I knew,” he told me. “By using the Internet, I can now solicit comments and corrections from people I don’t know.” Despite the fanfare of the Internet’s crowdsourcing potential, there’s really no quality and widespread tools for soliciting feedback. One of the websites he’s experimenting with, Medium, was never designed to help authors co-write books. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams the blogging platform to shift our daily reading habits and inspire users to tell their most interesting ideas. Unlike other news sites, however, Medium lets users comment in-line, which makes it a more suitable place for targeted feedback. If the experiment continues to be a success, Isaacson will not only have proved that many authors should crowdsource their works, but will have given Medium an extraordinary new purpose. Medium, in fact, has a section for “ ,” but it might take an author with some buzz to make the idea more mainstream among authors. Of course, crowdsourcing won’t work for every book. Nick Bilton’s on the origins of Twitter revealed a handful of sordid details; he didn’t lend out any early copies because the launch made news. Additionally, as the CEO of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson has an elite circle of supporters. Even if it works for him, it might not work for newbies. It’s an ongoing experiment. The web has a pretty good track record of making industries, especially knowledge industries, more transparent and participatory. If I were a betting man, I’d say Isaacson is riding the cusp of what will eventually be a staple of modern authorship. If you’re a fan of technology or Isaacson’s past work, you can read the drafts . |
How Snapchat Became The Breakout Consumer Product Of 2013 | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | TechCrunch Last year, as 2012 ended, I scanned the early-stage startup landscape and tried to identify one company that was a breakout for the year — I ultimately selected Stripe, and explained why, . I liked the thought-exercise so much I decided to do it again this year, and it didn’t take much deliberation to choose Snapchat — in my personal opinion, the clear breakout consumer product of 2013. The framework is provided of Fred Wilson, a high-level litmus test that, when applied, starts to make the improbable seem obvious in hindsight: Clearly the Snapchat founders are smart enough to build something on their own, to iterate on their vision for a product, and to navigate the choppy waters of the early-stage app ecosystem and investment market. Once Snapchat made it through Series A and the 2012 Christmas “ ” from Facebook, the company’s CEO assumed the mantle of “David” against Zuckerberg’s “Goliath” and became the person who embodied this character. How many times have you been presented with the option to sign up to a new service by using Facebook Connect alongside terms of service disclaimers including “ ”? Snapchat’s value proposition is essentially the modern, mobile, of those types of disclaimers. Even with family over the holidays, when pictures are taken, you hear more than just one person blurt out “Don’t post those to Facebook!” The idea of Snapchat — to allow people to share images without posting to the web or Facebook — was definitely the right idea. Building on the idea of Snapchat above, the actual product, like Instagram, unbundled one of the most important parts of Facebook — mobile photographs. However, once Instagram became a of Facebook, and once those images helped build Instagram user profiles on the web, one could argue mobile-only Snapchat the forced permanence, faux-filtered finishes, and broadcast nature of Instagram to put people and faces at the center of images and to share them with individuals or groups in a more private, time-sensitive, mobile-only, intimate way. In 2013, the two leading social networks made big moves — Facebook transformed enough of its business to mobile to convince Wall Street that profits could continue to roll in, and Twitter finally went public and is performing well even with spikes in trading volume. At the same time, however, mobile apps, especially those from Asia, grew so big, dominant web platforms finally took notice, seeing them as a new platform threat. All of these companies combined could one day represent nearly one trillion dollars in public and/or private valuations, so as the market recognizes this, a property like Snapchat can easily be perceived to be worth much, much more than we imagine today. Mobile. Mobile. Mobile. User-generated pictures taken and viewed on mobile devices. A demographic centered around mobile-native teens and expanding rapidly. A communications app with network effects that can spread globally because the medium is universal. Oh, and mobile, mobile, mobile — a shift so huge, it could still be one of the most trends in technology relative to its scale. And, there you have it — Snapchat is the “breakout” company of 2013. I’m not going out on a limb with this one! In about a 12-month , the company grew , became one of the most dominant mobile photo-sharing networks, multibillion dollar acquisition offers from the two dominant web companies, and closed increasingly bigger Series A, B, and C rounds from some of the most successful investors at each stage, including the most recent round led by one of the world’s tech hedge funds. While the future of Snapchat is — will they be able to sell ads, deliver ads without ruining the user experience, capitalize on in-app purchases, or sell itself in early 2014? — the app remains at the top of the charts and shows of slipping. For all of these reasons, Snapchat is 2013’s breakout. |
CrunchWeek 2013 In Review: Bitcoin’s Big Rise, Edward Snowden And The NSA | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | In this first installment of our two-part year in review, Leena Rao, Ryan Lawler and I talk about the meteoric rise of , the digital currency based on an open source software protocol that seemed to capture the world’s attention over the course of the year as it hit staggeringly (amid lots of ) and secured , and the by previously-unknown whistleblower that the National Security Administration has been the digital habits of millions of Americans — with the help of some of the tech industry’s biggest and most trusted companies. |
Apple Highlights Language Learning, Visual Design With Its 2013 Top App Store Picks | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Apple just released its annual list for iTunes and the App Store, and apps that focused on language learning or featured unusual visual design were among its top picks. The iPhone and iPad Games of the Year both won Apple Design awards in June. iPhone game Ridiculous Fishing: A Tale of Redemption by Vlambeer, stood out from other fishing games with its flat design, while Frogland’s Badland, the top iPad game, featured lush high-definition graphics to create a menacing atmosphere. Disney Animated, the iPad App of the Year, uses interactive features and clips to show how all 53 movies by Walt Disney Animation Studio were created. Apple’s iPhone App of the Year is Duolingo, one of the first and best that are revolutionizing language learning by making it more accessible. Each year, Apple chooses its top apps of the year separately from those that performed best based on downloads and sales. Unsurprisingly, many of the top-performing apps by downloads were games. King’s Candy Crush Saga scored the most downloads across three categories: it was the top free iPhone and iPad app, as well as the top paid iPad app. Minecraft, published by Mojang, was the top paid iPhone app. In terms of non-gaming apps, both Vine and Snapchat did well, placing fourth and sixth respectively on the Top Free iPhone Apps chart. Runners-up across the categories included Pandora Radio, photo editor Afterlight and the Sleep Cycle alarm clock. Over in iTunes, pop music and rap ruled, with Justin Timberlake taking Artist of the Year with The 20/20 Experience and The Heist scoring Album of the Year for Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde’s “Royals” was dubbed Song of the Year, while Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City by Kendrick Lamar took the Breakthrough Album nod. Gravity was deemed best movie by Apple, while Despicable Me 2 was the best animation. 12 Years a Slave was noted for “Best Male Performance” by Chiwetel Ejiofor, while Blue Jasmine’s Cate Blanchett got “Best Female Performance.” The TV Show of the Year was, unsurprisingly, the final season of Breaking Bad, while season three of Scandal was hailed as the Best Breakthrough. Cult favorite Orphan Black was named Best Discovery, while season 3 of Duck Dynasty got the Best Reality TV distinction. For books available through Apple’s e-reader iBooks, Tenth of December by George Saunders was named the best novel of the year, while One Summer by Bill Bryson was the best non-fiction book. The best book for young adults was The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson, while the best book designed specifically for iBooks was the Breaking Bad tie-in. Apple’s picks for Best Podcasts are MSNBC Rachel Maddow, The Adam and Dr. Drew Show, AsapScience and Stuff You Should Know. To see more of this year’s top performers, check out . |
What Games Are: Games And Money Are Still Weird | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 12 | 29 | Suppose you have a passion-project game, an interactive story you want to tell or something similar. You want to develop it for iOS. You want it to be “console quality” by which you mean rich in graphics and sound and with a lengthy amount of gameplay. You want it to be cool. Given how everything has liberalized in the gaming market over the last few years, and how many million devices there are out there that play games you would think that it would be much easier to get a project off the ground than it used to be. You’d be wrong. It’s still something of a minor miracle that games like that manage to get made at all, even with the availability of cheaper tools and better distribution. It’s still often a story about how a team worked evenings and weekend for two or three years just to get a demo version of their game made so that they could go to Kickstarter, or speak to a publisher. Getting an original game started is just not a straightforward process. Games and money have long had a weird relationship. Many studios have found financing but lost the rights to their work. Many are the studios who found themselves working as de facto service departments for larger entities. Many many are the studios who have been told over the years that there simply isn’t any of that kind of money to be had for the kind of game that they want to make, and they should focus on something else. Sometime there have been viable publishing layers, other times not. The AAA console-game market, for example, used to feature third-party development deals between studios, publishers and platforms. Nowadays most of the publishers simply do the development in-house, leading to a closed culture. Sometimes financing has mandated creative control, or even commissioned projects. In the web portal business, for instance, many platform holders dictated what games they wanted to fill certain slots and farmed them out cheaply. They had very little interest in creativity and often the scale of what they paid made little or no sense for medium-sized studios. At other times the floodgates have opened. 10 years ago the notion that venture capital would invest in games was laughable. Then Zynga and Playfish happened and piles upon piles of VC money flooded into the social game sector. Something similar seemed to be happening in social casino until relatively recently, and still does with high end deals like for Supercell. But still few would invest in making a graphical adventure game, say. Those are still thought of as weird. A lot of the reason why comes down to creators and financiers having very different priorities. Any financier wants to “invest” in the truest sense of the word. It’s not the attraction of an individual game or celebrity designer that makes up their mind, but franchise or exit potential. They see investment in a game as a long-term thing, a way to build up something that will last 10 or 20 years and make billions in the process. The game itself becomes a kind of market of play, sometimes actually so, and in that model the developer is a kind of play-provider. Fundamentally the idea from the financier’s perspective is to keep players playing and extracting value forever. Whereas many game makers don’t care about that. They want to be successful, but in the eyes of the community and the press. They want to be getting the plaudits and the game-of-the-year awards. And they don’t want to get trapped into making sequels to that one game they invented one time. They basically have artist mentalities, and their more story-driven games especially are intended to be consumed more like books. Once done, the game maker wants the player to move on to his next project. And that’s why passion projects are such a difficult sell. Investors tend not to want to fund them because they’re just lottery tickets. Investors prefer platforms and platform-like propositions that have prospects. Games where revenue and long-tail opportunities abound, or services that support games. In a sense artistic ambition is nice, but the opportunity may not make sense for them. Various parties have recently attempted to square the games-vs-money weirdness. In the wake of the end of third party publishing at scale, various boutique publishers have arisen in mobile and other markets (for example: ). Their mission tends to be to provide financing for developers while at the same time maintaining their creative rights, although exactly how viable that proves over the long term is unknown. Others (such as ) have attempted to use a mezzanine financing model, or to provide a semi-freelance publishing-as-a-service model. In that model the financier uses systems similar to the bond system found in the movie industry to ensure completion and provide a sense of security for investor and game maker alike. None of those schemes have really taken off though because they tend to be complex and the relationships that they set up can be adversarial. In all honesty the problem tends to be that most such schemes require that a game maker has at least a conversational knowledge of how finance works, which they often don’t. Although they are both in technology businesses, game makers aren’t usually startup-founder types and commonly know nothing about what convertible debt is, or how financing options can be beneficial or no. They tend to need financing to be much simpler. Many indie developers, for example, prefer to work in ad hoc arrangements where team members all get paid simple revenue shares because that makes sense to them. They don’t really expect to be successful at scale and often don’t understand what exactly scale would bring other than headaches. Fundamentally the developer just wants a check to fund making their damned game, and to not get screwed. They want patrons and supporters rather than investors as such. Patronage with a significant possible upside, but more importantly no hassle. For most financiers that’s just not an inviting proposition. That’s why crowd funding is so much more attractive to many game makers than any kind of professional financing. It gets the middlemen out of the way, leaving the maker to focus on just the product and the audience. And with little chance of getting screwed over. Yet does crowdfunding really offer the scale that many passion projects need? For a game like $555k has been enough to fund an initial episode, perhaps two, yet its developer still needs a lot of people to buy season passes to fund its completion. For a game like , $300k wasn’t enough given the graphical ambitions for the game, and even despite a lot of press attention urging readers to back the game about the Iranian revolution there wasn’t enough support. The difficult truth is that while there are many game makers out there for whom passion-filled story-led games are the future, the crowd may simply not be big enough. Their ambitions to go all big-console-style still need considerable financing, yet at the same time the market for that money is just as awkward and strained as ever. Here’s hoping that it starts to resolve itself in 2014. |
All I Want For Christmas: A Beta App Store | MG Siegler | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Okay, Apple doesn’t actually issue such an alert, but they might as well. The App Store is about to shutdown for holiday break . And so I felt it was a good time to reflect on where we are with regard to the marketplace heading into 2014. The answer, as best I can tell from talking with innumerable developers over the past year, is still very good — but it’s not exactly . And it should be great. More specifically, the state of testing and releasing an app has gone from more-or-less untenable to the nightmare we all knew it would become. The time is now: Apple needs to come up with a real solution to allow developers to distribute and test their apps they launch on the App Store. These launches have never been more critical. And they’ve never been such a crapshoot. Apple needs to address this and fix the current solutions that just aren’t working. Currently, if you wish to test your app before launch, you have two solutions: or . TestFlight has long been the favored approach, leading up to . HockeyApp has come on strong as of late, likely due to TestFlight’s large number of bugs alongside recent iOS updates. (Note that I’m not mentioning Apple’s own 100 test device allotment for regular iOS developers because such a number for any sort of actual testing is absurdly low. And worse, those 100 devices are set in — even if you delete them from your account.) TestFlight and HockeyApp are far from ideal from the perspective of both the developer and the end user. The process to install and use both services is at best arduous and at worst, sheer insanity (how many times can your provisioning file . . ?). And let’s be clear: both are hacks. Both require a user to install a provisioning profile on a device which Apple undoubtedly would prefer everyone do, but turns the other way. These installations, which require a full security bypass, are the antithesis of what Apple preaches with the App Store. And yet, they’ve been the go-to way to handle third-party remote app installs. Well, almost. This past year, I’ve noticed a distinct rise in the use of to push pre-release apps to testers. This method has existed for a while, but few have dared use it (without explicit permission) in the past. Now it seems that almost everyone is using it. And for good reason: it’s much better for the remote installation of non-App Store apps. Send a link to the file, one click install, done. No provisioning file. No mess. This, of course, isn’t what Apple intended this system for. Such easy installs were meant for companies using private, internal apps. Apple charges $299 a year for this privilege. But Apple also can’t be completely clueless. I’ve heard from a number of developers that Apple is well aware of some developers doing this — they do screen each company that applies for an enterprise license — and chooses to turn the other way (except when they’re ). Why? Again, because there simply is no better way. With TestFlight fleeting and HockeyApp still just a hack that can work only when situations are perfectly ideal, there is nowhere else to turn. So here’s what I propose — it’s a solution that undoubtedly is not unique, but I feel like it is the right time: a Beta App Store. Throughout its history, Apple has seemed to be a company adverse to the notion of “beta” products. But the more recent launches of Siri, iWork, and of course, Maps, suggest that they may be coming around. Now it’s time to go a step further: to offer a full marketplace (still somewhat curated — more below) devoted to not-quite-ready-for-primetime applications. With a Beta App Store, Apple could provide developers a way to test apps with certain users — or even certain demographics, or regions. Developers do this now simply by releasing their apps — fully live — only in the stores of selected smaller regions (Canada and Australia being popular choices since both are English-speaking). This is more or less a “soft launch” but it’s also very much a launch. Again, the app is live. Anyone connected to the correct App Store could download it. With an official Beta App Store, a developer could potentially set more granular parameters. Demographics. More specific regions. Unique device restrictions. You could imagine a way to make certain downloads invite-only while others are opened up much more broadly. How could Apple do this? Fairly easily, it seems. They would create a new Beta App Store that is separate from the App Store. This app would not be installed by default on devices, but would instead be a separate download (just like many of the current Apple-built apps). And, of course, it would feature a bunch of big, wordy opt-in dialogues. But rather than allow anyone to submit apps to this new trial store, Apple should take a page from their OS X playbook. Starting with Mountain Lion, Apple began giving users the option to download an app from anywhere over the web or just the official Mac App Store. But there was also a third option: to allow downloads outside of the Mac App Store from “trusted” developers. A Beta App Store for iOS should work similarly. A user would opt-in to it (preferably via the download of the new Beta App Store app and with all the subsequent pop-ups) but a developer would also only be approved to push apps to the Beta App Store if they were approved in the same way that Apple currently certifies approved Mac app developers. In other words, a white list of app developers. This way, Apple could ensure that those pushing apps to this new Beta App Store aren’t trying to do so for malicious purposes. You could imagine a one-time review process for this Beta App Store — or a way to show that you’re already a developer in good standing. And, of course, a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy. What I’m proposing is a far less restrictive App Store where trusted developers are just that, trusted. They can upload builds at will and Apple would be okay with that knowing they aren’t trying to harm users. At the same time, users are opting-in to testing these apps which still may be buggy, but again, aren’t going to be harmful. It’s a more formalized, safe, and secure system than everyone is currently using. Win-win. So why not do this? It’s obvious, right? I imagine Apple is afraid that such a system would add both a layer of confusion and complexitity to the current App Store system. But again, I don’t think so given what I see developers already doing. What’s better: letting trusted developers push beta apps to willing testers through a lightly regulated store you can track, or letting them push beta apps to anyone via ad-hoc links? It’s time for this, Apple. The App Store has flourished thanks to a robust ecosystem that has allowed many companies, developers, and users to thrive. But no system is so perfect that it doesn’t warrant changes and evolution over time. Now is that time. |
After Bootstrapping To $100M+ In Sales, Tutoring Marketplace WyzAnt Lands $21M From Accel To Go Global And Mobile | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Building an online marketplace for local services is a tricky proposition, especially at scale. It takes time to recruit a stable of service providers, to offer deep coverage within local markets and maintain the quality of service (and the trust of customers) as the marketplace expands into new cities. For local service providers, though, moving online can be a boon for business, reducing costs and providing access to a new pool of customers. While products and businesses are increasingly moving online, Mike Weishuhn and Andrew Geant founded in 2005 to bring an online marketplace to a market where service providers still live mostly offline: Tutors. Today, following in the same mold as names like Uber, Etsy and Angie’s List, WyzAnt is building a national company that functions as a hyper-local marketplace, offering students an easy way to find and connect with tutors in a range of subjects. Starting with college campuses in and around Washington D.C. and advertising its new tutoring service with fliers and via Craigslist, WyzAnt began building a stable of local tutors and customers, slowly expanding into new markets. Today, WyzAnt has quietly become one of the largest online tutoring platforms in the U.S., serving 500,000 tutors and over one million students. The founders have bootstrapped the business to more than $100 million in gross sales to date, with a 120 percent annual growth rate since launch. After resisting outside investment for nearly eight years in favor of staying lean, the WyzAnt founders are looking to expand their tutoring business into new markets and beef up their team. To do that, WyzAnt is taking on its first capital — a $21.5 million Series A round from Accel Partners. As a result, Accel partners Ryan Sweeney and John Locke will be joining the startup’s board of directors. While it’s somewhat unusual to see an initial round of funding like this come from one backer, it’s a somewhat familiar market for Accel, which has also backed online marketplaces like Etsy and 99 Designs. It also marks the second significant investment in online education the firm has made this year, following the $103 million round it co-led with Spectrum Equity in video-based education platform, Lynda.com. WyzAnt and Lynda.com have similar stories in many respects, both bootstrapped online businesses that, over years, managed to organically turn simple business models into millions in revenue. Lynda.com, for example, went 17 years without taking on outside capital, building a huge stable of quality instructional content and leveraging a simple subscription model to not only turn a profit but hit $100 million in annual revenue in 2012, before taking money from Accel. WyzAnt, on the other hand, has managed to survive in an increasingly crowded market by making it easy for students in any state to connect with a quality, local tutor. Rather than focusing on the SATs, or a particular subject, WyzAnt has taken a broad approach, like Etsy or Amazon, offering tutoring in over 240 subjects that range from K-12 to college, test prep to arithmetic. The key to its service, WyzAnt co-founder and CEO Andrew Geant says, is to offer enough tutors and enough subjects to enable the platform to connect students to the “right” tutor. The best way to build trust and loyalty in tutoring, when there are now so many services parents and students can choose from, both online and off, is to keep quality high and facilitate better matches than the tutoring school down the street. Like Yelp, customers can search WyzAnt for tutors in their local area, filtering results by price, rating and distance. Search results include a picture and profile of each tutor, including a brief resume-like description of their backgrounds and areas of focus. Profiles, again much like Yelp, also include star-based ratings and student feedback, making it easy for students to get a quick feel of what their peers are saying and their strengths and weaknesses. Today, Geant says, WyzAnt has accumulated over 850,000 tutor ratings and reviews, which albeit small compared to Yelp’s bullpen of reviews and ratings, makes it one of the frontrunners in the tutoring industry where transparency is concerned. In most cases, students get connected with tutors based on recommendations from (family) friends, guidance counselors and schools, but WyzAnt’s system gives parents and students choice in the matter, and the ability to take more ownership of the process, rather than leave it up to chance. On the flip side, WyzAnt offers a way for tutors to tap into a new pool of customers, while moving their small tutoring service online and bringing in more dollars. Like many other marketplaces, WyzAnt generates revenue by taking a piece of each transaction, with the percentage it takes based on a sliding scale, depending how often the tutor uses WyzAnt. In addition, by offering profiles, payment processing and some basic CRM tools, the company wants to be an easy way for tutors to run their businesses, market themselves and manage usually tedious operational pains, like scheduling and collecting payments. With its new $21.5 million, however, WyzAnt is looking to beef up the services it offers to tutors, and is currently in the process of testing digital tools that will allow tutors to interact with their students online, like via video chat, for example. From the beginning, the company has been focused on live, one-on-one and in-person tutoring, but even as its hyper-local coverage expands, not every rural outpost in the U.S. has a quality tutor in the subject they’re looking for right around the block. As a result, WyzAnt wants to increase its support for those without tutors in their immediate hoods, while making it easier for students and teachers to chat, message each other, share course materials and content and so on. As of now, WyzAnt doesn’t offer video support, but the founders say that it’s in the works. Similarly, while the platform is available via the mobile web, the company has yet to offer native mobile apps. With its new funding in tow, WyzAnt plans to launch its first native mobile apps during the first half of 2014 and, as it ramps up its marketing, business development and engineering staff, is beginning to plot its expansion into international markets. In this way, it’s on a similar course to that of Lynda.com, which is also beginning to increase its global footprint, also guided in part by support and capital from Accel. Over the coming year, WyzAnt plans to hire 50 new employees, particularly in Chicago (where the company is headquartered), and will continue to build out its “Resources” section, which offers students a range of supplementary educational content, like Q&A forums, lesson plans, videos and blog posts. Tutoring is a crowded market and, as WyzAnt expands its platform, it will find itself in competition not only with the bevy of tutoring services out there, but other online education providers. Some of these can be prospective partners, but many won’t. In the end, marketplaces of all varieties are subject to network effects, so, as the demand for online tutoring resources increases and competition from vertical services , WyzAnt finds itself in an arms race and land grab — one that has claimed more than a few startups ( ). But with $21.5 million, the runway gets a lot longer. |
Amazon Reportedly Buys Mobile Payments Startup Gopago, Working On An ‘Ambitious’ New Project | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Looks like Amazon may have quietly made another acquisition, and another move to expand its role in the world of mobile: are that the e-commerce giant has , a startup that offers consumers an iOS or Android mobile app to pre-pay for goods before picking them up at a store, and retailers a point-of-sale system to process those orders and more. Gopago, founded in 2009, is based in Silicon Valley but was started by Italian co-founders: CTO Vincenzo di Nicola hailed from Teramo in Abruzzo before eventually studying at Stanford. The other co-founder, CEO Leo Rocco, was raised in the U.S. by Sicilian parents. It’s unclear how much money Gopago had raised but its lead investor was JP Morgan Chase, which took a stake in the company . We have reached out to Gopago, its co-founders, and Amazon to try to get a direct confirmation of the deal and will update as we learn more, but for now it looks like Di Nicola has spoken to Italian press about the deal. Here’s what we know from there: — The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
— There was apparently also interest from Google.
— Di Nicola is going to have a little rest now (“Intanto un bel po’ di riposo.”), and he’s not coming over to Amazon with the acquisition. (He’s actually just gotten U.S. citizenship. Congrats, Vincenzo!)
— It’s not clear yet whether anyone is coming over to Amazon, as it happens. It seems one of the main interests for the company was the technology, which Di Nicola says will be at the heart of a new, “ambitious” project. So what is this ambitious project? Amazon today already offers a few ways for people to use mobile devices to buy things, but for now these are largely limited to on apps sold via Amazon’s app store, and that let third parties sell Amazon products in their apps. But there have been some hints for a while that Amazon could be working on something more. Over a year ago, we that Amazon was working on a Square competitor. Gopago, with its business firmly rooted in facilitating local commerce by way of mobile devices, could be part of that plan. In any case, Square is not Amazon’s only commerce rival. Amazon recently launched “ “, a digital wallet service that places it in competition with the likes of PayPal and credit card companies, by offering online sellers a one-click checkout option that would let a user pay instantly through his or her Amazon account. Just as eBay and PayPal are working hard to connect the dots between online and offline, mobile and desktop commerce, so, too, may Amazon. (And there are still some loose ends that we’ve never quite figured out how they will fit into the mix, such as Amazon’s . Who knows if this is also part of this ambitious plan.) Combined with the fact that many are expecting Amazon to launch a of its own sooner rather than later, and you can see where Gopago technology, perhaps working across those handsets and a Kindle Fire tablet souped up specifically for merchants, suddenly starts to make a lot of sense. |
Premature Celebration: Today’s Anti-Spy Ruling Is Merely Symbolic For Now | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | The news industry exploded today with headlines trumpeting a federal judge’s declaration that the National Security Agency’s . The strongly worded anti-NSA opinion was quotation gold, but it won’t have much real-world impact for now. “It’s one judge’s view, and it will certainly be appealed,” writes former NSA general counsel, Stewart Baker, to me in an email. Judge Richard Leon issued a tentative injunction against the NSA bulk collection of phone call records (“meta-data”), but it was stayed pending the decision of higher courts. Leon predicts it will take “at least six months” for the appeals court to evaluate his decision. Every civil liberties organization and their pet hamster to end the NSA mass spying programs. , a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells me that any meaningful change at the NSA will likely wait for the Supreme Court, which could decide to bundle all of the pending suits into a single case. Civil liberty groups may get an early present if an appeals court upholds today’s declaration of unconstitutionality, and the Supreme Court decides not to stay an injunction while it figures out its own decision. But, don’t bet your Bitcoin on that one. “In the worst case, yes, it would require that the program be revamped or scrapped, but only if it stands up on appeal,” concludes Baker. For those angling for a bit of optimism, Opsahl says that the significance of today’s decision is that “it shows what the difference is between a one-sided secret court that only hears the government’s argument and an open court that hears arguments from both sides”. Previously, most cases about the legality of the NSA were decided in secret courts with the deck stacked in favor of government lawyers. Now, given the increasing public scrutiny, it’s equally as likely that President Obama himself, or Congress, could enact their own reforms before the Supreme Court even hears the case. will hopefully be made public early next year, that Congress considers one of several reform bills. Until then, put away the Piñatas and Statue of Liberty costumes, there’s a long road to go. For more info, see our own Alex Wilhelm’s . |
null | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 11 | null |
500px Plans Aggressive Consumer Market Expansion In 2014, We Take A Look At Their New Space | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Located in the heart of downtown Toronto, ‘s new offices are expansive, impressive and just as laden with exposed brick and beams as anything you’ll see south of Market in San Francisco. When we visited last week, they’d only been there a few days, and only about a quarter of the space was set up, but even so it was impressive, and fitting for a startup that’s been on a tear since its seed funding round in 2011. We talked to 500px CEO Oleg Gutsol in his new digs, about the just-launched 500pxArt.com, where users can buy customized prints of works licensed by photographers on the site (at a commission rate that’s well above the industry average). We also discussed how the site plans to use 2014 as a growth year by iterating product geared towards the average consumer, rather than the professional photog. 500px has raised a total of just under $10 million to date via its Seed round and , and it’s been putting that funding to good use, with two acquisitions in 2012. Now, the plan is to reach out beyond its core demographic of photo pros and advanced enthusiasts, in order to help make sure it doesn’t hit a growth plateau. Gutsol says he believes there’s a big opportunity there, in making everyday pictures feel bigger-than-life with a truly remarkable online portfolio tool. Google is trying to accomplish the same thing with Google+ photos, and Flickr also does it to some extent, but Gutsol still doesn’t believe the need is being served well by any existing solution. There’s also going to be a push into providing paid creative for companies to use in media and advertising. Gutsol says that this too is an areas where existing solutions fall flat, providing either stock photos that are not original or interesting, or custom shoots that are overly expensive for most businesses to even consider using. To fill up its spacious new offices, 500px is looking to bring on new talent across all areas. This is definitely one of the hottest Canadian tech companies currently operating, and now it’s got a proper space to reflect its ambitious goals. |
Ephemeral Messaging App Frankly Updated To Give Users More Control Over Their Text | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Spurred on by the intense popularity of Snapchat, it seems like everyone’s making an app with self-destructing messages these days. Or if you’re not making a standalone messaging app, you’re adding messaging as part of your existing service. With $6 million in backing by South Korea’s SK Planet, is another recent entrant into the space. And how is Frankly trying to be different? Well, with its latest update, the app allows users to have more control over how their text appears, including the size and background color. Frankly, in case you didn’t know, is an ephemeral messaging app that allows users to send text messages to one another that disappear after 10 seconds. While apps like Snapchat allow photos or videos to be shared, Frankly is mostly about the kind of short messages you used to send via SMS — that is, before exploding messages were a thing. But even if you add the ephemeral element, text messaging hasn’t changed much over the years, and users don’t have a lot of ways to get their feelings across. For the most part, the alphabet and font that they use hasn’t changed very much over the years. And while emoticons, Emoji, and even stickers have been used in varying degrees to better communicate emotions with one another, they’re often insufficient. That’s the main impetus behind the latest update to Frankly. According to Frankly CEO Steve Chung, the team wanted to provide a “full set of tools to communicate with your emotions via text.” That starts with enabling users to play with the sizing of the text. To do so, you simply pinch to minimize or maximize the text before you send it. As Chung explains, that lets its users differentiate what’s meant to be a shout from what’s meant to be a whisper. You can also change the background color of the text, you know to convey anger (red) or sadness (blue) or whatever other emotions you might have as a human. To do so, simply move your finger across the text field and it’ll automatically change. Anyway, so Frankly has a team of about 20 that is funded thanks to SK Planet, which has put $6 million into the company. Considering the size of the messaging market in general and the opportunity there, it’s a pretty modest bet for the Korean investor. |
Trustev Adds $500K From Notion Capital To Capitalise On The Ecommerce Boom | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Ecommerce fraud prevention startup is on something of a roll. Having recently closed a $3 million seed round from investors including Greycroft Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Telefónica’s Wayra and Enterprise Ireland, it’s now adding to this with a $500,000 investment from enterprise-specialist VCs Notion Capital. The team behind the latter founded MessageLabs, one of the largest ever exits in the European IT security market. Trustev’s anti-fraud and identity verification technology for e-commerce merchants is clearly sitting in a sweet spot given the billions now being spent online daily. According to research by eMarketer, global e-commerce sales are expected to reach nearly $1.3 trillion in 2013. The startup will now open an office in New York City in the first quarter of 2014. Pat Phelan, Trustev’s co-founder and CEO says the company has just over 60 customers, including some big global carriers. However, most are reticent to be named publicly about the fact they are battling fraud, perhaps understandably. Telefonica, for instance, is known to be an investor but may or may not be a customer. Trustev processed some 2 million customer transactions last week says Phelan, and that’s “an average”. They cover some 100 data points and the aim is to get that up to 10 million transactions by February. Part of the funding will be to take Trustev to the next step of their business, beyond alerting around fraud and identity verification towards payment guarantee. “We will move into payment guarantee in QTR 2 where we take all the risk and allow merchants to trade globally without the fear of fraud,” says Phelan. We wrote a fairly of the company and how it works when they were in the Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. After launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York last May, Trustev was in a startup competition backed by the European Commission. |
Pebble Seeds Engineering Schools With 4K Free Smartwatches In A Bid To Drive Developer Interest | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Pebble today revealed a in which it will donate over 4,000 smartwatches to higher ed schools including Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Virginia Tech and many more. The donation is worth over $600,000, according to Pebble’s own estimates, but it’s clearly designed to make sure Pebble and the Pebble SDK are in the hands of the next generation of top-tier developers before they ever even hit the job market. Now that Pebble has released its official app creation SDK, and unlocked many of the dormant features of the platform, it needs developers to get on board and start pumping out creations that really show off the potential of wrist-worn computing to push the Pebble’s appeal beyond the early adopter and gadget loving crowd who’ve already purchased one, and into the mainstream. Software sells hardware, and developers build software. In school, they’re often more willing and able to experiment with platforms that don’t necessarily have a proven ability to pay the bills, hence why it’s a good idea to give these things away to engineering students as development hardware. Pebble only recently hit the tipping point in terms of having stock on hand in stores and online, but current inventory levels seems strong, and there’s also a sale on right now offering a $10 discount on new units. As 9to5Mac’s Seth Weintraub noted on Twitter, this sale and education donation could be taken as evidence that the company is looking to offload stock ahead of some kind of refresh. Pebble donating watches + Big $90 Sale +CES = Update coming soon — Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) Pebble is also offering a special discount through its institutional partners to anyone who wants to order a personal device through them, it notes in its announcement today, which could also be taken as an indication that it’s offloading on-hand stock. This is a key time to watch the wearable computing manufacturer, since at the very least it’s clear it’s through the frenzy and supply catch-up process that it faced while Kickstarting the project and quenching initial demand. |
Federal Judge Rules NSA’s Phone Metadata Program Likely Unconstitutional | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | A district court judge has declared the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone metadata likely unconstitutional. While civil liberties groups are hailing the ruling as a victory, Judge Richard Leon has stayed his ruling pending government appeal. The ruling is a legal setback for the NSA, and its defenders who have maintained that the program is at once legal, and an important tool for protecting national security. In his ruling, Judge Leon casts doubt on both counts. Regarding its legality, the judge argues that past precedent used to legally support the program is outdated, rendering it obsolete in the face of modern technology and smartphone ubiquity. He also maintains that the government consistently argues that the program is needed for quick searching at a moment’s notice, but fails to back that up with real-world examples. The summation of his argument is that the metadata program does clash with protections included in the Fourth Amendment. Edward Snowden, the source of leaked documents that brought the program to the public eye, following the ruling: I acted on my belief that the NSA’s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts The Department of Justice, , claims to be “reviewing the court’s decision.” You can read the full ruling . |
Make A Little You With Shapify.me | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | , makers of high-end 3D scanners for industrial clients, have added a little whimsy to your day with , a service that can scan and print your body in full color, allowing you to make a little mini me of your very own. The system uses the Sensor – it works with either the Kinect for Windows or Kinect for Xbox 360 – and allows you to scan your entire body using a PC or Mac. The software then lets you download the scan for 3D printing or order the print for $59. Prints are available in the US and Canada but more countries are coming soon. Capturing the image is a little tricky – there are a lot of lighting issues and lots of turning – but the service seems to be outputting smooth, usable scans. Arguably these aren’t as beautiful as some other services we’ve seen including the incredible but because you’re depending on a fairly low resolution system like the Kinect and limited processing power it’s easy to forgive some of the elisions in the model. I’ve learned that 3D scanning is hard and anything that makes it easier is a good thing. While it might be a little late to give a Shapify figurine to your dear old mother and father, it’s definitely a fun little toy and could be an interesting tool for home hobbyists. Besides, who doesn’t want a 3D selfie? |
Hub Launches To Become The All-In-One Calendar And To-Do App For Your Family | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Organization within families — or even within teams — has never been easy. Different people use different calendars and tools for to-do lists, which means that it’s tough to stay on the same page. Well there’s a new app called that is designed to allow family members to share calendars and lists with one another. Hub was created by the same team behind , one of the many couples apps that popped up during the spring and early summer of last year. But in building that app, the team realized that couples apps weren’t really sufficient for all the people involved in family decisions. While sharing calendars and lists definitely helped facilitate communications between couples, there were other members of the family who were left out. For instance, grandparents who take care of kids might want to share schedules with the parents. And children who are old enough, like teenagers for instance, could have their chores assigned via the app direct to their own smartphone. And there’s also the ability to add babysitters, daycare providers, and other service providers to facilitate scheduling. With that in mind, the team built the new app to enable easier calendar and list sharing. It’s especially good for wrangling calendars from various different services and making them accessible to each other. That’s because it supports any calendar your phone does, including Google Calendar, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and Exchange. Users can also create multiple hubs with different participants. So there can be like a kid’s chore hub, a babysitter hub, a romantic couple hub, whatever. Hub operates on a freemium model, where free hubs get 5 event shares and 10 task shares per month. To upgrade, pricing is $35.99 annually or $4.99 monthly for unlimited hubs and event shares and task shares. And once one person in a hub has upgraded, everyone he or she shares with gets unlimited shares in the hub. |
Facebook Launches “Donate” Button For Non-Profits That Also Collects Billing Info For Itself | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Facebook to make it much easier for non-profits to take contributions. A nice side effect for its business? The button will collect credit card numbers and other billing info for Facebook that could aid its ecommerce and gaming initiatives. 19 non-profit launch partners will start displaying the Donate Now button at the tops of their Facebook Pages and bottom of their News Feed posts. These include (a personal favorite), Boys And Girls Club Of America, World Wildlife Fund, UNICEF, Red Cross, and Kiva. After some more testing, Facebook will open the feature to additional non-profits, who can . Thanks to the Donate Now button, instead of forcing users off Facebook and away from their friends, these organizations can now accept donations in a pop-up window right on Facebook. Users can choose how much they want to give and either enter payment details or use ones already stored with Facebook. The pop-up could boost conversion rates and get more funds to needy projects. The Donate Now button also gives people an easy way to share the call for donations with friends, helping philanthropy go viral. Facebook is not charging a fee to process credit card donations and is instead paying that fee itself so 100% of donations go to the non-profits. Sadly, some people believe that corporations are all evil and there’s no way they could actually be staffed by decent human beings that want to help non-profits. But Facebook seems genuinely determined to help these causes, even if there’s no denying that the button could also aid its business. It’s a part of a trend of for-profit businesses launching philanthropy initiatives that could earn them money in the long run. , an internet accessibility project for the developing world that could also get more people signed up for its social network. And just this morning, for online education resource Khan Academy in hopes of attracting more low-income families to its reduced-price broadband service. : Perhaps Facebook should make it easier to delete your credit card info after donating. Right now you can and remove your credit cards. Adding a link there or delete button to the donate flow itself would make it easier…but would also make it tougher to donate to other non-profits in the future.] Facebook is behind in the race to collect credit card numbers compared to app store owners like Apple and Google, and ecommerce juggernauts like Amazon. Not having payment details on file creates a barrier to people buying virtual goods in Facebook Games, or buying Facebook Gift cards for friends. The moral imperative to donate to a worthy cause could get users over the hump to keying in their credit card number or connecting another billing service like PayPal. More payment info on file will also bolster Facebook’s latest ecommerce push: . The system lets third-party mobile apps integrate a button in the checkout flow that lets users quickly pull in their billing and shipping info from Facebook without much typing. Facebook doesn’t collect a fee or revenue share, but instead plans to use purchase data it peeks on through Autofill to prove the return on investment of its ads. If you click an ad to download JackThreads’ ecommerce app, use Autofill With Facebook to import your payment info that you previously entered through the Donate Now button, and make a purchase, Facebook can tell advertisers just how much money their marketing message earned them. Again, these indirect boosts to Facebook’s business provided by Donate Now might not have been what drove Facebook to build the button, but they’re a convenient synergy. Connecting people to their friends and non-profits just so happens to make it easier to connect them to advertisers as well. |
Khosla Ventures Replaces Yuri Milner In Y Combinator’s YC VC Program | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Khosla Ventures is joining Y Combinator’s YC VC program, which provides $80,000 to each startup that goes through the seed stage accelerator. According to a , the firm will be taking the place of Yuri Milner, who is spending less time doing seed-stage investments. Khosla Ventures has already invested in a number of Y Combinator companies, including TightDB, Instacart, and Quartzy. But by becoming an investor in the YC VC program, the firm will get early access to companies alongside other firms that participate, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Maverick Capital. Under the structure of the program, each investor puts $20,000 into each Y Combinator startup. As part of YC VC, partners at the investment firms have also been asked to hold office hours at Y Combinator. The YC VC Program is a successor to , which was originally set up by Milner and SV Angel and gave $150,000 to each company in the accelerator. When Y Combinator moved to the YC VC model, it reduced the amount of money that the startups got, and added Maverick Capital as an investor. At the time, Y Combinator said it found that $150,000 was too much to offer as part of the program: “$150k was more than the successful startups needed, and it sometimes caused messy disputes in the unsuccessful ones. Switching from $150k to $80k may not completely eliminate such problems, but it will make them at most half as bad.” As an interesting side note, the news comes about a year after Vinod Khosla himself said that he that “get so much hype that they get valuations that no one who will help the team are going to pay.” Presumably having his firm’s partners get in on the ground floor and be able to provide personal attention and guidance to startups through office hours might help some YC companies avoid those pitfalls. Check out the Vinod Khosla interview below: Photo Credit: via |
Salon Booking Platform StyleSeat Goes Mobile, Ahead Of Upcoming Series A | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Salon-booking service StyleSeat has finally made its way to mobile, after seeing its smartphone usage increase from 15% during the company’s first year (2011) to now 78% of total usage today. Says company co-founder and CEO Melody McCloskey of StyleSeat’s mobile traction, “it’s completely blown up in the last couple of years.” The company, which has today grown to 200,000 stylists in 15,000 cities across the U.S., is growing quickly as well, as it turns out. In June 2012, StyleSeat had over 55,000 salons and spas on board with its online booking platform, for comparison’s sake. It has now booked over 5.5 million appointments for customers, up from 800,000 appointments also as of last June. McCloskey says that a lot of the company’s growth still comes from word-of-mouth referrals – stylists telling others about the service – which has helped it find deep penetration in two of its biggest markets: the South and the Midwest. With the new mobile application, consumers can now interact with the brand on their mobile devices, searching for stylists or other beauty professionals, browsing profiles and images, and booking services while on the go. Professionals, meanwhile, can manage appointments, client lists, post photos, update their profiles, and call or text clients from within the app. The app comes at a time when StyleSeat is working to transition its business to more of a marketplace. This year, StyleSeat has been focused on building out its core platform and feature set, and growing its stylist base, McCloskey explains. Now, things are changing. “There are a lot of features that stylists are willing to pay for, but we also know that if we were willing to make them free, there would be wider adoption,” she says. As the business transitions into a marketplace, it’s starting to become a balancing act between growth and optimization, McCloskey adds. Currently, StyleSeat offers a freemium product with starting at $25/month for added features like email marketing, advanced scheduling, reminder texts, and other tools. It also launched new client offers as a way to monetize through on-site ads, as of those client acquisition deals. Today, however, McCloskey characterizes the new client offers as a monetization “test,” while declining to discuss company revenue. Instead, she says StyleSeat has something else in the works for Q1 2014 which will help the company generate revenue. This forthcoming feature is in testing now, and McCloskey won’t offer any details beyond saying it’s related to “consumers spending more on their phone just to get things done, and spending in new ways.” She says it’s related to “client delivery.” Laughing, I guess “Uber for haircare?,” and McCloskey says, “we’re not discounting it,” noting that Uber founders invested in her business early on. (I wouldn’t take this as confirmation about the Q1 launch, however.) What we do know is that StyleSeat is poised to announce a Series A round of funding early in the new year. To date, the company has raised $4 million in subsequent seed rounds. With the mobile app now in place, the company plans to rapidly roll out a number of features in Q1 and Q2, to better build up their consumer brand and experience. For this reason, StyleSeat went with PhoneGap and AngularJS for its mobile builds, live now on and . |
My Long Road To Self-Publishing | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | After blindly supporting it for a number of years, I’ve decided to crowdfund my own project, a novel that I wrote for my son, and then . Today I’d like to talk about my own experiences in publishing and why I think crowdfunding is, at the very least, a viable alternative to the traditional models. Be warned: this is a little introspective and I’m writing it from the perspective of a crowdfunding – but not a publishing – newbie. First, understand that I’ve been entrenched in the traditional model for most of the decade. I’ve written , both directly acquired by technical publishers and without an agent. The advance for my first one, , was negligible and I receive almost no royalties. My second book, Blogger’s Boot Camp, netted about $10,000 for the first edition and the same for a second edition we just completed. That’s split with my co-author, Charlie White. So I haven’t gotten rich. I did, briefly, have a nice in 2008 which fell through for a number of reasons, primarily a number of changes at the imprint I was working with as well as the financial collapse and the destruction of Borders. That was the highlight of my writing life up until then but I was quite unhappy. I worked for two years on the book, spending evenings hunched over my keyboard until 10pm. I gained 30 pounds over that period – drinking a lot and having young kids didn’t help – and I’m now trying to reverse that damage. Having a “real” book contract paralyzed me. It was a huge amount of work and lots of travel. I spent a month in Israel and a month in Europe and suffered from a bout of some kind of stomach cramping that debilitated me and eventually landed me in the emergency room. I think describes the dread of having to write a big book quite ably: “I started to get scared.” How did I get the contract? I emailed my buddy who had published a book. I asked him who his agent was and he sent me to a guy named Larry Weissman. I sent Larry a few ideas and he liked the . The story is compelling: a watch made for Marie Antoinette was the iPhone of its day. It could measure time elapsed, ticked like a grandfather clock, and even had an thermometer. You could pull a little handle and it would chime the time. It was, in short, one of the most important pieces of technology of the late 18th century. The creator, Breguet, never saw it finished and neither did Marie Antoinette – they were all dead after the Revolution. The watch floated around, was stolen, and reappeared in 2008. I was writing the book at just the right time and I got some great interviews including some time with the thief’s wife. Another thing I learned is that the book proposal has to be almost as long as the book itself. Larry ran me through a boot camp that I won’t forget. I was sick of him, but he pounded and pounded until we got out a great proposal. All of this – the story, the agent, and the proposal he birthed with me – helped propel the book into the vaunted halls of high stakes publishing. But I failed. They cancelled the contract a few years later and the book is still floating around, unloved. I may be republishing it soon, but it’s been a disappointing road. I popped out of the other side of this crucible with only a tangential understanding of the publishing business but a little more insight into the creative process. I knew I needed more eyes on my work and so I found a network of first readers. I also learned that your first draft shouldn’t go directly to your editor. Publishers are like any editor: they want a good first draft that will go, with minimum work, straight to press. The days of Maxwell Perkins sitting down with a fat, degenerate inebriate and editing his or her work until it shines are long gone. Publishers are happy if the work slightly glimmers and they hope the cover art will sell a few copies. This is obviously not true of all editors but we humans love the path of least resistance. During that period I was visiting Madrid when we stopped in the where I saw the statue of Lucifer. I was in a historical mode at the time, always looking at old monuments and clocks for the book but I also wanted to write something for my kids. I imagined something hidden under the statue and plotted out a weird -like thing in my head. Then the word popped up. I decided to work on two projects. As far as I can tell I worked on Mytro from about 2009 onward, writing a thousand words a day into a program called , which is a great tool for writing long form pieces and even better for books. I worked on it on and off, at one point abandoning it for a long time while I dealt with the cancellation of my contract. I was extremely lucky – I had a great outlet here at TC and I didn’t let the contract slow me down. Because I had to write every day, that’s just what I did. I worked on Mytro, on a few other things, prepared proposals that never went anywhere, and tried to relax. I had kids I had to try to enjoy and a life that scooted by while I was in my attic working. When I “finished” – it still needs a good copy edit – I sent it to an agent in New York who expressed interest in my fiction and wanted to send it around to young adult houses. Why did I choose young adult? First I wanted a book for my kids to read. Second I knew that the last paper and hardback readers are kids and teenagers. Sure Stephen King can sell a few million fat copies of his books to die-hard fans, but I was no Stephen King. Why not try for a market that was still growing and that could potentially support a trilogy? The agent passed it on to a younger assistant who was tasked with passing it around. I waited all summer for news back but no one wanted it. I don’t blame the assistant but, in the end, she quit the agency and went on to do non-profit work. It was then I realized that I was placing some of the most important things in my life in the hands of people who were at worst hostile and at best really busy. Why did I keep going back to this system? First you have to understand that it’s very comfortable. You write your 100,000 words, submit it, wait, respond to some emails, and then you see a printed book come out the other end. The book appears in bookstores, you feel momentarily cool, and then it drops off the face of Amazon sales rankings like a stone. By then, however, it’s been so long since you wrote the thing that it doesn’t matter. You’re on to bigger and better things. Again, I know I’m a special case in that I’ve been able to stumble into some degree of publishing success, but I think any writer would love the black box nature of most publishing houses. Second, I thought these gatekeepers were important. I spent an evening with an old fiction professor of mine who told me he didn’t like Kickstarter and the self-publishing craze because he had made it and he didn’t want these new writers to have it too easy. In a way he was right. Why should they have instant riches when he had to punch up through layers of entrenched editorial control to achieve success? He is a literary writer with a wonderful voice and he got that voice out in an era when rejection slips still came on paper. He worked hard. Shouldn’t I? I don’t know the answer to that and I don’t think I ever will. I’m crowdfunding Mytro for a single reason – I need to see crowdfunding up close and I’m not about to make a smart thermostat or watch anytime soon. Therefore Mytro is the only thing I can offer the world of value that is mine and solely mine. I’m saying “Here, I made this” and watching what happens. I don’t expect riches from this endeavor but I do expect to see the power of the network over old, entrenched markets. If I can make an acceptable advance for a first-time fiction book publish a nice book at a nice price in a nice format, then I’ll be happy. To be clear I don’t disagree with my teacher. But I don’t think crowdfunding is a sneaky way of getting into his private literary club. I think it’s a way of creating a new club that is just as vibrant as the old one. One worthy of respect and, ultimately, admiration. To make it on your own terms, based on your own efforts, means something, and thankfully, the world is finally catching on. |
Comcast Will Spend Millions Developing And Promoting Khan Academy To Encourage Low-Income Broadband Adoption | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | has committed to pumping millions of dollars into a with that will pay for product development of its free, online education and promote it alongside Comcast’s cheap broadband access tier Internet Essentials for low-income families. Comcast’s executive VP David Cohen believes that backing Khan Academy will boost digital literacy and get more people paying for broadband because “its content is the ultimate proof point of the value of the Internet.” Khan Academy co-founder Sal Khan and Cohen announced the new partnership today on-stage at The Atlantic’s Silicon Valley Summit at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum. Cohen wrote today that “We’re announcing a multi-year, multi-million dollar comprehensive partnership designed to raise awareness…of Khan Academy and…Internet Essentials. This is one of the largest commitments we have made to a non-profit partner and includes a financial contribution, hundreds of thousands of PSAs a year, and significant digital promotion.” Comcast will directly provide funding to help Khan Academy build out its product. Khan tells me this includes creating a suite of full-featured interactive mobile apps next year that go beyond the basic video-watching mobile app it has now. 30% of Americans currently don’t have broadband Internet access. The program is designed to convince families that the Internet is critical to their economic success, with Khan Academy as the poster child for how the web can improve lives. The financial support of Comcast for online education certainly has a philanthropic aspect, but also stands to attract it new $9.95 a month Internet Essentials broadband customers. The program, open to families with at least one child eligible for the federally assisted National School Lunch Program that makes meals more affordable for low-income families. Cohen explained on stage that “The number one barrier to broadband adoption is digital literacy skills. And Khan academy is the number one solution. We’re going to put the largest allocation of our resources behind Khan Academy and promoting Khan Academy nationally, driving additional hits to that website. And we believe in doing that we’re not only going to give kids and families access to this content… but drive larger broadband adoption in America.” Khan followed up saying that people need broadband access at home to get the full benefit of Khan Academy. Khan hopes that through programs like this, the whole country will get online and become better equipped to compete in the new global job market. After Khan and Cohen got off stage, I spoke with them about how the partnership will move the needle for their two companies. When asked if the drive was just a way for Comcast to sign up more customers, Cohen passionately defended Internet Essentials, saying “When we sell an Internet service for $9.95 that we normally sell for $39.95 to $49.95, we’re not in it for the money. It’s not a great business for us. If you look long-term, it’s community investment priority not a business priority.” He did admit, though, that “In 10, 15, 20 years we’d like to hope this population will be making money and could be Comcast customers…or Time Warner customers, or AT&T customers.” Cohen and Khan agreed that once low-income families get a taste of broadband at home, they get hooked, and 98% of users say it helps their kids do homework, while 67% use the web to find information on government assistance programs — both which help them improve their economic situation. So why not just give away the first month of Internet Essentials for free? Cohen says it works better when people value the web, and that Comcast gives out tons of “Internet Essentials Opportunity Cards” that give families up to a year of free service. But what about mobile? Some believe that low-income communities are leapfrogging broadband access at home in favor of mobile Internet access. But Cohen noted that watching hours of educational video on a phone could rack up enormous charges, so broadband is more affordable for this use case. Khan admitted his academy’s mobile interfaces aren’t quite up to snuff, but he’ll be spending part of Comcast’s investment on fixing that. “One of the major initiatives we’re working on is a fully featured mobile app and tablet app.” For now, though, Khan encouraged low-income families to check if they’re eligible for reduced price Internet Essentials access, then to . There they can take the pre-test to determine their skill level and get suggestions of what education content to start with. Cohen concluded that while Google’s Project Loon and Facebook’s Internet.org accessibility initiatives are focused abroad, there’s plenty to do at home and as broadband provider, it’s Comcast’s responsibility. “If we don’t focus on broadband adoption, who will? If we’re not putting our money behind this, we can’t expect Exxon-Mobil or Walmart to step up and say ‘we’re going to get America connected.'” |
Windows Phone 8.1 Brings Popular Android And iOS Features To The Emerging Third Mobile Platform | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | For all its polish, Windows Phone still lags the competition in certain features that seem obvious to include. Windows Phone 8.1, set for a public reveal at Microsoft’s Build conference in April, brings two iOS and Android standards to the Windows Phone quiver, including a Notification Center and a smart personal assistant. Sources familiar with the unreleased update for Microsoft’s mobile operating system told that we’ll see a Siri-style personal assistant introduced, codenamed “Cortana,” (nice Halo ref, Redmond) and also a notification center that collects all your notices in one place. There’s also potentially going to be a move away from hardware keys and to on-screen soft keys, similar to the move made by Android in recent versions. Cortana was a , or at least a frequently leaked one, though the latest report confirms when it’ll make its first official appearance. Other things are also being added including VPN support, separate volume control for different types of things like calls and music, and more depending on different devices from different companies. But there’s a fairly common thread here: most of these are what I’d consider table stakes for a mobile OS at this point. It’s true that Windows Phone offers some things that the other players in the space don’t (I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but they’re there), but a lot of the work left to do is just making sure that anyone coming from another platform will be comfortable with what they find when and if they switch from either Android or iOS. There are expectations out there now about what you get with a smartphone, and those expectations are growing as Apple and Google raise to impress and win more of that top half of the market. Of course, it’s possible to trail in feature-richness but then lead in execution once you do get the stuff out there, and Microsoft could implement a notification repository and digital assistant that blow away their equivalents on iOS and Android. But it’s hard to see that happening given the current state of mobile affairs. Still, Microsoft might just need to call in order to earn that third spot at the table permanently, especially if its plan of attack on the low end of the market works out. |
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella On Outgoing CEO Ballmer’s Legacy, Management Style, And Vision | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | ZDNet’s today with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, one of its key executives and a candidate to be its next CEO. The discussion as written focuses on the legacy and style of the company’s outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, with whom Nadella has worked closely. Given the CEO buzz about Nadella, his views, and criticisms of Ballmer matter. If you are at all interested in the internal dynamics of Microsoft, Foley’s piece is . I’ve selected a few short segments that are worth discussing here, but the full interview is worthy. After asking Ballmer to vet his performance, especially in reference to his past work, his boss pushed aside the concept, according to Nadella: He said, ‘Why does that matter? Look, this business is not about longevity of any idea. It’s all about inventing new formulas. So the thing that I would want to really evaluate you on and I want you super focused on is not how I did or anyone else did with any opportunity we had, because that’s not going to tell you anything about the future opportunity. Microsoft is Windows and Windows is Microsoft, but that doesn’t mean that the company, let alone its main brand and platform, have remained static. In fact, the above Ballmer quote fits nicely into the last year of the company under his management. Ballmer has overseen both a — from software in a box to devices and services — and a reorg of its corporate structure. Those are both new formulas enacted under Ballmer. Whoever becomes the next Microsoft CEO will be handed the keys to a very different car. The company that shipped Windows 7 is in many ways over. Azure, Office 365, Windows 8.1, Lumia, and the like are essentially products of a new generation. That generation will be Ballmer’s functional legacy, I think, more than the company’s stagnant ( ) stock price. Nadella agrees: Steve’s contribution to broadly computing as well as to this company I think will be better told, quite frankly, in five, ten years when there’s more distance. It’ll be shaped by, in fact, what we do next. Finally, as you probably expected given his bombastic persona, Ballmer is an aggressive manager: Foley conducted the interview a few weeks back, so we can’t really tell much about its timing in terms of reading the tea leaves about what it could mean for his changes in CEO Bingo. Still, I think that the picture that is coming out of Nadella is that he’s a calm, technology-minded person who understands the enterprise space. In my (admittedly few) interactions with the guy, that’s the vibe I picked up. In a way, the legacy of a CEO can be compared (if we avoid the comically disparate scales involved) to an outgoing president’s. Both often see during their tenure the launch of new products or initiatives that don’t come to full fruition until after they leave office. George W. Bush’s stellar is an example of this. His paintings are not. (And no, I am not comparing Ballmer to Bush, calm down.) If the current crop of rumors is correct, we could see a new CEO for Microsoft by the end of the year. If that bears out, and it’s not Nadella, we can at least appreciate that in ten years’ time — at which point he will be a half decade shy of 60 — we’ll know who the frontrunner will be. |
Moments Lets You Quickly Build A Photo Book On Your iPad, Pick It Up At Walgreens When Complete | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | Looking for a last-minute holiday gift you can create on your iPad and pick up the same day? (not to be confused with photo-sharing app ), is a newly launched photo book maker which lets you quickly build a customizable, hardcover-bound photo book using images from your social networks, iCloud or your Camera Roll. When you’re finished, the book can be picked up within just a few hours from a nearby Walgreens or Duane Reade. The Tel Aviv-area company, started a year ago, was born out of the founders’ previous efforts in doing mobile development for hire, including time spent working with HP on the webOS project, as well as on client work for , , and others. Explains co-founder Amit Sherman, the idea to do a photo book application was partially due to their experience in the mobile photo space, but also because of the challenges that still exist today with building a book – something they felt could be improved on a touch-based device like the iPad. , then, is designed to be simple to use to make the process less frustrating, and much faster. There is only one photo book product you can choose from currently, which is actually good because it narrows down your options from the beginning. As you build the book, adding text, a different background color, or a pre-templated layout is done via drag-and-drop. The options are tappable at the top of the screen and you just pull them down on to the page to customize. Beneath the photo book editor’s interface are your photo sources: Facebook, Dropbox, or iPad (Camera Roll, Photo Stream, albums). From here, you drag-and-drop photos from an album into position on the photo book’s pages. There’s not much more to it than that. When you’re done you checkout to complete your purchase, which you later pay for in-store at one of the 4,000 locations across the U.S. offering photo book printing. (Moments also won Walgreens API developer contest for this app, we’re told). There were a couple of bugs with the current version of the app. For instance, when swapping out layouts after photos were already in place, the app crashed. The other issue was that the iPad albums are in the wrong order – instead of showing newest photos first, they show the oldest. However, Sherman says this is being corrected in the next app update which is currently in review with Apple. (This will include an iPhone version of Moments, too, he says.) The iPhone app will be very similar to competitor , in terms of its ability to automatically generate photo books for you after you first pick out a few photos you want to use. The bigger difference between the two is that Mosaic albums are shipped out to you, while Moments’ books can be picked up locally . : After attempting to order a photobook through the app, there were too many bugs to make checkout possible. The book got stuck during the initial upload. Then when it went through upon a second time, pressing “buy” to complete the process led to an error message “https://m5.walgreens.com We’re sorry, there was an error with your checkout. Please try again.” This could be a failure on the app’s side, on Walgreens’ side or both. Walgreens tech support said they are not responsible for anything to do with their API. The developer has yet to respond. Moments is a team of five full-time employees, and one freelancer. The company has raised a small ($300K) round of seed funding from the Shaked family (owners of 888) and the Mafil company. The app is a free download . Until Dec. 31, there’s a coupon for books printed which bring their cost down to $15.00 for the time being. |
Uber, LeCab And Others Now Have To Wait 15 Minutes Before Picking You Up In France | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 12 | 28 | At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 minutes in France before letting a customer in the car. Back in October, the French government mentioned this piece of legislation as these new services would hurt traditional cab drivers. But nothing was set in stone until the AFP the new bill today — and this news comes as a surprise. In France, you have to pay a hefty price to get your taxi license. As a payback, the taxi industry is very regulated in this country, and drivers can expect to get a healthy influx of clients. Yet, when the young and fearless startups appeared, many taxi drivers protested against LeCab, Chauffeur-privé, SnapCar, Allocab, Voitures Jaunes and Uber. While the French law calls these companies “VTC” services (car services), taxi drivers think that they are direct competitors — and smartphones certainly make Uber and others act like taxi services. That’s why the government sided with taxi drivers and talked about creating the 15-minute rule. Shortly after that, Allocab, Chauffeur-privé, LeCab and SnapCar put together an against the project. Then, nothing happened. It was like the government had forgotten about this idea. In November, French heavyweight raised $6.8 million (€5 million) in Series B funding. At the time, I that it was “a good time for it to raise” with the impending changes. Last week, the Competition Authority (Autorité de la concurrence) even that the 15-minute delay was a bad idea. “This competitive imbalance is not necessary to protect the taxi monopoly on this market. Moreover, it potentially contradicts the objective to improve free traffic flow,” the report says. But all of this was for nothing as the new 15-minute rule will be enforced on January 1st 2014. Without any warning, the new bill was published today. Chauffeur-privé CEO Yan Hascoet already reacted to news agency AFP, saying that the French startups will comply with the law but will immediately contest the government’s decision — according to him, the startups have a good chance of winning. On average, it takes 7 minutes for a so-called black car to come and pick you up in France. What will happen? Will the driver wait in the car on the side of the road? Drivers could spend hours waiting in their cars every day, losing potential income. Rides will take longer on average, meaning that less cars will be available for potential customers. With today’s bill, urban transportation companies are not the only losers — customers are losers too. SnapCar CEO Dave Ashton sent me the following statement. “It’s technically impossible to differentiate automatically between a booking that comes from a 4 or 5 star hotel or convention and some other booking type. So we will do as we have always done: respond as quickly as we can to a customer’s request. In America, religious people often walk around with wristbands that say “WWJD” on them (“What Would Jesus Do?”). For SnapCar, it’s “WWMW” (“What Would Mom Want?”). It works like this: if Manuel Valls’ mother books a SnapCar and wants to leave in two hours, she’ll leave in two hours. If Manuel Valls’ mother wants to leave in 5 minutes, will we leave her standing on the street corner in the rain for ten more? What would Manuel Valls’ mother want? or what would Manuel Valls want for his mother?” |
Google’s Chromebooks Have Hit Their Stride | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 12 | 28 | It looks like Microsoft was about Google’s Chromebook project. According to the , Chromebooks accounted for 21 percent of all laptop sales and almost 10 percent of all computer sales to businesses in 2013. That’s up from virtually nothing in the year before. Given that Apple is irrelevant in commercial channel sales (it commanded a whopping 1.8 percent of sales), Chromebook’s increased share is coming at the cost of Windows. A few years ago, Chromebooks were a bit of a laughing stock. They were underperforming single-purpose laptops that weren’t even good at the only thing they could do (that is, surf the web). Nobody really , despite their low price. Early sales were , and even Google’s few hardware partners looked like they were only doing this as a way to court Google’s favor. The whole project seemed doomed from the start. But somehow, Google stuck to its guns and over the last two years, Chromebooks somehow went from being irrelevant to actually making a sizable dent in the laptop market. And not just in the business market. Amazon this week that two out of its three best-selling laptops during the holiday season were Chromebooks. Two years ago, it seemed Chromebooks were only doing somewhat well in schools. Those were, after all, also the only numbers Google ever shared. Over the last year, however, something changed. Google created a more diverse ecosystem of hardware partners that now includes virtually all major laptop manufacturers, including the likes of Lenovo (though only for education), HP, Toshiba and Acer. With the $1,300 Pixel, Google even designed its own high-end Chromebook. My feeling is that Google gave away more free Pixels to developers at its I/O conference this year than it actually sold (that high purchase price is hard to justify for anybody who doesn’t regularly fly on a private jet, despite the Pixel being a great piece of hardware). What the Pixel did, though, was to show that Google was fully backing this project, which surely helped the ecosystem and potential business customers to warm up the idea, too. Over the last year, ChromeOS also went from a one-trick pony to something that’s more like a “real” operating system (in the sense that it looks and feels more like a regular PC and less than a laptop that can only run a browser). While Microsoft loves pointing out that Chromebooks are only useful when you’re online (which these days is pretty much true for any computer anyway), one area Google’s engineers worked hard on was adding more . Today’s Chromebooks are nothing like the old Cr-48 prototype Google once sent out to bloggers in late 2010. The fact that Microsoft has now started of them just shows that it’s concerned about losing market share in the business world. Microsoft should be worried. |
The Bathys Atomic Watch Is Heading Towards A Crowdfunded Future | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 28 | , a boutique watchmaker based on Kauai, Hawaii and run by one determined man, first announced in October. Now, a few months later, the company is nearly ready to hit the shoals of crowdfunding. The company made a name for itself by building sturdy dive watches for the surfer set. We haven’t heard much from them, however, until recently when they announced plans to make a watch that will remain accurate until your children’s children jet off in their moon cars to Juno. It uses a Symmetricom SA.45s CSAC atomic clock on a chip to power a standard quartz face salvaged from an older Bathys model. Created by John Patterson, the watch is still a work in progress but there is some talk of crowdfunding the product once it is ready for prime time. At this point estimates that the piece will cost $8,000 or so when complete with discounts offered to early adopters. Obviously this thing is comically large and obviously battery life is an issue but this is the first standalone device that will be more accurate than some GPS units. Because it doesn’t depend on a satellite sync it will be accurate all the time and even far into the future. While you’re not going to wear this on your next surfing safari I don’t see why you couldn’t wear it stargazing or, barring that, while manning the tubes at the Large Hadron Collider. |
Gillmor Gang: Almost Full | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 12 | 28 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Happy New Year! @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But T-Mobile Is Awesome | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 12 | 28 | I’ve spent the last week back in my wintry homeland in Canada, and here the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have seen the light, and I have a message for all of you who live in America, a message of the utmost importance, inscribed in fire on the sacred stone of the Internet. And that message is: Yes, I know I sound like a paid shill. I feel awkward and embarrassed about that. I think speaks for itself, though: when it comes to tech companies, usually I’m a crotchety, negative guy. But this is different. This is terrific. Heck, only six months ago I wrote a post called “ .” But then in October T-Mobile rolled out its . Basically, international travellers on a monthly T-Mobile plan no longer have to either deal with rapacious roaming charges or the hassle of getting and activating a new SIM card local to your destination. Instead you just switch data roaming on and let your phone find your provider. To my considerable amazement, that’s all I needed to do; no APN hacking, no mobile-network munging, no service calls; It Just Works. I could even . It’s not perfect, of course. You still have to pay, albeit very reasonable prices, for calls and texts, and your free data is only 2G/128kbps. Needless to say, you can buy 4G roaming from T-Mobile, but I’ve found no need to do so; in Toronto, at least, 2G is plenty good enough to check email and Twitter between the many zones and cafes where you can pick up a cup of wi-fi nowadays — and it’s much better than the alternatives that any comparison at all is kind of insulting. I am not accustomed to sounding like an advertisement like this. To be honest it kind of makes my skin crawl. But it’s probably important, on the rare occasions that a company — an , no less — actually does that right thing, that we praise them to the rafters and sing hosannas in their name. Oh, I have no illusions that T-Mobile’s boardroom is full of angels. They were only driven to doing the right thing because they were the distant fourth-place competitor in a vicious market; and now that Softbank/Sprint is , everything may change. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they canned this initiative the day after the merger closes, on the grounds that it actually improves their users’ lives without desperately inconveniencing them at every possible pretext and then charging them to mitigate those inconveniences — and we can’t have , can we? It sets a bad precedent. I half-expect their attitude towards their customers to soon revert to that of a medieval lord towards his serfs. But maybe, in the interim, we travellers can send a message by voting with our feet. Abandon your current carrier, buy an unlocked phone, and flock to T-Mobile and its (currently) almost incomprehensibly user-friendly plans. This golden era probably won’t last; but make the most of it while you can. chrisinplymouth, . |
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