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Startup Hackathon In Kiev Today Hopes To Build Tools For Euromaidan Protest | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 12 | 28 | I attended in Kiev. Normally tech startup conferences consist of speeches, pitches, panels and networking events. This time, however, there was an added element – major social upheaval just around the corner. [ : See update below]. In nearby Independence Square, there was a massive protest in favour of the Ukraine joining the European Union. It was ironic. Only a couple of hours away by plane Greeks had been rioting to get OUT of the European Union, with its heavy austerity measures. But what was happening in Kiev was different, and closely affected by the politics surrounding Russia in the 21st century. The Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had, at the last minute, reneged on negotiations for the Ukraine to strengthen commercial and political integration with the European Union, to opt instead for closer ties with the Moscow-dominated Russian trading block. That brought thousands of protesters onto the streets. It certainly charged the atmosphere of the conference, and many of us went down to see to take in the atmosphere. Technology has become an intimate part of social movements, and already the hashtag on Twitter had sparked international interest and media coverage of the movement. Since then the protests have continued, and the waves of social media around the protests have exposed police . Involved from the beginning, now technology people are rallying. Today, hackers from across Ukraine have gathered for the being organised by the “IT tent” based at the Euromaidan protest, the Kiev , and the startup community in Kiev. You can tune into the live tweets, in English, on from the Kiev-based , and follow the event on the hashtag And there is a into the event space here and . The aim is to create “instruments of public assistance” for Ukrainians. In other words, to improve the life of the Ukrainian citizen, their relationship with the state and aid their participation in significant public decisions. Amid all this political upheaval, tech people are seizing the moment to create better democratic tools. Participants will be presenting their ideas and projects. Teams will then form, and approximately 15 projects will be selected for concentrated development. Then the work will begin. On Sunday night the teams will present their hacks and we’ll update this post with links to the projects created. Of course, hackathons can sometimes be marathon affairs with little in the way of “action.” But it’s fascinating to watch what will be produced, in the middle of what — to many at least — is a revolution. Here’s the live feed: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CY0pR7ZPyY#t=1681] The winner of the hackathon was a platform for volunteers to coordinate their activities. It was build for gathering and delivering items (such as warm clothes, tea and cookies) to charity centres in Kiev, an soon across Ukraine. Anyone who wants to give some old stuff for charity can leave a application on cherrytea.org and then drivers with cars (volunteers) pick up it and deliver it to charity points. It has also been used during the Euromaidan Protest, delivering more than 600 kg of warm clothes from more than 100 people and more than 3000 cups of hot tea for street children in Kiev. Here are some more videos from the event: [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh7pCQ6dPWo] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuFTZPEX_mY] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnEnZ8rrtog] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO1Zew5znkQ] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrMRSCabA-A] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNI2xy7zPlc] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg12PrJw434] [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1s5c6f-U7Q] |
South America Can Now Crowdfund With Bitcoins | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | While the rest of us are messing around with our PayPals and Amazon Payments, some folks in Argentina have created the first crowdfunding platform in America to take Bitcoin. The platform, called focuses primarily on artistic, musical, and retail projects although, as evidenced by the project photos, many campaigns have a philanthropic bent. The platform was “born in Argentina” wrote Pia Giudice and is now in seven countries in Latin America. It is the area’s only regional crowdfunding platform. The platform has seen $750,000 in funding and should be raising $2.4 million in March 2014 in a Series A. Idea.me has already funded 450 projects and seen $2 million pledged to backers. Pledges can come from multiple sources but they’ve recently enabled Bitcoin as an alternative to credit cards and PayPal. “We’re the only platform that accepts Bitcoins in the whole continent, including US and Canada,” said Giudice. “Also, our business unit is unique in the world: Idea.me is the only platform that executes campaigns with multinational companies to fund specific projects.” I’d love for Kickstarter and Indiegogo to start taking Bitcoin, although, presumably, the long gestation times of most projects and the volatility of BTC could be problematic for the company and its customers. Idea.me uses Bitpay, “automatically converts Bitcoins in dollars, so that the pledger pays with BTC, but the creators will receive the contribution in USD” according to a When BTC turns into a medium of quick exchange, it makes a lot of sense. Best of all it’s helping the little guy in South America. “With the very limited access to formal capital in Latin America, Idea.me is essential for the development of our countries,” said Giudice. Looks like things are little speedier when it comes to virtual currency far south of the border. |
Apple Requiring All App Submissions To Be Optimized For iOS 7 By Feb 1st | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Apple is requiring developers to optimize all app submissions for iOS 7 by February 1st, 2014, according to a new . That includes new apps and updates to existing apps. In order to optimize apps for the new operating system, they must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5 which includes 64-bit support and access to new features like backgrounding APIs. Apple has been on a push over the past couple of years to encourage developers to support the latest editions of its OS faster than ever. To do this, it’s made a habit of pointing out the adoption rates of new versions of iOS, which are extremely high. Nearly every event mentions iOS 7 adoption, , and Apple now on a page on its site. It’s likely that Apple is more anxious than ever for developers to update their apps to fit in visually and mechanically with iOS 7, as it’s the largest change in the history of Apple’s mobile software. iOS 7 introduced a much more complex physical language while stripping out many of the visual cues that developers had relied on to instruct users. For better or worse, this has created a new aesthetic that many un-updated apps did not reflect. However, from the wording of the notice, it appears that this requirement is more about the underlying construction of apps rather than their appearance. You can ‘optimize’ an app (whatever that means) for iOS 7 and build it against the new Xcode without redesigning it. That being said, many of Apple’s standard UI elements have changed in its new SDK so most apps being built in the new tool will need some re-working in order to look and function correctly. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 12 | 16 | null |
Gift Guide: A Few Of Our Favorite Things | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Friends, the moments are ticking away and it won’t be long at all before your tranquil living rooms turn into wrapping paper-strewn war zones. What’s that? You haven’t done your shopping yet? Well, we’ve decided to take a quick break from our more thematic gift guides and give you the straight dope on the gadgets and gifts that just make our lives a little better. Read on for a glimpse of what really tickles our fancies, warms our cockles, and drains our bank accounts. Nerdy watches are my kind of thing and the Time-it T-Block is the nerdiest. At less than $200 it’s a great looking watch with a nice retro-Information Society feel. The watch shows the time by lighting up a series of bright red LEDs and the case and band make one fluid whole. If you’re dressing like Neo at all this year, this is probably the watch for you. It also comes with a blue and yellow band, but I think black is best. Shopping for a tinkerer? The Udoo Raspberry Pi/Arduino board is just right. It runs its own version of Linux and can directly control a set of dedicated digital and analog I/O ports. It’s a great experimental platform and allows you to add some very cool real-world interactivity to your Raspberry Pi projects. It’s not quite for the faint of heart but it’s amazing fun when you get it started up and you start blinking LEDs with reckless abandon. Go to war against your cubicle mates with the Trebuchette, a working, desk-based trebuchet designed to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their electric pencil sharpeners. The DIY kit is made of wood and comes with all the pieces you need to lay siege to Pam-alot. At worst, the Parrot A.R.Drone 2.0 is a fantastic toy. At best, it’s a device that will show the masses the appeal of drones. The Parrot A.R.Drone is a fully-capable drone, able to reach incredible heights and speeds and it’s controlled by just a smartphone. There is a learning curve and it’s definitely an outdoor toy. Still, after 30 minutes of wobbling around the yard, you’ll have the drone soaring like as if controlled by Skynet. It’s a fantastic gift for you or your kin.
There are countless mobile battery solutions on the market. But I have yet to find one as bulletproof and affordable as the . It’s dead simple: two USB outputs, recharges by microUSB and sports just one button that kicks on the power and displays the remaining battery capacity. Best of all, this battery is often dirt cheap on Amazon and comes in various sizes. The 11,000 mAh flavor can sometimes be had for as low as $28.99 on Amazon while the 7,000 and 2,400 variations are also priced relatively low. It’s a boring gift, sure, but a gift that will surely be used by anyone addicted to their smartphone. I’ve tried nearly every smart device on the market, but the FitBit Force is the only one I still use. It’s the perfect size. The battery lasts over a week and it functions beautifully as a simple watch. My expanding waistline is testament to the fact that simply wearing a health tracker will not cause you to lose weight. However, since the Force is much more than a connected pedometer, it’s managed to work its way into my life as something I wear 24/7. Amazon makes a mighty fine e-reader, and that hasn’t changed even as it started pouring more resources into its Android-based tablets. These kids with their Alanis Morissette and their TurboGrafx 16s might be okay with reading books on backlit LCD displays, but I’ll stick with e-paper like God intended, thank you very much. The latest generation is a refinement on last year’s model, but it does manage to truly refine things in every way that matters. USB hubs are possibly the least sexy gift you can get someone, but also the most useful. This one by Anker has been a stalwart, with two dedicated charging ports that offer both 2.1A and 1.5A 5V charging to power up your iPad and your iPhone or Android device at maximum speed. Little lights indicate what ports are currently in use so you can tell if you have defective or undetected equipment, and the design is actually not offensive or garish, which is rare in these things. Call me a weirdo but I really like these lights, and will slowly blanket my entire house with them as budget allows and as Philips continues to introduce new models that are compatible with all my various sockets. Heck, I’d use one in my oven if it was rated for that. If I have a complaint, it’s that the app maybe isn’t as good as it could be, but Philips just updated its software for iOS 7 and it no longer requires you to turn your phone into landscape orientation to change the color/tone of your bulbs. I know, I know: mobile gaming is the new frontier and there’s no shortage of gadgets out there that can turn your smartphone into something approaching a real gaming console. Call me an anorak, but until we start seeing seriously top-tier franchises earnestly migrate over to mobile I’m more than happy to tote around a separate device meant solely for catching Pokémon or navigating the wilds of Hyrule. You can throw as many filters and effects on a photo as you want, it’s no substitute for a bit of shaped glass that sits in front of your lens. There’s no shortage of these little things floating around out in the e-commerce ether but I’m particularly fond of the ones from PhotoJojo — I’d much rather have a magnetic ring sitting around my phone’s lens for the rest of its days than, say, a hefty clip sticking of the end of it. Easily the curveball of the group. I originally bought one of these for use with phone reviews until I realized that they just weren’t all that necessary to the process… so I started measuring other things instead. And by other things, I mean everything. Seriously, I think I have a problem. |
Stupeflix Launches Replay, An App To Quickly Stitch Your Photos Together Into Videos | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | , a startup that offers video tools to app developers, has launched a mobile app of its own called . In many cases, when a developer-focused company launches an app, it’s done as a proof-of-concept: “Hey, look what you could do with our technology!” In this case, however, co-founder Jeff Boudier said this was built to address an honest-to-goodness consumer need, using a lot of the video technology that Stupeflix had already built. “Even the biggest oversharers will only share 10 percent of their photos,” he said. “The rest will die in the camera roll. We want to fix that.” So with Replay, you can bring your photos and videos together in a single video. If you do it right, it’s like a slideshow, but flashier and more fun. The concept is similar to the Animoto mobile app, which has the company says been downloaded more than 1 million times, and which . I haven’t tried Animoto on my iPhone, but Replay is certainly easy-to-use — you just choose the items you want to include, and the app opens a single menu where you can choose a filter, choose music, and rearrange the order of the photos and videos. When I tried Replay, I only had five photos on my camera roll (and two of them were of receipts), so the resulting video wasn’t worth sharing (trust me), but the results in the “featured” section of the app are pretty impressive. “Our vision has always been to make it easy and quick for them to express themselves through video,” Boudier added. “This is really the accomplishment of our vision.” Replay is currently . Boudier said he’s planning to release an Android version in the second or third quarter of next year — for now, he said he’s focused “on exploiting 100 percent of the capacity of the iPhone.” |
Facebook Acquires SportStream To Increase Sports Chatter By Providing News Outlets With Cleaner Data | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Having watched Twitter establish itself as our go-to network for realtime content and chatter and LinkedIn move beyond the resume to become a professional content network, Facebook is taking a page from its fellow networking giants and continuing to push into the content game. Beginning with news and now sports content — areas where demand for realtime content is soaring — Facebook is on a mission to help media companies and its content partners more easily surface and make use of realtime sports chatter within its walls. To do so, Facebook that it has acquired a startup that analyzes social media mentions of sports and provides clean data access to news outlets and teams. By bringing more sports-related chatter and data from both TV and digital news sources, Facebook hopes to lure more fans to its own watercooler — and away from its pal Twitter. SportStream is a product of Paul Allen-backed news aggregator, Evri, which first launched its suite of sports applications for iOS and Android devices in September of 2011. Evri’s patented semantic matching algorithms formed the foundation of SportStream, eventually providing sports fans with a ready-made stream of personalized, realtime news updates from a range of sources. The app also allowed fans to bring their social feeds into the conversation, tweet highlights, view in-game scores, and tailor their mobile content streams to focus on their favorite teams, players and topics. After finding plenty of demand for this kind of personalized content experience, SportStream raised $3.5 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital in the summer of 2012 and spun out of Evri, becoming an independent company. Since then, the new mobile sports startup has continued to solidify its relationships with the providers of its social data, leading to the announcement , in which Facebook chose SportStream as an API partner, giving SportStream deeper access to sports-related data from the social network. As Josh explained at the time, when people post about sports, “the problem is jumbled data. When you write ‘RG3 touchdown’, you mean Robert Griffin the third scored a touchdown for the Washington Redskins NFL football team. Facebook can’t parse that, but SportStream can. By making its sports data easier to understand, Facebook might get more outlets and teams to use it. Facebook hopes the perception that it’s a home for real-time event chatter will trickle down to users.” Over the last few years, Facebook has been looking to strengthen its media partnerships and, in so doing, has allowed media organizations (like CNN, Buzzfeed, Fox News, NBC and Slate, to name a few) to access its data more easily. The hope is that networks like CNN will begin pulling status updates into their broadcasts, for example, and that its partners will begin to find new ways to incorporate Facebook’s enormous repository of social data into their content initiatives. Of course, for media networks, making sense of Facebook’s massive social stream has traditionally been too steep of a hill to climb. But, in the case of sports content, at least, acquiring SportStream allows Facebook to fling open those doors and make it simpler for its media partners to parse its social data. While terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, from what we’ve heard, SportStream’s product will continue to live on and the startup continue its work with the fifty plus teams and news outlets to which it already provides data. How long it will take Facebook to integrate SportStream’s tools into its growing content network remains to be seen, but as far as its potential audience is concerned, joining Facebook is a big win for the young sports startup. |
Move Fast And Break Our Comments Section | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. We’ve been on Livefyre comments , and while we weren’t the biggest fans of Facebook Comments* while we , we’ve since realized that there is no perfect solution for commenting. And Facebook Comments, as troubled as they can be, are actually not that bad. At least for TechCrunch’s purposes. So until someone invents a perfect solution, or we have the developer resources to devote to an in-house commenting system, we’re going to revert from Livefyre back to Facebook Comments. Because Facebook Comments load faster — not to mention actually post — on mobile and because they don’t present as many quirky usability issues on WordPress. And because we’ve listened to our We know that the lack of anonymity is an issue with Facebook Comments, but we’re willing to accept that in return for a commenting system that is relatively stable. We also like the idea of comments sorted by Facebook Likes versus recency, and Facebook offers that as a default. Sometimes it’s that simple. So no hard feelings, Livefyre, and hello again, Facebook. Let the commenting commence! * |
YourMechanic Launches An iPhone App To Connect You With A Mechanic While On The Go | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | just got a lot more mobile with an iPhone app that will help users to better diagnose repairs that are needed. The app will also send notifications to users as their car is being serviced and could even allow them to see pictures of jobs being done. YourMechanic launched last year to provide an easy way for car owners to book appointments with mechanics that come to them. The idea was to create a marketplace of mechanics that would come to users and service their cars But there was one problem: Most people recognized that their car had problems when they were in it. Then they had to go to a computer and relay the issue online and try to diagnose it from inside their home or office. The new mobile app solves that problem, by giving users a way to report issues when they find out about them, and to find mechanics nearby. That’s especially helpful for diagnosing non-specific issues, like fluid leakage or strange noises emanating from the car that the user can better report on from a mobile phone than from a computer. Even for those who are looking just to get routine maintenance done, the app simplifies things a bit. Users can get a list of available mechanics, including profiles and ratings, and schedule times directly from the app. They’ll also get push notifications letting them know when a certain job is done or get updates along the way. Push notifications are also helpful for reminding users when it’s time to get scheduled maintenance done, since it knows when a mechanic last looked at an automobile. For now, the YourMechanic app is only available on iPhone, though co-founder Abhas Art Agrawal says the company is working on an Android version. YourMechanic has raised $1.8 million from investors that include Y Combinator, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Jeff Clavier, CrunchFund (which is owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), Paige Craig, A-Grade Investments, Jawed Karim, Justin Waldron, Joshua Schachter, and Kevin Freedman. |
Facebook’s Silent Autoplay Video Ads Require Custom Content To Shine | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Facebook could have made it easy for advertisers to port their TV commercials or online pre-rolls into its new video ad unit. Instead, it’s spawned a designed to minimize disruption to the user experience. While advertisers might be a bit annoyed they can’t reuse existing creative, Facebook’s decision could reduce backlash and preserve its audience. And it’s not the first time. When Facebook , it didn’t offer the typical ad formats marketers were used to. They wanted flashing banners, home page takeovers, and standardized ad unit sizes so they could hawk their wares the same way they did elsewhere on the web. Facebook said no. The company knew that if it was going to grow to reach its full potential and become one of the most used parts of the Internet, advertising had to be subtle and it had to fit in. It mostly relegated ads to small boxes on its right hand column. There were some experiments and false starts from 2006 to 2009, but Facebook didn’t get serious about showing ads in the News Feed until January 2012 — almost six years after the feed launched. It didn’t show any ads on mobile until March 2012. The strategy worked. Users were pestered by the ads, but not enough to quit the social network, and Facebook continued to grow into the 1.19 billion user juggernaut it is now. By keeping ads conservative and the user experience healthy, it may have disobeyed advertisers’ wishes, but it made sure they’d still have an audience today. This year, Facebook faced another tough decision about how handle advertising. With wired broadband and mobile networks improving, more users on smartphones, people shifting away from watching traditional television, and public investors to answer to, it looked for a way to launch a more aggressive unit for video advertising that could bring in the big bucks. But how would the format work? A wrong decision that was too disruptive to the News Feed could scare Facebook users away in droves. Marketers likely wanted to have it their way: autoplay ads with sound that forced users to pay attention. Instead, reports say CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg took a deep interest in how the video ad format would impact the user experience. They staffed the video ads team with people from Facebook’s consumer division, not its ad squad, and delayed the launch until the format was done right. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=652318778152181 Today the first test of Facebook’s new video ads was . In the one-day test on Thursday, a video will autoplay as soon as it scrolls into view. But in a unique twist that differentiates them from other formats, the audio doesn’t play unless the video is clicked or tapped. Above you can see an example of what Facebook’s first autoplay video ad for the film Divergent will look like in the feed on Thursday. The current format strikes a balance between what users and what advertisers want. What a lot of users want is no ads at all. Understandable, but good luck with that. Advertising pays for the free services we use. You can wave the AdBlock Plus flag but most people aren’t that savvy. To them, ads are either natural and ignorable enough to be admissible, or so annoying they signficantly deter usage of a product. While everyone might not be happy (ie some people will surely go ballistic), Facebook’s new video ads could have been a lot more intrusive. Compare this to YouTube ads you’re forced to sit through for five or fifteen seconds, or the dozens of minutes of TV commercials you have to endure every hour, and Facebook’s format doesn’t look so bad. We’ll still have to wait and see how things shake out. If you’re trying to read a text post or comments from a friend, and autoplay video nearby would be a distraction. And Facebook will have to make sure the ads are well targeted. I’d be bitter about seeing irrelevant ads for sappy romantic comedies or women’s clothes. But beyond the initial shock, I bet users will learn to accept this video ad format in their feeds. Maybe they won’t like it. But and most won’t hate the ads enough to leave Facebook. For advertisers, the format makes things a bit tricky. They’ll likely need to produce custom content for the Facebook video ads. Specifically, they’ll want videos that get the message across without sound. Rather than lots of dialog, they may want to focus on vivid visuals and bold text. You can see this strategy at work in the example video ad embedded above. The short clip promoting Divergent doesn’t rely on audio. It’s soundtracked with thrilling music, but the action sequences and flashes of white text on black get the action flick’s message across even when silent. Compare that to the dialog-heavy official trailer for Divergent seen right that wouldn’t make sense without sound, and you’ll get an idea of how advertisers will need to adapt. Facebook did throw advertisers a bone, though. Once you finish watching a video ad, you’ll be shown a carousel of other video ads by the same marketer that could get you more deeply interested in the same product, or help you discover others. eMarketer’s VP of communications Clark Fredericksen tells me some advertisers may blindly try to import their existing video creative, but expects that “You’re going to have other advertisers that are gong to try to optimize the creative so it works best regardless [of sound]. I definitely think advertisers will be experimenting with this. Facebook has such a huge number of users.” That last point explains why advertisers may go the extra mile to develop special video content for Facebook. As I revealed in a I attained last week, Facebook cites that it can reach more people age 18 to 24 during primetime than any TV network. That means if businesses invest in making commercials for TV, they should invest in making silent autoplay video ads for Facebook’s billion-plus audience. And I’d expect Facebook’s auto-play video ads to also fit Instagram, adding another 150 million users to the audience. The extra effort might make it tough to constantly produce video ads, but Facebook’s confidential pitch deck reveals it’s focused on selling huge video ad “Blasts” that reach the majority of a demographic within three days. These will likely cost millions of dollars, and only be used when there’s something big and urgent to promote. The infrequency and cost of running the ads make customization appropriate. Facebook will surely need to keep a death stare on how overall usage metrics are impacted as it determines how often to show these ads. No matter the quality of the format, if they’re displayed too often, users will be pissed. But by developing a special video ad format that’s designed to fit the News Feed and respects users’ ears, Facebook may have found a way to evolve commercials for the 21st century. |
Google Glass Gets ‘Wink To Shoot Picture’ Mode, Lock Screen, YouTube Uploading And Hangouts Chat | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Google has just to Google Glass which adds a lock screen, Hangouts chat, direct YouTube uploading via a Glass app and a ‘wink to shoot a picture’ mode. The wink photo mode is obviously interesting as developers had dug up and it’s just making an appearance now. You can shoot images by simply turning the mode on and winking your eye to snap photos. This eliminates the need to snap an image using the photo button or a voice command. There are some immediate privacy issues which rear their heads here of course — winking is a lot less obtrusive than a hand to the face or saying it out loud. “Glass is about helping you look up and experience the world around you without getting bogged down by technology,” reads the posting. “Based on this philosophy, we’ve got a new setting that lets you quickly and easily capture the moments you care about with a simple wink of the eye. Whether it’s capturing an amazing sunset on an evening walk, or photographing your receipt for the lunch you’ll need to expense, you can now stay in the moment and wink to take a picture instantly.” The post says that photos are ‘just the beginning’. It asks you to imagine situations like ‘winking at a cab’s meter’ to pay for a ride, or winking at a pair of shoes in a shop window to purchase a pair in your size and have them shipped to you. “You wink at a cookbook recipe and the instructions appear right in front of you – hands-free, no mess, no fuss. Pretty cool, right?” Sure, maybe. For now, though, it will be a lot easier for people to take pictures with Glass without their subject’s knowledge. It seems likely that this will cause more friction with those who take exception to Google’s head mounted computer. Some restaurants have already banned the devices in the interest of customer privacy. A new lock screen mode will now clamp your headset down until you unlock it via taps and swipes in a pattern you set. You can now also upload to YouTube directly from the Glassware app on your device, an experience that was previously enabled by developers hacking the platform. Google Music All Access subscribers now also have access to their music and playlists with this update. Google also notes that it dropped the iOS version of MyGlass on the App Store too soon, but says that it will be up again later this week. The app showed up momentarily on the store before disappearing earlier today. |
Microsoft Chief: “Nobody Ever Buys Windows. They Buy Windows PCs.” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Earlier today ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley in what appears to be an orgy of access, this time with outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Regarding its executive changes, Microsoft today reported that it will , cooling speculation that the new CEO would land before the end of this year. Ballmer’s remarks are worth reading, of course, but two segments stand out. For one, his framing of Microsoft’s soul after its shift towards devices and services instead of software proper is interesting, given that if the board agrees, his views could be similar to the strategic rubric the company is looking for in their next chief: Are we a productivity company or are we a software company? Well, what we are is a company that knows how to create great software for productivity and serious fun, but the expression will be through services, and through devices increasingly. And maybe it always has been. Nobody ever buys Windows. They buy Windows PCs. That’s mostly true, even though enthusiasts do, in fact, buy Windows as a stand-alone product. But Ballmer is correct in saying people buy Windows PCs more than they buy the operating system itself. Even more, they buy ‘computers’ more than they buy Windows PCs, but that is a quibble. Secondly, Ballmer reflected on Surface as an internal project, in relation to its Xbox efforts. Xbox, of course, was a key moment in Microsoft’s becoming a hardware-capable company. In Ballmer’s view, Surface was “in a way… a tougher bet” than Xbox. Microsoft’s Windows platform needs OEM partners to make tens of millions of PCs each month. Its decision to hem in on their space was heavily frictional. When the Nokia purchase closes, however, Microsoft will manufacture hardware across every major Windows form factor: Tablets and PCs through Surface, smartphones via Lumia, and televisions through Xbox. It can now create hardware consumer experiences for every screen Windows wants to land on. That gives the company increased flexibility to reach consumers, and set the discussion. The new Microsoft’s strategy is well on its way to execution. The question now becomes who will . |
Amazon Kinesis Now In Public Beta For Developers To Build Real-Time Apps | Alex Williams | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | , the company’s new data streaming analytics platform, is now in public beta. It allows developers to build real-time apps without managing the complexity of multiple clusters. But though it has been heralded as a new type of real-time app platform, it also has some drawbacks that have emerged since its at AWS Re:Invent. AWS Kinesis streams thousands of data streams on a per-second basis. It allows developers to pull any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed. The power of the platform comes with its capability to process data in a world where sensors are transmitting information in any number of ways, said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at At AWS Re:Invent. Vogels made the point that there will be an increasing use of sensors to record data. With Kinesis, builders could look at the data and determine the best time to pour the concrete in the foundation. Kinesis works across multiple availability zones, which is also replicated for high availability. The service shards the data into streams with each handling 1,000 write transactions and up to 20 read transactions. Here’s a video primer about the new Kinesis service last week made by , a senior director of cloud management enterprise solutions at Dell. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXljE9Rh4ZQ&w=640&h=360] AWS is positioning Kinesis as an alternative to Hadoop, which has traditionally used batch processing of data to do analysis. But that only tells part of the story. Hadoop has a diverse ecosystem behind it with new pieces such as , which provides the real-time processing capability and sets the stage for building real-time apps. In his tests, Worley found that Kinesis is elastic and able to scale automatically based on the load, which takes away some of the complexity of managing EC2 clusters. If it works as advertised, he writes, it will greatly simplify cluster operations over what is done with a Storm setup. AWS has a lower barrier to entry compared to Hadoop batch processing, Worley writes. But overall, Kinesis is not built for complex data stream integrations. The downside, though, is that every Kinesis application consists of just one procedure, so you can’t do complex stream processing like can be done with Storm unless you connect together multiple Kinesis applications. Naturally, I have some concerns about this. Kinesis does mark a new era in the analytics world with its data streaming capability. But AWS is not the first on the scene and by no means necessarily the leader. There are a growing list of options from the open-source community that are viable alternatives to AWS and its proprietary infrastructure. |
Dropbox Makes Mailbox More Service Agnostic With Support For Yahoo Mail And iCloud | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Dropbox acquisition Mailbox has with support for Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Me.com and Mac.com accounts. Previously, the client supported only Gmail inboxes, making its audience large but limited. Mailbox said it had more requests for iCloud and Yahoo Mail support than for any other feature. This release displays the influence of Dropbox — which has been by its nature a platform agnostic offering. Confining Mailbox to only Gmail was likely a matter of expediency and growth. But now that Mailbox has the resources of Dropbox behind it, they’ve managed to add in additional services for the first time. The Mailbox purchase was a good signal that Dropbox was making moves to expand beyond a syncing service into a platform of tools. Given that it’s on a crash collision course with Box, which is coming in from the opposite (enterprise) direction, it makes sense for Dropbox to be cobbling together a set of unique productivity offerings it can eventually show to enterprise clients as a reason to use the platform. Box is in the process of doing the same. The Mailbox update is out today for iOS. Unfortunately, thought there are now more mail service options, the app remains absent on Android. And the app won’t truly be service agnostic until it gains support for adding custom IMAP or POP services, but that’s for another day. |
How The Nokia Purchase Will Impact Microsoft’s Financials | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s hardware business appears set to sail through, having passed shareholder and regulator approval. The 5.44 billion euro deal will see “substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business” become part of Microsoft, according to the companies. The deal will allow Microsoft to wrest control of its smartphone platform from a third-party that had increasing hegemony over its end-user experience. Nokia has become the de facto Windows Phone manufacturer, as its rising unit volume met slackening competition due to flagging OEM interest. What will the financial impacts of the Nokia deal be for Microsoft? Two questions need to be answered: Compared to Microsoft’s revenue, how large is the Nokia purchase in terms of relative top line? Also, what impact can we expect Nokia’s hardware business to have on Microsoft’s earnings per share? To explore these issues we will source data from both companies, their joint statement, and industry forecasts. We’ll first examine Nokia’s net sales compared to Microsoft revenue, and then weigh their net incomes to determine an expected percentage and dollar decline in Microsoft’s earnings per share using historical data. Microsoft says it will purchase “substantially all of Nokia’s Devices and Services business,” a statement that is far too generic to use. Happily, it supplied another figure that is quite useful: In 2012, the portion of Nokia that it will purchase generated 14.9 billion euro in net sales. According to Nokia, the larger Devices and Services group had net sales of 15.686 billion euro in 2012. So, Microsoft is buying assets that drive around 95% of Devices and Services’ net sales. We can use that figure to estimate calendar 2013 Devices and Services revenue, which we can then compare to Microsoft’s same-period revenue to get a good handle on their relative scale. 2012 data isn’t acceptable, as Nokia has shrunk in the interim while Microsoft has grown, distorting the comparison. Nokia’s calendar 2013 Q1, Q2, and Q3 net sales totaled 17.209 billion euro. In that three-quarter period, 8.51 billion euro came from the Devices and Services division, or 49.5%. This is a good number, as it jibes with Microsoft’s comment that the Devices and Services net sales from 2012 that is attributable to what it is purchasing was “almost 50 percent of Nokia’s net sales for the full year 2012.” The market expects Nokia to report 6 billion euros in net sales in calendar Q4 of 2013. Given that half of Nokia revenue is Devices and Services, we can expect that division to generate 3 billion euro in net sales. That added to the extant 8.51 billion net sales tally from the first three-quarters of calendar 2013 implies that Nokia’s Devices and Services division should have net sales of around 11.51 billion euro in the full year. Converting that to dollars at current exchange rates, we can see that Nokia’s Devices and Services division’s net sales tally for calendar 2013 should be around $15.8 billion. Microsoft’s cut of that total top line is 95%, or $15.01 billion. So, in 2013 if Microsoft had owned the pieces of Nokia that it will shortly, its revenue tally would have added just over $15 billion in net sales. We’re speaking loosely by comparing Nokia net sales to Microsoft’s revenue figures, but as the comparison is more conservative on the Nokia side, I don’t mind that much. To compare Nokia’s calendar 2013 we must stack it next to corresponding fiscal quarters from Microsoft, which operates on its own calendar. So, we’ll need to tally revenue from Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 and Q4 of 2013, and its fiscal Q1 and Q2 of 2014. As with Nokia, we’ll use average investor estimates for the current quarter (fiscal Q2 2014 for Microsoft, calendar Q4 2013 for Nokia): That totals to $82.62 billion. We can now compare: Nokia’s Devices and Services net sales tally for calendar 2013 that would be attributable to Microsoft totaled $15.01 billion, including its forecasted fourth quarter. That is 18.17% of Microsoft’s revenue in same-period. For a slightly more hatcheted comparison, Nokia’s net sales will be between 1/6th and 1/5th of Microsoft’s revenue in the period. So, Microsoft’s top line will grow by less than 20% after the purchase. The purchase lowers the cost of its shares on a sales multiple basis, reduces its balance sheet value by unloading cash, and, as we’ll see, hurts its earnings per share. Let’s get to that last bit. For earnings per share, let’s take a look at the most recently reported quarter for each company, and work out what the impact of Nokia’s recent net loss would be on Microsoft’s earnings per share. EPS, of course, is a number closely correlated with a company’s stock price. We’ll only deal with figures from Nokia’s Devices and Services group as they are the relevant sums. Microsoft had net income of $5.244 billion, and the Nokia division -$116.97 million (as reported: -85 million euro). However, Microsoft absorbs 95% of that. We’re presuming here that Microsoft’s share of net sales will be equivalent to its share of profits (losses). So, the division’s net loss comes to $111.12 million. Microsoft had an earnings per share ratio of $8.46 billion:$1 in the quarter. If we deduct the $111.12 million loss that Nokia would have contributed if Microsoft owned its future assets in the most recent quarter, it would have had net income of $5.133 billion. Using the same ratio, we can see that Microsoft would have had not $0.62 in earnings per share as before, but $0.6067 per share, or just over a penny less per share. So, we can predict that on a quarterly basis, Nokia’s losses will have a minimal impact on Microsoft EPS figure, and therefore, ostensibly, its share price. You could argue that the impact to Microsoft’s margins will be more material, which is fair, but at a minimum the EPS impact of the Nokia buy — assuming no new material deterioration in the assets in question – will be negligible. Nokia will bring to Microsoft revenue each year of roughly equivalent size to two quarters of its new Devices and Consumer groups top line. On a revenue basis (or sales multiple basis, if you prefer), Microsoft will become cheaper, assuming its stock price remains static. However, its gross and operating margins appear set to decline, as will its net profit and earnings per share, even if only in a minor way. Still, the move by Microsoft to deploy dully performing foreign cash reserves to add nearly 20% to its top line in one move, opening the door to accelerating profits, is appealing. The above presumes, of course that Microsoft can in fact wring profits from its shiny new Nokia assets, and employees. Microsoft wanted to get into hardware business. Welcome! — |
YouTube Finally, Finally, Finally Gets A Channel On Roku 3 | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Mark this up as one of those things that we’ve been waiting for forever and had to happen at some point: YouTube announced today that it’s . Well, one Roku streaming device at least. The new YouTube app is available on Roku 3 devices in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Republic of Ireland. And it provides fun stuff like HD streaming and the ability to control the YouTube app with your mobile phone. |
FlyCleaners, An On-Demand Laundry Startup Rolling Out In Brooklyn, Raises $2M | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | , a startup that picks up your laundry, cleans it, and drops it off on-demand, is announcing that it has raised about $2 million in seed funding from Zelkova Ventures and undisclosed angel investors. There are a number of variations on the “Uber for laundry” idea already on the market, and . As far as I know, all of them are limited geographically (FlyCleaners is only available in North Brooklyn), but I assume they all have hopes for expansion. When I asked how FlyCleaners is different, CEO David Salama told me via email: More than anyone else, we started with the question of what would be the ideal customer experience and then filled in the rest of the details from there. We didn’t want to provide just a satisfactory experience that happened to be a little more convenient. We aim to “wow” each customer with all elements of our service. This lead us to focus on a handful of key features, including true on-demand service, simplicity, transparency, extended hours, and most importantly, competitive prices and superior customer service. I tried FlyCleaners out myself, and I have to admit that the service was great — after I signed up, downloaded the iPhone app (there’s an Android version too), entered a few preferences, and ordered a pickup, someone from FlyCleaners arrived within a few minutes. My laundry was ready the next day, so I just opened the app again and said I was at home, and within minutes (again) it was dropped off. Oh, and they appeared to do a fine job with the laundry, too, though I admit that I don’t have particularly high standards on that front. (The app itself is a little less impressive, lacking the polish of, say, Uber, but hey, it gets the job done.) Behind the scenes, Salama said FlyCleaners is working with local dry cleaners and laundromats for the actual cleaning while hiring its own “Fly Guys” for pickup and and delivery and its own customer service agents. As for expanding into other areas, he said the immediate goals are Manhattan and more neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and the company is “considering various options as we look for the right metropolitan area to expand into next.” By the way, discussions of on-demand service companies like this tend to bring up the question of whether ( ) they’re focused on “solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand.” In this case, I can imagine that plenty of people don’t want to spend lots of time in a laundromat, and at $4.95 for five pounds of laundry, FlyCleaners isn’t that much more expensive than the laundromats in my neighborhood. (On the other hand, if you actually have in-unit laundry, then you’re probably just being lazy.) |
The Soloshot Is A Robotic Cameraman For Your Video Selfies | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Sometimes you just need a robotic cameraman at your side and when you do, the is the gadget for the task. Just set it up, strap on a wristband, turn on your video camera and go surf, bike or ski. As long as you’re within about 2,000 feet of the device, it will automatically track all of your movements and capture them for posterity (or your next YouTube hit). At , this isn’t exactly a budget gadget and the first time I heard about it, I couldn’t quite fathom why it would be useful. I’m not exactly into extreme sports, after all, and you won’t see me on a ski slope anytime soon, either. After the company sent me a test unit, though, I have to admit that it’s actually a pretty cool machine. The design is a bit reminiscent of the equipment you sometimes see surveyors use at the side of the road. It’s functional, sturdy and orange, but it won’t win an award for sleekness. More interesting than its looks, however, is that it actually works. The panning is surprisingly smooth, even as it closely tracks all your movements. Here is a cool example video that’s pretty representative of the videos you can shoot with the unit: The unit comes with a tripod, the base station and a wristband. Setting everything up is pretty straightforward. The base station can spin 360 degrees, making it pretty versatile for a number of sports. Because you supply your own camera, it also doesn’t try to zoom for you or do anything else fancy with the image. It’s worth noting, though, that while it tracks you across the horizon, it doesn’t actually tilt up or down. The wristband is waterproof and should hold its charge for about five hours. You charge it right from the base station and the transmitter has a couple of LEDs that show the status of the unit. This transmitter, too, won’t win any design prizes anytime soon, but it, too, works just as advertised. It’s a bit on the bulky side, but the armband that holds it is comfortable enough that you’ll quickly forget about it. While the company is mostly gearing its marketing to surfers and motorbikers, I could easily see some college or high school teams buying one or two of these to track players across the soccer or football field during practice. |
Foundation: Brian Armstrong on Coinbase and Bitcoin Security | Contributor | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | In this episode of my Foundation video series, I sit down for a chat with Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong. We chat about Bitcoin, his first Android wallet project, and the insane security he uses to protect your coins. Brian on security: “We have over 200 tests that run against the code before every deploy…we keep the vast majority of customer funds offline…we split the keys with redundancy and geographically split them all over the world so that each of the pieces is in a safe deposit box geographically.” |
Palantir’s Latest Round Valuing It At $9B Swells To $107.8M In New Funding | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Palantir, the big data company that started off with clients like the FBI and CIA before building up a large private-sector roster of customers, just added more funding to its coffers. Last week, the company filed that it was raising $57 million with the SEC. Now that round is coming in at $107.5 million, Sources close to the company told us that the round valued the company at $9 billion. This is a boost to Strong investor appetite convinced the company to bring in more capital at a 50 percent bump to their overall valuation. Palantir, which expects to see more than $1 billion in contracts next year, sells a big data platform to private-sector and government clients. It helps them make sense from disparate silos of data and point out trends that they would otherwise not see. For example, rescue workers operating in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy used Palantir to manage requests for water, medical supplies, and home repairs. Financial clients tend to use it to look for cybersecurity or fraud threats. While the company was originally founded back in 2004 to take anti-fraud technologies and ideas developed at PayPal and use them to fight terrorism with government agencies, the company is now working with lots of private sector clients. Today, government contracts make up less than 40 percent of the company’s revenues, a source familiar with the company tells me. The company was the brainchild of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, who recruited current CEO Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale (who went on to found Asia and Silicon Valley-focused investment firm Formation 8), Stephen Cohen and chief technology officer Nathan Gettings to put together an initial product. |
The Napwell Knows When You Are Sleeping, Then Coaxes You Awake | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | Is this the year of the sleep mask? thinks so. The Boston-based company is creating a napping mask that allows you to grab some shut-eye and wake up gently as lights inside the mask slowly rouse you from your slumber. The device lets you set a nap duration and then nod off. Once you reach the end of your nap the mask slowly lights up with a diffuse, calming light that simulates sunrise. The creators, Justin Lee, an MIT Ph.D candidate, and Neil Joglekar, late of Stanford, see this as a napping tool that can help users become more energized at work, sleep better on planes, or establish a new sleeping plan. Lee says the mask will prevent “sleep inertia” – the groggy feeling you get after waking up suddenly. “Our goal is to build products that help people lead efficient and productive lives,” he said. “We started with the problem and not the solution. We felt we found the most pressing need – helping people sleep more efficiently. We experimented with multiple products, but after speaking to many friends and experts we realized that a simple, mobile solution to sleep was necessary. We don’t mean mobile in the sense of an app, but rather something that can be used on the go. We were actually excited to build a solution to this problem that did not rely on computers or phones.” Lee said that the Napwell is far more portable than other sleeping masks and doesn’t think it compares to the in that the built-in interface makes it easy to use anywhere. “The mask is battery operated so you don’t need WiFi, Bluetooth, or a smartphone to make it work. This goes back to our philosophy of building products so that they can be used by anyone, anywhere,” he said. “I consider myself lucky to work with amazing people at MIT and Harvard Medical School, but it really frustrates me to see my colleagues routinely hampered by small things that have dramatic effects on their productivity. What started as a set of personal projects to help my colleagues (and myself as well) with these minor hurdles has evolved into a larger push to develop products that can help the wider population lead more efficient and productive lives.” The team is looking into further expanding their portfolio of health-related devices. The Napwell starts at $50 for a production unit and will ship in September. They’re aiming for $30,000 in funding. “While we think there is great potential in sleep, the Napwell is just our first product. We see napping as a significant pain point but also an introduction to making a retail product at scale.” [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2011830108/napwell-the-worlds-first-napping-mask width=640] |
PayPal Is Buying StackMob For Christmas | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 17 | [ : ] Mobile backend service provider is being acquired in a deal expected to be announced soon, according to multiple TechCrunch sources. We’ve heard from a few people the acquiring company is “down south,” meaning Silicon Valley or the South Bay. Some names that have been tossed around include Oracle and EMC, but we’ve yet to confirm. StackMob, a competitor to now Facebook-owned Parse, had raised in Series A funding in 2011, but was struggling to raise a B round, leading to the acquisition discussions. Many have been hearing similar rumors of a StackMob acquisition in recent days, but we’ve confirmed with several sources that the deal has, in fact, closed. [ : ] “We believe that with the addition of the talented team from StackMob, we’ll move even faster in creating, testing and deploying products that aim to transform payments for customers around the world,” wrote PayPal CTO James Barrese on the company’s blog. StackMob CEO Ty Amell added in a statement. “ The company, for background, had offered tools that made it possible for developers to more easily build scalable mobile applications, with support for things like custom code, HTML5 hosting, push notifications, location-based services, social authentication, a datastore for apps, API metrics. StackMob’s suite also includes a , which allows developers to quickly add modules to integrate additional features from other third-party services into their applications. (StackMob, in turn, would earn a 20 to 30 perfect referral fee on these). This year, StackMob also by touting its integrations with other software and platforms-as-a-service companies, API infrastructure providers, and others, initially including services from AT&T, Alfresco, Box, Braintree, GoodData, Mashery, Mulesoft, New Relic and Rackspace. We hear that effort had little traction, however. At the time, CEO Ty Amell said the company was generating revenue, but would still need another round to grow the sales team and expand faster. “The dirty secret with backends-as-a-service is that it takes a lot of time and money, especially when you’re talking about enterprise. It takes a lot of time to become profitable,” , adding that the company was not yet “revenue-positive.” StackMob also tried to capitalize on competitor Parse’s acquisition by Facebook, hoping to woo disgruntled developers to its platform . That acquisition may have validated the overall space, but it seems that only a vocal minority were griping about the change, or frustrated enough to actually leave. In the months since, Parse grew from 60,000 apps at the time of the acquisition to 100,000 apps by this June, and has . Meanwhile, signs of StackMob closing up shop have also appeared in recent days: I guess went out of business. Can’t seem to reach a human. No blog post in months and services are broken. StackMob go out of business or what? Can’t reach ANYONE for days AND CS # says out of service. — Aaron Wright (@WrightsCS) — Aaron Wright (@WrightsCS) Furthermore, since publication we’ve learned that StackMob reportedly hired a banker this summer in an effort to help it find an acquirer. We’ve also learned from sources that Yahoo was one of the companies to kick StackMob’s tires, however, in spite of the added incentive of a reportedly low asking price, Yahoo opted not to make a deal. So, while PayPal and StackMob declined to share details on the acquisition price, it doesn’t sound like this was a blockbuster deal. Furthermore, while StackMob had a good run, it doesn’t come as a complete surprise that StackMob struggled in its efforts to reach profitability and scale to the degree it had initially hoped. Ultimately, it seems as if StackMob’s early hype ended up working against it, as the initial buzz was followed by lack of momentum — a trend that also seems increasingly endemic to the mBaaS (mobile backend-as-a-service) space as a whole these days. Companies have had issues monetizing — even Parse, which sold to Facebook for a reported $85 million, at times loses money on higher volume applications, we’ve heard. And on the enterprise side, there are security concerns around exposing corporate data to the various mBaaS platforms. In the end, it seems the time has come for some consolidation among mBaaS players, and StackMob is the latest to pull the rip cord. Let’s see who’s next. |
nWay Raises $5M To Build Out ChronoBlade MMO Game | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | , a San Francisco-based gaming startup from an experienced team of MMO-makers, just raised $5 million in funding led by TransLink Capital. They also had participation from several of Silicon Valley’s better known micro-VCs and early-stage funds like Baseline Ventures’ Steven Anderson, Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee and Harrison Metal’s Michael Dearing. Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew, WI Harper Group, Zhen Fund, Bowana, and XG Ventures also joined the round. Before starting nWay, CEO Taehoon Kim had racked up years of experience through building several gaming companies including one MMO maker called Nurien, that he eventually sold to CJ E&M. They were behind several social dance and fashion show titles. He’s returning to the game-making world with a team that has worked on titles like Grand Theft Auto, Diablo II and Dead Space 2 & 3. “We wanted to basically create what we thought were real games. Some games are very blurry with the line between social networking and gameplay,” he said. The company’s main title , is a title where a handful of hero characters battle to protect a Multi-verse, or a universe where multiple versions of Earth exist. The enemy army, the Chronarch Imperium, has advanced weaponry that it uses to destroy most worlds’ defenses. Players take on the role of one of four inter-dimensional heroes that have to keep the Chronarch Imperium at bay. Each of course has its own unique skill sets and specialties. Right now, the game is just available on Facebook and on the new Android-based console Ouya. They’ll be launching a multi-player mode in three days. But nWay plans to have it work seamlessly across several platforms including consoles, PCs and mobile devices. Android and iOS should be coming in 2014. But the reason the company has been able to attract investor interest in a tough climate for gaming startups is because of the team’s experience and because they’ve developed some back-end technology that should allow for 60-frame-per-second synchronous multiplayer game play. “We think it will be breakthrough technology for twitch-based games that require low latency,” Kim said. So far, Kim says that tests show players are spending at least 30 minutes on average. They haven’t turned on any monetization features at the moment, as the company is focused on retention rather than revenue at the moment. The two-year-old company has raised about $11 million in total and has 34 employees. Jay Eum, a managing director at TransLink Capital will join Baseline’s Steve Anderson on the company’s board. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTWnEndE1zM&w=560&h=315] |
Meet Kubo, The Crowdfunded Electric Cargo Scooter Made By Lit Motors | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | The Kubo is a uniquely designed vehicle that brings together the best of both worlds from scooters and cars: It has a small two-wheeled form factor, but a nice amount of storage space. Lit describes it as “combining the beautiful design of Apple and Vespa with the basic utility of a pickup truck.” I’d liken it to a modern two-wheeled version of the , only much more beautifully designed (and eco-friendly!) Either way, it’s a very nifty piece of work. Once you see it, you wonder why something like it hasn’t been made already. Lit Motors is hoping to crowdfund the initial production of the Kubo through a launched last month. So far, the company has a ways to go — a little over $45,000 has been pledged out of the , so with nine days left in the campaign the clock is certainly ticking. As sleek as the Kubo is, it might have been a bit ambitious to expect dozens of people to each put down $5,000 to reserve a yet-to-be-built scooter from a small startup. But whatever happens with this particular Kickstarter campaign, Lit’s chief marketing officer Ryan James tells me that the company will figure out a way to get the Kubo into production for all the people who want it. There are lots of people rooting for Lit, and it will be exciting to see how its designs are made into a reality (and eventually come to our roads.) We swung by Lit Motors HQ to get a first-person look at the Kubo and watch Lit’s CMO Ryan James take it for a spin. Check it out in the video embedded above. |
Lovely’s Apartment Rental App Moves Into Its New Digs On Android | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Few things in life are more frustrating than trying to find a new place to live (especially if you’re itching to move to the housing market hellholes that are New York City and San Francisco). It’s no wonder then that so many startups — Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, Apartment List, Rental Engine, Zumper, Nestio, the list goes on — are trying to make it all just a little bit easier. Of these myriad startups, apartment-centric has been especially busy these past few months: it closed a (sadly undisclosed) Series A and snapped up automated rent payment startup Rentmatic to help prove its worth to property owners too. So what was next on their agenda? Getting a new Android app out the door, which the company . Lovely is hardly new to the mobile realm — it launched an iOS version of the app a little over a year ago, and anyone who’s mucked around with that should feel comfortable taking the Android version for a spin. That’s far from a bad thing when more than a few competing mobile real estate apps are happy to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into the mix. It’s not hard to see why: as stated, finding an apartment is hard and bombarding a user with fiddly options and controls makes them feel like they’re actually getting something done. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but the illusion of control persists. The Lovely approach is to strip out the cruft. When you fire up the app for the first time, color-coded listings appear in location-based groups that expand when tapped. From there it takes a but a few taps to directly contact the property owner, share the listing, or report obvious frauds. If you go on to create an account, even more doors open (I slay me) so you can set alerts when properties free up within specific areas and preload some personal and financial information to put potential renters at ease. There’s little here that differentiates the Android app from its iOS cousin, but that’s hardly an issue — CEO Blake Pierson said he considers Lovely a mobile-first company that uses what it’s learned from fast iteration on the web to inform the mobile experience. All things considered, this new Android version of the app is a handsome one and I actually found a few interesting leads while I was writing this story (what can I say, I’ve grown a little weary of southern New Jersey). “Some think of us as purely a search tool,” Pierson noted on the phone. “But our long term vision is to be the platform and THE marketplace for rentals.” What he means is that the Lovely vision ultimately encompasses the renting process from both ends: tools for renters and apartment hunters alike. The team has already starting moving down that path with its Rentmatic acquisition, but we’ll see if they can really balance both sides of that equation. |
Extole Raises $5M To Reward Customers For Promoting Products To Their Friends | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | “Referral marketing” startup is announcing that it has raised $5 million in new funding. Founded in 2009, back in April. Since then, the company has also brought on Mark Cyster as CTO and Chris Duskin as vice president of marketing — like Roche, they were formerly executives at Offermatica (which was acquired by Adobe). Roche said that when he joined, , i.e. tools to encourage fans to promote a company or product. Under his lead, however, the company has “doubled down” on a specific part of its business, namely referral marketing, while dropping everything else. In other words, Roche wants Extole to be the platform that companies use to launch “recommend us to your friend and get a reward!” campaigns on their websites and on mobile. For example, if you go to the website of , Extole is providing the underlying technology for the “refer and get $15 off” offers on the home page and on the listings for individual products. Roche said the campaigns are completely customizable and that Extole also offers analytics so that companies can monitor and optimize them. Roche plans to make the platform available to everyone early next year, but it started bringing on beta customers over the summer, and there are now 35 companies using it. In the case of American Giant, Extole says it’s driving 10 percent of the company’s e-commerce transactions. “This is an actual enterprise channel,” Roche said. “We are no longer in research mode, we are in exploitation mode.” The new funding comes from , , , and . When I asked if Roche had always planned to raise more money at this time, Roche laughed and said, “Sometimes, plans force themselves upon you.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWA9S38qLJM&w=420&h=315] |
Gifting Service Loop Commerce Adds PayPal As An Investor, Bringing Its Series A To Over $12M | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | After its Series A in early November, gifting startup has added an investment from PayPal to the round. While Loop Commerce co-founder and CEO Roy Erez would not disclose the exact amount of PayPal’s investment, the Series A was previously $7 million and now stands a little north of $12 million. So you do the math. Loop Commerce’s list of investors already includes eBay CTO Mark Carges, Don Katz of Audible and Amazon, Magento CEO Roy Rubin, former Toys “R” Us SVP Michael Scharff, Oren Zeev, Chegg CTO Chuck Geiger, and Novel TMT. With this latest investment, PayPal VP of Global Strategic Development Don Kingsborough will serve as PayPal’s observer on Loop Commerce’s board. As a B2B2C service, Loop Commerce’s aim is to find a place in the broader ecommerce landscape by integrating with retailers as an alternate checkout flow. When a shopper wants to gift an item to a friend, they go through Loop’s checkout process, sending a notification to the recipient asking for shipping, sizing, and color preferences. For consumers, it means giving and receiving gifts, especially clothing, that will actually see some use. For retailers, it could cut down on the cost associated with returns while delivering extra user behavior data. Loop Commerce has been in private beta since its launch in November, and it’s taking its time getting to market. Erez said the team hasn’t set a date to open up the service to retailers, although they have added merchants to their test roster over the last month (they’re not disclosing those names, either). “It’s not a consumer app where you get some feedback and make it happen. We built it from the ground up to go to the largest retailers out there,” Erez said. While Erez said it is too soon to comment on the nature of the startup’s relationship with PayPal, we’ll be watching to see how that informs Loop’s product. In the past, PayPal has invested in the Japanese personal finance app ; restaurant ordering platform ; , the service bill payment startup that was incubated by PayPal and Venrock; and mFoundry, which to FIS early this year for $120 million. |
Microsoft Debuts Another Set Of Surface Updates And Patches | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | As 2013 wraps to an end, Microsoft released its final set of Patch Tuesday fixes, updating its Surface line of tablets at the same time. According to Microsoft, the fixes include 11 bulletins, five of which are marked critical, solving 24 vulnerabilities. That’s quite the raft. Among the patched products are Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Exchange. So, more so than in some months, you want to get yourself up to date. Security firm points out that two zero-day flaws amongst the mix only cause havoc if a company is still using Windows XP, which it estimates that about 15% of enterprises still are. Keep in mind that the end of Windows XP support is rapidly approaching. Qualys correctly that a company’s “security situation will then become very quickly unmaintainable” if it stays on XP after Microsoft removes support. Microsoft itself would like it very much if folks would stop using Windows XP. The real meat out today is a set of Surface updates, however, which should bring quality of life improvements to owners of Microsoft’s line of tablets. As , here they are: : : : : : That’s no small list of updates. If you lean on Microsoft’s software, you have some patching to do. |
Cloud Storage Service SugarSync Abandons Freemium For A Paid Account Model | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | , a gladiator in the long, hard battle that is hosted cloud storage, has decided to go mercenary. The company announced today that they will offer a “paid-only” service model, doing away with their free storage tiers. Current customers can still access their files and will be offered considerable discounts on the service – up to 75% in some cases. “We have decided to no longer offer free storage forever,” said CEO Mike Grossman. “SugarSync is unlike other companies in the space because we do a lot more than just offer basic file storage. Instead, we offer a premium service that provides prosumers and small businesses with unprecedented control and flexibility over their data through our unique multisync capabilities.” That basically means they want more business clients. Competitors like Box and – not to mention Drive – are clearly taking the oxygen out of the casual cloud market, which is why is, in a way, pivoting. Free accounts will close on February 8, 2014 while users can still sign up for a 90-day 5GB trial or a 30-day trial with up to 60GB of storage. However, instead of letting you keep your free storage, SugarSync will attempt to monetize customers as soon as possible. “There are many companies in this space that are giving away free storage, however, most of these companies will not be viable. We are already in a solid financial position and this shift will further strengthen our business,” said Grossman. In a world where dozens of gigabytes for free is now the norm, this is definitely an interesting maneuver by a major player. |
Gift Guide: The Tech-Loving Outdoors Enthusiast | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Technology and nature seem in constant conflict, but they can be better together. And being a tech enthusiast isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive with loving the outdoors, which is why we’ve put together a whole gift guide featuring stuff that scratches that techie itch but also should help you conquer (or live in peaceful harmony with, if that’s what you’re into) nature. Soon, drones will be everywhere, and we’ll need to retreat to the forests just to escape their interminable whirring. But until then, nature is the perfect harbor for them. The is a smartphone-controlled quadcopter that you’ve probably seen on TV, the web or at a trade show, and it’s a great device for winging around the forest for some easy outdoor aerial photography. Bonus points if you can buzz a deer. The woods doesn’t count if you can’t quantify what you did there, and that’s where Nike’s new Fuelband device comes into play. Upgrading with much-improved activity tracking that can distinguish between biking, running, and even tennis and more. The can also track sleep for you while you’re toughing it out on the cold, hard ground, but it’s only an on/off state, so if you’re more concerned about that, look to something like the Jawbone UP24. An entire kayak that folds up into a convenient suitcase sized carrying package. That’s the only pitch you should need to hear with the . Made of durable corrugated plastic, it comes with a number of options, including a two-pack for the outdoor-loving couple. It’s well-reviewed by many kayakers, packs up smaller and is in many ways easier to assemble than most other so-called folding kayaks. Plus, as far as kayaks go, it’s not even actually all that expensive. If you want a camera ready for the wilderness, the is the best one that will still fit in your pocket. Dust, shock, water and freeze proof, it also offers a very wide maximum aperture and good image quality all around. This is the prevailing leader when it comes to the pocket toughcam market, and you can usually pick it up at a discounted price if you look around a little. You go to nature to enjoy the silence, not rock out to sick beats, but sometimes it’s okay to combine those two. And the can hold up to adverse weather conditions, including mud and dust, and it doubles as a very capable Bluetooth speakerphone with a long-lasting battery. |
Crunchies Nominations Close Next Sunday | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | The are almost here and time is running out to your favorite startup, founder, CEO and technology of the year. You have less than a week. Co-hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm, the annual “Oscars of Tech” celebrates the best of the past year. But it’s you, the tech community, that nominates who among us will be most deserving to take the stage at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on February 10th. Included in the 20 categories are the Best Startup, Best Design, and Angel of the Year with GitHub, FiftyThree, and Chris Dixon taking those top prizes home last year, respectively. New for 2013 is the Best Heath Startup in which we will recognize the company that best epitomizes the future of medicine. Nominations will close on December 15th, 2013 at 11:59PM PST. General admission tickets
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Twitter Apps Updated With New Swipeable Design And Photo Support In Direct Messages | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Today, Twitter has announced an as well as TweetDeck for Web, Chrome and PC (and Mac soon) that bring a renewed focus on direct messaging. The app now features a direct link to Direct Messages in the tab bar and allows you to send photos inside DMs for the first time. This major redesign has been in the works for a while, and today marks the first time we’ve seen most of these elements all in one place. Twitter has been testing a variety of these features over the past few weeks, but now they’re all packaged together. You may have as a part of Twitter’s ongoing experiments which see just a small percentage of users getting each permutation of the design. Those experiments are then used to determine which features hit the app itself. We had heard this release was coming and now we know which features made the cut. There is a bunch of new stuff in this update, but the addition of photo support to DMs and the enhanced placement of the icon right in the tab bar indicated a renewed interest in the private messaging portion of Twitter — which has been long neglected. By putting an emphasis on direct messaging, Twitter is performing its own sort of subtweet towards other messaging apps like Line, WhatsApp, Snapchat and, soon, Instagram. The DM function of Twitter is heavily used by a lot of users, but my guess is that some of the changes here will spur mainstream adoption of DMs as a ‘private comms channel’. The addition of Messages to the tab bar also bumps Discover from the main view. That’s now tucked under Timelines as a whole. You now swipe between those timelines in the main view. Timeline, Activity and Discover are all under the single tab now. On one hand, this is a great space saver and feels like a welcome move. As we , this also makes way for even more timelines: The idea behind a swipeable interface is fairly easy to divine, as it could make the app friendly to multiple timelines. If these feeds could be treated as discreet items, Twitter could move beyond its ‘Home,’ ‘Connect’ and ‘Discover’ feeds to offer more specific feeds focused on things like TV. And, judging from how #Music went, that . On the other hand, it does raise some worries about discoverability for the…discover…tab. There’s a handy lead-in animation and instructable that tells people about the new timelines, so that’s good. But there might be a tendency to forget that those sections are hidden under the single tab. Does this change consist of Twitter acknowledging that people get more out of DMs or notifications than they do Discover? Maybe? It’s likely to be the subject of even more experimentation going forward. There is now a filtration option under the Notifications tab that lets you show stuff from just people you follow, all people or (if you’re verified) just verified people. There are also some new notifications to be seen. The one above is interesting as it ties in with Twitter’s interest in getting people to engage in ‘conversations’ on the service. The ‘blue lines’ update was obviously all about that and other changes made to the apps recently reinforce that they’re trying to get people to see it as a place where you can talk to anyone and anyone can talk back at any time. They’re fighting, somewhat, the perception that Twitter is a spectator sport for most users. This way, if someone takes the plunge and sends a tweet, they get notified of feedback and are encouraged to continue. But, despite all of the other changes, this is quite clearly Twitter’s way of saying that they’re interested in being your private messaging client as much as they are your ‘public discussion forum’. As we mentioned above, there are dozens of competitors around the world looking to capture the majority of users, and services like WhatsApp, Kik and Line have enormous head starts. Twitter currently has somewhere around 232 million monthly active users, and WhatsApp recently reported it had 350 million. Even though Twitter has had a several-year head start on the newer messaging apps, it has a lot of ground to gain and more finessing to do if it wants to make itself a go-to solution for that market. But the benefits will be well worth the effort. When people using messaging apps, they use them If Twitter can position itself as an Internet ‘pillar’ that provides communication tools both public and private, it gains more than just users — it gains engaged eyeballs that it can use to get more and better business from advertisers. TweetDeck for Web, Chrome and PC are all getting the DMs with photo support as well, and the Mac version is coming once it’s approved in the Mac App Store. Image Credit: |
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Startups, Celebrities, And The Deadpool | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Entrepreneurs who have had successful exits find it easier to raise capital for their next ventures. They come with the sort of record the money people want: A past littered with big, profitable liquidity events. So, sell your company or take it public, count to 10 and start again. I doubt you’ll have much trouble raising the cash for another go. That sort of resonance, or pattern seeking, is built into venture capital and startup culture more broadly. But what if you are a celebrity of whatever flavor, and you get behind a tech company? I now pretty much just expect the company involved with the celebrity to die. Having celebrity cash, or having a celebrity executive can bring a certain glow to a company, and certainly greater press attention, but the impacts appear to be fleeting. Today ValleyWag covered an application called Just Sing It. As it turns out, Lindsay Lohan’s brother is working with the company, so she’s tweeted about it. She’s also now to promote it. Come party with Lohan, and then use this app? Something like that. And the application could use the help, given its low ranking. According to AppAnnie, Just Sing It is in the top 100 music apps on iOS in . So, it’s seeing about as many downloads as you had cups of coffee today. Back in August, Soleil Moon Frye — or Punky Brewster — launched an app called Moonfrye, which is “designed to inspire children’s creativity.” . Punky Brewster! I’ve heard that name! The app? It’s dead. Moonfrye is in the top 500 ranks of the iOS app store in a grand total of . Its best ranking country? Chad, where it tips the charts at 151st. Justin Bieber recently dropped dollars and pictures of his face into an application called Shots Of Me. Despite Bieber’s obvious popularity and the application’s direct aim at his fans’ demographics, it’s been a . Remember that Myspace ( )? Yeah here’s the of its traffic: So that didn’t go so well. Remember ? Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning count as celebrities, right? Well, despite , it seems that Airtime is as a dead skunk on your doorstep. Oh right, remember when Ashton Kutcher ? Yeah, I had forgotten, too. He also worked for Ooma, and launched Blah Girls (last tweet: ). Guess that deal with Myspace for distribution . Ashton (this guy, seriously) also put money into , which has . MC Hammer . Its website doesn’t even load any more. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that Ryan Seacrest invested into an iPhone keyboard company bears fruit. However, I will say that having a celebrity on board doesn’t always mean the startup will die. I’ve heard nothing but good things about , whose president and co-founder is Jessica Alba. — The list goes on and on. Having a celebrity on board means that picking up initial coverage from the media is easier. But that is at most what it means. Are companies with celebrity backing less focused on their fundamentals, or perhaps more focused on how they appear? I could be wrong on this, but I feel a negative correlation between celebrity interaction, and a startup’s future health. Maybe it’s just the economy. |
White Nexus 7 Now Available In 32GB Model In The US, UK And Japan For $269 | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Google has just released a , in white and packing 32GB of storage, available now for $269 on the Google Play Devices store, so long as you’re in the U.S., U.K. or Japan. There’s no LTE version and no 16GB model, unlike with the black Nexus 7, but if you’re looking for a color match tablet for your white Nexus 5 you’re now in luck. The bezel retains the same black paint scheme, and there’s no change beyond the back panel color job in terms of performance or specs. The Nexus 7 is a fairly capable Android tablet, however, and most likely the best deal available at that particular price point depending on your needs. If you’re looking to grab one, it’s probably a good idea to pull the trigger on that order, quickly, since these are probably going to be in fairly limited supply at launch. You do have a little more choice, however, as LG has just announced a , which has an 8.3-inch screen and costs a bit more at $349. |
Secret-Sharing App Whisper Adds Search And Topics To Find Other Users Like You | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | , the secret sharing startup backed by Sequoia and others, has just pushed a new version of its app into the app store that’s designed to help users search and browse through various topics. The update also adds a new “create flow” that will simplify the process of making and sharing Whispers anonymously with other members of the social network. Whisper was built around the idea of helping people to combine images and text of their secrets, and then . Sort of like a mobile version of long-running site , Whisper allows users to express themselves freely, without having to worry about being judged or what others might think about them. Since being launched earlier this year, Whisper has grown pretty rapidly. It now has more than 3 billion page views per month, up from . And users typically spend upwards of 30 minutes a day getting sucked into reading other people’s secrets. But the latest version is designed to make it not only easier to create Whispers, but also to find those on topics that interest you. The new Whisper create flow simplifies the process, allowing you to type in whatever you want to share, and then it’ll suggest a relevant photo for you that it has found. If you don’t like it, you can search for others or add one from your own image library. All of that should encourage users to create more Whispers of their own. But like most apps, the vast majority of Whisper users are consuming content rather than creating it. For them, the whisper’s appeal lies in the ability to read other people’s secrets. Before, they were stuck with just three options: The most recent Whispers, the most popular Whispers, and those posted nearby. But now users will be able to access a lot more. “Before, [Whisper] was a big river of content coming through, but it was a lot of noise,” Whisper CEO Michael Heyward told me in a phone conversation. “It was challenging to give different types of people different types of content.” The updated app now has the ability to search and browse Whispers based on topics, allowing users to dig deep into the things they most care about. To do that, Whisper had to do a bunch of work on the back end to break Whispers down into the relevant topics that they talk about. There are more than 1 million different topics to choose from, and those topics are displayed at the bottom of each Whisper that you view. So if you searched for or stumbled on a Whisper about death, then you could follow that topic and see other related Whispers. “We’re adding this whole other dimension to the product,” Heyward said. He asked us to imagine, for instance, what YouTube would be like if it were just a stream of the newest or most trending videos. Now Whisper will no longer be operating under similar constraints. The addition of topics, and the fact that now every Whisper will have them, could also make those secrets available to outside developers as well. Heyward said that the introduction of new features could have major implications for a potential API, if Whisper wanted to make one available. Whisper, which is based in L.A., now has 30 employees. The company has raised a total of $24 million from investors that include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein. |
Twitch Picks Up 100K Video Game Streamers On PlayStation 4 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Twitch today announced that its integration into PlayStation 4 has seen more than 100,000 new video game streamers join its service. In the month of November, grew from 600,000 total broadcasters to over 700,000. TechCrunch confirmed with the company that the delta from 600,000 to 700,000 contained 100,000 broadcasters unique to the PlayStation 4. Given that the console launched on November 15, the tally is impressive. According to Twitch, PlayStation 4 users now broadcast around 10 percent of all content on its platform. Given that PlayStation 4 broadcasters now account for around 16 percent of Twitch’s aggregate streamer user base, that’s not surprising. Twitch will also find integration into the Xbox One console in early 2014. Microsoft announced that partnership earlier this year but . Sony has sold more than 2.1 million units of the new console, implying that Twitch is seeing an under 5 percent sign-up rate thus far. Presumably, that figure will rise in time. Something that I did notice last week was that on Twitch often sport modest viewerships. While big PC titles on the platform, such as Starcraft II and League of Legends, can see their viewership spike into the six-figure range, and individual channels can easily shoot to five figures, no PlayStation 4-based channel has more than 1,000 viewers at the moment. In fact, only three have more than 100. Naturally, with streaming being new on consoles, we might have expected this. There is a framework around PC gaming, with mature tournament and leagues and teams and the like. Will the same structure be built around PlayStation 4 gaming? For now, Twitch has demonstrated that there is an appetite among gamers to stream from their new consoles. Whether there is long-term viewer demand will determine if they keep at it. |
KryptoKit Lets You Pay In Bitcoin Instantly On Almost Any Webpage | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | There have been a few wallets available for Chrome and other browsers but how about one that searches for Bitcoin addresses on the pages you visit and allows for one-click payment from your BTC stash? , launched today at the Inside Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, lets you do just that. First, KryptoKit allows you to create a Bitcoin wallet that you can use to store your BTC using your browser. It is ostensibly secure – you can set a password that you must enter before the wallet can send out any Bitcoins. It also lets you backup your wallet to a file. Founded by Anthony Di Iorio and Steven Dakh, the Toronto-based company is trying to make it fast and easy to use BTC with almost any web page. Di Iorio is a member of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada where he spreads the BTC good news hither and yon. “There are many Bitcoin wallet services and many vendors who now accept Bitcoin, but very few services marry those two,” said Di Iorio. “KryptoKit is a one-click solution to transferring BTC from your wallet to a vendor. To our knowledge, no one has to this date brought the simplicity of Amazon’s one-click system to shopping online with Bitcoin, and certainly not in the form of a browser extension (and the desktop browser is still a popular destination for people to do their shopping, especially for the holidays).” Interestingly, the plugin also supports PGP and lets you create a key pair for sending and receiving encrypted messages. Finally, the system can scan a webpage ( and [NSFW]). It’s not quite as easy as PayPal but it’s a start. “This could be the ‘Amazon.com’ moment for Bitcoin,” said Di Iorio. With a little more uptake and a little less volatility, he could be right. |
Deutsche Telekom’s Hub:raum Accelerator Opens Offices In Krakow As It Welcomes Its First Batch Of Startups | Contributor | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Originally based in Berlin, Deutsche Telekom’s startup accelerator has opened offices in Krakow, Poland. What’s more, fifteen teams from ten different European countries gathered in Poland’s second largest city last weekend to attend workshops in hopes of joining Europe’s newest accelerator. During the intensive workshops, called Hub:raum Warp, teams received much-needed mentoring and got the opportunity to work alongside fifty prominent international experts with backgrounds in financing, customer acquisition, product management and more. “The mentoring turned out to be a great success since we got the chance to work with some of the Europe’s freshest startups coming from Central and Eastern Europe. During the past week, startups have received a great deal of knowledge which we hope they will spread onto their local communities and further fire up CEE’s entrepreneurial spirit,” said Jakub Probola, Head of Hub:raum Krakow. At the end of the week startups pitched their ideas at Demo Day hoping to get accepted into hub:arum’s first batch of startups. From fifteen teams which attended WARP, four finalists were selected with Montenegrian winning the competition and securing the best pitch award. Alongside from Romania, Collar Pocket from Poland and Excalibur from Slovakia, TourVia.Me was invited to join DT’s Krakow-based accelerator. Only – a startup developing authentication for web services – publicly accepted the offer with others hoping to join in the following weeks. Hub:raum’s offices in Krakow are lead by a team of experienced serial entrepreneurs who’s goal is to further engage and help CEE startups develop and scale their ideas. “Our doors are always open. We can support different teams in developing their ideas and launching various products on the market,” said Probola. Hub:raum is offering seed funding, co-working space, mentors, and DT’s assets which include access to a massive 170 million user base (both in Europe and US) as well an access to T-Venture, a 720 million euro fund run by the company. |
Google Outs Play Edition LG G Pad And Sony Z Ultra, But They’re Still US-Only | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | Well, that was fast. LG inadvertently outed a G-Pad tablet that would be getting the , and Google has just followed up with a confirmation, a price tag ($349) and another device to add to the mix. Sony’s $649 Z Ultra is also available in the , much to the chagrin of rumormongers who have long claimed that Sony would soon get a crack at crafting a Nexus device. Alas, global gadget fiends won’t be able to join in the fun — like the Google Play Edition HTC One and Galaxy S 4 before it, these devices aren’t yet slated for an international launch. The spec sheet on the G Pad 8.3 hasn’t changed since last we saw it (8.3-inch 1920×1200 display, 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset with 2GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage) but the announcement of the Sony Z Ultra largely came out of the blue. If that name sounds mildly familiar, it’s because the X Ultra is a lightly modified version of the Xperia Z Ultra smartphone that debuted to positive critical feedback earlier this year. The exclusion of the Xperia branding is honestly a little confusing though — it’s not like the brand couldn’t use a publicity boost in the United States, and Samsung’s Galaxy moniker is still slapped on its Google Play Edition phone. Branding or not, the Z Ultra is still a hot little number with its 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 chip, 2GB of RAM, 6.4-inch 1080p display, LTE support, and waterproof chassis. It’s one of Sony’s best handsets to date, and frankly it’s heartening to see that the company is finally seems to be finding its footing in a hectic smartphone market after it discontinued its efforts on lower-end devices. Then again, the Google Play Edition badge (and the accoutrements that come with us) don’t always translate into sales success. Both devices are available for sale now if you’re living within the confines of the 50 states, so have at it if you’re itching for a little pre-holiday shopping spree. [gallery ids="925877,925876,925875,925873,925874"] |
Messaging App Line Launches C2C Marketplace Line Mall In Japan | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Messaging app Line began the limited rollout of its new C2C . The app, which is now available for download in Japan’s Google Play store, is a sign that the service is doubling down on its efforts to increase engagement among users as it competes with , and other popular messaging apps. Line Mall will officially launch next spring with an iPhone app and more features. Line Mall lets vendors sell products without listing fees, though it does take a 10% cut of the final price for items that sell. Each seller also receives one point (worth 1 yen or about 1 cent USD) that can be redeemed for discounts after each successful transaction. Sellers and buyers authenticate their accounts and connect payment info with their Line account, but they can also set up a separate Line Mall ID. Line’s other e-commerce ventures have included via official brand accounts on its messaging app, which monetizes through sticker sales, games and branded merchandise. The app, which was launched in 2011 by Japan’s Naver, and is targeting a 500 million registered user milestone next year. It is important to note, however, that those numbers reflect people who have signed up for the service, not monthly active users. Despite its push to expand globally (key markets include East Asia and Spanish-speaking regions like Spain, Mexico and Latin America), Line has so far only reported MAU for Japan, so it’s hard to tell how engaged users are in other countries. Key rivals WhatsApp and WeChat, on the other hand, both report monthly active user counts– has more than 350 million MAUs, while has about 272 million. As competition for international users heats up among messaging apps, launching other ventures like Line Mall can help increase user engagement. But Line faces several C2C mobile commerce rivals, including , and , which has its own Android and iOS apps. |
Tim Draper Wants To Split California Into Pieces And Turn Silicon Valley Into Its Own State | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | TechCrunch has learned about noted technology investor plan to split California into six separate states, including a Northern California slice appropriately named “Silicon Valley.” Draper shared his vision with TechCrunch tonight. He says he’s submitting a polished version to the state’s Attorney General in the form of a ballot proposition proposal within the next 48 hours. “ ” already has a campaign website up and is eager for an army of volunteers. We’ve pasted the full ballot initiative below, along with the redrawn map of California. Essentially, the idea is to section off California into six horizontal slices, with Silicon Valley getting its own region stretching from the Sierras to the Bay Area beaches. Southern California would also get its own slice of isolationist glory, with the new state “West California” consisting of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, among other areas. In an email, Draper tells me there are five key reasons he’s pushing the initiative: “1. It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average.
2. Competition is good, monopolies are bad. This initiative encourages more competition and less monopolistic power. Like all competitive systems, costs will be lower and service will be better.
3. Each new state can start fresh. From a new crowd sourced state flower to a more relevant constitution.
4. Decisions can be more relevant to the population. The regulations in one new state are not appropriate for another.
5. Individuals can move between states more freely.” Getting such a measure on California’s will be no easy task. Attempts to get initiatives on the state ballot can cost millions of dollars, and often fail. That said, California has a long secessionist history, and who want to split the West Coast into . And Tim Draper, who recently announced skip the next fund from his investment firm and has been dedicating more of his time to , certainly has the clout and financial resources that can be helpful in turning political visions into reality. It is an out-of-the-box idea, to say the least. But it’s in line with Silicon Valley’s recent history of hyper-ambitious ideas. Facebook Investor Peter Thiel is island. Investor Balaji S. Srinivasan called for a separate “opt-in” territory for radical experimentation. Google’s Larry Page techno-utopian island. We have asked Draper for more details and will let you know as soon as we get them (and verify that the Attorney General will, in fact, accept such a proposition.) For now, check out the proposal for yourself in the documents below.
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Powering Smart Content For Publishing Giants, Knewton Lands $51M To Take Personalized Learning Global | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Just when it looked like the , that venture capital was stuck in the doldrums, and that the year in EdTech might end with a whimper, no bang in sight, along comes Knewton to put an exclamation point . In a whopping round that stands as the for an education company in 2013, TechCrunch has learned that the New York City-based EdTech veteran has just closed a $51 million financing, led by London venture firm, Atomico. The round also sees GSV Capital join as a first-time investor, along with participation from existing backers, including Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, FirstMark Capital and Founders Fund, along with debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. With the new round doubling its total capital to $104 million, Knewton has big expansion plans on the docket, chief of which is its plan to become a global business. In October, the startup opened an office in London, its first office outside the U.S., which COO David Liu says will serve as the headquarters for its international operations as it looks to continue expanding across Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Over the coming year, the company also plans to add 80 to 100 people to its staff of 145 — with a heavy focus on beefing up its data science and engineering teams — and move into new, larger headquarters in NYC. Since debuting in 2008, Knewton has been on a mission to democratize top-tier, personalized education around the world. While that may sound like unrealistic fluff, over the years, the company has slowly pieced together software, infrastructure, APIs and gathered vast, anonymized data sets, which have since become the foundation of its innovative adaptive learning engine. In practice, Knewton’s analytics engine is able to map each student’s strengths and weaknesses over time, which then both enables teachers to identify and predict knowledge gaps and personalize instruction and tailored content to each student’s individual learning path. While that may sound like the building blocks of a consumer platform, Knewton has instead opted to become a service provider, giving educational publishers the adaptive infrastructure which allows them to not only bring reservoirs of content online, but to make that content smarter — and more personalized. Because so many publishers have struggled to adapt to an increasingly digital world, by acting as a technology provider, Knewton looks to be in an increasingly advantageous position. Over the past year, Liu tells us, the company has generated close to two billion personalized recommendations for students. And it’s been able to do that thanks to partnerships that now span most of the major education publishers in the U.S., including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan Education, Triumph Learning and Cambridge University Press, among others. These partnerships have allowed the company to triple its revenue in 2013, the COO said, and with Houghton Mifflin now on board, Knewton’s technology is now being used by over five million students in the U.S. But, perhaps more importantly considering Knewton has traditionally served higher ed partners, Houghton Mifflin and Triumph Learning are now beginning to give Knewton real penetration into the K-12 market. While it’s still relatively early days, the other potentially interesting area of opportunity for Knewton comes not from the old publishing world, but the increasing number of EdTech platforms and new learning models that have begun to sprout over the last two years. Given the difficulty startups have traditionally had surviving in K-12, thanks to slow sales cycles and bureaucratic decision-making that happens at the district level, many startups have opted to sell to teachers or parents instead. Many are focused on the distribution side, Liu says, with MOOCs having become of the more prominent examples of the new, digital distribution models now taking off within education. With Knewton attempting to serve the other side of the coin — particularly the data mining side — these new digital education platforms, MOOC and not, could ultimately become Knewton customers as well. Whether it’s the Pearsons and Harcourts of the world or the Courseras and Udacitys, their core competency is in delivering great content. They, to varying degrees, understand user interface, Liu tells us, and Knewton wants to be the infrastructure that powers that user interface. Increasingly, as MOOC platforms continue to beef up their content libraries and course catalogs, they will begin turning their attention to personalizing the student experience. They don’t seem to be there quite yet, but when they do, Knewton wants to be there. While you may not find too many startups or entrepreneurs itching to jump into the publishing world — let alone educational publishing — Knewton believes that by becoming the adaptive PaaS provider that helps publishers inject technology and personalization into their content, there could be plenty of greenfield ahead. And the greenfield that Knewton’s paying most attention to? It’s not in the U.S., Liu says. Many developing countries aren’t bogged down by the same legacy infrastructure one finds in the U.S., which means that their governments, states and schools are in a position to jump from first gear to fifth gear. Naturally, Knewton thinks that spells big opportunity for adaptive technology and Big Data companies. |
Apple Adds FaceTime Audio To OS X 10.9.2 Beta, Bringing Native Mac-To-iOS Voice Calls Closer | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Apple has issued a new developer preview of OS X version 10.9.2, and it introduces some interesting new features . The most interesting is probably FaceTime Audio, however. Apple introduced VoIP calling (no video required) to FaceTime in iOS 7 on mobile devices, but this marks its first appearance on the desktop. 9to5Mac reports that the new audio calling feature is “integrated deeply” into both the Messages and the FaceTime OS X apps, which presumably means that you can initiate and possibly receive voice calls from each. This is a major development because it essentially completes the picture on Apple providing a full set of over-the-top text, voice and video communication tools across both its computing platforms, bypassing typical network and even device type limitations entirely. Already since upgrading to iOS 7, and having most of my friends and family do the same, I’ve noticed a lot of inbound calls coming through via FaceTime Audio, and my outbound ones have mostly been the same. Having the option to use it on the Mac means I’ll now be able to field those calls at the desk, seamlessly, if I happen to be there, instead of having to fumble for the phone. I’d call this a considerable threat to Skype, if Skype didn’t already work on an even greater range of devices. And the crowd that uses Skype isn’t necessarily the same group that would be using FaceTime Audio – ordinary users who’ve never set up a Skype account could easily call friends using FaceTime instead of their carrier’s voice service, given how deeply embedded it is into iOS in general. In that sense, FaceTime Audio could cut off some of Skype’s growth potential, as iOS and Mac users at least who live mostly within the ecosystem won’t be bothered to look around for alternatives. As with any beta release, 10.9.2 is subject to change before its eventual launch, so don’t count on this absolutely, 100 percent definitely coming through in the final release. Still, it’s a logical move, and one that I’m personally hoping makes the cut. |
Loop Upgrades Its Mobile Survey App, Adds A Pro Account For $99 A Year | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | , a startup that makes it easy and quick for retailers to collect feedback from customers, has released version 2.0 of its iOS app. The most important change probably isn’t a product feature, but the fact that Loop is ready to start charging. With Loop (which ), it’s easy for business to put together a survey with a few questions, and then to display that survey on an iPad that they hand to the customer while they’re still in the store. As a result, co-founder and CEO Rajit Marwah said consumers are much more likely to respond than they would to, say, an email survey (though businesses also get a survey link that they can share via email, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else). The mobile app also allows businesses to see real-time results. Marwah said that since launch, Loop has been used by more than 10,000 businesses to collect more than 500,000 responses. During that time, he has also been testing pricing in “11 currencies” and settled on a price of $99 a year for Loop’s pro product. He argued that’s a “disruptive” price compared to someone like SurveyMonkey, which charges between $204 and $780 annually for . Like SurveyMonkey, Loop is using a freemium model — there’s a free version, but businesses have to pay to use more devices, to collect more responses, and to receive customer support. During the tests, Marwah said he found that Loop had three times the conversion rate of “typical” freemium products, and that the low price was “more than offset” by the fact that more people are buying. The company says other new features in the app include a redesign for iOS 7, the ability to conduct surveys from an iPhone, and the ability to include a page highlighting the business before starting the survey, and easier survey creation. Interested businesses can . Loop received seed funding from Archimedes Labs, an incubator whose chief product officer Keith Teare also co-founded TechCrunch. |
Appsfire’s First Ad Unit ‘Ura Maki’ Is iAd Done Right | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Last week, app discovery startup surprised everyone by its apps from the App Store to focus entirely on native advertising on mobile. The first iOS ad unit is here — Ura Maki is an ad format with an emphasis on app discovery and user experience. Unlike Apple’s iAd or AdMob, Ura Maki doesn’t rely on a tiny banner at the bottom of your screen. It’s a fullscreen experience that tries to avoid being invasive. First, you get a popup like those “Rate this app” boxes. It gives you the option to dismiss the upcoming fullscreen ad. A couple of seconds later, a native animation imitates the multitask screen. On the left, your application is still running, on the right, you get a screenshot of a promoted app. Again, you can dismiss the ad by simply swiping the right screenshot like you would to close an app in the multitasking view. If you tap on the screenshot, you get the complete App Store description and screenshots. The UI is a perfect replica of an App Store page. Yet, unlike iAd, everything is native — it’s not simply a UIWebView with a ton of JavaScript. Finally, you can download the promoted app without ever leaving your app. App developers can choose when those apps should appear (when you launch the app, at the end of a game level…). For advertisers, it’s very easy to sign up as all the assets are pulled from Appsfire’s App Genome, the company’s database of App Store data. And if you already have the promoted app on your phone, you won’t see the ad. Creating a brand new ad unit is always a risk, especially when you are a newcomer. But Appsfire is trying to make it very easy for both advertisers and developers. You don’t have to dedicate screen real estate if you are a developer, and you don’t have to create advertising assets if you are an advertiser. Now the next big challenge will be to sign up app developers and advertisers on the new platform. You can find more details on the company’s . |
Nextdoor Talks Growth, Now Being Used In One In Six Neighborhoods In The US | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | , the fast-growing startup that has been compared to a Facebook for your neighborhood, has revealed some new numbers today in a TCTV interview with co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia and and Nextdoor investor Josh Elman. As Tolia tells us, Nextdoor just launched its (up from 22,500 neighborhoods in October, and 6,000 neighborhoods a year ago.) He also said that the network is now being used in one in six neighborhoods. In the video above, Tolia and Elman talked about how they have worked together on growth ‘hacks’ for the network. Prior to Greylock, Elman helped Twitter grow its active user base nearly tenfold, led the launch of Facebook Connect, led product management for Zazzle, and was also part of the early team at LinkedIn focused on growth and jobs. As Tolia tells us in the video above, Elman’s insight and experience in growing a network has been instrumental in the startup’s continued engagement from users. On one project Elman and Tolia worked alongside the company’s designers and engineers to make the Nextdoor member experience in a neighborhood of ten members be different from in a neighborhood of 1,000 members. They’ve also worked through methodologies and frameworks around how to adapt a product once it starts to reach scale. Check out the video above for more on Tolia’s ‘growth hacks,’ Elman’s advice for thinking about growth and more. |
Microsoft Exec Charged With Insider Trading, SEC Alleges 400K In Illegal Gains | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Reality is always better than fiction. Today a — now former — Microsoft “senior manager” with insider trading. The employee, Brian Jorgenson, is accused of working with a friend to trade Microsoft stock and shares of its partners ahead of news such as earnings, generating almost $400,000 in profits over the course of the partnership that began in April of 2012. The pair had intended to use the spoils from their venture to start a hedge fund, according to the SEC. Protip: If you are going to abuse your job’s access to information to grind out illegal profits with a friend in hopes of building up a big enough stack so that you can open a hedge fund, don’t get caught. You look silly. Not to mention like a bastard. Still, making a cool $393,125 in a year and a half ain’t no small kaboodle, so you have to give Jorgenson and his co-conspirator Sean Stokke props for pulling of the scheme, at least financially. Bastards. Here’s how it worked: Microsoft planned to invest $300 million into Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader project. Jorgenson found out, passed the information along to Stokke, who bought, according to the SEC, “$14,000 worth of call options on Barnes & Noble common stock.” Microsoft announced the deal, and bounced Barnes & Noble’s stock up about 50%. Profit to the pair? About $185,000. Imagine what they could have made if they already had that hedge fund money they wanted to raise. The SEC goes on to note two other cases, including trading before a Microsoft earnings announcements. According , Microsoft fired Jorgenson, and helped the SEC in its investigation. Here are the formal charges: Jorgenson and Stokke are charged with violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5, both directly and pursuant to 20(d) of the Exchange Act. The SEC seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment interest, and financial penalties against Jorgenson and Stokke as well as an officer-and-director bar against Jorgenson. |
Fly Or Die: Motorola Moto G | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | It always seems like the flagship phones get the most attention, but what about a device that doesn’t even bother trying to claim that title? Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside has been saying for months that one of the company’s priorities was to improve the experience of using a low-cost smartphone, and the end result of drive was the cheapo Moto G. So how did Motorola do? Well, as long as you set your expectations appropriately before taking the plunge, you’ll find a lot to love here. The lack of LTE is a bummer for you North American types, but the Snapdragon 400 chipset nestled inside keeps things moving along at a respectable pace and the battery will run for days and days on a single charge. Purists may not be too keen on the sorts of oversaturated screens that Motorola seems so fond of but hey, you can’t with ’em all. Long time listeners of the Droidcast will know that it’s very rare for me and Darrell to see eye to eye on, well, anything, but we came together just this once to give the Moto G a pair of Flys. |
Twitter Adds In-App Notifications For Emergency Alerts System As Brazil And Australia Begin Supporting It | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Twitter has just but useful updates to its Twitter Alerts system, which allows participating organizations to send out notices to subscribing users about emergencies or disaster areas. The alerts system gains the ability to pop up an in-app notification inside of Twitter’s apps today, utilizing the same pop-up ‘toast’ notifications that its new apps use for mentions and retweets. The notifications are red instead of blue and will only display if you’ve subscribed to an organization’s alert system. Twitter says that you can now also subscribe to Alerts as notifications inside its iOS and Android apps by visiting an organization’s profile and tapping the bell icon. It also announced that organizations in Australia and Brazil have joined the program. An from earlier this week noted that various police, city and regional organizations had joined in offering the alerts in Australia. Twitter notes that even if you don’t live in one of the participating countries, you may still find some alerts of use. Currently organizations in the U.S., Japan, South Korea, UK, Ireland, Australia and Brazil are officially participating. As we mentioned with the program launched, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has already over other forms of communication during emergencies. And it fits in with the narrative of Twitter as a communication channel rather than a ‘social network’. |
AOL Finalizing Talks To Sell Winamp And Shoutcast, No Shutdown Expected On Dec. 20 | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | AOL is finalizing negotiations to sell off Winamp and Shoutcast in a deal that would allow both products to live on, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. The company (which owns TechCrunch) that as of December 20, Winamp web services would shut down and that the desktop version of the video and music player would no longer be available for download. Shortly afterward, TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reported that , another media streaming service that AOL owns through its acquisition of Nullsoft way back in 1999. My source did not identify the potential buyer, but they said the deal was close enough that they’re “confident” that an agreement will be reached. Also, they said they don’t believe the previously announced shutdown would happen on Dec. 20 — while these negotiations are progressing, I’m guessing it’s in the interest of both parties to keep the services up and running. An AOL spokesperson declined to comment for this story. As we noted in our previous coverage, the products haven’t entirely languished under AOL — for example, launched two years ago — but it hasn’t exactly seemed like a big priority. Nonetheless, Winamp in particular has for people of the right age (i.e., me) and someone (Microsoft?) thinks there’s still some value here. [image ] |
The World’s First Home-Printable Fashion Doll, Quin, Looks Pretty Spacey | John Biggs | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | This is Quin. She’s a fully posable (and Barbie-compatible) doll that can be made on a 3D printer and snapped together. Her creators, the folks at built her to prove that you can build usable, playable toys on a 3D printer. They also built her because she looks amazing. The 3D files will cost $55 once the project funds in January and you can order her pre-printed in ABS plastic for $245. You can also order clothes and other perks from their . The pair who created Quin are Natalie Mathis and Quincy Robinson. Mathis is the Director of Institutional Advancement at a fine art museum in Cincinnati, Ohio and Robinson is a toy inventor and sculptor. He’s worked for Mattell and Hasbro and writes “If you’ve been in a toy isle at a Target or Wal-Mart, chances are, you’ve seen my work.” “I’ve also been known to rehabilitate orphaned possums,” he said. The team is based in Cincinatti, Ohio where they’ve seen a renaissance of sorts in the 3D-printing community. Robinson said that “there is not a 3D Printing device that you’re not a couple of handshakes away from within this modestly sized, yet very capable, city.” The city itself is using the resources of General Electric and Procter & Gamble to expand engineering education and making in this burgeoning town. “We’re all about trying to test the boundaries of what can be achieved with desktop 3D Printing, and a doll (in my mind) is a pretty big test for good or bad,” said Robinson. “You can’t do a half-ass job and it be considered good. And if it’s not good, it’s ugly. Sculpting or printing-wise. Quin is the result of us trying to prove ourselves and present something to the current (and future) community that demonstrates where we are, and what we can expect. We as a community have the ability to create and offer easy-to-print, modular models, with lots of character, and offer lots of customization potential.” Robinson and Mathis see Quin as more than just a toy. They expect other 3D printing enthusiasts to remix and modify her for their needs and doll fans can mod her to work with their collectable accessories. “I really see Quin as being more of an inventing/customization platform. She can perform like a traditional fashion doll, but I hope her ability to be so many things will appeal to the creative tech savvy builders out there that need a no-mess platform to demo their thoughts on,” said Robinson. Will Quin survive the ravages of a three-year-old in a bad mood? The team thinks she can. “If you told me three months ago that I’d have a 3D Doll that would be as reliable as a standard Barbie and be able to stand on her own; I would have scoffed… But it’s true! A well printed Quin has the structural soundness of a Barbie with acutely sized tabs to lock legs together and snug joints to aide in poses,” said Robinson. “She’s sturdy.” [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3dprintertest/quin-worlds-first-3d-printable-fashion-doll width=640] |
Simple.TV Starts Shipping Next-Gen Streaming DVR, With Cloud Storage And Ouya Support Coming Soon | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | is making good on its promise to ship its to users who pre-ordered the product, telling them they would receive the devices by the end of the year. The company is also releasing new versions of its iOS and Android mobile and tablet apps to make it easier for users to find content that they want to stream and record. The release comes ahead of Simple.TV’s plan to unveil a cloud-based DVR storage offering, as well as support on OUYA game consoles. |
‘The Internship,’ The Only In-Flight Movie You Haven’t Watched Yet Because Jesus It Looks Annoying | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Though it seems to have bagged a licensing agreement with all of the airlines, the last thing you’ll want to watch as you fly home this holiday season is Now mind you, I have not actually taken the plunge and seen “The Internship,” despite the fact that I’ve flown at least 50k miles this year and watched “Les Miserables,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Amour,” “ ,” “42,” some movie about a gang of dads, some movie about a woman who had to sleep with a certain number of men to find her true love, and “Frances Ha,” which, despite its un-beguiling name, is actually quite good, and more. Notice as you sit down this Christmas (or whatever you celebrate, even if it is just taking time off) how eerily off-the-table “The Internship” is as a family Netflix choice. “The Way Way Back”? Sure. “Girl Most Likely”? Sure. “The Internship”? Hmm … let’s watch the trailer … Nope, let’s just go to bed. Maybe it’s the Macklemore-heavy soundtrack? Maybe it’s the insufferable Asian stereotypes that proliferate throughout, like there was a fire sale at the character canning factory? Maybe it’s the fact that no one wants to watch 119 minutes of obnoxious tech company perks in 2013? 2006 maybe, but now? is the new writing about Apple; bragging about the fancy food in your startup’s cafeteria anymore. And maybe it’s the fact that we’re all a little sick of Google? We’re straight-up main-lining it now. Many of us have to use multiple Google products multiple times a day just to get anything done: Google Calendar is my Lord and Savior. And it’s no longer just search and Gmail, it’s everything. . Creepy art pieces . . … What? Google’s monopoly over our lives was especially pronounced this year, as 2013 brought revelations that — — its internal server traffic was being harvested by the NSA, specifically because that was such a brilliant way for the U.S. government to scoop up massive amounts of our data in one go. Not the best year for a feel-good film starring the guys from “Wedding Crashers.” |
null | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 10 | null |
Developer Interest In Windows Phone Grows As Microsoft’s Windows 8.x Platform Slips | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | This morning Appcelerator and IDC released the results of a they executed in November. The data indicates that while Windows Phone is seeing record developer interest, Windows itself is slipping. Polled on if they were “very interested” in developing for various platforms, Windows Phone received an affirmative from around 37% of developers. Windows itself dipped below the 35% mark. Last August, Windows was close to 40% interest, and has declined or stayed flat in all polling points in the interim. Interest in Windows Phone has gyrated through time, going through cyclical ups and downs. We’re at a peak at the moment. In August of 2012, when Windows was at its developer interest maximum, Windows Phone attracted a “very interested” rating from a mere 22% or so of developers. So, it has managed to grow that tally by more than 50% through 2013. That’s not surprising, given that Windows Phone has had a breakthrough year, growing its unit volume and finally besting Blackberry as the established third place platform. Still, it excites barely more than a third of developers. More than 50% of developers said they were very interested in building for the Kindle Fire. 84% said the same about the iPhone, and 82% about the iPad. So, Microsoft’s platforms, though attracting some attention, are certainly still lower on developer radar than the company wants, and certainly needs. Here’s the chart of developer’s claiming that they are very interested in building for Windows: What’s a bummer about that line for Microsoft is that it declines, even as the Windows 8.x install base grows. So, despite an improving developer experience — more units sold, more downloads, presumably — interest is flagging. The decline is minor, but at a time Microsoft is working to build out the Windows Store, the line should be pointing in the other direction. On a completely different note, the rest of the survey is an interesting read if you need to catch up on the platform wars. Facebook is the most popular data source developers are using in their applications. Google+ is a surprising third, etc. |
Atheer Labs Turns To Crowdfunding To Bring Its 3D Augmented Reality Glasses To Life | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | The jury is largely still out on wearable gadgets like Google Glass that let you passively consume information that appears in front of your eyes, but Soulaiman Itani isn’t satisfied with just looking. Instead, his company — Mountain View-based Atheer Labs — has been working on a device that lets its users physically manipulate that information too. Sounds like yet another load of sci-fi nonsense trickling into the real world, but the experience is much closer than one might think. Earlier today Atheer Labs kicked off an campaign for two new pairs of augmented reality glasses they hope will get developers and tinkerers excited about their vision of the future of computing. “The digital world shouldn’t be limited to screens any more,” Itani told me. “It should be all around you and customized to you. The vision highlighted in the company’s Indiegogo teaser video essentially depicts the intersection of Google Glass and “Minority Report”. In order to interact with any of the information or apps that appear before you, you reach out and manipulate it with your hands, thanks to sensors that track your hand movements and gestures in space. We’re still quite a ways from being able to play with something that polished, but the groundwork has already been laid. Atheer first showed off its work at last May, and very early demos of the experience seemed and . [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPuXWgIp1Z4&w=680&h=510] Don’t expect this sort of tech to come cheap though. The real star of the pair is the Atheer Development Kit (or ADK if you’re feeling jaunty), an $850 model that packs what Itani refers to as “everything that’s in your tablet”. By that he means a slew of sensors, WiFi and Bluetooth radios, and a–sadly undisclosed–Snapdragon chip to power it all. At first glance it may not seem like enough juice to deliver on everything that Atheer has promised, but Itani is adamant that the software that allows those gesture tracking sensors and displays to work in tandem is lean enough to keep things moving at a respectable clip. And the end result? Something like holding a 25-inch tablet in front of your face at about half arm’s length, except you can reach into that tablet with fiddle with whatever you find. Meanwhile, the less expensive Atheer One is meant to tap into an Android device you carry around on your person for its computing horsepower and content — Itani says it’s compatible with the full library of Android apps. As you’d imagine, that means there’s going to be a pretty hard limit on compatibility, but Itani says the only limiting factor is whether or not a device is capable outputting “very large images”. “A three or four year old phone might not work,” Itani said. “But we’ve been testing with the Nexus 4, that’s more than enough.” Despite all the work that’s gone into turning the Atheer concept into an actual pair of products that should see the light of day next year, deep down Atheer doesn’t want to be a hardware company. This initial run of developer devices are reference units that will, with any luck, inspire some dyed-in-the-wool hardware players to take a chance on creating devices that can help push Atheer’s wild-eyed vision forward. |
Tooga Gear Gives Photo And Video Pros Options With A Modular Kit For Hard-To-Get Shots | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/762197237/tooga-gear-modular-camera-gear-for-dslr-gopro-smar width=640] A new based out of LA wants to provide a versatile, durable camera mounting solution for capturing tricky shots in a modular package that can support DSLRs, GoPros and other action cams, and even smartphones, all in a package that can fit in a small sling bag. Tooga Gear includes a dolly, suction mounts, a ballhead tripod mount, a protective guerrilla cage and a shell component that ties everything together. The pieces can be switched out depending on your needs, to make for smooth rolling pan shots, footage taken from a camera mounted to any smooth surface, including, to quote the project description, “the side of a plane.” This is nicer than many similar rigs (of which I’ve used and own a few) because of the accessory mounts built into each leg on the dolly wheels, which can support additional accessories like external fill lights, off-camera flashes and mics. The Tooga Cage, too is designed with two cold-shoe mounts, along with threaded mounts for additional gear. That suction mount kit seems a little more specialized in usage, but you could quite easily mount it to a car window for doing your own follow shots on (hopefully not illegal) chase scene filming. The entire Tooga kit can be had starting at pledges of $449, which sounds like a lot but is actually a pretty great deal when you compare against the price of any of the components individually (from a decent manufacturer). The team consists of mechanical engineers Shan Kim and Chris Anderson, who has built a number of camera gadgets before, and design students Kay Kim and Benson Lam. The founders have an existing supply chain in place, they say, so that should help them hit their March 2014 anticipated ship date. The Tooga team is seeking $45,000 to turn its prototype into a shipping device, and it’s just starting out with a little over $3,000 pledged so far. As a sometime videographer, it’s something I’d definitely like to see become a reality. |
Facebook Tries Salvaging Home With Redesign That Makes Its Lockscreen More Familiar | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | Facebook’s Home has been a bit of a flop, with few users willing to so drastically change the face of their phone. Today Facebook more familiar to a traditional lockscreen by overlaying phone and Facebook notifications, a clock, and weather info on top of Cover Feed and giving users more customization options. The hope is by making Home seem like less of a shock, more users will adopt it. The new version of Home went into testing with Facebook’s beta community in November but will become available to everyone in the over the next hour or so. It shows time, weather, and notifications overlaid on your lockscreen for instant viewing. You can swipe left to view the Cover Feed of full-screen photos and posts. A shortcut to bring up Cover Feed has been added to the Home launcher, and you can choose a wallpaper as well. The update falls short of letting you add fully customizable widgets to your lockscreen like you can with other Android versions and downloadable lockscreens. Still, it makes Home less foreign, which is a step in the right direction if it wants more usage. Here you can watch Facebook’s one minute demo of the new Home features.
[youtube= ] When in April, it basically steamrolled over your existing Android phone’s customization. There were no folders, no widgets, no dock of favorite apps. This made people feel like they had to sacrifice the phone experience they’d grown accustomed to live with Home, and many felt it wasn’t worth it. Traction was weak, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he wasn’t full satisfied with how Home has progressed. As of now, it still only has between one million and five million downloads, while Facebook’s main Android app has well over 200 million active users. I wrote in May how Facebook needed to on top of your existing Android set-up rather than a replacement. By July Facebook had begun by allowing you to customize a favorite apps dock, create folders, and crucially, import your existing folders. Today’s redesign could be seen as an extension of this push to make Home more of a complement than a replacement for how you interact with your phone. Since launching, Facebook has seen several new competitors enter the lockscreen and launcher market. Rather than a more one-dimensional experience around Facebook or another app, and are contextual interfaces that try to show you the right apps at the right time, like your work apps while you’re at the office and your personal apps at…home. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook acquire a startup in this space to bolster its lockscreen and launcher efforts. Home promised an interface that put friends ahead of apps. But in reality, we use our phone for so many things beyond social networking that burying apps and widgets made Faceboo Home for of a roadblock. To make Home succeed, Facebook may need to retreat from its initial strategy, and find a compromise where friends and apps are loved equally, rather than making us play favorites.
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Gift Guide: Four Sweet Presents For Your Sweetheart | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | The most important gift you give this holiday season will be the gift you give your sweetheart. After all, this is the person you get sex from. That said, these are some cute last-minute ideas that will keep you out of the dog house come New Year’s Eve. that offers a wide range of products — these are the same folks that came up with the SuperHero package, which delivers flowers to a guy’s work so that he can be the one to give them to his sweetheart. Now, the company offers floral delivery subscriptions, with new arrangements arriving weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. All you do is meet up with a design consultant who checks out the space and learns about your tastes and the deliveries begin. . keeps the romance alive by offering up interesting date ideas based on your location. Awesomely enough, the service offers a , which hooks you up with up to 75% off the dates, one free date, and access to sold out shows and booked clubs. There are some cute ideas on there, but the best idea of all is you showing your partner how important it is to go on special, interesting dates. You know, like you did when you first fell in love. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkveWyiU4Go&w=640&h=360] Ok, you caught me. This isn’t necessarily a gift because technically it’s free. However, signing up for and inviting your partner to join you in your own private social network can be pretty romantic. Couple lets you chat, share pictures, drawings, and location, and it even lets you draw simultaneously in a live sketch. With the new foursquare integration, users can suggest date spots and the thumbkiss feature is cheesy but fun. The app automatically stores important dates for your partner and the relationship, like birthdays and anniversaries, and you can share lists to stay on top of things as a couple. Hey, some of the best things in life are free. you could spend $55 on a really, fun night in the bedroom. The vibrator may seem a bit awkward at first — after all, it is reminiscent of those you wear on your wrist. But once those finger pads get to buzzing it won’t seem so awkward anymore. The HelloTouch can be worn a few different ways so that everyone can enjoy, and it even comes in a , including a stocking, handcuffs and a blindfold. |
Elsevier’s Research Takedown Notices Fan Out To Startups, Harvard, Individual Academics | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | A familiar story is starting to play out in the Ivory Tower. A powerful incumbent with a very lucrative business model gets reactive when the content it holds the rights for becomes too freely distributed on the web. First, it was the music industry. Now it’s happening in academia, one of the very last bastions to be affected by the free, unfettered flow of information on the web. Reed Elsevier, which owns many of the most prestigious research journals in the world, has been sending mass research takedown notices to everyone from startups like Academia.edu to individual researchers and universities. They brought in in the first half of this year, through journals like the Lancet and Cell. For years, they’ve operated a business model where academics provide their research for free and give journals publishing rights to the final versions of their articles in exchange for distribution in prestigious journals. Sometimes academics have quietly published their research on their own personal web sites or new emerging, social networking platforms like ResearchGate or Academia.edu. They’ve done this without feeling too much blowback from the publisher. But now Reed Elsevier is cracking down on this, saying that final articles need to be “readily discoverable and citable via the journal itself.” They’ve been asking researchers to take down their work. “We used to get one or two DMCA take-down notices a week. Then in the last few weeks Elsevier started sending DMCA take-downs in batches of a thousand,” said Academia.edu CEO Richard Price. “We are not sure what started this, but it seems that Academia.edu is not alone.” Rafael Maia, a Ph.D student in biology at the University of Akron who researches bird plumage, is one academic who got a takedown notice. “I don’t understand the difference between sending an e-mail or putting my work online for a person to find it,” Maia said. “The purpose of research is to be read and interpreted. Anything that stifles that is really problematic.” It’s a touchy issue. Technically, authors give away publishing rights for the recognition that being published in a prestigious journal provides. These journals can be key to achieving tenure or building up a strong academic reputation. “We can’t allow published journal articles to be freely accessible on a large scale — especially not through other for-profit companies, who want to benefit from our and other publishers’ efforts. What library will continue to subscribe if a growing proportion of articles is available for free elsewhere?” said Tom Reller, who is Reed Elsevier’s head of global corporate relations, . He said the amount of research that was being published in violation of these agreements had reached a scale where they had to respond. “The number has reached a threshold to where we felt it was important to address by reminding various platforms of the variety of permitted ways authors can share the results of their research,” he added. But many academics feel that Reed Elsevier’s traditional business model is fundamentally unfair. Universities are effectively double-charged for their work — once because research institutions bear the cost of producing the research and twice because libraries and academics have to pay for expensive subscriptions to see published work. That feeling of unfairness where more than 14,000 academics have pledged not to publish, do peer review or editorial work for these journals. A new generation of “open access” journals has also gained prominence. They allow readers to freely access scholarly work online and authors either pay for publication or they are subsidized by other research institutions. But these journals are still a far ways away from having the reputations that older, more traditional journals have built up over the last several decades. Even Reed Elsevier has adapted to this by starting a . Reller also says that academics are still able to publish other non-final versions of their work if they follow certain guidelines. Then, powerful universities like Harvard have also developed programs that allow academics to freely and legally publish alternative versions of their research. Peter Suber, who is a director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, said Harvard had also received a few dozen takedown notices in the last few weeks. “If these takedowns anger you, then don’t give your rights to Elsevier. Steer your papers to another publisher,” said Suber, who stressed he was speaking from a personal perspective and not on behalf of the university. |
Keen On… Innovation: Is Silicon Valley Losing Its Mojo? | Andrew Keen | 2,013 | 12 | 26 | Perhaps best known for his about Facebook, is one of tech’s smartest and best informed writers. He now runs a media startup called , which — through a series of annual conferences in Detroit and Tucson — focuses on the impact of technological innovation on the broader economy. So when I interviewed Kirkpatrick at one of my salons at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, I asked him if Silicon Valley is less critical to the innovation economy than it used to be. The good news for Silicon Valley, according to Kirkpatrick, is that what he calls the local “solar systems” of Google, Facebook and Apple remain extremely important. The less good news, at least for Silicon Valley, is that “it’s becoming really easy to do cool stuff.” So, Kirkpatrick says, innovation is widely distributed right now. And, echoing , he identifies Lebanese capital Beirut as a place that is doing particularly cool stuff. But for all his talk of innovation as a “global phenomenon,” the New York City-based Kirkpatrick hasn’t written off Silicon Valley. Indeed, next November he’ll be holding his main Techonomy event in Half Moon Bay where, no doubt, this conversation about Silicon Valley’s place in the innovation economy will be continued. |
Elephanti Raises $4.5M To Help Shoppers Find Products In Nearby Stores | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 26 | , a startup that’s supposed to make it easier for physical stores to connect with shoppers online, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from LMJ Holdings. The basic selling point for consumers, according to founder and CEO Lalin Michael Jinasena, is avoiding situations where you end up wandering from store to store, asking, “Do you sell Item X?” Instead, you can just visit the website or open the app, then search for a specific item, bringing up a list of stores that carry it. Or you can look up a retailer and browse a catalog of in-store items. The concept isn’t too different from Milo, the local shopping startup that was , but Elephanti has a number of additional features that make it more than just a product search engine. For one thing, after shoppers identify their interests, Elephanti can show them recommendations and offers from nearby stores. Users can also build shopping lists with multiple items, and the app will point to stores where they can buy all the items on the list. Plus, shoppers can check-in at stores and, in a promised update, share photos of what they’ve purchased, so their friends will know that something is really in-stock and available at a certain price. Since the company is working directly with merchants, Jinasena said it’s focused on a specific geography (namely, San Francisco) for now, although it works in other cities. In fact, I tested it out today in Los Angeles, and it would have saved my mother some time — a few days ago, she was hopping from store to store in search of baklava. When I opened the app, it instantly identified the restaurant where she eventually found what she was looking for. (By the way, the site’s product catalogs include menus, too.) The product search isn’t perfect. I also tried to find a mop (don’t ask), but the app would only recommend places where I could buy Mophies and albums by the band Moped. As far as I can tell, Elephanti doesn’t incorporate real-time inventory data, and instead asks stores to manually build and update their catalogs, but I’m confirming that with a company spokesperson. A spokesperson said stores can choose to connect their inventory systems to Elephanti. After a tipster told us that they were suspicious about the investment, I got more details from the company. They said that LMJ Holdings is “an investment / holdings company owned by the Jinasena family” — namely, the family of the CEO (that’s something I should have caught when I wrote the initial post). However, they said Elephanti is a separate business entity that received money from LMJ for a stake in the company, i.e., it was a standard equity investment. (I’ve tried and failed so far to find a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission about the deal.) You can . |
Gogolook Confirms Its Acquisition By Naver, The Owner Of Line | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 26 | Taipei-based startup confirmed that it has been acquired by , the Korean Internet giant that is best known outside of Asia for being the owner of . Gogolook has not disclosed the acquisition price, but a said the amount was NT$529 million (or about $17.6 million USD) (h/t Tech In Asia). In an email, Gogolook CEO Jeff Kuo told me: “After joining the Naver group, Gogolook will be able to accelerate and extend our strategic business deployment in a global scope. With the affiliation of LINE and abundant resources from the parent company worldwide, we cannot wait to show the world the strong innovative capabilities of Taiwan app startups.” Gogolook’s flagship product is Whoscall, a caller ID app that has 1.2 million monthly active users and over 600 million numbers in its database, according to the company. We when the company launched the iOS version of Whoscall. Gogolook was officially launched in April 2012, but started three years earlier as a side project by three friends, including founders Kuo, Jackie Cheng and Reiny Song. COO Edgar Chiu, who is taking on an additional position as general manager of (a Naver-owned mobile-specific company) in Taiwan. Whocall’s database of numbers was originally gathered from public sources like the Yellow Pages and the Google Place API, but as the app’s user base grew, it began to rely on crowd-sourcing. The company’s database of numbers — including spam callers — might prove handy to Naver as and compete against other popular messaging apps like and . Gogolook raised about $500,000 in angel funding and its investors included Trinity VC. |
Plain Vanilla Games, Maker Of Ultra-Hot Trivia App QuizUp, Raises Another $22 Million From Sequoia | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 26 | , the company behind ultra-hot trivia app , has raised a $22 million Series B Round of financing. The financing was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from all existing investors, including Tencent, Greycroft Partners, IDG Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, CrunchFund (owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), and MESA+. QuizUp is an iPhone app that pits users against one another in either real-time or asynchronous trivia matchups. Users choose from up to 300 different topics and can challenge friends or strangers to answer a fast, six-question round of trivia questions. It’s incredibly fun, and has become extremely popular over the last several weeks, with more than 5 million downloads since launch. This round of financing is the third that Plain Vanilla has raised since the beginning of the year, but it’s by far the biggest, and brings the total amount raised to $27 million. Along with the new cash, the company is adding Sequoia’s Roelof Botha to its board of directors. The game studio’s last round of financing — the addition of — was timed basically right around the time of QuizUp’s launch, which means the company took money before it knew that it had a hit on its hands. At the time, Plain Vanilla was looking for a little insurance and some money to fund marketing around the launch of the game. What it found instead was that QuizUp spread like wildfire, thanks to impressive word-of-mouth and growth through social channels. “We didn’t really need the money just before launch, but we thought of it as an insurance thing,” CEO Thor Fridriksson told me in a phone interview. “In retrospect we probably shouldn’t have raised then. The dilution is higher when taking money on a pre-launch valuation versus now.” The latest investment in Plain Vanilla was made after QuizUp spent several weeks at or near the top of the Apple App Store charts. Released in late November, QuizUp has averaged about a million downloads per week, racking up more than 5 million downloads since launch. “It’s the dream of any entrepreneur — you work on something for such a long time and then when you release it, it’s a hit,” Fridriksson said. While pure download numbers have been impressive, the company has been even more encouraged by continued interest in the game, even several weeks after launch. “The funny thing is that we had a really good launch, but we’re used to seeing games that follow a growth curve where they have a big spike in the beginning and then growth slows down after a week or so,” Fridriksson said. Until recently, he noted, QuizUp had been in the top five or top 10 in the app store since launch. (The app has been bumped down a bit in the rankings over recent days, likely due to new or first-time iPhone owners adding must-have apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.) But what’s more impressive than its download numbers is the amount of engagement that Plain Vanilla is seeing within the app. Users typically spend an average of 30 minutes a day playing matches, messaging friends, and participating in discussion boards. Those discussion boards might be one of the app’s best-kept secrets. Each of QuizUp’s nearly 300 topics has one, and altogether, users are posting more than 100,000 comments a day in those discussion forums, according to Fridriksson. Thanks to QuizUp’s impressive launch, the company has had its pick of investment partners to choose from. But it decided to go back to Sequoia and add partner Roelof Botha to its board. Botha brings with him a wealth of expertise in social and mobile startups. The former CFO of PayPal has invested in a series of startups with huge, high-profile exits, including YouTube, Tumblr, and Instagram. He also sits on the boards of EventBrite, Square, TokBox, Jawbone and, most recently, . But the investment follows a much longer courtship between Plain Vanilla and Sequoia. Botha told me by phone that he met Fridriksson about 18 months ago, and has been following Plain Vanilla’s development of the game mechanics and technology behind QuizUp ever since. Botha said he wanted to invest even back then, but that it was challenging to make the case for putting money into a company based in Iceland that was pre-launch. It’s worth noting that he did connect Fridriksson with angel and seed investors, and Sequoia put a small amount into Plain Vanilla’s Series A. But once QuizUp was out it the wild, it seems like making a larger investment was an easy decision. “After launch, [QuizUp] just started taking off like a rocket ship. How many apps have this type of engagement?” he asked. But he believes there’s an opportunity to make QuizUp much bigger. As quickly as QuizUp has grown, it’s important to note that the app is still only available on the iPhone, and still targeted just to English-language speakers. As a result, there’s a huge opportunity to expand to new platforms and new geographies. The next step will likely be a launch on Android, which opens QuizUp to a gigantic new user base. After all, about , according to research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. But Plain Vanilla is also looking to release an iPad app soon that will bring its trivia experience to tablet users. In addition, there’s an even bigger opportunity for QuizUp to reach more of an international audience. That includes localizing the app to support different languages, but also means adopting more trivia that is of interest to international users. “Our most popular topics in each country are the ones that are connected to pop culture of that country,” Fridriksson said. “We’re focusing then on sourcing local content for the things that those people are passionate about.” QuizUp does that by turning to its community of users for questions. While it sourced many of that original 200,000 questions on the app itself before launch, now that it has a huge (and growing) number of passionate users, it’s begun accepting user-submitted content for its trivia questions. With the help of its new funding, Plain Vanilla is in good shape to get its app in as many hands as possible. “It’s incredibly important for us to scale up and get to other markets and other platforms,” Fridriksson said. Now it’s just a matter of executing on that plan. |
How To Hire More Engineers In Less Time | Contributor | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | Got 990 free hours? Not likely. Yet that’s how long it takes the typical startup to hire 12 engineers. Even if you spread your hiring over the course of a year, you’ll need to spend more than 19 hours a week recruiting candidates to hit that target. A shortage of engineers is the biggest challenge facing Silicon Valley startups today. Hiring is what enables you to execute your product roadmap. So, falling behind on recruiting is a competitive issue. Yet many fast-growing startups resist hiring a recruiter. It makes sense to rely on your network of contacts for the first handful of developers. But at Sequoia, we think that once you have product-market fit, the risk to your business is too great not to have someone dedicated to staffing. Bret Reckard, who heads up technical recruiting for Sequoia, put together this calculator to help you plan your recruiting efforts. In particular, it highlights two variables that have the biggest impact on the time it takes to build a team: your referral percentage and your ability to close candidates.
Start by entering the number of engineers you’re looking to hire and how many months you have to meet this goal. Then enter the percentage of your hires that typically come from referrals and the percentage of candidates who typically accept your offers. If you don’t know these, start tracking. The tool will calculate how many hours you’ll spend recruiting and shepherding candidates through the hiring process. Finally, the calculator will suggest how many full-time recruiters it will take to meet your hiring goal. A seasoned recruiter at a company with a lot of resources can directly source and hire about 30 engineers a year. For reasons we’ll outline below, the number climbs to 70 if candidates come from referrals. Recruiting is hard work, especially for a company that doesn’t have a lot of name recognition. To find one new engineer, you need to scour LinkedIn, GitHub and your employees’ networks to identify 100 people who appear to have the right skills. Of those, maybe 10 people will be interested and open to a job change. After hours on the phone and countless cups of coffee, you’ll have a small pool of candidates. Referrals allow you to skip these early stages of recruiting—the candidate’s contact at your company did that for you. A company with a 20 percent referral percentage will spend more than 1,200 hours adding 12 engineers. The same company with an 80 percent referral percentage will spend about 750 hours. Between 40 percent and 60 percent of hires should come from referrals. If your percentage is less than that you likely aren’t doing enough to encourage referrals, or worse, your employees can’t recommend your company to their friends. It’s also possible you’ve exhausted your networks, but in most cases companies don’t push enough to find this limit. Companies with high referral rates tend to make a big effort to get them. They tend to make hiring a top company goal, providing regular updates at all-hands meetings. Some companies go further. Dropbox, for instance, built an app to manage referrals. Employees enter a candidate into the system and can track the hiring process. When you refer someone, being able to follow the process makes a big difference. Also, a fast hiring process is always important, but especially with referrals. Nothing kills referrals faster than letting people languish in the interview queue. Don’t just sit around and wait for employees to recommend friends. A referral program should be a systemized way to get leads. Sit with employees and make lists of the best people from their previous jobs, colleges and peer networks. These leads are just as valuable as the name of a friend who is looking for a job. Take time to court and get to know the people on your referral list. Even if they don’t join, they can and will be advocates in the community. There’s a lot more to recruiting than referrals. There are things you can do to improve the other big variable, your ability to close candidates. We think a company should be able to close around 75 percent of the candidates it makes offers to. Your close starts as soon as you meet a candidate with no upper limit to the lengths you can go. I often talk to prospective engineering hires on behalf of the companies I work with and I’d encourage you to ask the same of your board members. |
Code.org: 2 Weeks And 600M+ Lines Of Code Later, 20M Students Have Learned An “Hour Of Code” | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 12 | 26 | Less than a year ago, brothers Hadi Partovi and Ali Partovi launched to help advocate for computer science in the U.S. and increase participation in STEM education by making these subjects more available in schools and classrooms around the country. Today, it seems that what started as a whisper has grown into a roar. On December 9, Code.org kicked off a new, nationwide campaign called the “Hour of Code,” which asked teachers across the U.S. to help introduce their students to the basics of computer science through the organization’s coding programs and tutorials. Timed in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week, the campaign has sought to change the perception of Computer Science in the American education system — chief of which is the fact that, today, 9 out of 10 schools in the U.S. do not offer computer science classes. After months of campaigning and lobbying for change at the state level, in which the Partovis and Code.org have asked states to begin offering programming classes for credit, it seems that their work has begun to pay off — both at the policy level and through the “Hour of Code.” Alabama, Maryland and Wisconsin have announced (or are planning to announce) policy changes at the state level, while both the and the have unveiled plans to bring computer science to their classrooms. What’s more, at the culmination of Computer Science Education Week, the Partovis told us that more than 15 million students had participated in the “Hour of Code,” collectively writing more than 500 million lines of code during the campaign. While Computer Science Education Week came to a close on December 16, the campaign has continued, and the number of students participating has since crossed 20 million, with over 675 million lines of code now in the books. All told, Hadi Partovi told TechCrunch, more than 20 million students have participated across 170 countries. However, factoring out non-U.S. students and adults, Code.org claims that just about 1 in 4 students in K-12 schools in the U.S. participated in the “Hour of Code.” What’s more, Partovi tells us that “more girls participated in computer science in participating schools in the last two weeks than all students in the history of U.S. public schools combined.” To break down the “Hour of Code” stats even further, Code.org tells us that, of the 20 million-plus participating, 83 percent were from the U.S., 74 percent were in grades K-12, 51 percent were girls, 8 percent were African-American and 14 percent were Hispanic. While we’d all no doubt like to see these percentages continue to rise and it remains to be seen just how much of a long-term effect one hour of programming can have on students, the “Hour of Code” is off to an impressive start. As to how the campaign has managed to accomplish this? The “Hour of Code” has been bolstered by support from a litany of recognizable names. For starters, , both Microsoft and Apple showed their support by hosting an “Hour of Code” at every one of their retail outlets over the course of the week, with Apple advertising its tutorial on its homepage. Google, in turn, kicked off of Computer Science Education Week with a Google Doodle that remembered “Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and creator of the Cobol programming language” and also linked to “Hour of Code” beneath the doodle. On top of that, the campaign featured on the home pages of YouTube, MSN, Bing, Yahoo, Disney (and many more), with recognizable names from across politics, music and sports pitching in their support. Among them were “actors and musicians like Shakira, Ashton Kutcher, Angela Bassett and athletes like Chris Bosh, Warren Sapp and Dwight Howard, along with tech leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Susan Wojcicki.” Politicians from both sides of the aisle also lent their support, including President Obama and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, as well as “Senator Cory Booker, Newt Gingrich and Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan.” To help teachers get their students started in the world of programming, Code.org has curated online tutorials and programs from a bevy of partners, including companies, non-profits and universities. The traffic to some of its partners was so heavy, particularly Khan Academy, that their website was forced offline — . So far, it’s been a strong showing, but the 20 million is just a start. To find more on how to participate, find the “Hour of Code” . You can also find the videos from President Obama and more and more info in the infographic below. |
Meet Re.mu, The Social Network For Idealistic Style Lovers From Plurk’s Founder | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 26 | Remember , the social network once considered a rival to Twitter, along with other microblogging sites like , and the late ? Plurk is still trucking along with 10 million users (and recent ) and now its founder, Alvin Woon, is working on , his new fashion-based startup. Re.mu is a mobile- and web-based social network that is targeted at the kind of style lover who would rather browse thrift stores and than covet high-end designer items. Woon says he wanted to create a site that would attract users who are already showing off their daily outfits on platforms like Instagram. Re.mu’s seed investors include Taipei-based and . For its users, Re.mu combines the functions of clothing organizing apps such as , and with a social platform that lets people share their daily outfits, get validation from other users with similar tastes, and go shopping in-app. Re.mu’s community is still small — since launching two months ago, it has racked up 35,000 users — but Woon says the community is highly engaged and uploads about 25,000 posts per day, including photos of outfits and items that they own. In addition to Asia, Re.mu is also targeting growth in Spanish-speaking countries and the U.S. Re.mu can offer analytics about trends emerging in those places for fashion companies. For example, one trend that Re.mu has picked up on over the last two months is the popularity of floral-print leggings in Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand. Seventy percent of users in those countries, however, prefer to dress in black, white or grey, and Woon is excited about the potential of Re.mu’s data for social scientists that . But Re.mu has plenty of competition. Lookbook.nu is already well-established among fashion brands as a source for trend forecasting. Other fashion communities include , , and , as well as the and , a long-running group on Flickr. Woon says Re.mu sets itself apart with features like a machine-learning algorithm that will tell you how to style pieces you already own, based on factors like your favorite color combinations, body type and what’s trendy in your area. The site also offers “very granular filtering” in order to give companies and designers insight into not only what items are popular each season, but how fashion consumers are styling them. Re.mu also wants to differentiate with an approach to fashion that encourages people to wear the stuff they already own instead of chasing the latest products. To build traction, Re.mu has been targeting consumers who share that philosophy. In the U.S. and Spanish-speaking countries, the startup has approached bloggers who are into searching thrift shops for secondhand items or buying handmade items on Etsy. That tactic doesn’t work as well in Asia, where many style-conscious consumers still covet luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, but Re.mu has stuck to its idealism. In Taiwan, for example, the startup has hosted secondhand clothing markets. Of course, Re.mu will have to balance its “spend less and wear what you have” manifesto with the demands of fashion brands as it develops its business strategy, which Woon admits will be a delicate balancing act. He faced the same challenge at Plurk. “I think after a while, I began to realize that I’m good at building communities, but maybe not that good at trying to make money out of them,” he says. “But I’m pretty good at building stuff and getting people to come and play with it.” Re.mu’s path to monetization is more clear-cut than Plurk’s because it already has a strong vertical. Right now the app has affiliate links to e-commerce sites like . Woon says he wants Re.mu to eventually offer whole catalogs inside the app from a select roster of brands, with a focus on independent designers. To encourage users to make purchases in-app, Re.mu will offer incentives like discounts or the ability to upload more photos with each post. Plurk never achieved the high profile of Twitter and the microblogging networks of Sina and Tencent, both of which are massively popular in China, but Woon says that its traffic has continued to grow steadily since its launch in 2007. Woon isn’t involved with its day-to-day operations anymore, but he’s still its chairman. Though it’s hard to recall in the wake of , the site once had masses of users threatening to leave because of its server problems. The irritatingly frequent appearance of Twitter’s error message as strong rivals. When I asked Woon if it’s weird to see Plurk described as a Twitter also-ran, he was frank. “Plurk is a six-year-old company and I think we can agree that at times we lost track of what we were trying to do because people were trying to go for bigger targets, like how many millions or billions of users we could have,” he says. Now Plurk focuses on attracting users who want to connect with small social circles over niche topics they are passionate about (Woon has as “16-28. Female. Cos-player. Knitter. Second Lifer. Likes cheesecake.”) Woon hopes Re.mu will retain that same sense of intimacy even as its user base grows. “It’s a matter of trying to create a medium where newcomers don’t feel left out when they first get a taste of the network. Then after a while, you need something to keep them hooked,” he says. “As their friends join, are they going to get the feeling, like, if you like an indie band and then it gets popular and then you start not to like them anymore because now even your mom knows about them? We want to preserve a tight-knit social network as we grow.” |
CrunchWeek: Bitcoin’s Big Crash, The ‘Six Californias’ Plan, Dorsey Gives Back Square Stock | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | In this episode, , and I talk about the that cut the value of the Bitcoin currency in half (and the latest on the new Silk Road 2 exchange), the far-out proposal by renowned technology venture capitalist Tim Draper to and turn Silicon Valley into its own state, and Square founder Jack Dorsey 10 percent of his equity in the company. |
Announcing TechCrunch’s 2014 Pitch-Offs: Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington D.C., NYC, Boston, And LA | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | TechCrunch is about to hit the road again. Starting in late February, we’re bringing the magic of our Pitch-Off events to Atlanta and New Orleans. Then, a month later, we’re hitting Washington D.C., New York City, Boston and The City of Angels, Los Angeles. And that’s just for the first half of the year. Like previous pitch-offs, tickets will be just $5 and grant you access to an evening of pitching, drinking and general tomfoolery, TechCrunch style. And like before, the events will be a boisterous good time. These meetups have evolved over time. Once just John Biggs and family touring the East Coast in a rented van, these events are now large productions featuring fun interviews and a pitch-off competition involving the best startups in each city. If you’ve attended a previous TC meetup, you’re going to want to come to 2014’s events, too. Tickets and venues will be released in the coming weeks.
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Gillmor Gang: Robophobia | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — talk about what it means to be human in a digital age. The rise of the stream threatens to overwhelm us, and the Gang seems bent on drowning in wearables. But maybe that’s just a harsh look at a tough nut we’re all trying to crack: keeping up with the impossible flow. Meanwhile, @dannysullivan delivers a TED talk on Google algorithm repair, @jtaschek charms the chat room with his advance look at @scobleizer’s next book The Shrinking Size of Everything, and @dbfarber talks of the coming mindful computer. “But you’ll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffle.” @stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @dannysullivan, @scobleizer, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Overstock.com Reportedly Plans To Accept Bitcoin In 2014 | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | Overstock.com is moving to accept Bitcoin as payment in 2014, the CEO told . Apparently the retailer has the ambition to become the first major online retailer to accept the digital currency. And it very well could be. No other major retailer has announced a similar plan yet. However, put away your digital wallet for the time being. The retailer doesn’t expect to start accepting Bitcoin until the second half of 2014, by which time, could eclipse its popularity. This announcement comes just days after in the Bitcoin ecosystem as China’s largest BTC exchange stopped accepting deposits in Chinese yuan, causing Bitcoin’s monetary value to drop 50% in a few hours. Overstock saw just over $1 billion in revenue last year. The company trades on NASDAQ and its stock price is up 109.29% on the year. The news about accepting Bitcoin caused the shares to jump 7.77% on the day. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne stated that a healthy monetary system isn’t based off of an upside pyramid or the whim of a government official. Bitcoin fits that bill. Byrne stated that when Overstock starts accepting Bitcoin, the retailer would bank the digital currency in the event derivatives (such as Dogecoin) are increasing in popularity. If offshoots fail to gain steam, Overstock would transfer the Bitcoins into dollars on a daily basis, essentially day trading the Bitcoin income. In the latter half of 2013, a number of retailers have moved to accept Bitcoin as payment with OkCupid, Namecheap and Humble Bundle among the list. Charities are also latching onto the digital currency since it lacks fees usually associated with monetary donations. If Overstock follows through with its plan, it would be come the largest U.S.-based retailer to accept Bitcoins. That is, of course, if Amazon or the like doesn’t beat them to the punch. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 19 | null |
Mozilla’s Asm.js Gets Another Step Closer To Native Performance | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | Mozilla’s is a strict subset of JavaScript that Firefox can run significantly faster than regular JavaScript code. Thanks to the so-called module for Firefox’s built-in JavaScript engine, asm.js code was running at about 2x native speed and this week, the organization that it’s now running most benchmarks at just 1.5x slower than native or better. Given that most game engines are written in C or C++, the focus for asm.js has mostly been on gaming too. Indeed, one of the first public asm.js demos Mozilla showed was Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 . As Mozilla’s and note in the most recent announcement, the team manged to get to 1.5x performance through a number of small, incremental changes to both asm.js and the Emscripten compiler. The team, however, also profited from some general improvements to Firefox’s JavaScript engine. Specifically, Zakai and Nyman note, the fact that Firefox has now been optimized for resulted in “substantial speedups.” Mozilla measures asm.js performance by compiling the code natively (using clang and gcc) and comparing the results to running the same code through Emscripten and asm.js. Here are the most current results: For the time being, asm.js remains a Mozilla project. While Google’s Chrome team is clearly aware of it and recently , it seems unlikely that Chrome will support it natively anytime soon. It’s worth noting, though, that asm.js code will run in any current JavaScript engine – it just won’t run as fast as on Firefox. |
It’s A Wonderful Life, For A Few Of Us | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | So where were we? Oh yes: . San Francisco’s recent and “ ” kerfuffles are symptoms of an increasingly broad, deep, and bitter anti-tech animosity. : “The tech elite will join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.” : “Tech workers have, rightly or wrongly, received the blame. Resentment simmers.” Such ingratitude! What’s wrong with these warped, blinded haters? …Well, OK, it might be the very real sense that these days, with , if you’re not in tech, or you’re not already rich, then you are probably basically screwed for life. “ .” Unemployment remains high, and “may simply give up looking for jobs once their benefits lapse.” Meanwhile, US today is the highest that it’s been — which matters “the decline in middle-class incomes owes as much to rising inequality as it does to the depressed state of the economy.” The recently a Brooklyn neighborhood where the top 5 percent of residents earn 76 times as much as the bottom quintile … addicts gather outside a food pantry a block from $2 million brownstones The economic doldrums have hit Europe, too, outside of Germany. Don’t even get me started on Spain or France: and as for , well, the BBC recently that, for the first time, “More working households were living in poverty in the UK last year than non-working ones … low pay and part-time work has prompted an unprecedented fall in living standards.” So just go get a good education! Right? . Even if you have a Ph.D.: The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. … Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation.” Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment. Hell, even is a disaster nowadays. And total American student-loan debt this year. At that price, for many people, paying for higher education is almost like dumping your life savings into a lottery, or a casino; great if it works out…but absolutely crippling if it doesn’t. So everyone can move to the tech sector! Again, sorry, no — or at best, not any time soon. You cannot reasonably expect to retrain significant numbers of people into skilled engineers, and there’s little-to-no room for the unskilled. (Unlike most fields, bad software engineers actually add value to the projects they work on.) Engineering is hard. Most people aren’t any good at it. So people who aren’t rich, and aren’t in tech — the vast majority, I hasten to remind you — will increasingly become part of : This is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection, although all this is widespread. It is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations … had come to expect as their due. Meanwhile, the rich, as a class, are behaving with their usual elegance, taste, and restraint. Finding so they can charge higher rents. Reshaping corporations into what “distorporations.” “ .” And it’s hard to wander amid San Francisco’s new-growth luxury boutiques, artisanal coffee shops, and opulent social events without getting the sense that techies, too, are making decadent hay of today’s inequalities. I mused the other day on Twitter: Sometimes I feel like we in SF/LA/NYC live in the modern-day Belle Epoque. Which is, to be clear, a backhanded compliment at best. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) You think this is bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Right now the precariat mostly just resents the tech world because we’re wealthier. That’s because tech has only barely begun to — and keep their homes and cars . How do you think they’ll feel about us in five years’ time? That process has already begun, though, and it will only accelerate. about the way Amazon treats its workers; will they be as upset about those replaced by the robots to Amazon’s warehouses? (And before you start blaming Asian outsourcing, note that Foxconn is seeking to replace its Chinese laborers with a “ ” too.) As Andrew Leonard in : the big difference between the current technological revolution and the Industrial Revolution is that the initial technological advances of the 18th century created jobs for unskilled workers, while today’s robot armies are increasingly replacing the jobs of unskilled workers. will help those cursed with shitty jobs…but it won’t create more of them. may save money, but it can’t drive the poor to take . In the long run all this ferment, disruption, and innovation is a good thing for everyone, of course, but in the medium term, we’re staring down the barrel of a wrenching period of transition. Ask the poor, struggling, and insecure — the precariat — how they feel about Silicon Valley’s hallowed goal of , and its implications for them. True, we to in a cyclical economic upturn at last; but at the same time, the US unemployment rate is probably something like . As the , when people drop out of the work force, “it will as if the labor market has improved, even though it hasn’t.” Even if we are enjoying a cyclical upswing, it can only mask an ongoing structural decline in employment for so long. It seems to me (and many others) that we’re at the beginning of a Great Bifurcation. On one side: those who were rich when it began, plus the upper echelon of the tech world, the usual oil/finance suspects, and a smattering of others. Figure of the population. They will cluster in dense little islands of wealth — , beach houses and mountain chalets. They will travel to all the best places. Their parties will grow ever more decadent. Their children will get the best education — and, in time, the best biotech — that money can buy. But not techies will be winners. This modern-day is increasingly for people who can tick at least two of the following boxes: smart, skilled, and well-connected. (Don’t kid yourself–the tech world is by no means a pure meritocracy.) The room for people who can boast only one of those, let alone zero, is diminishing. The , unskilled, poorly-connected, and/or just plain unlucky will join the other side of the great divide soon enough. By which I mean the teeming masses of the precariat, getting by with part-time jobs, contract work, and , perpetually fighting a Sisyphean battle to erase their debts and amass some savings … and mostly losing. If you were born after 1960, you probably won't retire comfortably unless you inherit wealth. — Christopher Mims 🎆 (@mims) And across that great divide? Growing resentment verging on fury. Again, you think techies are disliked in places like San Francisco? Just wait another five or ten years. Yes, SF could and should build out much more housing– Fun fact: SF's pop density is half of Brooklyn's (17,620 vs 34,920). We don't even need to go Manhattan to add enough housing/lower rents. — Steve Simitzis Ⓥ 💛 (@s5) –but if I’m right about the fundamental trends here, even that won’t help. The tech world, and/or the machinations it is setting in motion, , and/or , for a period of wrenching disruption measured in decades. I know that’s not how we like to think of ourselves. But until and unless we come up with a better way — a , not band-aids — then it’s what we will become. |
Amazon Bought GoPago’s Mobile Payment Tech And Product/Engineering Team, DoubleBeam Bought The POS Business | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | Last week, we wrote about how Amazon had . Today, some more details about the deal: A source close to the situation confirms that Amazon bought the technology and the engineering/product team of GoPago, but none of the existing point of sale business and current merchant relationships. This part of GoPago is going to DoubleBeam — a sale by DoubleBeam late Friday. DoubleBeam — founded and run by a team of seasoned payments executives from companies like PayPal, Green Dot, and Digital Insight (bought by Intuit for $1.3B) — provides white-label mobile payments technology for mobile apps and point-of-sale systems, including services like e-checks. Amazon really wanted the GoPago technology, a source says, but not the existing business. That eventually led to this “non-traditional” arrangement that seems to include some aspects of GoPago’s point-of-sale technology, which will be integrated with DoubleBeam’s existing products. “We are very excited about the synergies between Doublebeam’s leading mobile commerce solutions and the mobile point-of-sale systems that GoPago brings to the table” says Ted Tekippe, CEO of DoubleBeam, in a statement. “The complimentary capabilities of these technologies will bring a unique and holistic solution to the retail industry. It’s exactly what our customers have been asking us for.” However, “The bulk of the story stays the same: Amazon is getting into the mobile payment space and has major plans for it,” says the source. It seems that originally there was going to be an official announcement in January about some aspects of this deal — such as the fate of what would happen to the part of the business that wasn’t going to Amazon. But with the news leaking out this week, it looks they moved up the DoubleBeam announcement so that merchants and employees had more security about what would be coming next. (It may have also been to fend off more reputation-damaging stories like and from coming out.) It’s still not clear when and how Amazon will use GoPago’s technology, but as we mentioned when we first reported on the sale, there are already a lot of moving pieces that point to Amazon’s ambitions to offer a way to make payments for goods more seamless and mobile-friendly: — Amazon already has some mobile payment systems in place, mainly for on apps sold via Amazon’s app store, and that let third parties sell Amazon products in their apps. — Over a year ago, we that Amazon was working on a Square competitor, and Gopago, with its business firmly rooted in facilitating local commerce by way of mobile devices, could be part of that plan. — Amazon has other e-commerce giants in sight. It recently launched “ “, a digital wallet service that places it in competition with the likes of PayPal and credit card companies, with a one-click checkout option for online sellers that would let a customer pay instantly through his or her Amazon account. Mobile payments would help Amazon reach even more product parity with PayPal and eBay. — Many believe Amazon will soon launch its own mobile phones — alleged models revealed to us . If there is a Square competitor in the works, you can envision how Gopago technology might get integrated into those handsets and a Kindle Fire tablet souped up specifically for merchants to provide Amazon with a built-in payment loop between consumers and merchants — putting Amazon also in competition with Apple and its merchant-friendly iPad/iBeacon pitch. |
Tune In For The Live Stream From TechCrunch Moscow, 2 Days Of Startups And Speakers | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | Today we are kicking off the first day of . Day one is all about pitching to enter the final stages. Day Two will feature from the Russian tech startup ecosystem and some international speakers. . Since the first TechCrunch Moscow in 2010, the event has created a major splash in the Russian startup and venture industry and is very much at the core of what’s happening. As always, the conference will be accompanied by the Startup Alley and pitches competition, featuring 38 up-and-coming Russian startups. (LDV Capital) will MC the Startup Pitches. Each startup will have 3 minutes for the pitch and another 2-3 minutes to answer questions from the judges. The pitches will be followed by the Product Announcement from Marina Kolesnik, founder and CEO of Oktogo, and a Success Story of Rocketbank presented by the founder, Victor Lysenko. You can tune into the live stream by . The TechCrunch Moscow event partners are and . Follow TC Moscow on and . You can also follow the . |
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Selling Anything | James Altucher | 2,013 | 12 | 21 | I’ve never read a book on sales. They seemed corny. Like many people, I always looked down on the concept of “selling.” It seemed like something lower than me. To some extent, selling appears manipulative. You have a product where you give the perception it has more value than it has in reality. So you need to manipulate people to buy it. This seems sad, as in “Death of a Salesman” sort of sad. I was wrong. And for the past 25 years all I have been doing is selling. Selling products, selling services, selling businesses, selling myself. Sometimes I have been manipulative. And sometimes I’ve sold things I’ve had such passion for I sold it cheap just because I wanted the message out about what I was selling. And often, it was very much in the middle: I needed to sell something because I had to pay my bills. Maybe I was a little desperate, a little hopeful, a little scared, and I wanted to make sure my family got fed. We live in a hard world where our basic needs cost money, and as we get older we become responsible for the basic needs of others. We become adults. Adults sell for today. Professionals sell for life. So here are the rules of this cheat sheet: None of this comes from a book. All of this is from my own experience. Which means it might not work for you. Which means it might go counter to the basic rules of salesmanship. I have no idea. I downloaded a book by Og Mandino and by Zig Ziglar but I didn’t read them. Maybe I should. But I can say that over the past 25 years I’ve sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff. That stuff being everything in Pandora’s box that I had to sell just to stay alive. When I think what worked for me, here’s what I come up with: Nobody is going to buy from someone they hate. The buyer has to like you and want to be your friend. People pay for friendship. This sounds sort of whoreish, and it is. The times when I’ve hated myself the most were the times when I’ve prostituted myself to make money (this isn’t as sexual as it sounds but it might as well be). One time when I was raising money for something, the buyer was going through a business catastrophe and was worried he would go out of business. I didn’t like him but I called him every day for three months at the same time to see if he “wanted to talk” and to offer my advice on how he should deal with his situation. I eventually raised a lot of money from him even though the first time I met him he was honest with me and said, “it seems like you don’t know your industry very well.” Which just goes to show: friendship outweighs almost every other factor in selling. One time I wanted to do a website for ABC.com. How did I do it? The main decision maker was involved with a school in Harlem for charity. I went up there for four weeks in a row and played 20 kids simultaneously in chess. Everyone had fun. I got the website job. My competitors were all bigger, better financed, and probably better. Unfortunately, I didn’t like either of those people personally. And eventually, I lost the business. The only good outcomes come when both sides like each other. At one point I was so sick of my new “friendships” I went to see a therapist with the clichéd line, “I don’t even know who I am anymore because I hate all my friends and all my friends are customers so I’m their slave friend.” Now I only do business with people I like. The fastest way to lose all your money, mutilate your heart, and then kill yourself is to work with people you don’t like. I will never do that again. Nor do you have to, despite what you might think. If someone wants to do a big deal with you it’s hard to say “no.” But No is valuable for many reasons: Instead of pursuing something you really don’t want to do, you could free up time and energy to find something more lucrative or something you would enjoy more. Opportunity cost is the one BIGGEST cost in all of our lives. We spend it like there’s no tomorrow. And guess what? Eventually there’s no tomorrow. If you reduce the supply of you (through “No”) then the demand for you goes up and you make more money (and have more fun). I see this every day, particularly in my own life. The reason I can write about this is not because I’m an expert. We don’t write about the things we KNOW. We right about the things that are deep down CHALLENGES for us right now. When I say “yes” to something I don’t want to do, I end up hating myself, hating the person I said “yes” to, doing a bad job, and disappointing everyone. I try try try not to do it anymore. (source: Palookaville by Seth) If someone pays $100 and you give them just $100 in value then you just failed. F.A.I.L.E.D. You’ll never sell to that person again. That’s fine in some situations, but in most situations it’s no good. If someone pays $100, you need to give them $110 worth of value. Think of that extra $10 as going into some sort of karmic bank account that pays interest (as opposed to a U.S. bank account). That money grows and compounds. Eventually, there’s real wealth there. And that wealth translates into wealth in the real world. People are three-year-olds. They like to get presents. People want to do business with people who give them presents. Over-delivering is a present. And it makes you feel good. Give and you will receive. This statement, which everyone knows, is usually applied incorrectly. People think it means, keep pushing and trying new things until you get a “yes.” That’s not what it means. If you do that, you end up in the spam box. Then you end up in the coffin box. In other words, you end up dead to the person you are trying to sell to. Instead, remember point A. Be a friend. However flimsy that connection of friendship is. Follow on Twitter, follow on Facebook. Say nice things about the person to other people. Never gossip. Do the art of the “check in.” Send updates after the “No” on how you are doing, on how the product or service or business or whatever is doing. Not every day. Maybe once a month. Maybe once a year. Who knows. Eventually you will find the “yes” with that person. It could be, and often is, up to 20 years later. Who knows? You plant a seed and eventually the garden blooms. I once wanted to do the website for Fine Line Films. I loved their movies. I met the guy running their site. He kept saying over and over again, “we can’t afford a lot” and I kept saying, “don’t worry about it” and would show him more and more of our work. Eventually we did the websites for every one of their movies. $1,000 per website. We made amazing websites for $1,000. Then, when Con Edison wanted to hire us, Nevin at Fine Line was a reference. Price for coned.com (a basic four-page website): $250,000. And that was the first of five websites we did for them plus monthly maintenance. I write for a lot of places right now for free. Any medium I love, I am willing to write for. It’s like a dream come true for me. The benefits from doing that have been incalculable. Not always financial, but always real. We are a combination of many constituencies inside of our bodies and minds. Financial is just one. But all of our constituencies need to work together to make us well-balanced and peaceful. The art of selling, for me, is to have everything inside of me working together. One time I wanted to buy a company. The details of how I would do that are sort of obscure and not important. The company is well-known in the financial media space. At the critical moment, the owner called me and said, “what should I do? I have this other offer and I have your offer.” He described the other offer to me. I told him to take it. I missed out on what could have been a lot of money to me. But there was a slight chance we would have all gone bust. Now he is thriving and eight years later he is a friend. Will we ever do business together? I can’t predict the future. But I know I delivered value to another human being. That value is real and I can put it to use whenever I want. Often the best way to make friends and customers for life is to direct them to a better service or product than yours. Be the source of valuable information rather than the source of your “product-of-the-day.” Then they will know forever that you are a trusted source. Trust is worth more than next month’s rent being paid. Trust builds a bridge that will never wear out. At some point in the distant future, when you are on the run in every other way, you may need to cross that bridge. Your offering is not your product. Your offering is product, services, your employees, your experiences, your ideas, your other customers, and even (as mentioned above) your competitors. Sell them all. When you are good at what you do, the product or service you offer is just the way people build the first link to you. It’s the top of a huge pyramid. But the base of the pyramid, the real service, is when they have access to you and you can provide advice and the full power of your network and experience. This is when you are over-delivering on steroids and how real wealth is built and not just a one-time fee for a service or product. Many people say, “no! My product is high margin and I want to make money when I sleep.” Stop going to BS entrepreneur, get-rich conferences. In the long run nobody cares about your product. In the long run, it is the entire holistic view of your offering, your service, you, that you are selling. Without that, you will build a mediocre business that may or may not pay the bills. With that, you will create wealth. People can see what your product is right now. What they want to know is…the future. Will your product make them more money? Will it get them a promotion? Maybe even: will YOU hire them if they buy your product. Everything is possible. When you get in the door, do not sell your product. People make a decision on your product in five seconds. Sell the dream. The dream has up to infinity in value. Build up images of the dream. Give a taste of what the dream is like. Let it linger. Let it weave itself. Let the imagination of the buyer take hold and run with it. But then, you might ask, do I risk under-delivering. Answer: Yes. Don’t do that. Be as good as the dream. This is similar to point B with the one difference that you have already made a sale. If it’s not going well or if it’s leaving a bad taste somewhere inside of you, or if they have gone from friend to enemy for whatever reason and it seems like there is no repair, then fire your customer. The sooner the better. This applies to not just customers but everyone in your life. EVERYONE. If someone no longer has your best interest at heart, then in your own self-interest you need to back off. NOW. A bad customer (a bad person) spreads like a disease inside you, your employees, your other customers, your competitors, your future customers, your family, etc. “But what if it’s my biggest customer? How do I pay the bills?” I don’t know. Figure it out. You have to or you will die. When I tell people to build their “idea muscle” (by writing down 10 ideas, good or bad, every day) it’s not so they can come up with great business ideas (although they might). It’s so they can come up with ideas in situations like this. This is where being an idea machine saves your life and saves everything around you. But remember: bad customers will kill you and your family and your friends. Your best new customers are your old customers. If you need to make more money or build new business then go to your customers (who are now your friends) and ask them, “I need advice. What other service can I provide you or anyone you know.” It might be something totally unrelated to your business. No problem. Do it. It might be your customer is looking for a new job. That’s great. Make it your business to find him a new job. Now you have a new customer. It might be your customer needs a boyfriend. Ok, introduce her to all of your friends who might be good for her. If you’ve been following this approach to sales then your customers are now your friends, are now your family, are now the lifeblood of how you wake up in the morning. — We spend years building a garden. We plant the seeds. We tend the soil. We water the plants. But we are also the sun. The sun shines no matter what. It doesn’t care which flower blossoms. The sun is always there providing value every second of the day. Be the sun and you will become abundance. I don’t know the buzzwords to make a sale. I’m not very good at shaking hands. I don’t take people out to baseball games or do any of the things I see other people do. But I’ve been selling for 25 years. And whenever I’ve been dead broke, depressed, and suicidal, I’ve picked myself up and sold again and again. |
Verizon Is Acquiring Content Delivery Network EdgeCast For More Than $350 Million | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | is looking to get deeper into the content delivery business with the acquisition of Los Angeles-based CDN provider , TechCrunch has heard. Owning EdgeCast, and combining it with the carrier’s global network backbone COMMA, will give Verizon access to EdgeCast’s big-name CDN clients while also extending its reach. According to a source, the deal for EdgeCast — which provides CDN services to the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, and Hulu — is expected to be announced in the coming days, and will be worth more than $350 million. Both EdgeCast and Verizon declined to comment on the matter. While Verizon has seen success in its wireless practice, growth in the company’s enterprise business has lagged. With the enterprise division expected to , adding EdgeCast to the mix could add a profitable new revenue stream. The deal would follow Verizon’s a few weeks ago for a , as the carrier seeks to provide more ways to stream various types of content over its network. Like UpLynk, EdgeCast would likely become a part of Verizon’s Digital Media Services group. Together, the two acquisitions enable Verizon to provide for more of an end-to-end offering around streaming video, but EdgeCast brings a lot more to the table. In seeking to differentiate its offering, EdgeCast has rolled out a variety of new services aimed at providing additional value to its customers. That includes a , launched in May, as well as the in October. Over the years, Verizon has made various attempts to offer content delivery to Internet companies, but for the most part that usually meant reselling CDN services from third-party providers. (Indeed, a names both Akamai and EdgeCast as part of its CDN offering.) EdgeCast is one of several content delivery networks that popped up around the 2005-2008 timeframe to compete with Akamai and Limelight. The company was founded by a group of serial entrepreneurs who had previous success with a company called KnowledgeBase, which had been acquired by enterprise CRM vendor Talisma Corporation. It’s also one of the few network infrastructure companies from that era to not only survive, but thrive in a competitive environment. The company had more than 6,000 clients and was on pace for a $100 million run rate when it . EdgeCast has been profitable for several years, company president James Segil told me at the time, which was probably attractive to Verizon. In all, the company has raised just $74 million, which means a decent payout for investors that include Menlo Ventures and Disney-backed Steamboat Ventures. What’s less clear is how the acquisition will affect EdgeCast’s reseller business. Since being founded in 2006, EdgeCast has built a tidy and profitable business out of providing the routing and dashboard management for a number of global carriers to deploy CDN Services. include Deutsche Telekom, Telus, Pacnet, and PCCW, but it’s also been linked to AT&T for that carrier’s a few years back. Being part of a competing carrier in certain markets could mean less reseller traffic, but it could be counterbalanced by increased demand for value-added services and Verizon’s own enterprise clients. Photo Credit: via |
CrunchWeek: Amazon Drones, Uber’s Leaked Revenue, 23andMe’s FDA Trouble | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | In this week’s episode, Leena Rao, Ryan Lawler and I discuss Amazon’s much-buzzed-about experiments in , the leaked screenshot that showed just (it’s a lot), and 23andMe’s battles with the FDA over of its genetic testing kits. |
A Few Basic Science And Tech Facts Many Americans Don’t Know | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | How does a power cord charge a cellphone? Magic, silly! According to a Pew poll, many of my fellow Americans are completely in the dark about how their world works, including the fact that is a chemical responsible for some global warming. Readers can take the interactive quiz before reading more. Pew’s quiz is especially salient this week, after another round of International test scores , once again, that America’s poorly run education system is producing a deeply and uninformed society. Here are a few of the essential gems that participants couldn’t answer. Forty-nine percent could not identify “carbon” as the cause of climate change (as opposed to Hydrogen, Helium, or Radon). Note, this wasn’t about whether humans are causing global warming, just what, on Earth, is making it warmer outside. Equally concerning to those who think Democracy rocks is the fact that about one-third didn’t know the basics of drug experimentation. About 33 percent of those without a diploma thought that researchers should give all the participants in a study the treatment drug, rather than half (the control group should not get the drug). The graph below is not segmented by education level. Nanorobots are not, in fact, robots that are very large, cold, or hot. Nano means tiny; it’s a prefix I’d like to know when an evil super-villain infects the water supply with mind-controlling robots. Or, less likely, when our government is debating pollution and crop spray regulations. “The inability to communicate effectively the potential risks associated with nanotechnology could create an environment where appropriate regulation and confident private sector investment are threatened,” explained a research paper from Yale’s Cultural Cognition Lab [ ]. About 33 percent of those over 65 years of age didn’t know that an electron was smaller than an atom. One would think with the Cold War’s delightful history of nuclear propaganda, someone would have noticed that the objects orbiting the center ball were smaller. In total, less than half (47 percent) got that question correct. Another fun fact: sound does not produce blinding light. Lasers are something we see. Despite this fact, less than half (47 percent) of Americans thought lasers were made of sound. We might be slowly rumbling . The more we inoculate Big Mac-destined cattle from disease, the worse our defenses become. Most people (77 percent) recognized that bacteria resistance was more of a problem than bacteria addiction (not a thing). Only 58 percent of those with a diploma or less could answer this question correctly. Here’s the full breakdown of the quiz: |
Gillmor Gang: Game of Drones | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, and Steve Gillmor — imagine a world 30 years in the future and discover it looks pretty much the same. A world where drones drop things off and pick them up, too. Why buy when you can rinse, rent, and repeat. The signs are everywhere, as the cloud makes anything possible at startup scale. The question is, can anyone but Google and Apple win? Form versus function is the framing of the media, but perhaps the real winners will capture the broad audience with fitness data topped with media services. Twitter is serving up viral swarms around binge programming, and soon we’ll be telling our wrist bands to sort the mail and start the dishwasher. It’s more and more difficult to tell the robots from their makers. Pass the oil, please. @stevegillmor, @dsearls, @borthwick, @dbfarber, @scobleizer Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Meet The Nate Silver Of Education. Bruce Baker Will Bring Sanity To Reform Hype | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | Public school children have become lab rats of policymakers who are eager to see change faster than we can study what works. Experimental reforms are often founded on the lackluster research of ideological think tanks, who have filled the expertise vacuum left by academics unwilling to conduct policy-related research. “I’ve reviewed some just God awful stuff,” cringes Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker, whose influential data-driven education, blog, has helped him become a go-to reviewer for policy reports. For example, he notes, the libertarian-happy think tank The Reason Foundation concluded that a controversial program to peg funding to student improvement had worked, but forgot to highlight the policy was adopted . “I started realizing that there’s this never-ending flow of misinformation and disinformation out there,” he said. Like Nate Silver’s influential and statistically nuanced election forecast blog posts, Baker has gained notoriety for reexamining data to trounce his adversary’s conclusions. And, with Silver’s new independent 538 channel, Baker’s brand of statistics-heavy argument could be the future of education journalism. “We really have failed in the teaching of mathematics and probability,” decries Baker, who regularly debunks myths about unicorn policy changes that radically improve student outcomes. At scale, experiments . Statisticians measure outcomes in “standard deviations”, or how students move relative to their peers. A full standard deviation is, on average, going from the back of the pack (33rd percentile) to average (50th percentile). If “Anyone starts saying they’re getting you a half or full standard deviation additional growth–that’s when the bullshit detector starts going off.” When a new Stanford University study found that Washington D.C.’s controversial pay-for-performance teacher policy had a half-standard deviation impact on quality, newspaper headlines lit up, “ ” read the Economix blog. [tweet https://twitter.com/NickKristof/statuses/398838388906020864] Despite data buried within the reports that show how reform had slightly improved the number of good teachers who didn’t quit, there was virtually no impact on student outcomes. Even worse, it ignored the fact that many other school districts have attempted similar strategies, with widely varying results. Baker put together a soon after, re-organizing all the reform-minded states in relation to their students’ initial starting points on reading and math In the admittedly ugly graph above, states should be showing great gains (above the red line)–but the effect is mixed. Stanford’s was careful to note the researchers’ skepticism, but that was missed by many media reports. This hasn’t stopped some states from adopting radical pay-for-performance schemes. Miracle charters have also been a favorite target for Baker, who finds that many apparent success stories of market-driven schools actually end up spending far more per-pupil than similar public schools. The report was searing enough to make the popular KIPP charter respond, a debate that added a healthy amount of skepticism to reform discussions in education trade journals. His one mantra in reading education reports: “avoid certainty.” Academics and news media are on radically different timescales; news cycles last maybe 24-hours, while peer-review publishing shuffles at a comfortable pace of a year or longer for a single paper. To get the most bang for the buck, schools like Stanford are releasing reports to the press before the peer-review process. “Even with the big research studies that gets released these days, the way to get recognized is by staging a big press release, and putting the study out long before it’s actually peer reviewed and appears in a journal,” says Baker. “Having a response out within a week often times isn’t even fast enough.” So, Baker combines lightning quick posts with previous academic research. For instance, to debunk a myth that Louisiana’s Charter schools were outperforming New Jersey’s “Failure Factories,” he compared math schools in both areas re-evaluated in a for accurately assessing poverty rates. According to Baker, the cost of living varies by state, so we can’t use national averages of income to compare districts. When states are re-weighted by regional poverty, it’s clear that New Jersey is likely doing pretty well, considering the number of poor students they’re dealing with. The problem is, education is tricky. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman once quipped that they’d love to evaluate students by yearly improvement, but “children do not develop in nine-month chunks except during gestation.” Unless a study is randomized, rigorously controlled and published in a peer-reviewed journal, arm your bullshit meter if anyone is claiming they’ve found a scalable solution. Until then, follow Baker for his response on hyped-up reform stories. I do. |
Localizing Games For China Doesn’t Just Mean Making Them More “Chinese” | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | China boasts the world’s fastest growing market for mobile devices and, like in the rest of the world, games dominate the amount of time users spend in apps. The there already include overseas companies like , , and , and launch of ‘s gaming platform in July promises even more opportunities for foreign game developers. The flip side, however, is that competition is very intense. In order to succeed, developers have to localize successfully. Localizing for China’s mobile gamers, however, doesn’t just mean making adjustments to language and graphics. Publishers also have to consider factors like bandwidth limits for individual users that are highly constrained by the standards of other countries and the right distribution channels in . Wandoujia, one of China’s top third-party Android app stores with 200 million users, that even though 200,000 people downloaded s latest game, Clash of Clans, none were able to purchase gems, the in-game currency. Clash of Clans asked users to install the Google Play store but then denied the validity of their account because Google’s app store doesn’t support paid apps in China. To avoid making the same mistake, other game developers need to figure out a China-friendly payment system instead of using Google’s in-app billing system. Options include working with a local partner, such as , which publishes Fruit Ninja and Temple Run in China, and setting up billing through mobile carriers, or through third-party Android app stores. Getting the right payment system, however, doesn’t mean that players will actually use it. Mobile gamers in China are reluctant to make in-app purchases, especially in casual games like Candy Crush (though they are more willing to spend money in MMORPG titles). iDreamSky co-founder and executive vice president Jeff Lyndon told me that his company gets 40 to 60 customer service calls per day from players confused about in-app offers. Lyndon says that one of the main reasons for piracy and clones is because the original game is priced too high for the market. Another reason is when players can’t find legitimate versions of popular games because developers decided to work with just one or two of the top distributors ( ‘s CEO Eric Tan said during the TechNode/TechCrunch panel that there are 102 possible distribution channel for the company’s games, including mobile carriers and third-party app stores) “Some legitimate brands want to work only with the top channels, or just one channel, and they won’t work with others. It may make business sense at first, but in the long run the other guys are going to want to get a cut and they will do something about it,” says Lyndon. Ensuring that Fruit Ninja is available through multiple channels helped reduce the fruit-slicing game’s Chinese clones from 40 to zero, says Lyndon. The distribution strategy has proven successful for Halfbrick. Phil Larsen, the company’s CMO, told me that China currently delivers about 30% of Fruit Ninja’s revenue. That figure could “easily be over 50% by the end of 2014,” when the game marks its third anniversary in China. In addition to figuring out the right combination of distribution platforms, game developers also have to deal with limited bandwidth. Data is relatively more expensive compared to average salaries in China. For example, Lyndon says, the average Chinese smartphone user pays about $100 USD, or 15% of a $656 monthly salary, for a 3G data plan. A U.S. user, on the other hand, can pay just $50, or 1.5% of a $3,263 monthly salary, and enjoy LTE. Game companies also need to remember that between earners in major coastal cities like Shanghai and Beijing, and those in other provinces. “The difference between a 50MB game and 90MB game in China is pretty huge and we need to think about that,” says Larsen. “In the U.S. it’s not a big deal but in China it can be the deciding factor for a player.” One solution is to break games into smaller packages. Zhou Xin of said the company has had to shrink game packages from 7MB to 2MB, then compress them even further to 1MB. Though these games might not have full features or HD graphics, “at least we can still get some user experience,” he said. Being mindful of game sizes and monetization strategies is just as important–if not more so–than localizing content. “In China, 50MB is still a decent amount of data. So we focus our attention on that, in addition to just adding stuff to Fruit Ninja like Chinese fruit, Chinese backgrounds, Chinese blades,” says Lyndon. “What localization actually means, and what we should focus on, is not changing the game on the surface, but figuring out how to make it easier to approach.” |
The Open Secret Of iBeacon: Apple Could Have 250M Potential Units In The Wild By 2014 | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | Yesterday, Apple began a on its new iBeacon technology, pushed an to support them and turned the in an initial rollout. According to the details we know so far, some Apple stores may have as many as 20 iBeacons deployed, depending on the size. But the size of that rollout is deceptive for a couple of reasons — and the full implications of the impact on Apple’s iPad business, the internal mapping industry and the retail market are far bigger than anyone has really copped to. Specifically, most of the coverage of iBeacons so far has failed to recognize a very important reality of this system: Yes, there are that can use Bluetooth LE protocols to act as a beacon, and Apple is using separate, specialized iBeacon devices that look like small silver rectangles tucked under shelves in some stores. But some of the iBeacons deployed in Apple stores are not specialized hardware at all, they’re just regular iPads or iPhones that have been configured as iBeacons. And that capability extends to any Apple device with Bluetooth Low Energy and the latest major version of iOS. Let that sink in for a minute and you’ll start to realize the forward-thinking strategy Apple has been implementing over the course of the last few years. According to estimates by Creative Strategies Analyst and columnist , an estimated 170-190 million iOS devices are currently capable of being iBeacons — that is they have the right hardware and are running iOS 7. That number could swell to 250 million if holiday sales of iPhones and iPads are strong. Bajarin notes that Apple’s anticipated China Mobile deal could put them over 200 million in iPhone sales in 2014 alone. This means that every compatible iPad currently deployed in a retail store is already capable of being configured as an iBeacon transmitter — and every iOS device with Bluetooth LE can be a receiver. And the iPad is already enormously dominant in the retail space. We spoke to Scott Paul, CEO of — a tablet enclosure solutions company — about their deployments of iPads and other tablets as digital signage, kiosks, information panels and more. Some 90 percent of ArmorActive’s sales involve iPads, 88 percent of its customers are using iOS, 10 percent use Android, and only 2 percent are on Windows devices. The company has been installing iPad solutions since late 2010, when the iPad was launched. They handled the that made a splash earlier this year. To date, they’ve deployed nearly 50,000 tablet kiosks in hotels, restaurants, retail and other locations. Paul says that they have seen demand for Android tablets wax and wane, as ‘hot’ models like the Nexus 7 have hit the market. “Apple continues to be the tablet of choice for the majority of kiosk use that we build at ArmorActive,” Paul told TechCrunch. “Android is there, but we find that even though the price can be more competitive, the [fragmented] versioning of the OS and change in size makes it difficult to rely on the device for long-term deployments. Microsoft has been gaining traction with the larger enterprise clients because of IT being familiar with the OS.” Microsoft, a surprise recent dark horse in the retail tablet install market, has gained a lot of attention in the space because clients are familiar with integrating them into their infrastructure, says Paul. Remote management of these Windows tablets is also far more flexible and powerful than Apple’s iPad solutions. Apple does iterate on its remote utilities over time, but it’s far outstripped by the administration capabilities of Windows-based tablets. If, Paul says, there was a stronger app development community, Microsoft would be seeing even greater traction. We asked Paul about the implications for the retail tablet install business if currently installed iPads can be used as iBeacons. While he was aware of the iBeacon system, and Apple’s rollout today, he was surprised to learn that existing hardware could also be used as an iBeacon. “This would present a major advantage to Apple, as many businesses have already implemented these devices into some part of their business, so iBeacons could essentially be turned on all over the business landscape with just a little education and awareness,” Paul told us. “This would further the value of using tablets in retail, as they can both display and transmit messages to those who have displays in their pocket. Apple would widen the gap between themselves and other tablet manufactures, because now their existing hardware plays nicely with your iPhone or iPad and would require such close proximity to make a handshake. NFC has failed to provide this value as evident in the ISYS hardware rollouts that see little adoption.” Paul notes that the Kate Spade installation — which consists of simple digital signage displays — could be made into something much more powerful if they were turned into iBeacons. And, of course, ArmorActive is just one of providing iPad solutions for stores. Another high-profile install is at LeBron James’ Unknwn in Miami, where every shoe has its own iPad display.
Apple’s current implementation of the Apple Store app sketches out the way that most of these experiences will be enabled. Whether the retailer you’re visiting is using a third-party iBeacon or an iPad configured as an iBeacon, you’ll have to have an app from the company on your device. When you installed that app (say the Walmart shopping app) you would have been required to allow it access to your location. So this will be an ‘opt in’ system of sorts. Once the app is installed and iBeacons are configured, retailers will be able to push ‘micro-location’-based alerts to shoppers about deals or particular sections of the store. The beacons do this by using ‘ranging’ based on Bluetooth signal strength to determine very accurately — within a couple of feet at times — your physical location. These behaviors are impossible with GPS, which isn’t so hot indoors and whose accuracy has a much larger dead zone. This will be the next big frontier for indoor mapping and retail, and Apple has an enormous — possibly insurmountable — head start because of how forward-thinking it was with Bluetooth LE hardware. And these kinds of behaviors were things Apple was thinking about long before it began installing Bluetooth LE in its devices. Current Tesla User Interface designer and former Apple employee that the Apple Store app team had been wanting to implement this kind of thing since they first began working on the app, and it was just now coming to fruition. The first version of the app was shipped in June of 2010, and was likely in planning well before that. Only the latest version of the app finally adds support for iBeacons, which trigger based on various areas of the store. The current behaviors of the app, we understand, are very limited in comparison to the company’s eventual plans. And Apple’s rollout in its stores is best to be seen as a template on which others — and Apple itself — can build, rather than the end of this thread. The difference maker to me here is that any sort of indoor or micro-location system now has to battle upstream from demonstration to proof-of-concept to acceptance to licensing and/or acquisition. Apple, by rolling out hundreds of millions of units capable of being both users and active transmitters, has positioned itself to be the de facto standard. On the other hand, it’s also done the industry a big favor by helping to define what a micro-location system should look and work like — and to do the job of beginning to educate customers. It’s far too early in the micro-location game to figure out who a ‘winner’ might be, but Apple has already established its hardware as a must for any new systems to either integrate or support. This isn’t Apple rolling out beacons in a few of its stores. It’s Apple rolling out beacons in every store that has an iPad — and there are hundreds of thousands already out there. Now, when a retailer makes a decision about tablet kiosks or signage, they’ve got the incentive of a hyperlocal advertising or customer-service system built right in. Lest we forget about Apple being a hardware company: This is going to end up selling an absolute ton of iPads. Screenshots via , |
Payments Company Square Debuts A Newly Designed Website | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | After announcing a this morning, Square is debuting a new today. As the company explains, this new site reflects where web design is headed, and where Square customers are headed as well, which is ubiquity across devices and countries. Square’s new site has more attention to design, especially with attention to being device agnostic, including on desktop, tablet, or phone. Square says it has developed SVG animations and motion graphics, and is using a request animation frame to ensure that performance on the site is up to the maximum refresh rate of 60fps for smooth scrolling. The website noticeably reflects the company’s new marketplace efforts, in-store technologies and hardware efforts. It seems to be an accurate reflection of what Square is today (as opposed to the mobile payments-focus of the company a few years back). |
It’s Time For A Special Regulatory Zone | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 12 | 7 | Your government is the enemy of the future. Innovative technology that would disrupt the world as we know it is already here, but oppressive government bureaucrats keep getting in its way. ; the ; the ; the ; . This is intolerable and must stop. The government must get out of Silicon Valley’s way. No wonder that, even as it has become , its leading lights are musing about , or, at least, “an environment where people can try new things … some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society,” as Google’s CEO earlier this year. Too right. In the same way that have triggered enormous economic growth in places like Shenzhen, Dubai, and even Iran, we need an American equivalent; a Special Regulatory Zone where the normal rules and regulations which (allegedly) apply to today’s technology will hold no sway. A bit like Burning Man’s famous , which Page also cited, except with less dust, fewer rules, greater permanency, and a slightly lower incidence of incoherent naked people. The existence of such a zone will be critically important to the sacred mission of bringing us all the fruits of the future as soon as humanly possible. you ask. I believe the answer is staring us all in the face. I hereby modestly propose that the city of Oakland be transformed into that Special Regulatory Zone. Oakland is perfect. It could hardly be more accessible to the tech titans who define this era; it’s barely a stone’s throw across the Bay from Silicon Valley. And yet at the same time it is a city notoriously plagued by poverty, crime, and political gridlock, all of which, like all problems, can be solved by the application of sufficient quantities of VC-funded smartphone apps and responsive websites built on Node.js and MongoDB. Silicon Valley has already shown this to be true with its cornucopia of revolutionary, world-transforming companies such as Instagram, Snapchat, Topsy, QuizUp, and Vine (to say nothing of Color.) What’s more, despite the challenges it faces, Oakland is already an early adopter. It was a pioneer of and recently approved a Domain Awareness Center that will provide 24-hour surveillance of license plates and street views for “ .” Its civic leaders don’t really understand the tech industry — indeed, one , laughably, “I have this theory that the big problem with the tech industry is a lack of self awareness” — but as an East Bay resident myself (okay, fine, Berkeley, but some of my best friends live in Oakland) I’m confident that the imposition of a Special Regulatory Zone organized by Silicon Valley’s finest tech minds would be welcomed by most of Oakland, much as a grateful Iraqi population greeted their American liberators a decade ago. Needless to say, its economically disadvantaged population can be turned into an army of six-figure earners in a jiffy by simply (though admittedly it’s not clear how long it will take to feature them all on the Today Show). Obviously all that training will have to be done en masse rather than one-on-one in what I like to call “re-education camps,” perhaps a little like the ones that kickstarted China’s economic growth some decades ago. We may however need to tweak the demographics of the Special Regulatory Zone a little for testing purposes. To make space, Luddites, hipsters, and other technological throwbacks could be humanely resettled to camps in the Central Valley, where I’m given to understand that there’s a thriving informal economy of agriculture jobs that can support them. Some will argue that Oakland’s may be an obstacle; but I say that, first of all, it can be curtailed if necessary by simply building a panopticon and an army of drone enforcers, and second, perhaps these lemons can be turned into lemonade. After all, aren’t the people willing to commit violence for the sake of the success of their personal enterprises exactly the kind of people with the drive, grit, and pluck required to become successful entrepreneurs? We only need to redirect their energies towards developing MVPs (Minimally Violent Products.) Furthermore, Oakland’s history of gang violence will likely let us investigate the realities of drone crime without having startups perform ethically awkward experiments themselves. You may think that this proposal is a little too America-focused, so let me add one key feature; any foreigner who meets certain technical criteria would be allowed to immigrate to this new SRZ to build their startup. Obviously this will raise legal issues in the outside world; this in turn will open a market niche for the first startup to build ergonomically designed ankle-cuff location trackers to ensure that foreign founders don’t leave the bounds of the SRZ except for certain approved purposes, such as Y Combinator interviews. I would like to finally suggest that the SRZ be renamed from “Oakland” — there are hardly any oaks left, anyway — to a name which better represents its glorious future. I propose “Cyberia.” Perhaps, in the future, people will speak in tremblingly optimistic voices of startup entrepreneurs being sent to Cyberia. It may never happen, but a man can dream. yours truly, in Oakland, on . |
Codecademy Releases Its First Educational App, A.K.A. My New Subway Time Killer | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Although I write a lot about apps and Internet stuff, I never really learned to code. I threw the “really” in there to soften the blow, but the fact is, I straight up don’t know how to do it. I started learning at one point in middle school, but my high school didn’t push CS, and by college I spent all of my waking hours writing for the student newspaper or reading books written by dead white guys. So it just never happened. But it’s on my to-do list. I swear. Today made its first foray into the app space and released an intro to coding course designed to take less than an hour to complete. I had a lot of laundry to do, so I figured I’d give it a shot. The launch was timed to coincide with , one of the goals of which is to get 10 million students in the U.S. to take an hour of coding. But the broader aim with the app was to create a version of the coursework that could be done in bite-sized portions on the go, well-suited for working professionals and busy types who want to learn a new skill. Codecademy for iPhone will eventually be its own independent learning platform, CEO and founder Zach Sims said. Version one is very basic — it essentially shows you what coding looks like and what the most rudimentary functions are — and the team is hoping to push more content out this week. The app is meant to be a super-easy onboarding ramp to future coding. The text feedback you get after each question is encouraging and makes you feel like you’re nailing it, which is nice motivation if you, like me, have a fragile but easily swollen ego. I finished the course just before the wash cycle on my lights ended and immediately wanted more. The program is currently broken up into five different sections that flow from one into the next: an intro (“Getting Started”), Data Types, Variables, Comparisons, and If… Else. Each comprises a few examples and questions, making for, as Sims put it, a series of “snackable” lessons. The learning experience has to operate under the usual constraints of mobile, specifically a smaller screen size and user intolerance for typing a lot. Whereas Codecademy’s desktop service supports learning by doing, the app holds your hand a bit more. Rather than writing their own code, users fill in brief segments of pre-written lines of code, most of which are presented as multiple-choice questions. For some sections, you just have to hit “Run” without answering a question Some of the questions seem ridiculously easy. In the introductory section, for instance, you are asked, “Can you write a program that calculates ‘6-2’?” and all you have to do is fill in “print(6 ? 2);” with a minus sign. (The “?” there is a box that you tap for your multiple-choice options.) “Ha-ha!” You may laugh to yourself. “Coding is for dummies! I’ll make a fortune on my app idea!” That’s the trouble with passive learning, rather than working all the way through a problem on your own. You have to remember to pay attention. My only issue with the half hour I spent on the app today (humblebrag) is that there weren’t any definitions provided, so you might have to Google things like “what is a string?” Just for instance. Presumably that will get ironed out as Codecademy continues to build out the mobile wing of its business. The goal is to create a product that is platform-agnostic, Sims said, citing Duolingo as an ed-tech company that has succeeded in that regard. The restrictions on producing one’s own code are tough, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing how Codecademy negotiates that. For now, I think I’m going to sign up online. |
Fashion Site StyleCaster Gets A Glossy Redesign, Adds E-Commerce Features | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Fashion-focused startup StyleCaster Media is unveiling a redesign of that gives the company its name. Vice President of Product Peter Tanapat gave me a quick tour of the new site (the first full redesign since March 2012) last week, and many of the changes are well-executed variants of what you’d expect — the design is now responsive, meaning that it works on tablets and smartphones by adjusting to the size of the screen, and the top articles are highlighted with big pictures at the top of the page, in an area that Tanapat referred to as the “Jubmotron.” From a business perspective, the biggest change is probably the addition of e-commerce features. Users will now be able to buy products after trying them on virtually using StyleCaster’s Try On! Studio (based on technology from ), browse and purchase editors’ picks, and purchase the other fashion that’s written about on the site. While incorporating e-commerce into fashion sites is hardly a new idea, founder and CEO Ari Goldberg argued in the redesign press release that StyleCaster is “the first publisher to provide advertisers and brands with both the technology and premium editorial content that will effectively help readers find their products through the buying decision process.” The company says this is the launch of its third big revenue source, in addition to advertising and Try On partnerships. One otherthing that Tanapat emphasized is the fact that the redesign was also built with existing StyleCaster content in mind — many redesigns leave older articles looking weirdly formatted or downright unreadable, but he said, “A lot of the content is evergreen. We have a lot of traffic to pages … that were published six months ago.” Founded in 2009, StyleCaster Media says that across StyleCaster and other sites like Beauty High, The Vivant, and Daily Makeover, it reaches 7 million unique visitors every month globally, across desktop, mobile, and tablet. (Update: Just for a point of comparison – and not an apples-to-apples comparison – says Stylecaster.com had 616,000 desktop unique visitors from the United States in November.) The company also says that 35 percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices. |
Kleiner Perkins Partner Chi-Hua Chien Transitioning Out Of Firm | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | If you paid a visit to Sand Hill Road headquarters on any given day, you’d likely bump into . Chien, who has emerged as one of the firm’s most accessible public figures since joining Kleiner some six years ago, is known for being a particularly engaged and responsive VC — always ready to pop into the office, provide advice to an entrepreneur, or talk shop with his fellow investment partners. But aside from continuing his workaday routine, things are changing for Chien and other partners at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Sources say that Chien is in the process of transitioning out of his role at Kleiner, amid recent changes in the firm’s partner structure. Both Chien and Kleiner Perkins declined to comment on this story. Last month, that Chien was “thinking about launching his own venture capital fund” that would focus on early-stage consumer technology companies. Two other seed investing sources we spoke to backed up this story and said Chien has continued to look into building his own fund, as part of his plan to transition out of Kleiner. Another person familiar with the situation says that early interest from potential limited partners in a new Chien-led fund has been solid. Chien, who joined Kleiner in 2007, has led the firm’s investments in a number of consumer web startups including , , , and (as well as Spotify, the now-public and , and the .) Some people have speculated that it is partly the lackluster performances of some of these kinds of consumer web investments that led to Kleiner’s in October, which left Chien and several other partners off of the investment committee in charge of Kleiner’s latest fund. At that time, however, it was that no partners were leaving Kleiner as part of the changes. Chien’s ongoing departure is said to be amicable on a personal level — he was in attendance at the firm’s holiday party, and continues to be active at other Kleiner events. People with knowledge of the situation say a more full exit will likely happen over the course of 2014. We’ll be sure to keep tabs on Chien’s next moves, since he’ll no doubt continue to be someone to watch in the startup investing space. It’s just the latest example that as much as industries like venture capital can seem to take on an air of staid permanence, technology is at its heart about constant change — and the world of those who invest in the sector is no different. |
Qualcomm Unveils 64-Bit Chipset With Integrated LTE: Next Year’s Moto G Could Have 4G | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Qualcomm has just , which is Qualcomm’s first announced processor with 64-bit support, but it’s actually more interesting because it aims to make integrated 4G LTE support a lot more affordable for device manufacturers. They plan to launch the 410 as a manufacturing sample by the first half of next year, which means it could be in shipping phones by this time in 2014. The 64-bit component is a key part of these new chipsets and should make it possible for devs to take advantage of improved processing capabilities in future Android software. But the LTE support being made available to devices like the Moto G, which currently uses a Snapdragon 400 as its powerhouse, and even more affordable devices sold in emerging markets like India and other places is bound to be far more exciting to device makers, app developers and service operators. Access to broadband is often cited as a key factor in helping determine not only income but quality of life, so making LTE affordable, even if only on the consumer hardware end, could have a tremendous impact on the global economy. It’s not just Android that stands to benefit here, either – Qualcomm calls out specifically Windows Phone and Firefox OS as supported by the Snapdragon 410, too. But for a North American audience, I’d be watching this very closely as used by the newly rejuvenated powers at Google-owned Motorola: As of right now, the Nexus 5 is probably the best deal in a 4G-capable off-contract phone, but Motorola could convert the remaining non-smartphone users domestically into both smartphone and LTE users in one fell swoop. |
Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Adds Video Upload On iOS, And Finally An iPad Version | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Amazon today added support for video uploads in the new iOS version of its which also now natively supports iPad and iPad mini. The update comes over a year and a half after Amazon first the capability to store videos in its Cloud Drive Photos service via the app’s Android counterpart. Its slow progress to introduce the feature on Apple devices goes to show how much Amazon values its iOS customer base. (Or rather, how it doesn’t). The company quietly released the updated app this afternoon, which, like the Android version, now supports the ability to upload videos up to 2 GB in size or 20 minutes in length. That’s long enough for the majority of personal videos, and still slightly longer than YouTube’s setting of 15 minutes (ahead of account verification). Also like the Android app, those who have turned on Cloud Photos’ Auto-Save functionality in the iOS version will now see support for video uploads, too. That means that both new and existing videos and photos from the iPhone or iPad will be automatically uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive when the device is connected to Wi-Fi (or Wi-Fi and cellular, if you choose). It’s handy that Amazon will retroactively upload your media collection when you switch this feature on, as that’s not always the case. For example, when Flickr it would only begin auto-uploads from that point forward, making it troublesome for new or lapsed users wanting to move their entire photo collections over to Yahoo’s photo-sharing site. Amazon has a few other tricks up its sleeve, too. For example, a “large upload mode” setting lets you disable the iOS device’s lockscreen in order to allow large uploads (like all your videos) to complete. And you can switch on an “Auto Save” option which allows progress to continue in the background. In addition, the Settings screen shows an indicator of how much Cloud Drive storage you’ve used, with separate colors for files, photos and now videos. Still, the app feels very basic compared with competition from Flickr or Google, for example, or other popular mobile photo-sharing apps. You can’t organize your photos or videos in any real way, tag them, search through them, or edit them using built-in tools. It’s merely an interface that connects the phone or iPad to Amazon’s online storage. Still, with 5 GB of free storage available, it’s worth it to back up your content to the cloud, if you haven’t already done so using another service, like Google, Facebook, or Apple’s iCloud. Now with video support across both iOS and Android platforms, Amazon may need to rethink the name of this app, since Cloud Drive is no longer quite right. The updated version of the iOS app is . |
As Foursquare Concentrates On Demonstrating Value, It No Longer Allows Private Check-Ins On iOS 7 | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Foursquare no longer allows users to check in privately with the iOS version of its app. The change was made with the recent 7.0 release and ‘iOS 7 refresh’ last week and appears to be a play to demonstrate the value of its network by ensuring check-in data is accessible to users of the product, its API partners and any possible suitors for acquisition. The , tipped to us by user , appears on Foursquare’s site and lists growth as the reasoning behind the change. “As Foursquare continues to grow, we have decided to remove the ability to privately check in,” the entry states. “If you don’t wish to share your location, we’d encourage you to still use Foursquare to get out and explore awesome places nearby!” Foursquare clarifies that all past check-ins that were made privately will continue to be private. The entry notes that private check-ins will still be available on its desktop and other platforms like Android (and older versions of the iOS app?) for now, but we’d expect this option to start disappearing across all offerings sooner or later. We discussed and found it to be a nice step forward. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to use it for my normal ‘Foursquaring’ and it holds up really well. The private check-in was a feature that allowed you to tag a location as having been visited without exposing it to your network of friends. If you’re not a Foursquare user, it’s important to note that detailed check-in info was and is only visible to your friends on the network. A private check-in was an additional layer of privacy that allowed you to create a personal list of ‘been theres’ without broadcasting those locations. Foursquare notes that you’re more than welcome to continue getting value out of the network checking in if you don’t want to share your location. This decision speaks to Foursquare’s current direction on several levels. First of all, it coincides with the overall shift of the service away from a ‘check-in game’ to a recommendation engine. Removing the private option means that you can no longer use Foursquare as a ‘personal diary’ of visits, either. It is firmly a public network of curated locations in the vein of Yelp now. It’s also interesting in the light of the questions about profitability that seem to surround Foursquare with a low hum of acquisition talk these days. Foursquare is a great, well-built product in and of itself. But its database of locations, verified by personal check-in and user activity like reviews, photos and likes, is unmatched by almost any other competitor in that space. There are databases with more locations, but I have a hard time thinking that any of them are so rich in signals. The Foursquare API is one of the go-to location feeds for independent developers that I speak to, and many big-name apps that don’t have skin in the Google v. Apple game (and they’re getting fewer by the day) use it because it’s just really dang good. Increasing the addressable surface area of public check-in data only makes sense if Foursquare wants to increase its attractiveness for acquisition. Of course, it probably won’t hurt the amount of public signal when it comes to powering its own product, too. : One interesting question about this is what will happen eventually with Foursquare check-ins via API. One of the larger private check-in partners, Path, has an experience built off of checking in either solo or with small trusted groups that may or may not align with your Foursquare friends. If Foursquare applies this ‘no private check-in’ model to the API as well, will these partners be out of luck or will there continue to be a solution offered there. If there’s a significant amount of data coming in from outside networks like Path, the answer might be the former, rather than the latter. |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Accel’s Ping Li And Foundation Capital’s Charles Moldow | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, Accel Partners’ and Foundation Capital’s will be joining us, separately, in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Li focuses on early-stage growth software and data-center investments for Accel and is also responsible for the firm’s Big Data Fund. He’s a board member of Blue Jeans Network, Cloudera, Code42, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Origami Logic, RelateIQ, Tenable Network Security and Trifacta. Prior to Accel, Li worked at Juniper Networks as a Senior Product Line Manager for their flagship M-series router products, as well as Director of Corporate Development. Moldow has made 14 investments since joining Foundation in 2005, of which five have been acquired: PowerSet to Microsoft; Xoopit to Yahoo; Adwhirl to Google; Weblistic to Spot Runner; and Therative to Phillips. His current portfolio includes: BancBox, CloudOn, Copious, Everyday Health, Fanhood, HomeRun, LendingClub, Luminate, Motif Investing, Revel Touch, and SunRun. Previously Moldow spent five years with Tellme Networks and was a member of the founding executive team. Please send us your or put them in the comments below! |
How Does Apple Really Feel About Bitcoin? | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Over the past couple of months, there have been a few Bitcoin app rejections by Apple that have made some waves. First, the venture-backed startup entirely from the App Store. Today, a from peer-to-peer messaging and payments app highlights its own rejection and the subsequent removal of its ability to transact in Bitcoin. Gliph’s Rob Banagale talks about a few aspects of the rejection, including the technical details of how Gliph handles Bitcoin, Apple’s motivations for rejecting the app and the possibility that it could change its mind. The rejection, Banagale notes, was based largely off of section 22.1 of Apple’s App Store review guidelines. The rule states that “apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where they are made available to users. It is the developer’s obligation to understand and conform to all local laws.” Bitcoin is not illegal, but it is also not legally recognized by governments as a currency. This gray area is what is leading Apple to reject Bitcoin-transaction apps. We reached out to Banagale to talk about the way that Gliph functions, and how it differs from apps like Coinbase. He notes that the app works with wallets like those from Coinbase and BIPS, but doesn’t function as a wallet itself. Instead, it passes along requests for wallet addresses (just strings of numbers) to the wallets themselves, and back to the recipient. The setup also means that Gliph does not deal with exchanges. “We didn’t want to specify which wallet you had to use,” Banagale says. “By doing it that way we aren’t really manipulating Bitcoin directly.” This method means that Gliph isn’t actually processing Bitcoin transactions, just facilitating them. It’s a distinction that may either be lost on Apple, or that isn’t evident enough to differentiate Gliph from other Bitcoin wallet apps. Banagale notes that Apple itself may be planning on entering the payments game outside of its own stores, and that this may have influenced their decision to reject Bitcoin apps. But that’s probably pretty unlikely. It is clear, though, that Apple isn’t acting as any real of Bitcoin at this point, something that Banagale says it’s in a good position to do. In the end, the answer is likely fairly simple. From our understanding, Apple rejected both Coinbase and Gliph based on rule 22.1 specifically. Yes, the interpretation of the rule is fairly narrow, as Bitcoin has not been declared legal or illegal in most of the areas that the apps have been available. But this is not a matter of speculation about whether Bitcoin become legal, it’s a simple matter of whether or not it legal. Since there is no clear-cut government acknowledgement of Bitcoin’s legality, Apple is simply taking the safest, most protective path by disallowing transaction functionality in App Store apps — for now. Google has similar rules related to illegal activity on its Google Play store, but has chosen not to enforce them on Bitcoin apps at this point. The stance there appears to be one of lenience or, as Banagale puts it, ‘optimism’ about the future legal status of Bitcoin. Still, Banagale feels that Apple got this one wrong. He points out that Gliph does not actually handle transactions, but only facilitates the triggering of them via online wallets. Yes, it’s a technicality, but there are plenty of apps that function as a basis of a small technical twist. Literally billions have been spent and earned by companies based on technicalities. So, in the case of Gliph, perhaps the functionality merits another look by Apple, but we wouldn’t hold our breath. This is a case where the rules that Apple uses to govern its store have to take into account the probable byproducts of litigation or legal ramifications, not just current complaints. And for a company with as big a target painted on it as Apple, caution is likely the better part of valor here. We’ve heard, but don’t know exactly why, Apple has been issuing stern comments to developers about legal notices in apps. They’ve been instructing app makers to ensure that any links to legal info about using Apple assets or other items with terms and conditions of use attached are visible and links are accessible when appropriate. It could be that the stance on Bitcoin is tied into that, but Apple has had a fairly standard approach to transaction functionality in the App Store for years when it comes to the crypto currency. The recent rejection of Coinbase and Gliph doesn’t represent an about-face so much as perhaps ‘enhanced awareness and activity’ when it comes to rejecting apps based on rule 22.1. With the recent loss by Apple in the courts related to the e-book case and the installation of a government-appointed monitor, the company is under more scrutiny than ever. Whether that’s coloring their handling of Bitcoin apps is a matter of conjecture, as we’ve gotten no information that indicates one way or another. As to how Apple might handle Bitcoin transactions in apps in the future, look to how it handles gambling apps, also covered in the App Store rules. For states or countries that allow gambling — like Nevada or the UK — Apple allows apps to use geo-fencing to restrict activities to those regions. A similar system could be put in place to allow Bitcoin transactions in places where it has been deemed ‘legal’ by a government entity. Is there a personal vendetta towards Bitcoin because Apple could expand its Apple ID-based payment system? That’s not our understanding. But will its attitude towards Bitcoin be one of caution for the foreseeable future? Yes. And any developers looking to include core transaction elements would do well to note that stance for now. |
Microsoft Could Bring Back The Start Menu In The Next Version Of Windows | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Microsoft watchers and recently detailed a number of changes that could be coming in the next major version of Windows, called “Threshold.” It could be heading towards our waters in 2015. Unsurprisingly, Threshold continues the trend of unification inside the Windows aegis. The platform becomes more tightly locked, with a common core sporting several faces, or SKUs. One, as described by Foley as “Modern,” is akin to Windows RT, and would focus on Windows Store apps. Also potentially coming with Threshold is a “more traditional consumer SKU,” which would include “some semblance of productivity and familiarity with Windows.” That makes sense. And, finally, an enterprise facing SKU that would suit organizations of scale and their needs. This should all make sense, as the builds that Foley is describing mirror closely Windows 8.1 RT, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7. The real force behind what Foley is discussing is the idea of having one core Windows regardless of SKU or device, that would allow developers to build once and deploy broadly. You can see the outlines of this in WinRT, and so forth. So, not surprising, but also encouraging. Now, to something that does surprise: The Start menu could be coming back. According , the Start menu – not just the Start button, which has already returned – could come back to Windows. It would probably “appear only on those product versions that support the desktop,” which makes sense given that sans desktop, you wouldn’t need the damn thing. All this kicks together to imply that in the Windows RT/Windows Phone OS we are not going to have the desktop at all. Office will go Metro, ending the need for the desktop on those devices. Naturally, there needs to be more user interface integration and so forth, but I think the writing is on the wall. So the story of Windows unification could contain new wrinkles that bring back old functionality in some SKUs. Thurrott likes this: When you combine this information with Mary Jo’s SKU info, you can see that Microsoft is, if not moving forward per se, at least continuing to do the right thing and responding to complaints. And given the changes in the groups responsible for Windows, this wasn’t a given at all. It’s a good sign. I agree with that, mostly, though any focus on the desktop comes at the expense of Metro, which means the Windows Store. Still, Microsoft has to assuage enterprise customers and consumers alike, which requires sacrifice. |
Scripps Buys Newsy For $35M To Expand From TV And Newspapers To Digital Video | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Another exit for a new media startup into the arms of the old media industry: , the storied owner of 19 local television stations and daily newspapers in 13 markets across the U.S., today announced that it has acquired , a digital video news platform, for $35 million in cash. Newsy will become a subsidiary of Scripps. To mark the video-friendly event, Newsy and Scripps posted a . The deal is expected to close January 1, Scripps said. This represents a pretty impressive exit for Newsy, which was founded in 2008 and raised . It also represents an interesting evolution for Scripps: back in 2007, in a moment of digital chicken that it lost, it division (full of in acquired and homegrown assets) and remained E.W. Scripps the publishing company. Since then, it has quietly been building that digital effort back up, with more cautious footing. This is about Scripps, which was founded in 1879, buying an asset that gives it a digital video component to complement its existing TV and online services — effectively a bridge between the three areas where it already does business if you also count newspapers. It also gives the company access into an audience that consumes their news (and video) on devices like tablets, and has largely turned away from some of those more traditional platforms where Scripps still bases a majority of its business. “Newsy adds an important dimension to our video news strategy,” Rich Boehne, Scripps chairman, president and CEO, said in a statement. “It’s a next-generation news network designed and built exclusively for digital audiences. Newsy’s uncommon approach to curation and storytelling has helped it build a strong national brand, which fits well with both our current media assets and our ambitions to further develop digital media businesses.” Newsy’s ad-supported videos are currently delivered to web, mobile, tablet and connected TV platforms, both direct to consumer and via partnerships with (TC’s owner) AOL, Microsoft and Mashable, among others. The fact that these were named in the release might hint that those partnerships will continue post-acquisition, although this wasn’t specified. What been is where the service will expand, which will be into more city- and region-based content: “Newsy will become an important news source on the Scripps digital products in local markets,” the company said. “Scripps is committed to participating in the future of digital media,” said Adam Symson, senior vice president and chief digital officer for Scripps, in a statement. “Newsy is built for the digital audience, especially on the platforms we’re seeing emerge now with highly connected consumers.” Newsy’s 35 full-time employees and its part-time employees will remain in Columbia, MO, the company says. That will include founder and CEO Jim Spencer. “We are proud to be joining with Scripps, which shares our values of innovation and editorial integrity,” he noted. |
Tech’s Hyper-Gentrification Has A New Fake Spokesperson | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | This weekend a taxi driver dropped me off at Twitter HQ and, as I paid my $7 fare with Square, he asked me if I worked at Twitter. When I responded “No,” he said, “Ok, I usually charge those people more.” Depending on who you ask, is either causing an economic cold war, or is blown out of proportion. Any way you slice it, the tech industry, paying proportionally higher salaries because of VC funding and creating millionaires through lucrative IPOs, has caused housing prices and everything else influenced by housing prices in the Bay Area to skyrocket. And No one likes paying 3k rent for a 1 bedroom, rich or poor… — justin kan (@justinkan) The rising housing prices and sense of inequity led to community protests this morning at , with the intent of blocking a Google private bus, for many a symbol for all that is wrong with the tech bubble. The protestors from the tech giants in order to fund affordable housing. Of course, tech rich or not, wants to pay $3,000 in rent for a one-bedroom apartment. The collective startup world cringed of a particularly insensitive response to the protestors: “Why don’t you go to a city where you can afford it? This is a city for the right people,” screamed someone who purported themselves to be a Googler. According to , the confrontation was actually a staged performance by who looks to be University of California union organizer (Update: Alpers it was a stunt.) The most comical part of Alper’s act was his declaration that he had been living in SF for six months! Honestly, if he really wanted to piss people off, he should have borrowed a pair of Google Glass. Despite the myths, and dumb Op-Eds, few people working in tech think that tech is a meritocracy. Sergey Brin has been secretly buying up down South. And Google, Facebook, Apple and Genentech are working with the City of San Francisco to pay for permits to use the MUNI stops, to the MTA board in January. You don’t need Glass to see there’s a problem, and the solution isn’t |
Payments Startup Clinkle Lays Off A Quarter Of Its Staff [UPDATED: New Layoffs In Addition To 30+ Who Already Left] | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | Stealthy payments startup which raised in outside funding before its product ever launched, has terminated around 25% of its staff (16 people), according to a report posted this morning by . The news of the layoffs comes amid that there’s internal trouble, and even potentially issues with Clinkle leadership, which has raised doubts about the company’s future. The company has had a hard time keeping news of its goings-on under wraps, choosing to remain “stealthy” even as large-scale leaks, emerged on sites like YouTube and Tumblr. ( . See below for Clinkle’s response.) Fortune says there had been a plan to disclose the Clinkle layoffs by announcing it alongside the news of high-profile new hires. The company had added including Meanwhile, Hopkins was added to help Clinkle pick the right people and teach those already there how to manage. Reading between the lines, it’s a hint that those in charge weren’t ready to drive a company with $25 million in funding and the ambitious idea that it could replace your physical wallet with a mobilized version. The layoffs then could be very well the result of McCarthy’s work – coming in, clearing house, and installing the right team. And that may be something Clinkle really needed. But as he told Fortune, the layoffs shouldn’t necessarily signal trouble for Clinkle: “Some young people are leaving, and some very seasoned executives are joining. It’s reasonable to assume that these execs wouldn’t be joining if something was chronically wrong or broken.” : The following is a statement from Clinkle about the layoffs: Our objective in today’s organizational restructuring is to better allocate our resources and work towards ensuring that we have the right people in the right roles. While turnover is a normal part of any business, especially in the startup world, it’s not easy or enjoyable for anyone. In all cases, we’re committed to managing these things as professionally and as considerately as possible. Today’s moves will better position our executive team to focus on adding the experience and functional expertise that we need. 16 employees (about 25% of the company) were affected in the areas of ops, growth, and human resources. This is in addition to the 30+ employees that were already reported to have left Clinkle by Business Insider. With regards to the 30+ employees, to put it in perspective, some were part-time, some were students, some were contractors – as we grow, there are going to be changes in business strategy that result in people seeking opportunity elsewhere. As I said, in all situations, we’re committed to managing things as professionally as possible. |
UK’s Tesco Starts ‘Close Cooperation’ With Samwers’ Rocket Internet, Leads $250M Round In Lazada | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 12 | 9 | If you thought that the days of Samwer brothers e-commerce investments with the eBays and of the world were over, think again. Today, their Berlin-based incubator announced a new and strategic investment partner, the UK physical and online retail giant Tesco. Tesco, which is the world’s second-largest retailer by revenues (after Walmart) will now work in “close cooperation” with the brothers’ incubator. That will begin by leading a $250 million round in , an Amazon-like online marketplace with operations across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Other Rocket regulars Access Industries, Kinnevik and Verlinvest also participated. Other aspects of the deal, Rocket says, will include “customer analytics, private label development and supply chain management.” And as another part of the news, it has also expanded operations in the region with in Indonesia and — a social commerce effort “to tap into the large informal e-commerce market of C2C transactions which includes thousands of shops on social networks such as Facebook.” It comes on the heels of a in Lazada only six months ago and brings the total invested into Lazada to $486 million. Rocket Internet — which is known mainly for incubating e-commerce startups — notes that this is the first time that Tesco has invested in a pure-play e-commerce operation. Up to now, Tesco has built an empire on Walmart-style supermarkets, primarily in the UK, using that to expand as a strong and early player in e-commerce in grocery and home goods delivery and later digital goods to complement the sale of electronics. But the investment news comes at a tricky time for Tesco: the company has long been seen as an aggressive and successful retailer, but its strategy has stumbled in the past two years. In the were down 1.5% in its main UK stores, and sales in other markets in Europe were down 4%, and in Asia 5.1%. In September, it (so, maybe not so Easy to crack the U.S., after all). In that context, a focus on new, emerging markets that ride on operations that have already been seeded is a sign to investors that Tesco is now betting big on new opportunities. Emerging markets like Southeast Asia are a key target because they are large, and fast-growing. Southeast Asia as a region has some 600 million consumers who are only now really getting turned on to smartphones and shopping online. Indeed, this seems to be the rationale for Tesco’s investment. “This investment in Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce retailer continues our strategy of developing leading multichannel businesses in core growth markets,” said Robin Terrell, group multichannel director of Tesco, in a statement. “Lazada is an exciting, pioneering business which has developed a market-leading offer in each of its five markets in just 18 months.” Notably, Rocket Internet has established e-commerce businesses spanning home goods, fashion, financial services and much more . It has put a particularly strong focus on operations in emerging markets in recent years because they are growing faster and are less crowded with competition, told me earlier this year in an interview. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors to build out these operations, often from repeat investors — something that could either point to sustained success if you are a Samwer believer or ponzi-like tendencies focused around clones, if you are one of their detractors. The real truth is that it’s hard to tell, because as is usual with Rocket Internet, it is not revealing the revenues, net income/loos or any other financial metrics of its operations. However, Tesco is a publicly-traded company, and that will likely lead to demands for greater transparency in the future. (For now Rocket tells us that the operation has some 1,500 employees across five Southeast Asian countries and that Lazada is the “leading online general merchandiser across the region.” Although Access Industries, controlled by Russian-born (now U.S. citizen) tycoon Len Blavatnik, is a regular Rocket Internet investor, this will be Access’ first investment in Lazada. “We are delighted to welcome Tesco and Access to join our investor group through this funding round,” said Maximilian Bittner, CEO of Lazada Group, in a statement. |
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