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How To Build Habits In A Multi-Device World | Nir Eyal | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Allow me to take liberties with a philosophical question reworked for our digital age. If an app fails in the App Store and no one is around to use it, does it make a difference? Unlike the age-old thought experiment involving trees in forests, the answer to this riddle is easy. No! Without engagement, your product might as well not exist. No matter how tastefully designed or ingeniously viral, without users coming back, your app is toast. How, then, to design for engagement? And as if that were not challenging enough, how should products that touch users across multiple devices, like smartphones, tablets, and laptops, keep people coming back? The answer is habits. For the past several years, I have , , and on how products form habits, and my work has uncovered some conclusions I hope will prove helpful to product designers. To be clear, not every product requires user habits; plenty of businesses drive traffic through emails, search engine optimization, advertising, and other means. However, if the company’s business model requires users to come back on their own accord, unprompted by calls to action, a habit must be formed. The good news is that in today’s multi-screen world, the ability to interact with multiple devices has the potential to increase the odds of forming lasting user habits. By designing across devices, developers have a unique opportunity to leverage an to drive higher engagement. Through my research, I have found a recurring pattern endemic to these products, which I call “the Hook Model.” This simple four-phase model is intended to help designers build more engaging products. Building for habits boils down to the four fundamental elements of the Hook: a trigger, an action, a reward, and an investment. This pattern can be found in any number of products we use automatically, almost without thinking. Designing for multiple interfaces means your product is more readily accessible throughout the day. The more often the user chooses a particular solution to meet her needs, the faster a habit is formed. A trigger is the event in the user’s life that prompts her to use the product. Sometimes the trigger can be external, such as when a user receives a notification with a call to action. Other times, the trigger is internal and the information for what to do next is imprinted in the users’ memory through an association. For example, many products cue off of emotions as internal triggers. We use Facebook to socially connect with friends and family when we’re lonely and check ESPN or Pinterest when we’re bored. It is important that companies understand the users’ internal triggers so they can build the product to meet those needs. Designers should be able to fill in the blank for the phrase, “Every time the user (______), they use my app.” The blank should be the internal trigger. Take, for example, the experience Nike has constructed for its aspiring athlete customers. Nike’s suite of products includes wearable monitors, which track physical activity throughout the day, as well as a host of smartphone apps to be used while running, playing basketball, or golfing. For Nike, it is critical that users attach the company’s products to a discrete moment in their lives. To succeed, Nike has to own the instant just before the user heads out the door to work out. Athletes want to know their effort matters and Nike helps them meet that need. By digitally recording the workout, Nike’s apps tap into a deeper emotional need to feel that all that sweating is not going to waste, that the amateur athlete is making progress. By creating an association with a moment in time—in this case, every time the user exercises—Nike begins the process of creating a habit. When it comes to multi-screen experiences, it is important to design a narrative for how the product is actually used. Knowing the sequence of behaviors leading up to using the products, as well as the deeper emotional user needs, is critical for successfully executing the next step of the Hook, the action phase. The action is the simplest behavior the user can take in anticipation of reward. Minimizing the effort to get to the payoff is a critical aspect of habit-forming design. The sooner users can get to the reward, the faster they can form automatic behaviors. In Nike’s case, simply opening the app or wearing one of their body-mounted devices alleviates the user’s fear that the exercise will be in vain. Clicking a button marked Run in the Nike+ running app, for example, begins tracking the workout and gets the user closer to the relief he was looking for. Finding ways to minimize the effort, be it by eliminating unnecessary logins or distracting functionality, improves the experience both on mobile and web interfaces. Nike makes the action of tracking exercise easier by building products designed to make recording even easier — for example, shoe-mounted devices that passively collect information. Designers should consider how many steps they put in the way of users getting what they came for. The more complex the actions, the less likely users are to complete the intended behavior. The reward phase of the Hook is where the user finally gets relief. After being triggered and taking the intended action, the user expects to have the internal trigger satisfied. If the user came to relieve boredom, she should be entertained. If the trigger was curiosity, she expects to find answers. Thus, the reward phase gives the user what she came for, and quickly! When the athlete uses the Nike app, for example, a 3-2-1 countdown displays to signify that the workout is about to begin. The user can get on with her run, knowing it is being recorded. But the Nike suite of products layers on more rewards. The apps not only record the workout, they also motivate it. To boost their habit-forming effects, many products utilize what psychologists call intermittent reinforcement. When products have an element of variability or surprise, they become and engaging. For example, scrolling on Twitter or Pinterest offers the allure of what might be found with the next flick of the thumb. In Nike’s case, the element of variability can be found in various forms throughout its product experience. For example, when athletes connect to Facebook, the app posts to the social network and runners hear the sound of a cheering crowd every time one of their friends “likes” their update. The athlete never knows when they’ll hear the encouragement and the social rewards help them keep pushing forward. Nike also implements a point system called NikeFuel, which is meant to be a quantification of physical activity. However, the mechanics of how rapidly points are earned is intentionally opaque, giving it an element of variability. Finally, exercising itself has an element of surprise, which Nike’s products accentuate by encouraging users to complete new and increasingly challenging activities. Lastly, a critical aspect of products that keep users coming back is their ability to ask for an investment. This phase of the Hook involves inviting the user to do a bit of work to personalize the experience. By asking the user to add some effort into the app, the product increases in value with use, getting better the more the user commits to it. Investments are actions that increase the likelihood of the next pass through the Hook by loading the next trigger, storing value, and creating preference for using the product. It is important that the four phases of the Hook are followed in sequential order for maximum impact. Every time the user exercises with a Nike app or body monitor, she accrues a history of performance. The product becomes her digital logbook, which becomes more valuable as a way of tracking progress the more entries she makes. Additionally, each purchase of a Nike+ device—like a FuelBand, for example—is a further financial and psychological investment in the ecosystem. Nike and other exercise training apps, like Strava, allow athletes to follow other athletes to compare performance. The action of selecting and following other users is a form of investment; it improves the product experience with use and increases the user’s likelihood of using the product again. In the future, products like Nike+ could automatically collect information from multiple touchpoints to create an individualized workout plan. The product could improve and adapt the more the user invests in using it. For multi-interface products that rely upon repeated user engagement, understanding the fundamentals of designing habits is critical. By following the Hook Model of a trigger, an action, a reward, and finally an investment, product designers can ensure they have the requisite components of a habit-forming technology. By building products that follow users throughout their day, on smartphones, tablets, and more recently wearable devices, companies have an opportunity to cycle users through the four phases of the Hook more frequently and increase the odds of creating products people love. |
Baggg.it Rebrands, Turns Into Shopping Extension Called Agora | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | When we last left , the founders Eliyah Finkelstein, Jonathan Cook, and Michael Cook were busy building a shopping extension, a Baggg if you will, that allowed you to comparison shop between sites and products. They were close to completion but they soon realized that sites with three Gs in the name had gone out with the BeeGeeGeeGees. Well the boys are back in town with a rebranded site. Called Agora, they are gathering and hope to be live this quarter. The service essentially does the same thing as Baggg.it – you dump items into a persistent shopping bag – but the branding is completely rethought and the technology is far smoother. Most interesting, however, is that the entire team is working out of a small town in Iowa, far from the glitz, glamor, and fancy wines of the Valley. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI0WWI-9Lns] “We all grew up in Fairfield, Iowa, went to the same school, and have been friends since early childhood. We started working on various programming projects together in our teens and have been working as consultants since around 18 years old up until about 3 years ago when we started our own company,” said Finkelstein. I first met this trio in Chicago where they were concerned about funding. Since then they’ve received $60,000 angel investment and a $100,000 Series A. The programmers see their largest competitor as Google Shopping but unlike other sites like Fancy, Wanelo, and media sites like Pinterest, they have created a browser extension that sits on top of major shopping sites and creates a universal shopping card. “Agora is a productivity tool for shoppers in the same way that Microsoft Word is a productivity tool for writers. We’re not relying on building a social platform to create value, but rather our value comes from creating a set of tools that makes shopping online faster, easier, and more enjoyable for each individual user,” said Finkelstein. You use it by dragging products off of, say, an Amazon page and onto a thin “belt” along the bottom of the screen. Agora stores the items for later perusal and offers you a central checkout. “The current iteration of our service, Agora, attempts to help the user with all stages of the shopping process from beginning to end,” said Finkelstein. Given the interest in Baggg.it – horrible name and all – I’m looking forward to seeing where these lads are headed. |
Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Private Companies Won’t Take The Lead In Space Exploration | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Famed scientist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about the importance of space exploration today during his keynote at South by Southwest Interactive. Despite advances by private companies, particularly SpaceX, he said they won’t be the ones making the biggest breakthroughs. Tyson admitted that for him, the appeal of space travel is the simple fact that it’s “a frontier.” However, there are more practical reasons to go into space. For one thing, we need to be able to respond if we find out that an asteroid is headed for Earth. “You know the dinosuars would have if they could have,” Tyson said. He joked that failing to pursue a space program when we have the scientific and technological capability would make us “the laughing stock” of other intelligent species: “They’d have human bones on display in their museum. ‘Here they are, not building a spaceship.'” He also suggested that space travel is tied to other forms of significant innovation like transportation, energy, and health — which he contrasted with people “who innovate because you want to make a buck” and are trying to figure out “the next app.” Tyson described space travel as “a long-term investment”: “It’s an investment that private enterprise cannot lead.” He recalled the excitement around , which sparked discussion about whether private companies would replace government as the main engine behind space travel. Tyson’s response? “They brought cargo to the space station! NASA’s been doing that for 30 years!” The problem, he said, is that it’s hard to predict the risk and return on investment on “doing anything big and expensive first.” He noted that the first Europeans to come to America were not the Dutch East India Company, but Christopher Columbus and his crew, whose expedition was paid for by Spain. After the initial exploration, there will be opportunities for private companies. “The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines the asteroid belt,” Tyson said. |
SXSW Just Got Real Interesting As Secret Creates Realtime SXSW Web Feed | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | BREAKING: SXSW is about to get even more interesting than normal. Secret, the app which lets you share anonymously amongst friends and friends of friends, has announced a web feed of SXSW ‘secrets’ that are posted from there or mention it. You can check it out at . We’ll have more info in just a moment… Suffice it to say some of the more interesting gossip at SXSW is going to appear on this feed… |
iPad DJ Launches Lightwave To Provide Wearable, Real-Time Analytics For Events | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Wearables are being used by users to measure their activity and provide them with feedback that can help them improve their health. Today, a new startup called is using wearable technology to provide analytics around live events for performers and artists. The project was started by , who was co-founder and VP of marketing at social ad and analytics startup . But most people know her best from her days touring as the first big iPad DJ, back when creating music on the tablet was a hugely novel thing. After several years of taking time off and dreaming up the next big thing, she decided to do something that would combine both her tech and music experience. The result is Lightwave, which provides actionable analytics for real-world events. At the heart of the project is a wearable wristband that measures a number of different user interactions — movement, audio levels, and temperature — to provide live performers with real-time data about people in the audience. “When you’re a performer, you have no idea if the guy in the back of the room is having fun or not,” Rana June told me. Lightwave changes that by collecting and visualizing crowd data. That gives artists a way to customize the experience based on audience feedback. During the show, attendees could unlock certain events based on different activity levels, creating customizable and programmable experiences for each show. The plan is for an artist or brand sponsoring an event would give away Lightwave bracelets, which could be used to augment the user experience. Like 3-D glasses, at the end of the event, organizers would collect them back and could reuse them. “When you enter a concert, instead of putting a paper wristband on someone, you put an intelligent wristband on them,” she said. The first test of the Lightwave technology will be at SXSW on March 10, where Pepsi is putting on an exclusive “bioreactive” concert with DJ A-Trak. But it’s looking to be used in more events over time. Photo Credit: via |
Facebook Has Big Updates To Share, Announces First F8 Developer Conference Since 2011 On 4/30 In SF | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Facebook plans to reveal new ways for developers to grow and monetize their apps. Today it announced it will hold its conference on April 30th in San Francisco. It will have been almost three years since Facebook’s last F8 when it unveiled Timeline and the Open Graph platform in 2011. The audience at SF’s Design Concourse will include “More than 1,500 mobile and web developers from all over the world” according to a Facebook blog post. Those wishing to attend are told to Facebook outlined the agenda for the day, explaining that “This year, we’re going back to our roots and having a pure developer conference. F8 will open with a morning keynote, followed by four tracks that will cover getting started guides, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies, engineering deep dives, and advertising tips for making your app or game highly successful. We’ll also have sessions dedicated to exploring how developers can take advantage of open source technologies.” Ilya Sukhar, CEO of mobile-backend-as-a-service Parse which Facebook acquired last year, laid out the plans for F8 at his SXSW Interactive Keynote. , he gave more information about exactly what Facebook will be sharing: “…building a hit app and finding people who will love it is really hard. Turning that app into a money making venture is even harder. Helping developers solve these problem is why we’re doing an F8. Between the Facebook and Parse teams, we have a lot of new developer-focused products to show off. We’ll have a day full of technical content, engineers all over the place to help out, and a sweet party to close it out.” The last included comedian Andy Sandberg impersonating Mark Zuckerberg before the CEO gave a keynote speech. VP of product Chris Cox showed off the Timeline redesign for the profile, and former CTO Bret Taylor walked developers through the Open Graph Platform, which would allow their apps to auto-publish a user’s activity back to Facebook to drive growth. Goth-rock band Crystal Castles played the after-party. This year, the focus is likely to be on how mobile developers can use Facebook to gain more traction with both free and paid promotion on Facebook, which can in turn help developers earn money. In 2011, Facebook’ launched an HTML5 app platform designed to be a mobile equivalent of its web canvas and competitor to the iOS and Android app stores, but it never got popular with developers. The question for F8 is whether Facebook will take another shot at directly challenging Apple and Google’s platforms, or double-down on its current strategy of being a social layer riding on top of them that provides backend hosting, personal data, growth, and promotion opportunities. |
Success, Reality And The Myth Of “Up And To The Right” | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Despite what many are led to believe, great startups rarely move linearly “up and to the right.” They zig, they zag, they take detours and often “pivot” several times to get to a positive outcome. The story is a great example of this point, which I make often to entrepreneurs. Last week for a reported several-hundred-million dollars. I’ve been an investor and board member at BlueKai since early 2010, when my firm, , led the company’s (along with co-investors and Ventures). The sale to Oracle was a terrific outcome for the founders, the company and its investors. Good founding teams have to cut through the noise in their industries and adjust their businesses accordingly. These shifts can be gut-wrenchingly painful and often result in very difficult organizational changes (often layoffs), founder dilution, challenging board conversations and painful media coverage. This coverage often portrays these shifts as desperate “pivots” and a sign of uniquely poor execution. The reality, however, is that these shifts, pivots, detours — whatever you want to call them — are the norm. Omar Tawakol In 2007 Omar Tawakol, Grant Ries and Alex Hooshmand — the founding team at BlueKai — saw a massive shift happening in the online advertising world. At the time, display was 75 percent of the $20 billion online advertising market, Google’s market cap was around $150 billion (vs. $400 billion today), and companies like Yahoo and Microsoft were considered online advertising leaders running primarily generic display advertising. It was also the year that major online players shelled out over $10 billion to acquire display advertising leaders: Yahoo bought RightMedia ($680 million), Microsoft bought aQuantive ($6.3 billion) and Google bought DoubleClick ($3.1 billion). Foreseeing a future where advertisers paid a premium to reach specific audiences and consumers, the BlueKai team set out to build an exchange where marketers could leverage data to match their ad spend with audiences. They partnered with RightMedia investor from RedPoint and launched the platform in 2008. It worked phenomenally well. For example, an airline could now run ads for flight specials across the web and reach consumers who were actually in the market to travel versus reaching “everyone” on the web. Advertisers loved it. Revenue on the BlueKai exchange grew over 900 percent in 2009 alone. Things looked pretty damn good. But like many great entrepreneurs, Omar and his team were paranoid, and as Andy Grove so eloquently put it in by the same name — only the paranoid survive. While the exchange model was working well, it was very clear to Omar that the ground was shifting. His customers were asking for software to manage this newly complex world of data + media, and if BlueKai didn’t provide it, someone else would. Building a software business, however, would require significant capital investment, hiring new types of talent from engineering to sales, and entrance into a market where the company was frankly unproven. Not an easy conversation to have with your investors and board members — especially investors like yours truly who had just ponied up $21 million to fund the existing business. To Omar’s credit, he went all in. He made it very clear this was not an optional “pivot” – it was critical to the company’s long term success (and possibly, survival). Over a period of about six months, Omar and his team did their homework, laid out the pros and cons of build versus buy, and ultimately made the case to the board to get into the software (SaaS) business via an acquisition. Private-to-private M&A transactions (one VC-backed company buying another) are extremely hard to pull off, as the founders and VCs of each company can rarely agree on valuation, leadership and other terms. After months of evaluating potential targets, Omar and team worked with BlueKai attorney and the board to come up with a structure that worked for all involved. And in January 2011, , a small software company founded by former Amazon exec . BlueKai never looked back. Throughout 2011, the company invested heavily in building out the SaaS platform, and TrackSimple’s Ingalls became BlueKai’s CTO. In 2012, the company began ramping up its sales and marketing efforts around the SaaS product line and started to in the Data Management Platform (“DMP”) space. As “big data for marketing” took hold, large enterprise customers like HP and other top marketers signed on, and BlueKai was able grow its SaaS revenue into the tens of millions of dollars annually. The timing for BlueKai’s rise could not have been better, and in 2013 a number of big players began to take notice. For the past few years, the marketing software category has been hot, with large public players buying smaller category leaders. Examples include Salesforce buying , and , Adobe buying and , and Oracle buying Eloqua and Responsys. These deals alone represent more than $8 billion in transaction value. Oracle’s acquisition of BlueKai is certainly part of this trend, and timing matters. Long before the category got hot, though, the BlueKai team shifted its strategy, had some tough conversations with its investors, and made a game-changing bet. Bets like this are often the hallmark of good entrepreneurial outcomes – much more common than “up and to the right.” |
Gillmor Gang Live 03.08.14 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | – Doc Searls, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
Secrets, Lies And Startup Leaks: Mitigating Tech Company Paranoia In An Age Of Constant Crisis | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | It’s been an interesting few weeks for Silicon Valley insiders. , the anonymous messaging app, has caused several communication crises for some prominent tech companies, and many more are no doubt on their way. By making the entire revelatory process anonymous and shareable, even seductive, the app’s attracted tech company leaks and spiteful rumors like never before. But from a broader perspective, all the industry chatter over Secret only points to a much bigger problem that’s still largely unaddressed: Few tech companies have created a comprehensive strategy for communicating in the social media era, when a can garner instant international outrage, or an embarrassing YouTube video can easily get sent to all the inboxes of the major tech news sites in minutes. For startup founders, whether you like it or not, you’re more vulnerable than ever before. And while the challenge may seem too daunting to deal with, a few proactive strategies can go a long way. In an age of real-time crisis communication, tech companies need to do more than keep a daily eye on social media channels where rumors about them are most likely to spread — they also need to have a plan in place to instantly counter those rumors. Is someone saying something untrue about your company, for example, insinuating they’ve heard it’s in financial trouble? Get in front of the rumor and refute it immediately before it snowballs. Of course, that advice doesn’t quite apply if a leak happens to be true, which takes me to my next point. When a company leak shows up on social media, it usually reflects a failure of management and corporate culture, poor internal communication, or weak HR support. The disgruntled employee is your worst enemy. When staffers feel angry, or abused, or in fear for their jobs, leaks are much more likely to happen. As founders, the best way to preempt leaks is to develop and foster a culture of transparency and respect. Show your employees you trust them, and 99 out of 100 times, they will follow in kind. One issue with transparency, though, is it also means your employees may have greater access to sensitive information than they would at, say, Goldman Sachs. So in cases where your employees know of something “leak-worthy,” have a conversation with them to ensure they understand the implications a leak can have, and how bad it would be for everyone involved. Leaks not only hurt morale, but may mar the company’s chances at raising funds or making acquisitions. In especially crucial periods for the company, it might even be necessary to suggest for employees talking about work on their social media channels. Beyond this, employees who feel unappreciated at work should have a channel to vent their anger, such as in the human resources office, instead of on social media — or for that matter through offline chat that’s easily overheard. (Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer , a San Francisco coffee shop.) HR should also make clear to employees how important it is to adhere to the confidentiality agreements they surely signed. And if you haven’t closely reviewed or updated your agreements in the last few years, now’s a really good time. Even the best guidelines fall through, which means they need to be coupled with a crisis communications strategy. Ideally, this should include a step-by-step plan designating who on the executive team should be contacted immediately after a leak occurs, how to craft a response, and the next steps to follow. (This is particularly important when the crisis involves .) At the same time, keep in mind that damaging or embarrassing social media leaks often gain little traction, especially if they’re deleted or made over the weekend or late at night. Therefore, it’s important to gauge the actual damage, and make sure any reaction is proportional. A CEO’s official-sounding, primetime reply to a potentially damaging but incoherent, anonymous tweet few people even saw may just make a potential crisis worse. This brings me to my next point. Startup founders and tech executives usually live in a very insulated environment and forget that people are observing their every move. For that reason, they need a mentor, such as a seasoned VC or other industry insider, who they can speak with in utmost confidence during moments where they might panic and say something that only escalates a problem. Ideally this person isn’t directly tied to the fate of the company, and can look at the situation with some partiality. And while a mentor is crucial for outgoing communication, it’s probably even more essential for internal communications, when bad news such as employee layoffs must be messaged with the utmost care. People are often motivated to reveal confidential information from a misplaced (or correct) sense of justice, directing their retribution at people or companies they believe have been harmful. So in addition to management plans and communication strategies, the personal accountability piece for executives needs to be there, too. To maintain confidentiality, it fundamentally matters how you treat clients, employees, and the media. Learning to be a good person who inspires loyalty at all times should be an intrinsic goal for everyone, but in the social media age, it’s fundamental to being a good business person, too. |
Tiger Global Checks In To Brazil’s Hotel Urbano With $50M Round | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | The Brazilian online travel agency has gotten a 120 million Reais ($50 million) reservation from the powerhouse venture capital and private equity investor and previous backer . With both the World Cup and the Olympics right around the corner, the Brazilian travel industry is exploding as the country frantically tries to increase its stock of accommodations for the expected tourist boom. “Today we have 450,000 hotel rooms in Brazil, and this number will almost double,” said Hotel Urbano co-founder Joao Ricardo Mendes. Some of the cash from the round led by Tiger Global will go to support a push the company is making to conduct direct negotiations with hotels across the country. Unlike the U.S. market, which is dominated by a few national brands, 85% of the 14,000 hotels currently operating in Brazil are individually owned, Mendes said. The Rio de Janeiro-based company is also looking to expand its sales and marketing efforts internationally and Mendes sees the World Cup and the Olympics as the starting shot in a race to increase the number of tourists making Brazil a top tourist destination. However, the of hosting has been mixed. “Barcelona before the Olympics wasn’t one of the top travel destinations in the world,” Mendes said. “Now it’s number 10.” In fact the city of Barcelona attracted more tourists at 8.4 million than the entire country of Brazil (which receives between 6 million and 8 million tourists per year). Founded in 2011 Hotel Urbano has grown alongside the Brazilian middle class. The company started with 5 employees and now has more than 500. Its revenues will reach nearly R$1 billion (roughly $427.4 million) by the end of this year, up from R$90 million ($38.5 million) in 2011, and the company operates two concept stores in addition to an online presence that includes 10 million fans on its Facebook page. Hotel Urbano’s revenue primarily comes from its hotel booking service, which accounts for roughly 65% of the money coming in. The remainder is from the package booking service it offers. Competitors like Decolar (the Brazilian site for travel service ) derive most of their revenue from airline bookings, according to Mendes. For Tiger Global, the investment in Hotel Urbano is just the latest in a string of large commitments to startups worldwide. The private equity and venture investor has bet big on e-commerce startups in , , and in addition to its big stakes in U.S. tech companies.
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Assange Says NSA Holds The Power In The Obama Administration | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gave a rare talk via video at annual tech mega-conference SXSW, where he came out swinging not only at President Obama but also Google and Facebook. Assange claimed that in the Obama administration, the intelligence agencies “wear the pants” and he called out Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as part of “an unprecedented theft of wealth.” Since the global uproar over the National Security Agency’s spying practices were exposed last summer, there have been no major shakeups, Assange claimed. When a government wants actual reform, “someone is fired, someone is forced to resign, someone is prosecuted,” he argued. Because few have faced sanction and the NSA continues its bulk collection of Internet and telephone records, “that means the Obama administration’s response is not serious,” concluded Assange, who has been holed up in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy since June 2012. There have been a few changes to the NSA. The deputy director, Chris Inglis, . Obama has ordered the NSA to , from “three steps” to “two steps” of association away from a suspect (for many people, that could mean being able to surveille a few million to a few hundred thousand, depending on how many associations a suspected individual has to the rest of the nation). But bigger reforms will be up to Congress. President Obama himself has claimed that the NSA oversight and that the only real reform needed is to reassure a now-scared public that the intelligence agencies are not violating the law. His argument has literally been an analogy about Michelle Obama occasionally needing to double-check that when he says he washes the kitchen dishes, he, in fact cleaned up the dishes ( ). Assange seemed to imply that Obama is powerless, claiming that if he really wanted to disband the NSA, he might be impeached and the intelligence agencies would drudge up dirt to discredit him. So if you follow the more conspiratorial explanation, Obama wants to stop the NSA and can’t. If you follow , perhaps the simpler explanation is that Obama doesn’t think he’s evil and is effectively managing the military. Notably, Assange also took aim at Google and Facebook. He claimed that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was part of “an unprecedented theft of wealth” that was transitioning power and money in the hands of a few people. Google, with its wildly popular mobile operating system, Android, now has the capacity to spy on millions of people all over the world. Not all Internet billionaires are bad in Assange’s view. Pierre Omidyar, for instance, has hundreds of millions of dollars to a new civil liberties-focused news site, First Look Media, which employs Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the NSA scandal. But even Omidyar can’t bring his journalists, who are scattered in different parts of the world, back to the U.S. and Britain. “With money alone you don’t get power,” he argued, saying that the NSA sees a “threat to cashed up industrialists who are not part of the military industrial system”. Assange won’t be the only big interview on the NSA at SXSW. On Monday, Edward Snowden will also be addressing the audience via video. More from the talk and live streaming options . I will also be addressing the NSA and other policy issues at my on Sunday at 11am with Congress members Darrell Issa and Suzan DelBene. [ ] |
CrunchWeek: The Hunt For Bitcoin’s Satoshi, Facebook Drones, Twitter’s Log Cabin Lunchroom | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | , , and I gathered around the big white table to discuss the latest wild goose chase for the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, which led Newsweek to living quietly in the Los Angeles suburbs (who being *that* Satoshi, with denials also apparently coming from the ), Facebook being a solar-powered drone company called Titan Aerospace, and Twitter purchasing to serve as lunchrooms in its San Francisco headquarters. |
Google’s Jared Cohen: It’s “Obvious” Bitcoin-Like Currencies Are “Inevitable” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Google Director of Ideas and former technology advisor to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jared Cohen, says that digital “crypto-currencies” like Bitcoin are here to stay. “I think it’s very obvious to all of us that crypto-currencies are inevitable,” he told the audience at SXSW, in conversation with Chairman Eric Schmidt, to promote their co-authored book, . The most popular digital currency, Bitcoin, media and political firestorm for its wild swings in value, strong support from the libertarian hacker community, and association with the black market. “There’s lots of value to it,” he argues, but “there’s a danger to it not being regulated.” is the search giant’s residential think tank that deals with governments, especially oppressive regimes. Bitcoin’s reputation has suffered , leading some critics to declare “ .” If Google’s own lead on these types of issues believes that the inevitability of cryptocurrency is “obvious”, it’s a resounding validation of the beleaguered technology. Now, Bitcoin itself may not last.”Is Bitcoin the model, or the master of crypto-currencies?” Cohen questioned. Anyone can create an anonymous completely digital currency. Like all currencies, Bitcoin just depends on two parties having confidence in the exchange value. Indeed, just this week, another technology blog, Ars Technica, decided to create one of their own, lovingly called “ “. Cohen says the long term threat to digital currencies is safe storage. Certainly the theft of from popular exchange service, Mt.Gox, shook the industry. But, even with that embarrassment, Bitcoin is still retaining value. The controversy has reached congress. Some members are calling for heavy regulation to curb the impact on susceptible consumers. In response, Congressman Jared Polis made headlines for cheekily calling for a ban on the U.S. dollar, with a clever letter comparing the frailty of the U.S. dollar to Bitcoin. But, if Google’s forecasting gives you confidence, then Bitcoin–and all its craziness–is here to stay. |
Austin Police Department Warns SXSW Attendees Not To Use Uber | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | Here’s something you might not have noticed if you were partying it up at SXSW and using Uber to get around: Your Uber might not be permitted in Austin, and the police department wants you to know that. In a , and a subsequent , the local police department has been warning inebriated SXSW attendees to “know the rules of the road” before hiring drivers to take them around town. SXSW tip: Use only permitted transportation services: — Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) When asked if Uber rides were permitted, the police department Twitter replied, “ .” You should read the whole blog post yourself, but it basically boils down to this: The Austin Transportation and Police Departments encourage South by Southwest festival goers to use permitted transportation services and to learn the law before registering as drivers for vehicle for hire services during SXSW. Uber has been offering rides to attendees for the last few years (as well as BBQ), but this year it appears the company has been ramping things up pretty heavily. Previously at SXSW, the company had dispatched pedicabs or unpaid drivers as a way to get around strict Austin for-hire transportation rules. Those rules include mandating a minimum $55 fare and a 30-minute pre-arrangement period, both of which would make Uber prohibitively expensive and not as convenient. Or, really, useless. To meet demand this year, Uber shipped in drivers from other cities — at least according to my Uber driver last night, who drove in from Dallas and didn’t know where he was driving any better than I did. The Austin Police Department has a warning for some of those drivers: In order to drive a ground transportation vehicle, a compensated driver must carry an operating permit, a chauffer’s permit and commercial insurance. Violating any one of these requirements could result in up to a $500 fine, totaling a possible $1,500 fine if all requirements are violated. Additionally, drivers who do not comply with the law risk having their vehicle impounded. Uber says its UberBLACK drivers follow Austin’s rules since they are licensed and have a minimum fare of $55. It also says there are a “limited number of uberX cars on the system for promotional purposes but they are free,” so they don’t violate the city’s rules. Someone should tell the folks at the police department before they start fining Uber drivers or scaring attendees away from using the service. |
Delaware Filing Confirms Lyft Is Raising $150 Million In Series D Financing | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | On-demand ride-sharing startup has raised, or at least is in the process of raising, a new round of funding, according to a filing from the . The new financing comes on top of about $83 million that the company has raised since being founded as Zimride back in 2007. Details are scarce — there’s no mention of who exactly put money in — but we had previously heard that Lyft was looking to raise up to $150 million in this round. The filing seems to bear that out: For its Series D, Lyft is issuing 14,804,726 shares at a price of $10.1319 per share. That’s a big premium over its last financing round, in which it raised $60 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a price of $4.2474 per share. We’ve heard the is Coatue Management, one of the growing list of hedge funds that have taken to investing in high-flying startups. Previously, Coatue had put money into Box, Snapchat, and HotelTonight.
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Mozilla Stops Developing Its Persona Sign-In System Due To Low Adoption | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | If you don’t know about Mozilla’s sign-in and identity, you’re apparently not the only one. Citing low adoption rates, Mozilla has decided to give up on this project and is allocating its developer resources to different projects. Mozilla will continue to host the service and patch security issues as needed, however. The organization hopes the community will continue to develop the product, but given that there had been very little interest in supporting it in the first place, it seems doubtful that many developers will volunteer to pick up the slack. I always liked the idea behind Persona, which uses email addresses as a way to authenticate users. It was a pretty simple and easy way to log in to sites, but sadly, very few developers actually integrated it into their own products. For the most part, even Mozilla always pointed those who wanted to try it out to some of its own products like or a demo on . That never seemed to dissuade Mozilla, though. Just last year it built-in support for more email providers, including Gmail and Yahoo Mail. For many of those services, Persona piggybacked on the OAuth support the providers already offered, but Google is going to phase out its old systems in favor of OpenID Connect. As a Mozilla spokesperson told me, though, there is no connection between its decision and OpenID’s recent launch. Here is what this looked like: It’s worth noting that Google and many other providers recently threw their weight as a cross-vendor standard for authentication. Mozilla itself is shifting its focus to offering its own cloud services around Firefox accounts and Firefox Sync. Indeed, it to end the year with 20 million users signed up for Firefox accounts. To get to this point, Mozilla plans to create a unified Firefox Account experience across all of its products. That’s a slightly scaled-back ambition from offering an identity system for the web, but it feels like a more realistic path. Online identity, for the time being, is by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter (with smaller players that dominate some other niches, including the likes of GitHub, for example). Yahoo just that it is shutting down support for Google and Facebook logins on many of its properties. Owning a user’s identity across the net is extremely valuable. Yahoo clearly wants to be in total control of its user’s identity — as do the other players in this business. Given the high stakes here, there was little room left for something like Persona then, which would have needed support from large vendors to be successful. Those larger vendors, however, have little interest in playing nice with Mozilla. |
PayPal Is Rolling Out Its New “Mobile First” Website Globally | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | , the eBay-owned online payments platform that made up some 40% of its , has turned on a redesigned website — it’s biggest attempt yet at putting a contemporary, simplified face on one of the older services on the web (founded: 1998); and to introduce users to some of the newer features it’s hoping will take off, such as mobile and physical store payments. The design was first announced but with little detail as to how the pages would look. Now, users in countries like the U.S., UK and France can see for themselves. On first arriving, a site visitor finds a much more simplified “front door” that is banked on a full-screen, 15-second silent video clip that changes with each visit (or each refresh). The clip is slick in a very familiar way, reminiscent of the video Facebook used to have to promote its Android launcher Home, along with the homepages of countless other apps. In the middle of the silent video is a single call to action (“send money now”, etc.). One example illustrated above, and another here: The idea behind taking away a significant portion of the text is to make the the whole experience more “mobile first,” in the words of Christina Smedley, PayPal’s Global Brand VP. So, too, is the touchscreen-friendly scrolling beyond the video, which introduces other services further down the page. Again, these are light on text and heavy on images. (And yes, for those who are not visiting PayPal for the first time or don’t really care for the new song and dance, you still have a list of simple, utilitarian tabs at the top that take you directly to different actions on the site to pay people, request money and so on.) This is not the first aesthetic update PayPal has made to its site in recent times. (It made , for example.) But as with the company’s general direction under new president David Marcus, you get a sense that it’s trying to accelerate how it iterates and keeps up with the times. With that activist investor Carl Icahn has been making, arguing for eBay to spin off its PayPal payments division, that acceleration and growth are taking on perhaps an even more urgent note under the wing of the e-commerce giant. Touchscreen-friendliness aside, what is perhaps most important about this round of refreshes to the website is that it’s part of a wider overhaul, both at the front and back ends, and deeper into specific services within PayPal. “Imagine this as our new ‘front door’ to PayPal, the pages behind will also reflect our new approach over time,” Smedley writes. “So although the homepage and more will have this new look and feel, we continue to chip away at the rest of the older content that doesn’t reflect the very best of what we want to bring to you. More to come on that.” She doesn’t mention StackMob, the mobile backend service provider that PayPal acquired in , but you have to wonder if this is exactly where they are playing their part. (These are not new features, PayPal notes.) But there will likely be more to come. I’ve seen of PayPal improving the user experience on third-party merchant sites — for example, making it unnecessary to go to new, PayPal windows to pay for things (perhaps a response to the very simplified UI of newer entrants like Stripe). But just earlier today I had to pay for something via PayPal and although I can see the new interface for PayPal in the UK, the merchant experience looked and behaved just as legacy-bound as ever. Looks like I’m not the only one to notice that. I think has redesigned their homepage about 3 times.. but the internal application still hasn't been touched. — Cameron J Roe (@CameronJRoe) This also points to another issue, though. Given how widely used PayPal is by third-party merchants on their own sites, updating will involve not just PayPal, but trying to get these thousands of partners on board as well. PayPal noted in February that it will be rolling out the new look across all of its 194 markets eventually, but not all countries are seeing the new look yet. Take , for example — a reminder what all users were getting when logging into PayPal not that long ago. |
With An Extra Focus On Security, Glimpse Joins The Ephemeral Messaging Battle | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | There are any number of apps out there focused on making sure images and text self-destruct after you’ve seen them. There’s and and and and and so on. Now here comes another app, called , that hopes to make messaging safe and secure. The app, which enables users to quickly, easily, and securely share photo and video messages with each other, seeks to “bring privacy to the mainstream,” in the words of co-founder Elissa Shevinsky. With the app you can send a photo or video file, with or without a filter or watermark that is designed to obscure the image. It also keeps images and videos from being screencapped. Images are truly ephemeral: They disappear after being viewed, from a user’s inbox as well as the Glimpse servers. Photos are shown for eight seconds, while video is just four seconds or shorter. That’s kind of standard operating procedure for this type of app, but what sets Glimpse apart from most of the others, especially at a time when folks like Snapchat are getting hacked, is the company’s focus on security and encryption under the hood. According to CTO Pax Dickinson (more on him later): Glimpse uses industry standard open source AES and RSA encryption routines to keep messages secure from end-to-end. Other apps rely on SSL or encrypt all messages with a single shared key. Glimpse ensures privacy by encrypting messages to a single private key that’s held only on the recipient’s phone. Dickinson and Shevinsky are a bit of a surprising matchup. Dickinson, you might recall, was CTO of Business Insider before a series of chauvinistic tweets led him to resign. To team up with Shevinsky, a female founder who had been working on a series of dating applications, and roll out an app devoted to ensuring secure communications is an interesting career trajectory. But the two have been fast friends since first meeting a year ago at SXSW. They began working on Glimpse as a side project, but in the wake of the NSA spying scandal, they decided to tackle the secure messaging problem head-on. They’ve surrounded themselves with a group of security experts as investors and advisers, including Gramercy Fund, Trent Gegax, Greg Arrese, pretty good privacy alums Gene Hoffman and Bob Kohn, Kelly Hoey, and Barak Michener. They are also offering a bug bounty for those who find vulnerabilities in their app. Will it be enough in a market that’s already flooded with disappearing message apps? Do users care about making sure their messages are that secure? Only time will tell. |
The White House Is Looking For More Innovation Fellows | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 8 | The White House is so happy with its internal residential hackers program that it’s making room of job opportunities. Members of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program work under the office of the Chief Technology Officer, and are largely responsible for opening stores of government data to the public and making tools more participatory. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK0HOIqOcHw] Since two years ago, fellows have designed projects that allow millions of Americans to download their health records and build tools that help reduce energy consumption [ ]. Some of the projects are still ongoing from the initial launch and were sorely needed to help with , such as RFP-EZ, a project to help small businesses apply for government contracts. I just hope that, as the White House institutionalized this residential hackers program, it takes their projects more seriously and implements their ideas with major laws. Learn more about the program . [ ] |
AmEx Debuts Its Most Mobile-Integrated, Rewards-Focused Credit Card | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | AmEx has offered a number of different cards to consumers: The Blue Card appeals to those who like cash back options and the Platinum card is specialized for consumers who travel. There’s even a Black Card for high-net-worth individuals. Today, the company is debuting a brand-new rewards-focused credit card, called Everyday, aimed at consumers who use AmEx for most of their everyday purchases. While the AmEx Everyday card is broadly focused on the frequent spender and “multi-tasker,” the core audience is the busy mom. As AmEx US Consumer Services President (and former Skype CEO) Josh Silverman explains, the typical Everyday card user uses credit and or debit cards at least twice a day. AmEx says that moms spend 18 percent more on monthly expenses compared to the general population (which, as a mom, I believe). The card itself doesn’t have a yearly fee, and it allows for a revolving balance. Users will get double reward points at supermarkets, and if an Everyday card member uses the card for 20 purchases or more in a given month, AmEx will boost the consumer’s bonus points by 20 percent. What’s interesting from a technology standpoint is the core integration with AmEx’s mobile app. When you open the app and integrate your card details, the app will recognize that you are an Everyday member and will show you where you are in the month toward 20 purchases. Users will also get notifications when they can apply rewards points to their purchases, that is being rolled out more widely with this card. You’ll be able to use the points right away, redeem via your mobile phone, and the deduction will be implemented on your AmEx bill. As Silverman explains, this integration with the mobile app “begins a more regular dialogue between AmEx and card members, and it brings benefits to life more in context.” The card will be available for consumers to apply by April 2, 2014, and will also contain an EMV chip. It’s not surprising that AmEx is appealing to the busy mom who controls a lot of discretionary spending in the household. But what’s distinctive about this launch is its integration with the mobile app — it’s not surprising that AmEx wants to engage with consumers on mobile beyond just using the apps to check balances or pay bills. The challenge is creating engaging features for consumers to want to open the apps more frequently. Rewards is one hook that AmEx has been , so it will be interesting to see how the multi-tasker consumer responds to this offering. |
Raspberry Pi Chalks Up Sales Of 2.5M+ As It Turns Two — $10K Bounty Offered For Opening Its Blob | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Happy Birthday ! The low-cost Linux microcomputer has just turned two years old. And boy how it’s grown. The Cambridge, U.K.-based creators of the $25/$35 credit-card sized computer thought they would only ever sell a few thousand units when they started their project. In the event, they sold 100,000 units of the Model B Pi on the very first day. Global sales of all Pi models have now pushed passed 2.5 million, up from . The businesses As Pi continues to grow, the not-for-profit Pi Foundation has just kicked off a competition — offering a $10,000 bounty — to help open source the graphics drivers running on Pi. Currently the Pi required a block of closed-source binary driver code (aka a blob) to talk to the hardware — but the chipmaker, Broadcom, has just released the source code for another similar chip. And the Pi Foundation is looking for help porting this to Pi so users can bypass its blob and get proper access to the graphics core. Full details below. If you’re interested in taking part in the global competition (which has no end date — continuing, presumably, until someone is able to do the deed), the competition rules can be found . In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a “blob”) which talks to the hardware. In our case, this blob runs on the VPU vector processor of the BCM2835 (the SOC or System On a Chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi); our are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing. Earlier today, Broadcom the release of under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob. As an incentive to do this work, at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers. This competition is open worldwide, and you can which describe what you have to do, and how to enter. |
HackerCare Aims To “Hack” Healthcare For Startups | Sara Inés Calderón | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | In four years David Varvel went from no health insurance, to full coverage via the Japanese government, to purchasing a high deductible plan, and then full coverage through an employer. He said having to switch insurance that often was “painful.” But now the founder of , a community lending platform, said he and his family have settled on : a healthcare startup for startups that is working to hack healthcare. HackerCare launched in beta in early February, and counts about a dozen members. The company signs up members for a health plan with the help of an insurance broker, and for an additional $50 a year, provides other services from health startups to supplement insurance with the aim of lowering costs. “HackerCare is for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. Also, it’s a lot easier to communicate with a smaller more agile company like HackerCare than a massive hulk like Kaiser or Blue Cross,” Varvel told TechCrunch. “It’s a great way for me to get coverage while getting my startup off the ground.” Based in Sacramento, HackerCare is focusing on signing up people in Silicon Valley — although later this year the plan is to expand coast-to-coast, said CEO Gina Lujan. The bootstrapped company is partnering with health startups to offer additional services for members, allowing them to launch in beta with a real customer pool, and giving HackerCare members services that save them money. “We want to hack that health plan with additional services,” Lujan said. Thus far, 1.6 million Californians have either up for a plan or enrolled in state Medi-Cal through Covered California; of those, 728,410 signed up for their own plans. Covered California, the state’s insurance exchange, allows users to search for plans, depending on their . There are plans available for less than $200, as well as others that are double or triple that price. Spokeswoman Sarah Sol told TechCrunch that Covered California is the best place to get information about receiving federal assistance, counseling or any official insurance information. Some of the services HackerCare is set to provide members includes TelaDoc, allowing members to skip on a deductible to see a doctor and Skype with one, and vision services with VSP Global. In the future Lujan said child services, help with medical bills, wellness, and pharmacy benefits may also be included. These services come from medtech startups, which can float new products to HackerCare members in beta in order to innovate more quickly, she said. “HackerCare members may prove to be the perfect test bed to try and fail fast with some new services and delivery methods that VSP is developing through our innovation lab, The Shop,” said Jay Sales, innovation strategist at VSP Global, a HackerCare sponsor. “By working with them, hopefully we can come up with some interesting experiences that can transfer to all our members.” Sales noted that a large wave of health innovation is happening in the startup world now, and HackerCare is poised to help those startups take their work to the next level. In the coming months Lujan said HackerCare plans to create a deductible pool that will allow members to receive up to 80 percent deductible coverage in the case of a catastrophic event. Even further down the line, in a few years, Lujan said the plan is that HackerCare has several thousand members and can write its own insurance plan that better caters to members both health-wise, and cost-wise. For a budding entrepreneur like Varvel, being on the cutting edge of health technology is a great way to keep his family healthy. He said he is now less worried about the future of his healthcare, and can focus more on the future of his startup — something he said will help HackerCare become a big hit. “If HackerCare can make healthcare 10 percent less painful for entrepreneurs, they’ll do great,” Varvel said. |
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Volvo, Ferrari, And Mercedes First To Add iOS In The Car Next Week | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | iOS in the Car, announced by Eddy Cue last year at the iOS 7 launch, was supposed to appear in 2014 and, according to the , it’s finally coming to Volvo, Mercedes, and Ferrari. BMW, a premium launch partner mentioned last year, was notably absent. The service allows for direct interaction with the manufacturer’s in-car entertainment and communications systems and includes an iOS-like UI. While many manufacturers have resorted to USB connections to iOS devices that may or may not allow for easy media access, iOS in the Car aims to offer call control, Siri interaction, and media playback with a simple interface. It also allows for satellite navigation using the iPhone’s built-in GPS and mapping systems. Honda and Acura have already implemented some of the features. According to , the company was slow to roll out the feature due to internal reticence in Apple’s corporate ranks. via |
2014 Could Be The ‘Tipping Point’ For Female Founders, Says Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Y Combinator held its first ever Saturday afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In opening remarks, Y Combinator co-founder said that the sold-out gathering is “the most over-subscribed event” in the famed startup accelerator’s history. For an organization whose biannual Demo Days have become known as one of the hottest tickets in Silicon Valley, that is no small feat — and it could signal a sea change in the entrepreneurial landscape. “Because YC invests so early and is so focused on funding outliers, we tend to see trends first. So when we see that 25 percent of startups in the current Y Combinator batch have female founders, I’m certain something is going on here,” Livingston said. “In any big change there’s always a moment when people think it is a tipping point. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, we feel like 2014 was the tipping point for female founders.” Livingston kicked off the event by sharing basic advice that she likes to share with all startup founders, such as the importance of having determination, empathy, focus, and thriftiness (the bullet points are in the image above, via an image shared by Twitter user .) She then entered into more personal territory, sharing more targeted advice specifically for female founders. “I thought about what advice I’d give to my sister if she were starting a startup,” Livingston said, adding that she had had second thoughts about sharing gender-specific advice in a public forum. “Things can get pretty heated out there on the Internet on the topic of women and tech, and I really agonized about what to do…. but I’m going to risk it and speak candidly.” Here are the three key pieces of advice Livingston shared for female founders: “Based on my own experience, I’d say it’s easier to start a startup before you have kids,” Livingston, who has two sons aged five and two, said. “In the first few years of YC [which was founded in 2005], when I did everything, I was working really long hours, seven days a week, and it was all-consuming. I don’t know if I could have done that with kids.” She added, however, that many successful male and female founders start businesses with young kids at home. “It’s definitely possible to combine kids and doing a startup,” she said. “Y Combinator has funded women and men with kids of all ages, including newborns, and we’ll continue to do so. …But if you do have kids and start a startup, know what you are up against” and don’t be afraid to seek help. That may mean outsourcing tasks that aren’t directly related to your business or your home life, such as grocery shopping, she said. “I’m by nature a bit shy, and I don’t like the idea of being a public figure… I’ve never needed public acknowledgement of my contributions to YC,” Livingston said. “But while I may be quiet publicly, I’m quietly determined. And it’s OK to be like that. Don’t feel like you have to change who you are, as long as you get stuff done.” This advice is especially pertinent to female founders due to the nature of how women are often raised, Livingston said. “I’m not an aggressive person, and often, girls aren’t trained to be aggressive in the same way that boys are.” One downside is that quiet founders “will be ignored by people who can only hear loud voices.” But if he or she is prepared to be occasionally overlooked, the final result can be a successful one. “Quietly determined people beat out people who talk loudly but never do anything.” As the non-technical female co-founder of Y Combinator, Livingston’s last bit of advice was directed to the non-programmers in the room who were starting companies. “Learn to program yourself. That is the best advice I could give to anyone non-technical,” she said. In addition, she said, non-technical founders should surround themselves socially with programmers. And if your social and work lives blend together, that’s OK. Livingston, who is herself married to her Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, said that founders should not shy away from starting a business with a significant other or spouse. Fully 34.5 percent of the female founders who have launched companies out of Y Combinator have had significant others as co-founders, she said. “Don’t feel like there’s anything weird about starting a startup with your significant other. We have significant evidence it works.”
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Watch The Y Combinator Female Founders Conference | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | The schedule has already kicked off and Y Combinator founder and Homejoy founder have already taken the stage, imparting such apropos insights as “If you’re not the technical founder, then your job is everything that’s not technical” and “It’s best if you’re a user of the solution your startup offers. That way you can have a conversation with your users just by thinking.” But there are many other female role models (Livingston holds that 2014 is the “tipping point” for ) who have yet to take the stage, and you can watch them here. Video and schedule below. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaqt9NzDUc]
1:30-2:20pm: Registration 2:20pm-2:40: 2:40-3:00: 3:00-3:25: 3:25-3:45pm: 3:45-4:05: Break 4:25-4:55pm: 4:55-5:25pm: Fundraising Panel 5:25-5:45pm: 5:45-6:05pm: 6:05-7:00: Closing remarks/Cocktails and appetizers |
As Auroracoin “Airdrop” Approaches, What Does It Mean When A Nation Adopts A Cryptocurrency? | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Iceland has its own Satoshi. A programmer called Baldur Friggjar Odinsson has created an alternative to bitcoin that he is calling AuroraCoin and in twenty-three days he will “airdrop” 31.8 coins to every citizen of Iceland – all 330,000 of them. It is, in short, a pretty ballsy move. (AUR) will work just like bitcoin and it’s already surprisingly popular. It’s worth $15 per coin and at launch 21 million AUR will be made available to all of Iceland’s citizens. They will use their private ID numbers to check in and receive their coins. Mining is performed through proof-of-work operations, just like bitcoin. To be clear there is no telling how popular Odinsson’s idea will be and who or when the citizens of Iceland will start using their currency. In his manifesto, he blames the Icelandic government for “bleeding” the country. “The people of Iceland are being sacrificed at the altar of a flawed financial system, controlled by an elite that made astronomical bets supported by the government on behalf of the people and ultimately at the expense of the people,” he wrote. “The power must be taken away from the politicians and given back to the people.” Auroracoin is, in short, worthless at the outset. The goal, however, is to allow Icelandic citizens to once again trade outside of the country. I spoke with Odinsson about his idea and he was very forthcoming. First question? Why not just give everyone a bitcoin? “I wish I could. Alas, it is all but impossible for Icelanders to buy bitcoins for themselves, let alone for a giveaway. Since the banking collapse in 2008, Icelanders have been subject to strict capital controls,” he said. “This means people are not allowed too freely exchange the national currency, króna, for foreign exchange such as dollars or euros. So people can’t buy bitcoins, unless someone is simple enough to exchange bitcoins for króna. “Giving people Auroracoin is a way of introducing the nation to cryptocurrencies, currencies that can’t be controlled by politicians and central bankers. This is an attempt too bootstrap a network effect. The government will not be able to control how people use their money if the people choose to use Auroracoin rather than the króna. The currency would allow Icelanders to begin taking part in a global cryptocurrency movement without investing actual cash. The goal, then, is for Auroracoin to become a catalyst for bitcoin trading, a sort of Trojan horse that will inject crypto into an economy shackled by post-crash fear. He’s expecting great things on the first day. “I expect those that are knowledgeable and enthusiastic to start claiming the coins. People will experiment. Speculators will speculate. The rate of adoption will pick up. Hopefully we will be able to keep things running smoothly.” Sadly, Icelandic banks and politicians are calling this a sham. “An influential government MP has called Auroracoin illegal and a ‘monetary scam.’ The Central Bank of Iceland has said that Auroracoin and cryptocurrencies are a ‘fringe activity’ and trade is possibly a violation of the capital controls,” he said. “The most read media outlet in Iceland, mbl.is, has done a fair deal of reporting on it. Other outlets have not done in-depth analysis, although they have mentioned it. It was discussed in a tech show in Channel 2 (Stöð 2) a couple of days ago.” While the brave notion that a single actor can move markets, Satoshi, has been proven, it’s one thing to get a bunch of nerds excited about frictionless wealth transfer and its entirely another to convince a country to the same. Odinsson is definitely aware of these limitations. If his idea fails – and odds are it probably will – no one loses a thing. If it takes off – and that’s a big if – it would create a new paradigm for a more nation-oriented idea of crypto currency. Auroracoin is ostensibly free, Iceland is already a haven for crypto currency mining thanks to its cheap electricity, and it’s an amazing idea to think that a single BTC fork can change an economy. It’s a brave new world, that hath such digital currencies in it, etc. Odinsson is optimistic. “I want to break the nationalistic currency shackles of Iceland’s monetary policy,” he said. “Auroracoins can be traded all over the world, no one can dictate to the people how they can use their coins. |
As India User Base Nears 100M, Facebook Hopes To Earn Big Revenue From SMBs | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | India is set to become in terms of number of users later this year, but don’t expect that to translate into ad dollars for the Palo Alto company anytime soon. India’s online advertising market maxes out at around $360 million, making it difficult for the company to translate this horde of users into a billion-dollar business. Companies like – their biggest user markets (mostly outside of the U.S.) are not necessarily top revenue sources. But Facebook sees immediate opportunity to earn big ad revenue by targeting India’s around 50 million SMBs who are increasingly becoming tech savvy and leveraging their smartphones to connect with potential customers. “It’s a huge opportunity and we’re just getting started. We are building products and features that target the needs of SMBs who can start with us for as little as $5 daily,” said Andy Hwang, Facebook’s director for SMB business in Asia Pacific. India has around 50 million SMBs, and many of them such as , and smaller retailers including are now spending over $5 a day with Facebook, Hwang added. Online fashion retailer is another such early Facebook customer that has seen its ‘likes’ touch 4 million recently. “With a minimum advertising budget on Facebook, we got around 33,000 likes in a span of one month,” said Nivedha Charles of Pigtails and Ponys. The startups sells handmade hair accessories. “The main thing we had to keep in mind was to to never get ahead of ourselves and to maintain the quality of our page. We had to check ourselves so that the excitement of page likes didn’t land us in a situation where we bit more than we could chew,” Nivedha said. Kaya Skin Clinic, a chain of salons owned by a mid-sized FMCG company Marico, is now seeing around 20% of all its sales come directly through Facebook. Fashion retailer Myntra is now earning a quarter of its revenues through Facebook. Facebook has already developed some specific products for SMBs that are beginning to gain traction. One of them is sponsored post, which is already being used by bigger advertisers such as P&G. In few months, Facebook’s active user base in India will cross 100 million (from around 90 million currently), making it the second biggest market in terms of active users after the U.S. In fact, Jana founder Nathan Eagle has already predicted that India will become the biggest user market for Facebook ‘ The biggest challenge for Facebook in India going forward would be to convert some of these early SMB case studies into advertisers who spend more regularly. And that’s where even incumbents like Google (with around $330 million in annual India revenue) are stuck. Also, Google is not just a social media network — it has Youtube for video ads apart from search-based advertising, which is quite established even in a nascent market like India. “Initially, we started spending with Facebook, but realized later that just getting ‘likes’ was not enough, and we found it really challenging to translate these ‘likes’ into real business,” said the marketing manager of an Indian e-commerce site. Another reality facing Google and Facebook in India is that most of these SMBs are not as tech or social media savvy as they would like. as research firm Zinnov estimates. As , Facebook may not be a threat yet for Google in India. However, with China out of radar for Facebook, India will be its biggest bet and a lot would be riding on the market not just in terms of user base, but ways to earn future revenues. And Facebook is hoping that smartphones and mobiles can help it address the SMB market better. This year, , India will add 207 new smartphone users, ahead of the U.S. (47.5M). “Around 10 million Facebook SMB pages are now being managed by our app using mobiles, and that’s why it’s so important,” he said. Another feature that Facebook is betting on in a growing market like India is the conversion tracking — which links sales with ad campaigns. “You will see more such innovations going forward,” Hwang added. |
Our Dangerous Obsession With The MVP | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Building stuff does not make you a startup. “But don’t we need to build stuff and iterate quickly?” I get asked a lot. Well, sure. Once upon a time, when companies used the “old-school” waterfall model to develop products, pushing entrepreneurs to think in terms of building a minimum viable product as quickly as possible made sense. It substantially accelerated the development process. By narrowing the product scope to core features, you start the customer feedback loop quicker and you can more rapidly iterate based on that feedback. But the pendulum has swung too far toward building stuff and away from spending some time getting to know your customer first. And the result is that more startups are building blindly, without focus, as well as falling victim to the “IKEA effect.” Illustration: Marius Ursache The IKEA effect, coined by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, is that when you make something yourself, you value it way more than you should. The valued their creations as equal to those made by experts – even though the expert-created pieces were objectively of a much higher quality. The phrase is named after the well-known Swedish furniture chain where “some assembly required” is an understatement. As a result, as soon as we build something, we all tend to move increasingly from inquiry mode to advocacy mode at the very time where the former is needed and the latter can blind us. One of our recent alumni teams, who will remain nameless for reasons you’ll quickly see, is absolutely in love with the technology they have created. They have developed some impressive award-winning technology which has the promise to significantly improve the Human Computer Interface. They have built a demo that is in high demand, and each time someone expresses interest in a piece of their technology, they get excited and add some more to address the interested party’s desire. With their demo and impressive technological skills, they have gotten money from business plan competitions and investors, which I think is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to them. Neither the “someone” watching their demo at a conference nor the business plan judges nor the investors are paying customers. What the team calls an “MVP” is simply a sexy proof of concept. They say they are testing hypotheses, but the hypotheses they are testing relate to technological feasibility. They claim they are “pivoting” – which means they have run out of business ideas but not money – on a regular basis. And as a result, they’re not making progress. Why are they devoting all their time and money to building when, as a startup, they have precious few resources? Because they built it themselves, and they love it, and they’ll be darned if you tell them their MVP isn’t attracting any paying customers and that they should instead focus on an honest dialogue about customer needs. They are too beholden to the IKEA effect. They claim to be in inquiry mode but really are much more in advocacy mode for what they have developed. Compare this to another recent alumni team, . The company , a miniature laptop power adapter that is a quarter the size of today’s power bricks. But when they first showed up in my class, they only had a promising technology from the labs. I’m sure that power supply geeks will be impressed by Very High Frequency (VHF) switching that is 1000x faster and with a 10x reduction in converter size. “The elimination of heavy components, like magnetic core transformers, enables superior resistance to mechanical shock and vibration,” according to their website, which sounds like a good thing, too. However, none of that helps a well-defined group of customers address a pain that they’re willing to pay money to address. FINsix recognized that, and so rather than build, build, build, they took some time to learn about customer needs. “We were able to test the [VHF switching] concept with many different markets using an electronic brochure and extensive surveying to determine our beachhead market of laptop power suppliers,” co-founder and CEO Vanessa Green told me. A brochure. There is a lot less emotional investment in an electronic brochure than an MVP that the engineers build. And their analysis allowed them to consider a range of markets, from cell phones to LED lighting, before determining that laptop power adapters were the best way to gain a core group of paying customers that would sustain the company so that it can develop more products. Had they fallen in love with their technology, or the first prototype they built, they may never have gotten to the point of selling a consumer laptop charger. Think that app makers are immune to the dangers of an MVP? Sure, an app has less initial investment required, but otherwise, a business is a business. It’s easier to spin the roulette wheel when you don’t need as much upfront or sustaining capital, but that doesn’t mean you have a solid startup. You can’t build great products in the dark, without a well-defined customer. And you can’t develop the right product for your customer if you fall in love with a prototype that nobody wants to buy. So unless your end game is hoping that before the money runs out a competitor will buy you for your engineers or technology, you need to stop obsessively building, and start an honest dialogue with potential customers about their needs. It may not be as fun as tinkering with a “product,” but it is far less stressful than playing the acquisition lottery. That is what we call “disciplined entrepreneurship” where you can have both great technology and great marketing, leading to epic products. It is a false dichotomy to think you can only have great technology or great marketing, as some commenters have recently claimed . Think I’m a conservative East Coast entrepreneurship instructor who’s behind the times? Last week when I was in San Francisco and chatted with of and Cory Sistrunk and Ed Hall of Rapt Studio, they were right on the same page. “The MVP mentality has unintentionally taken us away from ‘user-centered design’ and a focus on the customer,” they told me. “We before we can focus on the HOW and WHAT.” For the entrepreneur, stop obsessing about your MVP. Your first question, before HOW and WHAT, has to be “FOR WHOM?” |
CrunchWeek: Mt.Gox Implodes, GrubHub Seamless $100M IPO, Facebook Kills Email Feature | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | In this episode, Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I discuss the and of the Mt.Gox Bitcoin exchange, GrubHub Seamless filing to raise $100 million in , and Facebook feature. |
Finish, The Anti-Procrastination App, Goes Freemium | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | , the anti-procrastination app built by teenagers Ryan Orbuch and Michael Hansen, is today trying out a new revenue model. Instead of offering the app for $.99, Finish will now be available for free with extra paid features such as time limits and extra tasks. Finish launched in January of 2013 to help high school students stop procrastinating. The app with a UI that asked for you to prioritize certain tasks into short term, medium term and long term categories. Based on those prioritizations, the app reminded users to complete tasks based on the various time limits set. With the Finish Freemium model, users are allowed to set up to ten tasks without any timers associated. Once they try to set the 11th task, or set a time limit, the app will send them to the App Store to make a $.99 in-app purchase. Existing users, who’ve previously paid for the app, will be prompted to input their Apple ID and password and be automatically credited with the premium version of the app, called Finish More. Finish has accrued 50,000 downloads with the paid version of the app, and hopes to get even more users on board now that it’s free. The team is also working on an iPad version of the app that will sync across both smartphone and tablet, so that users can stay up to date on their workflow no matter where they are or what device they’re on. You can check out the Finish app . |
Comcast Is Acquiring Video Ad Company FreeWheel For $320 Million | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Over the years, has become the go-to ad-serving platform for many TV networks that stream their content online. And it’s about to become part of one of the biggest distributors of content online and off. That’s because FreeWheel is about to be acquired by Comcast, our sources say. The deal, which should be announced soon, is rumored to be priced at around $320 million, according to one source. ( A source close to the situation confirms the deal is nearly completed, but financial terms haven’t yet been finalized.) FreeWheel is one of the largest platforms used by TV networks and major video distributors to serve ads alongside their content online. Since being founded in 2007, the company has racked up clients that include MLB.tv, ESPN, FOX, NBC Universal, Sky, Turner, and VEVO, among others. Recently, it also to begin serving ads alongside its streaming videos. Comcast, of course, is interested in owning the technology for its own video ad platform. That said, FreeWheel is expected to continue serving outside clients, particularly the networks that the cable company has partnered with for its own TV Everywhere services. An acquisition by Comcast might seem like a conflict of interest among some of FreeWheel’s customers — in particular satellite TV provider DirecTV, which is a competitor to Comcast and an . Then again, this wouldn’t be the first tech platform that Comcast has bought and run as a standalone subsidiary. In 2006 , which has continued to serve a number of cable providers and TV networks to deliver online streams of their content. Other strategic investors in FreeWheel include . The company had also raised institutional money from Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital over the years. (As a side note, this is the second big win in recent months for Steamboat. It had also put early money into EdgeCast, which was for more than $350 million in December.) The acquisition would also mark the latest exit for a company in the video ad world. Last summer, both and went public. Not long after, Adap.tv was . The last big video ad companies that are still private are LiveRail, which is later this year, and BrightRoll. Probably worth noting that while this is a big deal for FreeWheel, it’s a tiny acquisition for Comcast, which recently announced plans to . We’ve reached out to Comcast and FreeWheel for comment and will update once we hear back. Photo Credit: via |
Gillmor Gang: Meat and Potatoes | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — marked Farber’s transition from the media to the new frontier. We don’t know what his plans are, but I’m betting great things are just ahead. Several weeks after Om Malik moved into a full-time executive role in his venture firm, Dan’s move suggests we’re seeing something fundamental in and on the air. The Gang’s ventures into BitCoin, the politics of news, and the late-breaking Square pullback from the public brink, all seem just shy of the growing Apple TV storm on the near horizon. Hollywood’s gone device crazy getting ready, offering TV Everywhere Oscars in a box for pay customers. Apple’s hobby is at the brink, threatening to disrupt the last yard just as BitCoin paves the way for moving from gold to the dollar to China. A Nixon app can’t be far behind. @stevegillmor, @kteare, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
This Industry Is Completely Ridiculous. Let’s Hope It Stays That Way. | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | OK. Let’s take a step back from all the recent tech news, look at it with fresh eyes — and try not to burst into slightly hysterical laughter. In Japan, some of cryptocurrency vanished from a site founded to trade Magic: The Gathering cards. In New Zealand, the has to revenge himself on those who . In Britain, the secret service is busy . Here in Silicon Valley, mighty Apple just revealed that a programming error gutted the security of all its devices for . Google, “more wood behind fewer arrows” Google, now , to go with its . Meanwhile, down Sand Hill Road, venture capitalists are that the tech startups they’re investing in : Wait, it gets weirder. The Jamaican Olympic bobsled team was partly funded by . TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler is crowdfunding an investigative journalism venture to Vietnam to find out why the viral breakout hit “Flappy Bird” was pulled from the App Store; the venture is . Oh yeah. And then there’s . I’m visiting my parents in Florida later this month, and am kind of dreading any discussions of the tech industry. I fear it might go a bit like this: https://twitter.com/MattBors/status/414639889980735488 The notion that Mt.Gox lost hundreds of thousands of bitcoins over a period of without noticing is completely implausible verging on — but still less insane than Mt.Gox’s one-time reign as Bitcoin Central in the first place. And let’s face it, Bitcoin itself is pretty absurdist, and I say that as a long-term believer in cryptocurrencies. Mt. Gox should pivot to a business model where for $5 they explain what the hell happened to your money — Pinboard (@Pinboard) In case it isn’t obvious, I think all this neo-high-tech- is awesome. I mean, it’s not all . Some of it is bad, if not outright evil. But it remains awesome. Take, for instance, the NSA’s darkly hilarious profusion of data-gathering programs. As Bruce Schneier : I can name three different NSA programs to collect Gmail user data. These programs are based on three different technical eavesdropping capabilities. They rely on three different legal authorities. They involve collaborations with three different companies. And this is just Gmail. The same is true for cell phone call records, Internet chats, cell-phone location data. Schneier views this as deliberate obfuscation; I think it’s just a side effect of the fact that the evil NSA bureaucrats are still fundamentally bureaucrats, obsessed with subdividing everything into separate silos and processes (with a bizarre penchant for .) It’s as if ‘s Milton made a Faustian deal with the devil — Meanwhile, , and the streets of San Francisco are teeming with : "We have a mechanical bull. Game-changer. Innovate.” Not from the Onion. /v — Ben Thompson (@benthompson) I'm assuming that both this piece and the event described within are some kind of post-Situationist performance art: — Jon Evans (@rezendi) But wait! Not all is lost. I give you this apparently entirely unironic slide from an from Morgan Stanley — — “Utopian society.” Morgan Stanley! This is, of course, exactly what causes outsiders to cry “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble!” as their eyes turn green with envy. “Hubris goeth before a crash!” they intone, secure in their certainty that 2015 will be exactly like 2000. Nope. Sorry. Something far more interesting is happening here. It’s more like what famed screenwriter William Goldman once said of Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” I’ve argued before that Silicon Valley is more like Hollywood than people realize — VCs as producers, founders as directors, most everyone desperate for blockbuster hits — and the Valley today is like the Hollywood that Goldman was talking about, the Hollywood of the 1970s, when nobody knew what might become a hit and so an anarchic wave of auteurs flooded the scene, Spielberg and Lucas and Coppola and and even, God help us, , because producers were throwing money at , because nobody knew anything. Let’s hope it stays that way. Because since then, Hollywood , and pretty much every tentpole movie follows them, and originality and auteur vision is mostly relegated to the indie circuit if and where it exists at all. I fear that the same may someday happen to the tech world; that now that the eyes of the entire world are upon us, , and hedge funds start , the industry will find itself “growing up” and becoming staid and respectable, lionizing people in their 50s and 60s who have paid their dues rather than twentysomething CEOs with zero fucks to give and $19 billion — — to spend when they feel like it. But while I may fear that outcome, it’s not actually what I expect. . I think that instead of the tech industry being co-opted by bureaucrats, and politicans, and I-bankers, and other Serious People … it will co-opt , and skew the whole world into its giddy circus of nonstop fast-forward ever-accelerating crazy unpredictable ridiculousness, and its surprisingly subversive results. I have a smug little suspicion that every would-be king and kingmaker who tries to take a bite out of the tech industry will instead find themselves unexpectedly devoured by us. Again, this is not always necessarily a good thing. But if nothing else, it promises to be awfully entertaining. |
A Guide To Post Seed Financing Options | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Seed capital availability exploded at the same time the traditional Series A ecosystem began consolidating to fewer and fewer funds. By some counts there are now over 135 active seed capital funds and now fewer than 90 truly active traditional Series A firms. This has caused what everyone now refers to as “The Series A Crunch.” A majority of these early-stage companies won’t survive, and a large percentage of those deserve to fail as unsuccessful experiments. Some seeded companies that will fail, however, are founded and operated by some of the smartest people in the world – the laws of math are just brutally unforgiving under these conditions. My partners and I know this feeling well, as the three of us have been involved in starting 14 companies, and getting to that first stage of institutional funding is no trivial task. In 2014, as the biggest venture capital firms continue to grow, the size of the checks they need to write in order to be effective also grows. As a result, the progress and traction they expect to see from startups seeking investment becomes more and more demanding. Given this ever-higher bar for “de-risking” a deal, what should the founder of a seeded startup do? A small handful at the top will quickly get venture capital, yes. And a non-trivial number at the bottom will just die naturally. Some of them will find a soft landing through an acqui-hire, or more rarely, a merger with a larger startup. Yet, within all those thousands of seeded companies, we believe a large number of them exist with good fundamentals, traction, early revenues, and product-market fit. Despite these positive signals, however, these companies may not be at the stage where large venture capital firms are comfortable investing. In these cases, we ask: “What financing options does a founder in this position have?” For founders today in 2014, here’s our take on what options are available: Today with platforms like AngelList, Indiegogo, Crowdtilt, Kickstarter, and more, entrepreneurs can leverage the Internet to connect all different types of capital to their private-equity opportunities. It’s unlikely to find a “lead” investor on these platforms but they are certainly of great value when filling out or completing a round. This is typically financing from existing investors and/or friends and family who may have also been part of the initial or angel round of funding. Many of the “fail fast” institutional seed funds (which invest broadly at very early stages and only continue investing in companies with traction) don’t offer this because it’s not part of their model. They required a third party to come in prior to continued investment. Some companies with valuable technologies or innovative APIs, for instance, may have developed relationships with larger corporations in their space, some of which may want to get closer to the company, license or test the technology or solution, or partner in some way. At times, these relationships can be strong enough where investment is possible, and with more corporate VCs sprouting up and doling out money, this could happen more and more. In many cases this money can even be completely non-dilutive as it can be structured as an NRE (non-recurring engineering) expense. I have successfully used this method in two prior startups. This is what I do at Bullpen Capital and it is what others like do as well. Our firms focus on investing “into” the Series A Crunch. Our formula is straightforward. We focus on early-stage companies that have already been seeded, products with early product-market fit, and companies that show strong evidence of being able to hit the next big milestone within a year or so. Our first deal was (now Desk.com), which was seeded by . Its founder, , found himself in the post product-market fit position with the option to raise a $6 million to 8 million round from a big fund. He lamented to at True, “I only need $2 million, why doesn’t any fund offer me that?” Phil introduced Assistly to Bullpen and it became the first deal we completed in our fund. This strategy worked well for all parties when Salesforce acquired the company only nine months later. Our frequent co-investors at Venture51 first recognized this opportunity, which they call “Post-Seed” or “Pre-Series A Traction Rounds,” when we both invested in (the first-ever venture-funded Android application) back in 2011. Its founder, , had several term sheets in hand to raise a big A round, but the proposed size of that round didn’t make a ton of sense for the stage of the company. Instead, Venture51 worked with Chris and other investors (including Bullpen Capital) to raise a smaller traction round. That round focused on optimizing the company’s unit economics over an 18-month timeframe, enabling it to hit key milestones that would allow them to tell a more complete story as they raised subsequent rounds of financing. The company successfully exceeded its key milestones and, as a result, raised $16 million in Series B funding. Life360 is now the largest family mobile application in the world with over 30 million families relying on it. In the right situation, investors focused on the post-seed round can offer founders some key advantages. Founders can retain more equity in their companies, and they don’t have to shake hands on a big financing round too soon before it’s apparent whether their company could be huge or not (which averts both the danger of taking a valuation that’s too high to live up to, and buyer’s remorse of taking a valuation that proves to be too low). These types of investment rounds work best when the interests of the founders are aligned with the interests of their existing investors. This is critical because aligning our interests with the founders and existing investors helps us all prepare for the next milestone when the companies in our portfolio get ready for a bigger venture round. For the past few years, Venture51 and Bullpen were two of only a small handful of funds doing this kind of round. We are seeing new players enter this space. These sorts of funds are just one of a number of viable financing options currently available to today’s founders, so choose wisely and good luck. |
Dattch, The Dating App For Gay Women, Launches in San Francisco | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | Aimed exclusively at lesbians, bisexual and/or bi-curious women, the dating app ought to be a shoo-in for the large San Francisco market. So it’s no surprise that the startup – – has now launched in the California city. You can . The product emphasises photos — not just profile photos but photos of where someone lives, what they wear, what they like etc. — and thus draws comparisons with Pinterest in user interface. Unlike Grindr, Dattch does not emphasise proximity-based social networking, allowing users to pick the distance they want to see people within, allied with age range. It incorporates Facebook Connect and makes a point of weeding out fake profiles created by straight men fishing for willing partners. CEO and co-founder has repeatedly said the gay female dating scene is badly served, and – given the success of Tinder and the like – an app experience now makes a lot of sense. She thinks re-hashing a gay male platform for women (such as Bender to Brenda Or GaydarGirls) just doesn’t work. Exton ought to know what she’s talking about, as she’d already built a straight dating product prior to Dattch. Dattch targeted London and other UK cities initially, but is opting for a geofenced city-by-city rollout in the U.S. Australia is also on its roadmap. The mostly female team was one of 17 startups in the Wayra London incubator, and has also closed a small $160,000 Angel round, alongside Wayra’s €40,000. |
Indian Business Angel Network Makes First Investment In UK’s SwiftShift | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 1 | India’s largest business angels group has made its first investment in a UK startup, in London-based company . The amount was not disclosed. The Indian Angel Network (IAN) is Asia’s largest angel network of over 250 investors spread across 10 countries. Effectively, this is an Indian angel network investing in a UK company run by an Israeli in London. SwiftShift allows companies to quickly fill short-notice shifts using their own staff through SMS, email, and mobile technology. The Indian Angel Network decided to invest in SwiftShift following a pitching session in London organised by UKTI where seven companies presented to the investors. According to UK government figures, Indian firms are now the fifth largest investors in the UK and more than 50 percent of Indian investment into Europe goes to the UK. The IAN has already invested in startups in the US.., Canada, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka and India. |
“Real” Satoshi Claims He Is Not Dorian Nakamoto | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | Dorian S. Nakamoto is probably having the weirdest day of his life. In less than 24 hours, the Temple City, California resident has been the subject of a as the elusive creator of Bitcoin, has with the cryptocurrency, and has literally been by a pack of rabid journalists. Meanwhile, an individual claiming to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto said the Newsweek story was wrong in a brief post on the ‘s , stating simply “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” Though still no one knows for sure who Bitcoin’s creator is (or if Satoshi Nakamoto is even his real name), the Ning post is notable because it is connected with the same email address used on the 2009 P2P Foundation post and attached paper which was one of the first to describe Bitcoin. TechCrunch emailed founder and creator , who verified that the email associated with the account is the same one connected to the 2009 post. Here is our email exchange with Davies-Coates. We’ve removed Nakamoto’s email address: On 7 March 2014 02:48, Alexia Tsotsis wrote: Could easily be the same person. But who is to say the original creator of the account is by the “real” person. I can confirm, however, that the registered email address on the account on our ning network is xxxxx@xxx.com which is the same one mentioned in the original paper. So perhaps whoever created that account is indeed the “real” person, whoever that is. I’d guess they likely are. No idea to be honest (but they do appear to have the same email address as used on the original paper). But now I understand why random people have suddenly started asking me if I know who Satoshi is! Not that I’m aware of. But perhaps if some hard core geeks got access to both Ning and gmx log files they might be able to work something out. Unlikely though, I’d guess (the sort of people who can come up with stuff like bitcoin tend also to be the sort of people who know how to cover their digital tracks should they so choose, which it would appear they do). What article? :P (I just googled newsweek satoshi and see they’ve got an article about “the real face behind bitcoin” but for some peculiar reason it claims I’ve reached my 5 free articles per week, which can’t be true because I’ve not been there in the last week at all) Cheers, Josef. Newsweek should really send a non-paywalled version of the article. Or a |
Manila-Based Altitude Games Raises $275,000 To Develop Midcore Titles | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | , a Manila-based mobile game studio, has raised $275,000 in seed funding from investors Nix Nolledo, co-founder Philip Cahiwat, an undisclosed angel investor, and members of its founding team. The startup will use the capital to “jumpstart its creation of original intellectual property in the midcore game space.” Altitude Games plans to announce its first title in May during , an annual industry event in Singapore. In a statement, CEO Gabby Dizon says Altitude Games’ goal is to help establish the Southeast Asian gaming industry’s reputation for innovation. “Southeast Asian has previously been known as a great place to outsource game development, but we’re 100% focused on creating original intellectual property for mobile games. We want to combine midcore themes and casual accessibility to make games that are easy to pick up but contain deep gameplay that you can enjoy with your friends,” he said. Altitude Games’ founding team have been friends for more than 10 years and all have worked at leading Southeast Asian game developers. Dizon was previously senior producer at Singapore-based , one of Southeast Asia’s largest casual game developers, where he led business development and production. Before joining Boomzap, Dizon was CEO of Flipside Games and also served as president of the . The rest of the team includes Luna Cruz, who was formerly senior designer at Boomzap, where she was the lead designer on . That game turned into one of publisher Big Fish Games’ top franchises and now includes six titles. Cruz also helped develop other Boomzap franchises like the and . Other Altitude Games founders include: Paul Gadi, former production lead at Gameloft Philippines and CTO at ; Marc Polican, former lead programmer at Boomzap and Gameloft Philippines; and Chester Ocampo, former art director at . |
Flare-Up Over Food-Delivery Fees Has South Koreans Debating The Marketplace Model | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | South Korea is no stranger to controversy over its Internet policies. The country still mandates virus protection and security measures that essentially require the use of Internet Explorer and Windows, and the government has . The Economist has despite its world-leading mobile and bandwidth penetration rates. Yet, a recent controversy over food-delivery apps here has all the ingredients for a wider discussion over the cost of technological progress in this highly connected country. Every city has its vices, and in Seoul, one of those vices is late-night fried chicken delivery. In residential neighborhoods here, dozens of fried chicken stores compete for the late-night snack crowd, offering a bountiful array of chicken options (my favorite is the “snowing chicken” – deep-fried chicken covered in sprinkled cheese). Chicken is always ready to be delivered, with 24/7 availability at a number of stores, and delivery reliably comes straight to your apartment door in 30 minutes or so, bundled with a bottle of soda and side dishes all for about $20. Until recently though, ordering chicken was cumbersome. Many of the chicken stores are independently owned franchises, without an easy-to-access website. Discovering new restaurants usually meant walking down the street and writing down contact information, or being aggressively shoved an advertisement by a stern-looking Korean mother who will not take no for an answer. That has started to change over the past few years as a host of new apps have cropped up that promise to simplify food delivery while making it easier for owners to manage their stores. These apps follow what might be called the Uber model – make the product instantly available using a smartphone without requiring a phone number or searching the web, and handle all the transaction details for the customer. Given the numerous food establishments already available, these apps try to build a discovery experience similar to Yelp, while also assisting in the logistics of actually ordering the food and getting it to your door. The most popular app in this category is (and also doubles as a pun, since the phrase has a classical meaning of “the Korean race”). , the app is currently installed on 5 million-10 million devices, which would be about 10–20 percent of Korea’s population, an astounding rate of growth for the three-year-old app. The app is charming and playful, as the screenshots show. The cartoon-inspired user interface is quite enjoyable to play with, but its amusing personality belies a very comprehensive and satisfying buying experience. Most stores have an online menu complete with photos as well as reviews from other customers. When users are ready to make a selection, the app provides a button to call the store, or if the merchant subscribes to the service, an instant ordering feature to deliver it to an address without hassle. Needless to say, it nails its target demographic. Yet, the success of the app has come under increasing criticism from local store owners, who say the app’s fees are too high. BeSuccess, one of the most prominent local startup news sites in South Korea, has . Essentially, the debate is around how expensive the fees are, and whether stores can afford the scrapes that the app takes. According to store owners, the company’s fee structure adds up to about a 12.5 percent scrape on every transaction. Calculating this is fairly difficult for all involved, because there are multiple fees, a monthly minimum fee, along with others that make an easy calculation impossible. The company has (Korean infographic), and that the fee declines quite rapidly with increasing order volume since the monthly subscription fees are then spread over more orders. Small businesses in Korea face the same profitability issues as small businesses anywhere, and these issues are particularly acute given that . In talking with Koreans about the issue, they seem to be legitimately torn between helping small business owners and enjoying the convenience of instant ordering. Baedal Minjok lists phone numbers, and any user of the app can easily make a phone call to the store and order without any per-order fees applying. Yet, few customers seem interested. The flare-up over food-delivery fees is only one part of the story of these apps and how they are changing the character of food here in Seoul. Before the advent of these tools, most stores operated in essentially micro-markets. For instance, my apartment building has about five delivery restaurants inside or within a few meters, and previously, few would have ventured out beyond a handful of very close options. But with these apps, customers suddenly have immediate knowledge of every store within a kilometer radius. Already, we are seeing a split between the most and least popular stores, with some of the more commonly reviewed stores receiving prominent billing, while others with fewer reviews are placed further down the rankings. Over time, such a system will tend to concentrate orders to a handful of winners, with other stores facing tougher odds of succeeding. Whether new policies will be introduced to protect the merchants remains to be seen. About two years ago, , to improve the competitive position of small local markets. Similar policies could potentially be introduced in the restaurant category. More realistically, small restaurant owners will have to adjust to a changing competitive landscape, and realize their location no longer assures them an adequate supply of customers. That will hopefully mean better chicken, like the delivery that just arrived at my door. |
Bye Bye Second Screen? The InAIR Lets You Browse The Web And Watch TV All In One Place | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | InAIR, which is set to cost $99, works by plugging directly into any television through its “smart” HDMI cable that then connects to a set top box. The device then pulls data from the currently playing television program or movie, parses it using natural language processing and other patented technologies, and presents related content pulled directly from the web and social media on the television screen. The user interacts with the InAIR by using a simple mobile app, or through gesture control by incorporating the Microsoft Kinect — giving the possibility for the to come to life. It’s a simple to use and compelling product that’s caught the imagination of the crowdfunding community, raising more than $158,000 out of an original $100,000 goal on . With less than 42 hours left in the funding campaign, we asked SeeSpace’s founder and CEO Nam Do to come by TechCrunch headquarters to give us a firsthand look at the InAIR experience and talk a bit about how it works. Check that out in the video embedded above. |
Clever Hack Gives The Oculus Rift The Button It’s Missing | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | The first time people try on the Oculus Rift, they tend to have two immediate reactions. First: “Whoa.” Second: “Wait, where’s my keyboard? Hold on. Are my fingers on the keys? Just a second. Okay, got it. Wait, lost it. Okay, here we go.” As much as I dig the Oculus Rift (and, if you’ve been my for , you’d know: that’s a lot), I’ll admit that it has one rather annoying fault: the input devices we traditionally use to interact with computers aren’t quite up to snuff, here. Keyboard and mouse? Once you put on the Rift, you can’t see a thing in the real world around you. Finding your mouse and keyboard (much less the good ol’ home row) becomes a pain. Gestures (by pairing the Rift with something like the Kinect)? A reasonable option, but it lacks any sort of haptic/tactile feedback (read: the wonderful feeling that comes from ), and it suffers from the same problem as above: you’re blind to everything around you. Waving your arms around while wearing a VR headset is a quick way to end up smacking your monitor or knocking stuff off your desk. Game controllers are a solid option — and, quite honestly, the way most people will probably interact with VR for at least the first few years. But for simple things — like, say, watching a movie — do you really want to have to bring a controller along? One guys’s idea, demonstrated in his proof-of-concept video below: use the Rift itself as the controller. Now, the Rift — at least, in its current pre-release form — has no buttons… but it have an accelerometer. With this hack, you’d move your head around to “look” at whatever you want to select, then “knock” on the headset to select it. An accelerometer built-in to the headset picks up your knock, and that gets translated into a button press. Is it a perfect solution? Nah — at the very least, knocking on a big thing attached to your head is probably a bit jarring. But it’s pretty darn neat, and shows there’s still plenty of ways to think about input with regards to virtual reality. (With that said: I hope the final Rift has some sort of basic input mechanism built in, be it a button, or a touch sensitive panel, or something way more clever than anything I could think of. Oh, and a camera, for augmented reality. Oh! And a machine that prints money and tells me I’m great.) |
Purported Registry Tweak Allows Windows 8.1 Users To Snag Update 1 Before Its Public Release | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | We aren’t supposed to get our mitts on Windows 8.1 Update 1 for more than a month yet, but it seems that a simple registry tweak is letting folks not only get their hands on the new code, but also get it straight from the source: Microsoft via Windows Update. TechCrunch has confirmed with a trusted source that the tweak works, and that the update is material. The only potential issue at hand is whether the new software is the full Update 1 or a portion of it. This source, who is claiming to have executed the software update, confirmed that it allows for the pinning of Metro apps to the task bar, and that non-desktop apps now include an ‘X’ to allow for their simple closing. Microsoft has not returned a request for comment. You can find the details of how to execute the upgrade . Standard rules: Your luck if you try this; brick your PC and I will have no pity. Also, Microsoft could slam the leak shut, so hurry if you’re game. Happy hunting. Microsoft ate its Wheaties this morning, and appears to have plugged the hole already. Hard to confirm, given how large the globe is, but expect a new set of leaks to follow. Microsoft provided TechCrunch with the following comment: “We look forward to sharing details about the update soon.” |
New York VC Investments Top $1B In The First Quarter | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | For New York City’s startup community, venture capitalists may be taking place right now. Over the past two days New York startups have announced nearly $200 million in funding, so the question may not be “When will New York be a venture hub in its own right?” but instead The city is already on pace for the best first quarter in its history – with 98 companies raising nearly $1.3 billion to date and its second best quarter by capital committed since 2009, according to . In the last quarter of 2013 New York’s new companies raised over $1.6 billion.
Increasingly investors from the West Coast are making the trek back East to look at deals in the Big Apple. “We traditionally had the bulk of our investment in the Bay Area and Boston was the number two [geography] for us,” said Menlo Ventures managing director John Jarve, who sits on the board of the New York-based financial services company . “[Now] I keep telling my partners we should open a New York office. This is here to stay.” The round that Khosla Ventures led for is indicative of increasing competition from West Coast VCs for New York deals, according to an investor familiar with the company’s negotiations. “We got priced out and sized out,” one New York investor said. Buoying investors’ faith in the long-term viability of New York as a new venture hub, rather than seeing the current climate as a New York bubble, is the breadth of companies that are being launched. “I can’t think of a day where we had this much activity and this size of investment. And diversity,” said David Aronoff, a general partner with the New York and Boston-based early stage investment firm Flybridge Capital Partners. “There was , , and in you’ve got something in adtech marketing that is a business to business sale.”
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Atomico-Backed Quipper Gets Another $5.8M To Expand The Reach Of Its E-Learning Platform | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | , an e-learning platform backed by the London-based VC firm, , that’s led by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, has closed a new tranche of funding. The $5.8 million Series A2 round takes Quipper’s total funding to just over $10 million to-date. Participators in its Series A2 round include existing investors Atomico and , a major Japanese education publisher. Additional unnamed investors also joined in the round. Quipper last raised back in 2012, when it took in a , led by Japanese VC Globis. The startup was founded in December 2010 by Masayuki Watanabe, a co-founder of a social game giant . Quipper’s main product — — lets teachers and educators set and track assignments, answer students’ questions via IM, push out feedback and grading, and monitor individuals’ learning progress. The free cloud software is cross-platform and cross-device, so students can access it on smartphone, tablets or PCs. While Quipper’s educational content (lectures and quizzes) is localized to regional curricula. To date its services have been used by more than 8.5 million learners, and it currently offers more than 7,000 educational courses. Working with its education publisher backer Benesse, Quipper has also amassed large amounts of learning data which it uses to power “social learning”, “gamified learning”, and “adaptive learning” offerings for different user segments to improve retention and attainment level for those using its learning platform. Quipper says its platform is similar to the not-for-profit — but reckons it has the edge, especially in Asian countries, thanks to large amounts of localised content it has developed by working with regional teachers. And also because of its focus on data-driven social/gamified/adaptive learning techniques. Quipper said it plans to use the new financing to “aggressively expand” its market focus. Despite being a London-based startup, it has focused on Asian countries so far, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. It now plans to expand to more Asian nations and also Latin America. It also reckons there is potential for its e-learning approach in the U.K. market — where it would be rubbing up against the likes of . “Since we’re very happy about our initial KPIs in some select Asian countries, we’re going to expand to several more countries in the region in the next couple months,” Quipper told TechCrunch. “From the second half of this year, we’re planning on expanding to Latin American countries, and the rest of the world very aggressively using the fund raised. We’re now developing content for these regions by working with local teachers.” In the meanwhile it’s also working with Japanese mobile operator KDDI to provide a smartphone-based learning service to their subscribers — and it has a revenue share deal for that service. A third revenue stream comes via Benesse, providing a tablet-based learning system for their subscribers. |
Together, Spotify And Echo Nest Want To Build The Facebook Connect Of Music | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | “We want to enable straight playback from Spotify on other services,” CEO Daniel Ek tells me. It’s part of why his company , the top music personalization and discovery API in the industry. “We’ve both invested in platform approaches to music,” EchoNest’s CEO Jim Lucchese explains. “To combine those creates such a cool opportunity for developers anywhere that music lives.” In a joint interview with the two CEOS, Ek tells me was a natural fit. “We have a long relationship with the guys at Echo Nest that stems back to 2007 before Spotify was even launched as a service publicly. We’ve been working together for a few years. We look at the world in the same way.” Their mutual mission? “Getting people to listen to even more music” Ek says. “It was pretty clear that the best way to do that was to be one company and not two separate ones.” Lucchese echoes that, saying “Ultimately, we both are obsessed with connecting more people to more music. Combining our understanding of music with Spotify’s technology, platform, catalog, and huge audience will allow us to do that on a scale that wasn’t possible otherwise.” There’s one big thing missing that could help Spotify accomplish that mission. Until now, Spotify has been focusing on becoming an omni-jukebox with on-demand streaming, radio, algorithmic discovery, and curated playlists. . But it’s not everywhere yet. Spotify’s massive catalog of on-demand music has largely been locked within its own apps. That’s a drag. If I pay for a premium Spotify subscription, it seems reasonable that I should never get cut off after a 30-second sample of a song, no matter where I’m listening. Spotify does offer embeddable songs and playlists on the web, an app platform within its desktop software, and a bare-bones API for quickly jumping from other apps to its own. But there’s an opportunity for Spotify to become something much bigger: Imagine being able to authenticate your Spotify account in other apps the way you sign in with Facebook today. But instead of bringing your social graph and bio data, Spotify Connect would you let you listen to full songs and your playlists on demand in whatever app your wanted. Essentially, it would set Spotify’s app platform free from its green walls, and let legal music bloom all over the Internet. Spotify could solve the music licensing problem for every developer. or could let you listen to artists with upcoming concerts in your city without booting you from the app. or could play you the full song you just caught the end of on the radio. Or you could pipe in a soundtrack to your favorite games. Think how much more valuable and attractive a Spotify Premium subscription would become. This platform play could get more people paying for music again. As of December, Spotify had and 6 million paying subscribers, but it will need more if it wants a widely anticipated but unconfirmed IPO to sound good to investors. For now, it’s relying on a $250 million round raised from Technology Crossover Ventures in November to , and it’s working on getting a credit facility from banks. It may take some time for this all to come to fruition, but with the acquisition of The Echo Nest, Spotify is now a much more API-centric organization. Plus, Spotify took a huge step in that direction with the beta release of its . It lets developers build Spotify music playback, search, playlists, and metadata playback . Similar functionality for Android and the web could make the “Spotify Everywhere” dream a reality. As for the immediate effect of the acquisition, Lucchese acknowledges the “direct competitive concerns” of some of , including Rdio, Rhapsody, Vevo, Mog, and iHeartRadio. No one wants to be standing on a rug that their competitor could pull out from under them. “They always knew this was a possibility and there were contingencies in our agreements for those eventualities,” Lucchese explains. “We’re going to honor our contractual obligations with all of them and we’re going to sit down with them to figure the best plan going forward.” Daniel Ek And Jim Lucchese Spotify is sometimes criticized for turning the dollars earned on CDs into tenths of a penny in royalties per stream. But Ek says The Echo Nest deal and Spotify’s roadmap could help more artists earn a living by getting people “listening more, or loving a song and buying it on iTunes, or getting them to go to shows. It’s ultimately going to be great for artists.” In the end, the deal is for the listeners. Lucchese says The Echo Nest and Spotify both have “music hacker cultures. We move quickly. Our goal is to start pushing things that will have a real impact on the [Spotify] user experience as soon as possible. I think probably in the next three months you’ll start seeing things in Spotify based on what we did here today that will have a big impact on music fans.” These improvements to Spotify’s radio algorithm, discovery suggestions, and more could come even sooner, Ek says. “I expect to see things that touch consumers really, really fast. You’ll start noticing improvements pretty much instantly.” Still, when asked if acquisitions are becoming a major part of Spotify’s game plan, Ek says, “No, it’s really not. I think Echo Nest is a pretty unique company. I view this as more of a one-off than as more of a bigger strategy.” But with the record labels’ approval and funding, Spotify, one of the most complete streaming catalogs in music, and now the best data treasure trove in music, might not need to buy anyone else for a while. “This is a game-changing deal for the strength of Spotify,” Ek says. “I don’t think people realize that Spotify is a platform company.” |
Bloodhound Evolves Its Events App To Focus On Its Most Popular Feature: Lead Capture | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | , a company previously focused on providing software tools for the conference space, today released Android and iOS applications focusing on mobile lead capture. In short, Bloodhound built a set of tools for event planners and attendees. Part of that suite was the ability to quickly take down the information of someone you just met, and then follow up with them quickly. Lead capture, in other words. If you, like myself, lack sales experience, it’s harder to fully grok the importance of this, but it does appear to be a material need. Problem is, Bloodhound’s lead capture tool was locked inside of an events-focused application. The company has broken it out of that box, thrown away the box itself, and has released the tool as a standalone. You could call this a pivot, or even a double down. The company pre-announced this coming change of tack in a , several weeks ago. Bloodhound has raised to date. Now called Bloodhound Lead Management, the application allows users to take photos of business cards, and then manage their follow-ups using a blend of automated tools and the like. Sales, it appears, leans closer to the spammish end of the stick, but I’m not sure if it has ever been different. Out in the newly slimmed Bloodhound app is the ability to send documents and other media from your phone, a lead “history” inside of the application, and improved tagging. You can snag the Android version , or the iOS edition . I spoke with the company about the new apps, and why they had focused away from the event space — though, they would tell you, their new app is still something that fits into an event environment. In essence, CRM isn’t as popular as you might think outside of the technology-savvy space. Those businesses need a tool to both accrete, and manage the contact information and relationships of those they meet in a way that avoids endless manual entry. That pain point is Bloodhound’s business model gambit. In its early days, Bloodhound had a business model. Now, with its simpler product, the company will charge teams for its use on a monthly basis. Individual use with a basic feature set will be free. Simple. |
Shopping Search Engine TheFind Arrives On Android | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | Shopping search and comparison engine , which launched its iPhone application last fall and has now grown its iOS footprint to over 1 million users, today its service on Android. Like its iOS counterpart, the new app lets you type in keywords or scan barcodes in order to search across over 500,000 stores and 500 million products, then find coupons, store locations, and price comparisons. Plus, the Android app introduces a new feature, with the addition of shoppable catalogs. The app competes to some extent with other price comparison sites and deal finders, like ShopSavvy, for example – or even Amazon, which also includes a barcode scanner. But TheFind’s focus is not only on savings. It offers shopping results, too, based on your own tastes and style. When you sign up online, for example, you’re prompted to pick your favorite brands and stores. TheFind can tap into your Facebook profile data, too, when connected, to learn more about the brands you’ve engaged with in the past. The company says that it now sees 350,000 monthly actives on iOS, and that figure has been growing 30 percent month-over-month. Mobile, in general, is increasing steady for TheFind, which has over 15 million total users across web and mobile combined. Overall, 40 percent of its traffic today is mobile, and that has also been growing at 10 percent month-over-month, mirroring trends among other e-commerce shops, specifically , as many of TheFind’s users tend to be. Unfortunately, shopping from TheFind is not always easy. The company says that over 25 percent of retailers are abandoning their mobile apps, but it doesn’t seem they’re necessarily replacing their native experiences with responsive mobile websites. Though TheFind is handy as a one-stop shop, so to speak, when you actually click through and try to buy, the retailer’s website may simply be too tough to navigate on mobile. That’s not TheFind’s fault of course, but it could limit the end-to-end use case that the company imagines. However, it’s worth pointing out that TheFind can direct you to local stores as well, offering locations, phone numbers and even the price matches that the retailer honors. Android is also first to receive the new catalog feature, which includes hundreds of digital magazines from retailers like Crate & Barrel, Nordstrom and LandsEnd, for example. The new Android app is available both on and the . |
Alleged Bitcoin Creator Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto Denies Involvement | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | Is this man really the father of ? After a full day of wild speculation and anger, the L.A. press has finally tracked down Nakamoto and he’s receiving a grilling. According to reports, Nakamoto and an earlier this afternoon while the rest of the press followed along. Finally, the 64-year-old man went to the AP offices where he conducted his only interview. http://instagram.com/p/lNv9-_QaNF/ As we see above, the man identified as the father of Bitcoin vehemently denies any involvement in this video shot by BuzzFeed reporter Hunter Schwarz. He to LA Times Reporter Andrea Chang. Satoshi Nakamoto, who changed his name to Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto in 1973, was outed in a article based largely on circumstantial evidence. Much to the chagrin of Dorian, the Bitcoin community, and other journalists, Newsweek released enough details to easily find the man that they claimed was behind Bitcoin and whose BTC hoard is rumored to be worth around $400 million. More as we get it. |
A Look At Lumus, The Amazing Lens Technology That Is Going To Change Wearables | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | You may not know the name now, but expect to be hearing a lot from them in the future. When we first met the rep Ari Grobman two years ago he showed us some amazing technology. It was basically an augmented reality display embedded into a standard lens that could fit into a standard pair of glasses. The 720p model displayed a binocular image at near HD quality right in front of your face, allowing you to watch movies, play games, and even interact with mobile devices on a screen floating in mid-air. Now the team is showing off the next incarnation of Lumus, adding a full computer and camera to create a system that puts Google Glass to shame. The system can handle gestures – you swipe away notifications and even display map data on the ground in front of you. I tried it and it worked perfectly. Imagine a small screen or screens floating in front of your eyes that you can completely control with your gestures. Sadly, the system is almost impossible to video, but rest assured it’s cool. That said, don’t expect Lumus-branded headsets anytime soon. The company is working with many major manufacturers to get the technology out into the wild but, to a man, each company is waiting to see what the others will do. is already using a version of the technology in their upcoming glasses The company owns over fifty percent of the military heads up display market and now is aiming to become the Intel of wearable screens. Grobman was most excited about creating binocular devices that allow for real “Princess Leia” moments where the video is floating in front of you. “We have telepresence demos where the system knows you’re looking at a table and will cut off the person’s legs so it doesn’t look like they’re floating over the surface,” he said. “Our customers can do some cool stuff,” he said. “They’re just not ready yet.” Grobman described other applications including gaming. He said console makers are exploring the technology to add true hands-free and immersive gameplay to their devices. When can we expect to see Lumus Inside? Grobman can’t say. As the OEMs get used to the idea that they need to put together a wearable solution, he said, they keep looking to the big guys like Google to move first. He wagers that Glass was Google’s way of getting people used to wearables on the face. The next step, he said, are real, binocular glasses that actually look good on your face. It’s a long road but, Grobman said, we’re getting there. [gallery ids="968682,968683,968684,968685,968686"] |
The Head Of Sony Computer Entertainment Steps Down | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | Jack Tretton has left the game. The longtime Sony executive is stepping down from his role as President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America where he was essentially in charge of the state-side PlayStation division. The news comes from that doesn’t reveal any details about the departure. It simply states that “this is a result of a mutual agreement between Mr. Tretton and SCEA not to renew their contractual relationship.” Was there a falling out at Sony? Did someone steal Jack’s leftovers from the fridge one too many times? That’s unclear right now. Tretton was with Sony Computer Entertainment America for 19 years, with 15 dedicated to the PlayStation division and most recently oversaw the launch of the PlayStation 4. This is the man who in part has built the PlayStation brand into a global force by establishing a strong foothold in America. Shawn Layden, current EVP and COO of Sony Network Entertainment International, will take Tretton’s chair at the head of the boardroom table. |
Iddiction Launches A New App Discovery Platform, Xplode | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | , an app developer and marketing platform backed by $4 million in funding, just launched a new app discovery network called . It’s a bottom bar that sits in apps across the network. When you tap it, a menu of other apps pops up. The company, which had been running an App-O-Day product that promoted one app at a time, is shifting into this new model. They’re not charging any app makers to participate and Xplode is a basic SDK that developers can drop into their code. “This isn’t spammy like interstitial ads. It’s something that feels more native to the operating system,” said Andrej Nabergoj, the company’s CEO. “We want to connect apps together and build a trustworthy network.” The platform, which is opening up today, has about 120 developers and 600 apps connected. They’re also building certain targeting capabilities, so that app makers can promote their work to paying users of other apps. Xplode is the latest iteration in a long list of attempts to “fix” app discovery on iOS and Android. When Apple’s app store originally launched, it centered around lists of top free and top grossing apps. Developers would try and game these charts by paying for a number of downloads that would push them to the top. Over time, this became less effective as the store got more crowded and as game developers got more sophisticated about getting the “right” kinds of users who would stick around and potentially pay for virtual currency. Then major players like Facebook emerged with app install ads and targeted social discovery. Game-specific networks like Sequoia-backed Chartboost also rose up, with big cross-promotion networks where mobile game makers would trade ad space in their titles. Iddiction has about 25 employees and has raised $4 million to date from Signia Venture Partners, Comcast, Highland Capital, IDG and Felicis Ventures. [vimeo 88310561 w=500 h=313] from on . |
Sean Parker Leaves Founders Fund | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | On the heels of the news that has raised a for its fifth fund, the venture capital firm is slimming down its top ranks, with now-former partner . While the split is perhaps surprising given that Founders Fund is more than able to line up capital to invest, according to the firm, Parker’s exit is neither immediate nor rancorous: “Sean has been winding down his involvement with the fund over the last few years to focus on other projects. He remains a friend and advisor to several members of the team, but he’s no longer investing on behalf of the firm as of the close of fund V.” Founders Fund went on to indicate that Parker would not abdicate his board seats on Spotify and other companies as part of the transition. Parker is best known for his founding role at Napster, and his work with Facebook during that comapany’s infancy. Founders Fund, which he helmed along with other partners such as Peter Thiel, has invested in firms as diverse as Palantir, Stripe, and Path. Including its new $1 billion, Founders Fund has raised a total of $2.15 billion. In recent months, Parker has taken dings for an . A startup that he helped cofound, AirTime, . |
Hointer’s Vision Of The Future Of Retail Uses Robots To Put The Focus On Shopping Experience | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | At this year’s Dx3 digital business expo in Toronto, one of the highlights was a Seattle-based company called that’s aiming for nothing short of a complete revolution in the way we buy clothes in stores – and it’s using robots to make it happen. If you ask the average guy about their least favorite part of the shopping experience, a good chunk of them are probably going to cite having to deal with overeager sales staff. Customer service is one thing, but feeling harangued by people who go in for the hard sell is something else, and it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between the two. There’s also the problem that the retail isn’t necessarily what one might call convenient or relaxing: fighting crowds, hunting through disorganized stock, waiting ages in line for check-out. Amazon is succeeding in taking away business from physical retailers, and it’s doing that mostly on the back of providing an experience that doesn’t require anyone to leave the comfort of their own homes. The retailer’s backend on Hointer Hointer founder Nadia Shouraboura knows a thing or two about Amazon and its retail strategy: she was employee number ten at the Seattle-based tech company. Her new company is heavily tech-focused too, as it uses mobile software, a robotic backend and a development strategy of rapid software prototyping to bring everything together for an entirely new kind of in-store experience. “Tons of people come into our storefront in Seattle, and they tell us what they like, and what they don’t like, and they yell,” she explained in an interview, describing how Hointer’s own store works, where developers sit on the show floor and code, replacing traditional customer service reps. “Sometimes if a feature request is really simple, it’ll be in the store the next day, and customers will come back and see that the idea has been implemented. We’ll try 10 ideas a day, and 10 of them are usually dumb, but we try it and then we roll it back.” The rapid prototyping approach has resulted in a mature sales platform that incorporates barcode scanning via a mobile app, to bring up product information and the ability to order direct from a mobile device, and have that stock waiting for you in a change room. You can order new sizes and reject items instantly, and also pay direct from your device in some versions. This can be handled via a robotic store backend, or done using human support staff, which is a more popular option in emerging markets where labor is cheaper. Even the robotics systems and SaaS solutions for the customer interaction and retail operation management only cost around $40,000 to $50,000 per year to install and get up and running, Hointer tells me. What consumers expect of in-store shopping is a shifting beast, and stocking shelves with goods isn’t cutting it anymore. People want something not easily replicable via online tools with their modern shopping experience, and Hointer’s systems are designed to handle the basics and free up floor space and retailer time, so that they can focus on better addressing those things they can offer a customer that an online shopping cart can’t. |
Google Expands Apps Partner Programs With Tech Track, Opens Cloud Partner Program To More Businesses | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | Google’s , its directory of cloud apps that integrate with Google Apps, now features over 750 services. Today, at its Global Partner Summit, Google is expanding this program by creating a formal Technology track in its partner program for vendors who “build complementary business apps and tools.” The new program, Google says, will run alongside its existing Reseller Program, which currently includes more than 10,000 partners. The Reseller track focuses on the resellers who bring Google Apps to other businesses (ranging from small stores to enterprises). The new track is meant for partners who have integrated their products with the Google Apps Services APIs. These range from companies that build anything from workflow tools and analytics dashboards to business intelligence and expense management tools. Some of the companies in the Marketplace today include the likes of , and . Google says part of the idea behind the program is to reward technology partners for their success in building this ecosystem. As part of this, they will get technical, marketing and sales support from Google. Those companies that make it into Google’s VIP Premier Technology track (which means they need to have an install base of at least 100,000 users) also get a number of extra perks, including premier placement in the Google Apps Marketplace. Also new in Google’s partnership program today is an , which is meant for companies that of the Cloud Platform (think SendGrid, New Relic, Cloud Sherpas, etc.) and those who provide . This program launched in 2012, but always remained relatively small. Google says it only features companies right now. Starting today, Google is now making it easier for more businesses to participate, however. The company is adding an additional entry-level tier to its offerings. This so-called “Registered Company” tier will sit under the and will give companies access to online resources and training. |
Tech Rights Lawyer And Entrepreneur Christina Gagnier Is Running For Congress | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | Silicon Valley’s role in the upcoming midterm elections is already getting a lot more interesting with a new tech-savvy candidate in the race who is looking to fill the of one-term representative Gloria McLeod. Christina Gagnier would bring rare tech chops to the federal legislature as a long-time digital rights lawyer and startup founder ( ). What makes Gagnier qualified to hold the exalted position of congresswoman? “People are fairly tired of representatives that are ‘politically institutionalized.’ It is important not to underestimate some of the competition in this race that have spent time in state politics, but I believe people are looking for an alternative,” she said. As a digital rights lawyer, Gagnier tells me that she’ll prioritize digital literacy, immigration, privacy, and protection from online harassment. Indeed, at this week’s SXSW conference, she’s on the dangers of “ ” — websites that publicize the once-intimate videos uploaded by scorned lovers. Additionally, her startup, Trail, aims at giving training and employment opportunity to the digitally illiterate (see her Battlefield pitch below). [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHidGsbqWiU] This may certainly give her an advantage in the recession rocked CA-35 congressional district. “Any candidate, regardless of tech, legal, medical, or other professional background needs to know the pulse of ALL of their constituents,” said Jim Green, founder of Tech4America, a nonprofit political group in the Bay Area. But Christina will likely need Silicon Valley’s deep pockets to compete in her upcoming primary. “As a lawyer, I am working with startups on a daily basis. I hear the issues that they face and know the obstacles, regulatory and otherwise, that sometimes prohibit them from success,” she writes. “Most importantly, I have started a business myself and can appreciate what it means to take something from nothing (literally from $87) and build a profitable company.” Will that win the support of the tech community? “I’m intrigued by Christina’s potential candidacy, and of course, I’m always supportive of those who put their names on a ballot,” says Mike McGeary, head of the technology lobby, Engine Advocacy. At the very least, it’s “an opportunity for our community to talk in greater depth during the electoral process about our issues.” You can learn more about Gagnier on her official website and her video below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olbKenL4l8c&feature=youtu.be |
TC Makers: Check Out The Georgia Tech Invention Studio Where Students Build The Future | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | When you give Dr. Craig Forest an inch, he takes a mile. The mild-mannered Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Georgia Tech helped set up the Invention Studio on the first floor of a nondescript engineering building at the heart of the university’s verdant campus. Founded in 2009, the 3,000 square-foot space grew and grew, eventually taking over the entire lobby and multiple workshops. The Studio, which features 3D printers, laser cutters, injection molding machines, and literally everything else a maker could want, is now a powerhouse and sponsors line up to donate cash to the free, 24-hour hacker space. “A lot of the students who came out of here have started their own companies. They instantly know how to design and build things,” said Forest as he took me through the studio. There are millions of dollars worth of equipment, all available at all hours, and the studio is entirely student-run with experienced mentors who train newbies on the machinery. Forest says there’s a culture of safety that ensures no one slices off a pinkie on the metal saw or lases an elbow on the cutter. The layout will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a high school wood shop but the tools are much cooler and there’s no grumpy proctor managing the gear. Students can do almost everything in the shop except sell the things they produce – it ensures nobody mass produces a thousand widgets on school hardware – and it’s entirely sponsorship-driven with sponsoring companies getting their pick of the engineers that come out of the program. Other schools are trying to copy the Invention Studio on their own campuses, a sign that the idea has enormous potential. By bringing tech, academia, and students’ innate creativity together in one place, Georgia Tech has created a clubhouse, hideout, and imaginarium all in one sprawling floor. |
Adobe Expands Its Marketing Cloud With Predictive Tools, iBeacon Support, And More | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | As Adobe kicks off its Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City, the company is announcing a number of new features and products in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, its suite of products for digital marketers. It’s the kind of announcement that’s best outlined with a quick list, and I’ll get to that in just a second. When I discussed the conference with Ray Pun, senior product marketing manager for mobile, he suggested that one of the big themes is Adobe’s ability to cover the full “digital marketing lifecycle,” from making ads to managing the campaigns, measuring them, and making money. One thing that we did get a chance to discuss in a little more depth was an addition to the Marketing Cloud’s core services that Adobe is previewing today. It’s called Marketing Mix Planning and is supposed to allow companies to optimize their full range of online and offline marketing. That includes online display, search, and social ads, as well as TV, print, PR, and events. Pun said Adobe will be able to look at historical data to make predictions about how changes in the mix of marketing spend will affect overall performance: “It removes a lot of the guesswork.” He added that to accomplish this, Adobe will be integrating with the third-party data sources that customers choose. Other announcements today include: |
SF Is Actually The New Palo Alto | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Lots of pretty writing in New York Magazine writer Kevin Roose’s and New York Times writer Nick Bilton’s response so you should read them both. But before you can cry or, probably in this case, “West Coast is the new East Coast is the new West Coast is the new East Coast,” remember that pretty writing is pretty writing. It exists for that purpose beyond any tenuous link it may have to reality. After visiting New York all last week and then coming back home to San Francisco, where one of the first things I encountered was, in my neighborhood, a four-block-long line I can attest firsthand to SF not being New York. In fact, some of the people I met on my travels in New York described SF as a sort of utopia. “Everyone has such creative ideas there!” one exalted. “Do people there think tech is a bubble?” another one asked sincerely. The fact that I could afford to live in San Francisco without a roommate was met with respect. While the expensive purses in my Manhattan hotel’s gift shop proclaimed San Francisco of having the country’s highest rents. Which, in a sentence, is the biggest difference between New York City and SF, beyond the former’s 10x population; bragging about wealth isn’t cool here. We’re not even bragging about having To me, what is most striking about New York is how well people dress up in order to walk down the street. What is increasingly striking about SF is how much it increasingly revolves around the tech industry, : “Go into any bar in San Francisco and you will hear people talking about their start-up, or a battle they recently had with a line of code. Stop by a coffee shop in some neighborhoods here and you will be surrounded by venture capitalists being pitched a new idea for a new app. I was walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto yesterday afternoon and I passed by three young guys wearing Facebook T-shirts, giggling together about what I assume will be Facebook’s next product reveal. What was most notable about the scene wasn’t how different it was from a street scene in New York — where I had just spent a week — but how similar it was to a street scene in the new San Francisco. “All of these people rarely, if ever, interact with people outside the tech world,” Bilton . Sounds like Palo Alto to me. |
A Look Inside Box: Competition, Product Plans, And Unit Economics | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | While Box was widely expected to be a money-losing shop, the and that its deficit is increasing surprised some. What the losses mean in the context of Box and its future is a complex question, but one worth answering given that if the company struggles during its flotation, it could close the door for other tech IPOs for some time. That would have a trickle-backwards impact of harming private-money valuations for nascent companies and reduce venture returns, thus harming continued investment. In short, if you are in tech, you want Box to succeed, as it’s good for the current ecosystem you are hoping to blossom in. So we need to understand how healthy Box is financially today, and where it is headed next in the context of product. Component to both those questions is Box’s cost structure, and where it is currently investing the most heavily. Box recently more to fund its operations. That round, taking place in December of 2013, came not a moment too soon: Box ended the period concluding on January 31, 2014, with $108 million in cash and equivalents. You can infer a timing period in late 2013 when Box was short on available funds. $108 million sounds like a towering sum, but for a company as unprofitable as Box, it isn’t. With a net loss of $168 million in its most recent fiscal year, Box would presumably burn through that sum in less than a year. That would put it back in the same spot it was a year ago: Looking for new capital. To get around that, Box wants to raise $250 million in its IPO. That figure could be a low ball. Twitter put up a very low dollar cost per share, for example, when it first went public. That figure went up. Box could refile if interest swells. That’s perhaps optimistic, but the firm certainly wants to snag cash now, because it will continue to lose money for a protracted period. That’s not me being negative, that’s the official line: As a result of our continuing investments to scale our business in each of these areas, we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, to the extent we are successful in increasing our customer base, we will also incur increased losses due to upfront costs associated with acquiring new customers, particularly as a result of the limited free trial version of our service and the nature of subscription revenue, What’s nice about a fresh S-1 is that you get to see a company beat itself up. But honesty bubbles up from blood, and Box is frankly stating that, at worst case, its losses will become worse before they get better. This is why its cash position, temporarily in the nine figures — as it was at the end of January — is wildly precarious. Enterprise sales is a long process, and contracts sold tend to expand over time, providing a stronger ROI to past expenses as time progresses. That’s to say that Box’s massive investment in marketing and sales of the past few years will continue to bear fruit for the firm. Box depends on its free accounts to draw in new users, who then convert to paid accounts, and later drag their employers or employees along with them. This is actually standard for enterprise-facing SaaS companies. It makes sales calls quite warm, given that users are already seeded into the corporation on the other end of the line. (This is why companies like Box have to play nice with IT: It lowers sales friction, but that’s another story.) Box separates its accounting — fairly, mind you — in the following ways: The expense of supporting paying customers is called ‘cost of revenue,’ and the cost of supporting free users is counted as a marketing cost. As you make the move, you become a revenue source and are treated as such. You can’t really be a cost of revenue if there is no revenue attached to you. Let’s take a look at Box’s marketing costs for the past few years: The cost of supporting Box’s free users, who are an important part of its future profits, is high. Note that the highlighted sum includes various other costs, but given that 93 percent of Box’s users are of the free variety, they are not an insubstantial weight. If Box wanted to better leverage its monetization of its extant user base, and continue to attract new and larger contracts with businesses, it will want to move up the value stack. That’s just what it is doing. And this concludes our cash discussion: What will Box need to continue to develop its product while sustaining the heavy costs of its current operations? Cash. And where will it get it? The public. So, on we IPO. That Box wants to extend from mere storage into products that sit on top of storage is fact. Its work building Box Notes, hiring former Microsoft Office guru Steven Sinofsky, and the like point to a future in which Box wants very much to sell you more than a place to park your files. This means greater per-contract fees, lowering the implicit cost of its free accounts system of picking up new paid accounts. This, I think, will be vital to Box making its long-term unit economics work. The pressure here is amplified by a host of competition, and declining per-gigabyte fees. This cuts at what Box can charge for a key part of its value proposition, as larger, better monied players like Google and Microsoft . The dance that Google and Microsoft are playing is different from what Box offers, but here’s the new reality: Cloud storage without editing and collaboration tools is moot, as are editing and collaboration tools without cloud storage. Box and Dropbox were early to the cloud game, but slower, it seems, to the editing and collaboration game. Box calls this space Enterprise Content Collaboration. The company separates it from file storage. Here’s Box’s own rubric for how to view its competition: This is distinction with difference. It’s harder to devalue the utility of an ounce of productivity than it is a gigabyte of storage. And given that the cloud storage market is trending rapidly toward per-gigabyte marginal costs of , this matters. (Aside: Egnyte is , and should avoid the harshest aspects of Box’s marketing costs.) From the S-1, here’s the section entitled “Box Apps” that sits just below the “User Access Layer”: Precisely. Dealing with content itself gets three spots while storing the darn stuff gets two. This is a fair look at Box’s future from a product perspective. Box’s pivot to the enterprise is existential for the firm. Friend of TechCrunch did a fine job today detailing the bull case for Box, that its growth rates are impressive, and that, in frankness, its enterprise activity is performing well. Here’s : Last year, 57% of orders came from enterprises, defined by Box as companies with more than 1,000 employees. That’s pretty remarkable for a startup that really only began catering to enterprises (as opposed to smaller businesses) about three years ago. Given how much Box has grown in the past three years, I’m less impressed by the 57 percent than Rosoff, but that enterprise sales are a majority does matter. If a large chunk of Box’s costs come from supporting free-loading free users — excuse me, potential individually paying account convert — and it’s increasingly selling to enterprise clients, the pipe between free users and large sales is doing well, perhaps. I think that it’s hard to say that’s correct, as if it was, we would expect the total percentage of Box users that are monetized to be higher. But Box can’t lose its free users, as they have been a self-converting, and conversion-helpful cadre for the life of the company. Also, that toothpaste is far from the tube — how would Box turn off free usage? Since it can’t leave that part of its history behind, it can only double down and hope that its revenue ramp will eventually out-class steep growth in its operating expenses. Standard SaaS play, right? Well, yes, but that argument would hold if Box were losing twice as much or half as much. You have to ask yourself when will the red and black lines cross? And if Box needs more capital to get there. I’d wager yes. So this is not its last financing rodeo. All told, keep in mind that Box is IPOing earlier in its growth cycle than it likely wanted to. It needs the money, and that does say something. Still, you can’t knock this revenue growth: |
Hands On With Bellabeat, The App That Lets Moms-To-Be Hear And Share Baby’s Heartbeat | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | It turns out that since then the project has been greeted with enthusiastic demand. The company sold 2,000 units in just the first two weeks, and has inked distribution deals with some key maternity boutiques in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to Bellabeat’s co-founder Urska Srsen. All this has occurred before the company’s official debut, which is set to happen tomorrow at Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 Demo Day. We invited Srsen to stop by TechCrunch HQ to give us a hands on look at the app and Bellabeat’s $129 pocket-sized digital ultrasound tool. Also in the office happened to be a friend of TechCrunch who is in her third trimester (it really was a coincidence, which is awesome) so we were able to get a full demo of the Bellabeat experience. By all appearances, it’s a simple and relatively affordable way for women to stay in touch with their bodies, babies, family, and friends during a very special time in their lives. When you see it in action, it’s no surprise that Bellabeat’s concept is a hit: If there’s ever a time in someone’s life that they want to track everything that’s going on with their bodies, it’s when she’s expecting a baby. Check it out in the video embedded above. |
Researchers Create Diamond “Wires” That Could Power Future Computers | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Physicists at Ohio State University have successfully sent an electron “down” a wire made of diamond, a first that could mean new methods of transferring data inside computer chips. As you can imagine, these aren’t wires in a traditional sense in that they conduct electricity. Instead, the physicists were able to pass a magnetic spin effect down the wire “like a row of sports spectators doing ‘the wave.'” Spin has long been seen as the solution to passing data via quantum computers and the researchers found that diamond transmitted the signals better than metal. The wire cost about $100 to make and was completely synthetic. To make it carry the spin, they doctored the diamond with nitrogen – one atom of the gas per three million diamond atoms – which allowed it to “spread out” and carry the dynamic information. “If this wire were part of a computer, it would transfer information. There’s no question that you’d be able to tell at the far end of the wire what the spin state of the original particle was at the beginning,” lead investigator Chris Hammel said in a Obviously you’re not going to be turning your wedding ring into a microcomputer any time soon. The scientists chilled the wire to -452 degrees Fahrenheit to get to carry the data and room temperature use is still far in the future. |
Apple’s iPhone 5c Sales Story Is A Complex One | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | For years, pundits and analysts have been suggesting that the only way for Apple to compete against cheap Android phones, especially in China and throughout Asia, was to produce a cheap iPhone. Well, Apple finally relented (sort of) when it released the cheapish iPhone 5c –only data suggests that the Chinese prefer the higher-end iPhone. It’s worth noting, however, that the data doesn’t actually tell a clear story about the 5c, and it’s difficult to draw clear conclusions about how it’s doing worldwide, mostly because Apple hasn’t released a break-down of iPhone sales by type, which leaves us to speculate and look at a variety of analyses to figure it out. The good news for Apple is that found that 8 out of 10 high-end smartphones in China, defined as those costing $500 or more, were in fact iPhones of one sort or another, so Apple is controlling the high end of the Chinese market just as it has controlled the high end of the U.S. market. , for the period ending January, 2014, the latest figures available, Apple was at the top of the U.S. subscriber heap with a 41.6 percent market share. We know the iPhone is selling well, but we are left to parse various sources to figure out how it breaks down. According to the data from Umeng, iPhone 5c sales in China at least have been dismal. According to a chart posted on Andreessen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evan’s blog, compared to the 5s, which is at around 12 percent and the iPhone 5, which is around 15 percent. The odd part of this equation of course, is that the 5c is basically the 5 in a colorful plastic shell, but it’s that design that people appear to be rejecting. It seems when people buy an iPhone, they want the full iPhone look and feel, and colored plastic is not what they are looking for in a smartphone. Part of the problem is that even though the phones have been highly discounted by carriers, at least here in the U.S., it’s not clear the discounts are driving sales. Consider that with a two-year contract last fall, and that was after Best Buy had dropped the price to $50 with a two-year contract. Last week, Apple, in what would seem to be a tacit admission that sales weren’t going as well as they’d hoped, introduced with 8GB of storage for £429 in England without a discount. That’s $729 U.S. for what amounts to last year’s iPhone in a colorful plastic case with a small onboard hard drive. No wonder they aren’t flying off the shelves. Benjamin Robbins, principal at Seattle-based mobile consulting firm Palador, told me that maybe the 5c is doing poorly across markets because people buy Apple for the prestige factor, and nobody really wants to get a cheaper one. He said this has always been true of Apple because cheap simply isn’t in its DNA, no matter what the pundits might suggest. “Apple’s brand always has been exclusive in nature,” Robbins told me. “Apple’s marketing team excels at portraying an elite experience and lifestyle that one would have through ownership of their products. Apple can’t have it both ways. It can’t be the penultimate tech product to own and the low-budget leader at the same time. Just as Android struggles to do cool, Apple struggles to do cheap.” If Robbins is right, and what he says makes sense in the context of the data, then offering an even lower-end 5c in overseas markets is probably going to produce the same bad results. If people didn’t want a 5c with , it’s hard to figure how they are going to want a 5c Do we simply go for the high end because that’s what we expect from Apple? Not so fast. A couple of stories put this theory into question. First, citing data from a variety of sources, reports that the iPhone 5c, for all its reported issues, actually last quarter with an estimated 12 million 5c’s sold to date. Compare that to 9 million Samsung Galaxy 4S’s, 8.2 million Nokia Windows smartphones and 2.3 million LG G2’s, according to data provided in the AppleInsider article. And a Wall Street Journal story (registration required) says that — due in large part to its relationship with Apple. All of that data tells a different story and suggest that perhaps the 5c is doing better than we thought — in terms of overall volume. One thing is clear, though, Apple is not built for the low end of the market and it never has been. If it was looking for pure numbers, there are ways to build market share. Nokia is trying to do it by offering which starts at €89 and tops out at €109 for the highest-end model. These phones, which were announced at Mobile World Congress last month, run a special version of Android, but instead of running Google services, they run Microsoft. The idea behind these phones would seem to be to boost their overall numbers (and boost Microsoft service usage). Microsoft, Nokia and BlackBerry all see the market share handwriting on the wall. They all know that if you can’t get to at least 10 percent share, it’s going to be hard to attract developers. So they try to get market share anyway they can, just to boost the numbers, but that’s simply not how Apple operates. Apple was never going to go that low. Instead, it made an odd compromise and decided to go low-ish, an approach that appears to have produced mixed results. If Apple were looking for some additional sales, it might have gotten them. If it was looking to use this to increase sales in China, it doesn’t seem to have worked. |
Sheryl Sandberg: Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | The between technology companies to prevent poaching and hiring among themselves, thereby limiting fair-market wages for the workers in question, has a new wrinkle today: Facebook refused to play ball, and we have a statement to that effect. A filing widely reported today includes an from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, indicating that Google once approached her to propose a détente of sorts between the firms. Here’s Sandberg on the how the ask came to be: “In or about August 2008, I was contacted by Jonathan Rosenberg, who was then at Google. Mr. Rosenberg expressed concern about what he described as the perceived rate at which Facebook could hire employees from Google. Around the same time, I also discussed a similar topic with Omid Kordestani, who was also at Google. I declined at that time to limit Facebook’s recruitment or hiring of Google employees. Nor have I made or authorized any such agreement between Facebook and Google since that time.” In short, while other companies were being and others to stop picking up talent from each other, Facebook wasn’t willing to participate. It’s worth noting that Facebook was hotter than the sun back in 2008, so for it to continue to recruit from other firms could could have been a reflection of its market position; if you are doing the poaching, why would you disarm? Just how annoyed Google was concerning Facebook stealing its staff? From a : So that’s that. Sandberg wasn’t having it. The above appears to corroborate her own telling of the story. And what happens next is precisely what is supposed to happen when companies don’t collude to defraud their employees of fair-market wages: Google coughed up more money to improve its retention. Here’s the very next paragraph of the filing screenshotted above: Well then! The gist here is simple: The pervasive attempt by large tech companies to suppress wages by diminishing their employees’ rights to choose where they work is not merely selfish in the extreme, but is counter to the very market principles that made these companies so successful to begin with. You can’t just free market part of the time. Good on Facebook for not being party to the shenanigans. |
Google Teams With Ray-Ban And Oakley Maker Luxottica For Future Versions Of Glass | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Google has signed on Italian optical wear firm Luxottica to help it design and build future versions of its Glass face-based computing system, according to a new report from the confirmed by Google to TechCrunch. The news comes from Luxottica itself, which says it will build new versions of Google’s wearable, which could theoretically be branded under Ray-Ban, Oakley, Miu Miu, Armani and many others that Luxottica counts as sub-brands. Google previously announced that it would be offering its own that work with Glass, with a price tag of $225 without the lenses. Luxottica signing on means that the company gets some big-name backing from one of the biggest eyeware manufacturers in the world, and that’s bound to help it do some work in that its eye-level smart device has potential in the general consumer market. Luxottica and Google have already been working together on Glass projects for the past year, but there’s no word on what the result of the project might look like, or what the terms of the deal are from a financial perspective. Still, short of Google announcing a solid release date for the consumer launch of Glass, this is a strong signal to its developer community and industry watchers that it’s still committed to making this a product you can buy on store shelves eventually. Google itself cites as a key factor in its decision to partner with the company, and in an email sent to TechCrunch it says that it will collaborate with Luxottica on all Glass-compatible frames resulting from this deal, and that it will focus on the U.S. market initially. Integrating Glass directly into existing eyeware form factors would go a long way towards helping make ordinary users comfortable with this still quite futuristic trend in connected devices, so I’d expect to see something more out of this partnership than simple frames that can support Glass in its existing form. Otherwise, I suspect we’d see something like the frames it already launched to support prescriptions for Explorers, but with name brands attached. We’ll likely know more about Glass and its consumer launch by the end of this year, as that’s long been the rumored date for when Google might launch a version anyone can buy. Now that the Luxottica connection is public, I’d expect more details from that partnership to make their way out around any other consumer news, too. |
Hotshot CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own About 5.7% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5% | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Box CEO Aaron Levie is credited with bringing sexy back to enterprise startups, but the big surprise in Box’s document filed today is that Levie only owns 5.7% percent of the company. Meanwhile, owns 25.5 percent. The numbers reveal Levie sold off much of his startup to raise the that funded Box’s rise to become an enterprise brand name. : As at Fortune, our previously stated 4.1% figure does not take into account Levie’s unexecuted stock options, which total around 2,613,841 shares at various option prices. This would place Levie’s share of the company at just under 5.7% in total. You can see those shares from the S-1 filing here: Another way to put it is that Levie didn’t have much choice. Box needed that funding. The startup is not profitable and notes in its plan to raise $250 million with an IPO that “we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.” As Alex Wilhelm lays out in his , Box saw losses of $168 million from January 2013-2014, largely due to huge advertising expenses. It looks like all that equity Levie traded away was to bring in money so Box could seduce enterprise CIOs into buying it. You can see the rest of the cap table above, including COO Dan Levin with 2 percent, and co-founder/CFO Dylan Smith with 1.8 percent. These all add up to 72.9 percent of the company, leaving the rest of the equity for current and future employees, and what will be sold on the public market. Below you can see how Box’s investors got that equity from its many funding rounds listed in . DFJ got in early, contributing the whole $1.5 million Series A round in 2006, and participated in every round after to build its 25.5 percent position. The Wall Street Journal says the latest , which implies Box will likely be valued higher than that at IPO. You might ask why Levie was willing to whittle his equity down to a nub. Well, many say that startup success is binary. You either win big or lose it all (barring soft landings). Whether you own a lot like Box’s top investors, or a little like its CEO, it’s all worth zero if the startup fails because it didn’t have enough capital to grow. The 28-year-old CEO, known for his frequent magazine covers and red converse sneakers, has never seemed scared of bold moves. Now we know Levie bet that 5.7% percent of a winning startup would be worth much more than 30 percent of a losing one. So would building a big company that employs many and makes work easier for millions rather than being greedy. If Box’s IPO goes well, he may be proven right. |
It’s Official: Disney Acquires Maker Studios For At Least $500M | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Media conglomerate Disney has taken a big step to embracing the new digital world of video, of YouTube network Maker Studios for $500 million, along with a potential $450 million in performance-based earn outs. The acquisition, which was , represents the largest acquisition of a YouTube multichannel network, and could spell more consolidation in the space. “Short-form online video is growing at an astonishing pace and with Maker Studios, Disney will now be at the center of this dynamic industry with an unmatched combination of advanced technology and programming expertise and capabilities,” said Disney CEO Robert Iger in the acquisition release. Maker will remain headquartered in Culver City, Calif., and will report to Disney Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo, the companies say. Maker was originally founded by a team of individual YouTube creators who hoped to leverage each other’s separate audiences and skill sets to increase the number of views and subscribers of each. Think of it as a sort of “whole being greater than the sum of its parts” strategy. But over time it’s evolved into a much bigger business than those original founders could have possibly predicted. It represents thousands of creators who have hundreds of millions of subscribers and together have 5.5 billion video views per month. Maker has also raised a ton of money along the way. It’s raised $66 million over three rounds of funding, with investors that include Canal+, Astro, SingTel Innov8, Lakestar, Northgate Capital, Time Warner Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Maker executive chairman Ynon Kreiz, Downey Ventures, Elisabeth Murdoch, FUEL: M+C, Daher Capital, and producer Jon Landau. The acquisition comes at a premium over its most recent valuation of around $300 million, when it from Canal+, Singtel, and others to go after the international market. Maker isn’t the only multichannel network to exist on YouTube, but it’s certainly one of the biggest. And being acquired by Disney could have a big impact on the industry, as other major media conglomerates or TV networks stake out their own place in the YouTube ecosystem. That said, there are still questions to be answered about the acquisition. For instance: the vast majority of Maker’s views and revenues come from YouTube — how does it begin to move beyond the online video giant as its main distribution platform and establish its own set of mobile and connected TV apps? It’s starting to get more serious about that, and has taken steps to improve its presence on new platforms outside of YouTube. Last summer it , which gave it another distribution platform, as well as a tech team with experience connecting to multiple different mobile and TV ecosystems. Having the backing of Disney and all of its media marketing power, as well as its tech prowess, could help make Maker even bigger — or at least more profitable. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of Disney’s fiscal year. Anthony just spoke with Kevin Mayer, Disney’s executive vice president of corporate development, who offered a little more context around the deal. He said that Disney tends to be “pretty proactive” when it comes to strategic acquisitions, and in this case it was searching for a deal that could help the company “take that big step on YouTube.” Disney has more than 70 channels on YouTube already, but it mostly treats the video supersite as a promotional channel, Mayer said, so it could doing a lot more to both repackage existing content for YouTube and create programs that are entirely new. He added that Maker was the right partner for this shift, not just because of the size of its audience, but also the quality of its executive team. (There are also some connections on that side, with Maker’s Chief Audience Officer Chris M. Williams previously serving as vice president and general manager of Disney Online Originals.) As for why Maker will be reporting to Disney’s CFO, Mayer said that structure will create “the best chance for each and every one of our business units to build a better presence on YouTube.” |
Telegram Hits 35M Monthly Users, 15M Daily With 8B Messages Received Over 30 Days | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Telegram, the mobile messaging app that offers secure communications created by VK.com co-founders Nikolai and Pavel Durov, today announced a , which has increased considerably since Facebook acquired rival WhatsApp: The app hit 35 million users, and TechCrunch has clarified with Pavel Durov that that number represents total monthly active users. Daily actives are now in excess of 15 million, and the startup has seen 8 billion messages received on its network over the past 30 days. That’s a considerable increase in traction from the last time Telegram shared numbers – in October, it had only , but the last time it reported a milestone stat it had seen a huge bumps in downloads on the back of the FB/Whatsapp acquisition news, racking up nearly in the course of a single day. If you’re looking for a hockey stick graph, this is a pretty damned impressive one. The Telegram app hasn’t been resting on its heels over the course of the intervening months between that 100,000 DAU figure and today’s 15 million number, however; it consistently releases updates that improve features, like the new change to how secret chats work that remove the conversation from both party’s devices, adds audio messages and builds in background downloading of message content. There are a lot of messaging apps vying to be the next king of the castle as some look to Whatsapp’s growth trajectory to lapse in the wake of its acquisition by Facebook. With 14,900 percent increase in daily actives over the course of just about five months, however, Telegram looks like it might be giving the legacy players on the market an impressive run for their money as a worthy successor to the independent messaging crown. |
Droplet Is A Robotic Sprinkler That Knows Your Soil Inside And Out | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Because your home can always be smarter, allow me to introduce , the smart robotic gardener. Effectively replacing your sprinkler system, the Droplet tries to save you money and the world’s water resources by watering only the area where there are plants. Through a cloud software system, you can configure your Roomba-style Droplet to water the grass, the trees and the areas where you have flowers planted without indiscriminately watering the whole yard. But it goes further than that. The Droplet actually knows about the soil, the type of plants it’s watering, and other data to help ensure each plant gets just the right amount of water to be healthy. You can give it a number of commands, including to water potted plants, fill up the doggy water bowl, or the usual trees and lawn task. Because it has a cloud connection, the Droplet system also tracks weather in your area. That way, it knows if you’ve had a good rain recently, and it can hold off, or if your plants desperately need some water. The IoT/Smart Home phenomenon is only starting to heat up. Not only will you have an entirely connected home, but it seems that you may just have a connected lawn, too. After all, there are now to self-clean cat poo. And a robot to help you clean out the gutters. No, not just the one from . . Add the Droplet to the list, for $300 on Amazon, and you’ll have a whole posse of outdoor robotic creatures. [via ] |
Inside Jobs: How Medium’s Product Scientist Brings Data To Life | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | The tech press can make it seem like the most important people in the industry are those with “founder” or “chief” in their job titles. The stories of companies such as Facebook and Twitter are almost exclusively told by focusing on the Mark Zuckerbergs and Dick Costolos of the world. But the truth is, the people who make the tech industry tick aren’t the CEOs. They’re the backend engineers, data scientists, product managers, UX designers, marketers, and others. Companies scramble to hire top-tier people in these roles, and will do just about anything to retain them once they’re there. Insiders know that these people are the real VIPs. They just don’t often show up in TechCrunch headlines. That is, until now. TechCrunch TV is thrilled to launch a new series called dedicated to giving in-depth looks at the key people beyond the C-suite, to find out who they are, what they do, and how they got there. We had such a positive response to our Inside Jobs pilot that aired back in November, which profiled , that we’re bringing it back for a special 12 week run. For the next dozen Mondays starting today, Inside Jobs will profile the men and women who do some of tech’s most critical jobs. In today’s episode, we headed to the headquarters of next-generation publishing platform to meet with , who serves as the startup’s lead product scientist. If you ask anyone at Medium who the company’s key employees are, Pete Davies’ name will likely crop up near the top of the list. But “product scientist” is one of those classic tech company job titles that usually elicits a blank stare and polite nod when it’s the answer to the “What do you do?” question at a party. So it was fascinating to meet Pete Davies in person and find out what exactly it is that he does, and why he’s so good at doing it. |
Box Files For $250M IPO On Full-Year Revenue Of $124M, Net Loss Of $168M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | The is out at last. The cloud storage company is looking to raise up $250 million in the flotation. That sum is less than its competitor Dropbox recently from the private markets. Box has long been rumored to have quickly growing revenues and large losses, which has proven to be the case. For the full-year period that ended January 2014, Box’s revenues grew to $124 million, up from $58.8 million the year prior. However, the company’s net loss also expanded in the period, with Box posting losses of $168 million for the full-year period that ended January 2014, more than its total top line for the period. In the period prior, Box lost a more modest $112 million. What is driving Box’s yawning losses? Sales and marketing. The company’s line item for those expenses expanded from $99.2 million for the year ending January 2013, to $171 million for the year ending January 31, 2014. That was the lion’s share of Box’s $100 million increasing in operating costs during the period. Or, put more simply, Box spent more dollars on selling its products in the year than it brought in revenue during the period. This could indicate customer churn, or merely a tough market for cloud products. Why IPO now? Box only has $108 million in cash and equivalents. That means it has under a year of burn at current losses. It needs the money. The company could go back, again to the private markets to pick up another tranch of, say, $100 million, but by going public, presuming market interest, Box can get enough cash for, say, two years in one go. Box lost more than $14 per share in both 2013 and 2014. The market has been receptive of technology IPOs of late. Box is betting that a juicy NASDAQ and investors still high on Twitter’s offering will be receptive to its shares, even as its losses appear to be budging. Its strong revenue acceleration could be its ticket to a stable offering, however. Box had 972 employees as of January 31, 2014. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 6 | null |
IBM India Battles Fraud Amid Scramble To Save Its $2.5B Airtel Contract | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Over the past few weeks, IBM India has fired at least half a dozen top- to mid-level executives, as well as several others accused of fraud. The fraud led to a portion of the over $2 billion outsourcing contract, with being subcontracted to a company founded by former IBM-ers. Now, as Airtel prepares to announce renewal of this 10-year-old contract, IBM’s share of the business is set to be reduced to around $100 million annually, at least three people familiar with the discussion said. “IBM and Airtel are now negotiating terms of a contract that could be reduced to around 3-4 years with total value of less than $400 million,” one of the people I spoke with said. He also cautioned that this figure could change, especially given the ongoing negotiations. The reasons are multifold — first, Airtel wants to reduce its over-dependency on IBM and shift away from the total outsourcing mode, and secondly, the mismanagement and involvement of executives from both sides in the subcontracting fraud has created “an environment of distrust,” one of the people directly familiar with discussions added. “The Bharti contract renewal has already undergone over a dozen iterations; it was supposed to get signed and announced weeks ago. Ongoing investigations into ‘unprofessional conduct’ of some IBM-ers and customer staff has made it a contract everybody wants to sign, but with conditions that reflect lack of trust,” a person familiar with the talks said. In one of the major changes, IBM will not have the freedom to take independent calls on subcontracting work, or buy hardware and software solutions as part of the contract. Instead, a committee of executives from both IBM and Bharti will make joint decisions about what products to procure and how. At least half a dozen sources, which included some company executives, confirmed that around nine IBM India officials being investigated for “process violations” have been fired. “The specific charge being leveled internally is called the business conduct guideline violation,” one of the sources told me. IBM’s has strict rules for working with a third-party vendor, and any kind of special treatment to a supplier is considered sinful. In this case, IBM has started investigations to understand why a particular subcontracting firm, (whose management mostly comprises ) was given a chunk of the business. Several IBM insiders and some officials at Airtel confirmed off the record that there are “conflicts of interest” about the decision to subcontract work to Mara-ISON. “At least a quarter of all the work being outsourced to IBM was being subcontracted to Mara-ISON, and the motives look questionable,” another person familiar with the investigations added. “Supplier selection cannot be dictated by a customer, which happened in this case. And when giving business to an outfit run by former employees who have quit IBM within a year, you need to take three levels of approvals,” another person familiar with the developments said. An email query sent to Mara-ISON in January this year was unanswered at the time of writing. IBM is not offering any specific comments on this story. An IBM India spokeswoman said the company does not discuss details of confidential client contracts. The latest process violations and a potential fraud being investigated by IBM India also involved the CIO of Bharti Airtel who was in December last year. For IBM, a lot is riding on this contract beyond just the commercial value. IBM’s current CEO to meet Airtel’s Mittal, underscoring how crucial it is for IBM to ensure that the contract renewal happens without too much reputational damage. And it’s not just internal process violations forcing IBM to let its staff in India go. IBM’s revenues have been declining for the past seven quarters, causing a rethink of its top-heavy management structure. When the going was good, IBM could accommodate even some its average performers in the top ranks. But with 2013 global revenues ($99.7 billion) almost close to what it reported in 2008 ($103.6 billion), IBM Rometty is cracking down on units and executive positions that were once considered untouchables a few years ago. “It’s a bloodbath for those making anywhere between half a million to $1 million and above annually,” an executive told me two weeks ago. In India, there are at least a dozen such highly paid executives who have been either asked to take a pay cut or move a rank below. After dominating India’s over $70 billion domestic software industry for over a decade, IBM’s revenues and profits from the country have been shrinking recently. According a regulatory filing with India’s ministry of corporate affairs, IBM’s profits for the financial year ended March 2013 fell by 20 percent. Falling profits, newer instances of corporate governance breaches and shrinking business from top customers such as Bharti Airtel are in stark contrast to the dominance that IBM enjoyed in India until a few years ago. All this is putting pressure on IBM’s India headcount, which is estimated to be around 150k currently, according to several sources. This is much more than what IBM employs in the U.S. (less than 100k). While it seeks to trim its payroll overall, IBM is also attempting to call back old talent in order to steer through the ongoing crisis. For instance, the company has extended the tenure of its former India head by another two years till November 2015. Shanker, an IBM India veteran of over a decade, had retired last year and now serves as a senior advisor. About seven years ago, IBM’s Palmisano addressed hundreds of company workers at the imperial Bangalore Palace, announcing over $6 billion worth of investments in the country. It was the first time IBM held its global investor meeting anywhere outside the U.S. and Airtel had won what would potentially become an over $2 billion outsourcing contract. “IBM means I am Bharti Mittal,” Sunil Mittal, chairman and founder of Bharti Airtel had said in June 2006 while hosting then IBM chairman Sam Palmisano in Bangalore, the tech capital of India. This is what Mara Ison, which had not responded to my original email query sent in January, apart from another follow up email in February, has to say now: Mara Ison states on record that it has no relationship whatsoever with IBM India. Mara Ison is not even a registered vendor of IBM India. Mara Ison is not linked to or benefitted from the current agreement between IBM India and Airtel India. Furthermore, the company has no association with any ongoing discussions between the afore mentioned companies for any future agreement on this contract. However, Mara Ison has been associated with IBM Africa as a registered vendor for the past three years to provide end-user support services to Airtel Africa in Africa. This sub-contract has no association whatsoever with the contract in reference between Airtel India and IBM India. |
Former LinkedIn VP Dan Yoo Joins NerdWallet As COO | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Personal finance startup is announcing a couple of big hires today — Dan Yoo (pictured) is joining as chief operating officer, while Florence Thinh is the company’s new vice president of talent. Yoo was previously vice president of business operations and business analytics at LinkedIn. He replaces NerdWallet co-founder Jake Gibson, who is shifting to an advisory role at the company. Apparently Gibson and his wife just had twins, so he plans to spend more time with his family — he told me that it was “largely serendipity” he and his co-founder Tim Chen (the company’s CEO) connected with Yoo when they were looking for advisors. “He not only provided us with great advice, he made it clear that he loved our story and wanted to be more involved,” Gibson said. “So, of course, we jumped at the opportunity to bring Dan on board.” Thinh, meanwhile, is filling a new position. She was previously an operating partner at Khosla Ventures, and before that, director of talent acquisition at Zynga. The company says it plans to double its headcount from 75 to 150 this year. Founded in 2009, NerdWallet has a team of “Nerds” who help consumers choose between financial products in areas like banking, credit cards, insurance, and mortgages. The company has not taken on any outside funding, and with continued profitability, it says it has no plans to do so. “We have some really exciting ideas for how to revamp our product to answer an even greater number of complex financial questions — the kind people would put to a financially savvy friend or financial professional,” said co-founder and CEO Tim Chen. By the way, you can . |
Tumblr Gets More Secure With Addition Of Two-Factor Authentication | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | Tumblr today a very important security feature to its service, with the addition of two-factor authentication – an option available within the blogging service’s “Settings” section as of now. The move sees Tumblr at last joining the ranks of other top tech companies, including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter, the of which offer some sort of two-factor authentication in order to provide an extra layer of security and protection for user accounts, making them less vulnerable to unauthorized access by hackers. Two-factor authentication, for those who don’t understand what that means, is a blanket term describing a method involving two stages (factors) for verifying a user’s identity. Simply put, it means you need two things in order to prove you are who you say you are – not just a username and password. One typical scenario would involve a user providing something they know, like a password, combined with something they have, like a cell phone tied to a verified phone number. In Tumblr’s case, the cell phone scenario is exactly the method they’re using. On the Account Settings page, users can first step up two-factor authentication by doing the following: After setup is complete, you’ll then need to provide the authentication code at the time of login in an additional field below the username and password box on the web (see screenshot above). On mobile, you’ll also need to generate a special one-time password in order to log in through your mobile apps on iOS or Android, Tumblr notes. Unfortunately, in initial tests, we had some difficulties getting Tumblr to accept the provided code, and attempts at having the code re-sent failed, implying there could still be some kinks in to work out here. [ : after waiting a bit and trying a third time, the system worked flawlessly.] Tumblr users with two-factor authentication switched on will immediately be less vulnerable to attacks and hacking attempts. While nothing will absolutely protect you from someone determined to gain unauthorized access to your account on Tumblr or anywhere else, two-factor authentication makes it much harder, as the would-be hacker would need both your username and password, and physical access to your phone to proceed. Tumblr until recently was one of the few companies cited on , a website that lists which services support two-factor (abbreviated 2FA), and which methods they offer – like SMS, Google Auth, , or another custom method. Most of the big-name tech companies – at least in the social space – either support 2FA or have it in development, like Reddit, noted as being “in progress.” Tumblr, however, was the only social service listed that was noted as lacking 2FA altogether. More info on the new feature is available on Tumblr’s website. |
You Get A Bitcoin ATM, And YOU Get A Bitcoin ATM… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | As news that may soon be gracing the byways and highways of Dubai, it’s interesting to note the rise in actual cryptoATM activity in recent months and what exactly is happening in this space. First, let it be said that the market for bitcoin ATMs is a little frothy. Not only are people fascinated by the concept, manufacturers like and can barely keep product in stock. A pair of entrepreneurs I talked to in Warsaw have two ATMs on order and, as time passes, they feel they are running out of places to put them. They are stuck on a Lamassu waiting list while bitcoin ATMs pop up like autogenetic, highly armored electronics. Sadly, these things aren’t quite ready for prime time. A Robocoin model launched in Austin over SXSW required you to submit your telephone number, a copy of your government ID, as well as a photo and a vein scan. Then, owners must pay $20,000 or more for the machine and have a “float” of $75,000 or so to stock the machine. Transactions are controlled by the vagaries of the blockchain so it could take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes – or more – to make a purchase. Right now there is a great arms race. As ATM makers drop their wares on unsuspecting cities everyone is clamoring that they are the first in Scranton or the best Dogecoin source in Sausalito. Interestingly, these ATMs aren’t for the hardcore users. As evidenced by the effort to put so many in Dubai, the makers are targeting fairly wealthy environments where folks with disposable income might want to try their hand at bitcoin. There are, obviously, including regular Satoshi Squares where you can trade bitcoin for cash face-to-face. But this is a key moment for the bitcoin gold rush and we haven’t quite reached peak ATM. Once they’re on every corner I expect we’ll hear far less about them but until them except a litany of “I tried my first bitcoin ATM” posts to appear from here to Timbuktu (a wide-open market, incidentally). |
Microsoft And Nokia Now Expect Their Massive $7.2B Deal To Close In April | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | he transaction is pending approvals from certain antitrust authorities in Asia which are still conducting their reviews.” The companies failed to reach the mark in time. This will cause analysts to revamp their models, Microsoft to wait to absorb the division, and force Stephen Elop to wait before assuming his post atop Microsoft’s now larger hardware division. Also, Nokia’s big payday is now a non-first quarter affair. A blow for both companies, given that slipping into a new quarter wasn’t in their planning, but here they are. Both firms are still saying publicly that the deal will close. Nokia reiterates that ongoing tax proceedings in India have no bearing on the timing of the closing or the material deal terms of the anticipated transaction between Nokia and Microsoft. |
Microsoft Reportedly Will Rebrand “Windows Azure” To “Microsoft Azure” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | According to a , Microsoft will change the name of its Windows Azure cloud computing platform to Microsoft Azure. The announcement is expected tomorrow, with an effective date of April 3, the first day of the Build developer conference. I’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on the reported name change and will update this post when I hear back. The rebranding of Azure doesn’t indicate that Microsoft is moving away from Windows. Instead it reflects the diversity of what is possible on Azure, which goes beyond servers in the Windows sense. Microsoft is, it must be said, an increasingly platform-varied company. Azure has been a successful product for Microsoft, perhaps in part because it embraced platforms that were not Windows, broadening its potential customer base. Thinking of Office in the platform sense, we can see a trend in this. Later this week, new CEO Satya Nadella will be in San Francisco, . Questions remain over what form the product will take and how radical Microsoft is willing to be regarding its productivity suite on Apple’s tablet. The company is at once making large bets on Windows through the unification of that platform across screens and form factors, and also extending its non-Windows products to the platforms of its rivals. This undercuts Windows mildly, given that products unlocked from a Windows world make it less of a requirement to adopt that operating system. But if Microsoft can pull off the double motion, it will be a financial coup for the firm. Azure standing slightly askance from the Windows brand is therefore not tossing shade on Microsoft’s premier product, but instead is a reflection of a broader reality. |
Pushbullet Instantly Blasts Alerts From Your Android Phone To Your Computer | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | . Your phone vibrates. The problem? It’s across the room. Maybe it’s someone texting you. Or maybe someone just liked one of your Facebook photos. Or maybe some dumb game wants to remind you to buy fake food for your fake cat. You better go check it, or curiosity is going to drive you up the wall. (Thanks a lot, classical conditioning!) With , that notification — whatever it may have been — would have gone straight to your monitor. But that’s not Pushbullet’s only trick. Despite being sort of like siblings seperated at birth, smartphones and computers generally kind of suck at talking to each other. Consider the photo taking process. You’ve snapped a photo; how do you get it onto your computer, as fast as possible, sans wires? Google Drive? Dropbox? That most folks would probably say “email it to myself!” means there’s something kind of broken in the process, here. Pushbullet opens up a tunnel of sorts between your smartphone and your computer, making the two a bit less awful at chatting with each other. It does this in two ways: While I’m primarily focusing on Pushbullet’s Android implementation here, they’ve got Because of software restrictions in iOS, however, it can only support the file/text/etc. sending functionality — not the notification mirroring.
Pushbullet isn’t the first app to push notifications from handset to computer, of course — apps like have been playing with this idea for a while. Google’s own , meanwhile, allows you to push text and links back and forth from device to device. It however, the first app I’ve seen to combine all of the above into one, polished, super-easy to configure package. You install the app on your phone, install the extension in your browser, log both into your Google account, and you’re set. Alas, one trick it do (and the first thing I checked): you can’t to notifications through Pushbullet. If someone sends you an important text, for example, you’d still need to get up and grab your phone to actually reply. Pushbullet co-founder Ryan Oldenburg tells me that they’re considering bringing in the ability to respond to certain notifications in a future build, but they’re focusing on getting that initial notification delivery perfect first. While the team is working on dedicated apps ( , OS X later) to tie Pushbullet directly into your desktop OS of choice, it’s primarily a browser extension (compatible with both Chrome and Firefox) for now. This has just one downside, as I see it: depending on which browser you’re using, completely closing the browser can kill off your notifications stream. The Chrome extension offers up an option to keep Pushbullet running even when Chrome is closed, but I couldn’t actually get that to work. But don’t let the little aforementioned quirks keep you from giving it a spin; I’ve been using Pushbullet for the past few days, and am thoroughly enjoying it. It’s one of those apps that just feels… right — like this is how the computer/smartphone relationship is to work. Pushbullet was founded by not one, not two, but Hipmunk alum. The trio broke off to do their own thing in September, then became part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 class shortly thereafter. Pushbullet is free . |
Data Management Startup Actifio Raises $100M At $1.1B Valuation | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | , a data visualization management company that is preparing for an IPO, today that it has raised $100 million led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous investors Greylock IL, North Bridge Venture Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. This latest round brings Actifio’s total funding to about $207 million and puts its valuation at $1.1 billion. Actifio says it will use its new funding to expand globally and develop new features for its data management products. The startup in March 2013, at the same time a report said that it is . Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh , however, that the public offering probably won’t happen until next year. In its announcement, Actifio shared several operating metrics, including 182% year-over-year bookings growth in 2013; over 300 enterprise users worldwide; customers in 31 countries with 44% of bookings from outside the U.S.; and over 1 exabyte of data, 14 petabytes of active app data, and 55 petabytes of physical storage capacity under management. Actifio’s data storage platform uses virtualization technology that allows businesses to create a single copy of production data and make changes to that master copy. This can help companies cut their storage costs by as much as 90%, says Actifio, and reduce recovery times. “Having shone a light on the $46 billion global copy data problem, we will use this funding round to expand our copy data virtualization solution across the Global 2000; enable our cloud service provider partners to build thriving businesses powered by Actifio; and extend the reach of our technology down into an even broader base of the mid-market,” said Ashutosh in a statement. |
Yep, BuzzFeed Is Doing Sponsored Quizzes, Too | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | One of the things that defines is the way its ads mirror its editorial content. So there have been , a , and more recently, sponsored quizzes. I’ve certainly noticed in the past few months, usually asking some variant of, “What Kind Of X or Y Are You?” (I should probably disclose that I’ve done for the site, but that doesn’t make me any less bemused by some of its content.) Melissa Rosenthal, BuzzFeed’s director of creative services, told me that quizzes have been a part of the content for years, but they took off recently thanks to “a massive hit,” namely a quiz published in January that purportedly determines, “ ” Naturally, BuzzFeed saw the popularity of editorial quizzes and followed suit with ads — Rosenthal said her team follows “a lot of the trends that edit’s seeing,” so it’s “actively pitching and selling” sponsored quizzes, with about 10 published so far. The successes include a Mattel-sponsored quiz, “ ” and an HBO-sponsored one, “ ” BuzzFeed says both posts have been viewed more than 1 million times, with the Game of Thrones quiz clocking in at 75,000 Facebook shares, while the Barbie quiz has 161,000. There’s very much a “church and state” divide between the editorial and ad teams, Rosenthal said, but at the same time they’re “backed by the same data.” In this case, “We’ve seen branded quizzes resonate just as well as editorial.” Indeed, even though the two sponsored quizzes I mentioned are marked as written by “BuzzFeed Partners”, I’m guessing that many of the participants didn’t notice a difference. Rosenthal also pointed out that these quizzes can be useful for advertisers since they can “potentially tell the brand about the habits of the people taking them.” And they can incorporate “real research,” for example by asking about your lifestyle and using those answers to identify the car model that might be a good fit. Asked if she’s worried that the quizzes might just be a fad, Rosenthal replied, “We’re always thinking about that.” There hasn’t been “a dip” so far, but she added, “That doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about what new forms they can take. … We’re never really stagnant in terms of our creative abilities, especially on the branded side.” |
Some Thoughts On The Latest Apple-Comcast Streaming TV Talks | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | The Internet is abuzz tonight with a that Apple and Comcast have been talking about a streaming, over-the-top video service. Reportedly, those streams would be delivered as a managed service over Comcast’s network, solving the so-called last-mile problem while also ensuring a high quality of service. I have no special knowledge of these talks in particular, and my contacts at Comcast have declined to comment. But I’ve been following the online video ecosystem for longer than I care to remember, so these are just my initial thoughts on what’s discussed in the report: Much of the report is centered around how the video streams would be delivered to consumers. On that front, the talks center around delivery that is separated from the public Internet but travel instead over Comcast’s private network. Over the years, Comcast has invested heavily in its own content delivery network, which it uses to deliver streaming videos to a growing number of mobile and connected TV apps. The plan is to also use that network to deliver on-demand (and eventually) live streams to its own set-top boxes. Already, Comcast has introduced a managed service for streaming videos that it delivers through its streaming Xbox Live app. That means that those streams don’t travel over the broader Internet, but to work they require a subscriber to be a Comcast broadband subscriber as well as a TV subscriber. All of which is to say, the type of deal that Apple and Comcast are talking about isn’t without precedent. And a whole lot of how it is delivered will be dependent on who exactly owns the customer relationship and what the service entails. This is where the WSJ report gets a little iffy, but most of whether or not a deal gets done will depend on the details. The devil is in the details, and the report acknowledges that Comcast and Apple aren’t exactly “close to an agreement.” On the one hand, Apple wants to create a service in which users would log on with their Apple IDs and control customer data. It would also ask for a cut of the subscription cost, according to the report. Meanwhile, Comcast would want to “retain significant control over the relationship with customers and the data.” It’s difficult to imagine a world in which Comcast would give up its network and control of customers that are streaming data through such a service. Then there’s the part about content rights. The report claims that Apple would need to acquire content rights, but that Comcast “would want to ensure that the price Apple has to pay to acquire rights wouldn’t cause the service to be priced higher than traditional pay-TV service,” according to one person. If customer data seems like a sticking point, content rights seem like an even tougher hurdle to overcome. After all, there’s been no shortage of tech companies seeking TV content rights… and failing. Over the years Intel, Microsoft, Sony, and yes, even Apple, have all tried to strike deals to roll out their own over-the-top TV services. To date, none has been successful in getting all the deals they need, although last year Sony for such a service. For Apple to quickly strike the deals it needs for its own service and also come in with a price that’s lower than existing pay TV services seems like a long shot. Comcast has been working to build its own next-generation set-top boxes to replace the old and busted DVRs most customers have today. By relying on the cloud and IP distribution, these set-top boxes are designed to go beyond what most customers have come to expect. That said, there are still costs associated with rolling out set-top boxes and DVRs to customers. With a growing number of mobile devices out there, as well as Internet-connected TVs, cable companies like Comcast are developing apps to bypass those devices and allowing customers to connect through devices they buy themselves. The next Apple TV, like the Microsoft Xbox, could give Comcast another way to connect to consumers. For all of the above reasons, I think it’s doubtful Apple would roll out its own TV service or license content to create a streaming TV service. To roll out a Comcast app on the next-generation Apple TV box seems a lot more likely. And to make those Comcast streams a managed service on that box in the same way that they’re a managed service on Xbox seems like a no-brainer. |
Change In UK Tax Law Could Raise The Price Of Music And Apps In The Country | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | A change in UK tax law that may take force at the start of 2015 would push the price of apps, music and other downloads and “e-services” higher in the United Kingdom. The legal shift would see downloads charged the value added tax (VAT) of that country. Currently, , companies like Apple and other digital store owners “are allowed to sell digital downloads through countries such as Luxembourg, where the tax rate is as low as 3%.” International tax law , but this particular little riff is coming to the end of its coda. In practice this should mean that charging a pound for a song is over, and that the cost to consumers for books, apps, and other digital content will rise at once. Naturally, a higher price will limit consumption, and likely induce some to piracy. Why would the UK make the change? Simply put, the income. The Guardian also reports that revenue could reach as high as £300 million for the government. The app economy it appears is large enough that the state wants a piece. How to tax online purchases is a topic of interest across the pond as well, with the United States currently wrangling with how to levy sales tax on retailers such as Amazon in a uniform, and functional way. If you live in the UK, keep in mind that this could be your last year at a discount. |
Financial Firms Looking To Linux, Windows 7 As XP Support Dries Up | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | In an unsurprising move, ATM operators and other financial organizations are beginning to look to as a replacement for their outdated Windows XP installations. That these organizations are deciding to move from XP only now is a testament to the staying power of the OS and a certain conservatism in financial circles. “Windows XP currently powers nearly 95% of ATMs around the world,” wrote . The operating system, which Microsoft will stop supporting on April 8, was a popular choice for embedded systems and ATMs for most of the decade as countless would suggest. New ATM operating systems must be Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) compliant and hardware updates may be necessary to upgrade current ATMs – which have a five- to ten-year lifespan – to next generation OSes like Window 7. Linux, obviously, is a solid choice because it is open and can be hardened even on legacy hardware. However, as the “PIN and chip” style cards begin appearing in the U.S. the need to update nearly every POS terminal and ATM may be far more pressing. Presumably, financial firms can keep their old machines running for a few more months or even years, but in the end XP is dead, and despite pleas to maintain support for the embedded OS, Microsoft is intent on pulling the plug. Which means, of course, the BSOD may soon be a thing of the past. |
Secret CEO Responds To Cyberbullying Criticism | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | When it comes to cyberbullying in his anonyous sharing app, co-founder claimed “We don’t see very much of that, if any” when we spoke on stage at SXSW. Secret’s users might disagree. Thankfully, through these highlights from our fireside chat, you can see Byttow acknowledge the darker side of anonymity. He reveals Secret is considering an 17+ age limit and other barriers to bullying. Now just seven weeks old, Secret and the opportunities it creates for spreading hate have become Without names attached, people are free to insult and troll as they please. Posts criticizing/defaming public figures in tech including founders and investors are not uncommon, and were especially prevalent in its first days on iOS. Discussions of the ethics of anonymity heated up after Secret raised including Garry Tan’s Initialized, Google Ventures, and other prominent funders. Marc Andreessen whether it was ethical to build or fund systems that “designed to encourage negative behavior, tearing people down, making fellow souls sad.” Others like Hunter Walk suggested apps should be judged on their potential to do good, not their worst use cases. Early in the talk, Byttow said his company would rely on its userbase to set norms and handle most moderation. But by the end, he clarified that Secret does take a firm stance against abuse and will step in and remove content when necessary. Secret had already begun to take productized steps towards combatting bullying by the time we took Byttow and I took the stage at SXSW on March 8th. When users try to post something that includes a proper name, Secret pops up a dialog explaining that defamatory and mean posts are against its and may be flagged or removed. While Byttow dodged whether company names are similarly protected, he reiterated that when it comes to humans, “posting about someone else and using real names is obviously against our guidelines”. In our talk, Byttow says these types of post are absolutely in. Byttow says that Secret is naturally better protected from cyberbullying because unlike Whisper, PostSecret, or Ask.fm, Secret isn’t a public feed where anyone can post or reply. On Secret, you only get posts from your community or that your community already interacted with. Byttow emphasized that the Secret users often share calls for help, and the community frequently rallies to support them. The company is seeking other ways to minimize abuse. Byttow says that limiting Secret to people age 17 and over is “something we’re talking about for sure”. It’s also considering a direct way for people to report not just objectionable posts but ones that defame them personally. And in a case where a user is depressed — no matter where those feelings came from — Byttow says Secret’s next update will pop up a link to suicide prevention resources if their posts mentions suicidal thoughts. He also said the team is interested in using its funding to grow its moderation team beyond the 1.5 people who currently moderate all of Secret’s content. It’s reassuring to see that Secret is increasing its focus on fostering positive community. While the app has big potential to out bad actors and create honest forums for criticism, Secret threads can devolve into name calling and unconstructive hate. Getting its policies hammered out now is critical as Secret is poised to expand. Byttow says he hopes to launch internationally in one to two months. Secret is also working on an Android version and to head up the effort. Finally, Byttow hopes to build an API for Secret, turning it into a platform. But unlike most startups that can just push a minimum viable product, it could be dangerous for an anonymous app like Secret to expand with a minimum viable community policy. It needs concrete rules established for how to deal with content in the grey area between bullying and freedom of expression. Until the kinks are worked out of its policy, traction amongst merciless high school students or in languages its team can’t moderate could lead to depression or violence. Yet if Secret can find a way to keep discussion civil but not sterile, it could become a powerful outlet for what we’re scared to say. |
Virtual View App Raises $500K To Bring Augmented Reality Campaigns To The Property Sector | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | , a London startup that offers an augmented reality publishing platform and app designed specifically for the property sector, has raised $500k in funding. The investment comes from unnamed private investors from a finance and professional services background. It’s the 2013-founded company’s only external funding to date. Co-founded by London-based estate agent Domenic Versace, the Virtual View App offers estate agents and house sellers a Augmented Reality platform for marketing purposes. The Android and iOS app follows the usual AR affair. Users point their phone or tablet’s camera at a static image that is Virtual View App-enabled to access additional digital content such as 3D property models, 3D floor-plans, photo galleries and videos. Virtual View App campaigns can also provide links to an agency’s social media channels, website, or any other relevant content. Another way to think of the startup is a vertical or niche version of an , targeting a specific sector — in this instance, property marketing. It’s also similar to , but, again, tailored to the property sector. You get the idea. To that end, Virtual View App says it will use the new capital to grow the team, develop the platform and further expand in the UK and select property markets. As part of that expansion it’s currently developing a new product offering which it likens to Google’s ‘Street View’ but for inside a property. The pull for estate agents is that by using AR — and Virtual View App, specifically — they’ll be able to secure a greater number of new properties, and provide a more engaging way for prospective buyers and tenants to check out a property, leading to increased sales and rentals. The startup is also talking up the analytics side of the platform in that each campaign is fully trackable, enabling ROI to be measured and campaigns accountable. Virtual View App says it is already working with a number of UK estate agency groups, including Fine & Country, Campsie, Orchard & Shipman, Newman, Jackson Stops and Harrods, as well as trialling the platform with a number of overseas estate agents. Other competitors in the Augmented Reality platform space include , and . |
Sony’s Advantage | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | Oculus didn’t invent virtual reality — but they sure as hell made people care about it again. As of this week, however, they no longer stand alone in their arena. Sony has decided they want to play the VR game too — and they’ve got at least one , not-so-obvious advantage. Before we dive in, I must admit: I’m naturally inclined to root for Oculus here. If we’re considering this some sort of “battle”, Oculus is now something of an underdog. They took the initiative to move into a market that had become in the decades prior, and managed to convince of to have their back. They’re doing something incredible. But even as a self-admitted fanboy, I’m real enough to see the faults. Now, Oculus has a of things going for themselves. As the team largely responsible for the gaming world’s renewed interest in VR, they’ve managed to dominate the discussion for over a year. They got in early, blew up fast, and have some big, big names on their side. They’ve got of developers tinkering with their prototype headset — something that’ll be hard for Sony to match, especially if they try to keep development/usage of their headset locked to just the PS4. For now, at least, most who think “virtual reality” immediately think “Oculus” — and as long as that’s the case, Oculus the bar. But they’ve got one big weakness: their headset is only half of the hardware equation. You see, when it comes to virtual reality, the things we generally use for controlling a video game character or navigating an interface just don’t cut it. We’ve ; others ; even Oculus founder Palmer Luckey : input is VR’s biggest hurdle. The ol’ keyboard and mouse? Even as someone who hasn’t needed to look at the keyboard to type since he was rockin’ velcro shoes and who pounds on keys , I can admit: once you’ve got that headset on and all sense of relative space is gone, finding the right keys is awful, jarring, and wrecks the very sense of immersion that makes a VR headset worthwhile. Gesture sensors? Perhaps in the future — but for now, things like the Kinect are just good enough to be anything but frustrating. Those crazy ? Heh. Okay. Good luck with that. That leaves us with controllers. With the Oculus Rift, this can mean a lot of different things. Maybe that’s Valve’s Steam controller. Maybe it’s the Sixense STEM. Maybe it’s Razer’s Hydra. Maybe it’s your good ol’ Gravis gamepad. Who knows. That’s a of different things to have to consider, each widely different in their usage and implementation. Which ones, as a developer, do you spend your time coding in support for? Which ones, as a gamer (or the parent of a gamer, or someone just looking to dabble with this whole VR thing), do you spend your money on? The early adopter crowd may be happy to buy any-and-all of it — but when most people buy a $350 accessory, they don’t want to have to figure out which expensive accessories they need to buy. With Sony’s VR headset, there’s only one real option: Sony’s own Move controllers. Yep. Those goofy-ass, glowy wizard wands Sony started playing with a generation ago? Surprise! They’re actually really, good for virtual reality input. Developers are free to use the console’s included Dualshock controller if it better fits their gameplay — but if they’re going for a deeper sense of immersion, bam: the Move is there. It can be a gun. It can be a sword. Pair two of’em together, and it can be a bow and arrow. You can squeeze the triggers to simulate closing/opening your on-screen hand to grab at things. It makes a lot of sense that Sony says they started working on VR around the same time they started working on the Move (and you can be damn sure they’ll bundle the headset with at least one Move controller) We can compare specs and babble on about fields-of-view all day — but in the end, the kit that sells best will be the one that offers a complete, plug-and-play solution. Without Oculus not offering a base controller of their own, Sony has suddenly made the Oculus Rift seem incomplete. Maybe Oculus is working on a solution of their own. If they are, they’ve kept it hush — and they certainly haven’t prepped developers for it. More likely, they’ll let the market, the developers, and the players spend this first generation working out what the best solution might be, then perhaps embrace that in an official capacity further down the road. Whatever the case, the next few years are going to be a blast. Bumpy as hell for everyone involved, perhaps, but still a blast. |
Unbabel Launches A Human-Edited Machine Translation Service To Help Businesses Go Global, Localize Customer Support | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | Today, you can be anywhere in the world in a matter of clicks. Thanks to globalization and the plucky old Information Superhighway, our world is shrinking. Inquisitive globetrotters can pop over to Google Earth, pilot through volcanoes in Hawaii or navigate a few Norwegian fjords and still be home for dinner. Vasco de Gama? Not impressed. The sheer number of people not only coming online but shopping, watching, learning and consuming online — from every corner of the globe — is staggering, and every business wants to take advantage. Businesses now know they need to be where their customers are and that they can’t be one-size-fits all if they hope to thrive in today’s global marketplace. The problem, of course, is that their new, global customer rarely seems to be speaking the same language. Not surprisingly, translation remains a big, expensive problem for businesses today. Most companies recognize the importance of localizing their websites and content, but few have the time, money or inclination to go one step further and localize that rapidly updating content or section of their site, their FAQs or their customer service interactions. For most sites, these last two points, especially, are usually what break the budget — for those lucky (or smart) enough to even have a line of the budget dedicated to translation spend. This is where wants to help. The Y Combinator-backed startup is launching today with a new kind of online translation service that aims to make it easy and affordable for a business of any size to translate all of its online content — from marketing collateral and FAQs to customer service emails, both static and dynamic. To save businesses from breaking the bank on translation services, Unbabel has developed technology that combines machine learning-based auto-translation with crowdsourced editing to offer quality translation at what it claims is “one-fifth” the going rate. By contracting Unbabel directly or by using the company’s REST-based API to integrate translation directly into their workflow, businesses can translate all of their website’s content in a flash at $0.02 per word. Now translating over 30,000 words/day for over 30 customers, Unbabel’s secret sauce leverages artificial intelligence software and its stable of over 3,100 editors (or translators) to translate a website’s content from one language into its customer’s language of choice. First, its machine learning technology translates the text from source into the target language, at which point it uses its Mechanical Turk-style distribution system to assign editing tasks to the right translators, who then check the translation for errors and for stylistic inconsistencies. Unbabel editors work remotely, via their laptops or mobile phones, on translations, which co-founder Vasco Pedro says provides the key to faster translations. This, combined with the efficiency of its task distribution and administration algorithms, provides a level of efficiency that allows editors to earn up to $10/hour working for Unbabel. The startup is also hoping to appeal to businesses looking to cater to international customers not only by offering integration through its REST-based API or by allowing them to quickly fill out their online form to order translations, but by offering email-based translation as well. To help with international, localized-style support, Unbabel offers businesses the ability to provide customer support in a customer’s native language via email as well at $3 per 150 words. Businesses can simply send an email to a language-designated inbox it sets up with Unbabel, and the company will reply with a translation in less than an hour. Beyond email, Unbabel also offers a separate pricing tier for FAQs, which allows businesses to translate their user’s comments (and their own) so they can follow all the whole conversation on their website at $5 for every 250 words. In turn, businesses can use the startup’s translation technology to translating their social streams, as Unbabel will convert each tweet, post and comment into their language of choice at $1 for every 50 words. This means that businesses can send Unbabel what they need translated online, through its API or by email, which the company then converts into micro-tasks, automatically translating the source and turns over to its community of editors to refine. The content is then delivered, recombined and translated in near real-time. Today, the startup supports nearly 14 languages, including English to 13 other languages, or nearly any combination thereof. However, co-founders Vasco Calais Pedro, Sofia Pessanha, João Graça, Bruno Prezado Sliva, and Hugo Silva tell us that they’re working to add more languages to its roster, and hope to begin supporting new languages over the course of the coming year. With over 700K words translated thus far and over 40 paying customers on board pre-launch, the Unbabel founders believe they’re just beginning to tap into the pent up demand for a faster, more affordable (and accurate) translation service among the nation’s businesses — particularly, among startups and the SME market. To support this early growth, Unbabel has taken on just over $400K in seed capital from Y Combinator, YCVC, Faber Ventures and Shilling Capital Partners, which the startup expects to supplement with another round in the coming months. On top of its API, through which Unbabel already offers integration with key P2P markets like Airbnb, the founders also plan to continue rolling out additional integrations based on customer demand, whether it be Salesforce or Zendesk. The long term goal, says co-founder Vasco Pedro, is not only to create a fluid user experience and become an integral part of the communication value chain for its customers, but to help bring the Web closer to a future where all of its content is available in a multitude of languages. In other words, in homage to the archetypal story, the company wants to un-Babel babel, and help bring some clarity (and order) to the and the variation of human language. Human translation is really the gold standard as far as online translation goes, but for most companies, paying real, live humans to translate their content is an expensive proposition. In most cases, it’s either pony up the funds to pay for humans, or make due with machines (like publicly available tools akin to the unreliable Google Translate) and automated services. By combining both machine translation human curation, the Unbabel founders not only believe they’ve created a novel solution to a persistent problem, but that they can offer a product that’s on par with pure human translation, faster, and at a fraction of the cost. The startup also wants to get a leg up on the competition by going one step further than the rest by providing companies with the ability to translate the types of customer-related communication and content that is critical to their business, yet goes mostly overlooked by existing services. The chief example, as mentioned previously, is the mountain of user-generated content companies collect across their web and mobile platforms, whether it be “Help”-style wikis, their social channels, forums or FAQs. In doing so, the Unbabel founders believe they’re beginning to unlock a new market of content, opening it up for translation into myriad languages and, thus making it more widely accessible — or so they hope, anyway. For more, find |
Digital Ocean’s Journey From TechStars Reject To Cloud-Hosting Darling | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | The cloud hosting service is one of the big startup success stories of the last year. Earlier this month, the company announced that it had raised a $37 million funding round led by Andreesen Horowitz, just a few months after raising a $3.2 million seed round. Maybe even more importantly, it’s adding customers and it has now spun up over 1.3 million cloud server instances since its launch a year ago. Getting to this point wasn’t all that easy, though. Earlier this week, I sat down with DigitalOcean CEO and co-founder Ben Uretsky to talk a bit about the company’s journey. It is, in many ways, the quintessential startup story. Uretsky has a background in hosting, but in 2012, he decided that a new approach to cloud hosting was necessary. Existing providers offered pricing plans that were too complicated and platforms that weren’t always meeting the needs of their users. With Amazon ahead of the pack, however, the team had a hard time convincing potential investors that it could make a dent in the hosting market. In the process of trying to secure funding, DigitalOcean’s founders met up with IA Ventures’ who suggested the company apply to . The only problem with that suggestion: the application deadline was just about 24 hours away. So the team hunkered down for a day and finished the application. “That was the first time we really solidified our mission in writing,” Uretsky admitted. In addition, the founders had to record 30-second video clips for one part of the application. Given the deadline, the founders used their iPhones to record them. From there, the team got invited to the TechStars intro day and, as Uretsky put it, “walked away with a sense of awe” afterward because it made them realize what kind of network an accelerator program like TechStars could offer them “We knew at that point it was worth getting in,” Uretsky told me (and he was especially impressed by meeting at the intro day). After this first introduction to the world of accelerators, the team went through the TechStars selection process. Uretsky especially remembers a key meeting with who was running the NYC program at the time. That meeting must have gone pretty well, because the company was invited into the finalist round of about 20 to 25 companies. Despite making what Uretsky believes was a very solid pitch, DigitalOcean was rejected in the end and didn’t make it into the program. After almost two months of going through the selection process, that was quite a letdown, of course. “We pleaded our case,” Uretsky told me, but to no avail. The company continued working on the product, though, and two weeks after the finalists were announced in March 2012, Uretsky got an email from Tisch, inviting them to apply to the Boulder program. Out of all the companies that were rejects, Tisch felt, DigitalOcean felt like it should’ve been part of the class. “The main reason [Tisch] didn’t want to work with us was that his own experience in the server and infrastructure space wouldn’t be helpful,” Uretsky told me, which makes sense, given that Tisch’s experience is really in the consumer space. By mid-May 2012, the company had been accepted into the Boulder program and the five-person team moved into a three-bedroom house in Boulder for the week. With just three rooms, Uretsky and one of his co-founders — who shall remain unnamed — ended up sharing a bunk bed. His co-founder turned out to be a very loud snorer, which probably didn’t make the whole experience, which Uretsky describes as “gruelling,” any easier. Still, he describes the accelerator program as “a great formative period for DigitalOcean.” With no distractions — besides the snoring — the team was able to focus completely on the product. That is, after it made it through the first phase of the TechStars process, which has the teams meet with lots and lots of mentors. All of them, of course, have different ideas about the company and there was always a push to think about pivoting to a different product. And that’s what the team did at first. For a while, they worked on other ideas, including a community content network, a provisioning service and other ideas. “At the end of all those conversations [with mentors], we were still able to stick to our original thesis,” Uretsky said. “We decided to stick with the original value proposition.” Still, some of those potential pivots turned out to be the seeds for some of the features of DigitalOcean today. With that phase behind them, the team went into phase two, which is about building the product, finding some early customers and getting traction. By demo day, the company had spun up about 10,000 instances and signed up just under 400 customers. Talking about demo day, Uretsky recalled how the pressure for companies is to come out of the program and be able to set up a round, but in trying to raise a seed round, the team faced the same challenges as getting into TechStars: cloud hosting is a hard sell. In the end, though, the team manged to convince enough investors to fund its early days, but to accelerate its growth, the team decided on a risky move. Even though DigitalOcean is known as an SSD-only hosting platform, it still used regular hard drives in 2012. The idea was to offer a simplified user experience, but SSDs weren’t on the original roadmap. Still, DigitalOcean decided that in order to differentiate itself, it would move to SSDs. Those are more expensive than regular hard drives, though, so it had to sign up twice as many customers as before to stay in business. My colleague Romain Dillet wrote and Uretsky was able to recall the date of that post — January 15, 2013 — because he says that’s the day when he realized that this idea was going to work. That story then hit Hacker News later in the day and the company increased customer acquisition 10x from then on. Over the last year, that growth story has only continued. For Uretsky as the CEO, though, this rapid growth also meant stepping away from product development himself and focusing on financing instead. “It’s a little disheartening because I love technology.” he told me. “But nowadays I do meetings and phone calls most of the day.” With a large funding round behind him, he now focuses on hiring, something that isn’t exactly easy, either, and that often shapes a startup’s future for years to come. |
Vaavud Raises $375K To Tame The Wind With Your Smartphone | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | A has just closed its seed funding round, raising $375,000 to continue its work of measuring the wind using a network of smartphones with a low-cost, electronics-free hardware accessory combined with a mobile app. Danish startup ‘s new funding comes from a group of angel investors, and according to Vaavud CEO Thomas Helms, it’ll help them expand at a faster rate than before, and offer more product features to its hobbyist audience, as well as build out more services that appeal to business and enterprise. The startup builds a tiny wind meter that consists of just a couple pieces of plastic that fit into your smartphone’s headphone jack. The accessory communicates with your phone via soundwaves, which are translated by Vaavud’s app into a windspeed measurement. Those measurements are then collected and analyzed by the app, providing the company with a comprehensive look at wind speed measurements around the world. This seems like a bizarre use case for a smartphone, but Vaavud has already attracted interested corporate clients from the agriculture industry. A joint project with the Swedish agricultural coop Lantmännen Maskin AB will see the startup build a custom solution for measuring wind speed that’s designed to comply with new, tighter safety requirements in Sweden around the use of pesticides for crops. Helms tells me that Vaavud currently sees around 4,000 new measurements per week, and with spring arriving in many places where the device is popular, that number is rising quickly. They’ve also hired a new PhD in computer science to help them work on their Android app, as well as to refine their algorithms to help filter out measurements taken indoors,or artificial ones like those generated by people blowing into their Vaavud wind meters just to check them out. Kickstarter success comes in all shapes and sizes, and the Vaavud wind meter is a perfect example of that. It’s a crazy invention, and one that you might have thought only had limited appeal with a small group of hobbyists, but it’s also proving its worth with big organizations who need a very specific problem solved with affordable, portable hardware. |
Mixpanel: iOS 7 Adoption At 90%, While Android Kit Kat Remains At Under 10% | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | Mobile analytics firm Mixpanel has iOS 7 adoption covering the vast majority of Apple mobile devices, with its real-time adoption stat tracker showing on the latest major revision of iOS based on hourly browsing data. By comparison, you can see that according to its Android device information, only around 8 percent of those using Google’s mobile OS are using Kit Kat (4.4) or higher. This stat shot says that Apple users are good at remaining fairly current on their devices, and it’s also great news for developers, since apps designed for iOS 7 are likely to be strikingly different from those created for earlier versions of iOS. Apple’s advantage when it comes to fragmentation issues mean less money spent on making sure software works across a range of different OS versions, and it’s something Android still lags considerably with, which is apparent from the current Kit Kat uptake. As for Apple’s latest version of iOS 7, iOS 7.1, it’s already accounting for the majority of visits to Mixpanel’s partner apps and sites since it debuted March 10. Between that date and today, Mixpanel has seen 31 percent of visits come from 7.1, versus 29 percent via 7.0.6, which is the next closest. The bottom line: Apple users are quick to update and don’t show any signs of becoming more reluctant to do so, which in turn means the efficiency benefits of developing software for iOS over Android aren’t likely going to disappear anytime soon. |
So A Breathalyzer For Quitting Smoking And A Patent War Room Web App Walk Into A Bar… | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. In just mere moments (depending on your reading comprehension level), I will reveal the winners of the TechCrunch DC and NYC Meetup Pitch-Offs, and you’ll all kindly pretend like you know who they are already. Of course, you shouldn’t know who they are. As a requirement, they’re all mostly in stealth or private beta or generally under the radar. But no longer. Drumroll, please! Taking first place in DC, with a “war room” webapp to help startups, lawyers, and patent trolls navigate the pitfalls of a patent dispute, while staying organized, communicative, and ultimately saving time and money, give it up for Lithosphere Software and their product, PatDek! Our first place winners will receive two tickets to Disrupt NY in May, as well as a demo table in the Disrupt Startup Alley. API Fortress, which tests and monitors your APIs, took home second place and two tickets to Disrupt NY in May, while Greater Places, the “Houzz” for urban design, walked away with the third place prize of one ticket to Disrupt. The audience choice winner, who is also receiving a ticket to Disrupt, was SpeakerBlast, which uses a webapp to turn any number of devices into a sound system with “superior technology and quality over Bluetooth.” And now for New York… IntelliQuit, a company that builds a pocket-size breatholizer-type device that helps smokers give up the habit, won first place in the Big Apple, and will also receive a Startup Alley demo table and two tickets to Disrupt. And hey! If the audience likes them at Disrupt, they may have the opportunity to move into the Battlefield on-stage. AFreSheet, which is a seven-layer disposable waterproof bedsheet for college students, won second place, and a women’s shoe customization site called Project Shoe took home third. Our audience choice was ShopDrop, an app that notifies you of sales at your favorite stores, online and at the stores. Thanks to everyone for an amazing night, and congratulations to the companies who pitched at the meetups! You guys did great. Our next meetups are on April 8 and April 10, in and respectively. And we can’t wait! |
When Startups And Revolutions Collide | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | In the last two months, tiny Silicon Valley startups have proven their ability to upset the well-laid plans of autocrats half a world away. , Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, failed spectacularly at banning Twitter, as local citizens found easy workarounds with tech tools, skirting blocks with tens of thousands of tweets mocking the impotent censors. “I think that startups can perform functions once reserved to government, but they are well-served to be as educated as possible before they wade into foreign affairs,” Secretary Hilary Clinton’s former senior adviser, Alec Ross, writes to me. The State Department is no longer the only bridge between a pajama-clad hacker and dissidents in the Middle East. Anyone with an Internet connection can wade into the dicey diplomatic waters of revolution, once reserved for governments. This new unregulated power has its promises and perils. In Turkey, anti-censorship workaround for clumsy government censors. Erdoğan brazenly threatened to “wipe out” Twitter after courts approved a ban on the micro-blogging service for hosting anti-government content. Almost immediately after the ban was instituted, information for workarounds spread virally. Twitter announced a text-messaged-based workout: [tweet https://twitter.com/policy/statuses/446775722120458241] Citizens sprayed graffiti instructions to subvert censors through Google’s alternative routing system (DNS): [tweet https://twitter.com/FindikKahve/statuses/446961277739749376] Mobile app downloads for software that secretly funnels traffic into servers outside of the host country (a virtual private network) spiked. The most popular, Anchorfree’s Hotspot Shield, went from 10,000 to 270,000 downloads in 12 hours, according to statistics provided by the company (screenshot of the Turkish app store below): Free from the shackles of the government censors, Turkish users flooded Twitter with roughly 17K tweets a minute, breaking a new record, to The Guardian. Below provided by Brandwatch of the number of tweets before and after the ban. And, then, the mocking of the efforts to quash the service began: [tweet https://twitter.com/ekara571/statuses/446952025931395072] [tweet https://twitter.com/serdaroncode/statuses/432172959579389953] “This is an attempt by Erdoğan to control an uncontrollable space,” Ross explained to me. So far, anti-censorship tech has been safe and effective, but that might not last for long and it certainly doesn’t hold true for all countries. Like many startup optimists, Anchorfree is out to change the world. “AnchorFree is a mission-driven company, with a mission to provide secure access to the world’s information for every person on the planet,” writes founder David Gorodyansky to me. But, giving people access to the Internet can encourage unintentionally risky behavior. “I’d encourage Turkey’s Twitter users to be careful about how they access Twitter, even if access is restored. Syria also restored Twitter access just before the revolution and used it to identify protesters,” writes Ian Schuler, CEO of Development Seed and a former State Department Official. Indeed, during last Summer’s protests, Turkish authorities 25 dissidents for the high crime of using Twitter. Skirting government censors has traditionally been a cat-and-mouse game with the select group of activists willing to fight back; cryptographers rarely design software to be used on the same country-wide scale as Angry Birds. The go-to solution for activists has been less-than-user friendly, open-source apps such as TOR, a free set of tools for anonymous browsing. Many of the experts we spoke with only trust non-commercial software. Speaking about Anchorfree, Enrique Piracés of the Benetech, wrote to me, “Their solution seems to be convenient and cost-effective, and some of their features are very clever, but unless there is access to the source code it is hard to think of it as secure or trustworthy solution.” In other words, commercial products may sacrifice security for usability. Encryption was never meant to be a one-click process. Andrew Lewman, executive director of the TOR project, told me “Free and open source software at least gives someone the ability to review, improve, and audit the code on which the app is based.” Ross, an adviser to Anchorfree, says that he believes the company has done its due diligence on the security side and that commercial products have an important role to play. “I understand the bias toward open source, but one ought not take a religious view on the question of what can best help dissidents.” Indeed, it seems that in the heat of the moment, citizens-turn-dissidents just grab anything that’s available. One Venezuelan activist we spoke to described how he came upon anti-censorship tech during protests last February. “The choice of the app in this case did not depend on the brand (because there are several apps that offer pretty much the same service)… It was just a matter of grabbing a VPN app to avoid the block the government was imposing! I just learned about this app when everything started (Feb. 12th). Before that… I just did not know about VPN apps. I just installed it and it worked perfect!” The upshot is that the majority of users in these situations are novices and don’t completely understand the risks. Easily downloadable software is great for feeding the ranks of grassroots protests, but it puts the onus of security on startups. “If a technology is not secure or a strategy is unsound, it can get people killed,” warns Ross. such road to disaster paved with good intentions. When a 26-year-old Ohio-born hacker developed anti-censor tech for Iranian dissidents in 2010, he never thought it would paint a big red target on the backs of its users. After serious security holes were discovered, Haystack was immediately taken off the market. “If you have a copy of the test program, please refrain from using it,” the makers warned users. At the mass scale of country-wide revolutions, awkwardly designed tools don’t cut it. Dissidents will grab whatever they can find, and that’s usually the same places they go to download Words with Friends. So, there’s a huge opportunity for startups to help, but it means also a margin of error is as thin as a knife’s edge. “My advice is for startup activists to confer with officials in government not necessarily for approval,” says Ross, “but for situational awareness that can help inform their strategies.” |
Fly Or Die: Whisper | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | Anonymity is all the rage these days, and so we bring our attention to . This week, we’re joined by , who has some mixed feelings about the craze around anonymous social sharing apps, like Whisper and competitor Secret. Whisper, based out of LA, launched back in 2012 to be the PostSecret of mobile. All the drama and intrigue was there. Most of the artistry still remained as well. Users could publish their secrets, anonymously, in meme form for others to engage with. When a post is shared, it’s shared with the entire Whisper community and Whispers with the most likes are filtered into the popular page. The entire network is navigable through an intense web of tags on each post. It’s pretty slick. And thus, the company has a without any revenue stream in sight. The app has seem competition in a world where ephemerality and anonymity are , but Whisper may have an edge in the fight against Secret. The issue of bullying will take center stage during the battle. Where Secret shares your anonymous post with your circle of friends, Whisper makes no distinction between people who know each other and people who are perfect strangers, inviting what seems to be a more positive and humorous user base. Time will be the real test, as more social ideas are being tested and launched as we speak. After all, . |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 24 | null |
Latest Snowden Revelations: NSA Hacks Huawei | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | The hacked Chinese networking giant and apparently gained access to the company’s source code, seen by and the German publication These latest leaked documents indicate that the NSA began an operation called “Shotgiant” against Huawei, the world’s second largest supplier of networking equipment behind U.S.-based Cisco Systems. The U.S. were being used as a Trojan Horse enabling the Chinese government to spy on the networking company’s customers. Now, it appears that the U.S. government simply cut out the middleman in its own efforts to monitor the goings on around Huawei. Not only did the U.S. security agency manage to intercept emails, but it also gained access to the company’s source code of specific products, according to the Spiegel report. That’s the crown jewels of any tech company — laid bare by America’s technology espionage apparatus. Luckily for concerned netizens and corporations a spokeswoman for the U.S. assured the that any spying was only done for national security purposes. Meanwhile, the unintended comedy of the situation was not lost on Huawei, whose spokesman issued the following statement to Spiegel: |
Noora Health’s Training Program For Patients And Caregivers Improves Recovery And Reduces Readmission Rates | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | If you’ve ever had a major surgery or medical event, you know that the education around recovery leaves much to be desired. When I had a C-section with the birth of my daughter, the hospital gave me a piece of paper that listed some of the medical issues that could take place if my recovery wasn’t going well. But I really had no idea how to handle the recovery. In fact, I made several calls to my physician (and had an untimely ER visit) because of complications. wants to change this. The nonprofit graduating from Y Combinator is building hospital education platforms for patients and their family members to teach them the skills needed to recover from a major medical event (like a surgery) or manage chronic conditions like diabetes and palliative care. Using an iPad app, Noora Health works with hospitals to offer patients and their families a combination of videos, quizzes and interactive content to teach skills to aid in their recovery at home. The problem that Noora is tackling is real. In the United States, patient 30 day readmission rates for hospitals are at 20-30 percent. Medicare alone spends roughly $17 billion per year on return visits that are preventable with proper education and training. Noora Health will actually supply iPads to be put on patients’ bedside tables post surgery. Patents then self identify by entering basic information related to their condition, and an interactive education program is presented to them based on their condition and circumstances. Part of the program involves giving family members 24-hour access while the patient is in the hospital so they can actually practice some of the skills (i.e. changing a dressing of a bandage) before they go home. Doctors and nurses get reports on the patient’s progress and can see which skills patients are succeeding and struggling with and follow-up with the patient accordingly. Each program has a different focus, and for now extend to new mothers and patients with heart failure (vascular, surgery), Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and pneumonia. Eventually the organization’s technology will become more customizable to each patient’s specific condition, we’re told. So the program will start taking into account certain medical history data points like whether the patient is a smoker. The non-profit was founded by Edith Elliott and Katy Ashe, who met while developing a program in India at Stanford’s d.school. Once they thought of the idea for Noora Health, Ashe and Elliot thought India would be a good start to bring better health education to a developing country. Specifically, the healthcare infrastructure in India can’t keep up with the growing demand for health services, and there is a need for more doctors and healthcare professionals in general. Through a partnership with a chain of low-cost hospitals in India, Narayana Health, Noora provided their training program to over 6,000 patients and family members. Results were impressive: There was a 23 percent reduction in readmission for open-heart surgery patients. As a side note, Noora’s name derives meaning from the Arabic word for light and was the name of one of the first family members Elliot and Ashe interacted with in the early stages of their nonprofit’s development. With this program in place, Noora Health is now extending this to U.S. hospitals. Currently, the organization is coordinating content and programs with eight institutions, including Stanford Hospital and Santa Clara Valley Hospital (a program for new mothers). Early data shows that the program is reducing readmission rates, increasing knowledge retention, and boosting patient satisfaction rates. What Noora Health is offering is compelling for hospitals, considering the recent changes in reimbursement with the Affordable Care Act. Patient satisfaction and readmission rates are now calculated into the costs for Medicare, Medicaid and MediCal patients. So hospitals are looking to increase satisfaction and reduce readmission rates. As Elliot and Ashe explain to me, Noora Health’s goal is to empower patients with the information they need to truly take care of themselves through design and technology. “Patients and caregivers don’t ever go through a training course like CPR, yet are being put in these very scary situations post surgery,” explains Elliot. Ashe adds that, especially in small villages in developing countries, there is no education. But even in the Western world, she says, patients are confronted with critical decisions and changes following surgery that impact their health for the remainder of their lives. Education and skill training is the best way to help empower patients and families. As someone who did go through a major surgery recently, I would most certainly have benefitted from a better education around recovery. [vimeo 89571148 w=500 h=281] from on . |
The Rise Of The Euro Mega-Round | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | Slowly, quietly, but increasingly more noisily, startups originally hailing from Europe but going global have been raising larger and larger funding rounds. The linch-pin in the ecosystem has been financing from London (handily, that’s where we’re holding our there in October). You can be a startup from the most obscure village in Europe, your developers happily hacking away in some austerity-stricken part of town, but raising financing from VCs who like the combination of the UK’s legal jurisdiction, the English language, and the fact that US investors barely need to tick a box to invest when the startup’s founders come calling. The other city attracting VC attention is Berlin. According to Dow Jones VentureSource in the second quarter last year Germany received $375.8m in new VC for 67 deals, mainly in Berlin, while the UK won $290m for 77 deals. But London is fighting back. A number of funding rounds have came in recently, attest to this trend, and it’s worth us taking time out for a moment to just register that ‘what just happened’ moment in three key stories which happened in the last couple of months. , a London-based startup aimed at the consumer money wiring/remittance market got (which has backed Supercell and Facebook. That was the startup’s first VC investment, and one of the largest-ever Series A rounds in Europe to date. raised in its second institutional financing. This is a – ready for this? – Vilnius-based startup, a mobile and web-based marketplace to sell secondhand and consignment clothing. The money was from London’s Accel Partners and Insight Venture Partners (New York). , launched out of London, lets people borrow cash and put up luxury watches, art and other fine goods as collateral. In March it , mostly form Victory Park Capital (Chicago). In February, London’s , which helps retailers use their customer purchasing data to improve the retail experience, funding led by Dawn Capital (London) together with other investors. London-based company data source , which led by Oak Investment Partners with participation from existing investors Notion Capital and Passion Capital. To date, the largest source of private company information in the UK, DueDil provides company and director data on private companies in over 22 countries. Launched in mid-2011, DueDil has raised a total of $22 million. It’s planning to launch in many more countries over the next year. London-based travel startup raised $8 million in a Series B round led by top-tier London VC Balderton Capital. Top10 is a hotel search platform that aggregates review scores, location, popularity, price, and other features, thus creating a shortlist of 10 recommendations for each search. Founded in 2011 with, initially, a focus on music, the startup pivoted in early 2013 to focus on solely hotel search, a key market in Europe, and of course globally, with juicy revenue potentials. Top10 is planning to expanding its reach in Europe. Lyst, a Fashion e-commerce aggregator, $14M more, and partnered with PayPal. And the money in London is not just staying in Europe. San Francisco-based private communications startup (we’re talking self-destructing And encrypted messages here) of $9 million led by Alsop Louie Partners with participation from angels including Thor Halvorssen, Gilman Louie, Richard A. Clarke, and Eileen Burbidge. For those of you unaware, is one third of the partners at Passion Capital in London and a key influence in the scene. And let’s not forget for , a social data platform that provides brands and enterprises with access to content from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and dozens of other social networks. And NewVoiceMedia’s $55m funding in 2013 across two big rounds, with a mix of US and European VCs. And not to mention, also last year, Yplan, the London-based startup that’s building a platform for selling last-minute event-booking on mobile, a $12 million Series A, led by General Catalyst Partners. Then there was Swiftkey, which a $17.5M Series B Round Led by Index Ventures. As a VC said to me just the other day in relation to this news: “VC confidence is at all time high. Those who actually have money are very keen to deploy it. Why? The stock market and the raft of new IPOs are a major reason, plus the proliferation of growth capital.” You heard it here first people. We’re looking at a new trend: The ‘Euro Megaround’ funding. ( ) |
Mobile Platforms, Smartwatches, And Golden Handcuffs | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 3 | 23 | TechCrunch Here’s how think about the choices consumers may face, assuming they want technology on their wrists — which, depending who you talk to, isn’t a foregone conclusion. “If” Apple does eventually develop a device for the wrist, we’d expect it to run on iOS, to seamlessly set up and pair with the iPhone, and to interoperate with other iOS systems and some suite of apps. Based on Google’s initial tip of the hand regarding “Android Wear,” they may view the wrist as a new interaction frontier to extend the power of its anticipatory computing service, Google Now. For those who would rather not feel locked in by a mobile platform, a range of existing and new platforms will be on the market in different shapes and forms. Despite all the speculation about what could adorn our wrists – and it is fun to speculate – there’s just no way to know what the big players will do, how good these new experiences will be (out of the gate), and whether even early adopters and fanatics will buy these new devices at the same pace at which we’ve been accustomed to buying cell phones. (I won’t try to reconstruct the countless posts on the matter here, though for reference, I’d encourage people to read Mark Gurman’s on Healthbook (for iOS, which should be noted, isn’t about a watch), The Verge���s on Android Wear (by Dante D’Orazio) and Benedict Evans’ analyzing both experiences. Instead, I’ll try to run through what choices consumers may make based on the evidence today, though its based on hearsay and not matters of fact, yet._ In such an unknown world, having vibrant third-party platforms is not only healthy, it may also be what consumers want to escape the handcuffs of any mobile platform lock-in. In this scenario, outfits such as Jawbone, Fitbit, Runkeeper, and others may have enough institutional expertise (and focus and passion!) to make this transition and/or morph into new interfaces with the advent of new motion sensors. And then, there’s Pebble, the already-popular independent smartwatch-maker, headquartered right in Silicon Valley, composed of a team which has built and shipped newer versions of its watches to rabid fans. On Pebble, which already has partnerships with other third-party apps, users interact on their phones through a Pebble app that helps setup and control the watch. This allows users the option to switch mobile platforms and keep their smartwatch, with less of a lock-in effect. Whether mobile platforms will slap users on the wrist with their lock-in techniques, no one knows — but what is certain is that those in the market for smartwatches and/or sensor-based wearables (or even connected jewelry) won’t handcuffed nor left without plenty of choice. And that is a very exciting thing. : / |
Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | ineer from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup and at the company to promote women in technology. In her on her departure, Horvath did not provide extensive clarity on why she left the startup, or who created the conditions that led to her leaving and publicly repudiating the company. Horvath has given TechCrunch her version of the events, a story that contains serious allegations towards GitHub, its internal policies, and its culture. The situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups in the tech sector. Horvath said she joined GitHub in 2012 when the company was “still pretty small” and its culture was supportive of the women on its staff. She said that at the time she was the only female designer or developer on the team. Despite GitHub’s generally female-friendly environment, Horvath claims: “I had a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion,” she wrote in an email to TechCrunch. Why did Horvath work for GitHub? She “loved the idea of GitHub because it was the place people went to make things for people who make things.” In light of that, Horvath told us that she “participated in the boys’ club upon joining,” but when her “character started being discussed in inappropriate places like on pull requests and issues,” the situation changed. In short, Horvath said that she felt she was being treated differently internally simply due to her gender and not the quality of her work. She calls her colleagues’ response to her own work and the work of other female GitHub employees a “serious problem.” Despite GitHub hiring more female developers, Horvath said she struggled to feel welcome. Adding to the already difficult situation was the wife of a founder whom she did not name in her email. Horvath says she did her best to distance herself from the founder’s wife, as well as the founder, for fear of being caught up in an unhealthy situation. But, as she told TechCrunch, she didn’t “move quickly enough.” The wife of the founder asked Horvath out for drinks, which she agreed to. In her own words: “Of course I agreed, seeing as she was my boss’s wife and I’m always looking to meet women I can look up to.” According to Horvath: “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate. She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.'” We are awaiting comment from GitHub regarding these allegations, and GitHub says it is looking into it. It’s not clear why this founder or his spouse appear to have felt threatened by Horvath’s employment. According to Horvath, the wife went on to claim that she was responsible for hires at GitHub, and asked Horvath to explain to her what she was working on. The wife also claimed to employ “spies” inside of GitHub, and claimed to be able to, again according to Horvath, read GitHub employees’ private chat-room logs, which only employees are supposed to have access to. Horvath called the situation, aptly, “bananas.” In her email to TechCrunch, Horvath says she felt “confused and insulted to think that a woman who was not employed by my company was pulling the strings.” She also said she felt bullied by someone with perceived power and influence over her personal relationship and her career at GitHub. In retrospect, Horvath said she feels like she should have handed in her resignation following the episode. My only regret is not leaving or being fired sooner. What I endured as an employee of GitHub was unacceptable and went unnoticed by most. — Julie Ann Horvath (@nrrrdcore) Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee, about what was happening. She warned him against being close to the founder and his wife, and asked him not to relay information to them. According to Horvath, her partner “agreed this was best.” He had talked with the founder’s wife, who agreed to give Horvath space. Instead of the issue blowing over, Horvath received a meeting request from HR at GitHub, and was asked to “relay the details of that personal conversation that took place out of the office.” Horvath recalls that she was “uncomfortable with this but complied to the best of my ability.” Her partner was also asked to relay past events. Radio silence ensued for a month, according to Horvath, while rumors cropped up that the founder was asking other employees about her, as well as her relationship with her partner. To Horvath, the silence made her think that she was “being bullied into leaving.” At this point, Horvath said she began to feel threatened. She said that having her personal relationship dragged into her work life and put on show for her coworkers didn’t sit well with her. The aforementioned wife began a pattern of passive-aggressive behavior that included sitting close to Horvath to, as she told TechCrunch, “make a point of intimidating” her. This stalemate ended when the founder asked to see her. Horvath said that she “wasn’t going to put myself in a position like that, so I required HR be present if we were to meet.” The meeting did not go well. According to Horvath, the founder accused her of threatening his wife, who she had not interacted with or contacted since the wife asked her out to drinks. Horvath cried during the episode, as she said the founder both “chastised” her and called her a “liar.” Horvath said the founder ended the meeting by saying that it was “bad judgement” to date coworkers (referring to her relationship, which was with another employee at GitHub) and then left. Horvath recalls sitting there after his departure both “crying and shaking uncontrollably.” We are waiting for comment from GitHub about these allegations. Horvath later learned that the founder had a similar talk with her partner and demanded that he resign. Her partner is still at the company. In Horvath’s view, her options were limited, given that “HR and the other founders had allowed this to happen, even after being made aware of his and her behavior.” It wasn’t clear whom she could turn to. While the above was going on, Horvath had what she referred to as an awkward, almost aggressive encounter with another GitHub employee, who asked himself over to “talk,” and then professed his love, and “hesitated” when he was asked to leave. Horvath was in a committed relationship at the time, something this other employee was well aware of, according to Horvath. The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.” His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.” Seeking to create something positive out of the above complexity, Horvath decided to start , an initiative that she now claims “wasn’t just to fix tech,” but was also something designed to “fix GitHub and to strengthen the support network for women who might be experiencing similar things.” Yet things failed to improve internally. Horvath calls the next period “uglier.” She says that the wife of the founder continued to show up at the office, sit next to her and “glare” at her for extended periods of time “as if trying to provoke a reaction.” After a spell, “spending a lot of time in the women’s bathroom crying,” Horvath spoke to a different founder who was “sympathetic” and promised to “address” the situation with the other founder and his wife. The first founder asked to meet. Horvath accepted. The founder apologized, and admitted to having “inappropriately escalated the situation.” His wife, he said, would work from home from then on. The wife, to be clear, was not a GitHub employee. Instead of getting gone, the wife appeared the next day and “planted herself right in front” of Horvath. Horvath pinged various executives who were “busy” but willing to help eventually. The situation wasn’t merely passively painful; according to Horvath it became virulent: HR eventually asked the wife to not be on the same floor as Horvath. But according to Horvath’s recount, “she continued to find her way in and plant herself right next to wherever I was working.” This continued until her exit from the firm this past Thursday. The final straw for Horvath came when she saw men gawking at women who were hula-hooping at the office. She called the episode “a really ugly and inappropriate scene.” Her words: Horvath told TechCrunch that she thought she “could fix GitHub.” She now claims that she was wrong.
After working with HR to secure and announce a simple exit from the firm, someone posted a very unkind post to the Secret social network concerning her tenure. Her exit, at that time, was still confidential. She contacted Secret asking for the post to be removed. Horvath claims the post was not taken down initially. TechCrunch has confirmed with Secret that it was eventually removed. The Secret post is what led Horvath to “speak up.” Instead of seeking attention, Horvath says she wants someone to be finally held accountable. GitHub says it is investigating the matter: “We’re looking into this.” |
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