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Google Starts Rolling Out New Version Of Sheets With Offline Editing Support To Everybody | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | Last December, Google a of Sheets, its online spreadsheet app that’s part of its Google Drive productivity suite. Until now, this new version was opt-in only, but starting today, Google will . Earlier on, there were a few features that and it seems Google has indeed decided to retire a few underused features with the update. These include support for the in Sheets, autofill using Google Sets and a couple of other functions. In return, though, it’s now easier to select multiple cells and add hyperlinks, for example. The new also make it easier to share different views of your data with your collaborators and those who need extra-large spreadsheets with millions of cells can now use Sheets for those, too. Earlier this month, Google also rolled out support for third-party add-ons for its productivity apps and those, of course, are also available in Sheets. Google says it will upgrade everybody to the new version over the next few weeks, so it may take a little while before you get access to it. |
Facebook Disputes Claims That They Were Aware Of NSA Data Collection Outside Of FISA Orders | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | The Guardian newspaper made headlines yesterday claiming the tech companies were not entirely truthful about their knowledge of National Security Agency spying. News outlets the accusations from NSA General Counsel Rajesh De that tech companies had “full knowledge” of the controversial surveillance of their users. From the beginning of the NSA scandal last summer, tech companies have furiously denied that the NSA had direct access to their data. They have also denied knowing anything about the program that apparently allows the NSA to forcibly demand user data, known as PRISM. Moreover, they have publicly lobbied the U.S. Government to permit them to disclose the number of users that have been surveilled by the NSA, authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Companies suing the government for the ability to be more transparent eventually won that case, and have since disclosed — — more information on government data requests. Thus, Facebook quickly denied the new accusations. In a statement, the company told TechCrunch: “Before it was reported in the news, we had never heard of ‘PRISM’ or any program in which Internet companies, voluntarily or otherwise, gave the government direct access to servers or in any way facilitated the bulk collection of user data. At the same time, we never suggested that we were not aware of our obligations under FISA, which was the topic of today’s hearing. In fact, we have been fighting for more transparency around the lawful national security-related requests from the U.S. Government that we may receive under this statute. The suggestion that we were misleading the public is frustrating and untrue.” Soon after we received this statement, The Guardian issued a major “amendment” to their story. “This article was amended on 20 March 2014 to remove statements in the original that the testimony by Rajesh De contradicted denials by technology companies about their knowledge of NSA data collection. It was also updated to clarify that the companies challenged the secrecy surrounding Section 702 orders. Other minor clarifications were also made.” Section 702 refers to a law that permits some of the more controversial intelligence agency surveillance programs [ ]. When asked whether The Guardian still stands by their original interpretation of the story, spokesman Gennady Kolker wrote back, “The article was amended to clarify and correct our reporting, in line with the Guardian’s policy and practices.” In the original piece, The Guardian wrote the following: The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting month of angry denials from the firms. … The NSA’s Wednesday comments contradicting the tech companies about the firms’ knowledge of Prism risk entrenching tensions with the firms NSA relies on for an effort that Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have. Now the passages read as follows: The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data. … De and his administration colleagues were quick to answer the board that companies were aware of the government’s collection of data under 702, which Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have. Note that these sections have now been stripped of anything about De’s statements “contradicting” the companies’ insistence that they have not participated. The piece still asserts that the companies were aware of the governments collection under Section 702 — the FISA Amendments Act — with De replying yes to a question about whether the data collection occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained.” The amendments to the article scaling back De’s statements reflect the difficulty in covering a story that has been shrouded in secrecy–a secrecy that has frustrated by citizens and tech companies alike. President Obama to Intelligence Agency surveillance, but any major transparency reforms will have to wait until congress takes up the issue later this year. Google did not respond to a request for comment, and Yahoo and Microsoft had no comment. |
Mozilla’s Australis Design And Improved Sync Come To Firefox Beta 29 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 20 | A day after releasing the stable version of , Mozilla today the first of Firefox 29. While there wasn’t all that much interesting in Firefox 28, the latest beta version represents a major step for Mozilla. It includes both the new — and very Chrome-like — Australis design, as well as support for Firefox Sync, Mozilla’s cloud-based syncing service with . The new design will likely be a bit controversial with long-time Firefox users. It’s quite a departure from earlier versions, with rounded tabs and a menu that’s now behind the same kind of “ ” as Chrome’s. I’ve been running the Firefox Nightly releases and Chrome side-by-side lately, and sometimes I get confused about which one I’m using — that’s how similar they look. What Firefox is keeping, though, is the extra search box, which most other browser vendors have done away with. You can always remove it, though, and just use the URL bar to kick off your searches, too, just like in Chrome or the latest versions of Internet Explorer. That kind of customization is also at the core of Mozilla’s thinking here. The organization thinks of Firefox as a browser you should be able to customize for your needs and to do this, the beta features extensive and easy to find customization options. Earlier versions of Firefox had similar features, but they were often hidden away a bit and most mainstream users never found them. With the Australis design, customization is now front and center. The design also puts an emphasis on simplicity. Tabs that aren’t currently active blend into the background, for example, and unless there is a page to go forward, the design simply hides the usual arrow buttons. Tabs now also sit higher up in the browser, so you get a few extra pixels of screen real estate for the sites you are looking at. If you want to give the new beta a try, you for Windows, Mac and Linux. |
What eCommerce Boom? From Amazon Textbooks To New Seed Funds, Education Technology Is Exploding In Brazil | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | Over the last decade, Brazil has “come online” in a big way. The percentage of people using the Web in Brazil leapt from 9 percent in 2002 to about 50 percent in 2012, . With 60 million Brazilians now using Facebook, thanks to increasing access to the Internet and the rise of social media, the country is undergoing a digital transformation — and with that comes a slew of exciting opportunities for startups. However, usually when it comes to growth potential, Brazil’s eCommerce market gets . Nonetheless, a flurry of noteworthy developments over the last six months have begun to make it clear that another big market (and opportunity) is quietly emerging in Brazil: Education technology. While Google and Apple have made sizable strides in education in the U.S., and chip makers like Intel have begun to reveal EdTech aspirations, Amazon’s plans have been less clear. But with its announcement yesterday, we now have an idea, and it looks to start (at least in part) with Brazil. Though the textbook industry is a fragmented market in the U.S., Jeff Bezos and company see the thriving market in Latin America as a big opportunity for its textbook business. , Amazon has landed a major contract with the Brazil’s Ministry of Education, which will see it work with the country’s educational development fund to convert and distribute textbooks to schools across Brazil. The pair have already begun to digitize more than 200 textbooks and distribute them to hundreds of thousands of Brazilian educators through Whispercast. Amazon claims that over 40 million digital textbooks have already been distributed through its service around the world, and, while it’s not yet clear what its targets are for Brazil, it no doubt intends to be a wide-scale roll-out. The news of Amazon’s deal with the Brazilian Ministry of Education follows hot on the heels of another key piece of news from the EdTech front. Today, Bertelsmann, the German media giant Brazilian investment firm, Bozano Investimentos, to launch a new fund in Brazil that will be dedicated to making investments in education technology startups. According to the announcement, the companies have so far raised two-thirds of what they intend to be a 100 million real, or $43 million, fund. Bertelsmann is to take a 30 percent stake in the new “BR Education Ventures,” with Bozano set to manage day-to-day operations. The new EdTech fund will make eight to ten investments in total, two of which have already been secured thanks to video training startup, Evolve, and QMagico, the makers of an adaptive learning platform. In essence, the new Brazilian EdTech fund will follow the blueprint laid out by in the U.S., the $100 million education investment firm Bertelsmann co-created with the University of Texas Investment Management Company, which has itself invested in nine startups to date. However, the launch of a local EdTech investment vehicle is an important step for Brazil, and particularly, for the development of early-stage education startups. (Just as the launch of for local, early-stage companies in Israel.) A sign of just how much interest there is in the education market among Brazilian entrepreneurs can be found in the make-up of Start-Up Brazil’s first class of technology companies. , the government-backed seed-stage program designed to help accelerate and develop early-stage businesses in Brazil, counted 56 teams as part of its first batch, 11 of which are focused on the education markets. That’s a sizable share of EdTech startups for any accelerator not catering to a particular vertical, in the U.S. or abroad. That means that about 20 percent of Start-Up Brazil’s first class were EdTech startups, a share which happened to beat out retail (at 14 percent of the class), as well as health, finance and events and tourism. This early-stage interest and activity in Brazilian EdTech comes during a period of high activity for the nation’s later-stage businesses and the education sector as a whole. , a trio of blockbuster M&A deals went down in 2013, involving three of Brazil’s largest education companies, followed by two major IPOs. The first being Ser Educacional Group, which planned to raise $275 to $447 million as part of its initial offering, and Anima Educação, which operates a number of post-secondary institutions that serve approximately 50,000 students in total. Anima, by comparison, planned to raise between $160 and $287 million as part of its IPO. These two IPOs served as a sign that the Brazilian market continues to favor education companies, which are beginning to feel the pressure of mounting expectations, considering that the two most profitable companies on the Brazilian stock market, Kroton and Estacio, are education companies. In the U.S., we’ve been waiting for the emergence of the next generation of big EdTech players, which could act as more attractive exit opportunities for the laundry list of education startups that have emerged in the last few years. In the U.S., most of the acquisitions or M&A activity in recent years has been at the hands of the old guard of educational publishing giants, like Pearson, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill and Kaplan, for example. While a similar dynamic exists in Brazil to a certain degree, the increasing number of IPOs among education companies means more potential acquirers, giving entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses a potential off-ramp, should they need it. And the more these companies are seen as younger, technology-first organizations, the better. Beyond IPOs and M&A, Brazilian education companies have been racking up the funding over the last year, with particular interest (and capital) being given to distance learning and online learning solutions. led by The Social+Capital Partnership, Peter Thiel’s international investment vehicle, Valar Ventures, Valor Capital Group and 500 Startups. In fact, the round also included a number of angels, who invested in Descomplica through an AngelList, representing its first Brazil-focused syndicate. Naturally, it’s another good sign to see familiar names on the investor roster of a Brazilian startup, and while it’s positive that foreign investments have begun to work their way into the market (and to Brazilian education companies), it’s arguably just important for the country to find more ways to support the growth of its early-stage EdTech players. Either way, the kind of sizable investments like poured into OpenEnglish, are good for the industry and could very well be a good sign for the Brazilian Education marker. |
Y Combinator Renews Calls For “Founders Visas” | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | has taken to the blogosphere for the U.S. to create a “founders visa.” Initially proposed by Paul Graham (Y Combinator’s original honcho) as a way to bring 10,000 new entrepreneurs to U.S. shores, Sam Altman is proposing a more modest 100 visas to be granted to Y Combinator to select founders that would be eligible to launch startup companies in the States. Altman writes: Altman told me that this founders visa got tangled up with the broader number of immigration reform issues. “Where I would like to see us get is to broad-based immigration reform where anyone who wants to work in the U.S. can work in the U.S.,” he added. But he said he would rather the government take a lesson from startups and get there one step at a time through incrementally easing the restrictions on immigration For Altman, the road to a broader liberalization of immigration policies is through “leveraging the highest-value pieces,” and a government embrace of the international entrepreneurs who want to create jobs in the U.S. Y Combinator already accepts a number of international startups to its accelerator program. The most recent batch of Y Combinator startups had over 20 companies from overseas in its crop. |
Sony Announces Project Morpheus, A Virtual Reality Headset For The PS4 | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | And just like that, the Virtual Reality wars have begun. Firing a shot across the bow of Oculus (the company responsible for getting many people excited about virtual reality again, after the myriad flops of the 90s), Sony has just announced that they’re building a VR headset for the PS4. Sony is calling it “Project Morpheus”, for now — a nod to the character from the Matrix, presumably. Lest you think that Sony’s just hopping on the VR bandwagon now that Oculus has sparked a bit of popularity: according to Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, they’ve been tinkering with VR prototypes ever since they started working on the Playstation Move back in 2009. Back then, though, they were literally duct taping move controllers to their heads. In 2010, they created an internal group just for VR. Yoshida was quick to point out that the prototype hardware, pictured above, isn’t final. As Sony sees it, there are six key areas they need to get perfect for VR to work: sight, sound, tracking, control, ease of use, and content. (Sorry, smellovision-hopefuls!) Is Oculus doomed now that Sony has entered the court? Hardly. Oculus’ greatest achievement so far isn’t in building a pair of motion sensitive goggles — most companies that can build a smartphone could’ve done that, if they cared to. Their greatest achievement is in getting people excited about Virtual Reality again. In getting many thousands of developers on board. In piquing the interest of people like John Carmack, and companies like Valve (who has with Oculus.) Building an active, excited developer ecosystem is a very, hard thing to do. Whatever the case, competition in this area is a very, very good thing. As Nate Mitchell, product of Oculus put it this morning prior to Sony’s announcement: So, as far as the competition goes – we’ll have to see what they announce. We are all about having more people involved in the VR space though. The more developers are excited about virtual reality, and the bigger the audience is, the more likely they are to build VR content. So having a major player get behind virtual reality in a big way opens the door for more devs to build VR content. So, we’re really hopeful that they do it right – anyone that’s doing VR, the main thing is just to do it right. Watch this space, friends — the fun is just beginning. |
The Anvil Problem | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | Over a decade ago I was a happy man. In about 2002 I bought an Archos Jukebox. It was a 6GB monstrosity, clad in metal and full of huge batteries, and it contained a clicking, whirring 2.5-inch hard drive. I used it to listen to music and even hacked it to run a home-brew operating system complete with games and media controls. For a while I was quite content with my crazy MP3 player and, although the iPod was rising in popularity, I felt no compelling need to replace the Archos. After all, it worked. But Apple kept at it and I began using Macs more and, suddenly, , Archos was dead to me. The same thing happened to Creative and Sansa and other MP3 player makers. In an instant the market was smashed by a newcomer. If you made MP3 players you were playing a losing game. There was no value in it. The same thing is about to happen to smartwatches thanks to the rise of Android Wear. Pebble, in other words, is about to get the anvil and be squashed flat, and I say this as a lover of the product and the team who made it. Wearables was a niche that needed disruption but, in the end, will be further disrupted by the biggest players in the market. The company that won the battle will lose the war. No one is going out of business. There will still be a few orders by die-hards, but as evidenced by the lack of MP3 players on the market there will be a time when the big guys will win out. It happened in the cellphone world. Where once you had myriad feature phones and smartphones, now you basically have the Galaxy line and the iPhone. All other competitors are just treading water. Wearables, for most of the past five years, have been a mess. The best devices are awful and the worst devices are unusable. This gave Pebble an excellent opportunity to make an amazing product. And they . Their dedication to simplicity and usability have made them a darling among discerning nerds and no one has quite matched their utility and battery life. But once Android enters the market, all bets are off. If Android can bring usability and battery life to LG and Motorola-branded smartwatches, it will be over for Pebble. Why buy a niche product when you can buy from a major brand? And everything Google and Android touch is, at the very least, beloved by a subset of users. The same can’t be said of Pebble, no matter how strong the sales. Luckily not everyone is doomed. still owns the “fitness” space and, given the battery requirements of monitoring devices, it will be tough to, say, leave the heart rate sensor on your Galaxy Gear all day long. It can be done — did it — but there are tradeoffs. Maybe I’ll be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Maybe Pebble will fit into another niche while the wear devices become popular among Android users. But when a major player with a proven track record smashes into a market, there’s really no hope for the incumbents. |
The Pandora One Subscription Service To Cost $5 A Month | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | Pandora is getting a little more expensive. Starting in May, and for new subscribers, the Pandora One monthly subscription service will cost $5. Existing subscribers that remain active will keep paying $3.99 a month to listen to Pandora without any ads. As , the subscription service hasn’t had a price hike since 2009 when it debuted for $36 a year. Later, Pandora offered to bill the service monthly $3.99. Pandora blames the new, higher price on the increased cost Pandora incurs on delivering songs, nearly magically, to any device you own. Only 3.3 million of Pandora’s 250 million registered users currently subscribe to Pandora one. And Pandora is taking good care of the one percenters by not increasing their monthly bill — something Amazon likely considered before increasing the cost of its Prime subscription service. As streaming music service become more mainstream, the cost of doing business is increasing as royalty rates and the cost of doing business increases. Amazon is the big player in this market. If Amazon has to increase prices, chances are Spotify, Rdio and the others are looking to it as well. |
Bitcoin Gains Ballast As Investors Continue To Pile In | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | The has been met with the and the from institutional investment trading platforms as investors attempt to right the ship of the stateless currency. Having large institutional investors like Fortress Investments and Benchmark certainly helps the beleaguered currency ( ) platform. “They believe in the protocol more than any [Wall Street] firm,” said Meyer “Micky” Malka of the Fortress investment in Xapo. This despite the fact that Fortress lost $3.7 million on $20 million in Bitcoin investments in 2013, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investment was made using the publicly traded alternative investment firm’s balance sheet money, the publication reported. Other venture investors — like Andreessen Horowitz — have also invested significant capital behind new bitcoin and Bitcoin startups.
Meanwhile, the joint venture between Perseus and Atlas aims to create highly secure private exchanges in locations like Frankfurt, Hong Kong, New York, and Singapore, according to Shawn Sloves, the co-founder of Atlas. “We’re giving [institutions] the ability to build private markets that manage their wallets for bitcoin and they can have their own exchange where they have buyers and sellers come in,” said Sloves. Atlas and Perseus are going to create these private exchanges for all types of digital currency, including whitecoin and dogecoin, Sloves said. “We’re here to support global Bitcoin trading and get it up as rapidly as possible,” he said. Some venture investors are skeptical of the viability of any exchange as a potential investment. “The question of who will win in the race to establish dominant exchange is wide open at this point,” one investor wrote. “There generally aren’t many, or even several, exchanges in a typical market … it’s got a ‘winner take all’ dynamic to it.” While the investor didn’t have a view on the Perseus and Atlas tie-up specifically, he did say that several competitors are looking to enter the market. “If I were them I would be looking over my shoulder at the various incipient brand-name coalitions that seem to be coming together to create a regulator-blessed U.S. exchange,” the investor said. |
Pebble Founder Emphasizes Multi-Year Lead On Android Wear And Google’s Smartwatch Ambitions | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | Pebble is one company that came to mind when smartwatch (and eventually, other wearables) development platform. The small startup has been creating smartwatch hardware for years now, first as the for BlackBerry devices, and then reinvented as , the Kickstarter success that proved to the world smartwatches could be more than just a weird gadget sideshow. With Android Wear, Google is making a tacit statement: ‘We want to own the smartwatch space.’ And they’re already partnering with some of the biggest names in OEM hardware (and watches) to make it happen, including LG, Motorola, Fossil, HTC, Asus and Samsung. That’s a lot of ammunition brought to bear on others playing in the nascent market, and Pebble is starting to look like it either has a target on its back, or at least like it’ll be bowled over as an innocent bystander when the Google wearable train rolls through. Pebble CEO and founder Eric Migicovsky isn’t waving the white flag just yet, however. He provided the following statement to TechCrunch regarding today’s announcement: We’re excited about today’s news from our friends at Google. When we started working on wearables six years ago, there were few players in the space and a lot of skeptics. It’s exciting to see this market grow so quickly — enabling more interesting use cases and keeping all of us laser-focused on creating the very best user experiences we can. The key point here is Migicovsky drawing attention to just how long his startup has been working on smartwatches – work which has taken place in the market, not just in labs behind closed doors, it’s worth noting. While it’s true that whenever a major company like Apple or Google enters a startup’s space, they tend to fall back on the ‘validation of our idea’ defense, he does have a point. Pebble definitely has an uphill battle now, but it also has key expertise. If it doesn’t manage to eke out a space as the platform agnostic wearable platform between the big players like Apple and Google, it’s at least ripe for an acquisition play from one of the primary interested parties. |
Snowden Leak: NSA Is Recording All Calls From At Least One Country | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | The National Security Agency has the capability to replay all telephone calls for 30 days from an entire country, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden . “The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording ‘100 percent’ of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place,” writes The Post. The Post withheld the name of the country currently being surveilled under code name “MYSTIC” to protect on-going operations. The report said that MYSTIC was begun in 2009 and reached full capacity in 2011. The NSA claims it needs this ability because emerging threats are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats.” Though the NSA is required by law to minimize the surveillance of innocent people, especially Americans, it is difficult to do with massive sweeps. “Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered,” explains The Post. to intelligence surveillance, including one idea that may store bulk phone and Internet data with private companies, and require the government to request the data each time. Nearly all of the significant intelligence reforms must wait until congress takes up the issue later this year. Read the full report and explore some of the leaked slides . |
Social News Startup Nuzzel Opens To Everyone, Announces Former Friendster Exec Kent Lindstrom As COO | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | , the social news service created by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, is leaving beta testing and opening to all users. Previously, you had to request an invite before you could use Nuzzel. In the year-plus since , Abrams said Nuzzel has brought on about 3,000 testers, but now it’s time to see whether the product appeals to a broader audience. He argued that the underlying vision hasn’t changed, and it’s one that’s “still pretty unique.” Instead of , or , Nuzzel does something simpler — once you’ve signed in with your Twitter or Facebook account, it will show you a list of the stories shared by your friends (along with their commentary), arranged either chronologically or based on whatever’s been shared by the most people. Nuzzel’s approach is supposed to give you a feed of the most talked-about news, tailored to your interests, without requiring any real setup on your part. “That vision is a solid vision and it’s creating something people are coming to use over and over again,” Abrams said. He added that the underlying tech infrastructure has changed dramatically to support user growth, additional features, and mobile apps. Speaking of apps, although Nuzzel is currently available as a website for desktop and mobile devices, Abrams said an iPhone app is “95 percent done” and should launch within the next month or two. In addition to opening the service, Nuzzel is also making user news feeds public. In other words, anyone can now see the feeds created for other users, including and . What’s cool about these feeds is that they don’t require any manual curation or sharing, but they still reflect a user’s interests, and they’re a fun way to cast a wider net when exploring the news. (News feeds are only public if they were created using a public Twitter account, and anyone with a public feed can choose to make it private.) Nuzzel is also announcing that it has hired Kent Lindstrom as its chief operating officer. It’s a Friendster reunion, of sorts, as Lindstrom previously served as both CEO and vice president of finance at Friendster. (Judging from , the hire happened last fall but wasn’t announced until now.) |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls ‘Haunted Empire’ Nonsense, Says It Fails To Depict Company Or Culture | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a new book out about Apple by ex-WSJ reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane called . Kane covered the Apple beat at WSJ for years, and her book deals specifically with how the culture changed between Steve Jobs’ tenure and the succession of Tim Cook as CEO. Cook has just issued the about the book to CNBC’s Becky Quick: This nonsense belongs with some of the other books I’ve read about Apple about Apple. It fails to capture Apple, Steve, or anyone else in the company. Apple has over 85,000 employees that come to work each day to do their best work, to create the world’s best products, to put their mark in the universe and leave it better than they found it. This has been the heart of Apple from day one and will remain at the heart for decades to come. I am very confident about our future. We’ve always had many doubters in our history. They only make us stronger. As you can see, it’s a fairly bold condemnation of the work and its accuracy relative to how Apple operates. The book has been criticized by others, too, with reviewers around the web . I plan on reading the book, but only just downloaded it to my Kindle today and haven’t yet had a chance to dig in. |
Just A Google Co-Founder Chillin’ With Robo-Snowden | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | [tweet https://twitter.com/TEDchris/status/446004368844652545] So, this happened Today: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin hung out with whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was attending the TED conference via a telepresence robot. You may want to read that last sentence again to let it sink in. Despite the very careful legal dance that tech giants have had to walk around the National Security Agency scandal, Snowden has been welcomed as a hero. In public statements, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others involved with the NSA have had to steer clear of giving the sensitive topic more spotlight. But, it seems that behind the lawyers and policy consultants, tech luminaries are fans. Last week, when Snowden , I couldn’t get into the room where he was telecast, let alone one-on-one time with him. SXSW had at least two giant overflow rooms just to fit in all the attendees that wanted to see it live. It’s impressive that any conference can provide that kind of experience for attendees. TED will post the interview with Snowden soon. |
Cloudera Raises $160M From T. Rowe Price, Google Ventures And Michael Dell | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | the startup that distributes and services Apache Hadoop-based data-management software and services, has led by T. Rowe Price, and including an investment by Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell. This brings the company’s total funding to $300 million. Essentially Cloudera helps manage big data in a company, offering software, services and support for databases. When a user needs to analyze raw data to find a trend or to see if they can find valuable answers in unused data, Cloudera (built on top of Hadoop) allows them to complete more efficient queries. Hadoop is a Java software framework born of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what does for the Linux framework. Cloudera’s customer base includes AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company), CBS, eBay, Morgan Stanley, and The Walt Disney Company. The company has a number of partnerships in place, including one with Dell, which offers a Cloudera Hadoop configuration packaged with its servers. The new funding will be used to support global expansion into Europe and Asia, scale the field and engineering organizations, and hire additional talent. In the last funding round, Cloudera was valued at , so the company could be part of the $1 billion club with this new round. |
YC-Backed Boostable Offers A New Way For Online Sellers To Advertise | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | , which is part of the current class of startups at Y Combinator, says it’s giving the individual sellers on online marketplaces a smarter way to promote themselves. If someone’s trying to promote, say, their products on Etsy, or their events on Eventbrite, or their housing on Airbnb, they can already buy ads for themselves. However, co-founder and CEO Selcuk Atli (pictured) said that many of those sellers “don’t have the time or the expertise” to actually do so. Or if they do, it’s hard to tell whether their ads are actually paying off — sure, they may (or may not) see an uptick in sales and traffic, but they won’t know how much of it was actually driven by a given ad or campaign. Boostable, on the other hand, has integrated with various marketplaces to offer these sellers “a massively simple solution,” Atli said. Using the URL of their store, sellers are supposed to be able to sign up and create an ad within minutes. The ads will actually be branded as an ad for the broader marketplace, but they’ll be paid for by the individual seller and point to that seller’s web page. Boostable ads currently run on Facebook, and they can be targeted using the social network’s data. The company also offers analytics showing whether a given campaign is actually driving increased sales. The Boostable team has prior experience with social ads — Atli was founder at , while his co-founder and CTO Alex Chang was previously co-founder and chief product officer at Social Amp, which was . Atli said Boostable has partnered with nearly a dozen marketplaces so far, but the only one he can announce right now is online education marketplace . “Our Udemy instructors — sellers on our marketplace — are our best marketers,” said Udemy co-founder and CEO Eren Bali in a press release. “Most advertising platforms are not designed for these sellers and it is difficult for our instructors to attribute their ad spend to conversion data on Udemy. With Boostable, our instructors can easily buy ads and see results.” Boostable has raised more than $500,000 in seed funding from investors including SVAngel, 500 Startups/Dave McClure, Fuel Capital, Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo, and LiveRamp CEO Auren Hoffman. |
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Inside Facebook’s Efforts To Fortify Security In A Post-Snowden World | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | At Facebook, the security team isn’t holed up in some basement wearing tinfoil hats. It’s embedded across the company so any department dealing with sensitive data or access has security researchers inside it. Hinting at protecting against government surveillance, Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan said today that he’s confident enough in the company’s technical security that “Everyone should be coming in the front door with legal process and not coming in any other way.” Nine months after Edward Snowden revealed just how insecure the Internet is due to secret spying programs by various governments, Sullivan says Facebook hasn’t changed what it’s doing, it’s just being more public about it. For example, today Facebook invited a group of reporters to its Menlo Park headquarters to learn more about its protocols. There Sullivan said “We’re continuing to work on the same things we worked on before [the Snowden revelations].” Still, the presentation he gave implied security has become a great focus for the social network. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been speaking out against unauthorized government surveillance, saying the United Stats on the NSA scandal. He even posted about . The company asked the government to let it be more transparent around government data requests, and eventually was able to release a . That doesn’t mean Facebook doesn’t cooperate with the authorities when necessary or advantageous. Sullivan says that when Facebook encounters big security attacks “Sometimes we do work with law enforcement. We know just playing defence and whack-a-mole and removing those accounts over and over doesn’t make the problem go away, so in that context we’ll build investigations and our own proactive referrals to law enforcement.” Along with Google and the sensitive info inside Gmail, Facebook is one of the companies with the most to lose if hacked. Its business model hinges on people being comfortable sharing deeply personal information. A security fiasco could shake that confidence, reducing the content shared, which in turn could reduce the time people spend on the site seeing ads. That’s why inside the company, Facebook has actually tried to make security fun. It’s dubbed October “Hacktober,” and for the last three years it’s spent the month having security teams try everything they can to hack Facebook while the rest of the company tries to stop them. Sullivan says “we’re using gamification. We encouraged [employees] to catch us and started giving out prizes.” The “Hack-o-lantern” t-shirts awarded for thwarting one of these pretend intrusions have become prestigious commodities at the 1 Hacker Way campus. Ars Technica offered a great, deep look at And while security isn’t the sexiest topic, Facebook says its users do care. Sullivan relays that before Facebook made SSL HTTPS encryption of traffic mandatory, over one-third of users voluntarily enabled it. On the technical side, Facebook is constantly adding new security improvements. Along with adding SSL/HTTPS to encrypt traffic in 2011 and making it the default in 2013, Facebook now uses Perfect Forward Secrecy to strengthen SSL. “With SSL, there’s going to be a single key that opens every car on the highway, and with perfect forward there’s a different key for each car,” Sullivan explains. Facebook has also bumped up its encryption key size from 1024-bit to 2048-bit RSA keys at the end of 2013. And it’s working to better encrypt the links between its data centers. Facebook is also trying to solve security issues for others by open sourcing systems like Conceal, which helps other Android developers encrypt data they have stored outside their apps and instead in a phone’s SD card. “You can’t expect security to be perfect,” Sullivan admitted. “On the Internet, the state of security is in a constant sate of improvement.” Facebook has had its share of troubles. A that installed malware on the computers of Facebook employees who visited a compromised iOS SDK site. Facebook said it the affected devices and worked with police on an investigation. And Facebook got a bit of a black eye when it ignored a security researcher’s tip about a bug that would let anyone post on anyone’s wall. The researcher resorted to proving the exploit by posting to Zuckerberg’s wall. “I think as a company we’ve matured a lot, we’ve been learning a lot,” Sullivan said of those experiences. He tried not to take a firm stand on the morality of Snowden’s leaks, but Sullivan did conclude, “it’s hard to deal with the constant stops and spurts of stories, and to figure out what’s really going on, but a world more concerned with security and things like encryption…that’s the silver lining on this.” |
Draw Something Designer Debuts Sneeky, An Anonymous Social App Which Focuses On Photos | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | Anonymous social networking is the new social media. (Or the new “ .” We’ll see.) Developers are attacking the space right and left these days, it seems, despite the surrounding the ethics and morality of these services, which include apps like Secret, Whisper, Wut and YikYak, to name a few. The latest to join the fray is , a new photo-sharing app which lets you anonymously send photos to your contacts, presumably without them guessing the sender’s identity. The newly launched app was created by “Draw Something” designer Garett Peek, along with David Alson, and Philip Golbraikh, who had the initial idea. The team cites a growing trend among younger mobile users, who are looking for more private ways to communicate, as one of the reasons they decided to build Sneeky. Says Peek, Sneeky is aimed at 16 to 24 year-olds, primarily. “They are on mobile, and are concerned about their public reputation,” he tells us. “Sneeky gives them a way to interact privately with their friends in an uninhibited way.” The app itself is fairly straightforward. Users send photo messages to their friends, called “Sneeks,” by selecting the recipient from their phone’s contacts. Once sent, the receiver can also choose to save these photos to their iPhone’s Camera Roll. Sneeky has some modicum of protection against abuse in place, as it offers tools that can limit its use to only mutual friends. That is, users can designate that they only want to receive Sneeks from mutual contacts – meaning friends that have your phone number, and where you have theirs. This is not on by default, however, and since a good number of users never check an app’s settings, it may be overlooked. The company also claims the data is “fully encrypted,” so you’ll stay anonymous. Of course, figuring out who sent a photo at first probably won’t be that difficult to do, as any new app won’t have critical mass. But Peek believes that will change in time, and that users could try to make their first “sneeks” photos of things that aren’t likely to give them away. Something to note is that, on Sneeky, it’s okay to try and guess who the sender is – in fact, says Peek, it’s “part of the fun.” That’s the polar opposite from Secret, where those who attempt to triangulate their way to the original poster are often scolded by commenters for doing so. Sneeky also suffers from the cold start problem some apps face. Until friends are on Sneeky, there isn’t much – or anything, really – to do. The app has a nice enough look to it, but ran a little slow, which could dampen adoption. (Your mileage may vary. I tested over Wi-Fi). The bootstrapping team at Sneeky isn’t talking about users or downloads at this point, for obvious reasons, but Peek says engagement numbers are “high and promising.” The focus for now is on building the user base and fine-tuning the user experience, not revenue, which is why Sneeky is . |
Backed By Boost VC And Tim Draper, Globevestor Helps Startups In Emerging Markets Get Funded Online | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | Entrepreneurs in India’s nascent but fast growing startup ecosystem are realizing that getting an early investor who appreciates their idea is increasingly becoming difficult. Sometimes it’s even tougher than finding their first paying customer. While there are , the early money and guidance is never enough for startups attempting to get the best deals on funding and access to newer markets. , an equity crowdfunding site , aims to change that by helping investors in the U.S. connect with entrepreneurs looking to raise money in the emerging markets — very similar to how a or an would work, except that it’s cross-border and the focus is only on the developing world. “Our investment thesis revolves around a strong focus on India and other emerging markets – we want to work with startups that are primarily based in those countries or who are tackling problems local to those markets,” Raju P.N., co-founder of Globevestor said in an interview. The other founder is Ankur Shrivastava, an IIT engineer turned management consultant. Globevestor is backed by , Bill Draper and Tim Draper among several investors. “We have begun working with a few exciting early-stage Indian startups (like , , ) that are or will soon be in the process of raising money. We have mandates to help raise nearly $500,000 for 5 startups over the next 3 months through our platform and will be co-investing alongside investors like Empire Angels, Tim Draper and GSF,” added Raju. Once accredited, investors are allowed to browse through startup pitches online that are pre-screened, and participate in focused investing rounds that generates separate funds for each startup. The investments can start with as little as $1k in pre-screened startups. For its part, Globevestor is already seeing interest from some of the big-name Silicon Valley investors such as Tim Draper who believe the platform will have a long-term impact on the Indian startup ecosystem over next decade. More importantly, investors such as Draper say the platform will help them invest in startups based in India, something they would normally avoid given the country’s existing complex venture investing rules. “Indian entrepreneurs have been suffering recently because global investors have discovered India’s inefficient (somewhat corrupt) government and poor incentive systems. Globevestor can offer hope in cutting through red tape and even the playing field,” Draper said in an interview. To be sure, the idea of building an online platform that allows hassle-free, cross-border investment opportunities for startups and investors is nothing new. While connects entrepreneurs in Israel with potential accredited investors in the U.S., enables a similar platform for the ecosystem across Europe. In India, is another online platform for angel investing that’s beginning to gain traction by disrupting existing angel groups through a much more transparent and convenient online platform. India has an existing and quite active network of angel investors. For instance, in the last two years has invested around a million dollars a month in almost 30 companies, which makes over a deal a month. IAN Incubator’s 50 companies have either become revenue earning or raised seed funding within 6 to 9 months of incubation, according to the network. But existing angel investors in the country still leave a huge gap to be filled for Indian startups looking for funders who have risk appetite demonstrated in the Silicon Valley. Graham Gullans, the founder of New York-based angel group Empire Angels, says there’s huge risk appetite to find companies with business models that mirror large successes in the developed world. “The startup landscape in India has grown precipitously in the past two years, making it attractive for capital that wants to access a large market ripe for innovation,” Gullans said. Earlier this week, Globevestor became a member of , making it the fifth accredited platform member after AngelList, SeedInvest, FundersCub and DreamFunded. The opportunity is huge for facilitating cross-border early stage investments into merging markets, especially considering the international diaspora controlling nearly $2 trillion in wealth and over $600 billion in savings in the U.S. alone. According to recent reports by the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and infoDev, this could be a $30 billion opportunity by 2025. The opportunity gets even bigger since most of the VC funds are focused on late-stage investments and a large majority of them get most of their money from limited partners in the US and other developed countries. “We want to focus on early-stage investments and allowing small/mid-wealth accredited investors the opportunity to invest in India’s growth story (by writing checks as small as $1000),” Raju said. There are about 9 million accredited investors in the US and only about 250,000 of them do active angel investing, according to Globevestor. “There is, therefore, an immense potential for online venture capital and equity crowdfunding if barriers to investing are removed for those 8 million+ accredited investors (a decent number of whom are Indian diaspora) who do not currently invest in startups,” Raju added. Despite its obvious advantages, online angel investing does come with several limitations and it cannot substitute high level of due diligence that potential investors conduct through one-on-one meetings. “Online equity fundraising platforms should not replace direct dialogue with the founders with early stage funds, they should merely serve as a guide to finding the hottest and best companies and globevestor has achieved this for emerging markets,” Gullans said. |
Birchbox Founders To Share Subscription Commerce Insights At Disrupt NY | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | There’s no question that the future of commerce lies in providing a more personalized experience to consumers. And has quietly created an $80 million business out of a subscription e-commerce platform for beauty and grooming brands. In a post-Amazon world, creating a commerce brand, especially using the subscription model, is a huge feat. Birchbox founders Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp will be talking about how they’ve built a technology, discovery and commerce brand at in May. . Birchbox was one of the early entrants on the subscription commerce scene, launching in 2010. The startup sends its subscribers a box full of sample products ranging from lotions to lipstick and mascara for $10 per month. If customers like what they see, they can go on Birchbox’s site and can buy more. Birchbox has also expanded to other verticals, including entertaining, home and food, , and even content as well. Already popular in the U.S., Birchbox has of late, acquiring its French clone, JolieBox, which allowed it to move into France, the UK, Spain and several other European markets. What’s particularly surprising about Birchbox is that it has only raised $12 million in funding, and others. But that may change soon. As , Birchbox is raising a huge new round. When rumors of a raise emerged last year, the company was valued between $300 million and $400 million. But according to the report, Birchbox is growing, and most importantly, the company is creating loyal users who want to buy the products they try via their monthly box. Barna and Beauchamp have been able to make a real business out of subscription commerce, and accomplish this despite the many challenges founders face in running an e-commerce business. to hear how at Disrupt NY in May. |
Equity Firm Thoma Bravo Buys TravelClick For $930 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | With its $930 million acquisition of business-to-business travel software provider TravelClick, private equity firm Thoma Bravo is showing that . The private-equity firm, with offices in San Francisco and Chicago, is buying TravelClick from Genstar Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, which had put the company on the auction block earlier in the year, . New York-based TravelClick sells a complete suite of hotel management software applications as a service. The company sells its software to 37,000 hoteliers worldwide. , technology investors are increasingly interested in the hotel business these days. Investors have funded travel-related startups in over 40 different countries since 2009, . While the U.S., U.K., and China lead the way in total number of travel investments, emerging markets are seeing their fair share, as well, from recent $50 million Series D round to seed rounds in Kenya-based and Colombian startup .
That financing hasn’t escaped the notice of TravelClick’s chief executive Larry Kutscher. “I probably track 50 or 60 [startups]. I watch what they’re doing and try to learn from what they’re doing and then I make sure my products compete well with them.” For Kutscher, startup companies in travel are introducing interesting products for hoteliers, but not the total solutions that he said TravelClick provides. “There’s lots of activity, and the beauty of it is that the hotel area is a growing profitable space, but what those companies are lacking — what they don’t realize — is that the hotel business is a high-relationship business. We have hundreds of sales people over the world who know the hotels.” In fact, TravelClick has over 300 employees in its “go-to-market” organization, and the company expects to have revenue north of $300 million in 2014. At the time of its acquisition by Genstar in 2007 from Bain Capital, TravelClick’s recognized clients included the Ritz London, Accor Hospitality, The Palms South Beach, Banyan Tree Hotels, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group, Harrah’s, The Kahala Resort, La Quinta Inns and Suites, Loews Hotels and Trump Entertainment Resorts. |
HTC Is The Honey Badger That Don’t Care | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | The new HTC One might be the in history. , , and new features have leaked over the last few months long ahead of its March 25th debut. Even HTC itself got into the action . HTC clearly understands that a big reveal will have little impact on the HTC One’s future. Companies have long toyed with big press events for devices but they’re a delicate balancing act. seems to have the right formula. They drag the press out to just a couple of big events each year, announce their new wares, and then reveal the pricing and release date. Apple has the right mixture of consumer mindshare and presentation tactics. Most companies do not. Samsung is still figuring it out. Last year, for the reveal of the Galaxy S4, the company complete with singing, complicated stages and an orchestra to explain every new feature found on the phone. This year Samsung went decidedly low-key with the Galaxy S5 reveal, yet the price and release date from the announcement. HTC is in a tough spot. It needs the next HTC One to succeed. The company . And the best way to keep using black ink is to maintain a responsible level of hype for its next flagship phone. Nearly every leak around the next HTC One shows that the phone will be a worthy successor. There doesn’t seem to be anything magical about the phone. And that’s good. The leaks have revealed a similar design to the original with an upgraded camera. The UI is familiar, but updated. It seems nice. But the leaks work in HTC’s favor. This is free marketing for HTC and free is good. Consumers generally do not rush out to buy an Android phone the day it’s released. The upgrade cycle is not as rigid as with the iPhone. Purchases are carefully weighed and measured against competitors’ devices. Apple needs the big pop to convert current iPhone owners to buy the next iPhone. HTC’s customer likely has a device from a different maker who HTC hopes will buy the next One sometime in the coming months. HTC doesn’t need a star-studded dog and pony show to sell phones. It needs educated consumers who simply have heard about the next HTC One, and for that you spread the news through word of mouth and not spend not millions on an all-singing-all-dancing tech launch. |
MadeSolid Is Creating Next-Gen 3D Printing Materials | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFZEl-cXv4 It seems like we can’t go a week these days without hearing about some new startup making a new 3D printer that wants to be better and cheaper than everything else. I’m not complaining, of course — competition is good for everyone. But it’s a tough space if you’re looking to stand out. , a YC-backed company out of Emeryville, CA, is going after the 3D printing market from the other end: they want to fix the materials we 3D print with. You see, 3D printing isn’t perfect. Amongst other things, the smallest snag in the process of printing an object can (and regularly does) wreck the entire thing — often after many hours of printing. Imagine if you were printing a book on an inkjet printer and the somehow ruined itself any time there was a paper jam or if a bit of ink ended up in the wrong place. When 3D printers fail, they tend to fail . MadeSolid actually started out with the intention of being a 3D printing service, but quickly realized that the fail rates of 3D printers was just too high for them to do it at scale. With backgrounds in chemistry, nuclear engineering, and business (quite the combination), the company’s set out to tackle what they saw as an overlooked weakness: the materials used to 3D print. For those who are just keeping an eye on 3D printing from afar, a quick primer: there are actually quite a few different types of 3D printers. The two types that have become cheap/accessible enough to find their way into the homes of hobbyists are Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and Stereolithography (SLA). Those names may sound a bit intimidating, but this is all you really need to know: (like MakerBots) heat up plastic until it melts, then lays that ooey, gooey plastic down layer by layer to form an object. Meanwhile, (like the Form 1) aim superfocused lasers into a vat of specialized goop (called a “photopolymer resin”) that hardens almost instantly when the laser makes contact. Each style of printer has its strengths and weaknesses. Stereolithographic printers tend to be a bit finicky right now, but can make detailed prints. FDM printers have a friendlier learning curve, but the print resolution of a stream of melted plastic just can’t match that of a finely-tuned laser. So which tech would a company like MadeSolid bet on? Both! While company co-founder Lance Pickens tells me that he sees SLA printers winning out in the long run, the company is hedging their bets and making materials for both types of printer. When it comes to plastic extrusion printers like the Makerbot, most folks turn to one of two materials: ABS or PLA. Neither of these materials is perfect. Printing with ABS makes the entire room smell like straight up cancer; it’s the type of thing that you smell and just it’s probably not great for you. PLA, meanwhile, smells like waffles (seriously) — but objects printed with it tend to be fairly brittle. Looking to make a material that offers up the strengths of both, MadeSolid has come up with what they call PET+ — a modified version of the that’s commonly used in manufacturing. MadeSolid has composited PET+ for a very specific set of properties: I’ve been tinkering with a spool of PET+ for a few days now, and I’m quite pleased with it so far. Like any material, it has its quirks (it’s very similar to PLA, in the quirks it does have), but I’m really enjoying working with it.
Unlike ABS or PLA, it smells like… nothing. Really — even when I close my doors and let the printer run for a while, I don’t detect any fumes. That’s not to say you should stand over your printer and huff at it all day (detectable fumes or not, the jury is still out on how safe 3D printer emissions are), but it won’t drive you out of the room. In two dozen or so prints, I’ve yet to have a single one fail for any reason that I could blame on the material (as opposed to a software or printer glitch.) I’ve seen next to no shrinkage/warping, and not one print has detached from my build plate (heated to 60c) As mentioned, MadeSolid is making materials for SLA printers, too. As with PET+, they’ve custom tailored their resin to fix what they didn’t like about the stuff already on the market: You can find out . These guys have only been around for a few months — I’m excited to see what they’ll do in a year. Oh, and be sure to check out the video up top which MadeSolid put together to show how their stuff fares against the rest (if only for that sweet, sweet blowtorch action at the end). |
Multiple Pinterest Accounts Hacked, Flooded With Butt Pics | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | If you log onto and see that one of your friends has suddenly developed a fixation with weight loss ads and butt pics like the ones below, don’t click on the pins. Multiple accounts have been hacked over the last hour and flooded with spam, including our own . Dear my accounts been hacked with someone posting hundreds of butt pictures all over my boards-security??! — hermioneway (@hermioneway) A representative from Pinterest told TechCrunch: Our systems were alerted to some incidents of spam yesterday evening. These reports did not come in at a large scale. We began working on cleaning up and placing the accounts in immediately. The accounts have since been secured. As a precaution, Pinners should use , and can get more information in our Help Center. As Pinterest’s popularity has grown, so have the number of scammers hacking into Pinterest accounts. The warning users to be careful when clicking on pins that don’t look like the usual content that their friends usually post. Hackers access accounts in a number of ways, including through third-party apps with security holes or inserting malicious code in “Pin This” widgets on other sites, says the BBB. To keep your account safe and free from unwanted butt pics and other spam, report suspicious pins, be wary about third-party apps, and check destination links before you repin content. |
Fancal Is A Calendar App That Showcases Your Photos | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | has such a simple but appealing concept that it’s surprising there aren’t more smartphone calendars like it. The iOS app showcases photos from your library, with dates laid out in an unobtrusive sidebar. Created by Dutch startup We Are Wow, Fancal is made for people who usually shy away from time management apps. In fact, it’s more likely to appeal to the users of memory-keeping apps like , , and , which dig up old photos from your phone’s album and social network profiles. Weeks are arranged in a thin “ribbon” down the left side of the screen and display the number of events you have on each day. Tapping on a date produces a pop-up window with your schedule. Fancal has icons you can use to tag events in different categories (food, business, leisure, sports, or miscellaneous). Aside from that, the app’s focus is on showcasing your photos. Fancal is customized by adding pictures to its album in iOS photos, which is automatically created when you download the app. If you have multiple snaps in there, the calendar will automatically display a new one each time you open it. Though Fancal lacks the snazzy features of popular calendar apps like , , and , de Vries says its goal is to attract people who are still using paper to plan their days instead of “hardcore calendar users who are looking to schedule every 15-minute slot.” Fancal’s design also lends itself easily to monetization. We Are Wow has already struck content partnerships with football clubs in the U.K., Portugal, and the Netherlands, including , , and . As the “official mobile calendar” for each team, We Are Wow produced apps pre-loaded with team photos and schedules. De Vries says the startup is also seeking deals with other fan communities and consumer brands, so keep your eye out for that Bieber Fancal (or not). |
Y Combinator’s Top Three Startups From Winter 2014, According To Y Combinator Startups | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | It’s been more than a day since , and we’ve already weighed in on which companies . But with each class, the startups within Y Combinator vote to determine which colleagues they thought were most likely to be successful. One source sent us a list of those companies, listed in order. So here’s Y Combinator’s self-selected top three startups: , , is a quantified self startup that sells a $129 pocket-sized digital ultrasound tool that allows expecting mothers to hear, record, and share their babies’ heartbeat. , meanwhile, provides a within organizations. It basically enables enterprise salespeople to team up and compete against one another, kind of like “fantasy sports for sales teams.” Right now, it’s for sales teams, but the company sees an opportunity to expand to allow whole organizations to compete against one another. , the third choice from YC classmates, is the into the accelerator. It’s also generally a later-stage company than YC usually sees. But! It’s doing a lot of business. According to founder Hyungseok Ha at demo day, the startup is on a $150 million run rate. And it’s tough to argue with that. As you’ve probably noticed, two of the teams that the accelerator’s founders picked were considered “off the record” — which is to say, while those companies presented for investors, members of the audience were asked not to publicize them “in any way.” Because we love Y Combinator so much, we’ve decided to keep that promise (also because otherwise they might not invite us back). We will say though, those companies are pretty cool. You might also have noticed that the none of the three startups Y Combinator picked . Make of that what you will: I mean, what do we know? |
TrueVault Raises $2.5M To Make It Easy For Healthcare Apps To Be HIPAA Compliant | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | , the healthcare app data security startup that launched this week out of the , has closed on $2.5 million in seed funding. The money will be used to further develop TrueVault’s “database as a service,” which provides a secure API for healthcare apps to use when storing sensitive patient data. Such data security is critical for healthcare startups to become compliant with the (HIPAA) regulations regarding patient privacy. TrueVault, which charges its clients $0.001 per API call, currently has over 300 customers. You can read more in-depth details about how the service works in TechCrunch’s earlier coverage . I’m told that the TrueVault concept was such a hit at YC Demo Day, that the company secured fully $2 million of the $2.5 million seed on Demo Day itself ($500,000 of the funding already had been committed.) According to TrueVault co-founder Trey Swann, this was largely possible thanks to the so-called conceived by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham in March 2013. According to Swann, the process was ideal: “Fundraising is not winning. The goal is to get it over with quickly and get back to work,” he said. Along with Y Combinator, TrueVault’s investors now include FundersClub, Paul Buchheit, ScoreBig founder Joel Milne, an LLC that includes Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Maverick, and Khosla Ventures, and Immunity Project founders
Reid Rubsamen, Naveen Jain, and Ian Cinnamon. |
Facebook Joins Google In The Hunt For The Future | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | in an era when Mark Zuckerberg Obama, controls fleets of drones, brokers $19 billion acquisitions in a week, and buys whole virtual worlds. Facebook’s mission has changed. While once it was solely “to make the world more open and connected”, it’s expanded to also “give people the power to share.” And nothing is too crazy if it brings Facebook one step closer to that goal. If you squint, the strategy looks a lot like the mantra of Facebook’s early days, “Move fast and break things,” but on a much more grandiose scale. Back in the 2000s, Facebook wasn’t afraid to launch sweeping new features like News Feed to the entire user base at once or overhaul privacy without warning, even if it had to apologize and back-track. But as Facebook approached its IPO, something changed. All thoughts seemed to turn to monetization. The product itself appeared to slow down, while business ratcheted up. Facebook began injecting ads into its sacred News Feed. It battled with game developers to levy a 30 percent tax on their in-app purchases through its Credits virtual currency. And it started asking Pages to pay to reach their own fans. When the share price plummeted on IPO day, it became clear that Facebook’s next crisis was mobile. It was hardly earning any money there, but that’s where its whole user base was headed. So it ditched the weak HTML5 mobile web standard and rebuilt its apps entirely natively to boost speed. It got dead serious about private messaging with big investments into its standalone Messenger app. And most critically, it saw that crowded app stores were making discoverability and growth tough for developers, so it launched mobile app install ads. Now, its apps are much better liked, Messenger has become a real competitor, and app install ads have turned into a cash cow. The helped Facebook become a mobile-first advertising company with over 50 percent of its ad revenue stemming from the small screen. That’s more than $1 billion a quarter in mobile revenue alone. This all wrenched the share price out of the hole and up into the $60 range its been fluctuating around recently. Having , and with the Wall Street monkey off its back, Facebook has finally been able to lift its sights to the horizon. Since Facebook’s share price surpassed its $38 IPO mark in August, we’ve seen it act like a much bolder company: Compare that to any seven months of moves in the past few years and it will look like Zuckerberg started watching too many sci-fi movies. But actually, he’s been turning Facebook’s new three-part mission into a reality. The CEO explained his plans on the following the Oculus acquisition announcement: “I’ve framed our strategy as three high-level goals over the next ten years- connecting everyone, one; two, understanding the world; and three, building the knowledge economy. With this acquisition, now each of those initiatives has an ambitious long-term bet associated with it, in addition to our important near-term work as well. For number one, connecting everyone, for the long term we have Internet.org, our initiative to make free basic internet services available to everyone in the world. And for connecting everyone, we also have our near-term efforts for our messaging and growth. For number two, understanding the world, we have our ambitious AI Research Group, which is trying to build a unified model of how every person [inside] the world is connected to each other. In the near term, our efforts here are in search and News Feed, and will help your network surface more useful information to you. And for number three, building the knowledge economy, that’s really about building future technology platforms. And we now have Oculus joining us, which long term can be one of the next important computing platforms. And of course we will continue to focus on our extremely important work of building out our advertising platform as well, as part of this.” With this strategy laid out, Facebook’s seemingly erratic launches, acquisitions, and investments come into focus. Facebook is playing two games. One for today, with messaging and News Feed powered by ads, and one for tomorrow, with AI and virtual reality powered by the entire globe being connected to the web and to Facebook. As outgrows its “social network” label, Facebook seems unconcerned with being perceived as creepy as long as it’s making progress. There’s only one other company that seems to be thinking this far in advance . It has Project Loon for connectivity, Glass for augmented reality, Calico for human longevity, Boston Dynamics for robotics, Nest for the connected home, self-driving cars, and Deep Mind for artificial intelligence. Both have realized technology is a lot bigger than showing ads on desktops and smartphones. They’re using the revenue from this era to fund research and acquisitions so they can pay their way to the next generation of innovation. It could be years before some of these technologies are ready for the consumer market and even longer until they’re widely embraced. But that’s why they’re starting now. Invention and integration take time. Of course, both could waste billions barking up the wrong trees. If users sidestep the Facebook-owned WhatsApp or developers abandon Oculus, these big bets could be seen as huge blunders in hindsight. But to these giants, gambling seems less risky than sitting atop a pile of cash. The age of social snuck up on Google, and the age of mobile snuck up on Facebook. Now that Facebook has its small-screen strategy humming, it has the bandwidth and brashness to join Google in the hunt for the future.’ — |
Threes’ Creators Publish An Epic Work Log To Show How Frustrating It Is To Be Cloned | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Not really. That’s just something that people like to say without really thinking about, because it sounds nice and makes them feel better. Kind of like saying “there’s no such thing as bad press.” when of-freaking-course there is. In reality, being imitated can be crushing — especially when your thing thats being imitated is something you’ve worked on for over a year. The developers behind (Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend) spent 14 months designing their game. Within 3 weeks of release, their first big “clone” (a modified but remarkably similar title called 1024) appeared. By the end of the month, another (2048) showed up — and within weeks of that, Threes’ developers found game being called the rip-off. There are now of Threes/1024/2048 clones in the app store. We over here. To demonstrate just how much work they put into their original game, of nearly all of the communication (some 45,000 words) and planning that went into the game’s 14-month design. Their goal? I won’t put words in their mouth, but this quote is the crux of it: We want to celebrate iteration on our ideas and ideas in general. It’s great. 2048 is a simpler, easier form of Threes that is worth investigation, but piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven’t had time to understand all we’ve done with our game’s system and why we took 14 months to make it, well… that makes us sad. It’s complicated and hard to express these conflicting feelings but hopefully this is a start. We are so happy with Threes and how it has done and all the response. Seriously. And even writing this feels like we’re whining about some sour grapes that we have no business feeling sour about. Like it’s not ok to feel the way we do some of the time. But we do. It’s worth, at the very least, . You might not get through all of it — but that’s kind of the point. It's a mix of feelings, we're still thrilled by all the love for Threes. But it has me wanting to never make a small beautiful thing again. — Greg Wohlwend (@aeiowu) |
Office For iPad Is A Hit: Word Jumps To #1 In US, Excel To #3, PowerPoint To #4 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Microsoft , and they came: Office for iPad is enjoying a big first day, with Word for iPad becoming the most popular app for the device in the United States just five hours after it went live. Data for the newly released Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps is still somewhat unfilled given the youth of the apps, but what is out there looks good. PowerPoint, for example, is the fourth most popular app in the U.S and Excel is rocking the No. 3 spot: Here’s Words’s scorecard so far [All data: ]: The numbers on the left represent its rank overall, and the numbers on the right are for the ‘Productivity’ category. A question only sometimes asked before the release of Office for iPad was would anyone care? The conversation instead centered around how much oxygen the appearance of Office on Apple’s tablet would suck from the lungs of Windows. Those who bet that there was real market appetite for Office on tablets have been proven correct. It doesn’t hurt that the apps themselves appear to be quite nice. TechCrunch’s was positive. TechCrunch will keep an eye on the charts, but it looks like a good day for Redmond. |
Sony Just Launched The Most Boring Product In The World | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Meet the , Sony’s latest e-ink slate. It’s part iPad, part e-reader, and must be made out of moon rocks. It’s $1,100 and will be available in the States this May. But you’re not going to buy it. The 13.3-inch “letter size” Digital Paper isn’t for the average consumer. It’s definitely not for me. Sony is marketing it to gullible legal professionals with large expense accounts. It’s a note-taking device. The flexible e-ink display boasts both optical and active digitizer touchscreens allowing for finger and stylus input. Markup documents right on the screen. Files are saved in a repository that can be shared. It’s too bad that the software only supports PDFs. Sony introduced this device to the Japanese market last year. Since launch the device has only supported the editing and viewing of PDF documents. Word and Excel docs can be converted to be viewed on the device. But it’s still a PDF. And as the notes, it lacks an email client and the ability to install additional software. What you see is what you get. The device sports Wi-Fi, 2.8GB of flash storage, a microSD card slot and a 13.3-inch flexible e-ink screen with a 1600×1200 resolution. The battery lasts three weeks. The whole package is only 6.8mm and weighs 358 grams — that’s less than half that of the iPad air. Digital Paper will be sold in the U.S. this May through Worldox, a U.S.-based company specializing in document management for legal professionals. Maybe I don’t get it. I’m not a legal professional, and I’ll stick to my iPad for note taking. |
Upshift Launches To Bring Scalable Sales Engines To Startups, And Help Engineer Growth | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | If today isn’t your first day in the tech industry (or reading TechCrunch), then you’re likely familiar with the rise of the accelerator program, a phenomenon that has swept through Startup Land like wildfire over the last five years. Pioneered by early movers like Y Combinator and TechStars as part of experiments that aimed to identify the best ways to support nascent companies during those headache-inducing yet critical early stages of growth, today, the seed accelerator model is quietly marching towards ubiquity. By helping entrepreneurs define products, identify potential customers, and by offering a nip of seed capital, co-working space, mentorship and networking opportunities — in short, immersive program packages — it’s no wonder accelerators have become one of the most popular approaches to business incubator. If accelerators get it right, the dynamic between partners and entrepreneurs is symbiotic. In turn, you also may be aware of the explosion of interest in tools and services that cater to the growing demand not only for technical literacy within education, but among businesses looking for competent developers. Over the last two years, this new phenomenon has taken the shape of blended “learn-to-code” platforms, as these hacker academies and coding bootcamps have been rapidly proliferating across the country. While this increasingly popular “Trade School 2.0” model differs from that of seed accelerators thanks to a greater focus on education and the individual (rather than the business), both have succeeded in developing support networks that provide framework for optimizing growth and improving potential outcomes for their “customers.” So, ultimately, while you probably haven’t been acquainted with , as the San Francisco-based startup is officially debuting for the first time today (nor its unique, hybrid model) it will seem familiar — and very much a product of the two models above. Much like startup accelerator programs, Upshift is on a mission to provide young businesses with tools and support systems that can help them get over the hump during a critical formation stage and get to market more quickly. Furthermore, just as accelerators can help entrepreneurs define and build products and secure business-critical resources (like financing) during the early stages, Upshift’s core goal is to help entrepreneurs turn good ideas into big, sustainable businesses. In turn, as the hacker bootcamp model has grown in popularity, it’s become clear that its success is derived largely from ways that its blended and immersive approach to education provide a better way to learn the material — in this case the core concepts behind computer science. Like accelerators, hacker schools typically offer programs of limited duration, and just as every learning experience for entrepreneurs in accelerator has a higher potential to be retained because that knowledge is offered (and, in turn acquired) if it’s relevant to helping the business grow. Lately, the hacker school model has begun to take its first steps away from subject matter and curricula that’s exclusively focused programming and CS. The training and “student incubation” model, if you will, is now being applied to different professions. , for example, helps train people for UX and growth positions at high-growth startups. , in turn, provides students with a broader set of potential skills (as they relate to startups). Upshift, like these hacker bootcamps for UX design and Sales training, and like the smaller cohort of accelerators that focus on incubating companies within a particular vertical, isn’t interested in helping businesses optimize broadly for growth. Instead, they’re laser-focused on helping companies get to market and scale in their area of core competency. After all, as Upshift founder and CEO Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski says, entrepreneurs face enough challenges and uncertainties in building their businesses. They don’t need Upshift offering half-assed advice about, say, recruiting engineers. That’s why Upshift is sticking to sales. By enlisting the startup’s support, businesses can remove sales from the top of their list of uncertainties. To increase the potential value it can bring to each business, Upshift partners with only two or three partners at a time, eschewing advice to focusing on developing solutions to their partners’ sales problems. Instead, Upshift spends a few months doing due diligence on prospective partners, assessing, designing, engineering, testing and then optimizing customer acquisition channels. Once the system is tested and ready to wear, then Upshift will work with business’ sales teams to show them how to get the most out of their new sales framework, as well as how to effectively use those tools to take operations to the next level. At this point in the process, depending on how the company has progressed with its new sales infrastructure, Upshift’s approach shares another potential similarity with the accelerator seed fund model. Again, once everything is in place, if the Upshift founder agrees that there’s real potential, they will invest between $25K to $100K of their own money to add more fuel to its engines. Targeting mid-sized startups who are ready to invest in building a big sales team, but either aren’t sure where to begin or know that, with the resources they could dedicate, they could afford it, though it might take more time than they potentially have to give. Assuming the Upshift founders, having built sales teams of 100-plus before, are keeping things (comparatively) affordable and wouldn’t price out customers that might be on the fence about whether to invest the capital and resources. Of course, at this point, a logical question from the perspective of a startup and potential Upshift partner would be, while that sounds good on the surface, how can I trust that, if I allocate the spend, I’ll get results? First of all, if anyone ever offers a “guarantee” in response to that question, walk away. That said, Upshift is hoping to get potential customers 99 percent of the way there, for starters, in the amount of time it spends doing due diligence. If the founders can get comfortable on their own diligence, enough to add the company to their portfolio, then they’re essentially agreeing to spend weeks planning and designing your new sales funnel. Founder Luna-Ostaseski tells us that, as part of the analysis Upshift does of its new portfolio company, it will make a deep-dive into the company’s marketing and sales operations to understand where they need to optimize. They spend time researching the ins and outs of the sales infrastructure, interviewing customers to get a more complete picture and understand key values, before reviewing the company’s current customer acquisition systems, processes and teams. Then, once it has a full picture of how the business defines and understands both itself and its customer, it begins working with the business to develop short-term and long-term sales strategies and doing in-depth sales modeling through ROI analysis, staffing expectations, targets, and so on. From there, Upshift designs its system, customizing to the company’s particular needs, integrating with CRM platforms of choice, sales process automation and design, telephone script and email template design, in-depth reporting and executive dashboards. Once Upshift’s engineering team completes the development, the founder works with the team to get them on-boarded and, longer-term, offer to meet with executives weekly, help manage expectations and make optimizations to the system. Again, while that gives one a clearer picture of how Upshift approaches the sales optimization process, the question remains about the founder. How can you be sure they are the sales experts they say there? Ostaseski says that, having been a founder, operator, advisor and angel investor, his perspective, recommendations, and strategizing is informed by multiple perspectives, and likely more than the average investor. His experience also makes him both “serial” founder, meaning that it’s not his first rodeo. In turn, he developed the idea for Upshift after coming to the conclusion that there just isn’t an obvious or magic formula that works every time when it comes to optimizing sales. Each company, each customer and each dynamic is different. Furthermore, at his friends companies and with colleagues he watched as many struggled with integration and UX friction, taking them sometimes years to put systems in place. So, deciding that after the necessary development process, he could help reduce setup time from years down to months and help businesses improve conversion rates and acquisition through a hands-on, high-touch and strategic process. At which point one might be tempted to say that those — while key to offering more value to your customers’ experience and potentially increasing loyalty — are usually not the ingredients for seamless scaling. But Luna-Ostaseski helped lead one of these companies, CalFinder Group, from bootstrap to $20 million in sales, and has had success building sales teams of between 20 and 100 as well. Because the firm is just launching today, it doesn’t yet have its portfolio filled out and is still vetting prospects. So while there aren’t any big, stand-out victories to point to yet under the Upshift masthead, Luna-Ostaseski spent time consulting with companies in a similar vein before deciding to turn his proprietary sales knowledge into a business. One of the companies he worked with was , the marketplace for local services. Co-founder Jonathan Swanson said of the company’s situation at the time, “We had zero sales experience at Thumbtack,” and were in the same position many companies find themselves in — they’re willing to spend the money to hire a CMO and invest in that side of the business, but are hesitant to do that without really knowing what they’re looking for. As a result, Thumbtack turned to Gabe because of his experience scaling similarly-sized sales teams. “Most of our work with consultants over the years hasn’t been successful,” Swanson continued, so their expectations were low. Luna-Ostaseski was able to pull it off, working within the company’s framework to optimize the existing team and build on it, “creating a productive sales team from square one in just a few months,” Swanson said, a process which “would have taken [Thumbtack] at least twice as long to do by ourselves.” For more, |
Office For iPhone And Android Is Now Free | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Along with a new version of , Microsoft made Office for iPhone and Android smartphones free today. The apps have updated in the respective app stores and can be snagged for iPhone and for Android. The change log notes that the apps are free for “home use.” As Emil Protalinski earlier today, this seems to imply that “Microsoft still plans to require that businesses have an Office 365 subscription.” You can now use Office for free, including editing, on every device except for the iPad, ironically, which requires an Office 365 subscription to unlock editing capabilities. There are free Office apps on Windows Phone, iPhone, Android and Windows RT devices, and for anyone on a regular PC, Office Offline is a decent solution. Microsoft’s goal is to arc people towards paying for Office 365. But at the same time, use of free Office apps leads to more use of OneDrive, which is another priority for the company. The free apps help OneDrive, and the iPad maneuver likely will help juice Office 365 subscriptions. Microsoft giving away Office on platforms it doesn’t own? The times are changing. |
Apple Gets Its 30% Take On Office 365 Subscriptions Microsoft Sells Through Office For iPad | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Microsoft is not just placating user demand with the today; it’s also selling Office 365 subscriptions directly within the app. Those subs are worth a pretty penny to Microsoft, as it collects a recurring revenue stream starting at $99 per year per user from Office 365, but it turns out Apple also reaps a reward from sales made through the iPad app. that Apple takes its usual 30 percent cut of transactions made directly in its software from Microsoft’s sale of subscriptions made through the new app. That’s not surprising – Apple has held fast on its insistence that companies pay up or ship out, and Amazon couldn’t broker a special arrangement, forcing it to have to scrub any and all links to its Amazon digital bookstore from its iOS offerings. The Office for iPad apps carry a single in-app purchase for Office 365 Home, worth $99.99, which means Apple gets just under $30 every time someone uses their iTunes account to sign up instead of going through the web. It’s only fair: presumably these subscribers wouldn’t have signed up if they hadn’t downloaded and wanted to use the iPad version of the Office software. One thing’s clear: It now makes even more sense why Apple CEO Tim Cook was quick to congratulate Office on its arrival in the App Store, aside from the simple fact that native Office support is definitely a boon for the iOS platform, regardless of how significant you think this late entry to the iPad productivity market is for Microsoft overall. Welcome to the and ! and Office for iPad — Tim Cook (@tim_cook) |
Boston And L.A. Pitch-Off Applications Close On Monday | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | You have exactly four days, depending on how much sleep you require, to apply to the TechCrunch startup Pitch-Offs happening in Boston and Los Angeles on April 8 and April 10, respectively. And if some part of you is blowing me off right now, thinking that this isn’t a big deal, you’d be pretty seriously mistaken. After all, if these Pitch-Offs weren’t a big deal, then would we have two of the biggest names in tech startups joining us for onstage interviews: L.A.-based Michael Heyward from Whisper and Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky in Boston? That’s what I thought. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about (but are smart enough to realize how big of a deal all this is), let me explain. The TechCrunch Meetups are small events, wherein people from various cities gather together under one roof to network, drink beer, and enjoy a really awesome Pitch-Off competition. Companies selected for the pitch-off (apply here for and ) have exactly one minute to pitch their product without any visual aids or demoes of any kind, and are then judged by a panel of experts, including local VCs and TechCrunch editorial staff. First-place winners receive a table in Startup Alley, while runners up get tickets to the Disrupt NY show in May. Plus, all the companies chosen to participate in the Pitch-Off get a quick, in-person meeting with a TechCrunch writer/editor to discuss their product and work on their pitch before the big show. Again, big deal! If this sounds like an event you’re interested in attending, you need to buy tickets now. I know what you’re thinking: “These events are weeks away — why would I buy tickets now?” Well, if you buy tickets now you’re getting in on our super early-bird deal. Tickets cost $5 until Monday, March 31, at which point they’ll go up to $10. During the week of the events, starting April 7, they’ll cost $15. Do yourself a favor and save some money. You and I both know you’ll show up anyway, so you might as well get a discount. Just before the Pitch-Off begins, we’ll do a quick, onstage interview with some of the biggest startups in each city. In Boston, where engineering is at the top of its game, we’ll be joined by Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky. 3D printing is all the rage right now, and Formlabs has been killing it with a product very different from the Makerbots you’re used to. In L.A., Whisper reigns supreme as anonymity reaches a boiling point. Michael Heyward, Whisper CEO, and I will discuss what it takes to make it big in L.A., how to grow a business outside of Silicon Valley, and plenty of other interesting tidbits around the theme of anonymity. Maybe we’ll even get him to tell us what he really thinks of Secret… There is a lot of information here, all of which is (I repeat) a big deal, so let’s recap: |
Office For iPad Review: Surprisingly Worth The Wait | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | , finally, after people have been asking for it since, oh, say, the day in 2010 when the iPad originally launched. The new apps are currently available for , so you can scratch that four-year itch, but is it worth it? Read on to find out why Microsoft’s iPad-based productivity suite will be a lifesaver for some, but probably not a necessity for your average tablet user. [gallery ids="979886,979887,979888,979889,979890,979891,979892"] The Office for iPad apps are each, to a tee, beautifully designed. These are great looking apps, with a flat approach to the UI that fits in perfectly with Apple’s iOS 7 but also retains key branding cues for Microsoft and the visual style it once termed “Metro,” but now refers to as “Modern Windows” or something (it’s hard to keep track). All the while, they retain a ribbon-style interface that should make navigating their features and menus easy enough to figure out for an Office veteran new to the mobile product. [gallery ids="979897,979898,979896,979895,979894,979893"] Each individual app shares enough design language to make it simple to learn once, apply elsewhere, but they also have interfaces clearly defined by dominant colors that make it so you’ll never forget which one you’re using. Everything from button and menu item touch points, to the icons, to the size and design of the cursor when editing documents seems carefully and thoughtfully created, so you begin to understand part of why this software took so many years to come to market. [gallery ids="979907,979908,979906,979905,979904,979903,979902,979900,979899"] Office for iPad on both the new iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display runs like a dream, without any noticeable lag or hangups. My library of stored documents on OneDrive is not all that big (I have none, if I’m being honest), but reports on Twitter suggest it handles even huge numbers of documents with finesse. What I like most about Office for iPad so far is how easy it was to get set up and started. You sign in with your Microsoft account credentials to get going (using the one associated with your Office 365 subscription if you’re already a member), and then you’re good to go opening documents stored either in OneDrive, or on your iPad locally. But the real magic happens through Apple’s “Open in…” feature, which makes it so that if you receive a document in your email or anywhere else that supports it, you’ll get the option to load it directly, rather than having to jump through any additional hoops. Conveniently, I just got an email with a .dotm file attachment, which can’t be previewed natively in iOS like some other more common Microsoft formats. The new Office app, however, handled it perfectly and displayed it without any formatting issues whatsoever. That’s the other big benefit of Office on iPad for most users: all documents display as they were meant to, rather than with visual quirks, font substitutions or other imperfect formatting concessions. With a connected Bluetooth keyboard, the value of Office for iPad’s editing and document creation features become even more apparent. All your standard formatting keyboard shortcuts are supported, so that you can bold, underline, cut, copy and paste with ease. Saving doesn’t work via keyboard shortcut, but it’s handled automatically by the software anyway. Typing is fast and responsive, with no detectable lag whatsoever. If I was left with just a Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad with Office for productivity, in other words, I’d have very little to complain about. My main complaint with Office on the iPad is no easy access to an AirPlay button for beaming it to a Wi-Fi connected screen. You can do it via the iPad’s native AirPlay menu, but it’s not nearly as convenient as it could be. And why not offer Chromecast support Microsoft, while you’re playing platform agnostic? Oh, one more, significant complaint: There’s no way to print anything from any of the Office apps. This is crazy, given that Apple supports AirPrint and makes that feature available to developers. I’m not sure why Microsoft omitted it, but I expect they’ll add it back soon enough, when denizens of mobile Office users send in complaints asking where to find the feature (and likely voicing disbelief that it isn’t present somewhere). In the ancient times of Palm Pilots, I used to use Quickoffice and Documents To Go, and those made the transition to iOS and offered capable Office doc handling for years. In the past few years, I haven’t needed any real dedicated Office software to get by, because my job happens mostly in WordPress and Google Drive these days. But I remember Office dependency, and it’s something the world at large still can’t escape. What Microsoft has managed here is nothing short of transforming working with Office files on iPads from a necessary evil to a pleasant experience, and that’s no small feat. It’s unfortunate that they’ve opted to go with the recurring subscription, instead of a flat one-time fee to unlock full editing and document creation, but those willing to stump the $5 per month charge probably won’t feel cheated (especially if it’s a cost defrayed by their employer). Office for iPad is surprisingly polished out of the gate, and despite a few decisions that I disagree with, their design and implementation is a sign that the new Microsoft won’t be treating platforms other than its own as second-class citizens, which bodes very well for it and its users. |
Amazon Plans Free Video-Streaming Service, WSJ Reports | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | point to Amazon announcing at a NYC event next week. Not a lot is known about it, but a report from the WSJ today sheds a little light on Amazon’s overall strategy, which will reportedly include a free, ad-supported streaming service. According , this service will not just be limited to Amazon Prime subscribers, but rather open to anyone willing to watch ads. Like on Hulu. If this report is true, it could give Amazon the ace it needs and the wire snippers consumers have longed for to finally cut the cable. The WSJ states that the service will feature original and licensed programming. Just how much content it will include is not known. It’s unclear if this service will launch alongside , but it’s logical and would give the product a big boost. The device is rumored to launch with a broad support of streaming services including Netflix, Pandora and HBO Go. But that might not be enough in a marketplace already saturated with streaming devices. It needs something special. However, if Amazon can pull off producing a Hulu-like service and bundle it with a low-cost, low-impact media stream, it would be an instant hit. Suddenly, consumers would have a legitimate alternative to pay TV. Just buy this Amazon streamer and watch TV content supported by ads. Easy. If any company can pull this off, it’s Amazon. |
Facebook Will Deliver Internet Via Drones With “Connectivity Lab” Project Powered By Acqhires From Ascenta | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Facebook plans to bring , satellites, lasers, and more. Today Mark Zuckerberg Facebook’s Connectivity Lab which will work on the project. It’s powered by talent acqhired from solar-powered drone maker Ascenta as well as poached from NASA. Internet.org, a partnership between Facebook and telecom industry giants like Nokia and Qualcomm, hopes to use these air- and space-born methods to bring Internet to the 5 billion people who currently lack it. Zuckerberg says that Internet.org and Facebook will work on inventing new technologies to complete the mission. While they both have somewhat altruistic objectives, Facebook’s Connectivity Lab could compete with Google’s Project Loon, which uses huge helium balloon vessels to beam Internet to the developing world. To bolster its talent in aerospace engineering, Facebook has acqhired the five-member team of UK-based startup Ascenta, whose members previously worked at QinetiQ, Boeing, Honeywell and the Harris Corporation. There they tackled on projects including the Breitling Orbiter and prototypes of the Zephyr, the longest-flying solar powered drone. Members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Center, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory have also come aboard the Facebook project. Here’s a video explaining some plans for the Connectivity Lab: Internet.org will use different vehicles to deliver Internet to different types of locals. In suburban areas it will use “solar-powered high altitude, long endurance aircraft” that can stay in the air for month, are easily deployed, and can provide reliable Internet connectivity. Less populated areas will be served by low-Earth orbit and geosynchronous satellites. Both will employ “Free-space optical communication”, or FSO, which uses invisible, infrared laser beams to transmit data using light. Note that Facebook made no mention of , the drone-maker it was said to be in advanced acquisition talks with a few weeks ago. Some will immediately think the idea of Facebook controlling a fleet of web-ready aircraft and satellites is a bit creepy. Other will assume the point is to get more people online so they can become Facebook users. Neither are necessarily wrong. But when I spoke to Mark Zuckerberg at an event at Facebook headquarters last year, he seemed earnestly adamant about the potential for Internet.org to empower the world through access to the web. In his Facebook post today, Zuckerberg explains: In our effort to connect the whole world with Internet.org, we’ve been working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky. Today, we’re sharing some details of the work Facebook’s Connectivity Lab is doing to build drones, satellites and lasers to deliver the internet to everyone. Our goal with Internet.org is to make affordable access to basic internet services available to every person in the world. We’ve made good progress so far. Over the past year, our work in the Philippines and Paraguay alone has doubled the number of people using mobile data with the operators we’ve partnered with, helping 3 million new people access the internet. We’re going to continue building these partnerships, but connecting the whole world will require inventing new technology too. That’s what our Connectivity Lab focuses on, and there’s a lot more exciting work to do here. Our team has many of the world’s leading experts in aerospace and communications technology, including from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Ames Research Center. Today we are also bringing on key members of the team from Ascenta, a small UK-based company whose founders created early versions of Zephyr, which became the world’s longest flying solar-powered unmanned aircraft. They will join our team working on connectivity aircraft. You can find more details on our efforts below. We’re looking forward to working with our Internet.org partners and operators worldwide to deploy these technologies and deliver on the dream of connecting the world. |
Facebook Takes Another Crack At Read-It-Later With “Save” Button | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Facebook’s undying quest to be your newspaper has seen it launch , the standalone , , and more. You’re not always able to stop what you’re doing and read what you discover, though. But now TechCrunch has learned Facebook is currently testing a read-it-later Save button on feed articles in the web News Feed that creates a section of bookmarked sites on your profile. It’s been almost two years since Facebook , a delightful that could cache articles but also videos and other content to your phone so you could consume it when you had time, like on an airplane even without Internet access. A few weeks later in July 2012, Facebook a native Save button on mobile, but it never got rolled out. spotted more mobile tests in November 2013, which, again never saw a wide release. Now, TechCrunch has attained screenshots of a Save button Facebook appears to be testing on its website thanks to . Facebook was a bit cagey when I asked for comment, responding without details about the feature and instead giving me the standard “We’re constantly testing new features, but we have nothing further to share at this time.” Here’s how Save works on the web. Below an external link’s preview window near the Like button, those in the test group see a Save button. When clicked, it saves a link to the article to a “Saved” section of their Timeline. A shortcut to that Saved section also appears on their homepage’s left rail navigation sidebar. The Saved section shows a site’s headline, link, thumbnail image, the person who originally posted the article to your feed, and a share button. Save plays into Facebook’s intention to be more than just status updates and photos. It hopes to also offer a more real-time feed of what your friends are thinking and talking about, as well as top world news. The Save feature could ease the latter experience because people wouldn’t worry about forgetting stories they can’t enjoy now or interrupting their feed-browsing flow. it could also encourage news publishers to focus more on pushing content to Facebook since Save could boost referral traffic. If Facebook rolled out a version of Save, it could put it in more direct competition with Twitter, which also centers around news sharing. Twitter’s mobile apps already allow users to send articles to a selected third-party read-it-later service such as , , or Safari Reading List. Those apps could feel the heat of a Facebook Save button, too. When I find articles I want to save on Facebook, I pop them in a new tab and use Pocket’s Chrome extension to squirrel them away. A native Facebook Save button could steal those links. (Also, I think acquiring Pocket would be a smart play, though diehard users would probably hate it as much as the gamers hated the Oculus buy.) To get people to actually follow up and read the articles they Save, Facebook would need a strong mobile home for your stored links. Cramming a Saved list into the navigation menu of its main mobile apps could work, but it would be a bit buried. Perhaps Facebook Paper could be this portal to stored content, with a Section dedicated to Save. Paper already supports pushing articles to Pocket, Instapaper, Reading List, and Pinboard, but being able to Save or read Saved sites there makes sense. Or maybe Facebook will release a full-fledged read-it-later app through the same Creative Labs standalone apps initiative that spawned Paper. Of course the feature could get canned. But if Facebook wants to connect us more deeply to world events and strengthen its place as a digital watercooler, it needs to respect that we’re too busy to instantly ingest all the content it hurls at us. |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 18 | null |
Obamacare Passes The 6M Mark After “Between Two Ferns” Viral Bump | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | Today the government announced that the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, has , putting it within striking distance of its original goals. The enrollment level is notable due to the law’s troubled technological rollout. The catastrophic failure of Healthcare.gov is the stuff of legends now. To accelerate sign-ups and generate more attention, the Obama administration has turned to controversial techniques. The president’s led to some mockery and questioning — was it beneath the office of the presidency to deign to Galifianakis? Whatever your answer to that question is, the video was a smashing success, racking up more than 20 million views across the and YouTube. It was, when released, temporarily the . The administration also to discuss healthcare. That debut also marked the launch of verified profiles on Quora, making the news something of a twofer. The Affordable Care Act will fall short of its initial goals. But not by much. Adding 1 million more enrolees in a means that attention is hot and you don’t get that without making a little noise. |
Sources: Dropbox Acqui-Hiring Social Reading App Readmill For $8 Million | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | With in its coffers, Dropbox appears to be on somewhat of an acquisition spree, albeit a quiet one. Following the cloud storage company’s of workplace chat solution Zulip, TechCrunch has learned from sources that it’s in talks to acqui-hire Berlin-based , the social and shareable reading platform. According to what we’re hearing, the deal value is around $8 million, made up of mostly stock but with a small amount of upfront cash for the startup’s founders who will be moving to Dropbox in San Francisco. What will happen to Readmill is unclear — I pinged co-founder and CEO Henrik Berggren for comment late yesterday but have yet to hear back so all of this is unconfirmed. However, considering this is a talent acquisition, it’s likely the service will be shuttered or possibly kept going with minimal support in the near term. The acquisition also points to a trend of coming out of the Berlin tech scene. Founded in late 2010 by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud, Readmill launched as a social layer for eBooks, making it easy to highlight extracts that can be shared with friends and peers, turning the book into a “social object”. It offers a very elegant reading app for Android and iPhone, as well as a tablet version for iPad. The app also employs a Twitter-like follow model where users can follow books, other users and, crucially, authors. The company at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September 2011, taking part in onstage office hours with YC Combinator’s Paul Graham. At the time the company hadn’t launched yet, and Graham repeatedly told them they should launch now. “Why wait?” he said. Readmill then began offering a limited number of invites, and at the same time announced seed funding from London’s Passion Capital, and Index Ventures to the tune of €280,000. In 2012, the company an undisclosed series A round led by Wellington Partners, with participation by existing investors Index Ventures and Passion Capital. I also understand that Atlantic Ventures (Christophe Maire’s angel vehicle), Peter Read, and Souncloud founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss are also investors. Investors we contacted declined to comment. |
Microsoft And Office In A Multi-Platform World | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | This morning Microsoft unveiled and launched , as well as new tools to help companies manage devices that run on platforms other than Windows. The move, while expected, underscored a shift at Microsoft, a lessening the internal hegemony of Windows, long the product considered to be the soul of the software company. At the end of the event, Microsoft’s newly installed CEO Satya Nadella discussed Windows and the perceived trade-off between supporting other platforms and working only to grow its own. It’s not a trade-off, in Nadella’s view, because supporting other platforms is simply the “reality” of their customers. The customers are already using a number of compute platforms, giving Microsoft zero option, in other words, to behave as if Windows was still the only platform game in town. Microsoft, in Nadella’s vision, is “committed” to running its services in a cross-platform fashion. This is Microsoft’s view of the market. Windows remains “massive” for Microsoft, according to Nadella, who promised that during the coming Build developer conference his company will expound and improve its platform to the surprise of no one. But Microsoft will not constrain its non-operating system products to its own platform. This has been a transition long in the making. When Microsoft released OneNote for Mac, it joined a number of other Microsoft applications that ran on OS X. Microsoft has built apps for all five major computing platforms: Windows, OS X, Android, Windows Phone, and iOS. Therefore, to see Office land on iPad is more a culmination of a shift underway for a very long time than a surprising strategy shift. To hammer that home, here’s part of the list of apps that Microsoft has built and released for iOS: Will the strategy of broad support succeed for the company? By linking the Office apps on iPad to Office 365, Microsoft is at once supporting the iOS, but also linking that support to its cloud and services strategy, so that any momentum it grants to Apple by supporting its tablets will be linked to the success of its more nascent incomes. (Anecdotally, TechCrunch staffers reacted negatively to the news that a subscription was needed. We’ll have a full review of the apps out shortly.) The bigger picture here is that Microsoft appears to be putting the cloud ahead of the operating system, in that it is locked on the idea that its cloud will be for “everyone on every device.” That is an inherently larger vision than Windows Everywhere, given that it spans more devices and people. So Microsoft is at once doubling down on Windows, while also committing to support every device with its other products. This makes sense given that services are not tied to a Windows universe — they can sit atop the cloud and run on any device. And if you want to sell the most services you can, you need to be open to selling them on every device possible. |
Indian Online Classifieds Site Quikr Confirms $90M Fund Raise Led By Kinnevik | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | India’s largest online classifieds site, , has raised $90 million in fresh funding from a group of investors led by Sweden’s Kinnevik. The latest round, which would take the total capital raised by Quikr to around $136 million, values the startup at over $250 million, a report added. Quikr had raised $32 million from Warburg Pincus, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay in Series E funding in May 2012. Omidyar Network and Nokia Growth Partners are among other investors backing Quikr. The latest funding in Quikr also underscores growing interest from newer investors in India’s online commerce. Kinnevik has already backed other online classifieds startups globally including Russia’s Avito, which became the world’s third biggest classifieds site . Quikr is among the fastest growing Internet businesses in India, as more Indian Internet users buy and sell products, services online. The startup gets around 30 million unique visitors every month, and has annual revenues of around $50 million earned mostly through advertising and premium listings. “Quikr has grown rapidly based on a deep understanding of the Indian market,” Mia Brunell Livfors, CEO of Kinnevik said in a statement. “It’s targeting a tremendous opportunity in a large growth market and we look forward to being a part of its exciting journey forward.” India’s e-commerce and online businesses are on fire, as the country’s around 200 million Internet users seek real-time information about products and services and are discovering more convenient ways to transact on the web. Many of them are buying and selling electronics, household goods, cars, bikes and other services on online classified sites such as Quikr. |
Experts Found That Mt.Gox Lost A Mere 386 Bitcoin Due To Transaction Malleability | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | In the long, kabuki saga that is the fall of Mt.Gox, one point seemed always clear: the company lost loads of bitcoin to hackers using a bug called transaction malleability. It seems, however that this is wrong. According to a team at the ETH Zurich University, the company allegedly lost only 386 or $200,000, nowhere close to the 744,408 bitcoins rumored to have been lost in the attack. In short, the team assessed that only 302,000 bitcoins have ever been lost due to . The attack is a sort of double-spending that happens when specific details of a bitcoin transaction are altered to convince the sender that the transfer never happened, thereby forcing the sender to transmit payment. By looking at the specific signature of these sorts of exchanges, the researchers discovered that only about 1,811 were related to Mt.Gox and that the number was probably far lower. Quoth : Was Mt.Gox hit by hackers? With Karpales refusing to and Gox Bitcoins popping up here and there, it’s clear that there is far more to this than meets the eye. Whether or not beleaguered users will get their coins back, however, is anyone’s guess. You can . |
Titanfall Goes Up, Xbox Live Goes Down | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | AGHHHH. I’ve been staring at my copy of Titanfall all… day. I’ve been itchin’ to hop back in the saddle of my Giant-Robot-of-Doom since the Beta ended, and finally, launch day was here — but I had to, you know, . Being an adult has its perks and all, but video game launch days tend to be a little less awesome then they used to be. Finally, the ol’ whistle blows. I pop in my copy… install the game… hit the launch button… aaaand.. “There was a problem. We couldn’t sign you in. Try again in a few minutes.” Turns out, I’m not the only one. While people seem to be able to log in, the official status page says that the “Core Services” for Xbox Live on the Xbox One are currently “Limited” — particularly, signing in is busted. If you’re already signed in, you might be alright. But if you’re just getting home from work and are ready to squash some fools? At the time of publishing, Xbox Live has been up and down (but mostly down) for four hours. Hurray! 6 hours or so later, Microsoft says it’s fixed. If you’re still having trouble, their recommendation is a : power cycle your console. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play this game until I can’t keep my eyes open. |
Sherpa’s Shervin Pishevar’s First $100K Cyrus Prize Goes To Dropbox Co-Founder Ferdowsi | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Shervin Pishevar was just six years old when the bombs from the Iran-Iraq War started to fall in 1980. His father, a high-ranking television executive, felt the family was in danger during the Iranian Revolution and so they left for the U.S. where he ended up driving taxis to make ends meet. But in America, the Pishevars persevered, and then they prospered. Now Shervin Pishevar, who was one of the very first investors behind Uber and who recently started , has been stepping up charitable contributions by joining the boards of non-profits like the Bay Lights-backers and , which teachers entrepreneurship to high school students across the country. He’s also trying to reach out to Iranian or Iranian-American teens and young people who could have been like him. He established a $100,000 , who once ruled over a vast empire that included what is now Iran today. Pishevar is trying to recognize other Iranian-American entrepreneurs and innovators with a prize that’s vested over three years and can be put to whatever use the recipient likes. His first winner is Dropbox co-founder , who started the company with MIT classmate Drew Houston back in 2007. Quoting Cyrus at a gala in Burlingame this weekend where the prize was awarded, Pishevar said, “Success always calls for greater generosity — though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed. Collecting boot [is] not an end itself, but only a means for building [an] empire. Riches would be of little use to us now — except as a means of winning new friends.” Coincidentally, Dropbox got some of its very first support from Pejman Nozad, the Palo Alto-based rug dealer . When Ferdowsi and Houston first moved across the country to the Bay Area, they took a Zipcar down to Palo Alto to meet Nozad. They ended up at a rug store, and were completely baffled. They thought they had ended up at the wrong place. But they approached the receptionist, who showed them a sleek backroom behind the Persian rug store. Nozad came out, offering to intro them to some of the Valley’s top firms like Sequoia Capital. Clearly, Ferdowsi, who sits at the helm of a company now privately worth more than $10 billion, doesn’t need another award or a cash prize. But Pishevar said picking Ferdowsi was about setting the bar high. He wants other Iranian founders to aspire to build companies like Dropbox and he hopes that Ferdowsi’s stature will help out future recipients, who may be less well-known. [vimeo 89080487 w=500 h=280] from on . |
Gogo Teases An App That Could Let Travelers Text And Make Calls During Flights | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | I did a lot of cool things at SXSWi 2014, but one of the coolest things I got to do was go for a trip in a private jet and test out some cool new technology from . As you probably know, Gogo powers wireless Internet for a number of airlines in the U.S. But now it’s extending that technology to eventually also enable smartphone users to text from the air and even make phone calls. It plans to do that with a new “text and talk” app that relays messages and voice calls by making them digital and passing data to and from their base stations on the ground. The app will be released for iOS and Android, and should be made available over the next few months. According to Gogo’s VP of product Brad Jaehn, in North America most airlines and the FAA have restricted voice calls while on an aircraft. But there are many places in the world, he says, where the technology is not only allowed, but has been requested. The app is currently in beta and in use by some of the company’s power users. But it will be made more widely available soon, so you can text your friends even while you’re flying. And won’t that be fun. |
Money Transfer Startup WorldRemit Collects Its First Investment, $40M From Accel | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | , a London-based startup that is tackling the antiquated consumer money wiring/remittance market with an easy and traceable online solution, has collected some money of its own: a $40 million investment from Accel Partners, the storied VC that has backed big consumer plays like Supercell and Facebook but also a number of financial services startups like GoCardless, Funding Circle and Braintree. This is the startup’s first VC investment, and one of the largest-ever Series A rounds achieved in Europe. WorldRemit is addressing two different business opportunities with its product. The first is a basic consumer issue: there are a number of people who live abroad or immigrate to make more money, with the intention of sending some of those earnings back home — home being a range of different countries and currencies around the globe. They typically want easy, cheap and reliable ways of doing that, but many of the most common routes today involve spending the time travelling to a physical location that offers Western Union or MoneyGram transfers, paying a large commission fee, and then getting recipients to do the same at their end. The second is more of a business and legal issue: financial regulators looking to reduce money laundering and funding for illicit activities like terrorism are increasingly cracking down on remittance services that cannot provide a clear enough electronic track of how money has moved. “This industry has largely remained offline until now,” co-founder and CEO Ismail Ahmed tells me. “The market share for online remittances is just 5% today, but we expect this to increase to 30%.” Driving that will be incumbents needing to change practices to meet regulatory compliance, but also, the ongoing pressure on brick and mortar businesses. “It’s just not fit for the 21st century,” he says. WorldRemit lets consumers make transfers from any computer or phone, and receive that money either straight into bank accounts, or mobile wallets or in the form of mobile airtime. And by its nature, the transfers are electronic and more traceable than those of offline services. The company currently lets people send money to some 100 different countries and the funding will be used to extend that to over 200, Ahmed says. It will also be used to extend the variety of ways that the money can be paid out: one other big issue for people sending money to family back home is the concern that it may not be getting used as intended, and so creating more channels for specific payments — say, for utility bills or education fees — is one way of solving that problem. It’s a solution that is also being tapped by a startup I wrote about last year called , which cleverly offers its customers the option of selecting gift cards for specific services as one way of guaranteeing how the money gets spent. And these two are not alone. Just today another money transfer service, Azimo, raised . And , which also recently raised a round, is another contender — although typically the average amounts being sent on WorldRemit are of a lower value so less directly competitive. Harry Nelis, who led the investment for Accel, says that he was attracted to WorldRemit both because of the traction that the startup has already seen with users in the markets where it operates, as well as because of the track record of the founders. “We like their focus on the long tail, and on the smaller corridors,” he says of WorldRemit. “Instead of focusing on Sterling to euro or to U.S. dollars, what WorldRemit does is think of how to service, for example, Filipinos in Norway remitting back to the Philippines.” He says that there are some 30-40 corridors like this one that are underserved by competitors right now, making for a very nice niche business. What the long tail business also brings is repeat custom. “Once WorldRemit acquires customers, they end up transacting 20 times per year.” Ahmed and Catherine Wines, his co-founder and COO of WorldRemit, both have been working in the remittances industry for 20 years. Ahmed has an economics PhD and has been a compliance advisor at the UN, with a focus on East African money transfer services, and he founded WorldRemit while studying at London Business School. Wines is a qualified accountant who had been MD of First Remit, another international money transfer business acquired by Travelex. |
Microsoft Appoints ValueAct Capital’s Mason Morfit To Its Board | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Today Microsoft announced in a that it has named ValueAct Capital’s President Mason Morfit to its board, and that it will issue a quarterly dividend of $0.28. Neither piece of news is a surprise. Microsoft and ValueAct created a “ ” in which the investing group got “regular meetings” with executives, and the option for Morfit to join its board. Given that ValueAct has quite a lot of capital tied up in its stake in Microsoft, his decision to accept the offer is nothing short of devastatingly unsurprising. What the hell does he want Microsoft to do that it is not currently doing? Bloomberg had a on that exact question in February. An excerpt: Morfit, 38, and ValueAct want the world’s largest software maker to reduce its focus on Windows, the operating system that underlies most of the company’s offerings, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. For two decades, Microsoft has focused on selling applications and server software designed to work specifically for Windows. Now ValueAct wants Microsoft to accelerate efforts to unchain products and services from Windows so that they can be more widely adopted on smartphones and tablets. Given that Microsoft is in the process of doubling down on Windows, that seems doubtful. For now, Microsoft’s new CEO has a new voice in his head. |
Azimo Raises $10M Series A Led By Greycroft Partners To Expand Money Transfer Service | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | More evidence that the online money transfer space is heating up significantly, as startups aim to disrupt the banks and incumbents such as Western Union. Money transfer startup has closed a $10 million series A round. The new funding, which follows a $1 million seed round , is being led by Greycroft Partners, with participation from Accion’s Frontier Investments Group, eVentures (who led Azimo’s seed round), TA Ventures, RI Digital Ventures, and KRW Schindler Investments. The UK company says it will use the funds to accelerate European expansion and target other key markets in North America and Asia. Meanwhile, Kamran Ansari from Greycroft Partners, and Monica Brand, Managing Director for Accion’s Frontier Investments Group, will join Azimo’s board. Launched in August 2012, Azimo aims to disrupt the remittance industry by letting users transfer money internationally to friends, family or other contacts via the Web, its mobile apps or Facebook, charging between 1 percent and 2 percent of the transaction, which is significantly cheaper than the rates charged by the likes of Western Union, PayPal or, indeed, the banks. The recipient receives the money either in their bank account, at local cash collection points, or as “mobile wallet” top-up credit. It currently supports money transfer from numerous European countries to 192 countries globally, and cites fastest recipient growth in Latin America, West Africa, and South East Asia. As we’ve previously noted, the European online money transfer market is a hot space right now, as is fintech in general. Just today, WorldRemit a $40 million investment from Accel Partners. Last October, Dublin-based peer-to-peer currency exchange raised a further $2.5 million led by Frontline Ventures. And just a few weeks earlier, Lithuanian-based , which also operates a P2P model to undercut the banks, announced it had raised a modest €200,000 in funding to launch in the UK. Then of course there’s London-based TransferWise, to the tune of $7.35 million by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, SV Angel, IA Ventures, Index, Seedcamp, and TAG. To that end, Monica Brand, Managing Director for Accion’s Frontier Investments Group, comments in a statement: “We’ve looked at the investment case for numerous remittance ventures around the world. The Azimo team’s track record in the sector, disruptive business model and their commitment to serve the two-and-a-half-billion unbanked potential remittance recipients, made us decide this was the business to back. We believe this is an exciting investment with potential for scale that can also change the world for the better.” Change the world for the better, perhaps; money does make the world go round after all. And online money transfer startups are no exception. |
Alibaba Pays $804M To Take Majority Stake In TV And Movie Producer ChinaVision | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | has to spend HKD $6.24 billion (about USD $804 million) for a 60% stake in TV and film producer . The purchase will allow Alibaba, which already dominates China’s e-commerce market, to boost its digital entertainment strategy. In addition to its own TV series and movies, ChinaVision is also the distributor for films like “Journey to the West: Conquering the Demon.” ChinaVision said it has agreed to issue new shares to Alibaba at HKD $0.50 a share. Like its rivals, including WeChat-maker and , Alibaba has sought to diversify its online services with a series of acquisitions and strategic alliances over the last year. Streaming video has become increasingly popular in China as mobile penetration increases and its majority stake in ChinaVision will allow Alibaba to offer more content across its different platforms. Alibaba’s deal comes one month after it , in which it . Last year, Alibaba bought an 18% stake in Sina Weibo, and the two recently . Meanwhile, rival , the second-largest e-commerce company in China after Alibaba, earlier this week. Its other acquisitions , a restaurant review app. |
Priceline Buys Israel’s Qlika For $15-20M To Boost Global Expansion With Rocket Science-Powered Ad Tech | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | of Israeli-American startups in March to tackle a big problem in online marketing: Localization. In other words, what’s the point of spending millions of dollars on marketing campaigns — across search, social and display — if those campaigns look exactly the same in California as they do in Sydney? Ideally, with conversion rates varying from location to location, companies should be tailoring their messages, targeting customer demographics and adjusting their keyword bidding in the same way. After sitting down with a handful of CMOs, Omri Morgenshtern, Ittai Chorev and Idan Zalzberg quickly discovered that most large organizations don’t — despite the spend — nor do they break out conversion or ROI goals for each market. So, the co-founders developed patent-pending technology to help advertisers do just that, and manage and optimize their campaigns for each particular market, media channel and segment. While the startup’s “micro-market targeting” technology could be applied across a range of industries — giving it broad appeal as potential acquisition bait — it was an online travel agency that got there first. This week, travel bookings and service provider, Priceline.com, confirmed that it is acquiring the Israeli startup to support the growth of its international business, particularly in Asia. Both Priceline and declined to go into details on the terms of the deal; however, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources close to the companies that the total value of the deal was in the range of $15 to $20 million — not $3 million . In addition, we’ve also learned that, while most of the startup’s 10 employees will be joining Priceline full-time, the team will not be making the trip across the pond to Priceline’s headquarters in the U.S., but instead working with its Agoda-led Asian business. As to the price, with Qlika having raised just over $1.7 million from Israeli angels and VCs and projecting a run rate of $3 million in 2014, , a price tag of $3 million in cash would practically be a fire sale. Were it imploding, 3-years-old and struggling to monetize, that would make sense, but the company is only a year from launch and, six months out, was doing one million-plus in revenue and, by all accounts, was growing quickly. However, more interesting is what this acquisition potentially means for (and says about) Priceline. Historically, the online travel booking site has displayed surprising shrewdness and resolve in its acquisition strategy, and today owns Booking.com, Rental Cars, Kayak and Agoda as a result. While those names may not quite jump off the page, Booking.com is a great example of an acquisition made at a rational price (as opposed to ) that would quietly return its value many times over — and become what some would say (read: Overstate) is the Priceline’s $135 million acquisition didn’t get quite the same attention in 2005 that Kayak’s splashier, far more expensive purchase would get seven years later, but the deal gave Priceline access to the Netherlands-based Booking.com’s small but fast-growing marketshare in Europe. As 1hestreet.com/story/12438063/1/priceline-shows-facebook-theres-more-than-one-way-to-do-growth.html”>The Street points out, Expedia initially led in European marketshare among the online travel agencies, but with the acquisition Priceline was able to blow by Expedia. Through some smart branding and advertising, Booking.com has today become Priceline’s largest business unit and one of the leading travel brands in Europe, with 45 percent share of online bookings in Europe and, , a significant contributor to Priceline’s $69 billion market cap. Worthy of note, too, is that Booking.com . It just so happens that Qlika’s articulated goal from the beginning has been to capture a share of the $40-some billion spent by companies each year on search advertising by helping companies running huge, national marketing campaigns (like Booking.com) “avoid using uniform bids and goals across their target markets.” Furthermore, , Qlika is not only looking to help companies understand “the differences in micro-markets” — like the average price customers are willing to pay for a particular product in one market versus another and how that correlates to conversion — but to automate this entire process. You can imagine for a company like Booking.com, even if it’s become the by applying some of these ingredients, how much value technology like that can have. It potentially allows Booking.com to get a lot more bang for . Going back to Priceline’s clever acquisition strategy, it has more or less been trying to duplicate the success it had with Booking.com in Agoda — the Thai travel site it purchased for $140 million back in 2007. It hasn’t had nearly the same degree of impact, but Agoda’s specialty is offering discounted hotel bookings across Asia, a region that’s been a key driver of the strong growth in Priceline’s international bookings rate. While it is pure speculation, as Priceline declined to comment on its plans for the acquisition, it would make a whole lot of sense if it planned to use Qlika to help it grow Agoda’s marketshare in Asia, and optimize its marketing spend. After all, though the startup intended to apply its technology broadly across verticals (particularly going after retail), its initial focus has been the home improvement and hospitality industries. Plus, its goal is to offer companies more granular targeting and visibility into campaigns at a higher resolution than one would find in AdWords’ solution, for example. Its big data engine crunches tons of customer, demographic and geographic data (and so on), discovering similarities between markets and segments, automatically optimizing campaigns and bids accordingly. With Priceline owning high traffic properties like Kayak, Booking.com and Agoda, it has a wealth of customer and demographic data, which Qlika can potentially help it leverage to run more targeted, cost-effective campaigns. If it can improve its conversions by just a few percentage points here and there, at scale, that could mean big dollars, and, at $15 to $20 million, would make Qlika a steal. |
New Jersey Becomes Third State To Ban Tesla’s Direct Sales Model | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Today the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission a rule that will end Tesla’s direct sales of cars to consumers. Tesla, a manufacturer of all-electric cars, does not lean on dealerships to sell its vehicles as other car companies do. The rule goes into effect in April. New Jersey is the third state to ban the practice of selling cars directly to consumers, joining Arizona and Texas in preventing their residents from easily buying a more environmentally friendly ride. The New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers was in favor of the rule change, unsurprisingly. Tesla is furious, claiming in a released today — in advance of the meeting in which the rule change was enacted (which Tesla was informed of yesterday) — that Governor Chris Christie’s administration had “gone back on its word to delay a proposed anti-Tesla regulation so that the matter could be handled through a fair process in the Legislature.” The company also alleged that New Jersey had been sitting on the “renewal of [its] current dealer licenses without indication of the cause of the delay.” Given that delay, and the quick change in the wind from a legislative discussion to a squashing of its model, it appears that Tesla has just run face-first into New Jersey politics. Tesla’s shares slipped 1.85% in regular trading. New Jersey residents can still buy Teslas, but will likely have to leave the state to do so, which is a burden. Tesla is looking to expand its manufacturing processes this year, to allow it to sell more of its Model S sedans. However, if more states follow in the footsteps of New Jersey et al., the company could have to scale back its growth plans. I don’t doubt that moves to block Tesla sales are merely short-term pauses — raise your hand if you actually think that local dealer groups can hold back the tide of change. But they are setbacks to a company that operates on a quarterly, and not half-decade, reporting cycle. |
A Very Flappy Crowdtilted Journalism Experiment | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Two weeks ago, I did a small experiment. to raise money to go to Vietnam and talk to Dong Nguyen, the creator of the sleeper hit Flappy Bird. At the absolute peak of the game’s hype, . He said he couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. The idea to do this came from at CrowdTilt, who reached out and asked if we at TechCrunch wanted to play with crowdfunded journalism. I jumped at it, because I’m curious about ways we can engage our readers and get them involved in what we cover. The campaign was oversubscribed in a few hours and attracted more than $5,000 in backing. Finding the Flappy Bird creator in Vietnam was an idea where there could be a lot of reader interest, but the risk-reward might not make financial sense from a top-down editorial standpoint. (It was like an absurdist modern re-enactment of journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s quest to find Dr. David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Coincidentally, ) Moreover, it’s important to incentivize coverage that goes beyond the rote funding updates and product announcements we see every day in the tech blogosphere. While doing this campaign and regular stories every day, I’ve been looking into the housing crisis and inequality. I’ve been talking to journalists who have been covering poverty and affordability in San Francisco They are people like San Francisco Chronicle’s Kevin Fagan, for four years and even slept on the streets of San Francisco for months because he wanted to know what it was like to be homeless here. His reporting at the time led then-President George W. Bush to back supportive housing, a holistic approach to tackling homelessness that incorporates job training and drug abuse counseling. I don’t know how contemporary media organizations, which are dependent on pageviews and online advertising revenue, will fund that kind of work going forward. Lastly, I’m half-Vietnamese. I used to live in Hanoi about eight years ago and my grandmother left the city for the South in 1954 when the country split in two after the French-Vietnam War. I have these beautiful memories of sharing a single room with nine girls while paying $30 a month in rent in the Thanh Xuan district, riding motorbikes down the South China Sea coast, falling asleep in Bahnar huts and getting food poisoning after eating too many snakes at the snake village. I haven’t been back in eight years. Nguyen is a sign that a startup ecosystem is growing up in Vietnam. He’s not alone. There are companies like , which makes the activity tracker, The Shine. While the Founders Fund-backed startup does its industrial design work here in San Francisco, much of Misfit’s machine learning talent is in Ho Chi Minh City. discovered that the talent he was trying to hire wanted to return to Vietnam after completing their doctoral degrees in the U.S. As the daughter of war refugees, I can’t really tell you how unfathomable this would have been to my parents or grandparents — . Vietnam is changing; most of its population was born after the war and the country has this beautiful, youthful energy . When I posted the campaign, I got tons of inbound requests from journalists on the ground in Vietnam, from donors who work with schools that teach girls how to code and requests from other Vietnamese entrepreneurs who wanted to meet too. Even my aunt wanted to come along. I’m just getting my visa back today from the consulate, but a few complications have come up since I posted the campaign. 1) It turns out that a Rolling Stone reporter named David Kushner had already been on the ground for several days when I posted the campaign on Feb. 26. This is good and bad. It’s bad, because someone was already there and beat me to the story. But then it’s also good, because Nguyen is not hiding under a rock. After last week, I was worried that people would make comparisons between my search for Nguyen and the way that Leah McGrath Goodman violated Dorian S. Nakamoto’s privacy by interviewing his entire family and posting photos of his house. If Nguyen had not wanted to talk to me, I was just going to be honest with my backers. Also, I was going to try to be charming, and not be a total jerk. 2) I’m hearing from a reliable source that Nguyen may actually be here in the Bay Area soon. So in the interest of being as honest and transparent as possible, I wanted to put both of those things out there. If you’re happy with the product that Kushner has created I’m able to talk to Nguyen here in San Francisco, I wanted to give backers the opportunity to either get a refund or tell me what I should do next. I personally would still love to go to Vietnam and speak to Nguyen and the broader startup community there. I had already been in the process of working with a couple teams of local video journalists on the ground there and setting up TechCrunch meet-ups to get to know the entrepreneurial community in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. But that’s just me. This is your money. There are also many other projects I have in mind. While researching San Francisco’s affordability crisis, I’ve learned that there are many things that are unique about our permitting process here. I’m personally fascinated with how other cities globally grapple with economics booms and affordability. Most of the media coverage so far has been over-simplistic; it distills the tensions in San Francisco down to a story of tech-haves versus non-tech-have-nots when there are decades of choices and political alliances that have led us to where we are today. Let me know what you think I should do next. All things considered. |
SigFig Hires Financial Engines Exec Steve Lifgren To Build Out Its Operations Team | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Financial planning startup has for the most part been flying under the radar since it . But now it’s ready to get serious about expanding and supporting a growing number of customers, with the help of its new head of operations Steve Lifgren. SigFig uses big data and machine learning to analyze your retirement accounts and to keep them optimized. By doing so, it can massively undercut the cost of hiring a traditional financial advisory, and generally outperform human analysts. Unlike some other financial-planning services, it also enables users to continue using their existing accounts. Lifgren was formerly senior manager of operations at retirement planning company . There he oversaw and grew the ops team as the company grew from a tiny startup with zero assets under management to where it is today — a publicly traded company with a market cap of $3 billion and $82 billion under management. Lifgren is hoping to transfer that expertise to SigFig, where he will take the title of Director of Operations and will be tasked with building out the company’s customer support team. That includes plans to open an office and build a big new customer support team in Phoenix, Ariz. Why Phoenix? Because believe it or not, that’s where a lot of the best talent can be found, according to co-founder and CEO Mike Sha. “Phoenix is the financial ops hub of the universe,” Sha said. “Between Schwab, Vanguard, and American Express… When you call their 800 number, chances are the person who answers is in Phoenix. Having our team based there means we can ramp up quickly.” Even without a large operations team, SigFig has been busy signing up customers, mostly through word of mouth. Sha says that the typical amount of time it takes for a user to go from registering to signing over their accounts to allow SigFig to manage them is less than five minutes. Providing a more robust onboarding and customer support team should only improve that. SigFig has raised about $20 million since it was founded, from investors that include Union Square Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and DCM. It currently has about 40 employees, with 10 of those in ops, but that should expand rapidly soon. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 27 | null |
Watch An Industrial Robot Nearly Beat A Professional Ping Pong Player At His Own Game – Sort Of | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8] If you’re looking for a vaguely frightening realization of just how good robots are getting at activities that require a high degree of optical precisions and fine motor control, than the video above has exactly what you need. In a promotional short film created by robotics company KUKA (via ), we see a manufacturing robot take on ping pong champion Timo Boll, with surprising results. Spoiler alert: The KUKA KR AGILUS still loses to its human opponent, but the frankly chilling speed, accuracy and versatility of the robot makes it a tough-won match of 11 to 9 in favor of Boll. Or, sort of, since in actual fact this wasn’t a real match but an elaborate film production not unlike a Hollywood movie. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2NeW9o5G6s?feature=player_embedded] The video above details the production process, which reveals that the speed of the interaction between the human and robot player is real, as well as its ability to repeatedly hit a desired spot within a millimeter of accuracy. The German company isn’t really trying to replace human ping pong players with robots, of course, but promote its new robotics factory in China, which is having its official grand opening today, so a little artistic license can be forgiven. In the end KUKA isn’t talking specifics about how much is real and how much is Hollywood movie magic, but you can bet Boll would still dominate in a fair match. Still, judging by cast, crew and programmer comments in that making of video, the robot can at least still field and return shots, which is impressive enough. |
MakerBot Starts Shipping The New Replicator And Taking Pre-Orders For Their Biggest 3D Printer Ever | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Back at CES, MakerBot announced three new 3D printers: one small, one huge, and one that’s about the same size as their previous models (albeit with a bunch of new tricks up its sleeve). You couldn’t actually any of them, though. You could pre-order them, sure — but it wasn’t quite clear when you’d actually get it. If you ordered one of those mid-sized models: Surprise! They’ve just started shipping. To recap, here’s what the new (fifth generation) replicators do that the older ones don’t: Meanwhile, MakerBot has also just started taking pre-orders for the aforementioned super-sized model, the Replicator Z18, with its max build volume (read: the largest object you can 3D print) of 12”x12”x18”. For comparison’s sake: the build volume on the mid-sized model is 9.9”x7.8”x5.9”, and the itty-bitty Replicator Mini’s build volume comes in at 3.9×3.9x.4.9. Unfortunately — but, as is to be expected — the Z18’s price scaled up along with its build volume. At $6,499, it’s over twice the price of anything else MakerBot sells. MakerBot says the Z18 should start shipping sometime this spring — the same time window they gave for the recently launched pre-orders of the fun-sized Minis. Curiously, MakerBot also seems to be taking the Z18’s launch as an opportunity to venture into a new space: 3D printing accessories. Because the Z18 weighs a solid 90+ pounds and no one wants to lug that around, they’ve built what they call the “MakerBot Cart” specifically for it. It puts the Z18 at a convenient height and provides casters to help you move it around more easily… but at $1,250, you… might want to just find your Z18 a nice, permanent home. Oh, and because the Z18 uses , spools of plastic (bigger build volume = bigger printed objects = more plastic used = bigger spools. Most spools used in 3d printing are sold with 1 or 2lbs of filament. Z18’s spools are 10lbs.), they’ve also built custom cases just for holding your Z18 filament and feeding it into the Z18. The price, again, might come with a bit of sticker shock: one case, albeit one with 10lbs of filament included, will run you $750. (For comparison: On the smaller models, the spools are generally small enough that you could just strap them onto the back of the machine) Yeaaah, I’m getting the feeling that the Z18 might be a bit out of my price range. |
Watch Beautiful, Simple Explanations Of Science With World Science U | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | The Internet has a new trove of beautiful, simple explanations of fundamental scientific principles, from Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity to quantum mechanics. The massive open online course provider, , launched today with a host of short videos and full classes on a range of weighty technical subjects. “If you can actually show visualizations of the slowing of time or the compression of space, kids can get it so much more easily,” World Science U founder and Columbia University Professor Brian Greene Stephen Colbert. To give you a flavor of the kinds of material World Science U is offering, the first video below is one of dozens of quick lecture bites that answer questions about science topics. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDf6g_0y9Eo&w=560&h=315] And here’s one of the lectures from the multi-part short courses on Special Relativity. At 6:30, Greene gives an example of how scientists measure the slowing of time for objects in motion. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62vOMHt-mn8&w=1170&h=658] The longer courses themselves take a page from the MOOC playbook, with peer-to-peer conservation forums and quizzes to supplement the learning process. All classes are free for now, but they’ll eventually want to find a revenue model. Others, such as Coursera and Udacity, for certifications and greater tutoring help during class. World Science U is certainly one of the better explanations of scientific concepts out there, which means it can easily be adopted in classrooms around the country. |
23andMe Founder Discusses The Promises And Perils Of Genetic Information | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the popular direct-to-consumer genetics testing company , sat down with us at the SXSW Interactive gathering this past weekend in Austin, Texas to discuss both the promise and perils of giving the masses access to their health data. “If consumers were more empowered, they would take more responsibility for their health,” Wojcicki tells me in the video interview embedded above. Wojcicki has a (very) optimistic belief that if consumers knew how vulnerable they are to obesity and other preventable diseases, they could be significantly reduced. Unfortunately, federal regulators are worried that 23andMe’s less-than-perfect tests could lead to irresponsible consumer behavior and to stop making health claims, especially controversial ones related to the probability of getting cancer. Since the letter last November, 23andMe no longer provides many of the health-related information it once did. “I think there’s a point to regulating, because there are snake oil companies,” she admits, but is adamant that consumers should be allowed access to their own data from companies that are responsible in the ways they talk about genetic information. Watch the full video above for more details about the future of genetic information, the perils of irrational consumers, and trends in the health business space. |
An Upcoming Anonymous App Called Cloaq Promises A New Way To Post & Share, No Email Or Phone Number Required | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | A team of engineers, who have asked to not be identified by name, are working to develop a new platform for anonymous posting called Cloaq (pronounced “cloak”). This upcoming web and mobile platform, they tell me, will combine the anonymity of apps like Secret and Whisper, with the ease-of-use of more public platforms for sharing, like Twitter, Medium or WordPress. (Oh, and no, it’s not . It’s a different one.) The team has sent me several lengthy and mysterious emails detailing their project, but I told them that I couldn’t, in good faith, cover them, unless I knew who they were, and why they were qualified to build such a thing. Though I’ll stick by my agreement to not reveal their names, what I can say is that the team at Cloaq are seasoned startup veterans hailing from the Valley, but rather a group of engineers whose backgrounds include both senior and consulting roles within larger organizations where they couldn’t have fudged their technical capabilities. Their decision to hide their names is more of a gimmick, it seems. Explains one, the team “decided that, in order to stay 100% focused on product, we will take our core theme of anonymity a bit further and remain cloaked ourselves.” In addition, the group “will not be publicly speaking or responding to press inquiries and will basically remain faceless and nameless beyond ‘Team Cloaq.'” Yep, definitely not seasoned startup guys here. Unlike other anonymous movements like Anonymous (with the capital “A”), Cloaq is not just the title given to a loosely defined organization that anyone can join. Instead, despite Cloaq’s attempt at ( ) cloak-and-dagger intrigue, the company sounds like your usual startup. Engineers quit their day jobs to build something they’re passionate about. They even have some initial funding from private investors. The product the engineers have in mind is interesting, though the actual execution has yet to be revealed, and could easily make or break this thing. Like anonymous “social” apps, Cloaq will allow users to post content, which appears in the timeline of those following you. This isn’t entirely different, on its own, from something like Secret, but there are a number of other features that make Cloaq sound unique. For starters, the anonymous posts can be of any length, and can be tagged with a category for searching and sorting. Of course, you can be pseudo-anonymous on blogging platforms today, especially on Tumblr, which is already home to a number of “anonymous” personalities, including some of those in the tech industry would know, like or that angry (gal?). However, what Cloaq says would be different on its platform is that it won’t even collect users’ email addresses or phone numbers at signup, like Secret or Tumblr or Twitter or anyone else these days, would do. “So, even if there is a hack… there is no personal information to retrieve,” explains a Cloaq co-founder. “That’s my only beef with Secret. It’s really fun to use and consume micro-content on, but I still wont post anything that I wouldn’t want coming back to me, because they have my personal information.” These numbers will start at @alpha1 and go through @alpha9999 before moving on to @beta1 through @beta9999, and so on. The co-founder adds that while Cloaq can handle password resets via security questions, those who forget their Cloaq ID could be out of luck, which is why they’ve tried to simplify them. Like blog posts, Cloaq posts can have a title, photo and content, though the title and photo are optional, which lets Cloaq work for long-form and short-form content alike. There will also be standard features, like a Popular section, favoriting and flagging functions, and comments among other things. To cut down on abuse, Cloaq will have a no-tolerance policy for racism, prejudice hate speech, and threats. Users’ accounts making those sorts of posts will be immediately frozen. “We designed this platform to give intelligent people a way to speak their minds freely,” explains a co-creator. “We want to give people a way to really be their true selves, and express their true beliefs, ideas, opinions and suggestions without the natural reservation that comes with living in the public social media age, and worrying about what their friends, family or followers will think of them, or how they will be judged,” he adds. In theory, it sounds like the time could be right for a service like Cloaq, as the shift to mobile continues amid the fallout from exposure caused by putting our personal info in the hands of social networks, which were later mined and archived by governments, it was revealed. But simply building an “anti” public social network is not enough, as a number of services in the past, including , or alt Twitters like and of App.net, have previously shown. Cloaq, however it turns out, will still have a lot to prove. since they’re playing the tease. A demo should be available in a few weeks, and will be made available on web and mobile, initially as an iOS app. Stay tuned. |
VeryLastRoom Raises $2.1 Million To Compete With Hotel Tonight In Europe | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | French last-minute hotel app just raised $2.1 million (€1.5 million). The app is very reminiscent of its American competitor, . VC APlusFinance, Extend and Sigma Gestion invested in this round. Previously, the company had raised $550,000 from business angels (€400,000). It is one of the last standing European Hotel Tonight competitor with Hot Hotels as Blink was by Groupon and JustBook was by SecretEscapes. VeryLastRoom is a mobile app used to book a hotel room at the last minute. This way, hotels can fill up their empty rooms by discounting the remaining rooms. But unlike Hotel Tonight, the price will go down in real-time all day long. At 2am, you get the lowest price for the remaining rooms. “We have a much better offering in France and Spain compared to Hotel Tonight,” CEO and co-founder Nicolas Salin told me. With today’s funding round, the team of 8 will double in the next three months. The company’s main challenge will be to take over the French market before Hotel Tonight. This way, it can safely keep operating, or even become an interesting acquisition target. |
Twitter Goes Down For Almost An Hour | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Twitter is down. I repeat, Twitter is down. Twitter “most users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter on web and mobile apps. We’re looking into it.” According to the , , and tests within the TechCrunch staff, the service is experiencing some serious performance issues. And it’s not just the desktop website that’s failing — Twitter for iPhone is down, as well as TweetDeck. We’ve confirmed that most activity out of Twitter, including the API and streams to third-party apps shut down right around 11am PST/2pm EST. Users are experiencing issues with loading their timelines and posting tweets (which, it turns out, is more difficult to track without the help of Twitter). Unlike partial outages where certain features go down one at a time, Twitter currently shows no signs of life. We just noticed the outage as of 2:00pm ET, and are reaching out to Twitter for more information. Things are working off and on. We seem to be back on track, but don’t be shocked to see things lag a bit. Twitter has posted the following statement on the matter: During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am. We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience. |
Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales Accidentally Starts A Bitcoin Donation Campaign For Wikipedia | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | Is Jimmy Wales testing out Bitcoin donations for Wikipedia? He is certainly considering it, according to a on Reddit. It first started with a tweet — Wikipedia co-founder set up a personal account. Playing with BTC today: I just bought 0.1 bitcoin with ! — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) But then, Wales shared his wallet address on and Reddit. “I’m liking Coinbase and finding the interface pretty straightforward,” he wrote on Reddit. Bitcoin users started voting with their wallets. Many sent small amounts of Bitcoin to show Wales that Bitcoin should become a new payment option on Wikipedia. While people are not donating directly to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales clearly stated that he will donate everything to his foundation. So far the accidentally viral BTC address I posted yesterday has collected 4.5+ BTC. I will donate all to Wikipedia of course. — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) “I’m planning to re-open the conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors at our next meeting (and before, by email) about whether Wikimedia should accept Bitcoin,” Wales wrote. But the main issue is that Bitcoin is far from being a mainstream payment option. Putting a Bitcoin button would mostly scare people away — at least people who have never played with Bitcoin. In other words, you won’t find a Bitcoin button on the . Instead, Wales is thinking about sharing a Bitcoin address on social networks and in various popular Bitcoin discussion groups, such as the Bitcoin subreddit. This way, people who know what Bitcoin is will be aware that you can donate to Wikipedia using Bitcoin, and those who don’t won’t even know that the Wikimedia Foundation accepts Bitcoin. While Bitcoin enthusiasts are very excited about the potential changes at the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia won’t become a big Bitcoin promoter. It won’t change a lot of things for mainstream Bitcoin usage. For the Wikimedia Foundation, accepting Bitcoin is just a matter of adding a new payment option. The foundation will probably instantly change their bitcoins into USD to minimize the volatility risks. So far, Wales has raised more than $11,000 with this small experiment. It looks like he’s enjoying playing with Bitcoin. “I used to be a currency trader,” he wrote. Time for me to go to bed after a long and interesting day: 17.88428302 BTC ≈ 11,235.26 USD. — Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) |
How To Run Live User Testing, Part 3: The Debrief | Brenden Mulligan | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | : The of this series focused on getting the tests setup The focused on actually running the tests, which includes arranging the room, meeting the participant, introducing the study, not revealing the answers, simulating app discovery and installation, walking the user through the prototype, and wrapping up. This post will focus on taking all that amazing feedback you just gathered and parsing it into useful, actionable intelligence. So what next? You have a set of recordings containing incredible user feedback, and now it’s time to parse and process it so you can turn the insights into action items for your product. Here’s how to pull out the good stuff and get your team on board with next steps: Like the first two parts of the study, this takes time, but it’s very worth it in the end. The first step is to schedule a time for the company’s key decision-makers to review the videos. Including everyone might sound like a waste, but it’s very important. I know because we didn’t always do this. When the whole team sits around, you have a much bigger opportunity to understand what feedback is important and what is worth ignoring. You’ll pull a lot more out of the sessions. Reviewing the videos with the Cluster team So, even though it seems like a lot of time, schedule time for the core team to watch all the videos in their entirety. Don’t skip this, or you’ve wasted all the time prior. While watching the videos, the goal is for the team to capture insights and ideas from what the user is saying and doing. The tools we use to do this are: Tools for capturing thoughts and ideas We’ve found it helpful to instruct everyone to capture two kinds of things on paper while watching: My notes and ideas from 5 videos The majority of the writing will be insights from the user and should be captured with a normal pen and paper. Examples of insights are things like: Everyone should write down everything they notice from what the user is saying/doing. If the insights lead a team member to have a specific idea of how to fix / improve the app (ex. “Add ‘We will never post’ under the Facebook login button”), have them write each down on their post-it notes using a thick, black marker. Getting these ideas down on paper will let the team member focus on the rest of the study instead of trying to remember their idea. After watching each video, have someone stand at a white board and write down the insights everyone captured. Use a green marker insights for things that worked, a red marker for things that didn’t work, and black for general insights. Only write down things that more than one team member heard. The purpose of this step is to distill everyone’s page of notes into a common list of insights to address later. Blurred version of the board after one of our debriefs Create one column of notes for each study participant. Then, somewhere off to the side, have everyone put up their Post-it notes in no particular order. Once you’ve watched all the videos, and everyone’s insights are up on the board, it’s time to find patterns. It’s not worth fixing every small issue each person had because all users are different. The goal of the entire exercise is to figure out the that might also affect users in the wild. With a new color, circle or draw a dot near any insights that come up more than two times (or more than 40 percent of the time depending on your number of participants). Do this for green, red, and black insights. Now that you know what common insights came from testing, it’s useful to categorize what part of the app the insights affect. With Cluster, our users were testing four sections: On another whiteboard, we made a column for each section. Then we went through the first whiteboard and moved each recurring pattern over to the appropriate column. Common insights and patterns Suddenly, hundreds of insights were distilled and organized according to the part of our app they affected. An actionable list emerged. We then moved the ideas that had been posted underneath the insights. What we found was that most negative insights already had some great suggestioned ideas for improvements. Now it’s time to get to work to improve the product to address the common negative insights you found during this process. Then, . Keep going until you’re satisfied that the problem areas aren’t too big of a deal. You’ve now completed the entire user testing journey! I know it’s a lot of work, but once you do it a few times, you’ll start to see problem areas disappear and users start to understand your app much faster. It’s invigorating. I’d encourage you to trust the process and see what happens. I guarantee your app will become easier and more delightful to use. |
Crunchweek: Facebook’s $2B Bet On Virtual Reality, Office For iPad, And YC Demo Day | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | In this special “Between Two Co-Editors” edition of Crunchweek, I was joined by my fearless bosses, co-editors Matthew Panzarino and Alexia Tsotsis at the White Table. We tackled Facebook’s $2 billion , and Zuck’s aggressive acquisition strategy in 2014; Microsoft’s release of and tales from |
The Improbable Rise Of Roku | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | In 10 years, when we look back and think about which companies fundamentally changed the way viewers get their TV shows delivered to them, will be a part of the conversation? Based on what the company has done to date, and where it’s going, it seems likely. That’s because no company has done more to define what we can expect from streaming video hardware than Roku — and the company did it all while competing against much larger companies that also wanted a piece of the pie. Consider this: Since , the company has had to compete against similar hardware devices from Apple and Google (and Amazon is on its way). Not only has Roku survived that onslaught, but it’s thrived. An early version of Roku’s streaming box But sales only tell part of the story. More than any other streaming video box or dongle, it's Roku that viewers turn to when they want to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime, according to CEO Anthony Wood. Today, people watch more streaming hours of Netflix on Roku than any other platform. The same is true for Amazon's video apps — which is why, when the online retail giant announces its own streaming media device next month, things could get complicated. Amazon, of course, would prefer to have its users watching Prime videos on its own device, where it would collect all the revenue from sales of on-demand titles. Amazon is also a distribution channel for Roku boxes, although Wood said today about 65 percent of its sales happen in brick-and-mortar retail locations. And, of course, it gets a cut of on-demand sales that happen through the Amazon channel on its devices. Roku has one thing going for it that the others don’t, however: It’s singularly focused on streaming video hardware and software. The company is home to 250 employees, and all of them are just working on products to working on hardware and software for delivering streaming video. Another thing that Roku has going for it is that it’s agnostic, both to the channels that are built for its platform and the devices that it will run on. While it launched with just the Netflix channel in 2008, it quickly made its box and now has more than 1,000 channels or apps to choose from. Netflix is still its largest streaming partner by far, but it’s seeing increased pick up in the long tail of third-party video apps. More and more, it’s become home to a growing number of apps from traditional cable programmers , . If Roku’s first act was simply getting its Netflix streaming box out in the wild and its second act included its efforts to attract more and more quality content to the platform, it’s the third act, in which Roku moves beyond its own hardware, that might be most defining for the company. The company has struck partnerships to become the operating system for connected TV manufacturers like . For a growing number of companies, which want to provide streaming video and but don’t have the resources to build their own OS, Roku provides a solution that they can license to quickly add a wide range of content. “Most companies that make connected TVs, other than Samsung, don’t have what it takes and will end up licensing our software,” Wood said at the Code Media event. It remains to be seen whether Roku succeeds in that endeavor, where others — like Google — have failed. But with a critical mass of content companies already on board, and a growing number of device manufacturers planning Roku-powered TVs this year, the company seems well-positioned to capitalize on that opportunity. |
After Stepping Aside From Y Combinator, Paul Graham Hands Over The Reins At Hacker News | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | As part of his from day-to-day operations at Y Combinator, Paul Graham announced today that he’s also handing over the reins of , the technology and entrepreneurship-focused social news website that he built and has run through YC since 2007. In a simple and straightforward , Graham announced that YC outreach director and YC partner will be taking over as the “voice of YC on HN,” responding to all YC-related inquiries on the site. Additionally, Daniel Gackle has joined YC full-time to handle of the YC community, YC partner will be in charge of the site’s web and mobile design, and software developer will continue to handle the site’s code. In his blog post, Graham said he will still drop in to Hacker News from time to time, just not as much as he used to: “I’ll still be around as a user, but less frequently than when I felt I had to check the site every hour or so to make sure nothing had broken.” Hacker News has had a big impact on the tech and programming community over the last 7 years — it’s arguably grown to be more influential to a wider audience than Y Combinator’s core startup accelerator itself. It will be interesting to see what the coming years bring for both HN and YC as they each move into their next chapters of growth, with taking a step back. For an in-depth look at Hacker News and its rise, read Leena Rao’s retrospective “ .” |
How One Cloud Enterprise Startup Decided To Sell To Microsoft | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | When Ursheet Parikh sold his company StorSimple in 2012 to Microsoft, it was one of the largest deals in the cloud infrastructure sector to date. But that wasn’t the only thing unusual about it. It was also a fairly large deal for which he played the banker and negotiated the deal. This is not unheard of, but it is an interesting example of how such a process can work in a startup acquisition. Before explaining why and how he handled the acquisition without a banker, it’s helpful to follow how the company developed. Ursheet Parikh Founded in 2009, StorSimple combined the functions of multiple storage systems — primary storage, backup, archival and disaster recovery — into a single storage appliance that integrated with cloud storage services from companies such as Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Google. Parikh, formerly at Cisco, had previous startup experience and started the company with Guru Pangal, formerly of Brocade. The two were a good match to work on StorSimple because Parikh had a strong track record in WAN acceleration and Pangal had expertise in storage. Early on, the team focused heavily on testing the product with about 40 customers. Parikh believes that some enterprise-focused startups push products out too early. Instead he advises enterprise startups to make sure the product is right before opening it up to the public. “Don’t settle on the product too early. These products take time to bake. It can be a mistake to declare general availability too early – especially before the product market fit is validated.” One of the challenges of releasing the product too early is that it becomes hard to change product direction or focus. This can be a big problem if the startup gets a large customer early for what could be a niche business. “As soon as somebody buys the product and gives you a $50,000 or $100,000 check, they have so much leverage,” Parikh says. At one point, some enterprise customers wanted to use StorSimple as part of a cloud backup service, like Mozy or Carbonite. That could have moved the company in a very different direction. But Parikh believed that enterprise cloud backup wasn’t a good business. Parikh explains their rationale: “We were initially tempted, but I believed that traditional cloud backup for enterprises is too inefficient. The data volume is just too large and the ROI isn’t there. We decided the best way was to do primary and backup storage together — combined. This ended up being one of the best decisions for the business.” StorSimple opened the product to the public in 2011 and it started to take off, blowing through its forecasts. “For enterprise infrastructure startups it can take two to four quarters of testing a product to bake it and another two to four quarters to hit scalable sales metrics. Within six quarters of general availability, StorSimple’s quarterly revenue had crossed a $10 million run rate with a few sales reps. This demonstrated that we had the product-market fit to build a business.” With more than 100 enterprise customers by mid-2012, StorSimple emerged as a leader in cloud-integrated storage and was used by mainstream enterprise customers in sectors like retail, oil and gas, manufacturing, services, consumer goods, healthcare, government and banking. StorSimple decided to raise a new venture round led by existing investors to expand sales, marketing and operations. Large cloud and storage companies in the ecosystem that were interested in taking the StorSimple product to market were invited to join this investment round. “The StorSimple appliances had to be deployed by enterprise customers with cloud services. Most StorSimple customers found that Amazon and Microsoft were their most viable vendors. The majority of StorSimple’s deals were happening in partnership with Microsoft as a cloud provider,” Parikh says. “We had a pipeline with both companies but we would close deals faster with Microsoft because of their sales force and channel presence. It was a great way to build a company in the same way that Citrix leverages Microsoft.” However, one of the companies initially approached by StorSimple for investment made an offer to buy the company before the investment round closed. At that point, Microsoft also made an offer to buy the company. StorSimple had to make a decision on whether to sell or try to build a big independent business. “We had product market fit and found ourselves at a strategic crossroads,” Parikh says. “We needed to decide if we wanted to double down and go all the way. We didn’t want to go capital-intensive and launch into a head-on battle with incumbent storage vendors.” StorSimple’s strategy had been to partner with big cloud providers and it was already in “co-opetition” with Amazon, which had recently launched a storage product that competed with StorSimple. At that point StorSimple had to decide whether to take on Microsoft as well. “We decided to explore merger options as we felt that our product would have a greater impact with companion products and the sales force of a large cloud vendor,” Parikh says. “Now the question was, whether we should engage a banker or run the process ourselves.” Rather than hire a banker, Parikh decided to go through the acquisition process himself with his board’s help for three reasons: Parikh fielded offers and acted as the banker during the deal. “The strategy was negotiate hard but be nice. Even if you don’t sell, you don’t want to piss them off since they are important go-to-market partners.” In the end, Microsoft has been happy with the deal, and Steve Ballmer has called StorSimple “ ,” touting it as a cloud service for use with on-premise Windows or Linux servers. “[T]hat thing has really exploded for us and helps our customers to understand why to double down on us as a hybrid cloud vendor,” Ballmer said. Most buying companies check in regularly with the acquired teams to make sure things are running smoothly. In Microsoft’s case, the company said StorSimple deployments grew by 700 percent in the six months after the acquisition. It’s also become a “core part” of Windows Azure storage offering, according to . “Acquirers will do a larger post-mortem evaluation one year after the acquisition,” Parikh says. “However on the StorSimple deal we agreed to do a review every six to eight weeks so you know that you’re on track.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella helped ensure that any issues were addressed quickly and that the organization stayed focused on the StorSimple business plans. Microsoft also made sure that its existing team worked closely with StorSimple to make the acquisition work. “At the time Microsoft bought StorSimple, Microsoft had a large team building comparable products,” Parikh says. “Post the acquisition, Microsoft aligned this team with the StorSimple product, and that alignment was one of the key factors for deal success.” That kind of alignment doesn’t always happen with acquisitions. But it was one of the key factors Parikh made sure of when he went through the deal process — that he could work with the Microsoft team and that they would work for the same goals. |
Neil Young’s PonoPlayer Passes $5m In Kickstarter Pledges | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | The portable music player is alive and well. just crossed the $5 million milestone on Kickstarter, making it in the site’s history. Twelve thousand backers have pledged enough to pre-order the device. And there is still 16 days to go on its campaign. The and hit its goal within the day. It’s clear that consumers that want something more than an iPod. The PonoPlayer is a high-fidelity portable music player. Rather than playing back MP3s, the device supports FLAC audio files that contain significantly more data than their MP3 counterparts, resulting in a dramatically higher quality sound than a traditional MP3 player. Music is served through the PonoPlayer’s music store, which is also part of the Kickstarter project. The files are all lossless audio, therefore the file sizes are larger than the average iTunes download. The PonoPlayer sports 128GB of storage, which is good for about 100 albums. Neil Young isn’t creating an iPod rival. This is something for people who listen to albums over and over again and crave the highest quality audio possible. It’s for musicians rather than a causal listener. Call it a Toblerone bar. Call it a relic of the past. But you also have to call it successful. |
Box CEO Aaron Levie Takes To Quora About His (Sorta) Small IPO Stake: It’s All Gravy | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | Reporters and industry watchers go nuts when an S-1 is filed for an initial public offering because there are always a few surprises to be found while digging through the numbers. The was no exception. Along with details on Box’s revenue (growing quickly) and bottom line income (still in the red), the filing revealed that , Box’s well-known and charismatic co-founder and CEO who is indisputably the face of the company, held a than outsiders might have expected. The S-1 indicates that Levie’s ownership of Box prior to the offering stands at 4.1 percent, and when his unexecuted stock offerings are taken into account, his overall ownership is 5.7 percent. It’s a stake that’s worth more than $100 million, which is of course a lot of money. But Levie’s holdings seem relatively small in light of his contributions to the company and the held by VC investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Someone to anonymously wonder, “Aaron Levie is down to a 4% stake heading into the Box IPO. How does he feel watching DFJ and USVP laugh to the bank after 10 years of sweat, blood, and tears?” Surprisingly, Levie himself pitched in with : “So far, I have yet to bleed while building Box (well, one time I was late to a meeting and cut myself shaving). And honestly, if anyone is regularly bleeding while building a software company, I would have some serious questions about their strategy and if they’re executing properly. Definitely lots of tears and sweat though. Start your company because you want to change the world, and the rest is gravy.” It’s a response that’s equal parts funny, clever, and earnest — fun without breaking any big rules (and there are a lot of for a company that’s officially on the road to an IPO.) In short, classic . For more classic Levie, you can watch his fireside chat with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington from our Disrupt Europe conference this past fall. It was a lively and solid conversation about Box’s past and future that’s fun to re-watch in light of the IPO news this week: |
Watch How Matterport’s Camera Captured A 3D Model Of TechCrunch HQ | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | It’s a pretty impressive claim, so we invited Matterport to stop by TechCrunch headquarters to show us just how the camera works by creating a 3D map of our TechCrunch TV green room. You can see that in the video embedded above. In an interview, Matterport’s CEO Bill Brown told me that there are three categories of people who they expect will most benefit from the product: Customers who want to document spaces, such as people managing construction projects or setting up remote factories; people who want to promote a space such as real estate agents or entertainment venue owners; and people who want to modify and redesign spaces by changing out flooring or furniture. And while Matterport’s current camera is impressive in its form factor and ease of use, Brown says that this is just the beginning — and that very soon, Matterport’s system could be something that fits into your smartphone. “Matterport was started with the vision that eventually everybody is going to have a 3D sensor in their pocket. When we get to that day, you are no longer going to take 2D pictures,” he said. He went on to note that with projects like (with which ), this technology is being pushed forward even faster than they had initially expected. “We’re not going to be surprised if you start to see the first [mobile 3D imaging] devices toward the end of this year, and within a couple years, it will be pretty commonplace.” Matterport’s latest camera might not be quite small enough to fit in your pocket, but for now it definitely lived up to the hype. The entire process of capturing the image took less than 20 minutes, and Matterport sent over the completed 3D map that could be navigated through within just a couple of hours. We included the footage of that model in the video above, and you can also see a video of a fly through of the model here: [vimeo 89556478 w=500 h=281] |
Whaling Is The New Harlem Shake | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | Have you whaled yet today? It’s the new thing. Whale at the club. Whale at school. Whale in your cubical. Just don’t whale at a funeral. That would be doing it wrong. As the Vines below show, the premise is to act like a whale breaching the water behind an unsuspecting observer. Bonus Internet points are awarded for twisting in the air. At the moment Twitter is awash with whaling videos, but if history teaches us anything, each new viral sensation lasts less time than the last. The Harlem Shake lasted about a week-and-a-half. This one started popping up on Vine a few weeks ago, and is still relatively confined to that network, but it could die at any moment. Get whaling while you still can. Just don’t break your back. is a habit jack Payne just took whaling to a whole other level — Chrissy Oka (@ChrissyOka) Found some more WHALES in gatlinburg! 🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋 — Jack Mosel (@moseljack) It’s Saturday. Have you whaled yet? — Kickstarter (@kickstarter) |
Pre-IPO Imperative: Know Your Customer | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | The IPO window is currently wide open. Riding the wave of strong IPO performance over the past few years (the classes of ‘12 and ‘13 IPOs have on average returned 234 percent and 78 percent, respectively, according to Deutsche Bank data), a growing number of high-growth, venture-backed companies are filing for IPOs. In fact, five venture-backed IPOs have been completed already this year, and 13 more are now publicly on file. The most forward-thinking of these IPO aspirants are preparing diligently for their big days – hiring experienced CFOs, building detailed financial models, homing in on metrics that help measure progress and raising plenty of private capital to fuel growth leading into their public offerings. These steps all make good sense. But there is a missing ingredient from today’s standard IPO-preparation recipe that is critical to keep in mind – “know your customer.” The motivations and priorities of the typical public fund manager are than those of VCs – attempting to see the world from the public fund manager perspective can help prepare a company for success in the public markets. To put yourself in the shoes of the public fund manager, there are three key things to keep in mind: The typical public investor has spent considerable time studying her universe of companies – meeting management teams, competitors, customers, partners, etc. The best public investors know when someone sneezes at one of the companies in which they hold a stake. Over time, they gain confidence that they won’t be surprised and possible risks are well understood. For private companies, the reverse is true. Most forward-thinking private companies conduct Non-Deal Roadshows (NDRs) nowadays to meet public investors and give them a taste of the story in advance of an IPO. This is good, but it still leaves public investors wanting for more information relative to the public companies they track. These investors follow lots of stocks, so earning their attention and serious consideration is no small task. The good news is that you get a chance to make a first impression, and you can do so by telling a compelling story, complete with your numbers and outlook, and delivering on this story as time progresses. The best advice I’ve heard on this point is to set yourself up to exceed the expectations of public investors and, to the extent possible, leave some good news in the tank to help build excitement for once you’re public. The ultimate goal of the IPO process is to attract great public investors who will get behind your vision and support you in both good and tough times. It’s certainly exhilarating on the day of your IPO to have a big pop in your stock. A pop can serve to attract and reward the investors you seek, but if the deal is too hot, and the price runs up too much, the smart money sometimes exits to seek shelter elsewhere. In hot IPOs, companies may end up attracting less convicted investors, and in that case, the slightest hint of possible bad news can cause a stock price dislocation. Similarly, it can feel really bad if you have a “cold” IPO, where no one wants to buy the deal, for reasons that may or may not be in your control. Investors, for example, may have a concern with your industry or macroeconomic conditions. If you encounter this, don’t despair — the same rules apply for cold deals. If you gain the confidence of investors by delivering good results and good news over time, you might see pretty heroic aftermarket performance. Investors love to catch a good story early where they can run with it for a long time. As proof, four of the top-five-performing IPOs from the classes of ’12 and ’13 were cold deals, pricing at or below the bottom end of their filing ranges (VIP Shop, Solar City, Wageworks and YY, a GGV Capital portfolio company). The best public investors, whether from long only funds or hedge funds, typically end up managing relatively large pools of capital. Therefore in order to move the needle on their own performance, they need to be able to take meaningful positions in your stock. To do this, fund managers need comfort they can sell out of your stock when they need or want to. The fewer shares you sell in an IPO (or, conversely, the more that are closely held by you and your venture capital investors), the less liquidity in your stock, making for a more difficult trading environment for public investors. If your VCs don’t want to sell any stock at IPO, this is a good thing, but it does work against deal size. Don’t be afraid to get your bankers to allocate bigger stakes in your IPO to investors with deep pockets, who have done their homework, and convincingly seem to want to go long with you. Additionally, it’s wise to think about a secondary offering, to get more stock from your executive team and VCs into public hands, as you’re completing your IPO. Make sure you have plenty of slack in your underlying operation versus your Wall Street plan so you have good momentum to do a secondary offering. If you’re part of the leadership team at a high-growth, private tech company and you want to go public, either this year or in the near future, you undoubtedly recognize that it’s an exciting and time-intensive process. But, similar to the importance of product/market fit to your business, the more you recognize that public investors are another set of end customers, for whom you need to tailor and customize your offering, the better off you’ll be through your IPO and life as a public company. |
Gillmor Gang: Sign Language | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — barely came out of the gates before John Taschek let Comcast have it, and really you need to see the visual on this one. After the salute to the internet provider, talk circled around Microsoft’s release of Office for iPad. Is it important? Well, no one on the show seemed to use Office any more, except (maybe) at the office. The consensus was three years too late, but the real question is how long will it take to convert Redmond to a consumer cloud model. Elsewhere, the Oculus Rift acquisition seemed to puzzle the Gang. Where is Facebook going and will they be taking us with them? For many, it seems like the Oculus purchase is for someone else; gamers with StarTrek helmets or refugees from the collapse of Windows and maybe XBox. Beam me up, Satya. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dannysullivan, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
The 11 Memes That Define Oculus Riftbook (NSFW) | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to have a little fun. Virtual reality itself used to be a punchline. Now, Facebook and its latest purchase of Oculus Rift is the joke. But can Facebook raise and nurture Oculus Rift into the virtual reality device of the future? As the following memes show, not everyone trusts Zuckerberg and team to raise and nurture Oculus VR into the chosen one. Proceed with caution. It will be like Second Life but with more ads. Gross. Facebook. For your face. As the cool kids say, don’t hate the player… Oatmeal apparently predicted Facebook For Your Face. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154009300040078&set=a.10150413121115078.628758.220779885077&type=1 Somewhere, deep within Zynga, you know a team of engineers are working on the revival of FarmVille. |
The Internet Is Held Together With Bubble Gum And Baling Wire | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | Did you know that, to quote an : The Internet from every angle has always been a house of cards held together with defective duct tape. It’s a miracle that anything works at all. Those who understand a lot of the technology involved generally hate it, but at the same time are astounded that for end users, things seem to usually work rather well. Today I want to talk about all of the egregious security disasters across the Internet over the last few months, but as Inigo Montoya once said: “No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” Alas, even an incomplete summary is a lengthy litany of catastrophe. Let’s see: Just another few months on the Internet, then. But don’t get me wrong. Things are worse than that list makes them seem. Did you know that ? Did you know that the certificate system which underwrites , so-called “secure” browsing, is a and always has been? Did you know that the NSA — well, OK, . (Thanks, Ed!) But did you know that OpenSSL, used extensively across the industry to secure apps of all kinds and sizes, is widely viewed as code so bad and confusing it “ ” Today's exhibit A for "autoconf: the least bad thing in its problem space": fucking OpenSSL. — zack without a name joke (@elwoz) Actually, you can just delete everything in the previous tweet prior to "fucking". — zack without a name joke (@elwoz) Why is this? Why are we not just insecure, but insecure, in an era of widely available unbreakable cryptography? What went so terribly wrong? Well. Three things, really. No, it really is. No, they really don’t. The across the Internet are “123456” and “password”. They have no interest in practicing even the most basic security hygiene: Security: Don't click on stuff / Patch your stuff / Get rid of bad stuff (Java) / Don't click on stuff. Can I go home now? — John Adams (ネッリク) (@netik) …until they get hacked. And then, of course, they blame the technology. I’m sorry to report, however, that that blame is not entirely misplaced. Because No, . Because security is hard, and users are lazy, and so making systems which are secure even for ordinary users takes way too much time and effort, so too many companies just hack together something slapdash and hope nothing goes terribly wrong. Do I sound like I’m overstating things? To quote “ ,” from a couple of years ago: We demonstrate that SSL certificate validation is completely broken in many security-critical applications and libraries. Vulnerable software includes Amazon’s EC2 Java library and all cloud clients based on it; Amazon’s and PayPal’s merchant SDKs responsible for transmitting payment details from e-commerce sites to payment gateways; integrated shopping carts such as osCommerce, ZenCart, Ubercart, and PrestaShop; AdMob code used by mobile websites; Chase mobile banking and several other Android apps and libraries; [etc]. Any SSL connection from any of these programs is insecure against a man-in-the-middle attack. The root causes of these vulnerabilities are badly designed APIs of SSL implementations. My friend Will Sargent recently wrote a series of blog posts about what one has to do to actually correctly enable secure HTTP connections in Java. It’s a superb primer — but it’s tens of thousands words long, because it has to be: It’s terrific, and as a developer who’s wrestled with SSL certificates on Android with Java myself, I’m really glad he wrote it; but in a better world — not a world, mind you; really, just a one — he wouldn’t have had to. Credit cards are even worse, of course. The Target hack, which was at the point-of-sale, would have been prevented by the use of technology…which is widespread, y’know, , and has been for . In the UK, chip-and-PIN was piloted in 2003 and rolled out nationwide in 2004. That’s . But US banks and retailers have dragged their heels — and now, as a direct result, they’re fish in a barrel. Of course, chip-and-PIN won’t help with online credit-card transactions, where, well: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/447654946100375552
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/447817504652402688 To be fair, we have seen some moves in the right direction. Facebook — which seems to have impressive security, perhaps unsurprising in a company led by a hacker — last month released . There’s talk of a common server-security platform at the . And the FTC is beginning to pay attention and cite violators, including Fandango and Credit Karma: FYI: if you disable SSL/TLS certificate validation in your app, you could get a call from the FTC: — Will Sargent (@will_sargent) But those are just a few flickers of life in a security-comatose body corporate. Meanwhile, we’re in an arms race, and while the attackers are training in the Shaolin Temple and gaining valuable work experience in the French Foreign Legion, the defenders are lazing around drinking beer because the dukes and duchesses told them to drain the moats, prop the gates open, and lose the arms and armor, all in order to encourage trade. I’m sure that always seems like such an awfully good idea … right until the day Genghis Khan rides up the road. (1) For those coders among you who, previous to the GnuTLS revelation, blamed Apple’s ifs-without-braces code style for the bug: Guys, no need to apply updates to GnuTls, I have reviewed the code and it has braces on every if statement. — Miguel de Icaza (@migueldeicaza) . |
On The Eve Of GDC, An M&A Wave Hits the Gaming Industry | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | , , , . A nice, little consolidation wave is floating through the gaming industry among companies in the U.S. and Europe. What’s changed? It depends on which part of the industry you’re looking at. Half of these deals are for individual game developers and the other half are for game development On the studio side, mobile gaming is now incredibly mature. , which definitely filed, and Kabam, which has been a subject of speculation for years and . There are now clear winners, in this biggest deal of last year to Japanese carrier Softbank and Gung-Ho Entertainment and made roughly $900 million in revenue last. “It’s not an open greenfield anymore,” said Jussi Laakkonen, who decided to sell Applifier to Unity Technologies, which is behind a popular gaming engine. “The stakes are getting higher.” On the seller side, some mid-size companies are deciding cash in their chips rather than slog it out independently. Unlike other kinds of tech companies, mobile gaming companies can generate decent cash flow while remaining profitable for months or years. That’s why there are still , who will likely stay that way. Yet as marketing costs tip over into the millions and tens of millions of dollars per month, it’s getting harder for new or smaller developers to break through. King alone spent $376.9 million on sales and marketing last year, . With those kinds of barriers to entry, some studios like Phoenix Age or Natural Motion are deciding it’s better to leverage the marketing budgets and technical infrastructure of larger parent companies. While Phoenix Age was bootstrapped, NaturalMotion had raised two rounds led by Benchmark and Europe’s Balderton Capital. On the development tools side, there are basically just too many SDKs. Middleware companies are asking gaming studios to incorporate all kinds of advertising, cross-promotion, analytics and virtual currency SDKs. “It’s hard to cut through the noise when you’re battling so hard,” said Andy Yang, who led gaming monetization company Playhaven and analytics startup Kontagent through a merger a few months ago. “There was a big push from customers to have a more unified offering.” Laakkonen said he didn’t have any financial pressures to sell Applifier to Unity, since the company’s video replay network growing nicely after a tough year or two where they had to pivot the company from the Facebook platform to mobile. Now Applifier, which lets gamers share video replays of their best moments, will be offered as part of the Unity engine. While not requiring it for all Unity developers, the company’s CEO David Helgason wants it . “Our customers want more fully featured products,” Laakkonen said. “They want solutions instead of piecemeal approaches.” |
Google Cracks Down On Deceptive Ads And Other Shady Behaviors Found In Android Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 29 | Android apps are about to get cleaned up. That is, if the recently added changes to the are actually enforced. Google this week updated its policy that dictates to app developers what sort of content their apps are permitted to display, with a number of rules designed to crack down on shady and deceptive ads. In addition, the changes put the onus on the developers themselves to make sure that no ad networks or affiliates they’re using for app promotion purposes are engaged in these practices. The majority of the changes are detailed in a new section of the Google Play Developer Program Policy called “App Promotion,” which reads as follows: Apps published on Google Play may not directly or indirectly engage in or benefit from the following behavior: It is your responsibility to ensure that no ad network or affiliate uses such methods to direct users to pages that make your app available for download. In other words, app developers are not permitted to fool users into downloading apps by simulating a system dialog box – a nasty trick that has been around the web for eons, most memorably perhaps with designed to look like Windows dialog boxes, warning users of system errors or malware infections. Those same tactics today continue today on Android, too, except this time around, the system being simulated is the Android OS, not Windows. Another change regarding advertising warns developers about an ad’s context, reminding them again that: . This line is also warning ad networks, who are often at fault for these deceptive behaviors. Apps are also no longer allowed to use the smartphone’s SMS functionality without getting explicit user consent. That’s something many app developers take advantage of today on both Android and iOS, actually – they often send out text messages as a way of building up an app’s initial audience through forced viral effects. (Sometimes it .) Though Apple has enforced stricter policies on this matter by way of its app review policy, a number of iOS apps, too, have made their app’s user interface just confusing enough that users would accidentally give consent, and . On Android, however, some apps wouldn’t even bother with tricking users into consenting – they’d skip right to the spamming. A few other sections of the content policy have been clarified, including those referencing sexually explicit material, and those banning dangerous products and other changes to the system interface. In the case of the former, the text has been modified to include “erotic content,” noting basically that now an app’s content can’t be “erotic” in order to promote pornography. Previously, Google said that: Now that text reads: This revised wording seems to leave a loophole for educational material related to sexuality, possibly allowing for the more instructional, as opposed to smutty, Kama Sutra apps, for example. Another change in a different section says that app developers must be clear when they’re using in-app purchases to generate revenue, explaining to users which features require an additional charge. Finally, apps are also banned not only for containing viruses, worms and other malware, but also for simply to them, as well as for modifying browser settings, which is now a system interface change banned alongside adding homescreen shortcuts, bookmarks or icons. Google is alerting developers to the change via email, giving the a couple of weeks to unpublish their app and resubmit it before these apps are banned: Any new apps or app updates published after this notification will be immediately subject to the latest version of the Program Policy. If you find any existing apps in your catalog that don’t comply, we ask you to unpublish the app, or fix and republish the app within 15 calendar days of receiving this email. After this period, existing apps discovered to be in violation may be subject to warning or removal from Google Play The full text of that emailed letter to mobile app developers is . |
Another Day, Another EdTech Giant Acquired: Following Renaissance Learning, Education Software Veteran Skillsoft Sells For $2B+ | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | It’s been an active week in the world of education software, with this weekend bringing news of the second big-ticket acquisition of a veteran EdTech company in as many days. Last week, Renaissance Learning, the 29-year-old, Google Capital-backed analytics and assessment giant, for a hefty $1.1 billion. On the same day, rumors of another pricey EdTech acquisition at the hands of a private equity firm began to swirl, this time focusing on , the 24-year-old maker of cloud-based learning software for the enterprise and the corporate sector. By the weekend, the rumors had been confirmed, that it had officially been acquired by Charterhouse Capital Partners, a London-based private equity firm, for north of $2 billion. Like , over its multi-decade history, Skillsoft has gone from private company to IPO and back to private company again. The SaaS provider first went public in 2000, before being purchased a decade later by Advent International, Bain Capital and Berkshire Partners in 2010 for around $1.2 billion. Renaissance Learning, in comparison, debuted on the public markets in 1997 and, 14 years later, went private again thanks to a $440 million acquisition by Permira, a U.K.-based private equity firm. It’s a move we’ve seen happen since, either in the form of a veteran education company jumping from public to private, or simply selling out under duress — with both cases ending in a buy-out from a group of private equity firms, who then attempt to orchestrate a turnaround. We’ve seen it happen since with Blackboard, in 2011 after struggling on the public markets during its seven years as a public company. Or, there’s the case of McGraw-Hill, which, with its publishing business flagging, saw pressure to right its sinking ship, go digital and increase returns to shareholders. The result was the sale of its giant educational publishing business — . In Skillsoft’s case, it appears that Advent International Corp., Bain Capital LLC and Berkshire Partners committed at least $510 million in equity when the three took Skillsoft private in 2010 for $1.2 billion, , before selling it for over $2 billion to Charterhouse. Like many of the EdTech bigs who have been around for a few years, Skillsoft is to being on the other side of the negotiating table, having made a number of . Like these other education veterans, it has also undergone a transformation over the years, morphing from a learning courseware provider in IT training for the corporate market into a technology solutions company. Today, the Dublin-based company offers product across a broad range of categories, from a learning management system and content development tools to eBooks, simulations, courses and videos. It now serves over 6,000 corporate and government customers, the company says, and reaches over 19 million students. |
Veronica Mars And The Case Of The Totally Adequate Kickstarter Movie | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | On Friday night, I was in a Manhattan movie theater watching . I’d contributed to that funded the film’s production, so I actually received a download code for the full movie earlier that day. But I didn’t want to watch it at home, on a TV. I wanted to see it in a theater packed with other fans on opening night. The fact that the movie exists at all is kind of amazing. As I hinted when a year ago, I was a fan of the canceled TV show and its eponymous high school detective, who solved crimes as a way to make sense of the bigger mysteries in her life. More broadly, I’m the kind of nerd who can get obsessed with canceled shows — the only time I’ve been to Comic-Con was for a panel about , the then-upcoming movie adaptation of the canceled show (the movie’s terrific, by the way). So I’ve been pretty excited about the idea that Kickstarter could become a mechanism for fans to help bring deeply-but-not-widely loved properties back to life. And yet, as I sat in the theater, listening to the rest of the audience laugh and gasp and applaud at what seemed like all the right moments, I felt vaguely dissatisfied. As I left, I was asking myself: This post isn’t meant to be a review, not exactly. It’s mostly an attempt to explain my own disappointment. I mean, the movie was … fine, I guess? The actors seemed to slip into their old roles quite comfortably, and the dialogue was, for the most part, as sharp and snappy as I remembered it. A little more disappointing were the movie’s TV-ish look and the central mystery, which fizzled out after an intriguing start. But those shortcomings were understandable given the limited budget and the constraints of a two-hour run time. What really drove my disappointment was the sense that the filmmakers were looking over my shoulder in every scene, asking, “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Isn’t it???” Large chunks of the movie felt like little more than excuses to trot out some cast member from the show with minimal explanation, then have them say a few lines, presumably giving fans a warm, fuzzy feeling as they recalled how much they’d enjoyed seeing Character X or Y on the show. Sure, I did remember most of those characters, and yes, it was nice to see them again. But what I’d wanted (and maybe this was silly of me) was something that stood on its own as a movie and didn’t feel like a two-hour addendum to the TV show. You know, something that might actually make people who’d been skeptical of the Kickstarter campaign say, “Oh, I totally see what you were talking about …” creator Rob Thomas (who co-wrote and directed the film) has said that since fan dollars brought back to life, putting in all the stuff that he thought they would want, and only then adding “a detective case in the middle.” I do think a movie aimed squarely at fans is exactly what he made, for better and for worse. And shouldn’t that be enough? Even if, as I believe, the movie isn’t nearly as good as the TV show, isn’t that okay? Isn’t it still a good thing that Thomas, along with his cast and crew, got to tell one more story with these characters? Isn’t that what fans wanted, and what they paid for? It’s a mystery, and I’m not sure it’s the kind that Veronica Mars can solve. Another mystery: Will the movie make enough money to justify a sequel? Thomas has suggested that if it does, he’ll do something less fan service-y, more in the vein of . And so, despite my reservations, I find myself hoping, watching , and waiting for Veronica to come to life again. |
GitHub Puts Co-Founder On Leave, Begins Investigation Into Discrimination Against Julie Ann Horvath | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | Amidst claims of sexism and intimidation at the startup, is making moves to quiet the uproar surrounding the departure of engineer Julie Ann Horvath. This evening in a blog post, CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath said the company had into the reasons for her leaving. On Friday, Horvath announced that she had resigned from the startup through a series of tweets that indicated . Later, she provided a that led up to her departure to TechCrunch, which included allegations of intimidation by the wife of one of the co-founders, as well as an increasingly sexist environment against women. In response to those claims, the company is putting the co-founder in question on leave and banning his wife from the GitHub office. Another engineer, who Horvath claims ripped code out of projects that they worked on together after she rejected his romantic advances, has also been put on leave. While the company won’t confirm the fact, on Twitter that the co-founder in question is Tom Preston-Werner, who earlier this year. The speculation mistakenly asserts that Tom Preston-Werner is the only GitHub co-founder who is married, which is false. Co-founder PJ Hyett is also married. GitHub, of course, will have work to do to overcome claims of sexism in the workplace, especially as it seeks to recruit more women. In the post, Wanstrath said the company had hired an HR Lead who joined in January, and is seeking to ensure that employees can voice their concerns and get the right feedback going forward. |
Google Drive Goes On The Offensive | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | Google drastically the price for storage on Google Drive this week, to the point where it now undercuts virtually all of its competitors. At $9.99 per month for a terabyte of online storage, Google puts all of its competitors to shame, but there is more going on here than just a price war. , SugarSync has a Maybe even more importantly, Google’s new prices even significantly undercut those of its own for developers, as well as those of and platforms. That’s where most cloud storage startups host their files (Dropbox uses S3, for example). Those startups that are big enough probably get some discounts for storing extremely large amounts of data on these platforms, but even then, Google’s price for consumers is lower than what developers can get on these platforms. The price trend for developer cloud storage has always been moving down and Google, Amazon and Microsoft have typically matched each other’s price cuts, so over time, those consumer prices will surely match the wholesale prices again — but probably not for a long time to come. Given that there is no middle tier between Google’s 100GB and 1TB plans, the company — just like all of its competitors — probably assumes that most users will not use the full amount of available storage anytime soon. For now, however, it also looks like Google is willing to sell its storage at or below cost in order to put pressure on its competition. Why is Google willing to do this? Obviously, it wants more (paying) users on its platform and an attractive price sure helps, but it’s also about fighting off competitors in a market it doesn’t yet dominate. But Google Drive isn’t purely about storage; it’s also where Google productivity apps live, and it’s closely linked to its photo sharing/storage tools and Gmail, all of which share the same pool of available online storage. Dropbox, for many users, is synonymous with cloud storage and syncing. Google Drive isn’t. Microsoft OneDrive is built into Windows 8. Google Drive’s desktop app works, but not quite as well as Dropbox. What most people love about Google Drive, though, is its collaborative productivity apps. That’s also where Google can expect quite a bit of competition, though. Microsoft is finally taking its free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and is starting to actually market them. Whatever you think about them, they do have a higher name recognition than Google Docs, Sheets and Slides and for most businesses, Microsoft’s Office suite is still the de-facto standard. Undercutting Microsoft in storage pricing surely isn’t going to hurt Google in its attempt to win over those users. Google’s announcement of support for for Docs and Sheets also shows that it believes it needs an active developer ecosystem around these services to compete. Drive, of course, is also where those images you store on Google+ Photos go. And say what you want about Google+, its photo storage and sharing features (and Google Hangouts) are among its best features. Storage for images under 2048×2048 pixels (that’s about 4.2 megapixel) is even free, though chances are your phone now takes images at a higher resolution, so unless you just want to store low-res backups on Google+ Photos, you will soon start needing Google’s paid plans. With these recent price cuts, Google locks the competition into a price war where it’s hard to beat because it even undercuts the usual wholesale prices for online storage. At the same time, it’s ramping up investments around its products that use its storage service to shut down competition in that area, too. The next few months sure look like they’ll be interesting… |
null | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 3 | 11 | null |
The Future For Anonymity Apps: Defamations And Revolutions | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | In 2010 the Iranian election protests — the “Green Revolution” — was at its tail end, though few knew the tumult of the Arab Spring was to come. The Iranian authorities were rounding up key anti-government leaders. People who had spoken out against the election result, which appeared to the whole world to have been rigged, found themselves in grave danger. The things they had posted on social media – often under their real names as Facebook insisted – in support of the protests, were now incriminating evidence. More importantly, they feared Iranian Police were meticulously working through entire social graphs, containing real family and friends, to throw people in prison. If you were a protester, it was likely your Facebook friends might be as well. So many started frantically deleting their accounts. Suddenly, anonymity was a prized possession. Fast forward to 2014. Startups producing apps which seemingly give us anonymity in our postings – Yik Yak, Secret, Wut and Whisper being the major contenders right now – are suddenly hot properties. But not because of any political process, but because their juicy gossip – especially of the Silicon Valley variety – has become addictive, not least to the media. But, with social media comes the inevitable trolling, and potential for defamation. Clearly, with their identity protected, users of apps based around anonymity are able to circulate salacious and downright damaging rumours. Some people , in part because of what is said on these apps. It’s not a pretty place. And it’s even worse when apps like Secret suggest that those posting the defamation are from within your own contact book. It’s led Secret to even warn users . And now it’s leading some investors – including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen – if it’s even something that they should be investing in, especially if the app in question is “designed to encourage negative behaviour.” Sure, it’s not just business – ethical and moral issues are at stake – but then again bad PR, sensitive LPs and damage to a VC’s brand are big factors. It’s not something we haven’t faced before. Anonymously run accounts on both Facebook and Twitter can act like these anonymous apps and are even easier to create and distribute. But although Facebook and Twitter are now old hands at moderation, plenty of bad stuff still gets through. But it is outside the US – far away from the moderators and the potential PR flare-ups – that anonymity has become a huge issue. For while we wring our hands over something nasty posted on Secret about someone in Silicon Valley, different legal jurisdictions mean full-blown libel actions are probably going to kick off as these apps start hitting other shores in larger numbers. Take the UK, a place so filled with libel actions it’s even become known as the home of so-called . This is a tricky part of the world for people who want to be free and easy on Twitter, Facebook, or any other kind of social media, anonymous or not. In the UK, Police cases involving social media have skyrocketed in the last two years, just as an example. And UK law is very interested in the concept of ‘identification’ – how someone might be identified whether their name is used or not. The question any judge will ask in assessing a case is, could this person be put ‘in the room’ and therefore be identified? For instance: Say a person posted something nasty on Secret about someone else. That ‘someone else’ is identified as working at a particular company. Another person posts something nasty, again, about the same person. This time they don’t mention the company name, they simply imply it, but add that this person is a manager in a named department. Another, third, person posts other potentially identifying information and adds a gender for the ‘target.’ Thus, through that “triangulation”, any person working inside that department at that company would be able to name the target involved, even though the target had not actually been named by any single Secret user. It’s this information the targeted person could take to a UK court of law, claim defamation and mount a legal action to either acquire the names of the people on the network who had defamed them, or level charges at the most likely suspects. Secret itself is not yet available on the app store in the UK. But when it is a whole can of worms could be unleashed. But enough of our Western issues. It’s in emerging markets like the Arab world, where anonymous apps may find a fascinating foothold. The first example is of course in different cultures. For instance, prevented from communicating directly very easily, many single Arab men and women go to great lengths to communicate digitally. The stories of people throwing papers with their phone numbers into each other’s moving cars are just the oldest examples. But with anonymous apps comes a greater opportunity to flirt and – no doubt – dish the dirt – in a safe, anonymous way. And there is another, fascinating path for anonymous apps to take. The Arab Spring was super-charged when people were emboldened to speak out after seeing their peers post to social media against the various Arab regimes. What anonymous apps now hold out is the possibility of doing the same, but in a way that could well be out of reach of the authorities. Imagine you are a Secret user in Cairo and someone in your personal contact network starts releasing damning evidence against the ruling Army elite on Secret. You know one of your contacts is almost certainly in possession of the truth. Suddenly, this acts as a verifier of the information, and gradually it seeps out to the public domain. See what I mean? And there is already evidence that this new wave of anonymous apps will be used in this way by activists. is an online, anonymous and ephemeral communication platform that enables users to share and interact anonymously via short messages. It requires no login or password, doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track IP addresses. Users set a date their submitted messages (“kwiks”) will self-destruct. Although founder , a world-renowned visual artist, created KwikDesk as a conceptual art project, it’s now being used by activists. The Chinese version of KwikDesk, for instance, was launched with the participation of human-rights activist and Tiananmen protest leader, Wu’er Kaixi. Kaixi was one of the leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and is still a wanted man in China. So, what will future activists do with this brave new world of anonymity apps? Surely there will be some dissing of friends — but there will be plenty of ways in which they can be used to undermine regimes, in a fast, viral, mobile way that other, older, platforms were not able to achieve. Those Green Revolution activists in Iran may now find a true friend in anonymous apps, where once – for many – Facebook’s insistence on real identity (even though it gave voice to so much of the revolution) proved an enemy to their lives and to the lives of their families. |
Hands On With HereO, The Small And Simple GPS Watch Made Especially For Kids | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | A startup called has made a gadget especially for keeping tabs on young kids in that age range. HereO has made what it claims is the world’s “smallest and coolest” GPS watch device, which connects with a mobile and web app to allow parents to keep track of where their children are at all hours of the day. The watch will retail for $149, and is available for $99 to people who fund the device’s . The GPS tracking service used by the app is paid for on a subscription basis, for $5 per month. There are of course other kid-focused GPS tracking devices on the market (they’re often actually referred to as digital ‘leashes’.) But the folks at HereO say that their offering is specially designed with a small form factor and eye-catching colors so that it might be something that kids might actually enjoy wearing. The idea is that it’s less a leash, and more of an accessory. HereO’s chief strategy officer Daniel Leon stopped by TechCrunch headquarters to give us a look at the HereO experience from both the kids’ and parents’ perspective. Check that out in the video embedded above. |
Popcorn Time Is Back | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | Behold the power of open-source software. After of the original , a so-called Netflix for pirated content, the project was forked several times on GitHub. And guess what? It’s back and more shady than ever before. The torrent site YTS has taken over the project, . YTS developer Jduncanator told that they are in a better position from a copyright standpoint because it’s built on their API. “It’s as if we have built another interface to our website. We are no worse off managing the project than we would be just supplying the movies. It’s our vision at YTS that we see through projects like these and that just because they create a little stir in the public, it doesn’t mean they are shut down.” The installer and project files are or . The new version works just like the previous one. It’s available for Windows, OS X and Linux. As the release notes say, the new version, build 0.2.7, now uses trakt.tv to pull in additional movie metadata meaning it now has cover images, backdrop images, Synopsis’s and runtime data. The project is being headed up by a developer that has worked on several public builds before, lending a bit of credence to this new build. All the files for the original Popcorn Time were available from the start on GitHub. Anyone could access and build out their own version. After the original shut down, a new group of developers backed by YTS picked up the ball and ran with it. It seems in this case the sequel is more interesting than the original. |
With ‘No Meaningful Position Beyond Flash’, Gaming Platform Mochi Media Will Close March 31 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | , a distribution and monetizing platform for Flash-based games that was in 2010, is closing down, with all services ceasing March 31. The latest casualty in the decline of Flash, Mochi’s shut-down is also a message to those businesses built on it to diversify or perish. “If Mochi had a more meaningful position today beyond Flash, then there may have been a different path for the company going forward,” CEO Josh Larson notes in a frank published Friday. If the news is a strong mark of the general viability of businesses that are focused too much on the shrinking world of Flash gaming, it doesn’t look like it came as a surprise to Mochi Media specifically: one of the co-founders, Bob Ippolito, was among those who had been trying to prevent a closure of Mochi and had even tried to re-acquire the company from Shanda. In a on a Mochi Media user forum about the news, he writes: “Nobody at Mochi wanted this to happen and there were parties interested in acquiring Mochi from them (including myself) for more than they’d make by dissolving it. They’re simply not interested in making a rational decision here, and they certainly don’t care about you all like we do (past and present Mochi employees). We’ve been trying to prevent this from happening for quite some time, but we failed to change their plans.” To be clear, Ippolito is no longer working at Mochi but appears to have remained engaged with company happenings from the sidelines. In an email, Larson tells us that all Mochi employees (including himself) are now wrapping things up and looking for work elsewhere. The news comes not just on the eve of , but also at a time when China-based Shanda Games has been the subject of acquisition rumors, with one report Alibaba might pay upwards of $3.2 billion for Shanda Games and its controlling shareholder Shanda Interactive. (To be clear, we have heard from a reliable source that this was unfounded speculation.) As for Mochi Media, you might call it another casualty in the decline of Flash, in this case as a platform of choice among games developers that are today focused on iOS, Android, Steam and more. “If Mochi had a more meaningful position today beyond Flash, then there may have been a different path for the company going forward,” Larson notes in a frank published Friday. Indeed, while a lot of the Flash-based games, written for the web, seem to be designed to promote the equivalent gaming apps for iOS or Android (you can see one example pictured above), Mochi may have had little to no role to play in how those games were distributed across other ecosystems. “Most ‘Flash’ game developers I knew from the halcyon days of Mochi services (2006-2010) have moved on to make games in HTML5, Unity, and Corona for platforms like Android, iOS and Steam,” games developer Steve Fulton in a post on a Gamasutra community board. Mochi Media had provided a few different services: for Flash games developers it offered a distribution platform on the Mochi site as well as through a network of other sites; for web publishers it offered gaming content to put on their properties; and for advertisers it provided a network for serving their ads within and around this content. All of these are now winding down. Mochi says it has stopped accepting new games, and advertisers using self-serve accounts can no longer pay any more money in. Flash these days seems to have diminishing importance as a platform for web development. By , today it’s used on only 14.7% of web sites, a decline of more than five percentage points compared to a year ago. (Unsurprisingly, Flash-maker Adobe some figures about how vibrant Flash is in the gaming world — although these come from over a year ago.) Mochi’s origins speak to a richer time for Flash. Founded in 2005 by Jameson Hsu and Ippolito, Mochi Media was quick to see an opportunity in providing a platform to help independent developers distribute their content — a concept that companies like Apple and Google picked up and ran with in their app stores. In Larson’s words, the idea was “You focus on making a great game, and we’ll take care of the rest.” As he recalls it, at the time Mochi was founded, “Flash was a platform that held a lot of potential if developers could find ways to track, monetize and build better games. Together, Flash and Mochi provided an on-ramp to a career or business in game development.” It was a business model that found some traction with VCs, too, with Accel and Shasta both backing the company. As Mochi Media grew, it also used its position to promote the Flash platform as much as itself, organising the Flash Gaming Summit and other events. (Notably, there was no Flash Gaming Summit in the last year.) But ultimately, as the wider gaming industry matured, it went in a different direction, even for games or developers that may first have had their start with Mochi. “We take great pride in currently seeing Ninja Kiwi’s Bloons TD5, and Flipline Studios’Papa’s Freezeria To Go among the Top Games Charts on iOS,” Larson writes. “We love that at one time we shared a desk with Casual Collective which is now known as KIXEYE.” After the end of the month, online accounts, dashboards, and forums hosted by Mochi Media will no longer be available. If games distributed by Mochi are hosted on third-party sites, they will continue to work, but without Mochi services such as ads, Live Updates, Scores, Achievements and Analytics, the company says. Customers can download all of their data, and Mochi says it will also be sending basic data around views and revenue information for games to users before the end of this month. It also has made some details about how it plans to pay out remaining monies to customers for those with over $100 in their accounts. Mochi has said that it has thousands of developers on its books. “Please keep in mind that a large number of people will likely be requesting a massive amount of data from our servers over the next couple of weeks, so please be patient with the computing times,” Larson writes. Thanks |
“Dehumanize Your Friends” Brings Cards Against Humanity-Style Multiplayer To Chromecast | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | Cards Against Humanity! If you run around in any even-slightly-geeky circles, you’ve probably heard of it. But in case you somehow haven’t: take and make it terribly offensive. As in, straight up, jaw dropping, probably-shouldn’t-play-this-at-work-or-in-public offensive. Once a humble $4,000 Kickstarter campaign, it now pulls in . Tired of the all those damned involved with this game? It’s now playable on Chromecast, albeit in the form of a very-much-unofficial clone. So, how’s it work? Just like the original game — but on your phone(s). Once each player has connected to the Chromecast and everyone has declared themselves “Ready!”, the game begins. Each round, one player is the judge, who pulls a random card with a question/fill-in-the-blanks sentence on it. The other players each pick a card from their hand that they think will be the judge’s favorite answer. The judge picks their favorite (based on literally any criteria they want), and whoever put that answer in gets a point. The judge role switches to a different player each round. Instead of going down on a tabletop, though, everything happens on your TV. The downside: it’s Android-only for now — and while the game’s developer says he’s hoping to add the ability for multiple people to play from one device, everyone needs to bring their own, for now. actually launched under a different title, originally. At first called , it mimicked ‘s style in pretty much every way — all the way down to the font choices and card coloring. According to a from ‘s developer, the changes were made at the request of the CAH guys. The game currently uses cards ripped directly from those found in the original game, which, too, might change. While is licensed under Creative Commons (they actually give CAH away for free in PDF form, if you want to print all the cards yourself), the developer is still working out just how legally sound that is. With that in mind, it seems, ‘s developer is focusing on making the game more of an engine for user-created content. Want to play with the original CAH deck? You’d download those and throw them into the engine. Want to play the Doctor Who-themed , instead? Just toss that deck in, instead. The project is only a few days old — so expect bugs, and expect things to change from build to build. But it’s free! You can |
After 2 Months, Gadget Marketplace App FOBO Has Hit A Million-Dollar Run Rate. This Video Shows Why. | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | It’s been just about two months since launched its . But already, the app has proven wildly successful in its home market of San Francisco, where it’s pushing a $1 million run rate and spreading just by word-of-mouth. FOBO is an ultra-simple app for buying — and selling — consumer electronics from your mobile phone. Aiming to be a Craigslist competitor, the app does away with many of the problems that users of that marketplace run into — i.e. lack of a guaranteed price, flaky buyers, and those who like to show up and haggle after the fact. Here’s how it works: Sellers list their consumer electronics on the app, and FOBO offers them a guaranteed minimum price for each device. Then, the items are put up for 97-minute auctions, during which time local buyers can bid to purchase the goods for anything above the minimum price. When an auction is over, the purchase amount is deducted from the winner’s credit card, and then buyer and seller find a time to exchange the item within 48 hours. Once the handoff is complete and verified by the buyer, the seller receives her share of the sale. If no one bids on the device, the FOBO team buys it and resells it themselves through other auction sites. Either way, the seller gets paid. I tested out the app to see how it works, selling off some consumer electronics devices I had lying around the house. That included a WDTV streaming video player, an Apple wireless keyboard, and a Dropcam HD wireless security camera. As shown in the video above, two of the three items sold for significantly more than their starting prices, while the third item was sold directly to FOBO. The whole process was quick and painless and resulted in me selling about $100 worth of goods in just a few hours, all without having to deal with the hassles of flaky Craigslist buyers. That ease of use means about half of all FOBO sellers who have tried it out come back and use it again, which leads to more — and better — deals on gadgets. To see my experience with the app, check out the video above — or better yet, if you’re in San Francisco, try FOBO out for yourself. |
How Many More Viral Comedy Videos A Day Will Obama Need To Meet Healthcare Goals? | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 16 |
President Obama’s is on its way to becoming one of the most viral videos in Funny or Die history. It spiked visits to Healthcare.gov an impressive 40%, compared to the day before. Unfortunately, this latest political touchdown was made in the 4th quarter and . They are still about 2.8 million enrollees short of their original goal of 7 million for the March 31st enrollment deadline. So, how many more viral videos a day does the Administration need to meet its goals? Let’s get nerdy with the numbers. By any metric, Obama’s comedy skit was a smash hit. The first day, it and, according to Health and Human Services, drove over half-a-million visits to the healthcare marketplace, healthcare.gov. Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, spiked the football, . But, when we dig through the broader numbers, . The Administration originally hoped for 7 million enrollees, flooding the system with the healthy bodies of young 20-somethings, whose sparse doctor visits will subsidize health care for the rest of the country. Unfortunately, massive website problems put the brakes on enrollment for the first few months (and, as I’ve argued, it’s ). So, by the end of February, only 4.2 million people have enrolled in a new health plan. February’s numbers are particularly disturbing because we expect to see a steady increase in enrollment as we race toward the deadline. In Massachusetts in 2007, which experimented with a healthcare mandate similar to the one in the Affordable Care Act, . Yet, in February, less people signed up than the month before (943K in February vs. 1.1M in January). notes that Health and Human Services was hoping to have 5.6 million enrolled by February, with 1.3 million that month alone. The Funny Or Die video certainly helped enroll more folks, but how many more? Well, of visitors to enrollees have pegged the number at about 5% (5 out of every 100 people who visit the site actually get insurance). If Funny or Die drove roughly 600,000 more page views, that’s an extra 30,000 enrollees (rounding to be conservative). If the Administration managed a new viral video every day until the deadline on March 31st, it’d mean about 450k additional signups. If March is a run-a-way success, and enrolls 50% more people than last month (1 million), the additional 500 thousand could meet the Congressional Budget Office’s downgraded goal. See, after the website problems, . But, if it actually needs 7 million, the Administration will need 2 more viral videos every single day. Our rough estimates seem to jive with previously released numbers. that on an average day in February, 33,000 people signed up for Obamacare. If the day before the Funny Or Die video saw roughly 635,000 views, and that represents the average page views a day, then healthcare.gov does, indeed, have about a 5% conversion rate (again, we’re rounding to be conservative). So, if all of the 40% more Funny or Die visitors had the same propensity to buy health insurance, we would have about 42,000 enrollees a day, for every day the administration released a viral video. If the administration needs 1 million more signups, it still needs about 24 more viral videos (1M divided by 42K). Or, two videos a day for the next 12 days. If you want more math nerdiness, has a very detailed count of enrollment . Ultimately, the final numbers will depend on the success of the states, greater marketing from the White House, and the procrastination of consumers. Our numbers are just rough estimates to put the Funny or Die video in to context. [tweet https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/444984134281089024] Given that it’s going to be difficult to meet the enrollment goals, one option is to chain Funny or Die workers to their desks and churn out some laughs. Or, the most likely option: the administration . |
Gillmor Gang: Another Fine Mess | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor In a world where big planes can be lost without a trace and and drunk-drivers make the biggest headlines at tech conferences, it was only fitting that we turned this episode of the Gillmor Gang on its head and started with an ending. Only in this crazy world does that make any sense. Robert Scoble gives us a taste of how HE experiences South By Southwest; fancy cars and drivers, rockstar-studded private parties, and excess upon excess. Others in the Gang debated the real benefit of the tech-meets-music conference and wonder if it has indeed jumped the shark. All agreed it is no longer the place for startups to launch. Lunch, dinner, network, party-hearty? Sure. But don’t launch. Music brought us around to sound, and the technology of sound almost produced a fist-fight between Scoble and Kevin Marks. Apparently Scoble has bore witness – well his ears have – to a sound fidelity that Kevin Marks absolutely rejects. Even the mention of being in Neil Young’s studio while this was being demonstrated didn’t sway the adamant Marks. Finally and somehow, we traveled off course (or was this in the flight plan all along?) and zeroed in on notifications. Steve managed to draw out a substantive conversation about the Battle of the Notifications, perhaps an outgrowth of the Attention Economy. As products and services test, fumble, and jockey for position, Steve assures us all that Notifications is the future of messaging, broadcasting, journalism, enterprise….well, everything. Not everyone is convinced but interestingly, a certain consensus is reached. Touchdown! Recorded live Saturday, March 15, 2014. This show is produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Cosy Is A Smart Heating & Home Control System Coming Out Of Cambridge, U.K. | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | When , it poured a fresh wave of attention and interest into smart home automation systems — even though it’s not entirely clear whether Google swooped on more as an acqui-hire (of Tony Fadell and his team) than a desire to further feather its connected home credentials. Whatever , it’s unlikely to focus early effort pushing connected home hardware into markets far from Mountain View. And that’s giving a bit of breathing space to European Nest alternatives. There’s German startup , for instance, which last September raised $2.6 million. And soon there will likely also be : a smart home control system being developed in Cambridge, U.K. — aiming to ship product next month. The initial Cosy system will include the inevitable mobile app to allow the users to control the connected hardware and access the Cosy cloud (where their heating and other home-related data is stored). Then the hardware kit consists of a wireless hub device to co-ordinate all the various pieces of the Cosy connected home system; a smart thermostat display to replace the traditional thermostat in the home; a wireless switch which communicates with the boiler; and also one or more smart plugs to allow the Cosy user to remotely control additional electrical appliances if they wish.
The startup has funded development thus far (six months on Cosy itself, but the company behind it, (Geo), has had skin in the smart heating and smart metering game since 2009) via private investment — with more than 100 investors backing its project. It’s now going the Kickstarter route for the final phase of this first tranche of development to get Cosy to market. Specifically it’s using the crowdfunding site to fund the ability for users of the app to control devices via the Cosy smart plugs, as well as remotely tweak their heating — having already built the core hardware prototypes and got all the other pieces of the puzzle working together. Geo names its main competitors as Tado, Nest, and British Gas’ . It says it’s differentiating by offering control for the whole home environment, not just doing a smart thermostat — looping in lighting and other electrical devices (whether that’s a radio or your electric blanket, say) by incorporating wireless plugs to extend its remote control abilities. So, for instance, when you open the front door the kitchen light will be on and your favourite radio station playing (as well as the heating on). Or that’s the idea. “We understand the emotional meaning of ‘cosy’ and what that translates in to in terms of light, warmth, security and lifestyle. We’re about so much more than ‘heat’,” the startup tells TechCrunch. “We’ve also made all the bits of kit in Cosy over-the-air upgradeable, so that early backers can access future functionality. We are creating a connected system for the home rather than a heating controller. “This release includes Smart Plugs, but the roadmap involves temperature sensors, TRVs, electricity and gas monitors, solar monitors and controls — all building towards a truly connected home… The Hub holds, receives and sends data, which means we can use it in plenty of other ways (in the future).” The Cosy system is also designed to support multiple users so it won’t matter who in the family gets home first — the system will respond to that user’s particular preferences. “Each user has an identity and there is an activity record so that you can see who has done what and when. For example, if you are on your way home and you go to switch the heating on, you may find it’s already on. You can look at the activity record and see that your partner switched it on 5 minutes before and so may well be home before you. Now, for the sake of safety (and harmony in the home!) there is one main account who has the overall say-so.” Another differentiator for Cosy is that it supports multi fuels — including oil and LPG. It also says it’s trialling heat pumps, electric and biomass heating integration. Finally, the Cosy thermostat is a mobile wireless unit, which means it can be moved from room to room so the user can set the temperature based on their current location (by taking the thermostat with them) rather than having the temperature benchmark be fixed to a hallway or corridor — or wherever the traditional wall-mounted thermostat happens to be. How that works with multiple users in the house, and only one mobile thermostat in the kit, remains to be seen. Geo says it’s working on enabling multiple heating zones in future iterations of its product. It’s also working on adding intelligence/learning to the heating controls — presumably a la Nest’s learning thermostat functionality. But, for Cosy’s first release, its users are going to have to do the remote switching on and off themselves, via the app. Despite this first release not including learning smarts or offering the ability to provision multiple heating zones, the startup stresses its devices support over the air updates so early backers are future-proofed to get these upgrades when they do land. “Cosy acts as the brains of the home to which the heating is just one thought. Other thoughts include: hot water, zoned heating, geo-fencing, behavioural control, energy monitoring, PV/microgeneration insight and of course the device control (currently represented by our one Smart Plug, but to which there is no limit – you can add as many Smart Plugs as you like to the system),” it adds. “Our ultimate aim is to make one holistic connected system for the home (of which Cosy is just one piece).” Geo says it also intends to license access to its protocols to third parties, and points out that its Hub is designed to accommodate other radios, such as ZigBee — so it could incorporate third party’s smart meters in future. “Cosy is just the start. And third parties will be part of this: we are determined to create a truly connected system for the home,” it adds. That ambition obviously depends on Brits’ appetite for Cosy. The company is also potentially going up against a behemoth in Nest/Google — if indeed Google is as committed to the connected home space as the Nest purchase suggests on the surface. For now, Geo is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise £20,000 to get its first batch of Cosy kits to market in the UK. It’s thinking beyond that home market though, and says it already has approval for Cosy to be used in any EU country. (On the smart plugs side it says it has a limited number of European plugs available — but it hopes to extend that via Kickstarter stretch goals.) The campaign has raised just over a fifth of its funding target of £20,000, with 29 days left to run. If all goes to plan, Geo is aiming to ship Cosy to backers starting from this April. The price of the Cosy system starts at £150 ($250) for one Cosy smart thermostat kit plus one smart plug. That compares to circa $415 for Tado’s Connector Kit (although the company offers a monthly rental option costing $12); and $250 for Nest’s learning thermostat alone. (The Nest Protect smart smoke alarm costs a further $130.) |
Meet The Companies Pitching At The Washington D.C. And NYC Meetups | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | Buckle up, NYC and Washington D.C., because we have a roster of Pitch-Off companies for this week’s meetups. We’ll be hitting , at The Park at Fourteenth, and then we’ll rock on over to my turf in to hang out with Silicon Alley at Santos Party House. As per usual, our meetups are full of booze and networking, as well as a pitch competition which will give about a dozen startups just 60 seconds to impress a panel of judges. We’ve already announced the , as well as a guest appearance and , and our NYC-based judges will be revealed shortly. In both cases, we’ve wrangled some of the greatest minds and most generous wallets in each city, so who knows? Maybe we’ll see the birth of a few deals right before our eyes. The full list of companies competing in both cities can be found below. 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. Are you a funded startup? Local employer? A company looking for a few good code ninjas? Consider emailing Sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com to help support the event. If you’d like to exhibit, please pop over to . The goal is to make this a great event for everyone and we can’t do that without your help. Bootstrapping and can’t afford a table? Let John or myself know. Matt@beta.techcrunch.com or john@beta.techcrunch.com. Thanks to our current sponsors, tickets to both events are just $5 and can be found and . However, tomorrow our early bird pricing will end and tickets will jump to $10. In other words, move now. Age 21 and up, please. |
Google’s Eric Schmidt On Critics Who Say College Isn’t Worth It: “They’re Just Wrong” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | Google Chairman Eric Schmidt took a not-so-subtle swipe at tech critics . “There are various people who run around and make claims that higher education is not a good use of your time: they’re just wrong,” he told the audience at the SXSW conference, where he was on stage promoting his book . The average college loan racks up $30,000 and the students are thrown into an uncertain recession-wracked job market. The most notable critic is Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who claimed that higher education was a “bubble,” and that invests in gifted kids who want to become entrepreneurs instead of attending college. Tech investor and TechCrunch columnist James Altucher has fiercely argued that college isn’t worth the rising costs. “Not only is college a scam, but the presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition,” . Schmidt vehemently disagrees. “The economic return to higher education over a lifetime produces significant compound greater earnings.” It’s true, on average, economists find that by about 15-30 percent. Despite the debt, it’s a wise investment for many students. When asked about the difficulty in paying for college, Schmidt was adamant: “I appreciate it’s expensive and we need to fix that,” he said, but “figure out a way to do it.” One potential problem with Schmidt’s statement is that it was an argument for the student. It may be more advantageous for students at the bottom and top quartiles of the talent distribution to go straight into the workforce (or get vocational training). Case in point, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, and I don’t think anybody would say he made a mistake. Similarly, students who fail out of college are left adrift with little more than debt. A cheaper vocational school can be a better choice. Schmidt also noted that — especially for gifted students — teachers should focus on teaching “grit.” “It looks like the thing that separates out the capable students from the really successful ones is not so much their knowledge,” says Schmidt, “but their persistence at something.” In other words, if a kid quits at the first sign of trouble, all the natural intelligence in the world won’t matter. Still, for the vast majority of students, Schmidt argued that college is worth it no matter what their goal. “If all you care about is money, you should go to college. If all you care about is culture and creativity, you should go to college. If all you care about is having fun, you should go to college. Go to college. I can’t be any clearer.” |
After Supporting Prop 8, New CEO Brendan Eich Comes Under Fire From Mozilla Employees | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Mozilla employees are calling for the removal of new CEO Brendan Eich, who previously held the position of CTO and has been with the company since its formation out of Netscape in the 90’s. In 2008, Eich , which was a California ballot proposition that aimed to ban gay marriage in California. In 2012, the was uncovered, with Mozilla appearing right next to Eich’s name. Eich remained at the company, continuing on as CTO, after the brief scandal. With this week’s appointment to CEO, Eich has come under fire from employees in his own organization and from members of the LGBT tech community. Open Badges lead at Mozilla Chris McAvoy tweeted: I love but I'm disappointed this week. stands for openness and empowerment, but is acting in the opposite way. — Chris McAvoy (@chmcavoy) And a creative lead in Badges, Jess Klein… Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of and I'm asking to step down as CEO. — iamjessklein (@iamjessklein) John Bevan, from Partnerships at Mozilla Foundation… I'm an employee of and I'm asking to step down as CEO. — John Bevan (@bevangelist) And this design researcher… To me, is about openness & expression of freedom. I hope to see us have leadership that represents those values in their actions. — emgollie (@emgollie) And the list goes on. Other employees have jotted down their issues in blog form. Mozilla’s head of Education Christie Koehler didn’t weigh in on Eich’s suitability as a CEO, but did with his private endorsement of anti-LGBT legislation. Like a lot of people, I was disappointed when I found out that Brendan had donated to the anti-marriage equality Prop. 8 campaign in California. It’s hard for me to think of a scenario where someone could donate to that campaign without feeling that queer folks are less deserving of basic rights. It frustrates me when people use their economic power to further enshrine and institutionalize discrimination. Still, she praises the company’s progress in regards to healthcare benefits and , and she doesn’t see Eich standing in the way of that. Certainly it would be problematic if Brendan’s behavior within Mozilla was explicitly discriminatory, or implicitly so in the form of repeated microagressions. I haven’t personally seen this (although to be clear, I was not part of Brendan’s reporting structure until today). To the contrary, over the years I have watched Brendan be an ally in many areas and bring clarity and leadership when needed. And it wasn’t just employees who spoke up about Eich’s new CEO role. Rarebit, an app developer that was quite active in the Firefox marketplace, announced that it would with Eich at the helm. Founders, and married gay couple, Hampton Catlin and Michael Lintorn Catlin published a post on their blog describing the painstaking process of trying to start a company with his partner, who was in the midst of the immigration process and tied to his job on a visa. Today, Michael has a green card and we’re able to pursue this venture in the US. These days, I am so damn proud of my country for making this all possible. It’s really stunning the support we’ve received, and thank you to everyone out there who have either changed their own minds on the subject, or convinced a relative or friend that there is nothing wrong with the government recognizing our relationship. Thank you. The overturning of , literally was the foundation that allowed us to start this venture. That’s why it’s personal for us. Brendan Eich was an active supporter of denying our right to be married and even to start this business. He actively took steps to ensure that rarebit couldn’t exist! Many advocates of Eich, like Mozillian Daniel Glazeman, of Eich not based on his personal beliefs, but based on the fact that Mozilla has always promoted an environment where everyone is entitled to their own way of thinking. Others, however, believe that Eich’s appointment to CEO may play a very different role in future decisions for the company that may affect the LGBT community, such as partner health benefits in states where gay marriages aren’t recognized. John Schneider, from Mozilla’s DevOps team, : A CEO is publicly seen as one of the most visible faces of an organization, and is quite a bit about image, partnerships, and culture, rather than the largely technical role of a CTO. Unfortunately, right now Brendan’s public image (which is also now in part Mozilla’s public image in his new role) is one showing that he donated money to deny equal rights to the LGBT community during Prop 8 in California. Note: I fully support Brendan’s right to hold these views and support them financially as he sees fit, even while I vigorously disagree with his views on this issue. Eich penned to the issue, with the hopes of putting some of these concerns to rest. In the post, he promised to uphold the same equality that has always been present at Mozilla, from employment to healthcare benefits. He also explained that he knows words are not enough, and that actions will seal whatever trust exists between him and his employees. John Lilly, former CEO at Mozilla and board member, from the company’s board of directors with a brief statement. As it stands now, it doesn’t seem like Eich is going anywhere. Current chairwoman Mitchell Baker posted of her own, promising to maintain the level of diversity and equality currently in the workplace, and hopefully grow it. But she also expressed that Eich would be a part of that. My experience is that Brendan is as committed to opportunity and diversity inside Mozilla as anyone, and more so than many. This commitment to opportunity for all within Mozilla has been a key foundation of our work for many years. I see it in action regularly. The CEO role is obviously a key role, with a large amount of authority. The CEO must have a commitment to the inclusive nature of Mozilla. This includes of course a commitment to the Community Participation Guidelines, inclusive HR practices and the spirit that underlies them. Brendan has made this commitment. Mozilla’s mission is “to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web.” In the world of tech, we influence legislation on a number of issues reaching well outside the scope of technology. After all, technology sets the boundaries for what is achievable in this world. Openness and innovation, Mozilla’s cornerstones, are dependent on diversity. Hopefully, whether Eich remains at the helm or not, Mozilla employees don’t lose sight of that. |
Facebook Bought Oculus VR To Create The Metaverse, Or Why Angry Kickstarter Backers Need To Chill | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | There are many people out there who take a pessimistic view of Facebook. To them, Mark Zuckerberg is a huckster, out to sell us the snake oils of distraction and dopamine in exchange for our eyeballs and personal data. I take the more optimistic view. I do not believe Zuckerberg is building Facebook to offer the world’s advertisers a better way to target humanity with ads. No, giving advertisers this vaguely sinister power is just a means to an end — a way to create billions of dollars of value on the current Internet while bridging the gap to the Internet of the future. In my mind, the future Facebook in Zuckerberg’s imagining is much grander, bolder and more futuristic. And what is that futuristic end? It has a lot to do with the Oculus Rift. Before I explain why, let’s talk about the metaverse. In the seminal piece of literary sci-fi that is , the author Neal Stephenson imagines a metaverse — a virtual reality world into which the technologists of a collapsed, balkanized America project their avatars. At the genesis of Stephenson’s virtual reality world (explained briefly in the book), the avatars started off as low-fidelity versions of the people behind them. But as the technology progressed, they became more and more representative and life-like, until the avatars reached the point that they were essentially digital replicas of their owners, projected into the cyber realm. In Neal Stephenson’s near-futuristic America, this metaverse was made possible by some wearable technology and a virtual reality headset. The piece he missed was Facebook. In one potential future, the identities we project into the metaverse will be fuzzy or even obscured. Here, our avatars will have little or nothing in common with our actual selves in the real world. They will range from pseudonymous constructions to total fantasies, like the socially-awkward straight male who plays the female dark elf seductress when he enters cyberspace. In another potential future, the avatars we project into the metaverse will much more closely mirror our actual selves. They will look like us, move like us, reflect our personal mannerisms, and so on. When we socialize in this virtual reality, we will be among friends, just from anywhere in the world with high-speed bandwidth, at anytime we choose. While it’s entirely possible (even likely) that both of these scenarios will co-exist, the latter future (where we project our real identities) will require some kind of authentic digital identity service that verifies that we are who we say we are, knows who we are friends with, and understands what we like and what we have in common with everyone else. In other words, it will require something a lot like Facebook. For all the hype (some deserved, some inflated) around the intersection of social, local and mobile, that trend will have nothing like the world-changing power at the intersection of social networks and virtual reality. After the gaming industry has worked out the VR interface kinks (there are a lot) and figured out how to develop credible, fully immersive experiences in a virtual world, it will be time to create something far more profound: the feeling of being “present” with your friends, colleagues and interesting strangers in virtual space. Virtual reality will be compelling because it will be free-form in ways actual reality can never be. Want to fly around the buildings of San Francisco with your girlfriend? No problem. The Grand Canyon? Sure. Want to have that board meeting in the world’s fanciest boardroom? How about a tropical beach instead? It gets pretty deep. Facebook was late to the mobile game. Indeed, Facebook’s inability to control the platforms it relies on for mobile reach (Android and iOS) presents one of the biggest risks to its medium-term success. This threat is the major reason that Facebook built Facebook Home: to do an end-run around Google and slowly-but-surely command the flow of attention and traffic on tons of Android devices. . But Zuckerberg is a visionary. He knows that smartphones and tablets are not the only interfaces of the future, and he’ll be damned if he misses the next boat. If you haven’t experienced the feeling of presence in virtual reality, or can’t imagine what the implications of that feeling are, it’s easy to believe that virtual reality isn’t that next boat, that VR is just a bunch of techno-nonsense hype. But it’s not. Feeling present in virtual reality–your mind believing it is there–is unlike anything else, and that feeling will change the world in all sorts of crazy ways. As , the display technology and processing power necessary to create the feeling of presence in VR is already here, and, though the Oculus Rift has a long way to go, it’s as close as anyone has got. With Facebook’s money behind it, Oculus VR’s team will (likely) be able to nail their product faster and have an easier time bringing it to market at scale. As Zuckerberg , Oculus VR will start by revolutionizing games. But not too long after that, it will revolutionize digital social interaction, and after that, the world. For all of this, $2 billion dollars for control of a virtual reality platform looks like a steal. |
Looking In The Rearview Mirror For Mobile App Inspiration | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 3 | 16 | TechCrunch Every Sunday, I try to write something about mobile that’s relevant today or tomorrow. This week, I thought it would be fun to briefly look back in time. When it comes to mobile (and this doesn’t include gaming), the apps that have proven to breakout either harness the (the camera), (mobile messaging), or use mobile to , which is then fulfilled offline (services). The opportunity for new startups is very large, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime window, which results in challenging, fierce competition and apps littered in deadpool folders across our phones. The good news is that you’ve all been focusing on the right areas — below, I’ll repost a few (potentially embarrassing) snippets from my older columns I’ve written about these categories specifically, which will remind us just how many apps are vying for our attention, how the eventual winners were right in the mix, and how enduring these categories will be in the future. Despite the chorus of people who reflexively decry photo-sharing apps, this is just the beginning. Photo-sharing is the consumer interaction that people get tired of because of all the apps doing this, but this misses the larger point — that the camera has always been and will continue to be the most important sensor on the phone. (Yes, GPS is important, too, and will grow into itself over time.) In December 2012, right around the time the world starting hearing about Snapchat, I wrote a column titled “ ,” with the following opening: In the few years I’ve been in Silicon Valley, if someone asked me to sum up — in one word — what defined and dominated consumer technology applications during that time, I’d have no choice but to answer: “Photos.” Now, it’s easy for others to sit back and roll their eyes at the thought of it. “Why not solve big problems?” an aggravated chorus might wail. Looking back over this time period, the big events touching on digital pictures gained outsized attention: The launch of iPhone 4, with its incredible camera; the meteoric rise and acquisition of Instagram; the technical achievement unlocked by Lytro; the influence of the Pinterest design on nearly every e-commerce site; our narcissistic addiction to Timehop or delight in depositing checks through our bank’s mobile app; today’s with exploding pictures, courtesy of Snapchat; and on the horizon, one of the most anticipated interface advancements: Google Glass. To say that the ease of mobile distribution (for the right apps) at this moment in time is attractive would be a huge understatement. In the same manner venerable companies were built on the network effects of the web, we’re beginning to see what these effects look like on mobile. No analysis is needed, because after some major acquisitions, we all know these network effects are immense. Three years ago this week, my column for the week was titled “ ,” largely written as such because I was trying out two to three new messaging apps per week and couldn’t keep up. Yet, despite all the noise of that competition, it turned out everyone listed was working on the right problem — it’s just that everyone can’t win. I ended the column with this closing, which if read today, may (unintentionally) shed light on some of Facebook’s thinking: Mobile and group messaging is attractive to investors, entrepreneurs, and users alike. If designed well, they could leverage network effects to amplify participation and enable the application of proven revenue models. This is a new class of social company, built entirely with mobility in mind from Day One. They are designed within a post-PC/laptop mindset. These companies will begin by drafting behind the lead cars in the social networking race. The most recent entrant into this red ocean — Color Labs — may have just made the waters a bit . We oftentimes take for granted that all of the established social networks will persist over time and satisfy most of our needs. Some realize building seamless, easy-to-use systems will create significant value for larger players because they weren’t originally built with mobility in mind. And some will perhaps break through and create their own lasting social experience. The shining example here is, of course, Uber, which has demonstrated people worldwide expect to download mobile software, sign up quickly, tap a few buttons to place an order, which then arrives within a reasonable time. it has spawned scores of new companies who will deliver your groceries, send you deliveries, pre-order items for you, and much more. Yet, the devil in these details is that local service models take real work to scale geographically. About a year ago, I wrote a column called “ ,” the car-washing service which I used and liked, but ultimately folded. I closed that post with the following: It’s easy to mock Cherry as a small idea, but I give them credit — and hey, they could still do something new and interesting. They went out, delivered a service, and while there were some , their shutdown creates a learning opportunity for the ecosystem which is especially timely given the companies I’ve mentioned above, and the venture capital (and time) needed to make these things spread offline with real margins. In the past few months, I’ve grown concerned that these offline, non-technical, and operational elements aren’t taken into humble consideration or waved off as being “easy” to execute on. Too many people think to themselves, “Hey, we’ll do what Uber did, no problem. Well, what Uber did and is doing is really, really hard, and they still have a long way to go. It’s also important to recognize that Uber is mostly a marketplace and doesn’t handle labor as much as some of the other companies. Managing and training labor is time-consuming and expensive, and can negatively impact all three dimensions listed above. When Uber was raising their early venture and growth rounds, some investors still passed on the deal because while they liked the transaction volume and offline scaling proof points, some questioned the robustness of margins. To each his/her own. That said, if Uber had such a tough time and fought through it, I’d imagine everyone else in this broad category will go through as much pain or more in order to get a peek to the promised land in the horizon. Yes, it’s a fight worth fighting for, but as we see with a company like Cherry, which probably had enough cash to keep going for a bit longer, there should be no illusions in how hard it will be to get there. So, what’s the point of all this reflection regarding consumer mobile apps today? My interpretation is that these are all good reminders for all of us who play in the mobile ecosystem — founders, operators, investors, and reporters — that when it comes to breakout mobile-first companies, the breakout categories are quite clear and any entrant should expect fierce competition. That said, there are lessons to learn from what previous companies have done right as well as those who didn’t quite make it. And, many of those lessons have a longer shelf-life than we may like to admit. We live in a world with two relevant mobile operating systems built by companies with lots of influence, power, and cash. We live in a world where we expect everything to be mobile tomorrow, yet only a few categories produce these breakouts today. We live in a world where we expect new mobile software to be pretty, with slick designs, yet some of the biggest apps appear to have very simple user interfaces. We live in a world where we expect mobile software to scale effortlessly with a few clicks and some well-timed PR hits, but to bring an Uber-like model to other locations requires dirt-under-the-fingernail tactics that are mostly executed offline. Every now and then, I like to make sure we all look at , because we could potentially already be using the next big thing, or have used some version of it before. / |
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