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The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Ben Horowitz’s Honest And Real Take On Entrepreneurship | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Imagine your business is down to its last stretch of runway and your investors refuse to put more cash into it. Your friends and your most trusted advisers tell you that it’s probably time to throw in the towel, but as a last-ditch effort to find some capital, you decide to take the company public. You are half-certain that the company will go completely bankrupt during the actual roadshow, making the entire process superfluous. You put on a brave face for each banker you meet, and keep an eye on your phone for the call that you’re hoping won’t come. And then it does. But the call isn’t about your company, it’s about your family — the only thing in the world that’s more important than your company. Your wife has had an allergic reaction to her medicine and stopped breathing. In that moment, you feel a fear that you’ve never felt before. Everything that matters to you is slipping away. This is Ben Horowitz’s story, as told in his new book, . When I first heard that Horowitz was writing a I thought of my husband. Because of my job I’ve always known that being a founder is hard, but watching Suneel create and made me realize how emotionally taxing the journey can be. As supportive as I try to be, I know there’s nothing like Suneel hearing empathy from someone who’s been through that and worse. That’s why he, and many other founders, have come to rely on Horowitz’s routine writings in the blogosphere. In the past year or so, a publisher approached Horowitz, attempting to convince him to put his thoughts into book format. He thought that if he did it, it would have to be different from other books that address how to be successful as a CEO. First, he wasn’t doing it for the money. He’s the book’s earnings to the in order to support its efforts to help women fight for their basic rights throughout the world. Second, there was something missing in the management advice book world. As Horowitz explained to me in an interview, he drew a lot of inspiration from a book by former Intel CEO and president Andy Grove, . Horowitz saw a way that he could expand on what Grove tackled in his book by talking about the real problems and issues entrepreneurs face in the context of his own experiences. He told me in an interview, “I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same — they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book, they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion. So I didn’t want to write another one of those. But having been on the other side I really felt like there was a missing book, which was what happens when everything goes wrong, and you have set it all up right.” The first thing that struck me as compelling about Horowitz’s book is his brutal honesty around his own missteps when it came to being an engineer, founder, husband and more. Of course, many would say it is easy to be honest about struggle and startups when you’ve had a $1 billion-plus exit to HP and now lead a successful venture capital firm. But when you read Horowitz’s account, his honesty comes across as genuine. And my sense is that his honesty is part self-reflecting and part inherent, and translates into the book because it is a trait he has had for some time — for better or worse. Horowitz spends the first few chapters establishing his own story, from growing up in Berkeley (his father is conservative writer and policy advocate David Horowitz), to meeting his wife Felicia in LA, and then the unfolding of his career. He gives the reader an inside view into his humble start as an engineer at NetLabs, and his beginnings working for his future venture and business partner Marc Andreessen. Horowitz really delves into the story behind Loudcloud, and then Opsware, which was born of Loudcloud. It’s in this moment in time Horowitz appears to have had the bulk of his education as a CEO, manager, and founder. Loudcloud, and Opsware, and this by no means was an easy road. In fact, the way Horowitz describes the journey, it was an epic disaster at some points. He recalls in the book that Loudcloud was running out of money and the company decided to IPO because private investors wouldn’t invest any more cash. On the roadshow, Horowitz says he was sure the company would go bankrupt. And in the midst of all this and his travel, his wife Felicia had a serious health scare, as outlined above. These sorts of hardships are the reason why he spends so much time on the actual journey versus the outcome, which was that HP acquired Opsware for over $1 billion in 2007. With this background set up, Horowitz spends much of the rest of the book around advice, and shares anecdotes from these times at various points. He also inserts quotes from rappers like Nas, The Game and others within chapters. Clearly, this isn’t your traditional, how-to founder advice. He tackles the real problems and challenges entrepreneurs face, because these are the questions he asked his mentors and problems he tackled along his journey. For example, he spends an entire chapter on how to lay employees off. Another chapter addresses when it’s okay to poach from a friend’s company. Horowitz also devotes time to advising on how to minimize office politics, how to establish titles and measure performance, and how to train employees and tell a good product manager from a bad product manager. But where Horowitz separates himself is in his advice around how to control your own psychology and demons as a CEO and founder. These are real problems that every CEO and leader faces, as sometimes they are their own worst enemy. As Horowitz writes in one passage: By far the most difficult skill I learned as a CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check. I thought I was tough going into it, but I wasn’t tough. I was soft. Over the years I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs, all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: the first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown. At risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face. Horowitz also delves into the next chapter of his professional life as a venture capitalist. Here he covers the history of founding A16Z with Andreessen, the reason behind the firm’s focus on hiring former founders as VCs and its replication of the CAA agency model in the VC world. He goes into detail around how he and Andreessen have segmented the firm into networks, which include large companies, executives, engineers, press and analysts, and investors and acquirers. So what makes this different from the scores of business advice books out there? Horowitz has essentially taken much of the advice that a mentor like Bill Campbell (a.k.a. to some household names in technology) has bestowed upon him and Andreessen, as well as many of the other top CEOs in Silicon Valley, and made it accessible for entrepreneurs around the world. It’s fair to point out that Horowitz’s ways of approaching problems may not necessarily be the right way for everyone. He’s speaking from his specific experience running an enterprise tech company and if you don’t want to be a founder, CEO, or senior leader in an organization, this book may not be helpful to you. While there are some drier ‘how-to’ parts of the book, there’s also anecdotes from Horowitz peppered in. You won’t find many many similarities between Horowitz’s outlook and advice and the perspective you might find on Wall Street. One of the chapters of the book is titled “The Struggle,” and offers founders a level of empathy that is almost too real (this was part of a in 2012). He deliberately doesn’t sugar coat anything, because he knows better than most that the world of a founder, is paved with hardship and can be very bitter. My bet is that Horowitz’s book becomes gospel for startups. His stories already have. Be sure to check in tomorrow, as we’ll be posting a Q&A with Horowitz about the book, his inspiration, and more. |
With $100M+ Run Rate, Gett Reveals A New Look, App And Delivery Service As It Prepares To Do Battle With Uber | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 12 | 25 | When it comes to the emergent world of on-demand transportation, of headlines of late, seemingly deadlocked in a race to become the clear “market leader” in a hot space that’s rife with competition. Of course, with startups like Hailo and SideCar , there are more than a few startups looking to throw their name in the hat. However, another European on-demand car service on its own fast-growing business, as it, too, follows Hailo into the U.S. market. Already operating in over 20 cities across the U.K., Russia and Israel, GetTaxi in August, looking to take on Uber and others by providing New York City passengers with a low-cost black car alternative (or “G-Cars”). As part of its expansion into the U.S., and in effort to differentiate itself from the pack, GetTaxi has taken on a new look since August. For starters, it’s rebranded its U.S. branch and is now operating under the brand Gett at . Secondly, although NYC has cleared after fighting them tooth-and-nail, Gett has decided to opt against offering a taxi service in NYC and go full-in on black car. According to co-founder and CEO Jing Wang Herman, it became apparent that, in spite of the efforts of services like Hailo, yellow cab-like on-demand services in New York City just don’t make sense. At least not yet. The proliferation of yellow cabs in the Big Apple has meant that too many drivers found that passengers weren’t showing up because they were able to find a ride on the street first. So, after opting against launching a cab service in NYC, Gett has decided to take on Uber and many others operating “black car” businesses by focusing on offering pricing that’s both predictable and affordable. The company is trying to offer a payment structure, Herman says, which makes sense for both drivers and passengers, while establishing Gett as a more affordable option when compared to some of its better established competitors. In addition, Gett offers flat fares between neighborhoods regardless of time spent in the car or distance traveled, and avoids the lure of surge pricing, a model oft-employed by Uber. The company also launched a “future booking feature,” which allows riders to not only order a black car on-demand for immediate pick-up, but schedule a future ride as well — up to two weeks ahead of time. Furthermore, Gett is not only finding success catering to corporate clients (with 1,500 corporate clients in 20 cities, including Google and Morgan Stanley), but the company is hoping that by further expanding beyond the traditional on-demand transportation model, it can tap into another parallel area of demand. And add an additional revenue stream to support its black car service in the U.S. Herman tells us that Gett believes that, by slowly adding a delivery service on top of its existing operation, it could have an ace up its sleeve. The startup began to test an on-demand delivery service over the holidays (beginning in mid-November) by offering to pick up toy donations from any address within New York City on-demand or pre-scheduled through its mobile app, in partnership with Toys for Tots. With its charitable toy delivery promotion having found traction, the company says that it will be looking to significantly expand its on-demand delivery service in the coming year, with its network of drivers providing the foundation for the new extension of its model. As to its success in NYC, Herman tells TechCrunch that it has attracted over 100,000 customers in New York City alone since launching, adding to its million-plus users around the world. The Gett CEO also claims that, thanks to its enterprise accounts in other countries, the company now has the highest margins of all transportation apps. She claims that Gett is now operating between 20 to 30 percent margins compared to Hailo at 10 percent and Uber at 20 percent, though we’re still waiting for verification on this from competing services. Furthermore, Gett appears to now be rivaling , as the CEO says that the company achieved a gross revenue run rate of more than $100 million in December. Furthermore, she says that the business is now “profitable in its first 20 cities” — even though Gett’s current total of $42 million in funding remains half of what Lyft has claimed from Andreessen Horowitz and others at $82.5 million. The CEO tells TechCrunch that she sees New York City as the key area of opportunity for the company’s growth going forward and will be going “all in on NYC next year.” Demand has been doubling every month since launch, she says, and the company will soon have 1,000 cars operating on the streets — which she expects to significantly increase in early 2014. With Lyft currently absent in the NYC market and Sidecar having shut down, the CEO says that she wants to turn the perceived Lyft vs. Uber battle in the U.S. into a more focused battle between Gett and Uber in New York City. To do so, Gett launched for iOS this week (and updated Android and Blackberry as well), bringing a slick, redesigned interface to its mobile experience, including, among other things, a new interactive mapping feature. The company has also remodeled the app’s search functionality to offer better results and faster navigation, particularly when it comes to contextual results. In particular, the new app makes it much easier to search for points of interest nearby, for airports by terminal, as well as for hotels and restaurants. The app is also now compatible with iOS 7 and the latest iterations of Android and, S that the new app makes Uber look like “sticks and crossbows.” (Whatever that means.) It’s still early for on-demand transportation companies, in New York City especially, and it’s not clear whether Gett’s impending delivery service will be an intelligent extension to its business or a distracting gamble. However, judging by current growth across its first 20 markets, Gett might soon be making a case for the addition of its name to the race for dominance in the on-demand transportation market. |
Basis Goes To Intel For Around $100M | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Intel has won , we’re hearing, at a price of around $100 million, according to one source. A second source pegs the deal at closer to $150 million. Basis makes wristwatch health trackers, 7 percent of the market versus competitor Jawbone’s 21 percent. As Intel was this year at CES, we’re assuming that this buy is an attempt to further its foothold (wristhold?) in the space. Intel made a lot of noise with its own reference designs at the conference, including a Siri-like Bluetooth headset named Jarvis and a smart chip it dubbed Edison, which has myriad , including smart baby clothing and even smart mugs. Intel likely doesn’t have aspirations to compete in the consumer electronic marketplace; the company wants to sell chipset platforms. But by acquiring Basis, it gains access to a team that has built one of the most powerful and comprehensive wearables to date, which it then can set upon its own designs. Intel is playing catch-up to rivals such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics, which are currently providing the bulk of the sensors for wearables. Intel not only needs to sell brands on buying Intel’s wearable platforms, but provide complete solutions in order to jumpstart adoption. With its robust online suite, Basis provides a solid foundation for that complete package. We that Basis had been talking to Google and others about an acquisition, at a price that was less than $100 million. Perhaps Intel outbid them all? Or a couple of suitors passed? Basis is funded by , and , invested in the company. The Intel Capital connection is especially interesting considering the company’s new ownership. |
Facebook Looking Into Buying Drone Maker Titan Aerospace | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Facebook, one of the primary backers of , which aims to bring affordable Internet access to the 5 billion people in the world who still lack connectivity, is in talks with a company that could help further that agenda. TechCrunch is hearing that Facebook is buying , makers of near-orbital, solar-powered drones which can fly for five years without needing to land. According to a source with access to information about the deal, the price for this acquisition is $60 million*. From our understanding, Facebook is interested in using these high-flying drones to blanket parts of the world without Internet access, beginning with Africa. The company would start by building 11,000 of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), specifically the “Solara 60” model. You can see an example of these UAVs, first introduced last year, . As the video explains, these drones are “atmospheric satellites” that can conduct most of the operations of an orbital satellite, but are cheaper and more versatile. The drones could potentially have many uses, including weather monitoring, disaster recovery, Earth imaging, or , the company has said, but clearly Facebook would be interested in that latter part. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmN13LnBk3c?feature=player_detailpage] The Solara 50 and 60 models can be launched at night using power from internal battery packs, then when the sun rises, they can store enough energy to ascend to 20KM above sea level where they can remain for five years without needing to land or refuel. Such capabilities make them ideal for regional Internet systems, like those that Internet.org would be focused on. (For those interested, Ars Technica took a more at the technology and history behind Titan’s aircraft last August). Titan Aerospace is a privately held venture with R&D facilities in New Mexico. The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding through seed and Series A and A-1 rounds, and had in October 2013 it would open a B round soon. Titan is currently , previously founder and CEO of Eclipse Aviation. The company was founded in 2012 by Max Yaney (CTO), in order to produce what it refers to as “atmosats,” new types of UAVs that do the work of near-Earth satellites at a fraction of the cost. The designation of “satellites” is important here, as the idea has been to position these aircraft above the airspace that the FAA regulates in the U.S. Class A airspace ends at 60,000 feet stateside, and above that the U.S. doesn’t regulate, last summer. That means the only issue in launching these in the U.S. would be the initial climb. In other parts of the world, the laws will, of course, vary. But in the developing markets Internet.org is focused on, it’s likely they’re not as far along in regulating such new technology. Following the acquisition, all of Titan Aerospace’s production would be for the Internet.org project only, according to a source familiar with the matter. The Internet.org project competes with Google’s own R&D effort called “ ,” which would involve balloons, not aircraft. TechCrunch had previously heard that Facebook has its own counterpart to “Project Loon” in the works, and this could be a part of that agenda. In any event, if you’re keeping score at home, that’s $60 million to bring Internet to the world, and for WhatsApp. That may seem odd, but this acquisition and WhatsApp would share the same broader goal of making the Internet more accessible, from Facebook’s point of view. If Facebook could project weak but free Internet to developing nations via Titan Aerospace drones, it could then make a basic version of WhatsApp available to those users. They may not be able to send or view photos, but they likely could send messages and view status updates without having to pay for the Internet. While phones are getting cheaper, it’s the data costs that make the web unaffordable to much ofthe world. Titan’s drones could help Facebook fix that. Facebook’s acquisition of Onavo could lend a hand, too. We hear the team is hard at work on data compression technologies that would allow the same functions to require less transmitted data to complete. Onavo-optimized WhatsApp or Facebook apps could run on a weaker Internet signal, such as from drones, because they don’t need to send or receive as much data. Many ask why Facebook would even care about getting these parts of the world on the Internet if they currently have such little buying power that it’s hard to make money off of ads shown to them. There’s the side of , but when it comes to business, Facebook is playing the long game. It hopes that with time, everyone in the world will gain affordable access to the Internet and smartphones, which could help them join the knowledge economy and gain more buying power. If Facebook can use Titan’s drones to be someone’s first experience on the Internet, they’re likely to get deeply hooked into the social network’s service and eventually become a lucrative lifetime user. |
Because Some Days You Just Want To Customize Your Pizza On A Giant Touchscreen Tabletop | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | http://youtu.be/xvT0MCugb58 Technology is a wonderful thing. Chaotic Moon co-founder Ben Lamm says he “remembers when it was cool to go to Pizza Hut” with his family and . It was with that nostalgia in mind that his development firm began working on building a way to bring back the sense of community and engagement that the pizza chain was known for. Hence, a big fat Pizza Hut touchscreen-enabled table that you can use to customize and order a pizza without having to talk to someone… And then, play games with friends and family while you wait for it to cook. Chaotic Moon has been working with Pizza Hut for more than three years, and designed a series of mobile apps for the pizza franchise. Building a tabletop experience is just one more step in creating an engaging new interactive feature for Pizza Hut fans. So what are the chances it’ll actually get built? Pretty high, actually, according to Lamm. The plan is to test out a few prototypes in high-volume Pizza Hut shops and get feedback, after which the concept could be rolled out more widely. |
With $96.7M In Funding, PowaTag Launches Its Mobile And Audio-Triggered Commerce App | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Powa Technologies, a UK-based e-commerce startup that has raised in outside funding in the last seven months, is today finally taking the wraps off its flagship product: PowaTag, an e-commerce app that combines elements of mobile payments, QR Codes and audio recognition to provide an all-in-one solution for brands and retailers to target customers in different physical and online environments and encourage them to buy products right then and there. Powa tells me that it’s signed up some 240 brands to the product so far — including large retailers like French-based supermarket giant Carrefour and Universal Music. To coincide with the launch, the , but Dan Wagner — the CEO and founder, who is also a repeat entrepreneur in the e-commerce space — tells me commercial deployments will only be rolling out gradually over the next couple of months. He says that can expect to see PowaTags appearing in magazines and newspapers and other printed matter; on websites; and in stores in the forms of small codes alongside displays of products. Over time, Powa also plans to add Beacons into retail locations and users will be able to, via Bluetooth LE, get alerts in stores for special details just as you pass them; and merchants will be alerted to what you like when you walk into the store. The audio solution, meanwhile, will be a sound that the average person will not hear. All of the tags and sounds will in turn trigger the PowaTag app to look up whatever product has been scanned. That will then lead a user through set of screens to let a user buy the product in question. The app will act as a kind of digital wallet at this point: storing payment details so that you do not need to enter them; or linking up with whatever payment solution a particular brand or retailer has chosen to use. Mobile payments, up to today, have been full of a lot of hype and promise and often more empty when it comes to delivery. Just last week, the much-lauded Square an expected IPO indefinitely after finding that its revenue run-rate was not matching up with its valuation. It’s latest bid to make money looks like it will be — a cash advance service. Another solution, Google Wallet, has been described as a “ ” because the hundreds of millions invested in the product have not been matched by consumer demand. Yet other services like iZettle (sometimes called the “Square of Europe”) have taken a slightly more low-key approach, choosing instead to partner with large banks and carriers to target merchants in different markets, rather than going it alone. But even if some solutions have been more successful than others — PayPal and Amazon have both been gradually building up their position in point-of-sale payments, for example, building on their existing, hefty e-commerce strength — the wider space of mobile commerce has so many different kinds of product permutations and technologies in the mix that it’s hard to see what will end up as the core, most essential part of a mobile commerce success story (and if we even need one). PowaTag is hoping that its all-in-one approach will help it circumvent all of the existing solutions and provide something that is not only attractive to merchants but useful to consumers. In a market where one of the biggest hurdles has been consumer engagement in these solutions — definitively answering the question of why we really need another way to pay for things — this is no small task. It’s at least a problem that PowaTag has grasped in its basic form. In a world of omni-commerce, “this is not really about using this in one place,” Wagner told me. “It’s about using a platform to transact.” |
Fresh Off Merger With Conduit, Perion In Talks To Acquire Mobile Ad Platform AirPush | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Mobile ad platform , which to move into native mobile ads, is now in the process of being acquired by . We haven’t confirmed the terms of the deal specifically, but the number we’re hearing is $170 million.* Perion, the makers of digital consumer brands , and , as well as several B2B services, also recently merged with , a company founded in 2005 that became the largest Internet company in Israel for a time, thanks to its community toolbar product. Last year, Conduit spun off its toolbar division in a that saw it (Conduit’s Client Connect) assuming Perion’s public listing on the NASDAQ. The merger brought Conduit’s Client Connect toolbar business and employees to Perion, which the company recently had been integrated “exceedingly well, even better than our expectations.” that building a proprietary mobile distribution network was a key strategic focus going forward. Before the merger, Perion was going to see $20.1 million in earnings and $104.6 million in revenue. Post-merger, it’s now expecting profit of $103 million-$108 million on revenue of $460 million-$470 million. Additionally, according to , Perion CEO Josef Mandelbaum said the company is planning to diversify its revenue streams by growing its display ad business and “making acquisitions in the mobile and advertising spaces.” While to date, Perion had been mainly a consumer-oriented software company, we hear that, going forward, it may be focusing more on its host of B2B solutions, which include tools for monetizing websites and apps, analytics and an affiliate program. (This is the part of the company where Conduit’s toolbar ended up.) For example, developers working on Perion’s consumer-facing email app, , have been reassigned to other projects. would fit in nicely with Perion’s other B2B tools, as its focus has been on helping monetize mobile applications using a variety of , including push notifications, icon ads, video and others. The company’s technology currently powers ads in over 120,000 apps, and employs approximately 230 employees, . AirPush has offices in both L.A. and Bangalore, with some 90 percent of its staff, including the tech team, located in the latter. The company was also in the news recently for hiring former Google Global Head of Mobile Display Matt Shaw as its first Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), ahead of what many presumed would be a possible 2014 IPO. In fact, even AirPush CEO Asher Delug that such a path was “probable.” Despite this optimism, the reality is that the majority (~70 percent) of AirPush’s ad business in the past had involved push-based Android ads, which sold well to direct marketers like LowerMyBills, Publishers Clearing House, or Experian, for example, as well as to smaller developers, but not big brands. In aggregate those numbers could scale, however. But that Android developers could no longer utilize this somewhat spammy “push” ad format, forcing AirPush to turn to other ad formats and products, including an ad platform for iOS. We understand that the news of the acquisition is likely being announced at an internal meeting today. According to AirPush CEO Asher Delug, AirPush has been involved in M&A discussions in the past, but is currently independent. |
Uber Adds Push Notifications To Let Passengers Know When Surge Pricing Ends | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | For the past several years, Uber has defended its use of “surge pricing” as a way to ensure supply in times when demand is high. By charging a premium for a ride, the company argues, it gets more drivers on the road, and curtails the number of requests from potential passengers, keeping inventory in check. That said, there was no good way for passengers to know when that was over. Now, thanks to an , passengers will never have to guess when surge pricing ends, as the company has added a field to allow them to be notified when the multiplier is turned off. According to Uber’s blog post, the update will begin rolling out to iOS users this week, enabling them to request an update and be notified if surge pricing ends within 30 minutes of their initial request. “In addition to seeing clear information about surge pricing in the app, you’ll be able to wait it out for a cheaper ride and get notified if surge ends,” the post says. Frequent users of the on-demand transportation service — especially those in major cities — have come to expect the pricing multiplier during rush hours and storms, when demand for service begins to outstrip supply. That’s something Uber says it’s working on. According to Uber spokesperson Andrew Noyes: “We’re working hard to bring on more partner drivers in all of the cities we serve so that there’s more supply available at all times. As you know, surge pricing helps get more cars on the road quickly when demand outstrips supply, helping to guarantee people can get a ride when and where they want.” |
Zuckerberg-Linked Group Releases Ad Blasting House GOP For Immigration Reform Intransigence | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | The , an affiliate of the Zuckerberg-founded and financed group, has released a new ad blasting House Republicans for slowing the path to immigration reform. Fwd.us is , where its tactics have caused a stir. After the group financed advertising praising the Keystone XL Pipeline, it lost Elon Musk as a supporter. The efficacy of the group’s methods is also . The Council for American Job Growth will spend $500,000 on the ad buy, running the spot in all 50 states, TechCrunch confirmed. The ad lays out a simple message: Immigration reform is a legislative must, both teams in Congress agree, and action now is better than action later. The spot began running today. Fwd.us was by Zuckerberg and a cadre of technology elites, including Bill Gates, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Sean Parker. It has two affiliates, the aforementioned Council for American Job Growth, and , which are used as vehicles to push both parties toward Fwd.us-blessed goals. Here’s the ad: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSsdSf_XrAc] Why should you care that technology money is being funneled into the realm of political advertisement? High-skill immigration was rolled into comprehensive immigration reform, meaning that it can’t pass without a larger immigration package passing. And given that American technology firms are keen to increase the number of H1-B visas, making it easier for them to hire, they have a stake in the larger immigration question. |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Google Ventures’ Rich Miner | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | This week on Ask A VC, we are thrilled to have Google Ventures’ general partner and Android co-founder in the studio. You can submit questions for our guest either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Miner, who leads Google Ventures’ East Coast investment team, has backed HubSpot, MessageMe, Stamped (acquired by Yahoo), ThinkNear (Acquired by TeleNav), Adelphic, UberConference, Crittercism, Divide, and Custom Made. Miner came to Google through the acquisition of Android. During his early years at Google, he helped lead the development of the Android platform and ecosystem. Prior to Android, Miner was a vice president at Orange, where he led R&D activities in North America and was an original principal at Orange Ventures when it was founded. Miner came to Orange through the acquisition of another company he co-founded, Wildfire, which developed a voice-based personal assistant. Considering his experience and investments, we’ll be asking Miner about mobile, mobile, and more mobile! Please leave your questions for Miner either in the comments or ! |
VideoGenie Goes Beyond Video With StoryBox, A Product That Collects Positive Testimonials | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | is a startup that helps businesses collect and highlight video testimonials from fans. But it seems that founder and CEO Justin Nassiri doesn’t want to limit this to video. So VideoGenie has launched a new product that it calls , which aggregates all kinds of content about a brand. The company says the testimonials can include tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram photos, and more, all presented in what Nassiri called “a rich, visual environment” on the brand’s site, and with the option for visitors to add their own stories directly from the site. Naturally, brands can curate the content, so that a tweet with the wrong message doesn’t end up in the StoryBox. At the same time, Nassiri said the product offers analytics showing which content is getting the most engagement and (when relevant) driving the most sales. StoryBox can automatically prioritize the best-performing content and display it prominently on the site. In other words, you get the authenticity of real customer testimonials, but gathered in a central location, with data about what is and isn’t working. The product is already live on , with Chegg and the ad:tech conference signed up as partners, too. “StoryBox was selected for its simplicity and effectiveness to help drive conversation leading up to – and during – our events.” said ad:tech Content Director Paul Treanor in an email statement. “In the past we’ve displayed Twitter feeds on our website and breakout sessions before presentations began. While a live Twitter feed is compelling, StoryBox will allow us to go beyond this and bring the buzz from every social platform to life in one location filled with rich content.” Nassiri said his team made the decision to start building StoryBox last fall, based on the feedback that it was getting from customers. He added that video will continue to be “the foundation” of Video Genie’s offerings, but he said, “There’s not a single client that we’ve worked with in the past where StoryBox wouldn’t have made it better.” VideoGenie in 2010. |
If You Watch One Video Of An Arduino-Powered, Tetris-Playing Business Card Today, Make It This One | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pXhOMO6ZjRg] I like alternative business cards. In lieu of pieces of paper, for example, I like to hand out copies of . But I may have finally met someone with a far cooler business card than mine. Take a look at Kevin Bates’ Arduino-powered , and weep, friends, because it is a thing of beauty. Designed to be about as thin as a few real business cards, the PCB contains a small OLED screen and micro controller. There is also a tiny speaker embedded and some touch-sensitive spots for controlling the screen. In fact, you’ll notice a distinct resemblance in this card to a certain game console that starts with G and ends with -ameboy. With the right code, for example, you can play games on it, draw images on the screen, and even play little tunes. Bates is looking to crowdfund the project and build more of these little buggers so you can pass them out as a resume or a bit of high-tech gimcrackery at your next networking event. Best of all it runs for nine hours on a single replaceable battery and it’s fun to build. It also plays Tetris. Tetris! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pXhOMO6ZjRg] |
Samsung To Donate $3M To Charities Chosen By Ellen, Says It Was Included “Organically” In Her Oscar Selfie | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | So … what was the deal with Ellen DeGeneres’ at the Oscars? Why did she use what appeared to be a Samsung Galaxy Note to take the photo? I mean, nothing against the Galaxy Note, but there’s been about whether DeGeneres, who was hosting the ceremony, got paid by Samsung to use the phone. Well, a Samsung spokesperson just sent me a statement suggesting that wasn’t the case. Yes, Samsung was a sponsor at the Oscars, and apparently there was “an integration with ABC” (the network that broadcast the ceremony), but the company said it was DeGeneres who chose to “organically incorporate the device into the selfie moment that had everyone talking.” Samsung also says that it’s happy enough about the results that it will be donating $1.5 million each (so $3 million total) to two charities chosen by DeGeneres — St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Humane Society of the United States. Here’s the full statement: While we were a sponsor of the Oscars and had an integration with ABC, we were delighted to see Ellen organically incorporate the device into the selfie moment that had everyone talking. A great surprise for everyone, she captured something that nobody expected. In honor of this epic moment and of course, the incredible response of nearly 3 million re tweets, we wanted to make a donation to Ellen’s charities of choice: St Jude’s and the Humane Society. Samsung will donate 1.5 million dollars to each charity. [image , naturally] |
Shutterstock Acquires Digital Asset Management Service WebDAM, Goes After Enterprise Market | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Stock image and video service today that it has acquired , a provider of web-based digital asset management software. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. WebDAM was founded in 2005 and never took any outside funding. The service offers a number of solutions for marketing and creative teams to organize, distribute and collaborate around digital assets. WebDAM allows these teams to work with images and videos (the core of Shutterstock’s business), but also other kinds of documents. Its For the time being, WebDAM will continue to follow its product roadmap and operate under its own brand. Its co-founders Jody Vandergriff and Steve Rabkin will also stay on after the acquisition closes. The company currently has 25 employees. Shutterstock says the acquisition will allow it “to deepen its relationship with marketing and creative teams and serve a broader range of their needs.” “Shutterstock is focused on extending our relationships with large enterprises, and by acquiring WebDAM, we can offer a more seamless experience to customers as they license, download, store and share digital assets,” said Jon Oringer, Founder and CEO of Shutterstock in a statement today. “WebDAM also aligns with our company culture and focus on innovation. We want to provide the tools for businesses to do their best work and this is an exciting opportunity to broaden our services.” . Since then, it |
Study: Massive Online Courses Enroll An Average Of 43,000 Students, 10% Completion | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Massively Open Online Courses are becoming more mainstream, as more top-tier universities give the public access to their courses. demonstrates continued wide-spread popularity with part-time students looking to substitute otherwise cat-video-filled downtime with ivy league lectures. Examining public data from 279 courses from the most popular MOOC providers (Udacity, Coursera, edX), researcher Katy Jordan finds that the average course enrolls about 43,000 students. About 6.5% of those stick around ’til the end. When looking at the number of students who engaged at least a little bit with course materials, the number of completion jumps to 9.8%. Interestingly enough, Jordan finds that one of the greatest predictors of course completion is course length. That is, students aren’t necessarily sticking around for a hotshot professor, big name school, or even the value of the material. The graph below gives us a good hint that MOOCs are still a part-time activity for most users. In the early days of MOOCs (way back 2 years ago), the pioneers boasted of six-figure enrollment. “It is misleading to invoke early enrolment and completion figures as representative of the phenomenon,” she writes, “six-figure enrolments are atypical, with the median average enrolment being 42,844 students, and decreasing over time as the number of courses available continues to increase.” Integrating MOOCs into the official university process has been trickier. San Jose State University had mixed results for college credit. However, a hybrid model, which combined online lectures and face-to-face class time, did significantly improve pass rates for engineers. Still, 5-figure enrollment of voluntary learning is nothing to scoff at, and MOOCs are proving that they can realize one of the big promises of the Internet: mass education. You can read the full results of the study . [ : Flickr user Cikgu Brian] |
Credit Karma In The Market For At Least $60 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Riding a wave of investor interest in new consumer-facing banking, trading, credit, and lending services, the online credit marketplace is looking to raise at least $60 million in its latest round of funding, according to several people familiar with the company’s plans. The company is one of a new breed of consumer facing financial applications and services that have launched in the wake of the financial crisis to tackle what they see as a generational shift in financial management. Credit Karma’s ads are ubiquitous online these days (at least I can’t escape them), which speaks to a major marketing push that seems to already be underway. “If you think about financial services products over the last twenty years, not much has changed,” said Ken Lin, the chief executive and founder of Credit Karma. “[Credit] applications have come online and things have gotten faster, but we think there’s more transparency we can create and a lot more efficiency.” Lin declined to comment on the company’s fundraising plans. So far, the company has managed to roll up a user base which accounts for $1.2 trillion of U.S. consumer debt. That’s roughly 10% of the nearly $13 trillion of consumer debt outstanding in the U.S. Now, the company is building out services to monetize those users. Lin said that the company is looking to be a sort of Kayak for the financial services industry. On top of letting customers access their credit score for free, the company is looking at partnering with banks to create a recommendation and origination engine for consumers to better manage their debt loads. It was only last year that Credit Karma raised $30 million in Series B financing, in a round led by new investors and , with participation from existing investor . The investment remains the largest commitment Ribbit Capital has ever made. Credit Karma isn’t alone in pursuing new financial services offerings. earlier this month to sell users on new investment trading tools for retail stock market investors that gamify the trading experience. |
Zynga Reboots Three Of Its Biggest Franchises on Mobile | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Under fresh leadership from new CEO Don Mattrick, Zynga has gone back to the drawing board on some of its biggest money-makers. Today, the company is unveiling upcoming revamped versions of Zynga Poker and Words With Friends along with a brand-new mobile-first version of its biggest hit FarmVille. It’s a critical time for Zynga, which is trying to revive momentum after losing out on mobile platforms to younger rivals like Finland’s Supercell. When the company went public in 2011, it commanded nine of the 10 top social games on the Facebook platform. But success on Facebook meant that the company didn’t invest enough in the emerging world of mobile gaming. So companies like Supercell basically built what could have been FarmVille for mobile in games like “Hay Day.” Now Zynga is fighting back by overhauling its best-known and most lucrative games. “We have top titles in casino, farming, words, racing, and people [through NaturalMotion’s Clumsy Ninja],” said COO Clive Downie. “Then there are another three to five distinct content categories that we’re already thinking about. If you have a #1 title in every one of those categories with a piece of evergreen entertainment, that’s scale from a business standpoint. Those categories are enough to power the top 20 games.” Downie said that since he was recruited by Mattrick from Japan’s DeNA, they’ve flattened out Zynga’s organization by removing layers of middle management and by making gaming teams more agile. Zynga , while in revenue with 665 employees. All of this continues to show how extreme the economics of gaming can be when you have a hit. Even though Zynga is struggling now, it’s entirely possible that it could make a comeback. Just look at the company’s rivals: King languished for several years in the late 2000s, while Zynga blossomed on Facebook. A couple of years later, they had switched places. Similarly, Supercell’s leadership came from Digital Chocolate, a long-troubled social and mobile gaming company from EA founder Trip Hawkins. Zynga’s shares have risen 88 percent in the last six months on hope that Mattrick might be able to turn the company around and on anticipation around King’s expected IPO. Anyways, Zynga is re-imagining three of its best-known titles. These franchises are key: Zynga Poker, FarmVille 2 and FarmVille generated 21, 17, and 16 percent of the Zynga’s online game revenues last year, . FarmVille is coming to mobile platforms as a standalone game for the first time ever. The company had released a companion mobile app a few years ago that let Facebook players water their crops from their phones, but it wasn’t fully-featured. But now FarmVille 2: Country Escape will be a fully 3D game that can get to 60 frames-per-second on an iPad air. It has mobile-friendly gestures for watering crops and dragging wheat onto a windmill to make flour. The game features a seaside farm plus other nearby virtual attractions like a winery, a mine and an airport. There’s a trading stand that serves as the games’ social hub so players can trade with their friends. “Farming is this evergreen category that speaks to our human DNA to plant and grow crops and raise animals,” said Jonathan Knight, who is a vice president overseeing the game. Then the company also re-vamped Poker, its top money-maker on mobile platforms for the last several years and the original title that made Zynga a company. The company cut out the red-headed female character and changed the color scheme to feature the kinds of rich reds and golds you might actually see in a real casino. “It’s hard to imagine reinventing a game that is so old in general,” said Nick Giovanello, the creative director for Zynga Poker. “We looked to the real world and real casinos to see how they design their environments and how that affects player psychology.” They made the profile photos of players more prominent and made manipulating the chips more of a tactile experience for the touchscreen. Lastly, they’re overhauling Words With Friends, the game Zynga acquired through the 2010 deal to buy Texas studio Newtoy for $53.3 million. They’re adding long-requested features like a dictionary and vanity metrics on people’s profiles so they can see their best-scoring words and stats on their average word strength. They’ve also gone back to the original, more simplified model of having a paid version without ads and a free, advertising-supported tier. “What we’ve found is that ‘simple’ wins on mobile,” said Abhinav Agrawal, who is vice president of Words With Friends. “It’s our core learning from the last few years.” |
Microsoft Confirms Executive Changes With Reller, Bates Out The Door | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Today the raft of executive changes that . Senior executives Tony Bates and Tami Reller will exit the company, Mark Penn will move to a more ‘strategic’ role away from advertising, and the company’s ad efforts will be headed by Chris Capossela, who will be the executive vice president of marketing. Eric Rudder will take Bates’ job on an interim basis. Head spinning? Let me help: Bates was passed over for the CEO role and wants to go run something of his own. Mark Penn is a divisive figure who just lost control of Microsoft’s advertising budget. So, Scroogled might finally be dead. Microsoft is bringing all its advertising work into a single role, so, to quote CEO Satya Nadella: “Tami Reller agrees with the go-forward approach of a single marketing leader and will support Chris through his transition into his new role. She will then take time off and pursue other interests outside the company.” It would appear that she became internally redundant. For more context on the moves, what it means for Microsoft and the like, . The missive from Nadella, given his new title, is worthy of scrutiny. He begins with a call for complete dedication: I have discussed this point in various forms with the SLT and have asked for their “all in” commitment as we embark on the next chapter for the company. We need to drive clarity, alignment and intensity across all our work. And concludes with a paean to teamwork: Lastly, I wanted to share a final thought from a I recently finished about the University of Washington rowing team that won the Olympics in 1936 that was written by Daniel James Brown, who worked at Microsoft for over a decade. It’s a great story of how commitment, determination, and optimism among groups can create history. There is a very evocative description in the book about a team of rowers working together at the highest level – he calls it “the swing of the boat”: “There is a thing that sometimes happens in rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define. Many crews, even winning crews, never really find it. Others find it but can’t sustain it. It’s called ‘swing.’ It only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing in such perfect unison that no single action by any one is out of synch with those of all the others….Poetry, that’s what a good swing looks like.” As a company, as a leadership team, as individuals, that is our goal – to find our swing. As an SLT and across the company we are on our way. Microsoft working together in harmony? , what an idea. |
Microsoft’s OneDrive For Business Throws Down Gauntlet For Box, Dropbox | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | today that the business end of OneDrive, its cloud storage offering, would be unshackled from its other services, and sold as a standalone cloud storage solution for corporate customers. Cue a surprised gasp from the audience. Microsoft has been working towards this result for some time. After building SkyDrive up from Windows Live Folders, the company released SkyDrive Pro before the recent rebrand, but that product was lost in the greater sea of other Microsoft productivity offerings. It was an also-ran. Now, with OneDrive for Business — the new SkyDrive Pro — Microsoft is selling cloud storage directly to businesses, no other strings attached. If you don’t want to buy into an Office-as-a-service contract, you can still buy cloud storage from Microsoft. This comes as part of Microsoft’s recent move to boost usage of its cloud storage platform, from . OneDrive has a huge user base with north of 250 million accounts, but recent conversations with the company have intimated that engagement — usage, really — among those gobs of humans is low, or at least lower than they want. Putting aside consumers, we have two questions: How does Microsoft’s business offering stack up to the competition, and, of course, why does cloud storage matter to begin with? Why is Microsoft picking this fight? Good questions. Let’s answer them. Cloud file storage may be the best funded niche in technology ever. Dropbox has raised . Box has raised . That’s more than a billion for just two players in the market. So, Microsoft is coming into this behind. I say that under the presumption that SkyDrive Pro, being all but invisible, didn’t accrete much market or dollar share in its short life. To compensate for its deficit, Microsoft is offering a deep discount — 50 percent — for a few months. Here are the comparable tiers at the three companies: So during its promotional period, Microsoft is offering a service with a commensurate per-gigabyte cost to Dropbox. Microsoft states that companies can buy more storage as they need. Box and Dropbox both offer plans with unlimited storage. I think that implies where the fee per gigabyte is going for paid cloud storage products: zero. But we’re a ways from that now. Moore and his little law will push that curve for us. Why would you use OneDrive for Business over Dropbox or Box, two companies that have seen quick revenue growth, implying that their product-market fit is strong? Well, Microsoft doesn’t appear to be playing that game, yet at least. According to , Microsoft is positioning OneDrive for business as an early step towards cloud for companies: “[OneDrive] is meant for companies that want to keep their on-premise infrastructure intact, but still want to start moving to the cloud for file storage and sharing.” This makes some sense: Microsoft’s OneDrive is still in the process of a rebrand, and the company’s online version of Office was — finally — . Microsoft is moving in the right direction here, but at a paced speed. So among potential clients looking for an aggressive bent towards the cloud, Box and Dropbox will retain their current market advantage. But what Microsoft is building is interesting, as it is taking the direct opposite approach of Box: Box built cloud storage and now wants to build editing tools on top; Microsoft built Office, and now wants to place cloud storage up underneath it. I’ve written that Box represents a threat to Office, given that people like editing tools near where their files live. So as Box picked up corporate clients’ files, it was building an opportunity to create editing tools that it could charge from, stealing oxygen from Microsoft’s Office empire. The hiring of former , and the carried the theme. Box has done an excellent job growing. Its burn rate aside, Box is , a testament to its rapid top-line expansion. Dropbox can’t be too far behind. But even though those firms are performing well, the picture that Microsoft is drawing could loom in their future. Most companies use Windows and Office. A slowly falling percentage, yes, but it’s still mostly the case for companies of scale. OneDrive for Business opens a pathway for Microsoft to come in and offer change, but also stability. You want that cloud thing? Well, how about some Office Cloud that plugs into Windows. Once Microsoft fully matures Office Online, and creates perfect real-time collaboration between Office desktop and web apps, the SkyDrive storage solution will be attractive. The Office tie-in is the best thing Microsoft can offer as a competitive advantage. But that is still a ways off. Today is a single step in that direction. A big enough movement to slow Dropbox or Box? Not in the short term, I’d say. But both those companies now have to think of another player in the space they have all but created. Viva la platform wars. |
Google Capital Pours $50M Into Real Estate Marketplace Auction.com At A $1.2B Valuation | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Fresh off its public debut last week, Google Capital is putting more money to work this week with the announcement of a $50 million investment in real estate marketplace The valuation of the company post-money is $1.2 billion, and a representative from Google Capital will join the company’s Board of directors and another will take a board observer position. Similar to other real estate marketplaces, Auction.com connects buyers and sellers of real estate. And the company has sold $26 billion of property since inception. What differentiates Auction.com is that the real estate transaction actually happens online. It’s been described as an “eBay for real estate.” Financing options remain the same as in the offline world (it happens via a bank). Similar to eBay, the highest bidder wins on these auctions. Another unique factor to Auction.com is that it lists a broad swath of inventory, from luxury homes, to multi-story office buildings, to a foreclosed home, or a self-storage facility. Auction.com actually handles tens of thousands of transactions across commercial and residential real estate for customers ranging from the largest financial institutions to individuals and brokers. Launched in 2008, Auction.com only started expanding in Silicon Valley last year, with the company’s headquarters in Southern California. And while Auction.com has raised money from private equity, it hasn’t used much of its unvested capital and is profitable. Of course, you can draw comparisons to other real estate marketplaces like Zillow or Trulia. As Jake Seid, president of Auction.com, explained in an interview, “Trip Advisor is to Priceline as Zillow is to Auction.com.” He sees sites like Zillow as compliemtary. The site says it vets sellers and buyers and requires proofs of funds and other checks before enabling any transaction, and Auction.com takes a 5 percent cut of each transaction. “Auction.com has quietly built one of the largest marketplaces on the web,” said David Lawee, Partner at Google Capital. “We think Auction.com can fundamentally change how real estate, and particularly commercial real estate, can be bought and sold, leveling the playing field for smaller investors.” We’re told the new funding will be put towards product expansion, mobile development, and sales and marketing. |
And The Oscar Goes To… Samsung, Jennifer Lawrence, And Selfies | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | Though none of them actually walked away with a tiny golden statue, Samsung, Jennifer Lawrence, and a particularly star-studded selfie definitely won the Oscars last night, at least according to social media. data, , revealed that Samsung stole the show. Some of the top ten phrases about Oscars advertisers included mention of the Galaxy Note, the Galaxy s5, and , which ended up being the most retweeted photo of all time. In fact, the picture of 11 celebrities (including Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Lady Jennifer Lawrence) was so popular on the Twitterverse that it broke the platform for a good twenty minutes, with over 2 million retweets. What with the massive Samsung sponsorship for the Oscars, it only makes sense that the historic selfie was taken with a Galaxy Note. The electronics giant was mentioned more than 5,000 times throughout the show, and there were nearly 30,000 unique conversations about Ellen’s Samsung selfie. What does this mean for Samsung? Well, it’s interesting to note that Samsung has shifted some of its focus from the Galaxy S line to the Note line, which is growing rapidly. Samsung also premiered a Galaxy s5 ad during the show. Plus, every single celebrity was happily Tweeting, Facebooking, and Reddit-browsing using Samsung products that featured prominently in the crowd and backstage shots. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmF-1WGwdhw&w=640&h=360] Also worth noting is the fact that Ellen DeGeneres was seemingly (not a Galaxy Note) backstage at the show. You know, where Samsung can’t get mad about it. In other social media news, Jennifer Lawrence is still our favorite person in the world, considering she was the most tweeted about celebrity at the event. “Jennifer Lawrence fell” was the most shared phrase during the red carpet program, and it was one of the top ten most tweeted phrases of the evening. Overall, there were 18,354 unique conversations about Jennifer Lawrence throughout the evening. Samsung, J-Law, celebrity selfies and Aaron Levie’s blue shoes would like to thank their family, friends, and the Academy. (Cue music.) Bonus: If you want to get in on that selfie from the Oscars, try out . |
FreedomPop Announces The Privacy Phone, A Fully-Encrypted Smartphone For $10 A Month | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Meet the , a device that FreedomPop brags is the only smartphone and mobile service that allows for encrypted communications. Lovingly nicknamed the “Snowden Phone” by FreedomPop, It can even be purchased with Bitcoin to further protect the owner’s anonymity. Simply put, if you’re in the market for a phone to plan to help run a criminal enterprise or serially leak ill-gotten government secrets, this is probably the phone for you. Voice and text messages are reportedly locked down with 128-bit encryption. All application and Internet data will be sent through a secure encrypted virtual private network (VPN). And, if that’s not enough, owners can change the phone’s number anytime they want. “In light of recent violations in consumer’s privacy across social networks and mobile devices, privacy is becoming increasingly important to many Americans and we all have a right to communicate anonymously,” said Steven Sesar, COO at FreedomPop. “Large carriers don’t have the flexibility, desire or creativity to invest in privacy. We don’t agree with this approach and felt it was up to us to create a truly private mobile phone service at an affordable price.” The phone itself is a Samsung Galaxy II and costs $189. No contract. The phone comes with three months of unlimited voice and text, plus 500 MBs of data. After the three months, it’s $10 a month and payments can of course be made with Bitcoin through BitPay. Encrypted wireless communication is nothing new. Emails sent through a BlackBerry Enterprise Server are encrypted. Several smartphone apps state that they can encrypt a phone’s voice calls and data services. As Uncle Ben wisely put “With great power, comes great responsibility.” This FreedomPop device seems to offer unparalleled privacy from all sorts of intrusion. Will it be used by privacy-seeking patriots or a bad guys straight out of ? Probably both. But that’s freedom. As Stephen Stokols, CEO of FreedomPop, told me “like any new tech, it can be abused.” |
Walmart Planning E-Commerce Marketplace To Enter India, Challenge eBay, Amazon | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | India’s e-commerce industry is on fire. After by investing $133 million in Snapdeal a week ago, the world’s biggest retailer, Walmart, is now looking to build a marketplace for tapping into the country’s e-commerce industry, which is expected to grow sevenfold to $22 billion over next five years. As , Walmart has already hired a team of over a dozen professionals who are busy fleshing out the marketplace. We have been hearing about Walmart’s initial interest in acquiring an Indian e-commerce/marketplace. Sources confirmed that Snapdeal was among potential partners Walmart had looked at few months ago, but nothing materialized. Earlier this year, Walmart established a new company in India after its initial alliance with Bharti Enterprises didn’t work out. Having tried different ways to make the offline retail entry work, it now seems that the American retailer might just take a pure e-commerce route. But even there, the Indian regulations do not permit foreign investments. And that’s why Walmart is building an e-commerce marketplace. As , the Indian government is already considering proposals from Amazon and others to reconsider ban on foreign investments in e-commerce. By building a marketplace in the interim, Walmart plans to be prepared better for a bigger play when necessary approvals come in. We will add more inputs after hearing from Walmart and others. |
inPowered’s Content Discovery Tools Are Now Free — But Advertisers Still Have To Pay | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | , a company that helps businesses find and promote positive press coverage of their products, opened the doors to parts of its platform today. Specifically, inPowered said its “content discovery and amplification” platform is now free to anyone. Users can search for any term and find relevant articles, sorted by the content that’s most-read and seeing the most social engagement. They can also share those stories to social networks directly from inPowered, and track the results using the company’s analytics tools, also for free. To be clear, inPowered is still hoping businesses will pay to promote that content through advertising. Nilforoush said this model makes sense because marketers can look at the content and the data without having to pay anything, making them more confident when it comes to paying to boost the articles that are already seeing the most readership and engagement. He also argued that inPowered more value for advertisers since it estimates how many people read the entire article, rather than just clicking on the headline. Asked how inPowered can actually measure “reads”, co-founder and CEO Peyman Nilforoush said it’s an algorithm based on social media data combined with the patterns inPowered saw when it worked directly with publishers. (The company last year.) Nilforoush argued that this could open up inPowered to a bunch of new uses, which is one reason why inPowered site has also been revamped today, making it seem a little more consumer friendly. “Anyone can use it to find out whether information is coming from a credible source,” he said. |
TreSensa Raises $2M To Help Build And Distribute Games For The Mobile Web | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | , which offers tools for the development and distribution for mobile games, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in Series A funding. Surprisingly (at least to me) TreSensa is focused on games built in HTML5 for mobile browsers. The reason, according to CEO and co-founder , is that the “window of opportunity” in smartphone app stores has closed. Launching a game in those stores now is “almost like a Hollywood blockbuster,” he said, without much hope for independent developers who lack a big marketing budget. (That’s one of the reasons why people found so fascinating.) What makes the mobile web better for them? For one thing, there are a number of game portals for distribution. For another, it allows games to be developed for and played across multiple devices. And Grossberg said browser-based mobile games have a better chance of spreading on social networks, once “you take away the friction of a download.” “We’re handling all of the plumbing to get that single code base to work all across more over 60 different distribution end points,” including game portals and social networks, he said. Other features include carrier billing, so it should be easier for developers to support payments in their games (they share the revenue with TreSensa). It’s not just indie developers using TreSensa. For example, HBO partnered with TreSensa in its first HTML5 initiative, building the True Blood-related game . “They just tweeted that out and posted on Facebook for their user base, who could click the link [and play right away],” Grossberg said. “It didn’t matter what device they were on.” The new round was led by Caribou Asset Management (whose principal Michael Elkins is joining the board of directors), with participation from Tremor Video co-founders Jason Glickman and Andrew Reis, American Media CEO David Pecker, and AdMeld founder Ben Barokas. This brings TreSensa’s to $3.5 million. |
These Selfie Apps Refuse To Die | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Anyone can create a self-portrait. Hell, we’ve been painting them since the Stone Age. But it’s the way you share them that can be special. Are selfies narcissistic? Sure. Can they be annoying? Yes, if done with too much arrogance, vanity, or frequency. But they’re not pointless. Selfies and context left by our shift from in-person conversation to online messaging via text. It’s why a new reel of selfie apps have emerged. Despite cultural backlash against the selfie, the Justin Bieber-funded and are gaining traction. Both have a tough uphill road ahead, but Shots has crossed a half million registered users since launching in November, while Frontback has hit 800,000 downloads since August. The desire the subtle emotions of the face is also why Snapchat has become such a popular messaging tool. You get to see someone’s expression along with what they’re saying. But if you post those expressions to a public forum, you make yourself vulnerable to bullying. Few people know this better than Justin Bieber. The post-teen pop star’s sugary songs are even more polarizing than selfies. The result is that he and his fans get a lot of hateful comments online. That’s why he put his own money into . It’s . The app takes a strong anti-cyberbullying stance by not allowing comments, only private messages. Bieber hasn’t been speaking to the press recently, but agreed to talk with me about the app. He explains, “I know there’s been a lot of hype around Shots being my app but I want to clear something up – it’s not about me. My friends John and Sam have built a place where you can be yourself without any haters or drama. That’s why I am behind it. I hope others see how different it is and get behind it, too.” With organic usagd by celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Snoop Dogg, promotional help from investors Floyd Mayweather and Bieber (wit his50 million Twitter followers), plus being featured amongst photo apps in the App Store, Shots has reached 260,000 monthly users. Seventy-eight percent of them are in the sought-after 13-to-24 age range, and 87 percent are female. To keep them happy, Shots has added a 3-2-1 countdown to allow hands-free selfies, and a yellow-tinted simulated front-facing flash to illuminate users while keeping their skin tone intact. Shots co-founder John Shahidi admits “It’s not really massive quite yet. The older people are like ‘Uh, this thing is that stupid Bieber app,’ but those people aren’t our audience. I don’t really want adults on here. Everyone else is going after the masses. Our audience is the kids. I want fun people. The Shots social network is a positive place.” Shots’ success or failure will depend on that community. Without any exclusive functionality, the only reason to post your selfies there instead of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram is the hate-free environment. Without the landscapes and lattes, at least Shots demonstrates that photos are usually more interesting with people in them. is taking a very different approach. It began as an app for simultaneously taking two photos — one of what you’re looking at, and one of you, which get stacked and shared as a diptych. You can’t easily create these without Frontback. Co-founder Frederic della Faille tells me “We know we’re in the selfie world, but we feel a little bit different. We are visual storytelling and your face is the reaction. It’s not a selfie like ‘oh, look how beautiful I look’. It’s people who have a good moment with themselves. A constraining medium can be turned into creativity.” For example, Japanese power user has turned herself into Frontback’s de facto mascot with a teddy-bearish costume she wears in her photos. You never even see her true selfie. Himesora’s ever-expanding legion of followers have started mimicking her posts by making their own paper cut-out eyes. Another Frontback star rarely puts his own face in photos either. Instead he explores the stacked two-photo medium by transitioning from photograph to drawing across the divide. della Faille believes the future of Frontback isn’t just in faces, but art that captures before-and-after, inside-outside, or here-and-there. Taking a shot at Shots says “Do I think a network based solely on selfies can be relevant? I don’t know.” Right now thanks to users pioneering the medium and being featured on the App Store home page in various countries, Frontback is seeing week-to-week growth accelerating 33 percent. It’s especially viral in Japan, where it’s growing 275 percent in total monthly users. della Faille is more concerned with engagement, though. Luckily, he tells me, Frontback’s daily active users create 2x as much content as Instagrammers. It saw 5 million photo views in January, and the average user is liking 20 posts per week. Active celebrities include Ashton Kutcher and Jack Dorsey…even though Frontback turned away . With Ellen’s star-studded becoming the most retweeted photo of all time, the whole world is getting into the trend. But while creative expression and human connection are all well and good, becoming financially sustainable may be more difficult for these apps. They’ll have to endure increasing competition from apps like (selfies with effects), (still unlaunched), (selfies of babies), (weight-loss selfies), and (a selfie messenger). And let’s not forget the desktop webcam-based selfie app (from before we called them selfies) failed and its founders were a . The odds are against Shots and Frontback. Neither sell any in-app purchases yet. To become real successes, they’ll either have to offer something people are willing to buy like stickers or filters that could pollute the purity of their photos, or get much more popular to sustain an advertising strategy. Even then, they’re not building spaceships or curing cancer, educating the underprivileged or solving serious business problems. But in the end, most innovation is in the pursuit of happiness. Some startups do it by alleviating suffering, others by leaving a customer satisfied. and Frontback want to share smiles. Whether you’re laughing with them or at them, perhaps they’re still accomplishing that goal. |
TC Cribs: Crowdtilt’s Spacious HQ, Where Ring Toss Rules And Imaginations Run Wild | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Welcome back to a new episode of TechCrunch Cribs, the show that knocks on the doors of some of tech’s hottest companies to see what the 9-to-5 life is like for the people who work inside. This time we headed to , the startup that lets you to fund projects or causes of your choice. Crowdtilt’s new digs are literally a few doors down from TechCrunch’s own headquarters, so it was a pretty easy trip to head over with a couple cameras to check it out. Crowdtilt currently has just 34 staff in an office space equipped to host 100+ people, so folks there have a lot of room to stretch out. And a very popular way to use the extra space is with a good old round of ring toss, the bar game that is popular in Crowdtilt CEO ‘s native Texas (I’m going to use that as the excuse for why he beat me so easily in our game, leading to my taking a shot of whiskey in the middle of the day.) But all that extra room can also lead to your imagination playing tricks on you and causing you to see strange animals that others don’t seem to notice — but that could have been the whiskey talking. Click on the video above to watch our full tour, and embedded below are some photos from inside Crowdtilt HQ: [gallery ids="967483,967482,967481,967480,967479"] |
Humint Proposes A Way To Recover The Lost Treasures Of Mt. Gox | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Like the King Solomon’s Lost Mines or the treasures of the Spanish Main, the 750,000 BTC lost in the Mt. Gox implosion isn’t gone – it’s just really, really hard to get back. The solution, then, is a sort of treasure hunt/dedicated vigilante mission with a bit of crypto thrown in. It’s called . Essentially, with the help of Mt. Gox and Mark Karpeles, goxcoin would replace the bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox. For every bitcoin you lost, you’d get one goxcoin. Owners of goxcoin would receive dividends based on how many bitcoin are recovered over the next few years and users can trade them with each other or buy them up if they assume the recovery effort is going well. All the goxcoin organizers would need is a list of Mt. Gox transactions and a ledger of accounts. In theory, this would encourage bounty hunters to start figuring out what happened at Mt. Gox, creating a sort of vigilante bailout that would, at the very least, give the victims of Mt. Gox some recourse. Just as treasure hunters don’t want to start digging for free, folks who go hunting for Gox’s Coin can potentially get for a 10% payout for every bunch of bitcoins found. Writes the team at : Will it work in practice? It will work only if the higher ups at Mt. Gox play along. This isn’t a finalized project, it’s an idea. And, like all ideas, it takes effort and action to implement. While the potential for funds being recovered are close to nil right now, it’s still possible. “Goxcoins represent the claim on a single bitcoin worth of recovery,” said Adam B. Levine, one of the co-creators. “So if you believe the coins will be recovered, it makes sense to hold them.” Bitcoin is nearly a mania, but, thanks to ideas like this one, it is getting less crazy and more predictable. While no one can save everything from the Mt. Gox disaster, these tokens can at least soak up a little of the damage. |
How To Orchestrate A National Media Push Without A PR Team | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | This week, . The anti-procrastination to-do list app, built by teenagers Ryan Orbuch and Michael Hansen, saw more than 50,000 downloads in the first 48 hours of launching the free app. So how did the startup, with absolutely no marketing spend and no formal PR representation, pull in so many downloads out of nowhere? It’s all about timing. For one, is a hound. He’s a smart kid who built a pretty app, and as a high schooler himself he truly understands his target demographic. But he’s also one of the last people I want to receive a text, email, or DM from. Not because he isn’t nice, or because I don’t like Finish, or because he’s done anything wrong. In fact, he’s done most things right — the kid won an Apple Design Award at 17! But he can’t be stopped. Try as I might to ignore his updates on Finish, I can’t. He wears me down. When he can’t get in touch with me, he starts to wear down my team. And the worst part is, he’s super sweet. You can’t even be mad at him for the incessant texts and emails. He’s just a young, smart guy who’s trying to make it in this crazy little place called Silicon Valley. Unlike some founders who are doing their own PR, Ryan never, gets angry. Oftentimes when founders do their own outreach, they can come off a bit aggressive and over-excited. If they don’t hear back, maybe because they’re doing something that a billion people have done before or maybe because the email simply got lost, they are enraged. Their hounding is aggressive, and laced with resentment. Never Ryan. When he doesn’t hear back, he sends a smiley. If he still doesn’t hear back, he sends a smiley to someone else on the editorial team (normally an editor), and another hint about how awesome Finish is. He’s like a puppy that can text. I’m not the only journalist who feels this way about good, ol’ Ryan Orbuch. I have friends from other publications who have mentioned him to me more than once, because he simply But beyond sweet, innocent persistence, Orbuch has a strategy in place. Not only did he secure coverage from a number of blogs with an embargo time, but he matched that embargo time to a . Combining the in-person crowd and the online reach of coverage in various media, the app saw a huge uptake in users. went from having around 50k paid downloads since its original launch a year ago, to having 50k free downloads in the span of a couple of days. To a go-getter like Orbuch, that was easy. The real question is how many high school students will pay an extra $.99 to unlock premium features. (Dear Ryan, please leave me alone until the iPad version of the app launches. Thanks!) [IMG via / ] |
UK Advisor Involved In Britain’s Internet Filter Arrested For Child Porn | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | A top British Prime Minister advisor, who helped design the , has been arrested for possessing child pornography. Patrick Rock was arrested at his home a day after Prime Minister David Cameron’s office learned about the investigation. “This is an ongoing investigation so it would not be appropriate to comment further, but the Prime Minister believes that child abuse imagery is abhorrent and that anyone involved with it should be properly dealt with under the law,” a spokesperson. Britain has come under fire for its Internet filtering program, that overlap with common porn terms. The program accidentally “led to the creation of filters that not only cover hardcore pornography, but hate speech, self-harm, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, dating, nudity, violence, gambling, social networking, file-sharing, games and more,” Wired UK. Despite the embarrassing arrest, there is no announced plan to revise the Internet filtering program. “Patrick Rock was one of a number of advisers and officials involved in dealing with this issue but the work was led by somebody else, and decisions were taken by ministers.” [ ] |
The PC Market And The 300 Million Mark | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Today that the PC market will contract by 6% in 2014, and will continue to decline at least into 2018. Unit volume according to IDC would slip from 315.1 million units in 2013, to 291.7 in 2018. The figures include traditional PCs — laptops, desktops, and so forth — but exclude Surface devices, Android tablets, and iPads. In short, IDC’s predictions now expect PC sales to fall under the 300 million threshold. In December, it had a different take, predicting a 3.8% decline in PC shipments for the current year, and then for PC sales to become “slightly positive in the longer term.” That would have . What this implies is that something changed, causing IDC to change its prediction logic. So, what happened? IDC is plain: Emerging markets are not performing as expected. After noting that as a group, emerging markets performed as expected in the fourth quarter, “concerns about the impact of slower economic growth, the culmination of some large projects, and conservative expectations for factors like touch capability, migration off of Windows XP, as well as continued pressure from tablets and smartphones has further depressed expectations going forward.” The group goes on to note that “emerging markets used to be a core driver of the PC market.” Weakness there led to a shaving of expected growth rates, changing IDC’s prediction of a PC market north of 300 million units and just shy this year of growth, to an industry that can’t stop its own decline. It’s important to keep scale in mind. IDC’s change in its view of the PC market was modest, but as its former optimism was more mild than tepid, those small changes are key. Here’s IDC detailing the shifts in its model: “Overall growth projections for 2014 were lowered by just over 2%, and subsequent years were lowered by less than 1%.” And that kids, is the ball game. It’s hard to find any sort of good news in the above, other than to say that as far as declines go, there doesn’t appear to be another 2013 on the horizon. And, given that IDC is putting this data out now, presumably it’s had a chance to test the temperature of the current quarter, which while likely weak, should not mirror the . As a final note, as Microsoft’s ramps Surface revenue over time, we should start to factor those sales into IDC’s numbers. For now, those unit numbers don’t move the needle. 300 million. That’s the threshold PCs don’t want to slip under. But if IDC is right, Geronimo. |
Quick! Look! Gabe Newell Is Doing An AMA | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Have you ever found out one of your heroes is doing an ask-me-anything on reddit…. only to realize that it already ended like 10 hours ago? Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve (the studio behind Half Life, Portal, Left4Dead, the Steam store, etc.) and all around really-cool-guy, . Right now. It started 20 minutes ago. Go! Go! Go! I don’t normally link to ongoing reddit AMAs unless some huge bit of news comes out of it because I’d be posting a zillion of these things a month, but this one is going to be the exception because: 1) It’s Gabe Newell, shut up, and 2) If you don’t know it’s going on, you’d probably miss it. Gabe and co. (he’s joined by Valve’s Erik Wolpaw, Erik Johnson, Ido Magal, and Greg Coomer) posted the AMA as, simply, “WeAreA videogame developer AUA!” Quick! Someone ask him when Half-Life 3 is going to be announced. Because no one has ever asked that. Ever. Gabe actually tried to do an AMA yesterday afternoon, and it seemingly got : it was posted more than 30 minutes in advance.. (We’ll keep an eye on the thread and wrap up any big things that pop up below. Otherwise, you can find the entirety of the ) “The biggest improvements will be in increasing productivity of content creation. That focus is driven by the importance we see [user generated content] having going forward. A professional developer at Valve will put up with a lot of pain that won’t work if users themselves have to create content.” Is Valve planning to release any exclusive for SteamOS? No. When did Valve originally start to research VR technology and why? Abrash was thinking about it for a while, and started to get serious around 2 years ago. He thought that we’d reached the point where VR problems were getting tractable. [ ] “We aren’t holding any game until VR is shipping. You don’t want to create that kind of dependency.” “We got bottle-necked pretty fast on tools and decision making which lead us to Greenlight, and is now leading us to make Steam a self-publishing system.” Do you ever play games such as tf2 on a secret steam account? Yes. “I’m not sure I’d agree with that. We are collaborating with them, and want their hardware to be great.” “When we announced our products years in advance in the past and then were really late delivering them, it was pretty painful for both us and the community. We’d rather not repeat that.” “We look for a history of shipping things. There is no substitute for shipping things that make your customers happy.” “Yes, we’ve got some things in the works that we think you’ll like.” “Obviously we were working closely with the FBI during that time, but they could not share with us which sources led to the arrest, and which ones didn’t. From what we could tell, though, you guys were doing far more to uncover Ago than anything the Feds could do. We think it was one of the first cases in which the authorities were humbled by what a community of motivated people on the Internet can do.” [Note: “Ago” here is Axel “Ago” Gembe, the German hacker who was ultimately arrested for the leak] |
The Father Of 3D Printing Is Being Inducted Into The National Inventors Hall Of Fame | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | With all the hubbub surrounding 3D printing as of late, it’s easy to think of it as something new. Something that, before 5 or 6 years ago, only existed in Sci-Fi novels. Surprise! 3D printing has actually been around for decades. In fact, the first kinda-sorta functional 3D printer prototype was built way back in 1984. This year, its inventor, Chuck Hull, is being inducted into the National Inventors Hall Of Fame. This puts him up in the ranks, in the U.S. Patent Office’s eyes, with folks like Thomas Edison, Jobs/Woz, the Wright Brothers, Einstein, and Eli Whitney. In 1984, Hull had a realization: if you pointed a highly focused UV light at a special, goopy material (called a “photopolymer” ), the material would instantly turn solid wherever the light would touch. If you did this repeatedly, layer by layer, you could “print” an object into existence. He dubbed it “ “, and bam! 3D printing was born. 3D printing has come a long way since 1984, of course. Materials — and the objects being printed with them — have gotten much, much stronger. We’ve developed new techniques, like laser sintering (which companies like Tesla use to print their prototypes in metal) and FDM extrusion (think Makerbot, which uses quick-solidifying melted plastic to print its layers). Most importantly, the software has gotten easier to use and the hardware has gotten cheaper — and it’s only going to get better. But it all started in ’84 — and for that, Hull is finding his place in the National Inventors Hall Of Fame. (To connect some dots here: when you hear people talking about those “important 3D printing patents” expiring that’ll open the floodgates for affordable 3D printers in the home, they’re often talking about Hull’s patents and those owned by his company, 3D Systems.) Another name you might recognize, inducted this year: Actress Hedy Lamarr, who, along with composer George Antheil (also being inducted), invented one of the earliest forms of frequency hopping — a technology that, while initially created to help keep the Navy’s torpedoes from getting jammed, can now be found in everything from WiFi routers to Bluetooth headsets. |
Why Would Titan Aerospace Sell To Facebook? Because Investors Weren’t Biting | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | One question we had concerning is why would Titan, a young company founded in just 2012, want to sell? Facebook’s interest in the business, after all, makes sense: It wants to use the drones to help spread Internet access to developing nations, via the , which is focused on connecting the “next 5 billion” people to the web. But Titan, led by , who previously founded Eclipse Aviation, seemed to have developed some very innovative aircraft, or “atmosats” as the company liked to call them. The company’s Solara 50 and 60 models, for example, could be launched into the skies using battery power, then ascend to 20KM (65,000 ft.) above sea level where they could remain for five years without needing to land or refuel, using just solar power. Unfortunately, innovation alone doesn’t keep the lights on, it seems. Titan had previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding in seed, Series A, and A-1 rounds, and was planning to open a B round this year. However, the company was struggling to get investors to commit, TechCrunch learned from sources who had unauthorized access to internal information. Apparently, VCs were interested in the direction the company was headed, but most felt that Titan was at too early a stage to be worth investing in, as it was still two years or so away from seeing revenues. (Social+Capital, for example, passed). Plus, they were hesitant to invest until Titan would be able to prove that its aircraft could do what it was promising. The Solara 60 aircraft, for example, could supposedly fly at 65,000 feet, , and could remain there for years. Titan itself hasn’t even been around long enough to prove that’s the case. Some investors were also worried about the forthcoming FAA regulations. As , rules governing the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the national airspace in the U.S. are pending – a regulatory framework is due in 2015. But the rules regarding larger aircraft, like Titan’s Solara models, are expected to be much stricter. Combined with the possible risk that the aircraft couldn’t sustain flight at 65,000 feet — which would be above the Class A airspace that ends at 60,000 feet — the risk may have been more than many VCs would want to take on. One of the very few investors that remained interested was , the independent, nonprofit organization that invests in venture-backed startups that support the needs of the CIA and broader U.S. Intelligence Community. And In-Q-Tel was only sticking around because Titan was nearing a deal with . But it would not lead a round. That meant Titan had to close other VCs, or turn to other funding sources, like high-net-worth individuals, perhaps. That could have taken some time. With this uncertainty on the horizon for the company, a Facebook deal may have begun to look like the better option for the company and its employees. It meant that Titan would have the funds to continue operations, and become a strategic part of Facebook’s mission going forward. If Facebook is able to deploy Internet access to the rest of the world that lacks it, as Internet.org intends, then Facebook itself could become a significantly more valuable company than it is today. Titan could also continue to operate more independently than other Facebook acquisitions. They wouldn’t necessarily need to relocate to Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, like a software-based startup might have to, for instance. And yet they would still have the benefits of working within a larger company, including the usual accoutrement of divisions like HR, Accounting, etc., which could help Titan focus more on its product, rather than the headaches of running its own company. Finally, for Titan staff who would be joining Facebook, the Facebook deal is also potentially lucrative in the longer term. In addition to the buyout offer (reportedly $60 million), Facebook would issue $25 million in restricted stock units to Titan employees. Facebook valued the company at $75 million at the time of its offer to Titan. |
Comcast Deal Doesn’t Change Netflix’s Earnings Forecasts | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Yesterday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, reiterated . This means that the Comcast deal, , is not expensive enough for Netflix to change guidance on its future financial performance. Calling the deal “important because it was an opportunity to shore up the long-term subscriber experience,” Wells described it as a solution to “some choke points around peak period usage times.” His following comments on the financial impact of the deal were simple: I would say we are going to be consistent with our guidance on 400 basis points year-on-year margin improvement for the U.S. streaming business. So you are hearing me confirm that nothing has changed there. So you should conclude from that, that the deal in terms of the cost for that, yes, it was incremental but it wasn’t incremental to the point where we’re changing that. Is Netflix overjoyed with the agreement, which will see the video-streaming company link its servers directly to Comcast’s network? No. Wells “philosophically believe[s] that the consumer is still best served in an environment where a content provider like ourself doesn’t pay an ISP.” Still, the CFO said the Comcast deal, “was an opportunity for us to ensure better service long-term for our subscribers.” In regular trading, Netflix is up 1.89 percent to $454. |
Mention Launches An iPad App For Its Media Monitoring Tool, Opens Office in New York | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | French startup launched an iPad app to monitor your online reputation from your tablet. At the same time, the company hired its first full time employee in New York — it will expand to the U.S. in the coming months. It also purchased the mention.com domain name and moved its product to the new domain name. As a reminder, Mention is a media monitoring tool that works a lot like , but with a better interface to skim through your alerts. It is mostly targeted toward business users. In December, the company announced a deep with Buffer, turning the product into a full-fledged media monitoring tool. The iPad app is on par with the web interface and the iPhone app. You can create keyword-based alerts, scan your mentions, order them and assign them to someone else on your team. It’s another way to stay on top of what people have been saying about your company and products. The company added around 20,000 users in the past two and a half months, now reporting 170,000 users. Mention now detects 5 million alerts a day. Clients include GitHub, CrunchBase and Microsoft. The startup has a seed round of $800,000 (€600,000) from Alven Capital and Point Nine Capital. Let’s just hope that the mention.com domain name wasn’t too expensive… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS_gZFBuMyc |
The Wearables Market Is Wear It’s At | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | may not have , but the company may have in Intel (should the deal go through). On the heels of we thought it might be nice to take a quick look at some of the big winners, losers and in-betweeners in wearables. So far this year , which has a fancy portable (some would say wearable) camera, ; Fitbit with Tory Burch; Jawbone is on its way to a public offering; and even humble can get money for wearable technology. Even are backing new wearable technology companies. Basically everyone wants to know ? Since 2009 the number of companies getting funded to develop new wearable tech-enabled hardware has grown dramatically, according to . Technology investors have spent over half a billion dollars in equity and debt on wearable tech startups since the sector began piquing investors’ interest in 2009.
Big investors in the sector include and the , but the undisputed king of wearable investment is , which has backed six companies in the nascent sector since 2009, according to CrunchBase data. Of the companies in the market, the ones that seem to have attracted the most attention from investors are , , . The question is, who’s next?
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There Is Only One Week Left To Apply For The Washington, DC Pitch-Off | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | Washington, D.C.: and will be hosting a massive meetup and pitch-off on March 18th. We’re looking for some of the area’s best, undiscovered startups to participate in a rapid-fire, 60-second pitch-off competition. Washington, DC-area startups have until March 11th to apply. The meetup’s general admission tickets and grant the holder a couple of beers and entrance into what will surely be a fantastic night. These events are part social gathering and part Pitch-Off competition where local startups or makers have 60 seconds to pitch their company or product to local VCs and TechCrunch editors. These products must currently be in stealth or private beta and be located in the DC region. Office hours are for companies selected for the Pitch-Off. These 15-minute, one-on-one talks will be held on the day of the event. We’ll hear about your company, give feedback, and talk about the best pitch strategy for the rapid-fire competition. Think of us as Adam Levine on The Voice. We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-Off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt NY; second place will receive two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt NY; and third place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt NY. There are plenty of sponsorship opportunities for local and national startups. Email our sponsorship team at sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com for more details. See you there!
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Watch Microsoft’s Cortana Assistant For Windows Phone 8.1 Shown Off On Video | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkgJwGzsn3Y?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Want to see how Cortana works on Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1? Gander above and all of the virtual digital assistant’s functions and features will be revealed. Well maybe not all, but this video (via ) does show a good amount, particularly around setup. The oddly silent demo doesn’t feature any spoken commands but still responds to unheard input (or just defaults to a basic option), bringing back weather information. You also get a thorough look at feature menus including ‘Quiet Hours,’ which has an extensive menu of settings where users can clarify just how quiet they’d like Cortana to be at any given moment (you can pick what type of notifications are allowed to interrupt your virtual silence). Setup requires a Microsoft account, which is no great surprise, and also involves answering a brief survey of “test questions” around personal preferences, preferred sources for news and more. Increased user input requirements should help it provide more personalized results out of the gate, but it’s also going to be a more laborious setup process than is required for either Siri or Google Now on mobile platforms that compete with Windows Phone. One last thing to note are the very Xbox One-style sounds Cortana seems to make. Microsoft keeps moving towards platform unity, at least in terms of UI, so it isn’t all that surprising to see a digital assistant that takes its name from a video game borrow console-inspired sound effects. |
null | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 3 | null |
Fools And Their Bitcoin | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | I got a text message today from a PR person – one I actually like – who asked me if I wanted the exclusive on two new ATMs in Austin as well as a “roving” ATM that will, presumably, be spitting out cryptocurrency for drunk social media marketing managers at SXSW. “Do you want the story?” he asked. “Nah,” I said. Because the real story, the story that in her excellent “ ,” is that we cryptocurrency fans (and I count myself among them) are idiots. We trust a strange man-child in Japan with hundreds of our BTC. We speculate on a currency that has no intrinsic . Watch as “exchanges” are born and die mostly because of programmer error. Heck. Check this out: , a middlingly popular exchange, shut down because people stole all its money (“On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC,”) wrote the moderators.) What about . They lost 12% of their assets to hackers. At this point it’s a game to bet which exchange get hacked. My money is on . The fan sites crow about every bitcoin win as if a bartender with a bitcoin wallet on his phone who accepts one drink order in BTC were the next Jeff Bezos. In reality, there is no Bitcoin Jeff Bezos because anyone with Jeff Bezos’ smarts knows that bitcoin, in its current iteration, is ridiculous. My take on all of this? Enough cheerleading. Bitcoin needs to get serious. There is an opportunity here that far surpasses imagining but, as it stands, the mental masturbation and the ridiculous failures and the obscene cupidity of almost everyone in the “scene” – from the “investors” to the hardware builders to the miners to the exchange creators – does nothing good for the basic premise of bitcoin: that we, the people, should be able to pay anyone we want at any time for anything anonymously and in a frictionless exchange. All else is vanity. Fools and children have hijacked the bitcoin conversation. What happens next? After the kids get bored the big companies will storm in and take control, turning bitcoin into a defanged mode of money transfer. PayPal would be happy to be your BTC provider of record while Chase would love to grab some of the potential transfer fees while happily taking advantage the frictionless payment process. Amazon would love to offer you a secret wallet full of money that you budget for Amazon wares. Anyone with any sense sees that this is the direction bitcoin is headed. I love a feel-good bitcoin story as much as the next gent. Your sandwich shop is now taking BTC for subs? By all means, tell them you’re happy. But don’t assume your efforts at creating a network effect in downtown Scranton are doing anything for the perception of bitcoin. Put your retirement savings in a wallet and, for a few hours, you can be interesting at a dinner party. It’s a great feeling! Opine on economic matters and shoot down anyone who contradicts you! It’s the way of the Internet. Don’t assume you’re doing anything positive for your community, however, because all the world sees when it looks at bitcoin is failure and confusion. You’re doing nothing to assuage that. There are good folks out there working hard to create a brave new world of BTC. But they are few and far between. But without self-regulation someone far meaner will regulate bitcoin. Bitcoin’s current marketing message is a few steps below a boiler-room pitch – get rich quick! It’s popular! – and bitcoin exchanges are not even as safe as hiding your money in a shoebox that you then place on a park bench – at least you can watch the bench from your window. You don’t even have to be smart to break bitcoin. You just have to be greedy. This market needs maturity and restraint. Those who would die for an idea usually end up dying alone. It happens again and again. This is no exception. Let’s grow up, bitcoin fans, or this dream will flicker and fail. |
Play That Funky Music, Cyborg | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io-jtlPv7y4] Gil Weinberg, , has a mission: to make it easy for amputees and the disabled to play beautiful music. His first project is a drumming prosthesis, a system that allows a user who is missing a hand to play improvise as well as the jazz greats. The arm attaches to an amputee’s stump and allows him or her to play the drums. A second stick keeps time and improvises based on the music being played, adding fills and trills galore. It’s like having a little extra hand attached to your real hand and it’s really cool. Interestingly, the player isn’t just bashing away with the main stick. The system has a built-in electromyography muscle sensor that triggers lighter and harder taps. You can but generally this is part of Georgia Tech’s music engineering program where Weinberg has taught robots to dance and play along with complex scores. The drummer above, Jason Barnes, will . |
Zite CEO Mark Johnson On How The Acquisition Helps Flipboard: “We Can Help Engagement, Help People Feel More Invested” | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | Earlier today – the first time CNN was the buyer, and this time around Zite’s main competitor Flipboard took it off the U.S. media giant’s hands. The deal sees Zite CEO Mark Johnson departing the company, but the outgoing executive still had plenty to say about what Zite brings to Flipboard, and how the CNN experience has helped it be in a position to deliver more value to its new owner. The Zite team is a big asset that brings a lot of value to Flipboard, according to Johnson, but there’s a lot more that the product and tech behind the digital digest offer Mike McCue and his team at the former rival company. “I think the technology, as in generally getting tons of great stuff about tens of thousands of topics is super useful,” he said. “Sure you can people curate things about knitting or about volcanoes, but having it done algorithmically really amps up with the Flipboard platform can do, plus our discovery technology can help engagement, and help get people more invested in the platform, too.” Design-wise, Johnson says he thinks there’s a lot that Zite can offer Flipboard, which could help shape big changes to the look and feel of the product going forward. It sounds like he believes a major redesign may come out of the new unified company. “The second thing that they get with our people is understanding how to take that technology and turn it into a really good user experience,” he explained. “I’ve always been really impressed with Flipboard being, as large as they are, being very humble about where their interface is, and knowing that though they have an amazing interface today, they really want to push it forward. Having that UX expertise in our group is really going to help them figure out what the next version of Flipboard is going to look like and make it simple and elegant.” I asked Johnson about the time at CNN, and what that brought to Zite, and he says that while a key part of that deal was that it be allowed to continue to operate mostly independently, CNN did assign a ‘”Sherpa” from its own staff to essentially guide and in many ways act as a board member and advisor to the company, and that proved immensely useful in helping shed light on how a media company might view a property like a digital mobile aggregator, and what kind of role that has to play in the world of publishers. Of course, through this deal CNN acquires equity in another digital newsgathering and reader software property, but it’s interesting that Johnson so clearly seems to see the move as a way for Flipboard to inject some new life into its product and vision. Consolidation here isn’t unexpected, in many ways, and adding Zite’s strengths to its own makes sense for Flipboard, but it’s just interesting to see it come with CNN along for the ride. Johnson himself isn’t entirely sure what comes next for him. The exiting CEO says he’s eager to build his own company, and has a number of ideas floating around that he could potentially focus on. To settle on one and really develop it, however, he hopes to spend some time traveling and experimenting with different concepts in a way that allows for more exploration and less focus on day-to-day product building. |
Founders Fund Raises $1B For Fifth Fund | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | is announcing this evening that it has raised $1 billion for its fifth fund, which will be led by partners Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Peter Thiel, Lauren Gross, Geoff Lewis, and Scott Nolan. Since 2005, Founders Fund has raised over $2 billion and invested in a number of sectors, including aerospace, artificial intelligence, advanced computing, energy, health, and consumer. The firm says that Fund V will have a similarly broad investment strategy. The firm’s portfolio includes Facebook, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Airbnb, Counsyl, Knewton, Lyft, Oculus, SolarCity, Spotify, Stripe, and ZocDoc. Recent portfolio company exits include The Climate Corporation, DeepMind, and Yammer. As the firm was rumored to be raising $750 million for the fund. At the time, two-thirds of the fund would be used towards new investments, with the remaining capital devoted to follow-on rounds in existing investments. It’s unclear what the breakdown will be for this new amount. Andreessen Horowitz is also reportedly raising a big fourth fund. |
Time.com Gets A Big Redesign, Along With New Ad Units | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | The new is here. Well, it should be here for some of you, anyway. A spokesperson said that the first few users should see the new layout now, and it will continue rolling out tonight and tomorrow. Time has been talking about the relaunch for months now, matching the talk with new hires (it has has made 35 of them since April) and by . Nancy Gibbs, who was , said that the redesign is phase four or five of a longer-term process — the magazine has already been placing a bigger emphasis on things like mobile and video, we can expect to see additional changes in the months to come. You can see the new homepage in the screenshot above. As news homepages go, it’s not all that radical. Gibbs described it as a “higher protein version” of the current one, a homepage that’s able to accommodate more content in general, and more breaking news in particular. The latest stories are featured on the left rail, the most important current news is highlighted in the central area called The Brief, and columnists and other features show up on the right. Along with the redesign come relaunch sponsors (Citi, Siemens, and Advil), as well as new ad units. Any banner ad can now be “magnetized,” said Publisher Jed Hartman, meaning that when a reader clicks on them, it opens larger ad in the center of the screen, and different sections of the ad can be activated by clicking on different parts of the original unit. And like , Time is offering native ads that are presented in the style of editorial content (while being marked as sponsored). These aren’t the first native ads on Time.com, but Hartman said they had to be “retrofitted” for the site before — this time, they were incorporated into the “ground floor” of the redesign. Oh, the ads have been moved to the left rail, which might sound like a minor change, but it makes them more prominent, Hartman said. The site uses responsive design, so elements will shift to accommodate the smaller screens of tablets and smartphones. When I asked if some elements might be applied to Time’s mobile and tablet apps as well, Gibbs replied that it’s “the philosophy” that carries over: “We want the experience to be customized for the platform.” The redesign, by the way, was originally supposed to happen last fall. Gibbs said the delay was less technical and more editorial — Time was working on big feature about 1 World Trade Center that would highlight both its technical and editorial capabilities. The feature is supposed to go live on the website tomorrow morning, with a panoramic, interactive image taken from the top of the building. (Time photo editor Jonathan Woods and his team had exclusive access to the spire at the top of the wire, and they worked with startup GigaPan to create a “13- foot long aluminum jib” that was used to create the image.) The feature will also be the cover story in the print magazine, with a three-fold cover, and there are plans to release book in April, too. With all the changes, I asked Gibbs if the editorial vision has changed as well. “I think the editorial opportunity has expanded,” she said. “To tell great stories, help people understand what’s happening, why it matters — to the extent that that’s our editorial vision, we have the opportunity to do that for much bigger audience.” Time says the website saw 23 million unique visitors in January, an increase of 118 percent year-over-year. And mobile now accounts for 45 percent of its traffic. Update: The 1 World Trade Center feature is now . |
eShares Tackles The Headache Of Startup Valuations By Offering “409A-As-A-Service” | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | , a company trying to , has expanded its product lineup to include something called “409A-as-a-service.” To be honest, until speaking with co-founder and CEO Henry Ward, 409A didn’t mean anything to me. Apparently it around the valuations used for employee stock options. Ward suggested that these valuations can be a pain, not just because of the cost ($3,000 to $5,000) but also because they need to be redone periodically, unless the startup is willing to risk the wrath of the IRS. As the product name implies, eShares is trying to take a software-as-a-service approach to the problem. At a monthly rate of $159, Ward said the company’s 409A-as-a-service should only cost half as much as the traditional valuation process. Plus, in addition to getting a long report, eShares also provides a summary of the most important information. And perhaps most significantly, once a business starts paying the fee, they shouldn’t have to worry about performing any more valuations — it’s all handled automatically. That’s because customers are already using the service to issue electronic shares, so eShares will have an up-to-date capitalization table in the system. Behind the scenes, while eShares is handling the technology, Ward said it has partnered with for the actual valuations. Ward added that eShares signed up more than 200 companies in the first two months of 2014 and that it has issued 1.2 billion shares as of today. |
More On Flipboard’s Acquisition Of Zite: “The Deal Whisperer,” Zite’s Fate, The Price Tag, And Paper | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | After Flipboard and CNN today announced that personalised magazine app , I had a chance to talk with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and CNN’s digital head KC Estenson about the deal (pictured here looking chummy around the time they announced the news). What they did talk about was some of the germination behind the deal, the fate of Zite, and a bit about how the two will work on advertising together. Key to the ad agreement is that CNN and Flipboard are working together on ads for CNN content on Flipboard — but also for across other parts of the Flipboard experience. And lastly, no one’s sweating over Paper. : It was really down to [Flipboard investor and former president of CBS Interactive], who I like to call “the deal whisperer.” KC could see how important this technology would be for digital content. And I wondered how we could partner with CNN. : We actually met on Tinder. (Funny guy.) I look at this as doubling down on news aggregation and personalised news. Flipboard is a bulletproof product on a big growth path. That was the impetus for me looking to reach out to Mike. : O Zite has the ability to teach itself what you like as you use it and we are integrating that capability as well. T : We’re not commenting on any details of the deal, but Mike has agreed to take me out on a date. : We don’t disclose active users in detail but we do have well over a 100 million activated users and growing very fast. Engagement is extremely good. : We’re not breaking out numbers but Zite more than tripled in size in the time that we had it. It’s a meaningful user base but Flipboard’s hand here was to leverage the capabilities of the UI behind the Zite product. different arrangements for web share and so on. Everyone gets to sell this inventory and premium ad executions, but also we will be partnering with Flipboard on new things that are not exclusive to CNN. That’s the key thing. Flipboard has a powerful and unique ad execution and we can help them scale to more users and grow that exposure. : We are trying to create a platform and ecosystem where publishers feel good about the platform. Y : No. I see it as at most people do on Flipboard is use it to discover things they really love. Paper doesn’t really do a lot of that. It’s interesting for Facebook but not taking the world by storm, so we don’t see it as any threat whatsoever. Those who use Paper probably still use Flipboard. Interestingly, we’ve seen an acceleration of downloads since the Paper announcement as some have discovered us as a result. : We’re on the lookout for other teams so that certainly could happen. |
Getty Images Jumps Into The Age Of Social Media With A Free Embed Tool For Its Photo Library | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | Last year, began to double down on how it could better control and ultimately make money from its library of 150 million of pictures (and counting) online. The first step was a that saw the company get a fee from Pinterest in exchange for metadata about each image. Today, the paid-content stalwart is taking another step in that strategy. It’s releasing a free embed tool for people to use and share select photos from the Getty Images library, which will continue to host and track them. The aim is to try to get people out of the habit of “right clicking off people.com or CNN”, as SVP Craig Peters described it to me. In other words, Getty wants to stop people simply copying its images willy-nilly — a recipe for no attribution and definitely no payment down the road. “We’re taking what we see as an already existing use case and putting it into an environment where it is easy and legal,” he says. So, in the first instance, the tool will be free to use — a pretty big step for a library that has been built around paid content — and will cover around 40 million pictures out of the 150 million that make up Getty Images. But further ahead, Getty says it will evaluate how to develop the embedding tool. Some of the options for what it could do include adding advertising overlays, paid features, sharing limits and extending it to video. All possibilities, or not — it all depends on how people take to the endeavor. “Out of the gate we are launching with a link-back and attribution, and we will evaluate monetisation in the downstream,” Peters says, “including how and what ways and over time you might develop alternative revenue models around it. We don’t have a plan to definitively monetise.” To be clear, Getty already brings in a healthy amount of revenues from blogs like TechCrunch and others who pay (not small) license fees to use its photography and videos. The picture I used here, for example, to illustrate how the embed tools look, has license fees that range from £25 to £579, depending on the size. This new embed tool is aimed at non-commercial content, so will not apply to them. This is really for Getty to get more embedded into the world of social media and user-generated content a la Tumblr and sites like it that have become popular havens for people freely repurposing copyrighted media. But in at least one regard, this is a long time coming for Getty Images. The company in 2011 for $20 million and has been using it to track each and every use of its images across the Internet (creepy, I know). So Getty Images knows just how extensively its library has been used and misused across the web. But Getty Images is going at this very softly-softly. “If the embed is used for commercial purposes, we could be notifying them of an alternative to using the embed,” says Peters. “We are focused on trying to educate and making users aware.” But while certain collections will not be embeddable, others very much will be, sometimes out of the hands of the photographers themselves, even. “We won’t give photographers an opt-out,” Peters says. Interestingly, Getty hasn’t so far inked any deal with Tumblr, or any other site, along the lines of the one it forged with Pinterest, although that hasn’t been ruled out as a blueprint in the future. “It’s up to Tumblr how they want to work with us,” Peters explained. “We’re open to that [same] type of relationship [as we have with Pinterest]. For now, the embed is one way to provide content in a legal manner. Deals like the Pinterest one make sense for some; for others it will be embeds.” Tumblr and Twitter, and soon WordPress, will appear as widgets on the Getty Site for people to share directly on those platforms. |
That Fake Hoverboard Video? Funny Or Die Says They Made It | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | If you were somehow still holding out hope that the hoverboard in that (very, very clearly fake) video from yesterday was in any way real: . “Why Are All These Celebrities Participating In An Epic Fake Hoverboard Troll?” The answer? Because Funny Or Die asked them to. In a move that’ll surely crush the dreams of a zillion 80s kids who should maybe trust random Internet videos a little less, Funny Or Die has that breaks it all down: Fake? Yes. How? Wires. Why? Because they wanted some Facebook comments, or something. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SMce7F9s5E (Regardless of who actually made the video, I hereby blame every future fake video on the Internet on Jimmy Kimmell. THANKS A LOT, JIMMY) |
Gracenote Teams With Musicmetric To Bring Social Data To Its Rhythm Music-Recommendation Platform | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | Today Gracenote announced that , its Internet radio and music recommendation service, is becoming a bit smarter with new inclusion of social data from Musicmetric. Rhythm is a white-label service that helps companies and brands create Internet radio solutions, but doesn’t provide music licenses. Gracenote is more than willing to help connect you to a raw music provider, but is more interested in helping you curate the radio station content itself. Gracenote is best known for its MusicID product that helps people identify individual tracks, and also can be found in Google Music and the Xbox One in various capacities. Information from Musicmetric that Rhythm will pick up will include trends in BitTorrent activity, and what Gracenote calls “sentiment reports.” If you are going to track mentions of music as indicative of buzz regarding a track that you might want to surface for a radio station, for example, you probably want to know if that buzz is positive or negative. Otherwise, it might be all the way down. Rhythm is not built so that you or I can spin up our own rack of radio stations tuned to our particular tastes. Instead, it’s designed for larger providers who can afford music-licensing costs to create a more holistic experience. Sadly, this means I can’t create my much wanted folk and death metal cross station just yet. In recent news, Tribune closed its . |
Quadcopters Never Have To Crash Again Thanks To This Software-Based Fail-Safe System | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs] If you’ve flown a quadcopter, you’ll know what happens when a propeller stops or fails: the thing flips around and crashes. Using a new system from Mark W. Mueller, Simon Berger, and Raffaello D’Andrea at , however, quadcopters can automatically right themselves after motor failure and can even allow a human operator to control the drone until it is safely on the ground. When a motor or propeller fails, the fail-safe routine keeps the drone more or less upright. LEDs on the arms show the user a “virtual yaw angle” so they can handle the robot as it flies, but eventually the team will add a magnetometer to handle this automatically. The team writes: The system can even right itself if more than one motor fails. Most important, however, is the fact that the system can work in software – there are no hardware modifications at all. This means your usual quadcopter can become a self-righting, self-flying super machine with just a firmware update. |
Twelve Reasons Business Insider Could Now Be Worth $100M | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | Business Insider just raised $12 million more, at valuation of around $100 million. The round was led by Jeff Bezos, and included RRE Ventures, IVP, Jim Friedlich and Gordon Crovitz. The $100 million valuation does not seem that far-fetched, because: |
Dumbstruck Lets You Send A Message And Capture The Reaction | Greg Barto | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | , an Albany, NY based startup from Michael Tanski and Peter Allegretti, has a different take on video messaging. The app allows you to capture moments in video and send them to specific contacts. When that contact opens your message, it shows the clip and records their reaction on the front facing camera. It then sends the reaction shot back to the person who sent the original message and plays them both simultaneously. The company was founded in 2013 after the founders launched Dumbstruck out of their mobile app idea lab (Doctored Apps). They wanted to create a messaging app with a more intimate feel. Head of strategy Joe Masciocco says, “The vision isn’t an app, the vision is to bring a more natural form of human interaction to the way we digitally communicate today. True emotional feedback and validation have been missing from our apps and devices, yet they are critical to our nature”. He likens it to Skype or Facetime, with the ability to save the reaction and relive it. He also offers some interesting use cases for Dumbstruck. For instance, “you just got engaged, take a picture of your new ring and actually watch your friends flip out when they see it!” Dumbstruck isn’t really an app that I’ve been looking for, but truth be told, the experience is pretty fun. Particularly with friends with whom I want to share specific moments. Reactions have been both hilarious (my friends) and adorable (my girlfriend). Masciocco says they’re focusing the rollout on the teen crowd but thinks Millennials could also find it interesting to capture and share life events. Eventually they plan to monetize using facial recognition to pull anonymized data from the user and sell that information to brands. For example, companies can get immediate, natural reactions to a new commercial from a targeted audience. Masciocco believes the real value is in the feedback. They will also be hosting a contest at SXSW giving away $10k in AWS credits to a startup. Enter for that , and check out the app . |
A Look At The iBeacon Store Of The Future With Retail Startup Thirdshelf | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | At this year’s Dx3 digital business expo, Montreal-based had a fully functional demonstration retail store with iBeacon proximity based shopper customization in place. The demo store makes real a lot of what you may have heard about the potential of this tech, using Thirdshelf’s whitelabel in-store app and . Thirdshelf’s SaaS solution is working with LXR&Co, a high-end boutique retailer, as well as Lightspeed, a POS software provider also based out of Montreal, and Ottawa-based Shopify for the ecommerce piece. The store features Estimote hardware peppered throughout a mock store layout, which communicates with a user’s own device when they approach to customize iPad-based customer facing software displays, and provide information about in-store shoppers in real-time to a customer service dashboard. “When a customer walks up, they can choose to browse in personalized mode, in which your wish list and recommendations follow you around,” explained Thirdshelf CEO Antoine Azar. “The salespeople also have a view of what’s going on, so they can get a feel for how many customers are in store, broken down by loyalty level. And, I can drill down and look at each shopper individually and check out their wish list, recommendations and profile.” [gallery ids="968126,968125,968124,968123,968122,968121,968120,968119"] It’s integrated with a storefront’s POS software, too, so transaction information and purchase history can be tied to accounts and used to populate and inform recommendations. The consumer app’s design and specific features can be customized by individual retailers to take on branding particular to that store or chain. Thirdshelf is targeting small- and medium-sized businesses so far, and says it aims to focus on that market for the time being, but eventually there’s a big opportunity to sell this kind of solution to large retailers, too. Azar says that Thirdshelf also offers up a chance to get meaningful data around shopper habits and store layouts to SMBs, as well as to help them partner up to offer better loyalty incentives to their customers through programs that extend beyond single storefronts. The project is in beta currently, and pricing is still being worked out, but eventually it’ll be a monthly fee based on volume of business driven through the store. Thirdshelf is bootstrapped by a team of experienced entrepreneurs, and hopes to expand its beta project considerably over the next few months. |
Zillow Hires Former Realtor.com President To Run Its B2B Business | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | Online real estate marketplace today that it has hired Errol Samuelson, the former president of Realtor.com and chief strategy officer of Move, Inc., as its “chief industry development officer.” Samuelson will take executive oversight for the company’s business-to-business products and tools, including services like , which helps real estate agents market their business, and , a communication platform for buy-side agents and their buyers. Samuelson, who has about 20 years of experience in the real estate industry, will report directly to Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff. Samuelson became the president of Realtor.com in 2007 and joined Move, Inc. in April 2013. “We’re thrilled for Errol to join the Zillow family. We’ve long admired Errol for his leadership as well as his perspective and approach in advocating on behalf of the real estate industry to embrace and leverage evolving technology and times,” said Rascoff in a statement today. “We place tremendous value on fostering great partnerships and building innovative products that support our industry partners, and Errol is the right person to lead this new role.” The move also shows how important the B2B business has become for Zillow, which went public in 2011. While the company started out as a real estate search service for homebuyers when it launched in 2006, it quickly expanded into other real-estate related services as well. For the most part, the company has done this through acquisitions. Just last year, for example, it acquired (which has now become ). Diverse Solutions was acquired in 2011. |
Building On The Solidoodle 4, A Sub-$1,000 3D Printer With Solid Hardware But Sad Software | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | 3D printer prices are falling steadily, something that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the vagaries of the electronics market. What cost a few thousand last year is now hovering at less than a grand while knock-offs are going for around $500 or less, depending on the model. It’s a great time to be a 3D printing hobbyist. But are these new printers worth picking up? I’ve used a few printers over the past year – and included – and I was just given an opportunity to try out the , the latest printer from a Brooklyn-based company that offers bare-bones printers at acceptable prices. The Solidoodle, as the name suggests, is quite solid. It is completely enclosed with a powder-coated casing with magnetic doors and a closing lid, making it delightfully quiet. It has a large 8×8 inch build plate and can create objects up to eight inches high. It prints ABS out of the box but you can modify the software to print starch-based PLA. You level the bed with three wing nuts, two in the front and one at the back, and there is another screw that controls where the endstops hit. The system is simple. It has a single extruder and a very primitive spool system that hangs off the back. You snake the filament into the extruder, push down the little lever that holds in the filament, and feed it through the nozzle. The controller is sealed in a plastic box to ensure it doesn’t overheat. A few fans keep it cool. That said, it’s well worth the $1,000 price tag for the hardware alone. The company offers acceptable and swift support and the devices themselves are nicely built. But, as with nearly every low-cost printer, the software is abysmal. The system uses , a formerly open-source solution for RepRap printers. This software looks like a cross between the worst of Windows 95 bloatware and the stuff you see on the screen of high-end milling machines. It is software written by engineers and, because engineers like to be able to do all sorts of things, it features a four-way control for moving the print head, a few buttons for controlling the motor and a manual heating system that requires you to click a button to even begin thinking about printing. If your bed isn’t exactly level it will either smash the filament into the surface or extrude a string of loose filament. There is no sweet spot. This is not fire-and-forget territory. Software is expensive. Makerbot spent millions on theirs and its Makerware, along with FormLab’s solution, is some of the best on the market. In short, it just works. You drag a file into the app, set your filament type, and press Make (the same goes for FormLabs’ solution, although it’s slightly more involved). Repetier, in theory, could do the same thing. You can place items, move them around with a very primitive text-based interface, and slice them using , another open source app. Again, in theory, this should work fine. In practice on OS X, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1, the experience is awful. The nerds among you will tell me that all this can be scripted but if I’m a tinkerer buying a 3D printer for $1,000 I probably want something more that works out of the box, not something I have to piddle around with for days. How frustrating is the software? Slicing takes minutes even on a fast machine. The system will sometimes run cold, which means neither the bed nor the extruder were hot enough to print. Extrusion thickness, if not set correctly, would cause print after print to fail and even after updating the settings with official Solidoodle specs it still failed. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice and I won’t get fooled again. There are many in the open source community who will disagree with my assessment but let me assure you that use of open source software, while inexpensive, will make or break your 3D printer experience. Open source is great when very little is on the line and you can get away with some wonky interfaces or when quite a lot is on the line and you can’t hobble mission critical software with closed source shenanigans. At this point in home 3D-printing’s gestation period, however, manufactures must offer as much hand-holding as possible. Anything less and you’ve just sold your customer a $999 paperweight. To be fair you can produce some acceptable prints out of the Solidoodle. With a good model you can print nice objects at a nice resolution. To test the printer, however, I printed this “calibration model,” a large sheet with a number of balls, holes, and overhanging parts. As you can see, the resulting print was far from perfect but good enough, given the potential for failure at every step. The ball, as you see, came out fine while the holes with the small overhangs were rough. The main structure in the middle was the most problematic and the entire thing peeled off of the plate even after a liberal application of ABS slurry. [gallery ids="967867,967866,967868,967865,967864"] All told I was able to produce two usable pieces using the Solidoodle, and 99% of the problems were related to the software. I spent a full week with it, trying various configurations, and the company was more than helpful when it came to troubleshooting. However, it just wasn’t enough. If you’re a student on a budget and have plenty free time to futz with this desktop printer then you can probably get away with simply buying a cheaper RepRap clone and calling it a day. If you’re a designer or engineer, however, you could be wooed by the Solidoodle’s superior build quality and heating characteristics. However, once you fire up the software you’ll find yourself stymied. Is it impossible to use? No, but you’ll find it quite frustrating. This is not to say that the Solidoodle isn’t a good printer. Compared to others I’ve seen and used it’s surprisingly robust and easy to use. However, as mentioned before, the software is the constant stumbling block. Makerbot, too, suffered from bad software fever a few years ago when it used Replicator-G but at this point every serious manufacturer of 3D printers should have their own solution until someone comes along and adds one-click printing from the CAD/CAM system of your choice. 3D printers are still in their infancy and software like this sets the industry back each time it is used. Should you buy the Solidoodle 4? If you have plenty of time to work through the problems yourself, then by all means pick it up. It is quite a bit more expensive than, say, a similar open-source printer but the build quality alone makes it a good deal. Are you a 3D-printing novice? Then that’s a different story. In short, this printer isn’t for you… yet. With an upgrade to the software I could definitely recommend this model over similarly priced printers, if only for the enclosed build cavity. I gave this thing hours of my life and, while I will agree that I’m not a smart man, you’ll need the patience of Job to keep futzing with this printer until you get something good out of it. I honestly want a 3D printer in every home and this model shows great promise. However, as in almost every computing endeavor, software makes or breaks an experience. Hardware is hard, but software is far harder. I will follow up with the company as they grow in order to see just where their software efforts are headed. [gallery ids="967857,967858,967859,967860,967861,967862,967863"] |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 4 | null |
Stripe Debuts A New Checkout Experience With One-Click Payments For Mobile And Web | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | Stripe is on mobile and web today, which enables one click-payments for the first time on the payments platform. The new version of Checkout allows for an embeddable payment form for desktop, tablet, and mobile that doesn’t take customers outside of a merchant site, and also allows them to pay without being redirected away to complete the transaction. From the site, “Checkout is built on Stripe.js and generates a normal Stripe token. You can use the token to charge a card, create a customer, start a subscription.” At first glance, this new version of Checkout with the one click-payments experience could solve a big problem of friction in the mobile payments world for merchants. The first time a purchaser pays via Stripe Checkout on their phone, Stripe will ask the customer for their credit card info. Stripe will also ask if the customer prefers for Stripe to remember the information, and will require customers to input their phone number. A single-use SMS code will be sent to the user which they can input to complete the checkout. In all subsequent transactions using Stripe (even on different apps and sites using Checkout), the customer can input their email, and a code will be automatically sent via SMS to the phone number attached to the email. You input that code, and the customer can checkout without having to re-enter their card information across sites and merchants. Stripe says this version of Checkout is already deployed on thousands of sites and has handled millions of transactions (including Dribbble, WillCall and Humble Bundle). Creating a native checkout experience is something that could be a game-changer for reducing friction in the payments experience, especially on mobile devices and tablets. PayPal is also working on its own , which is set to be released this year. With both Stripe and PayPal approaching this in their own unique ways, the idea of attaching credit card identity to your login across devices and merchants is something we’re going to see more of as even Apple joins the payments race. While the competition is heating up in the payments world, many investors are betting on Stripe to become a powerhouse — Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund into the company this year at a $1.75 billion valuation. Thiel’s involvement in Stripe is particularly interesting, as he was one of the co-founders of PayPal, which is currently one of Stripe’s largest competitors. And Thiel actually bet on Stripe early — a few years ago — as an angel investor. We followed up with Thiel shortly following Founders Fund’s most recent investment in Stripe in late January to hear his thoughts on the company’s opportunity. As he explained to me, “Stripe is rethinking the entire payments system as a whole stack offering to companies. This is not just processing, and they are looking to build up an entire suite of services.” He adds that because it is a simple, straightforward product, Stripe’s been able to capture mind share amongst the developer community early on. “This is a different world than when we started PayPal in the 90s. There are far more people on the Internet, and connecting commerce to this is a vastly bigger world than it was during the PayPal days.” As for Patrick and John Collison, brothers who are the founders of Stripe, Thiel sees something in them that is rare in entrepreneurs. Though young, they have a comprehensive understanding of all the layers of business, from product to engineering, to hiring, to managing people, he told me. “The best entrepreneurs are ones that have panoramic understanding of a business,” says Thiel. “And while they are confident, they also have the ability to take feedback and listen.” Thiel admits himself that innovating in payments is a huge challenge, but “when it works, it works well.” |
There Is Only One Week Left To Apply For The New York City Pitch-Off | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | New York City, get ready for an epic night of rapid fire pitches from your area’s best startups. But we’re still on the hunt for startups to pitch. The application is below. Apply before March 12th. On March 20, TechCrunch is holding in your glorious city. There will be drinks, startups and the most of New York’s roaring tech scene. All are welcome, but space is limited. Tickets are only $5 until March 17, when they’ll jump to $10. Sponsorship and demo tables are also available. These events are part social gathering and part pitch-off competition where local startups or makers have 60 seconds to pitch their company or product to local VCs and TechCrunch editors. These products must currently be in stealth or private beta and be located in the DC region. Office hours are for companies selected for the Pitch-Off. These 15-minute, one-on-one talks will be held on the day of the event. We’ll hear about your company, give feedback, and talk about the best pitch strategy for the rapid-fire competition. Think of us as Adam Levine on The Voice. We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-Off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt NY; second place will receive two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt NY; and third place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt NY. There are plenty of sponsorship opportunities for local and national startups. Email our sponsorship team at sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com for more details. See you there!
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Mobile Bot Traffic Reportedly Grew 30% In 2013 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | It’s no secret that mobile — and specifically Android — is becoming a for . The result of this, according to a new report from CAPTCHA-based advertising firm , is that suspicious traffic from mobile devices grew 30 percent in 2013 and currently accounts for about 25 percent of all U.S. mobile traffic. Overall, suspicious web traffic across Solve’s network increased about 40 percent over the course of 2013 and now accounts for about 61 percent of all traffic. Just because the traffic is suspicious doesn’t mean it has to be a bot, though. Solve tells me it can confirm that about 72 percent of the suspicious traffic is definitely from bots. That number is in line with what we from security CDN service late last year. In Q4, the highest level of bot traffic came from Southeast Asia, China and Eastern Europe, with hotbeds in Singapore, Taiwan, Poland, Lithuania and Romania. Solve’s data is based on looking at over 700 million CAPTCHA verifications on about 8,400 sites. Solve Media’s CEO Ari Jacoby believes that the spike in bot traffic late in the year is in large part due to the bigger ad budgets that are being spent around the holidays. “With US advertising budgets expected to top $182B by 2015, brands and publishers must both commit to adopting fraud prevention measures now,” Jacoby said in a statement today. “Aggressive botnet operators are not only stealing marketers’ hard fought budgets, they’re also creating false results on campaign performance.” Given that Solve protects against this kind of bot traffic, it’s always worth taking the actual numbers with a grain of salt and the sites that use its system may be more prone to being attacked than a regular website, which may skew its data, too. Overall, though, the numbers in this report seem to track what we’ve heard from other companies. |
Daylight Reinvents The Experience Of Art Photography On The iPad | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | , dedicated to art photography, has been a decade in the making. The company’s founder and Michael Itkoff first built a bi-annual magazine about 10 years ago dedicated to documentary photography. “It was meant to bridge the gap between the more conceptual concerns of fine art and artists, and then the more sociopolitical concerns of documentary photographers,” he said. “In between those, we saw a growing niche for a kind of art photography that never had a platform before.” Daylight grew into a respectable brand within the art world and attracted photographers who had been published in The New York Times, Vice and Wired among other places. But it became clear that tablets held the potential to be the next destination for consumers to experience art. So Forer is shifting into digital with the release of Daylight’s first iOS edition today. “We live and we breathe tech,” Forer said. “We recognized a massive opportunity to connect mainstream audiences with high art content.”
Each “edition” of the app is a deep dive into a single artist’s body of work and there are two editions per month. The debut edition surveys the work of , a photographer known for his work in the American Midwest. The photographs in each Daylight edition are paired with essays written by and interviews with the artists. Forer said that many other startups that intersect with the art world are focused too much on e-commerce. Rather than trying to push purchases of art onto users, Daylight is about having people experience and understand art inside an app the way they might be immersed in a gallery exhibition. “From our perspective, other art startups are antiquated in their approach. They’re ultimately trying to facilitate the purchase of an extremely physical art object,” Forer said. “We occupy a digital environment and want our users to engage with art in this new environment and live with it in this same way that physical art collectors live with their pieces. An art collection is a projection of one’s taste and personality within a physical space.” |
Centrify’s Tom Kemp On Preparing Technology Companies For The Long Haul | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 5 | On a first glance, it wouldn’t be apparent that , a co-founder and the CEO of , runs one of the world’s best private enterprise technology companies. Turns out, he’s on his second startup, this one — — started back in 2004. For the past nine years, Kemp and his team have been hard at work building security and ID management products for the enterprise to better manage how their cloud, data, and app systems are accessed, as well as working under a unified IT infrastructure. After nine years of work, four rounds of financing totaling over $50M, and a workforce over 400, Centrify is now booking $50M in sales and growing, preparing for the public markets, and continuing to reinvent their core business despite all their successes. In this video, I sit down with Kemp and have a discussion around a bunch of topics — ranging from how Centrify had to transition to a cloud architecture, how this impacted their corporate culture (including managing remote staff overseas), how enterprise IT systems are still a hybrid of cloud and on-prem solutions, and how Kemp is handling transitions at the board level to prepare the company for a potential offering down the road. For any founders working on large-scale enterprise systems, learning from a Kemp’s story is not a bad idea. |
Company Data Disruptor DueDil Raises $17M To Go Global | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Four years ago the founder pitched at a small event I was at, amid what can only be described as a fit of nerves. But now founder and CEO Damian Kimmelman is a fully-rounded, confident founder who has today raised a $17 million Series B financing round, led by previous investor Oak Investment Partners. The funding round was also supported by existing investors Notion Capital and Passion Capital. The new capital will be used to boost DueDil’s product and expand into new countries. Previously the company’s company’s Series A financing was in April 2013, and brings total
investment in DueDil to $22m over the past 10 months. Users can currently access information on companies and directors in 22 different countries via the DueDil API. The largest source of private company information in the UK and Ireland, DueDil has really changed the business information sector by enabling anyone to access up-to-date information on all companies and directors – a service which was previously tortuous and expensive. Kimmelman said: “Our vision is a world of real-time decision intelligence, one where data is integrated seamlessly into business decision-making. To realise this, DueDil’s next phase is about embedding world-class discovery tools, platforms and networks into daily working life.” In the past 12 months, the company says it has doubled in size since the Series A round, increased its blue-chip Enterprise customer base and won a clutch of awards and accolades. |
Thoreau Warned Us About Ellen’s Oscar Selfie | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Since the very beginnings of electronic communication, we were warned about the light-speed cultural wasteland we were stringing together. When Henry David Thoreau first heard about the telegraph, , “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” He lamented that the first thing transmitted would probably be celebrity drivel, referencing Princess Mary Adelaide, a sort of 19th century, Kardashian-esque gossip-magnet: “Perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Tonight, on the 21st Century’s own character-limited digital microphone, adorkable talk show host, Ellen DeGeneres snapped a celebrity-filled selfie at the Oscars. This selfie Barack Obama’s historic re-election tweet; currently, it’s on its way to garnering nearly three times as many retweets (2,089,000) as Obama’s historic “Four more years” (780,000) post, toppling Obama for the more retweeted update of all time. [tweet https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/266031293945503744]
[tweet https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/440322224407314432] Now, for some math nerdiness, we can’t quite say that One Ellen retweet in 2014 is equivalent to One Obama retweet in 2012. Twitter use has been growing ( ). Here’s their growth over the past 2 years: Twitter has approximately 30% more users since Obama’s epic hug was posted. On the other hand, a spectators or bots. Additionally, celebrity love-fests are generally bi-partisan, so it’s a lot less risky to share. Thus, while we don’t know exactly how much more popular a gaggle of sexy celebrities are than the most powerful man in the free world, we can confidently say that they’re a lot more fun to talk about–mathematically speaking. As I’ve written about before, . Presidential debates used to be deeply nuanced and many hours long. Then radio and TV came along and bludgeoned substance with a soundbite assault to the death. On the other hand, sometimes entertainment is a tempting fishhook to bring the politically disinterested into the national conversation. Buzzfeed, for instance, is on its way to becoming a media empire, betting that serious politics and mindless celebrity lists can live side-by-side. Indeed, Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith explained it best when he told me: “I think anybody who’s worked in the news business, at least since I think the Second World War, realizes that entertainment is more popular and more widely consumed than politics,” he argued. “I think probably more people were talking about Marilyn Monroe than about Dwight Eisenhower on any given day in the ’50s, too. I think that’s kind of the banal truth.” |
It Took 122M Commands And 16.3 Days, But A Collaborative Horde Beat Pokemon Together | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Well, they did it. A group of more than 1 million gamers managed to work in chaotic fashion to beat Pokemon. Over on the Twitch game-live-streaming platform, crowds to control a game of Pokemon as a group, with each user shouting out different commands at once. They eventually won. You could likely beat the game more quickly, but the experiment on Twitch shows that even crowds working often at cross-purposes can eventually monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare their way through a video game. Twitch, to celebrate the victory, regarding the sheer amount of input that it took the masses to best a game often played by kids in primary school: 1.16 million total active participants; 122 commands; more than 1 billion total watched minutes. The channel picked up more than 36 million views from 9 million folks. It peaked at 121,000 concurrent viewers. The game continues over on Twitch in case you wanted some non-Oscars entertainment.
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Britain Will Reportedly Scrap 20% Tax on Bitcoin | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | British authorities have plans to scrap a 20% “value-added tax” on Bitcoins, bringing regulation of the controversial crypto-currency in line with the way it treats other currencies. “The UK’s welcoming approach to Bitcoin contrasts with the approach of other countries, amid concerns about its use for tax evasion and money laundering as well as its notoriety for wide fluctuations in value,” The Financial Times. The Bitcoin news blog Coindesk further explains that the rule is “expected to be formally announced this week,” continuing, “the ruling would find HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK’s customs and tax department, classifying virtual currencies as assets or private money, not as vouchers that required a tax on the value of the coins.” Bitcoin will still be subject to other taxes, such as the corporation tax. Many other countries have gone in the opposite direction as Britain. The currency’s troubles with theft, wild swings in value, and facilitation of the black market have , including Russia, which has banned Bitcoin. The United States is still figuring out it’s own approach. While at least one senator has called for , the Treasury Department has said that it will not regulate those who mine Bitcoin. New York officials plan to regulate Bitcoin in the near future. Governments have a delicate role to play in the still uncertain crypto-currency market. They have a vested interest in protecting businesses that want to take early advantage of a potentially lucrative opportunity, but governments also want to protect vulnerable consumers. Further details about Britain’s decision are expected this week. [ ] |
China Unleashes Yet Another Attempt At A State-Run Search Portal | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | The Chinese government has launched a new search site that is reportedly run by the vice president of , the Communist Party of China’s official mouthpiece. Called , its logo’s color scheme closely resembles (and that’s putting it charitably) Google’s. As , ChinaSo is not the first attempt by the Chinese government to create its own search engine. ChinaSo is actually a combination of Jike and Panguso, two state-run search sites that . It’s unclear why the government decided to take another stab at launching its own portal. Jike and Panguso saw so little traffic that they didn’t even make analytics firm , which means that each had less than 0.2% market share. China’s search market is already dominated by companies like and , which together hold an over 80% share. Though ChinaSo is probably destined to be ignored, it can be seen as part of China’s ongoing effort to demonstrate that its tech infrastructure’s does not need to rely on foreign companies, an initiative it has been very verbal about. For example, a year ago China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology even though it is open source because “the core technology and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google.” The Ministry also praised domestic companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Huawei for developing their own operating systems. But while China’s startup and hardware industries are gradually , ChinaSo demonstrates that initiatives by its government still have a long way to go. For example, in January the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is overseen by the State Council of China, and Shanghai Liantong Internet Technologies , which is intended for use on both PCs, mobile devices, and set-top boxes. Though the two organizations said COS was independently developed, many observers questioned that claim. As , COS closely resembles Sense, HTC’s Android skin, leading to speculation that HTC engineers had helped with its development. The Chinese government has had a bit more success with Ubuntu Kylin, an open-source OS that . Released in April 2013, Ubuntu Kylin has been downloaded more than one million times over the past half-year. Admittedly, that number is just a miniscule fragment of China’s 1.35 billion population, but it , currently the most popular OS in China, in April. |
What Games Are: Going Small | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Some changes are as obvious as night and day. Where once mobile phone gaming was the preserve of Java studios against a backdrop of handset operators taking 70% revenue cuts, now there are smartphone gaming and app stores. Steve Jobs got up on stage and and changed the world in a moment. Things would never be the same again. You can mark your calendar by those kinds of change, look back and say “I was there when…”. However most change is not like that. It’s only clear in retrospect, gradual, almost imperceptible. The games industry slides from one state of being to another without any one dramatic moment capturing its essence. One day you wake up and realize that the world is a different shape to the one you remember, but you’re not sure when that happened. It’s with that second model in mind that I’ve noticed just how much small-team game development has changed. Not only it has become viable once again, small game makers seem to have developed much more capacity. Some of the games being advanced by small teams would be considered large in the lens of yesteryear and old measures would have mandated that they need dozens of staff to complete. Without being able to pinpoint the shift to any one moment, that metric seems to have changed. One day we all realized that video games had become a big business. In the early 1990s it was uncommon for a team working on a game to consist of more than a few people. Most studios consisted of 10-ish people working on various parts of a game for a year and then publishing the result. The budgets and stakes were favorable such that studios could work on many different types of game, and the ecosystem that resulted was one of many diverse voices. While most games wouldn’t be hits, a savvy publisher could lay on enough projects so that one of them would boom and pay for all the others. Then the situation started to change. Teams grew little by little, as did project timelines. It was teams of 20 working for 18 months, then 30 for two years, then 50 for three, and so on. There are lots of reasons as to why this happened, from technology allowing for greater graphics and consequently needing more artists to market demand for content-heavy games. Over a period of 10 years games evolved from a small-team industry to a big-team (and in some cases even a gigantic-team) industry. Today it’s no longer unusual to hear stories such as the one about Riot Games renting the in order to house 1500 employees working on . Nor is it stunning to hear that cost $265m to develop. They’re certainly on the upper end of the scale, but don’t feel like they’re three-standard-deviations different. A bunch of games operate at that sort of scale now. They’re all large scale operations involved with teams of specialists. One of the other consequences of the change from small to big was that it came at the price of multiplicity. Back in the day it was more normal for studios to work on many types of game, but in the big-team world that model doesn’t work. Big-team studios keep making and improving on versions of one franchise over and over, whether as annualized releases or large-scale service operations, and are intended to do so ad infinitum. Their games are keystones, critical to the life of their publisher and they can’t really afford to take risks. For many of us who observe the industry this big way of working has long seemed dubious. There are occasional stories of games like , for instance, spending its way through $100m but with . For a long time such failures seemed to confirm a bias that we already held. We told ourselves that such intense manual labor on single titles simply wasn’t an efficient way of working in the long term. Yet for much of the industry it seemed that the only option was to go big or go home. At the recent Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam I had the chance to play several games from tiny teams that show just how far we’ve come from go-big-or-go-home. However what’s fascinating is how ambitious the games from small teams are becoming. Making games seems to becoming a much smarter, much less labor-intensive process. Another dramatic shift has more to do with ways of working. Many small teams work remotely, from their homes or in shared office environments that are low cost and easy to service. Many have become adept at hiring freelance talent for parts of their project that don’t necessarily need full time attention (audio and some art typically), often using people based all around the world. And by being smart small teams attract all the usual advantages of being nimble. They have the We may not yet be at the point where a small team can create the next , but it is worth noting that even the next big Xbox One exclusive) has been developed by a surprisingly small number of folks (around 60). There is still a degree of labor needed to produce the best next generation graphics and cool visual effects, to craft cinematics and story and lots of other tropes of blockbuster video games, but it seems to be falling. Likewise there is still a need for certain kinds of game to maintain a large support staff ( again), but community is allowing some other games in the same space to do a lot with a little (such as ). For the small game maker we seem to be living in a smarter age. |
Google Loses Emergency Bid To Keep “Innocence Of Muslims” Film Online | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Google to keep the controversial film “Innocence of Muslims” on YouTube. One of the actresses, Cindy Garcia, who wanted the film taken offline after receiving death threats, claims she has some copyright control over its distribution. The 9th Circuit agreed: “Garcia may assert a copyright interest only in the portion of ‘Innocence of Muslims’ that represents her individual creativity, but even if her contribution is relatively minor, it isn’t .” To be sure, this case goes far beyond a simple copyright claim. , which depicts the prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant, sparked global religious violence and coincided with the fatal assault on America’s Benghazi facilities. Given the enormous debate around freedom of expression, security and religious attitudes, Google argues that the public has an interest in being able to see the film. As they argued in the rejected motion, “the First Amendment protects not just the right to express information, but to receive it.” Additionally, that the court’s “rule would wreak havoc on movie studios, documentary filmmakers, and creative enterprises of all types by giving their most minor contributors control over their products.” Movie studios often contract with people for minor roles that may not share their vision for the movie. Then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got in hot water when an actress in one of her campaign ads claimed that she actually wanted Barack Obama to win. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yr7odFUARg] For Clinton, it was a mere embarrassment. But it gives you an idea of the kind of ‘havoc’ Google is referring to if an actor with an ideological disagreement with the director could hamper distribution. In fairness, Garcia isn’t so easily labeled the villain. It’s understandable that she wants a film taken offline that potentially threatens her life. Her claim may be valid and, if so, it puts Google in an awkward position of having to deal with not just studios, but every person who could hold any claim to copyright over a film on their site. The suit is ongoing. You can read Google’s motion below:
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Hotel Metasearch Top10.com Closes $8M Series B, Led By Balderton, To Expand In Europe | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Hotel metasearch startup, , has closed an $8 million Series B funding round, led by , following what it describes as rapid growth over the past 12 months. Its It’s been quite long journey for the U.K.-based startup thus far. The founders’ initial business was in mobile phone and broadband price comparison — via its Top 10 Mobile Phones and Top 10 Broadband brands, respectively — which it sold to uswitch back in 2011. It evidently hung onto the Top10.com domain name though, . The current specific focus on hotels is a pivot from a broader social recommendation and discovery platform which it focused on after exiting its earlier price comparison segment. , from and others, back in 2011 for that social recommendation platform, which included things like music, with a Spotify app for collaborative music playlists, entertainment and travel. Then in late 2012, the company narrowed its focus onto hotel search specifically — launching its current Top10.com in February 2013, and raising a $1 million extension round last summer from existing investors. The Top10.com service draws on multiple hotel recommendation data-points — such as review scores, location, popularity (based on impressions, clicks & bookings) and price — to create a shortlist of 10 recommendations for users, saving them the bother of wading through multiple sites and reading scores of reviews. Users can then further slice and dice this list by factors such as price or specific hotel features they’re after like Wi-Fi. The hotel shortlists also aggregate content from the likes of Foursquare and Google Street View to make results even easier for users to take in. And Top10.com compares live prices from major booking sites including Booking.com, Expedia and LateRooms to ensure its prices (and therefore recommendations) are up-to-date. “We’re competing with lots of major brands across the travel landscape — from traditional review sites like TripAdvisor to price ‘metasearch’ platforms like Kayak or Skyscanner,” says the startup. “The aim is to provide an ultra-quick hotel discovery experience on every device, without bewildering people with options.” Its focus on incorporating popularity within its hotel filtering algorithm means it can surface hotels that are “trending” in a particular destination — i.e. by looking at things like booking velocity, and traffic to particular hotels’ websites. “We’re also experimenting with including social factors — for example Foursquare checkins and Twitter mentions — to uncover the most interesting and hip hotels,” it adds. Top10.com says it’s now generating $1m per month in hotel bookings via its metasearch engine, and driving more than 3,000 hotel bookings per month. Quarter to quarter it says it will “roughly double bookings”, but isn’t sharing more specific growth rates at this point. Nor is it breaking out user numbers. Its business model is based on taking a commission on bookings from booking partners (it’s not disclosing the exact percentage). The startup currently employs 14 staff in London. This new Series B investment round will be used to expand the team, with an emphasis on hiring more engineers — and also to expand in Europe. Top10 said it intends to move into new European territories throughout this year. It’s currently live in the U.K. but will be adding local language and currencies support, and spending on marketing and distribution beyond the U.K., to expand its reach beyond its home market. No word on the specific additional European markets it intends to move into, as yet. Commenting on the Series B round in a statement, Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital — who joins the Top10.com board, alongside Sonali De Rycker of Accel Partners — said: “We love investing in businesses where complex technical challenges are tackled behind the scenes, whilst leaving customers with a simple and satisfying experience, both online and on mobile, which leads to almost effortless transactions. “Tom [Leathes, co-founder and CEO] and the team are an exceptional set of repeat entrepreneurs.” |
Early Shakeups In Nadella’s Microsoft | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Earlier today that Microsoft’s Tami Reller, executive vice president of marketing, and Tony Bates, executive vice president of the company’s Business Development and Evangelism group will both depart. A reportedly formal announcement date of Tuesday now appears to be little more than a coming perfunctory exercise in rehashing. If nothing else, the changes indicate that Microsoft under Satya Nadella will look quite different than the firm during Ballmer’s reign, though there doesn’t appear to be indication yet that the company’s new CEO forced the changes. The exit of Bates is sensible as he was an unselected CEO candidate. Swisher reports that he has received several offers for the top seat at technology firms, and there is the mothership for top roles at other companies. Reller is more interesting, given that before her current role she was part of the duo in charge of Windows in the post-Sinosky era. Her then-cohort Julie Larson-Green recently to clear space for the incoming Stephen Elop who will take up her job as the head of Microsoft’s hardware efforts. In addition to the above, advertising in the new Microsoft appears to have been removed from the hands of Mark Penn. Tom Warren, a reporter who covers Microsoft, remarked on that change : I doubt that view is too controversial either inside or outside the company. Call it a chrysalis moment. Nadella inherited a firm on a , but one still in transition regarding its business model, and . The changes listed above could allow Microsoft to revamp its public messaging strategy (advertising), and developer and OEM outreach. New installs in those roles could lead to structural changes. Raise your hand if you think that Microsoft’s marketing and platform messaging couldn’t use a burnishing. To be fair, Microsoft’s recent ad campaigns have , and the firm certainly has done a better job of late attracting developers to its Windows 8.x and Windows Phone platform (successes that are , I’d say). But Microsoft has more, and harder work ahead of it to not simply establish its platforms — which it has done to a modest, if stable extent — but instead to drive them to market parity with the far larger iOS and Android ecosystems. So change might not be a bad thing. Provided Microsoft brings in exceptionally strong people to recently vacated leadership roles that are key to its growth. It’s simple to forget that Microsoft’s time atop the platform pyramid is either over, under , or at least shared. And that if Microsoft fails to reassert ascendency in that realm — or again, some sort of equivalence — its still-healthy enterprise-facing products and services could face future market and dollar-share erosion to rival products and services that are native to platforms that have supplanted the venerable Windows et al. (Windows has to become young again, essentially.) To do that, Microsoft needs to woo both the regular public, and the technology community. Hence why Reller and Bates leaving the firm somewhat in unison is interesting, as it could provide Nadella with an obvious, organic, and unforced — in the non-negative sense, of course — opportunity to retool and advance Microsoft’s message to consumers (buy our stuff, it’s the best!), and developers, partners, and the like. It could stumble at this, but the opportunity is now at least now open by default. It’s hard to gauge the of a complex company with massive reach and product diversity. But I think that when it comes to the most publicly consumable fare that a company produces you can catch earlier changes in the wind. So, we should keep our ears up. Finally, I wouldn’t cast the above changes in staffing as a negative for Microsoft, except in that Microsoft is losing two very competent workers. By that I mean that the news is not indication that Microsoft is melting internally following Nadella’s ascension. So far, I’ve heard no chatter to that effect. |
Acoustic Stream Turns Your Git-Fiddle Into A Robotic Metal Monster | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Guitarists love to shred. It’s a known fact. From Slash to Debbie Gibson, shredding is the way guitarists express themselves and/or meet their wives. But how can you show the world how hard you rock when you don’t have any way to share your rockularation with the world? You use the , man. The Acoustic Stream. What does it do? It’s a little box that sits on your guitar that connects to a cellphone. When you want to record your true, face-melting riffage, you just tap the guitar twice. It automatically streams to your phone for recording or it records right on the device for later syncing. Want to connect your music to the world? Just stream the audio out through the headphone jack – wirelessly. Need to tune that git-box? I’ll tell you how to do it: with your phone. Tap that sunburst Les Paul three times and the tuner pop up. Hey, how about my strings, you ask. I nod knowingly: the Acoustic Stream also senses when your strings are going to go bad and tells you whether or not you should add an extra 10 minutes to that Cinnamon Girl solo. The only thing this thing can’t do is get you a gig at the Whiskey A Go Go. How much do I pay for this, Socrates? you ask. Easy. You go to get an early-bird unit. It plugs right into your phono jack on your guitar or can stick inside your sound hole. Your choice, Scaramouche. The team, led by Robert Bean of Boston, is also making the plans for the device open so you can make a unit for your trumpet, upright bass, or flugelhorn. In short, it’s a pretty cool little piece of kit that can only get better. The team is looking for $50,000 (about the price of a nice dinner out with the band) and they’ve already raised half that (about the nightly champagne budget for the 14 On Fire Stones tour). It will be interesting to see how this thing actually pans out and, as always, those of you who are about to rock, we salute you.
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Mashable Finalizes $14M First Outside Funding Round | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Tech and social media blog Mashable has round led by Tribune Digital Ventures, the company announced today. The funding adds nearly $1 million to the as of early January this year, and represents the first time the site has sought outside funding. Mashable has offices in New York City and San Francisco, and was founded in 2005 by CEO Pete Cashmore. The round includes Update Partners, New Markets Venture Partners, Social Starts; and a number of individual investors in addition to TDV. This year, Mashable has hired on a number of new editorial personnel, and plans to expand with offices in LA and London to build out its global presence. |
Twitter’s Root Injustice | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | three years this post has been stuck in the drafts folder of my computer. I didn’t finish because I would go to edit it then convince myself, halfway through, that I was on the verge of a and my time was better spent coding. I’ve stopped thinking that there is a for Twitter. There is, instead, a systemic problem that all digital platforms face but few have ever dared to tackle. This seems like a small problem at first, but it’s a core one that extends to every corner of the product. The problem is so big because it builds on itself. The reason joining Twitter was so exciting in 2007 is the same for which it was exciting to register a domain name and start an Internet business in the 1990s — the first people who show up to open markets can win big. Yes, you can get a good username, but the real issue is the network effects that come from being first. It’s a classic platform problem. Every time you’re followed it gets easier for others to follow you because you have a bigger audience more likely to spread your message to more people. It’s easy to make an argument that what happened to blogging, and what is happening to Twitter, is a network effect and destined to happen to any platform, but that’s the easy and cynical way out. If you want a platform to thrive you need to do what good governments do: help newcomers, break up monopolies, and keep it competitive. The story of my experience on Twitter is the story that is celebrated — but rarely the case for most people. When I joined Twitter in 2009 it was like showing up to a half-settled frontier town. I could talk with people who would normally never talk to me, I could gain a following in fields where I was years younger than most, and I could do this all from a laptop in my underwear. Twitter was magical in 2009 because the platform was getting a daily flood of users of all stripes eager to find accounts to follow. We’ll never be able to get back to that era of Twitter, but there are a ton of things Twitter can do to help users. Twitter has a built-in method to reward users and it’s called the Suggested User List. The list comes in many flavors. You get a list curated by Twitter’s editorial team when you first join. This list is full of celebrities and recognizable news sources — in 2009, Anil Dash about what it’s like to be on this list. You then get a mix of personalized suggestions when you follow someone new in your email and in the left column after you follow someone. The algorithm for this is hidden but I get the same suggested users over and over, and I’m willing to bet most of these suggestions are fueled by overlapping followers of the people I follow. The Suggested User List is a mechanism that can make Twitter more competitive but only if it rewards a behavior new users have a shot at. Imagine if it the list were generated more like this: In this case, a new Twitter user who is followed by a handful of people has a shot at getting promoted if their tweets are resonating. And then on the flip-side, if that user gains a ton of followers, they have to maintain their level of engagement or they fall off the list. This algorithm is obviously just a sketch — there are a zillion other factors to consider — but the point is to reward a behavior that both new and old users can achieve. One of the worst behaviors I will admit to doing on a regular basis is to rapidly judge a Twitter user based on the number of followers they have. I know it’s wrong and stupid, but this is the metric that Twitter gives you on a profile to assess legitimacy. It’s hard to look away. Twitter’s latest profile redesign maintains this focus. Those who have been on Twitter a few years can game this by accumulating a large percentage of followers who never return. A simple thing Twitter can do to make this metric more fair is to change number of followers to followers. Active followers would mean something like number of followers who have logged in the past 30 days. Additionally you can have a metric like , which would be the number of times a tweet from this user loaded into the timeline of another in the past 30 days. It’s easy to see why this is a scary proposition for Twitter. Switching to active followers means breaking the news to users that they’re considerably less popular than they’ve been told. , as it would be a judgment day for a lot of precious egos. The consideration is that power on Twitter is displayed in a way that is more realistic and encouraging to newcomers. It’s hard for many who gained prominence in the first wave of Twitter to empathize with what it’s like to join Twitter today. To the first wave of users, Twitter is a bilateral marketplace of ideas. A meritocracy. You get people you admire to follow you through your own tenacity and wit. It was a frontier town where you made up the rules. Every vertical, whether it’s tech, liberal politics, or the NFL, has a maze of gatekeepers firmly entrenched in their own respective fields. People beg for retweets. Companies pay bot armies to follow them. Those with power sell their tweets to the highest bidder. The prospect of starting from zero is daunting to the point that many just opt out. Open systems start with no hierarchy, so they look like meritocracies at first, but network effects mean newcomers a hierarchy, often without even meaning to. We will never return to a Twitter where there’s little difference between newcomers and the old guard. The important questions to ask now are the same questions that were asked in an era of media where there were printing presses and delivery trucks. When you direct these questions to the owners of a platform, they don’t know how to respond and that’s partly because they don’t feel they have to. They’re tech. They make the pipes. If Twitter wants to survive, this is an attitude that will need to change. Twitter’s product has not changed significantly since it was first sketched on a notepad. In some sense, this is admirable, but there comes a time when doing the same thing lends itself to an entirely different outcome. That is what is happening now and Twitter is hurting. Twitter’s stock is sinking. Their user growth is flatlining. Facebook is making aggressive moves in the . I love Twitter. I’ve met some of my favorite people and friends through the site. But I also recognize that my success on Twitter is a privilege tied to the date I claimed my username. If Twitter wants to survive, they’ll need to keep this privilege in check. Getting there again means Twitter will need to change the way it rewards users and measures success. The only way that you’ll get Twitter to act is if they see this as a problem then feel the pressure. Now’s a good time to Tweet. Send one to: , , , and . |
More? | Devin Coldewey | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Earlier this week, Nilay Patel at the Verge a provocative, and provocatively-titled, pronouncement on the state of the Internet. Never one to mince words, he declared it fucked. I beg to differ from Mr Patel, not to the degree, as a man once said, that is fucked, but I think that, in the words of the rejoinder, the fucking plane has not quite crashed into the fucking mountain. Certainly it is beyond any doubt that the FCC, the lobbying process, regulation apparatus, and the depredations of globe-spanning corporations are destructive and counter to progress. On those subjects it is superfluous for me to add my opinion, since Patel explains well and in detail many of the problems with those particular concepts and institutions. (I gather, though, that the paid-peering issue is both more common and more complicated than he suggests.) Where I don’t agree, however, is in how we think about the necessary aspects of the Internet, and in treating it as a utility. The Internet is, it seems to me, not in territory. Utilities are for resources that are essential to the health and livelihood of human beings. Clean water provides hydration, obviously, and is electricity is the most common and efficient form of heat and light — the latter is nice to have when you want to read in the evening, and indispensable in a functioning city for a number of reasons. The disposal of waste from population centers, as well, is fundamental to the health of organized society. On the other hand, while certainly the Internet is for you and me and everyone else reading this, let’s be honest. We live in quite an intense first-world privilege bubble and even within that there is a huge difference in how much people rely on the Internet, and for what. It’s unquestionably massively helpful to millions of people, and contributes to productivity in a thousand different ways. But for that matter, so do petroleum, chemistry, forests, hospitals, and so on. The Internet is an incredibly useful tool in modern society, but it isn’t essential to the basic functioning of society. Utilities are. That said, I don’t want to just play word games here, although that can be fun. In this case, the objection is not exactly germane. My narrow definition excludes such things as schools and police from the “essential.” But obviously those are tremendously important public services that any effective and modern government has a serious interest in providing, funding, or otherwise promoting. So we can fairly include the Internet in that class — a step below utilities, but above, say, restaurants and hardware stores. So, working on the assumption that the Internet is to the public good, we still have to consider what the upper and lower bounds of its providance ought to be. After all, we expect a police department, but not a personal bodyguard for every citizen (we may have gotten that in a perverse way anyhow through the NSA). We expect libraries, but not branches on every corner. We expect public housing, but not public mansions. There’s a certain logical level of certain shared goods that we can and should reasonably expect — that which provides (this last since reducing the burden of the government on its people is a good likewise). Like most triple points, these are a bit difficult to pinpoint, but nevertheless we endeavor. So what is the triple point for Internet, or online communications, or however you want to phrase it? Well, first, what makes the Internet good? It is the ability to exchange information between two points on the globe regardless of their positions. This obsoletion of the physical dimension of distance is tremendous, the primary advantage, and the good from which every other good on the internet has sprung. The full power of the Internet was, in a way, on show as early as the telegraph. But in another, less ridiculous way, it arrived when there was basic always-on Internet access in every major population center (this point is by no means authoritative or official, just a convenient one to consider). That was the point when, with a modem and PC or via a library (kindly provided in many of those population centers), most people on Earth might have conceivably connected instantly with any other for the exchange of data. Now, I don’t want to imply that dialing your 2400 baud modem into a central hub from which you can Omegle a random Belgian man is a human right, or the “floor” for modern Internet access. On the other hand, I don’t think that the ability to stream “House of Cards” in 4K is, either. There is nothing in the social contract that compels a government to provide for excess (we find ways to provide ourselves, of course). And make no mistake, . We disguise our glut of bandwidth by comparing the price per megabit with Norway’s, as if the two countries are otherwise totally comparable and this price difference is all that divides us. We justify our multiplying demands by citing the corporate greed inarguably but largely irrelevantly leveraged against it by Comcast and Time Warner Cable. They’re evil, and they won’t let us have it — therefore our needs must be measured and just! What should you be guaranteed? I don’t think it is the government’s business to the bandwidth for, say, a two-way video stream in HD. I think it’s a great thing for everyone to have, and they should promote it and support it, but it’s really superfluous to the core benefits of Internet access. And if it can’t be provided or the cost is too great, as it may be in many places, that falls outside the optimum, far from the triple point of the best for the most at the lowest — and the should be the optimum. We should not attempt to set as a basic civic right something that can’t be guaranteed. What can we provide everyone in the world, or failing that — as we usually do — everyone in the developed world for nominal price and with penalties if interrupted, a la power and water? I would say you’re already getting a hundred times that minimum, ten times what you had a couple years ago, and rising fast. I would say you’re not in danger of not being included in the modern world, and I would say that the Internet, far from being fucked, is a riot of access and democratization. It’s one of the least-fucked things in the world. If what we wanted was to get the bare minimum faster and more efficiently, as we do with water and electricity, demand for bandwidth would not be skyrocketing. You don’t use a hundred times the water as you did in 1995, and because we acknowledged that people generally don’t drink, flush, and bathe in more than however many gallons per day, the infrastructure and cost can reflect that. With the Internet, we made a different choice, and I hasten to add : pay the same, for more. $50 bought you much Internet in 2001, and it buys you much Internet today. This is a choice we made! A choice to empower ourselves, because we felt our expenditure was about what we were willing to pay for connectivity. We get more for that money every day for many reasons, though of course largesse on telecoms’ accounts isn’t one of those. Yes, the telecoms are obstructionist, predatory dinosaurs. And they will go the way obstructionist, predatory dinosaurs always go in the end. And we will have our hand in that. But we also have to admit that we have had a hand in creating our own predicament: crying for more like insatiable chicks, but at the same time feeding the companies that provided for us; unsurprisingly, their power grew right alongside ours. Let’s say people use twenty gallons of water a day. That is what we must provide for the infrastructure of a healthy society. What is the “twenty gallons a day” for Internet connectivity? That is what we must provide in order to do our duty to our fellow men, who will then have the vast majority of the benefits of the Internet in their hands. Any problem we encounter in obtaining more than that is a case of insufficient luxury. The problems assailing the Internet are specific to it, but not unique to it. Everywhere you look, government regulation is ruled by lobbies, legislation inked by lawyers, laws eyed sidewise by ignorant old men in smoke-filled rooms on their way to re-election fundraisers. But while this “democracy inaction,” to borrow Jon Stewart’s phrase, is troubling the internet in some ways, it has more dire consequences elsewhere; and the scope of the problems we talk about online should be considered in light of that. As long as we’re talking real talk, it looks like pretty much is fucked. But the Internet is marching forward at a steady pace, largely because the companies that make it go have a financial stake in indulging our ever-increasing demand for bandwidth. I have faith that things will turn out all right in the end, though there will be setbacks. But I think we should keep in mind that we are fighting not for our rights, but for the continued increase of an already towering privilege. |
Samsung’s New Chromebook Apparently Getting The Leather Look Of Galaxy Devices | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Samsung’s next Chromebook has broken cover, courtesy of , and the Chrome OS-powered notebook has a familiar design trait that’s becoming a Samsung trademark: faux leather. Like the back of its new NotePRO and TabPRO Android tablets, the back of the lid of this new Chromebook appears to sport the leather look, with stitching around the edge (evleaks also uploaded a ). This is also a style that Samsung has applied to its Note and Galaxy S5 smartphones, and appears to be gaining popularity with the Korean company. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a solid or a questionable decision – the look definitely has somewhat of a throwback vibe, and not necessarily to a better time. On the other hand, it could theoretically lend a luxe appeal to an otherwise fairly drab design, and at least it sets Samsung devices apart from the hardware of other OEMs. There’s not much else to glean from this photo, save that it’ll have at least one USB port and one 3.5mm stereo jack, presumably for audio out. The Samsung Chromebook that exists currently (the Series 3 model) has an all-plastic case and was released in October 2012. At $249.99 it promised to be a supremely affordable computer with longish battery life and decent specs, but more recent releases from competitors outclass the aging notebook in almost every regard. It’s definitely due for an upgrade, and it looks like we won’t have long to wait for one to arrive. |
Among News Apps, Flipboard Drives The Most Traffic For Publishers (According to Onswipe) | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Mobile publishing startup is releasing data today that looks at the popularity of mobile newsreading apps from the perspective of digital publishers. Onswipe’s platform allows publishers to create mobile-optimized versions of their websites and ads, so the company says it can track every time an article from one of its partner sites is loaded in a news app. In the period from November 13 to January 13, the company says it tracked more than 60 million total visitors, and it saw that more than 320,000 visits came from four newsreaders: Pulse ( ), Zite ( ), News360, and Flipboard. If you’ve seen the news app charts on the iPad (that’s the device where , though it has been ), you probably won’t be too surprised to learn that Flipboard drove the most visits over that time period — 44 percent of the newsreader total, compared to 29.19 percent from Pulse, 24.94 percent from News360, and 1.87 percent from Zite. When it came to engagement, however, Pulse was on top, with the average visit lasting 3 minutes and 24 seconds, versus 2:40 for Flipboard, 1:36 for News360, and 0:45 for Zite. As far as the most popular content categories on each app, entertainment led on Flipboard and News360, while technology was at the top for Pulse and Zite. One caveat: Publishers can create Flipboard-optimized versions of their content that don’t require loading their websites at all, so those views wouldn’t be tracked in this data. However, Onswipe said they’re not aware of any Onswipe publishers that participate in the . I also asked co-founder and CMO Jason Baptiste if it surprised him that news apps are driving such a small percentage of total traffic to Onswipe sites, and he replied, “It really did, but Flipboard is gaining steam overall – adding a mobile web version really helped them is what my gut says. Also quite interesting that News360 is pretty big.” You can read . |
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Kickstarter Is About To Crowdfund Its $1 Billionth Dollar | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | How much money would you guess the Internet has collectively thrown at Kickstarter? Don’t bother whipping out the ol’ graphing calculator — Kickstarter actually shares that number regularly. Sometime quite soon, Kickstarter will surpass . This comes from Kickstarter’s , where the company regularly provides a breakdown of where the money is going on the site. As of this morning, Kickstarter has seen $999,209,752 dollars pledged to projects — or roughly $791K shy of the big B. They’ll likely pass the billion mark some time in the next few days. One thing worth noting: this is dollars pledged across “Successfully Funded” projects, projects in progress, and those that didn’t meet their final goal. On Kickstarter, pledged money is only received if the campaign’s target goal is met. Kickstarter says that, of the billion dollars pledged overall, $858M has been pledged to successfully funded projects. (For the curious: Kickstarter takes a 5% cut of successful campaigns. I promised you wouldn’t need your calculator, so: on the $858M that has been pledged to successful projects at this point, that’s $42 million or so that went to Kickstarter.) |
The Mass Market Tesla E Will Have A 200 Mile Range, Be Roughly 20% Smaller Than Tesla S | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5N9xIfTU5g?feature=player_embedded] A few new details about Tesla’s upcoming ‘affordable’ electronic vehicle came out of a talk the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk gave last week, and from the event. Musk shared info around what we can expect from the upcoming mass market ‘Model E’ from the electric car-maker, and those details suggest we’ll see a car with double the range and battery capacity of existing affordable electrics. Musk said that the Model E will be about 20 percent smaller than the Model S, and that it’ll attain the same 200 mile range on a single charge. That led Electrek to the logical conclusion that the Model E’s battery will be around 80 percent the capacity of that found in the Model S, which amounts to around 48kWh. That’s still over double the 24kWh battery in the Nissan Leaf, which has an estimated range of 75 miles on a full charge. The Model E should be priced at around $35,000 or half the entry-level cost of the Model S, thanks to economies of scale and improvements to battery production tech, which would indeed put it within striking distance for a mass market car buying audience. It would also make Tesla the market leader in an entirely new category when it comes to electric vehicles, which is good news for the car maker’s bottom line over the next decade or so. Tesla recently announced that it would be building a to help it drive down the costs of its battery packs by over 30 percent, which is designed in term to help it build ad scale production of its mass market vehicle, which it wants to bring to market within around three years’ time. |
The WhatsApp Effect | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | TechCrunch It’s no secret that many entrepreneurs and investors are seduced by the . Walk around any young company fine-tuning their product to fit their market or any early-stage investment committee meeting, and inevitably, network effects will be discussed. “How do we tweak the product to ignite a network effect?” “They’ve built a great product, but can it find a network effect to grow?” On the web, the right answers to these questions have created enduring global companies and handsomely lined many pockets. On mobile, we all knew — — that this would be the case, but perhaps we didn’t have a good sense of where the floor would be or how high the ceiling could rise. Now, as “The WhatsApp Effect” , the picture is beginning to get clearer, and the result will impact early-stage tech entrepreneurship moving forward. There are different kinds of network effects, but as it pertains to mobile software, this specific network effect is not just about how services improve as more people join — it’s also about the speed with which mobile software can proliferate and spread, with minimal friction, through various networks. Speed is critical, because quite often, these races can end in winner-take-all outcomes, and the minimization of friction is critical because it not only increases speed, but potentially reduces capital requirements to get there. When it comes to early-stage mobile products and the competitive environment to fund them (to a point), these elements are not only critical — they’re seductive. Mobile valuations will continue to rise, technical and design talent will continue to shift over to the mobile platform, more and more apps will build native messaging backbones into their products, and the competition for a mobile user’s attention and credit card will get even more intense. This is “The WhatsApp Effect.” We all now see the heights to which mobile software values can reach, with hits like Instagram, Angry Birds (and more recently, Flappy Birds), Uber, and now WhatsApp, and now more and more people worldwide are going to attack these categories and emergent opportunities in mobile gaming, transportation, payments, m-commerce, and much more. The opportunity here is so big, it’s like a “Voltron of Network Effects,” where mobile devices, mobile platforms, social graphs, address books, and applications themselves form a system where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s not always classy to admit, but . Yes, the $19b number is better analyzed as what this particular product was worth to its acquirer, not the broader market, but like a fancy piece of real estate, market price is ultimately what the highest bidder is willing to pay. it doesn’t have to “make sense” to the rest of us. In a global economy where capital is concentrated among a few, and where a good portion of that capital seeks high-growth opportunities, we can expect more and more activity now that investors of all stripes — from early-stage tech investors all the way to retail investors — see the and the quick, stratospheric returns it can generate. And, as it becomes harder to identify who the winners in mobile will be, and as those winners require less capital to begin and maintain operations, the competition to invest in potential breakouts and winners will only intensify. We’ve already seen a bit of this with Snapchat going from venture capital to hedge funds in the span of a calendar year. The creator of Flappy Birds could’ve raked in a huge bounty and only paid a toll to device-makers for the access to the user network — he had no need for private investment. This is just the beginning. Dating all the way back to the original telephone all the way up to influential global companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among others, the dream of network effects is to create value for users by adding more users to the service. These products often empower users to send and receive packets of information, in various forms, from something as complex to private payment keys to as simple as a text message inside WhatsApp. Eventually, networks can grow so large as to confer lock-in, where the software traps the user into its experience and creates a barrier to entry for competitors. This is the dream for mobile app makers, too, to harness the combination of these massive network effects and have their software spread faster than has ever been possible. However, we should remain cautious, too — the recent $19b representation of what mobile network effects can generate will intensify interest in the category, but , and while the number of mobile users coming online will continue to rise, these users’ hours per day will not increase. I don’t mean to imply there won’t be terrific opportunities for SaaS products or other infrastructure or enterprise IT products and services, but when it comes to reaching consumers en masse and looping them into a network effect product, the market has confirmed what we’ve all along — that we are all building and investing into a platform that can reach heights we may have never seen before. That, to me, is “The WhatsApp Effect,” and there’s no turning back now. / Flickr Creative Commons |
Inside The Billion-Dollar Hacker Club | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | of old friends, assembled for an impromptu reunion, the venue would feel familiar: an online chat room running on a secure private server. Each were former members of the elite hacking group “w00w00” and they had reconvened that afternoon to celebrate and share in the success of one of their own. In some ways it was just like old times. But rather than success being the discovery of a new software exploit or penetration of a computer network, this was something more extraordinary. One of the group’s former members had just sold their company for $19 billion. His name is Jan Koum (known to the group simply as “yan”) and his startup is WhatsApp, the messaging app by Facebook. “Is there a minimum net worth to be in here now?” quipped one of the chat room’s participants. However, what makes this story more remarkable is that Koum isn’t the first former w00w00 member to achieve entrepreneurial success or the fame that often comes with it. Nor is he necessarily the first from the group to have become a billionaire. Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning (“napster”) is known to have been a member of w00w00, along with a number of other early employees of the pioneering music file-sharing service. Meanwhile, although not universally recognised by the group, Sean Parker (“dob”), Napster’s other co-founder and the ex-president of Facebook, is said to have been present at the beginning of w00w00’s formation. Many other former members of this elite hacking crew have become leaders in the Internet security and related industries, founding or working in senior roles at companies such as Cloudmark, Duo Security, Hotmail, Google, Yammer, Veracode, CloudVolumes, Symantec, SecurityFocus, Immunet, and Sourcefire. “Everyone talks about the , but nobody talks about the w00w00 mafia,” says a person familiar with the group, comparing the impact its participants have made on the tech industry to the much-publicised successes of ex-PayPal employees and founders. Formed sometime around 1996 and still active until the early 2000s, not a huge amount is known publicly about w00w00 or its precise activities. Its online footprint consists almost entirely of the security tools and issued by various participants of the group and garnered through the discovery of such software exploits. The official website — or what remains of it — vaguely w00w00 as “the largest nonprofit security team in the world,” which at one point included 30+ active participants and spanned 12 countries on five continents. “w00w00 is, at its core, a social collective of people who are, or were at one time, interested in computer security,” founding w00w00 member Jonathan Bowie (“jobe”) tells TechCrunch. “It was also created out of the acknowledgement of a bunch of teenage whiz-kids that we needed a platform for social networking with people we’d consider our peers.” At the age of 17, taking inspiration from stories he had read about Xerox PARC, Bowie started the “#!dweebs” channel on EFNet and invited other like-minded hackers to join. But eight to nine months into the chat room’s existence, some of its participants decided a change of name was required. Jokingly, Matt Conover (“shok”), currently founder and CTO of , suggested they call the channel “w00w00” and the name stuck. Although they mainly congregated online, Bowie says w00w00 members would sometimes meet in-person at local “2600″ events or at major security conferences. “There were also pockets of the group that were working for the same companies,” he says. Contrary to our use of the term “members” to describe those who have gained entry into the group, the w00w00 website explicitly states “there are no ‘members,'” only participants, since to a certain extent membership remained informal. Framing it that way also likely protected the autonomy of its participants, many of whom already worked for major security companies. “I believe at one point in the late 90s/early 2000s we had representative membership with ties to every major security consulting firm, hacker think tank, and security team on Wall Street,” says Bowie. Another aspect of w00w00’s implicit mission was to be more open than other hacker groups and the “somewhat closed-off world of black hat research.” New members of the group were vetted simply by requiring that they be invited to the channel by an existing w00w00 member and that they could demonstrate a level of technical curiosity and expertise. “You just had to be invited… w00w00 was a really friendly and open group and a lot of the people in w00w00 were also part of other groups,” former member (“gaius”) tells TechCrunch. The other hacker groups active at the time included “HERT,” “TESO,” and “ADM.” That didn’t stop people attempting to join w00w00 without an invitation. In one story I came across, a hacker from Denmark tried to gain entry to the group’s private chat room by exploiting a weakness in the original IRC protocol. In retaliation, a member of w00w00 attacked the intruder’s box and retrieved his home phone number. They then called him up and asked him to explain in 20 words or less why he wanted to join w00w00. His answer: “I want to change the world.” In an interview with BME Online’s “HYPE,” published in 2000, a w00w00 representative likens the group’s activities to a security conference, but one that runs 365 days of the year and takes place online. “Acceptance into the group is based on technical knowledge and not reputation,” explains the representative. “We would spend hours exchanging ideas and crazy thoughts about everything, mostly computer hacking and security stuff but also business, life…” says Zboralski. In one chat log seen by TechCrunch, the young hackers discuss the age-old topic of matters of the heart and getting laid. “I have in quotes ‘love != productive,'” says one participant. “Lack of sex makes it hard to work,” counters another. “We liked to tinker with things,” says Bowie. “We liked to create, manipulate and, most importantly, discover technology. We researched everything from discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities, security tools ranging from password analysis to packet generation to exploit platforms. “The base ideology for the group was encouraging positive collaborative research in ways that not only benefited the community, but also could act as a launching pad for the success of the individual members,” he says. That dichotomy of collaboration and individualism caused some tensions within the group, as it found itself caught up in the “ ” debate relating to how much information to disclose after discovering a vulnerability. But it also created an environment that would set the seeds for members of w00w00 to pursue their own entrepreneurial endeavours, individually and in collaboration. An early example was the creation of Napster in the late 90s when Shawn Fanning recruited a number of other w00w00 members to help develop the music file-sharing service. They included system architect Jordan Ritter (“nocarrier’), who played a key role in helping Napster scale and is sometimes credited as a co-founder, and server admin Evan Brewer (“dmess0r’). Ritter has since co-founded multiple companies including and . Members of w00w00 were also some of the first users of Napster after initially reverse-engineering various aspects of the service in protest of Fanning’s refusal to allow them to inspect the source code. “This is, in our opinion, the greatest tool for finding MP3s in the world,” a cached version of the w00w00 website reads. “It’s safe to say without w00w00, the world would’ve never gotten Napster,” says Bowie. Other notable w00w00 alumni include Dug Song (co-founder of and co-founder of Arbor Networks), Michael A. Davis (CTO of ), David McKay (early employee at Google and AdMob), Josha Bronson (Director of Security at ), Joshua J. Drake ( Labs), Andrew Reiter (Researcher at ), Simon Roses Femerling (ex-Microsoft Research), Gordon Fyodor Lyon (creator of ), Adam O’Donnell (co-founder of ), Mark Dowd (co-founder ) and Tim Yardley (researcher in critical infrastructure security), to name but a few. Talking to a number of former w00w00 members, what’s striking is that none seem particularly surprised at the success that they and other members of the group have seen, including Jan Koum’s multi-billion-dollar home-run with WhatsApp — even if one member confessed to not knowing that “yan” was Jan until news of the acquisition broke. “The only surprise is that we didn’t all end up in jail,” joked one w00w00 participant. “We felt the world was ours to take,” says Zboralski, who is currently founder and CEO of . “We were young, smart, ambitious and crazy; we could do things that few people thought were possible. A lot of us had a ferocious sense of entitlement.” Adds Bowie: “We all thought great things would happen; we all saw the writing on the wall.” |
#SXSpontaneity, RIP | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 2 | Such was the sentiment of a long-time SXSW attendee who decided to sit out this year, echoed by many others in the tech world. With its ever-expanding programming, clusterfuckery of housing options and the commercialization of what was once considered a must-attend conference for anyone in the know, SXSW hasn’t just jumped the shark, it’s being openly maligned by veteran attendees. And those who are choosing to go, like me, are being looked upon with a sympathetic pity similar to a Southerner’s use of “Bless Your Heart” to mean “You’re as dumb as dirt.” Bless my heart, indeed. I’m going not to sit in on endless panels (though I did buy a badge, which apparently is becoming more and more rare, if my friends are any indication), but instead to give it one last attempt to salvage its value. I think there are still deals to be done and people to be met, which is perhaps an overly optimistic view after witnessing first-hand the change over the last 11 years that I have attended. And oh how it’s changed. Besides the size (unbearable — think mosh pit at a death metal concert, only with much dorkier t-shirts) or the giant, overstated big-brand activations that are a visual incongruity to the festival I once adored, it’s the authenticity and intimacy that has disappeared. But what I miss the most is the spontaneity. Best intentions would get waylaid, and it was wonderful…it’s what made the event what it was. You’d be walking to a (most likely overcrowded) party, run into someone you hadn’t seen in years and instead spend the following five hours getting to know your next boss. It was telling that hot guy you saw in the crowd of your 3,000-person party to “stay put” that resulted in a torrid love affair that spanned for years to come. It was the unexpected, the decisions you made on a whim, that led to some of the most rewarding experiences. I’d go so far as to say it made SXSW what it is … or, these days, what it was. Everything now feels over-planned and over-produced, and not just by an organization that (understandably) needs to grow and be profitable and provide experiences for both brands and individuals alike. It’s the invitations from companies and brands that start arriving in your inbox in January. It’s the fact that all downtown hotels sell out within hours of tickets going on sale…IN JULY. And it’s this loss of serendipity that is causing many long-time SXSW devotees to stay home. I brought this conversation to . Hillary Hartley and Amy Muller, two of the founders of YxYY (which many are calling the latter-day SXSW), both cited the loss of the “magic” as a reason to skip this year. The loss of “ ” made it hard for Hartley to justify going, as she was . Muller agrees; “ .” Others lamented the big brands and marketing projects, such as Drew Olanoff, who : “As soon as bad marketers and PR people saw SXSW as a shortcut to growing an app it all went downhill.” Yet others – such as – posits that this is merely a natural evolution. “Looking past the ‘it’s too big, too corporate, too lame now’ argument, as it happens with many things, we’ve outgrown it. I’m sure there are lots of 26-year-olds that are psyched to go.” Maybe. As for me, I’m not planning much, and I’m RSVPing for exactly one event (and it’s a small, invite-only dinner with some of my best friends.) Instead of throwing a huge party, I’m going to wake up one day, check the weather and invite some friends to join me for an outside drink. Is there hope for SXSW yet? I don’t know, but bless your heart, perhaps I’ll see you there. |
AirSnap Helps You Take Beautiful Group Selfies By Pairing Two iOS Devices | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | How many times have you stepped out of the group to click pictures, feeling left out as others posed? Or have there been instances when you’re jostling to get back for a group picture after setting the timer of a camera shutter? While there is , which comes with an LCD screen that flips 180 degrees for taking selfies, it still requires users to make adjustments in the frame. Ditto for camera-fitted mobile phones that need a lot of work in getting that perfect selfie. Group selfies are mainstream now, and that’s despite all the theories . As TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook wrote last month, . , an iOS app developer based in the Indian coastal town of , is today going live with an upgrade of its , loaded with a new feature called that helps users capture photos and videos remotely by pairing two iOS 7 devices (using Bluetooth or wi-fi) like iPhones, iPads or iPod Touches. Both the iOS 7 devices need to be loaded with Camera Plus app, which converts one of the devices into a remote trigger and the other one for capturing images, videos. I am not a big selfie fan, but while trying out the app it became clear that AirSnap allows much more than just clicking selfies. I paired my iPad with iPhone and used one of them to capture emotions of my 3-year old daughter opening a gift-wrapped doll some 20 feet away. I connected the two devices through Bluetooth, which assigned iPad as the device for capturing images and converted my iPhone 5 into a remote shutter. AirSnap allows users to control flash, switch between camera modes, see instant previews on the trigger device and select front and rear cameras. All these features make it so much easier to manage group photos where no one wants to be left out. Among features I liked while playing around with the app was the customized experience it offered for different iOS devices. For instance, AirSnap has a customized floating capture bar for Camera Plus on the iPad so that users don’t end up straining their fingers while reaching for the capture button. There are some standard features too that help enhance the quality of images and videos. Pix’d is a feature for instance that fixes color, skin tones. As part of the new release, Camera Plus 3.5 has also been upgraded with several cool features. A “Soft Flash” for iPads helps brighten images along with a 720p video capture option. AirDrop sharing and the ability to pause and resume video recording on-the-go are among other cool additions. The app allows standard social sharing across Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, iMessage, AirDrop, and helps Instagram users to fit entire images into the square format before uploading them. The latest release of Camera Plus also makes it easier to focus and hunt down that perfect shot. Along with “Lumy”, a slider feature on the screen that analyses prevailing light conditions and adjusts brightness accordingly, the photos should get clearer too. Apple has recently been granted patent for , underscoring how the company is moving into the wearable computing era. AirSnap kind of follows that trail too. “Apple seems to be bracing itself for the introduction of wearables era. It looks like an external device that can control and trigger photos and videos remotely. We just hope they open up their API’s so that Camera Plus can leverage it,” said Guruprasad Kamath of GlobalDelight. AirSnap marks an evolution for the most popular app developed to date by GlobalDelight — . The app has seen close to 25 million downloads and has nearly 9 million active users. Some of the past features such as the option of storing images and videos in a password-protected “Locked Roll” have been retained, but it comes at an extra cost through in-app upgrade. GlobalDelight might not be as well known in India as the country’s biggest technology companies such as and , but it’s not an alien in the Apple app store. Over six years since it was first established as a subsidiary of , GlobalDelight has launched several apps such as (3.5 million downloads) and Camera Plus, which has seen close to 25 million downloads to date. “Going beyond the intuitiveness and beauty of the app, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for the user. We’ve brought out simple ways to adjust the exposure and brightness (Lumy) as well as an easy way to take care of image enhancement (Pix’d),” added Rohith. Robosoft/GlobalDelight is inspiring a whole new breed of entrepreneurs from small towns in India to build software products. Based in Udupi, which is more famous for its temples and local cuisine, a team of 35 engineers have been cooking apps at GlobalDelight since 2008, totaling over 35 million downloads on the Apple App Store to date. Camera Plus with AirSnap will be available for starting today on the iTunes App Store for $0.99. If you’re an existing Camera Plus user, the upgrade with AirSnap comes free. |
Mt.Gox Finds 200,000 Bitcoin In An “Old-Format” Digital Wallet | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Mt.Gox, the bankrupt online currency exchange, said that it has located 200,000 bitcoin in a digital wallet. In , CEO Mark Karpeles disclosed that the currency, which is worth about $118 million at , was discovered in one of the “old-format wallets” that Mt.Gox had used in the past and assumed no longer held any bitcoins. The wallets were rescanned after Mt.Gox applied for a civil rehabilitation procedure in Tokyo District Court earlier this month. After the 200,000 bitcoin were discovered, Mt.Gox then moved them to offline wallets. As , this happened around the time large amounts of bitcoin handled by Mt.Gox that had previously been dormant started moving on the block chain. The recovered 200,000 bitcoin brings Mt.Gox’s total loss down to 650,000 bitcoin, but that doesn’t help the exchange’s customers, who are not considered creditors and therefore won’t receive any repayments if Mt.Gox decides to sell assets. As , the only way for most Mt.Gox customers who lost bitcoin to regain any of their money is to file a lawsuit. |
Microsoft Will Now Deploy Two Legal Teams, Outside Former Federal Judge To Approve User-Data Searches | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Following a court document revealing that Microsoft to uncover an internal leak, the company this evening announced a policy change, effective immediately, regarding how it searches user data that is part of its own network of services. Noting that it couldn’t, in its view, get a court order to search itself as none is needed, it will instead add layers of protection between it and its own users’ data. First, the company will deploy a second legal team apart from the “internal investigating team” to vet the need for the data search. Following, a “former federal judge” will review the case, such as it is, and grant a decision. Microsoft will only execute a search into, say, an Outlook.com account if the retired judge consents that there is “evidence sufficient for a court order.” And the number of this type of searches will be revealed in the company’s regular transparency reports. Microsoft exempts its own employees from the above. If you are an employee and have data on any Microsoft service, consider it public to your employer. The change in tack is interesting given its speed – Microsoft came under fire in the last day or so. The online reaction to Microsoft’s admittedly legal search of the blogger’s personal emails and IMs has been swift and negative. We need better legal guidelines to protect user data from the service-providing company. That said, the boundaries that the company erected, provided they are extended and strengthened in the coming months, are at least a decent start. I say that at the risk of being too optimistic. Here’s Microsoft’s statement: We believe that Outlook and Hotmail email are and should be private. Today there has been coverage about a particular case. While we took extraordinary actions in this case based on the specific circumstances and our concerns about product integrity that would impact our customers, we want to provide additional context regarding how we approach these issues generally and how we are evolving our policies. Courts do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed. So even when we believe we have probable cause, it’s not feasible to ask a court to order us to search ourselves. However, even we should not conduct a search of our own email and other customer services unless the circumstances would justify a court order, if one were available. In order to build on our current practices and provide assurances for the future, we will follow the following policies going forward: The only exception to these steps will be for internal investigations of Microsoft employees who we find in the course of a company investigation are using their personal accounts for Microsoft business. And in these cases, the review will be confined to the subject matter of the investigation. The privacy of our customers is incredibly important to us, and while we believe our actions in this particular case were appropriate given the specific circumstances, we want to be clear about how we will handle similar situations going forward. That is why we are building on our current practices and adding to them to further strengthen our processes and increase transparency. |
Medium Launches Simple iPhone App That’s Just For Reading | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Blogging platform for the iPhone that allows users to read articles from the site. They’re presented as a feed that’s recommended for you automatically, though articles that have been recommended by people you follow feature their mug shot next to the title. The app does not, in its current incarnation, feature any writing or composition features — this is for reading things on Medium only, not creating them. Twitter co-founder and Medium creator Ev Williams has about what the Medium app is about, and he says that, after consideration, the team decided to produce an app created just for reading. “When we started working on this six months ago,” says Williams, “we debated a lot about the purpose of the app. Was it just for reading? Should you write on it? If just for reading, what would be better about it than just using the mobile web.” The differences, says Williams, came in the details. Things that allowed them to make the articles display faster and that let them improve the layout. Things that made it “better than the web” in terms of reading experience. When you launch the app, you’re asked to sign in with your Twitter account. Then you begin reading. There is no index of your feed; you simply swipe to move backwards or forwards through articles. The app does include a simple feed of stories in a given Collection, however. Tapping on a collection name either at the top or bottom of an article will take you to this view. But that’s the only way to navigate around the various components of Medium. Otherwise the app is an exercise in restraint, presenting an extremely focused way to read, just read, Medium. Tapping on an author will give you a similar list of just the stories they’ve written. There will no doubt be a few folks who are confused by the lack of editing tools in the app — at least to start. But I think it’s admirable to focus on offering the best reading experience possible, rather than trying for a breadth of features done “just well enough.” It also speaks to the expressed desire of Williams and his team to move us away from “ ” and toward pieces that consider things more deeply. I did experience a couple of crashes within the first few minutes of using the app — especially when navigating to a category via the link at the bottom of a post. But hopefully those are just launch-day jitters. Medium has garnered a bit of a reputation for harboring pieces that are … less than self-aware. And multiple times over the past few months, it has been host to this or that controversial take on life, the universe and everything. The alternative, though, is for it not to be talked about at all — so I think we know which one they’d choose. Anyhow, Medium aficionados now have an iPhone app that reflects the clever and crisp design work done on the website itself — though it’s only for looking and liking, not writing. No word on an Android client. |
PayPal Expands Its In-App Pay At Table And Order Ahead Services In UK | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | It’s still very early days for mobile payments, with the vast majority of consumers still not convinced that it really is a lot easier to pay for things using their phones instead of pulling out a payment card or even cash. But companies like continue to lay the groundwork with interesting implementations for how and where a mobile payment might come in handy — the idea being, it seems, that if you put out enough of these, some will be bound to find traction with one demographic or another and achieve what eBay-owned PayPal calls the “beginning of the end of the wallet.” The latest development is now coming online in some of PayPal’s international markets and specifically around the business of food. PayPal is today turning on two features in its iOS and Android mobile apps in the UK, to let users order food ahead of visiting the restaurant, and using the app to pay for their food when eating at a restaurant by way of a four-digit code. Neither requires the customer to present a payment card to complete a transaction. Both Pay At Table and Order Ahead were announced Rob Harper, head of retail services at PayPal UK, tells me that this rollout will kick off a wider push of the services across Europe in the near future. At the same time, it appears that the same features in Australia. They also follow a successful trial of a pay-by-picture service that PayPal launched last year, which is now also getting expanded across more locations. The new features are more in line with the work that PayPal has been doing around barcodes and other software-based payment innovations, and they stand in contrast to the more hardware-based approach of Here. They also seem to differ in terms of what kinds of merchants PayPal is targeting. While PayPal’s Here effort — a dongle that attaches to a smartphone that turns the handset into a card-reading device — has been mainly focused on small businesses that may have found taking card payments in the past too expensive, Pay At Table and Order Ahead seem to me much more focused on how PayPal deals with larger restaurant chains. Early agreements cover eatieries like Wagamama, Gourmet Burger Kitchen and the Prezzo pizza chain. Whereas Here and PayPal’s other services geared at smaller businesses tend to be very transparent on pricing, in the case of these services, Harper would not tell me the commissions that PayPal takes. Interested restaurants need to make contact with PayPal, which then arranges fees on a case-by-case basis. While services like Here are about introducing new pieces of hardware into the point of sale system, the new services, PayPal promises, integrate with all standard electronic point-of-sale systems. To use the Pay At Table service, users who are “checked in” to a specific location can get a code generated for them by the restaurant, which then they can enter into their app to pay for a meal, or share with their dining companion to split a bill, either line by line or by percentages. Conversely, if a user forgets to pay before leaving the table, the restaurant can make the charge anyway. Order Ahead, meanwhile, gives users the ability to access a complete menu from a restaurant, select what they want before going to the location, and then having it there waiting to be picked up, with the charge made at the time of pick up. The first chain to sign up for this is Wagamama, covering some 107 locations. |
Twitter Goes Dark In Turkey Hours After The Country’s PM Threatened To “Wipe Out” The Service | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | After the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan promised that he would “ ” Twitter after it apparently ignored court orders asking the site to remove certain corruption allegations, the service has gone dark in the country. The situation is developing: a that lets the public track decisions made by the courts over Internet communications indicates that today the “İstanbul Cumhuriyet Başsavcılığı (TMK 10. Maddesi İle Görevli) has been implemented by Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı” — it’s the most recent of four Twitter-related decisions made by the court. A Twitter spokesperson tells us, “We’re looking into this now.” Twitter’s and (very little used) accounts are also providing updates. So far, that has offered users a way of posting tweets by way of SMS messages: Turkish users: you can send Tweets using SMS. Avea and Vodafone text START to 2444. Turkcell text START to 2555. — Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) “We will wipe out all of these,” he said at a rally in reference to Twitter and other sites where people have been speaking out against him. This is not the first time that Twitter has been caught in political crossfire and shut down in the process. It was blocked in , , and , among many other incidents. In France, the government has been battling long and hard with the site over how much influence it should have in forcing it to take down certain tweets and accounts if they violate French law, which sometimes runs counter to wider freedom of speech arguments. Ilhan Tanir, a Turkish analyst based in Washington who was one of the first to highlight the block, has also what he says is a statement from the U.S. State Department over the block: “As we have previously stated, we remain very concerned by any suggestion that social media sites could be shut down. Democracies are strengthened by the diversity of public voices,” the statement reads. “An independent and unfettered media is an essential element of democratic, open societies, and crucial to ensuring official transparency and accountability.” |
Netflix Blasts ISPs, Calls For “Strong” Net Neutrality And Explains Why It Pays Comcast | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | When Netflix agreed to pay Comcast as part of a peering agreement in the wake of the legal demise of net neutrality, the landscape of the Internet changed. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings today explaining his and his company’s views on net neutrality and why it now pays an ISP that it feels should be better regulated. The reason? Because it has to: Netflix believes strong net neutrality is critical, but in the near term we will in cases pay the toll to the powerful ISPs to protect our consumer experience. When we do so, we don’t pay for priority access against competitors, just for interconnection. How does Netflix define strong net neutrality? Here’s its definition of “weak” net neutrality, to begin: The essence of net neutrality is that ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast don’t restrict, influence or otherwise meddle with the choices consumers make. The traditional form of net neutrality which was recently overturned by a Verizon lawsuit is important, but insufficient. Strong net neutrality is sterner stuff, according to Hastings: Strong net neutrality additionally prevents ISPs from charging a toll for interconnection to services like Netflix, YouTube, or Skype, or intermediaries such as Cogent, Akamai or Level 3, to deliver the services and data requested by ISP residential subscribers. Instead, they must provide sufficient access to their network without charge. So Netflix wants to take things further and demand that peering agreements akin to what it signed with Comcast to be unnecessary. That’s sensible, given that it’s a growing cost source for the media company. you might ask; it’s a fair question. The foundation that Netflix leans upon to dispute the fact that peering agreements are a bad idea is twofold. First, that if Netflix had to fold under pressure and pay up, “imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future.” This is a rebuttal of the idea that since Netflix can afford the fees, the situation must be just fine. YouTube would have been killed in its crib, I think, under the terms of Netflix’s current reality. The second part of Hastings’ argument against peering is more complex: Some ISPs say that Netflix is unilaterally “dumping as much volume” (Verizon CFO) as it wants onto their networks. Netflix isn’t “dumping” data; it’s satisfying requests made by ISP customers who pay a lot of money for high speed Internet. Netflix doesn’t send data unless members request a movie or TV show. Interestingly, there is one special case where no-fee interconnection is embraced by the big ISPs — when they are connecting among themselves. They argue this is because roughly the same amount of data comes and goes between their networks. But when we ask them if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download** [** in other words, moving to peer-to-peer content delivery] — thus filling their upstream networks and nearly doubling our total traffic — there is an uncomfortable silence. That’s because the ISP argument isn’t sensible. Big ISPs aren’t paying money to services like online backup that generate more upstream than downstream traffic. Data direction, in other words, has nothing to do with costs. Netflix here is being impish. The first paragraph above shifts the onus, I think fairly, on Netflix’s traffic quantity from itself to paying customers of the ISP. If those customers didn’t want Netflix, it wouldn’t comprise so much bandwidth. And as the customers are paying the ISP for Internet access, having them turn around and bill Netflix for what they already sold is an odd setup indeed. The second paragraph is more of a middle finger in print, as you can see. The bit concerning ISPs peering amongst themselves is only applicable to a point. Comcast released a stern but polite : “There has been no company that has had a stronger commitment to openness of the Internet than Comcast. We supported the FCC’s Open Internet rules because they struck the appropriate balance between consumer protection and reasonable network management rights for ISPs. We are now the only ISP in the country that is bound by them. “The Open Internet rules never were designed to deal with peering and Internet interconnection, which have been an essential part of the growth of the Internet for two decades. Edge providers like Netflix have always paid for their interconnection to the Internet and have always had ample options to ensure that their customers receive an optimal performance through all ISPs. We are happy that Comcast and Netflix were able to reach an amicable, market-based solution to our interconnection issues and believe that our agreement demonstrates the effectiveness of the market as a mechanism to deal with these matters.” Its point on peering is worth pondering. I doubt that Netflix will get what it wants in regards to peering, given a lack of precedent for that sort of regulation. But its so-called “weak” net neutrality? That we need very much. |
Leap Motion Lays Off 10% Of Its Workforce After Missing On First Year Sales Estimates | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Leap Motion won a lot of , which is designed to make it possible for users to interact with their computer through gestures alone. The early buzz and pre-order interest led to a lot of growth, with the company swelling to 120 employees at its peak. But disappointing reviews when the hardware actually shipped took some of the wind out of the startup’s sails. Now, CEO and co-founder Michael Buckwald tells TechCrunch they’ve had to make some tough choices, dig in and prepare for a business plan where success is defined over the next decade, not in a first production run. Leap Motion has been forced to part ways with 10 percent of their employees, including personnel ranging from telephone support staff to high-ranking executives, in a bid to get to a place where its spend on human resources is more in line with its new fiscal reality, Buckwald explained in a telephone interview. But, he’s quick to stress, none of said employees are on the product, design or engineering teams, and instead are primarily involved in sales and marketing. “In order for David [Holz, Leap Motion co-founder] and I to feel financially responsible, we were forced to make a difficult decision and cut about 10 percent of the team from the marketing and support side,” he said. “So that we could continue to hire for engineering and product roles as we roll out our version 2 software and as we think about moving into new spaces and new form factors outside of the PC.” Buckwald called the decision “extremely difficult,” and credited his “amazing team” but also noted that since Leap Motion had anticipated millions of units in holiday sales, many of the roles they’d hired for ended up being superfluous. The startup’s predictions for year one device sales had been on the order of up to 5 million; in the end, the first year for Leap Motion brought in sales of much closer to 500,000 units. “We really had no idea what our expectations were [around holiday sales],” Buckwald said. “We didn’t know whether we were going to sell 100,000 units or 5 million units, and that was very scary. So we made a sort of best guess and we built up the team around that guess. We still ended up with a number that we’re really happy with and that, from a revenue perspective, gives us plenty of options in terms of continue to expand to new retailers and add new OEM partners, and continue to run and grow the company.” As for what’s next, Buckwald is seeking more talent on the product side, as mentioned above. And the startup’s main job is to rebound from the perceived disappointment of its early hype to chart a more realistic path to success. Considering the company’s goals, which include reinventing the way we interact with computing devices, that means looking at things with a more long-term perspective than many operating in the startup space might be used to. “In terms of how we see the technology, it’s always been about a five- or ten-year path to executing on that vision, and the peripheral as it exists now and the v. 1 software is an amazing device for many things, but it’s also the very, very, very first step in that direction,” Buckwald explained. “Both through software updates like our v. 2, and by creating new hardware and moving into form factors outside of the PC, that’s how we realize that vision.” The version 2 software Buckwald describes aims to answer some early user complaints, in part by offering a continuous visual representation of a user’s hands on-screen while they’re using their Leap Motion Controller across applications, so that they don’t get confused by interface and control paradigm changes. The company has also already released 13 SKUs of , and that partnership is alive and well according to Buckwald, with other manufacturer partners set to come on board soon. Buckwald is frank and upfront about his company’s early missteps, which mostly sprung out of impossible consumer expectations for a device that looked immensely promising pre-launch, and ended up being well-executed early adopter or niche hobbyist hardware instead of the next mouse or joystick. And while Leap Motion may have suffered some reversals, it also created and continues to build tech that will likely feature significantly in one way or another into the future of computer interaction models. |
Microsoft Read A Blogger’s Personal Email And IMs, Court Docs Reveal | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Microsoft an employee who leaked confidential software to a French blogger. That blogger then published screenshots of Windows 8 to the Internet before Microsoft’s official announcement. The employee also secretly released, without authorization, a tool that could have allowed for the unauthorized activation of copies of Windows, potentially harming Microsoft’s ability to derive revenue from its software products. The manner in which the leaker was caught was detailed in a suit filed by the U.S. government against the employee. (Microsoft commented on the situation. Its comment is included below.) Included in the was a note that Microsoft decided it was within its legal authority to tap into the Hotmail account of the external blogger tied to the leaks, and read email and instant messages. The blogger had emailed Microsoft looking for clarification regarding some of the software that he had received from the internal source. Microsoft connected the blogger’s email address to the publication where the leaks had been published. So the company took a peek. Was it legal for Microsoft to do so? Microsoft’s Terms of Service allow it to access information in the accounts that are stored on its “Communications Services,” a group of products that may include: “e-mail services, bulletin board services, chat areas, news groups, forums, communities, personal web pages, calendars, photo albums, file cabinets and/or other message or communication facilities designed to enable you to communicate with others.” The Terms of Service is blunt: “Microsoft reserves the right to review materials posted to the Communication Services and to remove any materials in its sole discretion.” That statement is preceded by a tepid promise of some sort of privacy: “Microsoft has no obligation to monitor the Communication Services.” Here are just a few of things that you are not allowed to use Microsoft services for: While Microsoft is within its legal right to access the emails in question, it is embarrassing for the company: It has spent untold sums attacking Google’s email service for its automatic scanning of email messages in order to better serve ad content against them. Both Google and Microsoft scan email for viruses, making Microsoft’s contentions in the ‘Scroogled’ campaign tepid at best and asinine at worst. Thus, to have it become known that Microsoft is willing to enter accounts of a blogger — journalist, really — to plug their own hole is tinted with hypocrisy. Microsoft won’t read your email unless they pretty much want to — then, too bad. Microsoft provided TechCrunch with a statement regarding the situation and past actions: During an investigation of an employee we discovered evidence that the employee was providing stolen IP, including code relating to our activation process, to a third party. In order to protect our customers and the security and integrity of our products, we conducted an investigation over many months with law enforcement agencies in multiple countries. This included the issuance of a court order for the search of a home relating to evidence of the criminal acts involved. The investigation repeatedly identified clear evidence that the third party involved intended to sell Microsoft IP and had done so in the past. As part of the investigation, we took the step of a limited review of this third party’s Microsoft operated accounts. While Microsoft’s terms of service make clear our permission for this type of review, this happens only in the most exceptional circumstances. We apply a rigorous process before reviewing such content. In this case, there was a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites. In fact, as noted above, such a court order was issued in other aspects of the investigation. You can decide on the morality for yourself. Here are the pertinent sections of the suit: |
Google Wants Everyone To Stop Hating On Glass | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | All social issues aside, Google Glass is an impressive kit of technology. However, that might not be enough to secure its future. The novel PR campaign that is the Google Glass Explorer program seems to be failing. So much so that Google has started firing back at Google Glass haters with a series of pro-Glass factoids. The company just shared “ .” A sampling: This comes a month after Google explained in a similar list . But as much as many hate Google Glass at the moment, Google needs to remember that consumers tend to hate everything when it first comes out. “Almost everybody is reluctant to change almost everything. Whatever you learned as a kid you want to keep always,” Dean Kamen told SXSW attendee Ron Miller who then . Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and other things, should understand quite well this early-adopter hate. On some levels the Google Glass Explorer program is as interesting as Google Glass. Never before has a company put the fate of a totally novel product in the hands of consumers. Google invited interested users to buy this completely beta device and essentially market it for them. Recent and show this strategy has largely failed to the point that Google has started social campaigns to revive Glass’s image. |
Style Lend Launches Out Of Y Combinator To Be The Airbnb For Women’s Closets | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Essentially an Airbnb for high-end dresses and accessories, Style Lend is a peer-to-peer marketplace where women can list and rent items for a fraction of their original retail cost. Most women can relate to having at least a couple items in their closets that cost a lot of money, but get very little wear: That one special occasion dress, or designer handbag. These kinds of items stick around because they aren’t quite candidates for consignment. She loves them and wants to keep them, but the truth is that they stay in the closet 95% of the time. Much like Airbnb, Style Lend’s purported edge is in the convenience and assurance provided by its added services. For the dress lender, there are two levels of Style Lend’s service: DIY, where the lender gets 70 percent of the rental cost, and “on demand,” where the fee is split 50/50 and Style Lend takes care of details like the dry cleaning before the items are returned. Lenders can also pay $5 for insurance that will handle issues such as small stains, broken zippers, and ripped fabric. A dress available for rent in San Francisco on Style Lend. Style Lend CEO Lona Duncan came by TechCrunch headquarters to explain the service and show us the kinds of dresses it offers in person. You can watch that in the video embedded above. Duncan says that Style Lend is meant to be a win/win transaction: The dress owner gets to monetize the “investment pieces” in her wardrobe and show off her taste to the Style Lend community. The borrower gets to sport a stylish dress or designer purse at a fraction of the price it would take to own it. The site is meant to be a true marketplace, where renters are also borrowers, and vice versa. The dresses in Style Lend’s “high end designer” category have an average retail value of $2,155, and cost $120 per week to rent. Style Lend requires that each dress on its site have a minimum retail price of $150. Dresses at that “cost-conscious designer” level are rented out at an average price of $30 per week. Right now Style Lend is only in San Francisco, but it plans to roll out in New York City and other metro areas in the coming months. The company is currently in the winter 2014 class of Y Combinator, which is scheduled to hold its Demo Day next week. Fashion may seem like a frivolous space, but it’s a massive industry that has a big impact on the world. Nowadays, more and more women want to keep up with trends and experiment with different looks. But many can’t justify investing a lot of money on items that they’ll wear only a couple of times. That’s led to the rise of disposable “fast fashion,” which has negative repercussions and the . If it takes off, Style Lend could help to counteract this shift by encouraging women to buy fewer, better things. If a woman knew that she could share an item with others and make money on it, she might choose to buy the $200 silk dress that’s responsibly made in the U.S., instead of the $40 polyester Forever 21 dress that’s made in a factory with questionable low-cost labor practices. It’s an optimistic vision, but Style Lend has the potential to make it a reality. |
Stir, A Kinetic Desk Startup From An Ex-Apple Engineer, Raises $1.5M Led By Tony Hsieh’s Vegas TechFund | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | As the world continues to see more and more everyday objects become “hardware” controlled through and internet connectivity, an ex-Apple engineer called JP Labrosse is hoping to take that principle and combine it with elegant design to transform the prosaic world of office desks. His company, , is today announcing a seed round of $1.5 million as it begins to roll out its first product, the Stir Kinetic Desk, in earnest. The round was led by Zappos’ founder and CEO Tony Hsieh’s Vegas TechFund and its MD Zach Ware, with participation also from biomedical entrepreneur Josh Makower, John R. Woodard, Richard Klein and several Apple alumni. Just as Labrosse is not your ordinary founder — his stint as a lead engineer on the iPod at Apple, he started many other companies, and has seen more than one exit — the Stir is not your ordinary work table. You can use the Stir both as a standing and sitting desk, and it has a special engine built in to adjust its height as it “learns” more about you and decides what the best regime would be for you. The desk tracks how you burn calories and the time spent sitting and standing, and creates what Labrosse describes as “magical moments to change things up” between the two. Part of the desk’s built-in program is something called Active Mode, in which a button on the front of the desk “invites the user to change position at certain times.” These are minor adjustments of no more than one inch — the movement is called “Whisperbreath” by the company — and the idea being here that, similar to the in chaos theory, these small adjustments, over time, have a large effect on your posture and overall fitness. Its built-in touchscreen lets users also adjust the desk height manually if you’re not quite ready for your desk to start telling you when to stand up and sit down. With all the ports you might want for the devices that would sit on top of it, and integrated bluetooth and WiFi, it’s sleek and beautiful as well as functional. (When I saw the desk for the first time alongside a friend, she remarked on how it could nearly double as a dining table if your place is space-constrained and you work from home.) Labrosse sees the Stir as part of a longer continuum of the new wave of physical products that can help us live our lives better, “not just data for the sake of it but data that provides value.” Think here about wristbands that monitor your activity and then report the findings back to apps that can use that data to suggest how many calories you’ve burned, and so on. “We are focused on this notion of finding ways that technology can really support you without you having to actively manage it,” Labrosse says. This will be the key to mass adoption of products like these, he believes. The Stir is off to a good business start so far. After a rush of positive reviews from both the worlds of tech and furniture, it sold out its first run at a price of $4,000 per desk, with customers including both individuals as well as enterprises, Labrosse says. Among the latter group, he tells me that there are Fortune 100 companies piloting the desks, with the idea being that they are working out how the desks could “serve their specific needs and configurations.” And although Labrosse would not confirm it, you can imagine that Hsieh and his position in Vegas both as the head of Zappos and also as a backer of a number of businesses in the city might also play a role in providing a channel for getting these desks into use. “Stir is one of those unique investment opportunities where the right team comes together at just the right time to lead a sea-change in a historically slow moving market,” said Jen McCabe, who leads the Nimbus hardware portfolio of the Vegas Tech Fund. “There is sea change happening and we have surfed to the right place,” is how Labrosse puts it. Going forward, the new funding will be used to expand production, work on distribution (deals in the pipeline for retailers but nothing to announce yet, Labrosse says) and start to look into more ways of developing the Stir desk’s functionality. Key to the last of these will be how the Stir interacts with more devices like wearables and more and basically hands off data from one device when you arrive at your desk, and then back again as you leave it. Whether this will involve further hardware is not clear yet, but I hope it will do. I have thing or two I’d like to tell my filing cabinet, if only it would listen to me. |
China’s iOS Usage Spiked With New iPhones, But Increase Driven By Older Models, Mixpanel Finds | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | A new report about the state of iOS usage in China from mobile analytics firm reveals a lot of interesting info about how one of Apple’s most important international markets is adopting its mobile OS. The good news is that iOS usage overall is rising quickly, especially over the past year – but that increase in usage isn’t necessarily coming from the sale of brand new hardware. The iPhone 5s and 5c launched in China in September last year, for the first time simultaneous with the North American launch. Mixpanel saw a considerable uptick in iOS usage in the country begin at that time, but the most growth came from the iPhone 5, not the newer devices. This is likely because the 5 became a lot cheaper as soon as new hardware was made official, which is backed up by the fact that once again, when China Mobile unveiled its iPhone 5s and 5c launch in January of this year, there was a growth spike attributable mostly to the iPhone 5. Mixpanel says the takeaway is that Apple manages to increase interest in its platform overall with launches in China, and not necessarily to the device(s) which are actually new to the launch itself. But it could also suggest that price sensitivity in these markets is a very real concern, and one that might result in a lot of new device sales if Apple actually ventured into the lower cost device market (the iPhone 5c, while spun by some as that, actually didn’t drive Apple’s usual pricing down compared to past launches). The traffic- and engagement-tracking startup also analyzed usage distribution in China, and found that iOS devices were used over a large portion of the country, with over 40 percent of its data coming from 783 cities. Major metropolitan areas understandably generated the most usage, which Mixpanel says is due to network coverage as well as average income. For more about this unique look behind the curtain at iOS activity in China, check out Mixpanel’s full . |
The Ember iPhone Case Improves Your Late-Night Selfies With 56 Built-In LEDs | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Model by model, the iPhone is getting better at taking photos at night without making everyone look like spooky-ass ghosts — but you can only go so far with one or two little LEDs. But what about little LEDs? is an iPhone 5/5S case that promises to add a crazy bright panel of lights to the back of your handset. “But wait!” you shout. “Won’t firing off 56 LEDs every time I take a picture wreck my iPhones battery life?” It would… if the Ember didn’t have it’s own 2200mAh battery pack built in. It makes the case a bit chunkier than the LEDs alone would, but it means about 4 hours of continuous light without putting a strain on your iPhone or requiring a recharge. According to their tests, their LED array provides about 10x more light than the iPhone’s flash can. You can also adjust the light output, if the max brightness of 56 LEDs proves a bit too intense.
Rather than trying to tie into your iPhone’s software, the light panel on the Ember is flipped on and off by a physical switch. That may not be quite as slick as the built-in flash, but it allows you to pop the case off to aim the light however you want (or, in theory, use it as an ultrabright flashlight.) Meanwhile, the top of the case detaches to allow for third-party lens add-ons to be strapped on top without things smashing into each other — and if you feel like getting fancy with your iPhone photography, there’s a cold shoe mount for strapping on a tripod mount. The catch? As with many a neat iPhone accessory concept, — and with $11,000 left before it hits its goal and just 42 hours left in its campaign, it’s possible that it might not even get the pledges it’s already pulled in. If you squeeze in before they run out, the “Early Bird” cases (with a warming filter and tripod adapter) will set you back $59. Once those are gone, the price bumps up to $79 — and at retail, they’re planning on slinging these for about $90 a pop. Wondering photos taken with the Ember actually look? |
Qik Is Shutting Down In April, Three Years After Being Acquired By Skype | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Qik, a company that was early on in the stream-live-video-from-your-phone trend that popped up and then quickly faded around 2008-2009, is by its parent company, Skype. Skype acquired Qik back in 2011 for upwards of $100 million. Why the shutdown? To be blunt: Skype got what they wanted out of the deal, so Qik is redundant now. While Skype doesn’t make direct use of the phone-to-web broadcasting functionality that Qik focused on, they say they’ve integrated core bits of Qik’s video messaging technology into Skype. While Qik as a service never got hugely popular (blasting videos to your friends in real-time is only really fun if all of your friends happen to all be free at the same time), the company built some damned cool technology. These guys were doing video recording on the iPhone before the iPhone even officially video recording (remember that?). If you’ve still got any videos lurking on Qik’s servers, you’ll need to get them off by April. Given that Qik pitched itself as a means of sharing things like your kid’s first steps with friends and family in real time, there’s probably quite a few precious moments still tucked away on the service. [Personal anecdote: Qik was one of the first startups I ever spoke to when I first started writing for TechCrunch. Seeing them fade away is a bit sad, but I’m sure their 100+ million dollar exit lessens the sting for many who worked on it.] |
Learnist Refreshes ‘Pinterest For Education’ Site To Add Reading Lists And Improve Board Creation | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Pinterest for education startup wants to provide its users with all the tools needed to create, curate, and share content that can be used to learn a wide variety of subjects. Now, less than a year after launch, it’s refreshed its website to make it easier for users to create and save those lessons. Learnist was built by the team behind social learning platform , which was last year. While Grockit was focused specifically on online test prep, Learnist is a much more broad platform to enable its users to share learnings about anything and everything. With a simple interface for creating lessons and boards, it relies on its users to generate the content which can then be viewed and learned by other users. It’s been used by academics to create course curricula, but it’s also attracted a wider audience driven by the more than 500,000 learnings listed. Since launching last summer, Learnist has quietly been growing its user base. In September when we wrote about the launch of the company’s first mobile app, the service had signed up about a million users. In the past six months, that’s grown to 10 million. While much of its growth has come from adoption of its mobile apps, the new version of the site has been tailored to create a more beautiful, immersive experience — and one that is easier to use. That includes an updated board creation flow, which will help get more users creating their own lessons. It also includes a way to save reading lists, so that users can come back to their learnings. In order to get people coming back and provide more high-quality content, the company is partnering with celebrities and tastemakers like director Gus Van Sant, actress Olivia Wilde, designer Danny Forster, MythBusters TV host Kari Byron, Travel Channel host and former NFL linebacker Dhani Jones, and best-selling author Brad Meltzer. It’s also signed up some major media companies like the BBC and Discovery. That latter partner shouldn’t be too surprising, as Discovery was part of a big . |
YC-Backed One Degree Is A “Yelp For Social Services” That Helps Low-Income Families | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | When migrated from the Philippines to Southern California as an eight-year-old, he saw his family hustle to make ends meets in their new homeland. “I grew up in a working-class family and I watched my family struggle for resources,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that other kids and families didn’t have to go through the same ordeal.” So while completing a graduate degree at Harvard in public policy, he put together a business plan for , a new non-profit that helps people find social services like affordable housing and job training. As a child, Faustino remembers that individual social workers had all of this information in their heads about the best programs to route families and low-income workers to. But there wasn’t a scalable, single destination where anybody could go to find whatever they needed, whether it was low-cost medical care or free after-school programs. He and Eric Lukoff created , a highly-curated search engine for social services. The site gives personalized recommendations and steps for people to take. Currently available only in the Bay Area, has catalogued more than 1,300 service providers. They started off scrappily. In the fall of 2012, they piloted pop-up resource desks at three schools and connected 50 families to resources like health care and after-school programs within 3 months. With just $500, they then made a basic web prototype with the largest database of non-profits and social services in San Francisco. Now there are “thousands” of people using in the Bay Area. Faustino said that parents have been able to find summer programs for their children or subsidized housing and employment services. Families and users can rate the quality of these services, creating a new feedback loop and reputation system. They can also easily share information with family and friends. “We are here to revolutionize the way that people access social services,” Faustino said. “We believe that we can do this because the non-profit sector has been stuck in the Internet dark ages. People still use binders and still rely on information that’s stuck in their heads. That means people aren’t getting the resources they need quickly and easily.” is backed by a number of foundations including the Knight Foundation, the Coatue Foundation, Echoing Green, All Stars Helping Kids Foundation, Petra Foundation, Harvard I3 Innovation Challenge, Huffington Post Ignite Good and SXSW Interactive. They’re one of the few non-profits that Y Combinator supports alongside organizations like Watsi, which fund medical care for patients in developing countries. They’re looking to raise a philanthropic seed round soon. |
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