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Keen On… Scale: How To Spread Excellence From The Few To The Many | Andrew Keen | 2,014 | 3 | 28 |
is one of Silicon Valley’s most influential business gurus. A at Stanford’s Engineering School, he is the author of bestselling books like and . And his latest book is , which argues that what distinguishes great companies like Pixar, Twitter, Google and Facebook from dysfunctional companies like Zynga is their ability to scale their organization. “Scale”, Sutton told me, means the “spreading of excellence from the few to the many”. And successful founders, he explains, are able to build teams around them and grow the company organically. But some companies are harder to grow than others, he says. Indeed, Sutton even refers to something he calls “the glass cliff” at struggling companies like Yahoo, where the job is so challenging that men are scared of taking it on. Being CEO of Google is an “easy job” compared to Yahoo, he says. Marissa Mayer could easily run Google, he says; but Larry Page would struggle to run Yahoo. So is Bob Sutton right? Is everything in Silicon Valley really about people? And are the most successful companies those that are best able to scale their organization? |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Oh, hey there, fans. Thinking about going for a little dip this summer? How about you go for a swim with a one-ton crab that will smash you under its massive legs? Sound fun? Definitely! is a wild crab-like robot designed to explore the deepest oceans without smashing itself into a squashed tin can. It has massive legs, a large body, and lots of cameras so it can find you even if you’re the dude from and can dive really deep. There’s no escaping our future robotic-aquatic overlords!
Not afraid of a crab? How about a that moves by filling air sacs up over and over again. It has interior chambers that hold air and a pump fills each leg up one at a time so it can crawl across the table and smoosh itself onto your face. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCEzuPKgK6c] Robots are taking our jobs, sure, but will they also steal our pens? This DIY robot can write on paper using a pen and clever programmer. Created by Dan Royer it’s an example of the simple things that robots will soon be doing in order to undermine our economy, namely kiting checks by faking our signatures. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1-ZIk8nOSQ]
Confused as to why your friends have changed so much overnight? They’ve probably been taken over by facial counterfeits that can scan and use your friends’ faces. The robot, called , follows you with its eyes and allows you to chat with it as if you were chatting with a human. But remember: it’s not a human. And it hates you.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqazH93RqH0] |
Meet Astro Teller, Head Of Moonshots At Google’s Project X Lab | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | has your dream job, currently serving as the Captain of Moonshots at the lab. There, he dreams and creates things like Google Glass, , balloons that , and many other seemingly impossible projects he and his team hope will one day become reality. We’re thrilled to announce that Astro will be joining us for an onstage interview at . Google has been recently that will allow it to participate heavily in the “Internet of Things,” the movement that will put connectivity functionality into nearly everything in your home. The , which makes connected thermostats and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors; Deepmind, an that will help Google focus on deep learning; and robotics company . Google[x] is also , creating clean energy with , and doing … something … with . And that’s just the projects we know about. Google[x] is undoubtedly looking at many other ways to make and bring what would otherwise seem like crazy, impossible, and/or far-off ideas into our reality. Astro Teller is a big idea guy, an entrepreneur who co-founded several successful companies. Prior to landing at Google[x], Teller co-founded and still serves as an acting director of Cerebellum Capital, Inc., an investment management firm that makes investment decisions using an advanced algorithm based on statistical machine learning. He also co-founded BodyMedia, a leading health wearables company that was , intellectual property holding company Zivio Technologies, and Sandbox Advanced Development, an advanced development technology company. Teller is also crazy smart, holding both a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s degree in symbolic and heuristic computation from Stanford. He was awarded a Hertz fellowship, which rewards the nation’s most remarkable Ph.D. students in the physical, biological and engineering sciences for his work in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon. And according to , he makes a mean margarita. Maybe he’ll demonstrate this for us on the Disrupt stage. This will be Teller’s first time participating in Disrupt. He joins other notable founders , including Secret co-founders Chrys Bader-Wechseler and David Byttow, Vine’s Colin Kroll and Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler. More speakers are set to be announced in the coming weeks as the event nears. Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City on May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased , and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team . |
TechCrunch Is Looking For An Office Manager | Greg Barto | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Working at TechCrunch the past three years has been a privilege for me, but it’s time for me to move on. And this is an opportunity for you to move in. Really, being the TechCrunch office manager and assisting , and the rest of the team is a dream job. You get to work alongside great co-workers and for a company that’s truly passionate about startups. We all work very hard here at TechCrunch, but we also have a lot of fun. If this sounds like a team you’d like to join, take a look at the listing below and send me an email at . Warning: Applying for this job, you must be prepared for . |
Tesla Strikes Deal To Keep Dealerships In New York | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Tesla can keep its dealerships in the state of New York. An agreement was made between the auto maker and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that will allow Tesla to keep its five direct-to-consumer retail stores as long as it doesn’t open any more. Tesla took the deal and ran to the bank. , any new dealerships Tesla wishes to open would have to abide by a “strengthened dealer franchise law.” In return, New York lawmakers who had previously sought to outlaw Tesla’s current and future retail stores will end their efforts. This deal is similar to one struck in Ohio earlier this week. While the measure seems like a stop-gap solution, both Tesla and Gov. Cuomo view it as an acceptable solution that benefits the consumer, Tesla and the franchised dealerships. Tesla’s unconventional business practices extend all the way to selling its vehicles. Instead of turning to franchised dealerships, it uses company-owned retail stores and service centers. In several states, this practice has come under fire by associations looking out for the dealerships. The company is outright banned from selling its vehicles in some states. But at least in New York, while this measure prevents new stores from opening up, the company can still sell its vehicles to consumers — while continuing to lobby for further change. |
Gillmor Gang Live 03.28.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | – Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
BeHere Lets Teachers Take Attendance Using iBeacon Technology | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | While Apple’s iBeacon technology is already being by both large and small , we’ve started to see other use cases pop up for this new indoor positioning technology, which involves Bluetooth LE-enabled transmitters that can communicate with nearby iOS 7 devices in order to push alerts, or even . Now a small team of developers based in Brazil have come up with a new angle for iBeacon: taking attendance in the classroom. Their new application called , first spotted by Apple blog , turns a teacher’s iPad into an iBeacon that automatically identifies students as they enter the classroom with their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch application also running the same BeHere app. Students’ profiles can also be connected to Facebook, allowing BeHere to include a profile picture, too. Plus, students can use the app after class starts to ask for the teacher’s help by just pushing a button on their phone. The teacher then sees those requests in a queue, and can respond as needed. BeHere, now making its official debut, was created by a company called Beelieve, which includes developers Ricardo Rauber, Maurício Meirelles, Maurício T. Zaquia, and Ricardo Rauber Pereira. Together, the team has self-funded their applications by doing client work, which lets them build their own projects, like this game designer . That app is currently on hold while they focus on BeHere, however. Rauber also tells us they’ve been working on the BeHere application itself since the release of the iOS 7 SDK. The company is currently testing the app at various colleges, where it has nearly 400 users, up from just 17 initially (teachers and students combined). Though only a simple application with minimal flourishes, the team has come up with an interesting idea which again showcases the broad potential for iBeacon outside the retail environment. While this particular app may not win the race when it comes to iBeacon in the classroom, it’s definitely a thought-provoking experiment. Now the next challenge is to figure out how to prevent students from carrying their friends’ phones into class so they can skip class that day. Or, hey, maybe that won’t be an issue, since who would want to be without their iPhone? The new BeHere application is a . [vimeo 90013859 w=500 h=281] |
Microsoft Will Stop Inspecting Customer Content, Will Instead Refer Cases To Law Enforcement | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Microsoft has released a from General Counsel and EVP – Legal & Corporate Affairs Brad Smith detailing changes to its practices stemming from a recent report detailing how it read a blogger’s email without their permission to track down a source code leak. Microsoft will not be doing that ever again, the post says, and instead they’ll refer any and all potential similar situations to law enforcement directly. The case in question involved Microsoft checking a blogger’s email when they found an ex-employee had leaked said blogger proprietary software. They did so on the basis that the case was extraordinary, and that fast response was the best way to quash the illegal distribution of their proprietary content before it got out of hand. Microsoft followed up that report with a blog post from another of its top lawyers, Deputy General Counsel John Frank, who justified the action and provided context for why the company did what they did. Now, however, they’ve gone even further, promising not to operate in this manner ever again, even under the kind of extreme circumstances that prompted them to do this before. They still claim no legal wrongdoing in the previous case; it was “clearly within [their] legal rights,” according to the new post by Smith. Even so, Smith also concedes that they’ve been listening to feedback from customers and realize they should take their own medicine so to speak, and rely on formal legal processes going forward. The dogfooding aspect here comes from Microsoft realizing that it has been advocating more openness and a strict adherence to the letter of the law and going through proper channels, by the government in accessing Microsoft’s customer data. The same standard should apply to Microsoft itself, and Smith clearly acknowledges that in this case, it didn’t. Microsoft isn’t just making a promise, however; it’s partnering with The Center for Democracy and Technology and The Electronic Frontier Foundation to help it identify the best way forward regarding customer privacy issues like this one that may crop up in the future. This is progress, and it’s nice to see Microsoft’s view on the matter evolve in response to clear customer expression of distaste and disappointment. Of course, legally they’re still primarily watching out for their own interests, but at least this shouldn’t happen again, or if it does, Microsoft won’t have its terms of service to fall back on. |
Confirmed: Dropbox Aqcui-Hires Social Reading App Readmill | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | As TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear yesterday, Readmill just that Dropbox acquired the company and that the service will shut down. It is a pure acqui-hire as the team will join Dropbox’s team and work on its core service. “As of today, it is no longer possible to create a new account, and on July 1, 2014, the Readmill app will no longer be available,” the two co-founders Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud write on the blog. Users can export their reading data and download their books. As a reminder, the Berlin-based startup developed a social reading platform for iOS and Android. The company released a well-designed mobile application to read and share highlights and extracts with your friends. According to our first report, the deal value is around $8 million. Most of it is in stock, and the rest in cash. The two co-founders will move to San Francisco. The company raised a $385,000 seed round from Passion Capital and Index Ventures (€280,000) and an undisclosed Series A round from Wellington Partners and existing investors. |
Zuck Nerds Out On Drones Vs. Satellites For Delivering Internet | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Free Space Optic lasers? Low earth orbit satellites? Solar-powered drones? has just on how Facebook’s for delivering Internet to the developing world actually work. Here’s are the highlights from his 3000 word progress report on Internet.org, including digs at Google’s Project Loon, and how it all fits into . First, the “Why”. Zuckerberg explains that when people get the Internet, they can connect with friends and family plus communities around the world, but it also empowers them economically. the Internet can help people find jobs, become entrepreneurs, get healthcare, educate themselves, receive financial services, and gain a say in their society. He calls this entering the “knowledge economy”, and cites a Deloitte study saying it could “create another 140 million new jobs, lift 160 million people out of poverty, and reduce child mortality by hundreds of thousands of lives.” Until now, has been using partnerships to expand Internet access. In report six months ago, he focused on how data compression, cheaper smartphones, and more efficient terrestrial transmission of connectivity could give more people the web. These efforts could make the Internet more affordable to the 80% to 90% of the world’s population that lives close enough to a city to be covered by existing 2G and 3G networks, but for whom the big obstacle is cost. Facebook has already been demoing some of these partnerships. “ In this report, though, Zuckerberg explains Internet.org will also focus on inventing entirely new ways of delivering connectivity, specifically through . These will serve the 10% to 20% of the population currently outside of existing connectivity infrastructure. The big question Zuck answers here is what type of vehicle is best for beaming Internet to who. First, he breaks down the physics that shape the answers. Essentially the higher you beam Internet from, the wider area you can cover but with a weaker signal. For densely populated areas, you need high-strength, low-altitude terrestrial connectivity beamed from towers like we’re used to in the developed world. Those don’t work as well in the developing world, though, as they’re expensive to physically build and install, and are vulnerable to threats on the ground including war, looting, theft, and natural disasters. For lower-density suburban areas, drones work well because they’re high enough to blanket a city-sized area with signal, but low enough to give a decent signal. Facebook recently acqhired talent from UK-based drone company Ascenta who had worked on the Qinetiq Zephyr, the longest-flying solar-powered drone. Facebook’s Connectivity Lab plans to drones that operate at 65,000 feet because that’s the lowest unregulated airspace which simplifies deployment, weather conditions and wind speeds at the altitude are low so drones are easy to control, and that’s above the clouds so they can reliably soak up solar energy to stay afloat for months at a time. Here, Zuck takes a swipe at Google’s helium-balloon Project Loon for bringing Internet to the developing world. He explains one big advantage of drones is that Facebook would “be able to precisely control the location of these aircraft, unlike balloons” because they can fly where they want opposed to having to rely on wind locomotion. He also notes that “ For extremely remote, sparse populations, Zuckerberg explains that satellites are best as they can cover an extremely wide area, though with only a signal strong enough to use very basic Internet services. Facebook’s Connectivity Lab is working on two types of satellites. Low Earth Orbit satellites are smaller, cheaper to launch, and are lower to the earth so they can provide a stronger signal and less latency for real-time services like voice calling. But since they don’t orbit at the same speed as the earth, base stations on the ground have to be constantly reconfigured to receive the signal, and a whole network of satellites that encompass the globe is necessary to maintain consistent coverage. On the other hand, geosynchronous satellites orbit at 35,786 kilometers above sea level and stay at a fixed point over the earth so base stations can stay pointed in one direction. But since they’re so much higher, the signal is weaker. Overall, satellites are extremely expensive to not only build, but to fire into space. That means Facebook might be inclined to focus on geosynchronous satellites instead of low earth orbit ones because it wouldn’t have to deploy an entire fleet. But to make satellites that high work, Facebook needs to make the signal they beam stronger… To make the signal shot by its drones and satellites stronger, Facebook’s Connectivity Lab is working on Free Space Optics, a form of infrared laser that transmits information via light. FSO can deliver Internet much faster than traditional microwave-based systems, and it uses much less power. That makes it better for solar-powered satellites and drones that have limited power. But FSO has big weaknesses too. They need a line of sight from the transmitter to a receiver mounted on the ground, which means it can be easily disrupted by clouds or bad weather. The lasers must be pinpoint accurate — enough so that they could hit a dime from 10 miles away. While it may be a while until FSO is fully developed, and getting approval to beam microwave-based Internet from satellites could take five to seven years, the drone-based approach is almost ready to go. Zuck says of the unmanned aerial vehicles, “We expect to have an initial version of this system working in the near future.” That means could start coming to fruition sooner than some might expect. Right now, Zuckerberg says Facebook’s mission plays out in the short-term by connecting more users to Facebook with a focus on messaging, opening the news and friendly content to people through the News Feed, and helping businesses “share” with people…by charging them for ads. It’s then using the profits from this phase to invest in the next, which includes Internet.org to connect the five billion people without Internet, open more data and make it useful through artificial intelligence, and letting people share vividly through Oculus’ virtual reality. Overall, Internet.org is walking the line between philanthropy and customer acquisition. Zuck seems honestly interested in helping the world thrive by democratizing connectivity, but there’s no denying that the project could invent some lucrative intellectual property and prime the developing world to become Facebook users in the process. You can decide whether these objectives justify or pollute each other. But regardless of what it means for Facebook’s business prospects, Internet.org could give people opportunities to empower themselves. Oh, and there’s one casually mentioned point in Zuckerberg’s report that could be a bit frightening if you’re a mobile operator: “The lasers used in FSO systems provide extremely high bandwidths and capacity, on par with terrestrial fiber optic networks”. If Facebook can perfect FSO, it could have a technology capable of disrupting the carriers or that it could license to them. That way it could subsidize Internet for the developing world by selling it to developed one. |
SRCH2 Brings Its Fast, Google-Like Search Technology To Android Developers And Consumers | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | , an enterprise software company founded by ex-Googlers and Stanford PhD’s and focused on building faster, more efficient search technology, is expanding its reach to mobile consumers and mobile developers. The company is now launching a new , which will allow third parties to integrate the SRCH2 technology into their own applications. In addition, showcasing what SRCH2 technology can do has also gone live in Google Play, offering end users the ability to search and find any contact, message, calendar invite, music, app and more. To give you an idea of the various use cases for consumers, this search functionality supports searching by things as specific as a song’s artist or a title fragment, or users can look for an address from a calendar invite from a particular time frame, for example. Founded back in 2008 by ex-Googler Chen Li, also formerly of IBM and HP, SRCH2 has been primarily focused on its in-memory search engine technology for enterprise customers. The technology, a competitor to Lucene and Endeca, is now used by customers like CBS, Huawei, and most recently HTC, which is planning to integrate SRCH2 natively into their new Android smartphones launching in the first half of this year. In fact, it was HTC’s move to integrate SRCH2 into the kernel that gave the company the idea about making this move to mobile, and the subsequent launch of its SDK. “When we first did that deal, we started realizing that there’s some opportunities there that maybe we should have thought through a little bit better,” admits SRCH2 CEO Dev Bhatia. “Why is it that a major handset manufacturer wants to run this kind of an enterprise search software inside a handset?,” they asked themselves. “As it turns out, the way it’s built is really efficient, and it’s small enough and thin enough that it can do that high-performance stuff…and still fit on a handset or any device,” Bhatia says. While the datacenter-focused technology was 40 times faster than competitors, the company claims that on mobile, it’s now 400 times faster. (SRCH2 references a study from a third-party as the basis for these figures.) Plus, it uses less power, which is also an important factor on mobile. The SDK is designed to be integrated into mobile applications using 5 lines of code, and once there, it provides the end users of that application with a feature set not previously available via other search utilities. For example – as you can see when using the new SRCH2 for Mobile consumer app – the app can adapt itself as you use it, learning and returning more relevant results the more you interact with it, while also offering things like instant, typo-tolerant search-as-you-type, index all your phone’s application, log your interactions with them to rank those you use more often higher, and more. Though clearly, they’re a technology provider, not a design-focused company: The company envisions the initial customers for this new SDK will be more in the business utility space, and likely on the enterprise mobility side of things. Bhatia details a potential use case, explaining: “Let’s say the client is a major cloud enabler of sales people, hypothetically. Salesperson #1 in Austin, Texas logs a call and makes a change to his data…that gets propagated to the cloud as is available to salesperson #2 who’s in Brazil interacting with the same global client,” says Bhatia. “What I’ve just described is federated search for mobile – no one in the world can do that, because we’re the only search engine that can sit on a phone. And the potential for that is massive,” he adds. In addition, that company’s partners could connect to that search capability via API, which is where the Java SDK comes in. SRCH2 is backed by funding from Data Collective and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The , and is a free download on Google Play. [vimeo 77240694 w=500 h=281] |
The Shifting IPO Market | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Once the , Marketo and Tableau had , and Twitter on its opening day, the door for IPOs appeared to be wide open. King Digital and both pulled the trigger, and . The market reaction to Aerohive and King has been flat to negative. Even more, Aerohive mentioned that it saw a “deterioration” in the market during its roadshow. The company priced in the middle of its range, $10, and ended the day essentially flat following a late rally. The company traded as low as $8.81. What’s going on? As Twitter, Facebook, and other momentum stocks have retreated from heights, investor appetite for more of their ilk appears to have tempered. When Twitter was trading over $70, shares of other technology firms appeared more appealing. With Twitter under $50, things are less rosy. King’s from its IPO price isn’t encouraging, either, and the company is profitable to boot. Aerohive isn’t, making its initial wobble understandable. I spoke to the company’s CEO, who confirmed his earlier comments regarding market conditions made on television. Asked if he felt that the situation would persist, he commented that perhaps after a trough things would return to past, more positive conditions. But that interim is a tough patch for firms like Box that want to go public on the strength of their revenue ramp, and not on their ability to make money. Here’s TechCrunch on : Aerohive has experienced quick growth and widening losses, due in no small part to its growing marketing spend. That expense isn’t surprising, given that the company appears to have worked to expand its top line at the fastest pace possible, even taking on $10 million in debt along the way. Revenue at the firm was $15.6 million in 2010, $31.8 million in 2011, $66.6 million in 2012, and for the first nine months of 2013, $70.3 million. In the comparable nine-month period of 2012, Aerohive had top line of $47.3 million. So, for the first three quarters of 2013, Aerohive grew just under 50 percent. Sound familiar? Box is akin to Aerohive in the financial sense, but larger. Another out today, digital wellness firm Everyday Health, slipped mildly following its IPO. If the market isn’t wild about Aerohive — a flat IPO day isn’t a failure, certainly, but it’s not what you wish for, either — what sort of interest investors will have in Box is a more open question. Past isn’t always prelude and history rhymes more than it repeats, but I think it’s fair to say that Box faces stiffer market conditions than existed six months ago. What impact that will have on its flotation I leave to you to suss out. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Oculus, HTC One, And Microsoft’s Glass Clone | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | Are you ready for the future? Facebook certainly is, considering the social giant just , which makes virtual reality gaming headsets, for a cool $2 billion. And Microsoft is joining in on the fun, with reports indicating that the company has similar to Google’s Glass. And in less revolutionary news, HTC finally revealed the latest-generation HTC One smartphone, which had been leaked so hard in the weeks prior to the event that we weren’t even sure if we wanted to cover it anymore. Yet here we are, discussing it on the podcast. This week’s episode of the features , , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
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Sigfox Raises $20.6 Million To Create A Global Cellular Network For Connected Objects | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | French startup raised a Series B round of $20.6 million (€15 million) from IDInvest and BPIFrance. Existing investors (Elaia Partners, Partech Ventures, Ixo and Intel Capital) also participated. As a reminder, Sigfox wants to create an alternative cellular network specifically dedicated to connected objects. Compared to traditional cellular networks, this network can cover a larger area and is very energy-efficient. Previously, the startup had raised $2.8 million (€2 million) and $13.7 million (€10 million). The company wants to create a global network that uses the same protocol everywhere. This network can be used, for instance, to monitor parking spots, communicate if your bus is approaching and more. And if you develop smart parking spot devices, you only need to support one network. Finally, it will cost you the same to take advantage of this network in every country. Sigfox already has a well-established network in France, and is working with local partners in Spain, Russia and the U.K. For example, in Spain, the company works with Abertis, a leading company when it comes to telecom infrastructure. By adding a layer to existing networks, Sigfox will be able to keep its costs down. The funding will be used to expand the team, and in particular the support, sales and marketing teams. At the same time, the company plans to keep investing in research & development. In short, the company’s two key advantages are that it’s creating a standardized and low-energy network. However, it has yet to prove that it can replace more traditional cellular networks. |
Softcover Is A New Self-Publishing Platform Aimed At Technical Authors | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | is a startup offering what it calls a “frictionless” platform for self-publishing e-books. Co-founder Michael Hartl is an author himself, having written the . (He’s also a repeat entrepreneur, having founded .) Hartl told me via email that between a publishing deal with Addison-Wesley and direct sales from the tutorial website, the book has made $750,000 — and Softcover is based on that experience: Originally, Softcover came from scratching my own itch: I wanted to make follow-on products to the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, a book and screencast series that has become one of the leading introductions to web development. I knew from experience what a pain it is to make a new website, install a sales system, and upload the files to make them available, and I didn’t want to have to do that for every new product. I also wanted to use my custom-built Rails Tutorial production system (or something comparably powerful) to output multi-format ebooks from common source files. Finally, I wanted the same level of control with additional products as I had with the Rails Tutorial, including full access to my customer list and support for custom domains. I couldn’t find such a service, so a couple of friends and I built Softcover. And that’s basically what Softcover offers with an e-book self-publishing system that recently left private beta. It allows authors to view an HTML version of their book as they write, publish HTML, EPUB, MOBI, and PDF e-books on the Softcover website, and bundle those e-books with screencast and other media to create premium packages. (Hartl said the e-books can include “syntax-highlighted code listings, numbered tables and figures, mathematical equations, and linked cross-references.”) In exchange, the startup takes 10 percent of the sales revenue. Hartl emphasized that the startup will still give authors a lot of control. For one thing, they can offer a free version if they want (something that he credits for the Ruby on Rails Tutorial’s success). In addition, the system is open source, writers will have access to their sales lists, and they can use custom web domains, so there’s nothing to stop them from moving away from Softcover if they choose. With features like the code and screencast support, Softcover seems to be a particularly good fit for technical authors, but Hartl said it can also produce “less heavily formatted documents such as nonfiction books and novels.” He added that he wants to lower the technical barriers to using Softcover’s production system (right now it’s “best-suited to writers who are comfortable using a text editor and a terminal window”), and to introduce a marketing guide to help new authors build an audience. Softcover has been funded by profits from the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. Hartl said he’s open to taking outside investment “on the right terms.” [vimeo 88221539 w=500 h=281] from on . |
New Android Handsets Will Need “Powered By Android” Logo To Get Google Play, Gmail, Etc. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | For better or worse, Samsung, HTC, and the rest of the Android manufacturing lot just to mess with the way Google’s OS looks and feels. So much so, in fact, that the OS sometimes stops looking like Android at all. Seemingly annoyed by the lack of credit where credit is due, Google has started asking manufacturers to show a “Powered By Android” logo at startup. According to some reports, this is now a requirement if the manufacturer wants access to Google’ first-party stuff: the Google Play store, Google’s official Gmail app, etc. (But, pfft, who wants that stuff? Besides ) The guys over at have managed to get their hands on a document that outlines exactly how the “Powered by Android” text has to be displayed. The too-long, didn’t read version? It has to be visible, it has to be big (at least half an inch tall in most cases), and you can’t crowd it into obscurity. One thing that isn’t quite clear yet, however, is the logo needs to be shown — and how often. The just-launched HTC One (M8) for AT&T, for example, only shows the logo (pictured up top) the very first time you turn it on. Every time thereafter, the HTC logo sits alone. This is likely a detail that Google/HTC/Samsung and the rest are still trying to work out. Being a bit of a phone geek, I find myself talking to people about their phones fairly regularly. It’s kind of shocking how many people still answer “What OS does your phone run?” with “I don’t know. Samsung?” Maybe, , this’ll help with that. |
Valve’s VR Expert Michael Abrash Joins Oculus As Chief Scientist | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | After Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, many were worried that Oculus’ top talent — many of whom are industry/VR pioneers — would leave out of spite. Seems quite the opposite is happening. Michael Abrash — the man largely responsible for leading Valve’s recent charge into Virtual Reality — has just joined Oculus as its Chief Scientist. Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can. Abrash joined Valve in 2011. At the time, founder Gabe Newell disclosed that he had “been trying to hire Michael Abrash forever.” And that makes sense — Abrash is an absolutely incredible hire and an industry vet, with code in everything from Windows, to , to the underlying tools that have powered many a AAA videogame title. This is the third major member of Valve’s VR team to jump over to Oculus, with Abrash’s sign-on preceded by Tom Forsyth (responsible for bringing VR support to Team Fortress 2) and Atman Binstock (one of Valve’s lead VR engineers.) His books on graphics programming are the foundation material for most of the coders building today’s gaming engines. If Oculus is trying to regain any of from the more hardcore geek crowd following the Facebook acquisition, this is a pretty damned good first step. A few months back, Valve promised to share the virtual reality research with Oculus. Seems they’re sharing a good chunk of their virtual reality , as well. |
Mt.Gox’s Login Returns, Lets Users Check Bitcoin Balances | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | After weeks of showing only legal notices, now has a login screen that lets users check their Bitcoin balances. But that’s apparently all the beleaguered digital wallet service will allow for now. The site also displays a notice stating: “This balance confirmation service is provided on this site only for the convenience of all users. Please be aware that confirming the balance on this site does not constitute a filing of rehabilitation claims under the civil rehabilitation procedure and note that the balance amounts shown on this site should also not be considered an acknowledgment by MtGox Co., Ltd. of the amount of any rehabilitation claims of users.” “Civil rehabilitation” is a reference to a legal procedure that Mt.Gox , which it claims may allow it to rebuild its business and repay some creditors. It is still unclear when users will be able to access their bitcoins. |
CloudGOO’s New App Turns All Your Cloud Storage Accounts Into One Big, Combined Drive | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 28 | , a newly launched with something of a silly name, offers a way for you to smush together all your cloud-based file storage accounts to form one big cloud drive in the sky. That is, the app aggregates your cloud drive accounts into one mobile interface, then uses that space as if it were one drive for things like automatic uploads of photos, videos, music, and documents. The new service was launched just days ago by Berlin-based developer Jared Preston, who previously spent a few years in Seattle working for Microsoft on the Windows Live platform, followed by some time at Deutsche Telekom. He explains that unlike other platforms, such as Jolicloud for example, which attempted to aggregate a user’s web services under one roof, the idea with CloudGOO is to have you navigate between your drives or media spaces using the app. Instead, he says, “you simply access and use your stuff, no matter where it is stored.” “Theoretically, you could just hook up as many Google Drives, Dropbox, etc., as you wanted, to create a total space available for you to use. CloudGOO can then be set to ‘automatic upload’ and would just utilize the space available,” says Preston. “You would not have to worry about managing the space, just using it.” Currently, the app supports cloud services including Google Drive, OneDrive (previously SkyDrive), Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, and Amazon’s Cloud Drive. To get started, you connect your accounts, and the app tells you how much storage you have available on each, and how much is already used in total. You can then fine-tune your settings to specify which file types (e.g. photos, videos, documents, etc.) you want to back up, and whether those files should be backed only over Wi-Fi. You can also choose to let CloudGOO decide which online destination to use for each upload, so it can optimize your drive space utilization, or you can specify where each file type should be stored on an individual basis. A basic user interface lets you access your content from the app, by tapping on big icons for photos, music, videos, and documents. From there, you can view your files, quickly share them on other social services or email, or copy them over to another cloud storage account. Support for offline access is also available, and you can configure the cache size the app should use. CloudGOO is currently , and Preston says an iOS version is in Apple’s review queue now. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iGG8FQWchQ?feature=player_embedded] The nice thing about this app is that it lets you easily take advantage of the free space online storage space cloud providers give away, in hopes of hooking you into becoming a paying user. For example, Google Drive gives you , while Dropbox offers another , with the ability to earn up to 16 GB through referrals. ( .) But until now, it’s not been convenient to combine your accounts to maximize the free offerings, which is why many users simply convert to paying customers as their need for online storage grows. Or else, they’re like me, and have somehow managed to sign up for accounts with all the providers, and now have idea where to go to find the files they’ve uploaded all over the web. CloudGOO (yes, I know, that ) solves this problem, too, and at it’s well worth the download. |
JFDI Accelerator Raises $2.1M To Help Singapore Become Southeast Asia’s Startup Hub | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Singapore’s has raised $2.1 million from investors led by to pursue the city state’s ambitions of becoming the startup hub for all of South East Asia. Russia’s SpinUp Partners and the Silicon Valley-based Fenox are among other investors participating in the latest round. The idea behind getting more overseas investors is to gain from their expertise and collaborate. “In Russia, we have talented startup teams and capital seeking access to world markets. Singapore is the gateway to Asia for us and we look forward to working closely with JFDI.Asia into the future,” Sergey Gorokhov, Director and Chairman of the Board at SpinUp Partners said in a statement. The funding will be used to incubate more startup ideas in the region, and is part of the accelerator’s aim to raise around $4.7 million in total capital. The new funding will also be used to support the upcoming batch of startups later this month. “Including two further runs of the program later in the year, 2014 should see JFDI add an additional 30-40 startups to its portfolio of alumni, with ambitions to expand that by a further 40-60 startups in 2015,” JFDI said. Since 2012, more than 60% of the 27 teams completing the JFDI programme have succeeded in raising an average S$650k ($513,000) per team, the accelerator said in a statement. Over past two years, Singapore has attracted many startup teams from neighboring India, New Zealand and Australia, who have relocated to build their products, raise seed capital in the country. Digital health startup Klinify and inventory management startup TradeGecko are among examples of entrepreneurs who have shifted to the city state. While still waiting for bigger exits, Singapore’s startup ecosystem has made some progress in past year. , a video streaming platform, by Rakuten in September 2013 was a sign that startups in Singapore were beginning to attract global acquirers. “IIPL is helping to build a strong pipeline of Singapore-based, high growth and innovation driven tech startups that can bring about a disruptive change to our entrepreneurial ecosystem. The accelerator model is a key part of our strategy towards achieving this,” Infocomm Investments’ Alex Lin said in a statement. These investments are part of Singapore’s strategy to . ≈ |
Facebook v8 For iOS Shoots At Snapchat With Extra Private One-To-Few Photo Sharing | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Don’t want all your friends to see your photos? That’s a big reason Snapchat has become so popular, and now Facebook wants to capitalize on more private sharing. , released today, offers an easy “Share with only these friends” option, allowing you to select specific people who you want your photo album to appear to in News Feed. The selector works and even looks a bit like Snapchat. [Update 3/18/14: Facebook says that “Share with only these friends” is brand new for photo albums, but has been in testing and quietly rolled out for individual photos and status updates over the last few months without announcing it or the press noticing. So it’s all “new” but one-to-few photo and status sharing is a little less new than for albums.] Now whenever you go to share a status update or photo, you’ll see the audience of that post at the top. For most people that’s set to “Friends,” but a tap reveals the selector where you can choose from your pre-made friend lists or individuals to share with by tapping their Snapchat-esque bubbles. To do this before, you’d have to make a new friend list each time you shared, which I doubt anyone was doing. , Facebook has been trying to push the concept of . The theory is that you’ll be willing to share a wider variety of content and post more frequently if only a subset of your friends can see it. The problem is that Facebook wanted users to pre-make these lists or groups, which can feel like an arduous and stressful chore. “Does this guy belong in my super close friend list, my wider set of local buddies, my going-to-the-bar list, or what?” As a result, that “Almost …The most we’ve gotten is 5% to make lists, and most don’t make more than one.” This is partly why Facebook relaunched Groups that day, which Zuckerberg recently said have 500 million users. Groups are great for sharing about a certain topic to people who are interested, but not really for sharing to a select set of friends. Facebook has also tried offering that have functions like notifying you whenever anyone on your Close Friends list posts. It even began who would then show up less frequently in your News Feed. the microsharing lists problem by having you start a whole new social graph of just your closest friends, but people typically over-added friends and still didn’t want to share to that many people. Snapchat nailed it by letting you choose exactly who to share each post to. Facebook’s new Share With feature on the left, Snapchat on the right Now Facebook does the same. While the new feature isn’t ephemeral messaging or photo chat (Facebook already , it could be seen as a successor to Facebook’s . If it’s a success, people might become more comfortable sharing silly or racy photos because they can easily make them visible to only their favorite people or those who will find them fun. That could help Facebook soak up more engagement time and user data, as well as foster closer relationships between friends. But it’s also quite possible that no one will notice the new “Share With Only These Friends” feature and people will just keep sharing to their default audience. Adding new ways to share hasn’t gone so well for mobile apps recently. Instagram Direct, a photo messaging feature, flopped, while Snapchat’s Stories method of sharing publicly hasn’t made too many waves, either. You can teach an old app new tricks, but it’s a lot harder to get people to remember to use them. |
Dropbox Acquires Zulip, A Stealthy Workplace Chat Solution Still In Private Beta | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Dropbox has quietly acquired , the makers of a workplace chat solution for desktop and mobile, which had yet to publicly launch. Though still in private beta at the time of the acquisition, Zulip had already developed for Mac, Windows, Linux, and , which allowed users to share both public and private messages with their co-workers. Public messages would appear in “streams” related to the topic at hand, like “Design,” “Sales,” “Support,” and more, for example. The startup, which has been fairly stealthy to date, competes in the broader business messaging space with other cross-platform chat solutions, like Yammer, Convo, , newly launched , or perhaps, more aptly, with email, which is still the place where a number of workplace conversations take place today, no matter what messaging solution a business may have in place. In Zulip’s case, its take on messaging was one which sees it focused on conversations over more basic “chats,” where topical streams include subject lines and threaded replies. Each section could also have several sub-sections, too. In a screenshot on Zulip’s website, for instance, an Engineering stream included sub-streams like “Documentation,” “New Hire,” “WebKit Bug,” and others. This feature, said Zulip, would help users be able to better find the conversations that mattered to them. Other features include robust and fast search, and several geeky additions that likely held developer appeal, like keyboard shortcuts, code syntax highlighting, an API, and off-the-shelf integrations for Trac, Nagios, Github, Jenkins, and more. Zulip also offers the standard messaging/chat app feature set as well, with things like drag-and-drop file uploads, image pasting, group private messages, audible notifications, missed-message emails, and even emoji, to name a few. The Cambridge-based startup was founded by a largely ex-Oracle team, including (CEO), , (VP of Engineering), The letter sent out to current customers (see below) hints that future Dropbox integrations are yet to come, now that the team has joined the cloud storage company. This could signal Dropbox’s intention to better compete with other online file sharing solutions like Google Drive, where co-workers can create and collaborate on files together in real-time. With Zulip, users can drag a file into the compose box and it would upload and preview it for you, allowing you to discuss it with co-workers. It’s not hard to imagine how something similar could be a beneficial add-on to the core Dropbox experience. Zulip had an undisclosed amount of seed investment, with AngelList noting funding from (CEO and co-founder of in Boston); and Meraki co-founders and . We’ve reached out to both companies for comment and more information about the deal, including financial terms and future integrations, and will update with more as we have it. : Dropbox only responded: “We have nothing further to share at this time.” Full email is below: Psst… hey, you! Yeah, you, the one using Zulip.
We have some news for you, but you gotta keep it secret. Can you do that? Alright, sweet. Here’s the deal: Dropbox is acquiring Zulip. We’re incredibly excited about working with an awesome group of people on a problem with huge scale, at a company that’s as passionate as we are about helping people work together efficiently. We couldn’t have gotten here without your support, enthusiasm, and evangelism — so, thank you! But enough about us: what does this mean for the service you’ve come to love and enjoy? For our customers, tomorrow it’s business as usual at Zulip. Please use all of the same channels to reach us with questions. As we make progress on integrating with Dropbox, I’m sure that we’ll have more announcements about what the product roadmap looks like going forward. Again, please don’t share this news. We intend to announce this publicly in a few weeks, but wanted to give you folks a heads-up since you’ve supported us from the beginning. Thanks again for your support, and if you find yourself in San Francisco, come and say hi! From all of us here at Zulip, Jeff, Waseem, Jessica, Tim, Luke, Zev, Leo, Allen, acrefoot, Steve, and Jason |
Looking To Serve 17M In 2014, SimpleTuition Lands $26M To Help Students Afford College, Pay Off Loans | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | By now, you’ve probably heard about the mounting student loan crisis. Thanks to the financial crisis, the high cost of a college degree and comparatively high interest rates in the U.S., some 40 million Americans have amassed somewhere between $1.08 and $1.2 trillion in debt. in the class of 2012, it’s no wonder student loan debt owns the highest delinquency rate . It’s for this reason that student debt has been getting more attention from the media of late, and why the tech industry has begun the price of admission. Luckily, companies like have emerged over the years to help those on the same side as Google CEO Eric Schmidt, . With tuition and loan interest rates continuing to rise and to drop, affording higher eduaction today (and in the future) requires a significant amount of planning. Like the , SimpleTuition wants to help students and families reduce the costs of a college degree — beginning with student loans — by offering tips, tools, advice and deals on everything from how to find scholarships, financial aid and cheap textbooks to how to manage debt and compare loans. When SimpleTuition first emerged in 2006, it primarily served as a destination for students to find and compare college loans. Since then, SimpleTuition has been slowly transforming itself into a marketplace in an effort to provide a broader range of college planning and savings services. The marketplace approach has apparently been working, as the Boston-based company expects to serve upwards of 17 million people in 2014, CEO Kevin Walker . Furthermore, with a staff that’s grown to over 35 and revenue increasing to $45 million in 2013, SimpleTuition’s appeal to investors appears to be growing in kind. Looking to capitalize on the interest and continue to dive into what it believes to be a huge market opportunity — thanks to the 50 million people involved in higher education, who collectively spend upwards of $400 billion/year on college-related expenses — SimpleTuition is adding a big chunk of new capital to its tank. , the company recently secured a $26 million round of new financing led by its existing investors, Flybridge Capital Partners, Atlas Venture and North Hill Ventures. The new investment brings SimpleTuition’s total capital to $52 million, raised in five rounds of financing in which Flybridge, Atlas and North Hill were the sole investors, , along with $5 million of debt financing from Horizons Technology and Finance Management to help fuel growth. In building out its marketplace to support a wider range of student use cases, the company has taken a combined build-it and acquire-it approach, developing , its rewards program to help students pay off debt, internally. In turn, SimpleTuition the ability to compare textbook rental and purchasing prices and find cheaper alternatives. The three prongs of its business — loan comparison, textbook purchasing and rental, and savings programs — all act as marketplaces, supporting additional tools that help students connect with buyers and sellers in an effort to help them find deals and save money. That includes scholarships and, even, electronics. SimpleTuition is moving in the same direction as a growing number of education technology companies, that is toward becoming a hub for student services and everything a collegian might need to survive at college. In SimpleTuition’s case, it’s to help students and families afford college. We’ve also seen companies like Chegg going increasingly in this direction, albeit from the opposite starting point; in other words, beginning as a book rental marketplace, Chegg has since been expanding into a larger platform and now offer study tools, internship search and course reviews to boot. Pearson is doing it, and so are many others. It’s been working. Thanks to its broadening scope, SimpleTuition has been hovering right around profitability, , sinking into the red at times as it pours revenue back into its business, whether in acquisitions or product development. With $26 million in fresh capital under its belt, don’t be surprised if SimpleTuition continues to add new services and mini-marketplaces which fit under its larger “student savings” marketplace umbrella. It could be an active year — not only for SimpleTuition, but the many moving in a similar direction. After all, the student debt crisis isn’t going away any time soon. |
Crowdfunding Platform Realty Mogul Says Its Users Have Invested $14.6M In Real Estate Worth $100M+ | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Real estate crowdfunding startup is sharing a bunch of numbers about its growth since it first launched just about a year ago. The most impressive one: More than $100 million, which represents the total value of properties that have been backed through the Realty Mogul platform. That represents 58 properties located in 14 states, in which the 6,000 Realty Mogul members invested a total of $14.6 million. The company’s goal is to make real estate investment more accessible — not to everyone, but to accredited investors. Members can browse through a marketplace of potential investments, and even if they decide to invest in a property, their money is only committed if the project is fully funded. If it is, they’ll get regular updates on the property and receive whatever cash distributions (such as rent payments) they’re entitled to. Realty Mogul says 67 percent of the platform’s investments are made by repeat investors, and that 55 percent of those investors make multiple investments. Retail properties make up 35 percent of investments, followed by residential properties at 22 percent. “The broader story is that real estate crowdfunding has quickly become the fastest growing segment of the crowdfunding market and the dust is starting to settle in our space,” the company wrote. You can go to see the infographic with these numbers and more. |
Uncertainty Persists As The Nokia-Microsoft Deal Races Towards Deadline | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Microsoft and Nokia told investors that their deal would close in the first quarter of 2014. They have two weeks to meet that guidance, which remains unchanged even in the face of Nokia’s . Let’s review the firms’ most recent statements regarding the closing period for the deal. Here’s Microsoft from its most (the company declined to provide new comment): We expect the acquisition will close in the first calendar quarter of 2014, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. And Nokia, in a that it referred TechCrunch to when asked about the potential closing date for the deal (Nokia said it will not comment further in its most recent statement, and followed up on that by not commenting on a follow-up question): Nokia would like to stress that recent developments in India related to ongoing tax proceedings are not expected to affect the timing of the closing nor the material deal terms of the anticipated transaction between Nokia and Microsoft, announced on September 3, 2013. The transaction is still expected to close in the first quarter of 2014, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, irrespective of the proceedings in the Indian tax case. So it’s good to go, right? Well. Nokia recently over a dispute regarding taxes. This means that the company has to either put up a huge against potential tax costs in the country, or a factory that is quite important to Nokia, and Microsoft, will remain a frozen asset. Presumably that would put the deal as originally created on hold, as one of the assets that Microsoft intends to buy is unavailable for purchase. Nokia’s response to the failure to get an appeal was sharp: Today, India’s Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Nokia on how its assets could be unfrozen and transferred to Microsoft. The decision means that the case now reverts to the February 5 Delhi High Court ruling on the asset transfer. Nokia is disappointed by today’s decision. The company strongly believes its offer to the Indian tax department is fair for all sides, allowing its employees and assets to transfer to Microsoft while also providing the necessary financial guarantees. Nokia regrets the anxiety this extended legal process has caused its employees. Nokia will now consider its next steps. It will not comment further at this point. Nokia had previously agreed to put aside for potential tax penalties. The company also dislikes the government’s plan for how it would tap the pool of cash it demands. To : Nokia has claimed that the order implied that the letter of guarantee could be cashed in whenever the tax authorities raised a demand, leaving the company without the opportunity to dispute any claim. So the sums here are huge and tangled. Why is the factory frozen? The Times is blunt: “Fearing that Nokia may wind up its local operations after the Microsoft transaction without paying the tax — which has risen to more than Rs 15,000 crore, including penalties and interest, according to authorities — the income-tax department had frozen the Chennai factory within days of the deal being announced last September.” This raises the following question: Can the deal be done without the factory? Nokia could operate it for Microsoft, but the company wants to see it sold; interim decisions could be used as stopgap measures. Nokia can well afford the tax bill, ironically, after the deal goes through. That it is selling an asset and keeping the legal exposure it generated is also darkly humorous. The lack of guidance from the companies as to whether the timeframe for the deal has changed, how they intend to proceed, and what implications it will have on their operations and incomes is likely due to legal requirements and a rapidly shifting situation. That doesn’t make the opaque situation less irksome. We’ll see. |
Move and National Association of Realtors Sue Zillow After It Poached Former President Of Realtor.com | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | , the company behind real estate sites like Realtor.com and moving.com, and the (NAR) today against and its chief industry development officer Errol Samuelson. Move is suing over “breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and misappropriation of trade secrets among other action.” “At Move, we take our trade secrets and intellectual property extremely seriously as a valuable asset in our competitive position in the marketplace,” said Move’s CEO Steve Berkowitz in a statement today. “We take action in cases in which we believe our trade secrets have been compromised. We have raised this matter for the courts and believe that the matter will be resolved judiciously.” In addition to NAR and Move, the plaintiffs also RealSelect, Inc., Top Producer Systems Company, and Realtors Information Network, Inc. Samuelson joined Zillow less than two weeks ago. His hire was a major coup for the company, given his 20-year record in the real estate industry and previous position at Move, where he was Zillow had no comment about the lawsuit, but in the relatively stodgy world of real estate, this constitutes , especially given that the lawsuit is not stopping Zillow from continuing to poach from Move. Today, Zillow that Curt Beardsley, who was recently the executive vice president of industry development of Move, is joining Zillow as its vice president for industry development. In this role, the company says, he will be responsible for building and strengthening Zillow’s relationships with multiple listing services (MLSs) and other industry partners. This is a pretty bold move by Zillow, to say the least. Beardsley, after all, was inside of Move to essentially take Samuelson’s role on the day of his departure. No word yet on when Move plans to sue him. |
Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten Leaves Microsoft For Sonos | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Microsoft has just disclosed that Marc Whitten, Chief Product Officer for the Xbox division, will be leaving the company. His new gig? Chief Product Officer at Sonos. Marc was a part of this division since the earliest days of the first generation Xbox. Before being bumped up to the Xbox Chief role back in January of 2007, he lead the Xbox Live team for around 2 1/2 years. Microsoft notes that Marc’s team will now report to Terry Myerson, who, as the company’s VP of Operating Systems, already oversaw much of the Xbox team’s operations (along with those of Windows and Windows Phone) Of course, this isn’t the Xbox team’s only notable exec departure as of late. In July, division head just weeks before the launch of the Xbox One, pinning him up as something of an effigy for the many pre-launch stumbles the One had early one. In , Blair Westlake, the exec responsible for securing much of the media for Xbox’s video/music services, took off as well. |
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Seattle Deals A Blow To Uber And Lyft By Limiting The Number Of Ride-Sharing Drivers On The Road | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | In the biggest blow yet to ride sharing in the U.S., the Seattle City Council voted today to limit the number of drivers available on Uber, Lyft, SideCar, and other on-demand transportation services available in the city. GeekWire has a of what happened at the meeting, but the end result was that the city council sided with the taxi industry rather than allow newer transportation services to compete on their own merits. By ensuring that companies like Lyft and Uber can have no more than 150 drivers on each platform, the vote essentially kills any competition to the city’s existing taxi regime. It also will render services like Uber and Lyft relatively useless, by ensuring that they won’t be able to keep up with demand. In places like San Francisco and Seattle, these new transportation services have offered an alternative to taxis, which are limited by the number of medallions available in each city. That ensured that in times of high demand or in late night off hours, passengers typically weren’t able to get rides. That all changed over recent years, thanks to the launch of Uber, Lyft, and similar services. By connecting passengers with drivers on-demand via mobile apps, the ride-sharing services were able to meet that demand. But the new services didn’t adhere to the same regulations as existing taxi or black car services, which has caused some pushback from regulators in various markets. Many questions about the new transportation network companies revolve around the issue of public safety, which the startups have sought to resolve with criminal and driver background checks, as well as $1 million supplementary insurance policies to cover drivers and passengers while a ride was underway. Uber recently that covers accidents that might happen while a driver is in-between rides, and Lyft has to do the same. Moves like that have helped ride-sharing startups to create greater clarity around their services and put some regulators at ease. In California, for instance, Uber, Lyft, and others were able to work with the state’s Public Utilities Commission to for . The hope is that those companies will be able to get similar provisions adopted by regulators in other markets. Surprisingly, the vote in Seattle happened despite the city being one of the first markets that Lyft, Uber, and other startups expanded into after conquering their home market of San Francisco. And it appears to be less about protecting public safety than it is about protecting the incumbent taxi industry. That’s why the new regulations are more about the number of cars that can be on the road for any company — capped at 150 — rather than requirements for how the services are run. While the new rules will protect jobs at taxi companies, mostly by ensuring that they have less competition, they mean that there will be fewer drivers in Seattle making a living wage from competing services. Uber, for instance, argues that the in the city will be forced out of work by the regulations. There is also some controversy surrounding the process of how the vote came to light. Under the city council’s General Rules and Procedures, it’s required to provide fair notice of its agenda at least two business days prior to a vote, according to Uber. The council waited until last Friday, however, to provide a which will be voted on. And that version included several provisions that were not in earlier drafts. Furthermore, the new amendments to the bill changed the program from a temporary pilot program to a permanent regulatory scheme. We’ve reached out to both Uber and Lyft for further comment, and will be updating once we hear back. In a statement, Uber Seattle General Manager Brooke Steger writes: “It’s astounding that that the City Council has chosen to ignore the voices of nearly 30,000 constituents and move to put hundreds of drivers out of work. This fight is not over, and as we explore our options, we urge Mayor Murray to reject the anticompetitive and arbitrary caps that will slingshot Seattle’s transportation ecosystem back into the Dark Ages.” Meanwhile, Lyft spokesperson Erin Simpson writes the following: Today, in a protectionist move that only serves the existing taxi and for-hire industries, the Seattle City Council voted to place severe limits on Lyft and other ridesharing platforms. These caps have no bearing on public safety, and the motivation behind these measures was planned behind closed doors. This vote makes Seattle the only city in the country to impose a cap on peer-to-peer transportation. In doing so, the Council is disregarding the voices of thousands of citizens who spoke out in opposition to these restrictions, and is crushing new economic opportunities for Seattle residents who have chosen to provide rides to their neighbors. We have worked closely with the local community to ensure safe, affordable rides remain available to all, and will continue this process in the weeks ahead with city and state leaders. Lyft will continue operating in Seattle, will continue to stand behind drivers, and will continue to offer a safe, affordable and friendly transportation option to the great city of Seattle. |
If You Gave Superman A GoPro | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | If anyone ever asks you what you’d use a personal drone for, you say “Real estate photos”.. or “ “… or you could say “ ” Armed with a personal RC drone, a GoPro camera, and fistfuls of crazy video editing talent, a team out of LA has recreated a first person view of a day-in-the-life of ol’ Clark Kent himself. This video just went up this morning, and is spreading like wildfire — and for GoPro, the timing couldn’t be better. With the company , they’ve entered that “quiet period” where they probably wouldn’t end up releasing too many crazy videos of their own — which, given that GoPro is a company , is a bummer. But an awesome video that showcases their product in a massively cool way? They couldn’t ask for more. Wondering how it all came together? Check out the behind the scenes version, below: |
For Tech Investors, The Midwest Is Flyover Country No More | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | These days, Midwestern entrepreneurs and investors are seeding more than just fields. A , propelled by strong initial public offerings and a healthy M&A market, as well as the launch of from companies like Amazon , has meant that entrepreneurs across the Rust Belt and Farm Belt are starting new technology companies in addition to . “There’s a ton of different factors that are coming into play,” said David Knox, the chief marketing officer at the digital marketing company Rockfish and a mentor at the Cincinnati-based startup accelerator The Brandery. “At the very top of things is a trend that is very clear to everyone — the cost of launching a startup continues to go down and the barriers of entry to it continue to evolve.”
New technology incubators, accelerators, and early-stage investment firms have formed in cities like , , , , , Kansas City, Indianapolis and even — often with support from local governments looking to rejuvenate moribund manufacturing centers or spur new job growth. Last week, program based in Kansas City, and earlier in the month, the Digital Sandbox KC in follow-on funding. “In the last five years there have been 52 companies [from the Midwest] that have either gone public or been acquired for north of $1 billion,” said Mark Kvamme, a co-founder of the Midwest’s largest — and most recent — venture investment firm, . Kvamme started Drive with fellow Sequoia Capital alumnus and Ohio native Chris Olsen as a way to take advantage of the flurry of startup activity the two men saw coming from the region. In part, investors can thank for Chicago-based firms and entrepreneurs; ExactTarget’s multi-billion dollar acquisition and the public offering from Indianapolis; and a from Wisconsin. The firm managed to raise $250 million to devote to investments across the Midwest. “ExactTarget has spun out 25 or 30 companies, [and] it’s a similar story with Chicago and Groupon,” said Olsen.
Even Detroit is turning to startups as a way to rebuild the economic engine of the Motor City. “It has gone from no startups in Detroit to over 40 and at least 10 investors in Detroit,” said Ted Serbinski, a partner with . One of the more active hubs for investment activity in the Midwest is actually Cincinnati, which has two very active startup accelerator and investment shops in , which was deemed one of the nation’s best accelerators, and , an early-stage investment group. “You have latent entrepreneurial energy in the big companies and now people are saying ‘Wait a second! I don’t have to uproot myself,'” said Mike Venerable, a managing director at CincyTech.”The more digital the economy becomes the more people have to address these technologies and the more aware companies become about them. You just need to do deals and if you do that, the community wakes up and the entrepreneurial talent will come out of the big buildings.” It seems that the Midwestern states’ policies of seeding venture funds and offering investment matches at the early stage is paying off. “If you can do a better job early on of funding a company and can get a pipeline and show those companies getting to scale and getting traction in the marketplace, then venture investors will come,” said one limited partner at a large Midwestern pension fund. Even with venture investors increasingly willing to come in from the coasts to look at deals, there’s still a need for local capital to seed innovation, according to Michael Wetta of the Omaha-based venture fund . “The pattern we see emerging is that larger funds want a sponsor within driving distance of a deal. Investment funds in the Midwest are providing that in Omaha, Kansas City, and Minneapolis.”
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GSN’s $165M Bash Gaming Acquisition Nets 100X Return For Investors | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Today, out of India went through. We’ve confirmed, through sources familiar with the matter, that the deal closed right around the $165 million mark. Pre-acquisition, Bash Gaming had raised a total of 200k in funding from Tandem Capital. If you’re having trouble with the math, the return to seed investors was over 100x while the founders owned 80 percent of the business, according to sources. That’s a lot of money. So how did this Cinderella story play out? Bash Gaming came on to the scene around 2010 with social casino games for Facebook. In early 2012, Tandem Capital, an accelerator fund based in Silicon Valley, took on the company with the intended goal of moving the same games from the Facebook platform to mobile. Turns out it was incredibly successful. In a very short time, Tandem was ready to close a bridge round with Bash Gaming and put in $200K on its own just before receiving around $800K from the Tandem investor network. The $1 million round closed just days after the team decided to raise. Though he wouldn’t confirm the details of the acquisition, Tandem Capital’s Doug Renert did offer some insights into how Bash Gaming pulled off the biggest exit for any Indian gaming startup. “Because of how easily we closed the round, we were able to put all our attention on speed and market fit,” said Renert. “Bash helped grow the developer team in India from 10 people to 100 people really quickly, allowing them to scale the company as fast as possible.” At the time, there were no dominant social casino game platforms, so the strategy was really to beat anyone else to market and then maintain that user base. Once players have invested time, energy, and money into a gaming platform, they are more likely to quit playing entirely than to move to another platform to spend the same money. “We don’t focus on gaming companies very often. It’s hard to identify where there’s a large market,” said Renert. “But we decided to go all in with Bash Gaming because most of the games they’re building aren’t just a novelty. These are games that have been around for centuries in some cases, and people love playing them together.” This isn’t the first big news we’re seeing from a gaming company. The space is getting even hotter, with folks like bringing four new MASS games to market and King headed to an IPO. But as with any crowded space, picking the winners in gaming can be a tough one. Luckily for Tandem, and Bash Gaming, the risk was worth the reward. |
Three Data Driven Nuggets From Nate Silver’s New News Site | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Nate Silver, the famous New York Times statistics blogger who 50 out of 50 states in the 2012 presidential election, has launched an entire news site dedicated to data journalism. Keeping the old blog name, , the relaunched site is dedicated to taking what Silver thinks is a more rigorous approach to writing about numbers. Flush with , Silver has hired writers who have skills in statistical analysis, data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. There have already been plenty of media outlets dedicating resources to data journalism, from the to . So, what’s new about Silver’s 538? Here are three stories that I think distinguish 538 from the rest of the media Typically, when journalists use charts and graphs, it’s entirely descriptive and plucked from existing datasets, like a graph of unemployment trends from the Department of Labor. From there, a writer will make their own argument about what the trends mean. Silver’s writers are more like academics who use graphs to make the argument. So, for instance, 538 launched with a feature “ ,” which made the case that elections for governors are increasingly pegged to the popularity of presidential candidates. To illustrate the case, writer Dan Hopkins designed the graph below to illustrate how votes for political parties are becoming more correlated with votes for governors. It’s not unlike what academics do when they start their own blogs. For instance, it’s how Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker . But this academic approach to graphing arguments is pretty novel for a media outlet. 538 is taking a big bet that readers want a handful of skepticism when talking about research. For instance, 538, did its own gadget review, looking at how various health trackers, like the Fitbit and Jawbone UP, measure steps throughout the day. When I’ve seen the writer looks at the differences in the number of steps each tracker says they took. 538’s approach was to meticulously break down how health trackers count steps during different activities, like this minute-by-minute breakdown of jogging vs. ultimate frisbee. This kind of post is not for the Internet skimmer who blasts through articles. I certainly had to dig through the piece to glean the takeaway nuggets, but it’s also the most thorough first-person piece I’ve seen on the subject. I have rarely seen a mathematical equation in a news article, let alone one adapted from the famous . In an article exploring how media outlets write about health advice, writer Jeff Leek proposed this formula to help readers understand if they should believe the headline: , Leeks makes the claim that “In general, health headlines are advertising. The goal is to get you to read the article, not necessarily to represent the research accurately.” So, after looking at all the possible elements of health evidence, from randomized control trials to whether the study was conducted on humans, Leeks explains how you can mathematically determine whether a piece of health advice is right for you. The closest approach I’ve seen to this lately came from in an op-ed last week about how from large-scale health studies. The 538 approach is to just acknowledge that The Guardian article is a given and then outline a detailed, quantitative method for acting on this fact. In a Venn diagram of conservative radio fanatics, TMZ fans, and Internet skimmers, 538’s audience is on other side of the Grand Canyon. Silver is going for an educated audience that relishes skepticism, nuance, and testable hypotheses. There are no pundits. I won’t bother judging 538, because I’m (really) biased. I’ve experimented with , exploring the , and . This morning I hooked myself up to a commercial-grade EEG device and measured the effect of green tea on my focus. Sometime’s these data-driven pieces have been popular — other times not. Silver’s experiment isn’t a test of whether data journalism can work; it’s a test of how nerdy the Internet’s news audience is. 538 is all data all the time. If Silver succeeds, it will be because the news industry underestimated just how much data-driven analysis the public wants. |
An Algorithm Wrote The LA Times Story About The City’s Earthquake Aftershock Today | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | As reporters around the country scrambled to push out stories on early-morning earthquakes that awoke southern California, The LA Times . “This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author,” explained the news story, posted 20 minutes after the USGS registered a 2.7 aftershock that hit Westwood. “Algorithms can help you find and report the news,” LA Times reporter Ben Welsh told Journalism.co.uk about a earthquake piece last year. “You can write code that will ask and answer the common questions that a reporter would ask when looking at that same dataset.” As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, automation is increasingly coming after jobs that require higher-order thinking. Algorithmic journalism has been relatively limited to simple plug-in-play stories, such as sports scores, , or natural events. “That’s not to say that computer-generated stories will remain in the margins, limited to producing more and more Little League write-ups and formulaic earnings previews,” explained a on the futurist, Ray Kurzweil’s, website. Google’s Eric Schmidt also warned a crowd at SXSW last week that most jobs that aren’t related to “creativity and caring” — including reporters. Perhaps most importantly, an algorithm doesn’t stop in the middle of a news story to hide under a desk: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiB7ny52-xw&w=560&h=315] |
TC’s NYC Meetup To Feature Interview With Tumblr’s Derek Gottfrid, Pitch-Off Judges Announced | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | On Thursday, March 20, TechCrunch will hold it’s third Meetup + Pitch-Off in New York City, promising to be one of the biggest nights in Silicon Alley all year. As a warm up for Disrupt NY in May, we’ll be bringing you some of the brightest minds in the city’s VC scene, as well as Tumblr’s VP of Product for a one-on-one interview. And you thought St. Paddy’s Day would be the highlight of your week. The NYC Meetup will go down on March 20 at 6pm at Santos Party House, where a dozen or so startups will compete in a rapid-fire pitch competition for the ultimate prize: approval from a panel of local VCs and TechCrunch Editors. Along with TC writer Sarah Perez and Senior Editor Leena Rao, our judging panel will also include Softbank General Partner , ff Venture Capital General Partner , and the always exciting , from Jello Labs, Box Ventures, and formerly of TechStars. Plus, we’ll be joined by Tumblr’s VP of Product Derek Gottfrid for a fireside chat about what it’s like to grow a consumer-facing internet platform into a billion dollar company. Gottfrid will delve into the , from launching on mobile to incorporating advertising to an acquisition by Yahoo. And it’s not only the judges and speakers that are excited to see you — our pitch-off companies are working, as we speak, to delivery the most amazing pitch you’ve ever heard in under a minute. Tickets are still available for , along with tickets to our . Ages 21 and up, please. Derek Gottfrid is the VP of Product at Tumblr, where he manages the Mobile, Product Engineering, Insights, and Strategic Partnership teams. As part of Tumblr’s mission to deliver creativity worldwide, Derek’s teams help keep Tumblr fast, fun and forward-thinking. Previously, Derek spent a decade at NYTimes.com, where he led various efforts to build a news and information platform. He is fond of four-letter words, including “code” and “ship.” Josh Guttman is a General Partner at SoftBank Capital specializing in early-stage investing in New York.
Prior to joining Softbank, Josh served as a Senior Vice President at Outbrain, the leading online content discovery platform, where he supported the growth of the business from 50 to 250 global employees. Josh has more than six years of experience in the content discovery space, beginning in 2007 as an early member of the team at Sphere, which was later acquired by Aol. Post-acquisition, Josh led Sphere as CEO for two years, ultimately initiating its divestiture (then rebranded as Surphace) and sale to Outbrain in early 2011. Josh began his career as a technology investment banker at Robertson Stephens & Co. in San Francisco. Josh is a 12-year veteran of the New York City tech ecosystem, having emigrated from the West Coast in 2001. David Teten (teten.com) is a serial entrepreneur, Partner with ff Venture Capital (ffvc.com), and Founder and Chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York. ff VC has made over 200 investments in over 70 companies since 1999. HBS Alumni Angels of NY is the second-largest angel network in New York. He formerly served on the board of Ionic Security and now serves on the board of Whisk. David led the first-ever study of best practices of venture capital and private equity funds in originating new deals and the first-ever study of VCs in creating portfolio company value. He is a published author and frequent keynote speaker. David is the Managing Partner of BoxGroup, a New York City based seed-stage angel capital firm. David is also the Co-Founder of TechStars NYC, where he previously served as Managing Director. BoxGroup is an investor in over 130 seed stage technology companies including Vine, Fab.com, GroupMe, Blue Apron, BarkBox, Warby Parker, Harry’s, DataMinr, Behance, Handybook and more. David is currently working on a mobile commerce platform as a co-founder and Chairman of JelloLabs. David was named to NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and serves on the Investor Board of Venture for America. He is an EIR for Wharton’s Entrepreneurship Program and on the Entrepreneurship Board at NYU. Prior to joining TechStars, David served as Executive Vice President of Interactive Strategies at kgb, a global information services company. While at kgb, David founded and lead Knowmore.com, a social aggregation startup within kgb. |
YC-Backed Next Caller Brings Smarter Caller ID To Businesses And, Soon, Phone-Based “Shopping” | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Y Combinator-backed , the makers of a caller ID system for businesses offering access to a secondary database containing a caller’s personal information — including their name, phone, number and, if available, email — has come a long way since last fall. Since then, the company has grown from just a handful of users to 240 paying customers, and has now signed distribution deals with ZenDesk and Nextiva, who will offer the service to their existing install bases. The company was co-founded a little over a year ago by Gianni Martire and Ian Roncoroni, who both have finance backgrounds; Martire is a computer science grad and serial entrepreneur with several startups already under his belt. But the idea for Next Caller came from Roncoroni, who was constantly frustrated with his phone calls to customer service agents who mangled his name. “My last name is really confusing,” he explains. “I found myself spending a lot of time trying to convince people that my last name is actually just one name, and not two names: ‘Ron Coroni.'” He thought it would be much easier if the call center agent just had his information in front of them when he was speaking with them, and thus the idea for Next Caller was born. As it turned out, there was a definite need to be addressed here – the founders tell us that 61 percent of inbound calls to companies today are considered “unknown.” Part of the problem is that the existing technology is outdated. For example, current caller ID systems don’t work with cell numbers, but Next Caller maintains a database linking U.S. phone numbers – cell or landline – to names, addresses and emails. The company claims it can identify 70 percent of the calls sent to its system, and, on average, it shaves off 40 seconds per call because of the data entry it eliminates on the business’s side. Another problem businesses face is when calls are routed between multiple call centers, they’re often then sent somewhere that uses a different CRM system. That means you have to give the agent you’re transferred to your personal information for a second time, which is frustrating for both parties. Next Caller could help solve this problem, if all the company’s call centers have Next Caller integrated into their systems, however varied they may be. The Next Caller API today integrates with a variety of existing systems, including Cisco, Avaya, Salesforce, Genesys, Five9, SAP, Zendesk and others. And now the Nextiva deal will see Next Caller offered to that company’s more than 80,000 business users in the U.S. who can switch the functionality on with just a check box. Once installed, customer-service agents can save the personal data provided by Next Caller with just a click, copying it to their own local database. Now that Next Caller has dealt with the immediate frustrations involving caller ID, it’s working to see what other solutions it can offer businesses and consumers going forward. One thing the team has in the works is a way to make “commerce by phone” as easy as it is online. Consumers will be able to enter their credit card info on Next Caller’s site, then existing Next Caller business customers would be able to use that data when selling a service or upgrade over the phone. The consumer would only need to confirm their info and provide a PIN. After joining the current Y Combinator class, Next Caller has decided to become a bicoastal operation with one founder in San Francisco and another in New York. The company is currently a team of nine full-time and is closing a seed round of funding (details forthcoming). |
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Is Coming To SF On March 27 To Talk Cloud, Mobile [Update: Office?] | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Newly minted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will hold a press event in San Francisco on the 27th to discuss the cloud and mobile industries. Nadella has been CEO for less than two months, meaning that his remarks will receive extra scrutiny. Will he outline a new vision for the company? A new product? The cloud name-check makes it feel like the little confab isn’t to tie a bow on the Nokia deal, but more on that later. Build, Microsoft’s developer event, is set to take place mere days after this gathering, making the timing almost odd. But why have one press cycle when you could have two? And, the smaller, earlier event could have a different bent than Build, making the two more antagonistic than symbiotic if paired. TechCrunch will be there. |
The Secret Bubble | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | There are not a lot of posts in my feed marked ‘nearby’. In fact, I can tell you the exact number: 0. This is because I live in a medium-sized city in the San Joaquin valley, not in San Francisco, New York, Austin or San Diego — the locations I see most heavily represented in the messages delivered to my ‘circle’. Some portion of this we can chalk up to the ‘bubble’ that exists with any new hot social app. The filmy barrier that buoys and nurtures fledgling services until it either bursts and releases them, or asphyxiates them into strangled sworls of Color. There are a couple of kinds of ‘bubbles’ that we talk about in tech. The most prominent is the ‘money bubble’, which posits that companies and investors are riding a wave of faux optimism when it comes to the worth of technology. This is the other kind. There are a few major trends in consumer Internet worth tracking, and several of them are woven together. Among these are messaging, ephemerality and anonymity. All of them are products of a generation raised on the Internet. I do not believe this is a coincidence. Truth be told, I think that Secret likely has a strong chance of puncturing the virtual real-estate of the early adopter bubble. It’s got a simple, universal premise and a very human draw. It taps into the psychological topology of the modern Internet resident in a clever, powerful way. After a generation of Internet users who have treated permanence and indexing as the cover charge for entering, there is a new group of people who have a real awareness that they might not want everything that they put on the web to be there forever. We are entering a new phase of the development of the net, in which we can actually make some real choices about what we want to be indelible and what we want to dissipate into the digital ether after it’s served its purpose. Part of this is the simple age of the medium. The early days of the web were marked by enthusiasm and sharing — we all helped this grow. Now, the machinery is in place and people like Edward Snowden have forced us to acknowledge publicly what we all felt in some secret crease of our cerebellum: privacy is for the luddite. Secret taps into that, to a degree, especially along the ‘anonymous’ axis. Even though it’s very much ‘security psychology lite’, it still plucks threads attached to the same sensitive nerve clusters that tell us that everything we’ve ever said to a computer has been read by someone in a cubicle in Virginia somewhere. It’s the fast-food to the square meal of or or . These are apps built for Serious Things and Serious Discussions that we want to remain Private. Secret, by comparison, is frippery. But, as time and tide and McDonald’s have proven to us — the frilly, fatty edges of things are often those most consumed, while the healthy inward parts remain the domain of the health nuts. Because it came along at the right juncture, and because it plays on our basest desires — I believe that Secret has a real possibility of popping its bubble in fairly good shape. But even doing so is no guarantor of value or benevolence. Even if the founders have a sincere interest in making a platform where people can be honest, we all know how that turned out for the Internet. Our own Josh Constine asked about what the service is doing to mitigate cyber bullying and abuse and what it’s doing to make Secret a safe place — and I believe he was right to do so. Once Secret emerges from its current pupate state, we’ll get a clearer picture of the value it can, or cannot, bring. Because of my location, I’m often treated to a fairly unique vista as the enthusiasm and froth of a new service surges out of San Francisco and crashes onto the shores of Real Life, CA. So far, there is no serious surf for Secret, but when and if it does break, it’s very likely that it will feel much different here — which is fine. Whatever it is, I hope it brings something worthwhile. A platform that gives a voice to people with too much fear in their hearts to express it any other way; something that gives voice to the voiceless; a tool to unlock inhibitions of the heart and mind. Not just another way to be crappy to one another. It’s the sign of something lasting when a structure is flexible enough to mold itself around different ways of living and different values. We’re talking about Secret, but we’re also talking about whatever the next thing is. That thing you’re shout-pitching to a VC at a SXSW party or running over in your head on your drive out to Sand Hill road with your palms sweaty on the wheel of your rented Toyota Avalon. Conquer those battles, get some users, create interesting things. But always remember that your wave will someday hit the shore — make sure it brings something valuable with it. |
Facebook Aims To Squash Chat Bugs Early With New Android Messenger Beta Program | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Facebook For Android’s beta tier has been a success, with 1 million testers helping fix bugs before updates go out to its hundreds of millions of mainstream users. So today Facebook launched a with multiple automatic updates of new features and fixes each week. With heavy competition in messaging, Facebook is intent on making Messenger is fast and stable. Facebook explains that “Performance and reliability are important aspects of any high quality product. For a messaging product, this is especially true – we want our messages to be delivered to our friends quickly, and reliably. We have learned a lot about improving mobile performance at Facebook, and the Android Beta program is a helpful tool we have at our disposal.” The in June 2013 and has testers in over 150 countries. Users with the courage to with withstand glitches and explore new features that could suddenly disappear will be encouraged to file reports about bugs and their satisfaction. They won’t get anything material in return, but will know they’re aiding hundreds of millions of people to have a better Messenger experience. To join the beta program, users must: 1) Join the Facebook Messenger for Android Beta Testers Google group: 2) Allow beta downloads by clicking “Become a Tester” in the Play Store (you need to join the Google Group before becoming a tester) 3) Download Facebook Messenger from the Play Store to update your app 4) Turn on automatic updates, as the beta version of Facebook Messenger for Android will be updated multiple times per week In January 2013, analyst Benedict Evans managed to scrape user counts of Facebook’s apps even though the company hadn’t officially released growth stats in a long time. As of September 2012, Facebook , with 32.3 million on Android. That number sure grew over that past year, and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January 2014’s Q4 2013 earnings call that “The number of people using Messenger grew more than 7 [since Messenger’s big redesign], and we’ve seen a large increase in the number of messages sent. We have a lot more coming to Messenger in the first half of this year.” That means Facebook Messenger for Android should have at least 50 million users, and likely closer to 75 million. That’s a lot of people to send an update that’s only be tested internally. Facebook’s doubling-down on Android beta programs could signal an increasing desire for Apple to offer its own beta system. Apple has been reluctant as it prefers a simple, consistent experience where everyone gets a production-ready app. For now, Facebook uses its own in which its iOS app actually contains multiple different interfaces that appear to different users. This lets Facebook still test its iOS apps with a large audience, but it has to do so in the wild with normal users who are less tolerant of bugs than those who actively sign up for beta programs. I’ve heard Facebook has been prodding Apple to offer a similar beta system to Google’s platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if other developers like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo would want that too. If Apple doesn’t figure this out, it may see companies pushing features to Android first because they can launch with a clean bill of health. |
Pebble Gets Its Tamagotchi With New Hatchi Game Launch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | Virtual pets are a natural fit for the wrist-borne Pebble smartwatch, and it was only a matter of time before a Tamagotchi-inspired app made its way to the platform. One of the new games debuting for Pebble at GDC this year is Hatchi, which is exactly that. The app originally appeared on , and on both platforms it features a pixelated pet for you to play with, though on the watch the pixelation is part of the screen resolution limitations, in addition to being a design attribute. The app is not very advanced, but it’s not very advanced on the iPhone either, and that’s part of its charm. You basically get to feed, bathe, play with, read to and generally care for a digital being, which hatches from an egg (hence the name) and eventually grows into one of a variety of beasts. All the while, you can track the growth progress of your virtual pets and watch its needs with an included stat screen. All of the above is managed with the top and bottom Pebble buttons for navigation, and the middle button to perform actions. So far, so good with the Hatchi app on my Pebble, though I’m curious to see if the more frequent need for interaction affects battery life at all. Pebble has a few other new games it’s debuting at the developer event in San Francisco, too, so if you’re looking for something to play on your fancy wrist computer. |
Apple Continues Pursuit Of IT And Education With Improvements To Its ‘Secret’ Loyalty Pricing | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | If you’re unfamiliar with Apple’s Loyalty Program, we’ll forgive you. It’s not all that well publicized and for pretty good reason. It only kicks in if you’re the kind of person who spends more than $5,000 in a 12-month period with Apple. That kind of “person” is typically easier to define as an organization — namely IT departments of companies or education customers. Though the low entry point means that those companies don’t necessarily have to be all that large. The loyalty program has been around for years, but benefits big-spending companies and schools that need large quantities of items the most. Late last week, Apple quietly updated the program with several improvements that should drive more sales to organizations. There are three tiers to the discount program, starting at $5K in a 12-month period — also known as the red tier. Next up is the $35K green tier, followed by the lesser-known $200K blue tier. With last week’s changes, Apple has improved the discounts of several items across all of these tiers. Almost all of the discounts have been improved a couple of percentage points. We’re hearing, for instance, that Mac has gone from 5 percent to 6 percent in the lower tier and as much as 8 percent at the higher tier. Third-party accessory discounts have gone from 5 percent to 10 percent on the low tier and higher on the upper tiers — though these discounts exclude certain items from sellers like Jawbone and Beats. iPads continue to be discounted roughly 2-4 percent based on model and quantity broken down by ranges up to 50. In addition, Apple has added unlocked iPhones to the mix — the first time the device has made an appearance in the program. We haven’t been able to determine the exact discounts for the iPhones with this update, but it’s probably safe to assume they’ll be a variable amount, as with iPads. Speaking of iPads, there’s actually a special iPad campaign going on right now, with big discounts (larger than the typical 2-4 percent) for 50 units and over. Organizations can speak to an Apple Retail Business Team member at a store or on the phone to arrange for these discounts. Another new item has been added to the loyalty program for the first time ever, as well: Apple TV. While this might not jump out at you as a huge addition, it’s actually quite a popular option for schools and businesses looking to add presentation capabilities to conference and class rooms that tie in well with iPads. An iPad AirPlay-ing to an Apple TV is a much easier sell than the nightmare of dongles and driver settings that normally accompany projectors. “The AppleTV’s stronghold has been the living room, but with technology like AirPlay, it’s finding its way in conference rooms and classrooms more and more,” says Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels, who has quite a bit of . “While iOS’ AirPlay has been around for a bit, OS X’s ability to use an Apple TV as an external display lets people share data on a TV or projector easily, without dealing with a bunch of cables and video adapters.” Adding the Apple TV to a program specifically designed to benefit “bulk” buyers speaks to Apple listening to its customers in these fields. These changes dovetail with expansions Apple made . Those tools were clearly an answer to requests that IT departments and schools had been making of Apple for years. The enhancements included the addition of “zero touch” setup and the locking of security profiles to devices — both things that will make the lives of those in charge of educational iPad rollouts much easier. When coupled with additional discounts and program additions, it all adds up to Apple paying more attention to IT pros — and making more efforts to attract and cater to them. |
Microsoft’s Power Cover Debuts As Rumors Of The LTE-Powered Surface 2 Landing In Stores Abound | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Two quick hits from the Microsoft side of things — the Surface Power Cover is now up for pre-sale, and the rumor engine is kicking around the bit that LTE-capable Surface 2 devices . The Surface 2 LTE has been an : It’s hit the FCC; the Surface team on Reddit; and we’ve known for some time even which providers it is . That it’s supposedly landing at Microsoft stores is therefore not surprising. Microsoft, for now, is mum on the matter. The Power Cover news is also incremental in that we have known the full story for a while, minus a date. The $199 gadget is now available for purchase, with a ship date of March 19th. Microsoft announced the Power Cover in the as the Surface 2, Surface Pro 2, new Touch and Type covers, and, of course, the dock. The dock and Power Cover were late to the release party, but both are now available and will ship shortly. The Power Cover will appeal to folks using their Surfaces for long periods of time and who don’t mind the extra weight and girth. A skinny kid the Power Cover is not, when stacked next to the current Touch Cover. That’s the latest on the Surface front. Things are quiet, and probably won’t pick up until we get the current quarter’s Surface revenue figure. That and, presumably, a crop of new devices during the next holiday season. |
TeselaGen Is Building A Platform For Rapid Prototyping in Synthetic Biology | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | As the costs of DNA sequencing and synthesis drop precipitously, a host of computer science-meets-biotech startups are cropping up in Silicon Valley. TeselaGen, which makes middleware for biotech labs that want to quickly design and iterate on new DNA constructs, is building tools that will help researchers set up and manage wetware experiments and interpret data from lab equipment. They and other startups like Genome Compiler, Transcriptic and SV Angel-backed Benchling are trying to make biotech software more elegant and speed up the development process. “Our vision is about closing the design-build-test-and-evolve loop,” said CEO Mike Fero, who was a researcher at Stanford focusing on protein localization and who was previously a vice president at a computational genomics company called Neomorphics that was sold to Affymetrix in 2000. “We want to shorten the time frame it takes to get your DNA built and run more experiments.” Unlike in the world of pure software, you can’t “compile” and “run” genetic code instantaneously (if you want to use the metaphor that cells are like miniature biological computers operating off of DNA). There is lag time as researchers have to splice together different DNA parts and then insert them into host cells in a lab, where they can test them to see if they properly produce certain enzymes. At the same time, a biologist might want to test 10,000 different variants of a design with minor alterations in each. Right now, the cost of synthesizing each one of those constructs would be too expensive. Fero is hoping that some of the products TeselaGen is building could make the cost of testing thousands of different combinations an order of magnitude cheaper. So TeselaGen has built visual tools that help researchers view and edit sequences (see above), which is somewhat similar to what both Benchling and Genome Compiler do. But they’re also leveraging j5, which is a new software-based tool that automates DNA assembly and design. And they’ve built a design canvas that supports , an open set of standards that helps synthetic biologists and genetic engineers share DNA designs. Like other companies in the field, TeselaGen gives its product away for free to academic researchers and then charges corporate clients annual subscription fees. The company is currently backed by about $1 million in Small Business Innovation Research grants from the National Science Foundation. |
Video Ad Company YuMe Launches “Video Reach” For Brand Advertisers | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | , a video ad company that , today announced the launch of a new brand called . Senior Vice President of Marketing Ed Haslam told me via email that, like YuMe’s Connected Audience Network, Video Reach enables programmatic buying and selling of video advertising. The difference, he said, is that Video Reach was built for agency trading desks and TV brand advertisers. “Most programmatic solutions for video advertising today utilize traditional cookie-based targeting hence can only work in web-based environments,” Haslam said. “YuMe’s first-party data science solution transcends cookies and allows for true multi-screen targeting in app environments such as mobile, tablet and Connected TV apps, as well as web for true cross platform reach, due to its deep, multi-screen Audience Aware SDK integrations.” The company says that buyers on its Connected Audience Network and Video Reach will have access to the same video ad inventory, but they’ll sold by different sales teams, with Video Reach’s team “specifically trained to sell to trading desks.” |
8-Bit True Detective Is Just The Ticket For King In Yellow Withdrawal | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3GEnHbfiUU] For those of you suffering True Detective withdrawal (and really, aren’t we all?) here’re the as an 8-bit video game. Video game Rust won’t win any , but whoever came up with the video sure should. Note: Arguably this isn’t 8-bit – more like EGA or Gameboy Advance, but you get the idea. |
Twitch Broadcasting Finally Goes Live On Xbox One | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=894253OJn0w?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Just weeks after Microsoft announced the Xbox One, they started touting a new feature that didn’t quite make it into the original debut: the ability to broadcast a video stream of your gameplay, in real-time, to Twitch.tv. Alas, the feature ended up taking longer to build then anyone expected. Originally intended to ship with the console, Microsoft announced just 3 days before the Xbox One’s launch that the broadcasting feature had been delayed until sometime in 2014. At long last — and just in time for tomorrow’s release of Titanfall* — Twitch has flipped the switches and pushed out the update enabling Xbox One broadcasting support. Minutes after release, the number of streams being piped from Xbox Ones around the world is . [* Heads up: if you’ve already managed to get your hands on a copy of Titanfall before the official release, you probably don’t want to use it with Twitch until Midnight or later (unless you don’t mind .) |
Snowden: “We Need A Watchdog That Watches Congress” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Whistleblower Edward Snowden addressed the SXSW audience in a rare public Interview today and gave some policy suggestions about how the government can better protect our 4th Amendment rights. The good news is that congress is already considering many of the proposals he mentioned. First and foremost, Snowden says intelligence agencies need to adopt a “law enforcement” model of defense. In other words, they need to cease the bulk collection of Internet and phone data and, instead, only go after suspects with a warrant. A contingent of congress members, including U.S. Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden, . However, Snowden saw a bigger problem with congress, who he accused of “cheerleading for the NSA instead of holding them accountable.” For instance, when Director of the NSA, James Clapper, about the bulk collection of data, some members of the Intelligence Committee rushed to his defense. “We need a watchdog that watches congress,” he said. The closest thing being proposed by both congress and President Barack Obama is a so-called “public advocate”. The proposed role would litigate against the NSA when agents go to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to ask for permission to spy on Americans. The important issue, especially to the tech industry, is the ability to disclose the number of users affected by NSA spying. Hopefully, then, we can know whether the government is, indeed, spying on us all or if it’s been more selective in its investigations. was able to disclose a bit more data from which organization was requesting information on its users, but we still don’t know all the ways in which intelligence agencies are collecting data. Concludes Snowden, “If we’re not informed, we can’t consent to these policies”. [ ] |
Mulu Launches Mobile Commerce App ‘The Latest,’ Which Is Like BuzzFeed For Shopping | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Over the past several years, e-commerce startup has built a backend technology that allows publishers to instantly embed shoppable items in their web pages. But now the company is introducing a new mobile app called “ ,” which targets consumers by connecting them with products mentioned by their favorite publications and tastemakers. When you sign up, the app asks you to select a few topics, allowing you to choose between categories like Style, Gadgets, Body, and Home. Doing so subscribes you to a feed of content from publications in each of those verticals: If you follow Gadgets, for instance, you’ll see content from Wired and Mashable; at Home you’ll see stuff from Apartment Therapy. What the app enables you to do is shop items that have been shared by those publications. So for instance, you can check out Wired’s article “Here’s The Gear We Couldn’t Live Without” and buy those gadgets directly from the app. Same for Cosmo’s “Six Kinds of Underwear Every Woman Should Own” or Maxim’s “The 5 Coolest Lasers You Can Actually Buy.” In addition to making purchases, users can also favorite items in the app to save for later, or share them with friends. Mulu hooks into Facebook, Twitter, email, and SMS to enable that. The latest app works with the help of . It crawls the web like a search engine, recognizes and categorizes the 400 million products mentioned in news publications, blogs, and other places online. It then finds items mentioned through a wide variety of online retailers like Amazon, Overstock, and Target, among others, to enable instant commerce with the best available price. For publishers, it enables a new revenue stream, while retailers can use its data to better predict demand, while also boosting conversions. All of this is something Mulu has been doing for a while, as it’s provided a widget for publishers to embed instantly shoppable items on their own sites. But that was a business-to-business play, with Mulu just providing the enabling technology. This is its first real consumer-facing application. For Mulu it provides just one more hook into mobile commerce, and it could provide the same type of technology to its publishing partners that they could use in their own apps. |
Google Starts Running Consumer Surveys About Select Advertisers, Highlights Data In Search Ads | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Google is a new feature for advertisers today that highlights data it gathers from its in their ads. These so-called “ ” can appear under Google’s regular text ads and will roll out over the next few days. The AdWords team runs these surveys on Google’s platform for the businesses that participate in this program. Currently, the company says, there are “several hundred businesses in the U.S., U.K., and Canada” that have ratings available for them. There is no additional charge for adding these ratings to ads. During its beta tests, Google says click-through rates increase by 10 percent on average for ads that showed these extra ratings. The ads will show “one or more strongly rated aspects” of the business, though it looks like the advertisers won’t actually have full control over what is shown to consumers. Businesses that want to opt out will have to , and those who want to be included in this program can here. Google says each rating is based on at least a few hundred completed surveys, with the average above 1,000, and the company says it will re-run surveys regularly to keep the data fresh. Users who take the survey self-identify as customers of a given business. According to Google, these surveys will start with questions like “What airline have you flown with recently?” or “Which mobile service provider do you use?” They will then go on to ask about the user’s experience with that business. Google has long been using ratings as part of its search results and ads, so the company has some experience with how important these are for click-throughs. It’s been using seller ratings in its Product Search , for example, and last year, it the ability to include brief quotes from third-party review sites to its ads. |
Build Your Own Bletchley Park With This Kickstarted Enigma Clone | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | If you invest in an open-source, crowd-funded Enigma machine today, make it Created by S&T Geotronics of Columbus, Georgia, this device first appeared as an and is now available as a full DIY for $250, which is quite a bit less than the Allies spent at while trying to crack Germany’s feared encryption system. Three hundred dollars gets you a fully assembled model. What can you do with your Enigma machine? Well, you can break codes… and make codes… and learn how Arduino works? The makers claim that you can actually get some pretty good encryption out of these things if you and your friends, say, want to communicate by wireless between your undersea lairs. They write: [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y922LJ1PCJ4] S&T will build only a few of these puppies so you’d best get cracking. You can obviously build one of these yourself using the instructions provided, but it sure would feel special to pull a machine out of a box that brought so many men to ruin and created the foundations for modern computing.
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Twitter Teams Up With European Galleries In #MuseumWeek To Push Its Cred With Culture Vultures | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Twitter, a big hit with news junkies and those in the media industry, has been working to widen that scope to bring in more mainstream users, as well as those with other special interests. The latest group to be tapped are culture vultures: between March 24 and 30, Twitter will dedicate a week to museums across and the , with hundreds of galleries signed up to produce special content for the platform, giving “Twitter users direct and unparalleled access to some of Europe’s leading museums and the people behind them in 140-character bursts.” You can see a full list of official participants , although a spokesperson says that any arty venue can jump on the bandwagon by using the #MuseumWeek hashtag. Those already signed up include the Science Museum (@sciencemuseum), the Natural History Museum (@NHM_London), the Victoria and Albert Museum (@V_and_A), the British Museum (@britishmuseum), and Tate (@Tate); as well as smaller places like the Roald Dahl Museum and the Pencil Museum in Cumbria (!) (@PencilMuseum). Some of these have already been savvy tweeters: the Tate, for example, of a Roy Lichtenstein over Twitter last year, where users were able to ask the curator questions throughout the event by tweeting #TateTour. Tate, it turns out, is the most-followed museum in Europe, and the third worldwide (1 million+ followers). “Tate’s presence on Twitter is crucial to engaging our global audiences in on-going conversations about art and creativity,” said Jesse Ringham, Digital Communications Manager from Tate, in a statement. “We’re delighted to be joining this international initiative alongside large and small museums and galleries from the UK and beyond.” Other types of efforts will encourage interaction between visitors and work (#MuseumSelfies), interaction with museum staff (#AskTheCurator) and anecdotes (#MuseumMemories). In its recently published , Twitter noted monthly active users of 241 million in the quarter that ended December 31, 2013. That indicated a slowdown of new MAUs compared with the two quarters prior to that. Moves like this point to how Twitter is working to make that growth something that is not simply down to bringing on the same kinds of users that have helped built it into what it is today; but by bringing on groups that have not used it before. What MuseumWeek will do is bring extra focus for users to how Twitter can be a window into art (much like a sports event might open the door to some users turning to Twitter for the first time), but it’s not a one-off effort. Mar Dixon, who works on social media projects for museums, points out that this has and will extend beyond this week. “Every day of the year museums and cultural institutions across the world are using Twitter in exciting and interesting ways to tell the stories of their collections to new audiences,” she notes. Buy there is another interesting element to MuseumWeek: it is another attempt by Twitter to move its platform away from being a primarily verbal medium, and one focused around visual images — the very currency of art, and the one that just happens to be a key focal point of Twitter’s ad-based business model. : Jan Steen, . |
Searching For The Silicon Valley Selfie | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | There are many benefits to living overseas, but among the most valuable is the ability to dislocate yourself from your timeworn surroundings. The typical cadence of our daily behaviors – driving down 280 every morning or getting a burger at SuperDuper before closing – suddenly and irrevocably disappear, and our minds suddenly become more active in seeking the stability of the regular. That awareness extends to analyzing our previous environment, particularly under the questioning of others who have never lived such a life. This was my experience last week, when I discussed life in Silicon Valley to an audience of Korean entrepreneurs, many of whom have never experienced a spirited startup ecosystem. Even though they had never visited, all had perspectives on Silicon Valley, some of which were far divergent from the day-to-day reality of working in the Bay Area. Particularly appreciated were discussions of little microcosms of activity that aren’t generally covered in the tech press. In a nutshell, a selfie is needed, or maybe a series of them to give a richer perspective of the region. Given that I am a writer, these selfies are necessarily textual, but hopefully elicit a similar effect: a portrait into the world from my hand extended. Each of these three, about investors, housing, and location, are inspired from actual questions I received last week. Silicon Valley has the most founder-focused investors in the world. I find this to be constantly reinforced, both after meeting my investing friends in the Bay Area, and in interacting with investors from the rest of the world. While there is definitely variability in the venture capitalists along Sand Hill Road, the worst offenders have been mostly flushed out of the system due to the increasing competition in startup investing and better information networks among entrepreneurs. Since Silicon Valley has gone through multiple iterations in the evolution of the Internet, an ample number of VCs have personal experience with building companies, and many of them have an engineering or product management background. This tends to mean that they care about very different characteristics than VCs in other countries: user experience and product quality is exceptionally important, and business potential can rank over proven business models. One question that came up was how to demonstrate commitment to a company. Investors here in Korea, but presumably in other nascent startup markets, often ask founders how much of their personal wealth they put in the enterprise. Presumably, this is due to a lower standard of trust, since in Silicon Valley, we take it on faith that founders want to see their visions become reality. Investors will generally check that the salaries for founders are in line with industry norms, but a personal investment is not required. If there is a point of dissent here, it is over the level of groupthink in Silicon Valley. Due to the smaller size of venture in much of the rest of the world, VCs are often quite conservative, but ultimately are responsible for making their own decisions since there is no one else to turn to for counsel. The same cannot be said for Silicon Valley, where the best way to fundraise is to get as many investors interested in your business simultaneously. Many of the entrepreneurs I talked to hoped to “go global” and one day move to the Bay Area with their business. It is the world’s leading technology ecosystem, and of course, San Francisco is one of the most photogenic cities in the world. Among the first tasks a newcomer will likely face will be securing a residence, a task that can be surprisingly daunting given the limited supply of new rentals on the market. Yet, despite the image presented in the media of an extremely expensive housing market, young technologists are not challenged to pay the rent in San Francisco or the Bay Area. Average pay for engineers runs up to the at major technology companies (lower at pre-Series A startups), and only increases from there. The from Washington, D.C., or New York City, other cities with large numbers of aspiring young professionals. Like in these other cities, the compromise most commonly accepted here is to share a place with roommates. Interestingly, entrepreneurs who immigrate to the United States are often much older than the prototypical San Francisco founder. Moving to areas in the South Bay like Palo Alto or Mountain View, or to areas in the East Bay are much more likely for founders with families. Prices are high, especially compared to prices in much of the rest of the world, so renting might be the only viable option initially. But, you will have excellent company in your neighbors, many of whom will share your aspirations. Silicon Valley is not a place. It does not exist. This has been mentioned , but even still, the poster advertising my event had a road sign with an arrow pointing to “Silicon Valley.” It may have been somewhat true a few decades ago when the semiconductor industry was concentrated between Mountain View and San Jose, but the number of startups in San Francisco and even Oakland means that the term has little physical meaning anymore. The breadth of the region means that commutes between points can be enormously long. San Francisco to Google, Apple and LinkedIn, for instance, can add up to two hours one way, which is why many companies offer their employees free shuttles to move through the region. For those outside such companies, commutes on public transportation or by car can be harrowing to say the least. This is a sore point for many residents, and is the reality of the day-to-day life of the region. One secret element of Silicon Valley’s success that is sometimes overlooked is its enviable location within California. People always talk about the weather, but the number of sites for environmental exploration are excellent. There is almost nowhere else in the world that simultaneously offers the beaches of Santa Cruz, the skiing of Lake Tahoe, the wines of Napa and Monterrey, the natural beauty of Point Reyes and Big Sur. The physical endowment near to the region is simply astounding. Finding the perfect selfie of Silicon Valley is probably a fool’s errand, but fighting the misperceptions of the region are not. Even people who have lived here for years can forget some of the most enduring qualities that make this region the center of technology in the United States. It is certainly not a paradise, but it can be remarkably refreshing in its openness in contrast to tech capitals in other areas of the world. |
This Is What Happens When Two Tech Writers Climb Into Robots And Fight | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Contrary to what you may have heard, South by Southwest Interactive isn’t just about high-minded panels and keynotes filled with big ideas. No, sometimes startups do fun, goofy promotions like asking people to battle each other from inside offered by Hammacher Schlemmer. And that is indeed what did over the weekend, challenging attendees to “ ” and offering a few “title match fights” under the dubious premise that they would attract more spectators. In my case, I took on Tom Cheredar, who writes for my old employer . For some reason, TechCrunch TV producer Steve Long decided to tag along and capture all the intense action, which you can see in the video above. |
Bucking A Down Day, Facebook And Twitter Rise On Strength Of Bullish Analyst Comments | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Facebook and Twitter had a good day in the public market, with each company picking up momentum from positive analyst comments. Both companies rose in the day, bucking a down day for the major U.S. exchanges. At the end of regular trading, Facebook was up 3.19% to $72.03. UBS for the company to $90, and indicated that “pricing strength” at the company (the cost per ad Facebook sells), is looking strong. Interestingly, the model UBS used to pick the $90 per share target includes shares pursuant to the WhatsApp purchase, but not the smaller firm’s revenue. UBS is right to call that decision “conservative.” In practice, UBS is saying its target price for Facebook, with all the dilutive effects of buying WhatsApp, and zero benefit, is 25% more than its current trading price. Twitter picked up a smaller 0.62% gain (technology stocks on average were down 0.37%), on news that MKM Partners for the company, and raised their price target to $72 per share. While Facebook may be seeing strength in its ad pricing, Twitter is not. According , Twitter saw its ad rate slip 18% in the fourth quarter of 2013. Revenue is up at the firm, as more total spots are sold, but, as Quartz points out, advertisers are paying “less to do so.” That coupled with growth concerns regarding its active userbase has perhaps tempered investor appetite for Twitter shares. The company still trades far above its offering price, so while concerns about the company exist, the larger market remains bullish on the social giant. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 17 | null |
Shopify Examines Social ROI For Commerce Sites, Finds Facebook Dominates But Reddit Is Growing | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | Shopify has compiled data from its platform merchants to determine how much value commerce sites get from social media engagement, and put the results . If, like me, you find infographics tedious and antithetical to meaningful analysis, then you’ll be happy to see I pulled the most interesting tidbits out of the giant graphic for a closer look. It’s interesting to note that Shopify analyzed 37 million social visits to its client stores, and found that those led to 529,000 total e-commerce sales for 2013. Given that Shopify sold $1.7 billion worth of goods in 2013, and that the survey covered data gathered from 90,000 online storefronts, that’s not a huge amount of money derived from social channels. But there are some key caveats to consider, the biggest being that many merchants don’t invest much in social or use it as a sales channel at all in fact. As for what does work in social media commerce, Facebook is still at the top of the heap in terms of converting social shares to e-commerce dollars. FB was responsible for 63 percent of all social media visits to Shopify stores in 2013, or a total of 23.3 million, and around 85 percent of all orders made following social visits came from FB, too. Polyvore surprisingly generates the highest average order value of any social site, and Instagram is high, too. Both have higher average orders than Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Instagram is doing well despite the fact that clickable links are accessible only via an account’s biography. Facebook’s conversion rate rules, however, with 1.85 percent of visits converting to sales. Another interesting tidbit: Reddit is the fastest-growing source of orders among social sites, with 152 percent increase in order volume between 2012 and 2013. FB is still growing strong, too, following in second place with 129 percent growth. Most of what these stats seem to show is that social media and how to use it to drive e-commerce business is still an area that could stand a significant amount of exploration. Facebook is dominating in most measures that count, but that could have more to do with its marketing tools being more mature and better developed than those on other networks. |
Carbon Wants To Kick That Smartwatch Off Your Wrist – And Replace It With A Charger Instead | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 10 |
Your wrist is a hotly contested new battleground, with a small fry like Pebble doing battle with giants including Samsung, and activity trackers like the Jawbone UP and Nike+ FuelBand fighting it out, too. A new Kickstarter project also wants to be a contender, with the . The project debuted a couple of weeks ago, with a blank-faced wrist-mounted charger that had a simple solar panel and could collect sunlight and generate around three hours of extra talk time for smartphones with its onboard 800 mAh battery and USB output. But the device, while cool and definitely handy if you’re in need of a bit of emergency juice, wasn’t super practical as a wristborne tool, if only because it originally lacked the ability to tell time. A new update to the project adds a watchface to the Carbon, however, after EnergyBionics gathered feedback from their supporters and found that this could be a way to increase interest in the wearable. The design of the gadget is already very watch-like, with a look not unlike that of the iPod nano and its many different watchband case accessories. The new watchface is actually applied as a thin film over the existing solar cell, and the watch hands are moved by a watch movement that the company has already sources. There’s a recessed crown for setting the watch’s time, too, and the face is powered by the device’s existing battery, which EnergyBionics says won’t impact total battery life since it uses an extremely energy efficient processor. The watchface is a small addition in many ways, but it’s also a game changer when it comes to making this product more useful. As a straight up reserve battery, it occupies an odd place as a wristworn gadget, but now that it doubles as an actual watch, it’s a lot easier to wrap your head around. You still might want to save that space for the next great smartwatch out there, but if you want an emergency backup battery and are willing to pay the same amount for smaller capacity in exchange for something convenient to wear and carry, this could be the project for you. Carbon should ship in August if the project creators have their way, and the version with the analog watch face will set you back a $130 pledge. |
Google’s 10th Summer Of Code Is Now Open For Applications | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | For now, Google has been bringing together open source software projects and students who are looking for a challenging summer project through its program. Starting , Google will accept for this year’s program. Applications close on Friday, March 21 at 12pm PDT. The participating projects from Google’s own Chromium to well-known projects like GNOME, , LibreOffice and WordPress and smaller projects with interesting . In total, students can apply to over 190 this year. The company is looking for about 10 percent more students than the 1,200 who participated last year. The students get a stipend to work on these projects and they are paired with mentors. Students who fulfill all of the requirements and submit their final program evaluations will receive , which is spread into one small payment at the start of the program and two large ones over the course of the summer. The mentoring organizations receive a $500 stipend. Because these are all open-source projects, all of the code they create and release is shared with the community. |
TrackR, The Coin-Shaped Dongles That Help You Locate Lost Items, Now Talk To Each Other | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | , the Bluetooth Low Energy-powered dongles that help you find missing or misplaced items, like your car keys, wallet, purse or bag, or even your dog, are now being upgraded in order to communicate peer-to-peer with other TrackR devices so that, when you’re out of range, you’ll be able to tap into a larger network for better support. Because such a task requires a network to exist in order to be worthwhile, the company is also giving away $100,000 worth of TrackR technology to kickstart its efforts. Formerly known as , the company was founded by Chris Herbert and Christian Smith back in 2009, as a spinoff from a project at the University of California Santa Barbara’s engineering school the year prior. TrackR’s initial device, the “WalletTrackR” (designed, as the name indicates, to be carried in your wallet) was soon . It was later followed by a smaller “StickR TrackR” dongle which can be added to a key ring with an included strap, or stuck on just about anything using double-sided tape, including things like bike seats or dog collars. It’s these StickR TrackR’s which are first being upgraded with the additional peer-to-peer support, though a software update due in around five months’ time will provide something similar for the older WalletTrackR users. The dongles themselves offer user-replaceable batteries, which is one way they differ from some of the competition, and they’re able to communicate with a nearby iPhone or Android app up to 100 feet, which is par for the course. (Though in TrackR’s case, the dongles themselves can help locate a missing phone running its app, too, as well as vice versa.) However, until now, the devices would disconnect when out of range, only providing users with their last known GPS location for reference. The new support for peer-to-peer communication changes that. TrackR calls this feature “Crowd GPS, explaining that when an item goes missing, all TrackR-enabled phones will join in the search. This is similar to the promise buzzy competitor makes today, but the difference is that TrackR may be beating Tile (which is still accepting pre-orders) to market. In addition to simply establishing the technology to underpin this peer-to-peer network, TrackR is also seeding its network via a giveaway. The company is offering $100,000 worth of its technology utilizing a viral marketing campaign that assigns users to “boarding groups” based on a variety of actions, including their willingness to invite friends, share on social networks, pay the shipping fees, or buy an additional device for a discount. (It’s $24.95, but users can buy the extra one for $19.95). Those who push their way into boarding groups 1 & 2 will receive the free dongles. The waitlist currently has nearly 98,000 users in line at the time of writing. To date, the company has shipped roughly 50,000-60,000 of its StickR TrackR’s, and 100,000 WalletTrackR’s. It now has over 100,000 active users, and has tracked a million items. In addition to Tile, TrackR competes with , , , and several others. [vimeo 87703541 w=500 h=281] |
Car-Sharing Startup RelayRides Hit With $200K Fine From New York State For Insurance Violations | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | , the startup that runs a peer-to-peer marketplace for people to share their cars, has been ordered to pay a $200,000 fine to New York State after an investigation by the state’s Department of Financial Services found that the company “put New Yorkers at risk through false advertising, unlicensed insurance activity, and other violations,” Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office . The Department of Financial Services explained the violations thusly: “RelayRides represented that consumers would not be financially liable for accidents or thefts that occurred while using the service, which was not true. …The company sold insurance and adjusted insurance claims without being licensed by DFS, which is a violation of New York Insurance Law. Moreover, RelayRides misrepresented to New Yorkers that they would not be liable for out-of-pocket expenses in the event that the car is stolen or involved in an accident. In fact, DFS’s investigation uncovered that those claims were not true and that New Yorkers could be held personally liable for property damage, theft, bodily injury, or death that occurs during the rental.” Along with paying the fee, RelayRides has also agreed to no longer conduct business in New York until it “submits a business plan that DFS determines is no longer inconsistent with New York State Insurance Law.” RelayRides’ operations in New York due to the insurance law investigation. $200,000 may not seem like a huge amount of money for a company that’s raised , but it is a symbolic blow in a larger battle between regulators and startups in the so-called “sharing economy.” This past weekend, for example, the Austin Police Department against using transportation services such as Uber. |
Mobile Messaging App & Gaming Platform Tango Raises Massive $280 Million Series D | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Tango, the mobile messaging application that allows users to text, play games and make free voice and video calls, is today announcing $280 million in Series D funding, in a round led by China’s Alibaba. The landmark round will give Alibaba, a company best known for dominating China’s e-commerce landscape, a minority stake in Tango, contributing $215 million. To date, Tango has raised $367 million. The company declined to share its current valuation. Today, Tango has 200 million registered users, and 70 million monthly actives, generally aged 25 to 45. According to co-founder and CTO Eric Setton, Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp opened people’s eyes to the value that messaging apps can create. “Messaging apps can go beyond communications, and can be used to discover new things like games, music and other content,” he says. “At Tango, we’re facilitating this discovery with our content platform and social networking features combined with communications.” For background, Mountain View-based Tango, founded in 2009, began as something of an Apple FaceTime competitor, at a time when FaceTime was limited to specific iPhone models and required Wi-Fi to work. Tango came in with an alternative service that allowed users to make video calls on iOS or Android, and over 3G networks. In the years since, the company has been evolving its platform to offer more communication features, including things like photo-sharing, music-sharing, voice and video messages, and even gaming. An in-app store sells upgrades like stickers and other decorations, and Tango’s ad platform, launched in December, is “well above industry averages” in terms of click-thru rates and conversations, the company tells us. Tango users have also been able to play games with in the app for some time. Gaming, as it turns out, is a popular activity for many mobile messaging users these days, especially on competing networks popular in parts of Asia, like , which is big in Japan, and Chinese messaging service . And last year, Tango began to transition more seriously into mobile gaming, with its own Tango-powered iOS games, built in-house, as well as those built by partners using the Tango SDK . This allowed third-party developers a way to offer social features within their applications, without relying on things like Facebook Connect, for example. Today, that content platform has grown to 40 content and and gaming partners who share revenue back with Tango from in-app purchases on the Tango platform. Not entirely coincidentally, Tango’s lead investor Alibaba recently its intentions to build a mobile gaming network to compete with rival Tencent, makers of WeChat. China today has one of the world’s largest gaming markets, with over , and a market size of roughly $13.7 billion. It makes sense, then, that it would take a stake in something like Tango, which has been rapidly growing both its mobile messaging user base and its mobile gaming footprint. Setton confirms that gaming is, in fact, a big part of Tango’s strategy going forward, explaining that Tango is different from utility messengers focused on just communications. “Content can be the pretext for conversation, and because of that – we’re going after a very big opportunity here. We need to be well capitalized to do it,” he says. “With this funding we will have the opportunity to pursue further content partnerships. Think about AAA game titles or world-renowned artists that we can sign up to Tango’s platform.” Though Tango and Alibaba’s interests align when it comes to mobile gaming, Tango doesn’t yet have a significant stake in China, with 31% of users from North America, 20% from Asia, 12% from Europe, 29% from the Middle East, and 8% from everywhere else. But Setton believes that will now change following this investment, and the exposure it will provide Tango, whose app, he says, takes a similar approach to other messaging apps popular throughout Asia, including Kakao, Line and WeChat. “Alibaba not only provides great expertise, leadership and strategic support in helping us scale our business, but they also help us by providing a unique view into the Asian markets which are a couple years ahead in mobile messaging,” says Setton. That being said, he admits the messaging space is the most competitive on the market today, and requires effort as well as “tremendous financial means.” The company plans to use the funding for further product innovations, hiring, aggressively expansion of its content partnerships, and development of its platform. |
Google-Backed Lending Club Brings Peer-To-Peer Lending To Business Loans | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Peer-to-peer lending marketplace is announcing a major expansion today into business loans. Lending Club lenders and borrowers who want to cut out banks in the process of investing among peers, has facilitated a total of $3.8 billion in consumer loans, and is growing at a pace of over $750 million a quarter. And the company has more than doubled annual loan volume each year since launching in 2007. We’re told Lending Club business loans will range from $15,000 to $100,000 initially, increasing to $300,000 in the future. The loans carry fixed interest rates starting at 5.9 percent with terms of one to five years, no hidden fees and no prepayment penalties. We’re told the average interest rate on the platform hovers at around 12.5 percent. Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche says that the company’s existing tech and credit products catered towards consumer loans can easily extend to other types of loans, including auto, business, home mortgage and others. “We want to cover the entire credit industry,” he says. The company has raised just over $200 million from Google Capital, Foundation Capital and KPCB and was valued at $1.5 billion in its last round in 2013. Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker, ex-chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley John Mack and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are all board members. Moving into the business vertical makes a lot of sense for Lending Club. The company will now compete woth and , both of which focus exclusively on the small business lending market. The alternative lending space is heating up, more players are growing fast and investors are placing their bets. Many of these companies could be interesting acquisition targets for traditional banks. And some, like Lending Club and Prosper, could also be IPO hopefuls. We’ll find out more when |
Accel Partners Raises New Funds Totaling Over $1B, As High-Profile Partners Cut Back Roles | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Accel Partners, one of the Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms best known for its early investment in Facebook, has raised two new funds totaling $1.475 billion, . According to the report, the $475 million Accel 12 fund will focus on early-stage investments, and a new $1 billion Accel Growth 3 fund will invest in growth-stage companies to help them scale their businesses. Accel had in June 2011 to focus on later-stage companies. In other related news, at the VC firm. Breyer is known for making the Facebook bet. Fortune added that he will now focus more on investing personal capital. Breyer’s exit, or reduction in his role at Accel, comes after two of the most respected VCs . Kevin Efrusy who identified Facebook as an early investment for Accel and Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, were said to cut back their executive roles at Accel. We will be updating this story with additional inputs over today. |
OneNote’s Transition To Being Free Was A Year In The Making | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Microsoft a OneNote client for OS X and made the application free across all five large mobile and desktop operating systems. The OS X app , spiking to the top of the Mac App Store and collecting a high rating. It’s been an oddly positive moment for Microsoft. Basking in this interval’s good press, the company’s OneNote team took to Reddit for an explanatory AMA session. You can find the full thing , but the gist is as follows: OneNote for Mac, and the larger Microsoft OneNote strategy, are popular. Moments like this are what Microsoft needs in constant succession. (The OneNote team’s adorkable is worth watching if you want to spit coffee on your screen.) Newly crowned Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella got name-checked during the session, regarding a question about whether the company has “plans to market OneNote to students or schools.” A OneNote team member was enthusiastic: This is Ari. As the new product marketer on OneNote, I can answer a to [that question.] We have a lot of investment from our new CEO in the student audience, with OneNote being one great example of where we can make a difference in their lives. So it would appear that Nadella isn’t giving up on the consumer market. The move to make OneNote a free experience on every major platform raised eyes. Why would Microsoft give away a product that it sold as part of Office? This is Microsoft we are talking about. The as far as I can tell is that Microsoft is breaking its non-Windows toolsets out of a purely Windows mindset in steps. Office for iPad will follow suit. In the case of OneNote, it had some free, and some paid, versions. Making a free build-out for each platform was reasonable. And OneNote sits on top of OneDrive, which Microsoft would like it very much if you would use. Here’s the OneNote team on the decision to go free now: We’ve actually been planning it for a while. As we released apps for more platforms we knew we wanted to always have a free version available for people so there was no barrier to getting started with and using OneNote. It took a while to work out the details for all platforms, what features we still want to charge for (we are still in the business of making money), and work on the actual releases, and we wanted to announce that plan along with releasing lots of cool stuff like we did on Monday. We’ve been planning it for over a year. So, this is not a massive shift in Microsoft thinking by Nadella in his first few weeks in the top seat. How long will the apps stay free? Microsoft had a simple answer: “Forever!” |
Ezetap Gets Additional Funding From Amex To Expand Its Mobile Payment Platform Across Emerging Markets | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | , a Bangalore-based mobile payment startup that uses a rectangular device to turn any mobile phone into a point-of-sales terminal when plugged in, is raising additional funding from American Express. Last month, in Series B funding led by , Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. “The investment will allow us to turn on additional value added services such as loyalty and rewards that will delight users and change the entire payment experience for end consumers,” Ezetap co-founder Abhijit Bose said in a statement. The companies did not disclose the quantum of funding, but added in a statement that “it’s a minority investment” by American Express. The total capital raised by Ezetap to date is around $11.5 million (including $3.5 million it had raised in Series A funding in November 2012). As , Ezetap is riding on growing mobile phone subscriber base in markets like India and Kenya, where more users are becoming comfortable with mobile as their primary device for online transactions. Ezetap’s device includes a card reader and chip, which costs around $50. The startup has been able to sell around 12,000 of them to date, and is aiming to have over 100,000 such devices installed across Asia-Pacific, Africa and Middle East in a year. “The payments landscape is changing rapidly and we believe mobile point of sales solutions will play an important role in helping to further enable commerce – especially in small merchant segments that have historically relied on cash – by delivering a smart and convenient way for small businesses to accept consumer payments,” said Sanjay Rishi, President, American Express, South Asia. Ezetap had officially launched with a Citibank mobile payment pilot in January 2013. Since then, the startup has signed up several banks and newer e-commerce companies, including Flipkart and online grocery retailer BigBasket. In Kenya, Ezetap partnered with Mastercard and Equity Bank to . Later in May 2013, Ezetap’s solution received global certification from , an organization that specifies processes and gives approval for chip-based payment cards. Ezetap was incubated in 2011 by Angelprime, a $10 million seed fund backed by Mayfield Fund, Chamath Palihapitiya and several others in the Silicon Valley. |
Larry Page’s Wish To Make All Health Data Public Has Big Benefits — And Big Risks | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Google co-founder Larry Page made a rare appearance at the conference and expounded on a few ideas he thinks will change the world. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to have anonymous medical records available to all research doctors?,” said Page, noting that it would save hundreds of thousands of lives. There’s some great evidence to show that Page is right. One of the FDA’s researchers, Richard Pratt, that if the public had had access to the millions of public health records, they could have spotted the deadly side-effects of Vioxx, preventing between 27K and 55K deaths. Statisticians need a large sample to spot trends that are different from random chance (“statistical significance”). The more people in the dataset, the more patterns can be identified and the more lives can be saved. Currently, the Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act places tight restrictions on the kinds of information that can be made public. “These are the consequences of HIPAA’s overcautious privacy rules,” that manages the Harvard Info/Law blog, in the aptly title post “Death by HIPAA”. In fact, opening up all health data could help spot all sorts of problems: we could conduct original research, look for hidden side-effects, and give users individual health recommendations based on their behavior. If Vioxx is any indication, Page is probably lowballing the magnitude of lives that could be saved or improved. But, there’s a downside: . “We have been pretending that by removing enough information from databases that we can make people anonymous. We have been promising privacy, and this paper demonstrates that for a certain percent of a population, those promises are empty,” wrote John Wilbanks of Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit that advocates for medical transparency. In the aforementioned paper, some participants in an anonymous medical database when they matched it with DNA from a database of their relatives. Statisticians are becoming increasingly sophisticated at identifying individuals with public and private data. And with the kind of data we’d need to make medical breakthroughs, it wouldn’t be that hard to unmask anyone. Here are a few variables that would be helpful: So let’s take myself as an example: There are only so many 5’4 31-year-old male Jews living in San Francisco’s Mission District working in the media. An amateur statistician could combine that data, scrape Twitter, and alert my friends to all my secret medical history in the time it’d take me to order a copy of on Amazon. Page’s comments could be especially controversial in light of that his company was aware of more NSA surveillance than they previously acknowledged. However innocuous, discussions about any privacy topic can get the company in hot water. I support Page’s idea of open medical data. Then again, I’m the kind of guy who’s comfortable . I suspect that in the future the benefits from transparent medical data will eventually override our sense of privacy. And Google could be the company to build the tool. [ ] |
TC Cribs: Meta, The Sprawling Rural Ranch Where Augmented Reality Magic Is Made | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | A lot of tech employees say that they are at the office “24/7” as they “eat, sleep, and breathe” whatever new gadget or app they’re cooking up. But in this episode of TechCrunch Cribs, we toured a company where that is literally the case every day: , the augmented reality and wearable computing startup. That’s because Meta’s entire 24-person team works lives together in a sprawling five acre estate in Portola Valley, some 30 miles south of San Francisco. It’s a unique setting for building a company, but as you’ll see in the video embedded above, it seems to be working out pretty well. It helps that the home itself is large and beautifully designed, with enough space for amenities such as a pool, a trampoline, and a garden — all of which ensures that Meta’s staff gets in a little recreation and relaxation along with their long days at work hacking on next-generation . And while it is pretty plush, Meta’s founder and CEO Meron Gribetz says that this setup actually saves the company money. By setting up shop in the country, Meta is paying the same amount in rent that it would take to lease a small cramped office in downtown San Francisco. It’s a smart set up that might inspire other startups to head for the rural life themselves. Check it all out in the video embedded above. |
Facebook Security Director, Amazon BD Director Join Bitcoin Startup Coinbase | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | has recently announced on Facebook, fittingly, that he is leaving his role at Facebook as its Director of Security Incident Response, and taking up a security-related role at Coinbase. His job, according to his posting, will be to “build [Coinbase’s] security program.” Another senior Amazon director, Todd Edebohls, is also joining the company as its new vice president of business development. After the world’s former leading Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem has entered yet another period of doubt and uncertainty. Mt. Gox, which posted roughly $400 million in losses, instigated new concerns that companies built around the crypto-currency aren’t trustworthy. So, Coinbase, one of the leading venture-backed Bitcoin startups, is under a lot of pressure to prove that it can do right where other independent, bootstrapped companies have failed. If consumers perceive Bitcoin as unsafe, Coinbase’s future is put in doubt. So bringing someone with the track record of McGeehan might placate both users and investors alike. Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam said the company continues to use a cold storage system with multiple distributed keys. “The industry is continuing to evolve,” he said. “We’re attracting very, very top talent from prior rocketships that were successful.” McGeehan is not speaking at F8 later this spring. He has some experience from the banking industry as well after a stint at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Given how long the security man has been at Facebook — he directly thanks two of Facebook’s co-founders, Zuckerberg, and Moskovitz, in his post — the risk he’ll pick up by joining another young company isn’t likely too much of a scare. Bitcoin needs to mature, and for that to happen, its network members must do the same. Let’s hope McGeehan can keep Coinbase safe. Here’s his note: |
YouNoodle Raises $1.1M To Build A Business From Startup Competitions And Data | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Remember ? The startup attracted some controversy all the way back in 2008 for . Since then, the business and the product may have changed, but YouNoodle is still around, and it’s announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in new funding. Over the past couple of years, the company has created a site where entrepreneurs can find startup competition, where competition organizers can manage the process (in fact, we here at TechCrunch have started using YouNoodle to handle submissions for ), and where larger corporations can get involved. Startup competitions might not seem particularly promising as the foundation of a business. Indeed, co-founder and CEO Torsten Kolind said YouNoodle is looking at another pivot of sorts. It’s not abandoning those competitions, but it’s trying to build a data business on top of them. On both the data side and the competition side, he suggested there’s a big opportunity when it comes to matching up startups and larger corporations that may want to work with or even acquire them. “For us, the pivot we have gone through and are still going through is from looking at ourselves as a technology company powering competitions to an engine for powering what we call the global startup revolution,” Kolind said. “We can do that more as a data-focused company.” To illustrate the kinds of information that YouNoodle could pull from those competitions, it has released , which looks at the top 1,000 startups that used YouNoodle in 2013. (That’s narrowed down from more than 17,500 entries in 232 competitions.) Among those entrepreneurs, the average age is 29 years old, and 28 percent of them were women. Biotech, healthcare, and science-related startups tended to do better than social media and web apps. And companies with prototypes rather than just ideas also did better. The funding, meanwhile, came from new investors, including Tony Hsieh’s VegasTechFund and Lars-Henrik Friis Molin of Sweden, as well as previous investor Amicus Group of Korea. VegasTechFund partner Andy White noted that even though YouNoodle is based in San Francisco, and plans to stay in San Francisco, it can still be used to strengthen the network of startups and entrepreneurs in Las Vegas. YouNoodle is also announcing that it has hired Lael Sturm, most recently of social ticketing startup unseat.me, to lead business development. ( It says it’s also announcing the hire of Natalie Surowiecki to lead corporate partnerships.) |
Founder Gabe Adiv Resurrects TuneUp To Continue Tidying Up Your Music Library | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | , the app that cleans up your iTunes and Windows Media Player library (by correcting song information, providing missing cover art, and more), seemed to reach the end of the road last month with . It turns out, however, that founder Gabe Adiv wasn’t willing to let it die. Adiv said he resigned as CEO of TuneUp Media last June. But after the company ceased operations, Adiv founded a new business, GMGP LLC, acquired the assets to TuneUp (as well as hiring some of the team members), and relaunched with an older version of the app last Friday (version 2.48, to be specific). Why will this succeed where the previous company seems to have failed? While before, I hadn’t followed the news recently. For one thing, it seems the release of version 3.0 last fall was , with lots of bugs. Adiv declined to comment about what happened to TuneUp after he left, saying only, “I’m confident that the version of the software that we just relaunched with still serves a real need in the marketplace.” His comment alludes to another question facing the company: Does the shift towards services like Pandora and Spotify make the concept of a personal music library less relevant? You can probably tell that Adiv doesn’t think so. “None of the consumption models are exclusive,” he argued, adding that he’s hoping to integrate with other music services in the future. Adiv said he has other ideas for improvements, but the company has to “make sure that the product performs its core competencies and stays stable.” He also said the company will continue to support (which was focused on identifying songs, Shazam-style), but there are no plans to develop it further. GMGP was funded by outside investors and Adiv himself. He declined to say how much he raised or from whom. But again, from a consumer perspective, the new company should be pretty much invisible; TuneUp is the brand that they know, and it’s what they’ll continue to see. “Ultimately I’m just really excited to be able to support those users that supported TuneUp for so long,” Adiv said. “I think it would be a shame for the best product in the market to just disappear.” As part of the relaunch, TuneUp is offering a 30 percent discount to people who use the promo code RELAUNCH14 when they . |
White House Crowdsources Campaign To Prove Climate Change Problems | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | The White House to help its climate change campaign. Instead of creating all of the doomsday scenarios itself, the White House is opening up government data so that researchers can create their own simulations and also help the cities prepare for the impacts. “The Obama Administration is today issuing a call to America’s top private-sector innovators to leverage open government data resources and other datasets to build tools that will make America’s communities more resilient to climate change and to forge cross-sector partnerships to make those tools as useful as possible,” a White House fact sheet on the website. Data on everything from coastal flooding to tsunami activity has been put in a developer-friendly new web portal on . To incentivize work on this somewhat obscure topic, it’s paired the new data with a host of prize-based competitions, including the “Coastal Flooding Innovation Challenge,” to “help people understand their exposure to coastal hazards and their increased vulnerability due to population increase and sea level rise.” The move is a continuation of the open-data-happy policies of Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, who explained to me back in 2012: We are enabling entrepreneurs and innovators across all walks of life to tap into fields of data sitting in the vaults of government in machine-readable form. They can, as they did with weather data, as they did with GPS data, create all kinds of services and products that we can only even barely imagine. Developers and data nerds can check out all of the new tools . [ ] |
Box Adds Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior To Its Board | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Today that Cisco CTO will join its board of directors, thus adding another outside member and woman to its leadership team. Warrior was also previously the CTO of Motorola. Box is widely expected to have , albeit privately. The company recently , at a valuation of around $2 billion. Box has raised $414 million in total. The addition of Cisco to Box’s board does raise the specter of a non-public exit; if Box decides against going public, or wants to delay the offering, it could have a corporate ally sitting nearby looking to make a move. Cisco is worth more than $110 billion and has cash and short-term investments of more than $40 billion. For Cisco, swallowing Box would be more than affordable. |
Of Course TechCrunch Disrupt Is In Mike Judge’s “Silicon Valley” HBO Show | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Striving to be as real as possible, more like in rather than , Mike Judge’s upcoming mixes in healthy doses of real startup life. That means TechCrunch Disrupt plays a big role in the show. And I guess that means you could be on the show too if you attended Disrupt SF last year. Bits and pieces of Disrupt can be seen in the behind the scenes video embedded here. A source familiar with the show tells me the last two episodes revolve around the show’s startup, Pied Piper, competing in Disrupt SF. Apparently they make it to the finals since he tells me they pitch twice. Even better, Jason Kincaid plays himself during these scenes. It’s true Mike Judge’s team attended Disrupt SF last year. They wanted to see first hand how startups operate and the pains they go through to pitch their life’s work to thousands of people. premieres on HBO on April 6th and the show’s Tumblr, which will probably be packed with taglines from the characters, launches on March 24. |
You Have 24 Hours To Get Tickets To The NYC Meetup + Pitch-Off | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | In the wise words of Rafiki, The is going down tomorrow night, Thursday March 20, at 6pm on the dot at . Be there, or hate yourself for missing out on a night of networking, beer-guzzling, and good, old-fashioned fun. Along with my beautiful self, we’ll have some incredible on-stage speakers. , Tumblr’s VP of Product will join us for a fireside chat, and to top it all off, we’ve wrangled some of the biggest investors in Silicon Alley to judge our Startup Pitch-Off competition, including . will have a total of 60 seconds each to present to the judges, with no demos or visual aids of any kind. The pressure is on, but the companies we’ve selected to participate will surely rise to the challenge. This is the third time TechCrunch has descended on the city that never sleeps, and each year has been better than the last. Will the same be true this year? Chances are, it probably won’t unless you show up. Yes, you. Without you there, none of us are going to have any fun. In fact, I might not even go at all. Is that enough of a guilt trip? Good. We can go together, then. |
Latest Photos Of Facebook’s New Gehry-Designed, Tree-Lined Campus Unveiled | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Take a new look at Facebook’s upcoming tree-studded Engineering Building. Sprawling over 22 acres of Palo Alto, the 435,000 square feet compound is designed by famed architect Frank Gehry. These latest photos of the architectural models show updates to the understated expansion of Facebook’s headquarters. The design has evolved since . A meandering and slightly odd-looking sky walk that jutted out of one side is gone. Both ends of the building are capped with imposing walls of windows overlooking patios and lush parks. But according to the models , it’s still one large room that Zuckerberg will be the largest open floor plan in the world. The tree-topped roof is still in the plan. It looks more like a park than a corporate office park. That’s by design, of course. The complex is built on top of a street-level parking structure and surrounded by trees. Between that and the number of trees on top of the building, Facebook appears to be planting enough trees to compensate for the loss of the Amazon rainforest. This building will be connected to its Menlo Park complex by an underground tunnel underneath the Bayfront Expressway. Facebook clearly had this idea in mind when the company moved into Sun Microsystems’ former headquarters in 2011, as it purchased the 22-acre parcel and underground rights at that time. Facebook plans to move in during the spring of 2015. |
Brazil’s ‘Constitution Of The Internet’ Puts Net Neutrality In The Spotlight | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Brazil’s Congress is days away from voting on , the country’s first major Internet legislation, and the big issue at stake is net neutrality. The bill, known as the “Constitution of the Internet,” has three major themes: net neutrality, freedom of expression, and Internet security. It had been rolling around Congress for two years until Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA spying on Brazilians — including the president — prompted President Dilma Rousseff to , suspending voting on all other legislation. That was last November. The issue that mobilized over 300,000 Brazilians this past week — no small feat considering it was Carnaval — is the net neutrality provision. Congressman Eduardo Cunha, ex-president of before privatization in 1998, and lobbyist for Brazil’s major telcos, is leading the effort to remove the net neutrality provision from the bill, which would allow telcos to limit access to Internet content. Referring to the bill’s latest version, Cunha said, “ .” “Without neutrality, the Internet looks more like cable TV, where providers can offer different service packages,” , a law professor, partner with PNM Advogados, director of the in Rio de Janeiro, and board member at Mozilla. “Basic service would include email and the social networks. ‘Premium’ would let you watch videos and listen to music. ‘Super Premium’ would let you download. Today that sounds like an aberration, but without net neutrality, it’s a possibility.” Lemos was one of the collaborators on the original draft of Marco Civil in 2009. In partnership with the Ministry of Justice and a group of law professors, including , Facebook’s current head of public policy in Brazil, the original bill was drafted through a to establish a bill of rights for Brazil’s Internet: protecting user privacy and freedom of speech, assuring net neutrality, establishing safe harbor for online service providers. Lemos says it was one of the first examples of collaborative lawmaking in Brazil. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and all signed a public letter of support for the original draft, but that was before it suffered dozens of amendments, including a “forced localization” provision that would require foreign Internet companies like Google and Facebook — a strategy Internet security entrepreneur Marco de Mello a “misguided attempt at solving a much broader problem than where data is warehoused.” “That can change significantly the way the Internet is organized, and influence other countries to do the same,” Lemos says. “The question now is whether Congress will continue to disfigure the project.” Mass mobilization in support of net neutrality has been the result of efforts by the same players who rose to prominence during Brazil’s coming-of-age protests that started last June. They are precisely the kinds of bare-bones budget, activist websites that could suffer discriminated access if net neutrality does not pass. , a social mobilization platform that has become an organizing tool for protesters, sent members to Brasilia in favor of Marco Civil and created a “ ” campaign that mobilized more than 11,000 Brazilians to email their congressmen in favor of net neutrality. , an activist media collective that also rose to prominence during the protests, has been the congressional sessions. And this Wednesday, along with the Brazilian Institute in Defense of the Consumer, and a dozen other civil society organizations, Meu Rio will display messages from Brazilians in support of the bill on a big screen installed in Congress. The biggest turnout in support of Marco Civil has come from a on Avaaz by Gilberto Gil, a musician and former Minister of Culture in the Lula administration, which gathered over 300,000 signatures in 48 hours. Diego Casaes, global campaigner for Avaaz and former editor of Global Voices in Brazil, Marco Civil a “Homeric struggle between civil society and telecommunications companies.” “I’m sure you’ve noticed that our media is dominated by Globo,” says , co-founder of YouPix, an epicenter of Brazilian web culture, which has been real-time updates and detailed explanations of Marco Civil. “But for the first time, we’re seeing big changes in the media paradigm. Social networks are tools of empowerment. So it’s a really important moment we’re living right now.” Marco Civil would be Brazil’s first major Internet legislation. “As a result of having no laws, court decisions here are quite a mess,” Lemos explains. Unlike in the U.S., “Brazilian courts are not bound by precedents, and any judge can decide according to her own discretion. That creates a lot of uncertainty for internet entrepreneurs in the country, especially startups, which cannot always afford to count on good lawyers to cope with the uncertainty in legal terms. “The whole framework of how the Internet is regulated in Brazil is at stake.” Congress is on Marco Civil this Wednesday, March 19. |
Everything We Know About The Moto 360 Android Wear Smartwatch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Motorola hosted a , the lead designer of the , and the discussion started with the inspiration for the product and moved to its specifics. Motorola wasn’t yet sharing that much about specs and details for the hardware, but the smartwatch actually works as Wicks used it on camera, proving this isn’t just an ambitious render, and that’s a big load of the minds of those looking forward to owning one. Wicks was emphatic about the Moto 360’s roundness; he said round at least 1,000 times by my admittedly inaccurate count. The purpose behind this was to get users on board with the idea without having to sell them on something they aren’t used to. 85 percent of watches sold have a round face, according to Wicks, and that’s what people are looking for in a time piece. Wicks also points out that this is a design that’s been associated with telling time throughout human history. “We’re going to map the tech to the consumers, not the other way around,” he said. “We’re not going to try to make consumers change for this tech.” It’s a fair point – most smartwatches these days have assumed that consumers would seek them out for their own intrinsic worth, but Motorola looks to be lowering the barrier to entry starting with approachable design. Familiarity might be the best way to break smartwatches out into the mainstream consumer crowd. Likewise, the team wanted to created a device that used high quality and comfortable materials to make it more approachable, so they embraced stainless steel and genuine leather bands. The bands are also interchangeable, and Wicks suggested different versions would come later to make the Moto 360 more compatible with smaller wrists. He said they’d be easy for users to change on their own after purchase, but didn’t go so far as to claim they’d be compatible with existing watch bands, which makes me suspicious they’ve employed a proprietary connector between band and watch, much like Pebble did with the Pebble Steel. The whole design is aimed at comfort, too, and that’s partially why they opted to go round. Wicks says that the same amount of diagonal screen real estate in a square watch would make for edges that dig into the wrist, so the Moto 360 is actually much more comfortable to wear as a round watch, too. Plus, the display he says is more readable, drawing attention to the center for at-a-glance info, with white space surrounding UI elements in a way that adds focus. The UI is also designed to rotate so that the watch can be worn on either wrist. Wicks didn’t share much new information around the barebones hardware specs for the Moto 360, but he did say it would be somewhat water-resistant, and that there’s no external ports for charging or data access. Instead, the watch has an alternate charging method that Motorola is keeping under wraps, which I’m guessing is either induction- or kinetic (motion)-based. The battery is also said to be a primary concern, but Wicks wouldn’t comment on how long it’ll last when it ships. He did note that the design team (which also built the Droid Razr and Moto X) learned a lot from the MotoACTV in terms of energy management, and that those lessons in fact informed the Moto X before this, too, and its ability to intelligently display smart notifications while retaining long battery life. It’ll help that there’s no camera in the watch, as Wicks confirmed, and that it seems designed almost wholly based around the core concept of presenting contextually relevant information from your smartphone when you need it, rather than for cramming as many bells and whistles as possible into a small space. Pricing for the unit wasn’t revealed, but a question about international availability did prompt Moto to say they plan to roll it out globally in due time, after its initial summer launch. As for device compatibility, the Moto 360 will work with “all Motorola Android smartphones,” and with any Android device running Android 4.3 or later. |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 10 | null |
One Seattle Politician Explains Why She Voted To Regulate Uber | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | such as Uber and Lyft Is this a clear-cut case of public corruption to protect a powerful political lobby, or is there a rational opposition that the tech community will have to win through hard-fought debate? Fortunately, unlike some of the , Seattle has had plenty of time to air their grievances in public. And at least one local representative is refreshingly honest. “I don’t want to ‘temporarily’ kill innovation, but I do want to buy a year for the taxi world to adapt,” Sally Clark, the chairwoman of the Seattle City Council’s Taxi, Limousine and For Hire Regulations Committee, in a post last month before the vote. “The idea seems to be that if you set the right number of vehicles, everyone gets a ride when they need it and the drivers have enough work to make a decent living.” Clark explained to us in an interview that she’s not opposed to upending the current system of metering and supply controls, but that “it can’t happen immediately.” Instead, innovation must be studied and measured before it can be allowed to impact the economy in unforeseeable ways. “We need to measure the impact on our system and then respond accordingly.” Clark worries specifically about wheelchair bound residents who rely on available cabs and taxi migrants who have invested their life-savings into a system they believed would be in place for the long-term. To be sure, we don’t know whether Uber and Lyft ever cause any of these problems; the ride-sharing industry hasn’t been around long enough to know whether it will wipe out the existing system. So why does a startup have the burden to prove it has the right to come into a new market? Describing the reason to regulate the number of Uber cars on the road, she argued, “Going ahead and doing unregulated numbers means that I go ahead and buy the cost of having to correct the problems later on.” Clark also doesn’t completely buy the argument that Uber and Lyft drivers are small business owners that are trying to make a living, too. “Taxi owners in this area tend to be immigrant East Indians who have invested their savings in owning one or many vehicle licenses. Flat-rate owners tend to be East African immigrants who have pooled money together,” she wrote in the blog post. “The bank rollers of Lyft and UberX tend to be venture capitalists (think Google and Jeff Bezos).” Furthermore, Clark calls out Uber and Lyft for not providing insurance to cover drivers when they’re not actively transporting passengers, services . Taxi unions often disguise their support for regulation behind rules for safety. It’s true that drivers for Uber, Lyft, and SideCar do have the same insurance policies and training to ensure driver safety. But, today’s vote is significant in that Seattle didn’t outright ban ride-sharing startups; it just severely limited their supply. As Ryan Lawler , “By ensuring that companies like Lyft and Uber can have no more than 150 drivers on each platform, the vote essentially kills any competition to the city’s existing taxi regime. It also will render services like Uber and Lyft relatively useless, by ensuring that they won’t be able to keep up with demand.” This decision seems to be consistent with opposition around the country who see increased competition as the real problem. At a union-orchestrated protest I attended last summer in San Francisco, it was clear that many . After questioning a number of participants on whether they would support Uber and Lyft if they were properly regulated, one taxi driver admitted, “They shouldn’t even exist.” The disquieting realization is that . Technology does away with the inefficiencies that give people jobs. Not everyone needs to be a full-time driver, nor do we need all the human-powered dispatchers that once routed taxis to passengers and maintained an optimal number of cars on the road. Clark maintains that the “wait and study” approach is far more progressive than other cities, which . The upshot is that tech companies are going to have to juggle protecting the workers they displace with finding a way to be profitable. “It is pretty difficult to shift the burden over to the folks who are going to lose service,” she explains. , and in some cases impossible. But if Seattle is any indication, this trade-off might not be a choice. [ ] |
YC-Backed CodeCombat Wants You To Learn To Code By Playing Games | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | So you’ve decided you want to learn to code, but don’t know where to start. There are dozens of services out there that can help you find your way, but a new company wants to teach you how to code through gamification. The teaches rudimentary JavaScript fundamentals, including everything you’d learn in an introductory computer science course, by forcing you to code your way through the game. In order to get from one level to the next, you must understand the lesson being taught and prove it through writing your own code. It’s an RPG-style game that has a beginner, single-player campaign as well as a multiplayer option for more advanced coders. The game is targeted at high schoolers who are looking to learn the basics in a fun way, and according to cofounder George Saines, it’s “growing like crazy.” The company was founded back in February of 2013 and is about to graduate out of Y Combinator next week. Since launch, they’ve put the Alpha version of the platform on Reddit before launching the beta in October of last year. In January, the team open sourced the entire product, releasing a level editor so that users can create content themselves. “That’s our biggest challenge going forward,” said Saines. “We’ve proven that people are playing the game and loving the platform, but creating content takes a lot of time.” So far, since launching the level editor, the platform has seen 103 contributors so far. The game is entirely free to play, and Saines claims that it will stay that way. Instead, the company will make money through recruitment. Because CodeCombat can see the way you type through a log of how you solve the problems and challenges posed by the game, as well as the way you structure your algorithms, it has incredible insight to your talent as a programmer. That information can be passed along to potential employers looking for developers (because who isn’t looking for developers right now) and CodeCombat will receive a placement fee. CodeCombat is free to play and available . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zjaA13k-dA&w=640&h=360] |
Epic Games Tries Something New, Licenses All Of Unreal Engine 4 For $19 A Month | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 19 | Licensing a big, brand name 3D engine (like the Unreal engine) to build your video game has always been… kind of hard. Pricing was, generally, done on a case-by-case basis. You had to explain what you were up to, negotiate for weeks, yadda-yadda-yadda… it wasn’t exactly easy to just jump into. Then Unity came along and turned that market on its head. Today, it seems, Epic is responding to change: their new Unreal Engine, source code and all, will start at just $19 a month. In other words, licensing the next-gen version of the engine that powers games like and will now cost less up front than a cheap cell phone plan, instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unreal Engine 4 will be able to publish games to PC, Mac, Android, or iOS (Xbox One and PS4 are supported too, but they have to license those the old fashion way) There’s one catch, though: once you want to actually your game, Epic wants 5% of gross revenue. As they put it: Anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users. If your game makes $1,000,000, then we make $50,000. It’s a small chunk of change in the big picture, sure — especially for something as powerful and well-known as the Unreal Engine. But remember: you’ve gotta pay Apple, or Valve, or Google, or whoever is distributing your game their cut, too. And since it’s gross revenue, you’re paying 5% on every dollar that comes in anyone else takes their cut. If you make $10 and your distributor takes $3.00 (30%), you still owe them 5% of $10.
– All the Unreal Engine 4 development tools
– Full source code access on GitHub
– The documentation
– Access to a private Q/A forum where Unreal will help you work through the kinks
– Updates Epic warns that the engine in its current form is “not very polished”, suggesting that it’s only ready for platform “pioneers” at this point. If that sounds scary, they suggest checking back in about 6 months. Ready to dive in, polished or not? You can . |
Lithium To Acquire Social Influence Scoring Site Klout For $200M | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Social customer service company will announce on Thursday morning that it has acquired for almost $200 million in cash and private stock, says . Re/code last month that Lithium and Klout, which scores influence on social networks, were nearing a deal. Lithium, which is expected to make its initial public offering later this year, to develop its tech platform and expand its sales and marketing. This brought its total raised to $142 million. Klout has raised more than $40 million in funding from investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund, ff Venture Capital, Microsoft, and CrunchFund (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington). Last month, the company with tools meant to help people improve their scores by posting more engaging content on their social media accounts. Though it , Klout claimed to be making revenue in the “double digit millions” for the first time last year. . |
Aereo Says A Win For Broadcasters Would Have “Chilling” Consequences To Cloud Computing | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | has today filed its response brief with the Supreme Court in a case that will make or break the streaming TV startup. So far, we’re in the preliminary stages of this particular case, with the broadcasters filing their initial briefing in March, arguing that Aereo violates copyrights by retransmitting broadcast signals as a “public performance.” Today, Aereo responds to the briefing with a briefing of their own, as well as a public statement on the case: Last December, we decided to not oppose the broadcasters’ petition for certiorari before the United States Supreme Court. Today, we filed our response brief setting forth the basis for our steadfast conviction that Aereo’s cloud-based antenna and DVR technology falls squarely within the law. We have every confidence that the Court will validate and preserve a consumer’s right to access local over-the-air television using an individual antenna, make a personal recording with a DVR, and watch that recording on a device of their choice. The broadcasters are asking the Court to deny consumers the ability to use the cloud to access a more modern-day television antenna and DVR. They are asking the Court to confine consumers to outdated equipment and limit their access to lawful technology in order to protect a legacy business model, the success of which is built on eliminating consumer choice and competition in the marketplace. Broadcasters should not be able to use the Courts or misuse the Copyright Act to drive forward what they believe are their most lucrative business models, at the expense of consumers. If the broadcasters succeed, the consequences to American consumers and the cloud industry are chilling. The long-standing landmark Second Circuit decision in Cablevision has served as a crucial underpinning to the cloud computing and cloud storage industry. The broadcasters have made clear they are using Aereo as a proxy to attack Cablevision itself. A decision against Aereo would upend and cripple the entire cloud industry. Since the beginning of television, consumers have had a fundamental right to watch over-the-air broadcast television using an individual antenna, and they have had the right to record copies for their personal use since the U.S. Supreme Court Sony Betamax decision in 1984. These are rights that should be protected and preserved as they have been for generations. We look forward to presenting our case to the Supreme Court on April 22 and we have every hope and confidence that the Court will continue validate and preserve a consumer’s right to use lawful technology innovations like Aereo. We’ve also embedded the full court briefing at the bottom of the post. The main question put before the SCOTUS is whether or not Aereo’s service constitutes a public or private performance. In their response, Aereo argues that its service — which pulls live broadcast OTA signals into dime-sized antennas/remote DVRs that are controlled by individual Aereo subscribers — falls squarely within the law based on a precedent set by . In that case, Cablevision won against broadcasters when it argued that its remote DVR service wasn’t a public performance just because the content itself wasn’t stored locally on the device. See, when you record a show to your DVR, you own an individual copy of that show. You can rewind and fast-forward as you please. Because it’s an individual copy, recorded and operated by you, it makes no difference whether that content was delivered from a cloud connection or stored locally on your device. It’s a private performance, not a public one. This precedent not only protects Aereo, but protects the way we cloud compute. Without it, watching a copy of a movie that you legally own by streaming it from Dropbox could be considered illegal. Aereo was built with the in mind. The service uses newer technology to achieve the same goal as a pair of rabbit ears above the TV, except that Aereo’s service delivers that content through the internet and offers a DVR service. See, what you pay for when you use Aereo is your own little antenna, stored in a local Aereo operations center. As a subscriber to the service, you have control over that antenna the same way you would if it was in your home. You tune it to pick up free, over-the-air broadcast signals to watch the shows you want. Whether you’re watching live or recording for later, the content you’re watching is always a recording. As soon as you press watch on Aereo for live TV, you tell the service to begin recording. Even though it’s only delayed by a couple of seconds, you’re not watching the same transmitted broadcast from the network, but rather watching your own recorded copy of that broadcast, which you tuned into using your remote antenna. Because you, as the user, activate an individual antenna, tune to the content you want, and record it, Aereo argues that it is an individual copy and thus a private performance, based on the Cablevision precedent. This argument has held up in similar cases last year in New York, and , though a Utah judge recently imposed a against the startup, marking the first major legal defeat since launch. However, the SCOTUS case, set to be heard on April 22, may offer some relief to Aereo, which has been under the gun since broadcasters caught wind of the service. And it was pretty hard to ignore, with media tycoon Barry Diller leading investment in Aereo. Though a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Aereo would , it surely won’t end the broadcasters’ rampage against Aereo. They will undoubtedly bring up other arguments in as many markets as possible to tire out Aereo. Luckily, the NY-based startup has over $100 million in funding and seems to be growing rapidly as it expands into new markets. In fact, we’ve even seen some markets sell out of capacity in the past few months. In short, this story is far from over. Stay tuned!
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With Revenue Up 2.4X In The Past Two Months, Instacart Lands In NYC | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | , the grocery delivery service popular in Chicago, San Francisco and other locations, landed in New York City today. I spoke to Instacart this morning about the New York City addition, which it described as something of an evolution. Each city is unique in its makeup, design, weather and so forth, but it seems that New York City is more unique than other municipalities. To serve the market, Instacart employs a blend of people on foot, bike and car to serve the neighborhoods that it has picked as first roll-out zones. Those ‘hoods are as follows: I won’t sound silly and try to to tell you what the names of those parts of Manhattan are. Users will be able to buy from Whole Foods at first. Instacart told TechCrunch that its revenue has risen 2.4X in the last two months. According to its own math, Instacart has grown more in those two months than it did in the preceding 20 months. Given that I am not privy to their internal metrics, I can’t vet that data point. Why is the company growing so quickly? I’d hazard that its expansion into new markets is driving top line for the company. Growth in one market is only so good when stacked next to growing in a number of locales. The company plans to be in 10 markets by the end of 2014, as I’ve . Instacart’s unit economics remain occluded, as the private company doesn’t want to offer a peek. But, given its recent growth, if its margins are intact, Instacart is having a fine start to the year. |
Yo Instacart, Can I Get Some Shareable Grocery Lists? | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | I suck at grocery shopping, at least compared to some of my friends. One knows exactly what vegetables go into a killer get-the-hell-out-of-bed smoothie. A gymrat buddy can suggest a healthier alternative to any popular foodstuff. And my favorite drunk has all the cocktail bar essentials memorized. Some of them already use grocery delivery service . Now I want them to be able to do the shopping for me. Instacart does its best to . The $10.8 million-funded Y Combinator startup breaks up items into intuitive categories, and it ranks popular ones from each at the top. But the friction is still in the decision making process. Shopping is exhausting, and in some ways, Instacart’s massive set of options makes it worse. In a supermarket, you have every brand and variation of a product right before your eyes. Because Instacart can only fit so much on the screen, and only shows items from one grocer at a time, it can be tough to know if you’re picking the tastiest, cheapest, or healthiest stuff. There’s also no easy way to price-compare, and no crowdsourced product ratings — two more features I think would help. Having to choose which option to buy on Instacart over and over causes two conditions: and . When confronted with too many options without a clear winner, humans tend to lock up and refuse to make any choice. For Instacart, this analysis paralysis could cause people to abandon their half-full shopping carts. Meanwhile, it turns out that making decisions is like flexing a muscle, and if we overexert ourselves, we get weak and start making poor, hasty choices. This decision fatigue could cause Instacart users to rush through the end of their order, end up missing things they wanted, buying lower quality items, and having a worse experience. Alongside informing people that you can actually order your groceries from your computer or phone, and hammering out logistics of reliable delivery, I’d bet that combatting these mental states will be one of Instacart’s biggest challenges. That’s why I want Instacart to offer sharable shopping lists. Like sharable music playlists but for groceries. My friends would be able to broadcast or privately share their whole list of purchases, or a selection of them centered around a theme like “Morning Juice Ingredients,” “Healthier Versions Of Your Favorites,” or “Cocktail Bar Starter Kit.” With a single click, I could add the same items or locally available substitutes to my cart, and boom, I’m shopping smarter with much less work. And think if Instacart got celebrities sharing shopping lists? I’d love to eat what 4-Hour Body author Tim Ferriss orders. Well-toned starlets could show you how to get their bodies. Maybe the would even share her favorite late-night snacks. You can bet their fan bases would sign up for Instacart to shop like the stars. Right now, Instacart has a curated by food blogs that offers shoppable ingredient lists and instructions for making dishes. But the only individual I saw recipes from was Martha Stewart. Plus I’m not looking for how to cook a specific dinner as much as improve my entire diet and drop the TechCrunch 10 I’ve picked up blogging from bed. Instacart told our writer Alex Wilhem six months ago that it was going to one day let people upload their own recipes, but we haven’t seen it yet. So , here’s your opportunity to make groceries social. Give us shareable shopping lists so I’ll never have to try to carry all my food-filled bags in one trip again, because you’ll be delivering them. |
Box Unveils First Standalone Product And New API Pricing At Inaugural Dev Conference | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Today at its in north San Francisco, Box, a cloud file storage and enterprise collaboration company, announced a number of product changes, new pricing schemes, and some new code. Especially in light of its , understanding what Box is up to matters. Let’s dig in. Financial quibbles aside, Box has grown quickly in terms of product usage. According to the firm today, there are now 35,000 developers working with Box in one form or another, and the company has now served 1 billion third-party API calls. It has also seen a 292 percent year-over-year growth in usage of third-party Box apps. Not that any of that is surprising — cloud file storage and enterprise collaboration are growth industries. Box has been growing its revenue at a quick rate using a per-seat pricing model. Today it introduced a new pricing schema for its Content API. The company, in a , called the new prices a response to companies using Box’s APIs at scale. This could be an important revenue driver for the company. Here’s the new pricing: On the subject of pricing, here’s what Box will charge for Box View, a new service that leverages the company’s past acquisition of Crocodoc: For Box View, Box today took its advanced metadata work for content sorting out of private beta and into a public test, and also revealed Box View. Box View is a system that allows other parties to leverage Box’s ability to upload, convert, and view content. Box View is also notable as Box’s first standalone service. Again, here we see a diversification of revenue streams. Regarding metadata, Box’s development work will allow users to better tag content on a custom basis in a way that is searchable via the normal Box Search tool already in the market. Box would very much like it if you would store quite a lot on its platform. The sticky bit is how to find each piece of content that you have on its servers, so, to combat that lack of grip, flexible metadata tagging and the ability to search those tags clears the path — at least in theory. Box calls use of metadata the adding of “context” to content. Metadata is integrated into Box’s mobile SDKs as well, so it should be pervasive to the larger Box experience. Essentially, today, Box revealed new tools for developers, services for end users, and revenue sources for its investors. It’s a decent mix for a company looking to grow up. |
Digital Ad Company CPXi Raises $30M In Its First Outside Funding | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Digital media holding company is announcing that it has raised $30 million in new funding. Founded in 2000, CPXi apparently raised no outside capital before this. The current round was a mix of debt and equity, and the money comes from the . CPXi says it has four main divisions: bRealTime (programmatic ad tech), Simplixity (media execution), Affiture (affiliate network), and AdReady, last fall. As you’d probably guess, CEO Mike Seiman and President Jeff Hirsch said CPXi has changed significantly over the past decade. In part because it needed to stay profitable, the company has been “pivoting according to the landscape,” according to Seiman, with Hirsch adding that the new funding will enable the company to “stay further ahead of the curves.” For now, programmatic ad buying seems to be the main focus and an area where CPXi plans to continue investing. Hirsch said that while programmatic is a much-discussed trend, CPXi’s offering with AdReady stands out because it’s not limited to “automating the buying and selling of ads”, but also using automation to tailor the creative content included in those ads. “It allows you to test and take advantage of who you’re reaching with the right message,” Hirsch said. For example, a large advertiser could set the basic template for an ad but then allow the content to be tailored to individual franchise locations, depending on the geography in which the ad is delivered. CPXi says its 2013 revenue was up 49 percent, to $111 million, compared to the year before. It’s also announcing the addition of two members to its board of directors — Poptent CEO Nick Pahade and betaworks partner and Chief Revenue Officer Janet Balis. |
Using Analytics, Bloomberg Beta Seeks Out Startup Founders | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | By now 350 employees at companies across the country might just be rethinking their day jobs, thanks to an email sent this morning by venture investment firm . The early-stage investor, whose sole backer is Bloomberg LP, tapped those 350 people as the candidates most likely to become founders of startup companies. Bloomberg Beta constructed the list using analytical tools and research performed in conjunction with , according to Karin Klein, a partner in the firm’s New York office. “We’re always trying to look at can we do venture capital in a different way,” Klein said. “This next future founders project is expanding that.” The firm conducted an analysis of all of the venture-backed founders and analyzed the traits that those people had in common. That created a set of patterns that they applied to a dataset of employees currently working at companies in and around the technology industry. The primary drivers were past work history and educational history, coupled with work experience at a current startup, Klein said. “We had 43 percent of the pool that we have worked at a venture-backed company immediately before founding a company,” Klein said. “I would have thought it would be higher.” The emails Bloomberg sent out don’t include term sheets or even an offer to join the firm as an EIR; rather it’s a way for Bloomberg to be proactive about building out a network among the next generation of potential founders, Klein said. “Our thought is let’s introduce them to other potential co-founders [and] let’s have them spend some time with us. It’s not necessarily that they’re all going to start a business tomorrow,” she said. The idea for coming up with some sort of predictive analytical tool for potential founders dates back to Klein’s days at Softbank, where she worked from 2000 to 2010. “I like that we’re being proactive in thinking about finding the people that might not even know yet that they have the good foundation of being an entrepreneur,” she said. “This type of thing encourages more people to be founders.” |
Buying An Engagement Ring Online Spoiled The Surprise | Felicia Shivakumar | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Buying an engagement ring online feels like a strange thing to do. It’s up there with buying a car you’ve never test driven or renting a house you’ve never seen in person. But in these technological times, instead of going from large retail chain to local jewelry store to look at sparkly rings, the engaged-to-be create Pinterest boards. Some do this voluntarily because they dream of their wedding day or have romantic thoughts about sharing the rest of their life with their partner. In my case, my man friend asked me for suggestions on what ring to buy when the time came. So I hesitantly agreed to make a board on a secret account that no one I knew would be able to find (unless he or I gave them ). Admittedly, the process became rather addicting. I dug online through all sorts of local shops, antique jewelers, Etsy, and even eBay hunting down vintage rings that were stylish and worth the price tag. I learned a lot about diamonds. Seriously a lot. From the value of the 4Cs to the exact amount of carats needed to look proportional on my hand ( ), I now know it all. After a few days, I found a dozen design suggestions and my “Rings I Like” board was complete. Now I waited. I waited and trusted that all my research would be thoughtful and meticulously considered in the hands of my partner. That was until I started getting notifications via Pinterest that options I so carefully researched and curated were now being repinned. All my hard work was now sitting on the dream boards of others. “That’s not fair! These are my finds,” I thought. Maybe I should make the board private? Yes, except that would make it difficult for my man friend to access and share with families and friends who might want to weigh in with their input. I would basically have to give him backend access to the account or he’d have to ask me to share it with certain people. So I left it public, and felt a ping of competitive jealousy every time someone repinned one of my picks. One morning I woke up to yet another repin notification. Since Pinterest doesn’t update or notify you if an item you pinned has become unavailable with any distinguishable frequency (which is probably for the best in cases like these), the only way to know if the status has changed is to click through to the link. The ring on my board that was repinned was no longer available. It had been sold, which was a bit of a bummer, but okay, fine. Until something in the URL caught my eye. In big bold letters it said ‘ON HOLD ANUP.’ This ring that was now sold has a new URL and title, with his name IN THE URL. Thank you, Internet; there goes any last chance we had at this whole process being a surprise. It turns out adding the name of a purchaser to the title is not actually unusual. I’ve noticed names plastered on listings all across Etsy. But for an engagement ring? Really? That just doesn’t make sense. A bystander to the engagement process, Internet-savvy me was now forced to block this information from my brain as to not ruin Anup’s chance at a romantic proposal. In the end, I would do it all again. I’m now the wearer of a nearly perfect art deco engagement ring that was purchased online for half its appraised worth. And I feel really good about that. Buying engagement rings online is by no means a mainstream trend. In fact, most couples rely heavily on online sources, including Pinterest, for research but opt buy . I, however, fell into the small percentage of women who prefer vintage. For ethical reasons, I didn’t want anything new. Vintage rings are often one of a kind so buying online became an obvious option. Whatever you opinions are on the tradition of engagement rings, e-commerce is trending and you can buy almost anything you want or need online. Hopefully, this post serves as an advisory to other future brides and independent online retailers. If you are selling anything that could be a surprise or a gift, even if the item is no longer listed, the notes and details you add stick around. I’m sure women far more engagement-giddy than I update their board and check out their favorite pins on an almost daily basis. So for the sake of happy couples everywhere, keep that shit anonymous. |
Microsoft And Dell Sign Patent Royalty Agreement For Android And Chrome OS Devices | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Today Dell and Microsoft that they have signed an agreement relating to intellectual property, which will see the two companies “license each company’s applicable” patents regarding Android and Chrome OS devices, as well as Xbox consoles. So Dell will pay Microsoft dollars when it ships devices running Google’s operating systems. The companies mention Xbox consoles because Dell, it turns out, has some IP with surface area to the device. Dell likely got a discount on its royalty payments as a result. The Android and Chrome OS portion of the agreement are not surprising, other than that they indicate that Microsoft can turn the largest of OEMs into its paying customers, and that it undercuts Google’s mobile platform hegemony and attempt to break into the traditional PC market. How so? Increasing the unit cost of using Android and Chrome OS adds a nip of cost to each unit, making them less profitable for their manufacturer, or more expensive to the consumer. Neither is much of a good option. And Microsoft directly cashes further into Google’s success, which is one of the more ironical pieces of the technology world at the moment. |
Twitter Tests More Inviting Profile Designs On Mobile | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Twitter has been , including a . But has spotted an update in the Twitter app (which is being partially rolled out as a test, considering my version of the app doesn’t show the change) that brings the same profile look to mobile. Instead of having a centered profile picture, with a user bio hidden behind a left swipe, the new design features the profile picture against a white background on the left-hand side of the screen, with a cover photo scrunched up top, and bio information just below the profile picture. The redesign also incorporates two new feeds to the profile section of the app, one that shows embedded photo tweets only and another that shows all the user’s favorited tweets. The idea here is to make Twitter a great place to consume, not just to share. It’s easy and simple enough to fire off a tweet, but when you’re trying to read through your feed or get to know someone a little better by viewing their profile, Twitter can become a bit tiresome. Not only are you traveling back in time, but it’s a text-heavy experience as opposed to Instagram. By giving users a way to look at media only, chances are they’ll be happier stalking their friends and past lovers on Twitter instead of Facebook and Instagram. Plus, showing tweets that were favorited gives yet another window into what kind of Twitter user a particular person is, which is helpful in determining how to engage with them. The switch is obvious. Instead of showing you a user’s name, number of tweets, and number of followers, Twitter is now focused on giving you real tangible evidence toward who a person is in the form of a front-and-center bio, photo feed, and favorites feed. Twitter has been trying desperately to be a more user-friendly tool, rather than being the platform of choice for early adopters and tech-savvy youngsters. With user growth slowing, the future of the business depends on whether new users are comfortable using Twitter right from the start. Though design has constantly iterated at Twitter to make things more user-friendly, like with , for instance, this would be the most drastic design refresh out of the company since launch. And the fact that it looks a lot like Facebook profiles? Well, like I said, new users have to feel comfortable stepping up to the plate on Twitter. What better way to do that then bank off a design they automatically and intrinsically associate with sharing. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment but haven’t heard anything back yet. We’ll keep you updated if we do. |
Mobile Users, Women Shoppers Fuel India’s E-Commerce Boom | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Among everything else that’s driving e-commerce growth in India, the ease of buying things sitting inside homes, avoiding the hazards of traffic snarls, worsening air pollution and finding a parking slot, will easily rank at the top, no matter how simplistic it sounds. India’s e-commerce industry has seen its most action-packed period over past few months — several hundreds of millions dollars have been pumped in startups such as Flipkart, Myntra and , the world’s biggest retailers including Amazon, Walmart and eBay are , and two of the biggest players are close to crossing the magical $1 billion in gross merchandise value anyway. In fact, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, . Indeed, India’s e-commerce market is projected to grow sevenfold to $22 billion in the next five years, as Internet infrastructure improves further, making it easier for the country’s nearly 200 million online population to shop on-the-go. India’s e-commerce market (sans travel sites) is currently worth $3.1 billion annually — just 1.5% of the value of China’s e-commerce sales, which are approaching $200 billion. Behind this frenetic pace of growth are several drivers and inhibitors. Accel India, an early backer of several e-commerce startups such as and in the country, has come up with a report that covers both the opportunities and the challenges. To be sure, Accel has made 13 seed stage investments and one growth stage ( ) over past few years in the Indian e-commerce industry, so a lot of what it has captured can be its own investment theses. However, the report does include some of the challenges that could hinder overall growth. Here are some of the top predictions and highlights from the report: “Some of our companies like are seeing mobile transactions greater than 40%, a 800% growth YoY – a large part of this growth in mobile transactions is coming from tier-2 and tier-3 towns – where the consumer is a mobile first consumer,” said Prashanth Prakash, a partner with Accel India. Opportunities in mobile commerce are also encouraging to talk about reaching audacious goal of processing 1 million orders in a day by 2016 before any of the bigger, established e-commerce rivals reach that milestone. Meanwhile, there are several bottlenecks threatening to slow down India’s e-commerce growth. As , the biggest challenge facing Flipkart and others is to grow the number of transacting users. And much of this is because poor Internet infrastructure. Finally, the biggest bottleneck for online retail or any other Internet business in India is going to be the existing regulations and legal regime that don’t seem to be in sync with the newer business models. As pointed out yesterday, current legal regime in India – namely and the 2011 Intermediary Due Diligence Rules – does not offer adequate protection and legal certainty to online platforms. Lead image credit: |
Timehop Brings Its Mobile Time Machine To Android | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | , the mobile app offering a way to recall your past one day at a time by displaying your old photos and posts from Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter, is now launching its service . The app, for those unfamiliar, is a simple service that lets you look back on what happened on this day last year, and the year prior, and so on. It’s a “this day in history” kind of thing, but only for your own content. The company last summer raised another led by existing investor Spark Capital, to help it build the new Android version. To date, the iOS app has topped over a million downloads, and sees a highly engaged user base, 40% of whom open the app every day, says Timehop founder Jonathan Wegener. He declined to share growth numbers, but notes also that the app is in the Top 200 in the U.S. App Store. Amid a sea of social photo-sharing applications, Timehop has stood out by offering a unique and clever way of revisiting your past. Thanks to the rise of smartphone cameras, photography became less about photo prints that were collected in physical albums you’d sit down and flip through over and over again with family and friends, and rather became about sharing these “in the moment” missives that are captured, posted, then forgotten. We simply take too many photos today to ever really remember them or revisit them all. This is also why apps like Instagram have been so compelling – it forced us to slow down and focus on one particular moment, taking the time to make it a memory through the use of nostalgia-inducing photo filters that gave the photo a sense of history. Timehop takes a different approach to dealing with our digital debris. It lets you time travel every day to remind you of where you were and what you were doing last year. It lets you re-examine your old relationships, return to your vacations, relive your parties and events, and watch your children grow. “We believe content actually gains value with time, that photographs become meaningful the older they get,” explains Wegener. “The average person now has digital photos and a social media history going back many years and Timehop’s goal is to become the place the world connects around the past.” Today, Timehop’s user base tends to be younger high school and college females, but a launch on Android – the mobile operating system with the largest worldwide market share – could soon change those demographics. The new app, which goes live this afternoon, will be a free download on Google Play. ( : The app is .) |
Twitter Adds People Tagging And Multiple Photo Sharing To Tweets | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Twitter has to its image offerings today, including the ability to tag up to 10 people in a photo without using any precious characters up. You’ll also now be able to attach up to four photos to a tweet, and Twitter will automatically craft a collage for you. The people-tagging feature will undoubtedly offer Twitter a way to increase the density of its social graph. Adding the ability to link people to specific photos provides Twitter with information about the photo, but also additional relational links between individuals on the platform. Making the tags available without eating up character counts will doubtless encourage people to use the feature. This is an example of Twitter utilizing the “invisible” carriage of metadata contained in each tweet to truck along extra information. Longtime users of the service may remember that Twitter had plans to roll out a ‘notes’ field, which would have used this metadata, but canned it to build the Cards feature that is now at the core of its multimedia offerings, including photos. Note that you will get a notification each time you’re tagged, so there are new settings in the apps that allow you to toggle those off. My fervent desire is for someone at Twitter to realize that the metadata storage that sits alongside each tweet would be a great place to put usernames as well. There is no good reason for them to take up characters in a tweet. If this goes over well, maybe we’ll see that come to pass, as well. Notably, face tagging — or people tagging — is one of the core features of Instagram, a photo app purchased by Facebook because it was growing its photo store much faster than Facebook itself. Adding multiple photo support is cool, and it looks fairly nicely implemented. It will likely increase the number of photos shared on the service dramatically, and will assist those who use it in a news capacity. It never hurts Twitter to have more people sharing more photos. The tagging is likely the big update here, though, when it comes to helping Twitter retain users and encourage people to open and check the app regularly. If you’re being tagged, that’s one more “legitimate” reason for Twitter to tap you on the shoulder to tell you to look at Twitter. Other efforts in this space include notifications that tell you when people you follow are discussing a TV show or other event. Twitter has been experimenting with these features in its Android beta and apparently liked what it saw, as it’s now rolling out to all users. These new features will be available in the Android and iOS apps first. They’ll likely come to the web at some point, too. And, according to , these features may actually be available for use by developers and users of third-party apps as well — something which has not happened a lot recently. Image Credit: |
King Falls 15% On Its IPO Day, Erasing $1.1B In Market Cap | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Today King went public, and immediately was given a raspberry by investors who sent its stock price down throughout the day, hammering the company to the tune of and $1.1 billion in value. A good flotation this was not. In fact, it was the . King is famous for Candy Crush, a game that has been a massive hit for the company, generating the majority of its parent company’s revenue and profit. Worries about the game’s longevity, and , appear to have spooked investors. An already profitable company, King now has ample cash to prove that it is not a one-hit wonder. How quickly it can do that is key, given that if Candy Crush becomes obsolete in rapid form, the company will see retreating revenue and profit, something that investors will not like. In frankness, the weak King offering was a negative for other public technology companies, as well. Facebook lost nearly 7 percent in value and Twitter more than 7 percent during regular trading. You can discount that as a merely a momentum shift following a sector IPO stumble, but I think that would be too generous; if investors are losing faith that King can grow, and it derives its incomes from mobile applications mostly, other companies that share similar monetization plans could face future impairment in their growth rates. And so their stock price goes down. The market appears open for technology offerings, but not suffused with enough optimism to grant King an IPO premium due to growth concerns. That’s our current market. C’mon Box, let’s . |
Google’s I/O Registration Lottery Happens April 15 – 18: May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | Google is doing something different with registration for its 2014 I/O Developer Conference this year. The company isn’t doing first-come, first-served this time around, which has resulted in a crazy scrum and a lot of server errors in the past, but instead will during which anyone can sign up, after which Google will choose randomly from the entire pool of applicants. If that sounds like they’re leaving a bit too much to chance, console yourself with this fancy new , which includes an interactive “Experiment” that’s pretty high concept, but possibly signals some of the areas of focus of this year’s show. Machine learning looks a likely subject, and possibly exoplanet exploration, though that last one might not be the central concern of all that many developer sessions. Even if you don’t get picked to play at I/O in person, Google is offering live streaming video of keynotes and sessions, and there are going to be a set of I/O Extended events taking place at various locales around the world for people who like the human touch but can’t make it all the way to SF. Details regarding these Extended events will be released soon, Google says. |
Vice Media’s Shane Smith To Join Us At TechCrunch Disrupt NY | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | After years of stagnation, the media industry is in full-fledged evolution mode. Consumption is changing, creation is changing, and even the act of reporting is transforming right before our eyes. And few people seem to have a clearer view of the future of news than , co-founder of . Luckily, he’ll be joining us onstage for an interview at in May. And we have lots to talk about. Vice is one of the most innovative and popular news/media sites in the world right now, aside from maybe BuzzFeed. The off-beat news site, which launched out of Canada back in 1994, tells TechCrunch it now sees 20 million monthly uniques, with a 129mm per month for VICE globally on all platforms including YouTube and its own HBO show. The company is even said to be as ways to deliver unique video reporting. And if that alone doesn’t satisfy you — perhaps you need some good old-fashioned capitalism to get excited — Vice Media is very openly while the market is still frothy. Smith has traveled all over the world reporting, including North Korea, Iran, Liberia and Russia, and is currently involved in the aforementioned HBO show entitled Vice, wherein his company’s trademark journalism is served up from different parts of the world and beamed into living rooms. Smith is will be on his home turf of New York City for Disrupt NY and we’re happy to have him. |
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A Brief History Of Oculus | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | years ago, Oculus raised 2.5 million dollars on Kickstarter. Yesterday, they were acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. To write the words “A Brief History Of Oculus” is a bit funny — because really, the company’s very has been brief. From the launch of their Kickstarter campaign to their massive acquisition, just 601 days had passed. The company has definitely generated its fair share of buzz in its short lifespan — and yet, many, people are hearing about the team for the very first time this week. For those people, and for everyone who might’ve missed some details along the way, here’s their story so far. Around the age of 15, Palmer Luckey started to fall in love with the concept of virtual reality. By day, he attended classes at the local community college. By night, he was the founder and admin of ModRetro, a community dedicated to modifying vintage gaming consoles. Taking a N64 and making it portable; contorting an Xbox into a package half its original size — that sort of thing. If there’s anything that videogames have taught gamers to love, it’s collecting things — the rarer, the better. Palmer’s favorite thing to pick up? Early attempts at virtual reality headsets. Throughout the late 80s and 90s, dozens of companies tried to turn VR headsets into commercial success. All of them failed — hard. Some were too expensive; most just didn’t work worth a damn. of them were far too ahead of their time (with components being far too expensive to source, and most home computers being far too weak to power anything worth playing.) Sourcing his collection everywhere from industry liquidation sales to government auctions and carting himself out to the seller to avoid paying for shipping, he’d get his hands on headsets that once cost nearly $100,000 for less than $100. By his own estimates, Palmer has the largest private collection of virtual reality headsets in the world. Around the age of 16, Palmer took on a new hobby: building headsets . Unhappy with the performance of everything he’d obtained, he set out to build something . Some of the prototypes were pieced together from his collection; others were modified versions of displays other enthusiasts had put together; others were built entirely from off-the-shelf pieces. Even then, though, it wasn’t entirely clear that there was a company in the making. He was attending classes at Cal State Long Beach, pursuing a journalism degree. Meanwhile, he worked as an engineer at USC’s Mixed Reality lab, experimenting with VR and head-mounted displays.
You never know who you’re going to meet wandering around the Internet. In Palmer’s case, a random crossing of digital paths made a connection that would very quickly define the company, raising it from “some crazy smart dudes building VR goggles in a garage” to something that just about everyone in the industry was keeping an eye on. Lurking around yet another forum, Palmer found himself chatting with John Carmack — John Carmack. As in, co-founder of id Software; the lead programmer of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake. When it comes to gaming giants, most of’em sit comfortably within Carmack’s shadow. As luck had it, Carmack had been playing with the idea of whipping up some VR goggles of his own, modifying a headset he had on hand. Palmer mentioned the prototypes he’d built. As he told Eurogamer :
“… He ended up seeing my head-mounted display work and asked me, ‘Hey, what you have looks interesting – is there any chance I could buy one?’ He’s John Carmack,” Luckey snorts, “I just gave him one instead – you can’t turn him down.” That was, perhaps, the best decision Luckey could have made. A few months later, Carmack was at E3 demonstrating one of Luckey’s prototypes — a hulk of duct tape and whatever components were convenient — to anybody who would watch. Suddenly, this thing wasn’t just a passion project anymore. The Internet was suddenly with talk of “Carmack’s new virtual reality project” — though Carmack wouldn’t officially join the company for over a year. Something was happening. Almost overnight, it had become shockingly clear: if there was a time for Palmer to do this, to do this, it was now. Within weeks, just past halfway to his journalism degree, Palmer dropped out of college to start a company. In June of 2012, Palmer formed OculusVR. When Palmer first started thinking about Kickstarting a virtual reality headset — long before he met Carmack, long before he ever formed a company — he hoped he’d get 100 or so enthusiasts to back his project. “I won’t make a penny of profit off this project, the goal is to pay for the costs of parts, manufacturing, shipping, and credit card/Kickstarter fees with about $10 left over for a celebratory pizza and beer.” in early 2012. Then came the endorsements from Carmack. Other industry titans, like Gabe Newell of Valve, threw their support behind the project. Thoughts of selling just 100 headsets went out the window. On August 1st of 2012, Oculus launched their Kickstarter campaign. For a company with such ambitious (if newfound) plans — to revive an entire genre, to succeed where so many had failed only a decade ago — they had a rather modest campaign goal: $250,000. That’s less than some of those 90’s VR headsets from Palmer’s collection cost when they flopped onto the market. Within 24 hours, they’d raised $670,000 from 2,750 people. Within three days, they’d broken a million dollars. (For reference: Around the time the Kickstarter ended, Oculus had 10 employees. By the time they sold to Facebook, they were at 100.) Now, they weren’t using Kickstarter to pitch some incredibly polished, perfectly refined virtual reality headset that they’d somehow conjured out of thin air. This was something… else. Something rougher. It was much, prettier than that old duct-tape-tastic E3 prototype, mind you — but, with relatively weak specs and a chunky design, it wasn’t something they meant to sit on store shelves. Instead, this first release was meant for developers and early adopters to get their feet wet with VR. To cleanse the palate of any bad taste left by the headsets of yesteryear. To get people building things in VR. This dev kit (or Oculus Rift DK1, as it came to be known) gave most people their first glimpse at Oculus’ potential, and it made one thing clear: this little $350 dollar headset was better than everything that came before it. But it wasn’t perfect. Its low resolution screen (combined with magnification lenses that helped wrap the image around your view) made even the most beautifully rendered 3D environment look dated. It was like you were sitting too close to an old TV, or staring at the display through a screen door (aptly, this shortcoming quickly came to be known as “the screen door effect”) This initial headset also lacked a feature that only really seems important once you notice it’s not there: positional tracking. While the headset’s sensors could keep tabs of how your head was angled (are you looking up? Down? Turned to the left?), it had absolutely no idea your head was from moment to moment. You could look down at an object — but if you tried to lean in for a closer view, your in-game character did nothing. Bam! Immersion shattered. Meanwhile, complaints of the headset causing motion sickness weren’t rare. That low-res screen, the early software, the lack of positional tracking — it all swirled together into something that managed to make some people’s inner-ears flip out and their stomaches turn. Despite the flaws, Oculus managed to sell every last one of these headsets that they could make. They’d sourced enough components to make around 65,000 units of this first iteration — on February 21st of 2014, they officially sold out. Could they have made more? Yes. But that would mean taking the time to source components for a now out-of-date product, as they were just weeks away from the debut of… On the morning of March 19th (just one week before the Facebook acquisition) Oculus began accepting pre-orders for their second hardware release. It still isn’t the product that Oculus intends to ship to consumers, but it’s close. Based on a prototype that Oculus had started showing a few months prior, Developer Kit 2 (or DK2) fixed or improved upon many of the original headset’s flaws. That old low-res display? They bumped it up considerably, from 640×800 in each eye to 960×1080 — increasing the overall pixel count by over 100%. That “screen door” effect isn’t gone, but it’s much, much less noticeable. As for the motion sickness? Oculus figured out that much of it was triggered by the display’s tendency to blur motion. They countered this in three ways: Most significantly, they introduced an entirely new piece of hardware to the mix: an external camera. By using this camera to track an array of cleverly hidden infrared LEDs built into the DK2 headset, they were now able to detect not just how your head was angled, but it was. Things like leaning in and out to read text, or to peek around a corner, or over a ledge, were suddenly possible for developers to support. Barely one year passed between Oculus shipping their first developer kits (March 29th, 2013) and the start of pre-orders for version 2 (March 19th, 2014), but a happened in that time. Before the acquisition, Oculus had two big checkboxes left on their to-do list: to ship all of those pre-orders they got for the second development kit, and, eventually, to finalize and ship the consumer product. With yesterday’s news that Facebook has bought them, however, they’ve given themselves a huge challenge: to keep people on their side. One of Oculus’ biggest strengths has always been in the way that people perceived it. You just to root for them — and how could you not? It’s the tech world’s favorite tale: a brilliant whiz-kid turns his garage project into a company, makes millions. Add in the fact that the company launched on Kickstarter, and Oculus had seemingly locked in its cred as something “homegrown”. Something “indie” — even when they went on to raise nearly $100M from traditional venture capitalists. So of course, them being acquired by Facebook was met with backlash from some of their biggest fans. To them, Oculus was like their favorite band — and this was them “selling out”. Within hours of the announcement, the top post on reddit was a drawing of reddit’s mascot laying flowers on Oculus’ grave. Many pledged to cancel their DK2 orders, and instructed others on how to do the same. Notch, the creator of Minecraft, immediately ( ) killed the company’s plans to build an Oculus version. Oculus that they’ll remain absolutely independent at Facebook, publishing not , not , but posts saying as much. When I sent the company an email with a few questions for this article, I (in haste) used the word “exit” to describe the acquisition, and they took issue with the term. “This is not an exit,” they wrote back. “Oculus stays independent.” Their challenge now is to somehow convince the world of this. The best thing Facebook could do here? Keep their hands off of it for a (long) while. Throw money at it, but keep their branding and influence at bay (No one, and I mean , wants a Facebook-branded VR headset.) Let them ship the hardware they’ve promised, and to make what they ship than anything they’ve promised so far. If this is a long term play, Facebook’s short term strategy should be to stay the hell away. |
Build Your Own Makerbot-Inspired Robotic Tattoo Machine | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 26 | [vimeo http://vimeo.com/89639653] I actually checked to see if today was April Fool’s but, seeing as how it wasn’t and seeing as how it would be quite simple to recreate this cool piece of hardware, I figured we could check it out. Basically it’s a DIY tattoo machine that uses a base with a needle attached to the extruder. To use it you simply strap your arm to the platform (!!!) and wait for the robot to blow some Sailor Jerry ink into your flesh. Write the creators from : You can view the or you can simply watch the video and imagine the future when reality mimics literature and this becomes the machine from Kafka’s The Penal Colony. Regardless, tread carefully when mixing 3D printers, ink, and sharp needles. |
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